Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  In the reflection in the Wyz Way Market front window, my cold sore was bleeding, but otherwise that was me still staring back at me.

  But I was differnt.

  Differnt, as in changed.

  Differnt, as in other.

  My shadow a long, strange darkness coming out of my feet.

  I had a nickel so I bought a Snickers. At the magazine stand, usually I stayed on the kids’ side, the side of the magazine stand that was the comics.

  That afternoon I stood on the other side, with the car mags and True Confessions and Gent. The other side with the freestanding book display that turned.

  I was reading Peyton Place when Mom walked in. I didn’t try to hide Peyton Place. I stood there on the side of the magazine stand where I wasn’t supposed to be standing like everything was normal, and I looked up over the pages.

  Mom wasn’t wearing lipstick. She was still in her farm shoes. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes, squinted, green, one pitched south, the other east. No doubt about it. She was pissed.

  Allen Price did not come back into class the next day. Or the rest of the week. And the end of the rest of that week was the end of school.

  The truth is, I never saw Allen Price again. One day the following spring, Allen’s father came to our farm to shoot rock chucks. I heard Allen’s dad tell my dad that Allen had been sick, had spent some time in the hospital, but was doing much better at a special high school in California for kids who liked science.

  California California California.

  If you’re a little differnt, if your pants don’t fit and your breath is bologna breath and you like secret places inside Nancy Drew mystery books, if you’re good at spelling, or you like to read Steinbeck on top of the granaries, if you’re differnt, if you’re a little bit queer, California California California must be the place you have to go.

  PART II

  Somebody to Love

  4 Gringa Loca

  OUT HERE ON the highway under a silver moon with an alien head shadow, it’s only now I can see I wouldn’t be free and clear and on the road if Mom hadn’t busted me with my cock out behind the barn. Funny, all those years praying to God, and what gets my ass out of Pocatello is the devil. Then again, they say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Sometimes when the universe fucks you up, it’s part of a larger plan.

  Weird, how things seem so easy when you look back on them. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Dad would say. The thing I needed most was somebody who could see me for who I was even though I couldn’t see that person yet. Allen Price tried, but I had my head up my ass. I needed somebody who was safe. Somebody I could like too. Mom had been that for me, but now that I was older, now that there was sex, all she could see was sin and eternal damnation and hell. What I needed was a friend.

  It took till the summer I turned sixteen to find true friends. Kind of pathetic, I know. But I was always differnt, more differnt than I could ever know, and maybe I just needed to wait for the right kind of differnt to cross my path. I was still scared too, deep-down real scared, so whoever differnt was, they needed to be kind. As fate would have it, my first two friends were as differnt from me as you can imagine, at least that’s what my parents thought. Mexicans, like niggers, like Indians. Maybe that’s why it worked out. That, and they were gentle. Flaco and Acho. They were the first, since my mother’s eyes, I found eyes I could recognize something in.

  That summer, Dad had one hundred acres of hay. I don’t know how to tell you how much one hundred acres is, but if those one hundred acres were a half mile long and the windrows of dried hay were laid out one after another six feet apart over and over again, the hay would last so far your eyes couldn’t see the horizon until you were halfway through.

  The whole time behind the baler, I rode what you call a slip. I carried the bale to the end of the slip and stacked the bale, and at the end of the field when the tractor turned around, I took the iron bar and poked it into the ground in between the two middle boards, and the stacked hay went off onto the ground.

  Heavy dry grass dust floated around you like a yellow cloud. You breathed the dust in, and you coughed and sneezed all the time. You were covered in that dust. Yellow scratchy dust through your top collar settled on your bare shoulders, down into your armpits. The dust even crept down into the crack of your ass. Felt like a million tiny jumping spiders in your pants. And it was fucking hot. Some days it was a hundred degrees and you were out there standing in a toxic yellow haze you could barely see through, in your straw hat, sweating, and the blazing sun was a huge yellow fluorescence, and here came another bale another bale another bale, and the sound of the baler was ka-chung ka-chung ka-chung. After a while you didn’t hear the baler anymore, you just heard your own breath through the handkerchief over your mouth like you were in an oxygen tent or something. The yellow dust filtered inside your goggles, so pretty soon the world looked yellow, looked like you were looking through a yellow periscope at everything. What everything was was a bale of hay coming at you and coming at you, and your feet stumbling over four boards, and the ground going by underneath your stumbling, heavy feet.

  Sometimes Mom drove the tractor, sometimes Sis. Mom always had to stop the baler, and with the pitchfork she’d walk all over creation trying to get every tiny last bit of fucking hay. Drove you nuts, that woman. Sis could give a shit, though. All Sis cared about was her tan. Plus, by then, Sis and I were sharing cigarettes. Sis would shut off the tractor, and I’d get a slug of water, and we’d each have a cigarette. Thank God for Sis.

  What made the work even harder was, whatever you might think of your dad, you still wanted to do a good job for him. Maybe if you worked hard enough he’d look at you, call you son. Slap you on the back or touch you with his two fingers on the top of your head like when you were a kid. Never worked out that way, though.

  Baling hay was a good three to four weeks straight, six days a week, eight to ten hours a day, in the dry, hot Idaho summer, out in the fucking sun, working like some fucking slave.

  Fucking hay, man.

  I hate fucking hay.

  When the hay was all baled, finally, finally, far out, thank the fucking Lord, and the hay was stacked in stacks at each end of the field, it was time to get the ’49 Jimmy hay truck running, time to start hauling the hay bales and stacking the hay bales into a haystack up at the feedlot. Sis and Mom could drive the tractor for the hay baler, but stacking hay was work too hard for the women. So that summer, Dad hired those two Mexicans who lived up in the Mexican house with their family.

  The Saturday before the Monday we started hauling hay, I was driving up to the feedlot in Dad’s Chevy Apache. I had my Viceroy, and the radio was going. I hadn’t heard any of my favorite songs yet, “Summer in the City” and “Paperback Writer.” I drove up the lane that connected us up to the rest of yellow Bannock County, over the old riverbed of the Portneuf River, then up past the Mexican house. I shifted into second, and this day I looked out the pickup window, and there were two young men, Mexican men, with smooth skin and shiny black hair.

  One was wearing a bright blue shirt with a really white T-shirt under it and Levi’s and red Converse tennis shoes untied. The other man was wearing a bright red shirt with a really white T-shirt under it and Levi’s, and he was barefoot, smooth and brown. The young man in the blue shirt was playing a guitar, and the young man in the red shirt was playing an accordion, “Cucurrucucú Paloma” I was to find out later. The way they were smiling, I didn’t know it yet, but my world had just changed so much that in thirteen months I wouldn’t recognize a thing.

  Monday morning I drove the hay truck up the lane to the Mexican house to pick up those two Mexicans. I was nervous in a way I always get when I’m going to meet somebody new. At least that’s what I thought was troubling me. Now that I look back on it, there was a lot more going on.

  There I was, the boss’s son, so I had an authority that I didn’t want. And also, there I was, fifteen, just about to turn sixteen, and those two Mexicans were m
uch older, say, maybe even twenty years old. How could I possibly boss them around, tell them what to do and how to do it? Plus they were real handsome with black hair, so they were probably like Scardino.

  Halfway down the lane, I was in the middle of thinking the universe was conspiring to fuck me up when something happened inside me that I remarked on because that something had never happened inside me before. Or maybe it had, and I just never listened.

  A voice. You might call it a voice.

  Just don’t do it like he’d do it.

  He being Dad.

  Dad shouted orders and expected you to know. He waved his arms and pointed his finger and didn’t listen to you. That’s how Dad did it.

  The place to start was to not be like Dad.

  And never to treat anybody again the way I’d fucked up with Allen Price.

  I revved the engine so maybe those two Mexicans would hear me. I thought about honking the horn, but there was no horn, plus honking the horn was something Dad did.

  I shut the engine off, took a deep breath, opened the door to the truck, put my work gloves in my back pocket, and started walking up the hill. Car parts sticking up out of the weeds. The definite Mexican smell of tortillas.

  Hello? I called out.

  There was a bunch of voices speaking Spanish real fast. You could hear people walking around on the wood floor, lots of commotion. Then the screen door blasted open, and those two Mexicans, the two young men I’d seen in the blue shirt and the red shirt playing the guitar and the accordion, jumped over the two wood crates that were the front steps, jumped into the air between me and the sun, and landed on the ground.

  Dad would never introduce himself, so I introduced myself. I said in English, even though Dad would use English — I mean what kind of choice is there when you know only one way to speak? I said: Hello, my name is Rigby John, and I stuck out my hand out to the guy who had worn the blue shirt playing the guitar.

  Flaco’s eyelashes almost covered up his eyes, but underneath the lashes were two pieces of black coal that looked straight into my eyes for just a moment, then looked away quick down at the ground. He was tall, tall as my dad, six feet at least. Real smooth, shiny skin. Long arms with that same skin. You might call him beautiful. I didn’t then, I couldn’t say both he and beautiful together yet. But I can say it now. Flaco was beautiful, big and strong, and kind of funny at being big and strong, but really what was beautiful about him was soft, a gentleness I’d never felt in a man before. Maybe it was because he was so polite, and the way he smiled. Like I was someone important that he would smile at me like that. How strange to be admired. He was wearing an old cowboy hat, sweat-stained around the brim, a white cowboy shirt, and the red Converse tennis shoes I’d seen him in, laced up this time. Some kind of denim pants, not Levi’s. A cigarette stuck behind his ear.

  Flaco reached for my hand. When we were palm to palm, I was about to give his hand a big howdy-pardner pump, but his hand and his arm just rested out there in mine, letting me hold it.

  Differnt from how any man had taken my hand before. He accepted my hand. It was weird at first, like when you think there’s another step, and there isn’t, and your foot steps anyway, and you feel where the step wasn’t all through your body. I almost pulled my hand away, but that’s what Dad would do, so I accepted his hand as well.

  Then our hands dropped to our sides at the same time.

  Pleased to meet you, Rigby John, Flaco said. My name is Flaco, and this is my brother, Acho.

  His English sounded like a Mexican speaking English, but I could understand him. Then I was looking at the ground, at our shadows on the ground. A polite, beautiful young man I could talk to.

  Acho accepted my hand too, but his hand was not a surprise. I was getting used to these guys.

  Acho’s beauty was differnt from Flaco’s. Acho’s chest and arms were big around, and he could throw a bale of hay all the way to the top of a fully stacked truck from the ground. Not as tall as Flaco. He had a Kirk Douglas chin, and his hair was cut in a butch, straight black hair sticking up. On his cheeks, the same shiny, smooth skin with three pockmarks, two on one cheek and one on the other. His dark eyes were deep inside, under a thick brow. His nose hooked down. Shiny, smooth skin on his thick arms. More hair on his body, on his arms, and when he took his shirt off, the patch of black hair just in the middle. His straw hat looked like somebody’d stepped on it. A white T-shirt, the same kind of denims as Flaco. A cigarette stuck behind his ear too.

  Skinny and Hachet. That’s what Flaco and Acho’s names mean in Spanish.

  Hello, Acho said. How are you?

  As I was about to find out, that was about it with Acho’s English. He never did get my name, Rigby John, right, even though all summer long we practiced my name. The best it came out was Reegbeejoan.

  Flaco and Acho were watching my every move. I turned the ignition on, pushed the starter with my right foot, put the clutch in. It took me some time getting into second gear, but I finally found second, let the clutch out, and something weird was going on, and then I remembered the emergency brake so I reached down, let the brake off, and it was a big sigh from me with all the trapped-up air in my lungs, and we were off.

  The closed gate was my first problem. Dad, in this situation, would tell Acho, who was by the window, to get out and open the gate. The problem for me was how to tell Acho to open the gate, partly because I didn’t know if he could understand me, but also I didn’t want to tell Acho to open the gate the way my father would tell him to open the gate. Plus, opening some gates, this gate especially, was tricky, because you had to know how to lean your body against the top part of the end post of the gate.

  So I shut the engine off, opened the door, and asked Acho to come with me. Flaco gave Acho a push and said something fast in Spanish. At the gate, I showed Acho how to lean into the top of the end post, which stretches the wire of the gate and lets the pressure off. I flipped up the oval piece of wire, pulled the end post out at the bottom, then arched the gate out of the way. After I drove the truck through the gate, I got out and showed Acho how to close the gate.

  At the next gate, Acho realized it wasn’t advantageous riding shotgun. After a bunch of fast Spanish, Flaco got out of the truck, and I showed Flaco how to open and close the gate.

  Mostly what was happening with the gate was I knew how it felt to be out there wrestling with something you didn’t have a clue about while the old man sat in the truck and found new ways to humiliate you.

  And you know, that’s no way to treat other people.

  In the hay field, I made another decision: we’d take turns with lifting and stacking. Two of us would lift while one of us stacked. And then I hit on something that was the best idea I had that summer.

  The truck was pulled up next to the first stack of hay at the bottom end of the field. First field, first stack of hay, first everything. The three of us sat inside the truck cab. I didn’t know exactly how to start, so I took a Viceroy and matches out of my shirt pocket, stuck the cigarette in my mouth, lit the cigarette. Both Flaco and Acho, their faces were so surprised looking at me. They took the cigarettes from behind their ears. I lit their cigarettes too. Three on a match.

  We all took drags on the cigarettes. I kept the smoke in my lungs for an extra-long time. I was waiting to say the something that I had to say. When I exhaled, the words came out with the exhale.

  I said: We’ll take turns driving.

  That’s what did it. That’s how Flaco and Acho and I became such close friends. That summer they learned how to drive.

  After two weeks of hauling hay, we’d all learned a lot about one another. Acho liked to clown around, Flaco stacked the tighter stack, and I could go all day without peeing. In the mornings, it took Flaco and Acho and I awhile to get used to one another. I mean, Christ, after all, who wants to be cheery and perspicacious at seven o’clock in the morning? First thing, after they argued in fast Spanish about who was going to ride shotgun, we’d just loo
k at one another and say morning or hi or hola. Acho always said hello how are you when he got in the truck, and after that none of us said anything, and one of us lit a cigarette, and we’d share the cigarette. In the cab, just the cigarette smoke, our three bodies. The smell of soap, sweat, tortillas, tobacco, and instant coffee, the roar of the truck inside the cab. Outside the cab was the new day. The sun still pink and blue and cool shadows lying around on everything.

  We got a good routine going. In the hay fields, we took turns driving the truck from stack to stack. This was some good practice for Flaco and Acho because, although they were driving in an open field and not out on a public road, they still had to do some precision driving. They had to back up close to the stack, make three-point turns, use the mirrors, plus the general steering, gear shifting, clutch, and brake.

  Two of us threw bales onto the truck, and one of us stacked. Again we took turns.

  We took turns driving back and forth from the feedlot, we took turns opening and closing the two gates, and at the stacks we took turns throwing bales off the truck, turns at stacking. Which wasn’t without incident. Especially Acho. I can’t tell you how many times I was laughing so hard I couldn’t even think or stand up the way Acho gunned the gas, then popped the clutch. The truck would take off like on a drag strip, hay bales flying every which way and the truck bumping over corrugations, finally coming to rest in the middle of the field.

  It is tricky getting the gas right and the clutch right. It took me months to get it down right. Flaco caught on pretty quick, but for some reason Acho just couldn’t get it. Then I realized something. Acho was like me. He couldn’t do things while people were watching, so I just left him alone. Soon as I left him alone, Acho was letting out the clutch, easing on the gas, in no time at all.

  One thing in particular I learned about Flaco and Acho was how they liked to cuss. Especially Acho. Chinga and chingada, I think meant “fuck,” and puta was “whore,” and Chingada tu puta madre meant something like “fuck your whore mother.” There was also cabrón, which meant “son of a bitch” or “bastard.”