“You’ve done some very good work, Wally. I’ve seen you. On film and on stage. Don’t be trivializing your career.”
He shakes his head. “It’s just that if I was going to make it, Missy, I mean really make it like I always dreamed, it would’ve happened by now. I have to accept that.”
“I don’t think you have to accept anything of the sort.” She grips his chin and turns his face toward her. “What has gotten you so fatalistic?”
He tries to smile. “I guess I’m just having a little trouble managing all my ghosts.”
“I know, baby. So I’ll give you a hand. We’ll get them all in line.”
He smiles down at her. She’s the only thing good about this place. The only truly decent, unblemished part of his past.
He reaches his arm around her and pulls her in close as they look out over the orchards and the rooftops of the town.
6
DOGTOWN
“Would you like Kyle’s car?” Regina asks the girl. “I can’t imagine what else I’m going to do with it.”
Luz looks over at the old woman. “His car? I can’t take his car, Mrs. Day. He’d be very angry.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’d take good care of it. Here are his keys. Really, Luz, what’s an old woman like me going to do with a car like that?”
They’re standing in the doorway leading from the kitchen into the garage. They’re looking at Kyle’s red and gold Trans Am. It had been his pride and joy. For months he had worked rebuilding the engine. Grease and oil and smudgy handprints had made their way all through Regina’s kitchen. Kyle would drink beer while he was working on the car, and his friends would come over. They’d be very loud, cursing and laughing and belching. Regina would watch them from the window, hiding behind the curtain, saying nothing, not wanting to be seen.
Luz is studying her face. “You don’t think Kyle’s coming back, do you?”
Regina puts her fingers to her lips. “No, I don’t think he is, dear. I think he’s gone for good.”
Gone for good.
And it’s good he’s gone.
His body lies in a shallow grave out in the backyard, near the poplar trees. Yes, of course, that’s where it is. I remember now how I dragged his body by his arms from the living room through the kitchen and then out the back door. I dragged him across the grass and dug a grave. That’s where his body is. Out in the backyard.
Regina wonders if it has started to decompose. She doesn’t like the idea of rotting bodies. Rocky had been so disgusted by the thought of decomposition that she’d made Regina promise that, if she died first, Regina would have her cremated. Of course, when Rocky did die first, Regina broke her promise. Aunt Selma was against the idea. She said cremation was barbaric and un-Christian. Now Regina wakes up sometimes from a cold dark sleep with images of Rocky’s skeleton decaying in the ground.
I’m sorry, Rocky, I’m so very sorry.
She watches Luz drive off in Kyle’s car and lets out a long sigh. She’s glad it’s out of the garage.
“He was nothing like my son,” she says, speaking to no one.
She often talks to herself when she’s alone. She has whole conversations out loud, monologues that go on for hours. She doesn’t think it odd or crazy; it’s just something she’s always done.
“Walter was always polite,” she says. “He was a good boy. That’s how I raised him. All his teachers said he was a good boy.”
She pulls the curtains closed against the picture window in the living room. She snaps on a lamp and takes comfort from the warm yellow electric light.
“My son never called me names. He never said bad things to me. He never made me give him money. He never got drunk. He was considerate, thoughtful. He never put his feet up on the coffee-table or left smudge prints all through the kitchen.”
On the wall hangs a picture from many years ago. Regina walks across the room to stand in front of it.
There are three people in the photograph. That’s her, in the middle, wearing her favorite dress, yellow with blue polka dots. It makes her look so gay, so happy—so much like Rocky. Next to her is her husband, resplendent in his navy uniform. Robert was a captain. He took shrapnel in Vietnam. He was a hero. A great man. Between them is their son, Walter, with his lips parted to reveal his two missing front teeth. Regina thinks he was in third grade.
“He was a good boy,” she says. “He never took drugs. He never yelled. He never stole any money from me. He was a good son. That’s how I raised him. To be a good boy.”
Her face darkens.
“And he certainly never hurt a girl the way Kyle hurt Luz.”
Luz.
So pretty. Such lovely almond eyes.
This morning, Regina had been transfixed as she watched the girl vacuum under the bed. Luz was bending over, exposing her cleavage above her blue-and-red striped tube top. Regina sat watching her, rolling a twenty-dollar bill very tightly between her fingers. Then she stood, her joints creaking, and slipped the money right down between the girl’s breasts.
Luz made a small sound. She straightened up, removing the offending object from her cleavage. She switched off the vacuum cleaner and turned with an expression of surprise to Regina.
“No, Mrs. Day. I told you. I like helping you.”
Regina tilted her head at her. “Please.”
Luz closed her eyes then opened them again. “Oh, Mrs. Day,” she said.
Such a good girl.
And so pretty. All the boys must like her. She’s almost as pretty as Rocky was, and oh, how the boys had liked Rocky.
But boys can do bad things to girls they like.
“Oh, Luz, poor, poor Luz,” Regina says in the backseat of the cab.
“What’s that lady?” the cab driver asks.
“Oh, nothing.” Regina smiles. “I’m just talking to myself, I suppose. I do that a lot. Guess I’m getting old.”
“Ah, age has nothing to do with it. I talk to myself all the time, and I’m not even fifty yet.”
Regina laughs. “Do you have any children?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Any daughters?”
“I got three daughters. Eight, twelve, and fourteen.”
“Oh, how lucky you are.”
“Yeah, well, I’d have liked a son. At least one boy.”
“I have a son,” Regina tells him.
The cabdriver drops her off where she requested.
“You sure you’re gonna be all right here, lady?” he asks her. “You want me to wait for you?”
“Oh, no, thank you very much. I’m fine. I’m here to visit a friend.”
He just shrugs, takes her money, wishes her a good day and drives off.
Regina watches him zip down River Road back toward Main Street. She knows people are afraid of Dogtown. She used to be, too. She grew up hearing all sorts of things about the bad people here. But Luz lives here, and Luz is her friend.
Like the daughter she never had.
How much Regina always wanted a daughter! Not that her son wasn’t a good boy. He was. But Regina always wished she’d had a little girl to dress up pretty, to put bows in her hair, to name after her mother. Elsa Christina. What a pretty name. That was Regina’s dream: to have a daughter and name her after her mother.
She walks up the steps to Luz’s house. The red and gold Trans Am is parked in the driveway. A little fuzzy elephant dangles from the rearview mirror. That’s new. Luz must have put it there. She was always putting nice touches on things. From inside the house Regina can smell the frying of beans. She knocks.
A dog begins to bark inside.
“Get the door, Jorge,” comes a man’s voice.
The door is opened by a little boy.
“Hello,” Regina says, “I’m looking for Luz.”
The child says nothing, just looks up at her with a strange little face. Luz comes up behind him.
“Mrs. Day!”
“Hello, Luz.”
“What are you doing here?”
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She seems anxious, glancing quickly behind her, then returning her eyes to Regina.
“You left without taking this.” Regina holds up the tightly rolled twenty. “I found it on the table.”
“Oh, Mrs. Day—” Luz looks over her shoulder again. “Wait one minute, please.”
She shuts the door. Regina stares at it blankly. She hears shuffling inside the house, the sound of footsteps, the dog barking wildly for a moment. Then the door opens again and Luz is shaking her head.
“Mrs. Day,” she says, “you came all the way down here to give me money?”
“I want you to have it for helping me.”
“Oh, Mrs. Day, I don’t want to—”
“And I wanted to see where you lived, too. I wanted to meet your family.”
Luz looks back inside the house again. She lets out a sigh, then nods, stepping aside so that Regina can enter. They’re in a little hallway, with paint peeling off the wall. The smell of beans is heavy. Regina follows Luz and the little boy through another room, stepping over a ripped bag of pretzels on the floor, with several of them ground into the green shag carpet. A thin gray-haired man is stretched out on a couch watching Wheel of Fortune. Beside him sits a Great Dane that growls when Regina enters. The volume on the television is very loud.
“Turn that down,” Luz says, but the man ignores her. “I said, turn it down!”
The old man grunts, aiming the remote control at the TV. The volume subsides.
“This is my friend,” Luz tells him. “Mrs. Day. You know, Kyle’s aunt.”
The man eyes her and laughs. Regina sees the look that Luz gives him. The old man just returns his gaze to the television set.
“This is my grandfather,” Luz says. “My father is at work.”
In the kitchen the beans in the frying pan are starting to splatter, pop. Luz hurries over to the stove to lower the blue flame, and the bubbles in the beans die down. Now that Luz and Regina are in the kitchen, the old man turns the volume of Wheel of Fortune back up. “I’d like to buy a vowel, please, Pat.” Luz just shakes her head.
Regina sits down at the aluminum kitchen table. She glances around the room, from the paint-peeling walls to the cracked ceiling to the mousetraps beside the stove. Luz sighs, leaning against the sink. “Yes,” she says, “it is terrible.”
Regina looks at her friend. “You’re not happy here, are you, Luz?”
“I hate it. I hate Brown’s Mill. My father promised it would be nice here. Right by the river, just like our home in Puerto Rico, he said. But in Puerto Rico the river was clean enough to drink from. Here it is dark and gray, coming through those rotting factories.”
The little boy, Jorge, has tottered into the room. He clings to Luz’s legs, staring his odd brown eyes over at Regina.
“This is my brother, Jorge,” Luz says.
“Hello, Jorge,” Regina says, reaching out her hand.
“He is retarded,” Luz tells her. “He is afraid of people.”
But the little boy takes Regina’s hand nonetheless. The old woman smiles.
Luz walks over to the stove and stirs the beans in the pot. “Kyle always promised me we would leave Brown’s Mill. When he got out of the service, we would move away.”
“Well, I’d miss you if you left, Luz,” Regina says, still shaking the little boy’s hand, making him laugh.
“This town is dead,” Luz says. “Look at the buildings. Hunched down and bitter, facing not the sky but the earth.”
“Luz wants to go,” Jorge tells Regina suddenly.
“Go where?” Regina asks.
“Just go,” Jorge says.
Regina sighs, gently removing her hand from Jorge’s and looking once more around the kitchen. No curtains at the window, no bright yellow curtains as there were in Regina’s own kitchen. The linoleum floor is dull and scuffed, not shiny the way Regina keeps hers. There’s a puddle of water collecting under the refrigerator. It gives off a bad smell, not the clean scent of lemon Lysol that Regina’s used to.
Luz slides some beans from the pan onto a plate for Jorge. He sits at the table and eats with his hands. His sister sits down now too, between Jorge and Regina.
“When I was a girl,” Regina tells her, “I wanted to go, too. My sister and I actually ran away to the city. We sang at clubs. The Gunderson Sisters.”
“Yes, you’ve told me, Mrs. Day. I love picturing you as a singer.”
Regina grins. She feels her cheeks push up into her face.
“Yes. I was a singer.”
“I’ll bet you have a beautiful voice.”
“Oh, not anymore. Now it’s old and dry. But then …” She laughs a little. “Maybe then it was all right. We sang at a place called Heck’s. At night sometimes, right before I fall asleep, I can still hear the soldiers cheering and whistling …”
“Soldiers?”
“It was during the war. The audience was always mostly soldiers and sailors. They were so appreciative of us, because you know … they were all going to leave there and … well, you know, they might not come back …”
Luz rests her chin in her hands, her elbows propped against the table. “So why did you return to Brown’s Mill? Why ever would you come back here?”
Regina stops smiling. “Well, my sister, she … she got sick for a while. We had to come home.”
“Did she get better?”
“Oh, yes, she got better.”
“So why did you stay here then? Why didn’t you go back to the city after she got well?”
“Oh, well, so many things …”
Luz sits forward suddenly in her chair. “Mrs. Day, if I leave Brown’s Mill, I’m not ever coming back.”
Regina’s taken by surprise. She doesn’t respond.
“If I leave, I’m going to become a model in the city. I’m going to become a famous model.”
Regina tries to smile. “Well, you’re certainly beautiful enough. You won that beauty contest, after all.”
“And I want you to know, Mrs. Day, that no matter what, I always liked our talks. I always did, no matter what.”
Regina looks at her oddly. “Are you planning to go, Luz?”
The girl glances over at Jorge. “I would go, but I can’t leave him. That is the problem.” She seems near tears. “They don’t understand Jorge.”
There comes a shout from the other room. A loud, hoarse shout, then nothing.
“What is it?” Luz stands abruptly, calling in to her grandfather. “What is wrong?”
The dog has started barking again. Luz hurries out of the kitchen.
“I’d like to try to solve the puzzle, Pat.”
“Oh, no!” Luz calls from the other room.
“Luz!” Regina stands now too. “What is it?”
The girl suddenly rushes back into the kitchen. Her face is white. Regina watches as she snatches the phone from the wall and presses some buttons. She shouts in Spanish, then changes to English.
“Please! You must send someone! My grandfather! I need an ambulance!”
Regina looks over at Jorge, who just keeps on eating his beans.
Regina Day is a small woman, with a square face and fair complexion and compelling blue eyes. Crystal blue, as crystal as the glassware displayed throughout her house. Her features are what were once called handsome in a woman, and even the ravages of more than seven decades have not completely erased her handsomeness. She walks now with a slight stoop, and she winces occasionally from a sharp pinch of arthritis, mostly in her legs. But she still stands slightly taller than Luz, who is no more than five-foot-two.
She holds Luz in her arms as they watch the old man carried out of the house on a stretcher. They pack him into the ambulance and drive off, red lights flashing, the siren wailing. The setting sun casts long blue shadows of bare twisted trees across the street. The wind picks up. Bitter cold.
“You were supposed to watch him.” Luz’s father is a tall, dark, scary man with deep-set black eyes. Regina is terrified of him. He
looks like every man who has ever scared her in her life. He glares down at them and shakes his finger at the girl in Regina’s arms. “He was an old man. He’s had heart attacks before. You know that!”
“All he was doing was sitting on the couch,” Luz says, defending herself. Regina feels the girl’s body stiffen.
The father yells at her in alternating languages. “You should have seen it coming!” Then something in Spanish. “You should have called a doctor!”
He spits on the ground and turns to walk away.
“Don’t go, Papa!” Luz calls after him. “Come back and I will make dinner!”
“No, Luz, don’t,” Regina says, holding the girl back.
Her father just keeps walking.
“Papa wants to drink,” Jorge says, watching him entranced.
Luz pulls out of Regina’s arms and slaps her brother across the face. “Don’t say that,” she scolds.
The boy doesn’t cry. He just keeps staring after his father.
“Come stay with me tonight, Luz,” Regina offers.
“I can’t. I have to watch Jorge.”
“Bring the boy. It will be delightful to have you both.”
Luz looks at her. “My father will be angry.”
“Yes,” Regina says, looking after the man. He turns a corner and disappears. “I imagine he will.”
“But we’ll come,” the girl says, suddenly defiant. “What do you think, Jorge? Should we go spend the night with Mrs. Day?”
The boy nods.
Regina beams.
How pretty Luz is. Pretty like Rocky.
Strong like Rocky, too.
“We don’t have to stay here,” Rocky had told her, one night in the dark. Papa was in the other room, blaring his radio, smashing bottles against the wall. “We can get out of here anytime we want,” Rocky said.
“But how?” Regina couldn’t imagine leaving.
“We can run away, Regina. You’ve seen it in the movies. We can climb out our window at night and run away.”
“But where would we go?”
Rocky was looking at her swollen lip in the mirror. It was all purple and black, like a fat nightcrawler. “He’d never find us,” she said, her eyes in the mirror. “We’d go to the city. No one would ever find us there.”
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