24. Blood Bath in the Restaurant

“Ay ay ay ay, que miedo.” Machi ran into the house, into the living room where Marina sat reading Verdad on the couch. He climbed onto her lap, and clung to her. “I’m scared.” David stood beside him, his arms hanging down, his face blank. She felt Machi’s small body tremble. His terror swept into her body. She wanted to hold him but he looked at David watching him and pulled away. What had happened to her Machi? He’d been scared since he was a toddler of an older boy he called El Nene Grande who lived around the corner on the next block. He still feared The Scary man, a vendor of hats on the avenue. He loved David partly because David pretended to be fearless.
“Que paso?”
“Un tiroteo…sangre en el piso.”
She sat up. “Donde?”
She had let Arturo take the boys out to eat after Elena’s. When Arturo came home this time he confronted Julia on her play embargo, and the boys were allowed to be together if they were with him.
Machi took a quick look at David before he went on. “We were at El Patio with Arturo eating fritas and drinking mango batidas. And this man came in and he screamed at David’s Pa’s…”
David stepped close to Machi who went silent. He took over the narrative. “Guns went off. There was blood on the ground.”
“What did you boys do?”
David went on. “We ran away and came here.”
“What happened to Arturo?”
David shrugged. “I’d better get on home.”
He gave Machi a hard look and ran downstairs.
Marina couldn’t get another word out of Machi. He sank into the couch, made her turn on the cartoons and bring him milk and chocolate cookies.
An hour later Ori bounded up the stairs and waved to her from the hallway.
“Sit down for this.”
“And you sit down for what I have to tell you.”
They sat facing each other, she on the end of the table against the wall facing the window, he on the side, facing the door.
She let him speak first.
“I just heard at the bodega there was a shooting at El Patio around four o clock this afternoon.”
She nodded. “Machi was there.”
He stood and knocked over a bowl of onions and platanos.
“You know who the shooter was?”
She shook her head and motioned to Ori to lower his voice as she rose and drew him toward the window.
“Arturo was involved. I don't know if he was shooting or being shot at. Word on the avenue is that he was there with his new girlfriend who’s maybe all of 16 years old.”
“His girlfriends are the age Julia was when she had David. The age Arturo was when he first went to prison. He’s stuck at that age.”
“This one had a brother. He came at Arturo with a knife.”
“Machi was telling me what happened and David gave him the sign and he clammed up. The guy dead?”
“I hear he’s in intensive care.”
Machi materialized beside them. They hadn’t heard him approach.
“What’s going to happen to David’s Pa?” He burst into tears.
Ori squatted so he could be face to face with his son.
“I don’t know.”
“You do know. He’s gonna go back to prison and David won’t have anybody on his side again.”

Screams from Machi’s room, then running in the hall, pounding on her door. Since the shooting Machi didn’t sleep and neither did Marina and Ori. He drew scenes of carnage, the hill of Moon Park covered with dozens of bloody bodies in puddles of blood, their guts spilling out, blood oozing. He drew huge men holding huge guns spewing flames, monster trees, menacing clouds, angry suns.
Other drawings: one enormous monster man with giant legs and arms holding a giant gun, chasing a tiny image of a boy; that same man chasing one small boy and two small parents. When Marina saw the drawing she felt her brain shut down, lock up, her eyes tighten up with unshed tears.
This night, after the nightmare screams, Machi lay next to Marina on her small futon in her old study, insisted Ori lie down on the floor beside them. His small body was stiff, his arms straight at his sides, his fists clenched.
“Tell me a Machimbili story.”
“Machimbili was traveling through the universe in a spaceship made out of his Mother’s”
“And his Papi’s love.” Putting Ori into the story was Machi’s ritual.
“What planet will he go to?”
Ori spoke, “What about the planet of the quiet boys.”
Machi nodded. “Yes. That planet. Where the boys with secrets go.”
Marina asked him what the planet looked like and Machi thought. “It’s got slippery places where if you fall you disappear, and magic leaves where if you touch them you go invisible, and a secret well where if you drink that water you start to talk.”
Marina smiled in the dark. “I think that was the well that instead of water was filled with magic tears.”
“No tears. No tears.” Machi’s body tensed up again, he gripped Marina’s arm.
“No tears, no tears. Boys with secrets never cry.”
Ori moved closer. “There was another city in that planet, where there was a temple. Wise martial artists of the order Magic Tears lived there and they believed the more they cried the more powers they had. They had many weapons: their concentration, their katas, their swords, and the power of their tears.”
Machi laughed. Marina hadn’t heard him laugh in a long time. “I don’t believe you. What could be magic about their tears?”
“Well, the tears accumulated as power in their haras. That was what was magic about them, the more they shed the more they charged up their haras”
“Like magic batteries?’
“Exactly. Like magic batteries.
Machi sat up and grabbed Marina’s sketchbook and her watercolor pens.
He turned on her bedside lamp. He drew a huge Warrior of the Magic Tears with a circle in his belly full of water, waves, and fish.
“Machimbili slipped on a magic leaf and landed in the Temple and met this man, this Tear Fighter. Tear Fighter decided to make Machimbili his apprentice.
“Everything I know about being a figther I will teach to you.”
“What do I have to do to be a fighter?”
“Young man first you have to cry.”
Machi turned out the light and curled up next to Marina, pushed her to the wall, made room on the futon for Ori.
“When Arturo drew the gun Catalina screamed don’t kill my brother.”
Marina held her breath. She was afraid the smallest move would silence Machi.
“Catalina’s brother jumped Arturo then, like in a movie, grabbed the steak knife off the table and stuck Arturo.”
Now Machi cried.
“I didn’t see when the shooting happened exactly. I don’t know, but then Catalina’s brother was on the ground and there was a puddle of blood forming under him and Catalina was screaming and David’s Pa made her go with him when he ran outside. David said, let’s go after him.’
“We looked at the man lying on the floor and we ran outside after them but we couldn’t see them. We were all alone there, standing in the sidewalk when the police cars came and David said, run and we ran.”