Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (22 page)

“We can’t do it without you, Sammy,” she said.

“Forget it, Gigi. NO LO VOY A HACER, RAMONA.” She hated it when I called her by her real name.

“Okay,” she said. “And if you ever call me Ramona again, I’m gonna slap your lips clean off your face, ¿sabes?” She smiled. “Okay then, you won’t do it. Okay.” When I said okay, it meant okay. When she said okay, it meant she was gonna come back at you when you had your guard down.

“You’re a real bendido,” René said. “The real thing.”

“Yup,” I said. I wasn’t budging. I’d been their pinche yo-yo one too many times. Not this time. If they wanted to start a revolution, they could start it without me.

René and Gigi didn’t talk to me for a week. Didn’t care. I finished detention. Every day, before school, I made sure I was wearing my belt. My hair was getting long. I cut it. I thought of Pifas, his military hair cut, the picture he’d sent to Gigi. All American. From Hollywood.

Two days later,
I came home from school. Last day of detention. I picked Elena up at Mrs. Apodaca’s. Dad was at a Knights of Columbus meeting. The Knights of Columbus. What was that? Catholic men getting together without their wives. Why did Dad go? He didn’t have a wife, not anymore, joined them after Mom died. Maybe it was us.

When we walked in the door, Elena looks up at me. “Sammy?”

“Yeah?” She had this look on her face. That look nine-and-half-year-olds get when they’re about to ask you a question you don’t want to answer.

“What’s heroin?”

“Little girls don’t need to know about heroin.” She didn’t like my answer. Nine-and-a-half-year-olds don’t like a lot of answers. “You wanna help with dinner?”

She nodded. We washed our hands. The rule. Mom was gone, but we still lived with her rules. Every time I washed my hands, I thought of Mom. The way she kissed me after I washed them. The way she looked at me. “What are you gonna make, Sammy?”

“How about meatloaf?” Meatloaf was easy. We had hamburger meat. It took a while in the oven, but it was easy. Not very Mexican, but easy.

“And french fries?”

“Okay,” I said, “meatloaf and french fries. You peel the potatoes.”

She nodded. She stood over the sink and peeled. She watched me as I crumbled Saltines into the hamburger meat. “I want to know what heroin is,” she said.

This was a father talk. I was the brother. Not the father. I always said that to myself when I knew Elena had me against the ropes. “It’s a drug,” I said. “And it’s bad.”

“What does it do? Why is it bad?”

Not that I knew what it did. “It makes you feel good, I guess. But only for a little while. And then it makes you crazy.” I made a face. “Loopy, nutso, crazy, crazy.”

She laughed. I could always make her laugh. “What’s addicted?”

“Why are you asking me all these questions, Elena?” She could peel potatoes and talk at the same time. She was good, my little sister. I kissed her. Maybe if I kissed her, she’d stop asking questions. Didn’t work. Never worked. Kisses didn’t work on girls. Not really. No.

“Mrs. Apodaca told Mrs. Garcia that she’d seen Reyes and that he was addicted to heroin, and that he looked like death.”

“Oh,” I said.

“What does death look like, Sammy?”

“Like Halloween,” I said.

“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

God, that kid could read me. “I don’t think you should worry about heroin,” I said.

“Dad will tell me,” she said. Like, who cares about you, Sammy?

“Maybe he will,” I said.

“You forgot the onions,” she said, as I kneaded the glop of hamburger meat.

But she got me started thinking about Reyes. He’d dropped out of
school. Not that I blamed him. But for heroin? It was true about him. I’d seen him around. God, he was skinny. And his breath smelled like hell. I’d given him two dollars. “Go buy a toothbrush.” That’s what I told him. I could be mean.

And that night, right when my father was eating my meatloaf and watching the evening news, Mrs. Espinoza came to the door. “Have you seen Reyes? Have you seen my Reyes?” And then she breaks down, “No se que voy hacer. Me estoy volviendo loca. No ha llegado a la casa por cinco días.” Five days without seeing her son. Crazy, crazy. I imagined La Llorona looked like that. Red eyes from crying, from not sleeping. A face that was old, not because of time, but because worry did that, aged you, made you look like you’d never been young. God, she looked awful. And she was shaking and crying. For her son—like La Llorona.

My father made her sit down, made tea for her. She cried, and she kept asking me if I’d seen her Reyes. She kept rubbing her hands on her thin cotton dress, rubbing and rubbing her hands until I thought she’d sand all the skin off her hands. I thought maybe she needed something to calm her down. I kept shaking my head, until she asked me one more time, and then I couldn’t take it anymore, seeing her like that. And I said, “René and I—we’ll find him.” Where the hell was I gonna find him? It was almost eleven o’clock. Where in the hell were we going to look? Where? My dad nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Ahorita salen a buscarlo. Va a ver, señora, ahorita se lo tráen.” Yeah, we would find him. Ahorita. We would find him. My father picked up the phone, called René, talked to him, talked to Mr. Montoya. He hung up the phone. He nodded at me. I put on my coat. I waited for René, so we could go out into the night and find Reyes. René, he might know. He knew things, got around. Maybe he might know. Before I left the house, I looked at Mrs. Espinoza. “We’ll find him for you.” I didn’t think so.

“So where the hell are we gonna look?” I looked at René. I was mad. I didn’t know what we were doing. I got mad if I didn’t know what to do.

“I know this guy,” René said. “His name’s Mark. He’s a dealer.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to know how René knew. I nodded.

We went there, an apartment near the university. René got out of the car, talked to him, talked to him for a long time. He knew this guy, I could tell, the way they talked in the light of the doorway. I waited in the car. Smoked.

When René came back to the car, he lit up a cigarette.

“You’ve been here before,” I said.

“¿Y qué? ¿Qué cabrónes te importa?”

“You do that crap?”

“Sometimes I sell that crap—if you want to know the pinche truth.” He looked at me. He could see what I was holding in my eyes. “Mr. Santito, Mr. Clean,” he said. “Librarian. Not everybody’s as holy as you. Not everybody has his head up his ass.”

I hated the way he said that, hated the way he looked at me. I didn’t say anything, nothing. “Let’s just find him,” I said. “Let’s just find Reyes.”

He started the car. “If you ever tell anyone we were here, Sammy, I swear I’ll kick the crap out of you. ¿Sabes, cabrón? ¿Entiendes Méndez?”

He sold that crap. How come I didn’t know? How come I didn’t? Because. Because I didn’t want to. I didn’t say anything. “Let’s just find Reyes,” I whispered. “Then we can just go home.”

We drove to some trailer house in Mesilla Park. René knew where he was going. He parked, got out of the car, knocked at the door to the trailer house. Some girl comes out. Straight long hair. A gringa. René
went in. A little while later, he comes out. He gets back in the car.

“Didn’t know you had so many friends.”

“Screw you. You want to find Reyes or not?”

I lit a cigarette. He drove to another apartment on Locust, cheap cinderblock apartments. Four of them in a row. René stopped the car on the street. “You wanna go in?”

“That where he is?”

René nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go in.” I got out of the car. We walked up to the door. “You been here before?”

René shook his head, knocked, nobody answered. He knocked again. “Open up!” he said. “It’s René.” No one answered. He pounded on the door, looked at me, then pounded on the door again. “It’s me, René. Open the damned door!” I could see his face, the corner streetlight shining on us. He looked older than me. It was like I’d never seen him before, like I was seeing him for the first time. And I didn’t like what I saw. Finally, someone comes to the door, opens it. We stared into the face of some guy, long stringy, dirty hair, stoned out of his mind. A gringo. He could hardly talk. And he says, “René. Far-fucking-out! René.” Screwed up, all screwed up. I could see that. René pushed him out of the way, and went into the house. I stood there, staring at this guy’s eyes. He stared back at me. They almost didn’t have a color, his eyes. Like he’d washed all the color out of them. He just stared at me—like he didn’t understand. Like his brain was missing. Like he wasn’t even alive.

René came back to the door. He just looked at me. “Sammy,” he said. Then he stopped. “Sammy,” he said. He looked sick. God. He looked sick.

“What?”

“Sammy!”

“What?”

“Reyes.”

“What?”

“Reyes—” I knew. By the look on René’s face. I guess I just had to see for myself.
I had to see.
I walked into the back bedroom, looked in, Reyes, he was there, just lying on the floor. I didn’t feel anything. I looked at him like I was looking at a thing I’d never seen before, like I was looking at something foreign, not a foreign person, but a foreign thing. And I was trying to figure out what it was. The light in the room was bad, bad, but I could see everything. A bed with no sheets. A needle on the bed. Reyes on the floor. It was as if my eyes had become a camera. I was taking pictures. That’s all I was, a camera. Cameras don’t feel.

I don’t know how long I stared down at Reyes. I just knew I’d be coming back to this room for a long time. I closed my eyes. I opened them. I walked out of the room.

René was leaning against the open door. I walked up to him. He had his back to me. “We have to call the cops,” I said.

René didn’t say anything. Not a damn thing.

“We have to call the cops, René! We have to call the cops!”

I remember looking for a phone. There wasn’t one. No damn phone. Nothing in that house except for a couch in the living room. Nothing. René just looked at me. It was like he was asleep. “Stay here,” I said. I took his keys. I drove to the Pic Quick around the corner. There was a phone booth there. When I pulled up, I saw a cop car. A policeman was inside—buying coffee. I stared at his car. My heart was pounding. Pounding and pounding. And the wings I had inside me were at it again—
beating like hell, stronger than they had ever beat, and the wings were a whole damned bird now—a whole damned bird and he was beating his wings with an anger that was fighting me to let him out, beating the hell out of all my insides. And I knew that the bird was a pigeon—the worst, most common, meanest kind of bird. A pigeon. And I knew that every time something bad happened, that damned pigeon would wake up and begin beating against my insides, and I would never know any peace.

I closed my eyes. I took a breath. When the cop walked outside, I stepped out of René’s car. “You have to come,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me.

“You have to come. Please. Please.” I think I started crying. Yeah, I was crying. Damn it. What good was crying? I blamed it on the pigeon.

“What’s wrong, son?”

“Please.” I pointed. “Around the corner. Will you follow me, please? You have to follow me. You have to.”

“Son, you have to tell me what the problem is.”

“Reyes. Reyes. He’s dead. He’s dead!” And then I was really crying. God, why was I crying? It was that stupid pigeon. He was hurting me. I hated that pigeon.

“Show me where, son.”

The cop followed me. It only took us a minute to drive to that apartment. René was at the door, waiting. The cop went in. René and I waited at the door. When the cop came back to the door, he looked at us. “What’s his name?” He looked sad, the cop did. And angry, really angry.

“Reyes,” I said. “Reyes Espinosa.”

“Wait right here,” he said. Then he saw the guy who’d answered the door. He was passed out on the couch.

“Who’s he?”

“I don’t know.” I was doing all the talking. René was saying nothing. Like he’d lost his voice. “Mrs. Espinoza, she came to my house. She asked me if I could help her find Reyes, that he’d been gone for five days. My dad, he said I should go out and find him. That guy—he’s the one who answered the door.” I’d stopped crying. But it felt like I was gonna start up again. God. The pigeon.

The cop knew that. He nodded. “There a phone in this house?”

“I couldn’t find one,” I said.

“I’d better call an ambulance,” he said. “Wait right here.” He walked to his car. He got on his radio. He walked back. He tried to wake the stringy haired gringo who’d answered the door. The guy wouldn’t wake up. The cop looked at us. “I want you to go stand by my car. Just wait there.”

So that’s what we did. I lit a cigarette, gave one to René.

“He’s dead,” René whispered.

I didn’t say anything. Finally, I said, “They’re gonna ask us how we found this place. I’m gonna tell him we saw this guy that we knew who hung around Reyes. We’re gonna tell him that I asked, that I asked him if he’d seen Reyes. And he told us that he hung around this apartment a lot. So we came here. And if they ask us who the guy was, I’m gonna say he was just this guy that hung around Reyes, and that I didn’t know his name. And if they ask us where we saw this guy, we’re gonna say, he was walking down Española Street. Are you listening?”