Barrio Pandilla

He deserves what he got. That pendejo had it coming.
           
So then after we’ve done it, we sprint away from Carlos’ Mamá through the usual route—under the playground hedge, behind Building C, between buildings D and E, through the Building F cellar, up the courtyard guava tree, through the window into the Community Room nobody ever meets in, and out down the West fence around the corner into our Pit—choking on our own tongues, we’re laughing so hard.
          
Juan Felipe gets all nervous and tucks in his shirt a lot and asks if Dona San Lucia was holding a gun, when she chased us. Eduardo say it was just a toy gun. It had to be a toy gun, says Tito, who’s never had a toy gun. Hector agrees because when someone does that to your son and you’ve got a real gun: you shoot. And so Hector gives Juan Felipe a shove because Juan Felipe shouldn’t be so worried about his shirt and the way he looks. Maricón, Hector calls Juan Felipe, and Tito agrees so that everyone knows that the two of them aren’t chaperos like we once heard their uncle was.
           
When we stop laughing we can all feel our hearts giving our eardrums the beating of their lives. We dust the grit from the Building F cellar off of our school uniforms, pretending not to check for cuts or bruises or maybe even bullet holes because when Eduardo’s brother got shot last spring Eduardo said his brother said he didn’t even feel the bullet til way after it went in his arm, so you never know. We’re not laughing anymore. Tito’s wet his shorts but no one says anything. Normally, we’d have said something.
           
The last time Tito wet his shorts was when we climbed up the sides of the church to see the párroco’s sister showering in her brother’s apartment, when she came to visit last winter. Hector pushed Tito as a joke—they were brothers, they were allowed—but then Tito fell. He only fell a little bit, from the window onto the shed roof, but he wet himself because that’s what Tito does. Tito said the wet on his pants was because of the rain, but we told him it wasn’t because if it was raining hard enough for wet pants, Tito would’ve slipped right off the shed roof tiles and died. Tito’s an imbecile but he knows how to drive a car better than of all of us. He’s only crashed once. If we go into town and we see a car we can use, we have to have Tito. We steal books from Carlos’ Papi to tie onto Tito’s shoes, so his feet can reach the pedals. We make jokes about how Señor San Lucia gets dumber and dumber without his stupid books.
           
Juan Felipe says something about how Carlos wasn’t even that bad. And how maybe we shouldn’t’ve done what we did and our Papis will kill us. Eduardo says his Papi’s already going to kill him for lighting the oven on fire a little bit for the second time this week. We laugh about how Eduardo’s Abuela lights the oven on fire every morning and she never gets killed. Because she’s pretty much already dead, so we laugh. We can tell Eduardo doesn’t like that much, but we don’t care. If anyone doesn’t like us they can go the way Carlos went now that Carlos has gone that way already.
           
It’s only a little bit dark but Juan Felipe already has to start going home. No one’s going to kill him for what we did today, because nobody ever gets Juan Felipe. We say it’s because he combs his hair all the time. We laugh at Juan Felipe, Mamá’s boy Juan Felipe, because he’s supposed to go home before the sun is down ever since what happened to his Papi. He just pulls his comb out of his front pocket and starts walking around the fence to the East gate, fixing his hair.
           
Tito says he wants to go home too, and Hector gives him a punch. It’s just a little one, but there’s red on Tito’s face from Hector’s knuckles, which are still bleeding from what we did to Carlos. Tito cries less than usual. The dust on his face goes all sticky and muddy from the tears. It’s the worst to cry with the Building F cellar dust on your cheeks. It makes your face burn more and feel fatter than just with regular crying. Only Tito can cry in front of Hector, because they’re brothers so Hector knows all the ways Tito’s been messed up, and he lets him cry. 
           
We haven’t seen Tito sad like this since we made our plan about what we did to Carlos. He cried the hardest right before we made the plan, because that was when Carlos said the thing about Tito’s reading at school. That was the last straw, with Carlos. We’ve told Carlos a million times that not everyone can have a billion stupid books on their walls instead of anything useful. Not everyone can have big bottle-cap reading goggles to help them see all the words. We called Carlos names, about the glasses, all the time, but mostly we just left him alone. The rules were that if we left him, he’d leave Tito.
           
He didn’t follow the rules.
           
So then when Hector was stomping and mashing the dirt from his boots into the wrinkles of Carlos’s tight-shut eyes, when we were throwing so many stones down at Carlos’s wimpy torso that he wasn’t even flinching every time a stone hit, when we were wrestling Carlos’s shins up to try and crack his knees and twist them backwards on themselves, when one of our rocks made a gash on Carlos’s arm and it started squirting blood to the rhythm of his heart, we told him. We told Carlos that in our barrio, you follow the rules. That’s why we all have to get killed by our Papis later. We have to be brave through our beatings, tonight, because we were just keeping the peace around here.
           
So now lying in our pit at the fence by the West gate, we look up at the sky and we talk about all the things we talk about to avoid talking about anything at all. Eduardo does his teacher impressions, and Tito farts with his armpits, and we laugh even though those things haven’t been funny since last year. When we start thinking about how to blame Juan Felipe for what happened today with Carlos, we go quiet and Hector says he’ll take Tito home because Tito’s starting to smell. Tito says he’s just wet from the mud when he slipped and fell running between the buildings. Eduardo’s hungry, because Eduardo’s always hungry, and he wants to go away, too. We all have to climb the fence at different points to get to our buildings.
           
They leave and it’s just me there, alone.
           
Carlos lives in my building. Dona San Lucia brought us papusas every morning for a week when my sister was sick last year. Señor San Lucia taught my Papi how to read. Dona San Lucia sometimes gives us caramelos she buys in the city to help my Papi with breathing when he’s at the construction site. Carlos copies off of my writing homework, so I get to peek at his math tests. Nobody knows that stuff but me. He should have left Tito alone. I know the rules, but when my friends are gone, I’m not so sure about rules anymore.
           
When Juan Felipe’s Papi disappeared, nobody said where the rules were then. They said they found him in a side street in town with his stomach cut open and parts of his body missing, so they could sell his insides for illegal medicine. They said that, but Juan Felipe’s Papi might have just run away from Juan Felipe’s Mamá, and then they just told her the story about the illegal medicine to make her feel better. No matter what happened, though, the rules didn’t win. Probably the guys who stole the body parts won. Those guys have some rules, and Juan Felipe’s family have their own set of rules, like combing their hair a lot and being home before it’s dark to put the candle in the window for their Papi.
          
I start climbing the fence behind my building. I can’t see where my fingers are curled through the metal loops, I can only see shadow, so I’m just climbing by the memory in my muscles. I think I can I see that there’s light in the San Lucia window and I can almost feel how much they’re worrying in there about all the blood on Carlos. By now, it must be the kind of blood that goes dry and black like the mud under the guava tree and starts to flake off all over til the blood turns to dust.
           
And so I picture Carlos sitting on his bathroom counter chipping off all of the scaly reds and blacks and browns of his punishment today, shedding it all like the little river snakes shed their skins in flakes the year we had the drought and they all died, and Carlos wincing and sobbing and retching as he goes until the scab opens again on his arm and starts to squirt. And I wonder if the organ thieves stole Juan Felipe’s Papi’s heart along with everything else.
           
Because when I look around this place, our little alphabet of buildings, even in the dark I can see all our rules written in everywhere. They’re in footprints in the mud or in the dust, in cracks in our doors from when they get slammed, in the different sizes of holes in our walls, in the looseness of our window frames, in the different-coloured molds and crusts in our bathrooms and on our mirrors. Written in the maps of movements and eyes meeting when friends and enemies pass on the way to see their other friends or enemies. Rules written in the different rhythms of our breathing when we go from one feeling to the next. They’re written in so hard they’re etched right into the muscles that beat our blood, but our barrio knows as good as any that not everybody knows how to read.

C. Madrenas is a fourth year Media and the Public Interest student at Western University.