Under the Purple Umbrella

The sun in Arizona doesn't set, it surrenders. I was sitting on the hood of my daddy's Buick Electra at the top of Reservoir Hill with Clouds, and we both already knew this was the last time. Reservoir Hill was where you went in Sierra Vista when you had something to say that would not fit inside a house. You drove up the dirt road past the water tank and you parked at the top and you cut the engine, and if you were lucky the wind stayed down and the whole valley opened up in front of you like somebody had taken the lid off the world. The lights of Fort Huachuca on the left. The lights of downtown on the right. The Huachuca Mountains black against a sky that was still bleeding orange and pink along the ridgeline. You could see forever from up there. That was the whole point of the hill. You went up there to see forever, and to pretend for one more hour that you had it.

She had ridden up there with me a hundred times. I didn't have a car of my own in Arizona. Didn't have any family out there either, no cousins, no uncles, no aunties, just us in that house on the edge of Sierra Vista. What I had was full access to my parents' cars. My mother drove a Pontiac Grand Prix she kept spotless, vacuumed on Sundays, dashboard wiped down with the same rag every time, and when she let me take it I drove it like it was made of glass. When I couldn't get the Pontiac, my boy Dexter would swing by in his little minitruck and we would pile in three deep with Clouds squeezed in the middle. And when my pops was in town before he shipped out, sometimes I could talk him out of the Buick Electra, that long boat of a car, powder blue, bench seats front and back, a trunk you could sleep in. That was the one Clouds loved. She said the Buick drove like a living room on wheels, and every time she got in it she still slid across that bench seat and put her head on my shoulder before I could even get the key in.

She wasn't putting her head on my shoulder tonight. She was sitting on the hood beside me with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching the sky do the thing it was doing, and she had not said anything for a long time. She had cried already. Once, hard, in the car on the way up. She was done with that now. Clouds cried the way she did everything else, all at once and then finished, and she did not repeat herself. Her hair was down. It always was when we were alone. Thick and black and long enough that when she sat like that, knees drawn up, the ends of it pooled against the denim of her thighs like spilled ink. She was Mexican, full Mexican, the kind of brown that glowed copper in the daytime and honey under streetlights, and when the sunset hit her a certain way, the way it was hitting her right now, she looked like the underside of a cloud right before a storm breaks open. That was how she got her name, and I was the reason. Freshman year I had started calling her Heaven, because that is what she felt like to me, and she had turned around and named me right back. Clouds, because Heaven lives in the clouds, she said, and every note we ever passed each other in the hallway or slid across a desk in fourth period was signed the same way at the bottom, Clouds N Heaven, her handwriting looping the ampersand into a little heart. The name stuck to her before it stuck to me. By sophomore year the whole school called her Clouds and nobody but me remembered why. Even her mother called her Clouds.

She was beautiful in a way that made people stop walking. Not the kind of pretty that apologizes for itself. The kind that commands a room without trying. She stood about five-six, but she carried herself taller, back straight, chin up, shoulders set like she had been trained in posture by somebody strict and loving. And her body was the kind of thing poets would have written about in another century, an hourglass that her clothes never hid even when she dressed modest, which she always did. Tapered waist, full hips, the kind of curves that made her walk look like music even in sneakers. She knew what she looked like. She wasn't arrogant about it. She just didn't pretend she didn't know. And she loved me. That was the part I still couldn't fully wrap my head around, even after a year. One year of her sliding across that bench seat. One year of her leaving strawberry lip gloss on my collar. One year of us sneaking all around Sierra Vista to get tangled up in each other and getting caught every single time, by her mother, by my mother, by a neighbor who knew both our mothers, one time by a Sheriff's deputy with a flashlight who told us to get dressed and go home and never said a word to nobody, God bless him. One year of us skipping fifth period to go to Peter Piper Pizza and her sitting on my lap the entire time, feeding me pepperoni off the top of the slice, laughing at nothing. One year of her being deeply, all the way, unreasonably in love with me.

"Ron."

"Yeah."

"You gonna forget me."

"I ain't gonna forget you."

"Everybody says that."

"I ain't everybody."

She turned her head. Looked at me. The last of the light caught the high plane of her cheekbone and the small mole right above her lip that I had kissed so many times I could have found it with my eyes closed. Her eyes were hazel in most light, green when she cried, brown when she was angry. Right now they were somewhere in between, searching my face for something I wasn't sure I had.

"You gonna write me?"

"Every week."

"You gonna call me?"

"When I can. Overseas calls is a whole thing, Clouds. I gotta save up."

"You gonna meet somebody over there."

I did not answer that right away. Clouds was not the kind of woman you lied to. She would know before the lie was all the way out of your mouth. So I sat there and I watched the last of the orange go and I said the truest thing I could think of.

"I don't know what's over there."

She nodded once. Slow. That was Clouds. She could take the truth better than most people could take a compliment.

"Ron."

"Yeah."

"You know what your problem is."

"Tell me."

"You don't want nobody. You want the idea of somebody. And ain't nobody real ever gonna live up to what's in your head."

I looked at her. One year of us. One year of driving up this hill and eating French fries at the Sonic on Fry Boulevard and slow dancing in her living room to Anita Baker while her mother pretended not to be watching from the kitchen. One year of her body pressed against mine in the dark of her bedroom with her little sister asleep down the hall. One year of me being as close to somebody as I had ever let myself get, and still, both of us knew, not all the way. Never all the way. Clouds had said it to my face back in the spring, sitting on this same hood, and I had denied it, and she had let me deny it because she loved me, and now she was saying it again the night before I left the country and I did not have the energy to deny it a second time.

"You right."

"I know I'm right."

"I'm sorry, Clouds."

"Don't be sorry. Be honest. That's the only thing I ever asked you for."

She reached over. Took my hand. Held it the way you hold something you are about to put down for good. Her fingers were warm and her nails were painted a soft pink she had done herself, a little uneven on the left thumb, which I knew because I had watched her paint them on my couch two nights ago, legs draped over mine, talking about nothing while I pretended not to be memorizing her face.

"Go be great over there, Ronald. Play your little games. Meet some Italian girl. Get your heart broke one time, please, for me, so you know what it feel like. And then when you a grown man and you finally figure out what you actually want, you remember I told you first."

I laughed even though it hurt.

"I'ma remember."

"You better."

We sat up there until the sky went full dark and the stars started coming out one at a time over the Huachucas. She let me hold her one more time. I pulled her in and her hair smelled like the coconut oil she used and her skin was warm from the sun and I held her so tight I could feel her heart beating against my chest, fast and small and brave, the way she did everything. She tilted her chin up and I kissed her, once, soft, the kind of kiss that is a period at the end of a sentence, and she tasted like strawberry and salt and everything I was about to lose. Then she slid off the hood and got in the passenger seat and said, "Take me home, Ron. Before I embarrass myself."

I took her home. I walked her to her door. Her mother was on the porch smoking a Marlboro Red and she looked at me the way mothers look at boys who are about to leave their daughters behind, which is with a kind of sad forgiveness you have to earn later in life to understand. She said, "You take care of yourself, mijo." I said, "Yes ma'am." Clouds went inside without turning around. That was on purpose. She had told me in the car she wasn't going to turn around because if she turned around she was going to break, and Clouds did not break in front of anybody, not even me.

I drove home the long way. Past Buena High. Past the Sonic. Past the practice field where I had run for a hundred and eighty yards on Friday nights and where a scout from a small college in New Mexico had already told me I could have a scholarship if I stayed. Past all of it. I pulled into our driveway a little before ten and sat in the Buick with the engine off and the windows down and I let the Arizona air come in one last time. The house was quiet in the way a house gets right before it stops being your house. My little sister Nia, thirteen, was asleep on the couch with the TV on low, cheek pressed into a throw pillow, one sock off. She had cried herself out three days ago and had been in a kind of stunned calm ever since. My mother was at the kitchen table in her robe, going through the last folder of paperwork the transportation office had sent over, passports paper-clipped to a stack of orders thicker than a phone book. She looked up when I came in and did not ask where I had been. She already knew.

"You okay, Ronnie?"

"I will be."

"Your father called from Vicenza around eight. Wanted me to tell you he's got your room set up. Says the ceilings is high enough for you to hang your posters."

"He got the Jordan poster up already?"

"He wouldn't dare touch that poster without you."

She smiled a small tired smile and went back to her papers. My pops had been in Italy for six months already, the way the Army does it sometimes, sent him ahead on his advance party and left us to close out the house. Six months of him being a voice on a scratchy line and a stack of blue aerogrammes in my mother's handwriting on the kitchen counter. Six months of me being the man in the house, walking Nia to the bus and cutting the grass and answering the door when the movers came. I was ready to hand that job back to him. I was tired.

I went to my room. Duffel bag on the bed. Walkman. Shoebox of tapes. A stack of letters Clouds had written me over the last year, held together with a rubber band, every one of them signed Clouds N Heaven at the bottom in her loopy handwriting, that I put in the outside pocket last. I turned off the light and lay there in the dark listening to the swamp cooler tick and thinking about her hand on my hand on the hood of the Buick. I was seventeen. I had orders to a country I had only ever seen on the back of my father's uniform patch. Vicenza. Even the word sounded like it belonged to somebody else's life.