There There(51)

Now I’ve got six of these pieces. Octavio said he’d give me five thousand for all of them. He’s got something going. All my shit’s untraceable. So I’m not worried about the government coming after me. I am worried about what the guns will do. Where they’ll end up. Who they might hurt or kill. But we’re family. I know Octavio can be a mean motherfucker. So could you. But here it is. Manny, he said they’re gonna rob a fucking powwow. Crazy, right? Shit sounded fucking stupid to me at first. Then it had me fucked up cuz of Dad. You remember he used to always tell us we’re Indian. But we didn’t believe him. It was like we were waiting for him to prove it. Doesn’t matter. Cuz of what he did to Mom. To us. That piece of shit. Deserved what he got. He had it coming. Long time coming. He woulda killed Mom. Probably you too if you hadn’t beat his ass. I only wish I had a white gun to give you then. So let them rob a powwow. Whatever. Dad never taught us anything about being Indian. What’s that got to do with us? Octavio said they could make fifty thousand. Said he’d give me another five if they pulled it off.

As for me, I mostly spend my time online. I’m gonna graduate from high school. My grades are all right. I don’t really like anyone at school. My only friends are your old friends, but they don’t really care about me except that I can make them guns now. Except Octavio. I know how much it all messed him up. You gotta know that. You can’t think it didn’t fuck him up, right?

Anyway, I’ll keep writing you here. I’ll keep you updated. It’s anyone’s guess what’s gonna happen. For the first time in a long time I got a little hope in my chest. Not that it’s gonna get better. Just that it’s gonna change. Sometimes that’s all there is. Cuz that means there’s something going on, somewhere inside all of it, all that turning the world is always doing, that means it was never supposed to stay the same heat. Miss you.

Daniel



Octavio brought me the first five thousand the day after I showed them all the guns. I left three thousand of it on the kitchen table in a blank envelope like Manny used to do. With the other two thousand I bought a drone and a pair of virtual-reality goggles.

I’d been wanting a drone ever since I found out about the powwow. I knew Octavio wouldn’t let me go, but I wanted to see it. To make sure it went all right. Otherwise it was on me. And if shit went wrong, that was it. Octavio’s plan was all I had, with my mom like she was. Decent drones are affordable now. And I’d read that flying one with a camera and live feed, with VR goggles, felt like flying.

    The drone I got had a three-mile range and could stay in the air for twenty-five minutes. The camera on it shot 4K resolution. The coliseum was only a mile away from our house on Seventy-Second. I flew it from my backyard. I didn’t want to waste any time so I went straight up, about fifty feet in the air, then straight over the BART station. The thing could really move. I was in it. My eyes. The VR goggles.

Out in the back of center field, I went straight up and saw a guy pointing at me from the bleachers. I flew closer to him. He was a maintenance worker—holding a trash-grabber and a trash bag. The old guy got his binoculars out. I went even closer. What could he do? Nothing. I flew almost all the way up to the guy’s face, and he tried to reach out to the drone. He got mad. I realized I was messing with him. I shouldn’t have. I pulled away and dropped back down to the field. I headed toward the right-field wall, then down the foul line back to the infield. At first base I noticed the drone had ten minutes of battery life left. I wasn’t about to lose a thousand dollars out there, but I wanted to finish at home plate. When I got there, just as I was about to turn the drone around, I saw the old guy from the bleachers coming for me. He was on the field and pissed, like he was gonna grab the drone and slam it to the ground—step on it. I backed up but forgot to rise. Luckily I’d been playing video games for long enough that my panicked brain was hardwired to perform well under pressure. But for a second I was close enough to count the wrinkles in the old guy’s face. He managed to hit it, which almost caused the drone to come down, but I rose, went straight up, quick, like twenty or forty feet in seconds. I cleared the walls and came straight home to my backyard.

    At home I watched the video over and over. Especially the part at the end where the guy almost got me. Shit was exciting. Real. Like I’d been there. I was about to call Octavio to tell him about it when I heard a scream upstairs. My mom.

Ever since Manny got shot I’d felt in a constant state of worry, half expecting some bad shit to happen all the time. I ran up the stairs, and when I got to the top I opened the door and saw my mom holding the envelope, flipping through the cash with her finger. Did she think Manny left it? Like he made it back somehow, or like he was still here? Did she think this was a sign?

I was about to tell her it was me, and Octavio, when she came over and hugged me. She pulled my head into her chest. Just kept saying, “Sorry, I’m so sorry.” I thought she meant about how she’d been in bed. How she’d given up. But then as she kept saying it I took it to mean how everything had happened to us. How much we lost, how we’d once been together as a family, how good it’d once been. I tried to tell her it was okay. I kept repeating, “It’s okay, Mom”—one for each of her sorrys. But then pretty soon I found myself saying sorry back. And we both said sorry back and forth until we started to cry and shake.