Mortal Doubt. Anthony W. Fontes

      “El Soldado said it was to make peace with the Boyz 13.”

      Casper spit. “Those motherfuckers. I’d sooner skin my dick.”

      “Well, we’ll find out,” Giovanni shrugged. “I’m just glad you came.”

      “Of course I came,” Casper blurted, then caught himself. “Where the fuck could I run?”

      Giovanni looked at Casper and then beyond him into the ravine of trash and the slums clustered against the steep hills on the other side.

      “Come on,” he said. “It’s time.” The left fork cut between two weather-beaten and crudely graffitied tin warehouses, then made a precipitous drop to a packed gravel road worn by dump truck tread and the soles of trash pickers. Giovanni started down the right fork that twisted across a desolate space pocked with crabgrass, broken bits of masonry, and scrap metal. Casper followed. More and more debris appeared as the path wound on, as if they were approaching the foundation of some blasted edifice, until it swung up sharply and into the cemetery’s outer border.

      After a minute a plateau of broken and eviscerated crypts came into view to the left down the slope. They could see a cluster of dark figures gathered there among the ruins, some sitting, others leaning against scattered gravestones.

      “Wait up a moment,” Casper said.

      “What is there to wait for?”

      “Just hold on, will you.”

      “OK.”

      They huddled against a mossy concrete slab. The sun had dropped into the hills cresting above the ravine of trash, swinging beams of light upward through the warship clouds strung in ragged columns across the sky. Suddenly the clustered figures threw their heads back and a shout of laughter echoed faintly, and Casper and Giovanni could hear traces of a deep voice speaking in rapid cadence. Then the men all rose, throwing up their hands in a salute, fingers cocked like claws over their heads.

      “Vivo te quiero,” Giovanni murmured under his breath. “Look alive.” Then he stepped out onto an uneven dirt path. Muttering a prayer and crossing himself, Casper hurried to catch up. As they crossed the barren decline, the voice ceased and the figures turned together, marking their approach.

      The one who had been speaking was El Soldado. He stood apart from the others, shaved head shining in the fading light.

      “You are here,” he said.

      Giovanni shrugged. “I told you.”

      “Why did the others run?”

      “They do not want to kill their neighbors. We’ve known those boys since we were kids.”

      “They would kill you if it suited them.”

      “Perhaps.”

      “Órale,” Soldado said, signaling to the other homies. Several ducked behind a concrete mausoleum and emerged dragging three figures, wrists and ankles bound with wire. They were so bloodied and beaten it took Giovanni a moment to recognize them. They were all that remained of the Boyz 13.

      As Calavera tells the story of the Boyz 13, we stand atop the low rise amid mausoleums marked with Mandarin characters, looking out onto the cemetery. Below us, long corridors of the dead cut through dense stands of broken pillars and concrete crucifixes. The cemetery ends abruptly above the ravine.

      In this telling, Calavera has put himself in Giovanni’s place, making his brother’s story his own. He points toward a plateau at the cemetery’s edge, hazy in the distance. “It was right over there, on that patch of grass just before the garbage dump. El Soldado called the two of us over, Casper and I, while the others kept watch on the Boyz 13. El Soldado had this terrible smile on his face. ‘Look here,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Right now you have a choice to make. Put an end to this charade once and for all, or . . .’ He nodded at the boys, all bloody and tied up, and said, ‘This has gone on long enough.’”

      “Wait, who were the Boyz 13?” I ask.

      “They were another clique belonging to the Letters like us, and they had gotten deep into drug trafficking, but for a dude named El Marino. El Marino controlled Barrio Gallito, over there, on the other side of the cemetery. We fought with them for years over drug puntos.” Calavera pauses, looking out over the ravine. “So I say, ‘’Right on then,’ and ba ba ba! Pistols for the two of us. Just revolvers, 38s. ‘Vivo te quiero,’ El Soldado told us. ‘Blast ’em, because if not I’ll be right here behind you and you too will stay here.’ Then he turned back to the other homies and told them to free the Boyz 13, that they could go.

      “‘Your mother,’ I thought. And so the meeting ended and the locos started to leave. I don’t know what they thought was going down. They were just walking back along the way we had come. And we’re walking after them, and El Shark and El Soldado are walking behind us. And I’m like that, almost trembling with that feeling.

      “And when those locos turn back and look at us, one asks, ‘What’s up dude?’

      “‘Nothing.’ I said. Then I started firing. One of them fell, I made one fall. And then Casper started firing, and he put down another. But one of them got away.”

      “Up that path there?” I say, pointing to a footpath leading back toward a cluster of rundown warehouses.

      “Yeah, up that way, but it was higher then, less eroded. I could hear the sirens, the police already coming and I knew I had to get out of here, so I ran toward 26th and jumped the cemetery wall and from there to my house. But with the idea that one of them was still alive. ‘Sonofabitch, what a shitshow,’ I thought. They’re going to come for us. But it wasn’t so. The last one had three bullets in his stomach, and he died. He couldn’t take it. Ah.”

      Several seconds pass in silence broken only by the sound of my scribbling in my notebook.

      “I should have recognized then that it was all bullshit,” Calavera continues with a sigh. “That all the talk of blood brotherhood and loyalty and giving your life for the Barrio was just a charade. Soldado and the others were just trying to get El Marino’s influence out of zone 3 so they could control the drug houses. That’s it. So they made us kill each other like dogs.” He shakes his head, grimacing. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me who took three bullets in the stomach.”

      We descend the stairs and turn onto a narrow path twisting between modest family plots overrun with creeping vines. Degraded by time, wind, and rain, many resemble ancient midden mounds. We turn a corner and nearly overtake a man dressed in ragged clothing bent over the pitted stone, pushing an empty wooden wheelbarrow. A boy walks before him carrying a battered metal bucket in each hand. The path is too narrow for Calavera and I to pass, so we slow and fall in line behind the two laborers. The old man smells of sweat and earth. A long knife in a cracked leather sheath hangs from a belt around his waist, softly slapping against his thigh with each step. Both man and boy are covered in a chalky dust from attending to the resting places of the dead. It is they who excavate the paupers’ graves, ferry the bones and tattered funereal finery, and fling them down the hole, human dust floating in a final wake.

      We turn down another long corridor, and then another. Calavera knows, or thinks he recognizes, several of the dead we pass. He points a few out to me.

      “These are the vatos who weren’t lucky enough to get arrested.” He laughs ruefully. He tells me how the police nabbed him at a checkpoint as he was moving crack across the city. Casper was the leader of Los Northside by then and promised to care for Calavera’s family. But the stipend Casper pledged never materialized, and Sandra was left to fend for herself and her daughters. Casper started going crazy, killing anyone who stood in his way. And he didn’t care when little kids or pregnant mothers got caught in the crossfire. Calavera read the newspapers, and his sister told him what was going down. He tried to talk sense to some of his old homies, but they were all scared