taken to calling Chon “Dodge-nasty,” he was less than pleased.
“I’m sorry, man. If I had known—” Henry apologized when John Robison said, “Later, Dodge-nasty” out the window of his Explorer as he cruised by. Chon cut Henry off.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He was at the pinnacle of teenage self-loathing. “It fits.”
Everything looked normal on the way to work. There weren’t any more or less cars on the road. The driver of every car loosened his grip on his steering wheel to pick up the index finger and pinky of his two o’clock hand in the form of a wave. There were more kids in the yards he drove by—playing football or hide and seek or whatever kids play—but today was the first Saturday of the summer, so that was to be expected.
When he pulled onto Main, he saw the “Hook ’em, Johns” banner bobbing up and down, lazing in its perch over town. It was almost enough to make Chon cringe except that the Longhorn symbols on either side of the banner reminded him that the Johns were moving away, on to bigger and better. They would meet new friends, new girls—women even—in Austin. Greenton, Texas and Araceli Monsevais and that microcosm of relevance—that blip that didn’t even register on Mejia’s radar—Chon ‘Dodge-nasty’ Gonzales were to be forgotten. They would be written off as a part of the quaint past.
“Good luck,” Chon said, flipping off the banner, “and good riddance.”
Chon parked the Dodge-nasty on the car-length path behind The Pachanga convenience store and gas station, worn bare to dirt by years of employee parking. Artie Alba, the store’s owner who lived in San Antonio but kept close watch on his store through reports he would receive from his in-town cousins, had purchased the Greenton Filling Station and renamed it. He knocked out a portion of the wall behind the register to install a drive-through window for the convenience of drunks too lazy to get out of their cars to buy beer.
Someone had spilled soda on the floor in front of the fountain area. Judging by the stickiness of the syrup that remained, the soda had been spilled three hours before. The beer cooler was near empty which didn’t make sense since beer sales were only permitted after noon, and the store’s solitary unisex bathroom was a mess, bombshat diarrhea all over the bowl. This is what Chon could look forward to for half of the summer’s work days, because now that he didn’t have school as an impediment or an excuse, he would be splitting the mid-shift with Ana, which meant coming in after Rocha, the septuagenarian drunk with his Olmec complexion and his malformed hook of a baby-sized left hand and his refusal to do any of the work that he was otherwise able to do when The Pachanga was still the Greenton Filling Station and Art Alba still lived in town.
“It’s my hand, bro,” he used to say, when asked about the state of the store at the end of the 7 to 3:30 shift he worked exclusively. “Mi manito nanito.”
Now all he would say if so confronted was, “Fuck you, kid. Do it yourself.”
And so Chon would have to do just that: face lakes of high fructose corn stickiness, mountains of unstocked beverages in the tundra of the walk-in, and the aftermaths of shit-bomb tsunamis.
He walked to the back and put the mop bucket in the sink to fill before he even clocked in. He met Rocha at the wall-mounted time card tower. “How was it today?”
Rocha grumbled from the bottom of his throat, not bothering his tongue to syllablize nonsense.
“Well, the store looks really great.”
“Chinga tu madre.”
“¡Ay papí! I love it when you talk dirty to me!”
“Pinché maricón desgraciado.”
His spirits lifted as they were, Chon mopped up the fountain area with a smile on his face. His day wouldn’t turn shitty until he hit the bathroom.
After a few hours of cleaning and relaying between the cooler, the drive-up window (at the sound of the doorbell buzzer on the bottom window sill), and the counter (at the sound of the bells above the door) like Pavlov’s dog, The Pachanga was clean, stocked, and operating as slowly as it did on any other day.
Chon had been sitting on the stool behind the register for as long as it took his mind to wander to thoughts of Araceli—which is to say it hadn’t been long—when he was distracted by the honking of a car passing by. It took him away from his favorite image of Araceli, remembered from the previous year’s luau-themed homecoming dance. She wore a bikini top—white with pastel polka dots of varied size, like stars approaching a spaceship Chon often fantasized he was piloting—with a simple flowerprint cloth tied at her waist and a pink lily in her hair. The Mejia goon in his blue board shorts, leather chanclas, and muscle-hugging designer tank top, though, was a part of that picture, a part Chon could only ever just blur out of focus, but never fully airbrush away.
He looked outside to see a line of cars making its way down Main to Viggie. It was a strange sight, so many cars on the road traveling in the same direction when there wasn’t a baseball or football game to get to. Was there a funeral in town? No, the cars were going in the opposite direction of both the church and cemetery. Besides, how could someone in town have died without Chon hearing about it? No matter how good he was at shutting his eyes and separating himself from what went on around him, he would have heard that kind of news the second it hit town.
It wasn’t just the cars. There were people on foot too, crying as they walked down the street. Chon felt like someone wading upstream in a rush of panicking hordes, unaware of the calamity and terror from which they were fleeing. His curiosity at the sight morphed to fear. That panic was interrupted by the bells over the storefront entrance. It was Henry, flushed and breathless.
“Holy shit, bro, they’re dead,” he blurted out. Henry’s face was covered with sweat, much of which had collected at the corner of his mouth on his pathetic Fu Manchu whiskers.
“Who’s dead?” Chon said.
“The Johns. There was an accident. They’re dead.”
Chon felt his eyebrow rise of its own volition.
“Give me the keys to the Dodge-nasty, man. Everyone’s going to the Robison place,” Henry said. He looked out impatiently at the cars and pedestrians making their way to the action. “Holy fuck,” he said to himself.
Chon took his keys from his pocket and slid them on the counter. Henry picked them up.
“Alright, man. You’re off at midnight, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be back by then. Hay te watcho.”
Then he left. After a short time, everyone seemed to have left. The streets of Greenton were empty, Chon Gonzales alone on his stool to contemplate what it all meant.
Andres and Julie Mejia had eaten breakfast and then made love. They’d planned on being louder, but it was as silent and meditative as the first time after their oldest son Gregorio was born. Goyo was asleep in his crib, put down after his changing and bottle. Andres would swear that the look in his eye that day had nothing to do with the fact that it was the day the doctor-mandated moratorium on sex had ended.
“I really didn’t know,” he said whenever Julie brought it up afterwards. It became one of their favorite stories to share in intimate moments. “And who says I would have waited one second longer anyway, no matter what any doctor said.”
Andres had done some boxing in his teen years and some volunteer firefighting with the county. He had worked odd
