“Hey you,” he told me. “Come and shake hands.”
I was already past, the corner I’d be turning in front of me. I did not want to talk, I did not want to turn back, but I did.
“This is my son,” Cloyd told the man.
That pretty much took me by surprise. Mad. I probably frowned. I felt my whole body want to go all diarrhea sick.
“Milt Womack,” the man said, extending his big hand. He was so fat his belly was squirting out between the buttons on the white shirt he was wearing. Even if I wasn’t very knowledgeable about ties, I could tell the one he was wearing was like from a hardware store and probably bought used. He stunk like gym socks.
“You shake his hand like a man,” Cloyd told me. “Give it a good grip!”
So I even had to do that again.
“There you go!” Cloyd said.
“It’s good to meet you, young man,” said Mr. Womack. He was very impressed by the advice I was given.
I wasn’t going to say anything, but I could tell Cloyd was about to give me more suggestions. “Nice to meet you too,” I mumbled.
I stood there. I couldn’t figure out how to plain leave yet. I’d say it was something like standing at a urinal with old men on either side of you, or a coach who’s telling you how much tougher everything was for him, or a vice principal who’s not saying nothing because he’s so much better than you. It was like I was getting old and wrinkled before their eyes.
“He’s a handsome one, like that mother of his,” Mr. Womack said.
Cloyd approved of that comment. “Yeah, she is one pretty Mexican gal,” he said. “I am one lucky man, all right.”
I was one disgusted dude.
“You play sports?” Mr. Womack asked me.
“This one, strong as he is, says he don’t like playing sports,” Cloyd answered.
“No?” Mr. Womack said. “You look like you’d be an athlete.”
“He don’t like playing sports,” Cloyd said again.
I couldn’t look at either of them. “I guess I’m gonna go.” I was squeezed up.
“You feel like coming out, having some dinner with us, you’re welcome,” Mr. Womack said.
Cloyd drank, hick-smiling at me to tell me not to say yes.
“You do like steaks?” Mr. Womack said. “I’m buying us big steaks.”
“Well, there it is, he’s buying!” Cloyd said, pouring himself some more whiskey first, then tipping some more into Mr. Womack’s glass. “That’s the best part!” The two of them hoo-ha’d.
“You gotta get good grub while you can,” said Mr. Womack, “because I know this cheap bastard Longpre ain’t feeding you steaks, is he?”
“Listen now, you don’t gotta go let him in on that! I don’t think he’d even noticed yet!”
I knew hahahaha in English. I knew jajajaja in Spanish. I wanted to learn how it was in French.
“You know,” Mr. Womack said, turning to Cloyd, “I barely get to see my boy now. About the same age as you, Sonny.”
“My own got all grown,” Cloyd said. “Can’t believe how fast they grow up.”
They both turned their gazes up at me and kept them there, like they were both suddenly all religious about life.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I think I’ll go finish the painting outside.”
“That is one very fine attitude,” Cloyd said. “Even if really he don’t want to go out with us old farts.”
If there was a way to bust the dude about him not wanting me to go with him, I would. I almost wished I could say I wanted to go, to see how he’d deal with it. “I’ll be finished today,” I said. “I’m almost finished right now.”
“That’s good news,” he said.
“My mom was saying you were worried about it,” I said.
“Worried about it?”
“That I’d finish the painting. That I wouldn’t. I’m just about finished right now, though.”
“No, no, not worried,” said Cloyd, talking more for Mr. Womack. “I saw the work.” He swallowed all that was in his glass. “He’s painting outside,” he told Mr. Womack. “Doing a fine job too.”
“That’s good,” Mr. Womack said. “Learning how to work is good.”
“He’s been doing lots around here for me,” said Cloyd. “I gotta be truthful.”
I went to get the ladder I left along the side of the building, in the tall weeds I never cut, but it wasn’t there. That scared me, because if it got ripped off, I’d hear how I should have put it away. The paint and the coffee can with the brush soaked in turpentine weren’t there either. I walked around to the back, where the shed was and saw that aquel Tino had gotten home, his car—front-ended, rear-ended, and side-smashed—was in its slot. My stomach got twisted sick. The ladder and paint and brush had been put back in the shed, but not by me. I balanced them all so I’d only have to make the one trip out to the front.
“Hey there, young man.”
Pink waved, leaning against a long, polished, heavy bumpered four-door Buick, obviously waiting for a customer. I liked seeing him and I probably would’ve gone over and talked to him, when Cloyd came around from the front door and over to me.
“Womack’s taking a leak,” he told me, “and then we’re on our way for some supper.” He was out of the gray uniform and in a clean shirt and a clean pair of pants, and his hair was comb-marked a little bit. “How you been, Pinkston?”
Pink waved to him too, but he was already on his way in the other direction toward a black man and woman, both Sunday dressed, who’d parked the car they drove to look over one of Pink’s.
Cloyd stared at the three of them for too long. “Don’t know when I’m getting back,” he said finally.
I thought he would be talking to me about the ladder. I was setting it up under the Los Flores sign, about to step up.
“Tell your mom,” he said. “You hear me? That I don’t know when I’m getting back.”
I nodded. It was too weird for me. Everything.
“All right?” he asked.
“Like, tell her you’ll be back late or what?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay,” I said. “If I see her.”
“She probably won’t be getting back earlier than me,” he said. “Don’t ya think?”
“I have no idea.” And I really had no idea. And now I didn’t want any. This was getting to be a bad subject. I made like I wanted to finish painting fast. It would be getting dark really soon, looking like his voice was sounding. I did want to finish. I was up on the ladder, almost about to paint, and I could feel him down there, not saying anything.
Just as suddenly, happy came back to his mood as Mr. Womack came out the front door. “’Bout time!” Cloyd said to him. “I’m starving!” He took off, more hungry to get away from me, and the two of them went to Mr. Womack’s shiny new car and settled in. “We’re off for them steaks.”
“You sure you wouldn’t want to come eat with us?” Mr. Womack asked.
“Thank you,” I said, shaking my head.
“That’s a good boy you got there,” Mr. Womack told Cloyd, but he wasn’t listening.
Finally it was streetlights and the building floodlights, on by an automatic timer, glaring at the fresh paint. I wasn’t sure I didn’t splatter the black, especially at first, after I got going a little too fast. Right then I didn’t care. I just wanted to finish no matter what. I forced myself to get it done, and I was relieved when it was. It took me longer than I thought it would, even working fast. I was starving. I decided I’d go inside and eat those chips first thing.
As I put the ladder and paint back in the shed, I saw that Nica’s door was open. I hadn’t seen her parents leave, but then I never did. They seemed to come and go without footsteps. Only one time I saw them on their way out, from the back. Her dad was short and husky and was one of those dudes who walk like he’s as big as anyone, even though I was already taller than he was. Her mom had a braid that reached to her skirt. It’s what you saw f
irst, not that she was so tiny. Which was not like Nica. It wasn’t that I thought about Nica so much that it seemed like she took up so much more space. It really was that she was bigger than both her parents.
“Are you alone?” I was standing way away from her door. It was quiet, the TV was off, not even the radio was on.
“Angel’s asleep in the bedroom,” she said.
“I meant, you know, your mom and dad.”
She nodded. “Angel went to sleep right after they went to work.” She was smiling, but at the same time the smile didn’t seem to be about being happy.
“It’s like three in the morning in there,” I said. “Not a sound.”
Then she looked at me, like she was scared. “I can’t go out there,” she said. “I have to stay close to him.”
“Of course,” I said. I stayed close to the railing.
“You don’t want to come in?”
“I can?”
“I can’t go out there,” she said.
“I’ll talk really soft,” I said too loud when I was inside.
She made a face at me.
“I’m sorry!” I said.
She gave me a real smile, happy. Happy to see me, happy that somebody was over, happy I visited her, that it was me.
“Don’t worry,” she said, a little hushed. “I think very soon he won’t be able to wake up.”
I was thinking how she was in this apartment all the time.
“Do you know the neighbors, the ones over there?” She was pointing the opposite way from Cindy’s.
“Mr. Josep?”
“No.”
“Pink?”
“No, the couple.”
“Oh, yeah. Them. Number Seven. Yeah.” I sat down on the couch. There was a crowd of pictures of the baby, Angel, on the walls. There were a couple older ones too, ones that weren’t in color but were more yellow than black-and-white. A big mirror with a gold frame so wide across the room, a black and red fan, gold trimmed. There was a picture of Jesus, that profile of him my mom one time said was a shampoo ad. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the church anymore, she’d tell people, even if she didn’t go. Other times she’d scream at me, saying how I should be learning some religion, how I wasn’t confirmed. In Nica’s apartment there were crucifixes, and there was a black statue of a Guadalupe.
“Bud and Mary, in Number Seven,” I said.
“They asked me if I could babysit.”
“Really? Babysit?”
“She did.”
“Really?”
“What do you think?”
“I think they don’t have children.”
“They do,” she said. “Why else would they need a babysitter?”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I didn’t hear they had one though.”
“My father told me he thought it’d be all right if I did it,” she said, her voice saying it fast.
“Yeah, I guess you’d make some extra money.” I didn’t think she made any, so it wouldn’t exactly be extra. “Right?”
“My father said so, that he thought it’d be all right.”
“I guess if you don’t mind doing it.” I didn’t know what to say. I still didn’t think they had a baby. “You would want to, right? ’Cause, I dunno, maybe you get tired of babysitting.”
She took a few seconds, but she wasn’t going to admit to that, if it were true. “You could go over with me. I was thinking that.”
First my heart stopped, then it took off. I was already sitting so I stood up. I even forgot I was hungry. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure!”
“You would go over there with me?” she asked.
She really wasn’t sure if I would! “Are you kidding? Of course!”
“That would make it better.”
Now I was so happy. “We could buy pizza,” I said. Maybe I could still think of food.
She looked like she was gonna say yes because she was smiling.
“Hey, I’m hungry right now,” I said. “What if I buy us a pizza right now? Are you hungry? Because I’m hungry.”
It was like she was trying to say something in English. But then, finally, her face made a not-sure, like I was saying we should run out of the apartment and walk on the streets and, before we got back, we should take one of Pink’s wheels for a joyride and then start making out in the back and then we’d get back later than her parents do from work, and all this while her little brother was screaming and crying, Where’s my sister?!
I was too worked up, and I had to convince her it was only about food, about pizza. “It’s that both my mom and Cloyd went out to dinner. I got my own money and I wanted to buy one for myself anyways. It’s not nothing. I mean, it’s pizza, and we can clean up the mess. Is that what you’re worried about? Or maybe you’re afraid because I’m here and I’m not supposed to be? Is it bad that I’m here?”
Walking fast over to the hallway to listen to something I didn’t hear, she put her finger to her lips to shush me.
“I’m sorry!” I whispered. I was probably as loud as I was excited.
She went on listening to the bedroom where Angel slept, her finger still crossing her lips.
“Look, I’ll go downstairs and order the pizza,” I told her as quietly as I could. “So that I don’t have to talk loud on your phone.”
I think she was so confused she couldn’t say no. And me, I was happy, and I also wanted pizza for both of us.
I about hopped the railing to get downstairs. I pulled up my money corner and added some to the $5 I found in my mom’s purse—I don’t know why I did that. I wasn’t sure how much I’d been using lately, but I’d been into it a lot. I spent it at the bowling alley on Mrs. Zúniga’s food at Alley Cats so I didn’t have to eat deer meat or whatever, but now that I might need more, I needed to start getting it somehow, somewhere. What if Cloyd didn’t give me the money for painting? That would suck. That would really piss me off. I’d have to get it out of him. I’d make sure I got it some other way. And how come he didn’t bring it up when we were talking about it? When I stepped outside again, I felt around in the sky like it’d be out there, like if I squinted hard enough I’d make out the answer.
I went back up the stairs so fast to Nica’s and my brain was beginning to scheme when I remembered, just as I got to where square light was beaming out the windows on either side of her door, that I forgot to call for the pizza, forgot what I went down there for, forgot I was hungry. I tapped on her door and it was like she was waiting right there. When she opened it, she put a finger to her lips.
“I’ll go down and wait until it comes,” I told her. “I already ordered, so I hope you like what I picked.”
She nodded with her finger at her lips. I think in her expression she really liked the idea a lot.
I sat in Cloyd’s swivel chair. I went into his office since he wouldn’t be back for a while and I’d seen the telephone book on top of the desk. Those guns, those rifles up there, they made me pissed off. I wouldn’t look at them, I didn’t want to. His phone was one of those heavy black ones whose dial made noise when it spun the number. Every object weighed heavy in his office, like everything was or was almost made of melted hard stone—the desk, the cabinets around it, this swivel chair, even the tile floors were gray. The thick green padding on his chair was probably vinyl, but it looked like sheet metal too. I flipped through the bulky Yellow Pages and made the pizza call and wanted to go right back up but decided not to until the delivery man came. I thought how, to be smarter, I better be quieter when I went up to Nica’s and not seen—not by Gina, Mr. Josep, or Cindy. I put the phone book back exactly where it had been. I didn’t want Cloyd to know I’d sat at his desk, that I’d been there. I was as careful as I would be if I’d snuck in. I opened his desk drawers. A drawer with boxes of bullets and shotgun cartridges. Another with letterhead sheets of paper and spiral receipt books with plastic covers and lots of pens with companies’ names on them, black and red markers, tubes of white glue and airplane glue, nail clipp
ers, erasers so old they were miniature bricks, tangled paper clips, new and rusted tacks and hooks and a couple of empty bullet and shotgun shells, a hunting knife and a pocketknife, screws, long and short nails, lead pennies, and some buffalo-head nickels that got my attention as much as the silver dollars. The biggest drawer was on the left, the one with the most papers stuffed in it, business contracts, so many there wasn’t any spare room to slide so much as your finger in if you had to. Don’t ask me why I pulled the drawer out all the way, and I can’t say how come I was pushing those files around in the first place, looking between them, or why I happened to look in the very back. Except I did. I did. And I saw a brown envelope and I got it out and I counted the pile of hundreds in it. There were ten of them. I counted three times. One thousand dollars. It made me crazy scared but also not. I felt the marble deer-head eyes over me. I looked right back up at them, and then it got to maybe they’d be cool with it.
I was like that longer than I should because the bell for the front door went off without me waiting and waiting for it. I only panicked for a few seconds because Cloyd’s money was still out. I got up and paid the dude for the pizza. It smelled really good. Yeah, I was still hungry, even if sometimes I kept forgetting I was. When I went back into the office, I put Cloyd’s secret stash in the far left corner where I found it. I was very careful. I was even conscious that I hadn’t taken a bill out of the sequence they were in.
“It’s sausage, mushrooms, and green peppers,” I told her, keeping my voice way down. I had to say sausage, mushrooms, and green peppers in English because I couldn’t think of the pizza words in Spanish. “I hope I picked okay, I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”
She was smiling! She was more excited than me, I swear!
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