Fina told me not to go see him. Never to go see him, to let it be. I didn’t know what I would do if I went over there, but there wasn’t shit she could do to stop me.
* * *
—
On the way over to his house I stopped in the parking lot of a liquor store I knew wouldn’t check my ID. I went in and bought a fifth of E&J. That was what Six drank. I didn’t know what I meant to do going over there. In my mind I had it like I would get him drunk and fucking beat the shit out of him. Maybe kill him. But I knew it wouldn’t be like that. Six had his ways about him. Not that I wasn’t mad enough to do it. I just didn’t know what it would be like. On my way out of the store I heard a mourning dove somewhere nearby. The sound gave me goose bumps—not the cold kind, and not the good kind either.
* * *
—
We had mourning doves in our backyard for as long as I can remember—under the back porch. My dad once said to me, when we were in the backyard trying to fix my bike, he said, “Their sound is so sad you almost want to kill them for it.” Once my dad was gone, I felt like I heard them more, or it was just that they reminded me of him and his attitude toward most kinds of sadness. I didn’t wanna feel sad then either. And it was like those fucking birds were making me feel it. So I went into the backyard with the BB gun I got for Christmas when I was ten. One of them was facing the wall, like he’d really been singing toward me inside. I shot it in the back of the head and then in the back twice. The bird flew up right away, its feathers rising then falling slow while it flapped in a flash of crooked downward spirals. It landed in the next-door neighbor’s yard. I waited to hear if it would move. I thought about how it would have felt. The sting in the head and the back, after it flew up over me. I didn’t feel even a little bit sorry for the bird because of how sad it made me feel ever since my dad got shot, when I had to look down and see my dad’s eyes blink in disbelief, my dad looking back up at me like he was the one who was sorry, sorry that I had to see him go like that, with no control over the wild possibilities reality threw into our lives.
* * *
—
At Sixto’s house I knocked on his door. “Eh, Six, eh!” I said. I backed away from the house, looked at the upstairs window. I heard footsteps. Loud and slow. When Six opened the door, he didn’t even look at me or wait for me to say or do anything, he just walked back into the house.
I followed him to his bedroom, found a place to sit on an old office chair he kept in the corner. I was surprised to find it empty considering the state of the rest of the room—clothes, bottles, trash, and a light sprinkling of tobacco, weed, and ash all over everything. He was hella fucking sad-seeming. And I hated that I wanted to say something to make him feel better. That was the first time I saw it different. Like felt for him and how he must’ve felt about what he did.
“I got us a bottle,” I said. “Let’s go in the back.” I heard him get up and follow me as I walked out of the room.
Six had a few chairs back there in that overgrown, crooked-fenced yard, between two fruitless orange and lemon trees that I remembered used to be full. We drank for a while in silence. I watched him smoke a blunt. I kept expecting him to start the conversation. Say something about what happened to my mom and brother, but he didn’t. Six lit up a cigarette.
“When we were kids,” Sixto said, “me and your dad, we used to sneak into your grandma’s closet. She had an altar set up in there. All sorts of crazy shit on that altar. Like, she had a skull. It was the skull of what they call little people. She told us the little people stole babies and kids. She had jars full of powders and different kinds of herbs and stones. One time she caught me and your dad in there. She told your dad to go home. He ran like hell. She can get pretty crazy in her eyes. They go all dark like she keeps a darker pair behind the green ones you usually see. I had that little skull in my hand. She told me to put it down. She told me I had something in me I wasn’t gonna be able to get out this time around. She told me I could handle it like a man. Die with it. But that I could also share it with family. I could give it away over time. Even to strangers. It was some old dark leftover thing that stayed with our family. Some people get diseases passed down in their genes. Some people get red hair, green eyes. We got this old thing that hurts real fucking bad, makes you mean. That’s what you got. That’s what your grandpa had in him. Be a man, she told me. Keep it to yourself.” Sixto picked up the bottle, took a deep pull from it. I looked at Six, looked at his eyes to see if he expected me to say anything. Then he dropped the bottle on the grass and stood up. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t brought up my mom and brother. Or was that what he was trying to get at? Was this some long explanation for why all the shit that happened to our family happened the way it did?