“Hey, Katman,” Stosh asked as if we'd been having a conversation, “so what are you going to do?”
“I'm going to Mexico.”
“Right. But what if we don't get it together, or even if we do, when we get back wearing our huaraches, then what?”
“I have my prospects,” I said, “a position in the ice-cream sector.”
“You mean like pedaling an ice-cream cart?”
“And then there's cans. America will always need more cans.” I'd worked on the production line at the American Can Company briefly the summer before. The one thing it taught me was that I didn't want to spend my life as my father had, on a production line.
The bank turned increasingly swampy. Cattails and reeds sprouted waist high. We balanced along partially submerged logs and hopped from rock to rock, sending frogs and turtles plopping in. Stosh suddenly sank in ooze up to his thighs. I leapt to the steep bank, grabbed his flailing arm, hoisted hard, and the mud made a smooching sound as he floundered free. His jeans were entirely slimed in mud.
“Sonofabitch,” he said. “I lost a fucking shoe.”
“I went into the jungle, Willy, and, by God, I came out without my shoe,” I managed to choke out before doubling over.
“Oh no, not a fucking laughing fit! You goddamn dope addicts have no compassion,” Stosh said, breaking up, too. We collapsed side by side in the weeds on the bank under the sun, howling while the birds in the trees chittered back.
“Shhh,” Stosh said. “I hear celestial music.”
“You're hallucinating on Bigbo spit.”
“No, listen.”
We clawed up the steep bank toward the sound and peered through a screen of brush. An expanse of perfect lawn, bounded by sculpted hedges that would have employed a truckload of
Manpower workers to maintain, stretched to a turreted mansion that made the great houses lining the streets of Evanston look like so many bungalows. In a formal garden, a string quartet played beside a fountain. White-gloved butlers in livery that resembled my Gents evening suit transported flashing trays of cocktails to the guests stroking croquet balls. A woman with a sleek, muscled Doberman was strolling across the lawn. The dog broke from its leash, loped in circles, then froze and, from the distance, locked on to my eyes. For the second time that day I felt the fury in a stare.
“They're setting the dogs on us,” I whispered.
We scrambled back down the hill as if we were guilty of trespassing and hurried upriver.
“You realize who they were?” Stosh asked, limping along on his single shoe.
“The Fugowi?”
“The Ruling Class. At play in their back yard. You ever seen anybody that stinking rich? They're usually too wily to let you see what real money is.”
“Yeah, but money can't buy happiness. That look like happiness to you?”
“Very profound. One thing they don't know is that while they're having their lawns trimmed and petunias fertilized there's fucking orchids sprouting wild under their stuck-up snouts.”
We had entered an atmosphere of gnats. Clouds of them reshaped themselves to fit the outlines of our bodies. They stuck to sweat. I was afraid if I inhaled I'd feel them buzzing in my lungs.
“Where the Fugowi?” I bellowed. It echoed off the river.
“Cool it,” Stosh cautioned. “If the Rich find out we're here for orchids they'll pass an ordinance that says they own them.”
“Speaking of orchids, where the fuck are they?” I demanded.
Stosh stopped. The plague of gnats evaporated. We stood knee-deep in ferns at a bend where the river pooled.
“They're here, muchacho.” He gestured. “Everywhere.”
For a moment I thought he was putting me on, then among the reeds along the bank I saw them, vivid slashed violet banners, their funnels striped orange and yellow, tiger-furred bees zooming about them.
We had our knives out, cutting bouquets. We took off our shirts and piled the orchids onto them, then insulated them in ferns. Cradling our shirts, we sloshed back along the bank.
Â
The car was sweltering. I was afraid the orchids would wilt. They filled the backseat, where we carefully piled them. Radio blaring the Latin station, we raced to the next stoplight on Sheridan, where the engine died. Stosh tried cranking it, then sat bashing his forehead against the steering wheel.
“Chinga, chinga, esta caro chingau.”
He groaned. “And you, Señor Simpático, had to say something about that poor joker broken down on the Drive. You couldn't just ignore him like everyone else. I told you the gods wouldn't let us get away with that. You know what we are to them? Gnats!”
“Look at it this way, better it happened now than later, in the Yucatán.”
“Ah! the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining theory beloved by nuns. Very profound!”
Traffic jammed the lane behind us while we unwired the hood. Stosh leaned into the huge, hot engine with a wrench, unbolting the fuel pump.
“Move the heap,” a guy in a Beamer hollered as he swung around us.
I flipped him the finger.
“You want a fucken orchid up your rectum?” Stosh raged after him. He disconnected one end of the plastic hose from the fuel
pump, sniffed for gas, and made a face as if ready to barf. “I can't go on.”
“Hurry up before the orchids wilt,” I told him.
He glanced balefully at me, then sucked on the hose and spit out a mouthful of gas. He was still spitting out the taste when the Porsche with the frat guys swung even and braked for a moment, all three of them grinning. “Wanna drag?” the driver taunted and spun rubber. Stosh waved at their rear fender with the wrench. There was a crunching sound from the taillight. “Oops!” Stosh said. The Porsche kept going.
I rewired the hood while Stosh slid behind the wheel, and the engine turned over with an explosive backfire.
“Tijuana or bust.” Stosh grinned as I jumped in.
“All that road rollin,” I said, “and all those people dreaming in the immensity of it.”
Two lights down, an Evanston cop pulled us over.
He was an older guy with a gray crew cut. His partner sat in the squad car listening to calls.
“I'm sure you both know the drill. Let's see some ID. Better yet, get out of the car and assume the position,” the cop said.
We stood with our legs spread and hands leaning on the hot car while he studied Stosh's license without bothering to frisk us down. Maybe Stosh's jeans looked too filthy. “Take those sunglasses off, so I can determine if this is you, Palacz.”
Stosh propped them up on his forehead.
“You been fighting, Palacz?” the cop asked, looking at Stosh's black eye. “You been rolling around in the mud like a pig?”
Stosh said nothing.
“What's with the one shoe?”
“There a local ordinance against one shoe?” Stosh asked.
“You know how many laws this vehicle is probably breaking? What are you troublemakers doing up here, anyway?”
“Worshiping,” I said. “We're Baha'is.”
“You smarting off with me, Katzek?” he asked, reading the name off my license. He looked in the car. “What the hell's in the backseat?”
“Nothing,” Stosh said at the same time I said, “Orchids.” Stosh gave me a disgusted look as if I was a snitch.
“Norm, come look at this,” the cop hollered to his partner, but Norm waved him off. Norm looked impatient to get moving.
“Where'd two characters like you get a carload of orchids?”
I looked at Stosh, and he raised his eyebrows in the crazed Groucho way he had each time he'd repeated “I went into the jungle, Willy,” but he said nothing.
The cop was jotting in a notebook. “Names and license numbers,” he said. “We'll know where to come looking.”
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By the time we hit the neighborhood, the shadows of doorways had edged down the front stairs and out along the sidewalks. After the blue lake and green-reflecting river and the gardens of Baha'i and shady lawns of Evanston, the streets looked narrow and shabby. Even the golden wash of late afternoon couldn't transmute the colors of concrete and faded housepaint. I wondered how it would look when we got back from Mexico.
The scratches along my arms from the thorny underbrush we'd slogged through welted up and burned.
“You know what poison ivy looks like by any chance?” I asked.
“Stop whining, we're rich,” Stosh said. “Figure, if we sell these to flower shops at say six bucks a pop, how many of them are back there? At least fifty. How many pesos is that? Plus we can always go back for more.”
“You're serious?”
“Why not? We could probably sell these at the Fulton Market, where the fruit peddlers go to buy.”
We wheeled down Washtenaw, yelling, “Orchids, hey! Orchids!” as if hawking tomatoes or watermelons.
“Pull over,” I said, and Stosh swung to the curb where an old
babka
dressed in black and wearing a babushka despite the heat was sweeping the sidewalk before a two-flat.
“Jak sie masz, Pani,”
I greeted her. “Would you like an orchid?”
She stopped sweeping and regarded us suspiciously.
“Maybe she thinks you're running the old orchid scam,” Stosh said. “Tell her no strings attached.”
“That was the extent of my Polish,” I told him. I handed an orchid out the window and, when she refused to take it, dropped it where she'd swept. As we drove away, I turned to see her pick it up and smile, revealing a mouth of missing teeth.
“There was someone who needed an orchid, all right,” Stosh said. “Just because we're entrepreneurs doesn't mean we need to be greedheads. Let's give a few away.”
We cruised the bars along Washtenaw, past Harrison High and its cinder ball field, past the motorcycle shop on the corner of Marshall Boulevard where Stosh's brother, Gordo, hung out. Nobody was around. It was that lull in afternoon for which there's no name, when the streets seem composed of shadow and the drawn shades of golden foil, an hour only weekdays have, just before the near riot of traffic when, freed from toil, people rush back to their lives. The Merc, rumbling low and liquid in second gear as if Stosh was trying to drive quietly, rolled into a space across the street from a frame house sided in imitation brick where Dahl lived with her mother. The blinds in the windows of their flat were drawn.
“Probably not home yet,” Stosh said. “She got a job working at a bakery.”
He sorted through the flowers on the backseat until he found the one he wanted, then crossed the street, climbed the stairs, and fit an orchid into the handle of the storm door.
“No note?”
“She'll know who,” he said and took off as if we were making a getaway. “Hey, we're on a roll. How about an orchid run to Bus Girl's?”
I looked at our mud-caked jeans, at Stosh's missing shoe; despite the elation we were riding, it sounded impossible.
“Nah, I'm dying of thirst,” I said, which was true.
“So let's go celebrate. I got a couple
cervezas
tucked in the fridge.”
The sudden idea of seeing Laurel again after thinking about her continually since prom night made me feel as if I'd just taken a hit of speed. In my daydreams, I planned on calling her when I got back from Mexico with something pretty I'd bought for herâI didn't know exactly whatâsomething you could only get in Mexico. We splished down Twenty-fourth Place, our windows open to the spray as the Merc windshield-wipered through the car wash of an erupting hydrant. I tossed an orchid to a little girl wading in the flooded gutter. We turned onto Rockwell, cruising along the truck docks and factories, and as we passed the block length of Spiegel's warehouse I noticed a shift of women filing out of work.
“Hold up,” I yelled, and Stosh braked and double-parked before the employee entrance. I scooped up an armful of flowers and squeezed between the parked cars into the group of women.
“Who's that wild-looking bouquet for, honey?” a poker-faced redhead with a hillbilly accent asked.
“Ladies, good afternoon!” I announced. “The Management of Spiegel's has declared this Women Workers' Day and asked me to distribute these tokens of appreciation. This is for
you,”
I said, presenting the redhead an orchid.
“Why thanks, sugar,” she said, cracking a smile, then gave me a peck on the cheek.
“And this is for you and you and one for you,” I repeated, handing out flowers. They mobbed around me, laughing and kidding and popping gum. Another group of women filed out the door and came over to see what was going on.