The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  That was the wrong thing to say. It changed the mood like someone walked in on us, like Angel cried. I wanted to take it back. “You’re right. I ought to go to France,” I told her, trying to go back to the subject of me. I wanted to say, with you. I wanted to say we could go together. It was dumb, but it was what I thought, what I wished. “You’re right. I could go. If I saved and everything, maybe I could go.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You ought to.”

  “Paris, France,” I said. “Notre Dame.”

  “Sonny,” she said.

  “What?” I was watching her again.

  She took a long time. “Nothing.”

  “What?” I said. Then, when she didn’t answer “I want you to go with me. To France.”

  “Ay, Sonny. And what would we do?”

  I was thinking, fast too, I wanted to answer fast. “Talk French. Bonjour, Nica! Como t’allez-vous, ma Nica? But that’s not right. Because we talk in the tu.”

  “Monica?”

  “Ma Nica.” I think she liked that name too. “I meant my Nica. I don’t talk French that good either, you know.”

  We both were laughing. “Je t’aime,” I said.

  “And that?”

  “I love pizza!”

  “Sonny,” she said. She was watching the ceiling, her long hair under her like it was a shawl. Her dress covered her like a sheet I could see through. It could have been new, an old-isnew style, but it was probably from a used store, washed and pressed and beautiful on her. It could’ve been a hippie throwaway. Wanting to touch her, I touched the dress at the sleeve. The material was like dried-up crumpled paper, dyed swimmingpool blue. I was thinking of kissing her. I was going to.

  She turned her head to me. Every other part of her body was relaxed. “I get scared,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know”—sounding more like she did know.

  “Tell me. You can tell me what.”

  She didn’t say. I was touching her arm, her skin, with my finger. The light of it came at me like a silver wind.

  “You can’t,” she said.

  “Can’t what?” It was warmer than just blood moving through her, warm not like what people call a feeling, but warm like a liquid, like a juice inside, heating. This little touch of skin, it was too much for both of us.

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t kiss.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long time. I wanted to say I’d take her to Spain. And couldn’t we go to France together? I really thought I meant it too. I had that money, you know? She’d turned on her side, she put her hands under her head. My hand came off her.

  “What if I want to?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. She said it nice, sad, not mean or angry.

  “You don’t want me to?”

  “Please, we can’t.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Híjola, man, I wouldn’t know what to do,” said Mike. It was that I just told them both about Nica. I told them how I wished I could do something, how I didn’t see why she had to live like that.

  “I would, vato,” said Joe. “I know I would.”

  Mike shook his head so hard at his brother that his glasses almost dropped off. “Cállate, güey.”

  “What?”

  “Que shut up, cabrón.” He said the words loud but like he was saying them soft.

  “Why’re you saying that?”

  “Por cause,” Mike said, dragging out the cause part. His head and eyes bobbled toward me. Even though I was not looking at either of them, I could still see from the corners. I was starting to get sick to my stomach. I was feeling all messed up.

  “What?” said Joe. He didn’t have a clue.

  I caught something in the corner of my eye and stopped walking. It was an ugly brown car parked in a lot with more than a few nothing, shitty cars in an apartment complex that didn’t have a name, only the not very fancy number 2131. It was that perv’s car in the oil-stained lot, near a set of dumped apartment doors and windows and a couch without cushions turned on its side. “Wait,” I said. “Stop for a second.”

  “What?” one of the twins said.

  “It’s that sickie’s car,” I said. “See? See where the windshield’s cracked?” It was a big spiderweb, a wide and pretty one.

  “Híjola,” said one of them. “He’s right.”

  “Hijo de la chingada madre,” said the other. “He has raisins, he’s very right.”

  “Whadaya wanna do?” That was Mike talking to me.

  “Whadaya think we should do?” That was Mike talking to Joe.

  “Nothing yet,” I said. “Except give me a fucking second.” I wasn’t moving.

  “Pues, I think we should take off,” said Joe.

  “Me too,” Mike said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to stay here.”

  “Véngase, Sonny,” said Joe. “Come on.”

  “Yeah, Joe,” said Mike. “What más hay to do?”

  I wasn’t ready to leave yet.

  “I think we should take off,” said Joe.

  “Me too,” said Mike.

  “Let’s take off,” said Joe. “Come on, Mike, we’re going.”

  “Bueno, simón, come with us, Sonny, vámonos, let’s go.”

  They took off walking, fast, toward the railroad tracks, which were up another block or so. I saw them look back, even though I wasn’t really looking at them.

  “What’s the matter, muchachito?” Mrs. Zúniga asked.

  “It’s only that I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “How can you say you’re not hungry? You’re always hungry.”

  “It’s only that I’m not.”

  “I’m going to bring you a hamburger and chocolate shake.”

  “It’s not necessary, seriously. I only want to bowl.”

  I found the ball I used in my spot on the wooden rack. Not that I had to look hard. I was the only one who ever used it. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who ever bowled any of the lanes ever.

  I needed to get some concentration. I rolled a few that were off, as off as I felt. I concentrated, stretched my body to the ceiling. Held the ball and focused until the pins got closer to me. I made a strike, but it still felt lucky. Then I got another strike, and this time it didn’t feel lucky, more that my body had it all from the moment I released. “Voilá!” I said. Suddenly that French made a smile take over my face.

  “Here you are,” Mrs. Zúniga said, leaving me a hamburger on a plate and a thick chocolate shake in a big fountain glass. She’d never brought food to the lanes before. I always ate at the bar.

  “You feel better.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant I did, because she heard me say the Voilá, or if she meant she hoped I would after I ate. “Mrs. Zúniga,” I said, “do you have any orange juice?” What I was really wanting to say was orangeade, just because that French word made me smile too, even if it wasn’t even orange juice. I could have already looked up the right word for orange juice, except I liked that other word too much.

  “No, muchachito, I’m sorry. You don’t like the chocolate shake?”

  “Sure, yes,” I said. I went over to the food. “Of course! Thank you so much.”

  “You eat,” she said as happy as if she were talking French too.

  As I came up the driveway of The Flowers, a black dude was stepping off the last stair. He was wearing a wrinkled black suit too big on him and a black tie and black shoes that weren’t shined. Like he was a businessman but not in any business.

  “Good evening,” he said to me.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  I looked through the window into the Cloyd’s office. He wasn’t there yet. My mom hung up the phone as I came through the back door. I was going to tell her who I just now saw coming down the stairs.

  “I can’t talk to you right now, m’ijo,” she said. She was up inside her own world. She rushed into the other bedroom, where I heard her
go to the phone in there, and then she shut that bedroom door.

  I took off to sweep, to get out of that apartment I stayed in. I started at the upstairs middle, #4. I think I was sweeping especially fast because I was keeping up with my brain and my body was trying to keep pace. I wished I could talk to Nica, which I couldn’t, or I wished I could at least see her inside the apartment. I got close enough to maybe hear her, but the curtains in #4 were closed. The TV was on to a screaming commercial, but I still heard her stepdad talking on the other side of it, probably in the bedroom not hers, though I couldn’t make out what he said over that TV. And then I wondered why I never heard her mom’s voice. Never. Then I forgot all that because I was near Cindy’s curtains, which were drawn closed too but seemed to be more forgotten than pulled together. The windows were slid half open, but she wasn’t inside. She was always there but she wasn’t there. I pushed the broom past Nica’s again, and it was like it was always the same screamy commercial and the same screamy voices. When I got to Mr. Josep’s, the curtain was open some. I couldn’t see nothing through the dark inside but his chair was the way it always was near the door, like the feet in the spots he always fit them in. So then I got the broom to #6, Pink’s, and the curtains were yanked closed like to the last tug of the cord. I was about to turn the corner at #7, where lights were on inside Bud and Mary’s and the cat named Baby, and go down the stairs, when Mr. Josep came out his door and waved me over, and he had another chair.

  “Mr. Josep, I can’t right now.” I couldn’t either. I couldn’t sit on any chair anywhere.

  He didn’t say anything about that. “You working hard,” he said.

  I couldn’t say nothing. My body was like popping all over the place, up and down and sideways. I couldn’t hold still.

  “You good boy. You working hard.”

  “Not so good,” I said. I couldn’t hold myself still. I kept hearing the TV shaking the walls at Nica’s and his voice from a bedroom, and the strain almost hurt my ears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “about your wife.”

  I think he wanted to talk. I think he was looking to get words to say something. He didn’t think he was being slow about it, but I wouldn’t tell him he was and I couldn’t wait.

  I hung the push broom on the shed hooks and finally it turned into dark enough.

  “Hi there.”

  It was Gina. She could’ve been there for who knows how long and I wouldn’t have seen her until she said something because she was so into wearing black. She was standing to the side as strange looking as always, her skirt like a plastic sign, her hair plastic too, the same too-shiny blunt cut like you’d see on a cover of a women’s magazine but never in front of you to talk. Maybe it was a French style? That almost made me smile and feel better, because I could look up a new word in French, and it almost made me smile straight at this Gina too, but then my brain was banging against my eyes and, French or no French, I didn’t want to say nothing about anything.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Non,” I said, and that made me come close to laughing out loud. I should’ve said something nicer to her. Or maybe less nice, or something else. I just didn’t.

  I was already turning the corner on the boulevard. I swore I heard the Cloyd’s truck squeaking behind me but I wouldn’t no way, güey, look back. I was making time so quick I was already near to Alley Cats where Mr. Zúniga was, outside his door with a few other people, really a bunch of people, not only the viejitos who’d be drinking inside his bar otherwise. It was that across the street over at Three B’s—Best Burritos & Burgers—where black-and-whites were pulled over with lights kicked on, bouncing off everything and everybody, and the police were facing a black dude going fucking nuts, hopping up and down and so at the top of his lungs you could not understand what the fuck, and a couple police had their clubs out and a couple had their hands ready above their guns. There was this vato sitting on the side against a wall, not saying or doing nothing, with no shirt on and his blue tattoos on his arms and shoulders there to see, knees up, hands behind his back, probably cuffed. Another black-and-white sirened up and two more police got out and traffic was slowing and stopping and more people were on the sidewalks and one of the police started hollering at the people and cars to move, move on, move, keep moving, almost pushing a man who was too close, and he went into the street, waving finger and hand and arm, screaming to get on home, go, go on, go on home, go on, go, and some of the people across the boulevard obeyed, like Mr. Zúniga, who stepped halfway back inside, but not everybody, and more people were stopping and a couple of black dudes who got out of a lowered red Bonneville came up and weren’t moving except getting closer, watching more. The wild black man was still shouting puros locos as another police car pulled up and then the police jumped on the dude and slammed him to the ground and were all knees on him and cuffing him and a few more black people around started screaming mothers and fuck and fingering desmadres at them, but especially those black dudes from the lowered red Bonneville, they started saying shit real loud, and the police yelled sticks up while backing themselves away and as soon as the loco was slammed into one of theirs, they were off like a switch, and then the whole world flattened out again, like there was nothing and never been something.

  Once I got to that 2131 building, I was sick to my stomach. Could be I was also scared I’d get caught. This was not gonna be like other things I did. It was can’t-see dark, and though blocks of icy light passed through the window squares of each apartment in the building, they wouldn’t shine on nobody outside or on me either. Still, I was thinking how maybe I should’ve come here later, when it was more dark, like if I got up in the middle of the night, or past that even. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do. I’d picked up my rock on the way, that good one I carried for something like this—yeah, it must be it was there to use it, a plan to throw my rock.

  The sickie’s car was still right where it was or where it stayed at night. At first I only stood near, burying myself into no light of the street, breathing. I leaned along a wall tight. Cars rolled up and down the road, headlights searching the asphalt ahead of them, and they didn’t shine nothing on me. I put my rock in one hand, then the other, and while I was there I kept breathing. A plane passed overhead, way up. I swear I could hear its red lights blinking, I was so not breathing with my body. I could tell what channel the TV was on from a house behind me, on the other side of where I was. I caught a black cat—another baby—staring at me, its zombie eyes as bright and faraway as stars. It took off fast across the street when I tapped a foot like I might jump at it, and a dog attacked a fence as it went by. Cars from another boulevard up there were like hearing a TV river pushing its way through a TV forest. A top forty was playing in a garage, one still far enough away that its light was half as small as one of the apartment’s windows.

  I back-and-forthed the rock in my hands until there was nothing else but that slap—in one hand, then the other—finally the only sound. When I stopped, it got too quiet and slow, like you know how the bad is coming in a dream. Or real good: I saw myself sitting on the fuzzy gold couch with Nica, her hair warming me, her hair exciting me like it was more than hair.

  Hey but what if I didn’t want to throw my rock? I didn’t know what to make of what was going on in me. It was like, why should I leave the rock here? I didn’t want to leave my rock. Like that. Even though it was supposed to be thrown, what a rock is, if I got to throw it while sickie man was rolling, after it bounced off his car, I could go get it back like last time. And better in the daylight, right in his face. I wanted it, I liked it. It was my rock. I never thought I was gonna have to waste it before, and if I threw it here, it was gone to me. I dunno, man. It’s that I walked with it every day. I carried it when I was with the twins now. But how could I say I came here and didn’t fuck his shit up because I like loved my rock, like say I were to even explain to the twins?

  I was messing it up and so I started running out of there. I
ran the street alongside the railroad tracks and then I saw a car, and I don’t know why I felt it was coming for me, slowing down up there and pulling over like it was waiting for me to get next to it. I stopped. It wasn’t much of a car, not low or high, but I couldn’t make it out as a Chevy or Ford or Olds except it had bubbly tinted windows. My mind caught a smell on it, you know, so I turned and I got running fast and then I heard the dudes coming behind me who were not gonna catch me even with the rock in my hand. And then I felt a sizzle of air brush my ear and saw a pipe sparking in front me against the sidewalk. I couldn’t look back to see who it was—fucking culeros who could be white dudes, black dudes, or brown dudes. I was running full out and I crossed back over the tracks, and when that ride came around again I crossed the tracks again and ran straight toward an alley where I thought they wouldn’t see me turn and I was halfway down it when that car peeled in. I hopped a backyard fence and landed on some hedges and dogs started barking, ones next door. Then I busted through a wooden gate—took it out, dropped it flat—to get to the front and the street, and once I was around the corner and I kept on, I knew that car lost me.

  I stopped at the Bel Air because it was by itself, no car in front or behind it. Having all those empty spaces made it look like something bad had happened, and I was standing near it seeing if there was damage on the grille or tail or hood, something I couldn’t see. Maybe it was sirens in the air too—they were everywhere, and even though my head was on everything else, my ears could hear like everyone else’s.

  “How it been riding?”

  Like every time, Pink was in front of me out of nowheres, scaring the pee out of me.

  “Man, you know, I don’t ever see you!” I took a couple of seconds. He was not hearing what I said. “I can’t drive it yet,” I answered.

  “What’s that? You ain’t riding in it?”

  “I don’t have a license. Like I told you.”

  “Oh yeah, a license, a driving license.” He was nodding and shaking his head both, but looking at the big picture window of #1, which was lit up like a movie screen. Inside the Cloyd and my mom and Bud and Mary were standing around the TV set. “You told me about that license before, didn’t you, little brother. You told me before.”