Drown by Junot Díaz Page B

his nappy head in order. A hundred-buck haul’s not unusual for me and back in the day, when the girlfriend used to pick me up, I’d buy her anything she wanted, dresses, silver rings, lingerie. Sometimes I blew it all on her. She didn’t like the stealing but hell, we weren’t made out of loot and I liked going into a place and saying, Jeva, pick out anything, it’s yours. This is the closest I’ve come to feeling rich.
    Nowadays I take the bus home and the cash stays with me. I sit next to this three-hundred-pound rock-and-roll chick who washes dishes at the Friendly’s. She tells me about the roaches she kills with her water nozzle. Boils the wings right off them. On Thursday I buy myself lottery tickets—ten Quick Picks and a couple of Pick 4s. I don’t bother with the little stuff.
     
     
     
    The second time we bring the Gold Crown the heavy curtain next to the door swings up like a Spanish fan. A woman stares at me and Wayne’s too busy knocking to see. Muñeca, I say. She’s black and unsmiling and then the curtain drops between us, a whisper on the glass. She had on a t-shirt that said No Problem and didn’t look like she owned the place. She looked more like the help and couldn’t have been older than twenty and from the thinness of her face I pictured the rest of her skinny. We stared at each other for a second at the most, not enough for me to notice the shape of her ears or if her lips were chapped. I’ve fallen in love on less.
    Later in the truck, on the way back to the showroom Wayne mutters, This guy is dead. I mean it.
     
     
     
    The girlfriend calls sometimes but not often. She has found herself a new boyfriend, some zángano who works at a record store. Dan is his name and the way she says it, so painfully gringo, makes the corners of my eyes narrow. The clothes I’m sure this guy tears from her when they both get home from work—the chokers, the rayon skirts from the Warehouse, the lingerie—I bought with stolen money and I’m glad that none of it was earned straining my back against hundreds of pounds of raw rock. I’m glad for that.
    The last time I saw her in person was in Hoboken. She was with Dan and hadn’t yet told me about him and hurried across the street in her high clogs to avoid me and my boys, who even then could sense me turning, turning into the motherfucker who’ll put a fist through anything. She flung one hand in the air but didn’t stop. A month before the zángano, I went to her house, a friend visiting a friend, and her parents asked me how business was, as if I balanced the books or something. Business is outstanding, I said.
    That’s really wonderful to hear, the father said.
    You betcha.
    He asked me to help him mow his lawn and while we were dribbling gas into the tank he offered me a job. A real one that you can build on. Utilities, he said, is nothing to be ashamed of.
    Later the parents went into the den to watch the Giants lose and she took me into her bathroom. She put on her makeup because we were going to a movie. If I had your eyelashes, I’d be famous, she told me. The Giants started losing real bad. I still love you, she said and I was embarrassed for the two of us, the way I’m embarrassed at those afternoon talk shows where broken couples and unhappy families let their hearts hang out.
    We’re friends, I said and Yes, she said, yes we are.
    There wasn’t much space so I had to put my heels on the edge of the bathtub. The cross I’d given her dangled down on its silver chain so I put it in my mouth to keep it from poking me in the eye. By the time we finished my legs were bloodless, broomsticks inside my rolled-down baggies and as her breathing got smaller and smaller against my neck, she said, I do, I still do.
     
     
     
    Each payday I take out the old calculator and figure how long it’d take me to buy a pool table honestly. A top-of-the-line, three-piece slate affair doesn’t come cheap. You have to buy sticks and balls and chalk and