“What color was it?”
The woman turned to the boy. “Answer the man.”
“Blue,” the boy said.
“Are you sure you brought it in the cab?” Hans said.
“It’s my favorite jacket,” the boy said.
The woman looked around the back seat. “It’s not here,” she said. “Stand up.”
The boy struggled with the seat belt. The woman grabbed it from his hands and unbuckled it.
“You hurt my hand,” the boy said.
“Maybe you left it at the house?” Hans said.
“Stand up,” the woman said.
The boy stood in the seat, curving his neck to avoid the ceiling of the car. He stumbled forward in his seat when Hans stopped at the stoplight.
“Where’s the jacket?” the woman said.
“I don’t know,” the boy said.
Hans reached for the meter on the dashboard. He nudged the glove compartment closed again.
“We’re here,” Hans said.
“Who told you to turn the meter off? Turn it on,” the woman said.
“Why?” Hans said.
“Start it again. We’re going home.”
“I want Waffle Place,” the boy said.
“You’re not getting anything until we find your jacket.”
Hans circled the parking lot and turned back toward the green house. He looked in the rearview mirror. The woman was mumbling to herself, loud enough for the boy to hear. The boy was crying. He made eye contact with Hans through the mirror. Hans focused on the road ahead. The boy stared at Hans every time he glanced at the rearview mirror.
“Drive faster. Stop milking the meter,” the woman said.
Hans drove faster. He needed the jacket more than the boy needed waffles. Hans hoped one day the boy would understand.
Pardeep Toor grew up in Brampton, Ontario, and currently lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature and the Midwest Review and is forthcoming in Great River Review.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Beneath a highway overpass, a high school boy hollers as a truck barrels by, feeling the vibrations in his body, straining to hear the sound of his own voice above the roar. “Salt” is a wonderfully sensory story, full of heat and sweat and physicality, and also quiet watchfulness. We follow Chava as he watches a boy named Fermín play goalie at an intramural futbol game on a sweltering day; talks with him for the first time at the rundown hotel where his family lives; and takes a field trip with him and other students to the strange Salton Sea in Southern California, where the water is drying up. One teacher describes the Salton Sea as “a big fish graveyard.” Another says, “Few can survive these harsh conditions.”
Alberto Reyes Morgan’s sharp prose captures the numerous threats these boys face—violence, prejudice, deportation of family members. Amid these harsh conditions, desire delicately blooms. “Salt” renders concrete a private intensity that gathers inside and is almost too dangerous to express, even to oneself, and lays it bare in its stark, painful beauty.
Polly Rosenwaike, Fiction Editor
Michigan Quarterly Review
SALT
Alberto Reyes Morgan
JUST BEFORE SHE left forever to Sonora, my amá said she’d given me the tit when I was a little boy for longer than I needed. Not to have me stronger or healthier, but as a way to keep another pregnancy away. My apá believed in raising as many escuincles as God handed down for his two-bedroom apartment.
And that last time we were all still a family, while I stared at the cracked plastic of my amá’s packed bag, she also open-handed me across the face on account of the dirt that I’d brought inside.
It had followed me from beneath the highway overpass. That tawny soil had caked my green backpack and the navy blue pants of my middle school uniform. Her slap never took, because I kept going beneath the overpass well into my high school years.
The sun didn’t scorch under there. I would lean against the warm, but never burning, concrete walls, my lower half cushioned by the finely ground soil. When I heard the slow rumble of a large vehicle, my back tightened. As the vibrations grew stronger in the concrete and rolled into me, I looked at the sloppy E and L tags the Eastside Locos had sprayed on the wall. Jagged 13s in thick block letters with red drip lines that ran down and met the smooth soil.
I felt the vibrations coming down my body as a double semi was heading toward the México border just a few miles away. The shaking noise, the heavy rumble. My uncut nails clawed into my knees as I hollered at the trailer going past, trying to hear my own voice.
“YOUR PARENTS PROBABLY work outside, under this same sun, when it’s even hotter,” declared Mr. Borland, from beneath his wide-brimmed sombrero. We followed behind his lanky body as he swiftly led us to our high school’s futbol field. That afternoon Mr. Borland, a trained athlete made to teach biology, gave us the bullet points of the scientific method. His sunglasses still on, he explained the importance of participating in the intramural matches he’d organized with some of the other teachers. He railed against soda and the fried food from the ice-cream truck. According to Mr. Borland, these twenty minutes of sport could change our lives, but most of us only watched.
Every few weeks I’d catch him at night, shirtless, running on the unlit streets toward my corner of town. He seemed to stretch taller as he galloped down the black asphalt, his white skin silver as his sweat caught the moon. I’d hear his pounding feet, the gasps of breath, as I walked home in the dark.
Today, in the August humidity, my bleached hair slicked back with number five gel for maximum lock and hold, I was all in black. A poor decision on my part, made exclusively because I’d read of the slimming properties of all black.
Straggling behind with me was Yisel. Her broad shoulders flabbed down into the fleshy edges of her wide back. A constellation of freckles covered her soft pink face. I didn’t care that she’d tried multiple times to convert me to Christianity.
Rene Cruz came up behind her with his big gold chain and big jeans but surprisingly understated small diamond earring. In one motion, he put his hand over her lower back and squeezed her tight to his body. I didn’t know she was into cholos.
A drop of sweat ran off my sideburn. It landed on the bare dirt of the futbol pitch. A dark spot that shriveled in seconds.
On the pitch, clouds of dust and dead golden grass rose as the ball was kicked around. A group of students watched the game; many hands raised over many eyes to block out the sun. In the confusion of moving bodies, I slinked away while Mr. Borland and another teacher struggled to put a team together for a match.
Though I saw people I knew, they weren’t the kind I felt I could approach. In an attempt to shake my awkwardness, to look interesting yet disinterested, I took in my surroundings: The dead olive tree baked by sunlight, its cracked trunk filled with stashed knives and homemade foil pipes. Our rusted school fence. A light blue sky that stretched past the chatter and heads of the spectators. Across that sky lazed wisps of cloud fluff, which disappeared as they reached the bleached-white corona of the sun.
Suddenly, I heard a deep boom followed by a sharp slap. The ball spun up into the blue, while on the pitch the goalkeeper lay splayed faceup on the dirt. Dusty goggles strapped tight on his head hid his eyes from me. The crowd began to whistle and holler at what must have been a spectacular save.
Most goalies in these student games would, at most, halfheartedly stretch out a limp hand to make a save; the position was usually reserved for the girls who didn’t want to get fussed up or the guys like myself whose technical abilities were limited. But as this goggled goalkeeper stood, the sun pouring down on him, I thought of an Aztec priest lifting a sacrificial heart for the sun.
He left alone the dirty brown patches on his creased navy blue pants and only spit into his hands, rubbing them together. He untucked his violet shirt—buttoned to the neck—and ran his fingers through his restless black hair. On top of his upper lip, a
thin black mustache. I could hear his congested nose; he breathed like a short-snouted dog, taking powerful lungfuls of air. Standing in the crowd, as the sunlight slammed my body and I took the white heat, I watched only him.
He propelled himself into every ball. Arms stretched out, he ran shouting toward the strikers coming at him. The passion that ripped through his body moved in sheets of sweat through my own. Gluey lines of melted gel crusted on my cheeks and sweat ran down my shins, but I didn’t care.
The drudgery of the desert dissipated. So, too, the repeating green rectangles of the agricultural fields that surrounded us. Those endless looped rows of alfalfa that speed past your car window, like some Hanna-Barbera cartoon background.
I STOOD BY the fence after school, marinating my clothes in my sweat. Cute girls waiting for rides hid their bodies from the sun in the shade of a lone palm tree. Round asses. Heavy chests. The long dark hair with touches of blond streaks. The narrowing waists, the widening hips.
An anxious energy filled me. At this point in September, my dad was still harvesting date plants out toward Yuma. My brothers weren’t home either. Efra worked nights as a stocker at the Walmart and disappeared for most of the day. Chema was at federal prison for crossing into Calexico in a car filled with coke. He thought there were only bricks of weed in the tires. So nobody was home. I thought of going to sit in the cool shadow of the highway overpass to listen to the cars.
“Hey, Chava,” a voice called out to me.
It was Luis Lozano, tall in an XXL white T-shirt draped over his bones like a tablecloth. I hadn’t seen him in months, since before the summer break.
“Yo, what’re you up to?” I asked.
“Just blazed a bit over at mota nation.” He pointed behind him.
“You mean the alley with the couch and the car seat.”
“Ah huevo! You know it. Just rollin’ past to see who I see. Headin’ to Fermín’s cantón now. His jefita got mad last time I smoke there.”
“Fermín?”
“You don’t know him? You’ve probably seen him goalie here. Wears these funny goggles.” Luis laughed by himself, his red eyes half-closed.
“Oh.” Fermín, like the song by Almendra, with those soft cooed vocals.
“You’re not doing shit. Cáele,” he said.
Luis’s head followed Lizbeth Treviño’s ass as she walked past. She caught him, looked right at him. It pleased me to see his nervous eyes dart back toward me; he was just as afraid as I was.
On our walk to Fermín’s house, heat radiated from the sky and reflected up from the cracked gray sidewalk. “So, you guys kick it a lot? What’d you say his name was?” I asked.
“Fermín. We play futbol at Zapata sometimes, at night. After the adults use up the daylight.”
“The park past the tracas? At night? Don’t the Eastsiders kick it there?”
“Yeah, but I’m cool with some of them. I kick it with El Papayo sometimes even.”
“Didn’t he shoot some guey in the head over there, a Westsider, no?” It seemed strange Luis would know those gueyes.
“Wasn’t even like that,” Luis said, and spit out through the gap in his two front teeth. “Just some guy from Chicali, not even from the Valley. Didn’t even die.”
It was even stranger to hear him defend them. He’d sometimes act hard, a real chingón. He’d tell me about his uncle Chito that lived up in Bakersfield, the big city. He ran a whole neighborhood up there.
But mostly, that all just seemed like talk. Over the phone, we’d laugh at cholos and their gangster leans. We’d kick it for days—sometimes beneath the overpass where he showed me how to smoke, how to hock a loogie. Then I wouldn’t see him for weeks. He’d get suspended from school or wouldn’t go. Then, middle of the night, between my apá’s drunken snores, I’d hear a noise outside the big aluminum-foil-covered window of the living room. It’d be Luis, his skinny arm between the metal bars, tapping on the glass with his dirty wooden bowl.
We mostly watched Channel 5 rerun AAA matches all night. The commentators did the talking for us as we sat in near silence. I’d peek at Luis, his small eyes squinting in the television’s changing light, the smell of wet fields coming off him with each bowl he packed. Other times, when a window rattle would scare me awake, I’d bend back a bit of foil but would find no Luis, only empty night.
A WARM BREEZE billowed Luis’s T-shirt but did nothing to cool my burning neck. I struggled to keep up with his swift gait.
We walked on Main Street, away from the blocks of houses, dipping into the shade beneath the awnings of vacant businesses. Glass doors and windows displayed the empty insides of places like the Vacuum Shop, the Owl Cafe, Shaolin Five Animal Kung Fu. We passed a survivor, Julio’s Marketa, a small convenience store where you could buy loose cigarettes, sitting in a city block all by itself surrounded by dirt.
“You still living with your tíos?” I asked Luis.
“Yeah, my cousins share the room with me.”
“How is Neto? He still only playing Metallica on his guitar?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear? He’s not here anymore.”
“What?”
“He got deported. He’s in Chicali, can’t get back.”
“What the fuck! Guey, how’d they get him! At work?”
“No, the pendejo was kickin’ it at the Circle K, by the house, you know. Went to go get a Choco Taco. Next thing, some migra asshole rolls up and asks him about his papers. Neto, being Neto, tells him he doesn’t have any. So they took him.”
“Verga. Out of nowhere.”
“Looked too brown, I guess,” Luis said, shaking his head. “He was always the most salado.”
“You think at least he got to eat the Choco Taco?”
Luis pointed to a faded brown hotel I’d passed many times. “Right here.”
“Here? In the hotel?”
“Around back.”
I’d never thought of the two-story building that encompassed the corner of the block as a working hotel, though a sign jutting out of one of its walls designated it MAYAN HOTEL. Crusty vestiges of white paint clung to the splintered wood of the front door.
The back of the building faced a vacant lot covered in broken glass. There was a lonely brown door and a loud air conditioner hanging on to the window. As we came closer, the air conditioner’s death rattle grew louder. But then I saw that it wasn’t the AC unit making the racket. A chain wrapped around the poor machine and tied with a fat lock held it to the window. As it shook and buckled, the chain rubbed against its dull metal parts.
Luis knocked on the door, which scraped the floor and shrieked as it opened. There stood Fermín, his shirt unbuttoned, a white wifebeater pressed tight against his skin. He had chest hair that curled out the thin fabric. The unusual goggles were gone, replaced by a round pair of glasses that revealed the bushiness of his eyebrows.
“What up, cholos?” We slapped hands and my hand stung, but I felt the slap inside; my chest jumped.
“Fucking hot out here,” he said through braces. “Come in, I’m Fermín.”
“I’m Chava” was all I got out.
We entered a small yellow room and sat at a round plastic table covered in dishes and food. In the corner, on top of a speaker, stood a TV with bent bunny ears. The other end of the room was a kitchenette.
“I was preparing some churritos. You guys want some?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Some water, too,” said Luis.
Fermín grabbed three plastic cups from the table and filled each one carefully with a water jug sitting on the floor next to him.
Luis tilted back his head as he gulped down the water. Glug, glug, glug. His large Adam’s apple danced.
“Bienvenidos at the Hotel Mayan!” Fermín said, standing and spreading his arms out wide.
“Cool house,” I said.
Fermín shot me a smile full of metal.
Luis refilled his cup and said, “Those churritos sounded good.”
Fe
rmín pulled out a bag of green limes from the minifridge.
There were two rooms in the small space and in each I could see a twin bed. Neither bedroom had a door, just a narrow archway covered in cracked yellow paint. Yellow scabs of paint littered the dark wood floor.
“Your mom’s cleaning?” said Luis.
“Yeah,” answered Fermín, slicing limes into halves.
“What’s she cleaning?” I asked.
“In the hotel. The rooms and stuff. But this house is separate, it’s not connected.”
Luis slapped the table. “Shit, if it was connected, Don Servín would be in here buggin’ your mom all the fuckin’ time! ‘Señora Vázquez, recuerde el bleach. El bleach!’ Your mom already hates him. She’d pour that shit in his eyes.”
Fermín stopped slicing limes and laughed with Luis.
I didn’t understand why that was so funny. Luis’s old-man croak annoyed me, but Fermín laughed, so I did as well.
Fermín tore open a plastic bag of churritos and flipped a bottle of Salsa Amor into the bag. The brown pieces of hard, fried maíz turned red and softened and most of the salsa drained to the bottom, where a puddle of hot sauce marinated those last lucky pieces.
“Y tu papá? He also works in the hotel?” I asked Fermín.
He pinched shut the top of the churritos bag and shook it violently. “I don’t have a dad,” he said.
“Better that way,” Luis said, rolling the plastic cup between his palms. “I met mine once. He’s a real asshole. Fucking mamón,” he said, looking at me. I never knew Luis had met his dad. “All he talked about was the Beatles.”
“You told me about that,” Fermín said. His fingers, with their small tufts of black hair near the knuckle, pinched hard into each lime, so that the liquid shot into the bag. He squeezed each one to its limit, until the last bits of pulp dribbled out. The juice ran down the insides of the bag and mixed with the pool of Salsa Amor on the bottom.
“Where did you meet him?” I asked Luis.
“At the Donut Avenue. The chinos sell good tea there, real sweet. My mom called my tía’s house, thought I was old enough and should have a dad.”
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