A Glass of Water

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  “Most work on weekends to fill up the next tank of gas so they can keep moving north to better jobs.”

  They arrived at the Pullman, his dad’s place, and sat down at a table outside under an elm tree. Carmen ran over to the warehouse and came back a few minutes later.

  “Go on.” She turned on a hand-size recorder and held it in her palm to record what he was saying. “It’s okay to be a little nervous … take your time.”

  “I was just thinking how my mom would send me and Vito ahead of her to pick the loose chilies. We’d stack them in piles in the furrow row and we’d wait for her at the end of the row and she’d come behind us scooping up the piles, filling her sack. When she got to us we’d curl up on the gunnysack and go to sleep.”

  “They make sacks that big?” she asked.

  “We each got one and she sewed ours to hers. Tied a rope to the top and looped the other end around her waist and while she picked, she dragged us. She’d pause to strip the chili plants—pull, pause, pull, pause. I spent the first five years as a baby inhaling the smell of pepper leaves and soil, rocked by mother’s rhythms and the sound of women talking across rows.

  “I remember certain times the heat got someone and he’d holler God was telling him something. And if it wasn’t the sun burning their brains, it was the moon calling to their hearts—a lot of kids were conceived at night between those chili rows. Lots of loving in those fields girl, lots of loving.”

  10

  Here, playing barefoot in God’s breath, I forget about myself. Here, memories surface like a harvest of frogs in the rain.

  One is my youngest son, Vito, and if you didn’t know him, he could chafe your patience like steel bristles on a sunburned scalp. You wouldn’t know he is considerate, with a relish for life, that goodness glows from him, that everyone loves the openness of this giant kid, huge for seventeen, a towering six foot three.

  It isn’t your broad nostrils that inhale the fragrance of dawn, radiator steam, and hot bald tires that one first notices; not your mischievous smile showcasing ivory teeth, or lips shapely as maguey leaves, or your Tarahumara cheeks and Apache jaw. It is the delight in your brown eyes, dimmed to anger now and then by hurtful words—Spic, illegal wetback, lazy Mexican—a pittance of words thrown your way by those who have wasted a lifetime holding their hat in hand, meekly submitting to their weaker impulses.

  True, you were never one to work until the last disk in the back turns chalky and you’re unable to stand. What you have is the dream for a better life, arriving in Albuquerque that night, lights brimming the sky below as you topped the crest of Nine Mile Hill.

  Remember, my son, when one is born new again, the face of the newborn shows no emotion as it peers over the volcano rim, the eruption of its own fate already under way. This fresh beginning feels like death—you are thrust naked and disarmed into the unseen, abandoned in an open clearing where you have to find your way back to life, reshape yourself in the world, uneasy because what you are seeing frightens you.

  A mile-long and mile-wide love you are, shouldering pure-life boy in size and strength, to you I gave the sacred arrowhead. Two hours after your birth I pushed it in beneath the skin over your heart to protect you from harm.

  As a teenager you loved to strut about the camp like a rooster with feathers spread, looking for anything to distract you, cavalier about your natural born strength—“Two guys at once?” You’d crow to a crew of newly arrived Mexicans. “You’ll never get a better bet, I could be jailed for giving odds like this.”

  But trouble gathers over your head like a tornado, leveling what stands in the way of its blind passion, and though you wore down the mountain of sorrow of my departure to an inch-size pebble in your palm, other mountains await.

  11

  April 2002

  Vito enjoyed working at the junkyard, especially because it was next to the Rio Grande and something about being by the river made him feel safe and close to his family back at the migrant camp.

  On this warm day in April, he ran his hand over an Impala’s metal-flake steering wheel and its tuck and roll seats. “Bad,” he murmured, “blood even on the baby chair.” He felt sick.

  He pulled himself out and looked over the acres of mutilated vehicles, shaking his head. He unscrewed a mirror, pulled off the exterior door molding, and piled them on a flatbed truck beside the car. He sprayed WD-40 on rusty bolts, went through the toolbox to find the right ratchet for the screws.

  “What’re your plans tonight,” Ignacio asked, crawling out from under another car.

  “I know you’re taking Lucia out and you’re trying to set me up with her cousin. Puffy eyelids, big old snout that hooks over her upper lip, beady eyes.”

  “Lucia’s mine.”

  “Women just can’t resist me. Man’s got to do something with his mind while picking bugs out of his crotch from fucking bush hogs,” Vito said.

  Ignacio bit his lip trying to understand what Vito was implying.

  “Whatever. Sure you don’t want to double date?”

  “Naw, I’ll finish this, then chill by the river, check my lines for catfish.” Vito pried open the trunk with a tire iron. “Nice,” he said, reaching for a pair of black and red boxing gloves with gold braid lace and the initials JC in green on each wrist in the center of a black eagle. “There a pawnshop near here?” he asked, but Ignacio was gone, probably over to the salvage-yard office.

  Vito took out the spare tire and jack and discovered a black gym bag. Something slithered backward and was gone—then he saw the rattlesnake, coiled in the trunk. He grabbed the bag and jumped back, slammed the trunk shut. He unzipped the bag, found boxing trunks, speed-bag mitts, a sweatband, a water bottle, and several Ring magazines. He went over to the riverbank, lay under a cottonwood tree, and leafed through the magazines.

  After a while he put the magazines aside and put his hands under his head and looked up at the sky wondering how his family was doing at the camp. He remembered with fondness the day Carmen appeared.

  He and Jose, a Vietnam vet and heavy equipment operator at the camp, had been working steadily through the afternoon until a car pulled up and a woman got out. She wore big black-framed designer sunglasses and her hair parted in ponytails.

  Vito idled the scraper and climbed down. He took off his bandanna and she started laughing.

  She took off her sunglasses.

  “You look,” she covered her mouth with her hand, “like an alien with those dirt rings around your eyes and nose.” He could just barely see the outline of her breasts under her denim short-sleeved shirt. She had a tawny complexion like a seasoned copper kettle burnished by flame for decades and her large brown eyes looked directly at him.

  “Can you tell me where the migrant camp is,” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “I’m doing an internship there.”

  “Go straight and you’ll see the camp and the sheds. Ask for my dad, Casimiro. Tell him I sent you.”

  For the next two weeks Vito was in heaven. He did everything he could to woo her. He found her a shack to live in by the river. He brought over boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables and gathered up cooking pots and kitchen utensils for her. He organized the local camp women to host a moving-in party. He walked with her, confessed he loved her, that something about her had completely swept him off his feet, and he vowed he would marry her someday.

  She tried to calm this headstrong seventeen-year-old kid but it didn’t work. Whenever she talked to him, the dreamy, distracted look in his eyes bothered her concentration. He told her stories about camp people and made her laugh, they picnicked on the ditch bank, they walked along the river and watched the geese come and go.

  He was filled with joy, certain she was sent by God and that she also felt an intoxicating surge of enlivening energy soar through her. They were two souls meant for each other.

  Every morning after a brief encounter at breakfast, he’d climb on the scraper and gorge the dirt, speeding back and fo
rth as if he were racing someone, going faster and faster until he wasn’t even slowing down to pick up the dirt—he was just running at it full speed, scooping, closing the bucket, racing across the road, turning sharply around the corner, and dumping the load at full throttle.

  This morning, on the third pass, rumbling at full speed, he turned sharply, rounding the corner onto an expanse of barren dirt shaved smooth and clean of prairie vegetation that Mr. Miller was developing into his private golf course. Overtaken by the state of childlike elation, he didn’t realize the scraper had hooked the fencing. He kept driving, dragging the fence and ripping out poles until he was dragging a whole length of it behind him.

  Jose came running in his direction, pointing to the rear, and Vito turned to see a gnarled mess of fencing. “Holy shit,” he gasped, then turned off the ignition and jumped down. The fencing was caught under the universal joints and rear axel. “I gotta get wire cutters, I’ll be back.”

  A half hour later, he approached the site on foot, wondering what Carmen’s car was doing parked in the middle of the dirt road.

  In front of her car was Miller’s ’67 Mustang, and he saw Herman, Miller’s boy, with a friend, their car blocking hers. When he got within earshot, he heard Herman saying that Mexican girls had nice big asses, which Vito thought was true and liked, but it was the derisive tone and their refusal to let her pass that got him pissed.

  He walked up and ordered them to let her go. He was hot, thirsty, and ill tempered.

  “We’re just having a little fun,” Herman sneered. “Wanna see her clap and dance like them Spanish senoritas and shake them belugas.”

  “How about I dance my foot up in your ass?” Vito stared at them.

  Herman’s fun voice changed to a cold scowl. “You better remember who I am and who you work for, Mexican, before you start throwing threats around.”

  “You don’t threaten us,” Herman’s red-haired friend snarled.

  When Vito came out of his rage, the two kids were on the ground, swollen eyed, purple cheeked, and with lips bleeding. He was standing with his fists still clenched, breathing hard.

  Around seven that night headlights bobbed down the dirt road alongside the chili fields toward the camp and Casimiro’s place. Miller pulled up, honked, and when Casimiro came out he motioned him over to the driver’s-side window. After Miller left, Vito asked what had happened, and his father told him, “He wants you out.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes and sensed the life-changing moment. Casimiro knew Vito had done what he was supposed to do as a man and Vito knew he had put his family’s future on the line. And he and Casimiro stood there taking in a long moment of life’s sorrow.

  12

  March 2002

  Casimiro sent Vito to work in the junkyard in Albuquerque for his good friend Rafael. Vito had been working about three weeks, dismantling wrecked cars for parts that were still usable, when Rafael sent Vito and Ignacio on a call to pick up old scaffolding.

  When they arrived, workers were stuccoing, buffing wood floors, painting, and running wire for electricity. The yard was filled with junk and one of the guys directed them to the pile of scaffolds.

  Once they were done loading them, Vito went inside to the bathroom and Ignacio struck up a conversation with a pretty blonde girl. When Vito came back outside he found a flyer and a weekly rag pinned under the wiper blades of the truck. While he sat in the cab waiting for Ignacio, he leafed through the tabloid. The headlines on every page were about atrocities along the border: drug wars, ten people killed a day, over four hundred women raped and murdered, INS arresting thousands of Mexicans without documents, deporting thousands more, new prisons being built along the border to imprison Mexicans. The articles were accompanied by photos of children working in the fields, dismembered women, and slain law enforcement officials.

  He scanned the flyer. It was a call for people to attend an upcoming rally in support of a muralist—a local hero who, after living in America for more than thirty years, had been deported. The INS split the family up and the children were left in America while the father and mother were arrested and shipped off to Mexico.

  The flyer went on:

  Have you ever wondered why the media depicts us as drug dealers, why they think we suck blood from the economy? We’ve been low-wage slaves for the rich too long!!

  Break the habit of believing them when they tell us they’re doing what they do to us for our own good! It’s time to speak up, show our force, our power! Show your support tomorrow at the protest march at 10:00 a.m. at Tiquex Park. We’ve had enough of people stepping on us!! We’re citizens and we deserve all the rights due to citizens.

  Ignacio jumped in and exclaimed, “I got her number, let’s go.” He looked at Vito. “What the hell’s that?”

  “This paper, they’re right.”

  Ignacio took it and read. “Shit, they got these rallies every weekend. Fuck that shit. Blow it off, man, it’s bullshit, we got better things to do this weekend.” He shook the girl’s phone number in his fist and repeated, “Yeah, brother, much better things.”

  Vito folded the flyer up, slid it in his back pocket, and started driving back to the salvage yard.

  “Don’t you know that selling hope is the best hustle there is.”

  “What you talking about, bro?”

  “Life is suffering, all of life. Whatever, dude, I won’t be suffering tomorrow with Yolanda.” He held up the scrap of paper with her number scribbled on it.

  They drove in silence, crossing Rio Bravo and heading north on Second Street, the railroad on their right, the river on their left. Vito was checking out the new Roadrunner commuter train that had just pulled into the station. It ran between Belen and Santa Fe. Suddenly, Ignacio yelled, “Fuck, watch out!”

  Vito slammed the brakes to avoid crashing into the back end of a black Escalade that had slowed almost to a stop at the railroad tracks. Scaffolding sailed over the top of the truck and smashed into the Escalade’s rear window.

  The Escalade’s door opened and a man dressed in a silk suit stepped out.

  Ignacio moaned, “Oh shit.”

  It was Puro, a Mafia gangster who controlled all the strip clubs in Albuquerque.

  Ignacio ran his index finger across his lips, warning Vito not to say anything smart.

  Puro yelled, “Son of a bitch!” He slammed his door and approached the truck, then pounded the hood with a closed fist.

  He glared at Vito. “What’s the fucking rush?” Puro raised both arms up as if he were being robbed and did a full spin, “Shit, shit, shit. Nothing but bad news today. Bad, bad, bad.” He motioned Vito to step out but Vito sat motionless.

  He lunged and grabbed Vito’s shirt through the open window. He started to drag him out then he recognized Ignacio. He stepped back, brushed himself off, and backed away from the truck. “You work for Rafael?”

  “I’ll pay for it, calm down.” Vito got out of the truck, meeting Puro’s stare.

  “How we going to do this, then?” Every molecule in Puro’s brain calculated the value of Vito’s existence. He exhaled. “People move ahead in life with luck, work, or risk. Which is it with you?”

  “Risk.” Vito could feel that Puro was impressed by his lack of fear and his calm demeanor.

  Puro gazed up at heaven as if asking the angels to intercede, then looked at Vito and repeated, “How we gonna do this, then?”

  “You tell me,” Vito countered, motioning toward the smashed window.

  Puro looked him over for a few minutes, then asked, “You box?”

  The question caught Vito off guard. “You want to settle the score now?”

  “No, I mean in the ring.” He laughed easily, slapping Vito’s arm roughly.

  “Sure.” Vito said.

  A spark of connection was lit between the two.

  “Meet me tonight at the old redbrick rail-yard bar at eight. A four rounder. You win, you’ve paid the tab; you lose, you pay me double.” He gestured tow
ard the window of his Escalade.

  “I win, we’re square.”

  Puro winked. “That’s it, kid.”

  Vito and Ignacio reloaded the rebar. The afternoon heat was intense as Vito coaxed the gears through first, second, and third and drove on to the junkyard.

  He was going to night school to get his GED and even though he’d committed to going to class and seeing it through, missing one night wouldn’t hurt. He’d make up for it.

  He thought about the boxing gloves he had found a few days earlier and how he had never made much out of coincidences like this. In the past, to his mind, field-workers attributing God’s intervention to winning a couple of hundred dollars at bingo was naive and ridiculous. Yet now he wasn’t so sure. His life had always been filled with jumbled situations, touched by chaos, but now it did seem like God or some divine power had an intention for him, a beneficent intention. The gloves were a sign from God, showing him what he was supposed be doing with his life. Somebody was throwing good juju at him and he was going to take it as long as it lasted.

  13

  It was March 19, Saturday evening, and that night Vito swung the gym bag over his shoulder like a gunslinger and strutted into the bar. His life would change forever this evening.

  It was a generic Mexican bar that sold cheap wine and beer and there were a few whiskey bottles on glass shelves that were otherwise almost all empty. A ring was set up in back. The songs on the jukebox were oldies but goodies from the fifties and sixties. The place was buzzing with workers still in their work clothes, sunburned and looking like they didn’t want to hear any bullshit. Women laughed loudly.

  They sat at the bar. Ignacio nudged his side. “Me gusta esa jaina,” he said, raising his eyebrows toward the bartender’s ass wrapped in tight black jeans. Chili-pepper lights dangled, casting red shadows on the ceiling, giving the place a neglected feel, a drunk’s Christmas remorse.

  A long mirror ran the length of the wall, above shelves stacked four deep with dozens of different tequilas. Sleazy flea-market pictures of naked women in sombreros and gun belts hung at either end.