by Bill Barich
“Mi hija,” he said tenderly, stroking her little body and contemplating his woes. “Creo que estamos perdidos, no?”
Waking early on Sunday morning, rested and relaxed, Lopez felt much better. His bedroom was warmed by a rosy wash of sun, and his mind was unburdened in the moment. He rolled over to be closer to Elena, who lay on her side with her back to him, and pressed his lips to her hair and sucked a few strands of it into his mouth. He turned his head so that his own hair mingled with hers in a glossy pool that he found quite stunning. He put a gentle hand on her hip, then slid it down her thigh and under her nightgown. She was hot to the touch, very soft and moist. When she stirred he moved closer still, but she slapped at him and pushed him away.
He nuzzled her ear. “What’s the matter, baby?”
“Leave me alone, Antonio. I want to sleep.”
“But you went to bed so early last night.” He renewed his exploring. He was committed to it. It was the right thing, the only thing to do.
“Stop it now!” Elena yelled at him. “Don’t be touching me there! I mean it.”
Lopez got reluctantly out of bed. He was naked and stared down at himself, sighing a loud and pointed sigh. He dressed, grabbed a Coke from the fridge, and sat alone in the toy-cluttered living room. It was just seven o’clock, but he was used to rising at dawn. He turned on the TV and was pleased to find a soccer match from Italy on a cable channel. He didn’t understand everything the commentators were saying, but he knew the game well and could judge its progress for himself, having played it all through his childhood on paved streets and unforgiving dirt fields that rewarded any tumble with a bloody nose or a nasty cut, although he had never suffered any injuries himself. He had grown up in a dusty settlement of Guadalajara, in canyon country not far from Barranca de Oblatos, the sixth of seven brothers and sisters, but even as a boy he had been separate from the others, the only one in his family who was blessed with good luck.
Lopez had learned about his luck on the auspicious occasion of his eighth birthday. His grandmother, who doted on him, treated him to a trip into the city for a big festival that was held every October, with bullfights and folk dancing. They rode a crowded bus from the canyons to the centro and wandered about in the plaza de armas where women in brilliant costumes were throwing flowers to people. He saw couples kissing in doorways and applauding mariachis, while drunks reeled about, frightening in their abandon. He ate tacos heaped with salsa and part of a tamale and begged his grandmother to stop on a corner where a fortune-teller had set up shop. The man had a canary in a cage and also a wooden box on which some flames were painted. The box was stuffed with hundreds of cardboard squares. If you paid a peso, the fortune-teller released his canary, and the bird would hop to the box and use its beak to pick up the square on which your future was written.
His grandmother had paid the required peso. Intensely excited, his eyes wide, Antonio looked on as the canary hopped to the box and pecked at the squares. The bird plucked one fortune, seemed to read it, rejected it, and plucked another. The second piece of cardboard had not a stroke of writing on it, only a heart tinted bright red with ink. The fortune-teller held it up for everybody to see. He was a fork-bearded fellow with copious hair sprouting from his ears.
“Ah, corazón!” he cried. He pounded his sternum with a fist and returned Lopez’s peso. “Tiene la suerte.”
In the aftermath of this divination, Lopez came to believe that good luck was truly his. He put his trust in it. It was his faith. His luck had allowed him to be first in his class at school, it had spared him from the pneumonia that carried off one of his brothers, and it had showed him where to hide whenever the older boys of the settlement ganged up on the younger boys and stole from them. Luck had assisted him in crossing the border and had directed him to his cousin in Sonoma County. He would never have met Elena without good luck, and it was his luck that had granted them a glorious child, but in the past few days, starting with the pain in his belly, he had been bothered by the notion that his luck might be perishable, not meant to last.
Lopez escorted his family to mass that morning. When Elena emerged from the bedroom in a simple black skirt and a steel blue blouse, her hair in an elegant braid, she stopped his heart. He knew again what he had known all along, that he would do anything for her and anything to keep her. He loved her that much, more than himself, more than any other creature. In her radiant presence, he felt like a man of honor.
“What are you gawking at?” she asked him, with a smile.
“A beautiful woman.”
Elena let him hold her hand as they walked to the car. Their church was on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, but it was nothing like the imposing cathedral Lopez remembered from home. It had no spires or balconies, no pipe organ, no ornate altars. It lacked a vaulted ceiling to scrape against the floor of heaven and didn’t have the power to intimidate him. In such an insignificant church, God himself was reduced in size, Antonio thought. He paid scant attention to the priest and instead gazed at the windows of stained glass and pictured himself repatriated to Jalisco, a landowner of substance with his own ejido and five—no, six—children divided evenly by sex. In fact, he had not been back to Guadalajara for almost three years and missed it terribly. His last visit had coincided with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and he happily recalled how he had attended a raucous party and had impressed his many cousins and friends with elaborate tales of his glamorous new life in Carson Valley, going on around a bonfire until well after midnight.
They had lunch with Elena’s parents after church, as they did every Sunday. These occasions were rather formal and stuffy, and Lopez would gladly have skipped them for a meal at Burger King. Ed Rodriguez didn’t really like him and had objected strenuously when his daughter first brought him around, screaming at her for dating a lowly farmworker, but Antonio was tenacious and in love and refused to be scared off. He had even gone so far as to buy her a dozen red roses once at a cost of forty dollars—enough money, he had reflected at the time, for a pair of good pruning shears—but the gesture failed to elevate his status. Only with the birth of Dolores, the first Rodriguez grandchild, did Ed make the slightest move toward accepting him.
“She’s going to sit by me at lunch!” Ed cried, as he bent down to embrace the infant, who was done up in a cute corduroy outfit. “Come here, Dolores, and give your grandpa a kiss!”
They convened at a table in the dining room. Lopez was alarmed when, within minutes, the subject of Elena’s health came up. Her mother was fretting over her, asking why she looked so pale. Had she lost some weight? Wasn’t she getting enough rest? Did she take her multivitamins? Should she consult a doctor?
“She’s just a little tired is all,” Lopez said, butting in on her behalf. He felt that he was being unfairly accused again, convicted of a crime he hadn’t committed.
“I don’t blame her,” Tina Rodriguez said with emphasis, casting a negative glance his way. “It’s hard to care for a baby and hold down a job at the same time. I’d like to see a man try it, Antonio.”
“I’m fine,” Elena protested to her mother, though her weak voice seemed to imply otherwise. “Really I am. We’ve had a busy few weeks.”
Lopez saw that he had to do something before they ganged up on him completely. “Anyway,” he volunteered, “she might be able to quit working in a while. They might be going to promote me out at the vineyard. To be like the assistant manager.” He was surprised by his own boldness and creativity.
“Hey, that’s great!” Ed clapped him on the shoulder. “Is this your boss Victor you’re talking about?”
“Yeah, Victor. It’s a big responsibility, but Victor, he thinks I can handle it.” He paused to let this sink in, then he hit them with a silver bullet. “He has a lot of confidence in me.”
Elena was regarding him with a certain disfavor. “Why didn’t you tell me that, Antonio? You’re always keeping secrets from me.”
He had a bite of turkey and shrugged. “I di
dn’t want to say anything until it was for sure. So you wouldn’t get your hopes up in case it doesn’t happen right away.”
The conversation turned to Dolores and what sort of Easter dress her grandparents were going to buy for her, whether it ought to be pure white or maybe pink to match the pumps they had given her at Christmas. Dolores would stay with them through the afternoon and evening, while Elena worked her shift. On the way to Kmart, she cuddled up to Lopez, pinching at his sleeve in fun and fooling around in his pants, pressing him for more details about his promotion.
“Hey, girl, slow down a minute, will you?” he told her lightly, removing her hand from his unzipped fly. “I didn’t say it’s absolutely for sure. Only probably for sure.”
She gave him a look of serious scrutiny. “You’re not just making it up, are you? Because you do that sometimes, Antonio. You know you do, so don’t make faces at me.”
“I’m not making any face,” he said. He did not want to lie to her, so what he told her next did not seem like a lie. “It’s going to happen. The only thing is exactly when.”
“You mean it could be next year?” She sounded discouraged. “What are you telling me here?”
“No, not next year. Way before that, probably.” He thought about the vineyard and imagined a harvest of record proportions and the generosity that would be obliged to flow from it. He would demand a bonus like Atwater’s. That was the obvious answer, the perfect solution.
“Can you ask Victor when it will be? Because then I could do some planning. I have to give my notice at the store and all that.”
“Victor, he gets mad if I ask too many questions. But probably it’ll be around the harvest.”
Elena kissed him sweetly when he dropped her off, and he had a sense of being restored to his proper role as her husband and defender. The afternoon lay before him rich in promise, but he couldn’t decide what to do with his freedom. He considered taking in a bargain matinee, but the day was too warm and pretty to be wasted indoors, so he bought himself an ice-cream cone instead and flirted briefly with the blond behind the counter. He drove about town in a mellow mood, glad for the sunshine and for the girls parading around in their shorts to celebrate the fine spring weather. In time, he came to the 7-Eleven where he and Elena had first met. There were a few men hanging around outside it and hoping for piecework, a lawn to mow or a basement to clean out. They were all full-blooded Mexicans, and though some of them were in California legally, others were not. The 7-Eleven was both their social center and a hiring hall.
Lopez knew a couple of the men and stopped to catch up on things, falling effortlessly into their banter. “Está bien?” he asked them.
“Nah, it’s been real slow today,” a rowdy, beer-bellied fellow called Tío told him. “No cars come in here at all except to buy shit.”
“Sundays are bad, hombre.” Lopez fiddled with the rubber band holding his ponytail. “Families, they’re busy going to church and having picnics and like that. God ordered them to take it easy for one day out of seven. It’s right in the Bible.”
Tío grinned. “You believe in that shit, man?”
“I’m not saying I believe in it. I’m just saying how it is.”
“Anyway, the new kid, he’s been getting all the breaks,” said an idler known as Jorge. “He blew in here from Ensenada just last week, he went out with a roofer right away and got paid fifty dollars.”
“Estupendo!” Lopez said, whistling. “How many days did he go out?”
“All week long, man. Three hundred dollars he made.”
“That’s good money. They pay that much? Es verdad?”
“Es verdad,” Tío replied. “My uncle, he works for a roofer in San Jose. If he gets on regular, he can make thirty thousand a year.”
“Trabajo feo,” Jorge put in, his mouth wrinkled in disgust. “You fry your ass up on a roof all summer. You sweat like a fucking pig. You get tar in your hair, and it won’t come out. Me, I’d rather be poor.”
“Like you really have a choice, Georgie,” Tío joked.
Lopez walked over to the kid from Ensenada, a squat and curiously symmetrical youth no older than eighteen. He hated the kid on sight. There was an arrogance about him, as if he didn’t understand that his success had nothing to do with his talents—fortune was just running in his favor. Lopez asked about the roofer and heard that the story was true.
“La carta de negocios.” The kid haughtily showed off a business card with embossed letters. “Coronado Brothers Roofing Company, man. They the best.”
“Es conocido, esta compañía?”
“Sí, muy conocido. Tiene, amigo. Un regalito.” A little gift.
Lopez noticed an abrupt alteration in the atmosphere as he accepted the card, the same intensifying of the elements that precedes an electrical storm. It was as though the wind had kicked up to blow clouds of dust across the parking lot. Somebody dashed by him shouting, “La migra! Ándale! Ándale!” and he looked up and saw two INS vans at the curb. Uniformed agents spilled from them, each carrying a nightstick and brandishing it to round up the loiterers and herd them away. The agents poked and prodded, they grabbed the men by their shirt collars and the seat of their pants and shoved them into the vans. They were fast and efficient and followed an arc of brutal energy that did not allow for interrogation.
Lopez was fishing out his green card when an agent confronted him. “I have my papers, sir,” he said politely.
“Get in the van.” The agent nudged him with a nightstick.
“But I am documented, sir.”
“Get in the van now.”
“Sir, please, I—”
The agent smacked him in the ribs. “You want more? I’ll give you more. Get in the van.”
The van held five detainees huddled together on benches in the caged and feral dark. Lopez joined them, angry with the fates and wounded that his rights as a guest of the American government were being violated. He realized to his added dismay that the kid from Ensenada had managed to escape. He saw Tío sitting in the back, and Tío kept grinning his stupid grin and made a gesture as if to say that such arrests were normal, a routine aspect of life in the United States.
“I’m legal here, Tío,” Antonio told him hotly. “You want to see my green card?”
“Sure, amigo.”
“Check it out, man.”
Tío took the card and threw it on the soiled floor of the van. “Fuck your documents, Lopez. You’re no better than the rest of us.”
For three more hours, the agents conducted raids in the poorer neighborhoods of the city until the vans were filled to capacity. Lopez could hear the agents chatting in the front seat. Their voices drifted to him through the steel mesh that separated the prisoners from their captors. He was pressed in so tightly that he couldn’t move. Smells were overpowering in the cramped quarters and sickened him a bit—tobacco, sweat, stale beer, farts, and an odor of terror, too, even though the penalty for being an illegal alien was not severe. He wondered what the men had really done wrong. Nobody ever asked to see their papers when they were hired to trim a hedge or paint a bathroom.
At an INS holding facility, the men sat in a big room from which, one at a time, they were summoned for processing. Lopez began walking anxiously in circles. He watched for a higher authority to whom he could appeal his case, but none ever appeared, and he was forced to wait with the others.
“Quit that walking all the time,” Tío yelled at him. “You’re pissing everybody off.”
“No me siento bien,” Lopez said. He didn’t feel well.
“Dios mío! Llama una ambulancia!” They would call him an ambulance.
It was nearly eight o’clock before Lopez heard his name at last. He was led to a much smaller room, where an agent sat at a desk littered with official-looking folders. Antonio refused to be scared off by the many signs and symbols of majesty and did not hesitate to present his documents. He was a victim, not a crook.
“I am legal,” he said with bravado.
The agent checked over everything. “I’ll have someone look at your card.”
“It’s real, señor.”
“We’ll look it over. It’ll be just a few minutes.”
He waited for another forty-five minutes, his eyes on a wall clock and his spirit sinking. He would be late to pick up Elena for sure. The agent released him in the end and apologized for any inconvenience. Lopez was too rushed to even consider filing a complaint. And what if he did file one? His would be just another form added to a column that was already much taller than the column of wasted rent money.
“My car?” he asked. “You’ll take me to it?”
They dispatched Lopez in a van. He was its only passenger this trip and was permitted to ride up front with the driver, who spoke Spanish fluently and offered an idiotic and inappropriate account of a recent vacation in Zihuatanejo. His Toyota was where he had left it, and he sped across town to Kmart where, at nine-thirty, Elena stood all by herself, a solitary figure in a circle of light. He raced to her side, eager to share the tale of his unlawful arrest and the horrible way he had been handled.