She resisted the compulsion to slam Lorenzo down on his back, yank his pants off, and straddle him on the sawdust, kicking crates aside. She wanted to get that hot stinging red chili juice on her lips and suck him until he cried out in pain and ran buttass naked to the water trough outside to soak his dick in cold water. Teach him to sulk.
She asked, “You mad at me?” The question made him irritable. She hated when he was moody, so preoccupied that all he could manage was a morose smile. She thought, the hell with him, and started for the door.
He clicked the conveyor belt switch off.
She stopped.
“Okay,” he started, “but now that we have a little money coming in we can’t afford a boycott, a march on the newspapers and TV stations, or to petition the governor to investigate. No more meetings for a while.”
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a book. She placed the book down on the table under a lamp next to the conveyor belt. “Read this. Read it aloud, this paragraph.”
He skimmed the highlighted phrases. “The proportion of those who will labor under all hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings … Freedom without opportunity … manipulation of their attitudes and behavior … and the best gift we can offer the suffering masses is to free them from the delusion that they have a right to live.”
He hesitated.
He had always been afraid of words, scared of their hidden meanings. When she first met him, she noticed that every legal letter he got in the mail he tossed in the trash and when she asked him why, he said he didn’t want to know what was inside. Poison hidden in words.
“You’re stirring up trouble and I don’t want him kicking you out like he did my brother.” She followed him to a semicircle of torn armchairs in front of an old black-and-white television against the wall, where workers watched soaps and sports. “Things are going good. The kids enjoy the soccer field, women are into their quilting circles, and the doctor is making daily visits. I don’t want to mess stuff up.”
“It’s true,” she insisted. “You’ve done a lot, but you don’t change people’s lives, I mean permanently, with sports. Change the way they think about what they can do in the world and everything is possible and every one of them will be a champion in their own eyes.”
“That’s the last thing we need. We can go on like we are: money improves our lives. Money’s the key.”
Carmen tried choosing the right words but said it the way she knew best, straight and direct. “I can’t do that.”
He looked at her.
She replied, looking directly into his eyes, “I love you like no other man I’ve ever come close to loving, and I want to marry you, but we have a chance now to do something and we should do it. Please.”
“You came here to do your studies, why don’t you just do that, focus on finishing it? You’re taking this poor-people thing too serious. Turning your studies into a mission to lead people out of their hardships? No, it’s not what this is about.”
“Read,” she tapped the page with her index finger.
“Your being a savior might end me up in jail. If the cops or DEA came around, I’d be in deep shit.”
“Lorenzo, I am so tired of you having to look in your rearview mirror all the time. Your cell phone ringing day and night. You’re out late, you can barely get out of bed in the morning, and your business associates from El Paso and Las Cruces are always high.”
He stood up. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
“But that’s not what we’re doing. Our group will open doors in people’s hearts.” If only she could convey what she was feeling without sounding too lofty. Explain how the sky, wind, soil, and water give the field-workers purpose. Explain how these elements live beside them in an intimate existence, how the elements were extensions of their bodies, shaping their hands, and molding their legs to their demands.
She continued, “We’re not going to march or protest, just file grievances and present them to Mr. Miller. And you know what, love means leaving the heart wild, so don’t try and tame mine.”
He gazed at her for a long minute and then shook his head, realizing that there was no way to convince her to stop organizing. He continued reading the phrases highlighted in yellow. “And people have no rights beyond what they can obtain … astounding success of propaganda … ignorance and stupidity of the masses, controlled for their own good … the ignorant and vulgar are as unfit to judge the modes of government as they are unable to manage its reins … slaughtering the natives, English style, so that the misguided creatures … its public relations … turn working people into objects … as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be … when in favor of the masters … the government or owners of industry are their only possible savior.”
He slapped the book shut. “This shit’s crap.”
“They’re shoving it up our ass every day.”
He flicked the ON switch to the conveyor belt, drowning her voice out.
She flipped the switch off.
“Knock it off, Carmen.”
“You cut the shit,” she demanded.
Rain started beating hard on the zinc roof, the moisture making the air smell like a bait shop.
He looked up at the rafters and said, “We need the rain.”
She answered, “Thank god, it’s about time.”
They sat on the chairs and listened, watched lightning whoosh through the air like a giant machete cutting across the green fields. Lights flickered and the electricity went out.
She’s right, he thought. He was stepping up the ranks financially, he was still a gutsy field-worker, but maybe he was losing his scrub-brush approach to life. It used to be he didn’t need much to survive and didn’t ask for much. Along the way something had happened to change that.
Her voice came out of the dark. “I love you.”
She groped and reached, their fingers touched, and they tumbled into a crib of just-picked corncobs. In the soft crackle of leaves and thunder, he whispered, “I love you, too, and I’m sorry I hurt you.”
His belt buckle flashed and her blouse buttons were ripped off.
Her hair smelled like clear blue sky along the river, her breath like cottonwood leaves blowing out the warehouse doors, brimming ankle high on the ground, bunched up at fence lines. And then there was a hush as she groaned, then silence followed as she shivered, a reverent quiet shiver as if monks were chanting music from within her, stirring in his soul a sense of ancient belonging.
Bright lights flashed in his head. He was in the chute, he tightened the leather strap around the mare’s stomach, pulled the slack until it was snugly wrapped around his hand.
She banged against the chute sides and the gate flung open. She zigzagged and whip-snapped and he felt himself airborne. One moment he could smell her skin and taste her sweat, and the next moment everything went blank. He came to in the warehouse, on the couch, with Carmen at his side.
“What the hell happened?” He raised himself on one elbow.
“When it comes to loving an amazing woman, you were pissing in a hurricane,” she smiled. “You hungry?” She offered him a corncob. “It stopped raining. I’m going for walk,” she said.
“I’m going with you.” He struggled to get up.
He washed his crotch at the water trough by the corral. The air smelled of livestock and she followed the music of water down a ravine where a creek ran.
Carmen watched the water. “It’s time, honey,” she said to Lorenzo and sat beside him.
“Time?”
“To get out of the business. I don’t want to live wary of every stranger, guarded, afraid it might be the last day together before they haul you off to jail.”
“Just now, in the warehouse, it was like you lifted me in this two-hundred-mile-an-hour wind. Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
She stared at the water. She was sad and didn’t know why. But she spoke anyway, “When I came
, butterflies fanned out across my mind, millions of butterflies released from my thighs, migrating out from the center of my soul, covering the sun, the moon.” She started crying and said, “Hold me, Lorenzo, I’m scared.”
He held her in silence, their breathing bringing them together, knees drawn up, arms and hands clutched tight.
“You feeling better?” he asked.
“Look,” she pointed at two mallards floating serenely amid the weeping willow branches drooping into the water.
“That’s the way you get married,” she said. “You just know you belong together, that you were born for each other.”
Lorenzo knew she meant the two of them, and said, “Yep.”
She thought, not so much in words but in feelings, Take away my body, my books, my mind, and you have left an anger forged on the anvil of my heart. But take away my man and I am alone. Feel alone. Every time I talk up, go into a store, walk down the street, I’m alone.
My anger goes deep and it would be bottomless if I ever lost you, Lorenzo. How I love you and how you seem to be falling down a long dark hole. I hear a train-crossing bell in my heart, warning you the train is coming, but you try to beat the train and it’s faster than you, baby, faster than you.
36
Interpretations are as abundant as chili leaves—and mine are as wrong or right as any person’s. Because I birthed my boys doesn’t mean I understand them. Raising a family and singing at night was real enough but my sons had a magic that lifted my spirit beyond all earthly pleasures.
Lorenzo does not sacrifice a good man to the uncivilized rabble. He tells them no, you may not make martyrs of the innocent. And when he speaks, the arrangements of words are patterned on the teachings of earthquakes.
There is a way to satisfy your vision without having to co-opt it. There is a way to see the deeper reality where spirits reside, as with the guitar, but the strings have snapped, Lorenzo, and you must learn the sorrow of the captive, learn the hard way that silence and jail bars are not an option for us.
37
May 2008
Instead of marching on the international bridge between Juárez and El Paso, in the May 1 solidarity march with Carmen and the immigrant women, Lorenzo lay on his back with his forearm over his face, pressing down on his eyes. He had gone with friends to El Paso to a few bars, then to someone’s house to talk business and do a few lines. The cops came and found an eight ball of cocaine on the table and everyone in the house was taken into custody and charged with possession.
Every hour or so the police brought in protestors by the dozens, reminding Lorenzo that he should have been out there with them. They talked about how they’d crossed police lines and he could sense the pride in their voices.
The talk in the cell was loud.
A white guy was saying, “Occupy a country we have no business in?”
A young Mexican replied, dreaming of the future day when he’d return in uniform, citizenship papers in hand, “I’m ready to go whenever.”
“You don’t think there’s something wrong with that,” an older woman asked, “that the government offers citizenship to any Mexican who signs up to fight in Iraq?”
There was almost a fight when some guy by the bars, looking out on the tier, shouted out, “It’s your manhood—not to sign up means you a bitch.”
“Fuck you,” a Mexican said from the other end of the cell. His female companion grabbed his wrist and held him.
A white kid wearing a UTEP T-shirt joined in. “It’s bullshit. Politicians fill their pockets, every one of them are corrupt muthafuckers.”
“I’ll tell you what,” an elderly Indian woman with graying hair said, “if the only way of proving you’re a worthy American is to grab a gun and engage in a war, then why don’t they send their own daughters and sons?” And, after a pause, she added, “My son Daniel was killed over there.”
A guard swung the tank gate open and a trusty handed out baloney sandwiches and cartons of milk.
Everybody ate in silence.
A middle-aged man with a bad limp got up from his cot, went to the bars, and threw his milk carton out on the tier. He turned around to the prisoners. “What happens, if you’re patriotic and do go to war, is that when you come back, people look at you with hate like you’re a monster.” He glared. There was something about his disposition that made any counterresponse dangerous.
“I used to believe,” he went on, his voice melting to a softer tone, “that an education meant starting a new life. Meant that with hard work an education could get you to places you never imagined. The degree, the paper with your name, could not be taken back, it proved you had earned it.”
Silence.
“But nothing! I got nothing but sweeping up the garbage, cleaning rooms, carrying out trash. Smart ass, when that happens, then what?”
The air vibrated in every ear, silence swung back and forth like a live utility wire snapped in a storm. Everybody knew he was talking about himself.
Lorenzo felt what the man was saying. He, too, felt there was a hole in his soul, felt how he held up his one stick of hope and burned it like a torch, trying to find his way out of the sewer tunnel of his life.
Self-loathing whittled him down to nothing.
He got up, looked out the window. A couple of miles beyond, ducks, geese, and cranes descended on fields under an inch of irrigation water, the water’s sunset reflection lulling him into a serene hypnosis. The fields had a calming effect, though he knew the bucolic scene masked the misery the pickers endured.
When he was three or four, they’d eat blue cornmeal for breakfast before boarding the truck. The brothers slept in the same bed, face to feet. Casimiro stuffed kindling into the small castiron box lined with bricks and Lorenzo would watch the flames shoot up through the small cracks in the siding. They waited inside the Pullman until one of them whispered, “Here comes the truck!” Then, in the darkness, engine sputtering steam, muffler grumbling low and spitting black exhaust at the ground where spasmodic coughs puffed up dirt as if the weight of more field-workers climbing in was too much for it to bear, they climbed in the back.
Some of the seasonal migrants worked for just a week or a few days. They were social dropouts, aging rejects, and grimlipped cadavers, opening eyes to a morning sun suspended like a corpse on a tree, bones bleached, pecked by buzzards.
Even their boots were patched, their shirts and trousers stunk of landfills, and the small handful of their soul seemed to visibly rise to the surface of their skin like scabs medicated with leaf juice, bandaged in dirt. They were the road-cracked ones, dispossessed, who couldn’t find a place in life, bulging eyes, thin arms, muttering at the air.
He could hardly look at them. A furtive shame branded their features, marked their gestures and talk, blemished their demeanor. Dark-skinned whites and Mexicans bedded down with bad luck at day’s end and it frightened him that such a morose role in life lay in wait for him. He prayed that God would protect him from such a frightening fate.
A part of him yearned to invite them home to wash their piss-stained pants, tweeze splinters from their palms, blow his breath on them as if they were dying embers, his child’s tenderness reddening their grief to something that glowed in the dark. But even at five he was aware how despair could not be washed off. The anguish had drilled itself down deep until nothing but the dust of their despair remained, debris of shattered wholeness, intact enough to allow them to bend and pick and carry bags to the truck, but that was all.
He remembered even earlier, when his mom would bundle him in blankets, at four or four thirty in the morning, still dark, and carry them over to Mrs. Quintana’s house, the camp grandma, where other working parents brought their kids and they’d be there all day, crawling around on the dirt floor smoothed by dozens of crawling baby knees and hands to a shiny brown tile.
When he started picking up bad habits from other kids, Nopal kept them with her. Strapping Vito to her breast with a sling, holding Lorenzo in her ar
m, she climbed into the truck with workers asleep in the back, packed shoulder to shoulder, ready with gloves, the women in their cardboard bonnets secured with safety pins, cloth covering the sides.
With his forearm over his eyes he remembered how he and his mama picked together. She’d pull out her sack, which she had sewn herself, embroidered with the names of her children and husband, with roses and hearts and hummingbirds, and she’d sing, moving through the rows.
If you got sick, with diarrhea, headache, or a snake or spider bite, you curled up in the shade of the water truck, next to the tire, and slept your illness off. The hours were broken by talk, lifting your head at the distant horizon—dreaming of a driver’s contract with farmers, begging the landowner to give his field to them, that was the big prize—but you had to speak English, be respected by the workers.
When Miller leased Casimiro a field, he was elevated to el majordomo, and was responsible for the hiring and firing of workers, keeping the trucks moving from field to warehouse, making sure shipments were dispatched in a timely manner.
He remembered lunch break, left his picking sack, and found a shady spot by the truck. There were no trees, only the hot dirt that burned right through boots. He exchanged a jalapeño for an apple, a piece of cheese for a tortilla, rice for beans, taco for burrito. And after lunch, he went to the rows again, and he saw himself bending down and snapping the chili off when a guard called his name and he was escorted from his cell to the visitor’s room.
38
August 2008
It had been almost four years since they had seen each other and even though Vito had not called ahead of time, he had no problem getting into the El Paso county jail. His unexpected arrival stirred the otherwise morose atmosphere with excitement. The jailers greeted him with pads and pens for autographs, the convicts crowded the front of the cage that opened on the common area to catch a glimpse of Vito.
In the visiting room, Vito turned his nose up, sniffed, and sneezed. He looked around.
A Glass of Water Page 12