Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (19 page)

“I didn’t shoot anybody! I didn’t have a gun!”

“I just told you about the guns,
hijo.”

Roberto felt like crying, probably because his head hurt so bad. “Who else got shot? I don’t understand why anybody got shot.”

“Juan Lopez has a bullet through his hand; he’s okay. A woman I don’t know from Reyes Street got hit in the leg. Rudolfo Escobar got shot pretty bad. He’s still in the hospital. Critical, they say on the tv. And this one cop, he’s serious but not critical. Everybody knows Mexicans can’t shoot straight.” He belched. “He probably got hit by one of his own buddies, all the banging away they were doing, but you’ll never get them to admit that. Then there’s a bunch of people that got beat up pretty bad. Jake Maestas is in the hospital with his ankle all smashed to hell. They have to do an operation on him. Our own Blanquita has a broken arm. She’s got a hell of a big white cast on it, and they sent her home so full of pain pills she can hardly walk. I guess they don’t think they can get away with locking up a young girl like that who’s got asthma. Everybody else that didn’t run like hell they handcuffed and hauled off to jail.”

“But what for? We were having a party!”

Great-uncle Tilo’s good hand pressed against Beto’s lips, silencing him. Softly the old man said, “They say on the news the cops got a phone call. Somebody told them that a mob from Pinto Street was going over to burn down the new Y building because of thinking it’s the Y that’s changed the zoning so their houses have to be condemned, which is crazy, but you know how people misunderstand things. The cops came loaded for a wild-eyed mob, so that’s what they saw.”

“Who would tell them a thing like that?” Roberto could not imagine telling such a lie. It left him awed.

“Somebody who didn’t come to the party. Somebody who’s all of a sudden not around, gone to visit relatives in T. or C. they say. Somebody that stomped out of our house because he couldn’t spy anymore, once we had him spotted.”

Pete Archuletta, he meant. I should have gone after him at the meeting in our house, Roberto thought dismally. I should have killed the son of a bitch, me and Jake and Martín should have just killed him.

Great-uncle Tilo’s ropey old arm came across his shoulders and hugged him hard. “We’ll get you safe out of this mess, don’t you worry,
mi hijo.
Go on and cry, go on, just try and be quiet, all right?”

Blanca had wrapped an old green sweater around her cast so that the white plaster wouldn’t gleam in the moonlight and give them away. She listened with delicious dread to every creak of branches in the bosque of willows and thorny Russian olives and the soft sliding hiss of the river.

“I don’t see why I got to run away,” Beto repeated sullenly for the tenth time.

And for the tenth time Great-uncle Tilo explained: “Not run away, it’s just leave for a while. We all talked it over. It’s too risky for you to hang around here. You’re scaring your mother to death, Beto. The cops are on a tear. She’s afraid for you.”

“Well, I’m not afraid.”

Liar, Blanca thought. Of course he was scared, and it was stupid of him to lie about it, but what else could you expect from Beto? He wasn’t about to admit that he was plain petrified, now that the thrill of hiding out had worn thin.

If it was me, she thought, I wouldn’t be scared. I’d take off in a minute and never look back. He just misses his dumb friends, that’s all. I wouldn’t miss anybody.

“Listen,
hijo,”
Great-uncle Tilo said. “Listen to me. I been in trouble with the cops myself, you know? Long time ago, about some railroad union business. You don’t want to let cops get hold of you, not with one of their own laying hurt in the hospital. They won’t care that you’re a kid.”

Somebody came crashing through the undergrowth. They all froze. Blanca thought, oh no, it’s not fair, it can’t be all over so quick!

“Beto?” the intruder said hoarsely. “Is that you? It’s me, Bobbie. Mina sent me down here with some stuff for you.”

Blanca could have laughed out loud: cousin Bobbie from the Heights, what a dope! He could have sent them all stampeding into the river, barging in on them like this.

“Keep it down, will you?” Beto said. “What you mean, she sent you?”

“She gave me some money for you. She says you should come up to the Heights. She can find you a place to hide out until all the fuss dies down. Boy, is she mad.”

“She’s always mad,” Roberto growled. “And I’m not going up there, no way.”

Not mad enough to come down and yell at him — or give him the money — herself, Blanca noted in silence. Mina was no kind of sister, money or no money. Blanca would show them about being a sister, somehow, and do it in person, too.

“Where were you supposed to go?” Bobbie said.

“To Aunt Marguerite in LA,” Beto said. “Shit. She could drive you crazy, all that religion and running to church all the time. Anyway, what am I supposed to tell her?”

Bobbie sat down on the old half-buried timber that Roberto was sitting on, the two of them dark silhouettes against the sparkly surface of the river behind them. Bandits at night on the river bank, Blanca thought. That’s what we are.

“Mina says you can’t stay with relatives, the cops will expect that. They’ll come looking.”

That was when Blanca had her idea. She said, “I read about some guys who ran away from the draft in the Vietnam war. They went to Canada.”

“Canada!” Bobbie said excitedly. “They’d never expect that, Beto. A kid I know, his uncle lives up there. In Toronto. I could get his name for you, maybe. It’s a long border up there. They can’t guard it, and there’s no fence. All that snow, Eskimos and wolves and things — Canada would be great.”

Roberto rubbed his head where it must be bothering him again. “That’s crazy! How am I supposed to get to Canada?”

Great-uncle Tilo said, “It’s not so crazy if you got some money in your pocket.”

And if you’re not alone, Blanca thought, the idea blossoming gloriously in her mind. If they’re looking for a kid on his own, running away, and instead there’s a guy and his sister, traveling to visit relatives, hitching, a couple of nice kids —

Great-uncle Tilo hawked and spat in the dirt. Blanca hated how he spat all the time. She looked at the shining gobbet of spit gleaming on the ground. She had loved Great-uncle Tilo a lot when she was little. He was saying how he went across Canada once on a train. Big country, he said, but cold. Good trains.

“First you’ve got to get out of Albuquerque,” Blanca said. With me, Beto. But she’d have to go easy on that right now or he’d spook and say no, and she’d never budge him. She’d have to make him see that it was her chance to get out too.

“I could go with you,” Bobbie said eagerly. “Part of the way, anyhow. They wouldn’t be looking for two guys, only one.”

She could have strangled him, stealing her idea. But that wouldn’t stop her. Nobody could stop her.

“I don’t know,” Great-uncle Tilo said, shaking his head. “It could get dangerous. You won’t know how dangerous until you try. For one thing, they’re looking for Martín too, remember. He’s an ex-con, so they’re all primed to start shooting, specially with one of their own shot already. Is it easier to slip two of you out of town, or just one? Maybe when Garduño takes his truck up into the mountains to cut pinion —”

As if that sour old man would agree to carry Beto!

Silence again. Everybody was thinking. Blanca ground her shoulder blade against the wood at her back, easing the discomfort of the cast. She was getting tired. She wished they’d get this over with so she could start working on Beto in private.

Bobbie said, “Hey. The drawing class.”

“What about it?” Beto said. He sounded really cranky.

“The trip is day after tomorrow, remember? We’re supposed to go in that big old van.”

“So what? Man, are you crazy, you think I’m taking some lousy field trip now?”

“Would the cops stop a car full of kids going on a school trip?”

Hey Mom, Blanca thought dreamily, guess what; I’m going to asthma camp in Canada with the wolves and the Eskimos.

Ellie Stern had never seen Roberto look so subdued.

“We have a ranch south of Taos,” he mumbled. “I mean we used to live up around there.”

She looked at him, puzzled and wary but gratified. Had she finally broken through to him on some level, had she banished his belligerence and his bluster? With seven years of teaching behind her, she still found kids baffling much of the time, especially your more sullen, angry ethnics. She had not run into too many of them at the Marshall School in New York. Some kind of success with Roberto, here, would be all the more significant.

The girl, his sister, piped up, “We used to spend our summers up there.” Such a clear, bright voice to come from that odd, slightly stunted body. What a striking child, with her apricot skin and honey hair; who’d imagine coarse, thick-set Roberto having such a sister? Ellie had hoped for some contact with Spanish or Indian culture on her vacation out here. This seemed to be it at last, the return for her bread of acceptance cast upon the murky waters of Roberto’s spirit.

She was relieved that her reaction to the street closing had not driven Roberto away. She was to have a chance now to show that though she was — not cowardly, exactly, but
sensible
— about problems like that, she was a good person.

He said, “The doctor said I should take my sister up there to spend some time with our grandma, as long as the class was going.”

“The doctor?” Ellie said. Surely not a trip to the country for a broken arm? “Is your sister — ah, Blanca, is Blanca ill?”

“She has asthma,” Roberto said. “All we need is a lift to Taos. Our grandma can pick us up there.”

“It’s okay,” the girl herself said, in her curiously self-possessed manner. “I don’t get attacks in cars, and anyway I have my medication with me.”

Roberto stood looking down and dug in the dirt with the heel of his boot. Angry at having to ask for help, probably; the pride of the Spanish heritage. Of course they would have no money for cars or gas or bus fare to Taos. Treatment for Blanca’s asthma probably devoured any spare cash they had.

Ellie said, “We’re not stopping except for lunch, and that’s going to be a picnic with what we’ve brought — is that all right? Good; glad to have you join us.”

Here came Joni across the parking lot toward them with a sketch pad and a big bag of sandwiches.