The chief drove through the night, and at sunrise they arrived in the farming town of Immokalee, two hundred miles south of the grove country they had fled. The chief deposited them at the Ross Hotel, a name suggesting amenities far beyond the realities of that dimly-lighted, onetime warehouse of unpainted concrete block. The place was an open dormitory for transient field workers and offered the cheapest bunks in town at three dollars a night, a private locker for a dollar more. It was even more malodorous than the trailers in the grove had been. Cockroaches skittered across the floor and the walls were covered with crude sexual drawings and profane scrawlings in English and Spanish.
“Put bars over the windows,” one man said to Julio, looking around, “and it could pass for the jail back home in Sabinas.”
III
He had now been living in the Ross for more than two months. He woke every morning before sunup and walked to the Farmers Market where the contractors with fields to be picked called out the day’s wages. As soon as he hired on he’d board the crew bus and take a seat and doze off like most of the other pickers around him. The rattling bus would usually get them to the fields just before the sun broke redly over the trees—and even before they were off the bus, the chiefs would be barking for them to get to work, goddammit, get to work.
But the narrow escape from the immigration agents’ raid on the orange grove had been a reminder of life’s ready perils and that a man had better take his pleasures when he could. He began to accompany a pair of new friends, Francisco and Diego, to a cantina called the Rosa Verde almost every night. The bar was about a mile beyond the edge of town, and sometimes they did not stagger out of the place until the early hours of the morning. And sometimes, after bidding his friends goodnight and heading back toward the Ross, he ended up sleeping in the palmetto thickets alongside the highway where he later woke shivering on the foggy ground with a hangover like an iron spike in his skull. Sometimes he awoke early enough to hurry to the Farmers Market before the crew buses left for the fields, and sometimes he missed the buses—twice last week—but was able to hitch a ride to the fields.
This morning he’d again come awake in the palmettos. He was lying huddled on his side, his clothes damp with dew, and staring into the pink eyes and long whiskered snout of a curious possum within inches of his face. He let a startled groan and the ugly thing scurried into the brush. His hangover was monstrous. With painful effort he got to his feet, clung to a papery cajeput trunk and heaved up the residue of the pickled pigfeet he’d so avidly consumed in the Rosa Verde the night before. He was repulsed by the smell of himself, the rancid taste of his tongue. The sun was already above in the trees and he knew the crew buses had long since departed the Farmers Market. He stumbled out to the shoulder of the road and started walking in the direction of the fields. Not ten minutes later a pickup stopped for him. The driver was a happy Chicano who spoke execrable Spanish and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the rock song on the radio. He gave Julio an appraising look and grinned and shook his head. “Bunked in the Palmetto Hotel, eh?” he said in English. “Rough, man.” Julio didn’t understand, and so smiled and shrugged. The Chicano laughed and turned up the radio.
He got out at a crossroads and thanked the driver for the ride and from there hiked another two miles to the tomato fields. The day was cloudless, the broad sky almost achingly blue, the sun already hot on his shoulders. A hawk circled over a cattle pasture and a flock of egrets rose on slow-beating white wings and banked away over the pines. The crew buses were parked in the shade of the roadside trees, their drivers napping or leafing through comic books and nudie magazines. When the black crew chief named Gene saw him heading for the stack of empty baskets by the loading truck, he stalked toward him, yelling, “You there! You fulla shit you think you come out here and work any goddam time you feel like. You! I’m talkin to you, goddammit!”
Julio stood with a basket in his hands and stared without expression at Gene’s yelling, contorted face. He didn’t need to understand the man’s words to know what he was saying. But he knew he would work. All week the order had been for red ripes and the chiefs needed every picker they could get.
“Goddammit, this be the lass mothafucken time, you unnerstan? The lass!” The chief gestured angrily toward an empty picking row. “Go-head on, get you sorry ass to work.”
The moment he settled onto his knees and started picking, he knew the day would be a mean one. It was not yet midmorning and already the sun was burning into his back and scalp. His blue Kansas City baseball cap was back in his locker at the Ross Hotel and he would have to work the day bareheaded. He remembered a red bandanna balled in his pocket and dug it out. Although he was tempted to wear it capped over his head and tied under his chin, he didn’t do it—that was the way the field women wore them. He rolled it and banded it around his forehead. It would keep the sweat out of his eyes for a short while, until it was saturated, and then would be worthless because he could not afford to stop working every few minutes to wring it out.
Each time a picker filled a basket with tomatoes he carried it to the end of the row to be inspected by a checker; If the checker approved the load, he gave the picker a ticket worth the day’s rate for a full basket, and then he called for a toter to take the tomatoes and load them in the truck. At the end of the day, the picker turned in his tickets for their total worth in cash. Today each ticket was worth forty-five cents. Last week the call had been for green tomatoes, the hardiest kind and thus the easiest to pick, as well as to check and load. The pickers had been able to work fast and the checkers hardly glanced at the loads before issuing tickets for them, and the toters had dumped them into the truck as casually as rocks. But when the order was for red ripes everybody had to work more carefully and the process was much slower. The pickers had to be mindful to pluck only ripe fruit and the checkers had to inspect the loads closely to ensure nobody was trying to get by with hiding greens and pinks under a top layer of ripes—a deception not unknown to pickers trying to fill baskets as fast as they could. The toters had to be careful not to bruise the tomatoes in loading them in the trucks. The crew chiefs stalked up and down the field, commanding the pickers to work faster, work harder, and the pickers cursed them under their breath. The call for red ripes always put everyone in meaner temper.
The fields were sprayed nightly and Julio’s stomach churned at the smell of the oily insecticide gleaming on the fruit. Within the hour his arms would be blackened to the elbows. The air was dusty, and the broken fruit discarded along the rows was already swarming with bulbous green flies, and the pickers had to work with their mouths closed against them. He ached in every muscle. His pulse beat painfully against the back of his skull and his eyes felt too large for their sockets. The insecticide seared the cuts in his hands. Sweat was already oozing from under his headband and rolling into his eyes, and when he wiped at it with the back of his hand his eyelids were left burning. His tongue felt like an oil-caked rag.
A hundred yards away, set on a crate in the middle of the field, was a thirty-gallon water barrel covered with a wooden board. Throughout the day, the workers would go to the barrel and dipper a drink, but none of them ever drank fast enough to avoid a chief’s angry order to quit lazing and get back to work. The sight of the barrel roused Julio’s thirst like a half-mad dog, but he would not go for a drink, not yet. Not on a morning when he had started work after everyone else and before he had even picked his first basket. No, he told himself, it would be as always: he could not go for a drink until he had picked at least three baskets. It was a rule he had made for himself on his first day in the fields when he’d discovered that many of the pickers were drunkards working only for the money to buy their next bottle. They were the first to go to the water barrel every day, and few of them were ever able to work all the way through the afternoon. Any man who went for water ahead of such derelicts was ridiculed without mercy by the other pickers and deserved to choke on his shame. But Julio knew that by
the time he had picked his first three baskets, all the bums would have made their first trip to the water barrel.
Everyone laughed at these bums, but kept their distance from them, too, for they all stank of something more than unwashed flesh and filthy clothes. The bums had a stink such as Julio had never before smelled on a living man, a stench of something dead, and it always made him feel a little afraid. One such wretch was working in the row to his left this morning, a sickly pale and red-eyed man whose grimace showed green teeth. Now and then Julio caught the smell of him and felt a small shiver even as bile rose hotly to his throat.
In the row to Julio’s right worked Big Momma Patterson, an enormous Negro woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, knee pads and gloves. She had been about ten yards ahead of him when he got to work, and she had since taken a full basket to the checker and started filling another, and the distance between them was now nearly fifteen yards. She was the best picker in the field today. The only one better was Sammy Bowlegs, a Miccosukee Indian who was at the moment serving sixty days in jail for setting fire to a woman’s hair in a barroom.
Julio’s hands and knees were now beginning to achieve their usual rhythm, his picking action gaining smoothness. His hands moved swiftly through the vines, grasping the tomatoes against his palms and snapping them free with a crook of the finger and a twist of the wrist, setting them quickly but gently into the basket. He pushed the basket forward and stepped up behind it on his knees. The same action again and again. When he filled his first basket and stood up, sharp pains ground into his back and his knees cracked loudly. He cursed and spat and picked up the basket and tried to swing it up to his shoulder as he usually did, but the action made him lose his balance and he sidestepped clumsily and his feet tangled in the vines and he just barely managed to drop the basket right-side up before he went sprawling. The derelict picker in the row beside him laughed and said something, and Momma Patterson looked back at him and smiled and shook her head. Gene came stomping down the row, swearing and gesticulating angrily. Julio retrieved the few spilled tomatoes and then jerked the basket up onto his hip and lugged it to the end of the row, ignoring Gene’s ranting as he did the flies raging around his head.
While working on his third basket he paused and leaned low over the vines and vomited quietly. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and was dizzy for a moment and then suddenly felt much better. Well, he thought, that’s done. By the time he filled the basket, the pasty drunkard in the row beside him had gone for water. Julio carried the basket to the checker, received his third ticket, retrieved an empty basket and took it back to his row, and then went to the water barrel and drank like a drowning man.
IV
Its little bell tinkling, the faded-orange lunch wagon came down the road and parked in the roadside shade as it did at noon every day. The owner and driver of the wagon was a thin-haired fat man named Harold who sweated constantly and had a wall eye. The wide serving window was attended by his busty but plain daughter, Georgia, who never smiled or scowled or showed any reaction to the fieldworkers’ pathetic attempts at flirtation except boredom and occasional impatience when one of them slowed up the line. Harold accepted cash or field tickets for his wares, the full range of which consisted of hot pork sausage on a bun, cold cheese sandwiches, corn chips, unchilled cans of soda pop, moon pies, cigarettes and candy bars.
The crew chiefs’ whistles shrilled up and down the fields, signaling the half-hour lunch break. Julio was not hungry nor even sure his stomach would accept food without throwing it right back up. But he had to eat something to give himself strength for the afternoon, the longest and hardest portion of the day. As the line advanced toward the serving window it was engulfed by the heavy smell of hot pork grease and Julio fought down a surge of nausea. He paid six tickets—two dollars and seventy cents—for a cheese sandwich and a can of Dr Pepper.
He crossed the road and sat in the grass in the shade of a mimosa tree. He stared morosely at his lunch. Six tickets. He had five left in his pocket. Never before had he picked so few baskets in a morning’s work—not even three days ago when he did not arrive at the fields until after nine o’clock in the morning. If he did not do better this afternoon …
But of course he would do better. Didn’t he always do better in the afternoons? By then the pain of his head would have eased and he would have food in his belly and the return of his strength. At the moment, however, he was tired to his bones, more tired than he had ever been after a morning’s work. He did not understand it. This was not the first time he had worked in the sun with a tequila hangover. He wondered if he would be able to work through the afternoon without dropping from exhaustion. Then realized it was the first time he had ever wondered such a thing.
The sandwich tasted strongly of oily mayonnaise on the verge of turning rancid, but he forced himself to chew it, swallow it, keep it down. He spied Alfonso de la Madrid standing in the lunch wagon line—and then Alfonso saw him looking and quickly averted his gaze.
Julio’s belly tightened in anger. The five tickets in his pocket, together with about eighty cents in coins, represented all the money he had in the world, and the reason for that sad fact was an unfortunate incident on the Sunday just past. And the cause of that incident—and thus the true cause of his present poverty—was Alfonso de la Madrid.…
V
“Stop for him, man—he’s a Mexican!” Alfonso shouted as Diego’s rusty, smoke-trailing Plymouth rumbled past a hitchhiker. “Give the poor fellow a ride. Don’t be a bastard.”
They were on an isolated stretch of State Road 82, a two-lane blacktop flanked by cattle pastures and pine stands and citrus groves, returning to Immokalee from a day in Fort Myers. The red afternoon sun was almost down to the trees. Pine shadows touched the road. The sweet scents of orange blossoms and new-mown grass swept in through the car windows. Squalling blackbirds lined the telephone wires, and a scattering of cattle egrets fed on insects in the pastures.
They had been to a movie and then eaten at a Burger King and then stopped in at several bars. Alfonso sat in the front seat with Diego, both of them wearing new straw hats they had bought at the Edison Mall. Julio rode in the back with Francisco, who was not feeling too well. His eyes were bruised purple and swollen nearly shut, his lips cut and bloated, his nose hugely broken. These disfigurements had come to him in an alley behind a Fowler Avenue bar, by way of a shrimp boat captain at least twice his age. The shrimper had disputed the legality of a shot by which Francisco sank the eight ball to beat him in a pool game and win their bet of a beer. Francisco had said, “It is a technique much admired in Piedras Negras. I will accept a Budweiser as my prize.”
Although he had learned his English in Mexico, Francisco spoke the language quite capably, better even than Diego, who had been born and raised in Colorado and learned both English and Spanish in childhood—but unfortunately did not learn either very well. His pronunciations in both languages were often perplexing, and it was an old joke with his friends that no matter which language Diego used to call his dog, the confused animal would simply stare at him. from a distance and scratch its head. “Julio and me, we don’t even speak English,” Alfonso had once remarked, “and we speak it better than Diego.”
“Well, we ain’t in no fucken Perras Nigras,” the old shrimper had said to Francisco. “Around here that’s a illegal shot and you lose. Make mine a fucken Michelob.”
Francisco winked cockily at his friends at the bar and said to the shrimper: “Maybe you wish to discuss this disagreement outside, eh, old man? Under the eyes of God?”
“Fucken A John square,” the shrimper said, tossing his cue on the table and heading for the back door.
And now Francisco was not feeling so well.
Diego brought the Plymouth to a stop and the hitchhiker came running. Diego looked at Alfonso and said, “Maybe I should get rid of this car and get a bus, eh? To all the time pick up the damn people you always want me to pick up?”
“Your ki
ndness has put a smile on the Holy Mother’s face,” Alfonso said. “You are ten feet closer to heaven.”
The hitchhiker was breathing heavily when he got to the car. Julio moved over, permitting the man to have the seat by the door.
“Many thanks,” the man said as Diego put the car in motion. He was tall and lean and hatless, his hair cropped short, like a soldier’s. His jeans and jacket still held the smell of new denim, and though his low-cut brown shoes were smeared with mud, they looked new also. On a band slightly too large for his wrist hung a gold watch. He said his name was Luis Blanco. Alfonso introduced him all around. Julio thought the man had eyes like a policeman—quick-moving, taking note of everything.
In answer to Alfonso’s questions, he said he was a baker in Fort Myers and was going to Immokalee to visit his girlfriend. He had a car of his own—a nice little Chevy only five years old—but it was being painted this weekend and so he had to use his thumb to get to Immokalee. He didn’t have to work tomorrow and would take the bus back to Fort Myers tomorrow night.
He asked about Francisco’s battered face and laughed together with everyone else—except Francisco, who glared at them all—when Alfonso told the story of the fight. Julio noticed a small dark tattoo on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of Luis Blanco’s left hand, a symbol shaped like an arrowhead. When Luis Blanco saw him looking at it, he casually covered it with his other hand. His Spanish was much like Francisco’s, a borderland region singsong. He was, he said, originally from Mexicali.
When he learned that all of them were pickers but for Diego, who worked as an auto mechanic in a garage, he asked if the pay was good for pickers at this time of year. Did they get paid every day, as he had heard? They must be doing very well to have a car and spend Sunday in Fort Myers and be able to buy new hats. Did they think he could get work in the fields? He missed his girlfriend and wanted to live closer to her.
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