Gert gave me THE LOOK and so I held out my hand and dabbed Toucan’s hand.
“I asked Gert to bring you in so we could meet,” he said. “Plus it’s hot as hell out there and I didn’t want you cooking in the car. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, so I’d prefer you weren’t, you know, burnt to a crisp.”
“I’m not that famous,” I said.
Nobody took off their shoes, which meant that the Rules of the House here were different from those at home. Most houses allow you to wear shoes, and so I kept mine on.
“Mi casa es su casa,” Toucan said. He stopped. “You know what it means?”
“My house is your house,” Gert said.
Toucan took his cigarette out of his mouth and moved it around while he talked. “True. Now, do you know where it came from?” He was looking at me so I shook my head and said I did not know. Toucan continued explaining. “When Cortés first met Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, Montezuma said, ‘This is your house.’ You know who Cortés was, Zelda?”
“He was an explorer.”
Toucan nodded. “The right word is conquistador. And you know what they did to the Aztecs?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Toucan bent over until his cigarette was close to my face.
“He fucked them and took everything and killed them all.”
I coughed from the cigarette smoke going into my face. It was quiet for a second.
Then Toucan laughed. Gert laughed too, not a serious laugh, but a quiet one. I did not know what was funny.
“He sounds like a shit-heel,” I said. “Cortés.”
“He was a badass motherfucker, is what he was. Now. Come, I need to talk to your brother about some things, so we’ll set you up in here.”
Toucan brought us to the living room, where there was a couch and a big TV. The carpet needed to be cleaned. We also have carpets in our apartment, and once a month Gert drives to the grocery store and rents a machine to wash the floor in our apartment, which gets very dirty after a while, even when we take off our shoes. Toucan for sure needed that machine.
At a round table in the living room some people were playing cards and smoking cigarettes. Toucan clapped his hands and they stopped playing their card game.
“Everyone. I am pleased to introduce Zelda, Gert’s sister. Zelda, this is the gang.”
I waved. “Hello, gang.”
All of them turned to me and I felt like a stick standing around trees.
They started playing cards again. Toucan threw his cigarette so that it landed right in the middle of the table.
“She said, ‘Hello, gang.’ ”
The gang put their cards down and each of them said hello to me. Toucan took out another cigarette and lit it.
“We’ve got some good games, Zelda,” Toucan said, pointing to the TV. “Have a seat on the couch there.”
I sat after Gert gave me a slow nod to show that it was okay. Toucan asked if I wanted anything. “Like a soda or something?”
I said I was thirsty and he asked one of the card players to bring me a Coke. “We’ve got the new NBA game. You like basketball, right?”
“We actually can’t stay that long,” Gert said.
I checked my watch. “We have one hour and twelve minutes until we have to be somewhere else.”
“Relax,” Toucan said, patting Gert on the back. “Plenty of time.”
Toucan pointed to one of the people playing cards and told him to set me up. “Get her going on some NBA2K,” Toucan said.
Gert told me he’d be right back. “I won’t be long,” he said.
And then he and Toucan went down the hall, talking in low voices. They looked like two large Vikings.
The person who was setting it up had low-hanging black Nike shorts so that you could see the top of his butt while he pulled out cords and untangled the controller. It was almost as bad to look at that as the woman who was hitting her child.
He handed the controller to me.
“Make sure when you play you do a new account,” he said. “I don’t want you fucking with my season.”
He went back to playing cards with the gang.
I drank my soda and began playing. The game was very good. I had played older versions of it at the Community Center, during Games Nights, and I picked the Boston Celtics, who were my favorite team, even though nobody else liked them. Everyone else liked either the Lakers or the Warriors. People thought that the Celtics were boring.
I played for a while. I won one of the games, against the Denver Nuggets, and then lost to the San Antonio Spurs, who were the champions, so their team was very good. They are boring to watch on television but get things done on the basketball court. Gert likes that they do not get fancy and do things like behind-the-back passes or dribble too much. They pass a lot and are like a good tribe doing battle and working together instead of trying to do everything on their own.
The people playing cards drank beer and kept smoking. The house was full of smoke. I finished my can of soda and put it on the coffee table, next to the ashtray, which was very full. One of them got up and left because he had run out of money, and the others tried to get him to stay but he left anyway. After he left, another person left too.
After winning another game, I checked my watch. Twenty-one minutes. Gert had been gone for a while.
I put down the controller and I walked over to the people playing cards. I stood behind the person who had set up the NBA2K and watched the game. There were five people left playing cards and they all wore baseball caps and had tattoos.
There was money and cigarettes in piles in front of them. One was smoking from a vaporizer box. I knew that many people stopped smoking regular cigarettes and instead smoked from the boxes because they smelled better and looked like bathroom steam whenever it breathed out. The man was very large and fat and looked at me over his shoulder.
“Can I help you?” the Fat Man asked.
“I’m just watching,” I said.
I had seen Gert playing poker before, in high school, and Uncle Richard used to play too. You put money in the middle and the winner who had the best cards got all the money. If you didn’t want to put money in, you could also put cigarettes. That was what Gert did during high school. Uncle Richard liked playing for money.
The Fat Man I was standing behind ended up losing.
“Man, you’re bad luck,” he told me. “Go stand behind someone else.”
“I got something you can sit on,” said the poker player who had a red hat on. “Come on over here.”
The Fat Man told him to shut his mouth. “That’s Gert’s sister.”
The man in the red hat looked me up and down. “Doesn’t look like Gert’s sister to me,” he said, and then patted his knee and said to come on over.
I decided to sit on one of the empty chairs, beside the person who had just won the last hand. He was thin and had his face hairs shaved into something called a Chin Strap that is thin and goes from your ears along the chin, like the straps you use to keep a bicycle helmet from falling off your head.
He stuck out his hand and said his name was Hendo.
“All right, Zelda,” Hendo said. “You can help advise me. Could use a bit more luck.”
“Pffft,” said the Fat Man. “Your funeral.”