I drive into San Antonio coasting through downtown till I hit Culebra, where I turn off to get to Grams’s house. I’ve missed knowing where I’m at. L.A. is this crazy-assed maze of highways and zones, but I get San Antonio. I know its divisions, its fractured body and spirit. It’s split into five areas, and growing up here, you know which one is which, and you figure out quick which one you belong to.
As I creep down Culebra, I pass the westside landmarks I’ve memorized without memorizing. There’s Las Palmas shopping center, the only real spot for shopping on the westside of town. Grams buys all her groceries at the HEB, and when I was a kid and it was time to go back to school, she took me to get my dorky-assed clothes at Joske’s department store. They let you put shit on layaway, at least until they went out of business. Las Palmas had it all: a Niesner’s pharmacy, where you could buy anything from a cockatoo to a cheap, awful cup of coffee at its lunch counter; a Western Auto where Mexicans went to get parts to keep their clunkers moving; there were dime stores and cloth stores and piddly, bizarre boutiques. You could get anything from a turtle to a nice dress for your daughter’s quinceañera at Las Palmas. The place has changed in the last few years, but it still feels Mexican even though lots of the stores have gone out of business or moved to the north side to the big white mall. Las Palmas isn’t fancy with Muzak pumped in from invisible speakers. It’s still got masonry work that makes it look like some Spanish colonial outpost. The stores are all arranged in a long line with HEB providing one of the ends of the bracket-shaped strip.
All along the wide passageways of white concrete stand tall palm trees transplanted from Florida or California. Each store has its own canopy, brightly striped or colored in a sharp, solid green, blue, red, or yellow. In the middle of the market there used to be this small carnival where Grams would let me ride the carousel and the small Ferris wheel when I was Antony’s age. If I was good, Grams would buy me a raspa at the stand where an old guy would scoop the ice into a cone-shaped paper cup and pour whatever flavor syrup you wanted. I dug coconut. Still do. Out in the parking lot, on the outskirts of the market, stands the old public library. It’s round, with high ceilings, and Grams would take me there on Saturdays and let me get two books. Across the street taking up about ten blocks of space lies San Fernando Cemetery, where Grams told me that only Catholics could be buried. There are always hundreds of flower displays lying on the graves. There’s tons of flower shops specializing in arrangements for the dead. Loud, funky bouquets set in bundles in green-and-red foil-covered pots are ready for the next religious holiday.
Even in the earliest part of the morning, the westside is alive, cars and trucks speeding down General McMullen, the main road, toward Commerce Street, which leads directly to downtown. The westside is split by Commerce and McMullen, and again, farther down on Commerce, by Zarzamora. There are a dozen Catholic churches, the most beautiful on Zarzamora, Church of the Little Flowers. It’s got this high belltower that you can see from miles away.
St. Mary’s University sits on the northern edge of the westside; Grams says that this is where I should go to college. When she wants to get on me, she says, “You better watch out or you’ll never end up at St. Mary’s, unless you plan on mowing the lawn.” At its eastern edge lie the railroad tracks and the matanza near Alizondo Courts where that skinny-assed Renaldo lives. There’s a produce market close to the tracks where Grams always goes so that she can buy twenty-pound sacks of oranges and grapefruit. Grams’s brothers all worked at the fruit market during the Depression, making a dollar a day stacking boxes, cleaning, and unloading trucks. I pass the Mariposa Projects. Grams’s house is only two blocks from the courts. When I was a kid, she didn’t let me go anywhere past her street in that direction except for Calderon’s store. As I creep closer, I decide to make a stop at the Cinderella Bakery that stands between the Mariposa and Durango Projects. It’s worth driving there to get the best pan dulce in the whole city. I figure I’ll bring some as part of my homecoming. I always get a couple of maranitos for Grams. She digs the pig-shaped molasses sweet bread, but they’re out of them, so I buy her a yam-filled regalito.
As I edge home, I cruise past the molinos and the rent-to-own joints that charge four or five times the price of whatever piece-of-shit furniture or appliance they happen to be “renting.” There are bingo parlors where old people sit for hours peering down at their cards trying like hell to win the five-hundred-dollar prize. That’s enough dough to hold off disaster in lots of westside houses for at least another month. There are too many fast-food places to count, selling cheap, fatty hamburgers, tacos, pizzas, and fried chicken. One thing, though: it doesn’t take a fortune to get fed on this side of town.
I drive past Dr. Flores’s office, around since I can remember. Westside doctors don’t take insurance. Cash Only. For thirteen bucks you can get a shot of penicillin. There’s always dozens of people waiting outside. Sick, feverish kids crying and coughing, waiting for their turn to get a shot and a prescription for cough medicine that their parents can’t afford. Cheap-clothing stores are always busy around this neighborhood, places where you can buy a blouse for five bucks and a bad-fitting polyester dress for eight. What I like about this place, and what I’m realizing as I make my way home to Grams, is that even though it changes, it doesn’t feel different. It’s still there, still where I can get to it.
* * *
The house is dark except for a glimmer of light coming from the kitchen window. Grams is up getting ready for work.
“I thought that was you,” she says when I come walking through the kitchen door. She acts like it isn’t any big deal, no crying or big hugs, no hurt feelings. None that she lets on, anyway. She’s behaving like it’s school I’m coming home from, not California. It makes me grateful to her because after the shit I’ve seen and felt these past weeks, I need her to be herself, her strong, nonemotional self. No-nonsense Grams. “You hungry?” she says, ignoring the way I look. I hold out the bag of sweet bread. She takes it and I sit down. She turns back to the stove and takes the boiling water. She grabs the handle with her bare hands. I don’t know how she does it without getting burned. Me, I’m a wimp when it comes to heat. She pours some of the water into a cup and drops a couple of heaping teaspoons of instant coffee and stirs slowly. No sugar, no milk. She drinks it still boiling hot, not bothering even to blow on it.
“I brought you a regalito,” I say, pointing at the bag.
She keeps looking at me, though, until I feel like I gotta say something. “Aren’t you mad at me?” She reaches out and touches my face for a second.
“I got no reason to be mad at a boy just because he wants to see his momma.”
“I’m back if you’ll let me,” I say.
She looks me in the eye and says, “Boy, this your home. You oughta know that.”
“You were right,” I say because I can’t think of anything else. “Things didn’t work out too well there.”
“Sometimes people can’t help themselves,” she says. “Your poor momma, she’s one of them. You pray for her.” She takes another drink of her coffee.
I want to apologize because I feel bad looking across the table at her. She looks smaller than when I last saw her, older, not the same. I hate to think about what my running has done to her, but I haven’t had much time to do that. People always think that when they leave somewhere that things will be the same when they get back, but when they do, they start to notice that things have changed. Maybe not a lot, but enough so that the surfaces of things look different. That’s how my grams’s face looks. More worn, thinner. I never recognized it before, but my grams is not just older, she’s old. “You been okay?” I ask.
“Been fine. You don’t need to worry about me.” She’s not trying to guilt me. Grams gets up to go get dressed for work and just before she turns to go to the bedroom, she comes around and gives me a hug. “Nice to have you home, boy.” That’s it. She goes off and twenty minutes later I’m alone because Grams has gone off to clean houses. My room is the same as the night I left, and I put my shit away.
After, I go out and sit in the living room. There’s nothing to do. I think about calling up Juan or Nacho, even devil-boy Enrique, but they’re all in school. I’m a dropout and anyway, I don’t feel like answering a lot of stupid questions about how everything turned out. Instead, I watch the tube. The Price Is Right with old-assed Bob Barker still giving free shit away. That never changes.
* * *
Grams has been getting up two or three times a night. I’m a very light sleeper and I can hear her moaning quietly and then getting up and taking that Doan’s back pills bottle off the counter, opening it, and drinking a couple down. It happens at two and four and just before six, when she usually gets up. When I ask her about it, she gives me a quick answer that means I should mind my own business. “My back hurts, boy. Your back’ll hurt too when you get as old as me, and with the type of burro work you’re going to have to do, you’ll be taking them Doan’s pills, too.”
“Maybe you should take it easier. I’m going to be working now and you don’t have to do as many houses. You should go to the doctor.”
“Doctor?” she says like I just suggested that she should go to a witch. “What’s he going to do? Send me to the hospital? That’s what kills old folks, going to the hospital. Now go worry about yourself. I don’t need it. I got work to do.” And with that, she pulls herself out of her chair and makes for the bedroom. She does it painfully, with too much effort, and it makes me feel worried, but with Grams, there’s not too much I can do.
* * *
I call this kid from Sunnydale whose uncle owns a construction joint. He told me he could hook me up with a job. I gotta get work and summer’s always good for construction. The guy who owns the company is used to hiring illegals and desperate-types, so hiring me isn’t really much of a stretch. He pays me six dollars an hour, which is about a buck more than he pays the illegals. The place is called P.J. Enterprises, but from what I can see, the only enterprising going on is the employees finding all sorts of new ways of not doing shit.
P.J. tells me how he’s trusting me to work on his top project. His “crack team” is supposed to be putting up suspended ceilings in an elementary school that needs to open by the end of summer.
They’re on a break when I show up. Four guys sitting on stacks of precut tiles like stunned iguanas sunning on desert rocks. I introduce myself and get a few waves and a come’ere gesture from Brace, the foreman. “You’re the new gopher, um?” he says as he sits leaning against a stack of throwaways. “You’ll do fine here if you remember one thing. You’s just shit labor.” The others nod lazily. That seems to be the orientation.
Our crew is one of the last ones in because the building has to be up already before we put up the ceiling. We also put in insulation, either laying rolls of itchy fiberglass or spraying glop above the ceilings. Brace told me not to ask what’s in the shit. “I don’t know, so don’t come to me if you start shitting blood.”
We hang the wire from the underside of the roof. After that’s done, we put up the fiberglass panels. The work is hot and itchy because the air-conditioning doesn’t work yet. It’s a bitch. Outside the temperature is in the hundreds. The only way to keep from going crazy from the thousands of fiberglass slivers inside of your collar and underwear band is to move around as little as possible and that means not working. But that isn’t a problem for Brace or his crack team. We take a ton of breaks, long ones, too. Brace says, “Fuck P.J., he’s kicking back at the office.”
The guys on the team look sketchy, pretty much solid losers. There’s Phil, a Willie Nelson–looking druggie with wrinkled, leathery skin and a stringy mustache and beard. Brace says Phil was once so fucked-up he took a walk out the back of a van while it hauled ass down the highway at sixty miles an hour. Bob is an unhappy-looking white kid a couple of years older than me, with blond hair and a really thin, scraggly goatee that reminds me of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, only he doesn’t look as bright as either Shaggy or Scooby. He’s married, lives in a mobile home park, and doesn’t talk much. Rollie, a fat, hairy guy, seems nice enough, but he stinks like he hasn’t stepped in a shower since he was in high school.
I get home that day tired and itchier than I’ve ever been before, but at least the crew is going to be okay. We didn’t do much, but even that got me tired. I’m not cut out for the heat. People always give me a hard time about that. “You’re a Mexican from South Texas and you can’t take the heat,” they’ll say. Even Grams says it, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just no good in the sun.
I go straight to the shower and stand under a cold blast of water until the itching stops. After, I grab a Coke and walk out to the porch. Ruthie and Tina are playing outside. I haven’t seen them since I’ve been back and it makes me glad that they’re out there. “Hi,” I say. They run up to the fence. Ruthie looks excited, but Tina just smiles and waves a little. I get up and walk over to them. “Where you been?” Ruthie wants to know. She’s always the gutsy one. “You haven’t been around.”
“I know,” I say. “I went on a trip. Went to see my mom.”
“Where’s your mommy live?” asks Tina.
“In California,” I say, expecting that they don’t know where it is.
“Did you go to Disneyland?” asks Tina.
“Yeah, Mickey Mouse,” adds Ruthie.
“Nah, I’m too old for that.”
“Your mommy didn’t take you there?” asks Tina.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to go,” I say, remembering my stupid plan to go there with Antony and Moms.
“That’s dumb,” says Ruthie. “Everyone wants to see Mickey Mouse. Bet your mommy doesn’t have money. That’s why we don’t get to go!”
“Shhhh!” says Tina. “Don’t talk so loud. He’s gonna hear you.”
She’s talking about their alky father. “Yeah, well, I probably wouldn’t have gone even if my mommy would’ve had the money,” I say. “You two been good?”
Tina nods and Ruthie shakes her head. “It’s you that ain’t good,” says Ruthie. “You ran away from home. I heard your gramma telling my momma.”
“Well, he’s back now, Ruthie, so shut up.” Tina turns back toward me. “Don’t listen to Ruthie. She talks too much. We’re glad you’re back from your trip.” Ruthie smiles at me, “Yeah, you got any money for ice cream?” I dig out a couple of dollar bills and put them in her small hand, which she’s shoved through the chain-link fence. She takes both dollars and runs around to the other side of the house. “She’s going to look for the ice cream man,” Tina explains. “I better go over there, too, or she’ll forget to buy me some. Bye.” And she gives a little wave as she starts off after her sister.
I go back to the house and order Grams and me a pizza because I know she’ll be tired when she gets home. Grams comes in a couple of minutes after it gets there, but she doesn’t want any. “I’m too tired to eat,” she says, and she goes straight to her bedroom and lies down. It worries me some, so after a while I go to her room with a plate and a glass of Pepsi, her favorite. “Brought you something to eat,” I say, coming in. She’s laying on her side and she’s got a heating pad on her back. “How can you have that thing on when it’s so hot, Grams?” I try and put the plate down next to the bed. “No, you,” she says. She sounds like she’s in pain. “I’m not hungry. You bring me some of my Doan’s pills. Maybe I’ll feel better in a while.” I go to the bathroom and get a couple of the tablets and come back in. She drinks them, the whole time keeping her eyes closed like it might hurt her more to open them. “Grams, you oughta go to the doctor,” I say because I can’t think of anything else.
“You go on now,” she says. “I got better things to do with my money. I need some rest, that’s all. What a life I got working like a burro for them white folks. Work, that’s all it is,” she says, half-complaining to make herself sound tough, but all the while I can hear the pain in her voice.
“How long has your back been hurting?” I ask even though I know she won’t like it.
“You, Roberto, you quit bothering me now. You go worry about your belly and stop worrying about my back.”
* * *
Bob talks a lot, but only about how much he hates being married and how his kid gets on his nerves, and how his favorite song is “Freebird” and how he’s going to leave that “bitch” one of these days. His favorite insult is to tell anyone complaining that “you bitch more’n my old lady.” But near the end of the week, he loosens up when P.J. hires these two girls to help us out for the rest of the month. They’re young and not too bad looking. Bob’s falling in love with the one named Nancy. I think she’s the other girl’s lover, but they’re trying not to let on, so Nancy flirts with him. Bob’s coming to work a few minutes early so he can set up his scaffold. He’ll load it with enough ceiling panels to last for two or three hours. Then he puts his boom box on the scaffold. He plays his Lynrd Skynrd’s greatest-hits tape and as soon as the girls come in, he asks Nancy to be his scaffold partner. He likes to explain the meaning of each of the lyrics and their personal significance for him. “See, that’s how I see myself,” we hear him say when “Freebird” plays. “I’m just waiting to leave, to head on down the road. It’s in me, you know. I got a taste for adventure. That sounds stupid, right?”
“No,” Nancy says. “It sounds like you should.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to.”
Rollie says, “I got your free bird,” and he gives him the finger. We all laugh except for Bob and Nancy.
Bob’s bringing double sandwiches to work, sometimes an extra banana, and he shares the food with Nancy. Her friend—we call her the “manster” because she looks masculine around the eyes and jaw—doesn’t like it. She’s taken to asking Bob about his wife and kid whenever she can work it into the conversation.
“But how can you leave if you’ve got a wife and kid? That sounds shitty to me.” Bob stops talking whenever the manster comes around. But the love affair isn’t meant to be. Brace tells the girls that P.J. isn’t going to keep them around after all. They have only a couple of more days on the job. On their last day, Bob’s fidgety and short-tempered. Nancy acts nervous, too. At lunchtime she goes to her car and comes back with a black T-shirt that she gives to Bob. It has “Freebird” spelled out in silver letters across the chest. Bob blinks hard and rolls it up, sticking it in his back pocket. For a minute, he looks ready to cry, but instead he just says thank-you. The girls want to stay on, but P.J. says he can’t afford it. “They’s just shit labor,” Brace says to Bob in explaining why the answer has come back negative.
The guys ride Bob hard the next day, asking him where his “Freebird” T-shirt is, and why he hasn’t brought his boom box to work that day, and could one of them be his new scaffold partner, and does he have an extra sandwich, and would he please stack up their ceiling panels. I feel sorry for the guy, though, but all I can say is, “Man, don’t listen to them, that shirt’s pretty cool.” Finally, at the end of the first two weeks, I’m psyched because it’s payday. I got plans for the dough. Big plans. But the day is torture. The way it works is that P.J. calls in all his employees from the different work sites and he tells them to take a seat around his desk. His office is a mobile home he’s put up on an empty lot he owns on the south side. There’s all sorts of supplies stacked outside with a six-foot fence surrounding the place. Inside’s a tired-looking dog he calls King, who doesn’t seem interested in barking unless he’s hungry. I guess it doesn’t matter because I don’t know why anyone would want to steal a stack of precut ceiling tiles. You can’t use them unless you have the wiring up, and P.J. keeps that locked up at his house.
P.J. likes to sit on his hot young secretary’s desk while she sits behind him talking to her boyfriend on the phone. She doesn’t do a damn thing that I can see except talk and drink Diet Cokes. Brace and the guys say that P.J.’s banging her, but nobody really believes it. I think that P.J. likes her around because he imagines that everyone thinks he’s banging her, and that’s something.
For over an hour after we get there, he just sits and stares at us as other guys come drifting in from the sites. He nods, but he doesn’t talk. His aim is to make everyone feel uncomfortable, to see who looks guilty. When everyone’s there, and not a minute before, he begins to ask questions. He does this shit till eight, but no one has the nerve to complain, much less ask for his check.
“How’s the Piedmont project going?” he asks one of the guys from the northeast side. The guy nods his head and says it’s going on schedule. P.J. goes down the row, asking everyone how their project is progressing. Of course, no one admits that things are dangerously behind, or that the floor people or painters are threatening to report the crew because we aren’t getting the job done. It’s more of a ceremony than a fact-finding meeting. I figure that it’s P.J.’s way of buying time before he has to part with the green. After everyone has shown their determination to “keep up the good work,” P.J. signals his hot secretary to pull the checks out from the check drawer. As he sits on his desk, his secretary hands him one envelope at a time, and P.J. grasps it, gives it a little snap, reads out the name, and gives the lucky winner a personalized message as he goes up to get the check.
“Rollie, buy some soap. You smell like a yak fucking a rotten cantaloupe.”
Next check.
“Brace, don’t drink it all. I don’t give a good goddamn about your Vietnam nightmares. You better get that job site humming come Monday or you’ll have a whole lot more to worry about than agent orange.”
Next check.
“Bob, get your pretty wife something before she gets wise and leaves you. Good thing them carpetmunchers are gone. Wife mighta gone over to the other side.”
Next check.
“Robert, might wanta spend more than a few of them dollars on a dentist. Those teeth are spooking my dog. You look like a goddamn wolfboy.”
Next check.
“Phil, please boy.” He takes a deep breath, like he’s really concerned. “Stay off of the pot. I don’t want you taking a midnight stroll off a moving truck.” And so on. Each check-wanter grins and nods their thanks so they can get their dough. After, our crew drives to the Sigmor up the road and buys a case of beer. The topic stays on what a bastard P.J. is and how one of these days, “by God, I’m going to pop him in the mouth, take my check, and walk out that fucking door for the last time.”
I don’t stay long. I’m starting a new routine, a payday routine. Every other Friday I’m going to bring home some groceries, order a pizza, and give Grams most of my cash. I bring home stuff I know she likes: a big jar of Folgers, Pepsi, chocolate ice cream, and some nice steak for carne asada. I’ve decided that one way or another, I’m going to make Grams go to the doctor and that one way or another, I’m going to make her quit her houses, or at least most of them.
Grams is happy with the groceries, but she won’t take all my cash. “You save some of that, boy. You planning on being a burro like me?” she asks, being more serious than usual about being a burro. She sighs. “You young now, but not always. Not always,” she says, emphasizing the word “always” in a way that scares me a little. “I just want you to slow down,” I say, “because you’ve been feeling tired lately.”
“I slow down now, I’ll never be able to speed up, boy. Now you go get yourself a shower and stop nagging me,” she says in a way that I know the conversation is over.
After I get out of the shower, Grams tells me she’s going to call it a night. I’m bored so I call up Enrique and Juan. Enrique tells me he’s got a “cutie” he wants me to meet. “She’s got a friend, man, and you can tell us about California. It’s good to have you back. You had us worried.” I figure a night out won’t hurt, so I drive my Mustang to his house on the northeast side. For once, I feel kind of proud to be there. Not even Enrique, with his fancy house and his rich parents, has a car. He checks it out and tells me how cool it is, but he can’t help himself and he tells me how his pops, my uncle, has promised him a new truck if he pulls his grades out of the shit-house. “I’m gonna do it, too,” he says as he messes with my stereo so that it sounds right to him. Juan gets there a little later. He’s cooler than Enrique and after a hug he makes out like my car is a Ferrari. “This is awesome,” he says. The three of us take off together for a girl’s house. Enrique swears that she’s in love with him and that she’s going to hook us up. Me and Juan give each other a look because we’ve heard this shit before.
Enrique always, always, blows it with girls. They usually dig him at first, but he inevitably does something to chase them off after only a couple of weeks. We get to the girl’s house. Her name is Karen, and Enrique’s been talking her up the whole ride, and to our amazement, she’s all he claimed. She’s got that fresh look, young and pretty with straight, long chestnut hair. Enrique’s had one date with her. He took her to a dollar movie and tonight he’s decided to surprise her with a gift he’s picked up at some five-and-dime: a cheap, visibly fake gold bracelet that’s already turning green.
“I’m gonna give Karen this present,” he told us just before we got out of the car. When he held up the bracelet, thin and so cheap looking that I turned red from embarrassment when I saw it, I was straight up with him. “You’re gonna give that shit to that girl?” He gave me an angry look. “What do you mean ‘shit’?” He snatched the chain from my hand. “This bracelet cost almost twelve bucks.” He gave it a closer look, turning it over in his hand as we walked up to the door. “Do you think it looks fake?” He seemed a little concerned. “I don’t want her to know it’s fake. Won’t get any snatch that way.” Juan laughed. “That thing looks like it’ll give her a fucking infection.”
Karen introduces me to her cousin Beatrice. She’s cute but dumb. Usually I wouldn’t mind this combination. It’s worked for me before, but tonight I’m more in the mood to talk, and this girl can’t carry a conversation at all. At least one that I’d give a damn about. She just wants to talk shit about how hot Karen thinks she is. She’s boring the hell out of me and about the only thing I can do is stare at her belly button, which is pierced. I have to admit, it does look hella good. But it’s not enough to keep me interested. Juan is talking to their friend from school, this Mexican girl who’s sitting on the sofa. She catches my eye right away, not only because I think she’s beautiful, but because she has this sad smile that’s got something deep to it. It’s kind. She’s gotta be that if she’s listening to Juan tell one of his dorky-assed stories. After a few minutes of listening to Beatrice go on about herself, I give Juan a shout so that we can combine our group. Enrique is off somewhere with Karen. I can tell that the girl with Juan is happy to get some other people into the action.
“This is Amelia,” Juan says. He likes her, but I can’t help it, I gotta horn in on her. Her eyes are big and dark brown. They tell me that she’s smart. Her smile makes me feel like I need to deserve it. We all start to talk about whatever, and I work it so that I’m talking to her. I tell her about just getting back from California and she tells me that she’s never been there, but that she’s always wanted to go. When she leaves for the bathroom, I notice that she’s got a little limp. Beatrice leans over and says in my ear, “One of her legs is almost an inch shorter than the other and she has to wear a special shoe. It gives her terrible backaches.” She says it pretending to be sad for her, but really she’s being a bitch because she can tell that I’m into Amelia. Juan can tell too, so when we’re in the kitchen getting a beer, he tells me that if I want, we can switch girls. I’m all for it.
I find out that she lives with her mom and stepdad, an ex-cop who now works security for the nearby high school. She doesn’t say it directly, but I can tell she doesn’t care for the guy too much. “You guys want to go downtown?” Enrique says, coming out of the bedroom with Karen. She’s wearing the fake bracelet and Enrique is obviously happy because he tricked her. We head off for the Tower of Americas that overlooks San Antonio. We park near the Alamo so that we can take the riverwalk to the tower. I look over at Amelia worrying that she might not be able to make it. “Are you going to be alright if we walk?” I ask. She’s embarrassed but she doesn’t show it too much. “I’ll be fine. Walking doesn’t bother me.” We take off along the banks of the river. It’s dark and not too many people are out tonight because it’s getting late. Before I know it, and without thinking about it, I take her hand. It’s warm and soft, small in mine, and it feels so good that I get a crazy idea to kneel down right there and then and ask her if she’ll marry me. I feel like I’m drunk with her and I’m so got that I can’t even look at her. Instead, I concentrate on her hand and the feeling of her round, warm fingers in between mine. I feel so happy all of a sudden that I start joking with everybody, Enrique, Juan, Karen, even that bitch Beatrice.
Up at the tower, I let the whole thing get to me. When I feel happy, I get a little stupid, so as soon as we’ve left everyone on the other side of the observation deck, I ask her if she’ll marry me. I straight out propose, “Please marry me. I’m serious. I want to support you, come home to you, the whole thing. The house, the kids, a goddamned dog.” I do it like a joke, like I’m only kidding, but I’m only half-kidding. Amelia looks down at me, smiling that sad-like smile and she says, “Don’t play. Some girls would take you seriously, a beautiful proposal like that.”
“Oh, you should take me seriously,” I say. “I’m always straight up when I propose.”
“I see,” she says, “you do this a lot?”
“Every time I come up with a pretty girl to the tower it happens. I can’t help it.”
“What’s so special about the tower,” she says, playing along now, but still holding my hand so that it makes me feel almost fucking giddy.
“It’s where my secret lair is located. I’m a vampire. You’ll never see me during the day, only at night.”
“Do vampires get married?”
“Not usually. They collect a bunch of women. You know, keep a harem. But every hundred years or so, they find one that they really fall in love with because they remind them of the one really special wife, the wife they had before they became a vampire, and that woman, they make their wife. Their vampire wife.”
“Doesn’t sound so great for the woman.”
“It’s actually a good deal. You get to fly, turn into a bat, smoke without giving a shit about your health. You can read minds.”
“Flying, that would be nice, I guess.” She’s looking through the suicide bars on the observation deck. “From up here you can almost imagine what it would be like to fly.”
I shut up for a second and look through the bars, the both of us still holding hands. It’s beautiful from up there, the city with its lights and tiny, crawling cars, with no disturbing sounds getting this high up. “Yeah, flying is a perk. If you sign up with me, we can do it tonight.”
“How do I know that you’re on the up and up, a real vampire? Give me a demonstration.”
“No problem,” I say. “I’ll just climb up to the top of these bars and take a swan dive off the top, a perfect arching fall, and just when you think you’ve made a terrible mistake, daring a lunatic to take a flying leap, I’ll surprise the hell out of you and pull up just before I splatter on the concrete. I’ll come soaring up about ten feet in front of you, right to that spot in front of these bars.” I point directly to the space in front of her. “Then I’ll do a graceful figure eight, a couple of spiraling loops, and for the grand finale, I’ll come down like a freight train to this very spot with a goddamn pigeon in my mouth. Strictly a gift for my beloved.” She’s laughing.
“That would convince me,” she says.
“Or,” I say, “I could just kiss you.”
“You could do that,” she says. “You could do that.” And I lean my face into hers, softly kissing her and knowing at that moment, that I am got good.
* * *
I work on Saturday this week and next because we’re trying to finish the job by the deadline. It’s a drag, but Rollie brings yesca and we all light up during lunch. It’s like a communal meal. We hop in Brace’s beat-up Chrysler, drive to the nearest Stop & Rob, and buy the vacuum-sealed sandwiches they keep in the refrigerator, along with two or three candy bars, a sixty-four-ounce drink, and a big grab bag of chips. No beer. Beer might be spotted by some snooping contractor who’ll be sure to let P.J. know that his workers are getting drunk on the job. The weed is a different story. It can be smoked in the car as we drive around the block. “It’s for medicinal purposes,” Brace says, inhaling, “to keep you from thinking about the heat and the itch in your pants.”
It’s cool because we don’t do a damned thing after that except talk. Amazing what people will tell you about themselves when they’re high. Rollie’s daughter is selling LSD at her high school, but Rollie doesn’t care because she doesn’t have to ask him for money. “One time, I laid one of her friends at a party her mama let her throw. Whoowee, that was the sweetest-tasting pussy I ever ate!” He laughs, remembering the night.
“Didn’t it bother you that you were screwing your daughter’s friend?” I ask. The guys look at me like I’m crazy.
“Hell, no,” Rollie says, “my old lady don’t give it up anymore hardly. She’s fatter than a friar. I can hardly get it up myself, and here some young baby girl wants to throw some of her sweet little poontang over to me?”
“What if your wife would have caught you?”
“You ask a lot of silly-assed questions, Robert. First of all,” he says, trying to look tough in his cheap aviator sunglasses, “I run the show around my place. I know it looks funny me letting my little girl sell LSD and shit like that, but I only let it get so far, see? And my old lady, she knows not to talk shit to me.”
“Fuck off,” Bob says, “I seen your old lady. She’s bigger and stronger than you are. I saw her bringing you to get your check that one time. She was the one driving and she made you turn over that check as soon as you got in.”
Rollie’s on the spot now. “She’s the only one with a check-cashing card.”
“You ain’t never had fifteen-year-old poontang,” Brace says finally. “I know you haven’t. When I was in Nam, you could fuck any sweet little whore for five dollars. Hell yes,” he says, remembering it a little too clearly. “Some got hooked on heroin, some got hooked on killing zipperheads, but I got hooked on sweet young ’tang thang.”
“How long were you in Vietnam?” I ask him.
“Two years.”
“What was the scariest thing you ever had to do?”
“They had this thing called elephant grass, and when you jumped off a helicopter, you couldn’t ever judge how high that grass was. It looked regular from up above it, but when you jumped, sometimes it was five or six feet deep. Enough to break your fucking legs. I hated jumping off that helicopter more than anything I had to do out there, and that includes standing watch.”
“I hates jumping out of the back of moving vans,” Phil says and everyone laughs.
“Why’d you do it?”
“I was high, man. I was sitting in there, tripping, and I just decided, I want to go outside and I did, just walked out the back door while the fucker was doing sixty miles an hour. I broke every fucking bone in my body.” He isn’t laughing anymore, but that makes it seem funnier for some reason and the guys laugh even harder. “Yeah, laugh, motherfuckers. Go ahead and laugh, but I’d be willing to bet that every one of you assholes is jumped out of a moving van or into elephant grass without taking the time to figure out what the fuck it was you were jumping into. You sure as hell wouldn’t be here if you had.”
“Look before you fucking leap,” Brace says. We’re supposed to be pondering that bit of wisdom when Bob breaks in. “Hey man, don’t bullshit us, how much longer we got on the job?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” he says. “We’re just shit labor here. I wouldn’t count on all of us being around past the end of this job, though.” Brace turns toward me. “That ought to be good for you, Robert. You can get back to school. Shouldn’t you be in school, anyway?”
“School don’t pay my bills,” I say, trying to be tough like the others, but it doesn’t come out right.
“You oughta be in school,” he says again. “You’re wasting your time here with us, that’s for goddamned sure.”
“Leave him alone,” Phil says. “School never did shit for me or anybody I know except make them an asshole.”
“Nah,” Brace says, “that kid’s making a helluva bad decision if he’s trading school for shit labor. Shit labor just fucks you up. Ain’t you smarter than that?” He looks at me expecting an answer, but I don’t have one. “You look smarter than that. I hope to hell you’re smarter than that.” We spend the rest of the day waiting for five o’clock.
When I get home, Grams is so sick from her back that she can barely move. I don’t even ask this time. I call the hospital. They send the EMS. Grams can hardly speak except to moan once in a while when the technicians roll her onto a gurney. They tell me that she’s going to the Baptist hospital and they take off. I find my pops’s home phone and call, leaving him a message with his girlfriend. All I can think is, Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker. What now?