by Manuel Munoz
All afternoon he waited. Saturday television had a few movies that he slept through, but still the door did not open. It began to rain by four o’clock, and it was only then that Joaquín and Robbie entered, both of them solemn, Joaquín’s eyes red and swollen.
“It’s time for us to head out,” Joaquín said. “We just came to say good-bye.”
“Are things okay?” Roberto asked, but Joaquín only shrugged. There was something larger to contend with, and he wanted to be on his way.
“It was good to meet you,” Robbie said, his voice so quiet that it was a surprise to see his arm thrust out for a handshake.
“Likewise,” he answered, and Robbie grabbed his duffel bag and hurried back out through the rain.
“Why don’t you guys just wait out the storm?” Roberto asked. “Have you eaten?”
The way Joaquín stood, with that look in his eye, brought Roberto back to last year and the broken promises. The empty feeling, too, of how Joaquín just drove away. In the days before Joaquín had left, Roberto had mentally rehearsed his departure, tried to have something final and absolute to tell him, but nothing had come, and he had been left imagining good-byes at midnight train stations, platforms filled with great blasts of steam, imagining the lonely blandness of an airport gate, an endless parking lot, a hallway so long he could stare forever at Joaquín’s leaving and still Joaquín wouldn’t turn back. It took a particular strength or denial — he couldn’t tell which — to be that way. At the hospital the night before, when Joaquín’s mother clutched her husband’s hand and begged him to stay, Roberto knew who had let go first.
Joaquín picked up his duffel bag and hurried out onto the sidewalk. It was still raining, but not hard. “Wait,” Roberto called out, running after him. He could see the silhouette of Robbie in the Datsun waiting, and he knew that if he hadn’t called out, Joaquín would have gone down the walkway of the apartment complex and opened the truck door, the dome light like a star in the dim of the afternoon, but he wouldn’t have turned around.
Roberto approached to hug him, and when his arms wrapped themselves around Joaquín’s back, the familiarity came again, he thought, like Joaquín’s mother reaching for the lightbulb in the kitchen, knowing where it was in the dark just by reaching out for it, and he said the words he knew he shouldn’t.
Joaquín let go to leave. “I’ll see you soon,” he said.
SEÑOR X
LAS PALMAS IS THE only new building Gold Street has seen in years. On this side of town, there has not been much new construction in a long time. Over on the north side, the town is stretching its way toward Fresno, swallowing up farmland sold by farmers who claimed that the soil was too acidic. But that’s a lie. The peaches, the nectarines, were growing just fine. Then one foggy day in January, I drove past the northern fringe of town and saw acres and acres of fruit trees pulled up, the trunks and branches gathered in piles. January: there were no leaves, no buds, just the bare dead trees, and as soon as the sun came to stay and the county waived air-quality restrictions for a few days, the farmers were allowed to burn their tree piles. That’s greed for you: now there are beautiful, beautiful houses up there. Las Palmas, by comparison, isn’t really that great. But since it’s on this side of town, it’s something else.
Las Palmas is two stories, like a good motel. My apartment is on the second floor and my bedroom window faces Treviño’s backyard. Ever since I moved back to my neighborhood a few months ago, I’ve watched him out there. Like a lot of backyards in the neighborhood, it’s full of junk: car parts, smashed aluminum cans for recycling, tire rims, old pieces of lumber. Junk has been back there for as long as I can remember. Treviño hunts through his treasures every day, moving slowly. Sometimes he inspects the cactus ridged against the fence and then produces a knife from his back pocket, slicing a heart for lunch. I remember him from when I was a kid and lived in my real house down the street, not in this apartment. Treviño’s an old, old man now, but even with his wife dead many years, look at the things Treviño has: a lot of kids, even if only three of them come to visit him regularly; his own house, shoddy as it is; a perfectly restored Cadillac from the sixties, the envy of the entire neighborhood.
I’ve seen him drive his Cadillac, very slowly, as if he were king of the street. He always has the windows rolled down, and the neighborhood kids stop their playing to watch him go by. Treviño waves at them and they wave back, gathering to follow his car like a royal entourage. I used to wave at him, too. The black paint was and still is perfect, shiny and waxed, the taillights glimmering sharp even in the daylight.
Treviño’s getting old, though: the Cadillac collects a little dust because he doesn’t drive as much, and I know this makes him crazy. A neighborhood kid comes down the street every couple of days to wash it with rags and a bucket of soapy water. From the bedroom window, I can see Treviño supervising the kid, admonishing him, shaking his head, but he doesn’t have much choice. I know it pains him to see his car lose out daily to the elements of the neighborhood. I know he stands there with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.
The thing is, I didn’t think much about Treviño until one day when I was coming home from the store. As I parked my car in my slot, I noticed a little oil stain on the cement. My car was a brand-new used Tercel, and it was too soon to have a leak like that. Still, I unloaded my grocery bags and tried to pay it no mind. As I was walking toward the stairs leading up to my breezeway, the Mexican woman who had just moved in downstairs came out of her apartment in a rush, pulling her two little kids behind her. She was flustered, not enough hands to control the kids, who seemed to bolt down to the ground like dogs on a leash when they don’t want to go any farther. In her struggle, the Mexican woman dropped some money, a fat little fold of bills, and my better side made me open my mouth and call out to her. “¡Oye, señora!” I pointed and she turned to look at me as if I didn’t understand she was in a hurry. But when she spotted the money, her face washed over in relief. She bent over to pick it up and stuffed it past her blouse into the cup of her bra, gave a nod of thanks, and off they went, on foot, to wherever they were going.
I could have been a good neighbor. I could have offered her a ride, even if there was something wrong with my oil pump. I’ve been trying to change. I think I’m a good person deep inside, except for some mistakes, some ways of thinking that I now know were wrong. But I stood there watching the woman and her two kids on the long trudge to their destination, and I thought about her money, the fat little fold of bills.
And that’s when it hit me: Las Palmas, this neighborhood, Treviño next door. People might be poor, but they were not destitute. They were savers. They shuttled money down to Mexico all the time. They distrusted the thieves at the banks. There was money everywhere in the neighborhood. But money to be made, not stolen. And then I thought of Treviño and his backyard, the work I might get out of him, and knew I needed to go over and introduce myself.
IT WAS A SATURDAY afternoon about four o’clock. I had dozed all day with the television on, sometimes going into my bedroom to see if Treviño had wandered into his backyard. Finally I saw him, and I watched him for a bit just to make sure he was going to stay outside for a while. Then I made my way over, knocked on his front door, pretended to wait, and then went along the side of the house to the backyard.
“Oye, Señor Treviño,” I called out to him. He was hunched over, bracing himself somehow against his right leg, pulling at a rusty piece of pipe trapped by two enormous fruit crates, the ones used for shipping oranges. Treviño turned around slowly, his face grimacing. I thought at first he was annoyed at having been interrupted, but then I realized he had lost his concentration, that it had been taking all his effort to get this piece of pipe. He was sweating a little through his plaid shirt, the same kind of thin, worn cotton shirt I always remembered him wearing. He looked at me almost with suspicion, but then that look flashed away, as if the old man had remembered the manners of his country, and he stood up as straig
ht as he could and began walking over to me.
“Buenas tardes,” Treviño said, wiping his hand on his khakis and extending it, even though we were still some distance apart. He greeted me as if I were familiar, so gracious, but I didn’t know if he actually remembered me.
I pointed to the pipe and asked him, in Spanish, if he needed help.
“A little bit,” Treviño answered, grinning slightly, and I wasn’t sure if he was feeling sheepish about needing help or about his pronunciation. “You’re one of the triplets, aren’t you?” he asked.
I nodded at him.
“Well,” he said, “which one are you?”
“Cristian. But I go by Chris.”
“Your mama named you Cristian,” he said, almost gruffly. “That’s what you should go by.”
I didn’t think he was even going to give me a chance to ask about helping out, but then he asked me about how I’d come to move back to Gold Street, and I told him about my new job at the paper mill on the north side of town. Treviño raised his eyes in surprise; he knew it was a good job, and maybe it made me sound like a man worth talking to. He forgot about the pipe and motioned me over to the shade near the back porch. Treviño took a lawn chair for himself and then pointed to my choices: a cinder block or an old fruit crate. I chose the crate and sat down.
I didn’t have to ask him to start his story. “Sonora,” he said. “All my people.” And then the brothers over in Texas, the three daughters who still came to visit him from nearby Visalia. For the wife, almost ten years now since she had passed away. “I miss her every day,” Treviño told me, looking away to the expanse of his backyard.
“She was a nice lady,” I said. I really did remember her. I followed Treviño’s eyes as he focused on an oil drum rusted on the sides and black on the rim from an old fire. He had weeds sprouting along the sagging wooden fences, the weeds already yellowed, the ground dry and dusty. He had an old swamp cooler, the kind some people still used in the summers here, the old box kind with a cylinder fan and a tray of water pooling at the bottom and the soft pads on the side, kept wet by a hookup to an outside faucet. Metal scraps curled up and ready for a good hammer; newspaper stacks in clear plastic to keep them safe from the rain; old coffee cans with their plastic lids still on, heavy with rusty nails.
“You ever think about cleaning up back here?” I asked him, swallowing a little. “Sell some of the scrap?”
“Who would want all this junk?” Treviño asked, laughing, but I knew he was waiting for the answer.
I had it all ready on the tip of my tongue. “A lot of people. Couple of dollars here and there. Probably the same people who would buy your Cadillac if you offered it for sale.”
Treviño sighed and surveyed his treasures. Was he adding up the dollars in his head? Or was he imagining how his backyard might actually look if cleared of everything? He shifted in his lawn chair, the aluminum groaning. He tugged at the cuffs of his plaid shirt, the worn threads, then studied them closely as if I weren’t there anymore.
“Back when my wife was alive, all this” — he waved with his hand — “full of grass, flowers all along the fence. Not just roses and petunias, but the fancy flowers like the white ladies. She used to have them in the front yard, but people would steal them. Can you believe it? Some of the neighborhood women lost a good friend in her by doing that.”
“I’ll bet it was nice,” I told him, but I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t recall the backyard ever having looked like that.
Treviño clapped his hands, his decision made. “You over in Las Palmas, then? You need work?” He lit a cigarette and coughed, shaking his head as if he knew he shouldn’t be doing it anymore.
“I’ve been looking for work. I’m only part-time at the mill.”
“You know cars? There’s a lot of good spare parts back here that will get good money, but you have to know car parts.”
“Yeah, I know cars some,” I lied. “All that scrap metal, even that newspaper. You can get something for that.”
Treviño was still looking over his yard, looking at one corner, then another. He puffed on his cigarette with that resigned look of longing that comes with exhaling. Then he said it: “Flowers would look pretty again. A garden.” Treviño shook his head as if at a memory. “You can start with that pipe,” he said, pointing. “Somebody said they’d give me five bucks for it.”
LAS PALMAS IS FOR people like that Mexican woman with her two kids. It’s for young mothers on WIC. Old ladies live on the bottom floors by themselves and peek out from their windows but hardly ever open their doors. Their parking slots end up getting used by other tenants, and no one asks them if it is okay. Las Palmas has a large laundry room, tenants standing around its entrance all the time until it closes at eight. A lot of the older kids hang out on the stairways, well past being bored. There is also a playground with hard-packed sand and a merry-go-round that I can hear the younger kids turn with a loud scrape. That’s usually in the early morning, the only time the younger kids are allowed to play there.
I’m at Las Palmas because I got released on a county work-furlough program and this is my housing. After all my talk and my dreaming about leaving Gold Street, about leaving my town, this is where I came back in the end. The job at the paper mill is janitorial and it’s only part-time, but I don’t say anything about it to anyone. Just saying you work at the paper mill is enough to make people think you’ve got a good job. Besides, if I don’t show up for work, I lose the apartment and the furlough is canceled. And I know people look at me with some envy because I live at Las Palmas — they know all about this place and why people live here.
I’m lucky: I spent only a year in jail at Avenal, for forgery, paychecks I faked a long time ago. The police were searching for something to charge me with when I got caught in Las Vegas, and all they came up with were those bad checks. I was in Las Vegas, heading east, as far away as I could get from the gas station that I helped rob with this guy I used to know, Kyle, the only white boy on Gold Street. To this day, I don’t know what happened to Kyle. He had taken off without me from the motel in Las Vegas, as if he had dreamed something in the middle of the night. I woke up that morning in the motel room, a hard, sharp bang on the door, and then a rattle of keys. It wasn’t like on television, with a burst of police shouldering open a room. It was more calm, the motel attendant pointing into the room as if he had known about me and Kyle all along, two police officers and only one gun pulled and quickly holstered.
I can’t explain why I hung out with Kyle to begin with, only that he had a hardness in him that came from being picked on when we were all younger, eight or nine years old. By middle school, he’d become a bully and something like a protector for a lot of us on Gold Street, mainly because of his horrible temper: he once picked up his desk and threw it at our social studies teacher and got expelled for a week. When all of us in the neighborhood reached high school, Kyle somehow got a car, a real piece-of-junk Mercury. But in our neighborhood, a piece of junk still cost money, and we never knew how Kyle got the cash — his mother was as poor as everybody else’s. We pooled money for gas, and that car got us out of the neighborhood, into Orosi and Cutler, where we’d fling bottles at kids on bikes and steal beer from minimarts to get drunk in the orchards. Somewhere along the line, after Kyle dropped out of school and was getting into serious problems with the police, it became just me and him: the other guys in the neighborhood stopped hanging around with us. A lot of them had fathers who came over to Kyle’s house and yelled at his mother, or beat their own kids and threatened to kick them out of the house. My mother never seemed to know anything about what I was up to, how I broke into one of the elementary schools in Orosi and stole a computer. She believed me when I said I bought it from the high school because it was old and they were replacing all the machines. She didn’t know how I picked on some of the junior high kids in Reedley and stole their money, five or ten bucks really, but enough for a case of beer at the minimart way out by Minkler,
where they didn’t care who bought.
Kyle had made no secret about wanting to leave town, but he didn’t seem to grasp how hard it was going to be for someone who had dropped out of school. One of the last times we hung out with some of the guys in the neighborhood, out getting drunk in the orchards, he said, “I’m moving down to Los Angeles this summer — do construction like my dad.” Someone had laughed at him in the dark. “How you going to do that, Kyle? You’re stupid as fuck.” And everybody except Kyle had laughed in the dark. Kyle turned quiet. You couldn’t hear anything but the swig of the beer in the bottles, no one saying anything. When we left, Kyle floored it back to town, zipping past the stop signs, and the guys in the backseat shouted for him to slow down. At the high school, he stopped and said, “Get out.” All of us got out of the car quick, even me, and I felt bad because I had never laughed at Kyle. I had never made fun of him, and I thought he knew that. It was almost a relief when he called me back in and I closed the door. “They’re a bunch of pussies,” he said, driving down the street, and I felt glad that he wasn’t angry with me.
But what he did next should have told me everything. Without saying a word, he drove calmly into the center of town. On Tulare Street, he cut into one of the alleys, turning off the headlights and pulling up as close as he could to the darkness behind one of the trash bins. “Move your leg,” he said, reaching for the glove compartment, and when he popped it open, I saw the steel black of a gun. I froze at its heaviness, how cold it looked, a coldness I could feel without even having to touch it. I’d never seen a gun in my life, but it was like running across a snake out in the vineyards, the way you move away from it immediately. He pulled it out, opened the car door, and walked over to the back entrance of the men’s clothing store, where he had a job in the stockroom. Kyle calmly shot at the doorknob, and I grabbed at the armrest at how loud it was, the alley ringing its echo. But he was so calm. It was only after he had wrestled the door open that he began to hurry, racing inside and coming back with an armload of jeans, packages of underwear.