The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  “So what school do you go to?” I asked. I struggled with my Spanish. I was scared of how I sounded, how pocho she might know I was.

  “I don’t go right now,” she said.

  “Not to any school?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I thought maybe you were going to St. Xavier.”

  “No,” she told me. “Not right now.”

  “Then,” I said, “you don’t have to go to school.” It was supposed to be a question.

  She didn’t want to talk about it, you could tell.

  I put that first screen back. She followed but she came out the front door. “I’m right outside here!” she told her brother. “I’m not going anywhere!” and she turned away and waved good-bye.

  Both curtains and windows were closed in #5, a one-bedroom, and I slipped out the first screen. Inside an old man whose name was Josep—a strange name to me—lived with a woman whose name wasn’t normal either. The first time I saw him he was on the walk in a scratched-up wooden chair, doing nothing but sitting there. Sitting, only sitting, no newspaper, no book, no radio, nothing but his hands on his lap, fingers laced, in these old-man baggy slacks and an old-man button-up sweater and slip-on shoes that were so worn they looked like moccasins. He was looking out and away at the sky—full of telephone poles and wires and pigeons on them but like he was seeing something in or on them because he watched. He had a lot of silvery gray hair, thicker and more healthy than most viejitos, and long for an old man, and it was combed back nice, like he planned to go out soon or could if something came up. That first time I was sweeping he wouldn’t even pick up his chair and move so I could sweep right there. I just went around, like I didn’t even notice.

  “How come you do this?” he asked. It was like he was talking more at the push broom. He had an accent from somewhere not close to where anybody I knew was from.

  “The slate deck here, it gets dirty,” I told him, “and it’s supposed to be swept.”

  “No, no.” He shook his head and a finger like I was way stupid, like I wasn’t paying attention. “How come you do this?”

  “Cloyd Longpre. I live downstairs, in Number One. It’s that he married my mom.”

  He grabbed me by his eyes and squeezed. “He make you, or he pay you?”

  I sort of twisted my head away to say nothing, or to make it an I’m not sure.

  He shook his head slowly, backing off. When I’d finished sweeping, he went back to what he was doing before, which was sitting there, his hands back in his lap, fingers laced, gazing at the beyond in front of him.

  In the bedroom that wasn’t mine I listened for Nica’s voice in all those voices up there—mostly her dad’s came through. I was also having to hear my mom and the Cloyd arguing just a little too loud on the other side of the door. I probably was relieved that they were. It meant I could count the money I had hidden. Bueno, okay, look: The truth is that when I snuck into those houses, sometimes I took money away. At first it was only the change, especially if I saw dimes and quarters. Then I smarted up and checked only for bills. A dollar, a five, a ten, any of them could be sitting around, folded, piled, like forgotten or nothing to them, or in a drawer or a box under the bed. The worst time was that girl’s house. Yeah, I did what I said before, I did that. But in her parents’ bedroom, in a small drawer, I found an envelope with twenties, coming out to $200. You know? Most of the time I thought nobody’d notice, because—I dunno, but that was so much it’s what got me scared. I also started taking from my mom or my sister if I saw it around, or when I decided to look inside their purse. Only a few dollars. I stopped that too, I didn’t like doing it. At first, yeah, I spent it. That’s what I thought I took it for. Even then I wouldn’t spend very much. I’d go out and buy like a half-gallon square of chocolate ice cream. But then I made a decision to save this money, to use it right. Also because stealing made me feel shitty, and I didn’t like that part much. So it seemed better that if I wasn’t wasting it, if it wasn’t exactly gone, just put away for necessary things, it wasn’t as bad. When I’d collected small bills, I’d go over to a store and exchange the little ones into a twenty, and then I’d put it in this envelope with the others. Anyways, once in a while I liked to see it and count it, and this seemed like a good time for that. It was, I thought, hidden in a good place—I’d pulled up the bedroom carpet in the corner, next to where the bookcase was, and put it there and it didn’t bulge out. I don’t know why I liked to get it out and count it sometimes, but I did. It was a thick stack, and it now was up to $249. Probably there’s some explanation I couldn’t think of for wanting to do the counting. Probably I looked right then because I’d just taken $6 from Cloyd, and I’d put it away fast a couple of days ago. It was sitting there in his truck, on the bench seat, almost lost in a pile of receipts and fast food trash. Like he didn’t care about it. To me. That was just the other day. I hadn’t thought about it much since, but while they were being loud at each other, I guess it got me to remembering what I did.

  I could tell by the tone of the footsteps outside my door that they were headed at me. I stabbed the money under the pillow fast when my mom walked in.

  “I want to sit with you for a minute,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I just want to. Dame un minuto, one, please.”

  “Why, though?”

  “Because I need to.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No. Yeah. No.” She laughed.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Nothing you can do, nothing. Only I can.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you know that he cares about toilet paper?”

  “What?”

  “He cares about toilet paper. How much is used.”

  “You mean. … ?”

  “Yes, when you make a coo-coo.”

  I started to laugh really hard. She did too. “En serio, he means this. I don’t think I ever knew anything like this.” I’m laughing, happy about my mom. “Like four squares. Algo así.” She was laughing really hard too. “Shh! If he hears us!”

  Bud and Mary were the couple who lived in #7. He did construction. You knew because he wore a T-shirt with the name of a sheetrocking company on it. He was muscles and shoulders under that cotton shirt, his skin darkened from sun, his forearms bulging out like they were biceps, his biceps swollen like calves. Mary was a substitute teacher. I knew that because she took over one of my classes one time. She didn’t recognize or remember or even know me, and she didn’t ask about where or if I went to school when I said hi then. Her face sagged as miserable as the rest of her when I saw her walking by my locker. At the table, she was eating chips from the bowl my mom put there, wearing her nice substitute teacher dress that, sitting down here, seemed like it was getting pushed at in more places about to burst. Bud made one of those glad-to-meet-mes, shaking my hand like it was a sport he always had to win and always did. My mom was cooking food. Really. She was even making something Mexican, even if she didn’t know how to cook it any better than anything else. One time I heard the Cloyd on the phone. He said, I love to eat them tacos, and now I even got myself married to a pretty little Mexican gal. He said that. Really. The dude who my mom married. She had some rice on the stove, and something was going wrong there, because her face was way close to the burner, watching it boil through the glass cover. I knew something was more messed up when Cloyd complimented her on the chili salsa. He might as well have complimented her on the tortilla chips, because she bought them at a store too. She didn’t correct him though. She had on a brand new apron. It was cute, she’d call it, probably from an expensive department store. She had a new dress on under it too, and she was fixed up like behind the stove door wasn’t enchiladas but one of those too-dark restaurants she expected to be taken to before she married him.

  My mom was already done with a tall drink of some kind and was asking Cloyd to fix her another. A whole lineup of colored and clear liquor bottles were
out on the sink, and next to them was the silver ice cube bucket with tongs I couldn’t believe anybody used but my mom said you were supposed to have. Mary was drinking a can of soda. Bud and the Cloyd were drinking beer and were the only ones talking.

  “We can’t let them take away the work from us,” Bud was saying.

  “But don’t you hire them sometimes yourself?” Cloyd asked.

  “Cheap as they are, shit yeah!”

  They both laughed and laughed.

  Mary was squirming like she wanted to move her underwear with her butt. She picked out the widest chips that were in the bowl in front of her. She ate one while she picked another, not stopping.

  “It’s just that I don’t know where they think they are,” said Bud. “This is my home, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “Please stop talking about this,” said Mary. “I hate this kind of discussion.”

  Bud didn’t like her comment. “Save some of the chips for the rest of us,” he told her, shaking his head. “Does this topic get you perturbed, Silvia?” Bud asked my mom.

  “God, I hate when you’re drinking,” Mary said after she’d swallowed again.

  “So now you see how come we have such a good sex life,” he told Cloyd. “We gotta make up every night.”

  The two men laughed.

  Bud said, “Maybe we have to limit our conversation to the black race.”

  The two men laughed.

  Mary said, “God, Bud.”

  Bud said, “Okay okay already.”

  Cloyd said, “He knows how to raise your hackles, Mary.”

  Bud said, “See, he knows I’m shittin’ around.”

  Mary shook her head.

  “So, what about these Southern Democrats? Isn’t it only a matter of time they’re in our neighborhood?”

  “God, Bud,” said Mary. She said that a little muffled because she was eating the tortilla chips and had a mouthful again.

  “That’s not gonna happen,” Cloyd said.

  “It’s happening already,” Bud said. “Lotta moving noises coming from just a few blocks from here.”

  “Bud, have you seen one yet living on our street? Have you seen one black living on any ten blocks around here?”

  “I dunno. It’s not like it’s impossible if I haven’t.”

  “You have not,” said Cloyd. “It’s not likely to happen neither.”

  “What’s to stop ’em?”

  “I own this apartment building,” Cloyd said. “You think I can’t let who I want to live here? That I can’t figure out how to not let who I don’t want to live here? We take care of each other by taking care of our own interests.”

  “Food’s almost ready,” my mom said from the cooking area. “Sorry it’s been taking me so long. And I just know this rice could be better. I’m embarrassed.”

  Cloyd went for his favorite bottle. He got a glass and an ice cube and poured his whiskey in it and swirled a cube.

  “The truth is,” he said, “I don’t want their problems.” It was like he was going to take a swallow but he didn’t. “Now you take the Mexicans. The Mexicans aren’t making no problems. They’re good, hard-working folks who take care of their family and pay their bills. It’s not that I don’t work with black people who ain’t like that too sometimes—”

  “I don’t think we should be talking about this,” my mom interrupted. “Can we please not? For me and Mary?”

  The two men looked at each other, discouraged like the women told them they had to turn off a football game.

  “Okay, so here’s another one for you,” said Bud. “What’s the deal with my new neighbor? What’s that freakball do? You know who I’m talking about.”

  “In Six?”

  “Of course! He don’t look like he’s ever seen any daylight.”

  “He is sort of strange, isn’t he?” Cloyd said. “Pinkston. You call him Pink.”

  “Pink? You kidding?”

  Cloyd shook his head.

  “How can his name be the color of his skin? I cannot believe a man who looks pink like that could be named Pink.”

  They were kind of laughing without laughing.

  “He sells used cars,” Cloyd told him.

  “Used cars?”

  “Parks ’em right outside on the street here. It took me awhile to figure it out. I’m betting he sells them like they’re his private and personal property. I’m betting he tells them it’s his old mother’s or grandmother’s dear car, practically never driven, something like that. How he hates to sell it because it’s been in his family so long.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Probably not exactly. He’s being a dealer without paying for a dealer’s license, appears.”

  “Damn well knew he must be some kind of hustler.”

  “He pays me cash too,” said Cloyd.

  “For his rent?”

  Cloyd nodded, but making sideways, thinking eyes. “Even when he moved in. All of it in cash.”

  “Ain’t that something suspicious,” said Bud. “It don’t set off the alarms?”

  Either Cloyd had thought of it a lot or never, I couldn’t tell by his expression which.

  “But then you gotta be impressed,” said Bud. “Yeah, I couldn’t get much of a read on that freak. He’s something, he is some work.”

  My mom was carrying the food to the table.

  “Don’t you love Mexican food?!” said Cloyd.

  “Here I thought you only married her for her looks,” said Bud.

  “I am a lucky man.” Cloyd smiled at her. He was drunk, that stupid grin.

  * * *

  Los Flores apartment building was right off the boulevard. The boulevard was cars parked or moving. At night they cruised in slo-mo, checking not just what was ahead but the headlights beamed every screwy way from the banged-up cars, up and down and left and right, while the dim yellow from the streetlamps, because of the wino stink, turned the broken glass in the alleys and against the curbs and doorways of out-of-business stores into glowing, petrified chunks of piss, made the dried-up oil stains seem to come from beneath the asphalt, puddling up from the center of the earth. I’d made it a few blocks away to the corner diner with the bowling alley, Alley Cats, where I was going to eat most of the time. I ordered a large fries and a burger—Mrs. Zúniga put a pile of jalapeños in it, which I loved, and instead of mayonnaise, she put in her homemade chile—and a chocolate shake. The thick shake was really two because it was made in one of those silver containers and came out all iced on the outside. Mrs. Zúniga, who I think liked me to eat there, always gave me so much more of everything. I think Mr. Zúniga and her probably owned the place. To me it was going into a home except there was a bar and bowling alley and a cash register. Mrs. Zúniga did all the floors and dusting and dishwashing and cooking, and Mr. Zúniga had the tools, the register, the trash, the beer openers, and changed the channel on the TV up in the corner. They both were always smiling at me, winking and like that. Mostly her, I guess, not him. Not him at all. He was too business, watching everything going on or else distracted by what was going on inside his head.

  There were only six lanes, and I was the only one bowling. There wasn’t a time I went when I wasn’t the only one bowling, and the customers on the stools at the counter got to watch me instead of the TV when I got there. The first time that made me do a lot worse, but not after a while. Mostly they were a bunch of viejitos with bad eyesight or lonely drunks and probably had nowhere else to go either, drinking beer after bottle of beer, and if they didn’t say something nice when I left, which they didn’t, it was only because their nose was sniffing the glass. I already put my favorite ball in a corner of the rack at the most distant corner, and I never had to worry about it getting moved. The holes in it were drilled maybe twice or something like that, and they were chipped all around, but I liked the way my fingers and thumb went in anyways. The ball made a little curve about two-thirds down the lane. I was trying to break my high of 207. I’d hit that the third
time I ever bowled and I was so hyped about it I daydreamed about bowling a lot. The last times I rolled I wasn’t even getting close. I was missing some easy spares, and then I wasn’t getting any strings of strikes like I did that high game. It seemed like I was right there, in that spot next to the one pin, but they wouldn’t all explode in that crash when it was a strike and I was leaving one or three or some split. It was no different tonight, and after the fifth game—which at one point I was sucking so bad it seemed like I might not break a hundred—I quit.

  I was following a street that ran beside the railroad tracks. I don’t know how long this sickie white dude had been following me. At first he was like trailing a car length behind, but when I noticed him, when he saw I did, he pulled alongside. His ratty car had electric windows with a strip of chrome at the top and the passenger’s window slid straight down, and he had to lower his head to do his pervie look over at me from the driver’s side. He had short hair that was long in some wrong way and wore glasses. I’m not sure if what he had was what you’d call a smile. He followed like that until finally I decided to cross over the tracks and walk the other direction and go back to Los Flores. Not a few minutes later, there he was next to me again. Inside I was screaming at him to fuck off, calling him queer joto homo and shit. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t bother to go after him. Maybe because it was easy enough to cross the tracks again, where his car couldn’t follow. This next time when he pulled around, he parked way up above me because I was walking against the one-way. He was sitting there, waiting. Did he think I would just walk right over to him? Fucking fucked-up freak maricón loser. I decided to make a break. I crossed the tracks once more, but this time I was running and I got onto a street that took me into a neighborhood with lots of trees and bushy shrubs and I kept on running until I found an alley and cut through it. It was a good run. Pretty soon I was on a bigger street. It was dark enough that if I had to I could hide. I ducked in a corner once when I saw some headlights coming from behind me, but it wasn’t sickie dude.