The Knife and the Butterfly (20 page)

Greñas jerks his chin at me as he charges toward two of their guys. “They brought a bitch?
Pinche
posers,” he laughs. Then he starts throwing punches.

“You think this is a game?” I say to her. “We’re not fightin’ you. Get out of here.”

Over her shoulder, I see Cucaracha break away from the guy he’s fighting. There’s blood streaming from his nose, but he swings a chain, and the tall dude backs off.

Cucaracha points at her and shakes his head. Drops of blood fly in both directions. “A fuckin’ ho?”

“You shits don’t know who you’re messing with,” she shouts at him. Then she turns to me and lifts her left fist. She’s holding a double-bladed knife by the handle in the middle. Part of me is thinking, that’s the knife I drew. Part of me is thinking, only a fool would open both blades. Because like that, even when you’re pointing the knife at somebody else, a blade is pointing back at you.

Then she starts swinging it through the air in sideways figure eights. The knife looks meaner in motion, the sun catching on its blades.

Another car pulls up on the Crazy Crew side of the field, and a skinny guy runs toward us, dodging Eddie and weaving between my other homeboys fighting on that side. “You’re not supposed to be here, Lex!” the guy shouts. “This ain’t your business!”

I open my eyes. I’m shaking all over from the remembering. “I never fought a girl. We don’t fight girls,” I say. “I didn’t hurt her, I swear. I didn’t hurt her. And the other guy—I didn’t—I haven’t—I never killed nobody.”

Pakmin is shaking his head. “You still don’t understand.”

The way he looks at me, I think he knows that I’m lying. I killed Pájaro, didn’t I? He wouldn’t be dead if it wasn’t for me. I shake the thought away.

“You’re running out of time,” Pakmin says. “You’ve got to keep going. Your eyes, you need to close them.”

I do what he says. And as I close my eyes, I feel that I’m also obeying something inside of me. It’s like at the same time that Pakmin’s across the table from me, he’s also in me. He’s making me remember from the inside.

She turns, and her hair whips around her face. “I don’t need your help, Cartoon!” she screams. “I got this!”

While she’s looking away, I give her a little push with the bat. She almost loses her balance, and one of the blades scrapes against her arm. It’s a shallow cut, but blood beads up in a line on her tan skin. I think, fuckin’ fool ho, one little shove and you cut yourself. I hear Eddie laughing from somewhere.

She stares at me, licks the blood from her arm, then laughs. Her mouth twists around words. “You’ll regret that,” she hisses. There’s a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth.

“Not my fault,
puta.
You cut your own self,” I say, laughing. “That’s the problem with toy knives and bitches who don’t know how to handle them.” Then I turn to meet the fool coming my way. Him and his crew are the reason I’m here, not some girl. He has a chain, but my feet are planted, and the bat swings easy and smooth. I’m ready.

“Get this bitch under control so we can fight like fuckin’
hombres,
” I shout
.

He ignores me. “Give me the knife, Lexi, and get the hell out of here!” He grabs her arm, but she pulls away, kicking at him.

I toss the bat on the ground to prove that I’m not fighting till she’s gone. “This is a joke,” I say. “She’s the best you got?”

Then I hear Eddie shouting, and I’m spinning around to see if he needs me. I’m done with these two, anyway, ready to leave them to their puppy-love fight when—

I lurch forward and puke. It’s like Pakmin knew this was coming because the trash can is already right there between me and the table. There’s no food in my stomach, and the vomit burns the back of my throat. I’m cursing all the times I thought I wanted to get my brain straightened out, to get this DVD to quit freezing and skipping. I don’t want this. I don’t want to know any more. But I can feel the pain spreading from the center of my chest all the same, a pain that wants to take over. A pain that is its own kind of knowing. I throw my head down toward the trash can and spit up another stream of stinging acid.

When I look up, Pakmin meets my eyes. “It’s normal,” he says quietly, handing me a paper towel. He gives me a second to mop off my mouth then says, “I can’t give you much more time, Martín.”

I’m so scared I don’t even tell him to call me Azael. I just fall back into the remembering. And the pain.

I’m turning away from them when I see a flash of red. Somehow she’s in front of me, and something explodes in my chest. I step back, stumble.

For a second, she just stands there, staring at me. “You fucked up,” she says. “You really fucked up.” She tosses her hair like we’re at the mall, but the knife is still clenched in her fist.

One of the blades is halfway folded in and dripping with blood. I watch the red slide down toward the handle. I think, she cut herself. I think, that’s a lot of blood.

Then I touch my chest.

When I pull my hands away, they’re covered in blood.

“What?” I start to say. “What?” Then I can’t speak. My hands go back up to my chest, trying to fix what’s messed up, because parts of me that are supposed to stay inside are up against the world, the air, the park, all this. My blood is escaping, and the world is climbing into me through my chest.

I give up on keeping my insides safe. I hold a hand out, taking a step toward her. I want to ask her something, but I can’t. I grab her arm. When she pulls it away, it is streaked with blood.

Then she turns and runs. The red of her shirt pulses. The knife blades flash in the sun as she pumps her arms.

All of a sudden everything is too bright, and I need to close my eyes. When I do, the pain in my chest is the only thing that’s real. The pain is a room that I walk into. I stand inside it. I am six years old, waiting at a broken window and calling for Mami, then Eddie, then Mami again.

I open my eyes to the unbearable brightness one last time. I see my hands covered in blood. These are my hands. This is my blood.

I feel myself start to fall.

“No!” I cry out. “It’s not true!” I pull up my shirt to show Pakmin my chest. No scar.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” Pakmin says.

“How’d you get this shit into my head?” I’m trembling. I still feel the ache in the center of my body like when I had my eyes closed. I stare at him, almost begging now. “What is this place? What the hell is this place?”

“You decide, my friend. But you’d better be fast.” He stands up, and I know he’s done with me.

Back in the cell, I drop onto my cot. I’m still shaking. I grab the breakfast tray and throw it against the wall. Globs of oatmeal dribble down the concrete. The orange juice carton lands with a thud by the sink. Did they pump last night’s applesauce full of some crazy no-taste, fake-memory drug? They could, right? They can do anything. Or am I still sick, tripping from a fever? Are they trying to poison me?

The questions skitter like cockroaches through my head. They don’t stick around long enough for me to make sense of anything. I feel like I might puke again, so I press my forehead against the clammy cinder block wall. Once the feeling passes, I reach down and pull my black book and the papers out from under the mattress. Reading is better than thinking, even if I’ve read it all before.

Only it turns out that I haven’t. Because when I look at the article that used to have shit blacked out, the one from June 12, the words that were missing before jump out at me. I read the first sentence. “Martín ‘Azael’ Arevalo, 15, was stabbed in a gang fight yesterday in a Montrose-area park.”

I stare at the words, but they don’t make sense. I think of that explosion of pain in my chest when Pakmin made me close my eyes, but I can’t get the words to connect up with what I felt. Stabbed? The word is like one of Regina’s stickers after she played with them too much. When I try to press it onto what I remember, the edges of the word just curl up, and it falls off.

I choke back more vomit and keep reading. “Gang violence broke the peace yesterday around 2:00 p.m., leaving fifteen-year-old Arevalo dead on the sidewalk, with a four-inch stab wound in his chest.” I want to flush the newspaper clipping right down the toilet, but I stare at the words instead, trying to make sense of them. This is some kind of trick. A game. Because I’m right here. They can put all kinds of shit in print, but that don’t make it true. Somehow they made it look like this happened to me so they could put me in here.

Then I unfold Becca’s letter.
I can never be yours
, she said.
Never
. I throw the letter down, but it’s too late. When I see NEVER there in Becca’s girly handwriting, I just know. Even though it doesn’t make sense. Even though this is all wrong. I know what I know.

Becca didn’t quit on me. I quit on her.

I reach for the newspaper page that was blank before. While I look at it, while it’s right there in my hands, real as anything, words start to appear. A picture of me, too, one I took of myself with Pelón’s cell phone.

I know exactly what’s in front of me. An obit. And it’s mine.

MARTIN “AZAEL” AREVALO, 15

June 16, 2011

Arevalo died as he lived: in the streets and separated from his family.

The 15-year-old was stabbed to death last Wednesday, June 11, in a gang fight that broke out in a Montrose dog park around two o’clock in the afternoon. Numerous members of both gangs have been questioned. Police have taken a 17-year-old white female into custody.

Arevalo is survived by his brother, Eduardo; sister, Regina; father, Manuel; and other relatives. His mother Rosa died shortly after the birth of his sister Regina, and his father has lived in El Salvador since being deported from the U.S. a year ago.

Arevalo and his brother seem to have slipped through the cracks of Houston’s social system. After federal agents arrested their father, CPS failed to bring the boys into state custody. The boys lived on the streets, occasionally staying with relatives, but usually drifting between friends’ apartments. They both became involved in Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a Los Angeles-based Salvadoran street gang.

Friends and family remember Arevalo as “sweet.” His girlfriend Becca Ramirez said, “He was trying real hard to go straight. He’ll never be forgotten.”

Arevalo’s body was transported to El Salvador for burial because his father is not permitted re-entry into the United States. Services will be held for Arevalo at noon on Saturday in the Iglesia de Santa Lucía, Santa Ana, El Salvador.

I want to cry or scream when I see my name there. I want to, but I can’t. Because now that I know, I feel like I’ve known all along, like Tigs was telling me, like Gabe’s crazy blue eyes were telling me, like Pakmin’s mustache was telling me, like the wall of the cell was telling me, like Lexi’s pen was telling me. It was all there.

I slide down onto the floor of my cell, shaking even harder now. My knee knocks against the concrete. I think I might be crying. I don’t want my name spray-painted on the sidewalk. I don’t want any “R.I.P. AZZ” messages that will just get canned over.

But I can’t do anything about that now, can I? Can you change anything once you’re dead? I think of Pakmin telling me, “If you don’t find a way to move on . . .” All of a sudden I’m feeling every bad thing I ever did like lead in my shoes.

I’ve got to do something before it’s too late.

I grab the pencil from under my mattress. I clench and unclench my fist around it. What can I do? No way am I going to write some message warning my homeboys about how they can end up, because they already know. I knew, too.

Words are no good for me, anyway. So I pull my black book out and turn to the last page, the one I’ve been saving, and start drawing. Not thinking, just drawing. Not thinking that probably by now every wall I canned has been buffed out or sprayed over with somebody else’s tag. Not thinking that I ain’t never going to touch Becca’s skin again. Not thinking of Regina and Eddie and Pops burying me in the El Salvador I never got to see. Not thinking about Pájaro or whether he’s in a cell like this somewhere. Not thinking about Lexi lying on a courtroom stand and turning my name blacker than it was already. Not thinking none of that. Just drawing.