That’s when Mom, dragging Pedi along with her, went over and stuck her finger inside Dad’s belt loop.
Seeing this, the first officer waved a cautious hand at her and stepped over to his partner. He leaned into his ear, nodded and turned back to Dad. “Mr. Hernandez, we’re taking the rifle. If you want it back, you’ll have to come to the station. But I don’t advise you do that, sir. I really don’t. I’m sure the Chief will want to ask a lot more questions about this rifle.”
“Don’t take it,” Dad said. His voice was thick, and he was beginning to breathe harder. I saw a redness flow up the vein of his neck and gather in a puddle of wine under his ear.
That’s when Mom pulled on his belt loop, enough to bend him a bit at the waist, and to my relief Dad loosened a little. “Look,” he said, more calmly, “you can’t take it. I wasn’t doing anything.”
The officer narrowed his eyes and lowered the rifle along his leg. He tucked his chin into his shoulder and signaled with one eye to the other officer, who instantly became alert. “I’m sorry then, Mr. Hernandez,” he said, “we’re going to have to take you in for possession of an illegal firearm.”
Before any more talk, and moving as if studying his own movements, the second officer walked over to Mom and slowly, as if trying to be polite, lifted her hand away from Dad’s belt loop. Then with a smooth, relaxed quickness, he took hold of Dad’s arms and just like that handcuffed him. Dad seemed to be stunned into feebleness by the speed in which the officer worked. All he could say was “You can’t take my rifle…you can’t take my rifle,” his voice sinking into a plea.
The first officer turned to Mom and raised a hand of apology. “Mrs. Hernandez, I sure am sorry about this. I sure am, believe me.”
But Mom wasn’t listening. She seemed to still be hearing something in the air. Then her face became more alert, and she turned to the officer leading Dad out of the door. “Take him,” she said, softly at first, then with decided anger. “Go ahead, take him!”
After the police had gone, Mom sat on the couch a long time staring at the floor. I noticed that she didn’t appear tired, but more like the muscles needed to move her face were numb. The curtains were closed, and there were no lights, but my eyes adjusted to the dark. The walls of the room, like in all the houses in our neighborhood, were Sheetrock, painted white, but in the darkness everything looked gray. The frame of the Last Supper, with its gold-colored flange and cherub angels, looked as gray as a plastic-model battleship. Even the glass-top table mirrored a reflection of gray.
Seeing a dark spot on the floor, Mom bent over and picked up a little donkey, staring at it, and delicately turning it over in her fingers as if expecting a hoof to suddenly click off. “You know,” she said, “I don’t even have a vacuum cleaner. Sophie has a vacuum cleaner. So does Mrs. Lopez. When the police came, I heard Mrs. Lopez’s vacuum cleaner. It sounded like it was really picking up dirt.”
Ever since seeing a demonstration by a plaid-suited man who came to our door, Mom had always wanted a vacuum cleaner. The man threw dirt and cigarette ash on our bathroom drop rug and to our amazed eyes sucked it all away. “There’s an attachment you can hold in your hand,” he had said. “That way you can get into cabinets and corners. You don’t need any cloth rags. You don’t need a broom. It does all the work for you.”
My legs weakened, like someone had pulled a plug from my ankles and drained all my energy, so I sat down on the couch. “Mom,” I said, “Mom….”
She wasn’t listening. She lay back on the couch and lifted her arm, resting it on her forehead, as if the heat were unbearable.
“Mom,” I said again. “When do you think they’re going to let Dad out?”
“When I go pay the bail.”
“How much is the bail?”
“I don’t know. But it’s too much, I know that.” Her voice sounded muffled, as though she were talking through stuffed cotton. She carefully placed the donkey on the glass table. “They’ll just have to let him out when they decide to let him out.”
After sitting quietly there with Mom for a while, I got up and went into Pedi’s room. Her face was moist and fevery, and she was whimpering. All the excitement had opened up something bad inside her, and with her two fists pressed tightly against her chest, she was trying to close it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the bullet I’d picked up earlier and wedged it between her fingers. That seemed to quiet her a little.
5
The Garden
Deep down I hoped Mom would wise up and leave Dad for good, or maybe go live with Grandma for a while, or run off on her own, if that’s what she wanted. Either that, or that Dad would finally open his eyes to see how close it was to being his last chance. But none of what I wished was going to happen.
On the day Dad got out of jail, Mom ordered us to clean this and clean that, she was so excited. Singing church hymns she learned as a girl, she took a long bath with some of Magda’s creamy soap, and dusted powder on her neck and shoulders. We went on the bus to pick him up, and after we returned home, I lingered in the living room reading my science magazine. I’d found it thrown away in the alley behind Giddens’s Pharmacy, a big boot print tracking the front cover, and its slippery paper warped by rain, but still amazing with pictures of flashy-colored planets whirling around in a thick, black space, and grinning dinosaurs fighting.
All afternoon they talked over the kitchen table about how things were going to get better. Dad promised he’d never go anywhere unless he said what time he’d be back, and how he was going to find a job and not just look for a job, since looking for a job kept him at the pool hall with all the other guys just looking for jobs. Mom promised she would never again embarrass him in front of his friends. And some other things I couldn’t make out. Finally, when they were done promising each other everything, night was beginning to push away the light, and they went to sleep, laying slowly down on their squeaky bed.
After staying up for the longest time, with everything inside me scary and about to collapse, I heard rustling outside by the elm tree, and then Nardo’s round face appeared at the window. He was drunk, mushy around the mouth, his eyes watery and stained. After losing his grip and stumbling a couple of times, he finally hoisted his belly over the window ledge and flopped into the room. He rose clumsily to his feet, and sat on the bed, staring at the floor as if over a cliff. He tried to take off his shoes but only knotted the laces. Seeing me awake, he started to ask about Dad, but I shushed him with my finger.
“Well,” he said, swaying, “did he get out?”
“He got out, now shut up!” I hissed.
He sat there staring at me for a while. “What??? Are they going to make it all right again?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Yeah, those two, they’re crazy, you know that? They’re crazy.”
“They ain’t as crazy as you,” I said, rolling over and covering my shoulder, then turning back around. “If you keep talking, they’re going to come in here and gang up on you.”
“Like I care.”
“You better care, because I think they’d rather be fighting with you than with each other. If I was you, I’d lay down and go to sleep.”
Nardo curled his arm around the bedpost and smiled. “Yeah, that’s funny. That sure is funny,” he said, moving his head up and down. “They’ll probably be picking fights with us tomorrow, huh?”
“Shut up and go to sleep,” I said, tiredly.
He looked at the mirror over by the door and noticed a swirl of his hair out of place. He tried clumsily to press it down but it kept popping up. Then he walked over to the mirror and peered into it, as if noticing something he hadn’t before, pointing a lazy finger at himself. For a long time he stared at the mirror, pointing, then walked slowly back to his bed and plopped down, asleep.
I woke to the bare bulb stinging my eyes. It was morning, and Dad was in the room, breathing heavy, like he’d just gotten out of a shower. He grunted at me and roughly shook N
ardo awake, who got up digging his fists in his eyes, still starched from drinking the night before. Dad slid out his belt from around the loops of his pants and began slapping it against the mattress, threatening to burn our legs if we didn’t listen. He stood around bullying us into our clothes and without breakfast drove us to Grandma’s.
Dad must have sizzled on some smart plans while he was in jail, and now, after all the smooth talk with Mom was over, he was ready to get into action. I’d rather have gotten dragged across a cactus desert and dropped thirsty in a lake of salt than listen to him, but he had us there in the car, muscling his voice so our minds wouldn’t wander.
Grandma lived in a clapboard house at the corner of two old gray roads that the city, after scrimping for years, finally paved over with asphalt. The asphalt came cheap, without curbs, and on the first dangerous sun it melted and became lumpy. From then on cars driving over it jostled in a chorus of springs, and people’s heads bounced wildly.
Dad pushed the car door open, leaned back on the seat and said he wanted the yard raked and hoed before he came back. “And I mean spotless,” he said, pointing a menacing finger at us. He leaned over and slammed the door shut.
Cleaning a yard to my dad meant even the grass edges had to be trimmed and plants polished. He reminded us that he’d check on our work, making sure we dug out to his satisfaction the tufts of grass near Grandma’s roses and pinched out whatever mealy bugs and aphids were chewing on the stems. We could tell it was going to be one of those hot days when asphalt softens and ants foam up from the dirt with the scratch of a stick, and when dogs bark, the sound is dry, like hollow wood. But it was still morning, and the first hour was a smile and thoughts of lunch; nothing but a few shrubs to chop and leaves to rake.
Nardo had trouble coming back from his hangover. He moved like a ground sloth, and kept gulping water from the garden hose. He sobered up a little when we began to clip off the small yellow weeds choking the roses. The bigger shoots over by the nopal cactus had to be pulled. The roots sunk deep and we knew in a month they’d spring up again, so we pulled with every muscle until a big chunk of the main stalk plucked out.
We wore our arms out pulling those weeds, as well as stacking the bricks Dad had once stored in the corner of the yard to build a barbecue pit. We found a couple of centipedes numb underneath an old plank and crushed them under our heels. We sent chips soaring from the axe as we cut out the roots of a dead trunk and dropped its bulk thundering into a wheelbarrow.
When Horacio, my grandma’s cat, came around, we were chopping the last weeds growing inside the flowerbeds. Nardo called to him, but he was stalking near the cherry tree. When the chirp of a bird skeetered in the air, he stiffened, his nose twitching and ears cupped like radar antennae, then he darted away, clawing up the tree trunk.
When we stopped, finally, the sun was prickling like a hot rash on the back of my neck, and a piece of lava was wedged in my spine. My brother’s face was swollen and burnished as a new penny. A channel of sweat slipped down the bridge of his nose and plopped on the dirt near his feet. His eyes, drowsy with sun, watched it like someone who didn’t deserve sweat.
“Hey, you know what?” he said, stretching. He pulled his shoulders back and the muscles tightened under his T-shirt. With one last punch of the hoe, he exploded a puff of dirt. “I’m gonna get some Kool-Aid. How about that? You want some Kool-Aid?”
“Why don’t we finish first, we only got this to do,” I said, knowing that once he went inside, work was over. I looked at the cherry tree standing brilliant at the end of the garden, its leaves twirling and echoing light. It wasn’t just a cherry tree. Long ago Grandpa had chopped off limbs and grafted saplings of different fruit. One branch sprouted plums, another almonds, and still another, peaches. Most were cherries, though. When in season, they glowed ripe and flashed like Christmas balls.
“I’ll wait for you right over there,” I said, pointing to the tree.
“No, you just keep on working, I’ll be right back. Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.” Nardo made a move to leave, but seeing me straighten up, he put his hand assuringly on my shoulder. “Don’t you believe me?” he asked. “I said I’ll be right back.”
“No, I believe you,” I said. “I just want to make sure you’re not going to take a nap.”
“I’m not gonna take a nap! What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he asked. “You been so suspicious lately. You act like I’m gonna quit or something.”
When I didn’t say anything, he slid the hoe along his knee, levered it in the air, then snatched it quickly by the neck. “I’ll be right back, believe me!”
It was no use arguing with Nardo. He could go around the same point from twenty different angles. “You do what you want,” I said, waving my hand like it weighed a ton, “but I’m going to sit down.”
Now that I’d given up, he was pretty springy. He hurdled the back steps in one leap and stopped at the door. “Man,” he said, smiling, “and they call me lazy.”
I shuffled over to the faucet, swishing the dirt from my pants. My joints felt slack, and my lips were cracked enough to bleed if I mouthed a zero. I’d taken my shirt off hours ago, and when I pressed my finger against the skin of my shoulder, I felt the numb warning of sunburn. Splashing water on myself came to mind, but my neck and shoulders chilled at the thought. Instead I hosed water into the cup of my hands and washed my face, drying it with my shirt before putting it back on.
As the sun winked over the ledge of the roof, the shadows of the cherry tree stretched across the yard, smudging Grandma’s row of cactus. Pinching the waterspout, I flecked some water on them and watched as curling wisps of hot dust exploded from the spiked, green skin.
When Nardo came back, he had two clinking glasses in one hand and an ice pitcher of Kool-Aid in another. He watched the clouds herding west and frowned at the puddle of water foaming like dirty milk near the faucet.
“Are you gonna work anymore or what?” he asked, accusingly.
“No,” I said, inspecting my fingernails, half-mooned with dirt.
“Hell then, let’s quit.” He hunched back his shoulders and blew up his lungs; then, tilting his head back, he began drinking from the pitcher in huge, noisy gulps. Then he filled a glass and finished that, shaking the purple-stained ice cubes. He put the pitcher on a wood stool nearby.
“Besides,” he said, breathing heavy, “Grandma’s awake.”
“Grandma’s awake?”
“Yeah.” He pressed his arms against his sides, feigning fear. “She said she just woke up from a dream where Grandpa was sitting on the bed beside her.”
He lay down on the shaded grass, linking his fingers behind his neck. Like my dad’s, his hair was swirly and glinted in the sun like splashes of water. I looked at the muscles along his ribs where the T-shirt had ridden up and thought of my own flabby waist. Nardo only had a mulberry birthmark on his shoulder, which he always rubbed when thinking. I had a face Dad said would look handsome on a horse.
Grandma came around from the front wearing a flowery Japanese kimono. Her eyes weren’t too strong, so she groped around, homing in on our faces. Ropes pulled at her from the ground when she walked and her sighs sounded like roots releasing from moist earth.
Nardo put the pitcher on the ground and brought Grandma the stool, which she stared at a while before sitting down. It belonged to my grandpa, who had died some years back after his brain got fevery and he couldn’t recognize anyone, even himself in the mirror when we held it up one day for him to comb his hair. A sickness broke down the muscles in his legs, then broke down the stories about Mexico that smoldered in his heart. In the end, his only memory was of the desert he crossed to plant his foot in this country.
Grandma used to keep her face pretty like a baby doll, dabbing cold cream on it every night. She used to tighten her hair in knots and dye it black like a young girl’s. Now her face was webbed with wrinkles, and her hair sworly white and frazzled. She still sprinkled on perfume, and w
as still wild about painting her lips, except now the sprinkles became palmfuls and the lipstick wandered, smearing her face eerie.
She gazed dreamily over the yard. It was beautiful back then, she said. It was a garden, and every house had one so bright a person’s eyesight blurred. She remembered browsing among the flowers, smelling odors that even people in heaven would envy. My brother and I scanned around, trying to imagine the same wonder, but what we saw wasn’t as sweet as Grandma remembered. I even tried to imagine neighbors, which she no longer had, except far down the road. One by one, they had all moved away.
She must have sensed our confusion, because she said it was true, the yard wasn’t as joyful as when she and Grandpa were young. She said it was mostly the drought that sucked all the gardens away, but we knew that wasn’t altogether true. There were still reservoirs of water, even if the rings showed how much the drought had shrunk them. It was more that the city planned to build a freeway, and was slowly buying and wrecking the houses, plowing the gardens gray. Grandpa and his neighbor, Mr. Vuksanivich, refused to sell, and for a while the city held back its plans for a freeway. Grandpa kept the garden alive and Mr. Vuksanivich kept his pasture green. Then Mr. Vuksanivich died, and the city bought the land from his son, and then Grandpa also died, and with him, the garden. Since Mom was the oldest, my dad figured she’d get the house when Grandma died.
The sun was a spot of dried blood on the rim of the horizon when Grandma waved at the cherry tree with her finger. “Allí” she said. “There.” A few puckered cherries lay on the ground; a mantis unfurled a blue sail and skittered across the grass. “There,” she said, again. “There!”
Long ago, under the drooping branches, was once a small girl, our mother, with a handkerchief covering her dark, pony eyes. She was swinging a stick at a bull piñata slung on a rope. By a chance hit, she burst open the clay pot nestled inside the bull’s belly. Fistfuls of chocolates and candy came cascading out of the wound. Everyone screamed with excitement. The children, from the once full neighborhood of children, scurried about, eyes watery and chubby hands stashing candies into their pockets. They laughed with a cute, greedy look Grandma said only a child can make. “Qué curiositos se miraban,” she said. “How curious they looked.”
Parrot in the Oven Page 5