Savages

13

Esteban lives in the big housing project and has an inquiring attitude.

Questions for the Anglo world.

You want me to get a job? Mow your lawn? Clean your pool, flip your burgers, make your tacos? This is what we came here for? Paid the coyotes? Crawled under the fence, trudged across the desert?

You want me to be one of those good Mexicans, one of those hardworking, churchgoing, family-valuing, get dressed in my best clothes on Sunday and walk with my cousins down those broad sun-baked boulevards to a park named after Chavez, humble respectful nigger taco Mexicans, the ones we all love and respect and pay subminimum wage?

Like my papi?

Out in his pickup before the sun, the truck with the rakes sticking out, trimming the gueros’ lawns so they look so green and pretty. Comes home at night so chingada tired he don’t want to talk, he don’t want to do nothing except eat, drink a beer, go to sleep. Does this six days a week, stops only on Sunday to be a humble respectful nigger taco Mexican to God, give the money he sweats for to God and the faggot priests. Sunday is his papi’s big day, the day he puts on a clean white shirt, clean white pants (no grass stains on the knees), shoes that come out once a week, wiped off with a clean cloth, and he takes his family to church and after church they get together with all the aunts and aunties, the tios and tias, with all the cousins, and they go to the park and cook carne and pollo and smile at their pretty daughters in their pretty little Sunday dresses and it is so chingada boring that Esteban would lose it if he hadn’t snuck off after church for a hit, drawn the sweet smoke in, chilled himself out.

Like mi madre? Works in the hotels, cleans the gueros’ toilets, scrubs their shit and puke out of the bowls? Always on her knees, if not on bathroom tiles, then on church pews. A devout woman, she always smells like disinfectant.

Esteban had a job for a while at one of Machado’s taco stands. Worked his ass off chopping onions, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, and for what? Pocket change. Then his papi got him hired on to one of Mr. Arroyo’s landscaping crews. Better money, but backbreaking, boring work.

But Esteban he needs money.

Lourdes is pregnant.

How did that happen?

Of course he knows how it happened. Saw her on a Sunday afternoon in one of those pretty white dresses. Her black eyes and long black lashes, the breasts under that dress. Went up and talked to her, smiled at her, walked over to the grill and brought her back something to eat. Talked nice to her, made nice talk with her mother, her father, her cousins, her aunts.

She was one of those good girls, a virgin, maybe that’s what attracted him, she wasn’t one of the gangbanger sluts who will go to her knees for anyone.

He called on her for three months, three months before the family would let them be alone, and then three more months of hot, torturous afternoons of visiting her house when her parents were at work, her brothers and sisters gone. Or into the park, or down to the beach. Two months of kissing before she would let him touch her titas, weeks more before she let him get his hand inside her jeans. He liked what he found there; boy, so did she.

She said his name then and he was in love.

Esteban doesn’t disrespect her, he loves her, he wants to marry her, he told her so. One night under a tree out by the parking lot she stroked him off—pobrecito—his stuff on her warm brown thigh, but you knew it was going to happen, you knew he was going to get up in there once her jeans came off and he was so close he couldn’t help himself and neither could she. That third month in her bed in her house when she let him in, he couldn’t stop before he let loose inside her.

Now they will have to get married.

That’s good, that’s okay. He loves her, he wants this baby, he hopes it’s a boy—a man becomes a man when he has a son—but he needs money.

So it’s a good thing Lado is coming.

His papi’s jefe, he owns the landscaping company Esteban’s father works for. He does a lot more.

A lot more.

He is the gatekeeper for the Baja Cartel in Southern California.

A feared and respected man.

He’s been giving Esteban some work. Not landscaping work. Little things at first. Take this message, be a lookout, ride along on this delivery, keep an eye on that corner. Little things, but Esteban did them well.

Esteban sees him coming, looks around, and gets into the car.