The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  “You’re afraid he’ll see the open cans.” Now I was smiling.

  “Go throw them away, will you? Will you please?”

  I went to the cabinet under the sink where the kitchen trash went.

  “No, not there, Sonny. You’re very funny.”

  “Why not?”

  “Please? Can you please do what I ask for me without making me want to scream?”

  I knew I couldn’t tease her too much right then. Sometimes I could, but I could tell that this time she might not like me going too far. She hadn’t hit me or threatened to since we moved in here. She was going out, and something was going on.

  I was stuffing the empty cans under some other garbage—trying to do a good hiding job for my mom—when that Gina came from behind me with her paper sacks of trash.

  “Caught you,” she said. She wore plasticky blue pants and shoes which came to a point, sharp as a rosebush thorn. I don’t know why it’s what I kept noticing. Besides her short black hair, chopped to the bottom of her ears, I couldn’t see her above her waist because my eyes were stuck on what was below. “What’re you digging for?”

  “I wasn’t. …” I felt caught, not as much for hiding the cans only for doing something like it. I couldn’t make eye contact with her.

  “I’m your neighbor,” she said. “Gina.”

  “I figured that,” I said. “I know you’re in, well, Number Two.”

  “The apartment next to you guys,” she said. She was bones, way skinny, really small, all buggy eyes that watched.

  “Right,” I agreed.

  “You’re doing such a good job around here,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I wanted to move on. “Thanks, whatever you mean.”

  “Of keeping things swept up and clean! You’re doing such a good job. The building’s never looked better.”

  “Oh yeah, that. Cloyd has me doing it.” I was dying, afraid she was gonna try to accuse me any second of lifting their magazines. I was glad when we were finally away from the trash cans and walking toward the apartment doors. “I don’t mind. I kind of like working around here even.”

  “It looks so much better around here too. Really! It’s always been kept up, but you’re making it almost spotless.” She stopped at the #2 door, hers. “It’s great to meet you finally.”

  I started crunching on tortilla chips in the bowl sort of like I was out of breath and needed air and the oxygen was inside them.

  “Don’t eat those!” my mom yelled. She was practically skidding around the corner, she was banking her turn so fast. She was in a hurry. “Those are for him and his client.”

  “Isn’t there a bunch more in that bag over there?” A bag was on the corner of the tile counter. I wanted these and I wanted them too.

  “Please don’t eat them. Please. Okay?”

  I still had one in my hand, and I took a few more.

  “And I want you to do something else for me.” She reached into her purse and handed me a five. “Maybe just go get yourself dinner tonight. He’ll be going out.”

  What was strange is that she said this like I wasn’t buying my own dinner practically every night. I guess she was so distracted it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder how I did that—how I’d been doing it. At first she would give me some money like this. But that stopped. I was using from my own hidden money pile.

  “It’ll probably take more than this to shut me up,” I said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m joking around, Mom. You remember how people do that?”

  “M’ijito, I don’t have time,” she said.

  “I’m pretty busy too,” I told her, “but I still remember how to joke.”

  She didn’t hear a word I said.

  “Speaking of that,” she suddenly said, “are you going to finish that painting outside?”

  “Speaking of that? What’re you talking about?”

  “I thought of it right now,” she said. “It’s that, well, I don’t want it to turn out like the weeds.”

  “What’s that mean, the weeds?”

  “He talks about it. How you couldn’t finish.”

  “Couldn’t?” I was pissed off. “Wouldn’t,” I told her. “Didn’t want to.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should not finish this other too.”

  “I’m almost done already. He knows it too. I’m sure he knows. I’m almost done right now. Did he say something?”

  “No. I just don’t want him to.”

  “He better give me money for it,” I announced. “He said he would.”

  She had actually stopped moving and was standing still, facing me even, looking at me, that’s how serious the situation was.

  “He said he was gonna pay me for that work,” I said right back at her. “I wanna be paid.”

  “Don’t make any trouble,” she said. This was another kind of tone, with another meaning. It wasn’t, I could tell, about me but about her and him, her and her trouble. “You hear me? I’ll give you money if you need it. You know that.”

  I knew that? How did I know that? When did I know that? “I want it, and he said he’ll pay me, right? He said he would. I believed him.” I was feeling like I was on my toes a little.

  “If he doesn’t, I will. If you really need it, I’ll get it for you.”

  If I really need it? I couldn’t believe she said that. “He will.” And no, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t remember, and if she did, or I reminded her to remember, she’d either deny she offered or say she would later.

  She stopped and, distracted, sponged the kitchen counter as if she’d already forgotten we’d had this conversation and then turned back to me, eye to eye. “Please tell him that I left the salsita in the refrigerator.”

  She had a note for him under the bowl of tortilla chips. “Doesn’t it say that right there?” I asked.

  “M’ijo, please tell him?” She drooped her head and closed her eyes for like two seconds, like a prayer. I was still thinking of him not paying me. “Will you please tell him? For me? Please?”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I’ve got an appointment at the beauty parlor,” she said. “A late one. Then I’m going to a fashion show.” She stopped and stared too much at me, then away like she was still staring, waiting for what I would say—I decided; I figured out—because she was lying. “Remember Nely?”

  Nely was one of her better friends, one she liked to go out drinking with, talk about dresses and bras and makeup and men with. I did like Nely, how wouldn’t I? She was the one who used to touch me the most when I was small, her soft hands all over my face and neck, and when she’d grip my shoulders and squeeze the muscles in my arms, she’d do it hard, like I was so strong, and like it made her feel muscles inside herself too. She’d tell me how I was a guapito, say it loud for everyone, soft in my ear. Of course I liked her. What I really didn’t forget is my cheek against her soft chichis when I would be in her lap. I would pretend I didn’t really know where my face was. In a way I wasn’t pretending to not know where I was. Except I wasn’t maybe supposed to like it, and she maybe wasn’t supposed to let me.

  “Didn’t she marry some really rich guy?” I asked.

  My mom made a face. Obviously she didn’t want to talk about that, and she snapped at me. “That’s who I’m going with is all,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since I moved here.”

  It wasn’t nighttime yet, though it wasn’t the bright afternoon anymore. I could paint the Los Flores sign. I was planning on that, planning on finishing this very day. Now I didn’t want to very much. Outside the front door, on the grass I’d mowed and edged the other day, I thought of some other things I could do to get away from the two of them. I could go bowl. Or I could go sweep the walks, though I had been doing that too much, like that Gina said, and nothing needed it that much. Mostly I did it to get an excuse to go past Nica’s door. Right then I decided to walk around from the front of the apartment building to look up there again. I was always watching t
he curtains, trying to figure out when she for sure was there alone, her parents at work. I don’t know why I was afraid to just knock.

  Mr. Josep was sitting on his chair, staring out. I didn’t think he ever noticed me or anything else.

  “Come.” He waved.

  “Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure what he said or if he was talking to me even.

  “Come,” he said again, waving upward. “Go up the stair and come to here.”

  I took the stairs up and stood close to him.

  “You want the chair?”

  “I don’t think. …” I started, considering. “I probably don’t need one.”

  I was standing there, waiting for him, for what he wanted.

  “You go to the school?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “High school.”

  “You like the high school?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” he said.

  He must not have heard what I answered.

  It was like he didn’t really want to talk to me but was working up the words, or his mouth was too full and he had to swallow. I stared out at what he might be seeing when he sat there. What I saw were dark electrical wires looping from one pole to another in the gray droop. And so many crinkly wood greased-up poles. I heard the traffic on the boulevard that I usually didn’t hear, unless I was on that bed in the dark, now everywhere in the air like insects in a jungle. I heard a motorcycle revving, then popping. I heard an airplane but couldn’t see it in the sky. I heard a dog barking, and then another dog barking. I saw the sky not like air but like gas, like clean fizz on a blank TV screen. For a second I started to imagine what he must see out there. Then he interrupted me.

  “She doesn’t go to the school,” he finally told me, nodding at Nica’s door. “She doesn’t know any English.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t for one second think this was what he was going to talk about.

  “That is not good,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t understand why she didn’t either. “Probably not, huh?”

  “I practice my English,” he said.

  I was wondering what language he spoke. It didn’t seem to me like his accent had anything to do with Spanish.

  “I went to the school. My father wanted me to finish the school because it was good, he told me. He told me I would get good job and have good life because I finish.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “I have good job too,” he said. “All my life, I have good job.”

  I was going to ask what that was and ask him about himself, like where he came from. It was supposed to be Spain, or Portugal, and though I never met anyone who was from Spain, or Portugal either, he sure didn’t seem to be from there, so I was planning to ask one of those since-you’re-talking questions when Cindy stepped out her apartment door.

  “Hey you handsome boy, you! How come you don’t want to visit with me?”

  Even Mr. Josep’s old chair creaked in surprise. First it was out of the surprise to hear any voice—made me realize how quiet it seemed before—and then at what she was wearing, which was a white bikini, which for a second or two didn’t look like a bikini but panties and a bra. Either way, she had it to show. Even Mr. Josep not only shifted his body to see her but bobbed his head, almost shaking his eyes into focus.

  “Why is that?” she said. She was standing fully outside the door, both bare feet on the deck, daring both of us to see whatever we felt like.

  Mr. Josep turned his head downward very slowly, and then his hand waved above, in her direction, like he was brushing away a feather floating down toward his lap. “She want you to go there,” he told me. “You go there.”

  “What is it about me you don’t like?” Cindy asked me.

  She was wearing a bikini that was supposed to make you think of Hawaii. I was liking Hawaii.

  “Were you at the beach?” I asked her, “or are you going right now?”

  “You want to? Yeah, let’s go!”

  She’d been smoking mota again, the smell strong in her place. She had her wine drink in a glass going just as strong. It was too hot in the apartment again, the heat up too high. Clothes were spilled and draped around the living room, and a few plates were off the walking path, and there were empty glasses and beer cans and cigarette butts in ashtrays on a big glass-covered coffee table. It seemed like more people had been here than just her and the Tino I’d never saw. I started looking for money.

  It was going to be dark soon, way too late to drive to the beach. “It’s a lot of fun to go to the beach. I practically never get to go.”

  “I promise you I’ll take you if you say you want to,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “That you do. You have to say it.”

  “Do what? Say what?”

  “That you want to. That you want to go with me.”

  “To the beach?”

  I was confused, smelling her marijuana so much it almost felt like I was already smoking it with her. I also kind of hated being around drunk people—her now too—and also, maybe, because she was getting real close to me, fast. Close enough that I could smell her winey breath. Close enough that I could feel the cups of her little Hawaii bikini top brushing my chest and then her hands on my wrists.

  “Tell me,” she said so close to me I couldn’t remember what we were supposed to be talking about. “Tell me we will, Sonny.”

  I was embarrassed about being excited down there just for her being against me some when then, like that, she pushed her lips against mine and opened her mouth and sucked my tongue into it. For a few seconds or minutes we were making out and then we dropped onto that hard couch and she reached back and undid her top and guided my face to a nipple. Her skin everywhere was soft, and curved, and moist. I didn’t know what I touched that wouldn’t make me want to explode. She was pushing at me, hot as a sweat when you’re working, and then she undid me and was playing with me down there and breath sounds came out of her and probably me too. When my eyes closed, it was the desert, black space and sparkly stars, so up there it made me feel both old enough for this and way young—thought of and seen so much, it had all been too far away or hidden from what I knew about—a sky too high and faraway that I could have never seen it from this city if I were to look up, straight at it, as someone kept pointing it out like constellations I didn’t see. I think she would let me touch her anywhere, but I didn’t because I wasn’t sure, even as she pulled down my pants and my chones and had her hand on me there. I couldn’t take it and I was telling her she would have to stop, I couldn’t hold back if she didn’t stop, but she didn’t want to and I couldn’t stop myself. I started falling away, into a black so black I couldn’t see nothing but the fireball streak of light swirling through it—I couldn’t tell if it was going away from everything or was going to suddenly crash.

  She got up, putting her little pieces of bikini back together as she went into the kitchen. I was still pretty much in shock. A good shock. It felt really good and I couldn’t talk.

  “I wanted to take you into bed with me so bad,” she said in the kitchen. She was drinking water. “You came too fast.”

  As bad as I felt, meaning good, what she said made me feel the other bad. I wanted to yell at her for saying it, and I wanted to do it again now, but now that a minute or two more went by, well, I didn’t say so. I wanted to steal something of hers and as my eyes went around I couldn’t believe the front door was wide open. I was scared too about what we did. What if someone saw? What if that Tino dude walked in?

  “You haven’t been with many girls, have you?”

  Maybe she was meaing it nice, but I didn’t like it that she made me out to be a punk. Except, how could I defend myself? “I’ve been with a few.” Almost dressed, I was standing up, near the front door.

  “A few?” Her tone made it clear she didn’t believe me for a second.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Shut up,
” I said.

  “Have you even been with one?” She wasn’t laughing at me but she was like, what, an older sister catching you making up bullshit. “You can tell me.”

  “I done it before.” Okay, mostly I was lying. Okay, I was lying flat out. Though in a way I wasn’t. I had a girlfriend last year, and I did everything I could with her, she just wouldn’t go all the way. And she’d never considered touching me down there, at least she never did except accidentally.

  “It’s all right,” she told me. “It’s sweet.”

  That got me really mad for a few seconds, until I decided maybe it was better to not say nothing else. I didn’t want to lie to her and—well, she’d know and I’d really feel fucking dumb. “You didn’t even know the door was open, did you?”

  “Oh no,” she said. She really didn’t. “That is bad!”

  I closed it hard and locked a deadbolt.

  It could have been that that got her going different, because she changed moods and started cleaning up the kitchen, piling pans and dishes into the sink. I saw her put her jug of wine in a lower cabinet. She’d gotten nervous and excited. It was the same kind of energy she had when she saw me, but now it was more like not drunk or sexy.

  “What time does he get home from work?” I asked.

  “See those plates? Could you bring them to me?” She barely looked at me when she said it.

  I stacked them and took them to her, even another two she didn’t ask for, and a couple of glasses sitting around. She was running the water hard into the sink, loud, making dish soap bubbles mound high.

  “I’m gonna go on and take off,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I’m feeling guilty.” She wasn’t looking at me. “I should have cleaned up the apartment earlier.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

  Her wet, soapy hand grabbed mine as I turned to leave. “I like you, Sonny,” she said. She kissed me on the lips. It was a lot different kind of kiss. “I like you a lot.”

  Cloyd swiveled toward me as I was trying to pass his office as fast as I could. There was a man with him in a slobby suit. Cloyd was already red-eyed, and he was wearing that hick smile I hated the most and swirling that ice cube. He had on his gray work uniform, still starched from a laundry, like he hadn’t sweated in it today. His bottle of whiskey was on his office desk like it was the latest trophy, shiny below all those dead deer with blank marble eyeballs.