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breath.
    “I don’t have a brain tumor, Mom. And I’m not
screwing Jack -- ”
    “Alex! Watch your language in front of the
boys,” Brian admonished me. Right, I thought. I’m dying of a
fucking brain tumor, and he’s worried that I might corrupt the
devil progeny.
    “Oh, it was Jack Murphy,” Kevin said
from his perch near the grill. “I heard it was one of the Murphy
boys, but I wasn’t sure which one.”
    “Well, at least it was only one,” I
offered.
    “At a time, anyway,” Kevin countered.
    “Kevin and Alexis, that is enough!” I figured
I was pretty close to being sent to my room, so I stuck my tongue
out at Kevin for getting me yelled at and proceeded to answer my
mother’s questions like the dutiful daughter she’d always wished
she’d had.
    After everyone had had their fill of burgers,
hot dogs and the epic tale of how I’d come to be living amongst
them again when I’d always sworn I’d poke my own eyes out with
chopsticks before I moved back to this godforsaken town, I decided
it was my turn to get some information. I turned to my mother.
    “How come you never told me that Danny
Salazar was back in Minter?”
    She shook her head, confused. “I don’t know.
He’s been here,” she looked over at my dad, “what is it Al, a
couple of years?” Dad grunted from his hammock and mom turned back
to me. “Why would I mention it?”
    “ Why ?” I looked at her incredulously,
then caught sight of Kevin out of the corner of my eye. He was
looking at me and shaking his head no. Duh. Why indeed.
     
    The Salazars lived in the house directly
behind us, our back yards sharing a fence. Miguel “Mike” Salazar
owned Salazar’s Sand & Gravel, and his two younger brothers,
Alejandro, or Alex, and Louie worked for him. Technically, I should
say Mike ran Salazar’s because although he may have owned the
business, the mob owned him. Minter is not a big mafia town, but
there are a few bookies and loan sharks that are reportedly
connected. According to popular legend, Mike Salazar was into them
for a lot of money. Rather than break his kneecaps, the mob made a
different deal. They would use Salazar’s for laundering money, they
would use Mike and his brothers as enforcers, and they would use
the gravel pits for whatever they needed them for. Mike was a mean
drunk. He didn’t necessarily drink often, but when he did he would
come home and beat the crap out of whichever family member he met
first. When his sons were small, that usually meant his wife, Rose.
Rose O’Reilly was a redhaired, fair skinned beauty who had fallen
for Mike’s good looks and charming lines. She had two sons with
him, Mike Junior and Danny, and she stayed with him after he
started drinking and cheating, I supposed because she always hoped
he’d stop and things would go back to the way they were before. As
the boys got older, they were frequently the targets for their
father’s rage, more often than not because they tried to protect
Rose. Supposedly Mike Junior was just like his father, hard and
mean. I didn’t know him. He was five years older than me, and when
I was still in junior high he had gone to prison for killing a man
in a bar fight. It was just before his eighteenth birthday, but
they had tried him as an adult, convicting him of second degree
murder, and he had been sentenced to fifteen years in the state
penitentiary at Lompoc.
    Danny was different. Being half Latin and
half Irish, it would have been an affront to stereotypes everywhere
if he hadn’t had a temper. But he didn’t have the same reputation
for meanness. Nevertheless, he was a Salazar and there was a burden
associated with that. People didn’t want their kids to play at his
house or become too friendly, and if it hadn’t been for baseball,
he probably would have been alone a lot. As it was, he was the best
player Minter had seen in decades, not to mention the best looking,
and consequently he was always popular, with both the boys and the
girls.