Aquaboogie Read online

  “Fuckin A, you said you was from there.”

  “Rio Seco ain’t even close. It’s a couple hours from the ocean.”

  “Shit!” Cotter laughed. “You have to watch it on TV like any asshole from here. That’s pretty funny.” He kept laughing, and Nacho smiled. But later, when he no longer ate in the room, Cotter danced close to him for the others.

  The cans had been crushed from top to bottom like biscuits, left wherever they’d been, wherever Nacho would have found them. In the trash cans, on desks, at the edges of the floor by the brick walls. Not all were smashed right; some sloped awkwardly from off-center stomping. Nacho rolled one of the worthless cans into the auditorium aisle. The shiny green color made him think of insect blood, the liquid green of a severed caterpillar. He felt a pull at his stomach, thinking that he should be with his father, working outside, pushing together piles of cut-smelling leaves and trimmings, steaming grass. This indoor dirt, the used Kleenex, vomit from students with hangovers, dropped gum, was what made Zadnek and the others nastier than they already were. In the yards, you were alone; people might watch you, dog you sometimes, but they didn’t fuck with you daily.

  He sat in one of the seats and turned the cassette back on. Imagining a car, he rested his elbows on the desks and leaned back; that was why he didn’t hear Zadnek and the others in the hallway. When they slammed the door against the wall, he jumped up and pulled off the headphones. Because he was so surprised that they’d come again, so soon, he spoke first.

  “Your usual one-a-day fuck-with-me vitamin wasn’t enough, man?” he said to Zadnek. “You a junkie and a half now, right?”

  “Sittin on your ass as usual,” Zadnek said. “You never do shit around here. Got a problem? Maybe I should write you up.” He didn’t smile, but the low cheeks looked higher, lifted up.

  Nacho saw him look at Wysocki. “It ain’t gonna cure you, these one-a-days,” Nacho said to Zadnek, just as Wysocki stepped forward.

  “Hey, King,” he said, “a nigger and a Puerto Rican both jump off a seven-story building. Which one lands first?”

  There was silence, and then Donohue said, “Who gives a fuck?!” He and Wysocki both laughed, and Nacho said, “Wysocki, man, he’s gonna die anyway. You can’t cure him.” He looked at Zadnek. “I got your nigger right here.” He touched his fly with his fingers and left them there.

  “You black-ass bastard,” Donohue said, coming at him. “Lemme cut it off and make you into a real man.” Nacho felt the blood jump into the back of his neck and stiffened, ready, but Cotter had his arms behind Donohue, twined through.

  Zadnek’s face was the gray pink of the bathroom stalls now, and his mouth drew back deep into his cheeks. “There’s nothin to cut off. Come on, he can’t do nothin, he doesn’t have the guts. Look at him.” But Nacho saw the fear in Zadnek’s eyes.

  After he heard them go up the stairs, he looked at the cart. He touched the bag and could feel that the cans inside were ridged, crumpled, too. He left everything and walked to the door.

  Walking home, he looked at the maple trees curling their long branches over him, making another tunnel, as if he were still in the hallways. Last week, Mr. Bowers had looked at something he was doing in class and said, “What’s that, a fern? Awful big as far as proportion.”

  “It’s a pepper tree,” Nacho said. “That’s the way they grow. They have pink berries and smell dead like pepper.”

  He could try to find a job in town. But the art class was only free because he worked at the college. He slapped his key ring across the trunk of one of the maples, chunking into the bark again and again. The smell of water rose from the sidewalk; the cement was always layered with something—he liked that, the leaves, then snow, the uncovered debris and film of water now after winter. He’d tried to explain that to his father, tried to tell him about the colors and their backward-ass ways. “Shit, color ain’t payin for nothin unless it’s that pale, dirty green. I knew when I seen Snooter’s ass get off that bus alone you were doin somethin stupid. How you eatin?”

  Nacho unlocked the door and walked into his room. It wasn’t even close to two-thirty, when he usually got home. He turned on the radio and sat on his mattress; he couldn’t call until about nine. Then it would be six in California, and Daddy and Snooter would be getting ready to leave. It was hotter now, and they had to start earlier and take a break in the middle of the day to rest from the sun.

  “What’s wrong, cuz, you cold?” Snooter laughed. “Oh. Man, I forgot, it probably up to sixty degrees by now, huh?”

  “Shut up, Snooter. Y’all fixing to go?”

  “Yeah. So did it snow again, or is that all done? I can’t believe you still there. You see I got out before that shit was even forming in the clouds.”

  “It won’t snow again. Where you gettin ready to go?”

  “I think we doin old Miss Linsey’s house first. Hey, man, did you happen to see Fiordaliza?”

  “You ask me every week. I told you she went back to Puerto Rico.”

  “Because of her mama. Cho, I coulda had that girl.”

  “Nah, she was too smart. Shit, she was the one brought me to the school to look around, so you half responsible.”

  “Why you stayin around so long, cuz? What’s the prognosis? It gotta be a female, right?”

  “Damn, Snooter, why you keep askin me? I told you about the art class.”

  “Then you a sorry-ass liar, cause I can hear you pissed about some-thin. Why you don’t quit fakin and tell me?”

  “Yeah, right. It ain’t a girl. These Cylons are gettin on my nerves.”

  “How many of em is it?”

  “Too many.”

  “Well, pick the smallest and get to nubbin. Ain’t no other way to stop it.”

  “Right. Just so I could go to jail. They’d love that shit. I could be in jail at home, at least be arm-wrestling with Ray-Ray and Dokio, get them big I-done-time arms.”

  “Not with Dokio, man. Blood got stuck yesterday, in the stomach. Don’t nobody know who did it yet.”

  Nacho felt the spit flow from the sides of his mouth. “He gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “See, man, shit like that make me want to stay away.”

  “You ain’t gotta be in it. We could use you on the truck.”

  “I want to finish somethin here. My class.”

  “So do the smallest dude, Cho. Take him out.”

  He sat on the mattress again, looking at the change he’d spread on the floor. Quarters and nickels from the last bag of cans. Snooter’s solution had always been the same, in school, in the street. Take him out. Knock it out the picture. The only thing Snooter was really scared of was dogs. He always carried a stick wherever he walked.

  They should be there by now, Snooter and his father, at Miss Linsey’s yard. When they were little, his father had taken them to work with him on the weekends and in the summer. On a street named Hillcrest, four of the huge yards were rimmed with dirt trails where Dobermans chased back and forth along the fences. They leaped and snarled continuously until Mrs. Whoever came to lead them into the garage. Snooter was always scared. He dreamed of dog teeth in his shoulder and spit dripping down his neck. Sometimes he’d wake Nacho up in their bed, hitting and fighting. “Why you poppin air?” Nacho would shout, angry.

  “Man, I was whuppin Miss Linsey’s dog,” Snooter would answer, breathing so hard that Nacho knew he hadn’t been whupping but losing. When they were older, still riding in the back of the truck on Saturdays, before the bed was full of branches and clippings, Snooter would swing his stick through the air. “I’ma see membrane fly, she let that dog come near me this time.” But when she did, one day when she saw Nacho and Snooter picking up over-ripe avocados and oranges and dropping them into a bag (she was the kind that let them fall and rot; they could clean up the black fruit, but taking good ones was stealing), Nacho saw her go back into the house and a few minutes later, the dog came bounding out, sniffing, his shiny coat wavering as he chased
Snooter to the fence.

  Miss Linsey watched from the doorway, calling him back immediately. “Get back here, Marcus, get back.” The dog ran through the doorway in front of her.

  Snooter wanted to come back with his .22 that night and shoot the dog. “She’ll bust us, man, serious,” Nacho said. “That ain’t the way.” He thought for a while, and the next time she took the dog with her to get him bathed, Nacho stood under the orange trees, dropping lumps of sugar he’d been carrying in his pockets. The ants clustered onto the sugar within half an hour, and he knocked the lumps into a jar. Snooter watched, and Nacho said, “Too bad we can’t catch roaches. They woulda been the best.”

  “I don’t know what you think you doin,” Snooter said. He followed Nacho to the house; Nacho reached into the kitchen window and undid the screen. He crawled into the house, telling Snooter to watch for Miss Linsey, and dropped the ants and sugar into spaces under the cupboards and in the backs of bottom drawers. When she came home, her lawn had been mowed, the landscaped hill in the back smooth as a whale. “I don’t know if it works or not,” Nacho told Snooter. “Do you feel better?”

  “Shit. I don’t know.”

  When he woke up with thin light near his face, he looked at the money on the floor beside him. He turned over the quarters so that the eagles were facing up. Ducats. The rain outside made the room so dim that the money barely shone against the wood, as hard to see as it must be for Zadnek, he thought. Scuffling and pawing on the linoleum.

  He went to the closet and took a small bottle of silver oil from the top. He’d tried to paint chrome bumpers and handles onto a drawing of a cherried ’57 T-Bird, but it hadn’t looked right. He spread newspaper on the floor, and put books around the edge to keep it hard and flat. He dropped the paint, holding the small brush down straight. The drops were tiny at first, too small, and he’d thought they’d be larger. It took a bigger brush and two dips into the bottle, then quickly he lifted the brush to let the paint run off onto the paper. He scattered the quarters and nickels to test the size.

  It took almost the whole morning to do the silver. When he sat down to look, he thought of Donohue and Wysocki.

  Blood. He pricked his thumb with the end of his buck knife, but not enough blood squeezed out to make a serious drop. He’d have to use someone else’s blood.

  An hour before work, he went into the basement. None of them ever came early, and on the Friday before finals, there were no students around. He walked through the halls, half-expecting to see one, because on watery, misty nights like this, a few might shuffle and whisper down the tunnels, trying to avoid the rain, looking like ghosts hugging the walls when they saw him. Their skin was clear and insubstantial, and their eyes white when they looked away from him, scared, embarrassed. If he surprised a guy when he came into the bathroom, the cheeks would flash red instantly, as if they’d been slapped, and the head would remain stiff as a flower.

  Zadnek. Nacho stood by the soda machine and put some of the money on the floor, then went upstairs to the main floor and lobby, where Zadnek worked. Two more machines stood in a corner; he arranged the rest of the money around them, placing two quarters with their edges just sticking out from under the Coke machine. Go on and scramble and scuffle, he thought. Get happy. Trip out cause you so lucky—some other fool paid for your soda. Your big dream.

  On the third floor, for Wysocki, he dropped large circles of blood from the container of liver he’d bought. This pork liver. Came outta pig feet, pig ears, all that shit you was lookin for in my lunchbag, baby. This is blood, that’s what you think you want. He made sure there were several wide pools in the bathrooms, and then he went up one flight to the fourth, to put the red sticky drops onto Donohue’s floor, near the warren of teachers’ offices. He went to the end of the hall, then walked past again to see the glisten, the height of the thick circles. Mop this shit up, man. You be on them floor, scrubbin like women. But work hard, cause it’ll come off.

  He went to the break room in the basement to wash his hands, then remembered Cotter. He looked at the clock. What for Cotter? Sweat was on his back and behind his knees, and he went out the side door to the stairwell. It was still raining, and he looked out at the roof before he went back down the stairs to walk home.

  At three in the morning, he went back to the side door. He’d stuffed a wad of paper into the lock. He walked up the stairs quickly and sat on the roof, where the mist rose into his neck, swirled around his chin; Zadnek would lock his stairwell door, but Donohue never checked his. Zadnek always complained about it. He closed his eyes and thought of the blood, how Sammy Harris had gotten shot and fallen on their front porch one night. The next morning, the blood was coagulated, and when Nacho tried to wash it off, it left faint outlines, traces on the cement as though it had begun to grow into the surface. The blood would have been easier for Wysocki and Donohue, still fresh, just smeary when they wiped at it.

  He heard their voices rise up to the roof; they were walking away to the parking lot quickly in the cold, wet air. After the night was quiet again, he went to the side door and walked down Donohue’s hallway. The floor was foamy gray with the scum of new mop-water.

  He started in the basement again, watching the silver drops of paint carefully, the circles they made when they fell and flattened, leaving them around the machines on both floors. The silver was dull, awkward and strange, in the air, but when it lay on the gray tile, it was pretty and unexpected, brighter than a slug you might see near a machine. Now mop, old man. After you run your hands all over this dirty floor, up under the machine, after I put your ass on the floor, go on. Take a brush to this shit. Make you thirsty enough you need a soda.

  On the third and fourth floors, he did the red. He left pools the same size, and drops as small as if they’d been shaken from a cut, and larger circles like a nosebleed. He watched his hand slash, dip. The shapes were right, the color. It ain’t gon come off, Wysocki. It’s gon grow, every day, under your feet.

  For Cotter, black. The paint tapped the floor and spread into a couple of puddles, like a car had been parked there on the floor. A lowrider. Nacho laughed. He walked back to his floor, the basement, and he looked at the miniscule splatters on his shoes and saw red, black, and green, and then he laughed harder. The right colors, he thought. Red, black, and the supreme mean green, in the silver form. He listened to the water drip steadily from the roof, as if he were in a cave. He touched the moist walls, walked to the bathroom to pee. While he stood, he seemed to see the pale student faces, the way the upper lips lifted in confusion when he walked inside, when he bought paper at the student store. He looked at the toilets, the stalls, the thin ballpoint writing, the lush magic-marker words. This is my floor, he thought, it ain’t no point in dogging myself. I’ll have to come back and scrub, or this the last art class. He went back into the hall, kicking the trash can, hearing it echo down the corridor, muffled, the way it sounded when the mist filled the alley behind his father’s house and softened the sound of men going through the garbage, or dogs. Nacho picked up the black paint and pushed open the bathroom door again. He flicked a dark mist onto the mirror, swirled CHO carefully on the wall over the sinks, and then began to put differing sizes of drops on the toilet seats and the stalls, making spatters, abstract patterns and small pictures then, drawing tumbleweeds and blackbirds with his brush.

  training

  DEMONE / MAY

  MAX SMOKE A SUPER KOOL before he did it. He show me the cigarette—it gotta be a Kool, he said. The dude selling it dip the cigarette in the stuff they put on dead people—bombing fluid, Max told me. I remember I seen a guy smoke one at the playground and when he started shooting hoop he died, so I said to Max he shouldn’t do no Super Kool, but he said that was all he had. “I been smoked everything else. I can hang. I’ma be gone soon anyway.” Then he started walking to the train tracks, and when I went after him, he threw rocks at me. He could pitch good when we use to play baseball, and he was tagging me in the legs so I wouldn’
t try and see.

  “Demone, aren’t you able to do those problems?” Miss Jackson all in my face, and I didn’t even see her. The book plus and take away, easy for babies, but I only did five because I heard the jet go over and I started thinking about bombs, did it have bombs just in case something happen before it could go back to the Air force base? Then I think of bombing fluid. Miss Jackson sit down and lean close in my part of the table, so I can see the gold specks in her eyes. She real lightskin and got a short natural. “Do you need some help? Don’t be afraid to ask me during the testing.” Max wasn’t gone from my head yet. I couldn’t see the bombing fluid when he show me the Super Kool. He wouldn’t let me touch it but the white part look dry. “No questions, sweetheart?” she say. Max told me no go, little bro, you can’t smoke none. You too young. Miss Jackson ax me again. If the bombing fluid already in the Kool, do it stay in their bodies when they dead, I want to know, so the undertaker didn’t have to put none in for the funeral? Like she gon know that.

  “Demone, you know by now that these are just diagnostic tests. Do you remember what diagnostic means?” Shit. My grampa use to work on cars before he got the sugar in his blood. Diagnostic on the motor cost you thirty bucks to find out what’s wrong. “They’re not tests you can fail, remember?” She lean over here again, but then the dude in the corner call her. Johnny Ayala. “Hey, Miss Lady, I need help, I’m serious.” He call her every five minutes, can’t do nothing by himself. Everybody in here stupid. They all sleep or reading except me, Johnny Ayala, and that girl name Kim. “I’ll be right back, Demone. Keep working.”

  It ain’t even time for the first train yet and I already been thinking about him. The 9:30 train. I don’t have to look at the clock to know, I could tell by the light. The sun shine past Miss Jackson desk, go to the wall next to me so I can see all the holes from the pins to hang up papers. She put my birthday up there yesterday, she only know cause it’s on the Educational Handicap paper. Everybody in this class have they birthday on the wall and Miss Jackson announce it. Demone Harris—May 19—ten years old. She talking about, “You’ll be celebrating it with us next week.” Max birthday was May 2. He always five years older than me for seventeen days.