Painted Cities by Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski Page B

constantly fitting and refitting her dress, me calling her Miss Piggy because she was chubby and more queda than the rest of us darkies.
    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 myfather 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 Kennedy Expressway rumbled within yards of the back door. Out the front door the South Branch of the Chicago River turned. There were neighbors to either side, but still my uncle’s house was lost.
    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 spinning head. We were laughing. My mother had her arm around my shoulder. My father had his arm around my uncle. When Maximilian fell on his ass we doubled over in laughter. We were roaring. And at that moment we seemed really together, my father, my mother, my aunt and uncle, my cousins Irene and Chefa, Stoney, my