by Jeff Rivera
Grossaint sashayed down the aisle with a limp wrist. “Heeeeey! I’m Simon.”
They all chuckled.
Dio rose. “Shut the fuck up, Grossaint, unless you like walking around like that.”
Grossaint burned red. “Just look, Simon’s little butt-boy has come to the rescue. What’s up with you and him, anyway? You fags or something?”
“Why? ‘Cause I stick up for my friends ’stead of talking about everybody behind their back like you?”
“Whatever, dude.”
“You’re just pissed ’cause I kicked your ass on the course again,” Dio said.
Everyone laughed and Grossaint looked pissed.
“Yeah, you’re just pissed ’cause he beat you,” Simon added.
“Shut up, faggot.”
“I know you are, but what am I?” Simon taunted.
Everyone froze. Did they hear what they thought they heard?
Oh, my god. What a nerd, Dio thought.
Dio sank into his bunk. He shook his head, feeling embarrassed for Simon.
“Sticks and stones, homie,” Simon added, “sticks and stones.”
Dio called Simon through gritted teeth. “Dude, sit down and shut up.”
Simon obeyed.
“What?” he asked innocently.
“Sit . . . down.”
“Why? What’d I say?”
Dio just shook his head.
Grossaint laughed. “What a fucking loser.”
Everyone roared with laughter and Simon shrank back into his shell.
“You’ve been awfully quiet today,” Louise commented.
Dio scrubbed around the tables with a small brush, drowning himself in hip-hop from the radio.
His mind was on the awful dream he kept having over and over again about Acne and Dirty Blond. They were always laughing in his face. “Don’t want to fuck with me, spic.” And he kept seeing Jennifer being shot, over and over again, her body flying through the air, her head hitting the pavement hard.
He didn’t even notice Louise was there until she shut the radio off.
“What’s going on with you?”
“Huh?” Dio said, waking out of his daze. “Oh, nothin’. I’m just, just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Just nothing.”
“Nothing? Still haven’t heard back from Jennifer?”
“Not really.”
In fact, the only letter he’d gotten was from his mom, and he didn’t even bother opening that one. What could she possibly say? Call him stupid or irresponsible or a hundred other awful things she liked to say to him?
“How long’s it been?” Louise asked.
“Like three weeks. I hate when she does this.”
“Well, maybe she’s busy.”
“Too busy for me? I don’t think so.”
“Got to give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“I guess.”
“I used to get on my daughters’ cases all the time. Didn’t understand why they were always coming home so late at night, or not at all. Used to think they were nothing but a bunch of rebellious teens. Then I learned to give them the benefit of the doubt, after some family therapy and things, and I realized . . . they just didn’t want to be around me.”
“How come?”
“Don’t know, really. Always tried to be the best mother I could. Wasn’t easy with all that was going on in the house. I guess they were mad at me ’cause they just didn’t understand why I didn’t leave my husband sooner.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes you just get used to it, used to all the drama. Besides, he’s changing. In fact, I gotta go meet up with him tonight.”
“You gotta? . . . Sounds like love to me.”
“Put up with a man like that for twenty-two years and you’d ‘gotta’ do a lot of things.”
“Where you going?”
“His place.”
“His place?”
“Yeah. We’re spending some time apart for a while. He got tired of being thrown out on the couch.”
“You guys never hook up no more?”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, mess around, make love.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Then when you getting a divorce?”
“I’m not getting a divorce. You don’t listen very carefully, do you? I said we’re spending some time apart.”
“That’s just fancy talk for eventually getting a divorce. . . . Divorce is a sin you know, says it in the Bible.”
She grunted. “Good to know.”
Louise was silent for a while.
“You still love him?” Dio asked.
“Course I do.”
“He your true love?”
“We’ve been married for twenty-two years, haven’t we?”
“Yeah, but being stuck with someone for twenty-two years just ’cause you’re used to them don’t mean they your true love.”
“Never mind me. You just mind your own business. That reminds me, I almost forgot.”
She ran back into the kitchen and handed him a book.
“What this?”
“Maya Angelou.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an author. And you oughta start reading her if you want to learn some romance.”
“I don’t need to learn no romance.”
Louise snickered. “Is that so? Listen, she’s a poet, and nothing reaches a woman’s heart like poetry. Well, that and chocolate.”
Dio laughed. “Poetry. I don’t read that shit.”
“Watch your language. And why not?”
“’Cause I don’t. We got enough to read in class.”
“You don’t read ’cause you gotta; you read ’cause you wanna.”
“Why would I wanna?”
“I just told you. Just read it. Make you a bet. You read about twenty of them pages in that book and if you don’t see the point by then, you won’t have to clean out the grease traps for a day.”
A smile spread across his face.
“Don’t give me that look, Dio. You better read it.”
“All right, all right.”
“I got your word?” she asked.
“Sure. Yeah. How you know all this stuff, anyway?” Dio asked.
“College.”
“You went to college?”
“What do you mean, ‘You went to college?’ Course I did. Almost graduated, too, just a semester away.”
“Why didn’t you finish?”
Louise seemed to struggle with an answer.
“Things come up, some things more important than college. Anyway, why would you not think I went?”
Dio didn’t know how to put it, but the truth was, you looked at Louise and she was the last person you’d imagine would have gone to college. She talked like she was from the sticks.
Weren’t college-educated people supposed to be polished and professional-looking?
“I don’t know,” Dio lied. “Just wondering.”
“I’ll have you know I was at the top of my class. University of Kansas West. Not far from where Senior Jackson grew up, actually. Was going to be a psychologist and everything.”
“A shrink? You would have been good at that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, ’cause you’re always asking all them questions and you listen real good, too.”
She smiled. “Well, thanks. You could go to college if you wanted. You’re smart enough. You keep at your studies and keep your nose clean and out of trouble, you could go far.”
“Me? Nah. I got a family to feed once I get out of here,” Dio said.
“You can do both, you know. I did for a while.”
“I don’t know.”
“What would you study, if you went?”
Dio was lost in his thoughts, and then he smiled. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“I don’t know. I like art. Jennifer alw
ays thought I was good at it. And sometimes when I was little, we’d sneak into the museum downtown. You know, the one by the library?”
“Leed or Lied, or whatever it’s called?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, part of being an artist is reading. Poems, literature, that’s just another way of expressing yourself.”
Dio squinted and then smiled. Out of the blue he said, “You’re in love with someone else ’sides your husband, aren’t you?”
“What?” Louise demanded. “What makes you think that?”
“I can just tell. Someone else got your heart. Maybe someone long ago.”
“We’ve all had crushes in the past.”
“But this one’s different. I can tell. You loved him. And he loved you. You ever look him up?”
“I couldn’t just look him—you know, you sure are one nosy little bugger.”
“Why not? You’re gonna get a divorce.”
“I’m not going to get a—”
“Well, you’re going to be single soon. Why not look him up?”
“That’s enough of all this chit-chat today. Get to work.”
And she headed right back into the kitchen.
Dio wondered why she pushed away any time he asked her something personal. What was so private that she couldn’t talk about it? Sure, maybe it was against boot camp policy, but they’d crossed those boundaries a long time ago. They were more than just employer and employee; they were friends. He knew that. He trusted her and there was a part of her that trusted him, too. It’d been a long time since he could trust anyone besides Jennifer and now he’d met two, Simon and Louise.
Dio drew another portrait of Jennifer. They didn’t give him much to work with, no colors, just a plain old pencil, but in his mind she was full of color and full of life.
He sighed; he knew he was supposed to read that damn book of poetry. He had promised Louise, and a promise was a promise. It was bad enough having to go to school in camp every day or having to read the dictionary at night. At first it was a dread. He didn’t even understand most of it, but then, the more he read, the more he got into it. The more he got into it, the more he enjoyed it. And the more he enjoyed it, the more he connected to what she was saying in the book. That night he read half the book. He just couldn’t put it down.
“What’d she say?” the trainees asked.
Dio sighed. Another night and he knew they’d never leave him alone unless he read Jen’s letter to them, so he did.
“Dear Dio,
“I haven’t been feeling all too good lately. It’s hard enough for me to get out of bed and go to the kitchen let alone out of the house. I don’t have a car and there’s no way in hell I’m going to ask my parents for a raite. It seems like my mom’s starting to be like her old self again, which is not a good thing. She came into my room today and insisted I have some picture of Jesus on the wall and not only that but she wanted it in a certain spot. She got all bitchy when I said ‘whatever.’ I just pray it’s not a sign that things are going to be like they were before.
“It’s so weird here it’s like all our history, all the things we’ve been through are in the pared. They’re in my cama. They’re on the techo and I can’t escape it. The only thing that keeps my mind off of it is watching TV so I sit in the bed most of the time and just watch novelas, and then comes the stupid cartoons which I’m starting to actually like and then all the talk shows and the boring news. Most of the time I just sleep. It gets so boring.
“Oh, I just wanted to let you know that I had the social worker pick up Daniel and bring him over to me. He remembered me. I try to give him things to do and now he and Desiree have started to play together. Most of the time se estan peleando and my mom just screams at them to stop. I think it’s funny actually. At first mom didn’t want him around Desiree at all. It was like she felt some how your old bad habits would rub off on her someway but now I think Mom kind of likes it. It gives her like a sense of purpose or something. She feels like a mother over again. That’s what I think.
“That reminds me Daniel said that your mom’s actually going to AA right now. Isn’t that great? That’s a good start, isn’t it? Seems like you’re not the only one making changes. Wouldn’t it be nice if she became like she was before when you were a little chavalillio?
“Well ya me voy a hir. I’ve been spending more time on the pot than anything lately. And I’ve got this rash and I’m always feeling hot, must be the medication. Talk to you later OK. Be good.
Love,
Jennifer”
“Sounds like she’s spending a lot of time with that social worker guy of hers,” Franklin said, snickering.
“Yeah, sounds like you might have some competition,” Grossaint said.
The squad laughed. Dio was pissed. Not so much that they had said it, but that they had said it in front of everyone.
“Hey, you’re not giving it to her, somebody else will,” Grossaint said, laughing. “That’s what skanks do.”
Dio pulled out a drawing of her. “Does she look like a skank to you? I don’t think so.”
“That’s a fake,” Grossaint said. “You couldn’t get a girl that good.”
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” Dio answered. “Like to see the toothless girl you got.”
Everyone laughed, but it still didn’t heal the wound Grossaint had made in him.
What an asshole, Dio thought.
But he wondered, Could they be right?
He held on to the letter and kept reading it over and over again the next day, as if it would give him some answers. But it didn’t. Dio stuffed the letter in his back pocket as he helped Simon weed the garden. Jackson had made them all start planting flowers and herbs and vegetables and things about a week before. He said something about it helping them learn patience, whatever that was supposed to mean. But Dio had to admit, there was something about gardening he kind of liked. It was like connecting to nature, or maybe it was because he just liked the thought of building something from scratch and seeing it grow. Whatever it was, it was peaceful.
Dio looked at Simon. Strange, he didn’t ask any questions or anything during the letter. In fact, it seemed like he wasn’t even listening.
“Qué pasa, homie?”
“Huh?”
“S’up,” Dio said.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just thinking.”
“’Bout what?”
“About life.”
Dio looked at Simon. He didn’t seem to be all the way there. It must have been the heat or something.
“You all right, man?”
Simon smiled a silly smile. “Doing fine,” he answered.
“Maybe you should step out of the sun for a while. I think it’s getting to you.”
“Why does Grossaint hate me?”
Dio shrugged. “He’s just an asshole. That’s all.”
“No, it’s more than that. He likes picking on me. He hurts me when you’re not around.”
“What?”
Simon had trouble making his words come out. His lips started trembling. “He does. And I try to make him stop, I do. Honest, I do, but nothing I do . . .”
Simon thought back to the first time he had interacted with Grossaint. It was only the first day or so of camp. He watched Grossaint and his friends from around the corner of the main building. They were sanding down the wood of an old fence. They seemed to be laughing, quietly of course, so as to not let Jackson know. If they hadn’t been in prison garb you could have sworn they were just a bunch of teenage boys goofing off at work.
“No, I’m serious. I’m going to do it, too,” Grossaint told the others. “Soon as I get out of here, gonna get a job with my cousin out in Pahrump. If I get into the union, I can be making thirty to forty dollars an hour making cabinets for casinos and shit.”
“That much?” Franklin asked.
“Yeah. That’s what my dad did before . . . before he got laid off. But now there’s more jobs than before. You two can come with me, to
o. You have to do some tests and shit to get into the union, but even you knuckleheads could handle it.”
They laughed.
“Best of all, hardly any trouble out there either. Just good ol’ hard-working Americans, families and shit trying to make a livin’.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. There’s only like fifty thousand people out there anyway. How much trouble could there be? They’ve got jobs lined up for union workers, too. ’Sides, there are more good, quality women out there than the skanks in Vegas.”
They laughed again.
“Man, the girls out here make me itch,” Grossaint joked.
They roared with laughter. Simon couldn’t help but laugh, too. They seemed like pretty cool guys, down to earth. They even seemed to have woman trouble just like he did, or at least just like he wished he did. He hadn’t really connected with anyone by then, so he figured he might approach them.
He cleared his throat.
“Hey,” he said, his voice all squeaky, as usual.
They looked at him, then looked at one another. Something was brewing in their minds and Simon didn’t know what.
“I’m Danny. Danny Simon.”
“Who gives a fuck who you are, nigger?” Grossaint said.
The others chuckled.
It was as if someone had shoved a dagger in his heart. It shocked the hell out of him. It just didn’t seem like the same guys he had seen goofing off.
He backed away.
“What the fuck do you want? Get out of here,” Grossaint said.
Simon backed off. It was just like junior high school. The popular kids separated from the nerds; only there was no one else for him to hang with.
“Find you trying to talk to us again and you’ll find yourself lynched up some tree,” Grossaint said.
“Or dragging behind some truck,” Franklin added, laughing.
“Chale, homes. You can’t let him walk all over you like that,” Dio said, putting his garden tools down. “You gotta fight.”
“I don’t know how.”
Dio looked to see if anyone was watching, then pulled Simon over to the side by the laundry buildings. He started throwing punches into the air. Simon winced.
“Man, don’t back up like that. You gotta fight back. Hold up your fists.”
Simon obeyed, but looked like he was afraid of his own fists. Dio showed him how to hold them, how to jab, how to duck, but he was getting it all wrong. Finally, Dio sighed.