Free Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

mind if Mr. Lopez did kill Vallejo’s dog.
    Somebody had a tv on loud, soap music. And there was the big old salt-cedar that leaned out of the Roybals’ yard near the corner of Pinto Street and Fourth.
    Blanca saw the young men gathered at the joining of the streets. They were lounging together, half-hiding the orange traffic cones behind their legs. Jake and Martín Maestas, Ramon Romero from Truchas, and for goodness sake, Great-Uncle Tilo! He sure looked dried up and funny with the younger men, but he looked sober, too. Somebody must have pushed him to leave his eternal card games and his bottle-passing cronies and come stand with the others like a man. He seemed dignified even, in spite of that beat up old hat of his and his crippled arm hanging like a knotted rope. He’d almost lost that arm years ago, working for the railroad.
    The one who looked best, though, was Martín Maestas. He always looked beautiful to Blanca, at least until he opened his mouth to talk — something he did seldom — and you saw the gaps where he’d lost his front teeth. It wasn’t from fighting, as most people assumed when they looked at Martín’s wide shoulders and strong arms and the tattoos on his smooth brown skin. He’d stood too close behind the batter in a sandlot baseball game when he was younger. Sometimes Blanca thought his shy, quiet manner was all because of those teeth; other times she knew it was his nature. But he was a tough guy, too. Nobody messed with the Maestas brothers.
    Today Martín wore a sweat shirt with the sleeves torn out to show his biceps, and pressed blue jeans, and boots. He had on his tooled leather belt with his name on it and the brass buckle in the shape of a charging bull. His hair gleamed black in the sun. He looked ready to take on a whole army.
    Only nothing was happening. They just stood around and smoked and talked, and after a while Ramon Romero turned on his portable stereo so they would have some music.
    People going to work had gone. No cars turned off Fourth or even slowed down. The young men looked bored.
    Blanca, bored herself, headed back toward the ditch-end of Pinto Street. She would run a risk that Roberto, stationed there, would recognize her, but even that would be better than a lot of dull waiting around.
    She went through the yard of the abandoned Estrada house and under the fence around the wood yard in the next street. From there she could trot down to the ditch and come toward Roberto’s end of things from Second Street.
    The ditch was wide and deep, and those who still farmed in this part of Albuquerque’s north valley drew irrigation water from it. It ran alongside Second Street in a rough parallel to the Rio Grande further west, from which its mud-colored water flowed. Every spring the machines came by and dredged the ditch out and smoothed down the dirt along its banks. A fat new growth of weeds was already reclaiming the banks, and straggly elms gave a ragged shade.
    Somebody was with Beto and the other boys from the street. It was Bobbie, Blanca’s cousin who lived in the Heights. He had an Anglo kid with him, a brown-haired boy with work boots on and corduroys and a torn t-shirt. The stranger had a big pad of paper under his arm. Bobbie was taking Horacio Ramirez for a ride on his bike up and down the ditch-bank trail, the bike shooting thin gray smoke and making a sound like a machine gun.
    Blanca sat under the trees and ate some of her cheese, thinking about asking Bobbie for a ride. Maybe he wouldn’t even recognize her. He hadn’t been down here more than twice since his parents had moved to the mesa that sloped up from the river valley to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains — the new part of the city, full of new people from the east and west coasts. Anglos. This Anglo kid must be one of Bobbie’s new friends from up there. He didn’t look like anything special.
    She decided to have one more look at the Fourth Street group. If nothing was going on she