Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (5 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Apestan. I can smell them from here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Just go home and wash them.” That was Mrs. Apodaca.

My dad said I was too hard on Mrs. Apodaca. He said she was
decent and hardworking. Maybe my dad was right. The problem was that she wanted everyone to know it. That was it, that was the problem. She liked to exhibit her virtues same as she liked to exhibit the roses in her front yard. Or her green grass. I think we were all supposed to cross ourselves and genuflect in the aroma of all that virtue.

She wasn’t mean. Not really mean. Not mean like Juliana’s father. Not like that. But she wasn’t kind either. Just wasn’t her way. When she cared, she’d say things like, “Tell your dad that Elena shouldn’t wear that dress anymore. It’s almost worn out, and anyway it doesn’t fit her anymore. ¿Qué no ven? La gente va decir que no les importa. Is that what you want for people to think—that you don’t care?”

I think my father liked that she was the clothes police—and the confession police—and the yard police. She did his dirty work for him. He never had to tell me to clean the yard. He didn’t have to. I mean, Mrs. Apodaca gave me a rake as a birthday gift when I turned twelve. My father made me knock on her front door and thank her. She nodded and asked, “You know how to use it?”

I nodded. “It’s a nice rake,” I said. I remember smiling. I remember practicing my smile. “The nicest rake I’ve ever owned,” I said. I think I went overboard with my gratitude. I must have sounded insincere.
But I was insincere.
What normal boy wants a rake for his twelfth birthday?

As it turned out, the first time I took the rake in my hands was also the last. One Saturday morning, a bunch of pachucos were running after Pifas Espinosa as I raked the front yard. As he ran past my house, Pifas grabbed the rake, turned around and broke it over some guy’s back. I’ll never forget the sound of that crack or the look on that poor pinche’s face. Mrs. Apodaca never counted on her gift being used as a weapon. It saved Pifas’ ass. One day she asked me what happened to my rake.

“It got stolen,” I said.

She shook her head. “You should learn to take care of your things.” She never bought me another gift. Somehow, I was glad about that.

Once, I saw her in church and she was crying. I could tell. I watched her from the back row of the empty church. I listened to her sobs for a long time. I think I fell asleep to the sounds of her moaning. I used to fall asleep every chance I got. My job at Speed Sweep Janitor Service was getting to me. She shook me awake. “It’s a sin to sleep in church,” she told me.

“It’s a sin to cry in church, too,” I said.

Mrs. Apodaca looked at me.

“No, it isn’t. And I wasn’t crying.”

“It’s a sin to lie,” I said.

“I suppose you’ll go and tell everyone in Hollywood that I was crying in church.”

“I might,” I said.

“Go ahead,” she said. Then, I saw her do something I’d never seen: I saw her smile. God. “No one will believe you,” she said. “No one will believe Mrs. Apodaca knows how to cry.” She walked out of the church. A few minutes later, she was standing over me again like an angel about to swoop me up in her arms and toss me into the pits of hell.

“What are you doing in here, anyway? Haber ¿qué té pasa?”

“I’m praying,” I said.

“Why are you praying?”

“Do I need a reason?”

She nodded. “Did you do something you weren’t supposed to do? ¿Qué hiciste?

I shook my head. “Nada. No hice nada. I was just talking to my mom,” I said.

And then she changed. And for a little while she was someone else.
She even looked different. I mean, she looked at me and she placed her hand under my chin. It was warm, her hand. Not soft. She worked too hard for soft. “You look like her,” she whispered. “Era muy bonita tú mamá. Y muy linda.” It occurred to me then that she had loved my mother. And that she missed her. And that she took care of Elena every day after school not for the small amount of money my father gave her, but out of devotion to my mother’s memory. I almost liked her, then.

“I miss her,” I said.

Then she changed back to being Mrs. Apodaca. The one I knew. “We all belong to God,” she said. “Just remember that. Así es.” She patted my face and walked away.

We all belong to God. I didn’t want to belong to him. I wanted to belong to Juliana
and
to my mother. But it was hard to belong to someone who didn’t have a body, who didn’t talk. I wanted to run after her and argue with her. And after I finished arguing with her, I wanted to ask her why she’d been crying. Not that she would have told me. I would find out soon enough.

Maybe a week or two later, Mrs. Apodaca called me in when I went to pick up Elena at her house after school. She sent Elena out of the room. “Tengo que hablar con tú hermano.” Elena nodded and walked back to Gabriela’s room. I held my breath. I knew I was about to get a lecture. It was like bracing for a hundred-mile-an-hour Spring wind. “School is going to let out in a month,” she said. “What are you planning to do?”

“I’m thinking of quitting my job,” I said.

“Are you just going to sit around and let yourself rot like an apple on a tree someone forgot to pick?”

I didn’t like apples. “No,” I said, “I put in an application at the
University. You know, working on the grounds.”

She nodded. “Good. It’ll keep you away from Juliana Ríos.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I saw you with her,” she said. “You let her kiss you.”

I nodded.

“She doesn’t come from a good family.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

“Your mother was a saint. Está cantando con los ángeles.”

I nodded. Yes, yes, a saint singing with angels, but—

“I don’t like her.”

I shrugged.

“¿Qué no puedes hablar?”

“Yes,” I said, “I can talk.” I looked at her eyes, black as a night without stars. “I like her. And it was me who kissed her.”

“I know what I saw,” she said.

“I like her,” I said again.

“I can see that. Everyone can see that. She’s not what your mother would want for you.”

“I don’t think we should be bringing up my mother,” I said. I felt my bottom lip trembling.

“Juliana’s not the kind of girl—”

“I don’t want to talk about Juliana,” I said.

“She’ll bring you bad luck.”

“Maybe it’s me who’ll bring her bad luck.”

“You’re a good boy.”

“No, I’m not.” I wanted to tell her I liked smoking cigarettes and hated going to confession. I wanted to tell her I thought endlessly about sex and that I liked to cuss. I wanted to let out a whole litany of
cusswords. I wanted to tell her that I hated her. What kind of good boy was that? “I like her more than I like God,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard me.” I walked out of her house. I wasn’t a political candidate. She didn’t get to sit me down and voice her opinion about the issues she cared about. She didn’t get to vote on who I should like. She told my dad I was disrespectful. I told my dad I was absolutely disrespectful. “I told her I liked Juliana more than I liked God.”

“You told her that, Sammy?”

“Yes.” I looked into my father’s serious eyes. I had trouble figuring him out, sometimes. “It’s true,” I said.

He nodded. “No,” he said, “it’s not true. It just seems that way.” He took my face in his hands and he kissed me on the forehead. He was always doing things like that. “Go on over there,” he said. “Vete. You have to apologize.”

“I’m not sorry,” I said.

“Dile que te perdone.”

I didn’t give a damn if she forgave me or not. “Just tell me what to say,” I said.

“But you won’t mean it.”

“No. I won’t mean it.” Adults wanted everything. They thought the world belonged to them. I wondered sometimes why they had children. It wasn’t good enough that you said what they wanted you to say. You had to feel it, too. “If I could thank her for a rake,” I said, “I can tell her I’m sorry for disrespecting her.” I walked out of the kitchen.

I heard Elena talking to my father as I left the room. “He’s maaaahhhd,” she said.

The next day, after school, I knocked on Mrs. Apodaca’s door and
told her I was sorry. “Favor de perdonarme, Señora.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then nodded. Her forgiveness was as half-hearted as my apology. And hadn’t she been my mother’s friend? But she had no use for Juliana. I hated her for that.

A few weeks
later, I saw Mrs. Apodaca in church again. It was just me and her in that small church on the corner of Idaho and Espina. Juliana hadn’t gone to school that day. I stopped into the church, not really knowing why. I was alone. Maybe it seemed okay to be alone when you were kneeling in the pew of an empty church. I wandered in, knelt, made the sign of the cross. I tried to pray. Really, I only thought about Juliana. I wasn’t fooling anyone. Not God. Not myself. I think I was in the church wanting to ask God to make her love me. Or something like that. It took me a while before I noticed Mrs. Apodaca. She was sobbing quietly near the front of the church. Maybe I should have gone up to her, asked her what was wrong. I should have made some kind of offer. But it would have been an awkward and graceless gesture. I let her cry in peace. I felt bad. I had to admit it.

One Saturday, Reyes Espinoza and I were playing catch in the empty lot behind Mrs. Apodaca’s house. Not that I liked Reyes Espinoza. He was a complete jack off. The kind of guy who would grow up to be a complete and total pendejo. He didn’t have it in him to be any other way. I felt sorry for him. But I hated him, too. That’s why I always avoided him. But that Saturday, he’d come over to play catch. Guess he was bored. Guess I was too. And right away he made my life miserable. He was good at that. So we’re playing catch, and after about five minutes, he
says, “Hey, Sammy, heads up,” and he throws my baseball right into Mrs. Apodaca’s yard.

He laughed. “Better get it,” he said.

“You get it,” I said. I wasn’t about to go into Mrs. Apodaca’s immaculate backyard without permission.

“I’m not gonna get it,” he said. “It’s not my ball.”

I wanted to pop him one. I did. “I’ll get it later,” I said.

“Just jump over her fence and get it. C’mon, Sammy.”

“Hell no.”

“Chicken. No huevos, baby.”

“Sí, cabrón,” I said. “If your balls are so big, you get it.”

“Nah,” he said. “I jump over that fence and that pinche ruca will have me tossed en el mero bote. Not gonna do no jail just for a piss-ant baseball.”

“She won’t throw you in jail,” I said.

“Like hell she won’t. That ruquita’s mean. And she hates my ass.”

We argued for a while. I hated arguing with pendejos like Reyes Espinoza. “You threw it in there. Now you get it,” I said. “Just knock on the door and ask her.”

“Hell no. You do it.”

“Later,” I said. I walked away. But I knew if I wanted that ball, I’d have to find my own way of getting it back. Reyes Espinoza didn’t care about it. He didn’t care about anything. Not about me. Not about my baseball. I’d have to apologize, and Mrs. Apodaca would give me a lecture about respecting other people’s property and she’d give me my baseball back and that would be the end of it. I told Reyes Espinoza he was a cabrón and had no huevos and that he was a pinche to boot. He threw me a finger. I pointed my chin at him. That Aztec hieroglyphic thing
again. I went home. I listened to the radio. K-G-R-T was playing some okay music. I gave myself a lecture
relax, relax.
I’d been telling myself to relax ever since I was a kid.
Relax, it’s Saturday.
My Dad had taken Elena and Mrs. Apodaca’s daughter, Gabriela, to an afternoon movie. They liked movies. Everyone liked movies. Except me. Movies bored me. I listened to the radio for a while, tried to relax, but then I got to thinking about my baseball. I was still mad about Mrs. Apodaca not liking Juliana. None of her damned business anyway. It’s funny how we have arguments with people in our heads. We’re better arguers when the people we’re arguing with aren’t around. And in those arguments, we always win. So that’s why we liked doing stuff like that in our heads. So I lay there in my bed and argued with Mrs. Apodaca for a while. Then I thought about my baseball. I saw it sitting there like a golden egg in the middle of her back yard. I decided to go get it. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I just needed to trespass against her. Trespass. I always liked that word—ever since I’d made my first communion.

Jumping over her fence wasn’t so hard. It was maybe six feet and made of cinder block. If you took a running jump, you could pull yourself over. That’s exactly what I did. I looked around and saw my baseball. It was right under one of her rose bushes. The yard wasn’t as perfect as I’d thought. Everything was neat and orderly but the rose bushes looked like they needed trimming and the grass definitely needed mowing. I thought that was strange. I’d never known the Apodacas to let the grass grow. Not like that.

I took the ball. Looked around. It’s a funny feeling to be in a place where you know you don’t belong. I was all in knots. And I thought I was going to throw up. Relax, relax. I wasn’t stealing anything. I looked
around again. I looked at the ball in my trembling hand—then tossed it into the empty lot. It was safe now. There. The world was right again. Except that I was still standing in the middle of Mrs. Apodaca’s back yard. I made my way back to the fence. That’s when I heard the back door opening. I didn’t even bother to look. I could hear my heart. I hated that. It was never a good thing when you heard your own heart. I jumped. I could feel the scrape of the cinderblocks against my knees. I fell to the ground. I don’t know how. Shit, shit. I wasn’t thinking. But I could see the huge pomegranate bush in the corner of the yard. A place to hide. That was all I could think of. Shit. I found myself hiding behind the bush. God. God himself couldn’t have seen me. Not that I was worried about Him. It was Mrs. Apodaca I was worried about.