Bougainvillea

Rolando had already trimmed the bottlebrush, the strawberry blossoms like a cylindrical hairbrush. Honeybees, bumblebees, and yellowjackets assaulted the blossoms, and made his job difficult and dangerous. The yellow jackets would not be scattered or shaken off. They stayed, waiting for an opening. Whenever he worked against yellowjackets, something bad would happen.

Rolando hated the mesh draped from his baseball cap to prevent the yellowjackets and bees from stinging his face or getting down his shirt. He hated wearing gloves, too, the smell of his hands with that musty rubber odor that never seemed to wash off. He had taken to a drop of peppermint oil at lunch to make his hands smell better. At the end of the day, however, his hands reeked of rubber and sweat.

He laid down his clippers and took up a small mustache trimmer and began on the neighboring bougainvillea, which did not attract yellowjackets, at this time of year so massively blossomed that he could hardly see the green foliage. He wanted to burrow into the plant, to feel all the beauty around him.

The snipping had a rhythm that made him think of home, of Guatemala. Rolando thought of his wife, his son, how difficult yet idyllic their life was back in the homeland, speaking Mayan at home, Spanish at school. He thought of her hanging wash in the bright sunshine of the mountains as they stepped their way to the pinnacle. He thought of picking bananas. He thought about sending money home, three hundred dollars a month, enough that his family would never go hungry, could keep their house.

Rolando thought of how lonely his wife had been during the first few years he worked in California, then how she had begun living with another man, sounding delighted and happy on the phone call. He thought of his comrades in the garage turned bedroom, how he laughed and drank and watched soccer late every night, how the other four took turns smoking cigarettes outside because the landlord did not want more than one Guatemalan to be seen at a time. When they got drunk, they peed outside off the patio together. It was their symbol of emancipation.

To trim the street-facing bougainvillea brought him pride. It was an opportunity to twine with beauty, to remove the wandering vines that shot sideways to prevent the ascension of the bougainvillea up the wall, and to remove the bulges that refused to flower and sapped the energy from blossoms. To use a ladder to place himself on this ascension, Rolando had whispered to himself, was like being a blossom himself.

When he finished, he put his tools back in the truck and turned to admire his work.

___

Magdalene, who worked at the same house, had hung the heavy blanket over the laundry line. It was overly wet and draped nearly to the ground. She went to the left post and brought the line toward her and deftly wrapped it around the horizontal piece of wood twice in order that the blanket cleared the ground by the length of her hand. On a different line she hung the sheets and the pillowcases, and on the third line another set of bedcovers. She was grateful for the work. She was grateful that she had had found the rich family who needed their laundry done. Every morning the sheets of their two sons were soiled. Each Tuesday and Friday Magdalene came to clean, there were six or eight sets of sheets and plastic liners to wash and dry.

She was happy, in a way, that her teenage son could grow into manhood without being beaten by her ex-husband. She was happy that she had a bed to herself, small cot that it was, that her body felt rightfully hers bounded by the wooden dowels at her head and her feet and the heavy canvas batting on the edges. Like a cocoon. Like a poor woman’s bassinet. Like a cuddling cloth that set boundaries for a child to let them know they were loved. All of her children had beds that were perfectly sized, snug.

Except her son, who had grown fast and beautiful, and became different and difficult, dropping out of school. He refused to go to Catholic church, preferring a small Methodist fellowship of his peers. He spent evenings at the rich people’s house, where his girlfriend lived. Could she call her his girlfriend? Young people didn’t date. Even thinking of her son and the other teenager having sex brought a smile to her face, a smile that dismissed her fear of the priest and his castigation. In all of her poverty, a revolutionary smile.

She noticed the landscaper had finished. Magdalene looked at his work, so orderly. The trim looked like an expensive haircut, elegant.

He had loaded his truck, and had left a large pair of clippers on the ground. He was a burly man, wore loose clothes, talked little.

He would want the tool. She rushed. She whistled at Rolando, but he did not turn toward her. She threw the clippers like a javelin towards him.

The clippers flew farther than she wished, farther than she thought she could toss them. She watched the clippers somersault towards Rolando, who stuck up his hands at the last moment. The clippers sharp end plunged into his right hand, and poked through and stuck in his left, as if he were being nailed to a cross by the Romans.

“Watch out,” she screamed, “watch out,” as she ran towards him.

Rolando looked at the clippers, and wanted to remove it, but had no way to use his hands.

Magdalene reached him and tried to pull out the clippers. Her strength failed her. She got out her cell phone and called 911.

Rolando sat, lay back on the ground, and passed out. When the EMTs came, they left the clippers in, put him on a gurney and sped away in the ambulance, leaving Magdelene on her knees sobbing in the yard.

___

When Rolando woke, he could feel his hands, his memory a blur of images that began with the wobbling clippers in the air, the stab of pain, the exit from the ambulance down the long white chute in the hospital, the many heads of nurses and a doctor telling him they would be operating, they would be able to save his hands.

He looked at his hands. They were wrapped, his right hand as if in a large cast, his left hand with less wrapping, though throbbing with more pain. They were held by strings to a support that transited his bed, an elaborate pulley system that operated from a motor with a timer that lowered and raised them at differing intervals, he was sure for circulation. He imagined the system like a fancy timer that both regulated the amount of spray and differing angles to water plants, some high, some low, some with great water needs, some with just a dose required.

He wondered, and grew anxious, as to whether his boss knew. He grew anxious about money, or the lack of it, for he would not be able to work, for two weeks, a month, more? He grew anxious about how he would pay for the surgery, the stay in the hospital, perhaps rehab that he could not afford. How long would they keep him? One week, two weeks, a month, more?

He would lose his job. He would lose his rental. Perhaps he would lose his work, his craft, his art.

He waited and ate, sipped water, and waited. The nurses flowed in and out of the room like clouds passing overhead in a quickened sky.

That night, after dinner, Magdalene came.

He pretended to sleep. It did not matter. She touched his shoulder. She was praying over him, crying.

“It will be okay,” he reassured. “The nurses have told me that a hundred times.”

She cried. She stuttered in saying sorry. “Have you seen the doctor yet?”

“I am sure I have, or he has seen me. No conclusions yet, if that is what you mean.”

Magdalene unrolled a few tamales from a cloth. They were still warm. She offered them to him.

Rolando smiled, giggled, nodded his assent.

“I brought a spoon. I can feed you better than with a fork.”

Magdalene fed him the tamales. It felt good to her to be able to be of use.

“How will you work?” she asked.

“I won’t. I will have to find another place to sleep, too.”

She put her hands to her cheeks and began crying again.

“You will stay with me,” she crowed, “until your wounds heal and your hands work.” She kept repeating the sentences over and over as if trying to convince herself, as if saying the sentences out loud were the beginning of a history about to come true. 

___

Rolando had rough hands with oversized knuckles and a couple of jarring knobs over the hamate bone courtesy of a hammer and a drunk and the loss of a bet. They were large, the size of oars and Rolando spent much of his social time trying to find ways to find an acceptable place to hide them, and usually using all of the spots—pockets, front and back, behind his back, holding a book or magazine or paper, though if the book were not sufficiently sized it made his hands appear cartoonish, or under his legs if he sat down. It was this discomfort when he was sitting, constantly moving his hands from out and under his thighs and back again that made one feel sorrow for him. With those hands he thought he’d be capable at sports, but they were a clumsy pair, the palms never seeming to catch up where a ball should be, and the grip overwhelming such that the relaxation needed to swing a bat or drive a golf ball or whip around a tennis racket never came, as if a tidal rush that overwhelmed a beach stayed surging. Even with football, they were in the way. They often reached for the ball to catch it even without his brain prompting them to reach.

But he could sew, he could button, he could lift the few flakes to make a perfect pinch of tobacco for his disabled grandfather, remove slivers without tweezers, and layer, brush, apply, and highlight the makeup on the performers in theatre at the local high school. Such rude hands, such delicate touch.

His mother wanted him to be a surgeon, but Rolando was no student. His father wanted him to be a miller, a cutter of fine shapes for furniture.

At twenty-six, Rolando had found his niche—he specialized in sculpting, not in clay--in landscapes, specifically defusing the overgrown and bringing the singular need of delicacy of balance to the flora to deactivate the typical explosion of meaningless bloom. When one heard Rolando speak, one thought, at first, that he was talking about bombs. He had that look about him, a directness of speech, a believability, that made him seem like a revolutionary even when speaking about a privet hedge.

But hedges were few in Guatemala, the money poor. His wife and child suffered. He migrated to California, where the pay was better, the hedges more plentiful, and instead of keeping his hands hidden, he now had to keep his entire body hidden. Instead of his few charged words, he could not speak.

Rolando listened to the doctor. His right hand had lost the ability to grip. The fingers worked, though the dexterity and strength of tendon from pinkie to thumb would never against exist.

“No tools?” he asked.

No, the doctor shook his head. “Pens, yes. You can learn to use those. Perhaps a toothbrush between your index and your middle finger. You can always peck at a keyboard.”

“My middle finger still works,” Rolando joked, extending the quivering finger as if stuttering in speech.

“And the left hand?”

“I used it in rehab this morning. It felt good. I can use it.”

“It has not fully healed. I would not go back to work and no power tools.”

Rolando nodded. In twenty minutes, his life was over.

He panicked over whether the government could take away his green card, rub out the nine digits on his social security card, delete him from whatever database it used to account for him.

He had not sent home money for six weeks. How would his wife and two children survive? He had not even told her of the accident.

___

Magdalene brought Rolando to every house she cleaned.

“They are houses, not homes,” she corrected. “Some are homes, a few, not all. They have furniture, beds, pictures on the walls, but no soul. The kids wear headphones to hide what they listen to. The kids do not talk to each other. They talk to their phones. The parents do not talk to their kids when they come home. The women drink wine every day. The men eat and slouch. Everyone exercises. Everyone eats healthy and everyone is sick in their soul. Houses, Rolando, I clean houses, not homes.”

Rolando had little else to do, and went along gladly, holding his right hand up over his shoulder every five minutes for five minutes to help it heal. It still throbbed the first few seconds he would lower his hand.

He imagined what he would do to each property, how he would shape the bushes, re-do the lawn, if the house had a lawn. Each house had either no clutter, looking like a picture in a magazine, or too much clutter, like carelessness one gets when one buys too many toys.

Eviction stared him in the face at all hours. He felt like a piece of meat on a spit, being turned and burned, skewered, and captured.

He needed to get work, or to get lost, but it is hard to get lost when one has no money. He needed to work with his hands, but it is hard to work with hands when hands won’t work for you.

He slept in the backseat of her van on the days Magdalene worked more than a few hours. He thinned. His shirts seemed airy, too large, his belt now staked one notch tighter and his trousers dragging on the ground. At times, he wished he could just evaporate. When he began to dwell on evaporation, it seemed, Magdalene would come out huffing and puffing and swearing about this or that in Spanish, throwing her cleaning tools in the back of the van. Perhaps, Rolando thought, she is not the force of life. She is merely static.

When he talked to Magdalene about moving out, she wept. She wept in the kitchen where he told her. She wept in the bathroom behind the closed door. She wept in her bedroom blowing her nose with a vibration that shook the walls. She wept when she came back to the kitchen.

“I’ve made you an orphan,” she cried, “cut off from your work, your family.”

“You’ve made me a friend,” he returned, “one I have not had here in seven years.”

She wept more. Each time Rolando reassured her, she wept.

“I must stop this. I will feed you.”

As soon as she took out two pans, the tears stopped. As soon as the vegetables sizzled, she began to laugh.

She had recovered, Rolando thought. She will be fine. Then she sat down to eat, and when he uncomfortably used his left hand to stab at a pepper strip, she wept.

Rolando wept too.

He had to leave. He had to leave Magdalene and he had to leave where he lived, that cramped space with his four compadres, all Guatemalans. How cramped can it be for five short Guatemalan men, Magdalene had laughed, holding her right hand high above her head as if to indicate the ceiling would be many feet above their heads.

“It is not the altitude,” Rolando suggested on the ride to his new quarters, “and not the width. It is the lack of privacy. No one can sing one song without another joining in.”

He hugged her goodbye. He kissed her on the cheek.

She wept, convulsing, and had to sit in her car for a few minutes before driving away.   

___

Rolando moved what he could take with him in the van he had borrowed from his friend. He had a new place, a converted shed, in the far back of a financial guru’s home which he would share with one other man who worried that Rolando might smoke.

He didn’t.

He had a job, and a job outdoors, found by one of Magdalene’s employers. He would mow the magnificently large lawns that stayed watered during the drought. He would eventually be charged with overseeing the crews that would come to make the lawns more drought-tolerant, succulents, cactus, a more Southwestern desert appearance, a return to the look of Los Angeles before the twentieth century. He could do what he needed for work without the use of his right hand, including whipping the steering wheel around of the motorized mower.

He would be paid like all indentured servants, poorly. Housing and utilities would be paid, and with a medical plan he could not estimate of the costs, he was better off.

He checked out the mower the first morning after he arrived, taking it for a spin, then tackling the first quadrant of the sod that needed to be trimmed. He saw a bougainvillea bush in need of trimming on the side of the house, gathered some small clippers and a ladder, and sat facing the purple flowering mass. He trimmed some lower-level dead shoots with his left hand, and he felt a mastery entering his fingers and palm that assured him he could accomplish what his eye saw needed to be done. Then, almost by accident, he transferred the clippers to his right hand, and though he could not squeeze to close the clipper and snip the shoot, he was able to hold the tool and repetitively kept trying to clip.

He returned to his shed and brought the mustache scissors and began to snip with them.

The flow of throb and blood felt different than in the rehab. The course flowed from shoulder to hand, where in rehab the flow, the pain, had gone hand to shoulder. This time the throb felt right, the throb of muscle, of work, the throb that flowed through the day from mind to fingers and wore out when the sun set. Work. His art. There were still dreams in his fingers, dreams in his palms, dreams in his wrists. If the bougainvillea could stir him with its ascension, he could recover. He would always be poor, always be without family. His son would grow without him, as he had done for seven years, swept into drug violence by his cousins. His wife, she had already moved into a different life with a different man.

Magdalene would remain a friend, an angel, an angel who had erred and suffered and would forever work to redeem her hasty action. She knew forgiveness in her heart, and the cells of her body continued to need expulsion of her sin.

For Rolando, he had been maimed; life had been cut short, yet he knew he would grow back more vibrantly, more capable, more beautiful.

He laughed. He hummed a song, and kept snipping with his right hand, slowly, painfully, awkwardly, then set out the ladder to move up the bougainvillea, the purple flowering like a mass bouquet welcoming him back into the world. 

About the author: Jeff Burt has contributed stories previously to The Gilded Weathervane, Per Contra, Lowestoft Chronicle, Muleskinner Journal, Green Silk Journal, and won the 2016 Consequence Magazine Fiction Prize. After growing up in the Midwest, he lives in Santa Cruz County, California.

Image created by Krin Van Tatenhove via Midjourney