and aunt who acted as though they’d lost one of their own because, really, they had. Conspicuously—and to Chon’s great disappointment—Araceli wasn’t there.
Sympathetic though he was to the families of the deceased, it was going to take more than a tragedy to quench his obsession. He still wanted to comfort Araceli, to make her feel better. He was removed from the initial shock of the Johns’ death, from the reality of life’s fragility and preciousness and whatever. His mind had wandered to more familiar selfish territory. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to make her feel better. He wanted to save the day, to be her Band-Aid, her hero, to fill the roughly John-sized, boyfriend-sized void left in her heart.
He was tired from having closed the store the night before and having had to open up at five that morning because Rocha called in sick and Ana didn’t answer her phone when Art called to ask her to cover. There was a bottleneck leaving the student lot. It was only 1:30 in the afternoon though. Chon would have time to go home, shower, and get to work on time. But he wouldn’t get any sleep before going in to work.
He went to the funeral the next day with his family, even though he’d heard from Henry that Araceli wouldn’t be there either. It was as well-attended as the memorial service. People stood in the wings, vestibule, and stairs leading to the church. The Gonzales family arrived an hour and a half early, affording them a small stretch of the pew in the farthest back corner of the church. They watched two caskets carried into church, an experience Chon hadn’t expected to affect him as it did—he became lightheaded and would have fallen down if he weren’t already sitting. They heard Father Tom’s sermon and a Gospel reading, punctuated by Julie Mejia’s crazy crying. Then the caskets were carried back out and loaded into hearses. The mourners got into their cars and followed the procession through town to the Greenton cemetery. Not Chon, though. He turned the Dodge-nasty left when all of the other cars turned right. He had come to church, having dressed in a shirt and tie for the second day in a row, and paid his respects to the Johns without any hope in the world of seeing Araceli. This gesture was enough to convince Chon, as he was sure it convinced his family and would convince Araceli if it came up, that his sympathy was sincere. He’d done his politicking and point proving. He didn’t need to see a couple of mahogany boxes lowered into the ground.
John Robison’s Explorer blew a tire and rolled over when he took a curve too fast just outside of Beeville, TX. Why the boys ended up there was anyone’s guess. The quickest route to Austin from Greenton was to take 16 to San Antonio and 35 from there to Austin. It would have been a four-hour drive. As it was, they had either veered from that route after Benavides, going east to Highway 77 outside of Kingsville and taking that north. Or driven over to Corpus and taken the Harbor Bridge into Portland and up north. Whichever was the case, the Johns ended up on Highway 181. They filled the Explorer up in Papalote, which made the rollover crash they would get in some seventeen miles up the road that much more volatile. It was the cause of the Johns’ caskets being closed. Lawyers were already, just three days later, making their way to Greenton from Florida and from all over Texas too, where class-action lawsuits were being organized against Ford and Firestone. Ambulance chasers hoped they could talk either the Robisons or the Mejias into foregoing the potential years-long wait of such a suit and make quick money in a settlement.
Representatives from both Ford and Firestone were at the funeral, where it was assumed they were sympathetic mourners from somewhere in South Texas. When a Firestone business card was revealed, a sheriffs’s deputy unholstered his truncheon and an old man grabbed the hunting rifle that had been stowed in his truck. Neither said anything. They just held their weapons across their chests. The Firestone suits never even got to speak with the parents of either boy before they got in their cars and drove away, followed quickly by the Ford representatives who saw just how their presence would have been received had they had the chance to say who they were.
When Chon got to work, Ana was outside sitting on the ice machine, an old double-doored cooler, smoking a cigarette and hugging herself. The cooler was five feet tall, taller than Ana herself. She would hoist herself up onto it by way of a milk carton and a trashcan. The impression Ana’s ass left on the top of the cooler would deceive anyone looking at it—granted that they knew what it was—into thinking it belonged to someone sexy. It didn’t. Four foot, ten-inch tall Ana had a round, flat rump that was just like her breasts—big, maybe even at one time desirable. But time and gravity had caused them to wrinkle and grow flabby. Her legs, by comparison, were small, made so by a drunk driver who hit her when she was eleven. The accident left her looking like a dreidel, the block of her upper body carried around on the legs of a preteen girl.
“She’s whoring herself now,” Ana said, smoke coming out of her mouth with every word. “I mean, it makes sense. She has to do something to live.” She shook her head, looked across the street at San Antonio in her mind, and emptied the rest of the smoke from her lungs.
“I mean, fuck. You know? Worst mistake of my life.” She chain-lit a new cigarette, then stubbed out the old one on the cooler.
“Yeah,” Chon said. She had sent her daughter Tina away to live with the girl’s father in San Antonio because Tina had been caught smoking pot in the school parking lot with Charlie Marquez, who folks in Greenton called el camerón. The nickname, ‘the shrimp,’ was a derivation of the word jailbait, given to the man by his friends when he was in his twenties—when he still had friends who would claim him—because of his tendency to go after younger girls. Twenty turned to thirty and el camerón lost friends because he was rumored to still be chasing underage tail. Then he turned forty-three and got caught getting a blowjob from a fifteen-year-old (Tina) in the high school parking lot. Charlie was run out of town when the charges didn’t stick because the kid who caught him, a hall monitor narc with a clipboard—who was sent out to the parking lot to find truants with cigarettes and vodka in Sprite bottles—was naturally traumatized by the sight of the black and white belly hair that led down to his junk. She couldn’t say for sure that she saw Charlie’s joint in Tina Guerra’s mouth, but nonetheless Charlie was run out and Tina was sent to her father.
In the year since Tina left for San Antonio, she had been kicked out of regular school and sent to a juvenile disciplinary school, where she made contacts with would-be dealers and pimps, developed a pretty bad addiction to drugs—pills and coke when they were available, but crack and meth mostly—done a short stint in rehab, and attended outpatient counseling which was working until her father lost his job and insurance. Bexar county’s LCDCs were less like counselors and more like probation officers looking to send an offender back into the system where they belonged. Most recently, she had run away and been involved in a string of home invasions with a guy named Terry who was wanted on three drug charges and a failure to appear. Over the past year, Ana had filled Chon in on the news of her daughter’s troubles as they were reported to her from San Antonio. Each time, she ended her report, in reference to sending Tina to her father, by saying, “Worst mistake of my life.”
Each time, Chon agreed with that statement—but in reference to something else.
A while back, Chon had talked a cigarette distributor into giving him a pack of his most expensive cigarettes. He thought he’d give them to Ana who always only smoked the cheapest cigarettes—Best Value, Skydancer, Leggett’s—and would only splurge the extra buck or so on Camels every third or fourth payday. When Ana came in to pick up her paycheck, he handed her the green box of Nat Shermans. She stared at them for a minute. Then she said she didn’t smoke menthols. She immediately shook her head, crossing herself.
“I mean, that was really nice of you,” she said. “You didn’t have to get these for me.” Chon was confused—weird how moved she was by a pack of cigarettes he’d gotten for free. “I mean, not cause they’re menthols. I just…Fuck—” She went to the back of the store, leaving the smokes on the counter. Chon was closing, the lights were off and the shop was locked up. Ana came to the front of the store, grabbed Chon, and began kissing him all over. He pulled back to look at her and ask what she was doing. When he did, he saw something in her eyes that had not been there
