The Flowers Read online

  I could see them through the window by the dining area, dishes and bowls still on the maple table. I didn’t go in. Then they were in the living room area. I thought about going around to the other side, where my window was, and crawling through, but while I was walking that way, I saw that Nica’s door was open upstairs. I could hear my heart beating, and it wasn’t red but blue. It beat with circles that made circles. You know how when you drop a pebble in a pool of water? I decided to go see her anyways.

  She was sitting on a golden couch, that crushed soft material, watching the TV but without listening to the sound. I saw this through her window, the curtains pulled open. It was like when she saw me, she couldn’t look too hard or smile too much. Then she came outside quickly, talking soft.

  “It’s that Angel just went to sleep, and I don’t want nothing to wake him up.”

  “So you take care of him every night?”

  “My parents are at work, so I have to.”

  I was thinking of the layout of the two-bedroom apartment. “So he sleeps in the room with you?” There was a dented pillow and a ball of blanket next to where she was sitting. “Or you sleep on the couch?”

  “Maybe it’s better if you come in, so that nobody sees us out here,” she said.

  “How come—” I started.

  “Shh,” she said, holding that finger to her lips.

  She was so chula! She was wearing a dress exactly like the other one I saw, only this one was orange-colored.

  I tried to whisper. “You could turn some dials so that you can’t see the TV either, so it doesn’t make any light against the walls.” The TV was almost that way anyway, too purple, the color gone. The program was a Mexican soap opera. We sat at different ends of the couch.

  She didn’t laugh but she smiled at me.

  “What do your parents do?”

  “My mom cleans at a medical center. Margarito, he cleans at an industrial complex.”

  “Then, they work at night and you watch the baby.”

  She nodded. “What are you doing out?”

  “I walk around,” I told her. “It’s what I do.”

  “Your father and mother don’t care,” she said, more as a comment.

  “He’s not my father,” I said.

  “Margarito’s not my father either,” she said.

  “But the baby?”

  “He’s my brother from my mother’s side. My mom is married to him.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you go out all the time? Whenever you want?”

  “They don’t really notice. I think my mom doesn’t care, but if she did maybe, she don’t notice anyway. Probably I’ve always been kind of on my own.”

  “So you go out every night?”

  “Not really. Sometimes, not all the time. More these days.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Come and go to bowling with me.”

  “Bowling?”

  She had trouble saying that word, and I didn’t know the Spanish for it. I stood up and made motions and dumb noises.

  “Shh!” she said.

  “You wanna go with me? There’s this place right around the corner.”

  “I have never been to this bowling. But no, I can’t go to this bowling.”

  I think she liked the word bowling.

  “Sure you can. It’s … fun.”

  “Fun?” She almost laughed when she said that word in English too. Like saying it in English was the most fun she’d had all night.

  “Fun fun fun!”

  “Shh!”

  “You will love bowling. Especially when you get good like I am. Even if you always lose against me.”

  She shook her head, happy. “Are you good at it?”

  “Hell yeah!” I said in English.

  “You must get to go a lot.”

  “Not a lot. Only when I don’t got nothing else to do.”

  “You have fun.” She almost laughed.

  “I eat there too. I like the hamburgers. You like hamburgers?”

  She nodded, a big smile. I thought maybe she smiled because she liked me, not hamburgers. I was feeling happy.

  “So come with me. We could go tomorrow, right after school even.” I was talking about myself when I said that, but I heard the school word the same way she did.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “What about the weekend? They’re open on Saturday.”

  She took a little longer to shake her head, not because she had to think about it but because she didn’t.

  “Well, sometime,” I told her. “Okay?”

  She nodded.

  We both stared at the TV. A beautiful woman was arguing with two men and a hot-tempered little grandma.

  “My parents would get so mad if you were here,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. “What time do they get home?”

  “Not for a long time yet. Until the morning. You don’t have to worry yourself.”

  “It’s that I don’t want you to get in no trouble.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “Sure!”

  I walked with her to the kitchen. She got two scratched-up plastic glasses out of the cupboard and filled them from the tap.

  “Want me to go buy us some cokes?”

  “I’m sorry I only have water,” she said. “Sometimes we have Kool-Aid, but not right now.”

  “I love water, it’s the best drink. But I can go buy us cokes. For, like, fun. I know you can’t leave. I can go and then I can come back.”

  “Maybe you better not. If someone saw you go and then come back. …”

  “Next time I come over,” I told her, “I’m bringing cokes.”

  That made her shake her head and smile—both soft like doing that too hard would wake up the baby.

  “And some potato chips or something. You like little things like that, right?”

  “Shh!” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered again.

  We sat back down with our glasses, that novela show still fuming.

  “I love this show too,” I told her.

  She did an ay ay and shook her head. “You like the fun.”

  “Serious, I watch it almost every night, and I hate when I miss it. Did you see it last night? Hijo de su, it got crazy!”

  She put her finger to her lips again and made a face at me.

  “Sorry!” I whispered.

  I wished I could kiss her. I didn’t know how I could. I was afraid she’d never want to see me again if I tried and it went wrong. So I only imagined kissing her—there was kissing on the TV screen in front of us and neither of us said anything. My mind kissed her lips and cheeks and around her nose and around her eyes, kissing and kissing her—her lips turned into a bright white against the blackness, tunneled into colors, purple and yellow and green and orange. She was her lips and their moisture was air and space but you could feel it. She leaned against me—and we were in a city of tall buildings and near a lake and a river and an ocean and sky and light, squares and rectangles like in buildings but diamonds and ovals and perfect circles too, and the air wet, floating us, and we were not here. I was so close to her, I was so close to her, her warmth was a kiss too and so we might spin so fast at first and then just spin until it got easy, even if it was like breathing underwater, might be as easy as falling asleep when you are so sleepy.

  “Have you ever made out with a chick?” one of the twins, I think Joe, asked me. I was beginning to think I saw a difference between them.

  “You’re stupid,” I said.

  “My brother hasn’t,” the other twin, I’m saying Mike, said.

  They were laughing like out of junior high.

  “It’s ’cause I skip past the kissing part,” his brother said. “I go straight for the hootchy-kootchy.” He bit the bottom of his lip and made his hands feel the top and grab a bottom, his hips pumping.

  They were killing themselves.

  We were in the middle of the tracks, a
nd really they were making me feel okay too. When we saw a lowrider over there, colored glitter in the midnight-blue paint job, popping off like metal to metal sparks, rims so polished they were like raw sunlight, we went straight over to it. The twins mashed their faces into the tinted windows to see the insides.

  “Hey you fucking putos!” a dude in a baggy white T-shirt and silver chains and black shades yelled. He was on the other side of the screen door and on the porch of the house right there. I don’t think he was gonna do shit else, but those twins ran off like we were guilty of fucking the car up. I stood by it a few extra seconds to make up for them, embarrassed and mad.

  “You dudes are such fucking pussies,” I told the twins. “You didn’t have to run, we weren’t doing nothing.”

  Tugging their matching white shirts and looking at their matching black shoes, it took them a little while to think of what to say to me.

  “I just didn’t want to hurt the vato,” said Mike, I think, after the long silence.

  “Yeah, if I got mad, hijo de la chingada, after I messed that culo mamón punk up, I’d have had to kick the shit out of his ride también! It wouldn’t be fair to that beautiful carrito to be all dented up por mis patadas.”

  “And then, you know what?” said his brother, getting into it. “I’d be so fucking pissed off still I’d go burn down his pinche casita feaissima! I’d have to fuck over his whole life and familia, dude!”

  * * *

  Her on the phone when I came in: I can’t be louder.

  Cloyd was wanting me to chop down weeds on the back side of the building. Everything else was okay, I just didn’t want this job. I knew something like this was coming, though, because I already overheard him telling my mom one afternoon how I had to learn responsibility, how I had to earn my right to stay here. That he was teaching me to be a man. I wondered what my mom was saying to back me up—she wasn’t loud enough for me to hear. Though I was also afraid to hear her. I hoped she was fighting for me, but I wasn’t liking her so much, because she was the one who was married to this man and his gray uniform.

  The weeds were really tall, some of them up to my waist. The weeds were why I couldn’t clean the screens on this side of the building, which was what got him to assigning me the job. I did not like weeding. I was swinging this weed cutter left and right, right and left, just not very hard, and I scratched like ants were all over me. I couldn’t decide if doing it would make it go away easier, which would keep anything like it from happening again. Already it seemed like I’d been at it forever.

  “Chief,” Pink said to me, shaking his head, “this is one job no God-loving young man is wanting.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I been watching you,” he said. “My advice, little brother, is that you need a beer.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You want a beer?”

  He wasn’t joking around. I grinned.

  “Come on, young man. Let me buy you something cold that you well deserve.”

  I hesitated. And then I decided I definitely wasn’t going to finish this weeding which I did not want to do, and maybe it was better to not be around to explain.

  We walked away from the weeds and across the front grass of the building to the street. He opened the passenger door to a Pontiac. It was a yellow four-door with black leather interior, an automatic, an AM-FM radio.

  “You like this?” he asked once he got in.

  Sure I liked it.

  It started up after a couple of halting groans.

  “We need to get a new starter and solenoid for it,” he said.

  We pulled out of the parking space, and in a minute we were on the boulevard. The windows were down, the wind took over the insides, and, yes, I liked this a lot more than what I was doing before.

  “You don’t mind we take a little drive?”

  He was going there already, but no ways I minded. Pretty quick there were only black people everywhere. Just when I started thinking about this, we both heard somebody hollering from the sidewalk. “Hey mister Pink man! Hey there brotherman Pink!” From a distance he seemed like an old dude wearing overalls and a cap. Once we pulled over to the curb and he leaned into the window on my side to talk, his right hand holding a tall can in a brown bag, I could see he wasn’t old. He was hanging in front of a bar with several guys who stayed back uninterested, dark T-shirts, one of them with a rag on his head.

  “What you say, Pinkston?” he asked.

  “I got the word and nothing but,” said Pink.

  The man laughed maybe five times bigger than his size. “Straight from the Lord, straight from the Lord!”

  Pink pulled out some dollar bills. “Since you standing here, can you see to getting us a couple of those?”

  The man called over one of his friends and gave him the green bills, then turned back to Pink. “How’s business? You doing good?”

  “I seen lots worse.”

  “That’s good, that’s good,” the man said.

  There was a wide space here. I thought maybe it was because of me sitting there, right between them. Neither of them had even glanced at me.

  “I thought it was you,” the man said. “Hadn’t seen you around.

  “Gotta work, gotta do God’s business, if you know what I’m saying, and carry in some coin too,” Pink said.

  “Yeah, I hear that.”

  “We both know it,” said Pink.

  Two beers in two wrapped-up lunch bags were delivered to him, and he handed one to each of us. He still didn’t look me in the eye even when he gave me the bag for me.

  “We gotta go see about getting a starter for this,” Pink told him.

  “Oh yeah?” the man asked.

  “She looks nice, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he said, backing his head out the window, stepping back one, examining. “Oh yeah,” he said again from there.

  “We’re rolling,” Pink told him. “You be good.”

  “That’s what she tells me!” the man said, laughing loud. “That’s what she be telling me!”

  We turned off the big street where the projects were, all those steel doors painted orange, and all those wooden houses with porches sinking like the roofs.

  “You wanna drive this?” Pink asked.

  I drank beer before, got drunk on it, but not malt liquor—I liked the drinking and being in the car with the windows down. I got even more comfortable because it seemed like he was in his own neighborhood. But I’d only driven a car for a minute one time, and that was in a shopping center parking lot on a Sunday when I told my mom I wanted her to take me over for a learner’s permit which I wasn’t old enough to get yet.

  “I shouldn’t be driving,” I told him.

  I made him really laugh.

  It was either Victory or Victors Auto Wrecker, couldn’t tell which because that last letter was missing. The weeds that grew in those cracks of the asphalt or in those dirt patches were dying of no circulation and whatever else could happen to them when nobody touched or cared about them—or of oil maybe soaking their roots and nuts and bolts and beer caps being pounded and crushed into them by tires driving over. No living weeds. Good beer or whatever it really was. I loved being here because I was not being back there.

  Everything in every direction inside was smeared and then smeared over again by grease, especially the man leaning on the counter between old parts and a cash register. He was fat, but in the way that looks more strong and hard and muscular, and scary as shit, like if he hit you you’d be really more than bruised, more broken like bones in a chicken dinner, and if he squeezed you you’d be really so freaking squished. Black-skinned as he was, you could see the grease was a coat of wax on him too, except I didn’t think he cared even if he noticed. What weren’t streaked were his teeth, clean and white as nurses’ uniforms. He showed a lot of them.

  “I know now why they call you the big man,” he said to Pink.

  “You keep on listening to them women.”


  “You a nasty fuck!”

  “You hear about last week?”

  “Damn fuck sure did heard about her! Damn!”

  They laughed, and they laughed, and they laughed.

  “Proof only you don’t care nothing about ugly!” that man screamed.

  “Ugly? You crazy? She was too young to be ugly yet! Nothing but a brick house, built too good.”

  They laughed more, and the man gave himself and Pink a beer. Pink told him to get me one too. He brought me a coke—which was fine with me—shaking his head, saying,”You don’t want to be getting too used to no drinking at your young age. You don’t let this crazy cat lead you into wrong.”

  Pink shook his head at me. “That is a good man in the making, one who ain’t gonna be led by nobody. Ain’t that right, Sonny?”

  The coke can stunk of grease too, but inside it was ice cold. I was nodding my head even before I knew what he said. After, when my brain heard, I wanted to say yes again. I might not have thought of it, but if I had, I would’ve. I wanted it to be true.

  I still didn’t want to have anything to do with that jungle forest of weeds along the side of Los Flores. I wasn’t even close to getting it done. When I went there now, all I did was stand there and dream about when I got a car. Like Pink’s Pontiac, sitting right there on the street. I imagined me and Nica cruising boulevards in it. We’d cruise east, then we’d cruise down to the beach. We’d even cruise Hollywood. She’d never been to Hollywood like me, a couple of times for me. Just telling her I went there and take her, I’d be in with her.

  I don’t know why I was so shy about going up to her. I wasn’t shy! I must have wanted her to see me outside, doing whatever, and invite me up. Or I was afraid of something. There was her dad, and it seemed like she had to watch out with him, and the door was never open anymore—not like that one time anyways. She didn’t go to school, you know? That was something from the dinosaur times. She was like some Indian slave, like the twins were saying. And I was hearing more yelling late at night than usual. I didn’t like to hear it—I hated that I did. He was always telling her to do something else and then saying it wasn’t right, like that. Like how come she couldn’t do it right without him showing her again? Shit like that. Sometimes it woke the baby and he cried too much and that was her fault too. I hadn’t swept the slate deck up there for a while, but how could I as long as there was this pinche weeding to do? I wasn’t ever going to finish this, I just knew it. I didn’t try and wasn’t going to either. I ain’t no slave, that was what I’d tell myself to say. I wasn’t explaining to either the Cloyd or my mom about it.