A Glass of Water

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  He showed Casimiro how to run the backhoe and taught Nopal the basics on a Ditch Witch, and while Casimiro excavated a main canal from the Rio Grande to irrigate the chili fields they would one day cultivate, Nopal trenched ditches that would feed the rows. They worked from 5:00 a.m. to midnight for three months and by the end of May they had cleared, disked, and leveled fifty acres running parallel to Interstate I-25.

  One evening, under a full moon, Casimiro and Nopal went up to the interstate in the tractor and stood on the road shoulder. They faced west and could see the whole lay of the land. Below them to the right was Miller’s place, a two-story imitation English country mansion with a hodgepodge of Moorish features—a red tile roof, porch arches, and a series of somber windows and doors facing the road. It was white with green trim.

  A mile beyond his house, fields unfolded in an uninterrupted fairy tale and at the north end of the fifty acres was a Pullman railcar set on bricks, field machinery, and various building structures. As far as the eye could follow ran a continuous background of cottonwoods concealing the Rio Grande, a wall of leaves so dense that midday air was blue under its canopy.

  Behind them, sixteen-wheelers zoomed by toward Las Cruces and El Paso but it didn’t cheapen the romance of the moment or the exhilarating sense they felt that they could do anything they wanted in this life as long as they were together.

  He was sixteen, she fifteen. They were feeling how much they had accomplished as their eyes slowly moved south to north along the graded rows, perfect and straight, not a single weed or break in the mounds as water poured from the main canal, row on row, glimmering in the furrows, and they knew it was time to move on to a big city and maybe start a family.

  They kissed.

  The next day, however, to persuade them to remain indefinitely, Miller gave them each a fifty dollar bonus, plus a dollar an hour raise for Casimiro and promoted him to supervisor over future Mexican workers. He drove them in his used air-conditioned truck along the Rio Grande, across open meadows and, finally, into a clearing where he promised, if they stayed, some day he’d sell them this part of the land, around twenty acres. He’d give them the old Pullman railcar to fix up and live in, and concluded, “If you decide to stay and help me make this into a real agricultural business, I’ll throw this pickup in, too.”

  Casimiro knew that even though it was old enough for the license plate numbers to be unreadable, it ran well. The following day he wasted no time putting the truck to use. He went to Las Cruces, picked up the lumber and rafters Miller had ordered, and hired a dozen migrants.

  Over the next few months, Casimiro and his new crew erected a huge barn, a packing shed, a storage warehouse, and six open-air lean-to sheds to park farm equipment under.

  Nopal was pregnant and they were here to stay.

  5

  When you wish to talk to me, Lorenzo, feel me, I live in your lower back, my son, in the muscles used for bending and rising. I am a heavy clay bowl in your stomach in which to pour your fear. Your spine is a canyon trail I walk and I am the latch handle you turn in the dark to let light enter.

  When I left you, all you had was my name, hugging it with your lips, my name shattering the silence of your sorrow, savoring it on your tongue because you thought I was going to return, flying through the night like an angel to sweep you up in my arms but I was taken away forever and became more a presence to you in death than in life—five years old, for months in the fields, no taller than a chili plant, your head low, eyes on your hands, raising your voice higher and higher, you repeated my name until you became lost in the quivering sound, the sound of Mama, Mama, falling into the sound of my name, that soaked up your sadness at my absence.

  After what happened to me there was nothing else, no consolation, no thought or hope to make it disappear. Even the warm buttered tortilla tasted bitter, it was complete defeat, the flame of your small gray-haired soul dimmed to a weak flicker and then an ember in the dark.

  You had to reshape how you saw yourself in the world, redefine your meaning, create new understandings of how to live without me. Every second of every day your joy blurred, eyes that had given you sight to pull things in were ablaze with the white blindness of grief. The reason to see connections in life was extinguished and the lonely nights rattled their raspy death seeds in your hands after I departed.

  You repeated my name a million times to undo what had happened. Looking over the plants, across furrows, beyond the backs and bent heads of field workers, you still believe sometimes you see me coming down the rows with my basket to join you.

  My oldest, I gave you my guitar. It’s good you burned my songs: a son can’t take his mother’s recipes acquired during a lifetime and get the same taste and flavor. Her soul is in them and it’s dangerous to take the moon-part of the person, a little of which went into every teaspoon and measuring-cupful note.

  You didn’t know how to distribute the light each word carries, how to illuminate one word more than another, how to let a word cool in the shade of one’s purring, another to purge rage in throaty snarls, or simmer a jazzy soup out of words lifted up from the never-healed wounds.

  My true gift to you, sweet son, was to teach you to see through the eyes of a woman’s heart.

  6

  April 2002

  Saturday morning, on the road before daybreak. It was Lorenzo’s eighteenth birthday and to celebrate he was aiming to stack up steak-and-potato money at the jackpot rodeo—cowboys pay up their entrance fee and whoever comes up on top takes home the winnings. During the spring he got in as many weekend jackpot rodeos as he could, traveling the circuit from Silver City to Socorro, Belen, Los Lunas, Moriarty, Watrous, Willard, Las Vegas, Tucumcari, Española, Tierra Amarilla, Questa, and Raton.

  After driving a little over two hours across the prairie, he pulled into Willard’s hot, dusty rodeo grounds, a poor boy’s raunchy sage and tumbleweed meadow lined with beat-up ranch trucks and rusting stock trailers, horses tied to the shady side with a bucket of water. He wasn’t there for roping, he was there for an entirely different game: bronc riding.

  He knew most of the riders, a unique breed of rough stock cowboys, not raised on daddy’s lap in new air-conditioned tractors. Most couldn’t afford to keep horses, they were horse-poor, all guts, willing to risk everything for a shot at the nationals and, God willing, with enough heart and luck, to make it to the big money.

  He pulled his truck around to the area where the bronc riders parked apart from the others, slowly driving by cowboys who slept in their trucks, some of whom were standing around yawning, stretching cramped legs, others who were rubbing wax and yanking on bronc cinches and hand ropes with serious faces. No fancy felt cowboy hats and pressed shirts—they were spitting, crease-faced, scuffed, and weathered as old leather, dreaming of escape from the poverty they’d been born into.

  Their eyes peered out from their reassembled facial bones, the kicked-in cheeks, broken jaws, split lips, and smashed noses. One-meal-a-day eaters, taking care of what they had because the leather got better the older it was—worn to fit them—like clubhouse boxers who got trampled and beat down for a living, sometimes killed.

  With used-up lives, pain staining the innocent texture of their smiles, reared with more guidance by a horse than an adult, birthdays and holidays celebrated in a dirt corral with a horse and sardines and crackers, changing clothes in truck stops, just-getting-by ones, trying-to-do-right ones, I-don’t-care-anymore ones.

  7

  He drew a bronc named Cocaine. A rodeo hand herded the other broncs into a separate corral and secured them, leaving Cocaine alone—he was a black-gray dappled bronc, snorting and kicking his rear legs high in the air at anyone that came near, banging his head against the fence siding wildly.

  Lorenzo bought a piece of cold watermelon from an old lady selling food out of a Styrofoam ice chest and squeezed through the crowd of onlookers, gnawing the melon as he appraised the bronc. Cocaine caught his look, threw his head in the air, sau
ntered, twirled, and kicked the fencing where Lorenzo stood. The crowd shuffled back, murmuring that the horse was crazy.

  “You bastard,” he whispered and threw the watermelon rind at the bronc and Cocaine bucked and rocked the railings; their eyes locked and Cocaine lurched at him with such hatred he dented the side rails of the pen. An old cowboy pulled the handle and flung the gate open, then dashed for safety as Cocaine blasted out into the corral with the rest of the broncs, every nerve crackling like a windblown prairie flame.

  That evening, for eight ruthless seconds, Lorenzo was astride an exploding star—Cocaine, with his spittle-drooling nostrils, huffing foam, every slingshot muscle discharging eruptions with every buck—and for eight seconds, Lorenzo was pitched through infinity, curving above the earth, spinning past planets, flipping over and falling for what seemed forever until he hit ground, landing on his right shoulder.

  8

  The next morning he collected his winnings, filled up his 66 Chevy truck in the town of T or C, and on the interstate rolled his window down. He inhaled, tasting the moist air from Elephant Butte Reservoir. Heading south on I-25, he opened the brown paper bag he had bought from local high school girls raising money for 4-H, unwrapped the green chili and potato burrito, and practically swallowed it whole it was so good, then poured himself a cup of black coffee from his thermos and leaned back and cruised. It was the kind of morning that touched his heart with joy—the bluest sky, the headiest sage scents, home-cooked food, a good running motor, the land’s mysterious beauty words could never describe—it didn’t get any better than this.

  When he topped the last hill he saw Miller’s place. His mother had told him how it used to be a shack in a once barren land, and Miller’s place anything but a castle. But now, more than fifteen years later, white pipe fence encircled the impeccably pruned orchards and landscaped rose gardens, in the middle of which black and white swans floated in the pond that Vito and Jose had made, and spread out beside it was the golf course built with his father’s supervision and Mexican labor.

  His eyes rested on the small adobe patched with landfill scraps—la cantina his mother had sung in, now owned by Arabs. His child’s heart memory of the man’s black scuffed boots entering la cantina had never left. The boots paused within a foot of him under a table. And he noticed the boot tips and heels plated with buffalo nickels. And for some crazy reason those buffalo nickels had gouged a rut in his heart and the image of them had remained prominent in his memory of the long-ago evening that still filled his lungs with dread. When the memory came to him, as it often did, it consumed his attention as a specter slowly appearing, as if he were dreaming with his eyes open.

  He’d been so proud of himself, carrying a cigar box full of treasures—candies, a rubber play knife, Mexican coins, a broken rosary, a yo-yo missing string, a shaving brush with no bristles, plastic Indians and soldiers. He had clutched the box as he followed the dirt road to la cantina and found his mother doing sound checks on the stage mic, his eyes dazzled by the string of red and green lights surrounding the stage.

  He stashed his cigar box behind the bar on top of the crate of whiskey bottles and went looking for his little brother, crawling around under tables and roaming along baseboards looking for coins. At the tables, beneath vinyl booths, cowboy boots and work boots reeked of manure and fertilizer chemicals. Lorenzo pocketed pennies, cigarette butts, nail clippers, and black combs.

  His mother was the center of the world here and he could feel the excitement. Above him barmaids lit table candles in Coke cans perforated with holes. He peeked out from under a table, listening as Amado, the owner, always with bloodshot eyes, greeted people. “Oye Juan—qué tal Maria—y pues Jose—andale Francisco, enter, enter.”

  And as the night wore on and people sat, rapt, listening to his mother sing, he remembered the exact moment the man entered, distinctly recalled the smell, sounds, and sights of the cantina and the man wearing black boots with heels and tips plated in buffalo nickels. He sensed the man had ill intentions toward his mother.

  Amid standing applause and whistles, he looked up at the man staring at his mother and felt an ice pick puncture his five-year-old heart. That evening, on the way home with his mother and brother, it rained heavily, brimming arroyos, and in the splattered windshield, as the wipers swiped back and forth, he saw the man’s face and its features chilled him with goosebumps.

  9

  He took exit 81 west, followed the ramp to his right into the valley, passed the now empty roadside stalls that sold chili, garlic, squash, watermelons, pinto beans, tortillas, and tamales, and drove until he turned onto the north-south dirt road leading to camp.

  On wide paths running east-west between the fields, big flatbed wagons were hitched to tractors ready to be filled and towed to the packing sheds. Alongside were more than thirty cars and pickups with hoes, knives, water coolers, and lunch buckets stuffed with hot sodas and cold burritos; when workers stopped for lunch, that’s what it was—hot sodas and cold burritos and they loved it.

  When he pulled in, women were spraying plastic pesticide tanks, next to the packing sheds, dogs and children splashing in the pools of wastewater.

  Carmen, a college girl, here at the camp for only five weeks, doing research for her thesis on migrants, came out wearing a packer’s plastic green apron and rubber gloves. “Did you win?” He threw her a thumbs-up and asked her to tag along while he checked on the field-workers.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she began, “how they just sent Vito away.” She set her apron and gloves on an oil drum. “That’s so unjust!”

  “Why?”

  “Did he have a hearing? Is there an appeal process? Just because it was the boss’s jackass son.”

  “He’s judge and jury here, he hires and fires.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Maybe, but it’s the way it is. One phone call and we’re in jail or deported. He calls la migra and they’ll dump us all on the border like a bunch of dogs. You got some learning to do.”

  “They can’t do that to you, you were born here.”

  “They can deport my dad and all the others.”

  They walked in silence to a far field where the migrants were picking in force.

  “What’s going on over there?” She indicated heavy equipment and construction going on beyond the fields in the distance.

  “We flooded last year, washed out trailers and roads, the waters closed down or knocked down schools, homes, you name it. Scared them so bad many of the migrants sold their tiny lots to Miller. He’s building condos, gated homes. River land is prime real estate.”

  They passed women picking in the rows, lip syncing while listening to their iPods. Carmen heard a big heavy black woman call to a Chicana in the next row, “Isabel, you going to the bar tonight?”

  The middle-aged Chicana said, “If Ruben’s there.”

  “Get off that Ruben, baby. You too pretty and young to waste your time with a man who don’t appreciate the finer aspects of your beauty.”

  “Retha, once you got him in your bones, you got him in your bones.”

  Carmen and Lorenzo walked a good two miles, past the fields, all the way to the open-air stalls. They sat on a picnic bench and drank cold watermelon juice.

  “Why aren’t these kids in school,” Carmen asked, looking at the teenage cooks and servers working the stalls.

  “They were until the mothers found out the school put them all in one room and made them just sit there all day. They got no books, no teaching, nothing. Day after day they just sat there, talked to each other from nine to three in the afternoon.”

  “That’s illegal, they can’t do that.”

  “There’s laws for you, then there’s laws for us.”

  “Believe me, in San Diego there are plenty of Mexicans doing a lot better than you and me. They get Medicare, welfare, food stamps, schools are packed with them. My mom and dad are middle-class Hispanics and they worked so hard to get ahead—and I work
so fricken hard to get ahead—and you know when my mom got pneumonia she couldn’t get into the hospital because all the beds were taken by Mexicans, and the way they look at you, they act like they’re so much better.”

  “If you hate them so much why are you here?”

  “I don’t hate them, I’m just saying I don’t pity them—and I don’t have to tell you, especially you, that there are two kinds of Mexicans: these, and those in the cities who exploit the system.”

  And just then, as though to prove her point, a group of Mexican teenagers drove in and piled out of a new Jeep Cherokee. The girls flaunted glossy black and red high heels, sleek designer cowgirl jeans that revealed their panty thongs, which their boyfriends, in jeans and T-shirts, kept pulling on. When they sat down to eat Carmen noticed that all the teenagers from the Cherokee had tattoos—a blue eagle, a black mustang, an Irish flag, a green heart.

  Two Mexicans pulled up behind the Cherokee in an old beat-up Camaro and didn’t say a word between them as they ate caldo and menudo to soothe their hangovers. Lorenzo could smell the starch in their clean clothes, their strong cologne.

  “Immigrants fresh over the border looking for work,” Lorenzo said. “The leaf blower in the backseat is for appearance in case la migra stops them. Come on, I need to get some work done.”

  They started to walk back. “Here’s some more information for your college paper. You notice most Mexicans carry a salt shaker on their belt instead of a knife? They love watermelon.”

  “You joking?”

  “Nope.”

  After a while she asked, “What do you do for fun out here?”

  “On weekends I play poker, go fishing, get a haircut in town. Work on my truck.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.”