hese days, Rico awakes wanting more sleep. Even tonight, as he tries to busy himself organizing things under a kitchen sink, he wants to get up and go to a bed, or a sofa, and dream.

He is carefully arranging a plastic garbage pail, cans and rags used for cleaning, and old grocery bags full of other old grocery bags around a drain pipe which hangs in the middle of the space, limits his placement of the things and will possibly block his access to them later. He approaches the task as he would a puzzle. Jenny has gone to the store so he is doing what he can to get settled into this place before she returns. This place. Her place. Their place, perhaps? Her grandmother's place? In any case, this mobile home, what was her grandmother's, is now Jenny's, and is occupied by them, Jenny and Rico. These kinds of uncertainties chatter at him throughout his waking hours now, and push his days along in the unpleasant, unpredictable fits and starts that his dreams move in, or did not so long ago.

Lately his dreams have been more pleasant than his days: in them, he relives the breezy, normal life he left two weeks ago. He misses that life. When he sleeps now he finds himself on the beach in La Jolla, with a Jenny that existed before her grandmother died, before he knew about the desert town of Roubidoux, or he is in high school with his friends, or he is a boy in his own room in his parents' house.

Two weeks in Roubidoux have numbed him, and surprise comes slowly to him. When he turns from the cabinet beneath the sink, still crouched on his heels, to see a man standing in his kitchen who he has never seen before, he does not start. He rises slowly. The man is young, less than twenty, a boy, in a loose plaid shirt hanging past his waist, his arms crossed comfortably behind his back. Rico asks, "Are you lost?"

The boy silently, slowly shakes his head no. He uncrosses his arms from behind him and recrosses them in front. He holds a shiny pistol in one hand, which points at the floor. Rico thinks a gasp, cannot make it come out, then thinks anyway that not breathing at all may be good. The boy does not look away from Rico. Rico says, "You want money." The boy nods, still silent. Rico remembers occasionally being told to always give a man with a gun what he asks for. Rico pulls his wallet from his pants pocket to see the few small bills he has. He does not count them. He empties his billfold and hands it all to the boy. Rico is aware that it is not very much, and as the boy turns away from the kitchen, Rico opens a drawer.

"There's a little more in here," he says. There are extra bills and change stashed in an empty peanut butter jar. The money comes from Jenny and Rico's pockets at the ends of their days, and it shares the jar with threads and bluish fuzz. They found the jar in this kitchen, where Grandma cleaned it and left it. When the grandmother passed away, she left money to her children, and her home, and everything in it, to her granddaughter. Rico had never met Jenny's grandmother. He hadn't known until she died that there was a place in California named Roubidoux, and he was not prepared for his Jenny to own a mobile home there. And it seems to him that since the moment she was granted this inheritance, he has begun to find himself confronted with increasingly unpleasant surprises.

Jenny wanted to move out of the cozy, apartment in La Jolla they had occupied for three years to live what she said would be a simpler life in Roubidoux. No rent to pay, she told him. We can sell off our furniture, Grandma's place has stuff already. You can stay unemployed, she reminded him. He didn't want to stay unemployed, he pointed out. He hadn't worked in months and he was weary of being unused. Then when we do get jobs out there, she told him, they can be simple jobs. Part time. We'll make just enough money to get by. Groceries. Then we can spend most of our time together, do things we've never done before.

This is what we should do, she said. He did not argue further.

Rico takes the jar from the drawer and holds it out so the boy can see the linty money. The boy steps into the kitchen, takes the jar and tucks it under one arm. The kid steps away from the kitchen again toward the living room. Rico remembers that Jenny had left some jewelry in an end table drawer next to the sofa. He moves out of the kitchen to show the boy before he finds it on his own. "There's something here," says Rico and he steps across the small area, reaches over the back of the crushed velvet sofa to open the drawer. "It isn't worth very much," he tells the boy, "but it's probably something." The kid hesitates. Rico is insistent. "She doesn't even wear them anymore," he says. "She just stuck them in here for safekeeping." The boy takes the items from Rico's hand.

It occurs to Rico that Jenny, when she returns from the store, will see the boy with the gun, and become more frightened than she's ever been. She will jump. She will scream like he could not. It will be bad if she finds him here, but he doesn't want to rush someone who is holding a gun. "You just want money, and this? Jewelry?" asks Rico. "You want equipment? That radio and stuff?" he asks, indicating the small assortment of stereo and TV equipment Jenny had stacked on a set of Grandma's folding TV trays. The boy is looking at the setup, Rico thinks, to measure whether he will be able to carry any of it. "Do you have a truck?" Rico asks, looking out a window. He sees a van, parked in the darkness on the highway. Rico makes a wave of his arm to offer the varnished, burgundy furniture on which Jenny's grandmother had reclined and rested her fragile cups of tea in the evening, the upright piano with polished white and black keys that neither he nor Jenny, nor anyone they knew, could play. He then turns to lead the boy into the bathroom where, on the wall above the toilet, hang small paintings of animals with large, sad, childlike eyes.

The front door opens. Jenny is glaring. Her face is taut. She looks angry. Rico is grateful that from where she is she cannot see the gun in the boy's hand. He has only moments to show her how calm he is and hope that she will be as well. "Jenny. We're being robbed," he says, in a voice he might have used to wake a sleeping child. She slowly shakes her head and blinks her eyes as though something has exasperated her. She walks forward, directly toward the boy Rico had never seen until tonight. The boy does not start or advance to Jenny. She reaches around him, grabs the gun from his hands. Rico watches as she points the gun at one of Grandma's sheet-thin walls and begins pulling on the steel trigger, making a sound of six or seven empty metal clinks. She is still glaring. Rico thinks she is glaring at him. She hands the pistol to the boy. The boy looks for a moment as though he doesn't know what to do, then he puts the cash and the peanut butter jar on the table next to the couch, and he sets Jenny's jewelry in the still open drawer. He leaves the trailer and the last Rico sees of him he is jogging comfortably across the highway to his van.

Jenny begins walking around the house turning off lights while Rico watches her, not knowing what to say, not knowing if what he might say would have any meaning at all, because he doesn't know if he is sleeping or awake. Jenny turns off the lights in the bedroom, undresses in the dark, and is in bed when Rico finally goes in there. "What was that," he asks.

"Don't ask me that," she says. "I'm not telling you. I'm never telling you."

For the next week, they finish putting away all the things they brought from La Jolla to their new desert home, and through it all, Jenny is as silent as the boy he remembers being in the trailer. If she says anything at all, it is so small and so quiet and so incidental, that he has forgotten it an hour later. Jenny begins looking for a job, and so Rico does as well. She looks in restaurants. He looks mostly for help-wanted signs in the windows of stores and donut shops. By the end of two weeks, Rico has allowed himself the belief that Jenny is mad at him for something that he cannot remember, something which may actually have occurred but which he has forgotten, and that the boy in the trailer with the gun was in fact a dream. Something so important would have warranted some comment from her, he is certain, and since she has said nothing about it, it could not have happened. Whatever it is that has brought about her silence with him would be trivial by comparison and he is convinced she will speak to him before long.

Jenny speaks to him. "Sit down," she says, and she points to her grandmother's violet sofa.

"I was going to bed," he says.

She says, "I'm going to show you something."

As he sits, he is aware of the nearby end table which, in his dream, housed the jewelry he gave to the boy. He is tempted to open the drawer. Jenny stands near the television and she turns it on. Warped and ghostly figures come in and out of view as she fidgets with the antennae, trying to bring in an L.A. station. When finally there is a discernible face there, clear and flesh-toned, Rico blinks to wet his eyes. Jenny is on the screen. She is speaking words which cannot be heard. Below her face, in a scarlet headline type, are the words

WHAT KIND OF MAN IS YOUR MAN?

"This is Jenny Browell," reads the urgent voice of the woman hosting the show. "She and her longtime love, Rico Romeo, were moving into this trailer park in Roubidoux, California, when she agreed to let us have our dangerous intruder pay him a visit." The screen is panning across the dusty park where they live to show all the trailers. Rico takes note of their own as it moves across the front of the picture. The pan stops on the sign at the gate: Riverside Estates Mobile Home and RV Park.

"I think Rico'll stand up to him," says Jenny, smiling, almost giggling, a Jenny that Rico realizes he hasn't seen in a long time. "He won't do anything stupid, to get himself hurt, but he'll try to get the gun away from the guy and call the police or something. Rico doesn't let people walk all over him."

The woman's voice crashes in. "Boy, was Jenny in for a surprise!"

It is nighttime on the screen, and the boy in the loose plaid shirt is in the back of a van filled with television screens and equipment. He is hiding the gun behind his back.

He leaves through the open van door, looks both ways along the highway and crosses it toward Jenny and Rico's trailer, near the front of the park, where Rico is organizing things under the sink. "Remember," says the excited TV hostess, "the gun isn't really loaded, and our intruder is specially trained in the defensive martial arts, to keep himself or anyone else from actually getting hurt."

Rico can see himself in his own kitchen window, just a shadowy video figure, rippling through the telephoto lens. His own voice sounds hollow, reverberating, by radio microphone, off the walls in the trailer. "You want money," he says, and his words appear in bright white letters across the bottom of the picture. Rico sees the boy nod in the kitchen window on the television screen. "There's a little more in here," says Rico's television self and the screen reiterates it in white letters.

Rico turns his head away from the television to look over the back of the sofa at the empty kitchen. The lights are off there. He looks then at Jenny's face, next to him on the sofa. He is sure his movement is peripherally visible to her, but her attention to the program is immovable. A crease at the corner of her mouth promises to become a smile, something Rico has not seen on her in some time. When Rico looks back at the screen he sees himself again, through a different window. He is reaching over the back of the sofa to open the end table drawer, reaching through the space where he is sitting now.

"You just want money," Rico hears himself say, his voice muffled in the little television speaker, and then reads in the bright white subtitles, "and this? Jewelry? You want equipment? That radio and stuff?"

"Jenny's beau was giving away the store!" cries the TV woman. Jenny is on the screen again. She is sitting in the darkness of the TV van, her eyes and face illuminated by the bank of monitors. She has begun to glare in the way Rico remembers from his dream. "Goddammit!" she cries, the word presented in its clipped television form. The camera's eye bounces behind her as she leaves the van furiously and heads across the highway. A car horn screams, speeding by, its wake whipping her jacket behind her. "Finally," asserts the television woman's voice, "Jenny had had enough of her boyfriend's charity. She put an end to whole show."

Rico continues to watch as the segment comes to a conclusion: Rico's hushed warning to Jenny, Jenny firing the unloaded gun at the wall, the robber leaving the trailer, jogging back to the van, Jenny turning off all the lights in the place. Everything that Rico had been comfortable with believing was a dream is real again now, and that thing he had hoped was real but had forgotten is simply not. It is a poor excuse to himself. Rico is disappointed with all of it.

Commercials begin. Ignoring them, Jenny says, "I lived up to it. I didn't tell you. I never told you. Technically anyway, I lived up to it." Rico sits silently for a few minutes, as silent as the intruder had been, as silent as Jenny had been, and every few moments he sneaks a look at the crease growing at the corner of Jenny's mouth. He considers a tirade full of expletives and accusations, then edits it silently, and then edits it further. When he realizes each version would be equally futile, he says only, "You thought I would try to get the gun from him?"

"Shh," she says. "It's over." She puts an arm over his shoulder and they watch TV for several hours, laughing at all the shows. They stay up late, and for a little while, this dusty park feels as real to Rico as the breezy coast had all his life.

They hear the motor of a large pickup truck outside their trailer and a scuffle at the door. They look past the TV and the stereo stuff, all set upon Grandma's folding TV trays, and see three men through the window of their aluminum front door. One smiles a rotten-toothed grin. He is looking directly at Jenny and Rico. "Whoops!" he says. "Better call 911!"

Rico reaches for the nearby telephone to do that, picks up the receiver and pushes the buttons with the one hand. By the time he gets the receiver to his ear, he is aware of footsteps behind the trailer. There is no sound from the phone. Three men enter through the front door, followed by a fourth who comes from around the back carrying a pair of small wire cutters. All the men have longish, unwashed hair, and bad teeth and skin. Their boots are dirtying Jenny's grandmother's shag carpet.

One of the men goes to the kitchen where he finds the peanut butter jar in good time. Another opens the drawer next to where Rico sits, pulls from it the cheap necklace and bracelets which are still there, then stands over the two on the sofa, watching them while his friends gather things. "You guys are cute," he says, his stubbly cheeks breaking out into a miserable grin. "You're a real cute couple. Very pho-to-gen-ic," he enunciates.

"Telegenic," says his friend, who is at that moment stacking the television and stereo equipment into his own arms.

"Hell, what?" asks the man guarding Jenny and Rico.

"When you're in a photo, Lyle, you're photogenic. When you look good on TV, like these two, you're telegenic." He too smiles at the couple. Jenny is glaring, not at anyone in particular. Rico only shifts his weight in the sofa and props his head against a cushion. He closes his eyes. He thinks he knows how this ends. He just hopes to fall asleep so that if they start to take the furniture they can lift this sofa and carry him right out on it, and he'll be somewhere else, leading a normal life.

© D. Navarro