Iron River Read online

  IRON RIVER

  IRON RIVER

  DANIEL ACOSTA

  Iron River. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Acosta. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, Texas 79901; or call (915) 838-1625.

  An excerpt from Iron River was published in Label Me Latino/a, Fall 2016, Volume VI, page 8.

  Iron River is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are used fictitiously and only to provide a sense of authenticity. All other characters, incidents, narrative, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Acosta, Daniel (Teacher), author.

  Title: Iron river / by Daniel Acosta.

  Description: First edition. | El Paso, Texas : Cinco Puntos Press, [2018]

  Summary: When twelve-year-old Manny Maldonado and his friends find a hobo’s body near the train tracks that run through their tight-knit San Gabriel valley community, a police officer tries to pin the murder on them.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017057540 | ISBN 978-1-941026-93-9 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-941026-94-6 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-941026-95-3 (e-book)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Murder—Fiction. | Railroads—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. Police—Fiction. | Mexican Americans—Fiction. | Family life—California—Fiction. | California—History—20th century—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A226 Ir 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057540

  Book and cover design by Bluepanda Studios

  ¡Gloria a Dios!

  FOR LINDA

  con amor y cariño

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  1

  November 1958

  I’m telling you this now because I don’t know when I’m going to die. If you ask me why is a twelve-year-old kid thinking about dying, well, I don’t want to die. You hear people say they wish the old people had wrote things down because now they’re dead and their stories didn’t get told. But sometimes people die who aren’t old and that got me thinking: people don’t always die when they think they’re going to. So I want to tell you this story in case I die before I get old.

  My friends call me “Man-on-Fire.” My best friend Danny Valdez gave me that nickname. Danny said my port-wine stain and my red hair made me look like I’m on fire, and now everybody in Sangra calls me “Man-on-Fire.” I’m red-headed and have light skin and blue eyes like my dad, and my port-wine stain starts under my left arm and goes across my neck and covers part of my jaw all the way to my right ear. It doesn’t bother me anymore when people stare at my birthmark because I’m proud to have such a great nickname.

  My real name’s Manuel Maldonado, Junior. Except on my birth certificate, my name’s spelled “M-a-n-e-u-l.” My mom says the lady at the hospital wrote it down wrong. Mom saw the mistake and asked her to fix it and the lady said she would, but she never did. Mom says it’s because we’re Mexican and the lady didn’t want to go to the trouble. On my baptism paper, the lady in the church office knew what she was doing and wrote my name correct.

  I pay attention to people’s names. Like Betty. Betty’s my mom’s sister and my favorite aunt. Her real name is Betulia, which is from the Bible, I hear, but she hates it and makes faces when Grandma calls her that.

  Betty lives two blocks away on Sunset Avenue with Uncle Ted. In the summer, while Mom’s at work, Grandma takes care of me, except she wants me out of the house after breakfast, and I can’t go back in until lunchtime. She likes the house to herself, but she lets me ride my bike to Betty’s. So when I get bored and none of my friends are around, I go visit Betty.

  I never have to knock on her door or anything. I just go right in. She did tell me to use the back door and park my bike in the back yard so nobody steals it. Most of the kids in the neighborhood got their bikes stole from somebody else. Kids just steal them from each other and paint them. I bet some kids are riding their own bikes and don’t even know it.

  What I like about Betty is that she loves me like her own kid. I asked Mom if I could stay every day at Betty’s while she was at work, but she told me she didn’t want me bothering Betty and besides it would hurt Grandma’s feelings. I was disappointed but I guess I understand.

  I go over Betty’s and look in her refrigerator and help myself to food anytime. She buys milk from Riverside Dairy. It tastes better than the Valley Fresh Grandma gets delivered. Riverside tastes like clover. I love the taste of clover. On hot summer days, I pull the clover from where it grows near the faucet in Grandma’s garden, and I suck on the little stems. I used to drink Riverside milk and close my eyes and taste the sweet clover in it and imagine like I was sitting in the shade of a tree in a giant field of sweet clover until my cousin Cruz, who thinks he knows everything, told me dairy cows eat alfalfa and that’s what gives the milk that taste.

  I wish he hadn’t said that. When I drink Riverside now I still taste clover, but I can’t help thinking about stacked-up bales of alfalfa instead.

  I especially like to go over to Betty’s when it’s hot. I can stay in the house and sit in her cool parlor while she cleans house. Betty calls her front room her parlor.

  When I told Mom that’s what Betty called it, she made a kind of snort like she didn’t like the word.

  Anyway, I like to sit in Betty’s parlor and look at her fireplace. I haven’t seen too many fireplaces, but I never saw a fireplace like Betty’s. It has tiles that show fairytale scenes of people sitting by a river or in boats shaped like tree leaves. Some of the people are half-human and half-goat or horse or something. Some of them are sleeping and some are dancing and some are fishing or splashing in the river. My favorite is this one little guy with red hair like me. He’s not wearing a shirt. From his butt down to his feet is like a goat. He’s sitting on a tree root that’s sticking up from the ground and he’s playing a flute. When I get to high school, I want to learn how to play the saxophone. On a hot day looking at the people in the fireplace really cools me off.

  Betty doesn’t mind if I look around her house. She has a room she calls the nursery.

  There’s no baby in Betty’s nursery. There’s no crib or any other thing that would be in a nursery. Betty says that it’ll be a real nursery when she has a baby. She says she’s afraid if she calls the room something else she’ll never have that baby.

  I found Ted’s Purple Heart in the nursery. It’s in a glass case with a nice wood base. I never saw one before so I took it over to Betty who was cleaning her bathroom floor, and I asked her what it was. When she saw me holding the Purple Heart, her eyes got real big and scared-looking.


  She got up from the floor and took it from me. She didn’t seem mad at me. She just looked kind of scared. I followed her back to the nursery and watched her set it on the shelf like it was a holy thing. She turned around and got down to my eye level and put her hands on my shoulders. She talked soft and told me I could touch anything else in the house, but I should never touch the Purple Heart. Ted won it in the war. She laughed after she said he won it. I asked her why she laughed. She said it’s an award nobody wants to win, but it’s better than the other. I asked her what the other was, and she just shook her head and told me that I could look at it all I wanted, but I couldn’t touch it. She also told me not to ask Ted about the Purple Heart or about the war. I promised her I would do what she said.

  2

  San Gabriel is ten miles east of Los Angeles. We have one of Junipero Serra’s twenty-one famous Spanish missions. The old-timers named our Mexican neighborhood Sangra, which is short for San Gabriel. The rest of the city is pure white people.

  But not all the people in Sangra are Mexicans. The Yamanakas are Japanese. My know-it-all cousin Cruz told me they used to live in the white part of San Gabriel but during the war they had to sell their house and go to some kind of camp for Japanese people. He told me the government was afraid they were spies or traitors so they moved them to camps in the middle of nowhere. When they came home after the war, the price to buy their house back was too high so they ended up in Sangra.

  Kiko Yamanaka is twelve years old like me and she’s about the prettiest girl I ever saw. She looks like those dolls they sell in Chinatown. Her skin is whiter than white people’s and she has these tiny red lips that make her look like a China doll. But me and Kiko probably won’t get married because she’s Japanese and I’m Mexican.

  Besides the Yamanakas, there was another family called the Collisons who are negros. I say was because they moved back to Texas after the murder. Mister Collison worked for the Southern Pacific and his daughter Melinda was in my class at school. She came to our school in fourth grade from Houston. Melinda’s family isn’t Catholic, but Mr. Collison talked the principal into letting Melinda go to our school because he wanted her to get a better education than the public school.

  It was her brother Lawrence who was murdered.

  Last year Melinda did her report on the Southern Pacific and she told the class all about the railroad. I think her dad helped her. I asked her for her notes when she was finished. I found out that the gravel under the rail ties is called the ballast shoulder and other good train stuff.

  My report was on port-wine stains.

  The SP goes past our house on Main Street and all the way through eight states till it ends at the Atlantic Ocean in the state of Georgia. I know this because the train station in Alhambra has this big map on a wall in the waiting room and the route is marked by a red line. That map at the station is the best map I ever saw. I went to the Alhambra station about five times to say goodbye to company from Arizona or Jalisco who came to visit. When everybody else was outside waving bye, I’d be standing in front of that map trying to make it stick in my head so I wouldn’t forget.

  What I like best about that map is the pictures of the different places where the train stops. Next to Los Angeles is a painting of palm trees and our very own San Gabriel Mission. There’s a painting of cactuses next to Tucson in Arizona, but there’s no painting in New Mexico. If I was from New Mexico and I saw that map, I’d be mad.

  In Texas there’s a painting of the Alamo. I know all about the Alamo because me and my friends went to the San Gabriel Theater and saw the movie with Fess Parker as Davy Crockett fighting the Mexicans. I love that movie. That General Santa Anna was a bad guy so I’m glad the Texans won.

  Me and my best friend Danny Valdez like to play the Alamo next to the SP tracks on the stretch of ground they call the rightaway. In the summertime, weeds grow there, and it’s covered in trash—mainly beer cans and bottles. But in the springtime, the grass grows so high you can hide in it. Later I’ll tell you about a time me and Danny did a dare there, but right now I want to tell you about the Battle of the Alamo.

  Danny lives with his mom and dad and grandma Doña Tí and his brothers Rafa and Món and his beautiful sister Sonia. Sonia would win for Mission Fiesta Queen or Miss San Gabriel every year except the girls in the Fiesta Court have to go to Mission Catholic High and Sonia goes to public high school. And she’s Mexican. They always pick a white girl for Miss San Gabriel.

  My cousin Cruz is Sonia’s age and all he does is talk about her. All the Sangra guys talk about Sonia, but they’re too chicken to talk to her. Not me. I talk to her all the time.

  In summer when I go over Danny’s to see if he wants to play, Sonia’s usually sitting on her front porch in the shade. Her hair’s still kind of wet and curly like she just took a bath. Some girls don’t look pretty until after they put on their makeup, but Sonia is already beautiful without that stuff. Her skin is smooth and her eyes always sparkle when she says hi to me. She has these beautiful brown eyes the color of root beer. They’re kind of like Kiko’s Japanese eyes—except she’s Mexican. And she wears these short skirts that really show off her brown legs. Sonia has nice legs. They’re smooth and shiny and the color of those butterscotch candies they sell at Silverman’s Market.

  When I go over to play with Danny, Sonia calls me up to their porch and gives me a big hug and tells me I’m the cutest boy in the neighborhood. When she squeezes me, her chichis press against my chest and make me lose my breath. And when she squeezes me, her curly hair smells like lemons and feels cool and wet on my cheek. And when I ask her if Danny’s home she yells “Danny-come-outside-Manny-wants-you!” right in my ear. She always smiles and says, “Danny and Manny. You guys should be a singing group!” and then she lets me go.

  Danny usually comes out after a minute, chewing on a taco. Beans and rice. He asks me if I want one, but I don’t care for beans unless they have cheese. He finishes his taco then wipes his hands on his pants. We go to the back and get the Radio Flyer his ninos gave him one Christmas. We cross the street to the rightaway and fill the wagon with beer cans and bottles that didn’t break when the people threw them out their car windows. Beer cans are okay, but we like to find bottles better because they break when we hit them with rocks. After the wagon is full, we spend a long time deciding where to put the Mexicans.

  When we first started playing the Alamo, we couldn’t decide if we wanted to be the Texans or the Mexicans. Me and Danny are Mexican. To be the Texans would feel like traitors. But the Texans in the movie won, and we didn’t want to be losers.

  Finally we decided to be the Texans because it was just the two of us, but there were at least thirty bottles and cans in the wagon—outnumbered just like the Texans. So we spent a long time setting up the Mexicans on the rightaway and on the tracks. We lined the cans up side by side on the rails like rows of Mexican troops.

  Don’t worry, beer cans can’t derail a train. I know because we’ve put pennies and nails and big rocks and even chunks of wood on the tracks to see if we could derail one, but we never could.

  At the San Gabriel Theater, they always put on this short movie called Dangerous Playground before the real movie starts. Dangerous Playground is about how dangerous it is to play on the tracks. The Sangra kids make fun of it. For one thing, the kids in the movie are white. I never saw a real white kid play on the tracks.

  Second, those kids seem pretty dumb. They stick their feet in switch tracks and stuff like that. Everybody knows that’s dangerous. You don’t need a movie to tell you that. And we know the movie is really fake because when an engineer catches the kids playing in the train yard, he doesn’t call the cops. If those kids were Mexicans, he would’ve called the cops and the kids and their parents would’ve gone to jail. That’s what Cruz says. And he knows everything. At least that’s what he thinks.

  I don’t know about you but to me throwing rocks is about the best thing a boy can do besides spitting from high places. I
don’t like to hock loogies as much as I like to let them just drop. Danny tells me there a place in France called the Eiffel Tower that’s so tall that if you let a loogie drop, it takes like an hour for it to hit the ground.

  I hope I get to go up that tower someday.

  I don’t get to high places much, but there’s always rocks to throw if a boy just looks for them. And things to throw rocks at.

  Anyway, we put the bottles here and there on the rightaway. Some we hid behind big rocks and some behind clumps of weeds and a few we stood out in the open like easy targets. Then we filled the Flyer with rocks and pulled it back across the street.

  After we killed a few Mexican bottle-officers and knocked over some can-soldiers, we got bored and decided to quit.

  Next day not a single bottle-officer was left standing. We expected the cans on the rails to be gone because the trains kill them, but it seems the bottle-officers got killed when we weren’t around, maybe at night.

  Who knows? Maybe it’s the Angel of Death. Last year in Bible History, Sister Francis Assisi told us about the Angel of Death and the Egyptians. I want to stay up all night some night and look out my window for the Angel of Death to fly by across the street killing bottle-officers with her rocks.

  The Southern Pacific Railroad is like a river. Sometimes the current flows east when an engine pulls out of Los Angeles dragging a line of cars behind it. I call it a strong current when four big, loud locomotives are hitched in line and roar by pulling more than two hundred boxcars. Sometimes the cars are full and their side doors are shut and locked, but other times they run empty and the doors are wide open so you can try to throw rocks right through to the other side.

  I say the current is light when a locomotive goes by pulling less than fifty cars. The current usually runs slower when the trains are heading west to Los Angeles. East currents usually carry empty boxcars.

  When we aren’t killing Mexicans, me and Danny and our friends Little and Marco throw rocks at trains. Little’s favorites to throw at are the car-cars. The car-cars are double-deckers that carry brand new cars to Los Angeles. I don’t think he should do that because who wants to buy a car with broken windows or scratched paint, but Little still does. He says his dad’ll never buy a new car so what difference does it make.