“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” my mom said. It wasn’t clear whether she was telling me or him or herself. She checked herself over, her clothes and shoes and jewelry, up and down, making sure nothing was wrinkled or dirtied, wiped on or off, hanging wrong. She squinted at her purse. It was wet black vinyl, and sunlight bounced off it and onto the nearby walls like it was a mirror, making flashes that seemed more like from a camera snapping photos of her. “I’ll be back,” she said, like an announcement. Her high heels tapped the sidewalk toward her car.
Angry still, or maybe always, his mind not on what he was seeing with his eyes, Bud backed off but not away, watching her at a distance, and close, like she was a movie star. “Hey,” he said.
“Yes?” my mom answered, tired of him.
“So you’re going someplace?” This time it was it, what he meant.
“Excuse me?”
“Wondering where you’re going.”
“I don’t think I’m married to you.”
“That’s your loss.”
“Is it now?”
“Why are you all dressed into the tens?”
My mom fumed. “I’m leaving now.” She dug around for her car keys and when she found them she opened her car’s door, got in holding the hem of her dress, making sure to catch what might show to somebody looking to see, and slammed the door shut.
* * *
Cindy’d already been smoking mota and drinking wine and something was making me think there was more serious shit too, something else. It was like a burning smell, except I didn’t know if it was a real burning or in my head.
“God, it’s about time,” she said. She went up on me and kissed me, her hands moving inside my pants and onto my butt.
“I miss you.”
I liked it, but her talk I didn’t like. I’m not sure how to explain what it was, if there was a name for it. There was. Tino.
“I do like you, Sonny,” she whispered, kissing my face and neck.
“Don’t say that shit,” I said, pulling away. “I hate your shit.” I was wrong to be there. It was not good, it wasn’t right. But I went there because I was mad. I knew where to look and I was right.
“Don’t be mean to me, don’t.” She pulled me back.
“I’m not. I just don’t wanna hear it.”
“But I do like you. Can’t you tell I like you?”
She had one lit and we took hits back and forth wordlessly.
Smoking it meant sex to me. It slowed quiet into numb. We took swallows of the wine cooler she made too. It let me like her touching me, her hand going down and pushing at the back of my pants and, guiding me to the bedroom and bed, pulling them off me, and her hands gripping my cheeks, putting her mouth all over me there. The mota made me learn how to wait too, taking her up to me and making her. My hands moving on her were streaking sparks on a roller coaster’s rails. She still was showing me things to do. At first I didn’t think I would like my tongue where she wanted it, but then I did, my hands holding onto her nalgas, as soft and hard as her titties were. She moaned with me in her mouth. When she did, it was sunlight and moonlight at the same time, yellow and silver and too bright, too scary even, to stare straight at. She tangled us up, but I liked her from above, her nipples tickling my chest, or turned around, the dimples above her butt like thumb holds to keep her where her curve was the sharpest, her back arched, the lines of her body a broad marker white in my mind, my eyes not even imagining before the pleasure that they were getting to see, my mind taking on light from this other sun or moon.
She was laying there naked on the bed, eyes closed. My face turned up and saw the photo hanging crooked on a wall with a group of others. It was another of him in a white cowboy hat and black snap-button Western shirt, smiling—not happy smiling but smiling like Yeah, here, I’ll smile. He was a man, a grown man, and he had a gun, I knew he had a gun. I’d seen it before. I saw it when she’d been in the bathroom too and I dug around. Now I felt like a big man, real bad, real chingón, while we were doing it. I don’t know why I wanted to mess with him too, but I did, and that’s why I was there, why I did it, why I came.
“You like what we smoked?”
“I guess.”
“It had something else in it.”
I was a little scared and it made me feel more fucked up too. I was too high. “I gotta go,” I said. I was so stupid!
She looked at me like it never crossed her mind I might leave. “Please don’t, Sonny. Not yet.”
I was already getting my clothes back on, thinking smarter.
“It’s still too early,” she said. “He always works late now.”
“I don’t wanna get killed.” He was death, because he would kill me. He had a gun and he would shoot me dead. I’m thinking, I’m him, I cap me, then I cap her. No French word for any of this could make me smile.
“But I want you to stay with me,” she said.
“I’m gone.” I had to make sure I didn’t make any more mistakes. I was way past just taking some dollar bills here and there. This was dangerous.
“Just a little longer. Stay with me a little longer. I’m always alone. I’m lonely.”
I was tying my shoelaces too tight.
“I don’t even love him anymore. I don’t really. I know what he really does. I don’t want it to be like this every day. I’m too lonely here, Sonny. Please don’t leave yet, please, Sonny?” She got up off the bed because I’d started walking. “We could eat dinner in the living room and watch TV together. I can get Chinese food delivered. If he came, he wouldn’t think anything, I swear. He knows I like to have company. I have to have friends, and he would think we’re friends. I know him. He wouldn’t think anything was going on. Can’t you trust me?”
She didn’t even have her clothes on. “Yeah, I’m sure he wouldn’t think nothing,” I said.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know what I should do.”
“I’m gone,” I said.
Already, going by Cloyd’s office whenever I came in wasn’t freaking me so much. I was over being fidgety now and feeling like I could handle whatever came. It was like I didn’t care or that the scare had worn off. It was going to play out however it played out, at whatever speed or loudness. I gave Cloyd a friendly bonjour when I passed and regretted it.
“Where’s your mom?” he asked, squealing the chair as he spun it.
The dead eyes were lit up on me in his office. “Pues,” I said, dragging the thought, “I don’t really know.”
“You don’t really know.” It wasn’t a question.
“No sir,” I said.
“You know what time she’s getting back?”
“No sir.”
“You don’t know?”
“I really don’t, man.” That man took off out of me, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“I wonder where the hell she is this time,” he said.
“I don’t know either,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Do you know about Pink?”
I didn’t want to jump back, like a nervous twitch, but I might have. “What about him?”
“You hear about someone living with him?”
“No sir. Why would I?”
“Because you talk to him. Don’t you talk to him?”
“Not that much.”
“You take the trash out?” he said, swiveling so his back went to me.
“I’m gonna do that in just a second.”
Sometimes the bedroom door shut gave me a safe and private sense, or at least an extra second or two if someone came to it. I started liking the boyscout book being a hiding place for that money. I’d thrown away the envelope and put the bills in the pages. It was smooth. I put some of my own money in the pages too, and then put the rest back under the rug, like before. I didn’t care anymore that it was running out.
I was hearing Nica’s dad upstairs. He wasn’t even yelling. He was telling her about her ironing. Didn’t she learn yet? Why couldn’t she lear
n to do it how he told her? He wanted the starch. There was a can right there, she could put it on. Did she see this can? Did she know how to push the button? Didn’t she know how to put the starch with the can? Was she a goat? Was pushing an iron too hard? She had to do something here, he worked many hours. Then he said he didn’t want that her mom would have to make the lunches. She could make the lunches. Her mom worked and was tired. Every day she ached until she can barely work, and they both have to work. Couldn’t she make the lunch for them? Was it so difficult to do that for them? He left, and it was silent, except I knew those were tears hitting the floor, the dripping off the roof after a light rain. She made the steam of the iron puff. Nica put the radio so low because he would’ve turned it off if it was too high.
Bud’s voice was at the edge of the kitchen at the door of Cloyd’s office. There were clinks of ice in a glass. I cracked the door to hear better.
“Well, what if it’s true?” Bud said.
Cloyd’s voice came muffled. He was in the office, the swivel chair squealing, Bud was standing at the door. Would I hear better with the door closed because I would listen feeling safer? I didn’t close it.
“I’m telling you what I saw,” Bud said.
Muffle.
“I can get him to leave. I can get both of them to leave.”
Muffle. More muffle.
“Why don’t we both go up there and knock and, then, if nobody answers, you got the master key. See who and what the hell is in there.”
Cloyd was talking muffled, before he stopped talking. Bud must have gone in the office too because I couldn’t make him out either.
Then I heard Bud’s voice come in clearer because it got louder. “It ain’t right, it ain’t right. I’m tired of these kind of people.”
Cloyd came into the kitchen and dropped in a fresh ice cube from the freezer.
“You sure you don’t wanna have supper with us?” Bud said.
“I got that under control,” he said.
“Okay, but Mary, she can cook some beans. You like beans. She’s got a pot of them. Probably some chicken too.”
“Real nice of you, but I got it under control.”
“Maybe bring some down to you later?”
“Nah, when she gets here, me and Sil’ll just go out to dinner tonight.”
“She’s awful late,” Bud said. “I’d be worried too.”
“She’ll be here any minute, I’m sure of it.”
“Okay then,” said Bud, opening that back door. “You change your mind.…”
Workboot steps came hard toward this bedroom I slept in. The only thing I could grab when I jumped over to the bed was the French textbook.
“What’re you doing?” he said like I was doing something wrong. He was in the grays, and they were not ironed anymore, his hair stuck on his forehead, pointing every direction. He didn’t have on the stupid grin, but the eyes were drooling whiskey.
“Reading.”
“What?”
“French.”
“French?”
“Yeah,” I said, avoiding the oui word that always made me want to smile to say it. “It’s French. Français.” I couldn’t resist smiling.
“What’re you doing with that?”
“You mean studying the language? Why am I studying français?”
“You know what the shit I’m asking,” he said.
“Not really.”
“You don’t read fucking French!”
This was what I had wanted, though it was making me a little tense. He was mad, which is what I wanted, but now I had to deal with it.
“I’m learning to. It’s one of those books, you know, that teach language.”
“They don’t talk French in Mexico.”
Mexico. I was feeling smarter and richer.
“French,” he said. He swirled the ice cube.
“They talk French in Paris,” I said. “Didn’t you say you were French?”
“My ass speaks French sometimes,” he told me. He tipped all his whiskey into him, then laughed once all the swallowing was gone. He cracked himself up with that one. After a freaking long time, he stopped.
“Where’s your mom?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see her.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No sir. I didn’t see her.”
It was like he was trying to stare through a thick bourbon bottle to see.
“You ever see any black man in Pinkston’s apartment?”
“In Number Six?”
“He sells them his used cars.”
“Sure, I know about that.”
“Bud says he’s got a black man living in his apartment.”
My mom came up behind him. Neither of us heard her come in.
“Bud says,” she said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. She wasn’t near enough to shake Cloyd’s hand hello, let alone kiss him hi, and she meant not to be.
“Where the hell you been?” He was too gone drunk to be taken by surprise.
“Shopping,” she said like she’d told him a hundred times.
He stared at her too, squinting through a bottle that wasn’t there.
“Bud says there’s a black man living up in Pinkston’s apartment.”
She was looking at me, and I was looking back at her. I say she was thinking about the dead owl, and him, and this apartment we were living in. “And so what if there was?”
“What, a black man? What if there was a black living up there?”
“Yes. What if there was?”
“Damn it, Silvia. You know there’d be hell to pay! You know it! What’re you saying? You see one up there?”
“No, I didn’t say one thing about that.” She put her fingers to that hole he put in the wall.
“Bud says he saw someone black in that apartment. That just wouldn’t be right.” He’d been looking at the hole too, then something jerked his head. “Better not be nothing happening.”
“Even if it were true—”
“Goddamnit, I don’t want no shit! I didn’t rent to one of them! Wouldn’t either! Goddamnit!”
“Slow down,” she told him. She looked at me again, like I would agree with whatever she was going to say, or about what we talked about that other time, about living here. “I’m sure it’s not true.”
“Goddamn better not be! I own this goddamn building and it’s my property and I do what I want.”
“It’s Bud,” she told him. “Bud’s a troublemaker.”
“He’s a stand-up man. Knew him before I met you.”
If she’d been trying to be nice, no more. “Ay, que lindo.” And she took off. He took off not more than a second after.
A dim yellow light stained the curtain in #6, probably not from the living room but the bedroom. It didn’t seem possible that if any stranger was living there, nobody’d seen him. It didn’t even seem like Pink lived there. I’d never seen him go in or out of the apartment either. I was afraid to knock on Nica’s door. I was afraid that if I did, and her stepdad was there, that’d be it with us. Mr. Josep’s chair was out, empty, by his apartment door. It never was before, it was never there without him. It meant he still wasn’t around. I thought it’d be okay to sit on it. I wanted to listen sneaky into Nica’s apartment because the window was slid open enough. But Mr. Josep’s chair was so weak, I thought it would burst into splinters if I moved any part of my body too much. Every little joint in the chair wobbled and gave in, so it was hard to lean to the side, and to fidget—like moving my ear might bust it. How could that man sit here day after day and not move? Because he couldn’t move in it, nobody could move and not break the thing. I thought about sitting as still as him and shut my eyes. I sat as lightweight as I could, and though I couldn’t hear much out of the window, not even half as good as from that room I slept in, it was more that I could hear too much everywhere else. Like tires that were too hot and were being cooled by running through cold water on the boulevard. Loud. Too loud. Every defect in tire t
read beat on the street like the bass was up too high. A turn left or right cried like it was squeezing the air out of a crow. Radio music broke off like from a metal grinder. People were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice cream or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the backseat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving alone and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they weren’t talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like they’d never been there before or maybe they’d seen so many things they didn’t know what to expect next. People were driving happy, so happy because they were in love and kissing, and people were driving in hungry or out stuffed, leaving La Costera and the pescado or Adriana’s and the steak tampiqueña or Elizabeth’s Bakery and the tres leches cake. People were driving to the hospital because she was having a baby or he was accidentally shot and people were driving in from New Mexico or Arizona to find a job or driving out to Texas or Sinaloa or Chihuahua to visit the family. They were driving to the phamacy to get medicine, to Tony’s El Mejor Que Hay to get huevos con chorizo and cafecito. She just bought a new dress. He just bought underwear and work socks. He was wearing glasses for the first time and felt dizzy and she was too scared to tell her mommy’s new boyfriend to stop driving so fast and she was dizzy, dizzy. Maybe it was another black man who pulled into the World Motel right around the corner because he’d driven from Oakland and he was lost and he was tired and he had to stop and he wanted maybe to watch TV and fall asleep and he liked that there were Mexicans parked on the street next to it drinking and laughing and screaming over the norteña music and talking and drinking beer and they were talking, though he didn’t know it, about life in Mexico and Califas and tortillas back home and chilangos and he didn’t know that they were out there sharpening saw blades—how could he know that?—and then driving off really mad because he didn’t believe when that clerk said there were no rooms and when the police stopped him he was still pissed off and he had been drinking, a little, yes, but not so much and he didn’t need no ticket, he didn’t need no DWI, no, don’t be giving me that, officer, please officer, goddamn you.
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