Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Humberto began swiping the brush, bending over the earth with confidence and knowledge. “Also, I have a bank account,” he said. “The bank is not around here. I have to travel to it. Somebody will give me a ride or I’ll catch the bus. In the meantime I hide my money in the woods. I have many safe places.”

  It was hard to talk and rake at the same time. He could get only so many thoughts out before his breath gave out. After his rake was full, he poured the berries into a yellow box and then he ran his fingers gently over them, smoothing them.

  The berries would go to Machias after that, in Pat’s truck along with all the other berries, to a processing plant where they would be sent through the IQF freezer, then a laser scanner to sort them for size, then bagged and sent to supermarkets across the country and around the world.

  “Lunchay! Lunchay!” some of the men in the barrens began shouting. Consuelo was rounding the bend in a white pickup packed with the day’s offering—$4 for a tamale, $1 for a Monster Energy drink, $2 for a beer, $3 for scrambled eggs and sweet peppers in a cup—and the workers dropped their rakes and ran toward it. When Naud appeared, the line parted, and Consuelo served her husband first.

  —

  IT WAS MUCH LATER IN THE DAY, the sun beginning its surrender, when Perez-Febles finally tracked down the boy who had called about his brother being blind. He was making his rounds in the barrens when he lucked out and ran into Pat, who confirmed that a man in his crew had reported seeing such a boy. Pedro and Juan and Urbano were already back at their tent by the time Perez-Febles pulled up in his enormous black pickup. “Is this the boy?” he asked, hopping out. “Is he okay?”

  Pinkeye, stupid pinkeye, a bad case of bacterial conjunctivitis. A complete nonissue for a kid with access to simple antibiotics; terrifying blindness for a kid without. Pedro got the medicine after the doctor pried his eyes open, assuring the family he would see again.

  Perez-Febles apologized for not making it to the phone in time. He told them about the mobile medical units, about the Rakers’ Center, about all the free stuff available to them, and they thanked him, kept quiet, and did not complain. To them he appeared every bit as intimidating as the Mafia family—just one more person whose power they did not trust.

  “Can I get something for you?” Perez-Febles said. “Can I bring you some food?” He was a hefty man, impeccably groomed, wearing jeans and the kind of dressy short-sleeve shirt that brings to mind cigars and nightclubs in Havana.

  “We have plenty of food,” Juan lied. “We are all set.” He was leaning against their car, a dark green Passat. Urbano stood next to him, a shield protecting Pedro sitting inside.

  “The rains are coming,” Perez-Febles said. “You need a dry place, no?”

  “We’re all set.”

  “They are saying one more day of raking before the rains,” Perez-Febles told them. “You should have a good day tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” Urbano said. “Okay, thank you.”

  In fact, Urbano wouldn’t return to the fields until Pedro could see again. Urbano would not leave his boys alone at the camp—just no.

  The family spent the next day waiting for Pedro’s eyes to clear. The day after that, Pedro could see again, but the rains came down—a total washout. They went up to the other camp at the top of Blueberry Circle to see Luis, the man who’d helped them find the hospital and who was by now a friend. There was a TV in the kitchen, and so they watched movies. The next day, the same. The violent tip of the storm was wreaking havoc along the whole coast of New England. Four days straight of none of them raking meant no money coming in, a loss of at least $2,000. It was a problem. Urbano needed the money urgently.

  He was forty-five years old, and it seemed as if everything he had worked so hard for was slipping away. He’d fled a life of poverty in Mexico as a teenager, eventually settling in North Carolina. This was back in the 1980s, when it was not unheard-of to get a green card legitimately. Urbano had figured out America, even if he’d never quite mastered the language. In the burgeoning South, he got steady work in construction, a bank account, a mortgage, and while his marriage didn’t work out, he had good kids, smart-enough kids who never bothered anybody. He had never fallen behind in his house payments, not once, but then last year he got word that his dad had died back in Mexico, and so he went home to bury him.

  “They shot my daddy,” he said, sitting in the driver’s seat of his car to stay dry while the rain beat violently down. He told the story without expression, his arm resting on the steering wheel, his gaze set uselessly on the windshield where a fly buzzed and bounced. “Somebody. A gun. Crazy people. The killer said he got confused—he wanted to kill somebody else. I said, ‘Why confused? Because my daddy is an old guy. Is the other guy old?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I made a mistake.’”

  The boys were up at the other camp with Luis. Urbano was down here by the tent, wondering if there was anything in there he should save from the rising water. The camp, so loud with dancing and drinking and gambling just a few days ago, had been transformed by the rain into a soggy, still sadness. Even the nameless pit bull was nowhere to be seen.

  “When I went to Mexico to bury my daddy, I was on a bus,” Urbano said. “This is a big problem: they know migrants from America are on the bus. Trucks came in the way. People with guns stopped the bus. ‘All people get off the bus!’ A gang. Necklaces. Rings. Forced it off. A lot of blood. Seven thousand dollars cash they got off me. It was all the money I had.”

  And so he ended up stuck in Mexico, penniless, with a father to grieve and to bury. “This was a big problem. I washed the cars. Cleared the fields for corn. It took a long time. Three months I was gone until I had enough money for the funeral and the trip back home.”

  He presented an exhausted smile, took a breath. “So when I finally got home to North Carolina, the mortgage man said I was behind. Every month behind while I was gone. I needed to make money fast. I knew about Maine. I worked there sometime before my sons were born. It’s hard, fast money. I got in the car to come, and my son, he said, ‘Hey, Daddy, I go with you to help work for the money,’ and my other son, too: ‘Hey, Daddy, what happen if you lost the house?’ A lot of years working for the house. A lot of years. This is the point: maybe I can keep it. Maybe. I don’t have the money yet. The mortgage man said he needed it all together or else he’s putting the house for sale. My sons say, ‘No, Daddy, we won’t let it happen.’”

  Pedro and Juan had never raked before; they knew nothing of a migrant’s life. To them it felt like a duty but also an adventure. They would help their dad save the house, and then they would make more money for themselves. They would buy a motorcycle and give rides to girls.

  Now, with four straight days of no raking and with blueberry season coming to an end, Urbano was losing hope of ever paying the mortgage man, and nobody talked about motorcycles or girls anymore.

  In the car, Urbano swatted at the fly but missed. Suddenly he remembered Slim Jims: he had some Slim Jims in a ziplock bag in the tent. He dashed into the rain to retrieve them, then drove back up to the boys at the other camp. They were in the kitchen watching The Price Is Right with some ladies from town in skinny jeans and high heels fanning themselves from the sticky, wet heat.

  When they saw their father, they marched up to him, excited. “We can stay here after blueberries and work other jobs,” Juan told him. In the kitchen, the boys had learned about people staying in Maine into winter to work in the sea cucumber factories; it was a famously disgusting, slimy job that had a way of appealing to a fourteen-year-old. It was the end of summer, and the idea of going back to school was hitting them like a brick in the face.

  Urbano listened and mostly heard foolishness. He knew his boys would soon start to miss home, their friends, the American teenager life he had built for them. He knew they longed to try out for football and go to the movies and kick back at the mall. T
hey weren’t rough-and-tumble migrant kids. They were gentle young men who probably didn’t even understand about the prostitutes in the room.

  “You have to go to school,” Urbano said to his sons. “You can live with your mother.”

  “You think you’re protecting us,” Pedro said. “But really, it’s the total opposite, Dad.”

  Some of the men in the kitchen laughed and made back-to-school jokes, but the boys did not want an audience for this conversation, so they fell silent.

  “You have to go to school,” Urbano said. “I make the decisions.”

  —

  PEREZ-FEBLES WAS CARRYING cans of kidney beans and applesauce to his truck in the parking lot of the Rakers’ Center, and he was getting worked up. He grabbed hold of two sacks of rice and heaved them into the back of the truck and then began driving toward Allen’s farm. He knew this work was important—passing out food and medical supplies and information on legal services—but nothing was nearly as vital as the work he did translating. “I have to promise them: no chupacabras,” he said. “Chupacabra is a devil in the woods, a mythical animal that sucks blood. Rapes lambs. It’s evil-looking, like a coyote. A lot of the people who come here are afraid of the woods. Scared to death, some of them.

  “We need a program for us to understand them as well as the reverse,” he said. His brow sweat easily and his eyes scanned constantly, like a man of secrets. “All the cultural things. I don’t even know where to begin. We refrigerate everything here. They’re, like, ‘What?’ They don’t have refrigerators back home, or if they do, the electricity is spotty. Then the employer gets fined because the employees leave food out. They don’t know. They don’t know to flush. They don’t have plumbing. Flies. I have to put signs: Please flush. It’s the little things. It’s a whole cultural thing, you know.

  “When I first came, there were a lot of problems,” he said. “Women was one problem. Drinking another. Fights. Drinking and driving. Horrific. They had no idea about that. I tell them they’ll be put in jail. It’s a totally new way for them to think. Speeding. Domestic violence. I try to educate them on the way we live. I say, ‘People have rights here, and there is recourse with the law.’ It’s all new to them. And I tell them about DWM—driving while Mexican. I tell them that they will get stopped. They don’t understand this law, and I tell them it’s not a law; it’s hard to explain.” He sighed often, as if overwhelmed by the amount of information to convey, and when we passed Wyman’s camp, a spick-and-span settlement of blue bunkhouses, he craned his neck to see if anyone was using the migrant soccer field.

  “The average education for a migrant worker is fourth grade,” he said. “A person in Mexico makes maybe $500 per year. And here in one month you can easily make $2,000. It’s not comparable.

  “Labor, labor, labor is everything.

  “My premise is no human being is illegal,” he said. “I call them undocumented workers or documented workers. It’s a silent world. Truly an underground society. There are not enough documented workers to fill the needs—not nearly enough. America is dependent on its undocumented workers, and yet they live in fear and hiding.” He rattled off immigration facts and figures the way another man would talk box scores. He said migrants pay into Social Security—money they’ll never collect because their IDs are fake. “That’s billions of dollars for the Treasury Department to keep. That’s the other issue. It’s really a good deal for the U.S. in many ways.

  “I helped investigate a murder at a camp years ago. An axe opened the guy up. I wanted his widow in Mexico to get his money. He had seven hundred dollars, and I wanted to find her. We found seven IDs on him. We could not even identify the victim.”

  —

  SHORTLY AFTER THE STORM PASSED, the sun returned, steam rose from the earth, and moods shifted dramatically. “You dump these buckets and I will get the sheets,” Urbano was saying to Juan and Pedro. He was holding an empty laundry basket, standing in the cabin at the top of Blueberry Circle that had become the family’s new home. Perez-Febles had continued to visit Urbano and his boys, and in time they began to trust him. The trust changed everything. Perez-Febles helped Urbano get a job with Cherryfield Foods. He could stay on and clean the fields, work the pesticides, become one of the “company Hispanics,” like Luis. The job paid $9.50 an hour, and it would mean a chance to save the house in North Carolina.

  The boys had just finished scrubbing the walls, mopping the floors, scouring the place with Pine-Sol so it smelled hospital clean. This cabin was bigger than anything down at the other camp, and it was just a few years old, solid, whitewashed, built to last. Right next door was the cabin that held the kitchen and the TV and bathrooms—with indoor plumbing—and the laundry room, where Urbano went to retrieve the sheets that were spun clean and dry. He pulled the linens from the dryer, savored the powdery smell and the warmth. He took the time to fold them corner to corner and then carried them back into the cabin, where the boys had each claimed a top bunk. Urbano thought about how many nights his boys had spent in the soggy tent and then the car, and something about the smell of the Pine-Sol and the sweetness of the clean fabric, just all of it combined, hit him and filled him with the kind of happiness that flows in bursts when a man feels any significant hope.

  Another person might not have looked at a camp in the woods with indoor plumbing and felt overwhelmed with good fortune. But for Urbano it was like his luck was a weather vane that had been stuck for the longest time and then God sent a tropical storm to give it a mighty shove.

  Juan and Pedro did not entirely share in their father’s elation. Urbano had agreed to allow the boys to stay with him, but then he came up with the stupid idea of signing them up for school. The bus to Narraguagus High would pick them up at the top of Blueberry Circle. Both boys hated everything about the new school. They hated the name. Who could even pronounce it? They hated that it didn’t have a football team. They hated that their dream of making money working with slimy fish and buying a motorcycle wasn’t happening—the whole heroic adventure of staying in Maine to save their father from financial ruin was interrupted by the dull clamp of reality.

  “We will play hooky every day,” Juan said.

  “We’re not kidding, Dad,” Pedro said. “We are not going.”

  Urbano paid them no mind and told them to get in the car, and then they all drove to the Walmart in Ellsworth to buy three-ring binders and paper and pencils so that everything would be ready for their first day. Pedro sat in the front, sucking a green lollipop, and Juan was in the back with his ball cap jammed low. He was wearing a T-shirt splattered with the signatures from last year’s eighth-grade graduation—I love ya, Juan! Shawna hearts ya! Ron was here!—a history that now seemed like somebody else’s. They were migrant kids now. “Loser kids,” Pedro said to Juan. Under his ball cap, Juan was wondering if any kids up here even skateboarded. He wondered if Pedro was right: that the white kids were assholes to the migrants. He would fight for his family’s honor if he had to. If he had to. His thoughts grew sour as fear solidified, and the towns along Route 182 rolled by the window. Most of them were tiny and quaint. They had pots of petunias hanging and American flags flapping and banners strung lamppost to lamppost advertising the blueberry festival in nearby Machias: a blueberry musical, a blueberry parade, a blueberry quilt exhibit, a tour of an actual working blueberry farm with a free shuttle.

  G-L-O-R-Y

  Paul Brown Stadium

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  Right now Adrienne might be sick. It isn’t funny. It isn’t her stomach so much as her nerves, her heart, her history. Rhonée, one of her closest cheerleader friends, has her eyes bugged out, standing outside the stall door, “Adrienne? Adrienne, are you okay?”

  “I’m good,” Adrienne is saying. “No, I’m good. I’m good.”

  She vomits. This is not good. Something is seriously wrong with Adrienne. At pregame practic
e in the gym an hour ago, she ran out crying—twice. Ran to the bathroom and slammed her fist into the stall door to get ahold of herself, to reclaim herself, to remember who she is: a Ben-Gal. Both times she returned to the gym with a smile, got in formation, front row, left center. “C-I-N!” she roared, “C-I-N! N-A-T-I! LET’S GO!”

  She seemed fine. She seemed Adrienne again, five-feet-nine, a Thoroughbred of a woman, broad shoulders, booming voice, the biceps and forearms of a sailor. She is not the drama queen of the squad, not even close, not one of the girlie-girls with the super-yummy cleavages and the wee, wee waists and the sugary smiles. She is the iron-willed, no-nonsense, no-curls straight shooter of the squad: six-pack abs, forlorn eyes, too busy with her own too-busy life to deal with a lot of crap.

  “Is Adrienne okay?” shouts Shannon from the other end of the locker room. Shannon is perhaps best known for her extreme volume of sandy blond hair.

  “What happened?” asks Shannon’s very best friend and protégée, the demure Sarah.

  “Is something wrong?” asks another as news of Adrienne’s nausea filters through the din of cheerleader chatter.

  Cheerleaders are all over the place, half naked, shrieking, sitting, squatting, kneeling in front of mirrors in the panic of an NFL Thursday night. National television! The game starts in just over an hour. This is crunch time, hair spray time, false eyelash time, Revlon Orange Flip lipstick time. “WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME? I CANNOT FIND MY MULTIPLICITY ESCALATE VOLUME WHIP!” Some cheerleaders are in curlers the size of Budweiser cans. The locker room, reserved just for them, is hardly equipped for the machinery of glamour, and so most have brought their own full-length mirrors, power strips, extension cords, suitcases of makeup, curling irons, hose. “Try my Bouncy Spray Curl Activator. You can totally glop it on.” The cheerleaders are all scream and shout, jazzed with beauty adrenaline, in thongs and hose and push-up bras, stretching, bopping, bouncing, assisting one another with hair extensions, pasting over tattoos, spraying tans, announcing newly discovered cleavage-engineering solutions—“Duct tape, girls!”—hooting and hollering in a primpfest worthy of Miss Universe.