This Wicked World by RICHARD LANGE Read Free Book Online Page A

everything
.
    She says it was like a dream, some of it. She and Oscar met at a nightclub downtown. He was a good dancer. Looking at him you wouldn’t think it — he was a little bowlegged, a little stocky — but he was naturally graceful. When he approached their table, Maribel’s girlfriends all hoped he was coming to ask them, but she knew it was her he wanted.
    His eyes could never keep a secret,
she said.
Never
.
    They danced to a few songs, and he bought her a Coke. He wasn’t crude like the other boys, cracking dirty jokes and talking tough into their phones. He asked her about her life and actually listened when she told him about it. Then he told her about his.
    He was washing dishes at a restaurant but wanted to get into construction. His father had died the year before, and Oscar was sending most of the money he made to his mother in Guatemala, to buy food for his little brother and sister and keep them in school. Eventually, he told Maribel, he’d move back to Zunil, where he’d build a big house and open a store that sold computers.
    I said, “Oh, so you’re a dreamer,”
Maribel recalls.
And he said to me, “Dreams are for children. A man makes plans.”
    Maribel says she’d been lonely since coming from Guatemala herself the year before, and Boone guesses that South Central, with its razor wire, bulletproof Plexiglas, and dead lawns, wasn’t what she’d pictured when she fantasized about California.
    Shortly after she arrived, a gang of black boys surrounded her while she was on her way home from the market. They grabbed her breasts and ran off with the bread and eggs her aunt had sent her for. After that she rarely ventured out, except to help her aunt clean houses. She spent her days watching TV and writing letters to friends back home.
    The night she met Oscar was the first time she’d been to a club in L.A., and she fell in love with him before he’d even asked if he could call her sometime. She was sixteen, he was nineteen, and they were made for each other. He took her to the beach, to Disneyland. He bought her a pair of sandals she admired at a swap meet and showed her how to play a few songs on the old guitar her uncle had lying around the house.
    Her family liked him too.
Didn’t you?
Maribel says to her aunt and cousin. Both nod and say,
Yes, yes
. They fed him, let him sleep on the couch rather than ride the bus home late at night.
    And then Maribel found out that she was pregnant. She was scared when the doctor gave her the news, wondering how Oscar would react, but her heart was saved when he shouted with joy and said they’d been blessed by God. When she began to show, he’d put his mouth to her belly and whisper messages to the child, telling it to take its time, grow strong and healthy, and he cried when they found out it was a boy.
    He promised her aunt and uncle that he’d marry Maribel as soon as he’d saved enough money to rent a place of their own. He was starting to get painting jobs, which paid a lot better than restaurant work, and two or three months were all he’d need. Until then, he said, he’d give them fifty dollars a week for Maribel’s room and board.
    And he did,
Maribel’s aunt interjects.
Every week, fifty dollars.
    The only problem, Maribel continues, was that he couldn’t manage to put any money away, no matter how hard he worked. Between what he sent home to Guatemala and what he paid her aunt and uncle, he was still just getting by, even with the extra he earned collecting cans and newspapers during his off-hours.
    He grew desperate when Alex was born. Someone passed him a few cartons of stolen cigarettes, and he peddled them in bars and on the street. Next it was Adidas sneakers, thirty-one pairs. Soon after, a policeman pulled him and a friend over in a hot car, and Oscar barely escaped, making a run for it while the cop drew his gun and shouted for him to stop.
    Then one day he showed up with five hundred dollars and a bouquet of roses for Maribel