“Get over here, moron.”
Buster came over and stood next to him.
“Unbutton your shirt.”
“Gosh, why?”
“Just do it, numbnuts.”
Cookie stuffed two more boxes of .22s into Buster’s shirt.
“Okay, follow me. Not too fast. Stop and look at some shit like you’re shoppin’.” Buster took him literally, and on the way out, stopped to stare at some bags of steer manure. Cookie looked at him sangfroid. “¡Si no eres el idiota más idiota que he conocido!”
When the forty-five minutes were up, everyone returned to the truck that was already loaded with groceries. On the way out of town, a truck that had the logo of a contractor’s company on the door panel, pulled up beside the Dominguez’s. The person on the passenger side of the moving truck rolled down his window.
“Hey, Dominguez, the boss wants to redo the floor of the Vanadium Hotel lobby.”
“Tell them to call you at the office,” Edita said nervously. She didn’t like this kind of communicating on the highway. Dominguez ignored her.
“How many square feet?” He yelled back to the men, further aggravating her.
While this mobile business meeting was being conducted, in the back of the truck, Cookie cornered Buster.
“Let’s have ’em.”
“Have what?”
“The shells we boosted, gringo.”
“Ah put ’em back.”
“You what?”
“If ah’da kep’m that woulda been stealin’.”
Cookie wanted to throw him off the truck, but he knew he couldn’t lift him. Instead, he grabbed Buster’s cowboy hat from his head and angrily Frisbeed it into the back of the truck conducting the business conference at forty miles an hour alongside them.
“Hey…!”
His other brothers pretended not to see it, but Buster’s sisters immediately came to his defense.
“That was mean!” they both said.
“Mommy gave me that hat for cleanin’ the house.”
“So go get it, if you want it so fuckin’ bad!”
Buster looked at his hat fluttering around in the back of the adjacent pick up truck.
“Better get it now while you still have a chance,” Cookie taunted. “Chickie, chickie, bruck-bruck!”
Buster’s brow furrowed. Feebly, he tried to calculate the physics of this. Could he do it? Could he jump from the back of one moving truck to another?
“Don’t do it!” his sisters pleaded.
“Shut up, you little cunts! If he wants it so bad, let him jump for it!”
Buster did not want to see his hat ride away. He put one foot on the side of the truck and braced one hand on the top of the cab—where inside his foster parents sat, unaware.
“All right,” the passenger of the other truck said to Dominguez. “See you tomorrow at ten-thirty.” The contractor’s truck started to accelerate away.
“Don’t do it!” Buster’s sisters screamed.
Buster had already waited too long when he jumped. He missed the side of the passing truck, but managed to get his hands on the tailgate. Unfortunately, his long legs reached the road—the tips of his cowboy boots burning from the friction.
Inside the Dominguezes’ truck, Edita and Dominguez were too busy arguing to notice Buster being dragged past them.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous that was—what you just did? There is such a thing as a telephone, you know.”
“Shut up.”
“You have children in the truck,” she said, wanting to have the last word.
Now smoke began to billow into their windshield from the truck in front of them.
“I think he blew his rings. I better catch up and tell him.”
Dominguez sped up and as they drove through the smoke, he and Edita were able to see Buster hanging by his fingertips, his boots on fire.
“How the hell…?”
“¡Dios mío!” Edita cried.
Dominguez sped up and began honking his horn. In the meantime, Buster’s higher mammalian instinct for self-preservation overcame his fool’s insubordination and commanded all the strength of his tall, skinny frame to pull himself up. Slowly, his feet came off the pavement where the friction had already erased the points on his cowboy boots and the tips of his socks. Shaking and trembling at every juncture of muscle and tendon, Buster managed to get himself up on the rear bumper. He waited a moment to catch his breath then flipped himself over the back tailgate. Gone from view momentarily, he suddenly sprang to his feet—triumphantly waving his hat. All of this took place without the knowledge of the driver and passenger of Buster’s current vehicle—loudly singing along with Reba McEntire’s “Is There Life Out There?” on the radio.
After they recovered their wayward passenger, Dominguez pulled over and interrogated the children in the back of the truck.
“Who let him do that?”
Dominguez stood waiting for an answer. Cookie remained silent. The younger brothers cast their eyes to their laps. Finally, Dominguez looked to his little daughters. Surreptitiously, one of them pointed a teensy-weensy finger in the direction of Cookie.
“You little coc—” Dominguez said to Cookie, cutting off the obscenity.
Cookie just smirked at him. There it was—the dismissive expression of Guillermo Cantante. Dominguez balled his fist. He wanted to slam it into that insolent, fat face of his, but he could wait.
This being the Sabbath, Mrs. Dominguez prepared fish balls, boiled chicken, beef brisket served with little potato pancakes, and crepes filled with ricotta cheese and topped with applesauce. Dominguez, at his wife’s direction, was not allowed to kiln tiles on the Sabbath. In fact, the Cantantes had inculcated him with the notion that he was not to lift a finger until Sunday morning.
There were other strict observances in the Dominguez household—the most draconian being no television. Mrs. Dominguez, trying to identify the causes of Cookie’s nascent criminal pathology, had determined that television inspired violence and took the Emerson down to be sold at the This ’n’ That Shop. Instead, the children spent their typical evenings cleaning the house, reading, and doing their homework. When those tasks were completed, they were expected to work on their respective art projects.
Buster’s project had been the creation of frescoes made on the bedroom wall next to his bunk. There was no denying Buster’s eye for anatomy and composition. His subjects, always horses and cowboys, were applied to the wall in a classic seven-layer Flemish style. The problem, to Mrs. Dominguez’s chagrin, was that Buster used boogers and not paints to create these naïve masterpieces. The removal of this dried and hardened medium was impossible to achieve without the removal of the underlying paint as well. Patiently, Mrs. Dominguez redirected Buster’s artistic talent to the age-old Kasbah art form—where awl and ball peen hammer were employed to tap intricate bas-reliefs on metal plates—in Buster’s case, discarded pie tins from the Buttered Roll.
After dinner, Cookie was busy in the tool room where he had constructed a Red Grooms–like model of the Vanadium jail to the smallest detail—fabricating the steel bars for the cells from a shopping cart he boosted from the grocery store.
“Cookie Dominguez!”
It was his father bellowing. It was time to pay the