Free Across the Wire by Luis Urrea

stark and stick-thin against the lights. He stayed behind because he had to—Andrés had two deformed knees that turned his feet perpetually sideways. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t even walk. He balanced on two aluminum crutches, and he moved slowly when he moved, his feet dragging and banging along the ground.
    “Nobody looks out for nobody,” he told me.
    We were looking out at the city lights.
    “Fucking lights,” he said. “Beautiful,
¿qué no?”
    “How do you eat?”
    He smiled. “Stealing.” He acted out delivering a blow with his fist. He ducked his head like a little boy. “
You
know,” he said.
    Andrés was barely five feet tall. He had long hair, long graceful hands that looked delicate—painter’s hands.
    His clothing was old and dirty: baggy cords and three shirts, a grimy watch cap on his head. He wore battered Converse high-top basketball shoes on his tangled feet. The jaunty shoes made his feet seem small. Everything about him was evocative of a child. It was disconcerting, because he was saying, “We gang up on them and beat them up and steal all their stuff.”
    He had the features of a Mayan carving—slightly sloping forehead, large nose, turned-down mouth. His eyes were bright as obsidian chips.
    “It’s hard for me,” he said. “I can’t run. So I try to join in when they’ve got the guy down.”
    “Do you use your crutches?”
    He laughed, covered his mouth with his hand.
    “Sometimes,” he said.
    All over the hill, there were little burrows where the boys buried jars filled with money or watches. No one dared disturb another boy’s jar, and when one was tampered with, the revenge was swift and final. They killed each other with stones or knives.
    The violence attracted the infrequent attentions of the Tijuana police. The cops raided the hill sometimes and delivered their version of social service to the boys: sound beatings. “Torture,” Andrés called it. To avoid the cops, or anybody else, the boys dug elaborate tunnels under the house. At the least hint of approaching feet, they dove into their rat mazes, where they hid, only their eyes peeking out from under the slab foundation. They slept under there, too, jammed in on top of each other inthe cold. They had sex there, sometimes undulating against each other underground.
    And, at all times, there was the glue.
    They were reduced to shambling zombies by it, their brain cells melting inside their skulls to give them their escape. There were nights when the tunnels were jammed with mindless, drooling bodies; the boys shrieked in hallucinogenic terror under there, came charging out like enraged pit bulls, swinging their knives at ghosts. Then they passed out, arms flung open to the sky, which must have seemed a baffling wonder to them before they slipped away.
    This was the best hour for murder. When a hoy had a vendetta against another, he would choose this time of coma in which to strike. The most recent murder had involved two lovers. One of these two fell in love with a third. The new couple plotted to kill the old lover and take his jar. On the night of his last high, they waited until he’d fallen over, then they crushed his head with cement blocks.
    “That’s why I sleep on the roof,” Andrés told us. “Nobody looks up there. They’re always looking in the dirt.”
    We’d gathered at a street-side taco stand. We were buying him supper. It took Andrés about ten minutes to get down from the hill. I walked with him, while Von went ahead.
    “What’s wrong with your knees?” I’d asked him.
    “I need surgery.”
    “Could you walk after it was done?”
    “That’s what they say,” he said.
    “How much does it cost?”
    He blew air out through slack lips. “Oh. Forget it. Too much.”
    “How much?”
    “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, shaking his head at the immensity of it.
    We bought him a paper plate of tacos.
    “I like gum,” he said. “Do you have any bubble gum?”
    I did.
    He