Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (6 page)

I closed my eyes and prayed. And then I heard a wailing, just like the sounds that came out of people when they went to a funeral. And then I wasn’t afraid anymore. It was like my heart changed—went from being scared to being sad. I peeked out from behind the bush and saw Mr. Apodaca raising his fists toward heaven. Tears were falling down his face. And then he started shouting: “No me quiero morir! No me quiero morir!” His face was all contorted. Rage did that, twisted your face and made you look like an animal. He looked completely different. Not passive. Not like a cement sidewalk you stepped on. But like a man. He was challenging God to a fist fight. I swear, if God would’ve come down, Mr. Apodaca would have knocked him to the ground. That’s when I saw him fall on his knees and howl.

Everything in the world seemed to stop. There was nothing else. Just Mr. Apodaca on his knees wailing like a coyote. I could have watched him forever. It made me sad. But, somehow, I couldn’t stop watching. Then I realized that I was seeing him. For the first time, I was seeing
him, Mr. Apodaca, a man.
A real man. Not just somebody’s husband. I’d never
noticed how small he was. Smaller than me. And skinny.

He was sick. It was easy to see.

I lived across the street from him. How could I have not known? I wanted to hold him. I’d never wanted to hold a grown man—except my father when my mother died. And I had held him. My dad. I had.

His sobs got quieter and quieter. And yet, they seemed to get louder and louder. There was nothing else in the world except the sound of his sobbing. He curled up like a baby in the womb. He cried. And cried. And I thought maybe he’d die right there. Right then, right there. Crying. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to save him but I didn’t know how. I didn’t. I didn’t know how to do anything. I was about to come out from behind the bush. I don’t know what I was planning to do. Hug him, maybe. Take him inside. Take him inside—that wasn’t such a bad idea. That’s when I saw Mrs. Apodaca come out into the yard. She didn’t march out. That’s what she usually did. She walked, slowly. I’d never seen her walk like that. She knelt down next to him. Slow. Careful. She looked at him. I’ll never forget that look on her face. Like she was seeing the face of God. She bit her trembling lip, then took a breath. Then another. And then she held him. She rocked and rocked him in her arms. Rocked and rocked him until he stopped crying and she kept saying, “Amor, no llores. No llores.” Then, as if she was as strong as one of the sentries who guarded the gates of heaven, she picked him up—and carried him into the house.

I stayed behind that bush for a while. Just didn’t want to leave. I played the scene over and over in my mind. I’d never seen a man yelling at God. I’d never seen a woman picking up a man and carrying him. Everything in the world was bigger than I’d ever thought.

Something happened in a back yard. Something small. And everything changed.

I don’t remember how long I hid there. Behind that bush. I half expected to turn to stone. I kept feeling my own skin. Just to make sure I was still flesh. Or maybe I thought I’d changed. I don’t know. I just know that I finally managed to leave the Apodaca’s garden. I jumped the fence. Went back home. But I was restless.

I called Juliana. She wasn’t there.

My own house felt strange to me. I don’t know. I wanted my Dad and Elena to come home. But I guess they decided to go do other stuff after the movie. Maybe that was a good thing. Because the Apodaca’s daughter was with them. And the Apodacas needed time to recover. They would be calm again when their daughter walked through the door. It occurred to me right then that my father knew everything about what was happening with the Apodacas. Fathers knew a lot of things. I wondered why fathers kept so many secrets from their sons. Maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be.

About an hour later I went out and sat on the front porch. I wondered why the Apodacas had never moved to another neighborhood. They never really belonged. I studied their house. The nicest, neatest house on the block. Maybe even the nicest house in the whole neighborhood. Anyone would have thought a gringo lived there—well, except for the fact that Mrs. Apodaca’s house was as pink as a flamingo.

I suddenly realized that the front lawn needed mowing. I even thought I spotted a weed. It just wasn’t right. I don’t remember walking across the street. I just know I found myself standing at the Apodaca’s front door. I was there—so I knocked. Mrs. Apodaca came to the door. Her eyes were dry. She looked at me. The same face. There was a question on her lips. But she didn’t ask it.

“Hi,” I said.

Her question was gone. She looked at me blankly. She looked tired.

“I can do the lawn,” I said.

“We can do our own lawn,” she said.

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I just needed some extra money,” I said.

“No te necesito,” she said.

I nodded. “Okay,” I said.

I started to walk away.

“How much do you charge?” She asked. “I’ll pay you a dollar. Front and back.”

I nodded. “A dollar?”

“No soy una mujer rica. I can’t afford more than that.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “A dollar’s good. I can start now. If you want.”

She nodded.

She taught me about rose bushes that afternoon. The right way to trim them. There were rules. There were rules for everything. She knew them all. She pointed at a branch on one of her bushes. “That one,” she said. “See how those leaves are turning brown? There’s always a part that’s dying. You have to know which part of a plant is dying—and which part is being born. That’s the key to trimming. You have to look. You have to see. ¿Me entiendes? Mira.”

I nodded. I listened.

And then she starts in with her religious stuff. I knew it was coming. She started talking about Eden, and how we carried the memory of paradise around with us, and that was why so many of us needed to have gardens. “We all have leaves from that original garden in our hearts.” That’s what she said, and according to her, they were there
so we wouldn’t forget. “When you work for something good, hijo,” she said, “you’re working your way back to Eden.” So that was her problem. She really believed most people wanted to be pure. She believed we all wanted to go back to Eden. And even though I knew anything was better than Hollywood, I wasn’t convinced most of us cared anything about Eden. Not that I told her what I was thinking.

Mrs. Apodaca just looked at me. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

I sort of shrugged. “I want to,” I said. I wasn’t lying.

After that Saturday afternoon, I kept up the Apodaca’s yard until Mr. Apodaca died.

He was nothing but bone in the end. We begin as water and end up as bone. Brittle bone that breaks. That turns to dust. Nothing anybody can do about it. Not a damn thing.

Mrs. Apodaca was damned stoic about the whole thing. And every time she got bossy about how I should take care of the yard, well, I kind of just listened. I took it. She was entitled to her bad days. Once, Juliana came over to her house and watched me trim the roses. Mrs. Apodaca offered her a Coke and a novena, and told her, “the Virgin Mary didn’t dress like that.” I looked at Juliana and smiled. I knew what she was thinking: The Virgin Mary never had to live in Hollywood.

Mrs. Apodaca didn’t change much during the last few months of her husband’s life. Stayed the same. Dressed the same. Her and her hats. Sometimes, she stuck her chin out at me. I liked that.

I think Mrs. Apodaca was a woman who understood life as a series of burdens. Someone had to carry them. That’s where she came in. That was her job, the one God had given her. That was her sacred duty. That’s where she found salvation. I never thought of her as being pure. But she
was. I think she was. She didn’t wear disguises for people like the rest of us. She didn’t. She didn’t soften herself. She didn’t make herself more acceptable to the people around her. She didn’t know how.

I dressed up nice for Mr. Apodaca’s funeral. I remember how she broke down when she saw me at the church. I felt a little funny holding her. I wished to God I hadn’t been such an awkward kid. I always felt like there was too much of me to stuff into my own flesh. I wanted to tell her something. We, who both liked words so much, we had so little to say. Juliana was right. Words didn’t mean as much as I thought. Still, I wanted to tell her things. A hundred things. That I knew she loved her husband. That she did her best and God knew. That the heart stopped hurting. At least enough to go on living. I knew about that. I did know. But maybe losing a husband or a wife was different than losing a mother. So maybe I didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t know anything. I wanted to tell her I really did believe that God planted leaves in our hearts so we could remember Eden, and maybe Mr. Apodaca could turn in his leaves now, and get into heaven. I wanted to say all those things to her, but I got myself all tangled up in the conversation I was having with myself—so I wound up not saying anything. Maybe I did say something. Maybe I said, “It’s okay,” as she sobbed into my shoulder. What a thing to say.

I thought about how I’d seen her carry her husband back into the house. It was like watching someone make love. I hadn’t earned the right to see that. Not by a long shot. I’d stolen something from her. From both of them. I wanted to tell her, I saw you. He was breaking and you made sure he stayed whole. I saw you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. And then, abruptly, she pulled away from me. And stopped crying. She looked up at me and shook her head. “You need a haircut,” she said.

I nodded. “I’ll get one tomorrow.”

“What’s wrong with this afternoon?”

“Okay,” I said. I was onto her. The days of fooling me were over. Sometimes, you find things out about people. And after that, you can’t hate them anymore.

I quit my
job at Speed Sweep Janitor Service. I was tired of getting up at four in the morning. I got a full-time job for the summer with the landscape crews at the university. Pifas Espinosa got a job there, too. He’d just graduated from Las Cruces High. He looked like he’d be permanently hung over for the rest of his life from all that celebrating. The first day on the job, Pifas said working there was the same thing as going to college. Pifas. He just didn’t get it.

When I got my first paycheck, I ran into Juliana at the Pic Quick. She was buying a pack of cigarettes. I was buying a Pepsi. We walked back home together. We didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, I said, “You want to go out tomorrow night?” I didn’t look at her.

“Yeah,” she said, “that would be nice.”

I thought maybe she’d say no because the last few times I’d asked her out, she’d told me she was busy. She seemed sad to me. I thought maybe it was me who made her sad. Maybe I hurt her.

I stopped walking. I thought a while. Maybe I’d just beg her to stay with me, tell her I was sorry if I’d hurt her. Beg. And then she stopped walking, too. And she looked at me. I thought she was going to kiss me. But she didn’t. I didn’t see any anger in her eyes, no remnants of her father. I didn’t see any pieces of Hollywood or Las Cruces High or any of
the other parts of the world that had hurt her. Her eyes were like a book and there were words written there:
I might be a knife. I might cut you. Sammy, tell me that you’ll bleed. For me.
And then her eyes became a desert, calm and large and I didn’t care if they swallowed me up. And I understood. Standing right there. That she loved me. That she loved me the only way she knew how. And then I kissed her. And she put her hand on my heart, and I knew she could feel those wings that were throwing themselves against my rib cage.

We walked back to Hollywood as slow as our legs could take us.

Every time we went out, she always came to my house. Because of the way her dad was. The next evening, I walked out of the house and sat on the front porch. Waited. Saturday night
I need you, ba-a-by. . .
I looked at my shirt. Maybe it wasn’t right. I never knew what to wear. Not that I had a lot of shirts. I just wanted to look fine. Hated to wait—gave me too much time to think about stupid things, things that didn’t matter. Like shirts. Seven thirty came and went. She didn’t show. Fifteen minutes later, I was still there. Waiting. Eight o’clock. No Juliana. That’s when I heard the ambulance. It passed right in front of our house and kept on moving down the street. I don’t know why, but I ran after it. I felt my heart beating in my chest like a bird flapping its wings, trying to find his way out of a cage. I ran and ran after the ambulance. When it stopped in front of Juliana’s house, I stood still and stared at the crowd. I heard myself screaming, but I wasn’t me anymore. “What’s wrong? ¿Qué pasó? ¿Dónde esta Juliana?” I started to follow the guys in the ambulance into the house, but a policeman stopped me. “Sorry, son, can’t let you go in there.”

“But Juliana—”

“Sorry, son, you’ll have to move back toward the street.”

“No. No!” I was yelling. “Juliana! She’s in there! She’s my girl—”

I felt the policeman’s firm hand on my arm. He led me to the street. He looked at me like he was real sad. Like he was real sorry. “It’ll be okay, son,” he said. He left me there, staring at the house. Surrounded by most of the citizens of Hollywood.

Everyone around me was talking, and some lady, Mrs. Moreno, was saying how Mrs. Ríos had left the house screaming and yelling, swearing to God that she was never coming back. “¡Parecía loca! Y el Señor Ríos, he told her to go ahead and leave, que se fuera mucho a la chingada—but when she came back don’t expect to find your children. ¡Me la vas a pagar, cabrona! I’m gonna get your ass! And he went back inside the house. That’s when I heard the gunshots.”