Quintana and Dante set up the telescope.
I watched them and listened to the radio.
Mrs. Quintana offered me a Coke. I took it, even though I didn’t like Cokes.
“Dante says you’re very smart.”
Compliments made me nervous. “I’m not as smart as Dante.”
Then I heard Dante’s voice interrupting our conversation. “I thought we talked about this, Ari.”
“What?” his mother said.
“Nothing. It’s just that most smart people are perfect shits.”
“Dante!” his mother said.
“Yeah, Mom, I know, the language.”
“Why is it you like to cuss so much, Dante?”
“It’s fun,” he said.
Mr. Quintana laughed. “It is fun,” he said. But then he said, “That kind of fun needs to happen when your mother isn’t around.”
Mrs. Quintana didn’t like Mr. Quintana’s advice. “What kind of lesson are you teaching him, Sam?”
“Soledad, I think—” But the whole discussion was killed by Dante, who was looking into his telescope. “Wow, Dad! Look at that! Look!”
For a long time, no one said anything.
We all wanted to see what Dante was seeing.
We stood silently around Dante’s telescope in the middle of the desert as we waited for our turn to see all the contents of the sky. When I looked through the telescope, Dante began explaining what I was looking at. I didn’t hear a word. Something happened inside me as I looked out into the vast universe. Through that telescope, the world was closer and larger than I’d ever imagined. And it was all so beautiful and overwhelming and—I don’t know—it made me aware that there was something inside of me that mattered.
As Dante was watching me search the sky through the lens ofa telescope, he whispered, “Someday, I’m going to discover all the secrets of the universe.”
That made me smile. “What are you going to do with all those secrets, Dante?”
“I’ll know what to do with them,” he said. “Maybe change the world.”
I believed him.
Dante Quintana was the only human being I’d ever known that could say a thing like that. I knew that he would never grow up and say stupid things like, “a girl is like a tree.”
That night, we slept out in his backyard.
We could hear his parents talking in the kitchen because the window was open. His mother was talking in Spanish and his father was talking in English.
“They do that,” he said.
“Mine too,” I said.
We didn’t talk much. We just lay there and looked up at the stars.
“Too much light pollution,” he said.
“Too much light pollution,” I answered.
Eleven
ONE IMPORTANT FACT ABOUT DANTE: HE DIDN’T LIKE wearing shoes.
We’d skateboard to the park, and he’d take his tennis shoes off and rub his feet on the grass like he was wiping something off of them. We’d go to the movies and he’d take off his tennis shoes. He left them there once, and we had to go back and get them.
We missed our bus. Dante took his shoes off on the bus, too.
One time, I sat with him at Mass. He untied his shoelaces and took off his shoes right there in the pew. I sort of gave him this look. He rolled his eyes and pointed at the crucifix and whispered, “Jesus isn’t wearing shoes.”
We both sat there and laughed.
When he came to my house, Dante would place his shoes on the front porch before he came inside. “The Japanese do that,” he said. “They don’t bring the dirt of the world into another person’s house.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but we’re not Japanese. We’re Mexican.”
“We’re not really Mexicans. Do we live in Mexico?”
“But that’s where our grandparents came from.”
“Okay, okay. But do we actually know anything about Mexico?”
“We speak Spanish.”
“Not that good.”
“Speak for yourself, Dante. You’re such a pocho .”
“What’s a pocho ?”
“A half-assed Mexican.”
“Okay, so maybe I’m a pocho . But the point I’m making here is that we can adopt other cultures.”
I don’t know why but I just started laughing.
L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp
Volume 2 The Eugenics Wars