The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  We all heard Angel crying. It hadn’t been for very long. He’d started to cry while we were listening to the story.

  “Did you kiss her?” I asked him. “Did she kiss you?”

  “I have to go inside,” Nica said. She was sad. “I have to go back inside now.”

  Mr. Josep stood up too. “He is fine.”

  “I have to go in,” she said as she shut the door, the sunset light against the glass of her apartment’s window gone.

  I saw it. Or it’s what I didn’t. The darkness was not light. The darkness was what might be a wall and might be a bottomless hole. It was not light. No sun and no moon. Death was not light. And the light, the light was what could be seen. Light was what shined and sparkled and was happiness, and death was like sleeping alone—it was not light. Light could be still and be watched or could pass under like a freeway was under you and you sat there. It was a spray and flow in the face when you couldn’t not notice it and you didn’t always unless it came at you so hard.

  I was sleepy, maybe even asleep, and light was making shadow and felt good, like the shape of a nipple and pushing against me, and my hands are on her, and she is a bright ball except small, and smaller—if I could get closer, if I could see it but it was too far, or so little, because I can almost not see it easy. I’m fast, I’m more, I’m more. I’m seeing, I’m hearing, I’m touching, I’m tasting.

  I needed to get up, or I needed to wake up. I was too alone. I was confused. I was all alone and it was dark behind and around me and I was alone and I was scared to be alone. I didn’t want to be this kind of alone. Nobody but me. Nobody else but me. I didn’t know what I should do and I didn’t know what else to do. I imagined going to my mom, but she wouldn’t. Not her either. No one.

  And so I woke myself up—whatever you call it when you get up from this and it’s still before the birds. First I went to the magazines I’d hidden. Nobody else touched them. I don’t know why I got so worried about having them. Nobody knew and nobody’d know unless I told them. First I thought about hiding them better. Then how I should give them to the twins. I pulled the bookcase over and pulled up the corner where I hid my money. I wanted to make sure it was how I left it. I was spending too much and I needed more and I didn’t think I was gonna get any money unless I took it. I stood up and I went into his office and I sat in his swivel chair. It squeaked so loud I about jumped out of it, feeling busted. I didn’t move, though. I waited. I almost went back, but then I opened, slowly, that desk drawer. The envelope hadn’t moved. I closed, slowly, the drawer. I kept my eyes low enough but I stared back at all the killed eyes in his office, eyes like Goofy’s, and though she watched me sometimes, hers were never sad.

  Me and the twins started walking the high beam of the street curb near the railroad tracks, balancing above the half- and full-out smashed paper cups in the gutter, near where dumpster trash blew up and out and off like moths unless they gummed up and tangled in the sticky weeds. There was a stink of a fire somewhere, which could not be called campfire smell and was something more likely horrible, like a house fire one day or two ago, and, yeah, also there was that nasty ammonia of wino piss new and old as everywhere as oil and grease and dried turds that, yeah, better be only dog doo, please. For me, it was not much like we were walking in wild nature even when we got behind one of those houses in an alley with bushy green growing all around it. First of all, mostly it wasn’t green in the right way, because smog and grease and gas fume was stuck on it, and there were a lot of broken branches, sticks really, and then a car parked on the front yard was usually a dead one, and out in the backyard there’d be a couple trashed-out classics, but they were wheelless, dented, with broken windows and rotted tires and missing radiators—a bad place to make a life of getting in the back or seat behind a wheel. To me, death hummed through power lines and were not like cute clotheslines swinging low in the air and didn’t make it feel like a clean spring morning. So for me it wasn’t no great outdoors when our fun was tossing rocks at shit, even when the best ones—and I got me one of those rocks I wouldn’t throw, a round one—and bigger ones that were chunks of broken cement made a nothing thud into and against trash cans, or when you had to be hopping over drying-out piles of bird shit—sure, you gotta watch your step out in the wild, I know that much, but barely tied-up dogs with drooling chops, leaping and snarling, gagged by rope that held them, wanting to chew us like we were bloody butcher bones still wet in the marrow. Nah, this was no wildass exciting danger in the woods. Maybe it was for these twins, but for me we never for one moment weren’t where I knew this wasn’t any nature hiking. Even if there were a couple of lemon trees and pomegranates in that alley, or oranges in that backyard, and over there an avocado and an apple tree and yeah there were tall palm trees and banana plants, and little palm bushes, and all of it would seem like it was the jungle pushing itself over a backyard with a gang-tagged wall—maybe the twins saw things around them in a better way than me. They kept telling me it was my messed-up and no-fun head until these lowriders threw a can that landed close, either by accident or not, and sprayed all over. Those dudes laughed and screamed “Cuidense, putos!” and rolled up their tinted windows and spun off. That at least changed them for a couple of minutes.

  Mike made the most flipped-out noises about them, cussing like he’d do something if they came back or we chased them down. Joe, who I finally knew was not Mike, was even saying, “Pinches culeros gachos.”

  It wasn’t asshole police he hated, even though now they were cruising by. They were still going on about those other dudes so much they were blind. I wouldn’t have interrupted nothing either, until that fuzzy-haired sickie from that other time, I swear, backed off his perv ride, checking us out slow, and maybe he did think his drooling eyes might get us all so heated up that ay ay, que pasó pues, mister, like we’d be dumb-shit all over to him, all turned on and wanna jump in. I told the twins how I swore it was that same freak who’d followed me before, and Mike got to wondering which kind of culo was worse, one with tinted windows and a car club plaque or ones with power windows smeared with saliva and none of us wants to know what else.

  “You’d think he could at least focus on girls,” Joe said. He wasn’t upset about the lowriders like Mike was. “Though I guess that’d be sick too, pues, even más sick.”

  “I hate living here sometimes,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, let’s tell Mom que por fin we will agree to move to Beverly Hills,” said Joe.

  “Chúpame, güey.” He wanted to get into a fight, even if it was only his brother, even if it was only with words.

  Sure, the twins weren’t like dudes who’d be able to fight for you or even with you—they’d fucking run so far, so away!—and they weren’t putos, but they were kind of pussies. Still, by now they were guys I’d stand up for. I was past liking the twins. I hung with them during these school walks anyways, no matter. They were the only dudes I really knew since I’d moved here and I wasn’t trying to meet anyone else at that school. They were the only friends I had. It was that I didn’t think we would be living very long at Los Flores. I don’t know why I got to telling little things about any of it to them. Maybe I liked the dumb way they got worked up whenever I told them shit. They made it seem like my life was a joy ride, like I was traveling, and their envy made me stronger. They heard me too much, and every little story I gave them seemed to pop in their sky like fireworks. It’s that they never hung with nobody outside their own family, and they were always like they were, dressed like they dressed.

  “You made it with her?” Joe couldn’t walk and say this at the same time. “Straight up! Did you put it in her?”

  The way his voice sounded—something almost like being at the top of his lungs but squeaking—made me laugh so hard I couldn’t answer if I wanted to. I hadn’t told them anything exact and didn’t plan to, but it wasn’t like I was saying I didn’t neither.

  “She’s married, right?” said Mike. He really did forget, just like tha
t, about the mood he was in. “That’s crazy, dude! That’s really fucking loco, loco!”

  “You mean being in her apartment?” I asked. I really was wondering if they thought it was as much about being in her apartment, just that, whether that was like crossing the line.

  “Fucking A, B, and C!” said Mike.

  “And putting Z in her!” said Joe like he was a voice in a Nazi movie.

  That really made me laugh too hard for a long time.

  “Yeah, I think that’d be something that’d make her old man not like you there,” said Mike.

  We’d moved off the curb and were standing on the wooden ribs of the railroad tracks above the gravel river of rocks, leaping between their iron spines, going miles forward and miles backward—couldn’t tell which way was coming, which was going. I was standing on train tracks, gray dirt air above and around, the twins in my ears, and my brain going into married Cindy’s apartment doing the dirty magazine thing or I was wishing for Nica, seeing her and me looking at each other in the gold-framed mirrors of her parents’ apartment, silver and gold and white, black and brown, and how could my mom be living with a hickabilly named Cloyd Longpre while I slept in some room with a checkered red camper bedspread, and then my mind’s hand was pulling open an office drawer in the dark. There was this boy part of me that wanted to hop and laugh and twist around like the twins and call it crazy crazy, who wanted to ask all the dumb questions they asked, the ones I couldn’t answer for sure. I liked it that I was going to be a man soon. The twins hadn’t even kissed a girl. I hadn’t been telling them about Nica very much, probably because that would’ve made them feel bad, you know? So I let everything be about Cindy to them.

  “What’s her husband like?” said Mike. “Is he big?”

  “Con big pata or small pito,” said Joe, “a pinche gun’s all it’d take!”

  “Yeah, dude, I’d fucking do you with a shotgun, dude, you putting el panchito to my woman!” said Mike.

  “Simón vato, I’d fucking blow you and your huevos off!” screamed Joe.

  “Her too!” added Mike. “How would it be if that was your old lady?”

  “For being in her apartment?” I asked. I was still hung up on that.

  They both moaned at the same time and it made me laugh again, made me feel happy I knew these dorks.

  “Once you were in there, yeah, how could you not cork his wife?” said Joe.

  We were all laughing like kids talking about caca and farts.

  “En serio,” Mike was saying, though Joe seemed like he might pee laughing. “Seriously.”

  Both their eyes were bigger than the chichis they saw in their nudie magazines.

  I was nearing the front door of #1, walking and not watching what was around me, my brain climbing and hanging upside down from schoolyard monkey bars, so I nearly crashed into Pink. I don’t know why I didn’t see nothing of him or where he came from or how or why he was standing there. He had on a thin tank top and he’d combed his wavy, kinky, peroxided hair. Probably he was looking Elvis because he really was that way and I hadn’t seen it and paid attention before, and maybe it was only because his skin was so white that his scar was so especially a cool pink, a baby girl’s bedroom color, like it might light up a dark room.

  “Hey there, chief,” he said. “You got a second?”

  I was still like waking up.

  “You know, to talk to you,” he said.

  I nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder and walked me to that Bel Air.

  “This is my proposal,” he told me. “I wanna give this baby to you.”

  “You do?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Give it to me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Like, whadaya mean?”

  “I wanna give her to you.”

  “But I can’t even drive it,” I explained. “I’m not sixteen yet.”

  “Holy shit, that’s right, that’s right, I forget! Damn, you still a child, ain’t you? You ain’t no virgin though, are you? I don’t think so, I don’t think so. Look, nothing don’t matter none, none, it don’t. You want her, don’t you? You want her?”

  His talking was moving in a way I couldn’t keep up. I must have nodded yes though. I wouldn’t say no, that’s for sure.

  “We make a deal,” he said. “Whadaya say, little brother?”

  “A deal?”

  “That’s right. We make a deal. We make a deal that benefits the both of us. You see?”

  “I guess. You know, not really.”

  “No? You saying no?”

  “No. I don’t mean I’m saying no.”

  “So we got a deal then?”

  “It’s that maybe I’m not exactly sure what the deal is.” We were standing next to the car, and he’d opened the passenger door and was motioning for me to sit inside. “You haven’t told me yet.”

  “It ain’t much. It ain’t nothing.”

  I wasn’t looking at him but he was smiling, he was winking even if I didn’t see his eyelids wink. I sat inside like I was told to. It felt good to sit there too, bad-ass thinking it would be mine.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Come on, whadaya say?”

  I was staring at the driver’s seat and the steering wheel.

  “I got the car for nothing, and I ain’t gonna sell her no way, and she’s meant for you.”

  “You’re saying you’re gonna give it to me? Come on, how much would I have to pay you?”

  “Have I once been talking one dollar bill?” he said. Then his tone changed. “You got money? It wouldn’t be much. Not much.” He was looking at me without his face.

  “I dunno,” I said.

  “We’ll work out the dollars part,” he said. “We can do that, we can.”

  “Not sure what my mom would say,” I said.

  “Listen, we can talk about that later, can’t we? Let’s talk about what I was talking about, you understand me?”

  I was dizzy. I thought I wasn’t hearing English. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I understand.”

  His eyes and his head and his shoulders and then his body were checking around like shit was about to hit. His eyes were checking the cars parked on the street, and he lifted his head up to see up the street if any cars were coming. He did that in a flash of seconds. Then he was back around on the other side of the parked cars and the streets, seeing if anyone was watching us, trying to hear, or any second, any second. He did that way long. Then finally he got inside my head and was looking in there, making sure. I felt him crawling in there and it felt like a long time too but it was probably only a few more seconds.

  “We just be working this out,” he said. “I just need you to be working with me, little brother. You see?”

  All I could see was the steering wheel.

  “What I’m saying, what I’m saying, is that I think me and you, we be like partners.”

  Then he tossed the car keys in the air and I caught them like I was ready for them all along.

  “Start her up! Yeah, that’s what you gotta do, you got to start her up!”

  The truth was that it was a stick shift and, though I’d barely driven a car one time, I’d especially never shifted a four-speed.

  “Go on! See how she sounds! I’m telling you, she is yours, she your girl! She wants you to take care of her, love her. Love how you want is how she wants.”

  I slid over as he made moves to take the passenger seat.

  “Put your foot on the clutch real sweet,” he said. Then he messed with the stick. “I put it in neutral, so go on, start her.”

  I’d slipped the key in the ignition and I turned. My foot pushed the gas pedal too hard and the engine shook the car.

  “You gotta learn it good is all. It’s got a lot inside, too much, but you’ll get used to her. But see, you see how you like it.”

  It was fucking bad and we weren’t even moving!

  “So we gotta deal, right?”

  “Maybe. I guess. I want
to. What do I have to pay you?”

  “Nothing right now, nothing. What I want is something else right now.”

  I clicked on the radio and punched the buttons. They all worked.

  “Look, what I want,” he said, “is for you to talk to me when I need you to. Understand?”

  This time I turned my head to him. “Huh?”

  “Little brother,” he said, “all I need is you to listen for me is all. Be some wide-open ears. I’m speaking of your stepdad. You know how your stepdaddy is, don’t you? What I want is that. I got a question, you got an answer. We be partnered up, see? You inside knowing what’s going on is all. Understand?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “Not really.”

  “It ain’t no big deal, ain’t nothing, not really nothing, probably nothing. You’ll see, you’ll see.”

  I turned off the engine and offered up the keys.

  “No no, uh-uh. You go on with them, they stay with you. You come start her and you take care of her because she yours now.”

  “I dunno, man.”

  “No no, it’s okay, it’s good, you do what I’m saying. I make a deal, I keep my word. I trust you, and you trust me.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, but I didn’t give him the car keys. I put them in my pants pocket.

  “What were you doing out there?” my mom asked when I came in.

  “What’re you talking about?” I didn’t want to tell her about the Bel Air.

  “With that man,” she said. “I saw you in the car with him.”

  “Nothing. He was just showing me it. It’s clean, really clean. A Bel Air.”