“I’m naming that pig Desayuno,” Ernie said.
“I’m naming that one Cena,” I said.
We’d had pork before. When we had a little money before the Great Depression, we used to eat bacon at the cafe in Trinidad when we’d go shopping for supplies. I liked bacon, but I was positive we wouldn’t be eating much of it. My dad would use every ounce of the pig to make chorizo. The mixing of the fat and the meat and the brains and the stomach and the organs would make a lot more meals than just slicing up small parts of the pig. He could mix all that stuff together, and we would have a lot more to eat. That’s okay. I loved the stuff.
“I’m naming that one Chorizo,” I said.
When we got the fence area made, we released the pigs into it. They squealed and yelped, and we fed them corn, corn husks, and any mushy alfalfa that had sat too long and had been turned down by the cows. By that time, a layer of dry earth and dust had already begun to cover the land. Things weren’t growing as good as they should. It was like people from Mars had come down and started secretly changing our planet to theirs. It was colder than usual, but the layers of dust that clung to the barn and our home made it seem like we were living close to the edge of the Sahara, like we would round the bend and see the pyramids of Giza or the Sphinx. But just like a frog being slowly boiled, we got used to it, day by day, the new normal of wearing handkerchiefs around our mouths when we worked outside and of cleaning dust off our clean dishes before we ate dinner. The black blizzards of dust and the dry lands had shrunken our crops and suffocated some of our chickens, but we moved on and lived in it and called our new pigs Chorizo, Dinner, and Breakfast.
That night, after my father had spent the day curing the beef, he came into the house late. He had grown so old since the dust began to come and since the money had begun to go away. His eyes had wrinkled even more with the booze, and his hair began to fade back along his scalp like he had become some caricature of my father, an old and tired man in the shell of my dad. It’s crazy what three or four years can do to a person. Stress, stress is a real son of a bitch. Work is different from stress. My father always worked hard but smiled through it because he could see something come of it. He could see the money being placed in hands.
We never really had “money” money, but we always had enough, more than most along the ranch-filled land of southeastern Colorado. The miners did pretty well, but they all died young. I’d rather be poorer than die with black lungs, but they didn’t have a choice either. They too had to live the life they had been given.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN HE CAME into the house, he looked worn, but he smiled. He smiled until my mom tapped him hard across the back of the head.
He dropped three huge ribeye cuts from the cow onto the table. It was enough to feed us for days. We could cut them up and put them in stews or let them soak into soups. We could slice them thin and place them into tortillas with fried corn and lard. We could even batter them in corn meal to thicken them up. Three large ribeye cuts. They lay on the table between my father and mother. Would this decision be the end of my parents? The look in my mother’s eyes told me that it would.
“Let’s cook them up, Benita. Just once, por favor” he said. “Me and Ernesto could share the big one. You and Della could share the next big one, and the two boys could share the little one. I will make a sauce to dip them in. You don’t have to cook at all. Della will cook the corn, and Ernie can fry some tomatoes from his garden.”
Ernie and I shook our heads up and down. We were like two damn lost dogs begging for scraps. Hell, I had already shucked the corn while I waited for them to get home, and I was loading up the frying pan with grease when my mother protested again by kicking me in the ass with the back of her foot.
“Benita, please. I don’t think this dust will ever lift. This might be our life forever. Can’t we just enjoy one day this year?” I’d never seen my father plead like that. Yes, he was kind, but he was no beggar, not even to his wife. He raised up both his arms to the sky like he was praying to the wife gods to show mercy.
Sheepish. The steaks on the table had made my father sheepish. The pigs in the barn had made him smart, but the cow on the table had made him vulnerable. Hungry. He was hungry for red meat, hungry for something besides fried corn, hungry for what all those years of work had earned him, a big, red steak, cooked just enough to stop the blood from leaking out of it.
“Please, Benita,” my father said.
She looked at him with his arms in the air, with the steaks on the table, and with me and Ernie watching to see what would happen, and said, “Stop whining, Francisco, I’ll cook up your meat for you.”
She grabbed the steaks, laid them out on the counter, pounded them thin with our kitchen mallet, stuffed the wood stove, lit it on fire, and then turned to us and told us to do what my father had promised her that we would.
Ernie ran to his garden and pulled out some big, ripe tomatoes, and since I had already shucked the corn, I gathered it up in a big bowl and waited for my turn with the fry pan.
My mom threw lard in the pan, and when it began to sizzle, she grabbed the flattened steaks, tossed them in corn meal and spices, and then fried them up until their skins sizzled golden brown. She dropped them on a towel and let them sit. They were not just the chunks of meat that my father had begged for; they were fried steaks in lard with an outside layer of crunchy skin that he loved more than anything else on this earth. She cooked a meal for him that he could not have enjoyed more. She bitched about it the whole damn time, with little whispers of “borracho” and “estupido” under her breath, but when the steaks came out of the pan, she smiled.
I used the same lard and fat and grease-soaked pan to fry my corn, and the bright yellows and purples and greens all turned to a dark black skin that had been flavored by chicken-fried steak and lard. When I finished, Ernie dropped his tomatoes in, only for a few seconds on each side so that he wouldn’t lose the flavor of his favorite red fruit, and then pulled them out and placed them in the middle of the table for us to stare at until my mom filled our plates with thin, hot, juicy steaks and fried corn.
My dad did nothing that night except sit there and drink whiskey and smile. He watched us cook, something he rarely did, always jumping in to move a pan so we didn’t burn ourselves or wipe up grease splatters from the wall or oven. That night, however, he just sat there and drank whisky and listened to my mom call him borracho, a drunkard.
We sat and ate together. The little ones barely finished their little steak, but we let them sit there and work on it for more than an hour. It was theirs, and they too had earned it for being a part of this world for the last few years when the earth and money had all dried itself up. My mom and I split the middle steak. It was heavenly. Son of bitch, I can still taste that steak on my lips and on my tongue. Outside the ground had become like the skin of an old man who had never used lotion in his entire goddamned life, but that steak felt like the rich, moist earth after a heavy rain from only a few years back in our memories.
My dad and Ernesto shared the big steak. They didn’t speak at all, my brother already becoming the spitting image of my dad. They finished the first half of it quickly, not able to hold themselves back from what had seemed like they had been waiting for all their lives. Then, however, when half of each of their portions disappeared from their plates, they slowed down. I think they knew then what I know now, and wished I knew then. There would never be another steak like this in their lives.
My dad had become so visibly drunk that each time he put a piece of steak in his mouth, he couldn’t chew and keep his eyes open at the same time, his muscles so weakened by liquor that they could not use all of them at once. When he finished his steak, he lifted his body from his seat, and, like he had been lifted by the hand of God, he floated to the floor of the living room and laid down and fell asleep.
The next morning, he woke up in the same clothes he’d slept in and walked out into the fields and did his daily work. He never touc
hed another sip of alcohol in his life.
Chapter Ten
John
1933
SINCE THAT DAY WITH THE KKK, OUR FAMILY JOINED DELLA’S family once a month for dinner. It was always the same. Either they came to our house and had chiles or we went to theirs and had corn. I looked forward to the next meal the second we left their house from the last, looking back to see the Chavez house disappear behind the dust cloud that the Auburn kicked up.
At her house, Della and I played outside by the apple tree until she was called in to cook, and I would help her. She set up scavenger hunts for me before I got there. She left little clues everywhere that led me from one treasure to another—little things she found around the ranch—and got upset when I couldn’t figure things out.
“Dammnit, John, are you dull?” she’d ask when I’d try to decipher a code she had put on a piece of paper. She would replace letters with numbers or vice versa and expect me to know which of the other they represented. When it took me more than a few minutes, she would rip the clue out of my hand and lead me through it like a teacher schooling a child.
“In this case, 23 equals W, so when you see a 23, it’s a W. If you see a 23 and 1/2, it’s a lowercase w. Understand, John? If you see a zero, that’s an O. The clues are simple. Here you see, 23 and 1/2 00 d. What does that mean, John?”
I stared at it for a bit, “Wood.”
“Yep, and where do we find wood?”
“In the woodshed!” I yelled.
We ran toward the woodshed, opened it up, and found her dog waiting there for us to rescue him.
“Della, get in here, time to cook,” Señora Chavez yelled from the kitchen window.
When we got to be about twelve years old, we stopped playing games and started harassing Ernie and Manuel who had begun to sneak off behind the barn and smoke cigarettes that they rolled between their fingers and shared, waving the smoke away from their mouths.
Della had the idea once to drop water on them from above, so we climbed up through the barn with a bucket of water and dumped the whole thing on their heads. Within minutes, Ernie held Della out over the edge of the second story of the barn and Manuel wrestled me to the ground in the hay.
“Knock it off, Della,” Ernie told her, “or I’ll drop you.”
“No, you won’t. That’s just a weak threat,” she said. “And if you drop me, I’ll tell dad you’re smoking. He hates that shit and you know it.”
Manuel slugged me hard in the arm and then in the quad. Both muscles went completely numb. He and Ernie were fifteen years old, and I was a long way from catching him in strength. I wiggled to try and get out of his grasp, but it didn’t work.
“Come cook!” Della’s mom yelled.
When she yelled, we all listened. It didn’t matter how strong our older brothers had gotten. Señora Chavez was no one to be messed with.
THE NEXT MONTH, THE CHAVEZES came to our house for dinner. We filled them with chile rellenos, stuffed peppers from the big peppers in our garden. I made a lot of it with my mom, but Della never helped me cook like I helped her. Instead, she moved between my dad and hers while they took apart the Auburn and put it back together. It had become a ritual, pulling pieces out of it, cleaning them, and then reassembling the engine.
Della brought a pencil and paper out and started inventorying the pieces that came out after the first time they did it and when they put it back together, two pieces remained on the ground. Somehow it still ran when my dad said, “Aww, no necessitatamos.” Della made it her business to make sure every piece that came out not only went back in but also went back in the right place.
After dinner, my mom left to go to adoration and the rest of us stayed.
My dad and Francisco sat on the deck and talked about the fields and about the mines and about the drought. Frank didn’t drink anymore, but it didn’t bother him when my dad put back his Sunday afternoon Coors. They’d become close friends, just like the rest of us, and at twelve years old, I’d begun to see Della in a way that I didn’t over the previous four years.
I began to have an urge to reach out and touch her face, to hug her when there was no need to. I even had to close my eyes as hard as I could at night to push the images of kissing her out of my brain like squeezing a sponge dry.
It became a nagging image that didn’t go away. I thought about it in school. I thought about it when I plucked chiles at home. I thought about it in the shower. I thought about it so much that I could barely look at her anymore.
THE DAY AFTER WE DUMPED water on Ernie and Manuel, I walked Della to the truck that would take her home after school, just like always. I carried her backpack. We talked. She mostly talked. She had begun to talk about leaving the ranch and Trinidad, to talk about going to places she had read about in books—California or New York or Chicago or some place called Miami for some reason.
This shot a mixture of fear and anger through me that I didn’t know existed. But it was different than when I got mad at Manuel for slugging me or taking the last tortilla from the batch. Or cross at Maria for always doing exactly what she was supposed to do or being my father’s favorite child. Or frustrated with Paulo for crying in the middle of the night. The anger came from what I could only call my heart.
“Why would you want to leave?” I asked her.
To me, I planned to be a miner. I thought she could be a miner’s wife. I had imagined this for so long in a childish way. I imagined her being my wife because we got along so well, but that day everything changed. I didn’t want her to leave because of something different, and I got angry when she started to talk about it.
“Here’s your bag,” I said prematurely, an easy ten minutes before I needed to. “I gotta go.”
“What?” Della asked. “Why are you being such an idioto?”
“I’m not. I just got to go is all,” I said. I turned away from her and began to run, but she caught my hand. A rush ran from her finger tips to my skull, like I’d stuck my hand in a fire. When I turned to her, she gave me a look that said Don’t go, John. Stay with me.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
She squeezed my hand a bit, let it go, and then she—the Della who never shied away from anything—turned away from me, blushing at the tops of her caramel-colored cheeks.
“The world is a puzzle that I want to solve,” she said. “Trinidad is just so…so tiny.”
I heard her talk, but I wasn’t listening. The blood rose up toward my skin, and I could barely feel my lips, and then they became the only thing I could think about. My lips. Her lips. Our hands touching.
“Chilis,” I said. “I have to tend to the chiles.”
“What the goddamned hell is wrong with you, John?” she said, loudly enough for every one of our classmates who headed out to the ranch too could hear.
I had used up all my words.
I sprinted away from her with enough adrenaline in my legs to skip the truck that carried us home—I ran all the way home, my legs fumbling beneath me by the end of the sprint.
“GO ON A WALK WITH me, joto,” Della said that following Sunday at our house.
“Nope, I think I’ll just hang out with Ernie and Manuel,” I said. “I think it’s time for me to just hang out with the boys.”
I followed them to the field to do whatever they did in the field after dinner. Manuel was my brother and my best friend, but when we went to the Chavezes, or when they came to our house, he only wanted to hang out with Ernie. Ernie did the same thing to Della.
The truth was that I think they both knew that me and Della wanted to be together too, at first as friends and then, now, as whatever this awkward thing was that we were since the moment she grabbed my hand earlier that month.
“I’m going to go to the field with them,” I said.
I started to run away from her, and then I felt a foot hook me at my ankle and the ground slam into my face.
Chapter Eleven
Della
1933
YES, I TRIPPED THAT DUMBASS. HE STARTED RUNNING TO THE barn like we hadn’t been friends for nearly five years. He was acting so weird. I knew why, of course, but I didn’t want to let him know I knew. This gave me the upper hand on the feelings I’d begun to feel for that niño more than a year ago. My mom always said girls mature so much faster than estúpido boys. I had been looking at John like he looked at me the day I grabbed his hand long before he noticed me that way. But I didn’t have that stupid “I don’t know what the hell is going on and I’m going to run away now look” splashed across my face. I could control it all.
He could not.
So I tripped him.
He fell harder to the ground than I thought he would. He didn’t expect it at all. His hands and wrists failed to brace him. He ate the ground hard, harder than I had seen any boy or man who hadn’t been drinking all day fall to the ground, and even when they fell, they wobbled to the ground like they fell through a big layer of jello.
“Ouch!” he yelled out.
No one but us were there to see him hit the ground. I ran over to him and turned his body over. He bled from his cheek, his mouth, and his palms and elbows.
“I didn’t mean to trip you,” I said.
“Yes you did, Della,” he said. Blood began to pull up next to the edge of his lips.
“Well, okay, I didn’t mean for you to fall that hard,” I said, which was true. I thought he might just stumble, brace himself, and then get the idea that he was being a stupid idiot and come back and go on a walk with me.
“It hurts,” he said.
“Don’t be such a joto, John,” I said.
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