Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (7 page)

She chortled. “Aw, Ricky, come on!”

“It’s perfectly evident.” He drew himself up and regarded her sternly. “Believe me, Dorothea. I’m no great detective, but the pattern is too clear to ignore.”

My God, she thought in dismay, I’ve hurt his feelings. And after all the study he’s put in on my damned dreams. “How — how absolutely
weird,
to quote my daughter on any number of other subjects. The French Revolution! How about a sherry or something, to celebrate this breakthrough? I’m not making fun of you, you know. This is the first thing to come out of those blasted dreams besides interrupted sleep and plain, nasty fear.”

He patted her arm. “No, thank you, I’m feeling quite high as it is.” She hugged him. She wanted to cry. To have been able to give him something that made him feel happy and strong was wonderful. She had wanted to help, knowing there was nothing to be done. But maybe the rotten dreams were good for something after all. Well worth it, then.

Unless now that he’s labeled them, they stop, she thought. And if they stop, maybe he’ll leave, to avoid “presuming” on me or something.

She admitted to herself the one disgraceful moment on her way back from Albuquerque when she had thought, suppose I get back and find he’s discreetly packed up and left in my absence? A note of thanks, a plant or a book on the table as a thank-you gesture, and my house all to myself again, my time to myself. Not to see him walking around with his death inside, peering confidently out now and then, not to have to hear what he thinks of the wall — recognizing this final cowardice as the true, devious spine of her feelings, she had rejected the whole mess of them.

And with what pleasure and relief she had seen his gawky body framed in the front doorway on her return, while the dogs whooped and capered around them both.

Right. But if he wants to go now that he’s shaken something out of the dreams, now while his body still serves him and his triumph is fresh, I mustn’t selfishly make it harder for him to do it.

“Well,” she said, standing back from him again, “heartiest congratulations. It looks as if you’ve cracked the code.”

“Oh, not at all,” he demurred. “I may have located the ball-park, as you might say. But the big question is still wide open.”

Ah, the big question. He would stay for the answer to that, she was sure. “You mean, why. Any theories?”

“Not a clue,” he said cheerfully, “but perhaps your dreams will honor our progress by pointing the way more concretely now. At least we’ve made a start.”

She stooped and fished a book from the carton. “Well, we certainly won’t need this, will we? He’d never have gotten as far as you have, not distracted as he was with his cigars and his rampaging libidos and whatnot.”

“What’s that?” Ricky said, squinting.

She grinned. “One of Nathan’s. He left me tons of books. This is Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams.”

2

Cousin Bobbie was younger, smaller, and neater than Roberto was. If I’m a phantom jet fighter, Roberto thought, Bobbie’s a Cessna. Bobbie sat tucked together on the rock, his arms around his shins. He looked pale, as if living up in the Heights with the Anglos had bleached him out.

Their parents’ houses had been next to each other on Pinto Street down in the valley part of Albuquerque. As kids the cousins had shot basketball together for hours with other guys outside Frank Lopez’s garage. A rusty hoop had hung there for years, until the house and the garage had both burned down from a water-heater explosion.

You wouldn’t expect Bobbie to go hoop-shooting now, in his fancy jeans with the stitched designs on the back pockets. His shirt had an alligator on the front. His motorbike gleamed in the shade of the willows deep in the canyon below. What the shit had Bobbie ever done to deserve that beautiful bike?

If I had a bike like that, Roberto thought longingly, I’d go to work every day just to show it off.

Bobbie was talking about school, this special school for Heights kids he’d gone to last summer. He was going again now for a three-times-a-week class.

“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “It’s all free credit, as good as. There was this kid in the southwest history class, he told his teacher he had a block about writing reports, so they let him report orally. He put together this little speech the night before class while he was watching tv. Got a good grade for it, too.”

“It’s still school,” Roberto grunted. To tell the truth, which he wasn’t about to with Bobbie, he kind of missed the hanging-out part of school. He missed the guys he didn’t see any more because they were still in school while he was out loading sand and wrestling prickly trees and bushes for the landscaping company.

“It beats hanging around being bored all summer,” Bobbie said. “Or working at some crappy job.” Quickly he added, “I mean, like the jobs they give kids, if you can get them — they’re all pretty bad.”

Roberto said nothing. He never talked about his work with Bobbie. Bobbie might say the wrong thing, and they’d have a fight, and there’d be no more rides on the bike.

Roberto tossed a stone into the canyon. It clicked on the boulders all the way down. Beyond the canyon the land sloped swiftly down to the murmuring spread of Albuquerque with the dark meander of trees along the Rio Grande winding down the heart of it, parallel to this long, crumbling mountain that formed the eastern boundary of the city.

“Some of the guys are okay,” Bobbie continued, back on the safe topic of this fancy school of his. “There’s some foxy chicks in my class, too.”

“Stuck-up gringas,” Roberto sneered. “Fuck ’em.”

“Some,” Bobbie said, turning red.

“Don’t give me that shit, man,” Roberto hooted. “Only thing you sleep with is that bike of yours, I bet.” That was another thing: it wasn’t so easy to find girls when you were out of school, except the retards, the pigs laying around in wait to marry a “father” for some other dude’s kid.

He prodded his crumpled beer can with the toe of his boot. The can slid off the rock and clanked faintly down into a clump of brush where it hung, gleaming in the brilliant sunlight.

“How many cans you think it would take to fill up this whole canyon?” he said. “We should go to one of those recycling dumps and load up a whole lot of cans in a truck, shit, a plane, and come bomb those cans down, let them loose. Wham! No more canyon, everybody jumps out of bed yelling, ‘Hey, what was that? Earthquake!’”

Bobbie said, “You can get money for those things.”

Shit, he’d gotten yellow living in the Heights, yellow and prissy. Won’t even come down for the street-closing next week, too busy filling a garbage bag with cans to help keep his neighborhood clean.

“Penny-a-can, garbage man,” Roberto sang, pushing Bobbie’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, litterbug bit you? I got a right, man. There’s nothing here that didn’t belong to us first. Why they call this Juan Tabo Canyon, after some damn Anglo, you think? Just because those fuckers put a fence around half the mesa and say it’s theirs!

“Now if it had of been me, I’d have snuck up the canyon with a rifle and when the sheriff came to throw me off my land, I’d shoot hell out of them all, blow them away into the sunset, blam, blam!” he yelled, sighting along the barrel of an imaginary gun. “Boom! Blow their brains out, ka-pow, ka-pow, Dirty Harry, get them all!”

He stopped, embarrassed to be playing shoot-out like a little kid.

“Your land?” Bobbie said. “Hey, bro, you’re a city kid, just like me. If this land was yours now, all you’d know is to subdivide it, just like they do.”

“What if I did?”

“I’ve got to go to class pretty soon,” Bobbie said, getting up. He looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m going to be late! Look, I don’t have time to drop you back at Pinto Street first.”

Roberto got up too, brushing the dust from the seat of his jeans. “Okay, just leave me off where I can thumb a ride.” Shit. You’d think with that fancy watch of his, Bobbie could keep track of time better — Anglo time.

Already starting down the steep back-slope, Bobbie turned. “listen, bro, why don’t you come to class with me? It’s only drawing, everybody’s pretty terrible at it, and you don’t have to know anything much. I’ll run you home after.”

“Shit, no, man, I’m allergic to school.”

“This is different, I told you.”

“It’s all the same.”

Bobbie stepped back, elaborately casual. “You’re not scared, are you? Come on, man. I’ll come down to help close Pinto Street next week, okay? Cut class, everything, to be there too. I’ll do that. You scared to come to a little art class with me today?”

Hell, when he put it like that — Roberto shrugged. “You’re crazy. The teacher won’t let me in anyhow.”

“Yes she will. They’re real cool at this place; nobody gets fussed up except maybe if you did dope right on the doorstep.”

Bobbie’s life, Bobbie’s kind of friends. Roberto was curious. He was a little nervous, too. Nervous about some Heights kids in some kind of playschool? No way he could really be scared of that!

“I don’t know about pictures, art, that stuff,” he said.

“So what? That’s what they’re supposed to be teaching you.”

Blanca’s sister Mina had her ride to work already. Their mother put on her long, sagging sweater-coat. She left early on the mornings that she went to work in the discount store, because sometimes the old clock in her bedroom slipped a couple of minutes.

Blanca, finishing her cereal, said nothing. She was afraid she would let out the secret if she spoke: today was the day, and Mom didn’t know. That suited Blanca. She would rather die than tell. She was furious with her mother over this asthma camp that her mother had gotten her into somehow. What a bummer — a whole camp full of asthmatic brats, and they made you go swimming and climbing and all kinds of things they thought you should be able to handle. Blanca had had enough of that with her Phys. Ed. teachers in school.

Mom insisted that these camp people were experienced, they knew. Hell they did. Nobody knew, not even the doctors. Look at all the different things the different doctors at the clinic had told them over the years: exercise, don’t exercise, take this medicine, take that one, you’re taking too much, you’re not taking enough, don’t over-protect your daughter, she’s being allowed to do too much. Nobody knew.

Blanca had refused to talk about it at all. She kept silent to avoid bursting out with the anger that would probably trigger an episode.

What if the camp people gave her the wrong medication, or they had some doctor there with a whole new plan and it was wrong? Here in Albuquerque Blanca knew the dangers. What if there were different pollens up there in the mountains to set her asthma off?

Her own mother wanted to expose her to these dangers: her own Mom, who was supposed to “understand.” Boy. She watched her mother hunt for bus tokens in the cracked sugar bowl on the sideboard. All she understood, Blanca thought bitterly, was how mad and scared it made her when Blanca had an episode. You didn’t have to be a genius to guess how sick Mom was of the whole thing, years of it now. Let’s push it all off on some strangers for a while, give the family a break.

The only one who never got a break was Blanca.

Besides, imagine leaving Albuquerque in summer, when there was so much to see — people living on the porches and in the yards of Pinto Street to escape the heat, and the exciting business today of the street closing that Mom didn’t know about and Blanca wasn’t supposed to know about, but of course she did. Knowing things was her best protection.

At the door her mother looked back. “Quita, you’re sure you don’t want to come to the store with me today?”

“I have this report to finish, Mom.”

“All right, but you stay inside, Blanquita, hear me? No running around. And don’t forget your relaxing exercises and your medicine. You know where the doctor’s number is. You sure you feel okay this morning,
mi hija?
I don’t like how you look.”

“I’m sure, Mom.”

At last Mom was gone, and Roberto was slamming drawers in his room looking for something. Soon they’d all be gone. All you had to do was be patient.

Blanca washed her cereal bowl and went into her own room. She shut the door and then opened it a crack again, quietly. She listened to her brother getting ready to leave. Her older sister didn’t know she was alive, her mother fussed over her too much, and her brother thought he could boss her around. That was how it was, being the youngest and having asthma. With Mom and Mina gone to work, Beto acted like he had the whole place to himself.

“Hey, Quita!” he yelled finally, “got a pen? I can’t find nothing to write down license numbers — shit, there’s nothing in here but a bunch of stupid crayons!” She could hear him rummaging furiously in the kitchen drawer that served as a catch-all.

“Here,” she said, tossing him a pencil she had already chewed. “Where are you going to be?”

“At the ditch,” he said. Pinto Street ran east at right angles to Fourth, the major road up the north valley, and ended at the big irrigation ditch that ran along Second Street, parallel to Fourth. The access to Pinto from Second, across the plank bridge over the ditch, was to be Roberto’s station. “Me and Horacio and John Archuleta. I could do it myself, but it’s going to be more fun with some other guys around.”

He left running, but slammed back in again almost at once. He grabbed a bowlful of cold potatoes out of the fridge and dashed out again, hollering with his mouth full, “Hey, Horacio! Wait up!”

At least he’d remembered to take food. They were supposed to guard the two entries to Pinto Street’s short length, Fourth on the west and Second on the east, all day long. The chances were pretty good that Beto would not come barging back in here at lunch time and find her gone.

Blanca waited a little before she went to the kitchen to get herself something to eat outside: a chunk of cheese in its cellophane wrapper and an orange. She hated cold cooked leftovers.

Back in her bedroom, she took off her bathrobe and laid out fresh underwear. Out of habit she looked in the long mirror on the closet door, the mirror that her sister Mina used for her preening. To Blanca it showed nothing new and nothing good, reminding her merely that there were reasons why her mother babied her and the others bullied her or forgot she existed.

Her arms and legs were sticks like broomsticks. But that was better than before, when the doctor had her on corticosteroids and she had swollen up and couldn’t stop crying. Another doctor had finally taken her off that stuff and given her cromolyn powder to inhale instead. Now she was thin, little and thin, and they said — she wasn’t supposed to hear — that she would stay little. The corticosteroids had permanently stunted her, that was what the new doctor had said in a roundabout way until Mom pinned him in a corner and he said it straight out.

Mom said, you’ll be like other kids, give the doctors a chance. There was another doc at the clinic who said that Blanca would begin to grow again now and “fill out.” That was what they always said, meaning, start looking like a cow, like Blanca’s sister Herminia. As if you weren’t a human person, if you were female, until you got great big tits. That was going to be a while, because Blanca was fifteen and still didn’t menstruate.

Mom never gave up. She had even let Great-Uncle Tilo try the old trick of getting a Chihuahua dog and tying it to the bed that Blanca slept in so the dog would take the sickness from Blanca. Blanca remembered being devastated when it didn’t work. That was back when Blanca still thought Great-Uncle Tilo could do things, before she realized what being a drunk really meant.