AS I’M HEADING DOWN the driveway, I stop the bike because I can see the dripline at the willow tree. It’s a problem spot, always too hot because the heat reflects off the white concrete, and I can’t get the verbena I planted for ground cover to hide the skinny black hose. Irrigation has to be invisible, so you can’t see the money you’re spending. That’s the point. You don’t need to see it, or have it be seen, like my cousins with their gold jewelry and El Dog.
In the beginning, the yards I do look really funny, tubing everywhere, circles around trees like I lassoed these scrawny trunks and plants out in the middle of a brown desert, everything flattened by the bulldozers except where the banks cut in steep so we can all fit on the side of the hill.
Two years is the longest it takes to decorate right, let the yard mature, wait for the market to go up by itself. Southern California. Just live here, eat and sleep for long enough, and if you’re in the right place, you make money. Do the house up, and you make more. Whenever she happened to see prospective buyers at the second house we sold, Brichée would tell them, “My husband and I love the house, we’ve just got it to where we want it. We’re only moving because of my job.”
That’s not true—by then I’m tired as hell of the whole place, pouring the cement for the patio, building the deck, matching the colors inside.
The back tire crunches off the curb, and I coast down the street, check out the progress of the Spanish-style three houses down and the Cape Cod next to him. They’re slow—still got cement bags piled up, none of their walkways poured yet. On the street, I have plenty of room to ride because no sidewalks are built here. The heat comes straight down my back; the city doesn’t do trees here, not like in the old neighborhoods with the huge carobs and elms. It seems even wider here, with the popsicle-stick baby trees and no cars parked in front of the houses. I can fit my truck and Brichée’s Honda in the three-car garage.
Brichée won’t be home until damn near ten, and I haven’t been riding in a long while. It’s tax time, end of March, and only 5:30. After four years of this, I know the seasons for accountants. Not that she’s ever home early, but tonight there’s no question. At the end of our cul-de-sac, I whirl around the corner and see a woman standing at her mailbox, giving me a funny look. A who-the-hell special. Nobody knows me, even though we’ve been here for a year. I leave at dawn, before anyone except the commuters starting their way to L.A., so I can do most of my banks and offices when it’s cool. Out in yards and parking lots all day, especially doing new sprinklers and irrigation, even winter can be too hot in Rio Seco. I usually get home around four, again before most everyone else, take my nap. Then I’m out in the back, trying to keep things under control, staining the deck, staking the trees. I have a half-acre lot, like everyone here, and the weeds are steady trying to kill me.
Riding out of Grayglen makes me dizzy sometimes, the curving short streets until you get to the main road leading down the hill to the city. Cars crank past me once I get to Gardenia. I can see the wooden signs by the side of the street, most of the arrows pointing over the hill the way the cars are going, the yellow lettering carved in: Grassridge, Rosewind, Rivercrest, Haven Hills, Grayglen. After the last, an arrow points at me, where I’m still waiting to pull out. The slope across the road is bare, with a slash down the middle where the rain made a rift, and pepper trees, wild tobacco bushes scattered near the place where the moisture gathers. I see illegals picking the prickly pear cactus, nopales in Spanish, I learned from the signs people put up below their houses telling the guys to stay away. The illegals ride ten-speeds down the hill every day, away from all the new tracts they’re working.
That was where I started. I bought a three-bedroom in Woodbridge for $89,000 and sold it two years later for 105. In Stonehaven, I bought into the first phase for 126. Six months later, the second phase, on that land I had been watching from my back patio, where tumbleweeds kept flying over my fence, went for 149, and the third phase started at 162. I sold and came back to the better side of the slope for Grayglen.
I hear cricket buzzes near my ears when the wind flaps my lobes; Brichée’s always teasing me about my big ears. Gardenia is steep. There isn’t any smog for a change, and I can see most of Rio Seco spread out from here. That’s the whole idea. The Westside, where my parents live, is past the long arroyo that stretches like spilled green paint in the brown fields. The last couple of days have hit 90°. I follow the strings of gray freeways, the cars close and even as beads on my mother’s rosary. Brichée drives from L.A. every night, an hour and a half minimum. Two hours tonight, looks like. All these L.A. people are keeping my prices high, running out here for a cheap house, shaving and putting on makeup in their cars. I won’t drive like that. One of the banks out in San Bernardino, about twenty miles away, offered me a contract seven years ago, and my father was cussing mad when I told him I wasn’t going to take it. “Boy, I woulda killed for a couple of banks, the easy life. They ain’t got but a scrap of lawn to cut, edge, a little trash. Shoot, I thought you had sense.”
“This isn’t just cutting grass,” I told him. “I’m doing custom landscape, remember? This is a month of driving out there with all the materials, completely different.”
“Is the money a different color? Goddamn. And you think you gon buy a house before you old as me?”
I turn at the four-way stop and cross over to Edgewild Estates, a section of custom-builts. All the streets are named after mountains: I drive down Rainier, Matterhorn, Everest. I did two of the houses here, but they didn’t want anything too spectacular. Nice border gardens, and for one on Matterhorn I did a beautiful grape arbor in the back, but the front yards were ordinary. Better than most of these I’m passing, though. They look like Singletary’s work, the usual boring petunias, marigolds, snapdragons in circle planters near the mailboxes. A couple of bougainvilleas along the cinderblock walls. I stop at my favorite, three weeping willows on a mound, and then head down the newest street, where they’ve just finished a house I saw months ago only framed. A total brick facade in front, three chimneys twisting and spiraling to a damn turret at the top. A castle. I’ve never seen anything close. I turn the bike around and come back for another look, stop to check out the patterns on the front walkway. Basket-weave bricks, beautiful with the rest. Three chimneys, and it’s 90 in March. But yeah, that’s it. I look across the street to see a woman in the bay window, staring hard at me. She glares straight at me, doing her best crime-watch frown. I laugh. You build bay windows, river-rock entries, brick facades so people will look, right? But from cars, circling around and around, or from the path where they’re walking up to the front door for dinner. Not looking like me. I know I should wear the uniform, the damn biking shorts and maybe one of those stupid little caps like Tour de France, but I like to ride in my sweats. My ass looks like two cantaloupes in those tight Lycra shorts. They aren’t made for people of African descent. Shit, I keep wearing the sweats even though it’s hot because Brichée’s always complaining about how I’m going from brownskin to blueblood like my father too quick in the tender years of my life, in the sun.
Just to bother this woman, I get out my little pad of paper and write down the name of the brick contractor from the lawn sign. I always carry the pad and a pen. Since I moved to Grayglen, the cops have stopped me twice talking about, “Somebody reported suspicious activity, loitering, checking out houses.”
I laughed real careful. “You want to see what I’m writing?” I showed them the pad, and then I read it, in case they didn’t know some of the words. “Wisteria on gazebo, Japanese maple, agapanthus a good color combo.” Yeah, right. I want to rob you, so I ride a bike past your house in the middle of the afternoon and write down how I’m going to break in. I see you looking at me, and I keep making notes about the accessibility of your windows and doors.
I turn to go back down the street—you can’t ride through, like in Grayglen. You have to go back out the way you came: a closed community. She’s still there. Hey, I watch people drive past my yard, slowing around the cul-de-sac to check out the way I painted my garage doors or how nice my roses look against the brick edging. Nobody plants big roses anymore.
Sometimes I can barely stop myself from running out the front door and yelling “Booga booga!” I say to Brichée, “That car will, depart at some high speeds. There goes the neighborhood.” She gets pissed when I talk like that. She’s chatted with our neighbors—on the right, a stockbroker, on the left, another accountant. She doesn’t run them off. But Brichée’s light, bright, and just about right—she’s Louisiana. I remember when she showed up at the city college, brothers were falling all over her and her sister Brandy.
Past Edgewild, there’s nothing but orange groves. I pass a dry bank, and the colonies of red ants are tossing up mounds of coarse sand. I watch them carrying bits of palm bark, dry straw, big loads weaving back and forth along the asphalt. Even though they name these places half-nature and half-England, Hampton or Fox or Hunter, this is as close as you get to wilderness before the dozers grade it. I have to break out the Diazanon granules for months because the ants are the worst problem. They eat flowers and stems, where in my parents’ neighborhood I only saw them eating regular ant food like sugar and soda. Up here, I find deep holes from ground squirrels; I hear coyotes at night.
I watch to see if the old beat-up house is still here in the next grove, past the canal. I was keeping an eye on it a few months ago. It’s gone. I walk around the razed area, where the foundation and chimney are left, with lots of trash from partying rich kids. No For-Sale sign yet, but I look closer at the groves and see the milkweed, straight and perfect as military boys, marching up and down the irrigation furrows.
The old farmhouses spaced in the groves were sturdy, some of them three stories. One old man I met told me that was so the farmers could look out over the tops of the trees and watch for people stealing oranges. I kick the edges of the foundation; the walls are thick, wide, and every room would have touched the outside, had a window. The walls in my house are thin. When Brichée watches “Wiseguy” or “Miami Vice”, I can hear the guns and screeching tires way upstairs in the bedroom I use for an office. I like sitting there, drawing plans, circles for each plant in the flower beds, curving paths and raised rectangular planters. I etch in the leaves sometimes.
When Brichée’s in her office, down the hall from our bedroom, I hear her 10-key sounding like the mice that tapped inside the walls when I was small. Everything’s thin in this new house. One night she was bitching about the parquet floor—she said another splinter got her, and she was tired of trying to keep the wood shined. “We should have picked tile,” she said. “I’m going to get a maid. I see their cars down the street when I’m home late in the morning.”
I told her no way, no maid. That was too close. “Don’t get black on me,” she said. “I’ll do it if I want.”
“What am I, the field nigger?” I yelled, and then I did something I remember my father doing when he wanted to prove his house was his. I punched the closest door. But when my father did it, the frame shook, and everyone was quiet. My whole damn door caved in, hollow as a wafer cookie. I bought a carved oak door after that—it matched the floor anyway, and it’ll recoup the money I spent.
I sit down with my back to the chimney and watch the crows parade and fight in the field across from the grove. My father saw a house as old as this one had been, a small Victorian with all the gingerbread trim, when I was still at city college. He took me downtown to see it. “Take you a belt sander to some of that wood inside, stain it up,” he said, standing on the porch, looking in the windows with me. The front room had a built-in china hutch. A mess, but it had potential. “Paint the trim with all them different colors. This the kind of veranda I always thought your mama would like,” he said, and it was true; she spent hours outside on the little square cement steps at our house, shelling peas or pulling the husks off corn. “Can’t fit but one more woman out there with her,” my father would say while we were working on a lawn-mower, “and you know she need at least two to talk about me like a dog.”
At the old house downtown, he stood next to me, close, and said, “You buy this, you won’t be stuck on the Westside, but you won’t be far away.” I remember looking at the street, ragged at the edges, thinking it could go either way, restored or run-down. “What?” he said. “It’s cheap. You want to own, right?”
I’d already thought of Woodbridge then, of location, but I was still saving up the down payment and starting the business. My father died a year after that, left me the down payment—two insurance policies that he’d been paying on for years, since he and my mother had first moved here from Jackson, Mississippi years before I was born. They’d lived in their house for thirty-one years, bought it for $9,000, paid it off. A $9,000 house in southern California. Everybody, my aunt, cousins, they’ve all been in the same houses for as long as I can remember. I knew exactly when their plum trees were ready to pick, when they’d call me to come stake the baby fig because the Santa Anas were blowing.
I bought in Woodbridge. I asked Mama to come live with me; I’m the only child. “You can’t walk to nothin up there—it ain’t no store, no church, nowhere. Uh-uh, baby, don’t worry. Sister and them can come here.” My aunt Sister and cousin Tarina came to stay with her, and they can all fit in the kitchen to talk at the same time, if not on the steps.
Mama comes to the newest house and laughs at the self-cleaning oven, the garbage disposal, the trash compactor. Brichée loves this house, with the most appliances we’ve had.
“What is this, self-cleaning?” Mama reads.
“Brichée spilled some barbecue sauce in there one night, and the next day she turned it onto self-clean, came back from work and it was just a little gray ashy spot,” I said, pointing to the dial.
“She still have to wipe out the ashy stuff?” Tarina asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Why she don’t just wipe the damn stuff up in the first place then?”
“Hush,” Mama said. “Brichée got all these rinds and peelings in the sink, though. Why you don’t put them on your compost heap, Trent? Ain’t no need to be grinding them up.”
“Mama, nobody keeps compost anymore. It just breeds bugs and disease.”
“Shoot, you gon have bugs anyway. Everybody got bugs. Less you got a self-cleaning yard, too,” she said, and Tarina cracked up, loving it. On Labor Day, Memorial Day, any of them, Brichée won’t come down to Mama’s yard for ribs and potato salad and peach cobbler. She says she has bills or accounts to do, but I know it’s because Tarina and my cousins always start on her. Tarina looks out the etched-glass pane in the front door, checking out the street. “All y’all got the same kind of houses in this track?”
I know better than to correct her word. “Three models, but each one’s slightly different, and that’s why the landscaping’s so important.”
“Huh,” she says, looking back at the living room. At Christmas, Tarina told everyone, “Brichée got it so clean and pale in there you don’t wanta walk. And don’t bring no babies, now.” The house was light—Brichée did this one in cream carpet, cream walls, light-oak picture frames to match the mantel and banister. Pale mauve furniture. Even the living room fireplace was light marble—alabaster, I think she called it. She does the insides, looks at those funny curtains, balloons and valances she says, and I do the outsides. f used to study the old-money houses my father cut, where the ladies gave teas in their rose arbors. Those gardens have subtle colors, silvery gray and blue salvia, huge cabbage-headed dahlias, bronze chrysanthemums. I read the Architectural Digests, the Horticultures, the high-class stuff. I looked at the hedges, the shapes, the blending colors, before I did mine.
No huge plum trees in the front, no figs or apricots, no beans and tomatoes growing up the side of a chainlink fence. No food in the front yard, because that meant you were raising something you needed. And nothing like morning glories, geraniums, common flowers.
I remembered the gardens at the very top of the hill, the estates that had been there for decades. I did mine English country, with old-fashioned borders and white wooden arches, the trellis for roses, and this time, a gazebo with purple clematis at the sides. Perennials, flowers no one else around here uses, columbine and delphinium and veronica. We always sell in the spring, when everything is blooming. Next year will be the same.
They go fast because it looks like Prince Charles or some earl lives there, as close as I can get it. We’ll arrange with the realtor to show people during the day, as usual, when we’re gone. If the lookers saw me, they’d bug.
I ride past the last grove, around the corner toward Gardenia again. The cars are still racing, I can hear ahead of me, and the sky lightens up near the edges of the hills, getting deeper above. This whole area will sell, I think, sell fast. I know Rio Seco, all of it, so I watch for my next move. You have to learn the boundaries, the newly-razed trees or cleared fields, the right hills. I tried to tell my cousin Snooter last year when he visited. He rode Brichée’s bike, the one she never touches anyway, and I showed him the layout of our tract, told him about location and resale. He started laughing when I shifted gears. “Hey, I used to ride this bike for keeps, you forgot?” I told him. “I had to learn to do it right.”
“Yeah, Trent, we used to see you motorvating home from school on that ten-speed, talking about that was your cruise, man.” He pulled next to me. “Let me ax you something, cause you don’t never stop. When we were kids, you use to just let go, you know, ride with no hands. When you do that, man, you know what you steering with? Your crotch. Remember?”
He was in my face then, and I couldn’t laugh, but my crotch is sore now, on the way up the slope, and I have to smile. My legs, too. My father used to holler at me when I said I was tired of pushing the mower. “Go on, you better pass me and improve that shit. Cause if you lag behind, I’ma turn around and run yo ass over.”
“You wouldn’t tow me, Pops?”
“Shit, I didn’t raise you to pull you.”
I pump hard up Gardenia, scaring the last of the crows out of the empty field before Grayglen. They join the flock flying down toward the river, over the city. I used to see them every night about this time, when I was standing in my father’s yard, and I’d watch them dive at each other when they got mad. Inside Grayglen, an illegal is still swiping circle patterns into the cement of an entry, and past him, I look up my street. All the garage doors are closed. Now I can hear the sprinklers coming on, the clicks of automatic timers starting them up; I pass the vibrating air conditioners, the buzzing pool filters that seem to float heavy in the air. I never put in pools—they’re a liability sometimes, not a sure asset. I think of a spa, but then I remember our house has a spa, in the master tub. We’ve never used it. The dark is coming down fast now, making all the hisses and humming seem louder, and by the time I get close to the end of our street, I see TVs flashing blue through the windows. In each of the yards and driveways I pass, no one is outside.