A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  With Mieyo always working, occasionally the formlessness of my own existence would become so boring and tiresome I’d try to get it together for a while and take a job. I was a laborer at Walker Plumbing, jackhammering concrete all day or crawling under scorpion- and spider-infested trailers or digging trenches. I’d work pumping gas or walk onto a construction site and do some manual labor. Once I had a job out at the airport, unloading and loading the food service on the planes on the night shift. It was one of the best jobs I ever had. I remember getting off one quiet windless morning in the middle of winter and stopping my bike at the fence next to a runway covered with fresh snow, the red and blue runway lights glimmering like Christmas bulbs in the distance. I stood there for the longest time, my fingers cold as I gripped the metal fence, my breath hovering about me like a small cloud, wondering why my life couldn’t have been different.

  Throughout those years I always had an appreciation for beautiful, quiet scenes. I just never told anybody. I’d always had a secret longing to have a place in the desert, all alone with the wind and the coyotes, or in the mountains by a stream, the forest beyond my door full of wildlife: birds, deer, elk, mountain lions, wolves. That was the happiest scene I could imagine. When I really needed to feel safe, I’d go out to the mountains and hang out with nature. The ponderosa pines and running streams appealed to me, but I always had to come back to the city, where I never lasted long on jobs. I resented the way I was treated, and when someone would call me a dumb spic or insult me another way, I’d storm off or get in a fight. I didn’t understand how my brother could be content carrying suitcases and meals and washing floors for the convenience of people who didn’t even look at him. Sometimes I’d try to convince him to quit, and when he wouldn’t, when he’d just go back to emptying ashtrays or delivering laundry, I’d run out and hook up with the old crew. I’d get in a fight, steal something, get busted, and end up in jail again.

  During my last year in Albuquerque, when I was seventeen, I ended up getting picked up and charged with murder. Some guy got himself killed at a gas station, and I was walking along the street with my T-shirt wrapped around my arm, trying to staunch the blood pouring from a gash I’d gotten from punching a windshield in anger. The police took me to the hospital, had a doctor sew my arm up with eighty-two stitches, and then hauled me down to the station, booked me, and showed me into a cell. I didn’t say a word from the time I was picked up to being locked up, but I had an alibi. I didn’t protest because I knew that sooner or later I would get out. The police always accused me and my friends of crimes we didn’t commit. With no money for a lawyer, and no family to challenge the injustice, we were easy targets for the police to hang something on. It gave them the illusion they were fighting crime and winning. Besides, three meals a day and a warm cot with a roof over my head was a vacation. It was often better in jail than on the streets; I didn’t have to worry for a while about surviving.

  This time, however, I was moody and dark-tempered because I’d just had my heart broken by a woman I believed I loved, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. It made me pissed and sad that I was in the same place my father had been in when I came to visit him. Except I was even worse, because while he was always thrown in the drunk tank, I was in a cell for felons accused of a capital offense.

  After being released, I had a brief period where things went okay. I was off the streets and working for a vending machine company. I’d even been able to rent myself a room in a boarding-house, with a small fridge and its own bathroom. My own car was parked outside. My life was good enough that I’d even started to allow myself the thought that things could get even better, that I was on my way to the kind of existence I imagined others had. I’d forged a birth certificate to make me over eighteen and old enough to be bonded. When I wasn’t in Santa Fe I’d be on the road, traveling all over northern New Mexico, servicing vending machines in the small one-cantina towns that clung to the dry hills or perched on the banks of the brown rivers that flowed through the high desert. Those long stretches between stops gave me my first opportunities to truly relax. I was good with people. Every time I went into a bar or a café to refill the cigarettes or the Coke machine, they’d offer me a free meal or soda and ask where I’d been keeping myself. It was like I was just one of the regular guys. I looked forward to dropping by and bullshitting with waitresses and customers. The scenery relaxed me—broad fields with Queen Anne’s lace, hefty sunflowers, and wind-blown grasses, poplars, and cottonwoods, shimmering creeks snaking through canyons—it offered me a placid repose from the hectic pace of urban life. I’d let the mountains and prairie beauty empty my mind of all its anxious worry and look forward to seeing my girlfriend, Theresa, waiting for me back in Albuquerque.

  I’d met Theresa in the aftermath of a fight when my brother had called me down to Albuquerque. Three guys had been threatening him, and by the time I showed up two more had joined them, all white guys, and one of them had a knife. I had a big old wrench handy and went after them in my fashion and only stopped when police sirens sounded in the distance. Afterward, Theresa was waiting by my car, a brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired Chicana who quietly asked me for a ride. I took her home and we began to see each other. She went to Highland High School and was impressed with my toughness and independence, and I by her beauty, kisses, and high-spirited nature. She was a normal high school girl, with parents and an older brother and sister. She was my first girlfriend.

  Nothing could have been sweeter at first. We went to drive-ins, burger joints, parties, bars, campsites, and we necked late into the night in her parents’ basement. But I had a difficult time getting along with her friends. They were middle-class Hispanics, whose parents made good money and bought them what they wanted, and they couldn’t speak Spanish and had never been in a cell. They’d known each other since childhood, and I felt left out of their collective experience. They’d laugh about what had happened to someone in the past and I would stare at them, wanting to be included, wishing I knew what they were referring to. The only way I seemed to impress them was by my fighting. It was what had attracted Theresa in the first place, and she, and then her friends, began to encourage me to step out with just about anyone they didn’t like the look of. I didn’t mind it at first; my fighting skills made me somewhat of a hero in their eyes and I liked being feared and respected. But later it made me feel like the reason they ever invited me anywhere with them was to see if I could keep my unbeaten record intact. I was always fighting guys who had bullied them or made them afraid. I’d fight like a pit bull, my violence fueled by the fact that I had nothing to lose. I provided entertainment only; when it came to social gatherings, they ignored me unless there was a fight. Most of the guys I was fighting were big Anglos, and I guess in some way I was taking up where my grandfather left off. He used to fight in barns and sheds against farm-circuit prizefighters to make extra money for his family. I wasn’t getting anything out of it except back slaps and free beer.

  This went on for some time until I realized I was feeling used, and I began to resent the people Theresa hung out with. They were a bunch of cowards, spineless spoiled brats who had had everything given to them. To gain Theresa’s affection, I was willing to oblige them, even though it undermined my self-respect. But when the dust settled and Theresa and I were left alone, we didn’t grow any closer. I didn’t know how to nurture a friendship, let alone love. We really didn’t have much in common except violence and drinking. She wasn’t interested in talking about crime, and I wasn’t interested in talking about my family or my past. Our conversations were usually superficial and glib, and I was shy around her. My silence annoyed her, but it frustrated me even more because for the first time I could sense the possibility of a real closeness, however elusive.

  Our meetings became sour, stiff, and unbearably tentative. I grew jealous of her friends who seemed to speak with her so easily, and I was suspicious of anyone she even looked at. A month after I turned seventeen I had bought a u
sed trailer, hoping to persuade her to move in with me. It was a snowy February afternoon. I was asleep when she walked in. “I hear you been acting stupid again!” she said. I knew she was referring to her friends, whom I had recently threatened to beat up. I was tired of how they reveled in my fighting prowess and afterward sniggered openly at my desperation to make Theresa love me. I’d found out that she was sleeping around. She looked at me with hate in her eyes. She accused me of being a romantic fool, someone who made sex into something special. It was plain and simple fucking, not love. She didn’t want an intimate relationship. She just wanted to have fun, to fuck and be done with it, with no attachment or commitment.

  I put on my shirt and laced my boots up, hoping she’d want to go out for hot cocoa and a burger, but when I stood in front of her, she slapped me. Again and again, until she yelled, “Slap me back! Why don’t you hit me?” She slapped me until her hand was red and puffy. In the silence between us, her eyes simmered with festering resentment. She wanted me to accept her desire to make love to other guys; she wanted to quit hiding it; she even wanted to break off our relationship. And my naïveté rankled and disgusted her. She found my meekness repulsive, my torment indecent, my loyalty vulgar and obscene. In her eyes, everything about me was repugnant. I lived in a stupid imaginary world where I worshiped her as the most beautiful woman ever. To her, it was the pitiful fantasy of a child. She wanted to be free of me. My faithfulness to her was keeping her from enjoying life. She had to hide and lie, hating herself for what she was doing. Our love meant nothing more to her than licking the bottom of every moment’s pleasure. She wanted to punish me for my fidelity; she wanted me to be more like her. She gripped my arms and screamed, “Hit me back!”

  But I was at the trailer door already. I fled. As I started off in a jog, the chill air and snow felt good. Dogs barked. People stared out their windows. Guys working in driveways on cars looked up. I was running to the foothills of the Sandias. The mountains would make me forget what happened. Sitting up there I could have some peace of mind and try to figure the situation out. I glanced behind me. She was following, screaming, “Get back here! I hate you! I hate you!” I was surprised to find myself among the piñons and juniper trees already. I was scared and confused, but free of her for the moment. I could see her still in pursuit and behind her the trailer park. It was snowing harder. I hid behind a piñon tree and watched her in sorrow. As she neared the foothills, she fell and yelled out, “Help, I can’t walk! I broke my ankle! My foot’s stuck, help me!”

  For a second I thought it was a trap but then decided she needed me; she was in pain. I skidded down, jumped over rocks, and was at her side instantly. My first thought was right. She lashed out, grabbed my foot, and snarled, full of malice; “You bastard!” She bit my calf, and I kicked to release her grasp, then sprang back, terrified. My adrenaline shot up and I dashed up the hill into the dense thickets. I could barely hear her yelling. I didn’t understand why she was doing this, why she hated me.

  Not until she had walked away and I saw her car leave, toward dusk, did I venture back to the trailer park. In case she might return, I got behind a Dumpster, hugged my knees to my chest to keep warm, and waited until dark to enter my trailer. The light and shadows played games in the snow, and I saw her wandering again in the fields, a woman wearing a white calfskin hide, dressed in feathers and moccasins, beads and shells, doing a ritual dance. The snow fell seamlessly around her and the air grew darker until she was gone.

  I knew Theresa loved me but she was as afraid as I was of intimacy. I leaned against the cinder-block wall, understanding nothing. I reached down sadly and tied my bootlace, wondering if I should go see her and act like this never had happened. I waited until the next day. When I called from the road she seemed uninterested in me. Dreading another abandonment, I clung to her all the tighter, telling myself that I would be able to hold on to her if only I wanted to enough. I was in love—no, not in love, but possessed with her. I prayed to the stars every night that God would make things good between us again.

  I drove down to Albuquerque unannounced to visit her. When I arrived I could feel that she was uncomfortable with my being there. She was busy, she said, and recoiled from my touch. I begged her to come out for a Coke or a ride so we could talk things through. She relented and got in but immediately seemed bored and offended by my intensity. Before I had even turned the corner, she wanted me to take her back. Feeling powerless to convey to her how much I loved her, convinced that if she only knew this she would fall back into my arms, I finally got so desperate I told her I was kidnapping her. She didn’t believe me at first, but when we left the city limits and kept going on the interstate, she became quieter. I told her we were going to live in another city and love each other and start new lives together. I kept driving. In between long smoldering stretches of silence, I repeated my plans for us. We were in El Paso by nightfall, when she finally agreed to give us another chance. I turned around and drove straight back to Albuquerque. Not a word passed between us the entire time. But just as we neared her neighborhood she told me she wanted me out of her life. I pulled over, and the next thing I knew there was blood everywhere. I had shattered the windshield, put my arm through it. There was a deep ugly gash to the bone in my left forearm. She ran off and I got out of the car, wrapped my T-shirt around my arm, and started walking toward St. Joseph’s emergency room.

  When the cops picked me up I didn’t care what they did; it didn’t matter anymore. I figured I had lost Theresa for good. After I was stitched up, the cops returned and told me I was being booked on suspicion of first-degree murder. I didn’t respond to their questions. I agreed to everything with an indifferent nod. I was taken to Montessa Park to await trial and stayed there for about four months, until one day my number was called and a guard informed me that I was being released. Outside, Mieyo was waiting for me. He told me he had joined the army. We spent a couple of days together, partying, drinking, and smoking weed with friends. I wasn’t saying much when I walked him downtown to the recruiting station, but I hugged him before he went to join the other recruits who were waiting for a bus to take them to basic training camp. He said he’d see me in a year, when he got out.

  THREE

  After my release, I had nothing left anymore so I decided to leave Albuquerque. I headed west on I-40, with a little money in my pocket for gas and cigarettes. I was undecided about what to do or where to go but hoped traveling would help shake off the past. There was so much I couldn’t explain about what was happening, but one thing was certain: No one wanted me around. I was falling apart. A long drive across the prairie would help me think. The farther I drove the more relaxed I became. My mother, father, and brother had all left me to start new lives, and maybe, with luck, I could too. All I knew was I had to keep moving, because then I didn’t have to think about how messed up my life was. If I had stayed, I would almost certainly have tried again to get Theresa back and ended up in trouble. Leaving was the only way to keep from doing something stupid. I still felt frantic. I needed to put some distance between her and me, and when I finally arrived in San Diego, the humid air soothed me with its mild, salty breezes. I stood on the beach, scanning the ocean, thinking sadly that I was eighteen and worse off than the day I was born. I marveled at the force of my emotions, which had pushed me over the edge and left me without options, except to escape as far west as I could go.

  It wasn’t only my heartbreak over Theresa that had pushed me across the line. Beyond my obsession with her was the wreckage of my past, and most recently an encounter with my mother, who had had the bad timing to come back to town. After leaving me in Grandma’s yard, she had gone to California with Richard and lived there for eleven years. She had returned to Albuquerque with two young children, moving into an affluent white-only neighborhood. My sister had talked me into paying a visit just as things with Theresa had begun to go bad. I’d gone reluctantly, but still I had some dim hope for a reconciliation, or at least for the embr
ace I’d longed for ever since she had abandoned us.

  When the door opened and my still-attractive mother looked from me to the two children clinging to her, she introduced me to them as a friend, shattering the hope that I’d allowed to grow in my heart. Immediately, I steeled myself against showing disappointment and followed her into the bright, sunny kitchen. Richard skulked out of view, moving through adjoining rooms. She poured me a cup of coffee but didn’t offer me a chair at the kitchen table. We remained standing, looking at each other across an island counter strewn with opened letters, bills, and invitations to social events. She didn’t talk about herself, and she didn’t need to; the evidence of the good life was all around her, from the expensive leather and wood furniture, the new refrigerator stocked with food, the sparkling pool I could see beyond the glass doors leading to the patio, to the stick-on notes on the refrigerator door instructing the maid to vacuum and wash the windows before the weekend.

  She asked questions: Was I working? Had I finished school? Did I have a girl? Did I need anything? How handsome I was, how big and strong. I knew she was trying, but after that initial betrayal I wasn’t going to make it easy for her. I answered her questions matter-of-factly, giving her just enough information so as not to reveal myself. I left when she ran out of questions. It was a cold, perfunctory meeting that lasted maybe ten minutes. Later, I doused the pain of her rejection in a three-day binge of whiskey and drugs. I ended up fighting some guys in a bar and getting thrown into jail. When I got out, things started crashing down on me. I hadn’t seen Theresa for weeks and I drove straight to her house down in Albuquerque. She’d been worried about me and we’d ended up driving to a cheap motel on the outskirts of town. We hadn’t ever been in a hurry to have sex, and I hadn’t ever pressured her. Now I needed to be inside her, to be swallowed up. But it felt dirty and perverted and brought out the worst in both of us. When we finished she wept quietly into a pillow as my hunger still raged. Three weeks later, I put my arm through the windshield of my car.