“What if you don’t find Michael?”
“Then I’ll come home.”
3
He’s on a bus on El Camino Real, heading south to Encinitas, California through the darkening hills by the ocean. Shifting the pack in his arms and rubbing his eyes, he’s slept through Oceanside, missed the stop for the hostel and now in the fading light, there’s all these new faces, people who must have gotten on in Carlsbad, a woman sitting beside him, her hands resting in her lap, a bucket of cleaning supplies at her feet, gleaming bottles and wet rags draped over the side, a toilet brush sticking out of it, the smell of industrial cleaners.
Spanish and another language he can’t make out, the woman beside him quiet till a man across the aisle in a paper painter’s cap leans out to say something and she laughs, glances out the window and the boy sees her dark eyes then, gleaming in the fading light.
In some rows there are three men or women sitting in two seats though other seats are empty, shoulders touching, the flare of the quiet talk between them, muscled hands resting on knees, lean, dark faces.
He can’t make out what they’re saying, and he stays quiet, the weight of the pack on his knees, the thrum of the engine under his sneakers, looks out the window at the passing hills covered in sage. And he looks at his hands, touches a splinter scar under his left thumb, a jagged piece of wood that had caught him on the green chain weeks ago, and now he feels far from that place in the Kootenays, doesn’t miss the work he tells himself, the banter on the line, Vince Camozzi going on about the girl he was seeing in Banff and asking him about Rose in that smiling tone that says he knows all, knows all.
He remembers the splinter sliding in and he’d dropped the board on the line, drawing away sickened and dizzy, he’d not noticed the frayed seam in his glove and the splinter had slid in exactly there, and when he’d stepped back to pull it out, the blood already flowing down his wrist, he’d felt how fragile he was, fragile and light in his own body.
All of this is new.
He gazes at the passing hills and already the faces around him are in shadow, evening comes quickly here, how quickly the California light fades. The woman beside him makes no sign, staring straight ahead, the cleaning bucket wedged between her white, polished shoes, dark hair braided and coiled in a bun.
He asks her nothing, doesn’t know her language.
Eighteen years old and heading south, the places he’s travelling through, Oregon, California, he’d only heard about in the talk of the Portuguese and Italian workers who would come up for the harvest back home, but now he’s seeing these places, they went by so quickly, Oceanside back there that he’s slept through and ahead the sky lit up by Encinitas.
He’s heard Encinitas is a rich place, houses of pastel bricks and wide mullioned windows, high, iron gates, as big as palaces some of them, the kind of houses that kept guard dogs, no out of the way places to sleep, no overgrown parks or a strip of beach, the streets well lit-up and neat.
Something carries him along, waiting and watching. Some gleam of light on the horizon, in the way that northern California beach had kept him sheltered last night, dampness ebbing into his sleeping bag, and at 1 AM or so he’d awoken to see three fish-boats gathered in the bay, their mast lights rippling on the water. He’s young at this, doesn’t know what or who to trust, relying on hunches, dim reassurances, a sheltering beach that will keep you safe for awhile or so it seems.
And now again he has this startled wide-awake feeling.
The bus has pulled over to the highway shoulder.
The woman beside him stands, reaching for her pail.
It makes no sense to stop here.
He looks out at the hills, no houses, just sage and pine and the long pull of evening shadows, and a lot of people are standing to get out, like they’ve arrived at some station at the end of a line, maybe a dozen or more, gathering up shopping bags, tool kits and pails, the woman with the cleaning pail, a man across the aisle in a spattered painter’s cap, a can of brushes in his hand that smells of turpentine, another with a bricklayer’s trowel, his bare arms streaked with cement dust.
They are filing out to cross the highway, to walk into the darkening hills.
He shoulders his pack to follow.
And it could be the place, all right, for this night, a wary glance at the traffic, waiting for gaps, darting across, like orchard workers coming in from the trees, shouldering the tiredness in their limbs, the easy talk and laughter at the day’s end, walking — where? — to a bed somewhere, and he’s cautious and curious now, standing on the side of the highway in the last light and he looks ready to cross till a hand touches his arm, the woman who had sat beside him.
“Wait,” she says, “too dangerous.” Some big transports roar by, hiding the cars in the far lane.
She doesn’t even ask what he’s doing here, just smiles and says, Wait.
They could be standing on a street corner back home in New Slocan, a local helping out a stranger. And hasn’t he often felt this way lately, wide awake and on the alert? And isn’t that what makes what he sees and feels so vivid, the buffeting wind of the passing transports, the way the long shadows pull down the ravines as dusk comes on, a faint pink stain on the sage and the flickering of campfires bright in hills. Light on his feet and ready to dart, yet staying here.
They run through a gap in the traffic into a ravine strewn with aluminum cans and wind-shredded plastic bags, and they climb.
She tells him a story then, as if to apologize for touching his arm, for holding him back. She’s talking about the San Clemente checkpoint on some highway called Interstate 5, something about her cousin crossing the border, and he leans in now, her voice so soft, and there’s the clatter of footsteps in the arroyo, high chalky walls, sometimes he gets lost in his own thoughts and feelings, doesn’t really hear what people are saying. Not that there’s really anything interesting in the tug and pull of his own worries — about being welcome, being helpful for instance. Lost in a cloud, his mother said once: You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, and he’d brought himself back then and looked at her and saw she was hurt, she had a need like grief spreading over silence.
“My cousin was running across the highway at night with his suitcase,” he heard the woman say, “near the San Clemente checkpoint. And he was hit by this car.”
He leaned in as they walked to ask whether her cousin was taken to hospital and how he was, and she said No, he’d died on the side of the road, they’d shipped him home to San Miguel in a box so that his soul could rest in the village. “His name was Martin Merida,” she said.
“Every week two or three people die there, trying to get across.”
“There are safer places,” she said then, as if giving him advice: “Tecate and a place called the Soccer Field.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t know what he was sorry for.
Not sure what he means.
Eighteen.
He’d never heard anything like it, people crossing a border, terrified in the bright glare of highway traffic, misjudging the distance.
They came out of the arroyo into a cleft in the hills lit up by campfires. Tarpaper dwellings, over a dozen of them, small fires ringed by stones.
The woman leads him over to a shack made out of plywood with plastic tacked on the flat roof, an orange box door framed with 2 × 4s, rusty hinges, hardly bigger than a child’s play hut he says to himself when she pushes open the door to show him her narrow bed, a row of wooden crates in which she’d folded her clothes, stacked her pots, knives and forks, a few tin plates, some cans, a small watermelon, packages of crackers.
Yesterday, she’d gathered firewood in the hills and left the bundles marked with strips of red cloth by a path. Would he go get the wood for her? He nods and she points out the path with a flashlight, gives it to him to find his way.
On the path he sees a man reach under a bush to pull aside a sheet of polyethylene, and under it there’s a hole with a sleep
ing bag in it and pots and a plate, all this lit up by a flashlight. He sees others walk down a ravine into the dark, vanish. He gathers up the bundled pine and sage branches marked with red cloth, the night rapidly drawing over the hills, the faint scent of the sea, the smell of sage heavy on his hands. The sticks he gathers are light, almost like paper, bleached by heat and light. When he hears the scutter of a lizard in the grainy soil, he stands to look back down the path to the fires, the dark shapes of the tarpaper cantons below.
Here.
She thanks him for the wood he brings in.
“Enough to get a fire going,” she says.
She has some scrap 2 × 4s and some pruned orange branches stacked by the wall, and she puts some stones near the fire she builds to heat and carry into the canton later.
“I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
She starts up a path on the east side of the encampment, carrying blankets.
“Where are you going?”
“Tikru Lake,” he says.
She looks surprised. She’d never heard of the place.
Below he can see ribbons of light on El Camino Real, the lights of Encenida to the south.
He doesn’t tell her that his going there has to do with water.
All this happened when he was thirteen and he didn’t think about it then, try to understand what was going on. There were some fires in his home valley, houses burned and pushed into their cellars, the orchards felled.
Then a quick, whispered argument between his mother and father in the kitchen when he was supposed to be asleep, he couldn’t hear the words but in the morning the air in the kitchen still, muffled, held their anger. He saw his mother’s drawn face, quiet over the stove and the way the breakfast plates had been set out for himself and his cousin Maren, his father already gone. No one needed to know about that. The sadness and tears in his mother’s eyes, the way she hugged herself in her nightgown by the stove, you didn’t have to talk about it or even notice.
Things were changing in those days.
Machines came in at night, lit up by glare lamps and in the morning you’d see the smoldering remains of a house, hear the chainsaws in the orchard, the crash of the trees, splintering branches, all that noise ripping through you, and for what? To clear the valley for a reservoir. How could you stop that, stand in the way?
He remembers the land buyer at their kitchen table, a quiet man, almost like a priest.
He was showing his parents some papers, going through the figures, showing where signatures were needed. When his mother rose from the table and shouted “No!,” her fists balled in anger, his father who was standing behind her put his hands on her shoulders, gently pressed her back into the seat, was saying, “It’s not about him, hon.
It’s not his fault.”
The land buyer kept pushing the white cuffs of his shirt into his jacket sleeves, as if the shirt sleeves were too long and in the end he spoke softly about how this needed to be done, couldn’t be avoided, the threat of court action and he looked embarrassed in the end.
And his mother didn’t say anything, her nostrils pinched white, fist on the table, her eyes dry with a kind of staring fury.
She’d shrugged off his father’s hands, stood and walked away.
Now he and the woman have come to a flat place on the hillside that looked like a section of disused trail or road.
“See?”
She’s pointing north towards Oceanside and she says there’s apple and orange orchards back there where there might be some work or sometimes the men in construction were looking for help, maybe he could pick up some work in the morning, but he says no, he’s planning to move on.
They came up to two women sleeping on the landing, under blankets on plastic bubble wrap and spread newspapers. He could see sneakers carefully placed at the foot of their mats, ball caps and a shirt and a sweater spread on the sage.
She lays out the blanket she’s brought for bedding and she tells him to unroll his bag on the blanket, to claim a place for the night.
Beyond the women a man sat up, shielding his eyes from the flashlight.
“He wants to know who you are,” she says.
She replies in Spanish and the man shrugs, resettles under his blankets, turning away from the light.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” he nods.
After he’s unrolled his bag, he follows her into a canyon, to a shack lit up by kerosene lanterns.
A radio is blaring music.
She says this is a restaurant.
When the owner comes out among the trestle tables she orders a bowl of soup for him, “Caldo de pollo,” she calls it, and he sits at a table beside a man in his mid-forties who is wearing a paper painter’s cap. A kerosene lantern is burning in the middle of the table and a lot of other people are sitting around it, looking and not looking at him, so that he feels every inch of his body, his heart thumping, “Evening,” he says and no one replies, propped elbows, people hunched over their bowls, tired and scraping out the last of the soup, and the painter beside him says, “Every morning on Encinitas Boulevard is a morning of hope. That’s where we go to be picked up for work. I’ve got a steady job that will last for a couple of weeks — I’m lucky!” and those sitting near him in the shadows of the lamp smile. “Then I’ll be back on the Boulevard. We’re all hopeful, and tired and sometimes a little careless.”
“If you’re careless,” he says, turning to the boy, “if you ask for too much or you stay at one job for too long, the Migra will pick you up and take you to the border. Don’t stay in one place too long; don’t make your face or your walk familiar.”
A woman brought the painter some soup from the kitchen, “Maria,” he thanks her. From under the bench he lifts two plastic bags filled with bread and melons that he’s pulled from an alley dumpster behind a Safeway, to share around the table.
“Even this won’t last,” he goes on, waving a hand at the shack they called a restaurant and at the smaller ones around it. “We’ll have a few more weeks here, maybe a month or two, no more. Our campfires disturb the peace of Garden View suburb. They see our fires in the hills through their living-room window and they feel uneasy. Something must be done, they say. The Health Department will come and declare our living conditions unsafe.”
“What will they do,” the boy asks, “burn these places down?”
“No, they’ll pay us to dismantle them and carry the wood and tarps and tarpaper and nails out of the hills, pay us by the pound!”
“Where are you from?” The painter asks, and he sees many lean forward to listen. That was how these men and women located themselves. Reach back through memory, to the place they called home, bring it here so that they and others are held and made to wonder at how far they have travelled and yet they can reach back and be held. They are eager, not just to hear the boy name a place, but to see through to the place in the boy’s eyes, a real human light they can understand.
He tells them about the flooded-out valley, that his village was now under water. In the still faces around the table he sees an amazed shock that something like that could happen in Canada, that a place they dreamed of going to could be so horrifying.
“Where are your dead?” a woman across the table asks, “The souls of your ancestors? Where can you go to honour them, to play music for them?”
“The people who agreed to that are ill,” the painter says. “There must be something really wrong with them.”
Around the table the boy shows a photo torn from a book, a sacred lake somewhere in the Central American highlands. They pass it around. No one knows the place.
He is going there, because he needs a destination. But something else in the photo holds him: the sense that it’s a healing place, that maybe there his nightmares will fade.
“You looking for work?”
“No,” he says, “going south into Mexico, then Guatemala.”
And the painter says he’s from southern Mexico, from a villa
ge in Oaxaca, naming the place and showing himself in the smile of his memory, where there is no work. He and his family lived on corn planted on a small plot that his father-in-law had owned. But bad business and some poor decisions had ended it all.
“Then,” he says, looking at the boy, “we went to work in the citrus fields of Sinola and the tomato fields of Baja California Norte,” reciting these names as if they were the lines of a song, and he traces the route with his finger as if the table planks were a map, the rub of his finger measuring out distances and direction, hundreds of kilometres over backroads. In Tecate his wife ironed and washed clothes while he worked in construction.
Last week, to seek a better life for his family, he’d crossed the border at I5, running across the highway in the dark.
The boy looks around the table, others are listening. Some nod.
Some smile and he sees acceptance in their eyes, like it’s okay that he’s here, to sleep out in these hills like these people, and one of them — a man with the muscled hands of a construction worker — says he’d tried to get into Canada last year because he’d heard there was work on the Vancouver construction sites, was turned back at the border, all that money and time wasted, ended up picking broccoli in eastern Washington, anger in his voice and the boy feels himself stiffen, still on the bench now, still as wood, not knowing where to look, the measured looks on him.
He feels the painter touch his arm, “Where south?” he asks and the boy says Xela.
“Wait,” he hears the painter say, rising from the bench, “I’ll show you,” and he walked up the canyon into the dark.
And he returns with a creased and frayed map that he spreads on the table, thick, crayoned lines leading through Mexico.
“Avoid Mexico City,” he says, “the station is full of drug runners and pickpockets. Avoid Nogales, it’s controlled by Los Zetas. Cross here,” and he points to El Paso. “Take a bus to Camargo and then to Colima,” and he traces the route, measuring down secondary roads that lead through Lazaro and Tecpan, along the coast into Oaxaca. “Cross the border here,” he says, tapping a place called Tapachula. “You ask for a bus there to take you to San Marcos. In San Marcos you can catch another to Xela.”
The Orchard Keepers Page 20