We Were Here (13 page)

He looked down at his watch and said: “Be pullin’ her out in exactly six minutes.”

He reached for my ticket, stared at it for a sec and looked at me, handed it back. “All the way to UC Santa Cruz, huh?”

“Or as far south as we can get that’s still by the beach,” Mong said.

The driver nodded.

I looked at Mong, wondering how he knew so much about geography. Not only San Francisco and Santa Cruz but Mexico, too. Maybe Rene was right about him being kind of smart.

As he and Rondell climbed onto the bus, I went back to the waiting area and bought candy bars and Cokes and chips from the vending machines. Then I went onto the bus too, took a full seat next to them in the back and let Mong and Rondell pick whatever they wanted. Me and Rondell dug in like it was the first time we’d seen food in a damn month, but Mong didn’t eat a bite. Instead he just stared at me with this little grin on his face—and not the psycho one I was
used to either, just a normal one. “You liked her, right?” he told me.

“Who?” I said, though I already knew who.

“Come on, you can tell me. I won’t be mad.”

I studied him for a sec. I didn’t know if he was being true about not getting pissed off so I just didn’t say a word about his cousin. Instead I asked him: “Yo, man, what
a gung gung
?”

He laughed to himself. It was the first time I’d ever seen Mong laugh without being all psycho about it. You’d almost think he was a regular Asian kid with a shaved head if it wasn’t for the nasty scars on his cheeks. He took a sip of his Coke and wiped his mouth on the arm of his sweatshirt. “It’s a Chinese person’s grandfather,” he said. “On the mother’s side.”

I nodded my head but didn’t say anything else. I looked over at Rondell, who was chewing away at a candy bar, watching us.

After a minute or so, Mong tapped me on the shoulder and said: “She’d probably like you too. Except you’re so much younger. And you’re Mexican.” He took off his sweatshirt and balled it up, set it between his shoulder and the window. “But who knows,” he said. “Maybe she wouldn’t even care about that.”

Instead of saying anything back I shoved the rest of my second candy bar in my mouth and chewed. Washed it down with Coke. Rondell burped so loud a couple people turned around to look at us.

He said excuse me, though, and they all looked forward again. When the driver started the engine and it began rumbling under our seats I put my hood back up, and Mong leaned his head against his sweatshirt and closed his eyes. I looked back at Rondell, who was asleep with his mouth wide open, half a candy bar still in his big-ass right hand.

I leaned my head against the window too.

All three of us were dead asleep before the bus was even out of the parking lot.

July 18

For the third time this month I woke up with a damn dude in my face. But this time it wasn’t Mong, it was the skinny black bus driver.

“Wake up,” he said, kicking the bottom of my seat. He kicked the bottom of Mong’s and Rondell’s seats, too. “Last stop along the coast, like you guys said.”

The three of us sat up all groggy, stretching our arms and looking all around. It was dark out, and at first I couldn’t see anything except the massive black ocean across the street. “Where are we?” I said, all disoriented.

“Davenport,” the driver said. “Last stop along the beach. Unless you wanna head up to College Station with the rest of us.” He motioned toward the five or six college-looking kids still on the bus, sleeping. “But y’all don’t really seem like the studious type.”

“We’ll get off here,” Mong said, rising out of his seat with his bag.

Me and Rondell followed him off the bus, and then we stood there watching it pull away.

It was dark as hell and the foggy sky was full of blurry stars. On one side of the road was nothing but sand and ocean, on the other it was these steep green cliffs full of baby trees and wild bushes. It almost didn’t even seem like America anymore.

“We’re north of Santa Cruz,” Mong said.

“Yo, I been to Santa Cruz before,” I said. “With my dad and my bro. But I don’t remember it bein’ all like this.”

“We’re still a few miles away.”

“What we gonna do now?” Rondell said.

“I’m thinking,” Mong said.

I listened to the muffled crashing of waves, like the sound you hear inside those big shells you’re supposed to put up to your ear at gift shops. I watched specks of moonlight sparkle off the water’s surface whenever a small swell rolled toward shore. Like some little kid had sprinkled glitter everywhere. The air was heavy and wet, smelled like seaweed and salt. I thought about the time me, Diego and my old man went to Santa Cruz the weekend before he got shipped out. Pop took turns throwing me and Diego deep passes while we stood in knee-deep water with our shirts wrapped around our heads like do-rags. He’d throw ’em just a little to the side so we’d have to dive into a wave to catch it. And me and Diego would fight for the ball, pushing and pulling and shoving each other under. I remember we stayed out there for hours and hours that day. Till the sun started going down and everybody packed up to leave. It was probably one of the best days me and Diego ever had with the old man.

About a year later, after Diego got his permit, we drove up there again, just us two, and threw the football in the water and almost drowned trying to swim out to the pier. But on the drive home we both agreed it wasn’t the same no more.

Mong picked up his bag from the dirt. “Okay,” he said. “We can get food and the stuff we need from that store over there.” He pointed down the road with his free hand. “Then we can build a fire on the beach and eat and sleep. We need rest. First thing tomorrow we’ll figure out how to get further south.”

Me and Rondell nodded.

“How much money do we have?” Mong said.

I pulled the leather petty-cash envelope out of my pocket
and counted the cash up in my head. “Six hundred forty dollars,” I said.

“Damn,” Rondell said, “that’s a grip.”

“We gotta save as much as we can, though,” Mong said. “It’s gonna take longer to get to Mexico now.”

We looked all around, at the beach and the cluster of stores down the way and the trees and bushes behind us climbing up the steep cliff. After being in a city all day it felt like we’d woken up on the set of a damn horror flick or some shit. Like any second some masked dude would pop out from behind a tree and start chasing our asses around with a machete.

Yo, bring it, I thought. And then I laughed at myself for playing hard when really I kept looking all around, kind of spooked.

Mong set off toward the stores, and me and Rondell followed him, the three of us walking single file along the dirt shoulder of the random two-lane highway.

Me and Rondell’s Surprise Shopping Spree:

The plan was to just pay for the stuff we needed, but it turned out this old white guy working the register was a straight-up racist. And that changed everything.

The second we walked in, the guy (whose face was wrinkled and blotchy and looked mad fake, like he was just a regular guy wearing an old dude mask) left his spot behind the counter and started following us around with a crooked little grin like he didn’t trust us. He folded his arms and told Rondell to get away from the nectarines unless he planned on buying every single one his grubby hands touched. Then he turned and asked me if I had any money. “And I’m not talk-in’ ’bout no pesos, either, compadre. We don’t take but dollars around here.”

I looked at dude like he was out of his mind. I’ve had
people talk shit about me being Mexican before, and I know how it happened with my pop when he was going for a higher job in the military, but most people are kind of on the down low about it. They say shit all under their breath. But not this dude, he was right out in the open.

Mong got up in his face, pointed a finger at his veiny white forehead and said: “You say any more like that and we’ll just take whatever we want, leave you tied up in a freezer somewhere.”

Me and Rondell got closer, and I looked in Mong’s face. It was just like I thought, his psycho self had entered the building.

“Oh, really,” the guy said, walking back toward the counter. “Tell you what, Kung Fu Theater. Why don’t I just call the cops right now. Let’s see how
they
feel about you waltzing into my store making threats.”

Mong signaled for me to get the stuff we needed and followed the guy to the counter. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, sir,” he said.

I grabbed a basket and stayed there watching. I’d seen Psycho Mong mess with almost every kid in the Lighthouse, heard stories about him breaking residents’ arms and all that, but I’d never seen dude go after an adult. For some reason I gained a little respect.

“… need to get somebody to come down here and take out the trash,” the guy was saying, picking up the phone.

Mong snatched the phone right out of his hand, pulled the wire clear out of the socket. Then he fired the phone at the wall, shattering it to pieces. Mong may have been sick like Mei-li said, but he wasn’t so sick he couldn’t fight people or destroy their shit. My only thing was if he might take it too far. ’cause even though store dude was racist as hell, he was
also
old as
hell, and I knew how some old people could be just ’cause they don’t know no better, or ’cause they were raised in a different generation or whatever.

Mong looked up at me.

I picked up a second basket, handed it to Rondell, and we hurried up and down the aisles throwing stuff in: hot dogs and ketchup and matches and skewer sticks and paper towels and six-packs of Coke and apples and nectarines and six-packs of beer and charcoal and lighter fluid and beef jerky and powdered donuts and chocolate donuts and orange juice. Every few seconds I’d look up to make sure Mong wasn’t actually hurting the guy, but mostly I was just concentrating on ganking whatever came into my head. It was like me and Rondell were on a damn shopping spree, the kind you always dream about when you’re a kid.

Only this wasn’t no dream. We knew we weren’t paying for shit.

By the time me and Rondell got back up to the counter Mong had old dude gagged and tied up in telephone cord. And the knots he made were mad professional, like he’d been doing them on people all his life.

“Got what you need?” Mong said.

I nodded, though in my head I was a little spooked at seeing the guy all tied up like that. It’s one thing to swipe supplies, but it’s something else when you tie up an old man and leave his ass there to starve.

Mong turned to dude, said: “You shouldn’t talk about people’s races like that, sir. Especially when the people you’re saying it to don’t have nothing to lose. Like us three.”

Mong looked at me and pointed to the guy. “Tell him.”

I moved forward a little, unsure of what he wanted.
“Yeah, man,” I said, “and why would you say if I had pesos for? I’m from America, just the same as you are. That shit’s ignorant.”

“That’s right,” Mong said.

The guy tried to say something back, but all that made it through the rag in his mouth were these crazy low muffled noises. Like when you shout something into your pillow.

Rondell leaned against the counter and started unwrapping a piece of chocolate. I couldn’t believe the guy. Here we were, messing with some old man who Mong had all tied up and gagged, and Rondell wasn’t even paying attention.

I turned back to racist dude’s wrinkled white face, his thinning gray hair. You could tell by his expression he wasn’t being Mr. Tough Guy anymore. He was just scared, like a little kid. Maybe old people revert back to when they were young when they get scared. His eyes darting back and forth between me and Mong. His loose cheek skin quivering. For some reason that shit made him seem even worse to me. If you’re gonna say something bad about somebody’s race, man, then you shouldn’t act like a damn baby when they tie your ass up. You should just man up about it.

“All right,” I told Mong, “let’s let his old ass go now and get outta here.”

But Mong didn’t let him go. He grabbed the guy’s ear and made him turn back around. And he did the shit all mellow-like. He didn’t even seem pissed anymore. He made you think of someone in the park training their puppy how to sit or roll over. “I’m not gonna throw you in the freezer this time, sir,” he said. “But I want you to think about what happened here tonight. Try to improve yourself as a person, okay? And the next time the three of us come in here to shop, I expect to see a changed man.”

Then Mong slapped the guy in the face.

I totally jumped, not expecting it.

The guy cringed and kept his head to the side like that for a few seconds. And then he lowered his eyes to the ground and sort of cowered in front of Mong.

Mong looked at me with a big smile, but I couldn’t smile back. “Wanna smack him?” he said.

“Nah, man,” I said, frowning. “I’m cool.”

“At least kick him or spit on him. People shouldn’t talk like that about people’s races.”

I looked back at Psycho Mong without saying anything. He was taking shit way too far now. A racist comment shouldn’t lead you to tie somebody up and slap their ass around and say for me to kick or spit on him. But at the same time I didn’t say anything ’cause I don’t think you can explain your opinion to people when they’re being all psycho.

I looked down at old dude. He had his eyes closed now, and he was actually shaking. His whole body.

Mong reached into the guy’s pocket and pulled out his cell. He flipped it open and snapped it in two, tossed both pieces to the ground. Me and Rondell loaded all our groceries in our bags and zipped ’em back up. I stepped up, grabbed some scissors off the counter and cut the cord on dude’s hands. He flexed them.

Mong shot me an irritated look.

“Come on, dawg,” I said. “He understands now.”

I tossed the scissors down a food aisle and we all tore out of the store.

Outside, I kept expecting to hear a cop’s siren wailing away in the distance, racing toward us, flipping on its spotlight and calling for us to “Freeze!” over their loudspeaker. But no cop cars were coming.