Seeing Off the Johns (7 page)

“I can't believe I'm sneaking into a cemetery,” Chon said, handing his beer under the fence to Henry and getting down on his hands and knees to crawl through the break. “So what…” Chon said, pulling dry dirt burrs from his hands when he got to the other side, “people cut a back entrance to the fence so they could be with their Johns whenever they need a fix of late night what-might-have-been?”

“No, they've been hopping the fence. I did this myself when I was little. So I could be with my mom.”

Chon took his beer from Henry, had a drink, and looked up at the full moon's bright pale glow for something to say. It gave back nothing, only a bluish white light. It looked and felt like New Year's Eves gone by when, as a child, Chon learned that night's scary dark could be painted fun by phosphorus, magnesium, and copper burning bright in the sky and by the moon that glowed through the gun smoke left hanging in the air.

Henry spoke up. “I used to ride my bike out here and just sit. Sometimes I'd talk. Sometimes I wouldn't say anything because I knew she knew exactly what I was feeling and thinking. I would come because I was scared. I was always real scared when I was little, and my mom would let me come to her bedroom to sleep on the floor by her bed. After she died, my dad would let me crash on the bed. But it was different. It didn't feel, or even smell, the same. So I took to not bothering. I'd just stay up scared and, when it got to where I couldn't take it, I'd sneak out here. I still come out a lot, but not at night anymore.”

“Did you ever see anyone else trying to sneak in?”

“No, but every now and then the sun wouldn't wake me up and the gravedigger would find me. He'd throw my bike in the hearse and drive me home. He never told my dad.”

“Wow,” was all Chon could say.

“Fucked up, huh?” Henry said, walking with the perfect balance of a high-beam construction worker, not looking back at Chon, taking care not to step on any graves, bending over to right fallen vases or wreaths without breaking his stride.

“This is it,” he said when they got to the adjacent graves.

Chon looked down. Even in the moonlight, he could see the strange outline the recently laid sod cut into the surrounding dirt and dead grass. For all of their exultation in life, Chon expected the Johns would have gotten something more than slabs of granite identical to all of the other slabs around them save for their jersey numbers—8 for Mejia, 34 for Robison—engraved in the upper right-hand corner.

Chon pursed his lips into a tight frown and stuck his chin out. He nodded, as if appraising the work of the stonemason who made the headstones. He drank down the last of his beer and dropped the can to the ground.

Henry picked up the can, placed it on a large rock on the caliche cemetery drive in front of the graves, stomped it flat and put it in his pocket. “You know, they're not the only people from this shit hole who've ever died. The whole town seems to think so, even you. You act like this is the goddamn John Cemetery and all the other people here were just test runs or something. The sooner everyone in town realizes that these are just two guys who died, the better. And it sucks—they could play ball, and they were going to make it and put us on the map or whatever. They have families who miss them—not the futures they were going to have. But they died like everyone else here, and the grass on their graves is going to die and in a few months their graves will look like all the others. Until Greenton realizes that, we're going to live in a goddamn circus.”

Chon looked at the Johns' graves, then at the rows of the other ones that held Greenton's departed. There were statues big and small, the Virgen and St. Jude the
most prominent among them after Christ. There were headstones pink, grey, and black; double and single; with hinge-shut peepholes that revealed faded pink and yellow photos of the dead. Chon imagined that they were like the photos his parents had at home of different family outings, always with kids slamming away at a piñata, always one of the cousins crying.

There were empties next to graves—some brown-bag special tallboys, some amber glass long necks. He could even see an Oso Negro. They were the remnants of the daily or weekly catch-up sessions between the survivors and the hallowed ground they came to talk to, to cry on, to seek comfort from in the middle of the night.

Lightning flashed in the east and a cool, damp air blew in.

“I'm gonna go see my mom,” Henry said. Before he left, he pulled a beer out of his back left pocket and handed it to Chon. He opened the other and held it up in the cool air.

Chon cracked open his beer.

“Here's to coming to see off the Johns,” he said. “And seeing everyone.” Neither he nor Henry made to tap their drinks. Arm still held out, Chon added, “God bless them.”

Henry nodded and they drank. He turned on his heel and had already taken two steps away from Chon in the time it took Chon to bring the drink to his mouth.

The pull he took of the beer tasted off. The beers had gotten warm enough in the backseat of the Dodge-nasty, but adding the heat of Henry Monsevais' sweaty ass on the other side of a layer of denim and cotton and the shaking they got from his crawling and walking, Chon's seemed to have gone flat.

He looked in the direction Henry had gone, but he couldn't see him, just diagonal rows of headstones that met at the road like a series of arrows pointing at Chon. He was tired and hadn't had a proper dinner. His stomach was aching from the beer. The breeze picked up and the sweat at Chon's hairline tingled, making his ears feel cold.

Odd that he didn't feel scared or anxious. He felt himself, a man—a boy—alive and alone among so many people who were cut off from consciousness and worry, existing unaffected by all of the sadness of the world.

Mejia owed Chon nothing. If the two of them had ever really competed at or for anything—and Chon could admit now that, outside of Little League baseball, they hadn't—no score that existed between them mattered anymore. If Mejia had ever laid claim to Araceli, a claim that could only be valid in reciprocity, that claim was now not only nullified, but nonexistent. So too was Chon's anger and resentment toward Mejia.

Chon let go. Even he could see that if what he had felt could be so easily unfelt, it probably meant that he had been grasping at straws. Letting even that go was a relief to Chon. He could proceed without anger or negativity guiding him.

Chon caught sight of Henry sitting beside a grave a few rows back of the road, pulling weeds that had sprouted up. He looked down at the Johns' graves and poured half of his beer out for Mejia and the other half for Robison. Just like in life, his actions went undetected by the Johns—that made Chon smile. He didn't register to them. They were on a totally different plane, and that put many things inside of Chon Gonzales at peace.

To the east, rain that Greenton so desperately needed had fallen and was being soaked up by Falfurrias' own thirsty soil. In the morning, Greentonites would wake up to the same hot temperatures that they'd faced the day before. Most of them would not know about the storm that had flirted with the city limit sign or the brief cool it blew through the Greenton Cemetery.

Araceli Monsevais arrived in Greenton the same way she left—secretly and in the hope of evading the teary gazes and unmitigated sorrow of Greentonites. Greenton seemed the same to her, which struck her initially as odd. It reminded her of something she'd thought about in catechism when they told her time doesn't pass in heaven. Or how they said in physics that time is relative. She figured maybe it would stop existing when she did. She hadn't necessarily thought Greenton would cease existing when she left it, but the fact of it existing so very much without change made her think that it was a place existing on a timeless plane, not unlike heaven, but probably closer to hell.

In the passenger seat of her mother's idling car, at the only stoplight in town, Araceli counted a silent one…two…three…four… Exactly on five, the light turned green. Purgatory, she decided. It was like purgatory, but smaller.

It was late, after midnight, on the night before the first day of school. Town was almost as dead as a child expects the world to be in the small hours between goodnight prayers and the sound of mom's voice calling her to wake up. The late arrival wasn't any kind of precaution Araceli and her mother had planned. They were held up by a long parting in Corpus with the Vela family, people who seemed fonder of Araceli than she was of them. They felt they had taken her in like one would a wounded puppy. Araceli, though, felt like a teenager forced to spend her last summer in high school with strangers.

Her mother didn't decide immediately to send Araceli to the Velas' for the summer. It wasn't until she called her husband at work and he went into hysterics that she realized her daughter would have to be protected from what was going to happen all over town. Her mother decided to give her daughter time and space so that she could process the loss of John Mejia, whose friendship and shared time made him something more than a childhood love, something like a brother to Araceli—a boy whose fears and insecurities only she knew, like only she knew how ticklish he was behind his right knee and how sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night after having dreams about striking out or missing his mark on a deep pass, leading Greenton High to a loss and Greenton proper to great disappointment and anger.

She didn't resent her parents for sending her to Corpus. She was grateful she didn't have to go to the Johns' funeral, and that she wasn't part of the town-wide craziness that she'd gotten almost nightly doses of over the phone. Half, or less, of that craziness was relayed by her mother, trying her best to be as delicate and considerate of what her daughter was going through as she could. She had to tell her the truth about the wreck Araceli's father had become at the loss of the son-in-law he would never have.

The most news, however, came from the house Araceli used to sneak into and out of most nights so that she could be with the person she honestly believed she would be with for the rest of her life.

Julie Mejia didn't call Araceli on the day the Johns died. She left that, like so much else, to Goyo, who called the Monsevais house himself. When Araceli picked up, he asked her in a calm tone to give the phone to one of her parents. When she saw the look on her mother's face, she remembered thinking that nothing that had been reported could hit her as hard as it hit her mother. And, aside from the kick of the initial shock, Araceli was right.

Araceli was not, however, mourning the loss of any plans to be with John Mejia after high school. A rift had formed between the couple when John returned from a visit to Austin. He and Robison had toured the campus, had taken a few very unofficial swings at the Longhorn practice facility. Mejia was given what he called—in defense of his stupidity—a “dry and painful” handjob from a drunken coed at a party in the apartment of a red-shirt sophomore pitcher from Brenham. She'd cried tears over their relationship then—they both had. Against her better judgment and in a desperate attempt to hold onto the place she'd forged for herself in Greenton, Araceli took him back. But it was never the same.

He began talking a lot more about the future, but her role in John's plans seemed a peripheral one. He would mention being in school and playing ball and hoping for a future in pro ball and, after that, in coaching. The
I
became more pronounced as the
we
seemed to shrink on the horizon until Araceli was left behind like all of Greenton would soon be.

She didn't mention it, but, after he and Robison signed their commitment letters with UT, the end of their relationship hung on and around every minute they spent together. She told John that ‘commitment letters' sounded funny to her, like some sort of pre-nuptial agreement he had made with the university. He laughed, but she saw that it was something much more meaningful and romantic to him. Officially joining the ranks of Roger Clemens and Burt Hooton and Spike Owen—cementing it in ink, on 25# paper, with all of Greenton and much of South Texas watching in person and on TV—was the biggest moment of John Mejia's life. And while she was there, it was a moment not really involving Araceli, as they almost all would be from then on.

That silently acknowledged inevitability arose every time John mentioned the time they would spend apart during his freshman and her senior year or his probable start in the minors, living out of a bag on the road, in buses, playing to half-filled stadiums in
Bumfuck, all in hopes of being mined up ahead of the other prospects on the field by a big league team—living the dream. She suffered the obvious with feigned indifference, a cold stoicism that seemed to hurt Mejia more than the fact that soon he would break the heart of the only person he'd ever loved.

The night before he and Robison left town—the night before they died—John took Araceli as far away from the party lights at the Saenz ranch as its boundaries let him. He drove his father's truck along a dirt path that led around the perimeter of the property, stopping a few miles away when they reached a locked gate.

John turned off the engine. He and Araceli got out of the truck and climbed onto a blanket John laid out on its bed. They didn't say a word. When they finished, she wrapped the blanket around them. John cried silently on her chest, his tears rolling up to her collarbone and down off her back. Araceli lay counting stars, certain that this was the end, determined not to break down with him.

The next day, on the front lawn of his parents' house, John Mejia broke up with Araceli Monsevais. Right there in front of everyone. “We have to break up,” he said. A few tears fell, but as soon as Araceli felt them coming, she steeled herself and stopped. He held her and whispered to her that he would always love her and be her friend. He told her he still wanted her to go to UT when she graduated, to be with him. He said he would call her every day and asked her to please look after his mother which, last-minute public breakup or not, she knew wasn't asking too much.

All of Greenton watched, oblivious to the fact that their king and queen were a couple no longer. She told herself that she'd known it was coming, but still it hurt like she thought a gunshot might. Araceli was proud that she hadn't cried, that she hadn't done something foolish like making an angry scene.

Riding back into town on the night before the start of the school year, Araceli
remembered what hurt her most that day: the realization—as the Johns drove off with their police escort and the whole town cheering them on—that with Greenton's king leaving town, she was no longer its queen. She was just a girl. Maybe she was more beautiful than the girls around her, but she was no longer any more special or remarkable than all of the prettiest girls in school who had come before her—girls who only ever seemed to get married and pregnant and fat, left with picture books and school annuals to show kids who don't really care that their mothers were young once too, that they used to be beautiful.