Chelo- part 1

He had a kind heart, Chelo did. He hated to see suffering and fed the stray dogs that slunk through the back alley the crust from the cheese sandwiches his mother made him. She always managed to avert her gaze long enough for him to drop the little piles of unwanted bread where the dogs slept behind the battered trash cans. He wasn't proud of his tenderness and hid it like an embarrassing birthmark.
Chelo was the oldest of 6 children, and at 15 he felt the turmoil of puberty but also the soft warmth of nurturing that comes from diapering babies and mixing countless bottles of formula. He knew they couldn't afford to keep a pet and the crumbs were the best he could offer the timid, mangy creatures.
His Nan lived with them since his father died a year ago. She was a shriveled, bitter woman who believed her greatest service to her grandchildren was warning them of the dangers of the white devil. While in life she hated his father and wished him every ill, in death he’d become a martyr. His violent exit from the cruel streets of King’s Corner was punctuated by a stray bullet from the police as they chased a kid accused of stealing a packaged muffin from the bodega up the street.
The park across town was full of rusty metal dinosaurs, their hot metal bones jutting into the sky in defiance of the passing of time. He often took the smaller children there in the afternoon so his mother could tidy the house and start the evening meal. They giggled their way down the street, insulting each other loudly with nonsensical names and accusations of heinous crimes. The old woman who lived across from the park sometimes offered them butter mints, which they took but never ate.
Sundays were good days in King’s Corner. Most people were home from their errands and jobs and the park smelled of meat fat, smoking charcoal, and stale urine. Chelo hustled the kids past a sleeping vagrant with vomit in his beard and sought a quiet place to write while his siblings tumbled over the playground equipment.