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

converted to a workout area. The swings had been removed, and a heavy punching bag hung from the overhead pole. A pear-shaped speed bag dangled next to it. Pancho went up to the swing set and sat on top of the plastic toy box where he kept the boxing gear.
    When Mrs. Olivares told him that there was no way that the State of New Mexico would let him live in the trailer by himself, he thought they were taking the only thing left to him. What else was there to take? Now he thought that even if they had let him be, he would not have been able to stay in the trailer for long. In there, a few moments ago, he had felt as if his brain were suffocating, as if his head were filled with a mental steam that steadily increased in pressure.
    D.Q. was limping toward him, the green perico in his hand. He sat next to Pancho. “We should take these with us, add them to the bag you’ve already hung.” He pointed at the boxing bags with his chin.
    “Why?”
    “You could start a boxing club. St. Tony’s used to have one, you know. It was before my time, but one kid actually won the state Golden Gloves for his age group.”
    “Luis Rivera,” Pancho answered without thinking.
    “Right. How’d you know?”
    “I saw the trophy.”
    “I got an idea. We get Brother Javier to come over with the truck and pick up the swing set and bags.” He touched one of the pipes. “A little paint and it would look great right next to the basketball court. What do you think?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “Yeah, I know, you’re not planning on sticking around for that long.” He took off his cap and combed the fine hair, what little there was of it, with his fingers. He put the cap on. “I’m not planning on sticking around for long either,” he said, trying tomake Pancho laugh but not succeeding. Time went by without either of them saying anything. Pancho was about to stand up when D.Q. spoke.
    “What was it like living here, before people started dying out on you? I mean, did you have any friends? What did you do when you came home from school? On weekends?”
    Pancho thought hard. Did he have any friends? What did he do when he came home from school? His father worked at the Sears Auto Center from seven A.M. to three P.M. As soon as he got out of there, he came home and waited for Pancho to get back from school, and then they did carpentry jobs and construction jobs, building porches, cabinets, additions, whatever came up. He hung out with his father most of the time. His father was his friend. They worked together, trained together, laughed together. Rosa was his friend also, in a different way. The people at the gym were friends, or like friends, you could say. Did he have any friends his age? The absence of friends had never come up before. It was a lack he had never noticed. There were kids at school. He talked to them, ate lunch with them, joked around with them. He could give D.Q. some names, but he knew those were not the kind of friends D.Q. was asking about. “I worked out. I helped my father. I always had things to do.”
    “Yeah,” D.Q. said, as if he understood what that meant—that Pancho didn’t have any friends.
    Then, unexpectedly, Pancho added, “After my father died, it seems like I was always busy with one thing or another. I had use of the truck. I didn’t have a license, but I never got caught. People hired me to take stuff to the dump. There was always some place to go, to buy food, to the laundromat, to take my sister to work.” But you never went to pick her up, a voice said. “There’s a gym over by Mesilla,” he said quickly. “I had a job after school there.”
    “You boxed there?”
    “Mostly I washed the towels, cleaned the locker room. I used to get a few bucks for sparring with people, whenever they needed someone live to hit.”
    “You probably did some hitting of your own.”
    “Manny, the guy that owned the gym, he’d let me pop a few heads now and then. Nothing major. He didn’t want to lose any