“Because cards aren’t your specialty,” said Juan. “And you got enough problems with that dance you’re putting on. Plus, I’m a professional, so I can guarantee you a solid profit and no problems.”
Towering over Juan, Archie pulled at his lower lip like a big sad-faced cow, thinking, figuring, then he said, “Okay, I’ll try it your way one night.”
“Oh, no,” said Juan, grinning. “Three nights, minimum.”
Both men laughed, continuing their negotiations.
Just south of town in a place called La Costa, Lupe and her family were picking tomatoes. It was almost noon and the sun was high overhead, and Lupe could see that her mother and father were exhausted.
“Mama,” said Lupe, “why don’t you and Papa go ahead and set up lunch? Victoriano and I will finish up your boxes.
“Lupe’s right,” said Don Victor, “I’m tired.”
“Well, okay,” said their mother, “I do need time to set up a place for us to eat.”
So the old lady took off her wide-brimmed hat and wiped the perspiration from her face with her handkerchief. Then she and her husband started down between the rows of tomatoes.
Doña Guadalupe and Don Victor were two of the oldest pickers. And working out in the treeless fields was a job only for young people, not for people who’d already had all the juices sucked out of them with years of working in the sun.
Lupe and her brother watched their parents go down between the rows. They looked so old and tired, yet beautiful, walking together; two old people who’d seen so much life.
It was noon and Lupe and Victoriano were coming out of the field, too. Lupe breathed deeply and she could smell the ocean in the distance and the fragrance from the fields of cut flowers down below them.
At the edge of the tomato field, Carlota came rushing up to them. She was working with another group of workers down below in the fields of flowers.
“Lupe,” she said excitedly, “there’s going to be a dance in Carlsbad tonight and Jaime and his friends want us to go with them.”
Jaime and some other young men were several yards away, talking among themselves but glancing over toward the girls. Lupe couldn’t understand why Jaime and his friends always kept getting Carlota to ask her to go to the dances with them when they knew perfectly well that she didn’t dance.
“Oh, come on, please say yes,” said Carlota, glancing nervously toward Jaime and his friends.
Seeing how anxious her sister was, Lupe nodded. “All right,” she said, “but we’ll have to ask Mama.”
“Oh, thank you!” said Carlota, waving at the boys.
Then Lupe and her sister and brother continued down the dirt road that circled the field to where the people were setting up places to eat under the trees and brush.
From here, the whole lagoon was visible, and the flat horizon of the sea could be seen, too. White seagulls circled overhead and the sky was blue and wide and clear. The fields of cutting-flowers were in full bloom and they looked like a great rainbow covering the soft, rolling hills all the way down to the sea. Next to their box canyon, this was, indeed, one of the most beautiful sights that Lupe had ever seen.
Coming up to the brush line, Lupe saw that her father was asleep in the shade of a small tree and her mother had cleared away the brush and spread a blanket out on the ground for them to eat on. It never failed to amaze Lupe how her mother always managed to make a little home for them no matter where they were.
Sitting cross-legged, looking plump and regal, Doña Guadalupe sliced a big juicy tomato and put the luscious red-orange wheels next to the slices of the rich, green avocado that she’d already cut. Lupe’s family was one of the poorest in all the fields, but still, they always ate very well, getting food from the different ranches where they worked.
“Mama, there’s going to be a dance in Carlos Malo tonight,” said Carlota, “and Lupe and I have been invited!”
Carlos Malo was what the Mexicans called the town of Carlsbad.
“Well, you can only go if your brother agrees to take you,” said their mother, putting a couple more tortillas on the little open fire.
“Will you take us?” Carlota asked her brother.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Victoriano, getting a tortilla off the fire to nibble on. “I’m a busy man. I have a lot of very important business to attend to tonight.”
“Lupe!” yelled Carlota. “You tell our brother to stop teasing me!”
Lupe only laughed, turning over the tortillas on the little fire. They were going to have quesadillas with tomato slices and avocado. “I agreed to go with you,” she said. “I can’t do more, Carlota.”
“Oh, you and Victoriano are just old goats!” said Carlota. “Never wanting to do anything! This is the String Bean Festival! The most important dance of the year!”
“I thought the most important was the apricot dance of Hemet,” laughed Victoriano.
“Well, that one’s important, too,” said Carlota.
“And the orange blossom dance in Santa Ana,” continued Victoriano. “We’d be going to dances every weekend if it was up to you!”
“Yes,” said Carlota. “Exactly! And some day I want to own my own dancehall and put on dances every night!”
They all laughed and Lupe wondered deep inside herself why it was that she didn’t like to go to the dances like her sister Carlota.
But then, thinking further, Lupe knew why it was that she didn’t like to go. Dancing wasn’t really that important to her. What was more important for her was to have a special person to dance with. Why, if her Colonel were alive, she’d go dancing with him every night. She breathed deeply, realizing that she hadn’t thought of him in a long time.
“Buenas tardes,” said Jaime, suddenly coming up to them.
Lupe turned and saw Jaime and his two friends. They were as lean as jackrabbits and they wore brightly-colored bandannas about their heads and tight-fitting, sleeveless undershirts and loose pants. They were what the people called showoffs because they didn’t wear hats or long-sleeved shirts to protect themselves from the sun.
Seeing that Lupe had turned to look at him, Jaime gave her his best smile, showing her his beautiful white teeth. The muscles on his arms raced up and down like rabbits. All the girls were crazy about Jaime, and the men respected him, too, because he was a semi-pro boxer. But Lupe didn’t really care for him.
“Buenas tardes,” said their mother. “Would you care to join us?”
“Oh, no, thank you, Señora. We have our own lunches waiting for us,” he said respectfully. “I just came by to see if Carlota has told you about the dance,” he added, looking directly at Lupe.
“Yes, she has,” said Doña Guadalupe, “but we won’t have an answer until my husband awakens and we talk.”
“Very well,” he said, giving a polite nod. “Then with your permission, enjoy your lunches. And I hope that you’ll be able to join us, too, Lupe,” he said. He gave Lupe another smile, nodding goodbye to her.
After they were gone, Carlota turned to Lupe. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with you!” she said. “Every girl is just dying for him to ask her out, and for months you’ve ignored him like he has lice!”
“Well, maybe he does,” said Victoriano, laughing, mouth open.
Lupe joined her brother, laughing, too. But inside her soul, she felt very nervous.
After shaking hands on a deal, Archie and Juan decided to go up the street to eat lunch at the Montana Cafe. The people who ran the Montana Cafe were a big German named Hans and his wife Helen. They’d moved out to California from New Jersey a couple of years before.
“Hello, Hans!” said Archie as he sauntered into the cafe in a big, loose-rolling gait.
“Good to see you, Archie,” said Hans. “But you better eat all you order this time,” he added.
Archie only laughed, pulling up his gun belt as he sat down with his back against the wall. “That Kraut son-of-a-bitch,” he said laughing, “you got to be careful you don�
�t order more than you can eat or he’ll force you to eat it, crazy son-of-a-bitch.”
Helen came up with two cups of coffee. “Hans says the roast beef is best today, Archie,” she said, smiling. “And then my special homemade hot apple pie for dessert, I say.”
“Sounds good, Helen,” said the lawman, tipping his hat. “I’d like you to meet my friend, Juan.”
“Oh, ‘John’ in English. Same as my Hans,” said Helen. “Glad to meet you, Juan.”
“Very glad to meet you, Helen,” said Juan, also tipping his Stetson.
The café filled up with local businessmen, and Archie and Juan were eating their roast beef, truly enjoying the good, cheap food, when three, loud-mouthed boys entered.
They were in their late teens, large, muscular. They were the sons of local ranchers who’d been away to college, and they thought that they were pretty hot stuff.
Archie only grinned, picking up his cup of coffee. “Oh, this is going to be good,” he said.
“What?” asked Juan, not quite understanding.
“You just watch,” said Archie, sipping his coffee in big, air-sucking sips. “Them boys are in for a rude awakening.” And he winked at Juan, truly enjoying it.
Still, Juan had no idea what was going on.
He and Archie had just been served their big juicy slices of hot apple pie when the three boys got a little too loud. Hans came from behind the counter with a big butcher knife in his hand.
“Boys,” he said, chewing his words in his big square jaws, “this is no place to fool around! I work hard to cook good food, and I got good, cheap, honest prices! So now you three boys settle down and eat, and everything will be just fine!”
But the biggest boy wasn’t about to be told what to do, and he pushed his plate away. “Hell, we don’t have to eat this shit if we don’t want to, grandpa,” he said.
Suddenly, the big, blond German’s face exploded, and his eyes rolled over like a bloodshot bull’s. Bellowing with rage, he hit the boy in the back with the big wooden handle of the butcher knife, stunning him.
“You eat!” he bellowed. “All of you! And you enjoy that food you ordered, now!”
The three boys saw his bloodshot eyes and the huge knife. Terror-stricken, they began to eat.
“But aren’t you going to do something?” asked Juan. “You’re the law.”
“Not me,” said Archie. “I ain’t no fool. I’m eating my pie. Hell, last month he hit me on the head with a coffee cup when I came in half-tanked up and refused to finish my steak.”
“He hit you? A deputy?” asked Juan incredulously.
“Hell, he’s a German,” said Archie, pulling back his hat and showing Juan a red scar across his skull. “I was lucky he didn’t scalp my ass!” And he laughed and laughed, truly enjoying himself. Archie was half California Indian, and he didn’t have a mean or revengeful bone in all his body.
It was almost dark, and Lupe and Carlota were standing in line with Victoriano across the street from the pool hall, waiting to get into the dance. The music had already started, and it could be heard halfway up the barrio. Lupe was wearing her polka-dot-dress and some beautiful earrings that her mother had gotten for her in Arizona.
Across the street, Juan was overseeing the card tables. He was all dressed up in a white shirt and dark suit, and his beard was neatly trimmed.
“Well,” said Archie, seeing that Juan had control of the situation, “I think I’ll mosey on over and see how things are going at the dance. I don’t want no young studs getting in for free.”
“Go ahead,” said Juan, “everything is fine here.”
“It better be, for the price I’m paying you,” said Archie.
The big lawman went out the open door of the well-lit poolroom and across the rutted dirt road to the church that he’d rented to put on the dance. Approaching the line of young people, Archie immediately spotted Lupe in her pale peach dress, but he paid no attention to her. The one he liked was Carlota. She was dressed in red, and she couldn’t stop moving. Her feet were dancing back and forth on the hard-packed ground that the people used as a sidewalk, as she whirled about in her full-skirted dress.
“Hey, you!” called Archie to Carlota. “Come over here to the front of the line,” he said, grinning ear-to-ear.
“Me?” asked Carlota, pointing at herself.
Everyone in town knew that Archie was the local law and a big shot in the barrio.
“Yes, you, and that whirling red dress! Come on up here with your friends, baby!”
Carlota screeched. Archie had said “baby” to her just like a gringo. “Come on,” she said, quickly going up to the head of the line with Lupe, Victoriano, and Jaime and his two friends who’d just joined them.
“Here are the tickets,” said Archie to Carlota, towering over her and Jaime and everyone else. “You sell ’em for me, but don’t let no one in who ain’t paid.” He winked. “I’ll be right back. Just gotta go inside and lift my leg to a fire hydrant.”
He laughed good-heartedly, pulled up his gun belt, and went inside. Carlota was ecstatic.
“Line right up!” she shouted.
“Give me the tickets,” said Jaime. “This is a job for a man!”
“Oh, no!” yelled Carlota, jerking the tickets close. “I’m the boss! He gave them to me!”
“Oh, ‘the boss’?” laughed Jaime.
“You damned right,” said Carlota, laughing excitedly as she began to take people’s money.
Lupe smiled, realizing that her sister’s dream of having her own dance room had come true. She looked across the street, and through the open doors of the pool hall, she saw a well-dressed man with a lion head of hair. Her heart stopped. There was something strangely familiar about his back, his posture, his stance.
The dance had been going on for some time when Archie came back into the pool hall and asked Juan how it was going.
“Pretty good,” said Juan, “but you didn’t tell me that you’d be selling whiskey in the alley, you bastard. Liquored-up men are harder to handle.”
Laughing, Archie slapped Juan on the back. “Shit, does the coyote tell the fox where the chickens are?”
“You sneaky bastard!” said Juan.
“Whatever,” said Archie. “But I’ll tell you this, you get hold of some good whiskey for me, instead of this rot-gut shit, and I’ll make us both rich!”
“How about some good tequila?” asked Juan.
“Nope,” said Archie, “gringos like whiskey.”
“I see,” said Juan.
They were talking, going over the different possibilities of doing business together, when suddenly there was a commotion outside and everyone rushed to the open doors of the pool hall.
Archie and Juan went to the doors, too, and they could see that a fight had broken out in front of the dancehall across the street. It looked like the same three boys that they’d seen at the Montana Cafe, fighting with four Mexicans.
But one tall, slender Mexican wasn’t really fighting. He was just trying to get the short woman in the red dress, Carlota, away from the fight. She looked tough, as if she wanted to get into the middle of the fight and scratch people’s eyes out.
Someone came running up to Archie. “They’re killing each other!” yelled the man. “You got to stop them!”
But Archie only grinned and brought out a stick of gum. “It’s all right,” he said. “Just let them soften up each other a little for me.” And he put the stick of gum in his mouth and began chewing calmly, watching the fight.
That’s when Juan saw Lupe. She was standing under the outside light of the dance hall, looking so fresh and tall and slender—a flower in full bloom.
Juan felt his mouth go dry and his heart come pounding up into his throat. He didn’t know what was happening to him. It felt as if far away, in another lifetime, he’d known this fantastic creature. Her posture, her simple dress, just holding there with such regal grace under the glow of the light.
Juan forgot all abou
t his responsibilities and started across the street. He needed to find out who this woman was, right now, before the magic passed.
But then Archie grabbed Juan from behind. “Hey, just hold on there,” said Archie, turning him around. “You get back in there, and watch ’em tables. I’ll handle this.”
Juan had to concentrate down to the marrow of his bones in order not to go crazy and hit the big lawman. Oh, she was so beautiful, it made him all weak and dizzy inside. Sobering up, Juan went back to the pool hall to watch the tables.
Archie sauntered on over to the fight, nice and easy, sizing up the situation. He could see that two of the Anglos were already pretty well-used up, but the third one, the biggest one, was still going at it toe-to-toe with a very fast Mexican who knew a lot about boxing.
Carlota was screaming at the top of her lungs, “Get him, Jaime! Get him!”
Pulling out another piece of gum, Archie moved up close to Carlota. “How’d it get started, baby?” he asked, bending down so he could hear her over the ruckus.
“Those three!” she yelled, pointing at the Anglos. “They didn’t pay and were forcing their way inside!”
“Oh, I see,” said Archie, popping the gum into his mouth. “Should’ve figured as much.”
He straightened up to his huge six-foot-five frame and walked into the fight with his rolling gait. Grabbing the two Anglos from behind, who were well done in already, he popped them together with his huge hands. Their heads slapped up against each other, and they sank to the ground as nicely as wet paper dolls.
“You two are deputized,” he bellowed at Jaime’s two friends who’d been fighting the Anglos. “Now just drag these gents across the street and tell my barkeep to tie ’em up.”
The two young men jumped to it and began dragging the two Anglos across the street.
But the big Anglo and the Mexican named Jaime continued fighting. They worked their way up and down the street. The big Anglo tried to grab Jaime and wrestle him to the ground, but Jaime was fast and he just kept moving and hitting.
Having checked the tables, Juan went back to the front door. “I need to calm down,” he said to himself. “Hell, I don’t even know her and I’m going crazy.”
Rain of Gold Page 38