by Robert Hough
— Sí, Francisco finally said. — We do, señora. My final exam takes place in the middle of June, and then my days will be mine.
— Gracias, Francisco, Malfil responded. — Trust me when I tell you that I would not grant just anyone this task.
The rest of the meeting was filled with polite conversation, most of it concerning the coming of the tower. On this topic Malfil Cruz was exuberant: the project was filling the entire town with a sense of possibility, and for this reason she had felt a rekindling of her desire — ay no, of her need — to discover what had happened to her only son. When the coffee was finished and a respectful amount of time had expired, Francisco Ramirez stood and thanked Malfil Cruz for entertaining him. After bowing slightly to both Malfil and Violeta, he excused himself and walked towards the door. Yet just before leaving, he turned and said something that had the resonance of the prophetic.
— Don’t worry, señora. I’ll find your son. Or I will die trying.
{ 5 }
JUST BEYOND THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF TOWN was the rickety wood-planked bridge separating México from Los Estados Unidos. At most hours of the day customs guards sat on either end of the little bridge. The American guard had a small cabin in which he kept a radio, a fan, a stack of pulp novels, back issues of the Saturday Evening Post, and a small icebox in which he stored his lunch, a roster of snack items, and a variety of soft drinks. His Mexican counterpart had nothing more than a hat to keep the sun off his head and a three-legged kitchen chair he’d salvaged from the municipal dump, an operation that had exposed him to odour and crow attack. While both guards were theoretically in place to control the flow of commerce and immigration between the two countries, they functioned mostly to collect bribes from those powerless enough to feel intimidated by their presence. Most of Corazón’s residents, when needing to visit los Estados, simply chose to swim for it.
Exactly two weeks after the Reyes brothers’ lucha night, the dusty stultification that so characterized life in Corazón de la Fuente was fractured by the rumble of three Model T pickup trucks crossing the bridge at precise twenty-metre intervals. All three vehicles turned right at the sandy impression that was Avenida Cinco de Mayo. The drivers then motored west, past the ejido, the remains of Antonio Garcia’s once-grand hacienda, the central plaza, and the long, jacal-style lodge that was Madam Félix’s House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. With the entire town excitedly watching — noses pressed against windowpanes, mothers calling for their children to come see, men opening celebratory bottles of cerveza — the gringo drivers pulled up at an expanse of flat desert scrub. Here a half-dozen men got out, all dressed in dungarees, workboots, and hard hats. To those townsfolk who were perplexedly looking on, it was as though the men feared a vulture might suddenly expire from a heart attack, plummet through the broiling air, and clunk them on the head.
The men started walking around the area’s perimeter. Occasionally they stopped to point, arm-sweep, or gesticulate, actions that were often accompanied by raised voices. One of them kept unrolling construction plans, which he would hold vertically, and then horizontally, and then vertically, before his own flummoxed expression. The gringo trucks came again the next day, and the day after. Then, in the following week, the only visitors to the work site were voles and the occasional deer wandering into town to feed on scraps missed by the town’s stray-dog population. A gloomy quiet descended upon the lot, causing some townsfolk to wonder whether the project had fallen through. But then, one morning, Holt tractors equipped with dozing blades could be seen approaching the river. Ignoring the Mexican border guard, whose chair collapsed from the resultant vibrations, the drivers chugged across the shaking bridge and turned right. Upon reaching town, they rattled walls and cracked windowpanes and shook wooden dentures from the mouths of the town’s elderly.
They stopped at the work site. In true gringo fashion the men got right to work, no cigarettes or chit-chat or cups of warm chocolate (fortified, more often than not, with a little fermented agave). They immediately began pushing around mounds of the thin, tan, wormless soil, stopping only to drink Coca-Cola and eat a quick canned-meat sandwich at noon. After lunch they worked for the whole of the afternoon, never once stopping to nap or sip pulque or sneak off for a quick visit with a mistress. All of this was a source of fascination for the people of Corazón de la Fuente, who, having little better to do, gathered and spent the day watching. Some of the more enterprising set up food stands from which they sold organ-meat tacos and warm beer, only to pack up when it became obvious that the gringos were interested only in the bland-looking lunches they’d brought from home. When the sun was low in the sky and starting to turn the colour of marmalade, the tractors chugged back through town, fracturing whatever windows they had failed to crack on their way in that morning.
Within three days, a four-hectare field of bramble, mesquite, and prickly pear had turned into a mound of light brown soil. Suddenly, the coming of the tower seemed more than a vague possibility: all you had to do was close your eyes and you could imagine it, reaching towards the relentless sun, risen magically from the moistureless earth. The following day, Mayor Orozco went to welcome the project foreman. It was a short greeting: though the mayor’s English was rudimentary, it was accomplished in comparison to the foreman’s Spanish. They shook hands and grinned at one another.
— Welcome, said Miguel.
— Ain’t nothin’, said the foreman.
— If joo needing any assistance, please just inform me.
The foreman nodded and resumed hollering instructions at the bulldozer operators. His actions, at least in the eyes of those watching the proceedings, were brusque and lacking in courtesy, and a small minority of townsfolk felt that he should have been rebuked by the town’s kindly, if indecisive, mayor. By the end of the day the work team was gone.
The field sat quiet for the next nine days. Just when the townsfolk began to suspect that a serious delay had occurred, the same vehicles came rumbling back through town, though this time they were fitted with grading blades. Throughout the day, the mounds of dead Coahuilan earth were spread out, scooped up, churned, spread out, scooped up … On and on it went until the field was more or less as flat as it had been before the project started. The difference, of course, was the glaring absence of agave, huizache, mesquite, scrub grass, succulent plants, vole mounds, scrap metal, broken bottles, spent artillery shells, and all manner of flowering cacti. The adults of the town looked at the field, struggling to keep rein on their soaring feelings of hope. To the town’s children, the field was now as tempting as an actual sports field; the foreman soon posted security guards to keep dirty-faced little ones from playing on the site, their makeshift balls fashioned from inflated goat udders. At the end of the day, the tractors rumbled towards the American side of the border, again causing damage too petty to complain about, given the notices that were appearing throughout town, posted on walls, fence posts, and palm trees. In a faultless Spanish they read:
¡Attention One and All!
To the good and fair people of Corazón de la Fuente, I do hereby invite you to attend a job fair that I, John Romulus Brinkley, will be sponsoring in the central plaza of your charming town next Saturday morning. Refreshments and a light lunch will be served, and I do hereby guarantee that all those who are not afraid of a little hard work, and who meet some basic job requirements, will leave with gainful employment. So come one, come all, to a morning of productive, good-hearted fun.
Sometime later that week, the strangulating heat that had gripped northern Coahuila for a month finally broke, a cool breeze descending from the north like a susurration of hope. The townsfolk, used to waking early in baking temperatures, now awoke for a more pleasant reason: they were too excited to sleep. Wrapped in woollen ponchos, eyes crusty with sleep, gripping cups of hot coffee or the chocolate beverage known as atole, they drifted out of adobe homes and tin-roofed hovels alike. Clustering in the central plaza, they chatted and smoked cheap punche cigarette
s and kept glancing furtively towards the bridge separating nations.
A truck pulled up, the crowd parting to make room. In the cab were three men: the project foreman, a sub-foreman, and a translator named Geraldo who was obviously not from the north, as he had the distracting habit of addressing everyone as chango, a southern expression used in place of primo or compadre. As Geraldo began advising the crowd to form a single, orderly line, the two gringos set up a table in the middle of the bandstand where the Reyes brothers had put on their wrestling display. Geraldo also tacked a large handwritten sign to one of the square’s dying palo verdes. On this sign were the rules: no women, no one under eighteen or over sixty-five, no one without the usual complement of arms and legs, no one with a criminal record. The line soon extended through the plaza, along Avenida Cinco de Mayo and past Antonio Garcia’s hacienda, only to peter out somewhere in the smoky, festering depths of the ejido.
As the two gringos began taking down the names of the eligible, another truck showed up. Within minutes, a pair of smiling women from the other side of the river, each with a gingham apron and upper arms as wobbly as gelatin, began giving free cups of lemonade and pieces of tepid southern-fried chicken to those who cared to join a second queue. By the end of the morning, everyone who qualified was informed that he had a job; this included Francisco’s delighted father, who had not worked since the middle days of the revolution, when a misdirected government shell had destroyed the tannery where he was employed.
— Okay, changos, Geraldo began to yell, his arms waving in the air. — Time to go home, party’s over, the chicken is all gone, when we need you you’ll be the first to know …
Again there was a period of maddening inactivity. Days turned to weeks, and an agonizing ennui set in. The boredom, the relentless sun, the gruesome memories of the war, the monotonous diet of rice and beans and cereal — all of it now seemed unbearable when weighed against the promise of employment. As those weeks turned into a full month, the day of the job fair began to seem like something imagined, as though it had existed only in the columns of wavering air that rose from the streets at high noon.
But then, one morning, a convoy of diesel-engine flatbeds, all carrying metal I-beams, began rolling through the narrow, dusty lanes of Corazón de la Fuente. Given their loads, it was difficult to negotiate the turn encountered at the plaza: the eldest palm tree on the square was repeatedly assaulted, and the house with the misfortune of being located at the junction was scraped by the protruding girders. Upon reaching the work site, each driver dumped his bundle of I-beams before returning to the American side and fetching another. This went on for a full day. The damaged palm tree keeled over, taking another one with it, and the façade of the scraped house grew so thin it became permeable to the hot, dense air.
The following afternoon, a little blue Ford automobile with a speaker mounted on its roof cruised through Corazón de la Fuente. Ears perked at the sound of Geraldo’s crackling, distorted voice: Listen up, changos, good news, tomorrow’s the big day, report to the site tomorrow, good news, good news, it’s all starting tomorrow, seven a.m., don’t be late, tomorrow’s the big day … This went on for the better part of an hour. The Ford careered along Avenida Cinco de Mayo and Avenida Hidalgo, around both the central plaza and the second, smaller plaza, and through the wider pathways of the ejido, causing many of its impoverished residents to believe they were being evicted.
The following morning, 127 men, a few dozen of whom actually lived in the neighbouring village of Rosita, congregated in the work field. Each wore a cowboy hat, patched Levi’s, and huaraches fashioned from tire shards and lengths of old string. In short order they were given shovels, riveting gloves, and second-hand steel-toe boots. This was followed by a five-minute lecture on safety, which was translated, perhaps too concisely, by Geraldo:
— These gringos were too cheap to get you helmets, and if a beam falls on your head it’ll squash like a plum. So for the love of Christ, be careful.
The assembled workers all nodded and went to work. Their efforts were directed by the sub-foreman, who, in typical gringo fashion, lacked both patience and foreign-language skills. There was excessive yelling, confusion, and swearing in both Spanish and Kickapoo, one of the Native languages spoken in northern Coahuila. Still, by nine o’clock even the most obtuse of workers had gleaned enough to know that his job was to dig one of three large craters in which the foundations of the tower would be placed. A trio of huddles formed, the backs of the men facing the depthless white sky, the rays of the sun piercing work shirts thinned by repeated washings. Owing to the dictates of machismo, the workers didn’t stop often enough to drink water, such that within an hour their tongues began to swell, their lips began to crack and sting, and their skin began to show the first rubbery signs of dehydration.
At ten-thirty there came the clanging of a large metal cowbell. This puzzled the workers until it was explained that they were now allowed to break from their labours. They stood, groaning, hands on their lower backs, and proceeded to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and drink cups of real coffee provided by the building company. A second ringing indicated that their break — which couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes — had expired. Shocked, the men returned to work.
At lunch they were given ham-and-cheese sandwiches and Coca-Cola. During their afternoon break they smoked and drank coffee and complained that the muscles in their shoulders were starting to ache as badly as the muscles in their lower backs. At four o’clock the bell rang again, signifying that their workday had ended. The workers hung around for a while, looking at the immense depression they had created in the soil. They then trudged off to their homes, where repasts of bean and tortilla were already being warmed over low, smouldering fires.
The workers returned the next day, and the day after. In the middle of the fourth day of digging, the cowbell sounded at a time that was neither their lunch nor one of their breaks. The men stood and looked curiously at each other, muttering Qué pasa? Within minutes, Geraldo was pacing from one group to another, informing them that they were done, the holes were big enough, any further and they’d hit mud. Not knowing what to do, the workers mostly plopped themselves down on the soil and pensively smoked, those with flasks of pulque considerately passing them around. Dutiful wives, many of whom had watched all day from the sidelines, saw the work stoppage and rushed to give their husbands quesadillas flavoured with pickled chili.
Within the hour, trucks piled with bags of concrete mix began pulling up to the site, and it now became the men’s job to offload them next to the three caverns in the ground. The men worked late that day, apparently earning something that Geraldo described with the English word overtime. They went home past sundown, their way guided by torches. The next day the men were divided into three groups. There were those who dumped the concrete mix into wheelbarrows, there were those who mixed the heavy substance, and there were those who began filling the first of the foundation pits. Midway through the following morning, a cantilevered crane arrived on a flatbed. A group of men were borrowed from concrete duty to help offload the crane, and by mid-afternoon the workers were helping guide the first of the foundation girders into the damp concrete. By the end of the day a beam protruded diagonally from the first hole, its tip gamely tilted towards the imagined summit of the tower. For the people of Corazón de la Fuente, that single rigid beam had a symbolic value: it was the town, reaching towards the promise of the sky.
This was achieved late on a Friday afternoon. The men lined up to be paid, each receiving a packet containing as many pesos as they typically earned in a year. Around five o’clock in the afternoon an impromptu performance was given by Los Inconsolables del Norte (who had been practising and who no longer played with quite such a wheezing, anemic quality). Someone’s abuela, a sturdily built little woman with eyebrows as thick as caterpillars, initiated the dancing. She was followed by laughing children, a few off-duty Marias, and a coterie of señoras in snug, brightly pat
terned dresses. As always, the last to join in were the men, who looked stiff-backed and worried about scuffing their boots on the twists of discarded metal that lay about everywhere. This sparked a wholesome, familial riotousness, without any of the fistfights and pistol firings that so commonly mar Mexican festivities.
Someone started a bonfire, and a grinning local arrived with a deer that he had shot, skinned, and gutted that very week. Dinner was impaled on a spit and placed over the flames, the buck seeming to gain an expression of mildly indignant surprise. When it was cooked through, shreds of meat were sprinkled with salt and lime, wrapped in flour tortillas, and served to anyone who was hungry. Francisco and Violeta ate together, their faces reflecting the light of the fire, while everyone around them drank and laughed and danced. Soon after, children were dispatched to kitchens and cellars to fetch buckets of fermented agave punch, most of which was as potent — and about as flavourful — as nitroglycerine. Liberal servings were passed around in the traditional gourd-shaped glasses known as jícaras.
The faces of the townsfolk, caught in the low flames still warming the deer’s underbelly, turned speckled and orange, like something glimpsed in dreams. Everything wavered. Children ran in excited circles, like ricocheting points of energy. Men hung arms over shoulders and sang wheezing corridos about lost love and survived battles and the luscious torment that was life in México. A pistol, and then another, came out, the owners passing them around while boasting about the damage they had caused during the revolution. There was a surfeit of firing into the air, all of which was accompanied by pronouncements of love to the moon and the stars and the sand and every one of the women in their sad, miraculous country.
{ 6 }
IT TOOK A WEEK AND A HALF FOR THE BASE OF DR. Brinkley’s tower to peek out of all three corners of the foundation. Yet once it did, it grew exponentially, the three sections of the structure tapering towards one another not unlike a famous tower that, the workers were told, had recently been erected in some distant European city called Paris. The more fearless of the workers — meaning the Kickapoo Natives — began earning additional wages by fitting and bolting beams, their bodies looking small and vulnerable from down below. Much of the work on the ground was now done by men with their chins pointed upwards, their round faces flushed by the restoration of their dignity.