Aquaboogie Read online

“The girls are at school, and I was just taking a little nap before I start cooking.”

  “Where’s Aint Rosa?” he asked. “I thought she was still cooking for you and for Esther down the street.”

  His mother paused. “Your daddy didn’t tell you?” she said, frowning. Nacho sat on the end of the couch; his back felt like minty liquid was draining from either side of his spine, painfully cool, collecting in his feet.

  His mother said, “Ruskin and them are tearing down Green Hollows and putting up office buildings. Your daddy and Snooter supposed to do the cleanup, next week, I think. Aint Rosa moving to that new Seniors’ Tower downtown.

  “Ruskin? Daddy still working for him?”

  “Still doing odd jobs, cleanup and hauling.” His mother brought a pile of green beans into the living room and started snapping. “Lord, Aint Rosa drives me crazy, that noise she be making with her lips all the time, and always talking about Tom Cruise’s wife or Burt and Loni’s baby, some such nonsense. But I’ma miss her taking care of the kitchen. This night shift catching up with me after all these years. Didn’t you work nights out there where you was?”

  Nacho nodded, closing his eyes. Ruskin. He couldn’t believe his father and Snooter still did Ruskin’s shit work. He remembered a few months before he and Snooter had gone back East, when Snooter was tired, had been out all night with Juanita, and Daddy was hollering all day. “Back that damn truck up, boy!” he’d shouted at Snooter, and Snooter accidentally grazed a mailbox, one of those big-money cast-iron types. Ruskin came tearing out of his front door. “I just bought that, King!” he yelled at Daddy. “You can damn well pay for a new one if it’s damaged.”

  “I’ll check it out right now, Mr. Ruskin,” his father said. “My boy here’s sick today.”

  “No, he’s too damn lazy to turn the goddamn wheel.” Ruskin must have had a bad day, Nacho had thought, standing near the truck. “Goddamn scatterbrained nigger ruined my wife’s irises last year digging where he wasn’t supposed to,” he muttered, and Nacho looked into Snooter’s eyes, but saw his father’s shadow cross the fading sun. Nacho heard rising cement costs, Mexican laborers who didn’t understand English, rain in Ruskin’s voice; he saw calculations and remembrances of that mailbox price tag at HomeClub in his father’s sloped shoulders and quick stride. Snooter came around the back of the truck and laughed.

  “Ruskin just making money left and right,” his mother said softly. “He did that new freeway to Coronita, and your daddy said him and his wife just bought them a house down at the beach. Must be nice.”

  “Aint Rosa can’t cook for you then, huh?” Nacho said. Slow—his brain was still concentrating on the fiery-cold in his muscles. “She can’t walk to the Westside from downtown.”

  “Baby, you don’t sound right. You better go in the back and lie down. Your daddy and Snooter be home to eat soon.”

  Nacho pushed himself up from the couch. He didn’t want to be home when they came in and talked about his softened hands. “She probably need some help moving her stuff, huh? Who’s packing it up?”

  His mother raised her brows. “Ain’t nobody that crazy, Nacho. She got forty years worth of junk down there.”

  “Well, I need to take a walk. Been sitting on the bus too long.”

  “If you really going down there, bring me some a her greens. They grow sweeter in the hollow.”

  The grass in vacant lots was brittle yellow, but when he crossed the arroyo and neared Green Hollows, he could smell the wet. Under the trees, in that deep dent, the earth was always moist, kept a film of water. He saw only four of the long, thin shotgun shacks left, their olive-green sides peeling. The greens that grew around each house, the always thick, tender grass, the springy tumbleweeds at the edges of the hollow, that was what he’d thought Green Hollows was named for when he was a child, he realized, but it was for the paint, uniform on all the houses that had once been quarters for the orange-grove workers. The big farmhouse, white and three-story with scalloped shingles near the roof, was gone. A block wall ran along the edge of the hollow, and gray-stucco office buildings butted up against the cement.

  Aint Rosa had never worked in the groves; she had been a cook for one of the elementary schools since she came to California, and she still wore her white nylon uniform every day. He saw her ghostly form in the doorway, waving.

  “Nacho! I got a cobbler, oh, yes, I knew somebody was coming!” He stepped onto the tiny porch, stacked with National Enquirers and People magazines. “You know, Fergie’s fixing to have her baby any minute, and it’s gon be another girl.”

  “Yeah?” he said, following her into the kitchen. The cobbler’s sweet steam hung around her gray braids for a moment and went out the window. A pile of greens, trimmed but not washed, sat on the table.

  “These are for your mama, when we go back,” she said. “My greens is always more tender.”

  “You planning to walk over there today, Aint? I thought you were packing up to move over to the Tower.”

  She jerked her head impatiently. “Don’t nobody want this land—your daddy’s just talking to hear his own self. I got too much stuff to fit into one a them little tiny rooms. I seen them, your mama took me over there once. A bitty closet and a hot plate—uh uh.”

  “Mama said you were moving next week.” Nacho saw that she wouldn’t listen; she put a piece of too-hot cobbler in front of him and started to wash the greens, putting them into a grocery sack. The oilcloth was slick and cool against his forearms, but the air was summer-warm, and he pushed the plate away.

  “Blow on it a little,” she said. “You got time, cause I needs to wash these dishes before we go to your mama’s.”

  He stood in the yard, watching her lock the door, remembering all the summer days he and Snooter had come to the hollow to climb the pepper trees, lie behind Aint’s house in the shade of the huge peach tree, beg her for teacakes. She took her time, and then they walked up the slope to the street. On Picasso, she stopped at Esther’s. Esther did hair and sold lunches, and Aint Rosa leaned in the doorway to call, “I’m coming back soon.” To Nacho she said, “Your mama keep insisting she want to cook for herself. I won’t be long over there, I bet. I don’t know why she going on about this. She need her rest. You see where Liz Taylor went to the hospital for exhaustion? Women got to have they rest.”

  He woke up at 5 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep, staring at the shadow of shifting palm fronds against the wall of the bedroom he’d shared with Snooter since they were children. Snooter’s parents had died in a bus crash on the way to Vegas when he was only six. Nacho looked at the empty twin bed—Snooter never slept here anymore, he could tell; he had four or five women calling all the time, and he rotated, depending on who had the best cooking skills if he was really hungry that night, and who had the best bedroom skills if he wasn’t.

  Saturday morning, Nacho thought. I’m in this narrow-ass bed; I slept on a bus seat for days, and a mattress on the floor back in Amherst. I ain’t got shit to my name. He went into the kitchen, padding softly across the carpet, and took a piece of Aint Rosa’s fried chicken out to the front yard with him. He sat on the folding chair, the early morning air warm and dry, wondering if Snooter still bothered to sneak in. He’d been a master creeper all through high school, entering the girls’ houses and this one without a sound.

  He didn’t want to go to work with them. Saturday morning—the yards all up and down Arroyo Grande, those huge lawns and hedges that always needed trimming. And he’d argued with his father about Green Hollows last night; about working for Ruskin, and helping to make Aint Rosa move.

  Back in Amherst, he’d dreamed about the hollow, imagined it always when he cleaned the dark, winter-wet hallways and mopped the linoleum, smelling that same clinging, sharp water. He didn’t want to think about the earth there compacted by bulldozers, sectioned off for parking and block walls. His father would be up soon, Snooter would cruise in and wait for Daddy to bring out the coffee, and they’d say, “Them sissy
hands ready to work today? Ain’t done nothing useful in a year.” Nacho threw the chicken bone into the trash can at the curb and headed for Sixth Avenue.

  The sun began to rise when he stood in front of Quick Pick Liquor, drinking a cream soda, and a truck pulled up next to him, loaded with mowers, shovels, and rakes. Trent got out. His father had been Daddy’s cousin, had died while Nacho was in Amherst, he remembered. “What up, cuz?” Trent said, exaggerating the greeting like they used to in high school. Nacho thought of Amherst again—“When none of em knows the daddy, they can all be cousins…”

  “Just kickin it,” Nacho said. “You gotta work this early?”

  “It gets hot quick, man, you know that, and I don’t do too many yards anymore. Mostly setting up the landscaping for the new houses, the irrigation and stuff. I got a big job today, and I don’t feel like frying around noon. Why you up?”

  “Avoiding them damn mowers you parked in my face,” Nacho said, and he waited until Trent bought a six-pack of Pepsi and came back outside.

  “You just back in town and your pops already working your ass? Bad as mine was.”

  Nacho said, “Sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “Thanks, man. I don’t plan to work that hard and die that young,” Trent said with a strange bubble in his voice, almost a gargle. “You want a ride, check out my new crib?”

  He was surprised when Trent passed through the Westside and headed for the sloping hills where orange groves had been. Row after row of two-story houses terraced the hills now, so close together people could shake hands out their windows. So new he couldn’t see any trees. “Snooter said people were moving out here from L.A.,” Nacho said. “Daddy must got big-time work with these new yards, too.”

  “Cheaper here than L.A. or Orange County,” Trent said. “But the people are cheap, too. I bet your dad doesn’t have any yards up here—all Mexican, cause they work for less.” He turned into a tract with a high block wall screening it from the street. “So you working with your dad again, huh? Snooter, too?” He sounded comfortable all of a sudden, Nacho thought, and he didn’t like the smile in Trent’s question.

  “I’m just killing time until summer session at the college, man,” he said. “It’s all about school.”

  “I heard you were going to college back in Amherst,” Trent said. “Why’d you come home?”

  “I was just taking some art classes, drawing and painting,” Nacho said, looking out the window at the perfect, fresh sod in the yards. “Got tired of winter, man, snow will kick your natural ass.” He spoke quickly, hearing how stupid the words sounded even as he said them.

  “So what you plan to do with your art? I mean, how do you make a living? You planning to be a graphic artist or something?”

  Nacho was hot in the forehead. “I don’t know, man, I just do it, I like it.”

  “Sounds good,” Trent said, the same way Nacho said it to a guy in Lincoln Park who said he was going to stop drinking. “Here’s the latest homestead.”

  “Damn, Trent,” he said, looking at the two-story house, with an oak and stained-glass door, three-car garage, and a mailbox like the one Snooter had hit at Ruskin’s. “Latest?”

  “I buy and sell them. Sure cash,” Trent said. “That’s number three.” He stopped, said, “You want a tour? It’ll have to be quick.”

  “No, I better get back,” Nacho said. “I’ll come check you out one night when we both got more time.” Nacho watched the houses slide past, the immaculate cement driveways. Three Mexican guys were building a block wall to separate two houses, and another crew was weeding the bank outside the entrance to the tract.

  “Your dad should have gotten his contractor’s license,” Trent said suddenly. “These dudes are making big money.” Nacho looked at him, and Trent said, “My dad and yours used to do cement back in Mississippi. My dad told me they could have made big cash out here, but they ended up doing yards and hauling.”

  Nacho remembered his father doing odd cement jobs around the Westside, curbs or planter boxes. He always criticized other cement work, showing Nacho the uneven slant or rough edges on a job, but that was when Nacho was small.

  “He’s getting ready to clean up Green Hollows,” Nacho said loudly. “He got all kinda work now.” He saw the block walls surrounding the office buildings.

  “Yeah, it flooded a bunch of times when we were kids, remember?” Trent said. “It’s a health hazard, I read in the paper.”

  They drove in silence. When the car slowed to turn onto Picasso, Trent said, “So, Snooter still have a bunch of ladies?”

  “More than he can handle,” Nacho said, his hand on the door.

  “Some things never change,” Trent said. “Easy, man.” He pulled away slowly, looking at the back of the big aqua truck.

  The high snore of the mowers, the weed-whacker almost sparkly-sounding when he ran it around the edges of the lawns—he’d forgotten that the noise could be lulling even as the sun grew stronger.

  They drove to a deli for lunch, and Nacho knew that was a big concession for his father, who liked to work straight through noon. Sitting on the curb by the store while they waited for Snooter to bring the sandwiches, Nacho looked at the layers of green stain, craggy as the mountains, on his father’s boots. “I saw Trent this morning,” he said.

  “He show you his house?” his father said. “Don’t tell me.”

  Nacho felt the heat from passing cars drift around his ankles. “He was talking about you and his dad used to do cement work. I forgot you did that. Why you didn’t get your license?”

  “Cause I was busy.” His father lit a cigarette. “Busier than you ever been.”

  “Serious, you coulda made your own jobs instead of waiting for somebody like Ruskin to call you all the time. Trent said yards are getting harder to come by.”

  “He ain’t lying. Every fool with a Japanese truck buy a mower and start driving around looking for work.” His father stood up, kicked the boot heels against the curb, restless to get back.

  “So why didn’t you?” Nacho pressed.

  “Shit, boy, who the hell are you? I was tryin to feed your ass, Snooter’s, buy you shoes for school. We had a ice box in 1952, nigger, me and your mama living over there off Second Avenue in a cracker-box. Wasn’t about no career and shit. You and your classes. We been here from Grenada two years, just got out the service, and some white man seen me walking near Lincoln Park, asked me did I want a couple day’s work. It was September, and Snooter was cryin for some kinda shoes he seen at the store. I didn’t have time to sit around on my artistic ass and think about life like you do.”

  Snooter stood behind them with the paper-wrapped sandwiches, translucent from the salad oil. “And I was stylin in them shoes, Unc.” He smiled and said, “I been tryin to pay you back ever since.”

  In the truck, Nacho winced at the sting of jalapenos in the sandwich. His mouth had forgotten. The green heat stayed at his lips all afternoon, and when they were home, sitting in the yard, he kept licking them to feel the momentary coolness. Lanier and Red Man, his father’s friends, came by soon, and they argued about Green Hollows.

  “You a hot lie, Floyd,” Red Man said. “That woman was Indian, all that long black hair down to her knees and straight as rope.”

  “I remember who you talkin about, Lucy was her name,” Lanier said. “I always heard she was white, too. Had about five kids runnin around in the yard every time I went down there.”

  His father said, “She was French, came over here lookin for some nigger she met in the service during the war. I don’t care what y’all remember.”

  Nacho held the beer can to his lips. Esther, across the street, came out onto her porch and walked down the steps slowly; she hung a wet cloth on the chainlink side fence, and Nacho’s father and Lanier shouted at her to wait. They walked into her yard, hands in their pockets, and Nacho was puzzled, watching them give her money. A dollar—that was what each handed to her, Daddy’s big bent fingers around her wrist for
a second, him smiling with his face down. Nacho couldn’t hear what they said, but then he remembered that she’d just brought home a new baby, and he realized suddenly that his father and Lanier, all of them were the old men of the Westside now, the ones he and Snooter used to be scared of when they rode bikes across a lawn or made too much noise close to the fish at the city lake. Aint Rosa’s husband Johnny used to always give his mother a dollar, press it into her palm and whisper something, when she brought home the girls.

  When his father sat down again, he looked at Nacho. “You gon take the Toyota over Aint’s in the morning and move her dresser and bed.”

  Nacho shook his head. “She says she ain’t moving. The Towers only one room, a studio, and she says no way.”

  “Don’t start now, boy. She know the truth, and we gotta start tearing them things down Monday.” He took a long swallow of beer. “Go over there early, before it get hot. Aint don’t do good in the heat anymore.”

  “Yeah, and it’s always cool in the hollow.”

  His father turned away, to Red Man. “He think Green Hollows is a valuable piece of architecture like it is. It got artistic qualities, he fixin to tell us next.” He said to Nacho, “Try that on the city. It’ll go over about as well as a fart in a crowded room on a hot summer night.” Red Man and Lanier laughed.

  “Man, it’s better than offices,” Nacho said, standing up. “You know what I’m saying.”

  “You’re trying to make it sound better than it is,” his father said. “Just like you do with them paintings. You see trees and look right past them big old rats down there, whup a pit bull if they please. Electrical always goin out cause the wires from 1910. Aint couldn’t turn on the TV and the porch light at the same time.”

  “Boy getting sentimental, huh?” Red Man said, and they all laughed again. Nacho went inside, to the back room. Snooter was ironing his clothes.

  “Who you going out with?” Nacho said, sitting on the bed.

  “Me and Beverly headin out to Club Seven.” He sprayed starch on the pants. “What you trippin on, with your long face?”