“They had guns, anyways,” I started. “Shit, I don’t even have my rock!”
“I didn’t see a gun,” said Joe. “You saw a gun?”
“I saw one for sure,” I said, “and another probably.”
“Hijole, man,” said Joe.
Mike didn’t want to talk facts. “I’m sick of having to hear them or hear about those pendejos y sus pendejadas.”
After we walked some, Joe said, “Yeah, like because we’re Mexicans we have to apologize for being as stupid as they are.”
“I can’t wait to go to college,” said Mike.
Joe nodded. We walked quiet for a while.
“So did your mom throw that magazine out?” Mike asked.
“Look at how my brother is!” Joe said. “He’s still angling to get it from you!”
We laughed.
“Your mom,” Mike said. “I think she is all right.”
“Simón, tu mamá es muy padre,” said Joe, smiling. “We’d be in the shithouse.”
“Worse!” said Mike. “We’d be outside the dog shithouse, sleeping next to piles and piles of poops.”
“I’d die,” said Joe. “If we got caught, I’d die.”
“N’hombre! We’d get spit-roasted and chopped up como cabrito, dude!” said Mike. “I wouldn’t wanna imagine how Dad would cook us.”
* * *
“He wanted me to make a Mexican dinner,” she told me. I think the apron she had on was new. It was a red-and-white checkerboard. I think it would be called cute. She wore a white dress under it, sandals, her hair—well, muy nice. “Can you believe that? He thought I should cook, and not only cook but cook Mexican food.” She definitely wasn’t doing that. She was making spaghetti, and she dropped a couple of jalapeños into the sauce. “There. Now it’s Mexican.”
“You’re cooking, that counts for something.”
“Things are kind of upset around here,” she said. “I want to warn you.”
“What?”
“You haven’t seen someone going in or out of Mr. Pinkston’s, have you?” she said.
“I haven’t, like I said before.”
“Bud keeps on saying that some man who is black is living there. He says that’s how they’re doing it now, by getting someone else to rent an apartment with a roommate nobody sees until later. He thinks that’s what’s going on.”
“Can I tell you something? What I heard?” I wanted to tell her about me sitting with Mary, how Bud talked about her. I would tell her without telling her.
“Is he bothering you?” she asked. She heard me asking something else. “You’re not going to tell me he’s bothering you too, are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Because Bud used to be a cop,” she said. “I don’t know if he quit or they got rid of him. Can you imagine him a cop?”
Maybe me telling her anything else about Bud talking about her wasn’t necessary.
“Have you seen anyone else in that apartment? A white person?”
“Not me. I never even seen Pink in that apartment.”
“They’re talking about him too.”
“Pink’s okay. I like him. I think he’s cool.”
“He’s an albino,” she said. “I don’t think Cloyd knew it before.”
“Albino?” I didn’t know it either.
“It’s an idea I heard. Nely told me. It’s right too, explains why he’s like he is. He’s not as obvious as most albinos. Nely says some don’t look like albinos exactly.”
“Nely?”
“Yeah,” she said, not really wanting to get into that with me. “He’s white but he’s really black. It makes sense, it explains it. Cuando le dije a Cloyd, ay, he died de un infarto! I thought his heart would attack him out of his mouth, he was yelling so much.”
We both liked so much the idea of Pink messing with Cloyd and Bud, him maybe having a black roommate, there was no room to say anything about Nely or not Nely. I was almost finished eating.
“M’ijo,” she said. She sat down next to me, but she didn’t look at me. “It’s not so bad here for you.…” She stopped there too long. “I have to think,” she said. “Did you get enough to eat?”
“Oh yeah,” I said.
I was sweeping the lower walkways and Cindy had to lean hard over the upstairs railing. “Hey,” she said. As always, she was practically naked, at least it seemed like you could see everything even if it was covered.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she said again, stretching the sound out, playful.
“Did I see you the other night?”
“What’re you talking about?”
This time I didn’t say nothing.
“Sonny,” she said, all sweet, my name yellow and warm.
“No,” I said. I didn’t see what she did or where or how because I kept my head down and swept. I wanted to be good. I swept everything. Then I cleaned the laundry room. I’d dragged over a trash can from the back and while I was thinking of it, I went over to the mailboxes to grab the flyers that had to be thrown away too. That’s when Bud’s pickup wide-loaded the driveway, almost pinning me against the building.
“Looking for the titty magazines again, Sonny boy?”
I almost said I didn’t do that shit, out of habit.
He’d rolled down the passenger’s side window from a switch on the driver’s side.
“Your age, it’s the only action you get!”
I still didn’t say nothing. Made me mad that Cloyd told him.
“Your mom getting things ready in there?”
I didn’t say nothing to him still. I swore to myself I was gonna start pumping iron.
“You gone deaf? They say that’s what happens after you keep whacking it so much! You keep at it, hear say you go blind too!” He was laughing and laughing like he was watching himself on TV.
I wanted to steal something from him. Put nails under his tires.
“You better watch yourself, kid,” he said. “I’m telling you.” He drove in.
Maybe it was the word kid that did it.
Nica came out of her apartment with Angel in her arms, rocking him fidgety and moving her feet—like being out of the apartment was dangerous. “Tonight,” she said. She pointed to #7, Bud and Mary’s apartment. She was grinning fifty smiles but showing it to me and me only. She made it seem like she was only talking to the baby, and then she turned back around. She had to answer her dad inside the apartment.
I wanted to run laps around The Flowers instead of spin in the tight circles my brain took. I rushed over to the Bel Air and went in. I sat and waited. I saw anybody, I ducked and hid. Cloyd’s butt-heavy truck, those huge toolboxes hanging on either side, squawked and squealed onto the driveway. Neighborhood people were walking from parking their cars way down the street. It was the time of night when some headlights were on, some still off. Waiting waiting. Gina’s car, her perfect husband Ben’s sporty car, Mary’s plain car. People from the whole neighborhood coming home. I sat and sat and sat, waiting. I was happy! I dreamed in my Bel Air. I dreamed of what it would be with Nica and me cruising the boulevards, pulling in this place, parking there—a desert, the cactus and sand, or mountains, or a river, a lake, and there’d be a real sky, a real moon, stars falling all over us, and trees, and dew. The windows down would let in air, or be up to keep warmer—all about not being here, all about being with Nica, Nica being with me, everything I ever wanted to see all around us. Stopping. Sitting someplace pretty. Kissing. I only wanted to kiss her, I swear it’s all I really imagined. No, I wanted her to kiss me. We could go to movies. I’d never been to those Spanish ones. She wouldn’t want to either. She liked the same radio music I did. We could drive down to the beach. Probably she’d never seen the beach. She could watch and listen to the waves. I would kiss her lips! My fingers would touch her cheek, hold her chin. I’d kiss her on her neck, under her ear, and feel her goose bumps rise. She would be against me, warm. Her body. I imagined it, sure. I knew I would love her body, b
ut I only saw her lips while I was holding her.
“Young blood,” Pink said. His face was at the passenger’s window this time.
“You did that again,” I told him, shaking my head.
“What I do again?”
“Surprised me when you came up. I didn’t see you.”
“You better be watching yourself better then,” he laughed. “You better always know what coming up behind you. At all times you better be knowing what coming up on you, my little brother.” He got in and sat with me. “So everything cool?” His eyes were watching the front door and windows of Cloyd’s apartment too. “Like they having a party. Good. That is nice, that is good. Good for them.”
I looked at him.
“Give me some time,” he said.
“Time?”
“Gotta be leaving here,” he said. “I am gone.”
“Really?”
“You don’t say to nobody, you didn’t hear that.”
“Okay, sure.”
“Don’t want Longpre knowing till he knows.”
“So, the car?” He knew what I meant.
“Little brother, I told you. I told you, this is your ride.”
It didn’t make any sense, I really didn’t understand, but I didn’t want to say no. If he really was out of here, if he was really leaving it to me, I’d even go ahead and learn to drive it. Not play in it like I did now, not pretend. “I guess you haven’t had a lot of cars around lately, now that I think of it.”
“There you are, you have been paying attention. This here is the last and only. But little brother, I am around. I come around time to time. You gonna see. I come around. You gonna be seeing me again, and we got a deal.”
“Hard not to see you,” I joked.
“You only just said you missed seeing me, didn’t you say that?”
I laughed.
“So it ain’t that easy unless you be watching careful. You don’t be watching careful, you do not see.”
I shook my head.
“Buncha shit I’m talking, ain’t it? Ha! Buncha bull and shit, ain’t it?” He laughed and laughed. “I better get on up. Hey-uh, they still talking?”
“About a black man living in your apartment?”
“That, yeah.”
“No more than I said.”
“Well then little brother man, I better get up on it.”
The door of #7 opened fast. Nica had a finger over her lips. “He just went to sleep.” Her eyes would barely to look at mine, but she was smiling. “He’d never seen a cat.”
“You mean the baby,” I said.
“A cat!” She said that loud for her. “The cat is the baby! Can you believe? The lady wanted me to take care of her little cat!”
“I told you already they didn’t have a baby.”
“No, you didn’t tell me.”
“I did too, I swear.”
“Then I didn’t hear you, or I didn’t understand.”
“It’s that you didn’t believe me.”
“How can she call a cat her baby? He won’t find out? Maybe he won’t understand either. Who would call a cat a baby?”
“This world is a crazy, I don’t understand nothing.”
“I thought it was a baby, and that’s why Margarito said he would permit it.”
The cat was hiding under the couch, balled up, scared. I got down on my knees. “Come here, baby baby baby.”
Nica laughed the laugh of ten hours of dopey Mexican TV skits, without me talking any French.
Angel was asleep on a small bed in the bedroom across from the master bedroom. She let me follow her to see, and then we both wanted to go into the big bedroom. I couldn’t help but want to, neither of us could. I wanted to see the bed and clack the metal drawer knobs on their chest of drawers and untangle bobby pins and clips and earrings and scratch myself with the hairbrushes and open the face cream jars and smell and look inside jewelry boxes and a big wooden chest at the foot of the bed. I saw some cash. But I already had so much now. I didn’t want to scare Nica, if she was watching, which she wasn’t, because it was more like she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open, so she wasn’t sure whether she was looking at the ceiling or through it. On their floor there was nothing but apartment carpet. Not one corner of a shirt under the bed, not a flip-flop, not a sock, no dirty chones balled up. I say Mary cleaned it all up for Nica’s babysitting. On the bedroom walls were a really not too great painting of a desert and another of a snowy mountain with a gold cross at the top, Cristo Rey, and one of baby Jesus with the Virgin Mother, a little like Guadalupe from Mexico but not really. None of them were realistic exactly, and though they didn’t seem very good to me, they did seem like they weren’t from a store. I say they were hers, that she painted them herself. That she was a substitute art teacher. They had a couple photos of other family people, probably their moms and dads, that yellow-gray kind, and the others, modern in color, were probably brothers and sisters. But there were no pictures of the two of them.
“That’s kind of fucked up, I think,” I said in English, until I went back to Spanish. “You don’t think? That it’s not common?”
“What’re you’re talking about?”
“That they have no photos of themselves, like, together. Not even at their wedding.”
“Probably,” she said, unsure, uncritical. Then she was on the bed, on her back, watching the ceiling. “Maybe they don’t love each other. Maybe they don’t love.”
I didn’t want her to think I was going to try anything if I got on the bed where she was so I didn’t get on it at first. Then I sensed that she trusted me so it didn’t cross her mind, and I fell on my back and stared at the same ceiling she stared at. I swear her happiness, which I couldn’t see, was changing the air like we were getting high. We could feel the earth under us and hear the whish of it spinning us, even while our eyes saw only the ceiling and that cottage cheese sprayed on it. We both stared up like it was 3 a.m. and we were outside and the nightsky was far and close and it was real and there weren’t any words for any of it. At first we were only squirmy, but that kind of changed, like months and months passed in minutes of not talking.
“Sometimes I forget,” she said.
“What?”
“Everything. That people don’t live like I live.”
This was exactly what would happen to me when I used to sneak into other people’s houses! I’d start thinking exactly like this. But never once had I imagined anyone else being next to me thinking it. I had never imagined Nica before, never imagined a Nica, never imagined a voice like hers, never imagined her so close to me.
“You won’t have to live over there forever,” I said. It came out of me like someone else talking. Because I didn’t know what I was telling her. What did I know about her or her life, about mine, about life? Not shit. Not nothing, about anything. I guess it just seemed like the right thing to say, and besides being probably true, it had to be. It especially couldn’t not be true, not now that we were here. We were changing everything because we were together, because me and her were on our backs on the big old soft bed and were staring up.
“What if I were named Carmen?” she asked.
“I thought you liked Cathy.”
“I like that name too. You don’t like the name Carmen?”
“I guess. I like yours already.”
“It’d be so beautiful.”
“Why are you thinking of this?”
“Oh, that little old man next door. He told that story about Russia. When I was a little girl I always wished I were from Spain. He made me think of that, of living in Spain. Then, I would have pretty white skin and straight black hair, and I’d listen to music and dance beautifully.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think any of that’s Mexican too. You have beautiful black hair. I like your skin. Your skin is beautiful, your color better than theirs. Those people sit in the sun on a beach forever to get their skin to look like yours.”
“Think of how perfect it m
ust be in Spain. I saw photos once. Of Sevilla and Córdova. Have you ever seen photos from there?”
“No, I only saw a Zorro movie. That’s Spain, right?”
“You have to see the photos. Then you would want to go. I think the whole city is painted white. It’s not like Mexico. I’m from Mexico.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. I didn’t like what she was saying but not what it was. “I like your name,” I said. “I think Nica’s a beautiful name.” I wanted to say so better, but saying I loved her name—well, I wasn’t really talking about her name.
“It’s not really Nica, you know.”
“Veronica,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s not Veronica.”
“It’s not?”
“My name’s Guadalupe.”
“Guadalupe?”
“Like my mother’s, María, it is very common. I hate the name María. I also hate the name Guadalupe.”
“I like it, I like that name. It’s nice. I knew a Lupe once. I like the name.”
“Wouldn’t you want to go to Spain?”
“I never thought about it. I don’t know, Spain seems so … I don’t know. Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish the right way. I almost can’t. I almost can’t talk to you.”
“Where would you go?”
It was almost like I was set up to say it. “France. Remember, je parle français. I’m learning French, remember?”
“France?”
“Oui, oui.”
She giggled. It is what I loved about this learning French. It made me get a smile, it made everyone make a smile, and it always worked. Now it made my Nica giggle.
“J’aime le pizza,” I said. “Qu’est-ce que aimez-vous? No avec le faim?”
“Oh Sonny,” she said. Smiling!
I was going to kiss her. Our eyes were still locked on the nothing ceiling that was our own world. I moved onto my side. She didn’t.
“Do you think you’ll go?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I never really thought of it.”
“You said you wanted to.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it, not seriously.” It was only because of Cloyd and my mom. It was a game I was playing, not a want. I only pretended. “And you? Do you think you’re going to Spain?”
The Flowers Page 20
