Bad Monkeys - Страница 3

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One morning my aunt asked me if I’d like to come help out at the store. Normally there’d have been no chance, but I was already so bored that I said OK. At the end of the day she gave me fifty cents, which seemed pretty cheap for eight hours, even if I did spend most of that time flipping through magazines. Next day, same deal. The day after that, I bailed out around noon, and instead of waiting to get paid I swiped a couple dollars from the till. Then that night before bed, I went to put the two bucks into the drawer where I kept my other wages and my Officer Friendly money, and instead of the twenty-six dollars that should have been there, I only found twenty-four. It was obvious what had happened, but I pulled the drawer out anyway and shook it upside-down, just in case the rest of the money had gotten stuck somehow. A single quarter fell out.

Your pay for the half-day you’d just worked?

Right.

Did you say anything to your aunt?

What would I have said? No fair stealing back what I stole from you? Anyway I had to hand it to her, keeping a step ahead of me that way. And no energy wasted on yelling. It seemed, I don’t know, efficient.

But it was also frustrating. If I haven’t made it clear already, there wasn’t a lot for me to do in Siesta Corta, and once you took away the stuff I shouldn’t be doing, life got really dull really fast.

The low point came about ten days in. My aunt and uncle didn’t own a TV—of course they didn’t—but they did have a lot of books in the house, and one day in desperation I started rooting through their library. Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I wasn’t illiterate, and I wasn’t allergic to books the way some people are, but still, on my list of preferred leisure activities, reading anything more demanding than Tiger Beat ranked somewhere down around badminton and pulling taffy. But there I was, on a perfectly good Friday afternoon, curled up in an easy chair with a Nancy Drew mystery in my lap.

I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be a Nancy Drew fan.

I wasn’t, really. I was a Pamela Sue Martin fan. She was the actress who played Nancy Drew on television—had played her, until she got kicked off the show for being a troublemaker. She was one of my role models. On TV she was squeaky-clean, but in real life she had a reputation for being a bad girl who wouldn’t take shit from people. She’d been in Playboy, and done R-rated movies—just that year she’d starred as John Dillinger’s girlfriend in The Lady in Red. So because of Pamela Sue Martin, I had this image of Nancy Drew as a sort of closet bad seed, cooler than she had any right to be.

The book turned out to be strictly G-rated, but I got sucked into the story anyway, and by the time I came up for air, most of the afternoon had gone by. Which freaked me out when I realized, because, you know, sitting in the same spot for hours, barely moving, that’s the kind of thing Phil would do.

You were worried about turning into your brother?

Yeah. I know it sounds comical now, but at the time? That really was a panic-inducing thought for me. So I got up right then, went and got my money, and made a beeline for the highway.

What about your promise to Officer Friendly?

Well, I wasn’t really going to run away. It was more like a test run—kind of a hitchhiking feasibility study. Turned out to be good timing, too, because while I was standing there by the roadside, I spotted something really interesting.

It was a girl, about my age. Mexican, but with a cigarette in her mouth, which marked her as a member of my tribe. She was sitting out next to the diner, along the wall where they kept the dumpsters. She’d gotten a bunch of empty produce crates and built them into a sort of hunter’s blind, and she was hunkered down in there with a pile of green rocks. Then I got closer and saw that the rocks were actually oranges. The girl had a homemade slingshot, and she was using it to fire these unripened oranges out across the road.

At cars?

That would have been cool, but no, across the road, at the gas station on the other side. There was a guy over there, Hispanic like the girl but older, eighteen or nineteen. He was supposed to be minding the pumps, but what he was actually doing was taking a late-afternoon nap. Or trying to; every time he started to nod off, the girl would cut loose with another orange.

She didn’t try to hit him directly; that would have given the game away. Instead she aimed for the gas-station roof, which was made out of tin. Each orange would make this big thunderboom when it hit, and the guy would jolt awake and come running out from under the roof overhang just in time to get beaned by the orange rolling down. Then he’d stand there rubbing his head and shouting up at the roof, daring the orange-thrower to come face him like a man.

I watched this happen like five times, and each time, I fell a little more in love with the girl. I kept moving closer to her hiding place, too, until I was right on top of her. “Jeez,” she finally said, “crouch down or something if you’re gonna be there. He’s not that dumb.”

I joined her in the hunter’s blind. She gave this big sigh, like she didn’t really want company, but then she offered me her cigarette pack. I went to take one and realized they were candy cigarettes—so, maybe not a member of my tribe after all. But I took one anyway, just to be friendly.

“So is that guy your brother?” I asked.

“My stupid brother,” she said. “Felipe.”

Her brother was Phil, too?

Yeah. Weird coincidence. And not the only one: her name was Carlotta. Carlotta Juanita Diaz. “I’m Jane Charlotte,” I told her, and she nodded like she already knew that, and said, “You’re staying with the Fosters.”

“For now,” I said. “What about you?”

“I’ve always lived here. My parents came up from Tijuana when Felipe was a baby.”

“Your family owns the gas station?”

“And this place.” She jerked her thumb at the diner. “And my dad’s a deacon in the church.”

“Wow,” I said. “Important people.”

“Yeah, we’re the kings and queens of nowhere, all right.”

Across the way, Felipe had settled back into the lawn chair he was using for a cot. Carlotta handed me the slingshot. “Remember,” she said, “aim high.” I did, and I did manage to hit the roof, although instead of rolling back the orange popped up over the peak and fell down the other side. No matter: Felipe jumped up just the same, and this time, instead of going back to his siesta, he ran inside the gas-station office. When he reappeared a moment later, he was dragging an extension ladder.

“So Carlotta,” I asked, “how long have you been out here doing this?”

“You mean like today, or just in general?”

“This is a regular thing for you?”

She shrugged. “There’s no movie theater in town, so I gotta make my own fun…Here we go.”

Felipe had gotten the ladder set up and started climbing. Carlotta waited until he was on the roof, then used one last orange to knock the ladder away. Game over.

“So,” she said, “you want to get ice cream?”

Carlotta’s parents both worked in the diner. Her mother ran the cash register and waited tables. Her father managed the kitchen—although Señor Diaz’s management consisted mainly of sitting around, reading the Bible and the sports pages, and occasionally yelling at the cooks for not moving fast enough.

“Hey you!” he called, as Carlotta led me in the back door. “Where have you been?”

“Walking to and fro on the earth,” said Carlotta, with a nod to the Good Book in her father’s lap. The crack earned her a scowl that could have come from the Old Testament God Himself.

“That’s not funny, Carlotta. Your mother has been looking for you. She needs help out front.”

“Yeah sure, in a minute,” Carlotta said. She ducked into the walk-in freezer, leaving me alone with Jehovah.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jane.”

Señor Diaz cleared his throat like he was going to spit. He started to return to his Bible study, then looked up again and gave me this long, thoughtful stare.

“You’re the new girl,” he finally said. “At the Fosters’.”

“Yeah, that’s me. The new girl.”

“You’ll be staying with them a while?”

“Looks like.”

“So you’ll be going to school here, then.”

I hadn’t given it any thought, but of course he was right. The prospect didn’t thrill me. “I guess so.”

He nodded. “And how are you planning to get to school?”

“I don’t know. I guess…Is there a bus?”

“Ah! A bus!” He waved the idea away. “Why would you want to take a bus to school?”

“Well…”

“I’ll tell you something—Jane, is it? — the school bus here, it’s not very good.”

“No?”

“No. I would never let my daughter take the bus. We drive her to school. You could ride along with her, if you’d like.”

“I could?”

“Yes. In fact, I think that would be an excellent idea.”

It sounded like an OK idea to me, too, but there was obviously a catch. “Well,” I hedged, “of course I’d have to ask my aunt and uncle first…”

“Oh, I’m sure they won’t object. You just let me talk to them. Here!” He stood up, and dusted off the stool he’d been sitting on. “Here, sit down, relax! Would you like some ice cream?”

Later, Carlotta told me what was up. The previous spring, she’d been kicked off the school bus twice for fighting, and after the second time, the driver refused to let her back on without a written apology. But Señor Diaz wouldn’t hear of it: “He wanted the bus driver fired, you know, for violating my civil rights? But the superintendent wouldn’t do that, so now my father wants to send me to a private school, only he wants the superintendent to pay for it. So we’ve got this lawsuit, but until we win, I’ve still got to go to the public school.” But not by bus. Instead, Carlotta’s mother would drive her to school in the morning, and her brother would pick her up at the end of the day. “Which is OK, except it means a lot of waiting, especially in the afternoon. Felipe can’t leave the gas station before somebody else takes over for him, and some days that’s not until five or six.”