Lawn Boy

  “His blood pressure is a major cause for concern,” she said, glancing at the chart. “If we don’t manage it, we could be looking at some real complications. We need to make some lifestyle changes immediately. Like yesterday.”

  The way she looked at me, the implications were inescapable. This was my fault. What the hell kind of brother was I? Nate was a child, incapable of making sound decisions. I was an adult. I should have monitored his diet. I should have kept him on an exercise regimen. I should have been coercing him all along, fighting him for his own good, no matter the inconvenience, no matter the black eyes, the errant saltshakers. But I took the path of least resistance. I accepted the fact that things would get worse for my brother. That’s old Mike Muñoz for you: Take the easy way out. Accept the worst like it’s inevitable. It’s easier than changing the game, isn’t it? Why bother changing the game when you can just talk a big one: talk about writing novels and saving the world, but at the end of the day, you’re just plying your special-needs brother with cheeseburgers and Oreos and phoning in the rest.

  We left with two prescriptions, about twenty pages of literature on high blood pressure and one very guilty conscience. The minute we climbed back into the Tercel, Nate had a Big Mac attack.

  Los de Abajo

  The following day, I dropped off an application at the new Rite Aid on 305, then wandered down the hill to downtown Poulsbo to kill some time. When I got to Front and Jensen, I found Andrew the librarian standing there with a clipboard, collecting signatures. He was wearing a pea-green cardigan sweater with big brass buttons over a homemade T-shirt that said ACT!

  I had to hand it to Andrew, the guy took initiative. He was socially engaged, highly motivated, and unwavering in his convictions. Pretty much everything I wasn’t.

  “Hey, Mike. What’s up?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Spare two minutes to talk about the environment?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure.”

  “Did you know that Shell plans to resume drilling for oil in the Arctic?”

  “Yeah, I think I heard something about that.”

  “Experts say there’s a seventy-five percent chance of a major spill, and oil recovery is nearly impossible in Arctic conditions.”

  “Bummer,” I said.

  “Not to mention the fact that there’s no spill-response capacity in the region in the first place and that the Arctic is one of the most fragile ecosystems on Earth.”

  He gave me about two seconds to let the information settle in before soldiering on.

  “Did you know that the Arctic is currently warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world?”

  “That’s fucked.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “It is most certainly, unequivocally fucked. Especially if you’re a polar bear or a ringed seal or a migratory whale or a puffin. But also if you’re a human being. And the oil companies know this. They’ve known it for five decades. But they don’t care about anything but quarterly profits. That’s why we’re collecting signatures to stop the drilling before it begins.”

  “Hell, yeah,” I said. “I’ll sign it.”

  Andrew flashed a Stonehenge smile, handed me the clipboard and pen. I proudly filled out my name and address. Yeah, I know a signature’s not much, but it buoyed my spirits a little knowing that I’d at least done something to make the world a better place, which was more than I usually did. Hell, for all my complaining, I wasn’t even a registered voter. I determined then and there to change that.

  “Thanks for caring,” he said.

  “You bet,” I said. “Thanks for, you know, standing on a corner with a clipboard.”

  But I don’t think Andrew heard me, because he’d already moved on, accosting the next passerby. Too bad, because I’d wanted to hang around and talk about books for a while. I was about to cross the street to avoid Tequila’s, when I ran into Tino in front of the Christian bakery.

  “¿Qué onda, Miguel? ¿Cómo lo llevas?”

  He was still wearing his work clothes; boots scuffed, dirt on the knees, baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead.

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  “Whatchu doin’, ese?”

  “Just walkin’ around,” I said. “Savin’ the Arctic, that kind of thing. What about you?”

  “Just picked up mucho dog shit at McClures’. Pinche dog shit on the lounge chairs. I need a cerveza, ese. C’mon, I buy you one,” he said nodding at Tequila’s.

  “Do we have to go there?”

  “Naw, man, wherever you want.”

  So we walked down by the marina to the Dockside Tavern, with its murky light and its sagging, lost-puck shuffleboard table, its filthy bathroom, and its bar top sticky to the touch. The bartender, not the chatty sort, had a jagged three-inch scar across his forehead and a naked-lady tattoo on his forearm.

  I ordered a PBR to go easy on Tino’s pocketbook.

  “So, what’s new?” I said.

  “Ah, you know, ese. Same old shit. Lacy, he just getting meaner and fatter. New accounts, bigger projects. We working most Saturdays now. Overtime on weekdays. But he don’t pay us extra. He still payin’ the same shit wage, no matter how many hours.”

  “So quit.”

  “Shit, I’m thinking about it, but it’s the same everywhere. Nobody want to pay a Mexican. I need to make more money, ese. I need some space, you know? That trailer is getting too small. Ramiro, he only four foot six, but he snores like a pinche oso. And Rocindo, all the time he having sex with his wife late at night. Then his hijos eating Skittles and climbing the walls at six in the morning. It’s Locotown. I gotta get out, ese, gotta get my own place. But how am I gonna do that working for Lacy, when I’m sending half of what I make to Durango?” He shook his head grimly. “Is not supposed to be this way, Miguel. Is supposed to get better.”

  “It does get better,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said, doubtfully.

  “In my experience, yeah. Right before it all goes to shit again.”

  Tino sipped his beer soberly. “Something gotta change, that’s all I know, ese. I gotta do more than just survive, or what am I doing here? I may as well be back in Durango.”

  “I know a guy who’d be happy to give you a lift to the bus station.”

  “Don’t I know it, ese. Back home things are even worse, though. But still I miss it, my niños, my esposa. Is lonely, Miguel, you don’t know.”

  “So go back.”

  “I can’t afford to go back. It took me everything to get here. More than everything. I got people depending on me back home. I gotta make something happen.”

  “Bring your family up here.”

  “Ha, is not so easy, Miguel. And my money, it don’t go so far, not here. Rocindo, he got help—his wife, she work part-time. Her brother help them out, too. And still they need me and Ramiro to pay the rent. Where do I put my family?”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  Tino drained his beer and held up two fingers for the bartender, who delivered two more, promptly and without a word.

  “¿Mi hija más joven?” he said, taking a long draw of his beer. “She two and a half years old. Mi Isabella. Mi chiquitita Izzy. Look just like her mama, with her big feet and her little nose. She talking all the time now. Mia say she never shut up. Last week she say she gonna go get Papá. Bring Papá home. This kills me, Miguel. Seems like half my money I’m spending on my phone. Pinche Verizon gets half my paycheck.”

  “Verizon is fucked,” I said.

  “Tienes toda la razón,” he said.

  We ended up talking for two hours. We joked a little about the old lady and the abundance of dog turds at McClures’, but mostly we talked in earnest, grinding axes and regretting our lots. He asked me what happened to my teeth, and I told him about Freddy’s foray into dentistry. He winced throughout the story, like a guy who’d been there, which in fact he had, opening his mouth to prove it. I could see the gap once occupied by a molar.

  “Did it myself, vato. Fiv
e shots of mezcal and alicate viejo.”

  In spite of all his difficulties, financially, personally, geographically—and let’s face it, they were worse than mine—Tino ended up buying me four beers and a shot of Jäger. I shouldn’t have let him, but he seemed to want the company, and if I weren’t broke myself, I would have done the same for him.

  “I don’t know, Miguel,” Tino said, calling for the tab. “Something gotta change.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said, clapping him on the back.

  And boy, did I ever know the feeling. But at least my family wasn’t a million miles away. At least angry white men weren’t calling for my deportation, blaming me for their problems; at least they weren’t trying to wall my people out. I had it better than Tino, and I’ll admit there was a little comfort in that, but things were getting dire on the home front. As the days of unemployment mounted, the old revenue stream had slowed well past a burble or a trickle, past so much as a lonely drop, to a parched and heat-fissured drainage ditch, strewn with bleached skulls and faded beer cans. No callbacks and nary a word from my old mentor Chaz, who, for all I knew, was collating Walmart circulars at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla.

  “All I want, Miguel, is to get by, a ser tratado con dignidad, a caminar con mi cabeza en alto, ¿comprendes?”

  “Sí. I think so.”

  Is That You?

  Snaggle-toothed Marlin was manning his post outside Safeway, staged in front of three dozen shopping carts, each emblazoned with Doug Goble’s shit-eating grin, along with his slogan TEAM GOBLE. GOBLE OR GO HOME. I’m pleased to report that Marlin’s ax work was much improved since Freddy’s campfire tutorial. He was banging out “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, and he wasn’t even watching the fret board the entire time. He looked like a guy who actually played the guitar. Clean him up, and he could probably play at somebody’s wedding.

  When Marlin finished the number, I reached for my pickle jar and started unscrewing the lid with the intent of scooping out a small offering. But I bungled it, and the jar slipped from my grasp and shattered all to hell. Small change and broken glass scattered everywhere. Marlin set down his guitar immediately and scrambled to my aid as people started walking around us like a couple of undesirables.

  Within moments, the special-needs bag boy came out with a broom and a dustpan as Marlin and I scrupulously picked through the glass for silver, and yes, even copper, under the bike rack, behind the propane tanks, below the watermelon display, filling the fronts of our T-shirts. As I was scanning the pavement for coins, I heard a voice.

  “Muñoz? Is that you?”

  Confronted by a pair of pointy leather loafers, I reluctantly peered up to behold the living, breathing personage of Doug Goble towering over me, perma-grinning like a mayor on a parade float. Instinctively, my eyes darted to the queue of shopping carts, then back up at Goble.

  “Great idea, right?” he said. “As long as some kid isn’t sitting his ass on your face. God, I hate kids. What are you doing down there, Mike?”

  “I dropped something.”

  “Your piggy bank?”

  “Blow me,” I said, blanching.

  He grinned even harder, stooping down to help Marlin and me.

  “You’ve got a small fortune here,” he observed, dropping coins into my shirt. “Invest it wisely.”

  “I’m gonna punch you if you don’t knock it off,” I said.

  “Relax, I’m just joshin’. C’mon, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  So there I was at the Starbucks in Safeway with Doug Goble. For all my discomfort, Goble was downright chatty. He acted like we ran into each other all the time, and it had nothing to do with dicks. He talked about old times at the church but never mentioned our penises or the fact that he never said ten words to me after our little foray in the bushes. He talked about a few of his new listings and his plans to expand his real-estate empire into Jefferson County but made not a single reference to holding or tugging or sucking dicks. And yet I was convinced he was flirting with me. He talked about the five acres they were developing over on Weaver and the new parking lot at the casino.

  “So, what about you?” he said, like someone who’s not actually interested.

  “I’m a landscaper.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Landscaper.”

  “I’m also a writer,” I said, a divulgence I regretted immediately.

  “A writer, huh?” he said, doubtfully. “You make any money in the writing racket?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Hmph. Who the hell has time to read, anyway? So what else you been up to? Inquiring minds want to know.”

  I was becoming increasingly certain that “buy you a cup of coffee” was some sort of euphemism. All I could think about while he was chatting me up over the rim of his cappuccino was his little salamander between my fourth-grade fingers, rapidly engorging with blood. Was he expecting me to do it again? Just like that? Not that I would. Not for a cup of coffee, that’s for sure. It was all so confusing, you know? I didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling. Was I putting out some kind of signal I didn’t know about? Why would Doug Goble buy me coffee after all these years if it didn’t have something to do with touching penises?

  “Let me give you a lift,” he said.

  There it was. The proposition. Or maybe it wasn’t. Fuck, I didn’t know. All I knew was that a lift would save me two bucks in bus fare, but it wasn’t worth sucking Goble’s dick, or even touching it. I figured if he tried anything, I’d punch him in the throat and jump out of the car.

  On our way out the door, we passed Marlin, banging out a ham-fisted rendition of “Tom Sawyer.” Doug stopped to watch him for an instant before dropping a fiver in his guitar case.

  “Hey, I got a request,” he said. “How about ‘The Sounds of Silence’? Go ahead and learn that one.”

  Marlin looked a little pissed off until he glanced down and discovered it was a fiver.

  “Peace, bro,” he said.

  “Get a job,” said Goble.

  With that, Goble led me briskly across the parking lot to a black Lexus convertible.

  “Nice car,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  At the stoplight on 305, Doug pulled out a tube and started applying cream around his eyes. I thought it was sunscreen at first, but then I recognized the extra-long yellow nozzle.

  “Dude, hold up!” I said. “That’s not sunscreen!”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s for hemorrhoids. It contracts the blood vessels—gets rid of my wrinkles.”

  “You don’t have any wrinkles.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  He pulled out his phone and glanced at the screen again. “I’ve got an open house at five thirty,” he said. “Kinda late, I know, but I wanna wow them with the sunset view. It’ll distract them from the fugly kitchen.”

  “Look at you,” I said. “Driving a Lexus and shit. I can’t walk a hundred yards without seeing your face. What I don’t get is, how did you make any of this shit happen? You came from the res, just like me. Your mom, she didn’t have any money, just like mine.”

  “Money’s not the only resource, bud. There’s sweat.”

  “Then I should be rich.”

  “You gotta sweat smart, though. You can’t just grunt your way to something better. Landscaping, you any good at it? You a pro?”

  “Hell yeah, I’m good. I’m fast as hell, and my edges are gold. I can make your yard look like a million bucks. But my real specialty is topiary.”

  “What, like bird watching?”

  “Plant sculpting.”

  “Hmph. How much do you make landscaping?”

  “Actually, I’m between jobs.”

  “How much did you make?”

  “Twenty bucks an hour,” I lied.

  “How much does your boss make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there’s your problem right there.”

  “Is it?”

  “Y
ou’re good, you said so yourself. But you don’t even know what you’re worth. How are you supposed to advocate for yourself when you don’t know what’s at stake?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You’ve gotta know exactly where you stand; otherwise, how can you possibly make your position seem better? You’ve got to leverage yourself. How else can you create the perception that you’re actually in control when you don’t even know what it is you’re trying to control?”

  “I give up.”

  “You wanna get out of the ghetto, Mike, you gotta follow the money.”

  “What money?”

  “There’s always money. You just gotta look closer.”

  “Like under the couch cushions?”

  “No, Mike, that’s not what I mean at all.”

  “You mean like I gotta think big?”

  “Anybody can think big. Prison is full of big thinkers. Think smart, Mike.”

  “You mean like smoke and mirrors?”

  “No, Mike. I don’t even know what that means. Look, I’m not sure why I’m telling you any of this. These are the keys to my success. This is about the will to power. This shit is gold. I don’t even offer this stuff in my seminars. I guess I find you nonthreatening somehow. And maybe I feel a little sorry for you—which is unusual for me. But the way out of poverty is to infiltrate communities. Communities within communities. Communities under communities. Communities that exist invisibly inside other communities. Communities outside your community that might possibly profit from your community. ¿Comprendes?”

  “How do you infiltrate invisible communities?”

  “You go to three church services every Sunday, plus a Thursday mass at St. Cecilia. You go to fund-raisers and dodge out right before the bidding. You go to city council meetings—even in cities you don’t live in. You go to Little League games—yeah, a little weird, since you don’t have kids, but you’ve got a four-by-eight-foot billboard in center field, plus one in the lot adjacent to Rotary Park, and a realty sign in front of the duplex two doors down, so it seems pretty natural, you being at Little League games, know what I mean? You’re a sponsor. The point is, you be there. That’s how you earn trust. Just by being there. Attendance is gold.”