Last Summer of the Death Warriors by Francesco X Stork Page A

that would be good.”
    “Until he goes to his mother’s.”
    “He’s going to need you more than ever when he’s with her.”
    “Need me for what? What am I supposed to be doing other than pushing him around? I don’t get it.”
    Father Concha pulled his legs in and sat back on the bench. His voice was even-tempered. “You don’t get it?”
    “No. I don’t know why he needs me. If he wants moral support or whatever, he’s looking in the wrong place.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Is that what he’s looking for? What does he want from me?” Father Concha stuck both hands under his armpits andlowered his chin. He twitched his nose and mouth like someone about to sneeze. “What do you think about death?”
    Pancho jerked his head back like someone had hit him with an invisible jab. “Death? It happens. People die all the time. It doesn’t bother me anymore.”
    “It doesn’t scare you?”
    “Hell no! Why would it?” He thought suddenly of the revolver in his backpack. Then he thought of his sister. The idea of death filled him with anger, hatred, a suffocating urgency, remorse even, but there was no fear anywhere. Then he realized: Maybe that’s what D.Q. wants. When he turned, he saw a mysterious grin on Father Concha’s face.
    Father Concha took a wallet from his back pocket. He opened it and lifted out all the bills inside. Pancho could see they were all twenties. “It’s three hundred dollars,” Father Concha said, handing him the money. “One hundred for you, and the rest to spend with D.Q. Do some fun things when he is up to it. There are many interesting places to see in and around Albuquerque.” Pancho held the money in his outstretched hand as if it were contaminated. “You are owed more, I know. You will be paid for your time as agreed. It’s all I could get right now.”
    Pancho lowered his hand. Putting the money in his pocket right then somehow felt inappropriate. He tried again to calculate how much he would be owed by the end of the month at thirty dollars a day, but he quickly gave that up. Whatever the amount, it would not be enough. He had not given much thought to what he would do after he found Bobby. He had an image of getting on a bus and going to Mexico. But he knew it was unrealistic to think that he would survive in Mexico. People came from Mexico to theUnited States looking for jobs, not the other way around. It didn’t really matter what happened afterward. He would go someplace and try to survive. The point in time where he met Bobby face-to-face—that was all of the future he allowed himself to contemplate.
    “You shouldn’t have many expenses. Everything has been taken care of at Casa Esperanza. If you need anything else, you can call this number.” Father Concha took a card out of his wallet. Pancho read it.
    “He won’t want anything from his mother.”
    “I’m giving you her phone number in case you need to get in touch with her.”
    “Must be an Anglo thing,” Pancho said, finally stuffing the money and the card in the side pocket of his pants.
    “The wrangling between mother and son?”
    “Yeah. It’s weird.”
    “It’s something that’s hard for you to imagine, isn’t it?”
    “She must have really screwed him for him not to want anything to do with her. She seems like an all-right lady.” He tried to recollect the image of his own mother, but all his memory could come up with was a faded photograph of a woman in a wedding dress, holding a bouquet of daisies.
    “She is a mother, and her perspective toward his treatment is that of a mother who does not want to lose her son. You can understand that, can’t you?”
    Pancho shook his head. He understood where she was coming from all right. What he couldn’t understand was how a parent and child could get separated in the first place.
    Father Concha said, as if trying to fill in the gaps of Pancho’sunderstanding, “Seven years ago, when she brought Daniel to St. Anthony’s, it was only