LITMIR.BIZ

      THROW

      A Novel

      Copyright © 2019 Rubén Degollado. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Slant

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-6507-3

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-6507-3

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-6509-7

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Degollado, Rubén, author.

      Title: Throw : a novel / Rubén Degollado.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Slant, 2019.

      Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-6507-3 (paperback). | isbn 978-1-5326-6507-3 (hardcover). | isbn 978-1-5326-6509-7 (ebook).

      Subjects: LCSH: Young adult fiction. | Texas—Fiction. | American fiction.

      Classification: PS3600 T35 2019 (print) | PS3600 (ebook).

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. February 26, 2019

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      For Susan Eloise

      Llorona de negros ojos, Ya con esta me despido, Llorona.

      Weeping Woman of the black eyes,

      With this one [verse], I say goodbye, Weeping Woman.

      “La Llorona”

      —Andrés Henestrosa Morales

      one

      If I’m going to tell you the story of how I lost two people who were closer than blood to me, I have to begin here in Dennett, Texas, during the summer between the sophomore and junior years of my life. This story begins as it ends, with me, Cirilo Izquierdo, waiting for what all of us spend our whole lives waiting for: to not be alone anymore. The time in between the waiting when we get to be with others, to laugh or to cry or sit in silence with someone next to us, always ends and then we wait again. Like a sentence or prayer or a beautiful verse, there is always punctuation, the little endings of the connections to others in the world, forever the pauses where we leave or someone leaves us, and then again the waiting.

      It was Saturday and I was on my parents’ front porch, waiting for Ángel and Smiley to pick me up to go to La Plaza Mall and then Tommy’s Hobbies. Even though it was still morning, it was already hot outside. Summer days like this, the buzz of chicharras was so loud in the trees you could hear them wherever you were, in your house, or even driving in a car. So many mornings I woke up and this was the first sound I heard. I would hear the cicada’s song and know it would be hot outside, which it almost always was in the Valley, except when we got a cold front once in a while.

      Where I lived was not exactly barrio, nothing like where the brothers Smiley and Ángel lived over on the South Side. Since Pop had taken over our grandfather’s business, Izquierdo and Sons Painting and Drywall, he had gotten himself out of La Zavala, the barrio where he used to live in McAllen, the bigger town close to Dennett. Back in the day, my Pop had been an old school gangster, the captain of a crew called Los Diggers in the Zavala, made up of his brothers and other kids from the neighborhood. Since many of his friends had died or been put in jail, Pop had gotten it together, spending all of his time at the boxing gym and away from the vagos until he met and married Mama and they moved away. He made sure that he, Mama, and I would never have to live anywhere like that, in houses without air-con, little houses like where my Pop grew up, my Papa Tavo and Abuela Guadalupe’s over on Ithaca Avenue.

      Pop always said that the one thing in life he was happy about was that he hadn’t moved us into another poor neighborhood like the South Side, and that I would never be in a gang. He didn’t want us to live anywhere like the Zavala or where Ángel and Smiley and my other friends did, where there were tags on all the walls, tagger crews’ names in barely readable but skilled and original letters. Driving through their neighborhood, you could also see the messier HCP tags that were made without skill or pride, graffiti that marked the boundary lines, representing the Hispanics Causing Panic, a gang that Ángel and Smiley and some of my other friends were in since junior high. HCPs weren’t like the other big gangs you heard about on the West Coast or across the Valley with veteranos running the show, getting the youngsters to deal or commit crimes. It was mainly just a bunch of locos who ran together, who got initiated, mostly getting jumped in by the other HCPs for a full minute, vowing to always be down for the boys no matter what.

      Truth was, me, Pop, and Mama didn’t live in any kind of neighborhood, not even in one of those new air-conditioned subdivisions where no one talks to each other. With our nice house hidden by mesquite trees and too many rooms for just the three of us, out north on Herrera Road with no one living next to us, Pop, Mama, and I were our own barrio. Even though we were a barrio of three, and Pop had tried to keep me away from that life, it still didn’t stop me from being an HCP associate, a friend to the kind of kids my Pop had run with as a youngster.

      Pop and Mama had also not liked that I had been going around with a girl from the South Side. My ex-girlfriend, Karina Galán, also known as Llorona, lived there with her mom, in a small house without air conditioning, a house with a wooden floor sitting on blocks, one of those kinds that you could move with a trailer. Even though I didn’t want to, I started thinking of her. I could see us in that house together, laughing and telling stories to each other, recording songs from the radio, her dancing in front of me, pretending to be Selena, being different from how we were with the others.

      I heard Ángel and Smiley coming all the way down Herrera, and then they pulled up in their father’s old flare-side Ford work truck. The brothers had plans to trick it out as soon as they could save up more money, doing audio and alarm system jobs with their cousin Fernando who worked out of his garage. Already he and Smiley had put in a good system, since they said this was the most important place to start with any street sweeper. I didn’t have the heart to tell them they just needed to start over, that they should just forget about it.

      The bass line was thumping real low when they pulled up. I signed for them to turn it down because my parents were still asleep even though it was almost eleven o’clock. Pop and Mama had been out late the night before, drinking since happy hour (I called it not-so-happy hour), probably at the Gaslight or the Toucan Lounge over by the hospital. They were all hung-over, trying to sleep it off in the coolness of the house.

      When I’d walked into their room to get a couple of bucks off of Pop’s money clip, the silver one with a gold peso on it, I’d seen them. Pop and Mama are not that old, maybe forty-one or forty-two, but seeing them laid-out like that, thrown around the bed, they looked older than they were. In old pictures I’ve seen of Mama, she has this clean white skin, long black hair, and big eyelashes. When I look at them, I understand how Pop fell in love with her. In these old pictures, I can also see what she saw in my father. In one black and white photo, just after his younger old school gangster days, he is in a boxer’s stance, his hair piled high and greased with Tres Flores pomade, his eyes telling you he owned you no matter how you felt about it. The color of my eyes, a mix of green and brown, my

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