New West Fiction

The Ringer, Chapter Two

By Jenny Shank, 6-09-11

Chapter 2
Patricia Maestas de Santillano—Monday, March 13

Patricia Maestas sat home too early on a work day, sunk in Salvador’s chair, a seat no one had occupied since he’d left for Mexico again six months before.  The chair was hard around the edges and concave in the middle, covered in scratchy brown material that resembled burlap, so it had always been Salvador’s private throne in the corner of the room.  She rubbed her hands over the armrests and settled into the dent left by his body.  It had been an hour since Tío Tiger called her at work to say he’d seen the article about Salvador being killed by the cops in a drug raid.  Salvador had been dead for over a day without her knowing and she couldn’t understand how that was possible.  The father of her children, the man of her life: shouldn’t she have felt something when it happened?  Bewildered, she’d made her way home.

When she first arrived she thought of taking the kids out of school but then thought, no, leave them a few more hours of not knowing.  The afternoon sun began to fail, sending in a weak shaft that stopped just past the windows, but she could read the clock across the room as its red numbers flashed the day away: 3:45.  The kids should have been home by now.

She walked out on the porch, shielding her eyes to scan the street.  The litany of terrible possibilities unspooled in her head.  Then she saw Mia approaching from the end of the block, alone, heart-shaped face angled toward the pavement, dragging her backpack by one strap.

When Mia ran up the porch steps Patricia sank to her knees and pulled her daughter close, burying her nose in Mia’s long braids that smelled of strawberry shampoo.  Mia’s milky skin and delicate build came from Patricia, but her full lips came from Salvador, and Patricia kissed her on the mouth like she used to when she was a baby.

Mia wiped her lips with the back of her hand. 

“Where’s Ray?” Patricia asked. Mia was eight years old and responsible, but they lived near Federal, a busy street.

“He said he’d be home in a while.  I’m not supposed to say.”

“Supposed to say what?”

“That he let me walk home alone.” She looked down at her shoes, as if consulting with them about how much to spill.  “He was walking to Federal with those boys.”

“What boys?  Miguel?”

It had started after Patricia and Salvador separated.  In sixth grade Ray stopped hanging out with the neighbor kids and picked up a new group that included Miguel, whose mother was barely thirteen years older than he was, her boyfriend tattooed with the insignia of the North Side Mafia.  Patricia had agreed to drive Ray over to Miguel’s once.  Two blunt-bodied, short-necked dogs scrambled over the dirt lawn toward their car like a couple of slavering torpedoes.  Three men with shaved heads slouched on a sun-faded floral couch on the porch.  Patricia kept on driving, Ray saying, “What the fuck, Mom?” as the house with its gray peeling paint and sagging roof faded away.

Patricia screeched to a stop in the middle of the block, squeezing the clutch until her knuckles popped so she wouldn’t smack him.  The skill separating a good mother from a bad one was the same quality Ray often mentioned good pitchers possessed: superior muscle control.  “We don’t talk that way,” she said.  “You get that from Miguel?”

Ray fixed her with an ugly stare. “Maybe I got it from Dad.”

“He doesn’t talk like that.”

“You act like he does,” Ray huffed.  “Don’t say ain’t,” he added in a high-pitched tone meant to rile her in imitation of her grammar lessons.

She sped off.  Miguel’s people were the sort who shot their guns into the air at midnight on New Year’s Eve, too drunk to care where their bullets fell, but Patricia cared, because sometimes the bullets landed in bystanders wheeled in to her at the hospital. 

“You’re too good for Miguel’s neighborhood, too good for Dad’s,” Ray continued, testing his power.

She shot him a glance: watch it. She knew little about the house where Salvador had been renting a room, except that people moved in and out all the time.  She couldn’t keep track of the different men who answered the phone there, Bueno? The neighborhood was bad, too, one that often made the 10:00 news.  Since they had separated, Salvador had been meeting the kids at places where Patricia dropped them off—Sloan’s Lake, the Woodbury library, the museum on a free day so Mia could hunt for the elves hidden in the back of the animal dioramas.

Ray pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and faced away.

“Fine,” Patricia said.  “Hate me if you want, but ask yourself: who takes care of you every time Dad takes off?”

After the day she’d driven past Miguel’s, she’d kept Ray apart from him when she could, but she couldn’t prevent the association at school, and a few weeks earlier they’d been suspended for flashing gang signs to each other on the playground.  Salvador had told her not to worry about it so much, that Ray was a decent kid and he’d figure things out.  Now Salvador was gone for good.

“You’re not going to tell Ray I said he went with Miguel, right?” Mia asked, tugging on Patricia’s sleeve.  “Why are you still wearing your coat?”
Patricia looked down.  She had forgotten to remove her coat when she arrived home two hours earlier, and when she let it drop now, she shivered.

“And you’re still in your nurse scrubs,” Mia said.  “What about germs?”

“We’ve got to find your brother.”

Patricia led Mia into the car and drove toward Federal Boulevard.  She scanned the parking lots of businesses, churches, schools, and homes all jumbled together along one stretch of road.  She was hoping he’d be outside, where she could see him.  She’d revoke his allowance for a month.  Two.  The only way to keep them home was to keep them broke.  Federal offered too many places to pass five bucks’ worth of time.

“Why doesn’t he hang out with Nino anymore?” Patricia asked Mia, who shrugged.  Plump little Nino, who lived next door with his grandma, used to be Ray’s sidekick.  They had been friends since first grade, when they started playing baseball together on the same parish team, Ray pitching and Nino catching, because in some leagues, as in bad baseball movies, that’s where the chunkiest player is put.

They passed the old Federal movie theater that had sat empty for years, its name in jaunty white cursive writing above the jutting marquee.  She glanced at the little shop where her mother Lupe used to buy chorizo and nopales for their restaurant on 34th Avenue, a panadería with a bimbo bread delivery truck in front, permanent fireworks stands busy on only a few occasions a year, stores with bilingual placards advertising the services of tax preparers, curanderas, bailbondsmen, money wirers.  Places Salvador used to visit to send part of his paycheck home to Mexico, no matter how many times Patricia asked him to stop.  Two men outside Rudy’s Cash Express were dressed in jeans too tight and high-waisted for Americans, their shirts tucked in, just like Salvador when she met him.  She took a deep breath so she wouldn’t cry.  How appropriate, really, was the term “alien” that her mother always used for such men, their experiences so different from hers that they may as well have originated from another planet.  Patricia understood so little about how immigrants ran their lives, even after being married to one for thirteen years.

In the other direction, a chiropractor’s sign read, Dolor de cabeza—podemos ayudar! A hairdresser’s services were spray painted on the windows of a salon: Tintes, Mechones, Rayos, Permanentes, Extenciones. Outside the bars hung Broncos banners, offering 2-for-1 game day specials.

A group of boys of about the right age were hanging out in the parking lot of El Pollo Loco and Patricia pulled in.  She rolled down the window as the boys backed away.  “Hey guys,” she said, “Do you know my son Ray?”

A skinny kid in a long-sleeved collared shirt buttoned all the way up to his incipient Adam’s apple took a step forward.  “Stingray?”

It was the nickname Nino had given Ray on their baseball team, for his blistering pitching.  Patricia used it only to tease Ray when she was calling him to chores, but all the kids in the neighborhood seemed to call him nothing but Stingray.  “That’s the one.”

“He’s inside.”

She found him crunching into a chicken taquito, sitting next to Miguel, who wore a pristine, all-white Colorado Rockies cap backwards and some matching snow-white Nikes that he must have scrubbed the street off every day.  The bleached gear signified something and it scared Patricia that she didn’t know what.  Twelve years old and lanky, Ray wore his hair in a buzz cut, the shortest length Patricia would brook, covering it with a baseball cap the second school let out, where hats—with their potential gang affiliations—weren’t allowed.  She only let him buy caps in teams’ regular colors.  He had his father’s sharp profile and pointed chin, but his eyes were Patricia’s, brown and clear.  He took a sip of his pop and choked a little when he looked up to see her.
“We need to go,” she said.

“I’m not done eating.”
“You are now.” She grabbed his taquito basket and led him by the arm.  Miguel bit into a taquito with a crunch so loud Patricia took the gesture for insolence.  Ray shook off her grip.  A girl sat near the boys, wearing the placid expression of an overfed lion, brown lip liner surrounding her sullen mouth.  As Patricia stared at her, wondering if she was Ray’s girl, she opened her purse—shaped like a woman’s curvy torso in a black lace bustier—and drew out a compact to inspect her makeup.

“You going to yell at me for not bringing Mia home?” Ray asked, playing tough for his audience.

“Not today,” Patricia said so only he could hear.

“Did you come home early just to spy on me?”

She put her hand on the nape of his neck, feeling the pulse beneath his warm skin, and gave it a squeeze.  “Honey, you don’t even know.”

He turned his back to her and started to rejoin his friends.  “I have to tell you something,” she said softly, and he turned around.  She didn’t want to tell him here but Ray was too big to drag home and she didn’t know how else to make him heed.  She held Mia by the hand and backed away from Ray’s friends, moving toward the exit.  Something about her expression must have cracked his act.  He approached, dropped his voice and asked, “What?”

She put her free hand on his shoulder.  “Your father is dead.”

Ray pushed away from her and searched her face for a sign he’d heard wrong.  What he saw in her eyes made him turn his head.

“Papa died?” Mia screamed.  The people in the restaurant looked up from their chicken nachos and quesadillas.  The place grew silent except for someone slurping the last gasps of a drink through a straw.

Miguel stood and took a step toward them.  “That’s messed up,” he put in. 

Patricia shot him a glare and he faded back with a shuffle step like she’d jabbed him in the sternum.  Then she put her arms around her children and led them to the car as everyone in the restaurant stared after them.  The kids climbed in, Ray up front.

“Your father was killed by policemen,” she said.

“You’re lying,” Ray said, “you are.” He crossed his arms over his chest, his tough frown quavering at the corners.

“The cops were raiding the house he lived in,” Patricia explained as she pulled out of the parking lot, “looking for drugs.  And then, after that, I don’t know exactly what happened.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what happened?”

“No one has given me an explanation yet.  I’m trying to find out.” When Patricia had spoken to the woman at police headquarters, all she’d say was that there would be an internal investigation and that Patricia could have a copy of the report when it was ready.  Then she’d given her a number to call for victims assistance but she hadn’t phoned yet.  She glanced east toward Denver’s modest set of skyscrapers, and wondered where the cops who had done this were, out living their lives, killing a man all in a day’s work.

“I know what happened,” Ray said in an eerily distant voice, like he was a half-century old.  “The cops shot him for no reason at all.  They do it all the time, just like with Miguel’s cousin.”

“Miguel’s cousin was a drug dealer and a gang banger,” Patricia said.  She slammed her fist on the steering wheel.  How did he and Salvador end up in the same situation?

“Where is he?” Ray demanded.  “I want to see him.”

“I want to see him, too,” Mia said.

“Take us to him,” Ray said.  “Take us to him now.  I don’t believe you.”

Patricia shook her head.  “I can’t, baby,” she said with no breath at all.
At a stop light three blocks from home, Ray looked up at Patricia.  His wet eyelashes were clumped together in tiny triangles.  “If you hadn’t made him leave, he wouldn’t have died,” Ray said.  “He would have been living with us like he was supposed to.”

She felt a pain like an icicle popping inside her.  Salvador had been living in the house where he died only because she had locked him out of their home.  No—that wasn’t right.  It was Salvador’s decision that put him there.  He was the one who walked away when she’d told him not to.  But before she could figure out how to explain this, Ray threw open the door and took off down the street.

“Ray, get back here!” she yelled.  Patricia pulled out of traffic to follow him and stopped the car.  “Mia, please stay,” she said, locking the doors and glancing into the backseat at her daughter who was sobbing, huddled in the corner.  Patricia regretted leaving her, but didn’t know what else to do, performing the same quick calculation she’d been making since she’d had her second child, judging which one’s need was rawer in that moment.

Patricia chased Ray down the residential street just off of Federal, pumping her arms to go faster, pains shooting through her lungs almost the moment she started sprinting.  She cursed herself for not getting to the rec center more often as she lost him around a corner. 

She was unsure which way to head.  Then he began to scream.  It wasn’t a child’s scream, centered in the throat, but a holler from the gut, the very place the pain settled at the bottom of his stomach.  The neighbors who were already out on their porches drew forward and followed Ray’s flight with their eyes.  Others emerged from inside the little tile-roofed brick bungalows that lined either side of the street, walked out onto their lawns, planted their fists on their hips and stared.  The Maestas family had lived in this neighborhood off of Federal Boulevard in north Denver for generations, since Patricia’s great-grandparents’ time.

Ray was still screaming and Patricia had to make him stop.  She sprinted after her son down the uneven sidewalk, and finally tackled him as he slowed in the muddy part of Mrs. Salazar’s yard, where the grass wouldn’t grow in the shadow of a pine tree.  But he didn’t stop screaming.  Even the heavy traffic from Federal Boulevard two streets over didn’t drown out his sound.

Ray lost control of his breathing and the hyperventilating silenced him.  Patricia kneeled in front of him, holding his hands in her own, telling him, “Take a deep breath,” when she pulled his hands apart, “Blow it out,” when she brought them together.  Patricia counted twenty slow breaths like this, until her son’s chest was rising and falling at a regular interval, then helped her boy—spent and shaking—to his feet.  She covered his shoulders with her arm and walked him back to the car, her shirt damp with her children’s tears, spring mud on the knees of her scrubs.  The neighbors watched them pass in silence.

**

Back home, the children retreated to their rooms.  Patricia walked to the living room and played the music of her favorite singer, Otis Redding.  Just when she was building the courage to ask Salvador to come home, the cops killed him.  Marched into his house and killed him.  If he had to die, he should have died after Patricia had managed to tell him what she wanted to say: she still loved him.  She wished she could be more like Otis, able to speak of his love so clearly, so constantly, the breaks and purls in his voice, the nonwords between lyrics conveying emotions that most people struggled to express.  But Salvador died, as far as he knew, without Patricia’s love.

She looked out the window at the little spruce that Salvador had planted on Ray’s first birthday.  Patricia asked him not to.  She was born with a foreboding of disaster, and so she avoided moments that seemed too idyllic, so as not to create memories that would come back to wound her later.  She could usually spot such scenes developing and measure how to avert them, like a farmer weighing the time remaining to load the newly mown hay into the barn before a storm hit.  If something happened to Ray, the sight of the tree would serve as a slap.  Because of her gloomy nature, her cousins from Pueblo had nicknamed Patricia La Llorona, after the weeping woman of Mexican folklore, and the nickname had proved prophetic. 

“Don’t, mi vida,” she’d told Salvador, holding Ray on her hip after he’d already dug the hole for the tree in the yard. 

“My American wife,” Salvador said, smiling as he settled the burlap ball at the base of the tree into the earth.  “As superstitious as the viejas in my pueblo.”

The doorbell rang and she opened the door to see Tío Tiger’s sweet teddy bear face, round stomach and silver moustache.  As soon as she took two steps toward him he held out his arms to her.  He was her father’s best friend and her Nino, but she’d lost touch with him in recent years.  She rested her head on his shoulder like he was her dad, and he rocked her gently.  She buried her nose in the good tweed scent of his jacket, let the pine forest of his aftershave calm her.  “I’m going to help you, Patricia,” the old man whispered into her ear, and she believed him.  “This isn’t right.  I’m going to help you fight the city.”

Fighting the city.  It reminded her of the stories Tío and her dad used to tell about the Chicano rights days in the ‘70s when they were always fighting for something.  “What you could do for me,” Patricia said, “is call Salvador’s family in Mexico.  My Spanish is so shaky.” She knew just a handful of phrases that she’d learned from her grandmother, Salvador, and Sábado Gigante.  Lupe had made her study French in high school.  She copied the phone number onto a small piece of paper, and then pressed it into Tío’s hands, which were brown and wrinkled as a walnut.  “This is the number of the only family in his town that has a phone, the people who run the store,” she said.  “They’ll tell his brothers.”

Patricia sat with Tío at the kitchen table.  “I need more information,” she told him.  “The cops are lying.  Salvador had nothing to do with drugs.  We had our hard times, but I know that about him, at least.” She walked to the phone, picked up the receiver, then put it down.  “I don’t know who to call.”

Tío shook his head.  ”Hija, the cops aren’t going to tell you anything without a fight.  You need legal help.”

Patricia thought of the small amount that was left in her checkbook at the end of the month when the bills were paid and knew she couldn’t afford a lawyer.  Salvador had kept giving her money every month, but always much less than he earned, she knew.  Now even that would stop.  “It’s too expensive.” She sank back down on her chair.

“I know a guy who will help you out.  Remember John Archuleta?”

“That chubby kid who used to come to my parents’ parties?” Her mother had tried to set them up once, when Patricia was twenty and already in love with Salvador.

“He’s still chubby.  But he’s a lawyer now.”

***

Jenny Shank‘s first novel, The Ringer, was a finalist for the Reading the West Book Award. Her stories, reviews and essays have appeared in many publications, including Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Onion, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bust, Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, Rocky Mountain News, Dallas Morning News, and Boulder Daily Camera.

***
From The Ringer, by Jenny Shank © 2011 Jenny Shank. Reprinted with permission of The Permanent Press. Sag Harbor, New York.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.