Throw. Rubén Degollado
She put her arms around me and looked up. Her mascara made black lines down her face and when she asked me to get her out of there again, her breath smelled sour, like she’d just woken up. She was wearing flea market rejects, this ugly night-shirt with a teddy bear on the front and these sweatpants. Why did they have to take her clothes too?
We sat down at one of the tables and I was still holding her when she said, I want to go, I don’t want to be here, I want to go home, take me home.
I told her, Ssh ssh ssh, it’s okay.
Then like I’d told her something mean, she pulled away real quick and said, Don’t tell me that, don’t you ever tell me that. Get out of here! Get out, I don’t want you here!
I said, Karina I was just. . . . I didn’t get to finish what I was saying because she slapped me in the face and kept on slapping. These big dudes with Charter Palms badges clipped to their belts came in and told me I had to leave. They pulled Karina up and told her visiting time was over, that she had to go to her room now.
Leave me alone! Let me go, let me out! She twisted her body and tried to get free from them, but they held her arms real tight.
They were moving her through the other door when she said to me, I can’t believe you hurt me like this. I can’t believe you’re not helping me, telling me ‘ssh’ when I just needed you to be nice. I hate you Güero, I hate you.
Karina had problems none of us could help her with. Right then I was sure of this, but I also knew something else. I would try to help her anyway, and I loved her even more, in ways I could not explain.
Later when I talked to Brenda about her, she said that Karina changed after that. She didn’t need to tell me, though. She was cold to me and for a long time, would not even hold hands with me, as if she was pulling away to some place I could not follow. Everyone saw it, how the girl we knew as Karina was slowly going away. She didn’t cry for anything like she used to and she started wearing those blue makeup tears on the inside of her eyes, which made her eyes look even blacker. She started drawing ghost faces and skipping school just to smoke cigarettes at Bonham Hill Cemetery and read the tombstones and would take a long walk to go spend time at the caliche pit where the kids had drowned in the bus accident. She had known a lot of them, and had even been best friends with one of the girls.
Because of this, and because of the Llorona tag she started drawing on her binder and papers, people started calling her Llorona. The only tears were the painted ones now. Then she started to get into more fights, jumping any girl who looked at her wrong, or talked bad about her. I knew she was doing it so everyone would forget about her up there on the bleachers, crying and messed up, out of control. But none of them would forget, and they’d never stop asking why she’d wanted to kill herself. I’d asked Llorona why, and she would ignore the question, as if she couldn’t hear me. How had she been hurt enough to want to kill herself? And if she did answer, she would only say, Maybe someday I’ll tell you, Güero. Maybe when I’m stronger. Months later, she would tell me the truth of what had happened to her, but I never told anyone, because it wasn’t my story to tell, no matter what she did to me.
Now Smiley said, “Let me tell you, Llorona’s no good for you. Into that brujería of her mama’s curses, hearing all that talk from spirits and devils, messing around with that Ouija board. You really want that? She’s got you messed up with one of her mama’s curses on you. I know from experience. Let me tell you one thing about my jefe. After he’d been drinking and he’d had a few, he used to tell us stories about a bruja he went out with before he met my mom.”
“This witch he was going out with was like Llorona and her mother. Any man who left her or did her wrong she would make sick, and just like that—” He tried to snap his fingers. He tried again and said, “And just like that.”
I snapped my fingers loud and said, “You mean like that?”
“Yeah güey, you got it, así, just like that, the man would die. Now do you want that?”
He talked and his eyes were all big, like he was telling me scary stories near a fire. I laughed because I knew one of his stories was coming, because Smiley was making me forget like he always could. His whole face moved when he told stories, every muscle in his face working to make you think of the story he was telling you, and not about what you were going through at the moment.
“Let me tell you one thing: before my dad married my mom, he was all serious with this witch lady from Mexico named Esmer. Esmer de las Something. Esmer de las Pacas, las Parrancas, Esmer de las something like that. Anyway, my jefe and this lady talked about getting married. My pops soon heard from one of my tías about Esmer’s hechizos on people and let me tell you, my pops didn’t want to be with a witch woman. So what he did was, he told Esmer he didn’t want to go around anymore and you know what? Let me tell you, she put an hechizo around him, but not a curse bad enough to kill him, because she loved him so much. That was the kind of mojo my Dad had with the ladies. But in a way güey, what she did to him was worse. Much, much worse than any kind of death. Let me tell you, what happen was, my pops got this chorro that wouldn’t go away. Day and night he was in the bathroom, going and going, pooping his brains out hasta que se echó una bota. Así, like you could a hear a boot hitting the water.”
He made his face all red and strained-looking. “All he could do was say, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die,’ and buy all the Gatorade he could buy at the Centrál. De verás güey, it was diarrhea from Satan.”
“Whatever, Smiley.”
He grabbed my arm, “No, no, no, it was The Evil Runs, güey. For reals, true story, I’m not kidding.” I was laughing now, forgetting all about Llorona and Rey.
“I’m serious, ése. Let me tell you, my jefe, he almost died from dehydration and frustration from having to sit on the toilet so much. He even lost his job because of it. So then what he did right, was he hired a curandera to do a cleaning on him, and she rubbed the egg over his body and he was all better. The little egg sucked out all the curse from his body like some kind of spiritual vacuum cleaner. Afterward, my jefe was laying there, sweating. He was thinking how nice it would be to go to the restroom like a normal person without having to kick everybody out of the house, because when he was cursed every cagada was like an exorcism. Then the curandera said she wanted to show my jefe something. She broke the huevito and poured out the yolk, which is normally yellow, right. But let me tell you, the yolk looked all black, like tar or something, and it smelled gacho, like menudo that had been left outside for three days. The curandera poured the evil yolk into a coffee can, and said all the evil was there in the Folgers. Let me tell you my dad could never eat eggs again. He would just smell eggs cooking, right, and then get real bad asco like he needed to throw up or have the runs and have to go drop water again. Así.”
His face went all red again like he was on the toilet. “‘Ay Dios mío, I’m dying. Give me peace.’ That was my jefe. He always told us stories like that.”
I looked at him as he stared off, thinking about his jefe. What was it like to not have your father anymore, to know that he was gone forever? Mine was a drunk and I barely saw him, but at least he was still physically around. The crazy thing was, Smiley and Ángel’s dad was more present in their lives than mine was. I knew because in their apartment, their mom had a shrine set up in his memory. There were snapshots of their father when he was an old school pachuco with the black hairnet and the Stacy Adams shoes. Old school. When Ángel was born, he straightened out, quit hanging out on the streets, but it didn’t matter. The cancer from the cigarettes got him. The way Ángel and Smiley talked about him, he was a good man when he was alive, letting them smoke cigarettes and drink beer with him if their mama wasn’t around, playing cards and always talking about the old days when he was in the gangs in McAllen. My father knew who he was back in the day, and said he would fight with knives or tire irons, always fighting dirty. But like I said all his gangster ways changed when he had Ángel and then Smiley. He had taken care of them and was home a lot. It wasn’t good or fair that he was dead.
Real quick, because he could see something else starting in my eyes, he said, “Cirilo, it’s a true