But then, she thought, perhaps it was time to lay her fears to rest.
“All right, Cookie. If you think you can do it by yourself. I’ll be in the next room.”
He waited with his hands at his sides until she left. Edita stood and listened before setting to work at the ironing board where a three-foot pile of Dominguez’s shirts awaited. She turned off the iron’s steam function to better hear. It was quiet in the next room, so she began to iron. A few minutes had passed when she thought she heard a choking sound. Or was it a baby chortling? She stopped and cocked an ear. No, that was choking! She threw the iron down and ran to the kitchen where she saw Buster, red-faced and desperate, trying to put his fingers in his mouth to clear his throat. His brother, meanwhile, sat impassively across from him, doing nothing. Edita pushed Cookie out of the way and quickly yanked Buster from his highchair, laid his stomach across her knees and began pounding his back. No good. She sat him up and performed what she could remember of the Heimlich maneuver that she had seen in a restaurant. Two violent contractions of her fists in Buster’s solar plexus sent the obstruction flying from his windpipe across the room where it smacked against the wall. Now being able to breathe, Buster managed a laugh and playfully reached lovingly for his brother’s face, but Edita held him tightly to her hip. At first glance, the object that Edita found near the wall, looked to be a Hershey’s Kiss. In that scenario, Cookie, out of affection for his brother, imprudently gave him a piece of hard-to-swallow candy. On closer examination, however, the object in question turned out to be a moving piece from the family’s popular board game.
“Sorry,” Cookie taunted as if playing the game.
“How did he get this?” Edita demanded.
“How the fuck should I know?”
Edita, slapped him so hard she turned his face sideways like a movie stuntman’s.
“Can I give him a bath?”
“Go to your room!”
How was it possible? All of her children were raised the same way, given the same amount of attention and yet, while the others were thoughtful and obedient, helpful around the house—even talking about the colleges they wanted to attend some day—Cookie was pen pals with a man by the name of Richard Ramirez—who, Edita later learned, was a serial killer on San Quentin’s death row.
She expressed her misgivings regarding Cookie’s moral turpitude to her husband, since he spent more time alone with Cookie than anyone else.
“Entender algo. I am not his father. His father is the Devil.”
It was clear that Buster’s security would rest solely on Edita’s shoulders. To her husband’s growing frustration, she moved the baby’s crib into their bedroom where it stayed for four years. During the day, while she cooked, did the laundry and the vacuuming, Edita carried Buster in a sling on her back. She bore him in this fashion until he weighed nearly sixty pounds—it having the welcome side effect of correcting her congenital scoliosis a doctor in Denver told her would never improve without surgery.
When Buster was finally placed on the ground, he was only allowed to play with his sisters. They fussed over him—cornrowing his red hair and dressing him in their clothes. This went on until he was eight—despite a constant barrage of sissy name calling by Cookie. Buster’s sequestration with his sisters came to an end when he was ten and already a foot taller than Cookie—who was a paddle-footed, squat and corpulent nineteen. Still somewhat fearful, Edita felt Buster was now physically capable of protecting himself.
“I’m thinking of letting you play with your brothers.”
“O-kay!!!”
“But you have to be very careful around your brother, Cookie.”
“Why, Mommy?”
“Something is wrong with him…up here,” she said, tapping her temple with a finger.
“Ah’m awful sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just careful.”
Her warning delivered, Buster was released into the company of his brothers. The younger ones were delighted. Maybe they would no longer be on the receiving end of the games Cookie invented for them to play. In those games, the younger boys played the role of Hapless Law Enforcement to Cookie’s Sadistic Criminal Mastermind. No matter how hard Hapless Law Enforcement tried, they always wound up crying.
“You know how to play DEA Man?” Cookie inquired of Buster.
“Nope, ah shor don’t.”
“Well, you’re gonna be the DEA Man. He’s the man with the badge.”
“Gosh, thanks!”
In the game of DEA Man, Cookie and his younger brothers had to move several five-pound bags of tile glaze around the compound and keep it hidden from Buster who was the green agent sent to the West from Washington, DC. There wasn’t much more to the game than that. The fun part for Cookie was when Buster discovered the drug cache. He would then jump him or descend from a rope somewhere and employ different faux martial arts moves. Unfortunately, the bullets in Buster’s imaginary government-issued sidearm had no effect on Cookie. Buster endured being karate chopped and flipped on his head too many times to count, but he never complained nor tattled on him.
When Fridays rolled around, the Dominguezes would load all the kids into the back of the truck for a drive into town. Buster liked to sit above the rear fender of the pickup with his nose in the wind like a dog. All the kids had a few bucks in their pockets from chores and an idea of how they wanted to spend it—even though it always came down to the same things, candy for the boys, teen fashion magazines for the girls.
Vanadium’s Main Street had resisted paving for over one hundred years—almost as if the town was holding out for the return of horse-drawn carriages. People passing through on their way to Utah drove slowly, not to enjoy Vanadium’s down-on-its-heels Victorian architecture, or raised wooden sidewalks, but rather to avoid potholes that were deep enough to conceal a man on horseback wearing a stovepipe hat.
Dominguez guided his Dodge Power Wagon into an empty space in front of the Buttered Roll, the town’s only restaurant without a bar. In those days, before Mr. Mallomar came to town, Vanadium hadn’t any need for more than one restaurant. The prevailing attitude was that paying for a meal outside the home was a useless extravagance. Buster could see Sheriff Dudival in the window booth having a cup of coffee and a cigarette with a crusty-looking cowboy. They both took notice of him. In fact, they seemed to be talking about him.
“Have your asses back here in forty-five minutes,” Dominguez said.
The kids all jumped off the truck and left on their predetermined missions. Cookie lumbered out the back with the difficulty of a fat kid. It didn’t help that he insisted on wearing a big woolen overcoat whenever he went to town—even in the broiling heat of summer. No one talked about it, assuming it was his sad way of concealing his weight problem.
The pockets of Cookie’s coat were slit on the inside to allow his hands to reach all the way through. To the proprietor of a shop, it looked like he was just standing by the merchandise with his coat open, but inside the coat, his hands were grabbing whatever he desired. Cookie, alone, was responsible for 75 percent of Vanadium’s retail “shrinkage.”
It was time to get going. He only had forty-five minutes. His parents insisted they be back at the house on Fridays by sunset. He started walking off by himself, then noticed Buster.
“Hey, fuckwad. Come with me.”
Happy to be included, Buster followed his brother into the hardware store. Cookie made a cursory inspection of plumbing supplies, power sanders, fuse boxes, rattraps, and poison. He was not really interested in any of that. He knew the owner of the store was watching him and that diddling around long enough would tax the proprietor’s attention span. When he saw him go back to reading his paper, Cookie headed to the real object of his desire—a pyramid of .22 caliber ammunition in