checked out books to him—Dr. Seuss to Mark Twain—weeping at the passing of their youngest. And of Araceli Monsevais, Goddess of Greenton and queen of Chon’s dreams and imagination, crying. He thought of the lake of tears the people of Greenton were crying at that moment and was shocked. And shamed even further when he didn’t feel the warm stuff on his own face.
He sat at the register in silence. Through the store’s windows, he looked at a Greenton that was emptier, deader than he had ever experienced it before. He thought of the last time he’d seen the Johns. Araceli was sitting across Mejia’s lap on the tailgate of his father’s truck. Robison was sitting at the other end of the tailgate, entertaining a group of girls. The girls claimed to be friends, but were strategically elbowing each other away from the single John with malicious words told out of smiling mouths. They hungered for their sisters’ blood and the bragging rights that being with Robison on graduation night, the very weekend he was set to leave town, would have afforded them.
There was a huge circle of cars around the fire pit at the Saenz ranch that night, all of them driven there by high school students who had known the Johns as classmates and teammates and all of whom would be embraced and regarded as old friends if they ran into them on some city street in the surely glorious future. That said, the Johns were left alone—not necessarily placed in the limelight, but looked at enviously from a distance as they always had been at Greenton High and in town.
Chon and Henry were walking from a trip to the keg trough when Chon was summoned.
“Hey Dodge-nasty,” Robison shouted from his Chevy throne.
Chon looked at Henry. Henry shrugged. Chon made his way over to the truck.
“You really pulled through with the beer,” Robison said, raising his plastic cup.
Chon had gone against his better judgment in providing access to the night’s spirits. Though he didn’t have a problem selling beer to minors, he had never sold anyone underage so much—three kegs that had gone skunky from having been dropped, rolled, and kicked from one end of the Pachanga’s walk-in to the other. Chon knew that he could be fired, even arrested, if anything bad happened as a result of the beer he’d sold. He knew that every time he sold a six-pack to his contemporaries for ten dollars and kept the change.
“Didn’t Jesus say, ‘Drink up, folks,’—or something like that—at a wedding? So, you know, it was the Christian thing to do,” Chon said, looking over at Araceli.
“Hi Chon,” she said, with a little wave of her fingers. Mejia gave him a nod. This was why Chon had sold the kegs, this very exchange here.
“Yeah, man. Jesus. You’re a pretty weird guy, you know that, Dodge-nasty?” Robison said. He was drunk.
“You know what, Robe? This is the first time someone’s ever told me that when it didn’t sound like they were trying to be mean,” Chon answered back, trying his best to stare Araceli down, but out of the corner of his eyes.
“Hot damn, Dodge-nasty. You know how to make a guy feel good about himself,” Robison shouted. His crowd of girls all roared with laughter.
“Hot damn, Robe, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Robison gave Chon a pound on the shoulder.
“Alright, well, good luck in Austin,” Chon said.
“Yes sir. And good luck to you here in Greenton,” Robison said, not intending to be ironic.
Chon’s eyes drifted past Araceli’s in a deliberate show that took all of the will power he had. They met John Mejia’s.
Standing there, face-to-face with his nemesis, Chon worked to convince himself that he and Mejia weren’t too different from each other. Mejia wasn’t better looking—at least not by leaps and bounds—than Chon. He had an athlete’s build, sure, but a lean teenage baseball player’s. All that separated them was a God-given and determinedly honed skill on the diamond—that and a future at a university in a city Chon couldn’t even picture in his head outside of images of clock towers and capitol buildings he’d seen in books. And a present with the only person worth wanting in a one-stoplight town built on cattle and railroads and killed by bypasses and super-ranches.
“Good luck,” Chon said.
Mejia gave him a nod and took a drink of his beer. As Chon walked away, Mejia told Araceli something that made her laugh. A fire burned inside Chon that made him wish things he would come to regret in a few short days.
The clock read 12:13 when Henry got back to The Pachanga. Chon was sitting in the dark in front of the store, unable to lock up because he’d given his keys to his best friend.
“You’re late,” he said when Henry got out of the car. He took the keys and caught a whiff of Henry. “And you’re drunk. Where’ve you been?”
“Flojo’s, man. Half the town is there, the other half is at church,” Henry said opening the passenger door to the Dodge-nasty. He let his body fall into the car, ass-first.
“You mean you were drinking at Flojo’s?” he asked Henry when he got in the car.
“Yeah man, they were letting anyone in. The sheriff was even there getting pedo. We had all posted up at the Robison place, the whole town. Then Goyo Mejia got there to be with his parents. I mean, you think everyone was wrecked before… When he got there, his mom came out to the porch to meet him and she, like, fell into his arms. That totally tore everyone up. He just stood there with her crying on him for so long he had to crouch down under her weight. His dad had to come out and help her up and into the house.”
They sat there in the parking lot of The Pachanga, the car not turned on, Henry’s story fogging up the car’s windows.
“After about an hour, Goyo came out and asked everyone to leave. He said that his parents and the Robisons were going through a rough time and had asked if we could leave them alone to ‘hurt over their sons.’ He said it like that. He wasn’t even crying, man. His face hadn’t seen a tear all day.
“By that time the whole sidewalk in front of the house was covered in candles. Man, I can’t even think of how so many candles got there so fast. That stretch of Viggie doesn’t have a streetlight, you know? The whole street was lit with candles. The sidewalk was covered in front of their place, so they just kept putting them in front of other houses. They almost reach to your house. Anyway, everyone left. No one said where they were going, but half ended up at Flojo’s and the other half at the church.”
Chon waited for Henry to tell him more. But Henry was done. He just sat there, his hands over his eyes, breath coming heavily out of his nostrils. Chon turned the car on and drove him home.
He took Mesquite from Henry’s house, a street that, along with Sigrid, served as the east end of Greenton’s east-west bookends. A few blocks from Viggie, Chon could see the town’s church strangely active. Half of Greenton must have been there, looking up at the cross with their hands clasped in prayer (like a button that has to be held down on a walkie-talkie for any correspondence to be transmitted), asking God, asking the beaten-bloody Jew on the cross—asking them both at the same time—why?
He went back over to Main Street. There was a truck pulled onto the sidewalk—like its driver had tried to park perpendicular to it and then drove right on ahead. Chon might have assumed this was one of the Flojo’s loaded congregants if he hadn’t seen someone, presumably the truck’s owner, standing on the roof of the cab. Chon slammed the brakes, backed into
