There was a bang outside my kitchen window–a big bang with reverb, a Hollywood bang. Whatever that was, it wasn’t a gunshot, I thought. A gunshot sounds like metal corn popping.
“It’s little Mario.”
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Sometimes I get pissed when I think of them just hanging out. How can they do so much of nothing? Even when I’m screwing around I’m doing something–reading, watching TV, cleaning the bathtub. But then they’re kids. And not too long ago I spent a lot of my own time with my hands in my pockets, desperate for something to happen to pass the time–though the games I invented to make myself feel alive seem amateur compared to the ones these kids play.
“Oh, he has a gun,” I said.
At about three in the morning on Puerto Rican Independence Day there was a rumble in the intersection below my apartment involving about 30 boys. Each side had a flag that its members rallied around and defended. It was the Puerto Ricans versus the Mexicans.
Two months ago some guys in a car tore down the street and plugged a bunch of bullets into a parked car. Some of the kids who were hanging out jumped in their cars and chased after them. A few police came by and strutted around shining their flashlights in people’s faces.
“Hey, is he alive?” I asked one of them.
