Bob Whelan had been there. He'd seen what Caesar was doing and looked away. He could have done something about it. Whelan is the kind of man who could have said something to Arroyo and made him think twice about knocking his kids around like that. At least made him stop doing it out on the soccer fields where the other kids saw it and got freaked out. But he didn't do anything. Just like most people. Most adults just don't have the kids' best interest at heart.

Any wonder the Arroyos have grown up like they have? A drug lab. Here. In his town. When do these things happen? How do they happen? Don't people know they have to monitor their children? Care for them? Love them? Otherwise, things like this happen.

Tragedies. Family tragedies.

He gets up, tops off his cup again. Marks the bottle. Then goes down the hall to his son's room.

He fingers the Master Lock Paul mounted there last year. He takes out the duplicate key he had made the afternoon he was doing laundry and found Paul's key, forgotten in the pocket of his dirty jeans. He opens the lock and goes into his son's room and sits on the bed.

He remembers the room as it was, before it became plastered with posters of Iron Maiden and Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne and Ted Nugent and AC/DC and The Scorpions and Judas Priest and all the others dripping blood and wrapped in Spandex and surrounded by skulls. He remembers when the floor was littered with Legos and Lincoln Logs instead of microwave burrito wrappers and empty matchbooks and torn copies of Rolling Stone and crushed beer cans pushed under the bed and discarded cigarette pack cellophanes. He remembers this room before it smelled of spilled beer and smoke and the stale incense that's meant to cover it all up.

He gets up, takes a long drink, sets his coffee cup on top of the dresser and starts to search the room, just as he does every day.

An empty half pint of Fleischmann's vodka and the same old stash of Playboy back issues with Bob Whelan's address label on the cover.

Booze and dirty magazines. Kyle Cheney knows there's worse somewhere.

When Paul first started changing, when his mother took off and left them alone six years ago and he started talking back, that's when he'd had to start this. She'd driven a wedge between him and his son. That's what he couldn't forgive her for. Not the stupid way she left them, but the things she'd said to the boy, the things she'd said about him. Things she'd screamed that scared Paul. Things Paul was just too young to understand.

Things that confused him about their relationship.

What it was.

What it meant to him.

When he started finding the boy's door blocked, a dresser shoved in front of it, that's when he knew the extent of the damage she'd done. The damage she'd done to their trust.

Paul stopped talking to him. And he'd had no choice but to take things into his own hands, to find out what his son was up to.

And he found things. A few joints. Pills. A boom box and someone's cla.s.s ring, both obviously stolen. Girls sneaking in the window in the middle of the night. Girls he'd seen, and heard. Stood in the hall outside the boy's room and heard them.

But it wasn't enough. None of it was enough to make him feel like he was still inside his son's life.

He just had to keep looking. Keep looking until he found the secret that would open his son back up to him.

[image]

Hector wakes up, reaches for his turntable and hits play.

The tone arm jerks and drops heavily onto the alb.u.m that's cued up and waiting to start his day. The speakers hiss and crack and then explode into "Memories of Tomorrow."

The sound yanks him from bed and he pogos around the room, flailing his arms and bouncing off the walls.

Suicidal Tendencies got it right.

The Pistols were a great start. Dead Kennedys and Black Flag carried him for awhile. He thought it might be the Bad Brains that did it for him. But it was Suicidal Tendencies that took it all the way. He heard about them after taking the bus to Hayward and riding the BART train into San Francisco for a Kennedys gig at Mabuhay Garden. He had to wait another month for the alb.u.m to come out. It was worth it. It's perfect and he's been listening to nothing else ever since.

He jumps on his bed, jumps from it to the twin his little brothers sleep on, bounces back and forth between them. The little f.u.c.kers must be up already. Up and outside, fighting with each other and talking back to their mom. Little pieces of s.h.i.t.

Alexandra opens the door.

--Turn it down!

He bounces high off the bed and lands in front of her, smiling and jumping up and down.

--What?

--Turn it down, Hector, it's awful! Turn it down.

He pogos higher, arms plastered to his sides, leaping.

--Turn it up?

--Down! Down!

--Louder?

--Heeeectoooor! Stooooop iiiiiiit! It's awwwwwfuuuuuul!

He grabs her hands and drags her into his room, pulls her up on the bed and bounces.

--Dance, mija, dance to the music!

She tries to jerk free.

--Noooo, it's not dancing! It's not music! It's awful!

He wraps his arms around her, bouncing, laughing.

--Dance with me, little sister.

--Moooooom! Muuuuuhhoooooom!

But she's jumping with him now, her perfectly blownout hair mussed, her sharply creased khakis wrinkled, heavy eye liner smeared by tears as she laughs at her crazy big brother.

He lets her go and they jump up and down on the bed.

Their mom comes in.

--Mijo!

He flies off the bed and crashes off the wall, the record skips once, plays on.

He dances.

His mom puts her hands on his shoulders and tries to push him down, to stop the bouncing.

--Mijo! So loud! So loud!

But she can't stop him. She's laughing.

--Mijo, no, it's too early. Come eat breakfast. Turn it off! Come eat.

He bounces to the turntable, lands, thrashes his head back and forth at the end of the song and takes the needle off the record, becoming still.

Alexandra climbs off the bed, running a fingertip under her eye.

--Hectooor, you ruin my makeup. Mooom, look at my face.

She runs out the door and into the bathroom, where she'll spend the next hour redoing her hair and makeup.

Their mom is still laughing.

--You look like a dancing fish, mijo. A fish.

He smiles.

--C'mon, Ma.

He puts the needle back down on the beginning of the song, bounces back to her and grabs her hands, pulling.

She jumps up and down a few times with him, then frees her hands and covers her ears.

--Enough, mijo, enough! Too loud. Come eat.

She reaches out and grabs a fold of his belly skin between her thumb and index finger and gives it a twist.

--Eat!

He bounces free and moshes around the tiny room.

She waves her hands in the air and walks away, still laughing, the song thundering and ripping new cracks in the taped up speakers.

Through the open door he watches her walk back to the kitchen, where she spends her life minding pots of rice and beans and stewed pork and chicken.

His dad is in the livingroom, asleep on the couch already, his ruined leg propped on a kitchen chair, a bottle of his painkillers sticking out of his bathrobe pocket, a half empty gallon jug of Gallo on the floor.

Hector pushes the door closed and dances, slashing his hand up and down over the strings of an invisible guitar. The guitar he'll have one day when high school is over and he takes BART into The City for the last time.

He'll crash in a squat full of punks and put together a band and play that guitar when they gig at Mabuhay and he'll take it on the road and he'll see s.h.i.t that he's never gonna see if he takes a job at the quarry and marries one of the pachuco chicks from the neighborhood and has three kids by the time he's old enough to go in a bar. f.u.c.k that. He's gonna buy a guitar and be a f.u.c.king punk.

He is a f.u.c.king punk.

And he sings.

Ma.s.s starvationContaminated waterDestroyed cities.m.u.tilated bodies I'll kill myselfI'd rather dieIf you could see the futureYou'd know why.

[image]

It's hot in George's attic room. All summer long he wakes up sweating. Today he wakes up sweating and screaming, having dreamed the El Camino running him over.

He sits on the edge of the bed, sweat coating his scalp under his long hair and running from his pits and down his sides, soaking the seat of his Fruit of the Looms. He gets up and goes to the mirror over his desk and looks at the sc.r.a.pes running from his jaw down the left side of his neck.

When he and Andy came home yesterday he told their folks he pulled an endo on a jump at the firebreak. His dad asked if his bike was in one piece while his mom cleaned the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. Andy had gone straight to his room.

You don't want Andy around when you're lying to mom and dad. Little spaz gets restless and starts talking too much and f.u.c.ks it up.

But it wasn't a big deal. Mom was relieved it was nothing that required a trip to the emergency room. Dad was satisfied that the bike wasn't messed up. But he gave one of his speeches: Got to value the things money buys, the hard work that goes into making that money. You'll need that. You're not gonna be getting a scholarship anywhere like your little brother, you're gonna be working for a living. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with you. That's the way it is. Life's not fair. Sooner you learn the truth that work sucks and working for someone else sucks even worse, the better. Got to put value on what you earn when you hate doing what you have to do to get it.

Big Bob Whelan, saying it like it is. Again. Telling him that everything has a cost. There's no free rides and life's not fair and there's always a.s.sholes wherever you go. Work, work, work and get by and take a break on weekends and crack a beer and watch a game and show your kids how to mow a lawn and drywall a house and shovel rocks and play hard and there's no such thing as second place winner and be nice to your wife and she'll be nice to you and don't take anything for granted and clean your plate and as long as you live under my roof you live under my rules and there's no such thing as a free ride and if it ain't easy that just means you should work a little harder, doesn't it?

The lesson of life: You get what you work for, if that.

George turns from the mirror and goes to the bathroom at the foot of the stairs. He gets in the shower and blasts it cold to stop the sweat. He should have brought his jeans down with him, his jeans and the Aerosmith Toys in the Attic T he plans on wearing today. Getting dressed up there, he'll just start to sweat again. He thinks about the money from yesterday, wonders if there's enough to buy an air conditioner for his room, a window unit. No. His dad would want to know where he got that much cash. But a fan, he could probably get away with a fan.

He thinks about the money, but that makes him think about the Arroyos' house, and that makes him think about hitting the street and the El Camino just missing him and what it might have felt like to go under the wheels.

He could have died. But according to dad, that's not the worst thing that happens to you. The worst thing is that you work for someone else and have to put up with a.s.sholes telling you what to do, that's the worst thing.

But it doesn't have to be like that. Be smart enough, and maybe it doesn't have to be like that. If he can get to be good at something else, he won't have to work. Not really.

[image]

Andy makes a map.

He starts with a blank piece of graph paper. Sitting at his little desk, wearing the gla.s.ses he hates, tracing heavy black lines over the light blue lines on the paper, creating a world.

Not a whole world, just a part of it. A tiny secret corner filled with puzzles and traps and treasures and monsters. A dungeon for heroes to explore and plunder.

With one hand he draws. With the other he fingers a set of geodesic dice, tossing them one at a time or in combination, glancing at the numbers and applying them to secret formulas only he knows. The results dictating which way a tunnel will twist, where a creva.s.se will open suddenly, a goblin leap from a recess, a potion of healing be found.

He could design it all. Lay it out in his head and put it on the paper, but randomness is cool. It injects chaos into the game. Chaos is cool. He wouldn't have thought of that on his own, but reading about it lately, it's cool. The way order is just an illusion, something we create in our heads and lay over the world to try and force it to fit all these ideas we have about the way things should be. But the world's not really the way people think it is. Or maybe it is. Hard to really say for sure. But chaos seems to make more sense than anything else.

It explains a lot.

Like how you can be so smart about some things and so dumb about others.

Like stealing the methamphetamine and giving it to Paul.

Now that was stupid.

He stops drawing for a second and bangs his forehead against the desktop. Really, really stupid. Man, why is he so d.a.m.n stupid?

Imsuchad.i.l.d.o.

He lays his head on the desk, still fiddling with the dice, letting part of his brain play with the numbers. Letting the smart part of his brain play.

Stealing the crank is either the coolest thing he's ever done or the lamest, he's not sure which. Order or chaos.