Pablo Got Beeped at 3 AM

This is an emergency. Pablo gets beeped at 2:00 a.m. His only choices are to leave Rut alone in the street or drag her along. What if she'd come right out and told him not to go? Instead she'd followed him. Pablo drags her through the pasote weeds, leads her by the hand. They push through the pasote fronds. She steps through the tall, flowering summer grasses, the tall dense pasote.Pablo takes her into the boarded up Light Family squatters’ building through the back. Her feet crush crack vials on the ground. Inside the Light Family’s squatter building two men sit by a kerosene lamp, silhouettes in the flickering light. Skinny men in t-shirts with the sleeves cut off.
The lamp makes a ring of light around the men. They sit on red plastic milkcrates. They jump turn when Pablo enters as she follows him in out of the darkness. She smells danger, smells the sour crack smoke wafting from another room. She sees the stripped floorboards for the first time, bone worn. The closer of the two men lunges at Pablo. She knows Pablo has a gun, and doesn't know. She sees the other man's gun first. Pablo shoots. Slaps life out of the man. As he falls she sees the man up close. She takes him for Pablo in the dark. He is a boy, like Pablo. Just before he falls his eyes open wide, his head tilts to the side. Blood gushes out of his belly like the river eye Rut had seen in the mountains on la Isla gushing water out of the ground.
Blood washes over the bone worn wood floor. The bone wood is bathed in blood.
She should come back in the daytime to cut some for Abuela, for Mamita, so they could boil the leaves and pour the water on their floors and wash out their bad luck. Abuela had told Rut the City pasote looked just like la Isla’s pasote, was just as good for limpiezas. What good had the false City pasote done Pablo?
Or not go because she didn't want him to. If only she'd said, don't go. At that time, on that night, she hadn't even known she didn't want to go. She had not thought of danger. She was with Pablo. She was an innocent. As bad as Mamita, Rut had willed herself not to know what it was that Pablo did, how it was he discharged his duty to the others, his saints' calendar of aunts and cousins.
Figures in her nightly blood dream now. Pablo swore he didn't mess with users. Pablo was too smart to use himself.
Aunt Meche had made her taste the water. She said it was the best water in the world, as good as food.
Rut did not scream.
"Corre." Pablo shoved her toward the door. She caught a glint of tenderness in his eyes. She remembered it. Or she made it up. The love glint froze in his eyes like the bugs in the yellow stones Mamita brought from la Isla and promised to leave to Pablo to give to Rut when she died.
She was outside by the back door when the cops burst in shooting. How was it she hadn't heard them break down the wood boarding the doors and windows up front? These must not be the same cops Pablo pointed to with his chin on the street, to show her that one's ours. Many times she'd walked past the Light Family building, later; the ripped open boards confused in her mind with the ripped open belly; and felt the hole in her own flesh.
The street’s habladas said that by the time the Blues got to the back of the house Pablo's gun was nowhere to be seen, that it was never found. They said the Blues stormed in and shot the other guy right off the crate he was sitting on. Pablo dove to the floor, they said, didn't get a scratch, he's got more lives than a cat. They said after the Blues found the Light Family’s arsenal in one of the upstairs rooms they raided every squat in the Barrio.
Rut found her way back to the street through the maze of false pasote. Adrenalin lit her eyes from inside. She discovered an intelligence she didn't know she had for escape. She coursed through the tall lacy pasote grasses knowing the powerless leaves couldn't scrape her clean of what she had seen. The green smell of the pasote grasses couldn't flush her nostrils and her lungs clear of the reek of blood. She squeezed through the pulled apart prongs of an iron fence, into the churchyard, fearless. A lone white alley cat stopped and watched her walk among the rubbed down, rubbed away, fallen down grave stones, past a wrung neck chicken sacrifice, through the unhinged iron gate, to the street.
She walked straight to the shower and stepped into the hot water stream still dressed, and let the water hit her face as she stripped, wanting to wash the blood from behind her eyes, from the bone worn wood floor. Purple red blood. Indelible.

confusion shudder through Pablo’s brown, round, childlike face when the words guilty as charged were spoken by that woman, plump and benevolent, looking a little like Pablo’s own mother. She wanted to throw up.
Through the small streaked tinted window of the 11th floor courtroom Rut had stared at the wall of steel gray skyscrapers of the City Center. Which one of them was the steel gray skyscraper where she worked? She wanted to throw up. The giant robotic skyscraper fingers closed their grip. How could she ever return to that world? Mamita spoke in Spanish under her breath. “Why did we leave la Isla for the City for this?” Rut wanted to scream curses in English. Fuck la Isla that spat us all here. Go fucking back to the swaying palms and the stinking pig shit.
She stared through the dense, hot air into the varnished, dizzy, yellow veins of the the long empty wood bench in front of her. Back in La Isla City wood always got comejen. Pablo's lawyer Amelia in her fancy suit tilted her jet black pageboy helmet toward Pablo, whispered into his ear, grabbed for his hand. Rut clenched her fists. Pablo dropped his head, pulled his hand away. He was going to cry. He was crying, sobbing the way he did, without making a sound. She bit her fist to stop herself from screaming.
Someone else screamed. A few second row seats away from Rut, on the other side of the courtroom aisle, the woman with the long brown curls stood up and screamed. She'd been there every day right behind the D.A. Without ever looking straight at her Rut had seen her in her long print skirts and embroidered blouses and big hoop earrings. Who in the Barrio dressed that way? The wailing woman looked straight at Pablo. Rut wondered who she saw. When the bailiff pulled the screamer by the hand to lead her out, Rut buried her face in Mamita's fat chest and sobbed, not minding the tears and snot, not holding back the moans. She'd never come that near to Pablo's mother. Under the mortuary flower perfume Mamita smelled of rot.

The morning after the day Pablo went up the river dawn’s first shimmer stirred Rut's blood dream. Rut surrendered to the dream. She'd been in that killing room only once; it was burned into her, a mark. The images stacked, converged, scattered, pressed on her. She willed to erase them. She threw off her covers and kicked. She fought the dream. Blood washed the bone worn wood floor. blood bathed her closed dreaming eyes. She woke up alone at 5:00 AM. Pablo was up the river. She was alone like all the other women in the Barrio learning what widows would one day have to learn. She did not scream. She pulled the blanket over her head. Eyes closed she saw again confusion flicker through Pablo's child face when the woman plump like Mamita spit out the words guilty as charaged. The gunshot clap quivered through her. Blood bathed Rut’s closed dreaming eyes, washed over the bone worn wood floor where the killing had happened. The boy’s river-eye belly wound pulsed its blood tear. Rut woke up alone at five smelling that menses stench, the reek of blood. Eyes closed, she pulled up the pink, flowered quilt she’d kicked to the floor and curled up, fists clenched, jaw clamped, with the covers over her head.