The man was on top of her, grabbing her breasts, groping between her legs. The other Mexicans in the car looked on, afraid to get involved. The man was holding her down, his hand over her mouth. She felt the predator’s lust in his grip when he yanked her head back and slugged her. He knotted her hair around his fist and dragged her back so quickly and with such force she didn’t know what was happening.
Her survival instinct kicked in and she bit him, tearing a chunk of flesh from his ribs. He hissed that after fucking her, he would gut her. He snapped the button of her jeans, slid her pants down, and opened her legs.
She clawed his arms and face, bit his hand, feeling cheap as his fingers poked inside her. He kept hitting her but she kept squirming; he slammed his knee into her jaw and lunged on top of her to dominate her. She felt like a flea caught in the mouth of an erupting volcano.
Then Nopal freed one of her arms, grabbed the knife stashed in her boot, and in one clean stroke, starting at his testicles and slashing up, she cut him between his legs.
He fell over and howled in horror.
Nopal scrambled to her feet. The other men in the car grouped together and moved toward her, ordering her to jump or they’d push her off. She grabbed her backpack and guitar case, threw them first, and then leaped, rolling over and over in the dirt and weeds. The last thing she heard as the moving train sped forward was the man screaming, “You’ll pay for this, you whore!”
She spent the night hiding in creosote bushes, the brutality of the rape running over and over in her head. She was in disbelief. Looking out at nothing, unaware that she was raking her fingers repeatedly through her hair, she became filled with a deep sense of gloom that God had abandoned her. The image of the man slapping her returned. She raised her arms to protect herself, turned her face away from the hurt, and then because conscious that it was only memory. Only memory, she repeated, as she touched her swollen lip, felt the still-moist red stains of blood on her jeans over her thighs, crotch, and stomach.
She wiped the knife blade with some leaves and stuffed it back in her boot. She scrubbed her hands with dirt to clean away the blood but it wouldn’t come off.
How could such violence have happened? Her eyes searched for answers in the stars in the sky, in the firm soil under her boots, in the moon above earth, in the millions of other galaxies beyond our universe—why, why did this man board the cattle car and attempt to rape her? Why didn’t the others try to help?
She had given no provocation, in fact, her jeans, T-shirt, and jacket were loose and masculine looking. Besides an exchange of a few, brief words, she hadn’t looked at him, hadn’t talked to him or engaged his attention in any way.
The violation chilled her. A scream of denial thickened in her throat but never came. Instead, tears streamed from her eyes, eyes that felt loose in their bone sockets, like they might fall out of her face. She felt like her body didn’t belong to her anymore.
Her fingers wanted to free themselves from her hands and crawl into the weeds. Her right ear was torn and bleeding and felt like it might fly away. Her feet were anvils, bruised from the hammering she had endured as the man twisted and stomped them.
She touched the parts of her body that hurt and ached and drew her knees up to her chin and rested her head on them. After a while, she wheezed her tears out and started pounding her forehead against her knees to feel pain, to claim her body again.
After a long time she got up and walked a couple of hours into the night until she came to a small town. She washed at a gas station, changed in the bathroom into clean clothes, and threw the bloody clothing into a Dumpster.
As the sun rose over the horizon, it was a normal morning, cars appeared and pedestrians filled sidewalks on their way to their jobs. Nopal promptly went to the train yard and, within the hour, jumped on another cattle car and resumed her journey north.
Part Three
25
June 2005
North of the fields and a little beyond the camp, where half a dozen migrant trailers and shacks circled the compound, three warehouse flood lamps threw nets of light misted by flying insects. They illuminated the weary tractors parked by every warehouse door.
Tractors have much more to them than a city person might think.
Lorenzo knew a tractor was a tool, but to make it yield something took common sense and life experience, belief in something beyond Lorenzo’s own strength and effort. When Lorenzo turned the key, it was to make money to feed and care for his father and other families in need. Just as the plants were more than plants, more than the cutting and pulling of peppers off the stems—there was the seed, and before that, preparing the soil, and before that, Lorenzo standing in the middle of a nondescript piece of dirt, looking at the stars and breathing in, praying this crazy idea of water, seed, and earth could make him a living.
It was summer, and because it was a bumper crop harvest, Lorenzo hired a dozen additional field-workers. Their cars around the camp, by the river trailers and alongside the field rows, seldom moved once they were parked; they were the migrants’ temporary homes.
Then there were the college kids, volunteering until the end of August, at which point their research papers on the environment or labor or sustainable communities would be done and they’d head back to school for fall. Migrant cars and trucks were rusty and dirty; the students’ vehicles were tattooed with activist stickers advocating one green cause or another. The last few would be gone by the end of the picking season, when September turned the chili from green to red and early October stripped yellowing leaves off stems, ditch water dried up, cranes and geese scattered south, and the earth chilled.
Dimitri, who had been one of the college volunteers in the fields a few years before, now turned off the interstate toward the camp. Lorenzo had contacted him and they had started seeing each other regularly. An hour ago, Dimitri had gotten off an airplane in El Paso and rented a car. Now the bright moon shining over the quiet fields reminded him of the good old days. Irrigation water trickled in furrows and, from stalwart roots, peppers whispered their plans to the sun.
A coyote barked somewhere in the hills east of the highway. Dimitri rolled his window down and the constant swooshswoosh of vehicles going ninety on the interstate blew cool air over his face and refreshed him as he turned right, down the dirt road running beside the field. His headlights aimed over the fields, illuminating to the far side of the river where the air was thick with flying insects.
Lorenzo saw him approaching, headlights bobbing up and down. Dimitri was not coming to work in the fields as he had when they first met and he was a freshman at a private New York college; he was here to deliver three hundred thousand dollars.
They gave each other a light embrace and Dimitri handed him the army duffel bag. Lorenzo took it into the warehouse, to a backroom, and emptied the cash out onto a table and started counting it.
“I thought I taught you how to fight,” Lorenzo stated as he counted the hundreds and bundled them with rubber bands in ten-thousand-dollar stacks.
“What are you talking about?”
“The scratches.”
“Oh, my neck, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“A little love spat?”
“Last night I was in a bar in Brooklyn, you know, talking to this guy, bought him a beer, killing time, and I tell him that I’m flying to New Mexico today to see an old friend—” Dimitri’s face turned red. “Fucking neo-Nazi.”
Lorenzo looked up but kept counting. “What’d he say?”
“I guess he thinks this is still Mexico. He started in about Mexicans taking jobs, abusing the system.”
“Seriously? So you popped him?”
“Well, I let him go on a while but then he said we should round up all the Mexicans in a corral and shoot them—that’s when I popped him and the little bitch scratched me. A white Nationalist, that’s what he was.”
“He was a little bitch scratcher,” Lorenzo said and Dimitri laughed.
“No
w he’s not talking to anyone, I tell you that. I got him good.”
“So Mr. Ivy Leaguer, do you think Mexicans are going to take all your daddy’s law firm money?”
“Man, don’t play that on me, man. It’s serious. Punk starts talking shit about swarming hordes, animal-like people, public health risk, raping white girls.”
Lorenzo finished counting the money and they went outside and sat on a bench under a cottonwood. They shared a joint.
“Chalk one up for the Ivy Leaguers.”
They both smiled, nodding as they gazed over the fields.
“And what’s up with Vito? They still got him kicked out or what?”
“Yup. It was the middle of 2002, now it’s ’05, almost three years.”
“I liked that dude. He was crazy in a good way, used to liven things up around here.”
“Yeah, that’s my brother. You were just this gangly long-haired college kid carrying a grungy backpack and a skateboard with all those antiwar slogan stickers, and when you emptied the backpack, I’ll never forget—”
“Out fell packs of green tea, vitamins, flax seed, a beat-up journal. Blah blah blah.”
“Man,” Lorenzo smiled, “least you weren’t one of those fraternity kids we get sometimes, suited more for black-tie banquets than dirty work.”
“I agree.” He paused, “But look who’s talking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you say something about this chick from the university, San Diego?”
“Ah man, it’s getting serious. I gave her a ring.”
“What? You didn’t tell me! Damn, that’s crazy. Congratulations! How long you two been going together?”
“Two years. She got here when Vito got kicked out. Hell, it took me about six months to ask her out, another six to ask her to be my girlfriend. Thank god, I’m making a little money. It takes money to be in love.”
“She’s doing all this? Used to be nothing but dirt fields, now it looks like a soccer field and educational buildings of some type.”
“That’s what they are. We hired tutors and teachers, bought books and computers for the workers and their kids. We have a soccer team now.”
“And you used to scoff at money, say it was evil and that the rich were the scourge of the planet. Now, my good friend, you believe me when I say it can be put to good use.”
They each took another toke.
Dimitri looked around. “Ah, I see you’re liking it a little too much. New truck, watch, expensive boots. It can be very addictive.”
“I blow a lot of it on Carmen. We spent a weekend in El Paso, stayed in a sweet little place, went out and ate, drank, you know … talked a lot.”
“Yeah right, talked.” They laughed.
“No, serious. We’re talking about a life together. We even drove up north to southern Colorado and I did all this crazy shit.”
“Like?”
“I actually shopped for fruit and vegetables at a health food store. That was weird. I mean, I picked it all my life and then I’m buying it with all these health nuts.”
“I know the kind, they look like my mom. You know, some things in life are inevitable, and change is one of them. That’s what makes it sweet; we can never predict change. That was some good weed. Never had it so fine. I’ve given them names and my clients love it—purple butterfly, powdered cocoon, crystalline resin, phosphorescent black, scintillating green.” Dimitri narrowed his lips and whistled. “Worth its weight in gold.”
“I’ll have another load in two weeks.”
Starting in July 2004, almost a year before, with money coming in, Carmen and Lorenzo had upgraded the camp. Four new pod buildings were added, tutors were hired, and after-school programs in music, karate, and boxing were set up. They bought a dozen goats and began their own herd then started a plant and child nursery run by the older female pickers. Young men were apprenticed to older ones who taught them carpentry and they made desks, furniture, and cabinets. Electricians, plumbers, and masons took young ones under their wings and taught them the trades.
It didn’t bother Carmen that it was profit from selling marijuana that made life better. Marijuana, Carmen reasoned, was a gift from mother earth and throughout her life she’d known so many people who smoked it and were nice people that she had no qualms about Lorenzo selling it. She was, however, against hard drugs of any kind—she loathed meth, cocaine, heroin, and crack, and felt deeply sad for the addicts whose lives were being destroyed by them.
Miller never suspected where the money was coming from and as far as he was concerned, he believed Carmen when she said she had applied for grants and gotten them for the expanded human services now offered at the camp.
A sense of fullness and good fortune permeated the days at the camp and it made Carmen feel grounded enough to start making plans for herself and Lorenzo.
They drove to San Diego to meet her parents and break the news that they were engaged. During that week, while they picnicked at the zoo and dined at the marina on a ship docked in the bay, Carmen’s mother worried for her daughter’s future. She hadn’t exactly dreamed of her ending up as a chili picker’s wife. She suggested Lorenzo attend university and study agriculture. She was afraid of prying too deep, fearful he might respond by telling her they were going to live in a jungle or on a reservation. Her father, on the other hand, was fine with Lorenzo and, though he didn’t talk much, he kept telling Carmen’s mother, “He’s a good man. You watch, he’ll be someone, he’ll be someone.”
Lorenzo and Carmen managed to break away to spend an evening at the theater enjoying a modern jazz dance troupe. Another night they strolled along the sea, watching the pelicans and seagulls on the shore as the waves ebbed and flowed, kissing as the setting sun lowered.
The last day of their visit he gave Carmen’s parents his mother’s green chili recipe, telling them that it went great with an egg and potato breakfast. Lorenzo promised that when they came to visit he’d take them rabbit hunting and fishing.
26
January 2005
Vito was back in Albuquerque and when he walked into the barbershop after being absent almost two and a half years, there were the same faces sitting in the same chairs, watching the same sports channel. When they turned and saw him, their eyes glinted hard and sharp. It was clear there had been many rumors about the reason for his disappearance.
“When’d you get out?” one guy asked.
“Was never in,” Vito replied and added, looking up at the boxers on TV, “that’s bullshit, he can’t fight. I whipped him in the Amarillo stockyards—punked his ass.”
“Heard you was running from the law,” another man offered.
Vito’s hair was long, his clothes smelled of too many nights on the road sleeping in his truck. “None of it’s true, I split off from Rafael for a while.”
Two and half years ago, at the end of 2002, he had taken off with Ronny, a big Déné Indian, and together they’d been to every reservation west of the Mississippi in at least fifty matches—in community centers, auditoriums, bars, VFW halls, bowling alleys, abandoned warehouses, hotels, parks, and county fairs; they had even done cage fighting and corral wrestling. There was no such thing as a draw—the rule was simple, one man walks out of the ring. Five or twelve or twenty rounds, until one went down. No headlines or sports-page write-ups; the fights were arranged in backrooms over cigars and whiskey.
Vito didn’t care who they were—Chicanos, Asians, or Gringos, they all hit the concrete, the dirt, or the canvas, and though it wasn’t a million-dollar purse, he had enough pocket change, after splitting it with his road-dog Ronny, to satisfy his meager needs—a good meal, a woman, and a warm bed.
“You see,” he said, sitting down, “used to be old schoolers believed fighters get in a ring to fight. None of that dancing and dodging as if they were rehearsing on stage for a ballet.” He paused, “I beat him,” he said again.
The men turned their eyes from the television to Vito, mulled over his
lie.
“It’s not on record,” Vito added.
A thoughtful silence followed this statement.
Then one man growled, “I lost money on you. You were supposed to fight and you didn’t show.”
“Ask Puro how much of my earnings he stole from me. How many of you are willing to work without getting paid?”
They were Puro’s friends and a silence stretched out tense as a slingshot until the barber tapped the chair for Vito. “You look worse than a goat.”
“De-lice him,” one joked. “So, where you been?”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Vito said and started to tell the tale.
Vito whipped a big Indian at the Grants, New Mexico, powwow and on his way to the next fight he had dropped in at a Navajo bar by Jemez Pueblo and bought drinks for the whole bar. A one-armed Indian slid in next to him at the bar and told him that the Indians in suits worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and were no good. Knowing nothing about the BIA, Vito denounced them as traitors, warning them not to drink the tequila shots. He went along the counter taking their drinks away until Ronny slammed him in the face and all hell broke loose. It was a good fight but then Vito knocked Ronny down and carried him out the back door.
They shook their heads in amazement and murmured, “Oh, it’s a crazy world out there.”
Someone else now opined, “You get some of the Indians drunk and you’ve got real problems on your hands.”
Vito agreed and after his haircut, all clean and smelling of talcum powder and hair tonic, he headed to the junkyard on the outskirts of the city.
Rafael and a few workers were up on the scaffold against the north wall, laying bricks. When Rafael turned, he saw a piece of plywood stacked high with bricks. He didn’t know who was under it, but spoke a warning.
“You have pride in your strength now but your back will pay the bill later.”
A Glass of Water Page 8