The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  I didn’t know what I’d been thinking. A license? I just needed to drive it. I didn’t need a license to drive it.

  “So, they acting up a little in there, wouldn’t you say?” he asked. He turned to smiling big enough it was almost laughing but also like he was gonna call them motherfuckers again. “It got their attention, ain’t that the way it is, little brother?”

  The way I saw them in the window was they were standing still. Only Bud was pacing, and he was doing it twice the size of everyone else.

  “I don’t know what they’re doing,” I said.

  “They watching the TV. They watching what going on.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “You ain’t been hearing?”

  “Kind of. I saw your friend coming down the stairs.”

  He looked at me like that wasn’t what he was asking about.

  “That so?”

  I nodded.

  “There you are, there it is.” He laughed how he laughed.

  He took a second like that wasn’t it, then started nodding.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’m getting my automobiles here, almost all turned on out.”

  “So that’s why the spaces,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, moving ’em on.”

  “Then”—I nodded at the Bel Air—“you want the keys back?”

  “Little brother,” he said, his head disapproving. “Little brother, little brother.” He put his hand on my shoulder. It was the closest he’d ever been to me. I saw how big it was. Huge! I don’t think I realized what a big mother he was. And I saw that jagged scar too good. It was a nasty one, real serious ugly. “Now what’d I tell you? I told you how we got a deal here. You ain’t in on the deal, that be a difference.”

  “To watch?”

  “Eyes and ears, that is all you got to do, yes, yes. You can do that now. I know you can do that now.”

  The TV was booming and Bud too.

  “I am so sick of these fuckin’ jigs!”

  “Bud,” Mary said, his name dragging out as she shook her head, sad.

  “Don’t fuckin’ tell me shit,” he snarled at her.

  That one even tripped up Cloyd’s attention for one second. My mom was already making her way to me before he said that. Cloyd went right back to the TV screen on second two, barely swirling the ice cube in his whiskey glass, the whites of his eyes red as apples, the sirens inside the TV set way louder than the newsman’s voice. Mary was taking her husband’s advice.

  “I don’t know where we live no more,” said Bud. “They think this is African jungle.”

  Mary rolled her eyes and sat down on Cloyd’s favorite chair.

  “No pase por ay,” my mom said. There was so much noise, it was as if she were whispering. “Están pisteando, y ella, she can’t get him to go home.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Dice que, que there’s un negrito living next to him—”

  I interrupted her. “I mean on the news right now.”

  “The riot? Es que, there’s a riot. You didn’t know?”

  “Take your baton and hit that nigger, then fuckin’ kick ’em after that!” Bud hollered.

  “You didn’t hear?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out.”

  “Why don’t they just fuckin’ shoot at ’em?” he shouted.

  “Aren’t they throwing bottles? Isn’t it them? That deserves shooting at!”

  “Please,” she said, making her breath closer to my ear.

  “Mary’s trying. If she can’t, me dijo que she’s going to leave him. I don’t want to be around him either. I feel bad for her, m’ijo.”

  Je lance la pierre. I loved this French so much! I was suddenly almost crazy happy. Pierre! Could it get any better? I’m thinking of poodles because the only Pierre I heard of was a tiny white poodle. I liked the lance verb too. I picked it out of a couple of possible verbs and it seemed right. It got me to see things and smile seeing them, me and a lance and my pierre. A dark brown horse with a black mane prancing on a dark dirt path, green grass and green trees and green green like I imagined France, and I had on a hat that I didn’t even know how to describe. Like it wasn’t even me no more. I kept saying it as good as I could. La pierre. Je lance la pierre. Ma pierre, je lance! It could have been that I repeated this so much that my smile got pushed away by a wild laugh, but I was also feeling como más confident and serious, as I tried to pronounce the words in a real dramatic French accent. It was working enough that I wasn’t hearing them in there with the riot news no more either. When I stopped saying it over and over it might have been because of watching a twirling spider near the open window, and then I was hearing the old couple next door who talked whatever language to each other and their English to their perrito or gatito and then I started hearing blue-gray air in the room, swirling around, floating up or down like dust except it was sound, like when you hear a wall clock clicking somewhere, just barely, until it’s bigger and bigger. The mixed air in the room got more important, blue here, gray there, and it was filling up everything until it went down into my ears soft, a music, and it became a pretty new color, not one, not the other, and a calm ocean wind.

  When I was waking up it was maybe early, early morning or late night, and it was Nica’s stepdad saying to her it was a cat, it was a cat, it was a cat, how could it be a cat? Did you know it was a cat? Why didn’t you tell me? He was saying she was stupid and it was stupid to stay with a cat. Why would you stay with a cat? Why would that lady want you to stay with a cat? Why would she pay you to stay with a cat? What did she say to you? Why did she ask? Don’t lie. Are you lying? Why are you lying? You have to stop lying. You are lying. What were you doing over there? What did that lady want you to be there for? Did you talk to her? What did you say to her? What did she say to you? What did you do when you were there? What did you really do? Don’t lie. Don’t lie. Don’t lie to me. I don’t like it, I don’t like this, I don’t like this, I won’t have this.

  It was so early morning I could taste tears like they were in a foggy morning. Maybe because she told me about Veracruz, when she was living near a beach, in a light blue house with palmas secas and floppy green banana leaves shading it, and that green, and that blue, and some red in maybe parakeets on its roof and a striped lizard looping its tail from above like a monkey and wind blowing inside and over her and we were on the soft fuzzy gold couch and she was crying. It was so early in the morning I could see closer through the tears, like in a spyglass. I saw a squealing, white-tooth little girl with a cotton Sunday dress pulled up to her chones and she was at a river with the primos and their feet and legs were slapping the mud at the river and splashing it into their eyes and mouths.

  Joe said, “You probably saw that shit go down, dude, you probably saw!”

  “He probably started it, ese,” said Mike.

  That made Joe laugh and nod.

  “Verdad qué no?” Mike said. “Pues, and then he wants to go start up a riot con los sickies también!”

  “Ay, how would it go in a riot con sickies? A caravan of dirty cars cruising the boulevards, those vatos all hunched down below the steering wheel, alone in their four-doors, all hyped up, whispering out the windows while they circle the elementary schools, that classical music station low on their radio.”

  They cracked up.

  “How do they say it started?” I asked about the riot in the news.

  “After some cops pulled this loco black man over and he got whipped on, it went out onto all the streets.”

  “So you think it was at the same time as what I saw?”

  “Simón, vato,” said Joe.

  “He don’t know,” said Mike. “He don’t know any more than you.”

  “It sounds like it,” I said. “Like almost the same time too.”

  “My dad said nada más que some todo pedo mayate got pulled over y then, salieron los diablos, the whole city went c
razy.”

  “Maybe it was right after,” said Mike. “You know? But it wasn’t just one place, one thing.”

  “Pues, entonces, no es the same!”

  “The police drove away fast where I was,” I said.

  “Ay está,” Mike said.

  “Bueno,” said Joe, “the one that supposedly started it, he was throwing chingazos with the cops, and a black lady in rollers got arrested too because she jumped on his back. Once it got dark, people started throwing chunks of cement and bricks and anything at cars that came by.”

  “It was dark when I saw what I saw.”

  “They’re predicting it’s gonna get worse,” said Joe.

  “Sabes que, we should do shit like that,” said Mike. “I mean our peoples. Show them.”

  “And show them how short we are? N’hombre! Los blacks ain’t shorty indios como nuestra gente!”

  “We could throw balled-up tortillas at them, lots of them, because our hands can squeeze harder than anybody’s and do that shit.”

  “Orale vato, come on, pero, porqué no las de harina, heavy con un buen chingo de manteca.”

  Throwing flour tortillas heavy with lard, that was funny to all of us.

  “Pero even that’d be nada más like throwing spit wads, dude, and they’d just stick to them like they do on the school clocks.”

  “Little piedritas entonces. Throw handfuls. Maybe we wouldn’t be no cannons, pero we’d be little shotguns, and then ’cause we’re chiquitos we could split de volada and hide easy.”

  “Hey so what’d you do to the sickie’s car with that chingona roca?” Mike asked.

  Je lance la pierre. Right then I was going left to right hand, right to left with it. I started doing it faster. “Nothing.”

  “You went over there last night and nothing?”

  “Yeah, dude,” said Joe. “I swore you were gonna get us busted before, and then you went back for more, vato!”

  “You said you went over there,” Mike said.

  “You can trust us, for real you can, ya sabes,” Joe said.

  Mike nodded to agree. They both waited for me. I didn’t want to say, but the longer I took, the more they thought I did something.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” I said. “I swear.”

  They didn’t believe me. I stopped switching the rock from hand to hand. “Je lance la pierre,” I announced.

  They each took a bunch of seconds going over it before they both cracked up. When they stopped, Mike said, “Did you? Did you throw it?”

  “Je ne lance pas la pierre,” I said. I lobbed it in the air, caught it in the right, caught it in the left. “I should’ve. I want to.”

  That sort of stopped the laughing. It was that they weren’t sure what I was going to do and got scared, for real, again.

  Gina was over there talking to my mom. It seemed like my mom was probably headed somewhere and got stopped. My mom couldn’t stay still. They both stared at me for a couple of seconds when they saw me coming from a distance. Then I saw my mom say something else and take off and Gina was mad too and slammed into #2. My mom went through the back door of #1 and was waiting for me. “I told her I wasn’t going to do anything.”

  I stood still, didn’t even close the door all the way. She was so mad, I didn’t want to say anything because anything was going to be wrong.

  “I am so mad!” She got down a shot glass, poured herself some of the Cloyd’s whiskey, and put it away in two swallows.

  “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Are you okay?”

  “You don’t have them still, do you? Do you have them?”

  “No.” I hated having to talk about the nudie magazines, I was still embarrassed and ashamed. And to my mom. Maybe doing this was worse even than the money.

  “I can’t believe you would steal,” she said.

  It wasn’t worse. I had the inside jitters.

  “I want to leave.”

  “Okay,” I said. I started to move away from the door I was still standing close to.

  “I mean leave. Leave, me entiendes?”

  That’s when we heard the truck tires rumbling the whole entire earth under us and when we both saw Bud see us through the window as he passed and he braked his shitkicker troca in the driveway and flew out and right to the door like he was gonna start a fight.

  “Where’s Cloyd?”

  Neither of us could think of what to say fast enough.

  “This is important. Where’s he at?”

  “I don’t know, Bud,” my mom said.

  “And you don’t know what job either,” he said. Even when it was supposed to be about something else, he looked her up and down in a screwed-up sex way.

  “Bud, I only know he’s out there.”

  “You don’t even know what job.”

  “You probably know more which jobs better than me.”

  His smile was not a smile. “No doubt that.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

  He was nodding her way, nodding the other away. “Niggers, that’s what.”

  My mom went ay ay just enough.

  “Don’t you say nothing to me!”

  “Hey!” I screamed. “Don’t yell at my mom, fuckass!”

  “What?” He didn’t even try to fake-smile at me.

  “Stop, stop now!” my mom shouted.

  “You got something to say to me?” he said to me. “You got the hair to say jack-fuckin’-shit to me?”

  “Stop!” my mom yelled.

  “Go jerk off,” he told me.

  I came at him and he tossed me into a maple chair and the table. My mom was punching on him, but he kept her at arm’s length, and I came back at him, surprising him with a good one to his nose and eye. He almost swung back at me but stopped and instead grabbed me and flipped me around. His strength tore at my shoulder muscles as he forced my arm behind my back with one hand and locked under my neck with his other, lifting my entire body. My mom still screaming at him, Bud rotated both of us into the living room, where that owl was into one of my eyes and the fish in the other. “I’m gonna let go, you hear me?” and just like that we were moving forward again. “Don’t nothing, don’t nothing,” he said into my ear. His palms popped my chest and he shoved me onto the couch. It was the first time I saw a shotgun leaning by the front door next to it. I jumped up again, so I’d be standing. I didn’t care, I didn’t care how much he could beat me, I was going to find out.

  She was screaming at him as she came to me and held on.

  “Get out! You get out of here now!” She was pushing me back now, holding me. “No, no!”

  “Sick of Mexicans too,” we heard him say.

  “GO!” It was more a sound that would come off the boulevard, so loud it didn’t seem like it was in the room.

  The back door slammed behind him.

  “I’m gonna hurt him,” I told her. I don’t know why those eyes were in my vision still. “Let me go now, let me go.”

  “No,” she said, “no.” She was not crying, not one tear. She let loose of me.

  “I can get that asshole, I swear I can. With a bat if I have to. Make him fucked up.” I was looking at that shotgun.

  “I know you can, I know, but no no no.” She was too calm.

  “No,” she said. “Please, Sonny.”

  We listened to his truck tires squealing.

  “We have to be smart,” she said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. Promise me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll be right back. I have to go. I have to. But I’ll be right back, as soon as I can.”

  I didn’t know what she was saying or what I should do.

  “What?” That wasn’t the right word.

  “I know you’re a man now,” she said. “Please, Sonny,” she said, “I have to go, and you have to promise me.”

  “Mom, I don’t understand.”

  “I hav
e to go. I’ll be right back. Don’t do anything. Promise me! Please.”

  The glass windows at Alley Cats were busted out and plywood was already up. The glass front doors were cracked too. It was open for business still, but Mr. Zúniga was too much not talking and too much about cleaning up. And no customers, not the regulars either. Only one man, Mr. Cervantes, who wasn’t saying nothing.

  “I don’t know, muchachito,” Mrs. Zúniga said. “It is hard. If we don’t get the people, I don’t know what we going to do.”

  Mr. Zúniga hadn’t turned on the alleys and she didn’t know if he would, or when, and it wasn’t like she was planning to ask him.

  “Ay, maybe it is just another day or two, nothing else.”

  I ordered only what she said she had, which was a hamburger and beans. She couldn’t even make french fries.

  “Why did they come here?”

  “I don’t have not one idea,” she said. “We didn’t do nothing against them. They don’t visit us here very often, you already know, but we don’t say nothing when they do. The neighbor, who sells the liquors next door, he is a Greek who, you understand, maybe it was because of the way he speaks bad about them. But the black people, they never come here, you already know that.”

  “They did it driving by?”

  “It seems, yes, because they live so close, right there.”

  “Last night, after that thing across the street?”

  “When we weren’t down here, after we already went to sleep. We found it like this. And now we are scared. He doesn’t want to leave here, and he doesn’t want to stay.”

  “He’s afraid of tonight.”

  “It’s what they say, it’s what is on the news.”

  Mr. Zúniga didn’t even want money from me. That was a good thing, because I didn’t know I didn’t have enough on me.

  The Cloyd and my mom weren’t in #1. Which meant something was up. Good for me though, for being alone, and I didn’t want it to change for a while, a few minutes anyways. Maybe after I rested on the bed a little. I wanted … it wasn’t that I wanted to go back home like I used to. That was before, candy and comics down the pants. Though this room with the bed wasn’t mine and I didn’t want it, maybe because I’d been having my sleep on it long enough anyways, it was mine enough, comfortable, like the rock was mine.