Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (15 page)

So that day, I had the car. A white Chevy Impala, twelve years old. I’d lost my wallet and my license along with it. I hadn’t made the time to get a new one. My father told me I was the worst driver ever to get behind a wheel. “You’re fucking gonna die in a crash. Won’t live to be thirty.” But my parents had bigger worries than letting me drive their car. My oldest brother was in the can—ten years for robbing a 7-Eleven with a weapon. My parents insisted he was set up. I knew better. My oldest brother was the meanest sonofabitch I’d ever met. I would never have used the word
innocent
within ten feet of him. My sister, two years younger, was pregnant and living with my grandmother. My youngest brother died of meningitis. My father’s grief and disappointment turned to rage. The rage was pointed in my direction. Hell, me driving without a license didn’t even register on the list of things my parents were worried about.

I lit a cigarette and sped away from the school parking lot and made good my escape. I hated fourth, fifth and sixth periods. I was acing all the classes. So why go? The rent-a-cop didn’t even notice I was driving off campus without a pass. He was too busy flirting with a girl who would land him in the
same place as my brother if he wasn’t careful.

I didn’t have a plan. Anywhere but school. School was hell. I felt like an ice cube that was slowly, slowly melting. I felt if I stayed in that school one more second, I would disappear. The sad part was that nobody would notice.

I drove around town. Not much going on at one thirty in the afternoon. I always thought Las Cruces, New Mexico, took a siesta in the afternoons. On certain days, I was convinced the town didn’t even bother to wake up.

I wound up at the river—which was everyone’s favorite place to go, a place where you could get drunk or get stoned and put in an eight-track tape and listen to Janis Joplin sing those great songs which were angry and sad and rough and beautiful. Someone else’s pain was always beautiful. And after that tape was done, you could pop it out and put in
Abbey Road
and listen to it over and over again. I memorized every word of “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.”

I parked the car and listened to Janis Joplin. I sat there on the hood of my car and smoked cigarettes and stared out at the water and the sky and I thought that this was as close as I was ever going to get to heaven.

And then I noticed Brian standing there. It was as if he just appeared. “Hey,” he said, “can I bum a smoke?”

“Sure,” I said. Like we were friends.

We sat there on the hood of my car and smoked.

“She broke up with me,” he said.

I looked at him. “Bummer,” I said. I don’t think we’d actually ever spoken to each other. We probably said
Hi
or something like
How’s it hangin’
. The thing was that I hung out with guys like me—Mexicans who went to school because they had to and who mostly had jobs after school and on weekends. Brian hung out with guys like him—gringos who belonged to the Future
Farmers of America and wore blue corduroy jackets and thought they owned the school. They
did
own the school. So what? They could have it.

I think he was waiting for me to say something else besides
bummer.
“So you still like her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He sort of laughed. “She’s pretty, you know? But her name’s Beth,” he said.

I don’t know why I thought that was funny, but I found myself laughing.

So we sat there and laughed.

We smoked. We talked, not a lot. Brian wasn’t a talker. I was. I really liked talking. Talking and sleeping, those were my two favorite things. But I didn’t have much to say, not to Brian Stillman.

I could see the guy was lost. One thing was for sure—he’d lost his ride back into town.

“So you got dumped.”

“Pretty much. I think I wanted her to dump me. And it’s not as if I was gonna marry her.” He took a puff from his cigarette. “You still hanging out with Rosie?” I didn’t know he knew anything about my life.

“Nah. Rosie’s history.”

“Too bad. She’s fine.”

Rosie
was
fine. And she’d been right to give me the highway. What was she doing with a guy like me? I lit another cigarette.

He looked at his watch. “School’s almost out.”

“Yeah.”

“I hate school,” he said.

“Brian Stillman hates school? Could have fooled me.”

“Why? I’m not smart. Not like you.”

“I’m not so fucking smart.”

“How many A’s you have on that report card?”

“So what?”

“You understand things, Neto.”

It was funny to hear him call me Neto. Most gringos just called me Ernie. “I’m not sure I’m getting you.”

“How do you do it? The teacher calls on you and you always answer as if you wrote the fucking book.”

That made me laugh.

“How’d you learn how to think?”

“I don’t know. I go to a lot of movies.”

That really made him laugh. He flicked his cigarette. “So, you goin’ to college?”

“Yeah. Sure. Why the hell not?”

“Well, there’s always the army.”

“The army’s never gonna own my ass. And that’s the fucking truth.”

“Well, I’ve kinda thought about joining.”

I looked him and shook my head. “There’s a war going on, Stillman. Anybody let you in on that dirty little secret?”

“I might get drafted.”

“Not if you go to college.”

He nodded. “Maybe I just need to get out of here.”

I nodded. “I get that.”

“You should leave too, Neto,” he said. “You’re too good for this fucking place.”

Yeah, too good. Like that was true. We smoked another cigarette together.

I offered him a ride home. He lived on a farm just off Highway 478. His house was about half a mile in from the road. We didn’t talk that much as we
drove along. Just listened to
Abbey Road
. He pointed. “This is my stop. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“I can take you all the way in,” I said.

“Nah. My old man—” he stopped in mid-sentence. “He’s a piece of work.” He had this real sad look on his face. I wished to God I hadn’t seen that look. It made me like him. He opened the door and started to get out of the car. But then he just sat back down on the seat. “You still run, Neto?”

“Yeah, I still run.”

“So why’d you quit the team?”

“Cross-country wasn’t my thing.”

“You were the best runner. That’s why they hated you. They could never beat you.”

I nodded.
Yeah, sure, they could never beat me.

“You should have stayed on the team.”

“I wasn’t having a good time.”

“Well,” he said. “We sure as fuck made sure of that, didn’t we?” He got out of the car. Then he put his head through the window. “I’m sorry I was such an asshole,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “it
does
matter, Neto.” He flipped me a peace sign, then shut the door.

I watched him walk down the dirt road lined by pecan trees along a ditch.

I thought about how sad he looked as I drove off. I thought of all the time I’d wasted hating him.

The next night, I was going out. Friday night, on the cusp of summer and graduation and manhood. Yeah, going out. Just some guys who wanted to
head out to a keg party at the river, maybe meet a girl and kiss her.
And
if you were lucky, she’d kiss you back. And you might feel something inside of you. Maybe that’s why we went to the river.

School was ending and maybe,
just maybe
, life was beginning. I’d applied to State and got accepted. That surprised me. I even got a two thousand dollar scholarship, which was a fortune. But I’d also applied to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They’d given me the exact same scholarship. Not that Albuquerque was worlds away, but it was far enough. I hadn’t told anyone, not even my parents. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I didn’t want their advice. I wanted to make a decision that was all mine. I kept pinching myself. Me, Ernesto Zaragoza—I was going to college. I was thinking about all those things while I waited for José and Jimmy to pick me up.

My mom and dad were sitting on the front porch, my father reading the newspaper, my mother reading (or praying) her novena. “
No te pongas marijuano, cabron
.” My father shot me his favorite look. The man could scare me in two languages. Talented guy, my father.

José drove up in his father’s jeep. I kissed my mom and smiled at my dad. “I’ll be good, Dad.” I always said that to him. It pissed him off when I said things like that. He didn’t actually want me to be a good boy. He wanted me to be a man. But a man who didn’t smoke marijuana. For him that was the worst.

José and Jimmy waved at my mom and dad. My mom was all smiles. My dad scowled. José got a big kick out of my dad. I never really knew why. Like scowling was something amusing.

There were about five or six keg parties at the river. Five or six or seven or eight. José was looking for one in particular. His cousin Mike was hosting him and his buddies. José pointed as he drove. “That’s Mike’s truck.” We pulled up in front of the crowd, got out of the jeep and did the shaking-hands business,
the casual hugs that we learned from watching our fathers. Yeah, like we were men. But you had to hug in just the right way and always slap the other guy on the back. That’s how it worked.

I got handed a beer.

The sun was setting and there was a breeze and everything was so perfect. I felt almost happy. I don’t really remember much about Mike’s keg party. Rosie arrived along with a group of about six girls. Then another group of girls arrived. Girls always arrived in packs. It was protection. That’s how I thought about it. It made me sad to think that they needed it. Protection from guys like us.

Rosie and I talked. She was so pretty. I mean, pretty in ways that most girls envied. She was real. Sometimes, I wanted to just keep looking at her. “You should leave this town,” she said.

“Are you chasing me out?”

She laughed. She kissed me on the cheek. “I like you, you idiot.”

“Then how come you broke up with me?”

“Because we’re just friends. There something wrong with that?”

“Guess not,” I said. “Still, maybe I’m a little insulted.”

“Don’t be. I don’t want boyfriends. I want to go to college and get a life. A life that’s mine.”

“A life that’s all yours, huh?”

She laughed. “It sounds beautiful, doesn’t it, Neto?”

And then I found myself laughing my ass off. “Yeah, Rosie, it sure does sound beautiful.”

She smiled. She looked like an angel. “I’m going to U.T.”

“Austin? No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Scholarship?”

“The works, Neto.”

“I’m fucking impressed.”

“I should thank you.”

“For what?”

“Remember when we were in junior high?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You used to read to me.”

“I almost forgot about that.”

“It did something to me. There were other worlds out there. And you knew that. And you wanted me to know that too.”

She smiled at me. It broke my heart, her smile.

I lit a cigarette. She took the cigarette away from me and took a puff. She kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t forget to write.” And just like that, she walked away.

I guess I didn’t feel much like partying. Maybe there was something wrong with me. I had a few beers, mostly listened to people talking a lot of bullshit. Some guy tried to put his arm around Rosie. She grabbed his paw and shoved it aside. “Go wash your hands,” she said.

I smiled. She noticed I was watching. She smiled back at me. Rosie didn’t need anybody to take care of her. That’s what I liked about her.

Some guys lit a bonfire. It was getting dark and the weather was perfect and I
really was
almost happy.

I walked away and headed to another keg party. I knew some people there, not people I hung with, but you know, school friends. We shot the shit, talked about some crazy things that had happened during high school. Everyone remembered when the gym got spray-painted asking the principal
to suck everyone’s cock. Nice. Yeah, well, it was high school. There was a lot of laughing. I felt alone. And didn’t mind it. It was one of those things, feeling alone. Sometimes it was better than being with other people.

I lit a cigarette and decided to go off and sit by the river. Think about things. I liked thinking about things. My mom called it daydreaming. My dad said I was lazy. They were both wrong. I wasn’t daydreaming and the lazy thing, well, my brain didn’t have a lazy cell in its body.

I don’t know how long I walked, but I was pretty far from all the bonfires. I went and found a good spot by the river where I could take off my shoes. I lay down on the bank, my feet in the water, the stars in the sky. I thought for a second that maybe my life would be a good one. And I would go through life this happy, happy guy. And then, in the middle of all that happy conversation I was having with myself, I heard something. I didn’t know what it was, at first, and so I made myself perfectly still and listened. I knew the sound. Someone was having sex. I mean they were really having sex. I smiled to myself. Yeah, someone was getting lucky as hell. I knew I was being a voyeur or something but what was I supposed to do at that point? So I just sat there and listened.