Read Online Muchacho by Louanne Johnson - Free Book Online

the passenger door. He got inside, put on his seat belt and looked at me real serious until I got behind the wheel.
    We just cranked up the speakers and didn’t talk too much until we got to Cruces. We stopped to get some gas and a couple bottles of iced tea which I thought Primo would add something to, but he didn’t. He just climbed back into the passenger seat and waited until we were on I-10 and then he said, “I never thanked you for not ratting me out that day.”
    He didn’t have to tell me which day. We both knew.
    I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to do anything. I didn’t eat or talk for a couple days. I even got a fever. Mami took me to the doctor and he said I probably had laryngitis or something. He said sometimes kids yell so much when they’re playing outside that they lose their voice. Nothing to worry about, he said. After a couple days, I could eat a little bit, but I had nightmares every night for a whole year. I tried to erase that day from my brain and I never said anything about it toanybody, including Primo. He never said anything about it, either. Not for eight years up till now. I thought Primo must have forgot about it, even though I didn’t, but it isn’t the kind of thing you could forget, especially if you were the one who pulled the trigger.
    Primo stared out his window at the Black Range Mountains, which look green and blue in the daylight. “You know why I never told you why I shot that guy?” He waited a minute, but I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even shake my head. I just sat there wishing I wasn’t in the truck with him. I was wishing that I was in school listening to McElroy talk about Shakespeare or something, which would have surprised McElroy even more than it surprised me.
    “You were too little, that’s why. I didn’t want you to know the bad things that some people will do. I’m still not going to tell you because maybe you’ll never find out which would be good. But you remember that girl who got pregnant and told everybody it was my baby but I said it wasn’t?”
    “Yeah.” I did remember that girl. An Anglo girl named Debbie with long blond hair and skinny legs. She was a senior and Primo was only a sophomore. She stayed in school until she got so fat that they made her quit because they thought other kids would want to have babies if they hung around with her which is so stupid. Maybe girls think it’s cool to look at a fat pregnant belly, but guys don’t. If they put a pregnant girl in every class, I bet a lot of guys would start using condoms.
    “It was my baby,” Primo said. “The prettiest little girl youever saw. But I was too young to be a dad. I was a
pendejo
, I admit that. But she was the one who seduced me.” He stopped talking for a second and looked out the window some more. “When she found a new boyfriend, I thought, Good, now I’m off the hook. No child support, no hassles from her. But that guy was
puro diablo.
He …”
    He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes and put the glasses back on.
    “I’m not going to tell you what he did to that little girl, but I promise if somebody did that to your kid, you’d shoot them. Anybody would.” He punched the dashboard and then rubbed his knuckles.
    “How come you think the cops never came looking for me?” He looked at me hard.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Because they knew what he did, except nobody couldn’t prove it,” Primo said. “Even the cops don’t care if you kill some guy like him. That’s the kind of
basura
you don’t need the cops or the courts to decide anything about. Everybody knows the right thing to do. So I did it.”
    I got a sick feeling when he said that because I remembered sitting in that car, smoking that cigarette, and then shitting my pants after Primo pulled the trigger. I picked up my iced tea and chugged the rest of the bottle.
    “Hey.” Primo waited until I looked over at him and then he