Help Wanted (6 page)

"It's a beautiful day," Veronica remarked.

For moneymaking,
Javier thought. He couldn't wait to get home to examine closely those two hundred-dollar bills in his pocket.

"What do you think of my toes?" She wiggled her blue-painted toenails at Javier.

"They look clean," he answered.

She laughed.

Javier wished she would be quiet and let him suck down his pineapple milkshake—he had changed his mind about a smoothie. He was thinking of stuffing her mouth with napkins when she asked if he wanted to go to a dance with her.

A mouthful of milkshake went down his throat like
vegetables. "I don't know how to dance," he admitted. He sighed.

"Silly, you don't have to know how to dance to go to a dance."

Javier blinked, confused.

"A dance is where you go, you know, to see people, to be with your friends." She sucked some of her strawberry milkshake and then said dreamily, "Like last year in San Francisco. My dad took me there to a sort of pre-coming-out dance. You know what a debutante is?"

Javier shook his head.

"It's like when you turn sixteen and you meet society."

Society,
Javier wondered. "What's society?"

"It's like when parents show off what kind of daughter they raised." She described the fancy dance ball she went to in San Francisco. There was an orchestra and waiters in tuxedos and all kinds of food. "I wore long gloves," she said, wiggling her fingers and laughing.

Javier wondered if that dance had been outside. He had heard San Francisco was cold. He asked if it had been cold at the dance.

"No, silly. Everyone wears gloves. White ones."

"The boys, too?"

She nodded her head. Then she pulled a necklace from under her sweatshirt and said, "A boy gave this to me."

Javier sucked a cheekful of milkshake, swallowed, and muttered, "Cool."

"It's a ruby," Veronica whispered, her head leaning between the two milkshakes. "He was really nice. He's in Junior ROTC and is a captain. His dad's a colonel in the air force." She sipped her drink. "My dad used to be a colonel, too. He retired a long time ago, just after my parents broke up."

"That's when he started his onion farm, huh?" Javier could sense a nastiness grow in himself. He didn't believe a word she was saying.

"No, the onion farm was in our family for a really long time. Since the conquistadors came—or something like that." She explained that the Spanish adventurers settled in New Mexico and her family was part of the first settlers. "Of course, we didn't grow onions back then. It was just for sheep, I think." She stirred her drink with a straw. "I'm not really Mexican, like you. I'm Spanish."

Javier gazed out the window at his bicycle.
Just a few more sips of this milkshake,
he reasoned,
and I'm outta here.
He was mad that she was denying she was Mexican.
She's embarrassed,
he growled in his thoughts.

"You know the explorer Cortez? My last name is Cortez. We're related."

"Yeah, right," Javier snarled. "Veronica, you're a liar!"

Veronica's smile disappeared. She let go of her straw, which began to sink into her milkshake.

Immediately, Javier felt bad. "Well, maybe not a liar, but you're making all this up." He couldn't see the difference being lying and making something up, but the latter seemed less offensive.

"I'm not a liar."

"So, your dad has a farm in New Mexico and some grapes in—" He stalled as he tried to remember the place.

"Napa. And yes, he does. He grows zinfandel varietals."

"And he flies a helicopter! And he was a captain in the air force!"

"Colonel," she corrected coolly. She lifted her straw from her milkshake.

Javier's face reddened with anger. He continued in spite of himself: "And you're Spanish, not Mexican like me. And you went to this stupid fancy ball. And you've got all those Barbies and Kens. Plus, your mama drives a Ferrari." His voice had grown louder until he sensed the pimply guy behind the counter sneering at him. Suddenly he lowered his head.
I'm a jerk,
he thought.
I should just let her lie and lie.

"You know, you're being really awful, Javier." Her voice was about to crack.

The two became silent.

"I'm sorry," he heard himself mutter. He considered plunging his hand into his pocket and giving back her two hundred dollars. Indeed, his hand went into his pocket, felt the crisp texture of new money, but then he brought his hand out empty. He really felt like a jerk when Veronica's eyes filled with tears. When the tears began to spill, he apologized, "I'm sorry. I believe you."

"No, you don't."

"Yeah, I do." He almost crossed his chest and said, "Scout's honor."

Veronica wiped her face, jumped from the stool, and left the store, riding away with the teapot clanging like a bell on the handlebars.

The next day Javier looked up "charminggirl" on eBay.

"Dang," he muttered when he found her account and discovered that she had already posted the teapot for sale. The teapot's price was two hundred dollars, but it was going for over three hundred. Javier looked up from the computer screen. Even though he was full from breakfast—
chorizo con huevos
and
papas
with homemade tortillas—he had an empty feeling in his stomach. He felt that he had lost something precious.

"I'll call her," he said. But he couldn't remember her last name. He knew she shared the name with an explorer, but which one? He asked his mother, who was on the couch in the living room. Her face was layered with lettuce—she was suffering a headache from the buzz of the neighbor's leaf blower. Her hands were fitted with rubber gloves—his mother made her own moisturizer from honey, and she wore gloves to keep it off her clothes and furniture.

"Mom, who's the Spanish explorer?"

"Christopher Columbus."

"He wasn't Spanish."

"Thomas Edison." She held the lettuce on her face as she started to laugh. Her headache, it seemed, was gone.

"Mom, Edison wasn't an explorer!"

"Michael Jackson." She laughed harder.

"No wonder I'm getting Cs in school!"

Javier stomped from the living room as she uttered, "Placido Domingo." He went into the kitchen and was about to call the library to ask about the explorer when the telephone rang. It was Veronica.

"I'm sorry about yesterday," Javier said before she could speak. And he was, and was especially sorry because she had the teapot that was going for hundreds.

"I understand how you might not believe me," Veronica nearly sobbed.

"I do," he lied.

"You do?"

"Yeah, totally."

She asked what he was doing later. Her father had
flown his jet from New Mexico and was going to rent a helicopter to view some vineyards outside of town. Her father was thinking about buying them.

She won't stop,
Javier thought.
She lies and lies and lies.
But could he be wrong? The idea flashed in his mind.

"I'm playing baseball," he said. "With some friends."

The friends were little kids and the game was with plastic bats and balls. When she asked where, he told her the vacant lot at the corner of his street.

"I know the place," she said. "That's where people sometimes throw garbage."

"Yeah, that's it."

Javier repeated his apology and had to repeat it a third time when she said she couldn't make out what he was saying. She said she had just gotten a cell phone, the kind with a small screen.

Liar!
he shouted in his heart.

He was about to ask her about the teapot when she said that she had to go, that her brother was calling from France. "
Ciao,
" she said, "I'll see you later."

Dang!
Javier groaned as he hung up. He had been stupid to trade the teapot. He got back on the computer and searched eBay. It was going for over four hundred dollars.

"It's not fair!" he cried in anger. For a moment he wondered if he was wrong. Maybe she was rich. After all, she did wear nice clothes and he had heard she
sometimes had parties at her house. He did remember her buying ice creams for all the girls in third grade. Plus, didn't she seem to pull out hundred-dollar bills from her pocket whenever she wanted? In the end, though, he figured she couldn't be that rich. "No way," he told himself. "She's just like me—like the rest of us."

Javier left the house just as his mother was mixing a bowl of egg whites, a concoction she would apply to her throat. The mixture, she said, would keep her throat from sagging.

"I'll be back," Javier hollered.

He went into the garage to see if there was something worth anything. He kicked among the boxes. He scanned the shelf where his mother kept the detergent and bleach—nothing. He rifled through a laundry basket of old clothes; the sour smell nearly brought tears to his eyes. He wrestled a lawn mower and car parts out of the way to get to a chest of drawers. "It's got to have something," he told himself. When he opened the top drawer, a mouse leaped up and scampered over his shoulder.

"Ahhh!" he screamed.

He hurried out of the garage and seconds later returned to retrieve the plastic bat and balls. Late for the baseball game, he ran to the vacant lot and found the little kids sword fighting with branches.

"You're going to hurt yourselves," Javier said.

"We're already hurt," one kid said. He showed him
the skinned elbow from when he had fallen. Another kid showed him where he had been whacked on the back of his hand.

"Man, you guys," Javier snarled. "Your parents are going to blame me."

"No, they won't," one chubby kid claimed. "They won't care unless we die. That's what they said."

Because he was thirteen and they were only eight-year-olds, Javier played himself against them. But he couldn't concentrate. The image of the teapot kept floating behind the back of his eyes. He imagined it on eBay and its auction price rising to over a thousand dollars.

"She's such a liar," he found himself saying as he swung through a pitch. "Yeah, right, your brother lives in France and you've got a cell phone." He swung and missed again. "Yeah, right, you have the lightbulb that once belonged to Thomas Edison." He swung and missed badly.

He was out, but none of the kids in dirty T-shirts cared. An ice-cream truck rolled up the street and the kids ran after it. Javier was glad they were gone. He sat in the shade of a pomegranate tree and stuck a blade of grass in his mouth. He placed his hand over his brow, as if he were saluting, and made out his cat walking on a neighbor's car.

"You're going to get busted, buster!" he yelled. He
liked his cat because he was an adventurer that sometimes scratched at the front door with a mouse in his mouth. Javier was about to get up to get him when the dirt at his feet began to swirl. He heard a sound above—
whump, whump, whump
—and when he peered up, in a confused state, thought he was seeing a washing machine falling out of the sky.

His pants began to waver and his T-shirt flapped about his belly. The dirt powdered his face like makeup.

"Hello down there!" a voice blared through a bullhorn.

It's a helicopter,
he realized.

"Did you win?" the voice called.

Veronica,
he thought, rubbing his eyes with his fists to get the dust and disbelief from his eyes.

The helicopter hovered over the vacant lot, swirling dust and bending the limbs of the pomegranate tree. The plastic bat and balls rolled away.

Wincing, Javier could make out the pilot—a man wearing sunglasses and a soldier's hat with a shiny colonel's cluster. He could make out Veronica talking on a cell phone. She snapped closed the cell phone and picked up the bullhorn.

"That was my brother. He's flying in to see the vineyard!" she yelled above the whirl of the helicopter's propellers. "Plus, my dad might buy the lake next to it." She then dipped her hand into a sack. "Catch!"

Veronica tossed what he believed was a discolored baseball. But when he caught it, he discovered it was an onion. He sniffed it and recalled her saying that her father had an onion farm in New Mexico.

"I'll see you at school!" she yelled.

He had no choice but to wave as the helicopter lifted slowly and banked away, but not before he heard her yell through the bullhorn, "I'm taking off a week to go to Florida—sorry you can't come!"

He watched the helicopter until it was a speck in the sky.

"Yeah, right," he answered with dirt on his tongue and an onion he tossed like a baseball from one hand to the next. "Yeah, right."

Becky Garza rubbed an old T-shirt up the shaft of her five wood and marveled how the chrome-plated shaft sparkled in the hot summer light. Uncle Andy had given her a set of used clubs (minus the putter) with the promise to take her to the golf course when she got good. And in order to get good, she figured, she had to practice. She first practiced in her backyard, but her cat, Samba, kept chasing the golf ball. Then she practiced in the living room but had to stop that when the golf ball slammed against the television screen. Becky was spooked.
That was close,
she thought. How would she explain a spiderweb-like crack like that? Her parents didn't like her horsing around in the house.

The solution, she decided, was to make her own golf course in the vacant corner lot. She spent two whole
days removing rocks, boards, car parts, bicycle parts, paint cans, and other debris. She raked away litter and cut the long, brittle grass. Some kids from school came by to see what she was doing. They straddled their bikes, spitting sunflower-seed shells, and asked, "What are you doing?" She explained the course, and they listened awhile before riding away doing wheelies.

Becky was in competition with her friend Dulce Rosales. Dulce was a smallish girl who played tough at all sports, especially soccer. Dulce wasn't afraid of playing football with boys or handball with grown-ups. She tied back her ponytail and taunted, "Let's go." But Becky felt that Dulce was too rough to understand the subtle nature of golf. Golf was a thinking person's sport, Uncle Andy said. Becky wiped her face and complained, "Man, it's hot."