Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “Viet Nam or no Viet Nam—honesty’s the best policy.”

  “Shit. That’s a gringo thing.”

  “Honesty’s not a gringo thing.” That was Angel. That was her voice. “You’re full of it. You think gringos are honest. You’re full of it, René.”

  “Ooouuuuhhh, Angel!” That would be Gigi’s voice. “Da le gas, baby!”

  I was laughing. Yeah, yeah. I could laugh. Not a lot. But I could laugh.

  “You have a nice laugh, Sammy.” Angel was looking at me. I looked away. I don’t know. I just looked away.

  “So what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Give it a rest, Gigi. Who knows? Who the hell knows? You think I know, Gigi? I don’t. You think René knows?”

  “Tell him you love him, Gigi.”

  “You’re full of shit, René. You can’t lie to a guy like that. It’s Pifas.”

  “You think women don’t lie to guys? Sammy, you really have your head up your ass.”

  Gigi took the cigarettes out of my shirt pocket.

  “Help yourself,” I said.

  She broke out laughing. She had a killer laugh. I could see why Charlie was crazy for her. I could see that. She lit a cigarette. “What would it hurt, if I lied to him?”

  “So he comes home from Nam and he expects to marry you, right? And you tell him, Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’m dating Charlie Gladstien, that gringo.”

  “It’s not settled whether he’s a gringo or not,” Gigi said.

  “Yeah, yeah.” That’s what I said. Yeah, yeah.

  “So I break his heart when he comes home.”

  When he comes home. “Look,” I said. “René’s right. Just lie to him. Tell him you love him. He’s fighting a war. He’s going through all kinds of shit. Hell, lie to him. Make a mess now. Clean it up later. Like cooking dinner.”

  “Right,” René said. Not that he knew anything about cooking dinner. He knew about eating. He knew about that. Cleaning up? I don’t know.

  Gigi looked over at Angel. “Why not?” she said. “What could it hurt?”

  “And besides,” Gigi said, “he’s just lonely. When he gets back, he won’t even want me. He’ll go back to being Pifas. I mean, can you see that guy working steady. Being a father? Can anybody picture that?” She took a drag from her cigarette. “I’ll tell him I’ll marry him. That’s what I’ll tell him.”

  That was the thing. She didn’t want to hurt Pifas. Nobody wanted to hurt him. Pifas was a funny guy, screwy, I mean that guy wasn’t marriage material. No way in hell. But he got his feelings hurt kind of easy. It was like a part of him was made of glass. I never understood that about Pifas. He was a year and half older than me, but he was always following me around. Like a kid. I never really understood that. He was always a little lost, never quite found himself. One minute he was wanting to kick your ass and the next minute he was giving you the shirt off his back. I don’t know. Maybe you just can’t know anyone. Maybe that’s not possible. One thing I did know—it would’ve killed him, if he’d have known that we were all sitting in a car at Shirley’s talking about him. It would’ve killed him to hear us.

  “I’ll write the letter,” Gigi said. “Tonight. I’ll write it—and I’ll mail it.” She had this serious look on her face. I knew that look. I wore it all the time.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  So the next day, I go to school. Like every day. René picked me up. It was kind of a routine now. René would pick me up. Except when his car was having problems—then we’d walk. So that day, he picked me up. And there, in the parking lot of Las Cruces High School, Joaquín Mesa and Charlie Gladstein and Ginger Ford are passing out black armbands. “Make peace, not war.” They kept saying that to everybody as they handed out black armbands. René was already wearing his. I stared at it. Sitting there in René’s car. Stared at his black armband and at him and at Charlie who was handing out armbands. I guess he was an activist now. I wondered what that felt like. To be an activist. “Make peace, not war,” I told René. I kind of smiled.

  “That’s right,” René said.

  “You solve everything with a fist, René.”

  “Look. I don’t go looking for fights.”

  “They just find you.”

  “I don’t back down, Sammy.”

  “You sure as hell don’t. Chingazos—that’s what you know, René.”

  “You’re all pissed off, ese. And fuck you, Sammy. I know more than chingazos. Why are you all pissed off all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t.

  I just sat there. The first bell rang. Five minutes to get to class. We both just got out of the car, then walked inside. We were both in the same homeroom class. Spanish IV-S with Mrs. Scott. Jaime and Eric, they’d been in that class too. But they were gone now, like they’d never been there. It was at the other end of the school, our class. And god, the hallways were crowded. I was tired of pushing my way through. Tired, and as we’re making our way through the halls, René says, “I don’t understand you, Sammy. Something’s eating you,” he said.

  “A pigeon,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I don’t know why—but all that day I had a bad feeling. The pigeon inside was making noises. Charlie walked up to me at lunch and I felt bad because I wasn’t wearing an armband. I thought maybe I should be wearing one. I mean, my dad and me, we talked about the war all the time. He didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. What was there to like about the war? Guys like Pifas were getting killed. Shit. But I wanted to run, I think. It was too hard. Everything was too hard. I don’t know why I was thinking those things. But that’s what I was thinking that day. I just wanted to go home and sleep—and maybe when I woke up, the world would be fine, the world would be good, the world wouldn’t be at war. I would be able to go to college anywhere I wanted to go. And it wouldn’t matter whether I had money or not. Pifas would be home—saying stupid things, making me laugh. Because there wasn’t a war. Jaime and Eric, what they felt about each other, well, it wouldn’t matter to anybody. Nobody would care. Beause they weren’t hurting anybody. And heroine would still be around, but nobody would be using it—because they didn’t need it. They didn’t need it to feel good. They didn’t need it to help them get through the day.

  Mrs. Davis wanted to know what was wrong with me. She said I looked distant. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m a little distant.” She wanted to see me after school. So, I went to her classroom after school.

  “Your paper,” she said. “Sammy, you’re going to college, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. Pinche Harvard. Yeah, yeah. I started to cry. So I just left. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

  I walked home. I stopped at the Pic Quick, bought a Pepsi and a pack of cigarettes. I was looking at the sky. And I felt small. And I remembered looking at the stars one night when I’d been with Juliana. And I had felt as large as that sky. I had. That night. And now, now I felt small when I looked at the sky.

  When I got home that day, there was a note on the table from my dad:

  Sammy—

  Power went out at work today. Came home early. Elena needs some new shoes so that’s where we are. Don’t cook tonight. I’ll bring home some hamburgers. Oyes, you left the iron on this morning. You could’ve burned the house. Be careful. Where are you? Come home.

  Come home. That’s what he said. As if I were gone.

  God. I was restless. Usually, I’d just pick up a book and read. And read. And nothing existed. Just the words on the page and me, and the whole world disappeared. But the whole world didn’t feel like disappearing. Not that day. It wanted to stay close. Right by my side. The world. And it didn’t feel good. It didn’t.

  So I went outside and sat on the porch. I looked across the street and saw Mrs. Apodaca working on her yard. He’d been dead for a while, Mr. Apodaca. But she was still keeping up the yard. And maybe her heart had healed. Maybe it had. Enough to care about a garden.

&nb
sp; Sometimes, I helped her out, mowed her lawn. But only when she asked. She was proud as hell. And a pain in the ass. She just couldn’t let things alone, couldn’t give the citizens of Hollywood a break, just didn’t have it in her. Her and her novenas and her holy water and her prayers, her and her hats, her and her strict ways. Nobody was ever good enough. But we’d made a kind of peace, she and I. We had.

  I saw her take off her straw hat. She wiped the sweat from her brow. Then she saw me. She waved. I waved back. We were friends now. “You shouldn’t smoke.” That’s what she yelled.

  That made me smile.

  She shook her head and kept working.

  I took a drag off my cigarette. I looked up at the sky. I felt a little better. I wondered why I’d started crying in front of Mrs. Davis. What the hell happened there? I didn’t know. Shit. Then, I see René’s car pull up in front of my house. And Gigi gets out. She gets out—and I wave but I can see that something’s wrong, something’s really wrong. I can see that. I can see it on her face. And René, he gets out of the car, and he has this look on his face. And then Gigi, she looks at me, and she drops to her knees, and she starts crying and screaming like a crazy woman. “Sammy!” And I couldn’t stand it. “Sammy!” And she cries and she cries and she can’t stop because she doesn’t even own her body anymore. And I walk towards her as she’s kneeling there, and I pull her up, and I’m holding a question in my eyes, but I know I’m holding the answer too. And my heart is breaking, seeing Gigi that way, and I want to tell her to stop, to please stop, and I know I had hate in my heart, I hated again, only I didn’t know exactly who I hated, maybe my country, maybe Pifas for going off to Viet Nam, maybe myself for being all screwed up, maybe all the adults in the world who let bad things happen to hurt girls like Gigi.

  And then, finally, Gigi, she stops crying long enough to tell me, to tell me, even though I already knew. “Sammy! Sammy! Our Pifas. Our Pifas is gone. He’s gone, Sammy.” And she looked at me, like maybe I might say something, maybe I could do something to change what couldn’t be changed. “Sammy, God, Sammy, our Pifas is coming home.” I knew what that meant. In a coffin. In a body bag. Pifas was coming home. Maybe that’s what I had been feeling all day. Maybe that was it. Maybe my pigeon had known. But on the day Pifas left, even then I’d known he would never be coming back. Because even he knew it. “Sammy,” she cried, “Pifas—”

  I just held her. “He never got my letter, Sammy. He never got my letter.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Gigi. It doesn’t matter anymore.” That’s what I whispered. I kept holding her. That’s all I could do. Just keep holding her. If I’d known all along that Pifas would never be coming home, then how come it still hurt? How come it felt like someone was taking a sledgehammer to my heart? “No,” that’s what I kept saying over and over. “No.” What good did it do—to keep whispering no.

  I remembered that night at the river when Gigi had sang for us, for me and René and Pifas and Angel. Mostly, I think she’d sang for Pifas. God, I’d never heard anything that pure. And I’d thought that the world should end like that—with a woman singing a song. But that’s not the way the world ended. The world ended with a boy. Killed at war. That’s how the world ended.

  I don’t remember how long Mrs. Apodaca had been there, standing beside us. With her arms around me and Gigi. I just remember hearing her voice. Soft. “Shhhhh,” she kept whispering. And her voice was like a wind, the softest wind in the world. “Shhhhh,” she said. And she smelled of lilac and mint. Like a garden. “Shhh,” she whispered. And I just let her hold me and Gigi. I just let myself sob into her shoulder.

  Gigi sang at the funeral. The Ave Maria. Didn’t know she knew Latin. “I don’t,” she said. “But, well, I guess I just liked that song. So l learned it.”

  We hung out on my front porch after we laid Pifas in the ground. “Well, I guess I don’t have to marry him,” Gigi said. She didn’t laugh at her own joke. We didn’t either.

  We didn’t talk much. Mostly, we just sat there and smoked. And smoked. We didn’t bother going back to school that day.

  I told René what I’d thought the day we took Pifas to the bus station. “I thought maybe we should’ve taken him to Canada.”

  “What’s in Canada?”

  “Trees,” I said. “A sky.”

  We went to the river.

  We drank a beer.

  Angel and Gigi and René and me. We sat there and looked at the river. It wasn’t carrying much water. Not this year.

  The day after Pifas’ funeral, we went back to school. Charlie and his friends were still passing out black armbands in the parking lot. Gigi said she was gonna call off the thing they had. That’s what she’d told us at the river. “What was the use?” she said. I looked at Charlie, and wondered if he loved Gigi. Hell, what did I know about love?

  I took an armband from Charlie.

  “Peace,” he said. “Peace, Sammy.”

  Yeah, yeah. I didn’t know anything about peace either. I looked at René. “Tie this thing on me, will you?”

  René looked at me. “I thought you didn’t want to wear one of these things.”

  “I didn’t want to wake up this morning either. So what?”

  “Don’t talk like that, Sammy.”

  “Like what, René?”

  “Like you’ve given up.”

  He tied the armband on me.

  “Give up? Then why the hell am I wearing this?”

  We walked through the hallway. Five more weeks, I thought. Five more weeks and I would be gone. I would be a ghost. I wouldn’t matter a damn to these halls. They weren’t built for me, not for Sammy Santos. That’s what I was thinking when Colonel Wright walks up to René and me—right there, right in the hallway. Right there, in the crowded hallway. “What’s this?” he says. And he reached for René’s armband. Like he was gonna rip it right off.

  René didn’t say anything.

  “I asked you a question, son.”

  René pulled away from Colonel Wright’s grasp.

  But the Colonel was mad. He was really mad. And he moved right up to René, right in his face. And he looked right at René and he says, “You’re a coward, son. That’s what you are.” And he said it so loud that everyone around stopped, just stopped. And the hallway got real quiet. And then he pointed at René and he looked at all the kids and he said, “This here is what a coward looks like.” And I thought René was going to explode, but my pigeon came awake right then, and I couldn’t figure out why I’d hated that pigeon because I understood then that he always came around exactly at the right time, and so, me and my pigeon, we knew we had to get to work and do something. I kept thinking that if René lost it, he would take a swing. And he’d been arrested before, and if he took a swing, maybe his life would be over, and I couldn’t let that happen. When the Colonel grabbed René’s arm and tried to rip his armband clean off his arm, that’s when I pushed him. That’s when I pushed the Colonel away.

  And the Colonel just stared at me. And I could see what he was holding in his eyes. Fucking good-for-nothing little sonofabitch, ungrateful cockroach who doesn’t know crap, who’ll never understand anything about the business of living. God, I could see everything he was holding there. And it was a kind of freedom to see it. To see all his hate written there, in his eyes, on his face. It was so clear.

  “Santos,” he said. “I’ll meet you and your friend here in the principal’s office.”

  “No sir,” I said. “I won’t be at that particular meeting.”

  “What? Santos? You plan on graduating?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m planning.” That’s what I said. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, a thousand things—and then suddenly I didn’t want to say anything at all. I was tired. Damnit to hell, I was tired. It had been such a long year. And I wondered when I would get to rest. God, I was so tired. And I hadn’t even turned eighteen yet. I wanted to look that sonofabitch right in the face and spit at him—spit—just spit an
d keep on spitting.

  He grabbed my arm. I hated the warmth of his hand. “Pifas is dead,” I said. And he let go of me. He knew who I was talking about. He’d read it in the newspaper, he’d seen a picture of Pifas’ mother kissing his coffin, clutching a flag—clutching a flag instead of clutching a son. God. “Epifánio Jose Espinosa was killed in action. In Viet Nam. Epifánio. They brought him home. Not all of him, Colonel. They couldn’t find his hands. Blown clean off. His hands, Colonel, they stayed in Nam. His hands stayed there, Colonel, but the rest of him, the rest of him, they buried yesterday. Say his name for me, Colonel. Say it. Goddamnit! Say his name for me.” He grabbed my arm again and started dragging me toward the office. But I wasn’t going to let him. I pulled away from him. I was stronger. He knew I was stronger. “Epifánio,” I said. “His name meant epiphany. It’s what happens at the end of story or a poem when something is revealed. It means we’ve learned something.”

  He let go of my arm. He stood there looking at me.

  “It means we’ve learned something, Colonel.”

  He stood there. Lost. He looked defeated, the Colonel. That’s how he looked. But he was standing, and he was alive. And, Pifas, hell, he was dead.

  René and I, we just kept walking down the hall.

  I hadn’t remembered my dream about Pifas, about all the people who were passing by in front of my house—waving at me. The living and the dead. Waving at me. I hadn’t remembered. But that day, after the incident with Colonel Wright, I remembered. I’d dreamed Pifas’ hands.

  That night, before I went to sleep, René called. He just wanted to talk. I lay in bed talking to him. I told him about the dream I had. He said, “Sammy, soon you’ll have better dreams.” René, he’d changed. He was different now. He could have gone either way I think. He was going to live. I knew that now.

  When I fell asleep, I had another dream. Juliana was walking down the street—and she had someone with her. It was Pifas. And she left him standing there in front of me. He walked up to me on the front porch. And I could see he didn’t have any hands. And he was sad. And I was sad, watching him. And I couldn’t do anything about his sadness. His sadness or mine. Couldn’t do anything about it. And then as he raised his arms—his hands, his big beautiful hands, they were there. God, they were there. And he was waving. “Hey, Sammy! Hey, Sammy!” He wasn’t waving good-bye. He was saying hello. Pifas, he’d come home.