Savages

15

Very nice place, this house.

Trimmed, tended lawn, manicured pebble walkway to the back of the house, to the kitchen door.

Esteban follows Lado down the pebbled path.

Lado rings the doorbell, even though they can see the lawyer standing at his kitchen island chopping onions. He sets down his knife and comes to the door.

“Yes?”

He looks annoyed, distracted, bothered maybe. Probably thinks they’re mujados looking for work.

Lado puts one big hand to his chest and pushes him inside.

Esteban kicks the door shut behind them.

Now the lawyer looks scared. He glances at the knife on the cutting block but decides not to do that. He asks Lado, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Roberto Rodriguez asked me to visit you.”

The lawyer turns white. His legs start to shake a little and Esteban feels something he never felt before in his whole life—

Power.

Weight.

Some gravity on this American soil.

The lawyer’s voice trembles. “If it’s money . . . let me get you some money.”

Lado snorts, “Roberto could buy and sell you with what’s in his pockets. What’s money going to do for him in prison?”

“An appeal, we could—”

Lado shoots him, twice, in the legs.

The lawyer crumbles to the tile floor. Folds himself up and whimpers.

“Take your gun out,” Lado says to Esteban.

The boy takes the pistol from his pocket.

“Shoot him.”

Esteban hesitates.

“Never,” Lado says sternly, “take your gun out if you’re not going to shoot. Now shoot him. In the chest or the head, doesn’t matter.”

The lawyer hears this and starts to beg. Tries to stand but his broken legs won’t let him. Pulls himself across the kitchen floor on his forearms, leaving a streak of blood behind him, and Esteban thinks that his mother would hate to have to clean that up.

“Do it now,” Lado snaps.

Esteban don’t feel powerful now.

He feels sick.

“If you don’t,” Lado says, “you’re a witness. I don’t leave witnesses.”

Esteban shoots.

The first bullet hits the lawyer in the shoulder, spinning him back down on the floor. Esteban steps up and makes sure this time, firing two bullets into his head.

On the way out, Esteban vomits on the pebbled path.

Later, that night, he lies with his head on Lourdes’s belly and cries. Then he whispers into her tummy, “I did it for you, m’ijo. I did it for you, my son.”