Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (8 page)

Mom always said, I’m not mad at you,
mi hija,
I’m mad at the asthma. A lie; Blanca could feel it.

Mom said, you’re a girl like the other girls, Quita, and you have to learn how to live like them. They had had a huge fight about that because Blanca had voiced her own thought: that she wasn’t a girl, not really. A girl is somebody who grows up and gets married and has babies of her own. Nobody was going to marry Blanca. If she had babies they could be sick like her, so why would anyone want to have them with her?

I will always be a kid, she thought, staring at her knobby knees in the mirror. But people forget about kids when important things are going on. People pay no attention to kids.

She shivered with excitement over what she intended to do. Actually, she was pretty scared, but you couldn’t just lay around being sickly, not when everybody was gearing up for this big effort and even dumb, punky Beto was in on it.

She put on one of Roberto’s old t-shirts, a pair of bleached out jeans, and sneakers on her bare feet. The sneakers dated back nearly two years now. She had not outgrown them yet, although her toenails had worn a hole in the rubber rim of the left one. The thing was to look like some anonymous boy from a neighboring street. Otherwise some well-meaning pain in the neck would spot her and take her home to keep an eye on her until Mom got back.

Her thick hair she stuffed into a baseball cap that Roberto had worn one summer. The cap still smelled of his hair-stuff, ugh.

She put her medication in her jeans pocket, the one without a hole. Where she would find water if she needed to take pills she was not sure, but she’d taken them dry before, throwing her head back hard and working her throat, so that didn’t worry her.

A soft cotton flannel shirt, long-sleeved and faded, completed her outfit. It was a hand-me-down from Roberto that her mother wouldn’t let her wear out of the house because it was too boyish-looking. That was why Blanca loved it. She wore it whenever she could. With her lucky shirt she put on an identity so far from her own that she felt her asthma could not follow.

Dust still hung in the air of Pinto Street from somebody’s car or truck passing through. The houses looked so quiet in the morning. School was out, but most of the kids had gone to the church-sponsored teen outing today. Blanca could see two little kids playing by the sagging fence around the trailer park. Betsy Armijo was feeding the ducks in her yard, all dappled with the shade of the thorny Russian olives her parents had planted before Blanca was even born. Betsy liked to play invalid when she had her period, as if her cramps were the end of the world. Too bad she didn’t know what being really sick was like.

Blanca heard water running and dishes chinking in the Romeros’ kitchen as she walked by. Vallejo’s dog came scuffling out of his dusty yard and grinned at her, trotting along beside her for a little until Mrs. Ruiz’s big mutt began barking from inside her fence, and Vallejo’s dog veered off to go yell back.

Estelle Ruiz, the widow, was out watering her flowers in front of her place, a converted trailer with trumpet vines all over that were now beginning to blossom. She was old and ugly, but nice. Blanca walked fast. Mrs. Ruiz had sharp eyes.

Then that place the Ortegas kept working on while they lived in it, slowly patching it together over the seasons out of adobes, cinder-block, and faded black panels of rigid insulation board nailed over two-by-fours. They had a great big woodpile made from the dozen Chinese elms they had cut down when they started building. Slimy-wet and iron-tough under the bark at first, the wood had finally dried out so it would burn long and hot, and last winter the Ortegas had sold some off to their neighbors. Beto used to pretend he had black widow spiders from that woodpile to turn loose in Blanca’s bed.

The sawhorses were still out in Mr. Lopez’s yard where he’d been working yesterday, building a new coop for his chickens. He said Vallejo’s dog had run off with another hen, and next time he saw that dog he would kill it. Nobody ever saw Vallejo’s dog kill anything, but Mr. Vallejo never fed it and it was very fat, so it was assumed that whatever ran loose and disappeared on the street, Vallejo’s dog must have gotten it.

Blanca thought it was a pissy little dog, always digging its way out from under Vallejo’s chain-link fence around his bare dirt yard. She wouldn’t mind if Mr. Lopez did kill Vallejo’s dog.

Somebody had a tv on loud, soap music. And there was the big old salt-cedar that leaned out of the Roybals’ yard near the corner of Pinto Street and Fourth.

Blanca saw the young men gathered at the joining of the streets. They were lounging together, half-hiding the orange traffic cones behind their legs. Jake and Martín Maestas, Ramon Romero from Truchas, and for goodness sake, Great-Uncle Tilo! He sure looked dried up and funny with the younger men, but he looked sober, too. Somebody must have pushed him to leave his eternal card games and his bottle-passing cronies and come stand with the others like a man. He seemed dignified even, in spite of that beat up old hat of his and his crippled arm hanging like a knotted rope. He’d almost lost that arm years ago, working for the railroad.

The one who looked best, though, was Martín Maestas. He always looked beautiful to Blanca, at least until he opened his mouth to talk — something he did seldom — and you saw the gaps where he’d lost his front teeth. It wasn’t from fighting, as most people assumed when they looked at Martín’s wide shoulders and strong arms and the tattoos on his smooth brown skin. He’d stood too close behind the batter in a sandlot baseball game when he was younger. Sometimes Blanca thought his shy, quiet manner was all because of those teeth; other times she knew it was his nature. But he was a tough guy, too. Nobody messed with the Maestas brothers.

Today Martín wore a sweat shirt with the sleeves torn out to show his biceps, and pressed blue jeans, and boots. He had on his tooled leather belt with his name on it and the brass buckle in the shape of a charging bull. His hair gleamed black in the sun. He looked ready to take on a whole army.

Only nothing was happening. They just stood around and smoked and talked, and after a while Ramon Romero turned on his portable stereo so they would have some music.

People going to work had gone. No cars turned off Fourth or even slowed down. The young men looked bored.

Blanca, bored herself, headed back toward the ditch-end of Pinto Street. She would run a risk that Roberto, stationed there, would recognize her, but even that would be better than a lot of dull waiting around.

She went through the yard of the abandoned Estrada house and under the fence around the wood yard in the next street. From there she could trot down to the ditch and come toward Roberto’s end of things from Second Street.

The ditch was wide and deep, and those who still farmed in this part of Albuquerque’s north valley drew irrigation water from it. It ran alongside Second Street in a rough parallel to the Rio Grande further west, from which its mud-colored water flowed. Every spring the machines came by and dredged the ditch out and smoothed down the dirt along its banks. A fat new growth of weeds was already reclaiming the banks, and straggly elms gave a ragged shade.

Somebody was with Beto and the other boys from the street. It was Bobbie, Blanca’s cousin who lived in the Heights. He had an Anglo kid with him, a brown-haired boy with work boots on and corduroys and a torn t-shirt. The stranger had a big pad of paper under his arm. Bobbie was taking Horacio Ramirez for a ride on his bike up and down the ditch-bank trail, the bike shooting thin gray smoke and making a sound like a machine gun.

Blanca sat under the trees and ate some of her cheese, thinking about asking Bobbie for a ride. Maybe he wouldn’t even recognize her. He hadn’t been down here more than twice since his parents had moved to the mesa that sloped up from the river valley to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains — the new part of the city, full of new people from the east and west coasts. Anglos. This Anglo kid must be one of Bobbie’s new friends from up there. He didn’t look like anything special.

She decided to have one more look at the Fourth Street group. If nothing was going on she would come back here and try to get a bike-ride out of the day anyhow. It wouldn’t trigger an episode, not a little thing like that, just riding around.

She heard men talking as she neared Fourth. The orange cones had been lined up across the end of Pinto Street and backed up with sawhorses. A car that said “Sheriff” on the side was parked there, and Eddie the cop was leaning against the car and talking with the young men. Blanca moved into the shadow of the Roybals’ twisted salt cedar and listened.

“I’m telling you,” Eddie was saying patiently, “you can’t do it. Look, the street belongs to the city. You aren’t allowed to just block off a street like that. What if there was a fire or something, and a fire truck needed to get in or the Emergency Rescue people?”

“We got no fires today and no emergencies except what we’re trying to handle ourselves here,” Jake Maestas said. He had a fierce black mustache and a bandana tied, cholo-style, around his head. “It’s our street. We’re closing it to outsiders today.”

Eddie, who was short and stocky and crew-cut, pushed his cap back on his head and looked past the young men. “What is it, you having a block-party or something? All you do is, you call the city people and let them know, and everything is okay.”

Jake said, “But everything is not okay. That’s the point.”

Ramon Romero said to Martín in a tough voice, “What’s this guy got to do with this anyhow? He’s with the Sheriff, right? I thought we were in the city here, not the county.”

Ramon was a newcomer, sent down from the mountain village of Truchas to live with his aunt and uncle for a while. He didn’t know Eddie, who so often came by here to drop off Great-Uncle Tilo when he’d found him wandering drunk on Fourth Street.

Eddie answered for himself. “I know folks on this street and I see these barriers up and I stop, that’s all. I don’t think you want city cops swarming all over the place, do you? Not if you don’t have to. Let’s just talk about this, okay?”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” Jake said. “I just called the tv news from Mrs. Roybal’s. They said they’ll come up here. We figure if the guys that are after our homes here won’t come to us, we’ll go to them via the media, and we’ll tell them our message: lay off our homes, lay off our street, quit trying to rip us off.”

“Lay off what?” Eddie said. “What’s going on?”

“Some kind of scam,” Jake said. “Some guy has been coming around here daytimes, you know, when there’s not too many men around, and hassling people in their homes. I mean telling them, hey lady, I am a city inspector for the zoning up here, and the zone rules are changed because of that new YMCA building going up across the street, so I got to inspect your place and see if it conforms. And then they come back and they go, Hey, your wiring’s no good, or your plumbing’s not up to code, or this or that, so we’re going to have to condemn it. Only this guy is saying he’s got a buyer, somebody who wants to buy your place and put the money in it to bring it up to code. This buyer would buy cheap, but it would still be a better price than the city will give you if they condemn the place, this guy says. And then he goes, don’t tell your neighbors or it’s no deal, my buyer can’t have everybody trying to get him to buy their place at a better price than the city would give. How does all that sound to you, Eddie?”

Blanca hugged the knobby trunk of the cedar. She liked the way Jake talked, quiet like his brother, but hard, too; no crap.

Eddie scratched the back of his neck. “Sounds like you got some kind of real problem.”

Great-Uncle Tilo spoiled it all by moving forward and saying humbly, “We just want to make our statement, Eddie. You can see no harm is being done.”

“The harm, the only harm,” Jake said, “is being done to us, man. That’s why we’re taking this action.”

A city police car drew up with two cops in it. They got out in a carefully casual manner and came over to join the group. Jake began explaining again about the man who called himself an inspector. Mrs. Roybal came out of her house, drying her hands on a dishtowel. She hung, frowning, on the edges of the knot of men. Somebody came over from the trailer park. Soon a small crowd had gathered, listening to Jake and the cops talk.

One of the city cops got back in his car and used the radio. When he returned, Blanca could see the patches of sweat beginning to darken under the arms of his blue shirt. He was nervous, she thought. Funny to think of the cops, who made everybody else nervous, being up-tight themselves. But there were only the two of them and Eddie, and all these people from Pinto Street.

Martín Maestas was talking to Mrs. Roybal and several other neighbors now. Mrs. Roybal was not liking whatever it was he was telling her. She looked mad. She shouldered into the crowd and started talking over Jake as he talked to the police, all on top of the racket from Ramon’s portable stereo.

One of the cops asked Ramon to turn the sound down. Ramon sneered. He didn’t turn the sound down.

Here came Roberto, running down Pinto Street with the Anglo kid tagging after him. Blanca watched him work his way into the crowd to be nearer to Jake. He really hero-worshiped Jake Maestas. And he better not see her here, or he’d send her home.

She swung herself up into one of the lower branches of the tree where the bark had been polished smooth by a lot of kids sitting there. She sat panting slightly, triumphant to have gotten up this high without setting off the asthma and to have had the strength to climb at all.