Help Wanted (10 page)

"
Gracias,
" the woman said without a smile and not much movement of her mouth. She waddled away. Her children, including Rafael, were standing by the entrance that would take them from the basement and back up the stairs.

Richard was glad when they left. He worked until two in the afternoon, bagging groceries and applying to his face a smile that he—and maybe others—could tell was not always sincere. He felt bad about that, his
insincerity, and tried to make up for it by helping a grandmotherly woman with her groceries. She needed someone to lug them home for her. Home, she said, was only three blocks away.

"Watch your step," Richard warned as they climbed the steps of the basement. He couldn't hold her arm to help because he was carrying two heavy bags of groceries.

To Richard the world seemed full of too much light. He had to squint his eyes shut until the pupils adjusted. When he opened them, he was surprised to find the woman fitting a cigarette in her mouth. She lit it and took three quick puffs, followed by a long pull that collapsed her cheeks. When she released the smoke, it took the shape of a noose. She next licked her thumb and put the cigarette out with its wetness. The woman carefully cupped the cigarette into her hand and placed it back into her coat pocket.

"Which way?" Richard asked.

"That way," the woman answered, pointing, vaguely. A cloud of smoke broke from her mouth.

The two walked in silence for three blocks. Richard tried to think of something to ask her, but his mind was disturbed by her smoking.
Where does she find money to buy cigarettes, anyhow?
he wondered.
Isn't she supposed to be poor and unable to afford such a trashy luxury?

Finally he managed to ask a question he believed
might get them talking: "Have you always lived around here?"

"What?" the woman asked, cupping her wrinkled ear toward him.

"Are you from around here?" he tried. He was upset at the sight of an old ear that had heard truths and lies and—somewhere, at some time, by someone—words of love?

"Yeah, I live nearby." She pointed in the direction of a tall apartment building with torn awnings. Two men in greasy jackets were changing a flat tire.

"In that building?" Richard asked. He jerked his chin toward the apartment building.

"Yeah, I live nearby."

Richard pleated his brow with lines of confusion. He had to wonder if she was all right in her head. After that Richard just kept a slow pace, but in one weak moment he nearly asked that she hurry up. The bags of groceries were hurting his arms. Once he had to stop and place the bags on the hood of a car and rest. It was during this two-minute break that she took out her unfinished cigarette, lit it, and took a few puffs that had her mouth gathering into deep and dark lines. She then again wet her thumb and stubbed the cigarette against its moisture. It sizzled.

Richard was glad that he finally got to her place, which was not an apartment but a house. The front
yard was full of weeds, and the grass was dead where a parked car had leaked oil. He climbed the steps ahead of her, placed the bags of groceries in front of the door, and waited for her to climb the steps.

"Let me help," Richard, a good cadet, said. He clomped down the steps and hooked his arm under hers, creating an image of a mother and good son to a passerby. At that moment he felt a sharp weight in her pockets—it took no smarts for Richard to figure that she had helped herself to a few cans without asking. Still, he wasn't about to say anything. He just wanted to get away. He waited for her to open the front door so he could say, "You're home! I gotta go."

"You can put the bags on the table," she told him. She shoved the door open and entered.

He bent down and picked up the two bags. Following close on her heels, he was overwhelmed by the stench of cigarettes and—he sniffed, nose moving like a rabbit's—an odor he recognized. Then he saw where it came from: What he imagined was a furry couch was actually layers and layers of cats. Their glowing eyes seized his attention. Three stood up, stretched with gaping mouths, and climbed down from the couch.

"Oh, man," Richard muttered.

"What?" the woman asked as she took off her hat. Richard could see the white roots of her dyed hair.

"Nothing," he said. He hurriedly set the grocery
bags on what he believed was the kitchen table. On the table lay two more cats, asleep, though their tails were twitching. His steps didn't disturb the sleeping cats. And the cats didn't spring awake when cans of soup dropped from the old woman's coat pocket with a loud bang—she had taken off the coat and hastily swung it onto a chair.

Richard picked up one of the cans that had rolled near his feet. A can of creamed corn. He set it on the table.

"I'm hungry," the old woman said. "I like vegetable soup."

Richard bit his lip. He didn't like her, and he didn't like the house. Three cats were rubbing against his ankle. "I have to go."

"Help me." Her eyes had a pleading look of someone clinging to a cliff.

Richard wondered what she meant.

"Change a lightbulb for me." She waved a hand toward the darkened hallway.

"Yeah, I guess," Richard answered lamely. He had to wonder if the lightbulb was in her head—she seemed dim.

Then a sound of water running in the bathroom made them turn their heads. They both held their breath.

"Is anyone home?" Richard asked. He was ready
to pitch a can of creamed corn if an intruder showed himself.

"What?"

Richard repeated himself. He asked if anyone was there.

"I didn't hear anything." The woman cupped her ear in order for its ancient hole to pick up a sound as quiet as a knock.

"I think there's someone in the bathroom," Richard said.

She winced. "Maybe..."

The bathroom door swung open. A voice called roughly, "Grandma?"

Instead of relaxing from hearing what only could be a familiar voice, her face grew tense. The old woman grew scared. She turned to Richard and, in a near whisper, repeated, "Help me." Scared, Richard backed away when her hand rested on his shoulder.

From the darkened hallway appeared Jared, the kid from school. Smoke was rolling from his nostrils. Jared stopped. He looked at his grandmother, then Richard, a fanglike snarl creeping from the corner of his mouth. He stepped into the dining room and, eyes still on Richard, asked his grandmother, "What's he doing here?"

Richard explained.

"He's a nice boy," the old woman added.

Richard stood nearly at attention, his hands curled at his sides, his shoes angled and pointed outward.

"Your grandmother asked me to help her," Richard said.

"Yeah, but you're done now, ain't you?" Jared walked around the table, and for a second, Richard thought Jared was going to hit him. But Jared just plunged his hand into his grandmother's pocket and brought out a crushed pack of cigarettes.

"Don't—" his grandmother started to say, but her hand instinctively came up and swatted those words from her lips.

Richard turned away, head down.
Let them fight over cigarettes. Let them put in their own lightbulbs.
Two cats, like sentries, stood by the door. Both of them were washing their paws with the buds of pinkish tongues.

He left the house. The sunlight had him squinting his eyes. This time, however, he wasn't hugging bags of groceries, and he was able to raise a hand to shield his sight. He appeared to be giving a cadet salute, and he realized that. He realized also that the world needed discipline and that maybe it was a soldier's duty to provide it.

"Why is it like this?" he asked himself. "Why are people like this?" His mind flashed on his father, who had disappeared on a bicycle, and then his mother, who was probably at the sink peeling carrots or potatoes. His mind flashed on Desiree Sanchez. He would never catch up with her.

"That's the way it is," he found himself saying.

He climbed down the steps and took a sharp left. Soon he was marching in a clipped step and wondering about that community service ribbon he would earn, imagining a future that did not include smoke billowing from bitter mouths.

When Norma Lucero opened up her locker, she wasn't sorry to find that her flute was gone. In fact, she smiled and stomped her shoes, an action that made her skirt jump around her knees. And was that a rush of blood into her heart? She touched her heart, then her cheeks. Her temperature had risen.

"Yes," she said to herself. She raised a fist and repeated, "Yes." She closed the locker, turned, and leaned against it. Her smile was like a bright orchid on a cold winter day.

It wasn't that Norma hated playing the flute or the long hours of band practice in the musty basement of Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School, a dingy room where the furnaces clanged, rattled, and messed up everyone's musical timing. And it wasn't that she hated
looking like a nerd as she carried her instrument in a black case. No, the disappearance of her flute meant love: Samuel Ortega, a boy she liked a lot, had pulled her case from her grip the week before, and she'd had to run after him until he relented and gave it back. Now, she assumed, he had stolen it. Love was a kind of thief, she believed. Love involved taking something and giving it back.

She didn't have to dig deep into her memory to recall the day when Samuel had spit a mouthful of sunflower-seed shells and then asked, "Why don't you kiss me instead of that flute?" That a sunflower-seed shell stuck to his lower lip didn't destroy the beauty of that moment for her. It would soon fall off, and he would return to being the perfect boy for her. Sure, he was a little heavy, but wasn't she, too? Didn't that make them a perfect match?

That Samuel knew nothing about her music didn't keep her from liking him, either. "You'd like that, huh?" she told him, not too loudly, then giggled with a hand in front of her mouth. She had to admit that the way she pursed her lips when she played the flute was something like kissing—or so she believed. She had never kissed anyone, except Mom and Grandma, and her dad, when he was still around.

"Samuel's taken it," she told herself, and strode off to the cafeteria to buy some hot chocolate. "I'm sure of it."

"Hey," Rachael Duran called. Rachael, a member of band, was carrying a flute, too. "Let me copy your math."

Norma stopped in her pigeon-toed tracks. "Oh no," she moaned.

Rachael was a girl who wrote answers to quizzes up and down her arm, who pestered you with e-mail ("How do you spell Venice?" or "Who's Thomas Jefferson again?"), and who borrowed things and never gave them back. Norma noticed that Rachael was wearing Norma's barrette. She had lent it to Rachael during a parade march and never got it back.

"No, I can't," she yelled, and hurried toward the cafeteria to buy herself a morning treat. She let sixty-five cents, mostly in nickels, rain into the outstretched palm of the cashier. The cashier gave her a nickel back—she had paid too much.

When she blew on her hot chocolate, she saw in the reflection of that heavy brew that her lips were pursed—
Kiss, kiss, kiss,
she thought. Her giggling shook the surface of the hot chocolate into ripples. As she put her drink down on the table, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps. She put up her hand, as if stopping traffic.

"No, I said," she said to Rachael. "I can't let you copy my homework."

Rachael pouted. "Come onl"

"It's not right!"

"I'm your friend."

Friend?
Norma thought angrily.
A pest, you mean. A bug in my ear. A foxtail in my sock.

"I won't ask except this one time. I promise." Rachael crossed her heart to make her point.

"I said no." Norma shouldered her backpack, picked up her hot chocolate, and walked away, indifferent to Rachael's snarl. "You better watch your back, girl."

Norma had been in such a good mood. Sip-sip-sipping from her hot chocolate. She had had the best thing she owned, her flute—
sip-sip
—taken from her by Samuel Ortega. What a guy!
Sip-sip.

She fought her way through a crowd of students exiting through the glass doors of the cafeteria into the yard. She perched, knees together, on a cement bench, where she dreamily watched the steamy hot chocolate. When she exhaled, she saw her breath hang in the frosty air of midwinter.

"He likes me!" she exclaimed. She smiled. "Why else would he steal my flute?"

She had never had a boyfriend. She didn't even have many friends, and those friends were at church. In elementary school she had spent most of her time alone under a tree, where she read books. Her best friend then was Melissa Campbell, who, like Norma, was a little heavy. Their knees were pink, as were their faces and chubby little hands. Any kind of exertion made them pink—even climbing the three steps
to their bungalow classroom. Together she and Melissa had spent a lot of time combing the manes of their My Little Ponies. They combed and combed them until the nylon hair fell out.

Norma's ears perked up when she suddenly heard a flute call above the sounds of shuffling students and skateboards. She stood up, the folds of her skirt falling out evenly. "Samuel?" She swallowed the rest of her hot chocolate in three quick gulps and grabbed her backpack, which was as heavy as an anchor—the math and biology books alone were as heavy as gym weights.

She walked in the direction of the sound.

"Samuel, give it back!" Of course, she was prepared to run after Samuel. She liked the idea of a chase on a cold morning.

"Samuel, you're going to be in big trouble!"

Norma made her way quickly through the students, some of whom were holding cups of hot chocolate. She thought she could still make out the sounds of her flute but wasn't sure. When the bell rang, the huddling students broke apart and headed noisily off to class.

"Samuel!" she called one last time. She imagined her voice as a flute, and imagined Samuel answering back. "Samuel, it's time for you to give it back!"

But Norma stopped when she saw Rachael seated at a bench and rushing answers to her math homework onto binder paper. She had gotten Jason Harvey
to share his homework. Jason, Norma knew, wasn't good at math. He wasn't good at anything except basketball. Rachael finished copying Jason's homework and gave him a kiss. Her tongue, like a fat worm, touched Jason's tongue.