The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

“It’s okay,” I said.

  “I can get you a studying desk too,” he said, looking at an empty space. “I got the one that was in here out back in the storage unit.” He was trying to be nice, but really it was more have-to-be-nice than nice. It was to make my mom happy, probably.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, shaking my head no.

  “It’s not a problem,” he said. “It fits right there. I don’t even remember why I took it out.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “I must have taken it out because it was broken, not just small. Yeah, I think that was what it was. But I can glue it up, make it work for you, and then I’m sure I can find you a chair for it.”

  “I don’t need nothing, man.” I was sounding nice, I swear.

  He looked around and paused, but he was thinking about me. “You gotta study. That’s what the Notre Dames want.”

  “I can probably just lay on the bed if I have to,” I said, trying, honestly. Still, a few seconds later, I couldn’t stop. “Notre Dame, France.”

  “Always good to have a desk,” he said, copping attitude.

  I was hoping not to talk much more. I didn’t like the way it felt, me sitting there on the bed he owned, and him standing above me. “Yeah, thanks, but I don’t want it.” I looked up at him for less than a second, which was hard for me to do. “I like it here the way it is now.”

  “Have it your way,” he said. Now he sounded ticked at me.

  “Thanks though.” I don’t know why I didn’t want to say it to him directly, but I said it looking away.

  “You need anything. …” he said.

  “A French book,” I said.

  It was almost like he was hearing me talk in French. “Wha’d you say?”

  “A French book. I probably need a French book. To study it, you know?”

  “O-kay,” he said, making two words.

  He almost closed the door behind him, but my mom was next, already pushing it back open. She’d had her nails done. It was how she was holding her hands.

  “Is everything fine, m’ijo?”

  I nodded.

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nada nada?” She used a mami voice to me.

  “Yeah. Nothing.”

  “It’ll be good living here,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  I nodded like I was trying to really mean it.

  “You’ll see.”

  My mom was dressed too pretty to take serious, shampoo in her hair and body lotion smell, and she was trying too hard to sound happy. Nobody’d believe her except her.

  “I won’t have to work, so I’ll even get to cook for you.”

  That made me smile because it was almost funny to imagine.

  “I can too cook! Don’t you laugh at me!”

  Sometimes she’d cooked at home. She made enchiladas and tacos fast. What I loved was this deal made with noodles and beef and green chile and cheese and canned creamed corn. She would make one or the other of them for birthdays, although she usually bought our food someplace. I couldn’t imagine her in the kitchen more than like once a month. First off, she didn’t have the clothes for it. She’d have to buy special clothes. Second, moms who cooked were fat and slobby. And third, they wore their hair like for being home, for vacuuming and watching daytime TV. She never even watched TV. She wasn’t any fat, and it seemed like she was always going to a beauty parlor to try a new hairstyle, which everyone complimented her on because it would like “fit her face so well”—what she’d say the girls said, no matter what style—and she had to wear lots of shining jewelry. Nobody cooks meals wearing hoop earrings and silver bracelets.

  She came over and sat next to me on the bed, putting her arm around me like she might make out with me. “Todavía you’re my baby boy, you know, and now I’m going to get to be a mother for you. I know I haven’t been. I haven’t had any time for you, have I?”

  I shrugged. This whole scene was beginning to make me pretty much think about, I don’t know, studying French, just to mess with everybody.

  “I’m so sorry, m’ijito. I really am.” She kissed me right on the lips.

  I couldn’t remember the last time she kissed me anywhere, unless it was for show when she’d also be drinking. You know, one of those Qué guapo es my little man!, and then a hard smooch like she couldn’t resist me, leaving her audience, her fans, usually her girlfriends, giggling and aahing. But this was softening me, enough to almost straight out ask her, So why this Cloyd dude? It ain’t funny. What are you thinking? I already knew her answers, once I took a second. I was older than her in a way that isn’t about years, and she even expected me to tell her practical shit. But I still wanted her to tell me herself. I didn’t want to only listen in, overhear her talking on the phone. I loved my mom even when I wondered why everyone was supposed to love their mom. Maybe because, if she wasn’t drunk, it was so easy to understand her. Simple. Except the part about these men. Especially except the part about this Cloyd man. How could she? I don’t mean the practical part. I meant, How was she planning to live here with him every day? How was she gonna get out of here clean? She did not like him. So I wanted her to tell me in words, to describe it to me kind of, well, so it’d be a story that made sense, and I’d see it that way.

  All you had to do was look around the apartment to know this Cloyd wasn’t right for either of us. That big dinner table which he called the supper table, with the heavy wooden chairs all around it—I don’t think I’d ever seen so much wood, even in a picture of a forest. And we never ate dinner at no table before, unless it was at a restaurant. My mom told me the furniture was maple. That was the same wood as all around the house, the end tables and the coffee table, the little knickknack shelves, and a china cabinet. I figured it was that maple went with the color of a dead deer’s head. Those were in the living room—that room next to where the dinner table was—hanging from a wall. Okay, all the others were in his office, and there was only one deer head in the living room. A buck, he explained. Another body on the wall was a prize-winning rainbow trout, he said—it was a fish, to me, before he said it—and another was an owl, which took over the top of the maple cabinet, its claws gripping a branch which shot off a thicker branch which was in a varnished slice of a tree trunk. He didn’t shoot this owl, Cloyd told us. His son just gave it to him as a present. Not on a birthday or Christmas, no holiday whatever, just plain gave it to him to be his kind of cool. His son was a taxidermist and did the work himself. All of it, in fact, was his own professional work. The lamps, wood with flying birds—mallard ducks, he said—painted on them, he bought those at a store for decoration.

  He asked if I wanted to hear about the day he shot that buck. I was supposed to say yes. I couldn’t stand there nice and listen, could not. No, not even if I sat on that ugly red sofa or that big leather chair, the one that was his favorite chair, he said, more reliable than any woman—his Sil here excluded, of course! I was welcome to sit in it too, he said, but if I got used to it, I better not be surprised if he just landed on my lap. He was so funny, huh? I wanted to laugh. Yeah, he’d been sitting in it for so many years it was like a bed to him. He liked to fall asleep in it after work. He’d get so comfy and cozy he’d get mad at himself when he woke up past his bedtime. A couple few beers, he said, a couple few sips of Old Grand Dad, and, well, that chair was the one to make Zzs in. But no anyways, not even if I could sit in that chair of his, did I want to hear about the buck that was up above, across from it. Maybe later, I told him, as polite as I could make myself.

  I was slouching against that red sofa, waiting for the end. “So when is Goofy gonna be able to come here?”

  “We’re working on that,” Cloyd said. “We’re trying to figure that one out.”

  My mom was pretending not to hear my question, and I did not want to talk about it with him. But I didn’t want her to say some lie to me either. She was always lying.

  “What happened to her?” I was asking
my mom.

  “She’s with my son,” he said.

  “You mean the dude who stuffs dead animals?”

  “That’s not what’s happening,” he said. “Be smart.”

  “He is smart,” my mom said.

  “Let’s not get in a fight over this,” he said.

  “I just don’t think you need to say anything like that about Sonny,” she said.

  “I only wanna know what happened to Goofy,” I said.

  “And all I meant to say, all I said was, she’s fine,” he said.

  My mom got pissed off eyes for him, so didn’t look at him. “She can’t live here with us, m’ijo, I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. I’m sorry.”

  “The dog’s fine,” Cloyd said. “The dog’s happy.”

  I would have to learn to talk in French. I wanted a sentence. It made me smile, thinking how I would learn French.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you ask where she is?” Joe or Mike said, the first dudes around here I met. I couldn’t get which name went to which yet. We were walking home from the new to me school.

  “At least you could ask to go over and see her,” said his brother Mike or Joe. “I’d be so mad.”

  “Me too,” said Joe or Mike. “I’m pretty sure they really gassed her in the dog pound ovens. I’d be pissed.”

  One of them slanted an eye at his brother. “You shouldn’t say that,” he told him.

  “Okay, yeah,” said the other. “Sorry.”

  “So lots of people have those sheets on their bed?” I asked. I wanted to change the subject.

  “Yeah, dude,” one of them said, though either could have. “You raised up allá el rancho grande or what? Everybody gets sheets in the big city.”

  I’d seen these twins, José and Miguel Hernández, after the first day, and when I saw them going my direction I made them my walking-home friends. They told me they lived a block farther than I did, which, they explained, meant I lived the second farthest away than anybody else. That was a fact, one of them said in these words, a quantifiable, measurable fact. My fact was that I not only couldn’t tell them apart, I was never sure which one of them was the one talking unless I was staring because they sounded exactly the same too. And since I hadn’t ever known twins before, I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. They parted their black hair on the side the same way, the cut too short, waxed hairs still popping out, and they both wore the exact same black-framed glasses, and they both dragged the soles and heels of their black wingtip shoes. They were strange, you could tell. And not the science-and-math kind of strange, and not the hanging-out-too-much-at-the-library type either. I had a feeling that, before I came along, they didn’t have lots of other friends. Or any. I didn’t have any here either, and I decided I didn’t want any while I was living here because I was convinced it was just for a few months until my mom busted us out. I was so mad at everything that nobody knew I was mad, only that I snapped like a backyard German shepherd. I was not gonna let no new kid fuck with me, and I walked the schoolyard that way. The twins were so harmless I didn’t even have to think about anything with them, which was like world peace, and they were funny, so I liked them and I walked home with them.

  We were stopped at a malts-and-dipped-cones stand another day and were drinking tall shakes at a wobbly picnic table near the sidewalk. The street beside us seemed wider than four lanes. All kinds of cars cruised it, from the best low ones, with glittery spokes, to the finest-looking rods with pipes gurgling and wide slicks, and older Caddies all customized or streeted out, and newer Lincolns that were stock and wet-glossed, and sick, sputtering, wheezy coupes with duct-taped windows, and dried-up station wagons with new various-sized retreads and no hubcaps ever. And always lots of shouting huge loud radio stations floating by, lots of broken tunes and words.

  “What’s he do?” one of the twins asked me.

  “A plumber, I think,” I said. “For like new homes and businesses, you know.”

  “He must be rich if he owns your apartment building,” said the other. “How many apartments?”

  “Six or maybe seven. I can’t remember.”

  “Any hot ruquitas live there?” one asked.

  That was the first time one of them made me laugh out loud and not just to myself. It’s because I couldn’t imagine either of them even standing near a girl, so it was crazy hilarious to hear the word like they were on it. “You mean girls?”

  “Hell yeah, chicks, what else?”

  “What else.” I laughed. “I think so,” I said.

  “You don’t know?” said the other. “How can you not know?”

  “I think there’s this one,” I said. “She’s in an apartment above.”

  “Oh yeah.” It could’ve been either of them who said that. He said it in an all-hip tone, like she was already a sure thing. “What’s she like?”

  “What’s she got?” the other jumped in. “Jugaluggas, buenas nalgas, o todo el paquetote?”

  They made me laugh! It was like, did they think I thought they were experts on the subject? They were both serious, like we were talking cars that passed. “I dunno, man,” I said. “Big chichis, it seemed like, and a nice butt. I only caught a glance. Both were good, I’d say.”

  They nodded at each other scientifically, and then a distant look away, like to God, like pretty soon they’d make a move to check out my crib.

  These black dudes with too much bass in their ride pulled up to the curb and were looking at us like that was why they pulled over. I looked back, and then away, keeping them so far at the corner of my eye that it wouldn’t seem like at all. One of them got out, gold chains slapping his chest while he walked, and he bobbed and weaved like right to where I was sitting, jamming me with his eyes on the way, then went past, not saying shit else until he got to the order window. Another dude had turned off the engine but not the sound system, which took everything like a headache. Our straws were sucking the bottom of our cups and it seemed healthy to get going.

  “Wouldn’t you hate to have a name like that?” one of the twins said, getting up.

  They were still talking about Cloyd Longpre. It was as though he didn’t see what was maybe happening. He tossed his empty cup in the barrel, which was near the dude at the window. He was watching but not straight on.

  “Wouldn’t you hate telling people that your dad was named Cloyd?” the other said.

  The brother watched the other twin toss his in the barrel near him too, ready for a wrong move. I held on to mine even though it was empty. Once we started walking, and the music got quieter and behind our back, I threw my empty in front of the door of a closed-down store. It was more like they didn’t know those dudes wanted to get us into some kind of roll.

  The twins had started woofing on names. They were competing on who could come up with more of what Cloyd’s brothers would be named: Hoss, Elmer, Jethro, Wilbur, Honker, Gomer, Horatio, Horace, and so on.

  I wished I could make myself joke more about Cloyd Longpre.

  “Lots of Mexican names are howlers too,” one of them said. “You gotta admit it.”

  “Yeah, lots of names just like that in Spanish, even crazier,” said the other. “Think of it. Like say your name is Ramiro Ramirez. Or maybe Gonzalo Gonzalez. Or maybe Rodrigo Rodriguez.”

  “You know what I hate?” said his brother. “Beto. I know it’s muy common, pero to me it sounds como like saying butthole, with an accent.”

  “But Cloyd!”

  “Ay, yeah, that is a really, really, really bad name, even for a white person! And, hijole, a stepdad!”

  Laughing, they both looked at me, wanting me to agree. When I didn’t do nothing, they slowed it down.

  “Pero nothing like Skip. Or Tad. Tad. Hey, man, you wanna tad? Or like saying Jack. How can that be a real name, you know? Besides, no Mexican can say Jack, you know? It’s ’cause it’s hard to say when you try to say it: Yack, hey yack.”

  “What about the name Dick.”

  “Dick!” His b
rother cracked up.

  They were both bent over dying over those names. I guess I didn’t really care about it as much as they did. “Hey, I don’t want you guys telling nobody his name,” I warned them. “Don’t be talking about it, funny or not funny, nothing.”

  “We wouldn’t,” one said, a big old grin still there.

  “I’m not fucking around,” I told him.

  They both shut down and got a little afraid of me, I could tell.

  “You don’t have to get pissed off,” one said. “We’re not laughing at you.”

  I’d probably sounded worse than I meant, but, you know, it was probably better so they wouldn’t dare make the mistake. “I just don’t want you telling nobody at that school,” I said.

  “We won’t,” one said. “Swear to God.”

  “Yeah, swear to Quetzalcoatl y la Lupe,” the other said. “Sorry, okay?”

  I don’t know what I was up to at first, spending so much time in that bedroom my mom was calling mine, sometimes watching a TV alone there, avoiding the other rooms and people like Cloyd. If I were to go out there, they’d want to sit at the maple dinner table and eat supper. I hated that word, but I would’ve hated the deal no matter. I’d say junk like I’m not hungry, but thanks, or I already ate too much after school, I’m so full. The first couple of times my mom made me sit there anyways. Once it was deer meat, which I could barely chew or swallow—ugly!—so much I didn’t even want to eat mashed potatoes, which I love. Which made my mom feel hurt because she said she made them from real potatoes, not a box. I hated deer meat and will always hate deer meat. Cloyd food. Another time was fish. I pretended to get sick on that, which in a way wasn’t hard because this fish had an eye staring up at me from the plate. Like the deer, he killed it, it was his—he was proud of that kind of shit. I just went to the bathroom and came out and told them I threw up. I knew Cloyd didn’t buy any of that or like it or both, and probably my mom didn’t really either—she didn’t eat that fish either—but she backed me.

  I had my own little stash but for right then she also started giving me a few dollars, passing a few to me kind of sideways so he wouldn’t know. I rounded the corner onto the boulevard, passing the World Motel and Mercado Tires and La Copa de Oro, and I bought burritos off Manny’s lunch truck or hot dogs at a stand, Lucy’s Tacos, until I found this six-lane bowling alley and diner, Alley Cats, where I really liked eating, though I had to get used to going there because the lady there kept asking me questions. I liked the bowling. If I didn’t have enough money or want to spend my own, I’d just stay hungry until the Cloyd went to sleep, when I could sneak out and make sandwiches. I never liked watching TV so much and finally I turned it off, even if I’d never had one in my bedroom before. I listened to radio. When I listened to music it was Fourth of July, colors and explosions of colors and lights and shapes, the singers’ voices spinning like planets and moons, getting bigger, and smaller, and farther away, and closer, and closer, then over there, and up. I loved this world. When my mom this one time wondered how I could listen to a radio so much, I told her, or I tried to, and she stood there with this somewhere-else look on her face, and she didn’t understand, or maybe she didn’t listen to me, and she didn’t ever wonder again, so I didn’t have to try to explain. That’s how she usually was. She had other things in her ears, she saw other things. Yeah, we were kind of alike, I know. But it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t.