Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (25 page)

That’s when I noticed a group of F.F.A. types, all in their blue corduroy jackets with their yellow and blue Future Farmer badges. They were standing not too far from where the strikers were sitting. They were talking. I didn’t like the look of it. They were trouble. Then I saw a group of pachucos from Chiva Town. They were talking, too. Shit, I thought, trouble. I gave René a look. I pointed with my chin. He saw what I saw. We both had a bad feeling. I handed Gigi my flyers. “Keep passing them out,” I said. Just then Fitz and his sidekick, Mr. Romero, walked up to Gigi and me. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re passing out flyers,” Gigi said. She smiled, handed him one.

“You don’t have permission.”

“It’s a free county, Mr. Fitz.”

“I want you to stop. Right now! I want you to stop.”

René was watching us. “Change the dress code!” he yelled—and kept passing out flyers. I could tell he was watching the two groups, the F.F.A. jackets, the pachucos from Chiva Town. By then, it seemed, the whole school had gathered. I didn’t know it then, but Charlie had told everyone to skip their classes and come to first lunch. And they had. They had. But I didn’t know that, then. God, it seemed like people were everywhere. All of a sudden. The whole school. Where had they come from? Fitz reached for the flyers Gigi was holding. She was smart. She let them drop to the ground.

She smiled. That’s when I looked up and saw the group of F.F.A. types pouring milk on the group of people sitting down. They were pouring milk all over them. Fitz saw them, too. “You gonna let that happen?” I said.

“You made your bed—”

Right then, right there, all hell broke loose. Charlie Gladstein didn’t have a pacifist bone in his body. He got up and started a fist fight with one
of the guys pouring milk over Jeannete Franco. “You sonofabitch.” That was the cue for the Chiva Town pachucos to move in. Those guys from Chiva Town were on those F.F.A. corduroy jackets—all over them. And they were going at it. They didn’t give a damn about a dress code. What they knew is that they hated each other and this was as good a time as any to beat the holy crap out of each other. That’s when the whole school exploded. Everybody just moved in. Punches everywhere. For once, René and I weren’t throwing fists. We were just watching. Gigi and I just looked at each other. Fitz and Romero had disappeared.

I kept watching as students poured out of the building. People were shouting and yelling. But where were our teachers? Where was Mr. Fitz? Where was Mr. Romero? Then Mrs. Davis walks up to me and says. “Sammy, Sammy, my god, make them stop. Look at them. Make them stop.” It was a riot, chaos, what everybody was afraid of. All that anger, crawling all over the place with no direction. “Change the dress code! Change the dress code!” That’s what I started yelling. Mrs. Davis caught on. So did René. So did Gigi. “Change the dress code! Change the dress code! Change the dress code!” And then, more voices. And then more, our voices like a steady beating of a drum. “Change the dress code! Change the dress code!” René ran over to the Chiva Town pachucos and made them stop. None of those guys wanted to fuck with René, they didn’t, and the chicken shit F.F.A. guys—they were all for stopping the fight. They weren’t winning. God, it was all happening so fast. And everybody was chanting, “CHANGE THE DRESS CODE! CHANGE THE DRESS CODE!” Mrs. Davis looked at me and smiled. “You done good, Sammy,” she whispered.

I could barely hear her above the chants. “That’s not good English,” I said.

That’s when all the cops came. Every cop in the damn city—they were there.

They stood in a line about twenty feet away from us. There were more of us than them. Not that it mattered. They scared us. All we had on our side was our stupid pigeons.

“Go back to your classes.” We heard the voice over the bullhorn. “Go back to your classes or you will be arrested.”

The chanting stopped.

“Go back to your classes! Or you will be arrested!”

Gigi moved to the front. I followed her. Couldn’t leave her there by herself. René was right behind me. There we were, the three of us, between the cops and the whole school. It was so quiet. God, all of a sudden, the world was so quiet. Gigi turned around and faced the students. “Everybody sit down!” she said. “Everybody sit down!”

And they did. They did just like she said.

That’s when Fitz and Romero and all our teachers came out of the school building and walked straight behind the line of cops. The students booed. “BOOOOOOOOO! BOOOOOOOO!” Right then, I hated them all. They were afraid of us. They were afraid. Of us. It made me mad, that they thought we’d hurt them. Hiding behind the cops. I hated them like I’d never hated anyone. And then I noticed that Mrs. Davis was standing right next to me.

“Go back to your classrooms! Or you will be arrested!”

“Come and get us!” I knew that voice. It was Charlie. And then he got up in front of everybody with his stack of papers—the dress code. He held up the stack of papers. “This is the dress code,” he said. Then he lit the pages on fire. A few pages at a time. God. The fire, it was so peaceful. Just for a few seconds. And no one said a word. No one moved.

“I’m warning you—you will be arrested!”

“Come and get us,” Charlie said. And they did.

Most of us went along quietly. A few of us mouthed off. Our big chance. They took our names. They didn’t technically arrest us—or at least, not the whole school. They took our names and our phone numbers, then sent us back to our classrooms. Except Gigi and René and me and Charlie and Angel, we were taken down to the station. I was getting tired of that police station.

Fitz said he was pressing charges. Instigating a riot. There were others involved. There would be a full investigation. There we were at the police station. Guess maybe I wouldn’t be graduating. But I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t. Gigi was crying. René, hell, he just looked sad—like he was tired of losing. Charlie kept ranting, “It wasn’t our fault! How come they’re not arresting those bastards who started the riot? Those F.F.A. shitkickers. Why aren’t they arrested?” I finally told him just to sit down. We had it all planned. Shit. We couldn’t plan a camping trip to the backyard. I was numb. That’s what I was. At least the pigeon was taking a nap.

I don’t know what was taking so long. We were in a room. They’d already taken our statements. They’d done that. Now what?

“Jail,” René said. “They’re gonna put us in fucking jail.”

Angel didn’t say anything. “My mother’s going to kill me.” She was more afraid of her mother than she was of jail.

“What about your dad?” René was looking right at Charlie. I knew what he was asking. Our parents didn’t know doctors or lawyers or accountants or teachers. Our parents didn’t know anybody. But Charlie’s dad, he knew some. He knew people. Maybe—

“When my dad finds out about this, he’s gonna kick my ass from here to Jerusalem.”

That’s when we laughed. Because he made a joke. About his own kind. And that’s what we did. That’s how we’d survived. So we laughed.

And then, the pigeon came back. I knew then that the pigeon wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t beating me up. He was just there, waiting with me.

We paced. They wouldn’t let us smoke. Not in that stupid waiting room. Or whatever it was. I don’t know how long we were in there. I kept looking at the door. When it opened—I didn’t want to think about it.

“My dad always said I’d wind up en la pinta.” René said that. “Maybe he was right.”

We all looked at each other.

“What’s la pinta?” Charlie asked.

“Jail,” Gigi said.

And then, then the door opened. And we all looked at each other. I saw Gigi and Angel squeezing each other’s hands. And then this man in a suit walks in, young guy. Younger than thirty. He was all smiles. “You can go,” he said.

Charlie’s jaw drops open. “Who the hell are you?”

“Your lawyer.”

“What?” I kept looking around the room. “We don’t have a lawyer. We’re from Hollywood. We don’t know shit about lawyers.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” he said. And he smiled. He stuck his hand out and shook my hand. “You must be Sammy. My wife talks a lot about you, says you’re really something. I’m Paul. Paul Davis.”

I nodded. He shook everyone’s hand, had good manners. “She’s married to a lawyer?” I said. “Mrs. Davis is married to a lawyer?”

He smiled. “Yup. She sure is.”

“What are they gonna do to us?”

“Nothing. Oh, I think your principal wants to throw you out of school,
but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The school board meets on Monday—I’ve scheduled you and your friends to speak on behalf of the students. If they don’t consider changing the dress code, I told them I’d sue them on your behalf. And I will, too. If I were you, I’d just show up to school tomorrow like nothing happened. And maybe by Monday evening, when you talk to the school board, maybe you should bring along a petition. With names on it. And maybe you want to bring some students along.” He smiled. We all looked at each other. He laughed. “My wife tells me you put on a helluva good show at school today.” He searched our faces. I wonder if he found what he was looking for.

We all went back to school the next day—and nothing happened. Our teachers didn’t say a word. Not one word. Everything was the same. Except for Colonel Wright who growled something at me when he saw me walking down the hall. And Mrs. Jackson who said it hurt her to teach students like us. Deeply.

We took up a petition. People stood in line to sign it. Ninety percent of the school signed it. “Ninety percent,” Charlie said. He was the one who did the math. A real numbers guy, I was finding out.

René said that he hated the thought that a gringo had saved our asses. I told him to re-laaaaaax. “Look,” I said, “how many Mexican lawyers do you think there are in this town? Re-laaaax. They’re not all bad.” I thought of Mrs. Davis. How she’d stood with us.

I read a statement at the school board meeting. I wore a tie. My dad made me. I told him it didn’t make sense for me to wear a tie when I was trying to get them to loosen up. “I don’t care,” my father said. “You’re going to speak to the school board, and you’re going to wear a tie.” And so I did. Five hundred kids showed up at the meeting. Parents, too. I made
my presentation. I introduced myself. “My name is Sammy Santos,” I said. “This is my father,” I said. He stood. He was proud. Please, Dad. Don’t cry. He did that, sometimes. I handed them the petitions. I told them that the citizens of Las Cruces High had spoken. I told them that we did not feel respected. I told them that when you did not respect someone, that you shouldn’t be too surprised to find out they hated you. I said that. I’d read it somewhere. Or something like that. I was trembling. And Mr. Davis, well, he stood right next to me.

The school board nodded. I asked them if they had any questions. One man, a guy named Mr. Stafford who had eyebrows that looked like mustaches asked me about the riot. “Some kids from F.F.A. poured milk on the strikers,” I said. “Mr. Fitz saw what happened. Ask him. The strikers didn’t do anything. Ask Mr. Fitz.”

Mr. Fitz admitted that the strikers hadn’t been violent. Except for Charlie, and he admitted that even Charlie was only fighting back. “But they provided an opportunity for the riot to occur. They created an environment for chaos to flourish. They threatened the safety of the entire student body.” All by ourselves. That’s what he said. Yeah, yeah. He spoke against allowing the dress code to be changed. When they asked him if his teachers were for or against the measure, he said his teachers were solidly against the measure. “Solidly.”

Mr. Davis produced a petition of his own. Sixty-four percent of the teachers had signed a petition in favor of the student’s request to change the dress code. Sixty-four percent, Mr. Davis said. He handed the petition to the school board’s president. Mrs. Davis, she’d been working after hours.

There was some discussion. Was it legal to vote in private? They conferred. No, no, they would vote publicly. Why not?

The measure passed unanimously. Not because they agreed with us. I knew that. But because they were afraid. Of us. Their children. I knew that. But right then, I didn’t care. We’d done something.

After the vote, the room went crazy. Crazy, crazy. God. Crazy.

We were a fire, and we were blazing, alive, blazing. And we thought, just for a moment, that we were the heart of America.

If you asked me what I remembered most about that strike, if you asked me, I’d have to tell you it was the look on René’s face when the board voted to change the dress code. When they all said, “Aye,” in unison, with one voice. The look on René’s face. He’d looked broken and tired the day when we’d buried Reyes. And old. And he was too young to look so old. But that’s how he’d looked. And sometimes, when people got that look, they never looked young again no matter how old they really were. I’d seen it happen.

But that day, after the vote, René wore this look, like it meant something to be René Montoya. We looked at each other. In all that commotion, we searched for each other. I think sometimes, people look holy, they do, that’s how he looked. He waved from where he was standing. And I waved back. Hello, René. Hello, Sammy. I remembered the night I’d seen him in the light of the streetlamp outside that apartment where we found Reyes. I’d told myself he was a stranger, that I didn’t know him. But there he was, René Montoya. I swear he was holy. Maybe the pigeon inside him had found a way out. Flown away. Gone. Maybe.