Rickie Trujillo

by Nicholas Bradley

  CHAPTER 12

  When they wake up, the room is cast in darkness. Rickie’s left arm is without feeling, and he wonders groggily if it has died already and if death is moving slowly through his body. He can’t remember where they are, nor does he have any idea what time it is. His chest aches as though bound with tight bands; it is thick with disgusting stuff he will have to cough up and spit out. When his eyes focus, he finds Alex’s head resting on his left shoulder. That’s why I can’t feel it, he thinks, and shoulders him roughly away. Alex sags over on his left side and moans. Rickie massages his arm until feeling begins to return.

  “Wake up,” he says, pushing Alex with his hand. Alex moans again. “C’mon, fool, wake up. It’s dark. I feel like shit. I don’t know if I can stand up.” He braces one hand on his friend’s shoulder and pushes himself up the wall, shoving Alex to the floor as he does so. His head lies at an awkward angle. Rickie leans against the wall until the dizziness and nausea lessen. He listens to the darkness, scared now, holds his breath. There is no sound—no creak or shuffle or pop—as though the house holds its breath as well. Outside, he can hear music from a party.

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” Rickie says in a low voice. He wants to get outside quickly now, his fear of being trapped in the house growing steadily.

  Alex turns so that he’s on his hands and knees. He coughs until he chokes and gags, drool and snot issuing from his mouth and nose. He wipes his face with his T-shirt, not moving from his hands and knees until he catches his breath.

  “Jesus Christ,” he says in a low, hoarse voice. “Help me up.”

  Rickie reaches down and grabs his hand and elbow and heaves him to his feet. Alex, too, stands with his back against the wall, breathing heavily, rubbing his face with his hand.

  Carefully, they pick their way through the shadowed rooms of the house to the back door and outside. The air is still and warm, heavy with the day’s smog. The sound of the band is much clearer now. Trumpets and violins and guitars, an accordion and a male voice and a female voice—it’s mariachi. The boys head toward the house and the music.

  Walking helps them clear their heads, both of them hacking and coughing and spitting the thickness that fills their chests. Rickie’s head pounds.

  “What are you going to do?” Alex asks.

  “We showed those pendejos, didn’t we?” Rickie says, walking along jauntily now.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever. Those gangsters.”

  “Yeah. So? We’re just lucky we found that place.”

  Rickie looks at him disdainfully. “Dude, nobody can touch us.”

  “Yeah, right. Where’re you going?”

  “To check out this party.”

  “What if it’s them?”

  “Then we don’t go. Let’s just check it out.”

  They reach the end of the street. Across from where they stand, behind tall black wrought iron fencing and gates, lies a deep and wide front yard leading up to a two-story house. The size of the house and its expanse of well-kept yard make it an anomaly in this neighborhood.

  “The mariachi. This place. Dude, this cabron has money,” Alex says in wonderment.

  “Must be a dealer or a lawyer or something,” Rickie says.

  The boys cross the street and look in at the fence; they stand about fifty feet down from the gate where two security guards wearing tight black pants and tight black T-shirts check everyone who comes in or goes out. They also keep a wary eye on anyone who drives by. Rickie knows there are others walking around inside and probably some in a car nearby. The security people at the gate have nightsticks and radios; maybe those in the car have guns. As long as no shots are fired, the cops who drive slowly past every half-hour don’t stop and don’t ask any questions. It’s better to let these people control their own.

  Strands of white Christmas lights are strung in the trees and from tree to tree throughout the front yard. More than twenty long tables covered with white tablecloths sit beneath the trees. Candles flicker at each table. Close to the house the band is set up on a makeshift stage.

  “It’s someone’s wedding. We probably know them. C’mon, let’s check it out,” Rickie says.

  “How’re you going to get in there? You’re playing with fire, fool. We don’t belong here.”

  “It’s a party. There’s food. Fine-looking girls. Who knows what might happen. Aren’t you hungry? As long as we don’t make trouble, we’ll be all right. C’mon, don’t be a pussy.”

  “I can’t. Look at me.” Alex’s T-shirt is rumpled and dirty from wiping his nose and mouth. Rickie looks at his own outfit, pulls on the bottom of the shirt to straighten it. Because they were headed to Wendy’s house originally and he always wants to look good for girls, Rickie wore a collarless buttoned black shirt and black pants. In the dark they look dressy.

  “No one will see. Turn your shirt inside out.”

  They grip the bars of the fence above their heads and peer in, hoping to catch sight of someone they know. Most people, the ones walking nearby or sitting languidly at the tables, are in shadow. The boys only see faces when people cross through the lighted area near the house, but then it’s at a distance. The men and boys in the wedding party have shed their jackets and parade around in their white, heavily ruffled tuxedo shirts and shiny black pants. The women and girls of the wedding party wear lavender gowns with low-cut bodices. Everyone else is dressed as people usually dress for these weddings—in suits or frilly dresses, some in pressed T-shirts or blouses and jeans or black pressed pants.

  “C’mon, let’s try it.”

  “No, dude, I ain’t dressed right. And I don’t feel too good. I’m going home. I’ll eat at home.”

  Rickie looks over at him, trying to decipher his real reason for not wanting to go in. Alex continues to hold onto the bars but looks down as he kicks the grass at his feet.

  “Okay, dude. Laters. I’ll call you if anything happens.”

  “Yeah,” Alex says forlornly, and turns away. Rickie watches him walk away and thinks about joining him. Instead, he turns back to the party.

  CHAPTER 13

  Rickie knows he has to recognize someone here. People continue to arrive. A large group pulls up in a limousine and gets out stretching and laughing and straightening their clothes. Rickie recognizes some of the boys as the drivers of lowered trucks and cars that they wheel into the school parking lot with sound systems pounding. The girls, to whom the boys now offer a hand with studied nonchalance, can usually be seen hanging on their arms or in a group laughing loudly and gossiping—chismosas. The boys stand at the curb calmly surveying the party on the other side of the fence and checking the street, while the girls continue to brush their dresses with their gloved hands or bend over to check lipstick and hair in the side mirrors of the limousine. They all glance Rickie’s way when he moves away from the fence, but they do not give him a second look.

  Rickie feels as inconsequential as they think he is. He’s a loner, like a little boy, hanging onto a fence and on the outside looking in. He is ready to leave and catch up with Alex when he recognizes the brown van that takes the place of the limousine at the curb. It is what the car dealers call a California Conversion, a van created specifically for people who wanted to replicate a living room in a moving vehicle, and who didn’t want to buy a lumbering RV. The one time Claudia’s father warmed up to Rickie was when the man showed the boy the interior of the van, with its soft brown seat cushions, the tall wrap-around seat backs, the brown rug on the floor, and the little Venetian blinds at the teardrop side windows. Claudia’s father scrubs and polishes it each weekend, but there is no help for the faded and scaling exterior paint or for the sun-bleached cushions and carpet, stained and matted by spilled sweet drinks and greasy food. He babies this machine, always inspecting it, ever vigilant for an unusual rattle or ping or knock, and Rickie wonders why he cares so much; it’s still going to fall apart someday and end up dead in the driveway even if the man drives it with m
addening caution, rarely exceeding twenty miles an hour on the local streets, or fifty on the freeways.

  He pulls up carefully in back of the limousine as it is leaving the curb.

  “Rickie,” Claudia calls as she pushes open the side door and precedes her younger sisters out of the van. She runs up to him and gives him a friendly but careful hug; she keeps a proper distance from him, knowing that the eyes of her parents are on her.

  Claudia is dressed in a pale blue strapless gown and high heels. Her black straight hair is pulled back from her forehead. It shines in the light. She gained her woman’s body when barely fourteen, but her face retains some of the plump roundness of an earlier self and some of the happy radiance. Her eyes are round and dark. They used to have only a sweet teasing quality to them, but now there’s something new there, a hunger that Rickie knows the father recognizes and fears; the man doesn’t like Rickie, even though the boy is always mumblingly respectful or simply quiet, standing at the door or in the living room looking down at his feet. He fears what Rickie has on his mind.

  Rickie turns from Claudia and greets the mother quietly. The father pulls the van away from the curb to park it farther down the street, keeping the boy in sight in the passenger side mirror.

  “Como estas, mi’ jo? Are you going inside?” The mother, whose name is Merlinda, looks at him evenly, without judgment. He’s just another awkward boy who cannot hold her gaze.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you going in?” Claudia asks.

  “I wasn’t invited. I was with Alex. We were just passing.”

  “You could go in with us. It’s Gloria’s sister’s wedding party. You know, Gloria, from your English class. He can go in with us, can’t he, ‘Amá?”

  “I don’t think they want me here,” he says.

  Claudia and her mother both understand. “It is a party, mi’ jo. Behave good and nothing goes wrong.”

  Rickie looks at Claudia’s mother directly for the first time. She is wearing a shapeless black dress; he knows without thinking about it that it is her best dress, maybe her only dress-up dress. Her face, which had once been beautiful like Claudia’s, has become heavy and lined, her eyes tired. But there is calm there, and it settles him.

  “Nobody will care, Rickie. Anybody who might be trouble will be too drunk soon anyway,” Claudia laughs.

  “Come,” the mother says. She gathers the little ones around her and looks for her husband. She sees him coming up the street. “Let’s go in now. I see Papá coming.”

  They approach the gate as the father joins them. He acknowledges Rickie with a nod and a grunt.

  “Is he with you?” the security guard standing at the gate asks. Rickie recognizes him as a former star on the football team.

  “Yes, he is with us,” Claudia’s mother answers. The guard looks over at his partner with a doubtful expression and then at Rickie.

  “They don’t want no trouble. This is their daughter’s wedding.” He looks hard at Rickie, but Rickie doesn’t look back. The family shuffles through the gate past another group that has just arrived.

  Once on the grounds they head for the light, looking for familiar faces, nodding at those sitting in the dimness of tables distant from the floodlights. Finally, Claudia’s mother spots a family she recognizes. She takes Claudia by the arm and goes to them.

  “¡Hola! Buenas noches. Cómo están?” she says. The husband and wife rise. Everyone shakes hands with quiet formality.

  “Muy bien. Y ustedes?”

  “También. Disfrutando la fiesta?”

  “Sí, sí.”

  The parents sit. Claudia holds out her hand for the couple’s daughter who sits quietly in her elaborately ruffled pink dress.

  “C’mon, mi’ ja. Come with us. We’ll go look around. Maybe we’ll find some cute guys who will dance with us,” she says.

  The daughter catches her mother’s eye, and she nods. The little girl jumps out of her chair. Claudia’s sisters clap their hands excitedly.

  Claudia takes the two younger girls’ hands in each of hers. The group moves among the tables, Claudia and the girls in front, Rickie in back. Rickie keeps his head down as they walk, only occasionally looking up, glancing at faces, sometimes finding questioning eyes focused on him, once a glimpse of a member of 18th Street leaning in and whispering in the ear of another and then turning and nodding in Rickie’s direction. Rickie looks back down at his feet. He knows that if he stays, someone will come up to him before the night is over and challenge his right to be there. This isn’t safe territory.

  “Let’s find Linda,” Claudia says. She swings the arms of the two girls and heads for the house, looking for a knot of people. A photographer walks past them.

  “Where’s the bride?” Claudia asks him. He pauses, a big man with a kind, heavy face and wispy hair backlit by the floodlights from the house. “You’re a cute one,” he says. “Why don’t I take your picture? You, too,” he says to the little girls. “What are your names?”

  The three little girls call their names, but the photographer doesn’t pay attention.

  “What’s yours, sweetheart?” he asks of Claudia in a different tone of voice.

  “Misty,” Claudia says. Rickie looks at her and she laughs.

  “Okay, Misty, get in the picture. C’mon, little ones. You, too,” he says to Rickie. “Forgot your tux, huh?” he jokes, but Rickie doesn’t reply or smile. “Okay, line up. Kinda like the cops, huh?” he jokes again. “Smile everybody.” Claudia and the girls smile broadly. Claudia has a radiant, toothy smile framed by full and clearly sculpted lips. It is a smile that makes others think that she is always happy and sweet and not very bright. And she, herself, believes those things because no one tells her otherwise. Her world is telenovelas and the acquisition of inexpensive clothing and jewelry and make-up at the swap meet or from odd little stores buried in strip malls.

  After the photographer has moved on, they continue toward the light in search of the bride.

  “I don’t feel right here,” Rickie says. “I’m not dressed right.”

  “You look so fine. I could… Ohhh, I can’t say,” Claudia laughs.

  “Let’s go find some place,” Rickie says, interested now and anxious to get away from there.

  “What are we going to do with..?”

  “Take them back.”

  “We want to find Linda,” one of her sisters says.

  “Okay, we’ll go see Linda, and then I’ll take you back.”

  They scan the area, looking over the dance floor, the front door to the house, the surrounding tables with candles flickering in the warm night air. Exhaust from cars still arriving, or from those passing slowly to check out what’s going on, hangs in the air, which has only now begun to cool. Most people sit or stand with handkerchiefs in hand.

  Finally, they find the bride, sprawled in a chair at one of the tables, exuding the magnanimity and ease of one who knows that this is her moment, laughing and talking with those gathered there, but also glancing about for her new husband who has disappeared. Rickie wouldn’t trust him, and he sees that she doesn’t fully trust him either.

  “Linda, these little ones wanted to say hi,” Claudia says. “Go, girls, give her a hug.” Claudia gives them a gentle shove toward Linda.

  “Ven, mi’ja,” Linda says, sitting up and holding out her arms for the smallest one. The little girl goes to her slowly, more interested in the beading on her lavish wedding dress than Linda herself.

  Linda looks at Rickie and Claudia over the girls’ heads. Rickie studies her face as she looks at Claudia. He knows these two don’t like each other. Linda was forced to invite Claudia because their families know each other from church. She doesn’t like Claudia because she’s loud and draws attention to herself with her tight clothes. Linda must be glad her husband is not here right now; he’d be staring at Claudia’s breasts, openly drinking in her body even on his wedding night.

  Linda turns her attention to Rickie and stares di
rectly into his eyes with a slight smile curling her lips. She takes in his thin, tightly-wound body; he stares back with the surety in his eyes that he could make her cry out in satisfaction, not like Carlos, that Gordo, who probably lies on top of her and huffs and puffs and falls off of her into a deep sleep before she is even close.

  Rickie looks away before Claudia catches the look in his eyes.

  “Thank you, sweethearts,” Linda says, turning her attention back to the little girls. “I hope you have fun tonight. You guys, too,” she says.

  “You, too, you know, later,” Claudia says and laughs loudly. The men at the table laugh with her. The young women shake their heads and look down.

  “Me, too,” one of the young men says.

  “That’s all you think about, you perv,” his girlfriend answers and the others laugh.

  Claudia and Rickie escort the girls back to the table where the two families sit. The men lean back in their chairs with their arms folded across their stomachs. They both look like they will begin dozing momentarily. The women sit next to each other, arms on the table, engaged in a lively conversation.

  “Now where?” Rickie asks.

  “Somewhere alone,” Claudia answers and squeezes his hand. She moves closer to him and brushes against him. He looks at her as she does it again, and she laughs.

  “Where?”

  “Let’s go around the side of the house. Maybe we’ll find a place.”

  As they walk around the darkened side of the house, they come across a group smoking. It is too dark to see faces.

  “Hey, baby, you want some?” one of them calls. Others in the group laugh.

  “No, thanks. I’ve already got mine,” she says and hugs Rickie’s arm closer to her.

  “Who the hell’s that?”

  Everyone in the group peers at Rickie in the darkness.