Drown

This story is divided into vignettes, which are all subtitled, except for the first one.

The narrator, whom we later learn is named Lucero, states that he and his friend Cut drove to the South River for a drug pick-up on the day in which the story opens. He states that the Peruvian man who hooks them up gave them a sampler of his superweed. On the way home, having smoked some of it, the two young men could have sworn that they smelled cookies baking as they passed the Hydrox factory.

Lucero states that it took them four hours to sort, weigh, and bag the weed, and that they were smoking the entire time. Consequently, they became very high. Lucero says that he is waiting for Aurora to show up: she customarily comes by on Fridays, when she knows that they will have freshly-stocked weed.

Lucero and Aurora have not seen each other in a week. The last time they were together, she put long, swollen cuts on his arm with her long nails. Around midnight, she begins tapping on the basement window. When the narrator moves to answer her, Cut tells him not to, and that he should “leave it alone” (48). Lucero states that Cut is not a fan of Aurora: he never gives the narrator the messages that she leaves for him, which are “bullshit mostly,” mixed with an occasional note that “makes [the narrator] want to treat her better” (48).

Lucero listens to “neighbors flush parts of themselves down a pipe,” (48) and the tapping stops. Cut repeats his suggestion to leave the situation alone, but the narrator goes out to meet her. She meets him “in the door of the utility room, a single bulb lit behind her” (48). They kiss, once, and Lucero notices that she keeps her lips closed, in first-date fashion. Lucero intimates that Cut broke the lock to the room a month ago, and that Lucero and Aurora now use the room like it’s theirs. They smoke cigarettes and have sex inside of it.

Lucero notices that Aurora is “skinny—six months out of juvie and she’s skinny like a twelve-year-old” (49). Aurora says that she wants some company. Lucero asks where the dogs are, and Aurora says that he knows the dogs don’t like him. She looks out the window, which is “tagged over with initials and fuck you’s”, and says it’s going to rain (49). She asks where Cut is, and the narrator says the he is sleeping. She replies, “That’s all that nigger does”(49). The narrator notices that Aurora has the shakes, and that she is living out of her bag again. He sees that her bag contains cigarettes, a t-shirt, a couple tampons, and a pair of thin, high-cut green shorts that he bought for her the previous summer. He asks her where she has been, and she evades answering by saying in Spanish that she wanders more than a dog. Lucero notices that her hair is wet, and surmises she must have snagged a shower at a friend’s or in an empty apartment. He thinks he should give her trouble for staying away so long, and even though he knows that Cut is probably listening, he kisses her hand instead.

Aurora tells him that he hasn’t said anything about the last time they were together, implying that they fought. He claims to have forgotten it, and then they have sex. She tells him to “go easy” twice during intercourse, and Lucero states that “she has her hands on my shoulder blades and the way she pulls on them I think maybe she’s trying to open me” (50). Afterwards, the narrator muses that everyone does things that aren’t good for them. He wakes up the next morning alone, and sees that Aurora has turned out his pockets, without even bothering to push them back in afterwards.

A Working Day

It rains in the morning on the day this vignette describes. The narrator and Cut sell little bags of weed, “H”, and “rocks” to the crowd at the bus stop (50). Cut tells Lucero he heard him having sex the night before, and taunts him the whole time about it: “I’m surprised the AIDS ain’t bit your dick off yet”(51). Lucero replies he is immune. They receive four calls and then take the Pathfinder to South Amboy and Freehold, and then head back to the Terrace, to return to walking the streets. The narrator remarks that the less driving they do, the better. The narrator says that none of their customers are remarkable: “We don’t have priests or abuelas [English: grandmothers] or police officers on our lists. Just a lot of kids and some older folks who haven’t had a job or a haircut since the last census” (51).

Lucero states that he has friends in Perth Amboy and New Brunswick who deal drugs to whole families. He says that things are not like that in his neighborhood yet, but that more kids are dealing drugs while bigger crews come in from out of town. While he and Cut are still making good money, it has become more difficult. Cut has been stabbed once. The narrator has begun to think that it’s time to grow and incorporate their drug business, but Cut has resisted, saying that smaller is better.

Lucero and Cut are reliable and easygoing, which ingratiates them to older folks who don’t want any trouble. Lucero excels with kids. When Cut goes to see his girl, the narrator prowls up and down Westminster. He remarks that he is good at working alone, and that he doesn’t like being inside. He muses that those characteristics made a school environment unsuitable for him.

One of Our Nights

This vignette describes a night that Lucero spends with Aurora. He starts by recalling that on previous nights they have hurt each other both physically and emotionally. She has once broken everything he owns, and has tried to slam doors on his fingers: “When she wants me to promise her a love that’s never been seen anywhere I think about other girls,” (52). The last girl was on Kean’s women’s basketball team, “with skin that made [his] look dark”, and would drive her own car to come see him (52). 

On this night, however, he and Aurora sit in front of the TV and share a case of Budweiser. They also have some “H,” assumedly short for heroin. They can hear the upstairs neighbors fighting bitterly. They make sarcastic remarks about them, characterizing their fighting as “romance” and “sweet talk” (52). Lucero states that they fight like that because they’re in love. Aurora takes Lucero’s glasses off and “kisses the parts of [his] face that almost never get touched, the skin under the glass and frame” (52). She says that his long eyelashes make her want to cry. She asks, “How could anybody hurt a man with eyelashes like this?” (52). He responds that he doesn’t know, and thinks to himself that she actually should know such a thing: “She once tried to jam a pen in my thigh, but that was the night I punched her chest black-and-blue so I don’t think it counts” (53).

Lucero falls asleep first, catching flashes of the movie on the television before he drifts off. He wishes he could stay awake through bad TV the ways she can, but remarks that it’s okay, as long as “she’s breathing past the side of [his] neck” (53). Later, he awakens and catches her kissing Cut, who has his hands in her hair. He says “Fuck,” but wakes up hours later to find her snoring on the couch. He puts his hand on her side and says that she is barely seventeen and too skinny for anyone but him. She has left her pipe out on the table and he opens the porch door to let the smell out. He goes back to sleep, and wakes up in the morning in the bathtub with blood on his chin. He cannot remember why he has ended up that way. “This is no good,” he tells himself (53). Lucero goes into the living room, wanting Aurora to be there, but she is gone again. He punches himself in the nose to clear his head.

Love

Lucero intimates that he and Aurora don’t see each other much: two to four times a month. She tells him that she has her own life now, but he can tell she is again using drugs.

He tells us the two of them were closer before she got sent to juvie: “Every day we chilled and if we needed a place we’d find ourselves an empty apartment, one that hadn’t been rented yet”(54). They would break in by smashing a window, and they’d bring sheets, pillows, and candles. Aurora would draw on the walls with crayons and splatter them with red candle-wax patterns. He would tell her that she had talent. Lucero muses he used to be very good at art. They would squat for weeks at a time, until the supers came to clean up units for new occupants, replacing the broken window and locking the new one.

Lucero remarks that on some nights—especially the ones in which Cut is having sex with his girl in the next bed—the narrator wants things to return to the way they once were with Aurora. On these nights, he goes looking for her. She still breaks into unoccupied apartments, but now hangs out with “a gang of crack heads” and sticks with a boy named Harry (54). She claims that Harry is like her brother, but the narrator knows better. He remarks that Harry is “a little pato [English: gay], a carbon [English: dumbass]”, and that both he and Cut have beaten him up twice (54).

When he arrives to see her, he remarks that the other kids ask him if he has anything while trying to act hard. Harry, his head caught between his knees, also asks if he has anything, as does Aurora. He grabs her by the bicep and leads her into the bedroom. She slumps against the closet door. Lucero tells her he thought that maybe she’d want to get something to eat. She says that she has already eaten, and asks him if he has cigarettes. When she looks at the pack, contemplating whether to open it or sell it to someone else, Lucero says that he can give her another pack. She then asks why he has to be such an ass, and takes issue with his tone of voice. He tells her to take it easy. They smoke and have sex. Lucero remarks that they don’t use condoms every time they have sex. He tells us that Aurora says she doesn’t have sex with anyone else, but that he knows that’s a lie. Harry yells outside the door, but never touches the doorknob. Afterwards, he’s “amazed at how nasty [he] feel[s], how [he] want[s] to put [his] fist in her face” (55).

Lucero muses about all the apartments he has gone into while looking for her. He states Aurora spends a lot of time at the Hacienda, with her drug-addicted friends. He remarks that all the apartments are, ultimately, the same. There is always vomit in the apartments, and sometimes human feces on the floor. He recalls that he goes from room to room in the dark, with his hand outstretched in front of him, wishing it will find its way to her soft face instead of a plaster wall, which happened once.

Corner

Lucero remarks that if you watch anything long enough, you can become an expert at it. He is an expert at understanding the sights and sounds of his corner. He remarks that the corner is “where you smoke, eat, fuck, where you play selo” (56). He has observed people who have made two to three hundred dollars a night playing selo. He also says that people need to be careful about that: “Never know who’ll lose and then come back with a 9 or a machete, looking for the re-match” (56). He follows Cut’s advice and deals calmly and discreetly on his corner. He has observed the way Cut acts casual and easy, but is always scanning the street for police.

On this night, when Lucero arrives, he notices a few things. For one, he notices that everyone is “the color of day-old piss” (57). He muses that when he is fifty years old, he will remember his friends as tired and yellow and drunk. One of his friends, named Eggie, sports an Afro that Lucero thinks looks ridiculous. He intimates that Eggie used to be Cut’s gunboy, before Cut’s girlfriend took that position over. The narrator sees that Eggie is arguing with “some of the tigueres over nonsense” and not backing down (57). He then observes that Nelo, with whom Eggie is arguing, “has had more PTI than most of us have had traffic tickets” (57). PTI is New Jersey’s Pretrial Intervention Program, which seeks to provide rehabilitation to first-time offenders charged with nonviolent crimes. The narrator sees that his corner is now hot, and isn’t in the mood for it. He goes to get burgers for himself and Cut. Cut tells him to hurry back.

The narrator, in no rush, takes the Pathfinder behind the apartments, on the road that leads to the dump. He remarks that the area used to be their stomping grounds when they were younger. He sees black areas on the road: evidence of the fires they set that got out of control. He remarks that everything—the stack of old tires, signs, shacks—has a memory scratched into it.

He arrives at the restaurant and it’s closed, but the girl working lets him in. He remarks that she is heavy but has a good face, and recalls the one time they kissed. She gives him the food under the heat lamps for free. When he returns, Eggie is passed out on the grass and the other kids are peeing on his face. Cut is laughing too hard to talk, as are many other young men. Some of them pretend to smash their friends’ skulls on the sidewalk. Cut takes the food and squats between two bushes, so no one will bother him. He unwraps the food carefully, and refuses to give any to a girl who asks for some.

Lucero

In this vignette, Lucero recalls a conversation that he had with Aurora, while they were in an empty apartment, naked, with some beer and half a cold pizza: “I would have named it after you…you’re named after a star,” Aurora had said (59). This is when we first learn Lucero’s name. Lucero intimates that this was before he knew about “the kid.” Lucero asks her what she is talking about. She picks up a shirt she is folding, very deliberately, and then says that she is telling him something about himself, and that he should have been listening.

I Could Save You

In this vignette, Lucero finds Aurora outside a Quick Check. She has a fever. She wants him to go with her to the Hacienda. He asks her if she is in trouble, and she says no, that she just wants company. Lucero knows he should go home: the cops bust the Hacienda about twice a year. But he goes with her anyway.

They walk up to Route 9 and a Pontiac swerves at them to scare them. They flip the blond, laughing driver off. The sky has become the color of pumpkins. Lucero hasn’t seen Aurora in ten days and “her hair is combed back straight, like she’s back in school or something” (60). She tells him that her mom is getting married to a man who owns a car wash. She asks him if he wants to come to the wedding with her. He pictures them at the wedding—“her smoking in the bathroom and [him] dealing to the groom”—but still can’t quite see them there together (60). She tells him that her mother gave her money to buy a dress. He then asks her if she still has it, implying that he expects her to spend it on drugs. She looks so hurt when she says she does still have it that he kisses her and thinks to himself that he might go look at dresses next week.

Lucero reveals that the Hacienda is an old abandoned house with boarded-up windows, overgrown bushes out front, orange tiles on the roof, and yellow stucco on the walls. When Aurora was once arrested there, she told the police that she was there waiting for the narrator to take her to a movie. Lucero remembers the officers laughing at her; she couldn’t even come up with a movie title. When they arrive, Aurora tells Lucero to wait outside and he obliges—the Hacienda is not his territory. He tells her to hurry up. He muses that it would be so easy for her to turn around and say, “Hey let’s go home” (61). He fantasizes about putting his arm around her and not letting go for fifty years, or ever. He says he knows people who quit drugs just like that—cold turkey. Instead, he watches her jog around the corner. As he waits for her, he hears everything: “A bike chain rattling. TVs snapping on in nearby apartments, squeezing ten voices into a room” (61). He remarks that everyone knows the Hacienda: they come from all over town.

Lucero then sees someone come out of the Hacienda, who is “an old fuck in a green sweat suit…his hair combed up into a salt-and-pepper torch. An abuelo [English: grandpa] type, the sort who yells at you for spitting on his sidewalk” (62). The man has a wide smile on his face. When Lucero confronts him, knowing that prostitution and abuse occur inside the Hacienda, the man crumples, throwing himself on his car door. “Come here,” Lucero says, “I just want to ask you something” (62). The man then “slides down to the ground, his arms out, fingers spread, hands like starfishes” (62). Lucero steps on his ankle and grinds down on it. All the while the man doesn’t make a sound. His eyes remain closed and his nostrils are flared.

While You Were Gone

Lucero tells us that Aurora has sent him three letters from juvie, but that they were full of nothing substantial. He recalls one letter: “Three months and I still haven’t had my period. The doctor here tells me it’s my nerves. Yeah, right. I’d tell you about the other girls (there’s a lot to tell) but they rip those letters up. I hope you’re doing good. Don’t think bad about me. And don’t let anybody sell my dogs either” (62-63).

Aurora’s aunt Fresa has held on to the first letter for a couple weeks before giving it to Lucero, unopened. Fresa wants Lucero to tell her whether Aurora is OK or not. Lucero says that she seemed okay, and then Lucero and Fresa trade barbs, each saying that the other should write to Aurora.

Lucero does write to her but cannot remember what he wrote, other than that “the cops had come after her neighbor for stealing somebody’s car and that the gulls were shitting on everything” (63). Lucero doesn’t write again after the second letter, which to him doesn’t feel wrong or bad: he has a lot to keep himself busy.

By the time Aurora comes home in September, Lucero and Cut have a new Zenith TV set in the living room. Cut has told Lucero to stay away from Aurora, and that she has an addictive personality. Lucero and Aurora stay apart the whole weekend, but eventually Lucero sees her on the street corner with her dogs, wearing a black sweater, black stirrup pants, and old black sneakers. He remembers that he expected her to be traumatized, but, instead, she is just thinner and acts like she can’t keep still. They have sex in an empty apartment they find out near the highway—Aurora has hickies from someone else on her neck. Lucero muses that he should have done what Cut said, but that he is in love with her. He remarks, “You know how it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again” (64). After they are done, Aurora draws stick figures having sex on the walls with lipstick and nail polish.

Lucero asks her what it is like in juvie, and tells her that once he and Cut drove out there and honked their horn for a long time, hoping that maybe she’d hear them. She tells him that she hit a couple of girls, which earned her time in the Quiet Room—a euphemism for solitary confinement. She was in it for eleven days the first time, and fourteen days the second. She remarks that no one can get used to that kind of isolation, and intimates that she dreamed up an entirely different life for herself and Lucero while she was in there. She says, “You should have seen it. The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole fucking thing” (65). She then runs her fingers over the narrator’s side. He intimates that, in a weeks’ time, she will be begging him and telling him all the good things they’d do. He will hit her and make her ear bleed. He then says, “but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine” (65).