Painted Cities

“But he’s not doing it right.”

“What?” I asked him. I could still feel his biceps. He was still straining. The fibers of his muscle were fine and hard. “He’s not doing what right?”

“La vibora, the snake dance, he’s supposed to do it right after the dollar dance.”

“It’s all right,” I told Papo.

“No, bro, it’s your wedding. He’s supposed to do the snake dance. Fucking Indian,” he said to the DJ, this time louder. I could hear the clink of beer bottles. Someone was tapping on the side of a glass with a knife, kiss the bride, they were saying. This was a Mexican wedding. I didn’t know where my wife was.

I turned around and looked at the DJ. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Just go on with the dance music.” The DJ nodded.

I gently pushed Papo back toward the tables, toward the bar packed with people I hadn’t seen in years, friends I’d felt obligated to invite, people I could never not love.

“I just want it to be right,” Papo said. It sounded as if he was about to cry. I thought of Papo’s little girl, Crystal, his wife, Bernadette, who’d left him two years before, the cocaine habit that had him ru

“I want it to be right for you,” he said.

Papo turned and headed toward the bar. I put my arm around his shoulder.

“It is right, bro,” I told him. “It is right.”

Hours later I was in the banquet hall parking lot saying my last goodbyes. Most of the party guests had left, my in-laws, my father, my uncles. Only Papo was there, in the dim light of the streetlamps, and two other friends, Da

“Go be fucking married, then,” Papo said. He was smiling, he shook my hand. “Good luck,” Mario said. Da

“Go be fucking married, then,” Papo said, this time a little louder. “Motherfucker.”

He was standing behind me. I could feel him there. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look.

Da

“Motherfucker!” Papo said. He stepped toward me.

Mario got in front of Papo.

“Just go, bro,” Da

“Motherfucker!”

I climbed into the rental car and shut the door. I could smell my wife. All night she had smelled beautiful.

“What was that?” she asked me.

“That was Papo,” I answered.

In the rearview mirror Da

MAXIMILIAN

I want to tell you three memories of my cousin Maximilian. Two of them involve his fists.

My cousin was a short man. He was, however, like everyone else on the Mexican side of my family, built like a brick two-flat. Maximilian was heavy and hard. He was a ca

But Max, my cousin, Maximilian, was young. He was sixteen or so when my memories of him first begin. It was at his sister Irene’s cotillion, in the basement of Saint Procopius church on Eighteenth Street and Allport. I don’t know much about the pla

That night I sat with my mother and ate cake and people-watched. My father, done with his shift at the basement door, was at a side table sharing a bottle of Presidente with his friend Moe. My cousin Chefa was dancing with my uncle Bernardo. My aunt Lola was on the floor dancing with her only son, my cousin Maximilian. The music fit the moment, balladas, slow, sentimental. It was all beautiful, all quite nice. Then Stoney showed up.

I am not sure my uncle Blas would’ve allowed any boyfriend of Irene’s to attend the cotillion, but Stoney didn’t have a chance. He had issues, most noticeably the tattoo on his neck that said ALMIGHTY AMBROSE.

No one had been at the door, not at that moment. So Stoney and his four partners simply burst into the basement. They had to be high. My father and Moe walked up to the four. There was wrestling, chair throwing, screaming. There were two gunshots, pops that sang off the basement’s polished cement floor, the massive concrete support columns. Then the police showed up. Arrests were made — three paddy wagons’ worth. But the moment I remember most, right before my mother pulled me under the table, was catching sight of my cousin Max, on his knees, his fist jackhammering over and over straight down into Stoney’s limp head. I couldn’t see Maximilian’s face, his head was bowed, but I could see his thick shoulders, his biceps bulging within his dress shirt. Behind him my aunt Lola was pulling at Irene, my uncle Bernardo was reaching for Max, and my father had one of the gangbangers up by his collar. All of them were staring down at Max. All of them had looks of horror.

Maximilian ruptured something. His arm and fist were in a cast for months. I don’t know what got worked out, but Irene kept seeing Stoney. Eventually they married. Stoney never had a cross word for Max, not that I ever heard.

Memory number two happens a few years later, when I was eleven. By that time Maximilian was eighteen and he had just graduated from Juarez High School. He had joined the army and we were having a going-away party for him in the yard behind his father’s house.

I had lived in this house, back when my parents were split up over my father’s cheating. I had spent nearly a whole summer there, holidays included. I had my own bed, the bunk over Maximilian’s. Where other houses were hard to find, my uncle Blas’s house was simply forgotten. The Ke

His party was a year or two after I had moved back in with my parents, and though I had seen Maximilian nearly every weekend since I’d left his house, at the party he seemed aged. He had grown a thin mustache. He had on shorts and a Dago-T. His muscles looked thicker than usual. His skin was dark, worn even.

Maximilian was never a big talker. But as the afternoon progressed and he continued to draw from the keg, he spoke more freely, eventually calling out my name like I was a friend of his from the street. “Jes-se!” he would say. “I love you, bro.” And then he would start laughing.

Late into the party, the adults were drunk and I remember Maximilian putting his head under the tapper and chugging beer right from the keg. He was smiling, laughing as he gulped. He came up choking, spitting suds. He stumbled around the gravel yard trying to catch his footing. He seemed momentarily blind, lost in his spi