A Glass of Water

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  He was scared but there was a solution for fear and he headed to the shed, cranked up the tractor, and drove to the fields even though it was Sunday. Work was always the answer.

  Then, on a Thursday afternoon, twelve days after his fall, the perfectly blue sky filled with migrating cranes and the chili plants vibrant and stalwart, feeling robust and carrying a sack of green chili to the truck, Casimiro collapsed. Lorenzo rushed him to the rural clinic nine miles away but the doctor only showed up on Mondays. By the time they arrived in Las Cruces, twenty-two miles away, the right half of Casimiro’s body was paralyzed, his mouth drooped, his leg and arm dangled inert, and his speech had become a series of mumbles and slurs. His face was slack as if a weighted hook was pulling down on it, dangling from the right side, giving him a grotesque grin and twisting the flesh of his right eye and half his mouth into a snarl.

  * * *

  Casimiro was confined to the wheelchair Lorenzo bought at a second-hand store and during the next few weeks the son parked his father next to the water bucket on the truck, where the workers who huddled around could greet him and share the latest gossip.

  Sitting in his wheelchair, he studied insects, birds, and flowers, amazed they had no sense of greed or envy or hate. In the space of an hour he saw dragonflies, wasps, crickets, praying mantises, stink bugs, fireflies, ladybugs, mosquitoes, and grasshoppers. They reminded him of when Vito was a child playing near the creek, capturing insects in a mason jar to use as fish bait.

  With his left hand he reached into the cooler next to his wheelchair and pulled out a bottle of ice water. He placed it in the cup holder and backed the left wheel to reverse his chair out of the sun. The cold water chilled his brain, numbed his throat.

  Around ten in the morning the workers headed to the truck for a water break, tossing their bags and hoes down, lining up to dip the ladle into the blue-black water in the pine barrel and gulp great scoops of water until it drenched their chins and chests.

  Behind Casimiro, someone opened the passenger door on the other side of the truck and punched the glove box to get it open.

  “Papa, dónde están los Band-aids?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Abajo el sillon, on the driver’s side,” the words were shredded, almost unintelligible, but Lorenzo could make them out.

  Lorenzo pulled the white first-aid box out from under the seat and rummaged through it, grabbing as many Band-aids as he could find. “New ones signed on this morning, soft hands. I tell them we don’t work by the clock, we work by the light. Blisters.” He smiled, “Bueno, papa, gotta go.”

  “I miss him,” Casimiro grumbled.

  Lorenzo saw his father’s left hand shaking uncontrollably. He felt he had to do something soon, but it took money, lots of it.

  Casimiro watched him. Lorenzo’s shoulders slumped, his back was a little stooped. The fields were wearing down his boy.

  For an instant Casimiro felt that today might be the day when everything suffered turns out for the better, when God comes down on the earth and stands beside him, touches his arthritic hands and appreciates the work he’s done; today an angel descends and rewards him for his fairness to workers and kindness to children, today blessings will spill over his hands and legs, flooding over the field irrigation gates, brimming the rows, and no longer will despair attend him like an angry choke hold at his throat. But most of all, today is the day when Vito settles down and gets rid of his wildness, and the curse of the dream is lifted from Lorenzo.

  16

  June 2003

  After Casimiro’s stroke, Lorenzo took over the operations of the camp. He was well-known and respected. He had foremen and forewomen under him to whom he delegated day-to-day duties but he assumed ultimate responsibility for everything including disking fields at appropriate times for dormancy or seeding, supervising the field crew, overseeing the women in the warehouse who were boxing and shipping out the chili, paying the workers each Friday, and keeping up the maintenance of farm machinery.

  Most importantly, informing all his duties was the unspoken authority he carried in his demeanor, his genuine care and protection of the people who resided in the camp. He looked after them. They sought out his knowledge on legal matters and his advice on their children’s education, health care, and administrative issues dealing with their legal or illegal status in America. They asked him for suggestions about their permits and for news on the immigration service. Whether it was an ailing child, a residency question, or an incident in town where one claimed to be cheated or was arrested, he dealt with them with compassion and concern.

  * * *

  Now, as a crop duster buzzed over the fields, Lorenzo and Carmen pulled up to the warehouse, jumped out of the truck, and started hefting fifty-pound sacks of chili from the truck bed to a wagon stationed at the loading dock. A worker swung her legs off the office desk where she was sitting and ran up the ramp to help weigh the gunnysacks, writing the weights down on a clipboard, stacking the bags in another pile, and pulling the heaping wagon into the warehouse where conveyor belts hummed, hydraulic motors groaned, and dozens of workers silently focused on packing, cleaning, and inspecting chili.

  “We make a pretty good team,” Carmen said proudly as they walked into the warehouse. Rays of sun shot through broken boards and loose roof tin into the warehouse, golden light slanting across the faces of the men, women, and children standing at the conveyor belt. The fragrance of green chili floated through the huge front doors where tractors and produce trucks arrived to unload supplies or pack up produce boxes for shipment.

  From time to time animals would appear in the warehouse and the children would scamper after them to shoo them out but the chickens, ducks, dogs, mice, and rabbits would scurry into the pile of cardboard boxes or under straw and into shadowy corners.

  For the first two weeks that Carmen worked the belt, her hands burned, her lungs were irritated, she coughed all the time, and her eyes swelled up and reddened from the stinging dust. No matter how many times she washed her hands, blew her nose, or drank water, her eyes were on fire, her throat was always raw and her sinuses aflame, and she emptied endless Kleenex boxes sneezing and sniffling.

  “Come on, we have to feed my horse,” Lorenzo said.

  They walked across the compound to the corral by the Pullman and tossed sheaves of hay over the fence to Lorenzo’s horse. Then they leaned on the corral and watched the horse tear into the hay.

  “I wrote my mom about staying on and she doesn’t like it. She says six weeks is long enough. My dad’s cool with it, though.”

  “Why would it worry her?”

  “She planned on me going back to school. You know, hooking up with a doctor, not hanging out with field hands. Everything’s an investment to her. She paid for private schools, ballet, music lessons, study abroad.”

  “She thinks you’re wasting your life out here?”

  “Yep. She’d go nuts if she knew I wash my clothes in a tub and dry them on a clothesline. She’d go even crazier if she knew I was falling for someone.”

  After a bit of silence, she laughed. “You’re blushing.”

  “I’m not.” He paused and then changed the subject. “And if she knew you cook for the old ones who can’t, tutor kids in English, write letters to their families in Mexico, chauffeur women to the post office?”

  “She’d send the police and claim I’d been brainwashed.” She bent and turned on the spigot and drank from it. Water splashed on her hair and face and stuck her T-shirt to her nipples.

  He couldn’t help but stare as she slid between the corral fencing and went into the corral to brush his horse down.

  “Did you know that in the Mayan culture virgins could pick their lovers. The man had no say in it,” she said, clenching the rope tighter as the horse shied. After a bit, she said, “Let’s get a beer sometime, maybe at the place your mother used to sing at?”

  “Sure, it’s about ten miles south, down by the river.”

  17

  July
2003

  It was the first time in years Lorenzo had visited the place. He and Carmen pulled into the dirt lot in front of the weather-blistered cinder block building. The Russian olive tree next to the plank door gave off a beggar’s air, its spindly limbs caked in white chalk from desert winds sanding the cinder bricks. Black birds and prairie doves nested in empty tar buckets on the flat roof and black mops and rubber boots added to the clutter. It was early evening and already a group of men stood around outside drinking ice cold beer. Dogs panted under trucks, pigeons lined up on utility lines, and frogs croaked from the ditch behind the bar.

  When a man opened the door to join the others inside, Lorenzo could hear Lola Beltrán’s “Tu Solo Tu” wailing from the jukebox. La Suerte, as the place was now called, had the menu written on a plywood board outside, next to the door: carne asada, menudo, posole, al pastor, pollo en mole, carnitas, chili verde, birria, lengua, barbacoa y lonches Mexicanos.

  The front part of the bar was a store. Inside, ceiling fans turned slowly, the blades encrusted with dead mosquitoes and yellow jackets. A young Arab who had come across the border through Juárez a few years earlier stood behind the display case next to the register, talking in Urdu as he rang up calling cards for Mexican customers. Against the wall behind him shelves laddered up to the ceiling, sagging with dusty Mexican canned goods, knives, cowboy hats, leather belts, magic cures in green bottles, hex herbs, and bone-chip relics from mestizo saints in tiny plastic bags.

  Down two aisles, at the back end of the store, workers waited for their food orders as two aproned cooks turned over steaks, sizzled chili, onion, and garlic on the stove, and set platters piled with huge burritos and tacos wrapped in tinfoil on the stainless steel counter as they called out numbers.

  Carmen and Lorenzo walked past the aisles and ducked through a curtained doorway that opened to a spacious dance hall whose ceiling and walls depicted faded murals of scenes from the Mexican revolution. Light streaks from bullet holes in the ceiling struck the dark interior, illuminating the tiny airborne specks of field dirt shaken free from clothes and boots. The smell of sweat was engrained in the walls and ceiling.

  “There,” he pointed, “between the candles.”

  Carmen went over to the bar and stood under a paddle fan slowly swirling above a blue lamp on a shelf illuminating a photo of his mother.

  A wide-hipped waitress approached them. “Qué quieres?” She eyed Carmen with the slightly hostile disregard they reserved for outsiders.

  They drank their beers in silence until their tacos came and then they ate listening to Amalia Mendoza stir their blood with the passionate yearning of “Le Pido Al Tiempo Que Vuelva.”

  Carmen loved it. Lorenzo became very sexy—the hot greasy food, the music, the place, the people; it was all so different from her other life.

  Scattered around the dance hall, men in T-shirts and jeans sipped beer, eating Wednesday’s barbacoa y chili verde special, their eyes trolling side to side for someone they knew. She watched them tear off pieces of tortilla and wedge the pieces between thumb and fingers to scoop up the green chili and barbecue meat. They made it look so delicious. Besides pepper and salt, each table held a full bowl of hot salsa and chips.

  She saw Lorenzo’s jaw muscles clench and unclench; he bit his lip and cracked his knuckles. She knew he was back there again.

  His mother mounted the stage and the hall quieted; for a fraction of a second everyone held their breath as her first lines launched lyrics groaning with flammable impulse. And after a few songs, hips swiveling sultry hot in her miniskirt, grinding and stamping her heels on the stage, men yearning for her attention lined up drinks for her at the counter, which she gave away to anyone without money.

  And even though Carmen was only beginning to know him, she could tell that memories of his mother’s life were still very much alive in his heart and hard for him to relive. His eyelids fluttered, his head turned one way and then the other, he cast his eyes down, then around, and back to his fingers picking at his cuticles, doing what he could to endure the hurt of her death.

  “You know,” he started, “the temperature hit one hundred eleven yesterday and in Arizona it was worse—they found three dead bodies in the desert, all women. May 25, ought to be a day of mourning, but who gives a shit?”

  She motioned the waitress over and ordered two double shots of Chinaco tequila. She wished she could slip under his scalp and she momentarily imagined herself in his brain, swallowed up by his memories.

  He continued, “You’re a writer, I mean researching your paper on us—maybe you’ll write about the panty trees, the trees in the desert with panties in the branches, hundreds of them, each from a woman some bastard Mexican drug smuggler raped. Or about the secret prisons ICE has built in the desert along the border. No one is allowed in—it’s Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib on American soil. Thousands of Mexicans arrested and confined there. Nobody fucking cares.”

  He was trying to control his anger but couldn’t. “Three blacks in Texas are dragged behind a pickup and die, and it’s headlines around the world; white kids in Utah are kidnapped and it’s on every news channel, but Mexicans? Nobody gives a shit.”

  She knew why he was angry—his mother had been murdered out back behind the bar and all that buried sorrow had fermented into the rage that was now rising up in him.

  She said, “Let’s do the interview later and just enjoy ourselves now.”

  He watched a man spit sunflower seeds with expert aim into a Styrofoam cup three feet away. A moth fluttered past a ceiling light. Someone left the back door open and a sparrow flew in, skimming below the ceiling. Kids cheered out back.

  The waitress set the tequilas down and he paid.

  A group of neatly groomed cowboys walked in: neckerchiefs tied around their collars, new Stetson cowboy hats, tight-fitting jeans, colorful boots—some lime green, some red, some black. They sat down, cleaned their fingernails with pocketknives, shifted toothpicks between their teeth. They were recent arrivals, were wearing their first paychecks.

  “So, tell me more about this paper of yours.”

  “Well, it’s not just a paper, it’s my dissertation. Basically everything I’ve done in the last four years. But if you want to really know, it’s on communities under duress—that is, how oppression and poverty affect language and culture. What factors contribute to making a community a community.”

  He ran his tongue inside his cheek, gave a hmm, and nodded his head in appreciation. “That explains it,” he said, and offered a toast. “To your success,” and slugged his shot down. The sting made him grunt. “You think it’ll change anything?” This came out with a trace of ridicule.

  “It has to. It will change things,” she said with conviction. Tears started forming in her eyes.

  “Come on, baby, we’re going to have fun. I’ll show you how us Chicanos can dance.” He pulled her onto the dance floor, clapped his hands above his head, whirled her around, locked his hands with hers, and rocked her in the rhythm of his bronc-riding hips, shaking to the beat through three songs—Ramon Ayala’s “Cora, Cora,” Vicente’s “# 1 Interpreter of Life,” and Jose Alfredo Jimenez’s “Composer of Love.”

  Ice cubes rattled, boots and high heels clicked on the wooden floor, carnitas sizzled in frying pans, beer and whiskey saturated the air, laughter and hysterical yelps arched up as bodies turned with the loud music, everyone enjoying the fleeting happiness of the moment.

  18

  I appear in your dream, Carmen, to tell you,

  You are chosen. Only you can tell this story.

  Your intellect has been groomed to speak for those who can’t.

  It is your gift. Carmen, I accompany you.

  They are everywhere on the earth.

  In Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico,

  Their stories never fit facts,

  Never fit theories, polls or statistics.

  Go deeper,

  Feel the forbidding nightmares of their lives
shatter their soundproof days so their voices will be heard.

  They are everywhere on the earth,

  Breathing a third of the air other people breathe,

  Eating a third of the food others eat,

  Living in squalid camps in one-tenth of the space others use,

  Drinking water in cities others defecate in upstream,

  Feeling rich when they enjoy a joke with friends and family at their sides.

  19

  When they got back to the camp, a bonfire by the river was going strong. Two dozen people sat on haunches, logs, bricks, or stood. The official score-caller, huddled with other ten- and eleven-year-olds, listening to his transistor radio, announced, “Gol! Gol! Mexico scores! Two to one.”

  “Brazil is threatening,” another kid piped up, cracking piñon seeds and spitting the hulls out nervously.

  Lorenzo and Carmen joined the circle.

  “How’s it going?” Juanito, a stout man in his midtwenties, greeted them.

  “Muy bien.”

  “And your interviews?” The young woman who spoke looked no older than sixteen and had a honey-peach complexion and raven-glossy curly hair in a pageboy style.

  “Write about that worthless piece-of-shit ex-husband of mine. Takes off in the middle of the night with a girl twenty years younger,” a fifty-year-old Chicana quipped, her jowls drooping with a sour scowl.

  “You can always take off with me; revenge is the sweetest, they say,” a grizzled man flirted, his craggy, hoarse tone backed by years of drinking.