He put the Dodge-nasty in park, rolled down his window, and was about to shout the man down when he saw it was Goyo Mejia, indeed drunk, clinging to the telephone pole he was parked next to, tiptoeing up, just inches below the bottom right quadrant of the banner that had been hung for his little brother and his little brother’s best friend.
“Hey,” was all Chon managed to say. The first half of the H was loud enough to be heard, but he let the e and the y die in a downward glissandoing diminuendo, like a trombonist running out of breath and letting his instrument’s slide slip from his hand down to the ground.
Goyo was trying to stretch himself up the pole. Chon got out of his car to make his presence known, hoping that might make a difference. The danger of the situation had Chon standing on his toes, every muscle in his legs tense. When Goyo’s balance would tip this way or that Chon would give a start in that direction, like he did at so many routine grounders in his Little League days, with about the same, if not less, efficacy.
Suddenly Goyo gave a shout of frustration and punched at the telephone pole, which had years of nails and staples in it announcing so many yard sales and church Jamaicas and lost pets. Then he gave another shout, this one out of pain. He fell to his knee, still on the truck’s roof, and clutched at his bloody fist. Chon watched Goyo shift his focus from fist to banner, back to fist, then back again. Then he let go of his hand, laid both hands palm-side down on the roof of the truck, righted his stance, touched down and gave a leap.
Chon watched in awe. It was far more graceful a leap than Chon could have ever executed, drunk or otherwise. Goyo seemed to float in air, ascending inch by inch toward the night sky. He caught onto the banner, but it was secured to the poles so well that when the right side came down, the left still held. That changed what would have been an up/down trajectory for Goyo to an outward pull like Tarzan swinging on a vine and bought him in a belly flop onto the bed of his truck. A less determined, less inebriated man would have let go of the banner. But Goyo Mejia, clinging to a relic of his brother’s life that might otherwise have been taken by another person, held on with his bloody hand.
Half of the banner ended up in the bed of the truck with Goyo. The other half was splayed across Main Street. Chon heard a madman’s laughter, replaced quickly by the loud sobs of a person who had either broken his ribs or lost his brother. Probably both. But Goyo couldn’t have been hurt too badly because he began reeling what was left of the banner into the truck. Chon got in his car then and left, hoping that Goyo wouldn’t remember that he’d had an audience, that someone had seen him at his whisky-soaked, grief-stricken worst.
The house was empty when Chon arrived. Just like Henry said, candles lit his way home. In the time it took Chon to drop his friend off and bear witness to Goyo Mejia’s freefall, the candles had crossed his front yard and were making their way to Sigrid, if not all the way to Laredo and Mexico beyond. Chon got in the shower wondering if his parents and brother were among the half of town praying to a cross or the other half praying to the bottom of a glass.
He lay down in bed thinking, as he always did—but in a totally different way—of Araceli. He tried to imagine how she was hurting. He thought of how he would feel if she died, but he knew that it wasn’t the same thing. His obsession with her wasn’t the same thing as what she shared with John. He tried to think how he would feel if he lost his parents or his brother, but knew, without really knowing, that this wasn’t the same thing as losing someone you choose to love who chooses to love you back.
Then he gave up trying her hurt on for size. He knew she was hurting, and that was enough. He wished he could tear open her being and kiss her soul in ways sweeter and more loving than he had previously wished he could kiss her mouth or her breasts or her anything and her everything. He said a small prayer of his own for the Johns and their families.
He fell asleep that night having solved the riddle of nearly every sleepless night before then: he thought of Araceli without John Mejia muddying the picture. All he had to do, it turns out, was to think of her for her own sake—without thrusting upon her the weight of his desires and expectations—to see her as someone who could need and hurt and want and lose just like he could.
Two days later, the memorial service had to be moved from the Greenton Funeral Home to the school gym to accommodate the expected turnout. Coach Gallegos, the man the Johns had taken to regional tournaments in football and a state tournament in baseball, said a few words about the heart the Johns displayed on the field of play. Mrs. Salinas spoke about a Mejia most of them didn’t know, about the poetry he wrote and how he helped tutor his best friend and had sworn to do so through a tough academic life. “They had been thinking about academics at UT!” she said emphatically.
Dan McReynolds, who did the weekly football season addendum to the ten o’clock news—“The Friday Night Blitz”—drove in from Corpus and was the keynote speaker of sorts. He had been a fan of the Johns’ style since he first ran highlights of them during their freshman year. It was through this show that the boys had become regional celebrities, especially when McReynolds began running tape of the boys’ famous conferences at the line of scrimmage. He even began covering the Greyhounds baseball team during the spring, not just during the playoffs as was usually the case for AA teams from a town that made up so small a portion of KIII’s viewership. It all paid off when he was in Austin to cover the state playoffs during the Johns’ junior year. Greenton and AAAAA Corpus Christi Moody both lost in their respective semis. He did an exclusive interview with the boys that weekend and another when he came to Greenton to cover their signing with UT a few months prior to their deaths. During that interview, they made no show of lining up three different college caps and selecting one, as was the custom for such signings. In fact, they wore burnt orange for the occasion.
He talked about the young men he’d had the pleasure and good fortune of meeting. He’d become friends with them. He said that he had planned to cover them through college and the pros, sports or not, for the rest of his career. He gave a speech with as many sports analogies as he could fit in—he said the boys were running an option each with hands on the ball, each blocking for the other. He said that heaven was the end zone. He said that now they were in the stands cheering the rest of us on.
Chon listened and clapped along with everyone else. He had arrived early for the service, but already the gym was standing room only. He stood in back and, tall as he was, could not see the front rows of the service, where he assumed Araceli would be.
Throughout the service, the somber tone of the proceedings was disturbed by the sound of hyena-cackle laughing. People in the back of the gym where Chon was were exchanging confused looks and shaking their heads in disapproval. Single file lines formed on either side of the gym, leading up to where the Robisons and Mejias sat. When Chon got close to the front, he could see that the strange high-pitched sound wasn’t laughter, but Julie Mejia’s wails of grief.
Chon was glad to see that there were not two closed caskets at the front of the gym when he got there. They had been left at the funeral home. There were only three very large pictures—one of each John’s yearbook photos at either end of the stage and one of them when they had beaten Pleasanton to earn a trip to State their junior year. They each had an arm around the other. With their free hands they held up #1s.
Arn Robison and Andres Mejia were making an effort to shake the hand of every mourner who—out of respect or macabre curiosity—had taken a place in line to give their condolences. Angie Robison gave nods to people she knew and hugs to people she cared about and ignored the rest. Julie Mejia just cackled, clutching the arm of the son who was still with her. Goyo sat in a black suit and sunglasses, wiping his mother’s tears and caressing her face with his swollen right hand. Patchwork sutures on his fist stuck out ever so slightly, like tiny shoelaces that needed to be tied.
Chon shook both fathers’ hands, telling them he was so sorry. He had come from audience left, meaning he met Arn Robison
