Month: June 2011

Diego killed the baby, his cousin, in the winter of his nineteenth year. He couldn’t see that she was sitting outside on the sidewalk adjacent to the car port. He was young and eager, and he drove out quickly. He felt the tire roll over her head. Little Marta was dead when the police arrived. Diego never returned to his home, and everyone except his father forgave him. It was an accident in the paperwork.

When Diego was eleven years old and his father a burgeoning fat man, they went out to a restaurant. Diego’s mother was screaming and his father never learned to quiet her. They walked in silence and Diego’s father shifted his gaze across the suburban landscape in search of something unknown. This was his way. The sweat poured from the rims of his scalp.

They arrived at a dark bar. It was a small building perched on a cliff near the ocean. The walls were red and adorned in colorful scarves, miniature clay pots hanging from hemp ropes, and framed shadowy photographs of the devil.

“An elderly man sees a wolf and follows is it into a park,” said Diego’s father. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Diego’s father poked his index finger into Diego’s temple. “Do not be stupid, boy. Again: Why?”

“To kill it?”

“Good. Yes, kill it. The old man enters the forest and kills the wolf with a gun. Why does he want to kill it?”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It is only dangerous if he follows the wolf. And he does. So, why, Diego? Why does he do a dangerous thing? Because the wolves are enemies, my boy. All the wolves. They wait in the shadows to kill us and eat us. They kill us, our horses, our mothers, wives and daughters. He kills it for them.”

“Does he just find it and shoot it?”

“He does, but only when it is facing him. The old man looks his enemy in the eye.”

“It won’t attack him?”

“It does not matter. Look them in the eye. Everything’s in the eye. You look a woman or an enemy in the eye and they’ll respect you.”

“An enemy?”

“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone’s your enemy.” He smiled and wrapped his long hairy arm around Diego’s shoulder as he added, “Even me.”

They ordered chili burgers and sat in silence with the Pacific ocean at their backs. The waitresses at the restaurant that day were wearing black shorts and tight striped shirts. His father smiled hungrily.

Diego’s senior year of high school was a big year. He did many things that year that he hadn’t done before then. That was the year he fucked Janine, his girlfriend from junior to senior year, as well as Maria Norma and Noemi. Noemi was loud and left her scratches on his neck and back. He liked Noemi a lot, her biting his lip and breathing on him because she wanted to hold him close. It felt like she was afraid of falling away. He didn’t like her for the right reasons. He cried when she left him after their graduation.

The women he met at his office job were different. Older, many of them. There was Mae, who flirted directly and never in a way that left options. She kept her hair short, like a man’s, and she wore tight jeans and sweaters to all occasions. She smiled at everyone, made dirty jokes about cocks and fags. Her voice was full of a confidence that Diego had never known in a woman. She stopped at his desk frequently to ask him about lunch. They told him it was not a good idea to get interested in coworkers, so he didn’t.

“What’s so bad about it?” he asked, but their answers didn’t satisfy.

Sutter Middle School didn’t have a lot of kids. Not like in the city, where Diego lived as a man. The school was located in the hills nearest to Diego’s home. It was surrounded by redwood trees and it always felt like he was being watched because of it. The corner of the back field with all the trees was where all eighth graders went to make out. He went there a few times with his friends to hang out, and because some of the guys would convince their girlfriends to make out with them in front of everyone. Couples even had contests to see who could make out the longest. His first girlfriend, Gizela, was from Poland. She had a nice accent and Diego loved to hear her talk when they walked home after school. She said she liked him and boys in Poland are nice but sometimes rude. She told Jeff Danston the same thing when she ran with him after Diego. He kissed her, tasted her tongue, got to feel her breasts, which were fairly big for a middle school girl’s. Diego heard she fucked Jeff their first week together. He knew that it was because Jeff looked her in the eyes more than he did.

He didn’t know why people listened, or why they smiled when he smiled, and why they were glad to see him, but they were. All of them. His father said “you got rapport” when he brought this mystery to his attention. “Not like me, but you got it.” Diego didn’t know what rapport meant until he looked it up in the dictionary that night. It meant he got along with people, which he did. He never understood how.

Noemi was pretty. He could not pretend she wasn’t. She had bronze skin when everyone else was pale and spotted. Her hair was short and light. Her eyelashes were dark and long enough to stand out in pictures. She didn’t dress seductively or show off a lot of skin, she was just pretty.

Felix said, “She’s a slut, man.” Felix told Diego he was just looking out for him because he figured a girl like that is bad for guys. He didn’t get what Felix meant.

“Right. Probably just want her yourself.”

Felix shrugged and told Diego he didn’t care who he banged, but that he just had a feeling that she was not the kind of girl to chase. It made Diego want to date her. When he asked her out to watch a movie at the Nine she said she would, but only if he could have her home by eleven o’ clock, because her dad was not letting her stay out late. He was kind of disappointed but of course said, “okay.” They watched The Wedding Singer and he turned to her every few minutes to see the glow of the screen on her face. She was such a pretty girl.

Diego is dead. He lived until he was thirty-seven years and old then he died. The violence of his death was in his body, where his bones grew cancer. It was too late to do anything but cry.

Carla told him she was pregnant when they were sixteen years old. Not his child, though he liked her, but some older guy who’d convinced her about love. He was maybe twenty-eight. Diego didn’t know what to say to her. She sat in class and the tears welled, rolling down those beautifully round pale cheeks. Luckily, Autumn, a friend of theirs, was there for her. The same guy knocked her up once more then stopped paying child support.

“Sick old fuck,” is all he could say at the time. Carla avoided Diego from then on.

His long term girlfriend, Kris, who was with Diego in his young and successful times, told him it had been a long time since they traveled, so he took her to Australia where they stayed with his friend from college, Will. He and his wife owned a house on the outskirts of Syndey, across from the ocean. It sat nestled on a hill with a green lawn swooping down into the sea and the more silly-minded could run all the way down into the ocean forever. It was beautiful. One morning, as Diego lay in bed, Kris stepped out of the shower naked. He watched her step across the bare floor and behind her was the harbor and the city beyond. It was early so it wasn’t too bright yet and he could make out her features inside of the silhouette. He thanked God. She was a good woman, so wise and unique in her every wonderful angle. She married, later, to a businessman.

When he was five, he told his mother that he wanted to die and go to heaven. He did not remember this but she did, and she reminded him often as he matured. Not that she wanted him to die, but that he wanted to go to heaven. He would only arrive there if he lived a good life. He believed she worried about the company he kept. She stopped reminding him after high school, after he rolled a tire over Little Marta’s head. She had his brothers and sister to focus on. And his father. She never looked him in the eye, either. His father died at the age of fifty-seven, alone. They didn’t let anyone see the car, which had rolled down into the embankment. He was buried in a closed casket.

Toward the end of college he was with an Indian girl named Heaven. It was on her license. Her skin was dark and creamy; her light eyes gleamed beneath long, thick lashes. Her mouth was small and pouty, and she used a pink lip gloss that gleamed prettily when we they had sex with the low lamp on. The light came from the side of their bodies and although there was plenty of shine to them he chose to focus on her lips, tracking the wrinkles as they moved. It was a light show to him, a sparkly parade. She always wanted to know if he loved her, and did not forget to remind him. It was easy to say it when they fucked. It was always hard to say when they didn’t. When he left her she didn’t cry or seem sad. It was like she knew and didn’t care.

Afterward, a week or so, Diego and his work friend Kevon were driving up La Brea and there was a group of girls who’d just left a club and were walking alone. They of course whooped and asked if the girls needed a ride, and they did. They piled in. He was in the backseat with a girl wearing the shortest skirt that could still be called a skirt pressed up against him and smelling like perfume and sweat. Her hair was stringy and when he asked her what they’d been up to she told him they were just partying. They tried to convince the girls to come to the beach with them and get fucked up, and two of them were down, but the girl next to him, her name was Lucy, she wasn’t. They stuck to each other and were dropped off at a shady corner near the apartment of one of the girls. They did not let Diego and Kevon come up with them and so nothing happened, but the girl was always on his mind. She said they were partying.

He once told one of his lovers that the only lie worth telling is: I love you.

He worked at the hardware store the year after smashing Little Marta’s head. That year, he shoved a boxcutter into the temple of a man who tried to start shit with the cashier girl. Her name was Lisa. She was tall and had thin stringy legs. The man, whose name is dead, like Diego, never saw it coming. Diego came out from the back room when he heard the man yelling that he was going to beat her. Diego only thought to stab the man with something that would hurt. When he was one foot away from Lisa, as the report stated, the man noticed Diego, but not before Diego shoved the blade into his head as hard as he could. The man cried for a little over a minute and then flopped. By the time the police arrived he’d squirted much blood and was no longer flopping, just still. He was very still and quiet.

Later, with his friends, he recalled his thoughts: “I worked that job for four long, stagnant years, and the only lesson I still hang onto is paranoia. Open your eyes, look around, don’t focus on one thing or you’ll lose everything else. I did what I had to do.”

When Diego woke in the morning of his twenty-ninth birthday, alone in a car, he wished for the world to be kinder to him. He wished for the end of the enemies, for the end of the wars and the dead Indians everywhere on the planet. His father was dead and his mother was kind and if all the world could be kind to him he could find a way to a less cruel life. His hand was shaking. He missed Kris and remembered Noemi’s nails. He held his hand to his chest and waited for the sun to rise over his dashboard. When it did, Diego started the car and drove home.

Diego killed the baby, his cousin, in the winter of his nineteenth year. He couldn’t see that she was sitting outside on the sidewalk adjacent to the car port. He was young and eager, and he drove out quickly. He felt the tire roll over her head. Little Marta was dead when the police arrived. Diego never returned to his home, and everyone except his father forgave him. It was an accident in the paperwork.

When Diego was eleven years old and his father a burgeoning fat man, they went out to a restaurant. Diego’s mother was screaming and his father never learned to quiet her. They walked in silence and Diego’s father shifted his gaze across the suburban landscape in search of something unknown. This was his way. The sweat poured from the rims of his scalp.

They arrived at a dark bar. It was a small building perched on a cliff near the ocean. The walls were red and adorned in colorful scarves, miniature clay pots hanging from hemp ropes, and framed shadowy photographs of the devil.

“An elderly man sees a wolf and follows is it into a park,” said Diego’s father. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Diego’s father poked his index finger into Diego’s temple. “Do not be stupid, boy. Again: Why?”

“To kill it?”

“Good. Yes, kill it. The old man enters the forest and kills the wolf with a gun. Why does he want to kill it?”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It is only dangerous if he follows the wolf. And he does. So, why, Diego? Why does he do a dangerous thing? Because the wolves are enemies, my boy. All the wolves. They wait in the shadows to kill us and eat us. They kill us, our horses, our mothers, wives and daughters. He kills it for them.”

“Does he just find it and shoot it?”

“He does, but only when it is facing him. The old man looks his enemy in the eye.”

“It won’t attack him?”

“It does not matter. Look them in the eye. Everything’s in the eye. You look a woman or an enemy in the eye and they’ll respect you.”

“An enemy?”

“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone’s your enemy.” He smiled and wrapped his long hairy arm around Diego’s shoulder as he added, “Even me.”

They ordered chili burgers and sat in silence with the Pacific ocean at their backs. The waitresses at the restaurant that day were wearing black shorts and tight striped shirts. His father smiled hungrily.

Diego’s senior year of high school was a big year. He did many things that year that he hadn’t done before then. That was the year he fucked Janine, his girlfriend from junior to senior year, as well as Maria Norma and Noemi. Noemi was loud and left her scratches on his neck and back. He liked Noemi a lot, her biting his lip and breathing on him because she wanted to hold him close. It felt like she was afraid of falling away. He didn’t like her for the right reasons. He cried when she left him after their graduation.

The women he met at his office job were different. Older, many of them. There was Mae, who flirted directly and never in a way that left options. She kept her hair short, like a man’s, and she wore tight jeans and sweaters to all occasions. She smiled at everyone, made dirty jokes about cocks and fags. Her voice was full of a confidence that Diego had never known in a woman. She stopped at his desk frequently to ask him about lunch. They told him it was not a good idea to get interested in coworkers, so he didn’t.

“What’s so bad about it?” he asked, but their answers didn’t satisfy.

Sutter Middle School didn’t have a lot of kids. Not like in the city, where Diego lived as a man. The school was located in the hills nearest to Diego’s home. It was surrounded by redwood trees and it always felt like he was being watched because of it. The corner of the back field with all the trees was where all eighth graders went to make out. He went there a few times with his friends to hang out, and because some of the guys would convince their girlfriends to make out with them in front of everyone. Couples even had contests to see who could make out the longest. His first girlfriend, Gizela, was from Poland. She had a nice accent and Diego loved to hear her talk when they walked home after school. She said she liked him and boys in Poland are nice but sometimes rude. She told Jeff Danston the same thing when she ran with him after Diego. He kissed her, tasted her tongue, got to feel her breasts, which were fairly big for a middle school girl’s. Diego heard she fucked Jeff their first week together. He knew that it was because Jeff looked her in the eyes more than he did.

He didn’t know why people listened, or why they smiled when he smiled, and why they were glad to see him, but they were. All of them. His father said “you got rapport” when he brought this mystery to his attention. “Not like me, but you got it.” Diego didn’t know what rapport meant until he looked it up in the dictionary that night. It meant he got along with people, which he did. He never understood how.

Noemi was pretty. He could not pretend she wasn’t. She had bronze skin when everyone else was pale and spotted. Her hair was short and light. Her eyelashes were dark and long enough to stand out in pictures. She didn’t dress seductively or show off a lot of skin, she was just pretty.

Felix said, “She’s a slut, man.” Felix told Diego he was just looking out for him because he figured a girl like that is bad for guys. He didn’t get what Felix meant.

“Right. Probably just want her yourself.”

Felix shrugged and told Diego he didn’t care who he banged, but that he just had a feeling that she was not the kind of girl to chase. It made Diego want to date her. When he asked her out to watch a movie at the Nine she said she would, but only if he could have her home by eleven o’ clock, because her dad was not letting her stay out late. He was kind of disappointed but of course said, “okay.” They watched The Wedding Singer and he turned to her every few minutes to see the glow of the screen on her face. She was such a pretty girl.

Diego is dead. He lived until he was thirty-seven years and old then he died. The violence of his death was in his body, where his bones grew cancer. It was too late to do anything but cry.

Carla told him she was pregnant when they were sixteen years old. Not his child, though he liked her, but some older guy who’d convinced her about love. He was maybe twenty-eight. Diego didn’t know what to say to her. She sat in class and the tears welled, rolling down those beautifully round pale cheeks. Luckily, Autumn, a friend of theirs, was there for her. The same guy knocked her up once more then stopped paying child support.

“Sick old fuck,” is all he could say at the time. Carla avoided Diego from then on.

His long term girlfriend, Kris, who was with Diego in his young and successful times, told him it had been a long time since they traveled, so he took her to Australia where they stayed with his friend from college, Will. He and his wife owned a house on the outskirts of Syndey, across from the ocean. It sat nestled on a hill with a green lawn swooping down into the sea and the more silly-minded could run all the way down into the ocean forever. It was beautiful. One morning, as Diego lay in bed, Kris stepped out of the shower naked. He watched her step across the bare floor and behind her was the harbor and the city beyond. It was early so it wasn’t too bright yet and he could make out her features inside of the silhouette. He thanked God. She was a good woman, so wise and unique in her every wonderful angle. She married, later, to a businessman.

When he was five, he told his mother that he wanted to die and go to heaven. He did not remember this but she did, and she reminded him often as he matured. Not that she wanted him to die, but that he wanted to go to heaven. He would only arrive there if he lived a good life. He believed she worried about the company he kept. She stopped reminding him after high school, after he rolled a tire over Little Marta’s head. She had his brothers and sister to focus on. And his father. She never looked him in the eye, either. His father died at the age of fifty-seven, alone. They didn’t let anyone see the car, which had rolled down into the embankment. He was buried in a closed casket.

Toward the end of college he was with an Indian girl named Heaven. It was on her license. Her skin was dark and creamy; her light eyes gleamed beneath long, thick lashes. Her mouth was small and pouty, and she used a pink lip gloss that gleamed prettily when we they had sex with the low lamp on. The light came from the side of their bodies and although there was plenty of shine to them he chose to focus on her lips, tracking the wrinkles as they moved. It was a light show to him, a sparkly parade. She always wanted to know if he loved her, and did not forget to remind him. It was easy to say it when they fucked. It was always hard to say when they didn’t. When he left her she didn’t cry or seem sad. It was like she knew and didn’t care.

Afterward, a week or so, Diego and his work friend Kevon were driving up La Brea and there was a group of girls who’d just left a club and were walking alone. They of course whooped and asked if the girls needed a ride, and they did. They piled in. He was in the backseat with a girl wearing the shortest skirt that could still be called a skirt pressed up against him and smelling like perfume and sweat. Her hair was stringy and when he asked her what they’d been up to she told him they were just partying. They tried to convince the girls to come to the beach with them and get fucked up, and two of them were down, but the girl next to him, her name was Lucy, she wasn’t. They stuck to each other and were dropped off at a shady corner near the apartment of one of the girls. They did not let Diego and Kevon come up with them and so nothing happened, but the girl was always on his mind. She said they were partying.

He once told one of his lovers that the only lie worth telling is: I love you.

He worked at the hardware store the year after smashing Little Marta’s head. That year, he shoved a boxcutter into the temple of a man who tried to start shit with the cashier girl. Her name was Lisa. She was tall and had thin stringy legs. The man, whose name is dead, like Diego, never saw it coming. Diego came out from the back room when he heard the man yelling that he was going to beat her. Diego only thought to stab the man with something that would hurt. When he was one foot away from Lisa, as the report stated, the man noticed Diego, but not before Diego shoved the blade into his head as hard as he could. The man cried for a little over a minute and then flopped. By the time the police arrived he’d squirted much blood and was no longer flopping, just still. He was very still and quiet.

Later, with his friends, he recalled his thoughts: “I worked that job for four long, stagnant years, and the only lesson I still hang onto is paranoia. Open your eyes, look around, don’t focus on one thing or you’ll lose everything else. I did what I had to do.”

When Diego woke in the morning of his twenty-ninth birthday, alone in a car, he wished for the world to be kinder to him. He wished for the end of the enemies, for the end of the wars and the dead Indians everywhere on the planet. His father was dead and his mother was kind and if all the world could be kind to him he could find a way to a less cruel life. His hand was shaking. He missed Kris and remembered Noemi’s nails. He held his hand to his chest and waited for the sun to rise over his dashboard. When it did, Diego started the car and drove home.