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

the world. His favorite was the one from Holland with the wooden shoes. Maybe the only time he ever saw Rosa get angry was when he cut off the long blond braid of the Danish doll. He was seven at the time, old enough in Rosa’s mind to know better. He went through the dolls, lifting them up gently.
    He found the key under the Mexican doll. Of course, he thought. He stuck the diary in the front of his pants and put the key in his pocket. Mrs. Olivares was calling him from the living room. “What should I pack?” she asked.
    “Whatever,” he told her, looking down the hall. She had four unopened boxes on the floor. D.Q. was not on the living room chair where Pancho had left him.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go through and see what’s worth saving. You might want some of these things someday, you know.”
    “I’ll be in prison,” he said. He didn’t say it loud enough for Mrs. Olivares to hear.
    His room was between his sister’s room and his father’s at the far end of the trailer. D.Q. was sitting in the chair by the small desk, his eyes closed. “It’s nice in here,” D.Q. said, opening his eyes. “Who’s that?” He was looking at a poster of a boxer on the wall in front of him. The boxer was crouching, his hand cocked back as if about to deliver a left hook. Pancho followed D.Q.’s eyes to the poster but did not respond. It suddenly occurred to him that there was something besides Rosa’s diary that he should get. He turned around and went to his father’s bedroom.
    Nothing had been disturbed in his father’s room since his death. Neither Rosa nor Pancho ever considered removing their father’s things or moving into the larger bedroom. He found what he was looking for in the bottom drawer of his father’s bureau, underneath the work shirts. It was a .22 Smith & Wesson revolver his father had bought to shoot the jackrabbits that ate his tulips. Pancho never saw him use it. The worst his father ever did to the jackrabbits was cuss at them in Spanish. The revolver was not loaded. His father kept the bullets hidden on the top shelf of the closet. Pancho had discovered them just before he was taken to Mrs. Duggan’s, when he was looking for his father’s war medals. He took out seven bullets and put them in the same pocket where he had dropped the key, then he grabbed his father’s blue jean jacket from the closet and folded it around the revolver.
    He went into his room, where D.Q. still sat, opened the closet, took out a black backpack, and put the jacket and the diary in there. Then he went to Rosa’s room, grabbed the book he had lefton the bed, and dropped it into the backpack as well. When he walked out, D.Q. was in the hallway holding a wooden parrot the size of a child’s hand. “I’d like to have this for my new room, if you don’t want it.”
    “Take it,” Pancho said. He had carved and painted a Mexican perico in shop class during his freshman year. It represented the only A-plus he had ever received. There were so many objects with history, so many memories embedded in things around the house. It would be excruciating to choose one over another. What he had was all he could handle.
    “Pancho,” Mrs. Olivares said to him. She was standing by the kitchen counter, holding what looked like a large cigar box. “I found some silverware in here. It looks like real silver. You’ll want to save that.”
    D.Q., behind him, said, “Let me see.”
    Pancho walked outside, the backpack on his shoulder. The sunlight made him squint. “Take a box with you. See if there’s any of your dad’s tools you want to keep,” Mrs. Olivares yelled after him. Across the street, Mrs. Romano was pretending to sweep the front steps of her trailer, but Pancho could tell she had come out to investigate. She motioned for him to come over. He waved to her and walked around to the back.
    The two pecan trees covered almost all the backyard with shade. In the far corner, there was a swing set that had been