Free Sweet Jesus by Christine Pountney Page B

and the woman who drove him said, You should come and live with me, but Zeus said no because when he got home, there were enchiladas smothered in green chili and kisses from his mother and the flowery smell of her dark hair. She’d make him rice pudding – then the whole house would smell of cinnamon. And he’d watch his father slide under a car in his grease monkey suit and out again, the muscles in his arms flexing and making his tattoos come to life – making the lion roar and the flaming heart stabbed with a knife look like it was pumping with blood.
    Were these details even accurate, or had he invented them? His mother, Frieda Monterey, was only sixteen when she’d had him. High heels, tight jeans, a black t-shirt, and red lace. Skinny as a skeleton was how he remembered her.
    And his father, José Gabriel Ortega, who was a small man, like himself, drove a low-rider that he was constantly working on. A 1978 Ford Thunderbird, with an airbrushed panorama of the famous church on one side and a tableau of his life on the other, depicting run-ins with the law, a dead brother, two dead cousins, and a portrait of Zeus and his mother with the words
ámale por siempre
on a banner above their heads.
    When Zeus was eight years old, his dad got arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for drug trafficking. Zeus remembered thinking he’d be fourteen when his dad got out. Then his mother’s habit got worse, and she was declared unfit by Child Protection Services. Smile now, you can cry later, she’d whispered into his ear as two female police officers came to take him away. He was put in foster care, and sent to a household with five delinquent boys. He was the youngest and he hated it there. He kept running away and trying to find his way back home. Until he met Rose Crowe.
    Tell me another story, Sam said.
    Well, Zeus said, let me see. He finished off Sam’s shield with a final twist of balloon. There was this other time, he said. I went to this summer camp once, somewhere in New Mexico. Must have been for poor Latino kids. Anyways, I was about your age, Sam. You ever been to summer camp?
    Sam shook his head.
    Well, I loved it. I mean, I loved being out there in nature, but people were always telling us what to do and when to do it. One day, I don’t know where everybody was, but I just started running around like a crazy guy. There was this cliff that dropped down to the river with a rope attached for lessons in repelling. That’s when you use a rope to climb up and down a cliff. It was only for the older campers, though, and you were supposed to wear a safety harness and a helmet. I’d never done it before, but I knew I could do it. I grabbed the rope and jumped off the edge, and kept leaping, swinging out into the air and landing back against the cliff with my feet. It was amazing. I felt so free and happy, and the world seemed so beautiful.
    You didn’t fall? Sam said.
    No, Zeus said, I was never afraid of that.
    Sam stared at the window and the two of them went quiet, Zeus wandering off into the fog of nostalgia. Moments of consciousness, he thought. Why did he remember that moment and not another one? Why couldn’t he remember more about his mother? In a fit of anger, at the age of twelve, he’d destroyed the only pictures he had of her, and could no longer really recall what she looked like. There was Rose, the woman who adopted him, but she was like a photograph left out in the sun. She’d cry a lot and then apologize. I’m trying to be better, she’d said a hundred times, and falling short. Then she’d ask for his forgiveness. Well, Zeus got tired of forgiving her. Sometimes he felt that if he opened up her mouth, all he’d see was crumpled paper.
    Do you have cancer too? Sam said quietly, pointing to Zeus’s bald head.
    Cancer
? Zeus said and frantically slapped the top of his head. Sam looked so sad that Zeus leaned closer and whispered, Under this rubber dome, I have a full head of hair.
    I wish