Mission Road by Rick Riordan Read Free Book Online Page B

heat.
    •                           •                           •
    THE FIRST TIME I’D MET RALPH was also my first real experience with Frankie White. We were all juniors at Alamo Heights High School. Ralph got jumped by three Anglo linebackers outside a convenience store because he’d flirted with one of their girlfriends. I was on the football team, too, but I never liked unfair fights. I jumped in on Ralph’s side. He and I kicked some ass. One of the linebackers happened to be an overgrown blond preppie named Frankie White.
    In typical Ralph fashion, he became friends with both Frankie and me after the fight. I was never sure what Ralph saw in Frankie, but I understood Frankie’s fascination with Ralph. Ralph was completely unintimidated by Frankie’s mobster family ties. No one in San Antonio had ever had the guts to punch Frankie in the face.
    Several months later, Ralph invited Frankie and me to dinner at his house for the first time.
    The Arguello family lived in a crumbling white adobe cottage on the wrong side of McCullough, ten feet from the train tracks. The skeet club’s shooting range was behind the back fence.
    The tiny rooms were packed with a horde of smaller Arguello siblings, cousins and nephews whose names I could never keep straight. The extended family, Ralph informed me, lived with Mama Arguello full-time. Most had dead or missing or apathetic parents.
    Frankie White gave me an amused look, like,
Can you believe this shit?
    Sleeping bags filled the living room. Three dogs lounged on the sofa. The walls were cluttered with family photos and crucifixes and portraits of saints. No air-conditioning. A hundred degrees inside, with a limp breeze pushing the pale yellow curtains. Ralph’s mother stood at the stove, making tortillas by hand and cooking them on a hot plate. She kissed me, though she didn’t know me. She smelled of gladiolas and cornmeal.
    If it had been me, at age seventeen, I would’ve been embarrassed by the house, my mother, the way the kids clamored over Ralph and demanded piggyback rides and quarters and arm-wrestling rematches. Especially with Frankie White there, who lived in a mansion and drove his own Mercedes. But Ralph didn’t care. He grinned at the kids, laughed, joked around. He seemed as confident as he had when Frankie and the other linebackers tried to assault him. Nothing fazed him.
    At least, not until we went into the backyard to set the picnic table and found his latest stepfather (the sixth) trying to kiss Ralph’s fourteen-year-old cousin. Apparently, it had happened before, because Ralph’s voice turned to ice. “I warned you,
pendejo.
”
    Twelve minutes later, Ralph dumped the battered stepfather half-conscious into the curbside trash can, tossed his suitcase next to him and called a taxi.
    Frankie beamed like a kid at his first R-rated movie. “That was hella cool, Arguello.”
    Ralph said nothing.
    Back inside, his mother screamed, cried, made excuses for the bum she’d married, but Ralph just held her while she pummeled his chest. “He’s no good for you, Mama. I’ll look after you.”
    When she argued money, Ralph produced six hundred-dollar bills for the week’s expenses, more cash than I’d ever seen. He told the younger kids to go back outside and set the table. He grounded his fourteen-year-old cousin to the bedroom.
    By the time dinner was ready, the family’s happy chaos seemed to be restored. We ate homemade
carne guisada
tacos and drank Big Red while fireflies blinked across the lawn. Gunshots crackled in the summer air. Every so often a train rumbled by and made the ground shake.
    Frankie White enjoyed himself immensely. He kept glancing at the bedroom window, where the fourteen-year-old cousin was watching him.
    Ralph’s mother was the only one who didn’t cheer up. She stared at the citronella candle on the table as if she wished the flame would freeze, just once, into a