Whatever the conspiracy involved them, I wanted in.
I hopped over to the desk. Cliff held up the pad on which scribble-scrabble writing filled the page to the edges in the margins, cursive curlicues flourishing with a more controlled hand in the center of the college-ruled page. There were jagged, weird marks that for all I knew were diacritics from a foreign language filling the rest of the page, deeply inked impressions where someone drilled the pen into the paper, probably in frustration, the whole crosshatching of graffiti topped by that most recent big ink swirl my uncle had made in the pad before getting pissed and chucking the thing to the floor.
“Look at that.” Cliff held the cigar out over one line, using the stogie like an old-school laser pointer. “Does that signature look better to you than this one?” He swirled his cigar with its outermost leaf peeling over to a less legible scribble in which nothing like a letter was discernible.
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”
“See?” Cliff looked at my uncle, who was surly but self-contained enough to not be snappish anymore. “He’s a young buck with twenty-twenty vision. I’m an old fart who’s got a case of wet brain, and you’re a punch-drunk pug whose got Alzheim-”
“I’m not punch drunk!” My uncle went rigid, but he’d meant his screams for some internal voice that told him the same thing Cliff was saying, only more often than Cutty’s gentle goading. The rage in my uncle’s voice almost covered the doubt.
Cliff stuck the cigar in his mouth, bit, and said, “Good, get angry. Being angry beats giving up.”
A female voice came from behind us, speaking laid-back Spanish, laconic and lingering on the vowels. It was Luna, a clear plastic tackle box in her hands. She adjusted a gold locket draped around her neck, whose tiny heart-shaped pendant dipped into the décolletage of her plunging neckline, where the literal gold nestled in the warm shadow of her bronze cleavage.
Cliff spoke to her in a Spanish that was fast and staccato, machine-gunning from his mouth like a wire report from a cub reporter. He didn’t stick to his vowels like she did, or taste his words the way she lingered over hers.
Cutty’s was city Spanish, and hers was countryside Spanish, I decided.
He looked over at me. “These non-Boricuas talk too slow for a boy from El Barrio.”
I didn’t know what that meant, anymore than I understood the Spanish before that, but he was smiling and so I smiled, too.
“Take that cigar out of your mouth,” she said, “and lose a couple chins and it might be easier for me to understand you.”
He reddened in pleasure. The spotlight had sought him out, and he’d gotten zinged in the front row by his favorite Borscht Belt comic.
Luna looked past Cutty, suppressing a smile meant for the cute old man who’d taken the insult in stride. Her eyes were blind to me and I felt like a ghost, absent and formless without her gaze. She looked toward my uncle sitting in the shadow of the massive desk on the other side of the room, alone in his mind. “Mr. Reeves, I’m going to sew some Velcro tape on your new shirts so you don’t have to use the buttons.” She held up the tackle box. “The doctor just called, and he said he’ll be here in thirty minutes.”
My uncle didn’t speak, move, or acknowledge her words, or the rest of us in any way. She lowered her voice and spoke to Cliff, using English probably for my benefit. “How’s the apraxia exercise going?”
“It’s going.” Cliff took a deep breath, one meant to remind him to be patient with both this process and with his old friend’s mood swings. “Say,” Cliff said, and switched into Spanish after that. He squinted as he spoke to Luna, as if it had been a long time since the mother tongue had touched his lips and he had to search for phrases locked up the cobwebbed vault of his mind.
Luna listened with increasing impatience, frowned as if she’d bitten into unripe fruit finally as she readied to reply. “I’m not a seamstress, Abuelo. I’m doing this as part of my nurse’s duties. You mend your own shirts, you old goat.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“I have my very own money, too, thank you. This is a nurse-patient situation, not a maquiladora.”
She left us without another word, lugging the tackle box away from the den where country music softly played. Cliff beamed as he watched her go, shaking his head as he admired the controlled chaos of her hips swiveling as she moved, above that teardrop booty that could call down thunder easier than a whole tribe in a drum circle trying to draw rain from the angry heavens. Cliff made the sign of the cross over his person with the unlit cigar.
I knew how he felt.
***
The refrigerator was a giant black space-age slab that groaned low as I got close to it. Luna had said the apples were in the bottom crisper on the right, and I found one in the drawer, just where she said it would be.
I rinsed the apple in the sink. Her voice came to me from the other room. She said something that was indistinct, but repeated it as she walked into the room where I could hear her. “You don’t have to wash those. They’re fresh from market. No pesticides.”
She had a new book in her hand, a bodice-ripper paperback with a die-cut cover, in the center of which was a swarthy musclebound man with a ponytail, cradling a damsel. Luna saw where my eye was and held the book up, no shame in her game. She flipped the pages quickly. “Sometimes I have to take a break from the heavy stuff and read trash.”
“A lot of people don’t even read trash these days. It’s better than watching trash.” I did that, too, but I didn’t want to tell her.
“Have you seen the backyard?” Luna asked.
“No.”
I got the feeling she wanted me or us out of the way when the doctor came.
“Come on. I’ll show you where I live. But first…” She stepped around me and I held still, as if she were a magician performing a potentially dangerous trick and it was imperative I didn’t move. The electric warmth of her being this close to me produced two contradictory sensations, a paralysis and a desire to jump out of my skin.