Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

  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?”

  René nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m listening.”

  That pigeon was still flying around inside me. Trying to find a way out. But maybe the only way out was to kill me. I lit another cigarette.

  Then the ambulance came. More cop cars. The neighbors all came out.

  They took Reyes away. His body. Reyes wasn’t there anymore. And the other guy. The gringo whose name we didn’t know. He was still alive, at least I think he was.

  They took us down to the station. They put us in separate rooms. They asked me to write down what happened. I’d done this before. That night when they’d nearly killed Jaime and Eric. I wrote down what had happened. Just like I’d told René.

  When I was finished, I waited.

  I don’t know how long I was there.

  And then they let me and René go. They weren’t nice to us. Weren’t mean either. The detective tells us, “See what can happen? See. You guys think nothing’s ever going to happen to you because you’re young. See what happened to your friend? Do you see?” Guess he was a father. Or something like that. René and I nodded. But he wasn’t too hard on us. Maybe he could see what we were holding in our eyes.

  The cop, the one who’d been there first, he took us back to get René’s car. “Did someone call Mrs. Espinoza?’

  He nodded. “Yes, Son. Someone called her.” I wondered how they’d gotten her phone number until I remembered that I’d told them to call my dad, that he’d know how to reach her. I’d forgotten that. I’d already forgotten half the things that happened that night—except staring down at Reyes’ body. I’d never forget. Not ever. And then the cop says, “Boys, I’m real sorry about your friend.”

  We didn’t say anything.

  When he left us there in front of that apartment, René and I didn’t say anything. He drove me home. I opened the car door. I got out. “We found him,” I said. I slammed the car door. I didn’t want to see what René was holding in his eyes.

  René and I were pall bearers at the funeral. Me and René and his four brothers. My pigeon was still there. But words—hell, they’d all flown away. Everybody in Hollywood had so many brothers. Except me. Most of the citizens of Hollywood were there: Mrs. Apodaca, my father, Gigi, Angel, Susie, Frances, some people we knew from school. Mrs. Davis, my English teacher, she was there. I wondered why. Probably knew Reyes from school. And she was Catholic. I knew that. I’d seen her in church.

  At the cemetery, Mrs. Espinoza wailed like a coyote. I couldn’t take it. I thought that maybe Gigi had been right when she said the story of La Llorona was true. Mrs. Espinoza was La Llorona. She would search the world for an eternity calling out her son’s name, hoping to find him, but he was lost. And she’d never hold him again. And she’d blame herself forever. So she was La Llorona now. When they laid Reyes in the ground, all I could hear was Mrs. Espinoza’s wails. I had to walk away. I couldn’t take it.

  I found myself standing in front of Juliana’s grave at the cemetery. I stared at her name and the dates, and I started telling her everything that had happened in Hollywood since she’d died, and I told her about my pigeon, and I even told her I loved her—even though she’d told me never to tell her that ever again.

  That afternoon, I was sitting on my front porch. It was sunny. Not cold. Februarys could be warm in the desert. And today, it was warm and it was hard to tell that anybody had died.

  René came by. He parked his car in front of the house. He waved.

  I nodded.

  He sat next to me on the steps of my porch. “Hey, Sammy,” he said. We hadn’t talked. Not since that night. “I’m never gonna deal again,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I swear I’m not.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “What the shit difference does it make if I believe you or not, René?”

  He looked down. “Don’t—” He started to cry. His whole body was shaking. He had that pigeon inside him, too. Maybe everyone in Hollywood had a damned pigeon. “Sammy, Sammy—” And he couldn’t stop crying. I thought he’d cry forever. “Don’t hate me. Don’t hate—Sammy, Sammy—” There was nothing to do but let him cry. I couldn’t stand it. But I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t. When I reached for his arm, it was too late. He got up from the steps and drove away. I sat there and looked at the spot where his car had been. And then I saw Reyes lying there. Dead. On the street.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The day after Reyes’ funeral, I went back to school. I handed in my note to one of the teachers behind the absent line. Three long lines that day. I handed my father’s note to her. Just my luck, Mrs. Jackson was on duty. “Missed you yesterday, Sammy.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She read the note. “Oh, yes,” she said. I hated the way she said that. “I don’t think we should be encouraging you to go to these kinds of funerals, do you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know if I should excuse this. What do you think?”

  “My father was in the army. My uncle died in the Korean War. My father took me to that funeral! Would you like to speak to my father? My father, the veteran?”

  “Watch yourself, young man. I don’t like that tone.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I let her see that I hated her. I’d hid that bef
ore. Didn’t feel like hiding. Not today. She knew I hated her. I just stared at her. She was afraid. That’s the first time I’d ever seen that. Almost made me want to smile. She handed me my absence slip. EXCUSED. Good, I thought. I stomped my way to my first period class. I missed half of what Mrs. Scott was saying. Sometimes, when I got mad, I lost my hearing. Or maybe all I could hear was the conversation I was having with myself. I’d been a good boy at school for twelve years. A good boy. A good student. Straight arrow. Librarian. So I got A’s. Yeah, so what? Where was I going to school—Harvard? Yale? Berkeley? Nope. Nope. Nope. The local college. The local boy. The local college. Yeah, yeah. I hated myself. I did. I wasn’t getting over it. I wasn’t. I was addicted to staying the good boy—addicted. The addiction was killing me. Like heroine had killed Reyes.

  I hated that they expected us to behave, expected us to buy all their crap, expected us to say yes sir, yes ma’am, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, okay, I could mouth off—especially lately. But what was mouthing off? Mouthing off? What was that? Talk, talk, talk.

  That same day, the principal called for a special assembly. They gathered us all in the gym. “Why don’t they just shoot us?” Charlie Gladstein said. Loud. So everyone would hear. There we were, in the gym. We said the pledge of allegiance. Yeah, yeah.

  “Things are getting out of hand,” Fitz said. God, he was white and dull and plastic. Barbie was more real. “Things are getting out of hand,” he said again. “There is a dress code. There is a code of conduct. We are teaching you to be future citizens.” Yeah, sure. Imagine that beautiful future. That’s what I thought. We all knew why this was happening. Four full detention classes. Chaos. It was taking over. Full of students who weren’t wearing belts, weren’t tucking in their shirts, full of girls who were wearing their dresses too short. “One young man came to school with a beard,” he said. I smiled to myself. Like I could grow a beard with all that mestizo blood in me. Oh, God, a beard. Like Jesus. “And some of you think it’s okay to wear patches of the flag on your pants. What gives you the right? And in the most inappropriate and disrespectful places. . .” He didn’t mention Ginger Ford who’d come to school wearing IUD earrings. Suspended for two days. He didn’t mention all the red-eyed wonders who were wandering the halls like zombies because they’d discovered pot, dope, weed, mota. Or heroine. Or L.S.D. Not that I knew. But I knew enough. I could see. And who wouldn’t want to be stoned out of his ever lovin’ mind? Who wouldn’t? “We are trying to guide you, to help you find your way on this good earth. . .” I couldn’t listen. So I didn’t. I took out my notebook, started writing a letter to Pifas. Told him that Reyes had died. Heroin overdose. Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. He was in Nam. He didn’t need to hear about death. He knew all about it by now. Death. Pifas. Mr. Barnes stretched his neck out to see what I was writing. He looked at me. I kept on writing.

  When Fitz finished his little speech, no one clapped. Not one mule-faced student. “Thank you for your applause,” he said. Someone booed. People clapped. For the boo. “That’s enough,” he said. On the way out, everyone got a copy of the dress code and our code of conduct—so we’d remember. “Are we gonna have a test?” I said as I took mine.

  Mrs. Davis winked. I liked her. She knew the score.

  We all marched back to our classes. With our copies of the dress code.

  I saw René every day at school. We didn’t say much to each other. He just kinda went his own way. Gigi, too. I ran into Angel. I liked her. I really did. “How is it?” I said. She smiled. “Haven’t seen you around much. Seen René?”

  “My mom doesn’t like him. She says I can’t go out with him.” She shrugged. “I told him we were just friends.”

  “Seen Gigi?”

  She rolled her eyes. “She’s seeing this guy. That’s all she thinks about. All she does is be with him and talk about him.”

  I nodded. I knew Gigi. She found guys sometimes, fell in love, spent all her time with them. Then one day, she was back. Like she’d been dead. And then she was back. “Yeah,” I said, “that’s Gigi.”

  “You look sad, Sammy.” That’s what she said.

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m just tired.” I looked at her. I wanted to kiss her. Because she’d noticed. That I was sad. I smiled at her, walked away.

  I guess for a couple of weeks, all I did was go to school and work at the Dairy Queen on Saturdays. I felt like something had died. I hated everything, school, the world I lived in. And all my friends were M.I.A.

  One day, guess I just got lonely. It was a Saturday after work. Hadn’t seen René in two weeks. I went by his house on my way back from work, had my dad’s car. I knocked at the front door. Mrs. Montoya answered it, smiling. That lady was always smiling. René was more like his father. “Sammy,” she said. She liked me. She gave me a hug. “Muchachito,” she said. “Ya pareces hombre.” I didn’t feel like a man. That was for sure. “René here?” I said.

  She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears. I hated that, to see her cry. “There’s something wrong,” she said. “Se me hace que anda con las drogas.”

  I hugged her. “No, no,” I said. “René’s not into drugs. I swear.”

  “Lo has visto?”

  I lied. “I see him every day. Talk to him every day. No drugs. I swear Mrs. Montoya.”

  She smiled. She went into the kitchen and brought out a stack of freshly made tortillas. “For you,” she said. “Y por tú papá y por Elena.”

  I kissed her. Thank you. Gracias, señora. Mothers broke my heart.

  That night, I asked my dad if I could borrow the car. I knew I had to look for him. For René. Damnit! Damnit! I was mad. Now, I was really mad. So what the hell was I gonna do about all this mad stuff? I swear I thought I was going crazy. I mean the kind of crazy where they put you in some place where you can’t hurt anybody. I think my pigeon was driving me nuts—the kind of nuts where you can really hurt someone real bad.

  So that night, I took my father’s car and went looking for René. Cruising, cruising on a Saturday night. I cruised up and down El Paseo. I cruised Shirley’s. I heard about some party at some guy’s house. I went there, another keg party, saw people I knew—but no René. Asked everyone. “All doped up,” Charlie Gladstein said. “That guy’s been doing more weed lately than Janis Joplin.” Like he knew all about Janis Joplin. Yeah, yeah. That Charlie.

  I looked everywhere. I even went to that trailer house in Mesilla Park. I knocked at the door. That same gringa with long hair stood there, looking at me. I asked her if she’d seen René. Told me he’d been there earlier, that he’d scored a nickel bag. Said she didn’t know where he’d taken off to. Just didn’t know. But she said I was cute if I wanted to hang around for some fun. Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t into fun. Not that night. Not most nights, come to think about it.

  I’d run out of places to look. Then I thought about one more place. The river. Why not the river? He liked it there. So that’s where I drove. I had the radio on. Judy Collins was singing some sad song about not knowing anything about love at all. I liked her voice. I liked the song. I thought maybe that Gigi had a better voice. And more soul. But Gigi would never be on the radio like Judy Collins or Melanie or any of those singers. Born in the wrong neighborhood, I guess. And too much attitude. I wondered who Gigi was going out with. Made me sad when she went after a guy. They always dropped her. But she dropped her share. Desperate. Sometimes, she was desperate to be loved. Maybe I was too. I don’t know. I didn’t want to think about that. I thought about Angel. Maybe I’d ask her out. But she hadn’t said she didn’t like René. Only that her mother wouldn’t let her go out with him. And René was my friend. Or he had been my friend. And I was making myself crazy thinking about all these things. Crazy. Crazy. And damnit to hell, what if René was all doped up? What if I found him? What exactly was I planning on doing about it?

  There was a keg party at the river. A fire going around the keg. I checked it out. Lots of cars. People were laughing. I stood at the edge—looked in. Not
my crowd. Some guy was telling stupid jokes What’s brown and is a sex symbol? Marilyn Montoya. What’s brown and rides on a horse named Trigger? Roy Rodríguez. What’s brown and hops through the forest? Bugs Benavídez. What’s brown and rides on a chariot? Ben Hernández. Everyone laughed. Ha. Ha. Funny, funny. I took off.

  There were cars here and there. People making out, I guessed. I thought of Jaime and Eric. How they’d been caught. Together. Two guys. I felt bad. They were gone. They’d been sent away. Here, somebody else take them. Shit. I was tired. I wasn’t gonna find René. I wasn’t. I drove up and down the levy. Then I saw a car. Off by itself. Maybe. Maybe it was René. I drove down the road toward the river. A small road. A tree. A car. René’s car. It was! God! René! I’d found him. I thought of how we’d found Reyes. I felt the pigeon again. I stopped the car, got out. “René? René?” I saw him. It had to be him. Sitting on the hood. Smoking a cigarette. “René?”

  “¿Qué chingaos quieres?”

  “Hey, what is it?”

  “¿Que chingaos quieres?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  I walked up to the car. “Talk to me,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Just talk to me.”

  “Just get away. Vete a la fregada.”

  “Listen to me. People are worried about you.”