The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  Out of #7 was Shut up! and You shut it down now!, each word a sentence in Bud’s voice, and then the apartment door opened, and that was when Mary came out and hung her legs on the stairs. She wasn’t in her substitute teacher’s dress, which she probably had more than one of but seemed like just one to me. The gray sweats made her seem a little fatter—women who wore them proved they thought it about themselves anyways. Right then I didn’t think about that much, maybe because her face was in the palms of her hands.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see you there,” she said.

  “I was here.…”

  She was sniffling, trying to hold back and make a happy face.

  “Are you all right?” I was standing by her now, leaning on the railing.

  She surrendered and nodded. “Just a bad day is all.” She took a handkerchief to her nose and wiped the tears on her sleeve. She sat, elbows on knees, until she let out a sigh of breath. “Don’t get married to a man.” That made her laugh. She still didn’t look at me. “Sit with me?”

  I didn’t really want to sit close. Once I was on the rocky step near her, she didn’t seem to want to say anything, but I didn’t know the polite way to leave or how long I would have to stay.

  “Mr. Josep’s chair is pretty sad,” I said, pointing to it. “I don’t know how he could ever sit in it.”

  “Oh,” she said, getting her bearings about what I said. “Josep sits there a lot, doesn’t he?”

  “Lots.”

  “I think his wife didn’t make it,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Poor man.”

  “I wonder where he is,” I said.

  She shook her head. It was like she was praying. She started to talk with her head down.

  “When I was very little, my father would drive us across, to a colonia outside Juárez. I didn’t like visiting my grandfather. Everything was filthy, and there was too much sun in the day and not enough electricity at night, and the smells hurt my nose. There were potholes so wide and deep my daddy would say they were shortcut tunnels to China, except they heard it was worse there than Mexico so everybody went around them carefully. Dust was bigger than dust and it was blowing everywhere, and everything, the biggest and the smallest things, seemed like they needed scrubbing. Everybody was so poor. The women walked around in hand-me-down housedresses with aprons and chanclas, and the men, the men all wore those baseball caps with sweat stains that made them have white streaks around the visor and band. I didn’t want to feel poor, so I didn’t like to visit there much. Our family lived in the newest housing development on the east side of El Paso, near the best mall. I refused to speak Spanish. If someone talked to me in Spanish, I answered in English. I didn’t like it when Mommy or Daddy spoke it. It made me mad when they did, and I was ashamed of their accents in English too. I thought once you learned English, you learned how to be a good American citizen.” She stopped. She acted like she’d forgotten what she came out of her apartment for. “I almost didn’t remember what made me tell you this.”

  Even though I wasn’t looking at her, I really was listening. I knew she wasn’t talking about her grandfather or Josep. It was about Bud.

  “Thank you for sitting with me.”

  I nodded. I meant it too. It was okay.

  “It’s really nice of you.”

  “Well, I saw you crying.”

  “My ’uelito, he would sit there and sit there too, calm and patient. He could only whisper at the end, and still you could tell he had been such a strong man. The pictures of him when he was young—he was very handsome, and even more so on horseback. He was a vaquero, a cowboy. He would never come to live with us. That’s what my mother wanted. Abuelo wanted to be on his own, and he didn’t want anyone taking care of him.”

  I didn’t even hear the street.

  “You know, my mom’s from El Paso,” I told Mary.

  She either knew it or didn’t care. “I met Bud in San Antonio when he was in the military. I was in college there.”

  “So both you guys are from Texas,” I said. It was like saying they were from the old country. Texas was maybe more far away than Mexico to me. Mexico was lots of people, land everywhere, mountains and rivers and oceans. Texas was all dirt, it was hats, it was way far away, it was mean hardasses.

  “Those are days past,” she said.

  “I didn’t think about you being from there before.”

  “Everybody’s from somewhere else,” she said.

  “I didn’t grow up exactly here, but close. Not like from Texas or Arizona or Mexico.”

  “Some people think we’re from one big nameless place, and we’re invading.”

  “Invading?”

  “You know,” she said, like it was obvious. “Like what Bud thinks.”

  “Bud?”

  She took a second. “My grandfather was such a good man. I don’t know what I was thinking back then. I’m disappointed in how I was and what I believed. He worked hard and made his own way the best he could. I wanted to be considered American so much, to fit in, to be smart, to be … I don’t even remember exactly now.”

  “My mom talks about stuff like that.”

  I heard her cat whining by the door.

  “Your mom is lucky,” Mary said, listening to the cat scratching. “Some women are just born with looks. My husband talks about her all the time.”

  “He talks about my mom to you?”

  “I think men do that. Beautiful women can do no wrong.” Mary was getting up. She made a face that could have been about her unbending her legs but also about what she was saying. “I probably should go back in. My baby wants to be wherever I am. It was so nice to get to talk to you.”

  The dark carried an ink in it, moving like a special liquid in the wind, like a swirl you see in gas or oil in a puddle of water. A wind that wasn’t much, only you knew it was there when it brushed by. When a car passed, all its noise and smell you could touch, yellows came that crashed into the darkness. Little flecks of silver and red light scattered everywhere, the littlest rainbow worlds in them. Like mirrors or glass, if I could catch one and see inside it, hold it, stare. Go there. I looked up, and as I passed the World Motel I swore I saw Cindy across the street coming out of La Copa de Oro, her blonde hair lit up like a sign, leaning against the shadow and wall.

  “Why are you here at this hour, muchachito? It’s late for a young boy. Aren’t you in school by the morning?”

  The bowling lanes were lights off. Besides Mr. Zúniga, who was counting money at his register, there was one other man, with messy hair like he’d been wearing a hat though he wasn’t, and he was holding his glass of beer and looking at it like he was watching maybe a baseball game in there.

  “I’m hungry,” I told her. I don’t know why I always liked to say the same thing. “It’s that I love your food.” I hated talking in Spanish. I was mostly self-conscious if I said anything, though, okay, a lot less when it was Mrs. Zúniga, who’d I’d been talking to more in it. She used it with me without a thought, whether I spoke in it or English. I wanted to answer with French words to play around but I didn’t think she’d get it.

  She didn’t ask what I wanted to eat. She made me a plate of enchiladas with hamburger meat and onion and chunks of green chile with white cheese all over it. Beans, rice. It was as good as food got! Home cooking. If only my mom cooked.

  “No, she doesn’t very often,” I told her. “For a while she was. Not so much now.” Mrs. Zúniga was wearing a black dress with roses that she wore, it seemed like, all the time. I don’t know why I saw that this time.

  “What does she do all day if she has no job then?”

  “I don’t know, you know?”

  “She cleans the house?”

  “Not my mom.”

  “Does she sit around and watch TV and get fat?”

  “Not my mom, no. She goes out. Does things out.”

  “Maybe she does have a job in a manner then.”


  “She used to, but now she’s married. We’re living here because she married this man.”

  “That’s why,” she said. “That’s why.”

  She gave me two more enchiladas while she was talking. They were the last ones in a glass casserole. I could’ve eaten more.

  “And no brothers or sisters?”

  “My sister’s older. She’s gone, already a long time ago.”

  “So you’re alone.”

  “More or less.”

  “She doesn’t have time for you either.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “He’s a good man, the husband?”

  “Who knows. She’s married, not me.”

  “But he treats you well?”

  “Oh sure. He works a lot of hours.”

  “That’s good,” she assured me.

  I shrugged. I wanted to say something real funny in French so bad. “Qu’est que c’est,” is all I could come up with. It came out funny enough to make me smile anyways.

  She ignored me. “He loves her,” she said.

  I’d never thought about that. I shrugged again. “Qu’est que c’est.”

  “He has to love her if she doesn’t have to cook for him.”

  “I guess you’re right. But she more or less makes food for him, a little.”

  “If he works hard, and she doesn’t cook well for him, then he loves her very much.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t think so, or not exactly. I got to thinking of what Mary said. “Everybody loves her.”

  Mr. Zúniga was telling the man with his beer that he had to go now because they were closing. I’d eaten so fast I was already finished too.

  “Thank you,” I told her as she took the plate.

  “Until tomorrow,” she said.

  Mr. Zúniga didn’t look at me when I asked him how much I owed. He barely shook his head. “Thank you very much,” he said.

  I don’t know why I was blowing around like I was an electric fan. I hopped straight sidewalk borders and jagging cracks, miniature rivers and cliffs, on my way to somewhere I’d never been. The song in my head was jukebox románticos, guitar and horns, a giant voice I didn’t have except in my little head, and I was translating into French, laughing.

  When I turned the corner toward Los Flores, I went over to the Bel Air to stop and breathe a minute. I sat behind the wheel and sank the key and it roared.

  “Hey there, young blood.”

  I about peed from the surprise. Pink’s face leaned sideways in the car window, his skin full-moon white. I wasn’t close to thinking he’d be out here. He’d come from behind me. I must have locked my door when I sat down, though I didn’t remember, because he was knocking on the glass too once he couldn’t open it. He was already going around to the passenger’s side before I could get my brains back. I reached over and pulled up the knob for him so he could get in.

  “So you’re liking this, you’re liking it a lot. I knew you would too. Didn’t I say?”

  I nodded.

  “I told you, I told you.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s good, it real good, this one. It’s yours too, I knew it, knew it first thing.” His voice might have been saying what it was, but it also was moving somewhere else. It was the same thing with his eyes. “So what’s been up, what’s been doing around here?”

  “Nothing new,” I said.

  “Nothing new,” he repeated. “Nothing new may be nothing, may be something.” Then he looked straight at me. “You ain’t heard nothing?”

  “Nothing?”

  “Any one thing, that be nothing. Nothing from your stepdaddy. About me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I guess, yeah. They’re worrying that you got a black man living in your apartment.”

  He started laughing. “Oh yeah, there you go, oh yeah.” He started laughing more, like he was celebrating. Laughing so hard he was spitting. “There it is.”

  “So it’s true,” I said.

  “Did I say that?” His voice was hooting. “Did I say that? You did not hear me say that.”

  “No.”

  “I did not say that.” He was kind of laughing, but it shifted.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I did not say that, but I could,” he said. “Listen, little brother, I’m gonna tell you something. I’m gonna tell you something because I know you and your momma ain’t them, and you know it too.”

  “Okay,” I said. I agreed and I didn’t, I understood and I didn’t.

  “These people,” he said, “these people are motherfuckers.” He said that as simple as throwing a punch, and he said the word like it was in the Bible and he was being religious. “They is motherfuckers and they deserve to be got.”

  He took a lot of time. He laughed, he shook his head, he laughed. It was as though he were imagining a conversation with that junkyard man. When I turned off the engine, which I’d forgotten was running, he turned to me.

  “You know what they say? They say they don’t like black folk living here in their nice apartment complexes, like they got some kind of right black folk don’t. But they ain’t got no right. They are blue-eyed-devil motherfuckers and fuck ’em.”

  I was scared of him and I admired him.

  “It all gonna change, little brother man, it all gonna change, no other way.”

  “So it’s true then?”

  He didn’t even hear me. “Them dumb motherfuckers.” He wasn’t listening. I wasn’t there, not even close by. But this time he used that word like everybody else who meant to be talking shit and cussing. “You keep that ear to listening,” he told me as he got out, disappearing into the darkness at the back of the Bel Air.

  “Don’t say anything,” my mom snapped at Cloyd. She was already coming toward me. They were sitting there like they were watching TV, but I didn’t think it was on. Cloyd’s eyes were so bloodshot that if he bent over on his favorite chair he’d stain the green rug red.

  The magazine I stole the other day was on the maple table. I didn’t know why I did that. It was real dumb, I know I know. It was that I was taking out the trash, like always, and I went to grab those grocery and drugstore and all those advertising flyers that pile up there, and the magazine was there too. That was how it happened every other time. In a way, it was like I had to take it again or else I would look guilty—after that Gina’d accused me, I couldn’t just stop right then. This time I meant to give it to the twins right away, first thing, and I don’t know why I didn’t remember. Worse, I’d stuck it there in that bookcase, under the pile of dumb heavy old geographic magazines that were always there, right below the row of books. Right below the boyscout books.

  “You better just go to your room,” my mom said. She was dressed in something new.

  I was relieved to do that. Well, only to not stand there and wait for what was going to happen. Mostly to go see if they knew about the money I stole. All of it was still there like I left it, even the money I kept stashed at the corner. After a couple of seconds, I knew if that’d been found—well, I wouldn’t have gotten to go to this room. Still, I was scared and I was embarrassed. I was really embarrassed. Nica’s radio was on upstairs but I couldn’t concentrate on it or her. I didn’t hear nothing in the walls or outside, no spiders, no cats, not even dogs, only the nervous chatter in my own head, its sparklers making crazy like I was driving wild with even faster cars going the other direction on either side of me. My real eyes were shut, but I was seeing too much light, so much I could see only white.

  “It wouldn’t have been as much if he weren’t drunk,” my mom said when she woke me.

  I was blinking. She didn’t even seem to notice that I was asleep when she sat on the bed.

  “It’s not good that you did that. I told you before.”

  I couldn’t look at her, and not only because I wasn’t focused yet.

  “You were stealing, m’ijo.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.” She smelled of perfume I liked.

 
; “You have to stop it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Es que, I don’t want you to get into trouble. I have confidence in you. I want you to be a man. I want you to learn how to be a man.”

  She was playing with her hair, pulling it behind her left ear over and again. She still had on her jeweled earrings. “He laughed, you know. He thought it was what any boy would do if he wasn’t afraid to. But he didn’t want you to think it wasn’t serious. He said he thought he should punish you. I wouldn’t let him and we argued. I don’t trust him, but then it didn’t matter after a few of his drinks.”

  “You guys got in a fight about it?”

  “It’s nothing new. Don’t worry too much.”

  Joe said, “Hijole, man.”

  Mike said, “Ay, dude, I’d hate if our mom found that shit.”

  “Don’t even talk like that,” Joe said.

  “It’s what I’m saying!” said Mike.

  “Pero, what your mom said, that is toda madre, güey,” said Joe. “She was all right, eh?”

  Mike was nodding in agreement.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.” I was ready to think more about it, but then some dudes, a couple with rags tied around their foreheads, bounced by slowly, screaming PUTOS! laughing like they were bad to come up with that word and chingones to shout it out too. They drove a four-door wannabe lowrider—all they had was suspension and shocks so fucked up that the ride sagged. The wheels were dirty hubcaps on baldies. They did have tinted windows, and the word relámpago was painted in glittered silver in all-electricized letters on the back side panel.

  “I don’t know why mamones like that gotta be like that,” said Mike. “They’re really embarrassing, really punkass payasos.”

  “And they’re too afraid to stop, to say it to us,” Joe said.

  Mike shook his head at Joe like he’d lost his mind.