Abuela settles into her reclined seat and perches her slippers on the outstretched footrest. They wiggle like pink bunny ears. From the backyard sound the slaps of hands against wet backs. Abuela says, “They playing with your gallo.”
“It's not mine. Spyder told me to buy it, but the breeder promised he's a good one. What do you think?”
“Bonito, but shy. Very shy. Like you.” She giggles. “But pobre chickens. Dogs ugly and stupid, but those gallos so handsome. I say to César no more chicken fights, pero no escucha.”
“Sorry. He told me to buy it.”
“It okay, Kayda. But pobre chickens, pobre poor chickens,” she murmurs.
I nod and duck my hands into my pockets so they have something to do. In the pouch of the cushion, Abuela is a hollow puppet, as though the silk of her fuchsia bathrobe drapes from a hanger. A naked cat in a sweater.
She says this carefully: “So handsome, but so sad. They wait until we make them fight, then they die. Pobre chickens.” Her eyes question me. “Do you feel like that?”
“Like a chicken?” I half-chuckle. “I'm no coward.”
“César say you argue when he give you job.”
“I didn't argue, I explained the consequences. We can't push if we're always fighting the Kings. Spyder needs to understand that if I just drop Carthage, they'll send soldiers. Then who knows what'll happen. 5-0 will snoop around, and we won't be able to ship. And no product means no profit. I'm here to profit.”
“You here, Kayda, to obey César,” says Abuela leaning forward.
“La Mara didn't spread from LA para dinero. Cliques now in Boston, Nueva York, in Baltimore. Mara everywhere. But those cliques growing faster than us. More Kayda, we need more. ‘More' makes men.” She glares at me. “So if César say, ‘Carthage,' lo quiero muerto.”
I yank my hands out of my pockets and fold my arms, teeth gritting. “Sorry.”
“Remember where Tick find you?” asks Abuela. “One of our houses, needle hanging from you like a sword from a toro. Crying and calling yourself a coward and screaming for your grandfather? Tick ask you, ‘Want to buy more?' And you weep and say you want to sell.”
“Yes,” I say, “I hadn't gotten any work for –“
“So I give you chance. I tell César to break you and make you man. Now look at you,” she says.
I feel nauseous at the memory. I remember standing in the middle of the co*kfighting ring in the yard. Spyder with his dark skin and web of veins sprawling up his neck, positioned outside the chicken wire with his arms crossed. The North Carolina day roasting, but he still wore the red shirt with the red sleeves. Always wears sleeves. Tick hopping up and down beside him so his bare chest jiggled. His piss yellow cracked-tooth grin shining beneath the devil horns drawn on his forehead. The jittery recruiter. Roach next to him, young at age fourteen, pulling at the white stick in his mouth and wiggling his shoulders. His skunk smell spreading toward me. Pillar, oldest at twenty-four, standing far from it all, fearful for me in his retired fat clown way. He spent the time rubbing his swollen belly.
“No fighting back,” spoke Spyder, biceps still bundled over hidden fists and peering up at me with his head lowered. “s** it up for the thirteen seconds.”
I nodded, already brainstorming explanations to Izzy for the bloody eye and dislocated shoulder. He'll cry all night. First, Grandpa gone he'll think. Then, Santi hurt. He'll feel as though the world hates him. But what else? I also prayed my teeth were left alone. No medical.
After nodding to everyone else, Spyder widened his stance and shouted, “One!” Then Roach flicked from his face the burning bush, but Tick was first to hop into the ring, and he charged toward me, probably pretending I was his older brother who liked to twist lit cigarettes into his toddler back. And as Tick co*ked a fist, in his eyes I saw the spark of lighters.
Abuela says, “You have a chance now, but you look angry at us. When they drag you from backyard into my living room, did I get mad when you drool blood onto my carpet? No. I hug you and say, ‘Here, we love you.' And you sob and promise, ‘Mara para siempre.' Is it still ‘Mara para siempre'?”
I confirm, “Forever.”
But from deep within her face, like black marbles thumbed into dough, her cat eyes scramble around me. “I think you lie, Kayda. You argue. You no around. I cook Sunday, everyone here, but not you.”
“I'm –“
“You no tattoos. No where ‘MS.' You try to hide?” she asks.
“Spyder actually likes that. Pillar and Tick can't go anywhere without scaring people, Kings spotting them, or Blue tailing them. I can. I look normal. That's why he a**igns me more than them.”
Her brows casually rise, and with tongue-in-cheek, she leans against the armrest of the couch to check the television. Her slit eyes finally crank up to me. “You know I gave ‘green light' on Long Legs, si? He didn't understand ‘para siempre' and ran. He leave Mara and ran. So we ‘green light' him. Long Legs knew we ‘green light' him if he run, but he ran. And what happen? Mara clique in Nueva York find him and send him back to me. I watching Telemundo and hear knock. Fedex man at door with three boxes.” She holds up the appropriate number of fingers, and the corners of her lips creep up, like the grinning Cheshire cat. “'Green light' mean three boxes. Mara growing. Mara everywhere. ‘Para siempre,' entiendes?”
I nod.
“Prometame, Kayda.”
I confirm, “Forever.”
She asks, “How Izzy?”
I shudder. After our clash over the hit on Carthage, Spyder ordered Tick to follow me to my trailer. He saw Izzy through the window.
“He's at school,” I reply.
“Tick tell me he very hermoso. More handsome than you. Why you try to keep him secret?” she asks. “We your only family.” She licks her teeth. “Find your grandfather yet?”
I claw at her, seize her by her throat, and hoist her up, shaking her within my grasp so she rattles like a skeleton. That head of a goblin. I chuck her at the TV so her forehead slams against the volume knob and the shower cap flutters off her scalp. But only in my thoughts.
I force through my teeth, “Not yet. But I've been checking the news and the papers.”
“Go to the police. They help you.” She chuckles.
The screen door creaks open, and in pops Tick's face with his horn logos and his trademark teardrops. He says, “Orale, puto. Thought I heard you. Gotta see this.”
Abuela, gazing back at the screen now buzzing with bad reception, waves her wrist at me and says, “Let me watch mi telenovelas.”
I bow then march toward Tick. I hope the cancer shrivels your lungs.
But right as I step out the door, she lets out, “When a country doesn't believe someone exists, it very easy to make that person—not exist. Entiendes?”
The screen clacks behind me.