The War Whisperer: Book 1: Geronimo Read online

  I looked at the piece of fruit in my hand, frowned, and looked up at him. “It’s not meat; It’s an apple.”

  “But,” he countered, “it might have a worm in it.”

  It was then, I think, I realized that the so-called race of humans are made up of billions of individual races, each individual almost a separate incomprehensible species from every other human. Some things, some persons, I simply wouldn’t understand.

  It didn’t, the apple—It didn’t have a worm in it.

  At times it seemed like Abril teaching English was a way of honoring her father, but then she would call him “the idiot,” or “the dumb bastard.” I never did find out why. Nevertheless, it was fun learning English from her. She made it fun and easy to learn.

  Her name was Abril Espinoza and I fell in love with her, which seemed silly even then. I was in third grade and she was in sixth—practically a decrepit old woman. But she was so smart, and when she talked English it wasn’t just rules and spelling and pronunciation and penmanship. It was stories, adventures, songs, and mysteries that took us over the wire and into other places, other times, other worlds, even other dimensions.

  Words to her were functions in sometimes very complicated equations. To solve a sentence’s riddle, the correct words in the correct form and order needed to be used, and then she would show us the words being used in books. She played the guitar for the songs that fit her lessons, and she seemed brilliant with both her playing and her singing. She taught us to sing as well as to speak and to write.

  “Even if you never write for publication, or just in a diary, you can write to keep your head on straight. You can always sing to do that.”

  We laughed at that.

  She smiled. “Keeping your head attached is important. You know how you get sad, angry, hurt, so frustrated you could scream or want to kill, and you’re like that for days or weeks?”

  All of us nodded.

  “If you write down how you feel, you can take those feelings out of your head and work on them, change them, repair them, make them something that has your head doing what you want it to. I call that keeping your head on straight.”

  “Do you write?” asked one of the second grade girls, Olivia. She looked like all the second grade girls who were skinny: Short, black hair, brown and brown.

  “Sometimes,” Abril answered. “Sometimes I sing my feelings in a song.”

  “Would you sing us a feelings song?” asked Olivia.

  I was nodding along with the rest of the bobble heads.

  Very quietly, checking frequently for teachers, the principal and other staff, Abril sang us a feelings song. “I call this,” she said, “‘A Song for the Near Future’.” She had told us the names of the chords and she began with E minor, then D, then C, then B7.

  Two plus two can equal four

  I’ve seen it happen twice.

  The leaders and those mothers,

  Though, will always add a slice.

  Now two times two is five or three

  Wars come hot and cold,

  Ignorance is education

  The glitter’s always gold.

  Plenty now is poverty,

  Justice is a sign

  Purity’s suspicious

  And honor is a crime.

  Lies are truth and truth just lies

  Facts are simply lost.

  We fatten up on symbols

  In storyteller’s sauce.

  ◊

  Two plus to can equal four

  I’ve seen it happen twice.

  But that was very long ago

  Before the fire and ice.

  She looked up and met a strange mix of expressions. From me and the other young ones, the expression was one of bewilderment. We, of course, had been looking for another Rusty Cage. I looked at Belinda and her expression was strange. She had tears in her eyes. Two of the older kids nodded.

  Abril looked at me and said, “That was a feelings song, but perhaps this one might be more fun. I call it ‘Things I hate.”

  I hate little piles of shit

  People throwing fits

  And twits.

  I hate boogers in the Spring

  Every little thing

  And bling —bling.

  I didn’t catch what the rest of words were. I was laughing too hard to hear. Ms. Stoker, a straw-haired blue-eyed young woman with too many freckles and a switch in her hand had the recess duty that day and came over to where we were happy and laughing. Obviously we had to be doing something wrong. Abril by then was playing a song called “Redwing.”

  Ms. Stoker looked at Abril a long time, practically willing the young girl to do something for which she could be punished. Then she glared at Belinda. Eventually she turned and walked away.

  A home for us.

  Big happy family.

  Not a prison at all.

  One time that cook, Ms. Donatella, was watching as Abril taught us English her special way. The cook walked over and listened for awhile. At one point, she said to Abril, “Don’t reach up.” She looked at the rest of us and said, “Don’t reach too high unless you want to get slapped down. Don’t you know what school you’re in? What country you’re living in?” She walked away looking down at the dirt.

  I said to Abril, “What did she mean?”

  Abril stared after the cook for a long time, a dead mask for an expression. She turned back, leaned over, and pointed at the dirt. “See that beetle?”

  Some kind of brown bug was crawling across the dirt, the dust on its carapace making it look almost tan. Abril bent over, held out her finger close to the bug which paused, pawed the air a bit with its front legs, then tried to climb up on her finger. Once it had climbed upon the tip of her finger, Abril crushed the insect between her index finger and her thumb.

  She stood up, opened her hand showing the crushed bug, and looked straight at me. “That insect reached too high.” She looked at our faces. “You have been assigned places. If you reach above your place, those who assigned you to what they wanted you to become will fight you.”

  “Shouldn’t we fight back?” asked a boy named Elías. “I mean shouldn’t we have dreams? Try for something better?”

  “Are you a bug?” asked Abril.

  “No,” answered Elías.

  Abril wiped her fingers on the dirt, looked down at her guitar, and strummed a few chords. “There are those who would crush your dreams either by force, or discrimination, with scornful words, and wet blankets.” She looked up at us. “You know what I mean?”

  We all nodded, especially Belinda.

  She looked back down at her guitar. “I wonder how a boy or a girl feels when they are told for the thousandth time, ‘don’t try. Don’t reach too high’.”

  And without waiting for an answer, she played her guitar and sang another feelings song:

  Gonna find me a bluebird.

  Gonna stomp it in the dirt,

  Gonna kick it ‘till it hurts,

  Gonna sqush it ‘till it squirts.

  Gonna kill me a bluebird

  If it sings another song

  Or tells me that I’m wrong

  I’ll tell King Kong.

  Then she said, “Class is over. Remember, when you reach up, be quick, watch your back, and make certain no one sees you.”

  Too high.

  That was what I was doing on that rooftop, I realized: I was planning my reach up. The alternative would be waiting for the system to issue me whatever it thought I deserved. Right then, my skill set from the government school seemed aimed at making me a janitor; The skill set I had learned on my own pointed toward something different.

  It was like when I was on kitchen detail, sweeping up and gathering trash. I went to get one of the garbage cans by the baking island, I saw one of the cooks there, Mrs. Breeland, making pies. She said, “Give me a minute, honey, before you empty that can.”

  I said okay and watched her roll out some dough, fold it, put it on top of an apple pie, then
unfold the dough for the top crust. Once the top crust was on, the cook ran her sharp knife around the edge of the pie pan, cutting off the excess dough. It was the last pie and she gathered up the scraps of dough and threw them in the garbage.

  “There,” she said. “Thank you for waiting.”

  Mrs. Breeland was dark, round, had fat arms, really big breasts, and a perpetually sore back. She saw me frozen, looking in horror at the garbage where she had thrown the dough scraps, and said, “Did you want that, honey? To play with?”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said.

  I didn’t want it either.

  Nobody wanted it.

  It was then I realized what the children at UCH were to all those pie people out there on the other side of the wire: we were dough scraps, extra humans trimmed off the human race’s pie into the garbage can of The Crotch.

  My very first metaphor.

  That was the day escape—illegally moving to the center of the pie—began filling my mind and refused to leave. I knew very little about what was on the other side of the wire, where to go, how to make a living, nor at what. I added geography to my studies, for which my teacher, Mister Stenos, was grateful. It seems the lack of interest in the subject was about to get his employment at UCH terminated. I was the deciding number.

  Geography plus computer science enabled me to memorize the town of Uvalde, the county of Uvalde, and the State of Texas. I still needed to make a living wherever I went. The school had vocational classes for cooking, carpentry, electrical work, plumbing and heating, auto repair, hairdressing, and so on. I had no real interest in any of them, but enrolled in the construction series, an introduction to the different trades involved in building, which was all I could do in the third grade.

  One day on kitchen detail taking out garbage, the thirteen year old boy named Dylan was washing pots and pans. He had really big shoulders and kind of an ugly face. When he wasn’t washing pots they had him in vocational learning how to fix cars. He wanted to learn how to cook. I heard him say so to one of the supervisors right there in the kitchen. There was also a fifteen year old girl in there named Silvana who was learning how to be a cook. She wanted to be an auto mechanic. I heard her tell the same supervisor, a tall skinny woman named Brie Feller.

  “We’ll see,” said Ms. Feller.

  We’ll see, was UCrotch-speak for Shut up and don’t cause trouble.

  The next day during recess I saw Dylan outside in the playground sitting in a swing and not swinging. Instead he was looking at the dirt in front of his feet. He looked sad. I told him “Hi,” and instead of telling me Vete a la chingada like most of the Mexicans did, he said “Hi” back.

  “You going to learn to cook?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not at Club Yoo-Crotch. Ms. Kohl explained all about it to me. They got these numbers, mira? Call ‘em metrics. Metrics say they need me to fix cars.”

  “That’d be okay,” I said. “Fixing cars.”

  “Better, I think, they make better cars. Pero mira, it ain’t cooking. Fixing cars ain’t creating magic. Man, you ever have a really good meal, perfect from start to finish? Sits in your mind like gift from the gods—a treasured memory?”

  “Never,” I answered. “All the meals I ever had have been right here. I like the pies sometimes. Cookies.”

  “Great meals,” he said. “As a kid? Mira, my uncle was even more than a cook; He was a chef. That’s part cook, part architect, part magician. You know what a architect is?”

  “Designs things, right? Buildings? Bridges?”

  “Bueno. You got it. And meals. My Uncle Camilo he cook Mexican, American, French, Italian, he even cook Middle East and Chinese, some Japanese and Thai. At home he show me how different things go together. Spices, heat, moisture, meat, veggies, bread . . .” He shook his head and looked back at the dirt, his eyes glistening. “Bread. Perfect meals. They take a bad day and make it good.” He looked up at me. “They take a good day and make it . . . sensacional.”

  “What happened? How come you aren’t with your uncle?” I asked.

  “Ahh, situation normal: eternal pain. He got sick. Stroke or something. Couldn’t speak, walk, even remember his own name. Didn’t know me anymore.” Dylan sighed and shrugged. “They call the kiddie police on me ‘cause I got no one ‘cept Uncle Camilo. Kiddie cops poke around, and say my parents came over the fence from Mexico; wetbacks. They had me—I was born in Del Rio—then they was deported, left me with my uncle. He came over legal.” He shrugged again. “My parents never made it back.”

  “Didn’t anybody look for them?” I asked, the thought of losing such a valuable thing as a parent inexcusable.

  “Uncle Camilo he try to find them. Internet, telephone, even a dick—a private eye. They from a little town in Coahuila named Hércules. Private eye say, when they was sent back to Mexico, they never arrive home.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  Again he shrugged. “Who knows. Bandits, maybe caught in a cartel battle—bad shit goin’ down in Mexico—maybe they say the wrong thing in the wrong ear. Been seven years. Got to be dead.”

  “Do you remember all your uncle taught you?”

  He shook his head. “No, man. I was only five or six when my uncle got sick. Don’t remember much of anything from back then except some meals. I remember a few fights, the names of a few dishes, a girl who told me she think I’m funny lookin’—”

  “She was right about that,” I joked.

  He frowned at me, then came a big smile and a laugh. “Sí, she was right on, hermano.”

  Hermano.

  It means “brother.”

  I felt this great emptiness open in my chest. I wondered if he meant brother, or was it just using the word like “hombre,” or “cabrón.” I hadn’t made many friends fighting with anyone who called me “Geronimo.” I would have liked to have had a friend. I would have loved to have had a brother. The silence grew until it seemed awkward.

  “Why won’t they let you swap with Silvana?” I asked, at last. “She wants to fix cars.”

  Dylan made a comical face and held out a hand. “Make too much sense, amigo. Told you what SNEP mean, right?”

  “Situation normal: eternal pain.”

  “Fucking truth.” He lowered his hand. “Mira, we talkin’ ‘bout the U.S. Government, here. Metrics say Sil should cook. Say I fix cars.” He spat on the playground and sat up straight. “Kids call you Geronimo, right?”

  “Not so many now,” I said coldly.

  “You like that?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Didn’t think so. Jerry then.” He frowned. “Thiago, you remember him at all?”

  I nodded. “I remember. Long time ago. He was nice to me. He died.”

  Dylan nodded. “Him and me, we was homies, comprende? We both from Del Rio.”

  I nodded.

  “Thiago tell me once look out for you, Jerry. He say you a good kid. So I look out for you.”

  “All these years, I only see you now and then,” I pointed out. “This the first time we ever talk.”

  He laughed. “I ain’t a bodyguard or therapist, Jer. I got things to do, too. But I look out for you. Big kid shoots off his mouth near me, gonna bust that smartass look off that redskin Geronimo’s face, I take him aside, we discuss it, and the big kid change his mind, mira?”

  Yeah. Miro. That was okay. Dylan was a good guy. “You think your parents are really dead?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Either dead, locked up, or don’t give a shit,” he said. “All the same. Tell me something, Jer. You ever feel bad about that Bodey dying?”

  “No. Not about Bodey.”

  “About what, then?”

  I shrugged. “I feel bad about him slapping me around—that I wasn’t big enough to do anything about it.” I frowned and searched Dylan’s face. “Did Thiago know about that? Did he pick a fight with Bodey because of me?”

  “No, man. He had his own shit down with B
odey.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you was a part of it. Mostly I think they was just looking for something different to do.”

  He wagged a finger back and forth at the ground. “Don’t spend no time back there in the past, Jerry, ‘cept for what it can teach you. You play around in that old yesterday shit . . .” He shook his head. “You play around back there in memory land just to feel bad, beat yourself up, it gonna kill you or make you murder somebody else.”

  One afternoon a few days later I was in Ms. Kohl’s office emptying the trash. I noticed the bottom drawer on the right side of Mister Makin’s old desk was unlocked and open a little way. I peeked in and could see a lot of knives in there, gouges, saps, sharpened screwdrivers, chisels, and even a small unloaded revolver. These were all weapons the principal, teachers, and residence supervisors had confiscated from “our big happy family” in the past.

  Making certain there was no one to see me, I gently opened the drawer and looked through the weapons until I found Thiago’s knife. It was a very old Barlow folding knife and hard to recognize because of the blackened crust of dirt and old dried blood. The blade was frozen into the handle. I took the knife with me when I finished replacing Ms. Kohl’s waste can.

  It took me a day of soaking the knife in hot water before I could get the blade to come out of the ribbed bone handle. A lot of cleaning with steel wool, rags, and toothpicks to get Bodey’s blood off and out of it.

  In the school shop next to where we kept cleaning supplies and some of us were being trained to perform handyman jobs, there was a sharpening wheel. Dylan and I together sharpened the knife. We oiled it, too.

  The blade was about twelve centimeters long and had all kinds of wavy patterns in the metal I could see once I polished the blade. I learned how to keep the knife sharp, and Dylan began graduate lessons showing me how to use a knife in fights.

  He said, “When two thirds of the people around you got knives and hate your guts just ‘cause you’re you, using a knife a good thing to know.”