THUGLIT Issue One - [5]

*****

It was hotter mid-July heat than Lauro had experienced last year, after moving to the desert with his mother. As he squinted at the sun, he considered Angel probably knew exactly how hot it needed to get for the egg to fry. Angel had the advantage of being born and raised in Phoenix, living there longer.

They hopped the fence to Garfield Elementary; cut across the sallow playfield. They put as much distance as they could between them and their crime, where the metal Phoenix sat on the other side of the black vertical bar fence.

Like a game of follow the leader, Angel led Lauro through the neighborhood. They kept an eye out for cops; larger groups of teens. They took a shortcut through a ramshackle stucco duplex with a giant banner hung from the side, advertising: Low rent, low move-in fees.

On Fillmore, the next street over, they passed a beautifully renovated pyramidal cottage that had been boarded up and a For Sale sign stuck in the yard. The cottage was wedged into a row of broken-down ranch style homes and empty dirt lots. Another home was boarded up, missing a door, the insides gutted, the copper pipes and wires picked clean. Slivers of shade bordered the sides of the buildings, or under the moribund fronds of wayward palm trees leaning hunched along the broken street like the bowed backs of old, tired men.

Angel was tossing an egg in the air, catching it. Across the street, a skinny girl with ratty matted hair squatted in the feeble shade of the boarded up home with the missing door.

When he noticed her, his first impression was: crack whore squatting to piss. She had a greasy dirt-streaked face, dirty clothes, like she belonged in a third world country-not America.

What was she doing there? He wondered if she was really taking a piss.

Maybe he would get a free show.

“You know her?”

“Nope, never seen her before,” Lauro said.

Angel lobbed the egg near her.

She ran to a white mini-van covered in rust spots, missing a rear bumper.

A man, her father by the looks of it, jumped out of the back of van as she got inside with the rest of her family.

They were huddled around ice chests, piles of clothes. Angel saw the black trash bags filled with everything they owned.

The children had their faces buried in their mother’s arms.

He yelled, “Go park at a Walmart!”

The dad got in the van, drove away.

Lauro laughed, uneasily, “That’s cold, man.”

*****

Inside Verde Park, near the Verde Community Center, the preteens were playing, catcalling to Miss Padilla again in their squeaky little voices. “Hey mamacita! I want to do the wild thing to you!”

Another said, “How much for a blowjob, bitch?”

In unsure voices that could crack glass, they catcalled, giggled. They tossed their football back and forth.

Miss Padilla, she couldn’t remember faces anymore. Her life before she got clean last year made it so. But the kids would not let her forget. She still liked to straddle her neck in gold jewelry. She still liked to wear the same hot pink, skin-tight, halter-top dress.

Angel said, “Check out Miss Padilla. Baby got back.”

At a fast clip, she bustled up Van Buren Street. Her chest puffed out, tits bouncing all over the place.

He did a little bump and grind dance, dry fucking the air. “I wouldn’t mind riding that train.”

“You’d fuck her? She’s like forty, and she used to be a prostitute.”

“I’m just playin’.”

Lauro smiled, “What’re you getting your mom for her birthday? Something nice?”

“I was thinking of some gold jewelry.”

Miss Padilla wore giant gold earrings that glinted in the sun.

Lauro saw the gold around her neck.

“I fucking dare you! You won’t do it!”

She bustled toward them like daring them to stop her, daring them to do something about it. But without looking them in the eye, she strutted past. Angel grabbed the jewelry from her neck. She started screaming, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kids!” Then she was shouting, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kids!”

Before they knew it was happening, she had opened her Chanel purse, pulled a gun. She boomed the way thunderclaps rumble through clouds, across the sky, “I’m gonna teach you not to fuck with decent folk!”

Without thinking, Angel ran. It didn’t register in Lauro’s mind right away that Angel had run. Lauro bolted a second later, as fast as his fat little legs would carry him. He was too slow, and it was all the excuse she needed to shoot him twice in his back with the.38 snub-nosed revolver. Like a spooked stampeding cow, Lauro belly-flopped into the ground. The momentum of his dead weight carried him skidding across the scarred pavement on his chin.

She boomed, squeezing off the last four shots in the revolver, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kids!”

She waved the gun, blasts cutting the palpable heat rising on the air. Inside Verde Park the kids screamed, fell, one by one as the errant bullets struck them.

Fuckin’ no good rotten kids!

Angel didn’t look back. He just kept running all the way to Washington Street where the metro light rail thrummed in place, its doors open. Had the train been waiting for him? He didn’t have time to consider it. Not that he cared, and jumped inside.