Donnie switched the TV to his favorite cartoon, “Thundar the Barbarian.” I had always been amazed and irritated that he and Three watched Saturday cartoons, staring and still like children.
“So we’re going to have some intellectual stimulation now, since we worked out our muscles with early-morning boxing,” I said, unable to stay out of the bedroom, to stop talking to him. I pulled clothes off the edge of the closet door that stuck out from under our mattress. We’d bought the bed from a hotel, and it sagged in the middle. We slid one of the closet doors underneath and sat on the shelf it made at the foot of the bed to watch TV, since there was nothing else in the room.
Donnie said, “At least Thundar got a woman who keeps her mouth shut. Maybe I should jump on into cartoon life, cause mine ain’t about shit.”
“You the one laying around here waiting for something to fly to you. You refuse to go back to school. You can’t find another job. And you want to stay here forever because you chicken to go home and be a nobody. That’s the only reason we’re still here. One time you were a bighead star, everybody wanting to know what you thought about the Skyline game and what about your knee, is it better for tonight? Now you know you’re gonna hear, ‘Donnie King? He couldn’t hang, man.’ I can say it for you right here, any time. I’ll be your friends for you and tell you all about yourself.”
But he didn’t put his hand over my mouth, which was how most of our fights began. He ignored me for Thundar. I pushed at his shoulder, and the flexible closet door bent a little under his weight. “You got nothing to say?” I prodded.
“You gon whup me with your tongue and then when I get mad I’ma do something you don’t like. I just want to say shut up now, okay?”
When we fought, he would get up and leave me wherever we had been rolling, on the floor, on the bed. Last month he had banged my head on the jutting corner of the closet door after I kicked him close to his family jewels. If I was in the front room, he would turn on the TV while I yelled at him to leave. He loved it. He’d watch something that allowed him to make noise, a show he could laugh loudly at, a sporting event where he could shout instructions. He knew his voice echoed off the cement walls. If I lay on the bed, throbbing in spots on my legs or arms where he had pinched me or bent something backwards, I knew he had scratch marks and blood too, but he would flap his house shoes loudly into the kitchen, banging around pots, making something to eat, taking up all the space. “This is my place, I ain’t gotta go nowhere,” he crowed. “You don’t like it, you go.” Outside there was snow and cold, and he laughed.
Thundar called upon his magical powers. He was getting ready to fight some evil, so I got up from the shelf to leave, but Donnie’s arm reached out to push me onto the bed. His skin was filmed with dried sweat, and I thought of the salty taste I had wanted that morning; now his skin only rubbed dull against me. “I don’t feel like messing with you,” I said.
“You used to kiss me all over my face after Cal State Merceno games, and I was more sweaty then,” he said. “I was soaked.”
“You were somebody special then,” I said, sliding out of his hands and going into the kitchen.
“I’m somebody different now, and I don’t gotta ask for what I want,” he said, following me and raking me onto the floor. He held both of my hands against my chest with one of his, and pulled my sweats and underwear off like he was changing a baby. “I’m somebody mad now,” he said. I waited, watching his small smile, and then he laughed and dropped my legs onto the floor. “I don’t want none right now,” he said, and slammed the front door.
My water glass fell off the couch onto the tile. I lay on the icy linoleum; it was gritted with sand from the streets. I tried to sweep it out every day, but it crept back on our boots. I knew Donnie’s breath would be smoking out of his nose like a dragon when he walked to Three’s in the cold, and when I closed my eyes and felt the floor touching my backbone, I thought, he hadn’t even been hard when he pushed against me. It wasn’t about wanting. The cold floor and my skin were getting friendly, and the tiny rocks pricked my bare thighs. At home, in Rio Seco, my skin and Donnie’s had seemed to meld together, on those hundred-degree days. Was the linoleum warming to my body, or was my skin cooled and hard? They were growing together, fusing, so I stood up, and like a tongue stuck to a rough ice cube, I left skin behind when I pulled away.
The dust joined itself together like webs along the walls and between the spidery legs of the card table and two folding chairs. I swept the webs toward the door and mixed them with the glass shards, glinting like dew in the dust.
The air outside was very still and frozen; I pushed the dust and shards close to the wall and stood at the chainlink railing. When I sniffed, the dampness in my nostrils clicked, turning icy, and I started to feel the crying, the heat in my jaws when I held it back. I lifted up my face, and remembered Donnie’s father teasing him about me, laughing with his uncles. “Is the boy in love?” “She got his nose wide open.” “Don’t let it come a storm and he look up, cause he drown in a minute.” Donnie had taken it, wouldn’t move his arm from around me even when his cousins joined in.
The broom lay on its side where it had fallen, and when I narrowed my eyes, it looked like a palm frond; at home, after the wind, curled stiff palm fronds would litter the streets and yards, the high school. We had searched for places to lie down, places where the cops wouldn’t find us, and after one of his games, Donnie led me back to the field near the street. I had said, “This ain’t no place,” and he smiled, draping the fronds over the chainlink fence, hooked by the curved bark end, until he’d made a shack in the darkest corner, away from the streetlight. When we lay on the grass, I saw the papers and trash clinging to the fence where the wind had blown them, hiding us.
The pile of clothes was damp against my hands. I touched them where they hung on the railing, the shorts and practice jersey from Cal State Merceno, the tube socks long as my arm. I breathed in again, felt the air. I went back inside and turned on the weather channel; it was fourteen degrees. I brought the plastic pitcher outside and poured cupfuls of water over the clothes, my hands red in the cold, and watched the cloth cling to the metal. I poured again, waited, poured, standing there for a long time as the water shimmered down the bumpy surface and my ears ached with cold.
I waited inside, by the window, where the light from the yellowed, dirty window shade made everything golden. Donnie’s face was beautiful in that dulled brightness. When we walked home, and I’d forgotten my gloves, he sat on the couch and put my fingers into his mouth, one by one, and sucked gently until they were warm again. His face was pale gold from the winter, glowing, when I leaned toward him. His eyes were closed, and the black fans of his lashes, his straight eyebrows, the thin-feathered wings of his faint moustache were like the markings on a tiger, soft and precise.
The light would shine over the three slanting scars on his cheekbone, arranged around a small black mole like Arabic writing that I couldn’t read, and I would slide against his side like a palm against the tongue that’s licking the sugar, or salt, from it.
I took paper to write him a note.
July will be seven years since I kissed you, after you lost the Doloreux game. You lost again. I am going home to the Westside.
When I went back outside, the clothes were frozen to the railing, coated with ice in a dimpled opaque pattern thick as shower glass.
tracks
TRENT / MARCH
AS I’M HEADING DOWN the driveway, I stop the bike because I can see the dripline at the willow tree. It’s a problem spot, always too hot because the heat reflects off the white concrete, and I can’t get the verbena I planted for ground cover to hide the skinny black hose. Irrigation has to be invisible, so you can’t see the money you’re spending. That’s the point. You don’t need to see it, or have it be seen, like my cousins with their gold jewelry and El Dog.
In the beginning, the yards I do look really funny, tubing everywhere, circles around trees like I l
assoed these scrawny trunks and plants out in the middle of a brown desert, everything flattened by the bulldozers except where the banks cut in steep so we can all fit on the side of the hill.
Two years is the longest it takes to decorate right, let the yard mature, wait for the market to go up by itself. Southern California. Just live here, eat and sleep for long enough, and if you’re in the right place, you make money. Do the house up, and you make more. Whenever she happened to see prospective buyers at the second house we sold, Brichée would tell them, “My husband and I love the house, we’ve just got it to where we want it. We’re only moving because of my job.”
That’s not true—by then I’m tired as hell of the whole place, pouring the cement for the patio, building the deck, matching the colors inside.
The back tire crunches off the curb, and I coast down the street, check out the progress of the Spanish-style three houses down and the Cape Cod next to him. They’re slow—still got cement bags piled up, none of their walkways poured yet. On the street, I have plenty of room to ride because no sidewalks are built here. The heat comes straight down my back; the city doesn’t do trees here, not like in the old neighborhoods with the huge carobs and elms. It seems even wider here, with the popsicle-stick baby trees and no cars parked in front of the houses. I can fit my truck and Brichée’s Honda in the three-car garage.
Brichée won’t be home until damn near ten, and I haven’t been riding in a long while. It’s tax time, end of March, and only 5:30. After four years of this, I know the seasons for accountants. Not that she’s ever home early, but tonight there’s no question. At the end of our cul-de-sac, I whirl around the corner and see a woman standing at her mailbox, giving me a funny look. A who-the-hell special. Nobody knows me, even though we’ve been here for a year. I leave at dawn, before anyone except the commuters starting their way to L.A., so I can do most of my banks and offices when it’s cool. Out in yards and parking lots all day, especially doing new sprinklers and irrigation, even winter can be too hot in Rio Seco. I usually get home around four, again before most everyone else, take my nap. Then I’m out in the back, trying to keep things under control, staining the deck, staking the trees. I have a half-acre lot, like everyone here, and the weeds are steady trying to kill me.
Riding out of Grayglen makes me dizzy sometimes, the curving short streets until you get to the main road leading down the hill to the city. Cars crank past me once I get to Gardenia. I can see the wooden signs by the side of the street, most of the arrows pointing over the hill the way the cars are going, the yellow lettering carved in: Grassridge, Rosewind, Rivercrest, Haven Hills, Grayglen. After the last, an arrow points at me, where I’m still waiting to pull out. The slope across the road is bare, with a slash down the middle where the rain made a rift, and pepper trees, wild tobacco bushes scattered near the place where the moisture gathers. I see illegals picking the prickly pear cactus, nopales in Spanish, I learned from the signs people put up below their houses telling the guys to stay away. The illegals ride ten-speeds down the hill every day, away from all the new tracts they’re working.
That was where I started. I bought a three-bedroom in Woodbridge for $89,000 and sold it two years later for 105. In Stonehaven, I bought into the first phase for 126. Six months later, the second phase, on that land I had been watching from my back patio, where tumbleweeds kept flying over my fence, went for 149, and the third phase started at 162. I sold and came back to the better side of the slope for Grayglen.
I hear cricket buzzes near my ears when the wind flaps my lobes; Brichée’s always teasing me about my big ears. Gardenia is steep. There isn’t any smog for a change, and I can see most of Rio Seco spread out from here. That’s the whole idea. The Westside, where my parents live, is past the long arroyo that stretches like spilled green paint in the brown fields. The last couple of days have hit 90°. I follow the strings of gray freeways, the cars close and even as beads on my mother’s rosary. Brichée drives from L.A. every night, an hour and a half minimum. Two hours tonight, looks like. All these L.A. people are keeping my prices high, running out here for a cheap house, shaving and putting on makeup in their cars. I won’t drive like that. One of the banks out in San Bernardino, about twenty miles away, offered me a contract seven years ago, and my father was cussing mad when I told him I wasn’t going to take it. “Boy, I woulda killed for a couple of banks, the easy life. They ain’t got but a scrap of lawn to cut, edge, a little trash. Shoot, I thought you had sense.”
“This isn’t just cutting grass,” I told him. “I’m doing custom landscape, remember? This is a month of driving out there with all the materials, completely different.”
“Is the money a different color? Goddamn. And you think you gon buy a house before you old as me?”
I turn at the four-way stop and cross over to Edgewild Estates, a section of custom-builts. All the streets are named after mountains: I drive down Rainier, Matterhorn, Everest. I did two of the houses here, but they didn’t want anything too spectacular. Nice border gardens, and for one on Matterhorn I did a beautiful grape arbor in the back, but the front yards were ordinary. Better than most of these I’m passing, though. They look like Singletary’s work, the usual boring petunias, marigolds, snapdragons in circle planters near the mailboxes. A couple of bougainvilleas along the cinderblock walls. I stop at my favorite, three weeping willows on a mound, and then head down the newest street, where they’ve just finished a house I saw months ago only framed. A total brick facade in front, three chimneys twisting and spiraling to a damn turret at the top. A castle. I’ve never seen anything close. I turn the bike around and come back for another look, stop to check out the patterns on the front walkway. Basket-weave bricks, beautiful with the rest. Three chimneys, and it’s 90 in March. But yeah, that’s it. I look across the street to see a woman in the bay window, staring hard at me. She glares straight at me, doing her best crime-watch frown. I laugh. You build bay windows, river-rock entries, brick facades so people will look, right? But from cars, circling around and around, or from the path where they’re walking up to the front door for dinner. Not looking like me. I know I should wear the uniform, the damn biking shorts and maybe one of those stupid little caps like Tour de France, but I like to ride in my sweats. My ass looks like two cantaloupes in those tight Lycra shorts. They aren’t made for people of African descent. Shit, I keep wearing the sweats even though it’s hot because Brichée’s always complaining about how I’m going from brownskin to blueblood like my father too quick in the tender years of my life, in the sun.
Just to bother this woman, I get out my little pad of paper and write down the name of the brick contractor from the lawn sign. I always carry the pad and a pen. Since I moved to Grayglen, the cops have stopped me twice talking about, “Somebody reported suspicious activity, loitering, checking out houses.”
I laughed real careful. “You want to see what I’m writing?” I showed them the pad, and then I read it, in case they didn’t know some of the words. “Wisteria on gazebo, Japanese maple, agapanthus a good color combo.” Yeah, right. I want to rob you, so I ride a bike past your house in the middle of the afternoon and write down how I’m going to break in. I see you looking at me, and I keep making notes about the accessibility of your windows and doors.
I turn to go back down the street—you can’t ride through, like in Grayglen. You have to go back out the way you came: a closed community. She’s still there. Hey, I watch people drive past my yard, slowing around the cul-de-sac to check out the way I painted my garage doors or how nice my roses look against the brick edging. Nobody plants big roses anymore.
Sometimes I can barely stop myself from running out the front door and yelling “Booga booga!” I say to Brichée, “That car will, depart at some high speeds. There goes the neighborhood.” She gets pissed when I talk like that. She’s chatted with our neighbors—on the right, a stockbroker, on the left, another accountant. She doesn’t run them off. But Brichée’s light, bright, and just ab
out right—she’s Louisiana. I remember when she showed up at the city college, brothers were falling all over her and her sister Brandy.
Past Edgewild, there’s nothing but orange groves. I pass a dry bank, and the colonies of red ants are tossing up mounds of coarse sand. I watch them carrying bits of palm bark, dry straw, big loads weaving back and forth along the asphalt. Even though they name these places half-nature and half-England, Hampton or Fox or Hunter, this is as close as you get to wilderness before the dozers grade it. I have to break out the Diazanon granules for months because the ants are the worst problem. They eat flowers and stems, where in my parents’ neighborhood I only saw them eating regular ant food like sugar and soda. Up here, I find deep holes from ground squirrels; I hear coyotes at night.
I watch to see if the old beat-up house is still here in the next grove, past the canal. I was keeping an eye on it a few months ago. It’s gone. I walk around the razed area, where the foundation and chimney are left, with lots of trash from partying rich kids. No For-Sale sign yet, but I look closer at the groves and see the milkweed, straight and perfect as military boys, marching up and down the irrigation furrows.
The old farmhouses spaced in the groves were sturdy, some of them three stories. One old man I met told me that was so the farmers could look out over the tops of the trees and watch for people stealing oranges. I kick the edges of the foundation; the walls are thick, wide, and every room would have touched the outside, had a window. The walls in my house are thin. When Brichée watches “Wiseguy” or “Miami Vice”, I can hear the guns and screeching tires way upstairs in the bedroom I use for an office. I like sitting there, drawing plans, circles for each plant in the flower beds, curving paths and raised rectangular planters. I etch in the leaves sometimes.
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