Twenty Dollar Bill

Houston, Texas

2002

I’m crumpled in the oversized pocket of Vinson’s JNCOs, next to bigger bills and a cigarette lighter that’s almost out of juice. The “bigger” bills are the same rectangular measurements, but people rank us by numbers tattooed in green ink. I, for example, am branded eight times with the number twenty. And with President Jackson’s long face, a crease down the side of his cheek.

Vinson’s mom, Robin, gave me to him for lunches during summer school. He doesn’t eat lunch often. Or go to school often, for that matter. Robin knows this. Still, she tries.

She’s louder than her namesake bird. Raspier, like cigarettes are lodged in her throat. The robin birds announce springtime; the Robin woman all but scares it away, flowers wilting in efforts to cover their ears. Robin was convinced she’d die when the millennium turned, but she’s still here, stubborn as a cactus.

I came to Robin from the Borners when they drove a U-Haul from Chicago to Texas and traded me for BLTs at a crowded Subway outside of Houston. Cash registers and wallets are fine beds compared to a teenage boy’s pocket during a Texas summer. I’m endlessly moist.

Vinson doesn’t know who Vincent Van Gogh is despite his art teacher always making some joke or another. He just says, “No T.” Or he says nothing and simply lifts his eyebrows in obliging acknowledgment. When he does do schoolwork, teachers get onto him for writing “Vin$IN” on the name line, but he doesn’t care about teachers as long as he wins approval from friends.

They’re here tonight, his friends, in Vinson’s carless one-car garage with a black light and two Pink Floyd posters curling at the corners from humidity. In Daisy Dukes and a low-cut Rolling Stones tee, Robin makes her exit with a quiet man and a “don’t wait up,” complete with her signature bark of a laugh. Her chest is sunburned—a red-breasted Robin.

She gives the boys a box of Shiner, says with surrender-arms that it’s all she’s got, and hops into the man’s jacked-up truck just in time for him to peel out. Quiet men often need loud accessories.

There are five or six boys with Vinson when his Nokia hums its monophonic melody. It’s one of the rare months he’s paid his cell phone bill, so the call startles him. When he pulls it from his pocket, I fall to cool cement beside his Sharpie-colored Vans. The boy next to him picks me up and sets me beside Vinson’s beer on a crate masquerading as a table. Vinson lifts his chin in thanks as he says “hey” into his cell.

The boy on the other side of Vinson elbows him, smirking. Vinson rolls his eyes and continues his call, “Nah, it’s past that park. Yeah.”

Robin and Vinson got evicted three weeks ago, spent two weeks in a downtown shelter, and just got into this rental house a few days ago, so he’s not actually sure if it’s past the park or not. But five minutes later, Claire pulls up in a hatchback Geo Metro.

She’s small. Too small. Vinson’s fourteen; Claire’s fifteen but looks eleven. The other boys nod or raise Shiners at her in greeting. Vinson stands and hugs her, towering over her by at least a foot. Her slightness of body and voice remind me that they are nothing but children.

When Vinson and Claire hug, she holds him, lightly but long. The way they need each other transcends the innuendos behind her back. Vinson ignores the boys and says, “You found it.”

“Yep.” She sits, swallowed by a cracked faux-leather armchair which might or might not have been well-cleaned when Robin hurled on it last Saturday after too much Smirnoff.  Claire exhales and looks up at water stains like they’re stars.

She’s wearing denim cut-offs, a white spaghetti strap, and a neon green bra that glows through her shirt in the black light. Her teeth also glow whenever she reveals them, exposing a hunger that outsizes her. The rest of her is blanketed in darkness—hair, eyes, skin, tiny face shadowed with nameless concern.

Vinson turns up his massive blown-out speaker until rap is louder than a thought could ever hope to be. This is the sort of neighborhood where nobody’ll complain. Pacts are made through knowing glances as neighbors take out morning trash with hungover eyes squinting against the cruelties of daylight.

Vinson offers Claire a joint. She shoots him a look of embarrassment and anger. All eyes in the garage burn her like an ashtray as she shakes her head. Vinson knew she wouldn’t want it. She sinks deeper into the pungent armchair and looks relieved when everyone’s attention shifts to a Lexus slowing down at the end of the driveway. It runs too quietly to be from around here.

A soft chorus of expletives fills the garage. Vinson reassures them, “Dude, y’all chill. I texted him. I’ve got the cash.”

Apparently I’m not included in “the cash” because when an older boy in khaki pants and an Astros ball cap approaches, Vinson immediately hands him a rubberbanded wad of Bigger Bills. Khaki counts the money, glancing over his shoulder like maybe he was followed, or like they’re actors in some heist movie. Country music blares from the Lexus, competing with the garage rap. In this instance, Pat Green beats Lil’ Troy.

With a practiced hand, Khaki gives Vin$IN a labeled baggy, which is stuffed into that moist pocket where I thankfully no longer am. Khaki scans the room and nods at the other boys, mumbling “what up” indiscriminately in their direction.

His eyes run down Claire like a chill. “Nice,” he says to Vinson, who has the decency to blush.

Claire looks away and plays oblivious to the LSD or X or whatever letter-named pills will take the edge off. And to Khaki’s gaze as it stalls at her chest, attention she loathes and craves. Then, Khaki’s gone, quiet as a snake, and Lil’ Troy takes back the air.

One boy adjusts a standing fan which blows me in a sudden frenzy to the oil-dotted ground. Claire lifts me to the table and uses a beer bottle to pin me down in the manufactured breeze. When Vinson picks up the bottle two minutes later for a sip, I’m blown to the ground unnoticed again. Claire rolls her macadamia eyes and pockets me while the others float subtly away from awareness like fish in a tide.

I’m not sure how long it is before I see red and blue flashes through the film of denim. In a mad rush, the garage goes dark. Bottles clank, music stops, and silence shouts in fear. Then, feet pound fast and heavy, leaving behind a cloud of weed and risk and pain. I’m in the pocket of the only straight-visioned kid as the teenage herd makes for the park by way of a shallow creek, pieces of styrofoam floating like lily pads.

Claire isn’t high, but she is clumsy. She trips over an oak root and gashes her toe in the fall. She bites her lip and watches a blue-glittered toenail darken with blood. The boys don’t slow down; Vinson alone pauses. But by the time Claire stands, even Vinson is a disappearing silhouette. His running surprises her because she knows he prefers juvie to home. Maybe a few days from now he’ll explain that the trees turned into guns, or the sky into their principal’s go-to-detention face. Or that cats were climbing on him like angry Garfields. Whatever the trip this time, Claire will know which pills were in the baggy and will blame Robin like she’s done since grade school.

She hesitates before turning back alone. She’s not sure if the cops were actually pursuing them, but she doesn’t see any Glock-decorated uniforms or fire-and-ice lights as she limps toward her Geo. Besides, she hasn’t done anything wrong other than swiping me. And I’m not a snitch—I’ve circulated long enough to know that wrong can be relative.

When she pulls out her keys under a cantaloupe-slice moon, I drop unnoticed onto a strip of yellow weeds by the curb. Her ignition turns over twice before sputtering to a start on the third try. She drives off the way she came, exhaust blowing me a couple halting inches east like the hot and weary breath of God.

Hours pass before Vinson stumbles home. Turns out some of the boys got picked up for vandalism while Vinson ran and ran. Robin’s still out when dawn birds harmonize with the trash truck’s screeching brakes.

The morning air is stagnant. I’ve blown only a matter of inches by the time the sun settles into its spongy blue sea and begins its discoloring work on the world. An ice cream bicycle comes through before lunch with its honking horn and sun-muted photos of Drumsticks and push-pops. Children speed out of their houses like ants and leap over hoses or little polyester flags stabbed into the corners of yards.

“Mijo!” An abuelita tosses a dish rag over her shoulder as she huffs and follows a shirtless blur of a boy. He races from the house next to Vinson’s toward the hope of some sugar to take the edge off. When he slows down, I see how his ribs protrude. President Jackson remains stone-faced, as presidents sometimes do.

Abuelita hobbles out, the screen door slamming behind her, both leaning as though the woman and the door lack a hinge on their left sides. Her bare feet are calloused enough to handle the red-hot concrete; she doesn’t flinch.

“Mira mira!” The sharp-ribbed, sharp-eyed boy scoops me up and waves me in the blistering air. I’m always being traded for sustenance or sin, though I can’t say which is which.

With his sighing abuelita like an exasperated angel at his shoulder, the boy exchanges me for a chocolate popsicle, some smaller bills, and coins caked with grime. His face relaxes, like when a bladder is emptied before it inevitably fills again.

I’m secured with a clip and shoved into a new cramped pocket that smells like hard work, tamales, and gasoline. The boy’s sticky wrapper is dropped to the curb. Chocolate dribbles down his chin like drops of escaping hope. Other children swarm, one or two lucky ones with coins in their palms.

The boy turns back toward his drowsy screen door, pausing to show a caterpillar to his abuelita, one arthritic hand on her hip and the other holding her grandson’s litter. He returns cross-eyed focus to his fast-melting comfort before it disappears—swallowed up in this relentless landscape of need.

Then I’m pedaled away, past Vinson’s garage, dark as a closed wallet. Somewhere inside the house, he sleeps. Dreams.