The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (6 page)

“Well, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Demetrio reached into his pocket once more, and
pulled out a small yellow card, laminated in plastic, and dusted it
off on the leg of his jean. “This is just a little something I
wanted to give you, too, because you don’t never know what life
holds.”

He leaned toward me, and held out
the card. I took it, and looked at it briefly. It was a Catholic
prayer card for Saint Anthony the Abbott. My mother and I were
Catholic, technically, but we didn’t go to church as often as we
should - which was a nice way of saying we pretty much never went.
My dad’s grandmother from Chimayó used to have things like this
prayer card in her house. I caught Kelsey’s look of amused
cynicism, and tried to ignore it even though it mirrored my own
feelings about the situation. The gesture was sweet, but the card
was
so
not
something any of us would ever carry around. It was in the realm of
quaint superstition that most of my friends avoided, other than for
purposes of erudite mockery.

“Uhm, wow. I can’t say I’ve ever gotten anything
quite like this before.” I tried to conceal my own discomfort, but
probably failed because Demetrio looked even more embarrassed
now.

“I know it ain’t for everyone, but where I’m from,
that’s what we carry for protection.”

“I would have thought a gun worked better for
protection where you’re from,” deadpanned Logan, pretending it was
a joke. Demetrio took a moment after the comment to take a deep,
calming breath, then continued to talk to me as though Logan hadn’t
said anything at all.

“It’s probably lame to you. He’s the patron saint of
animals, so I got it for Buddy, too. If nothing else, give it to
your dog.”

“That’s so sweet,” said Kelsey, leaning toward
Demetrio with her elbows planted on the table and her chin in her
hands. She might as well have had little cartoon heats floating up
out of her big, shiny eyes.

“Uhm, no, it’s fine! Not dumb at all.” I blinked
hollowly. “But what do I do with it?” I set the card down on the
table and smiled at Demetrio to let him know I, too, had found
Logan’s joke in bad taste.

He shrugged. “Just carry it. If
you need it, if you feel like, you know, like you’re in trouble or
danger or whatever, like if you crash again, which God forbid
happens, you’ll know what to do.” He backed up a little and made
room for Logan take his place next to the table. “I better go. Hope
you all have a good day. Glad you’re doing good, Maria. My best to
Buddy. Laters.”

Demetrio turned to walk away, a look of subtle
humiliated annoyance on his face, but Logan swiftly caught him by
the arm.

“Hey, bro,” Logan said, coping a tough-guy stance
I’d never seen him use before but that kind of appealed to me
anyway. “Thanks, dude. Me and my girl? We appreciate what you did
here. And I’d like to give you a little something for your
trouble.”

Logan took his slick black leather wallet out of his
back jeans pocket with great show and pomp, opened it and flipped
through the many crisp twenty-dollar bills he had there.

“Nah, man.” Demetrio looked slightly offended, but
unsurprised - almost as though he pitied Logan. He was patient with
my boyfriend, and forgiving. “I’m cool. You have yourself a good
day.”

“At least let me get you a coffee or something,”
said Logan, smiling gallantly. “I mean, if it weren’t for you, who
knows what might have happened to my girl. Right?”

“We cool. Nah, man. I gotta jet.”

“Ugh. ‘My girl,’” said Kelsey under her breath, to
me. “He thinks he owns you. How can you stand it?”

I ignored her, because that was
just how Logan talked and nothing more, and watched the boys.
Demetrio shrugged gracefully out of Logan’s grasp, and faux-limped
in his usual way, toward the door, nodding goodbye to me in a
slightly wounded way that made me realize he thought
I thought
he didn’t
belong here. Which wasn’t true, exactly. I felt sorry for him, and
a little sickened by my own awkward behavior toward him. Mostly, I
was confused.

I glanced at my friends’ faces, and found that, with
the exception of Kelsey, they still saw Demetrio as the potentially
dangerous outsider that I had also believed him to be one week ago,
because of his clothes, mannerisms and grammar. Logan’s mouth had
crept up into a cruel grin, as he fought the urge to openly laugh
at Demetrio. I felt awful. How could Demetrio be all that bad if
he’d helped me? If he’d gone out of his way to find me to return my
beloved necklace? I just didn’t understand things anymore. So much
that made sense last week suddenly didn’t seem fair anymore. My
heart ached for the lonely gangster and I was suddenly ashamed - of
myself, and of my friends.

“Thank you!” I called out to him, horrified to
realize I - supposedly the superior one here - hadn’t thought to
say it yet.

Demetrio didn’t seem to hear me. He was halfway out
the door, and just kept moving. My breath caught on the lump in my
throat, as he swaggered out the door, into the swirling snow,
alone. I was overcome with an urge to chase him down, and hug him -
and this frightened me. I was more sensible than that, wasn’t I? I
was too smart to fall for a gang member.

“Well,
that
was alarming,” said
Thomas.

“You know, Maria,” joked Victoria
after the door had closed and Demetrio was gone. “You really ought
to be more careful about who you crash in front of next
time.”

Kelsey pursed her lips in offense, but Thomas and
Logan guffawed at her biting witticism. Normally, I probably would
have joined it, but nothing felt normal anymore. For the first time
that I could remember, I smiled politely, but did not feel like
laughing with them.

♦

A short time later, we all stood in the
student parking lot looking at the big curved and barbed hunting
knife Logan’s dad had given him as a reward for making the
skeet-shooting team. I pretended to be interested. Kelsey didn’t.
She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“Thing like that cost much?” asked Thomas, trying to
look as manly as was possible for a toe-walking science geek once
thought to be on the autism spectrum, but still looking a bit
startled and discomfited by the tool.

“Hell yeah!” said Logan, turning the blade with an
admiration in his gorgeous blue eyes that bordered on infatuation.
“This here’s an eighteen-inch big gamer, with special engraving. A
beauty. I’ve wanted one for a while. Dad’s awesome.”

Seeing a teacher walking our way, Logan quickly
sheathed the weapon and stuffed it under the seat of his silver
Chevy Tahoe, as every sort of armament was forbidden on school
grounds. We all agreed it was time to get going anyway, so I kissed
Logan goodbye in the student parking lot - he and his amazingly
broad, strong shoulders were headed to Calculus - and joined Kelsey
for a frigid walk across the sprawling ivy-and-brick Coronado Prep
campus, toward our Art History class. I saw Logan toss a bit of
uneaten bagel to a few crows as he walked, and pointed it out to
Kelsey.

“See? He can be kind to animals. You’ve got him all
wrong.”

“Probably just fattening them up for the slaughter,”
she replied, bitterly.

“No one eats
crows
. Not even Logan.”

“Blackbird pie, deary. You never
heard that nursery rhyme? Two and tenty black birds baked in a
pie.”

“I never understood that one.”

“Yeah, me neither. Come to think of it, I never
understood most nursery rhymes and songs. They were always about
the black death, or the plague, or some other horrible thing the
old English found excellent for children to laugh about.”

The snow was tapering off a little, but the wind had
kicked up and literally sucked the air out of you when it gusted.
We huddled together, arm in arm, leaning into the gales, and moved
quickly.

“Oh, and by the way? When you told
me some ‘guy’ called 911 for you last week, you neglected to
mention the fact that he was young and incredibly freakin’
hot
,” Kelsey said, her
voice chattering with cold, near my ear. “I thought it was some fat
truck driver type.”

I turned my head to look at her, a
look of puzzlement on my face. “He’s not
hot
, Kelsey. He’s a gang
member.”

“Right. A
hot
gang-member,” she said. “You say
it as if the two were mutually exclusive.”

“They are. You need to be smarter about boys.”

“Look who’s talking, mister ‘look at my big-ass
knife.’”

I shook my head. “Logan’s a good
guy. Maybe the other one is too, he’s just - he’s not my type.” The
words rang false to me, but I desperately wanted them to be true.
He
couldn’t
be my
type. That would be stupid. I denied to myself that I’d felt a
massive attraction for him both times I’d seen him.

“That explains why you were so rude to him,” she
said.

“I wasn’t
rude
to him!”

“Maybe not you, but Logan sure was, and you didn’t
stop him.”

I flinched at her words. “What? What are you talking
about? I swear, Logan could bring about world peace or something,
and you’d still hate him. You just hate everything he does.”

“Oh, please. Like you didn’t
notice? Idiotic gun joke aside, Logan was all, ‘here, let me give
you some money for your troubles you poor little underling,’ like a
total snob. It was
disgusting
. How can you stand
him?”

I shook my head again, confused by
her interpretation. “Kelsey, he was trying to be
nice
. Maybe that’s why
you don’t have a boyfriend. You don’t understand guys.”

She laughed. “No. The reason I
don’t have a boyfriend is unlike some people, I’m very
picky
. Oh my God, you
are so naive, Maria.”

“Whatever.”

“Logan was totally not trying to
be nice. He was trying to put that guy in his place. ‘Let me give
you some money, poor homie dude, because I’m taller than you and
Maria’s my bitch, and you don’t belong here.’”

“Shut up. He didn’t mean it like that, and he’s
never called me a bitch. What is wrong with you today?”

We had arrived at the Visual Arts building, and I
held the door for the girl I had, until now, considered to be my
best friend in all the world. Once inside, we shook the snow off,
and began to walk together toward our classroom. I didn’t look at
her; I was too angry about all her insults.

“Maria, I know you are the nicest
person in the world, and you always see the best in people, but
just this once try to at least entertain the possibility that
I
might
be right
about Logan. He might not have been doing it consciously, but I
think he was trying to insult that guy.”

“Demetrio. That guy’s name is Demetrio.” It felt
strange to say his name in the quiet elegance of the hallway.

“Demetrio, who is hot and as far as I could tell,
pretty freakin’ nice.”

I paused at the door to our classroom, to look her
in the eye. “You think?”

“Duh,” she said. “Dude calls 911, builds you a fire
to keep you warm, puts your dog in his jacket even though it’s
freezing cold, stays with you until help comes, and goes out of his
way to return your necklace? Seems pretty freakin’ nice to me.
When’s the last time Logan did anything nice for you?”

I considered this as I opened the
door, and we entered the classroom. “All the time,” I told her,
even though in truth I had no answer. He’d been busy lately,
preparing for the shooting team trials, and - something else. I
didn’t know, exactly. But I was sure he was busy, like he
said.

♦

Our teacher, Linda Yazzie, was at her desk.
Her thick, shiny black hair, streaked with white but no less
lustrous for it, was pulled back loosely in a bun. A thin, fit
woman in her forties, given to yoga and tofu, she wore faded jeans
and a colorful, beautifully woven woolen shawl, with big artsy
turquoise earrings and cherry red cowboy boots. She wasn’t a mother
- and claimed quite vociferously that teaching all of
us
had rid her of that desire for all eternity - but
the boys at school called her a MILF anyway. She pretended not to
notice. At the moment, she held slides up to the light in her
sinewy brown hand, scrutinizing them with her intense dark eyes,
deciding to put some in the projector in front of her, and others
to the side.

“Good morning, Maria,” she said,
glancing at us. Our teacher had a habit of favoring students she
felt had artistic talent, and ignoring the others; for this reason,
she always spoke to me by name, and never did so for Kelsey -
presumably because my best friend had difficulty drawing even the
mot basic of stick figures and I didn’t.

“Morning, Yazzie,” said Kelsey, her voice bratty.
She used the teacher’s last name - which was her middle name (no
one knew her real last name) - as her only name, as everyone did.
Yazzie was a well-known postmodern Native American painter from the
San Juan Pueblo, of mixed Pueblo and Navajo ancestry, with her own
studio and gallery in Old Town Albuquerque. She had once told me,
during the oil painting workshop I took with her in the summers,
that she had made millions through sales of her work; she taught
because she said it was a moral obligation, “a way of giving
medicine.”

“So annoying,” I whispered to Kelsey, of being
singled out by Yazzie.

“You are the chosen one, Jedi warrior,” she replied,
sarcastically.