01 - Andy

Meet Cleo and Andy, two star-crossed lovers of 17 and 29 years of age, respectively.

Below the weighted boughs of an orange tree sat Cleo, alone in summertime. She was seventeen and wore a big, floppy straw sunhat. She cupped her hand to her face and sucked in sweet, hot smoke, then after stopping her breath and performing the trick Andy had shown her, she let smoke lick up out of her gaping mouth like a dragon tongue and breathed it up through her nose, then she puffed it back down out her nostrils like an angry cartoon character, shooting rivulets of backlit density floundering down like a beach wave that just crashed on the shore and is coming to calm. The sun was hot on her thin white legs because the shadows were dancing over there now, so she shifted her bottom half from Indian-style to sideways like ladies in museum-paintings, up on one arm, with the other hand, the cigarette hand, down her slender body and resting across her stomach. It was sexier, she thought. She pulled her top knee forward to the ground over the other one and looked at the other orange trees’ leaves fluttering in the steady afternoon current.

Andy said he wouldn’t be long. Half an hour late, even though today was special. Today was the day before her birthday, on a bubbling Friday early-afternoon with sweet, hot pheromones in the air and a damp stickiness on her skin. Humid days were rare in Riverside.

Tomorrow her family would drive up to lake Tahoe to celebrate her birthday, eighteen-years-old and almost out. Her daddy would take her water-skiing and her older brother would search for rich girls on the beach with his new haircut. Her little sister would refuse to put on suntan lotion and get red-apple-knees like her hair. Pale skin, red hair and stubbornness were haunts in Irish blood. They would go out to dinner and eat steaks and her daddy would be proud. He’d buy her a beer and comment how his little girl would be the first to go to college. She would smile and think about the new adventure that would be her life �" not the one he thought �" no schoolbooks or teachers, no bubble-tests, no mathematics, no history or literature. She had very little interest in school. She wondered what books they were reading right at that moment. She would fill books, not read them.

Most of her classmates were worried about where they would go to school, what they would do with their lives, who they might find out there, if they could support themselves. In that aspect, she was completely unique, ordinarily unique. Right now for the first time since she was a little girl of five or six, her mind was singular. The biggest choice for her to make was the red Popsicle or the green one, and the right answer took no consideration �" Andy.

She checked her cellphone and the tiny white squares made up 2:27. No messages. No calls. She crawled to the tree trunk sloth-style and put her back against it. She heaved her body up by the post and balanced on Jell-O-legs in a sparkling nature land. She reached out in the speckled sunlight, clouded by a volume of leaves, and oranges like Christmas-tree ornaments, and pulled at a tough round ball. The branch bent and gave its fruit. Another. Two more. She slumped back down, the oranges lined in a row on her arm, under her breasts against her gray tee shirt like the balls inside the glass side of a pool table. She let them roll of her belly and bounce on the ground, splaying out her legs as her hat rolled off behind her.

One of those oranges kept on rolling past the others, tumbling down the shallow hill like a chariot-wheel, careening softly under the toe of a big black leather boot, Andy’s.

“Howdy there, cowgirl.”

“Hey there, cowboy.”

He started dribbling the orange, not towards her but around a wide invisible circle.

“Mighty fine day.” “Yessir.”

“Hot day.” “Yessir.”

“You’re probably sweating bullets. How about you and me go for a ride… cool off?”

“I’m comfy.” She got out another cigarette and her Zippo.

He kicked up the orange with both feet in a bunny hop and caught it in his right hand, “You wanna stay here?”

She smiled with her eyes over her cigarette-straw, sipping up smoke. The Zippo responded with a snap.

The light was heavy on Andy’s eyes and made him squint, “Okay, fine. You stay here, cowgirl. I’m going for a ride.”

He turned his back confidently, waiting for the sound. He had lost his hesitancy and most of his acne at 24 when his dad died, and played his hand coolly now at 29. He had big, broad shoulders, though he was rather short, fierce grey eyes and a hooked nose, and he wore a jean-jacket and khakis. He took a big step, then another big step. His ears caught a dim rustle. It was long and loud, just the wind. Another step. And another step. He heard clothes rustle. Bingo!

He whipped around just in time to grapple an orange torpedo on a B-line a foot wide of his head.

“Whooie, missy. You thinking of trying out for the Pilots?” He bumped the orange on his arm.

She had already stood up and picked down another orange. Putting her weight into it like a bullwhip, she slang it at his crotch, which he caught on his downturned palm with a loud, echoing slap.

Cleo picked up her hat and made a practiced sexy pose, with her hip out and her thin arm poised on it, “Where are we goin’, Andy?” She took a drag from her cigarette and pretended to be interested in the leaves by her face.

He tossed the oranges on the ground and brushed his hands off on his jean-jacket. Squinting towards the sun through the brown ever-smog stagnating above L.A, he said, “I don’t know, Cleo. How about anywhere out of Riverside?”