Seeing Off the Johns Read Online Free PDF

have been hurt too badly because he began reeling what was left of the banner into the truck. Chon got in his car then and left, hoping that Goyo wouldn’t remember that he’d had an audience, that someone had seen him at his whisky-soaked, grief-stricken worst.
    The house was empty when Chon arrived. Just like Henry said, candles lit his way home. In the time it took Chon to drop his friend off and bear witness to Goyo Mejia’s freefall, the candles had crossed his front yard and were making their way to Sigrid, if not all the way to Laredo and Mexico beyond. Chon got in the shower wondering if his parents and brother were among the half of town praying to a cross or the other half praying to the bottom of a glass.
    He lay down in bed thinking, as he always did—but in a totally different way—ofAraceli. He tried to imagine how she was hurting. He thought of how he would feel if she died, but he knew that it wasn’t the same thing. His obsession with her wasn’t the same thing as what she shared with John. He tried to think how he would feel if he lost his parents or his brother, but knew, without really knowing, that this wasn’t the same thing as losing someone you choose to love who chooses to love you back.
    Then he gave up trying her hurt on for size. He knew she was hurting, and that was enough. He wished he could tear open her being and kiss her soul in ways sweeter and more loving than he had previously wished he could kiss her mouth or her breasts or her anything and her everything. He said a small prayer of his own for the Johns and their families.
    He fell asleep that night having solved the riddle of nearly every sleepless night before then: he thought of Araceli without John Mejia muddying the picture. All he had to do, it turns out, was to think of her for her own sake—without thrusting upon her the weight of his desires and expectations—to see her as someone who could need and hurt and want and lose just like he could.
    Two days later, the memorial service had to be moved from the Greenton Funeral Home to the school gym to accommodate the expected turnout. Coach Gallegos, the man the Johns had taken to regional tournaments in football and a state tournament in baseball, said a few words about the heart the Johns displayed on the field of play. Mrs. Salinas spoke about a Mejia most of them didn’t know, about the poetry he wrote and how he helped tutor his best friend and had sworn to do so through a tough academic life. “They had been thinking about academics at UT!” she said emphatically.
    Dan McReynolds, who did the weekly football season addendum to the ten o’clock news—“The Friday Night Blitz”—drove in from Corpus and was the keynotespeaker of sorts. He had been a fan of the Johns’ style since he first ran highlights of them during their freshman year. It was through this show that the boys had become regional celebrities, especially when McReynolds began running tape of the boys’ famous conferences at the line of scrimmage. He even began covering the Greyhounds baseball team during the spring, not just during the playoffs as was usually the case for AA teams from a town that made up so small a portion of KIII’s viewership. It all paid off when he was in Austin to cover the state playoffs during the Johns’ junior year. Greenton and AAAAA Corpus Christi Moody both lost in their respective semis. He did an exclusive interview with the boys that weekend and another when he came to Greenton to cover their signing with UT a few months prior to their deaths. During that interview, they made no show of lining up three different college caps and selecting one, as was the custom for such signings. In fact, they wore burnt orange for the occasion.
    He talked about the young men he’d had the pleasure and good fortune of meeting. He’d become friends with them. He said that he had planned to cover them through