The Flowers Read online

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  I didn’t like being inside #1 at Los Flores. You know, hearing new shit: No. I know. No. I know. I know. I can’t be louder. I said I know. Don’t. Because I’m not. I’m not going to. I’m not, no. Stop. I’m telling you. No. No. All that kind of movida. It would make me see these words like curving and turning, up fast and too sharp, down without looking. Bad music, wild light.

  I took walking cruises on the boulevard and turned pages of comics in stores because comics weren’t good no more, they were gone from me. I looked at other mags, even men’s ones, until I got told I had to stop or leave. One thing that was also true was that I didn’t want to be in my old neighborhood. So here it was all the black streets and white sidewalks. Walking and walking and walking until the night and late would come. Glass and mirrors, beer and cars and dirty girls inside La Copa de Oro. The night might start watching me. I didn’t like that. I wanted to know who and what the fuck? I started thinking how I could go bowling, right? I went to Alley Cats. I could eat there.

  Right before a sunset I stuck closer, did the good. The exact answer to the twins’ apartment question was: Five upstairs, #3 through #7. Downstairs, we were in #1, and along the driveway, which went around to six other carports, was #2, an apartment next to Cloyd’s office, which otherwise would have been a third bedroom. There was a carport for two cars on the same side the apartment doors faced, where Cloyd parked his work truck, as gray and stiff as his starched uniform, metal tool compartments welded all around it. Lots of pipe and some two-by-fours stuck out from the bed and were piled on the rack above. He had his luxury Mercury sedan next to that, which was what my mom got to drive. Beyond the carport was the laundry room—only two quarters to wash and two quarters to dry. One of the jobs Cloyd had made mine was to make sure the laundry room was cleaned up. Check the lint filter in the dryer. Check the trash can and empty it. I mopped the floor, and I sprayed and wiped glass cleaner on both machines so they shined. He said this was to keep my end of the deal up. To learn responsibility. I didn’t shake my head to that out loud. I was thinking it was about him paying me too. I didn’t mind working. I wanted something to do. It was about how I first met Cindy. She lived directly upstairs, in #3.

  “Sonny,” I told her.

  “You’re the boy I’ve seen,” she said.

  Cindy was in a paisley bikini top and black stretch pants and flip-flop chanclas and all ten fingernails were painted cherry and she had the blondest hair above dark roots. Her skin made curves, from a lot below her belly button way up, and it was hard not to pay attention to there because it came so close to those places you weren’t supposed to stare at but couldn’t not at the same time. If the clothes seemed too small, also everything fit her good. Still, she didn’t dress right for her, or something. I mean, she was wearing the clothes, yeah, but it was like the blond hair.

  “What’s your mom’s name?” she asked.

  “Silvia Bravo,” I said, forgetting that her last name now was Longpre. One of the first things she did was get a driver’s license with Longpre on it. She wanted that last name, didn’t want her old last name. I think that was the story she had. “He keeps calling her Sil.” I don’t know why I hated that he did and that she let him.

  She was nodding, smiling. “If you’re still in high school, you need to graduate,” Cindy said.

  I made a face away from her. Not only because of school, but because she said that right outta nowhere.

  “I miss high school,” she said. “That’s why I say so.”

  “Really?”

  “I need to finish.” She was folding, and stacking, then pulling a few hot things from the cylinder and piling them on top of the dryer to fold them. “It’s important.” The clothes that I assumed belonged to her seemed more small, in comparison to how large she seemed to me, standing near.

  “You’re gonna need your diploma.” She was being all older and wiser.

  I still wasn’t sure she wasn’t messing around. “Thanks, miss.” Though I wasn’t planning to drop out, the more I hear commercials, the more I want to rip shit off.

  She shook her head smiling. “It is important, you know.” She meant this. Except not really, because she was trying so hard.

  “Didn’t you say you didn’t finish?”

  “I’m certainly no example!” she said. Then she slugged me in the arm. “Smart-ass.” She stopped to look at me. “I had to get married.” She was facing me, holding herself steady, long enough to get me fidgety. “You’re a cute boy, aren’t you?”

  I could’ve said something to her, I just didn’t.

  “So, do you have a girl yet?”

  “Of course.”

  She showed off some really white teeth when she smiled. She was folding underwear, men’s boxers and women’s panties. “I’ll bet you do,” she said. “You will, anyway.”

  As she was putting her stuff into the plastic laundry basket, I decided to wet the mop in the washbasin, like the floor’s what I was going to get to next.

  “See you later, Junior.”

  “Bye,” I said, not correcting her. I grabbed the trash can to carry it to the barrels in the back. I wanted to watch her go to her apartment all the way, but I only peeked for a few seconds as her chanclas flip-flopped up the stairs. If I watched too long, I bet she’d turn around and catch me.

  “It’s in my blood,” Cloyd told me. His office was right next to the kitchen, and he looped around from his swivel chair, attached to that gray uniform, catching me looking down, wordless. If at eye level it was more gray—gray desk and gray chair and gray cabinets, even gray machines on it—above was a woodsy forest of laquered construction licenses and plaques, and above it all were the mountings of dead animal heads. The walls were pulled by the weight of petrified horns and marble eyes and those black noses that reminded me too much of Goofy’s. There were at least two on the side walls, three facing the door. It’s that when I walked in, it was like one of the horns had poked my eye. I was just thinking about that possibility, and probably Cindy, so long that he must have decided I was finally interested. “My family descends from mountain men, French and Scots who came down from Canada and into Louisiana and who stretched themselves out across to the Northwest to get themselves more room. We were skinning and selling the whole time. We lived off the wild.”

  “Dead deer,” I said. What I didn’t like even more were the three rifles on each wall rack. Lots of rifles. I could count them if I wanted. More than the heads, more than the plaques and licenses. I didn’t know about guns that much. I didn’t know about rifles except what anyone would know. I couldn’t imagine what anyone had so many for. So many I couldn’t look at them because they looked back too. I could see the dead dead heads below them. I felt like one of them, staring away and watching at the same time.

  “You got a lot to learn, boy. That there’s elk. A buck elk.”

  I didn’t care so much that he killed them. It was how killing them meant how much better he thought he was than me. How it meant he was a man, and I couldn’t be one if I didn’t blow away a dumb deer with a shotgun. That’s what it seemed like to me. Like killing these animals was where the chores I was expected to do would lead, once I learned responsibilities. And to not kill them meant I wasn’t ever going to be tough the right way.

  I nodded like I was getting it.

  “It’s my father’s side,” he said. “I’m an Okie child of the dust bowl otherwise.”

  The dust part. It was the lint in the laundry room where Cindy was.

  “You know what that means?”

  “I’m not sure, man. No. Really no.”

  “Means my family came here because there was no place else.” He took a sip from a glass. It was whiskey, water, and one ice cube. I’d seen him do these enough times already.

  For a second I stopped, and probably it seemed like I was interested. I wanted to think of—well, things to say, like I was supposed to, but I was waiting for what he wanted me to do, or what I wasn’t, lik
e that. I really wanted to take off. “Was there something else? You know, that I’m supposed to do?”

  “You been on it good,” he said. “You’re being a good man.”

  I could never look him in the eye. I shot a glance as always and nodded. That was all I could make myself do.

  “Remember that you’re taking out the cans too.”

  Finally. I didn’t remember because I thought I was only supposed to bring them in before I walked to school in the morning. That first time my mom ran out with me and helped. The second time she watched.

  “It’s a big help to me,” he said. “You’re a good man.”

  I nodded like the first time he said it.

  “If you get out to the toolshed, you’ll find a dolly.”

  The toolshed was where he kept the mop and bucket and light bulbs and water hoses and a wide push broom, which I used to sweep leaves from a neighbor’s tree behind the carport and the stairs and walkway on the second floor—slate, Cloyd said, showed dirt a lot, so it had to be swept a lot—and then the cement walkways on the bottom level.

  “You don’t mind, right? It’s a big help. One less distraction for me, and the business I got plenty of distraction with already.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. I noticed he was repeating things. I noticed he was getting the whiskey look.

  “Good man,” he said. “Good man.”

  I can’t say for sure, but I’d say this was the last time he tried to talk to me. You know, really thought he was, really believed it himself.

  “Excellent,” he said, swiveling away from me, dialing a phone number off the Rolodex.

  That work was something to keep me outside, not in there in #1, and that made it easier to not do the other cositas, like talk at that maple table with them. Doing the work made my mom happy too, because it meant there was no junk between him and me, and so she even started to slip me a few dollars to eat out. I even liked working at this apartment building, don’t ask me why.

  There were eight garbage cans. One was empty. After I dumped what was in a couple into a couple others, it left me with five to dolly out to the street curb. On my third trip a man was standing near them, waiting. His name was Pinkston, and he lived in #6, a one-bedroom. He wore a shirt that looked like it had sunlight in it, unbuttoned one lower than the top, a collar on it that to me seemed almost like wings that might lift him up in a wind. He was strange in so many ways it was hard to describe. His wiry hair was mostly white and had orange and red in it, his face showed freckles you wanted to count, and there was a river of a scar that cut from the side of his eyebrow, where it trickled down, winding down to his jaw, where it got widest and disappeared under his neck. Its pink color was so much darker than his skin and hair that, even healed, it looked like it still hurt. His skin was so white he didn’t look like a white person, but all I ever thought about was the scar.

  “How ya doing?” he said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Longpre made you trashman?”

  I pulled the dolly from the can. He had moved one of the cans to the other side of the driveway entrance.

  “Young man, these trash cans are not good for me today,” he told me.

  He pushed the other can away from the curb and closer to the sidewalk while he was talking.

  “Here’s my situation,” he said. “You see, this Bird here is one I’m about to sell. She looks good enough to sex with, don’t you say?”

  It was old, and it had some small scratches anyone could see, and the back bumper wasn’t perfect, and it seemed like there were a couple of tears on the bucket seats inside, but it was washed clean and waxed glossy and it was a T-Bird, and, yeah, it was a very bad-looking ride. I agreed with him.

  “I wouldn’t park here if there was another space, but you see how it is.”

  There was parking on only one side of this street, and parked cars stretched as far as you could see to the left and to the right, down the rest of the block to where it ran into the boulevard.

  “But I think this is where I’m supposed to leave these,” I said. “It’s where they were the last times.”

  “And this is exactly correct, you are exactly correct,” he said, dragging the trash can I just brought to the other side of the apartment building’s driveway. “But when my good friend comes over to buy my Bird here, I can’t have no garbage stinking up and disturbing. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “You all right, little brother, you all right.” He watched a car slowing down the street until it passed. “I gotta get very little distraction, all signs gotta be pointing right and good and profitable. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I went away and rolled back with another can. He’d moved the other over there too, and I put this one where those were now.

  “Getting dark. Cannot have these garbage cans in the dark next to my Bird. Bad sales psychology. See what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pitched a smile that wasn’t about only one thought, nodding, nodding. “I’ve been seeing you sweeping the upstairs.”

  Another car creeped and came to a stop. Pinkston went to it and bent down to the window, talked to the black man driving it. He pointed to the boulevard, leaned against the hood of his T-Bird when he got back.

  “This is the one,” he told me, quiet. “I’m feeling it itch.”

  When I wheeled out the fifth can, he was still standing in front of the T-Bird, and his customer was just rounding the corner—he had to park back on the boulevard.

  “You her son?”

  I nodded.

  He nodded too. “Well, when it comes down to it, I’m on hers and your side, you understand me?”

  Not even, but I didn’t have to say, because he wasn’t waiting for me to. He was making sure the doors of the T-Bird were open.

  “I sell my sweetheart now, you make a five-dollar commission.” He turned his head back to me with a smile that made me want to buy a car from him. “Whadaya say?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Now you stop that and take what I’m offering. You my good luck, see?”

  “Okay then, sure.”

  He stepped toward the man with an outstretched hand, and I took the dolly back to the toolshed.

  Cloyd was over by the front window, swirling what was left in his whiskey glass, no ice cube.

  “He was talking to you?”

  I made a yes look and walked to the big window.

  “What’d he say?”

  “That he’s selling that car,” I said.

  “Selling a car.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “That one? To that black man?”

  I didn’t answer. I stared out the window too. There they were out there, talking next to the T-Bird, the passenger’s door open, Pink bent over the top of it, almost laughing, talking it up, the man sitting inside with his legs on the curb.

  “He’s working some angle.” He drank the rest. I already knew Cloyd didn’t like black people. He didn’t say so, but it wasn’t like you needed to ask.

  Cloyd turned away from me and started walking toward his office, when he spun back around. I noticed that the laces on his work boots were untied. I thought, that’s what he does when he’s getting drunk.

  “Let me tell you something.” He was way louder than he needed to be. It didn’t even seem like he was talking to me.

  I made a turn to his face, which seemed mad, but I saw the empty whiskey glass. He had it low and was gripping it more like he was about to throw it, rolling it in his hand. I’d turned my head away from the window but didn’t move my feet. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

  It was like he was chewing, his mouth full, and he had to swallow before he could talk. Then the office phone rang and he rushed to get it.

  “What happened?” my mom asked, almost in a whisper. She probably couldn’t help but hear him talking to me. He was in his office being too
loud with someone on the phone. She said it more nervous than she had to. She was holding a hairbrush. It seemed like she came out of their bedroom, and I couldn’t tell if she was coming or going. She was all sprayed and decked out, maybe a new dress and new heels, like she’d be when she was going out on a date or even shopping.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He was in his office now. You could hear him too easy on the phone.

  “Why is he so … you know?” she asked.

  “Why would I know?”

  “Were you guys talking?”

  “A long time ago already,” I said.

  “De qué?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sonny, I hear him.”

  “I think it was about French,” I said.