Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

CHANGO YOU CAN BELIEVE IN

He’d given the pres a droopy pachuco mustache and some tiny, irritating homeboy sunglasses. Junior knew that Chango, ever the classicist, would still call the glasses “gafas.” He knocked on the glass until Chango woke up from his nap.

* * *

“Car’s for shit,” Chango noted as Junior drove.

“Where we going?” Junior said.

“You remember the Elbow Room? That’s where we’re goin’. Down behind there. Hey, the radio sucks, ese. What’s this? You should be listening to oldies.”

Junior punched the OFF button.

“Damn,” Chango muttered. “Shit.” He looked like a greasy old crow. All wizened and craggy, all gray and lonesome. His big new teeth were white and looked like they were made out of slivers of oven-safe bakeware. His fingers were yellow from decades of Mexican cigarettes. “For reals,” he was saying. It was apparently a long-standing conversation he had with himself. His various jail tattoos were purple and blurry and could have been dice rolling snake eyes and maybe a skeleton with a sombrero and on the other forearm an out-of-focus obscenity. He had that trustworthy little vato loco cross tattooed in the meat between his thumb and forefinger. “Tha’s right, you know it,” he said.

He’d shown Junior the article. It was by Charles Bowden, and did, indeed, confess to uninvited recon sorties into the creepy abandoned homes. One found these places by looking for overgrown yellow lawns and a sepulchral silence.

They pulled around the old block where everybody used to drink at the Elbow Room, except for Junior, who was too young to get in. They rattled around into a dirt alley and Chango directed him to stop at the double doors of a garage. They could hear Thee Midniters blasting out.

“That’s some real music, boy,” Chango said, and creaked out of his seat, though he managed to sway pretty good once he got erect, swaggering like an arthritic pimp.

Inside, a Mongol associate of Chango’s had dolled up a stolen U-Haul panel truck. He wore his vest and scared Junior to death, though lots of vatos liked the Mongols because they were the only Chicano bikers around.

“Sup?” the Mongol said.

“Sup?” Junior nodded.

“Sup?” said Chango.

“Hangin’,” said the Mongol.

There was a time when Junior would have written a poem about this interaction and turned it in for an easy A in his writing workshop. Oh, Junior, you’re so street, as it were.

The van was sweet, he had to admit. It was painted white. It had a passable American eagle on each side, clutching a sheaf of arrows and a bundle of dollars in its claws. Above it: BOWDEN FEDERAL and some meaningless numbers in smaller script. Below it: Reclamation and Reparation/Morgage Default Division.

Junior was all caught up in dreams of a little house and a lot of books. Junior wasn’t all that interesting. He wanted a garden. He was tired of the game. All he needed was some real money.

He stared at the truck.

“You misspelled ‘mortgage,’” Junior said, shaking his head.

They gawked.

“So what?” Chango said. “Cops can’t spell.”

“The plates are from Detroit,” the Mongol pointed out. “An associate UPS’d ’em to me yesterday.” He turned to Chango. “Your sedan is out back.”

Chango bumped fists with him.

“Remember, I want a fifty-inch flat screen.”

“Gotcha.”

“And any fancy jewelry and coats for my old lady.”

“Gotcha, gotcha.”

“And any stash you find.”

“You get the chiba, I got it. But I’m drinkin’ all the tequila I find.”

Chango, in his element.

* * *

Junior had to admit, it was so stupid it was brilliant. It was just like acting. He had learned this in his drama workshop. You sold it by having complete belief. You inhabited the role and the viewers were destined to believe it, because who would be crazy enough to make up such elaborate lies?

He followed the truck up I-15 in a sweet Buick with stolen Orange County plates. Black, of course. He wore a Sears suit and a striped tie. His name tag read MR. PETRUCCI.

“Here’s the play. We move shit — we’re Beaners,” Chango explained. “Ain’t nobody gonna even look at us. You’re the boss. You’re Italian. As long as you got a suit and talk white, ain’t nobody lookin’ at you, neither.”

To compound the play — to sell the illusion, his college self whispered — he had a clipboard with bogus paperwork clipped to it, state tax forms they had picked up at the post office.

Three guys in white jumpsuits bobbed along in the cab of the truck — Chango, a homeboy named Hugo, and the driver, Juan Llaves. Hugo was a furniture deliveryman, so he knew how to get heavy things into a truck. They banged north, dropping out of San Diego’s brown cloud of exhaust and into some nasty desert burnscape. They took an exit more or less at random and pulled down several mid-Tuesday-morning suburban streets — all sparsely planted with a palm here, an oleander there. Plastic jungle gyms in yellow yards, hysterical dogs appalled by the truck, abandoned bikes beside flat cement front porches. Juan Llaves pulled into the driveway of a fat faux Georgian half-obscured by weeds and dry grass and looking as dead as a buffalo skull.

Junior took his clipboard in hand and joined Chango on the lawn.

“This is it, Mr. Petrucci!” Chango emoted. Junior checked his papers and nodded wisely. Nobody even looked out of the neighboring houses. It was silent. “I can’t believe we’re doing this shit,” Chango muttered with a vast porcelain grin.

They tried the front door. Locked. Chango strolled around back. Some clanging and banging and, in a minute, the front door clicked and swung open.

“Electric’s off. Hot as hell in here. Fridge stinks.”

The associates went inside.

* * *

The bank notices were on the kitchen table. Somebody had abandoned a pile of DVDs on the carpet. “Oh yeah!” Chango hooted. The Godfather! Llaves and Hugo hauled the table and chairs out to the truck. Plasma TV in the living room; flat screen in the bedroom. Black panties on the floor looking overwhelmingly sad to Junior. Chango put them in his pocket. “Chango’s in love,” he told Junior.

In the closet, most of the clothes were gone, but a single marine uniform hung at the back. They took the TVs, a rent-to-own stereo system with about fifty-seven CDs, mostly funk and hip hop. Chango found a box of Hustlers and a Glock.40 that had fallen behind the box. For the hell of it, they took the dresser and the bunk beds from the kids’ bedroom.

In the garage, there was a Toro lawn mower and, oddly, a snowblower. They took it all. As they were leaving, Chango trotted back into the house and came out with a blender under his arm.

In and out in less than three hours. They were home for a late supper. The stuff went into the garage.

* * *

Wednesday: three TVs, a tall iPod dock, a long couch painting, a washer and dryer, a new king-size bed still in plastic wrappers, whisky and rum, a minibike, and a set of skis.

Thursday: a navy peacoat, a mink stole (fake), six rings, another TV, another bed, a recliner chair and a matching couch in white leather, a shotgun and an ammo loading dock, a video porn collection, a framed swirl of blue tropical butterflies, golf clubs, a happening set of red cowboy boots.

Friday: aside from the usual swag — how sick were they of TV sets by now — they found an abandoned Mustang GT in the garage. Covered in dust, but sleek black. Chango wiped that baby down and Llaves hot-wired it for him and he drove back to San Diego in style.

It was a massive crime wave, and the only witnesses so far had been two kids and an ice cream man, and the ice cream man called, “Times are tough!” and Chango, into some Robin Hood hallucination, took him a thirty-two-inch flat screen and traded it for Sidewalk Sundaes for his boyz.