American Orphan

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Ten minutes later, we park in a gravel driveway. To the right, a white-columned mansion with a water fountain of a statue of some civil-war military man riding a horse. To the left, a dreary, cinderblock bungalow. In front of us, a row of big sheds where expensive tractors, grime-caked 4x4 trucks and dusty ATVs are parked, along with smaller single-dog pens, open-air lean-tos and field implements. Behind his place, fields stretch out ready to be plowed, seeded.

  A dense, industrial grayness hangs over everything. An afternoon breeze clinks the fence-line signs warning “Trespassers Will Be Shot.” They are studded with bullet holes. There’s a criminal character to it: a stopover where outlaws chug white lightning from plastic milk jugs, recent parolees drop in in the middle of the night to unload crates of stolen rifles, boxes of funny-money printed in a federal prison in Atlanta.

  Lila swings the steel door open. I follow her in.

  Frog King sits in a corner to my left in a large brown-leather La-Z-Boy recliner. Our eyes meet with the acknowledgment of our previous introduction, when he barged into my house, threatened me, demanded I leave. We say nothing. We understand that remains between us as men. But the second I enter, I know we share something more: the awareness that poverty, anxiety can bend a person’s most adamant principles, how flexible the human spirit is when offered a way out of suffering. He knows the dark underbelly of what people are capable of, given the right temptations, enticements. He could find a way to get someone to agree to any crime.

  There he sits, all four hundred pounds of him, holding the newspaper open before him. Then he starts laughing, a husky, scalawag chuckle. “Nancy Reagan and John Denver . . . ‘Just Say No’ is about the stupidest damn nonsense!”

  I wonder if the day might come when he leans back too far in his chair, shatters the antique grandfather clock behind him.

  As I described earlier, Frog King has the bulk of a bullfrog, is just as predatory in patiently waiting to snatch his victim. Sitting in wait, human weakness buzzes around him, his long tongue unfurls twenty feet beyond his mouth, plucks the unsuspecting man’s weakness. His bloated torso, hunched shoulders, brawny neck, redwood thighs make it difficult to get up from his La-Z-Boy to greet us. He throws the paper aside, comments how dry things get around here during Halloween.

  “Hell, normally, we get all the weed we want from Florida, tons of Columbian gold bud, but never fails: around October, dry as a eunuch’s scrotum,” he says. “Can’t find it anywhere.”

  That’s when the word comes out of my mouth, the plan I knew was coming into effect, the plan that I had intuited at the pond the other day, the plan that would force my world to flip and boomerang.

  He shrewdly dangles the bait. It glimmers midair. He asks if I know where to get weed. My resistance has been worn down by the daily frustration of living in constant need.

  I reply, “Maybe,” knowing my consent plants enough in my mind that I can’t back out, that to him, it’s an unwavering yes.

  I am aware that an impulsive slip of that one word will dramatically change my life. I’m okay with it.

  That one word, maybe, makes my mind, my heart amp hot with adrenaline, detaches me from myself, sweeps aside all past promises and moral obstacles. In that split second, my mind’s uncertainty learns that self-preservation has two faces—a proud face, a self-loathing one—and he takes note.

  In that instant, his malted laughter cements him as a man who finds a person’s flaws and uses them to his advantage. He finds mine. He satisfies his wants, he knows the worth of a stranger’s conditioning by how he presents himself. He knows we are both part of something dark–call it criminal.

  After my implied compliance, to my profound surprise, I begrudgingly find myself in a risk-it-all frame of mind—my heart springing for the first time like a powerful boxer, emboldened by the clarity of my possibilities.

  He and Lila talk but I am miles away. I see their mouths move but I am deaf to their voices. They laugh. He shares a story about someone they know. She shows surprise. I notice a book of Lila’s poems on the coffee table, wonder when Lila gave it to him.

  He notices my look, says, “How the hell do you get those word pictures? Hell of a trick, how you make those pictures out of words. Sit down, sit down. Mind you, there’s a cottonmouth loose somewhere around here . . . won’t hurt you, more scared of you than you of it.”

  He offers a glass of moonshine. Lila takes out a plastic milk jug from under the sink and pours a glass for each of us. I drink, making sure not to squint from the burn. I take it down like soda pop laced with blowtorches.

  Looking back now, seeing myself sitting there on his couch, I know that an hour before entering his bungalow, I would have scoffed at the assertion that I might act against myself out of an instinct more powerful than my own dogged logic.

  Looking back now from my house and kids and wife in 2019, I see a divided self. My heart is making the decisions, my heart has always gotten me in trouble, especially when people say I am a disappointment. Shame begs me onto the edge, dares me to jump, and I do. I take the dare rather than stand and face the shame of my being no one.

  I remember, ostensibly, in those days I was all about knowing myself. I mean, after all the isolation, condemnation I’d gone through, I thought I knew myself pretty well. Then somehow, the truth was that being a nothing in life was far worse than all the suffering and sorrow I endured.

  My mind keeps asking, Why didn’t I just say no and keep going with the promise to myself that I could make a good life out here without entering into a criminal hustle?

  Looking back, I could have said without reserve, “Not interested.” But I didn’t. Someone in me, from life-long conditioning, deals the cards, and I stack the chips. That’s it. Done. I’m in the game again.

  I am over the fence again.

  Baffled by how I offered my services so easily, I feel shock that I blindly believed there was no way I’d ever go back to crime.

  I marvel at how inconsequential my principles were. While I thought I was operating on and guided by a system of integrity, deep down in my unconscious brain a whole new clandestine engagement was functioning and thriving. Apparently, it stewed there until ready to be ladled out to my hungry criminal heart, willing to sit at the table, make an offer.

  There in front of Frog King, the whys, whats, wheres, whens of my journey into a forthright life fracture. I am disappointed to find myself so unpredictable. If there was ever a young man with two glaringly obvious, disproportionate states of character, it is me, laired up in my loathsome stench of cowardice.

  I suppose I want to acquire meaning by any means necessary.

  On my reentry, I thought I could willfully impose a path of action, garner the gumption to follow it, adhere to my ethical determination. But as it turns out . . . in the bones, in the muscles, in the eyes, hands, feet, tendons, nerves, in the blood, in the imagination’s kaleidoscopic circuitry, I am a criminal—as society claims, as all those counselors, teachers, police opined—nothing more than a prairie bramble, thorn-bred hustler with the bastard-virus of an avenging despair in my criminal heart. I see as the one-eyed owl does because the other one has been shot out by the justice system.

  Inside Frog King’s place, sitting on his cheap couch, I feel I am a make-believe man, decomposed into instant gratification, with no fortitude, no foundation. Here I am talking to a man who has millions, and every single penny came by way of criminal activity. Because he has lawyers and accountants willing to corrupt the law, because he’s White, connected to the good ol’ slave-working White Boy network, has a brother who is a senator—a real shining knight to the bornagain Christians and Evangelicals who kneel, kiss the rings on his fingers—he acts with impunity.

  I don’t complain? In fact, I want to indulge in the bounty. There is no ethical substance in me that I can claim. What distresses me at that moment, though, is that I realize everything is up for sale. This sentiment repels my heart because I have always wanted to be known as a man c
on corazón, with heart. I value honor.

  I want, despite everything, to be true to myself, unchanging, known for my good word. I hate this trait of weakness in me that allows me to dissolve my promises, throw all my day-to-day discipline and the belief in myself out the window. In that moment of loss of self, I go from no one to someone. I have a role in the world now.

  It would have been so easy to keep my life simple, focused on school, dedicated to getting employment. Yet, in that moment, it seems so easy to ignore my promise not to get back into the game because it alleviates the day-to-day tensions, confusions of enduring Lila’s mood changes.

  The illusory promise of our old letters declares their sanctity a bad joke. The words explode like landmines triggered by each new day. The words drop from the sky like dead finches. The words melt like a thousand red candles with their wax dripping like blood on the paper. The bleeding between us continues to illuminate our dark resentment, nothing can salvage the cindered remains of our promised love.

  I reconcile myself to the war of attrition, forget how I want things to be, accept how they are. Move the hell on, even if it is into the dark regions of the criminal world.

  No one warns you about the That’s Life principal, working so heartily, intricately in all manner of interaction upon release and reentry. I never heard it from anyone. All I ever heard was that my reentry was going to be hard, but you can do it, you can go to school, get a job that you like, make good money, make new friends.

  All of that . . . puro pinche pedo.

  Instead, they should have warned me about the reality of reentry: when you apply for a job and don’t get it ’cuz you got a record. That’s life. What about school grants? Can’t because you’re a delinquent. That’s life. People don’t trust you ’cuz you wear this invisible veneer that says you’re contaminated, you carry the virus of having been locked up, you’re not to be trusted. That’s life. Or that you want to learn to love this woman but don’t know how, never was socialized to trust, never had a healthy relationship. That’s life. Every door gets slammed in your face, you can’t pay your bills or rent, you have to rely on a woman to support you. That’s life.

  What are you taught through lived experience? Sometimes the only thing that’ll give you a brief respite from the misery is a line of cocaine and a shot of good whiskey. They help you fend off your fear that everything you wanted to achieve you won’t, that it will never happen. . . . That’s Life.

  Real life is Frog King giving Lila a half-filled grocery bag of weed. She and I drive back with it. I look out the window, even thinking about Frog King, I feel his eyes on my back.

  We pass black folks gathering in a yard, I watch with envy, know I just forfeited that life. Dogs bark after our car. Black laughter fills the air. Freshly barbered, in colorful blues, greens, two-tone shoes, black high-heels, they lean on their polished used Caddies, wave. I wave back.

  I gaze at the forest meadows and reflect with brutal pragmatism that as much as I want to live a crime-free life, as much as I want my reentry to society to work out, I don’t have the moral wherewithal. Perhaps the truth is, I have no business in the straight world.

  The ruthless reality is I’m living off Lila’s kindness. Why? I still can’t make it. So why prolong the torture? My life at this moment, even from the perspective of later decades, seems so abstract, profoundly ungrounded, that the only real, intelligent course of action is to get some money, throw some cash down on a fixer-upper shack and start a business with Camilo.

  And get away from Lila and Frog King.

  Go home.

  5

  I’M RESTING IN MY LEATHER CHAIR in my sunroom, May, 14, 2019. Most of the day I worked with the crew I hired to install a new sprinkler system, because my twelve-year-old daughter wants one. Her dream is to run through the sprinklers, then lay on the grass under an umbrella with her school friends, listen to songs on the radio and scroll through her Instagram.

  Since I found that picture of me at DYA, dressed out in institutional denims with a lonely look on my face as if the whole world were out to get me, I’ve rummaged through boxes in storage to find more pics. I find one of me, younger, before my mother left, maybe I’m four or five. There I am, standing in front of her, leaning back against her legs, tall as her knees, leaning back into her as if I am holding her back, as if I sensed she would leave soon. My fists clutch her dress tightly, the blue cotton knots up in my tiny fingers, as if saying, “You’re not going, you’re staying.”

  My brown eyes are huge, like cups of liquid moon shining in the dark, as if they can fit the whole universe into them. I’m looking up at the camera, telling it she’s mine, she’s mine, I keep her to myself. My eyebrows lift a little, my eyes keep looking at the camera: “No, you can’t have her.”

  She has her hands on each of my small shoulders. She smiles a forced smile, as if aware of a menace beyond the picture. Her blue eyes have a healing in them, an inner blue bruise on the mend. And that look of mine, innocent and soft, asking for the world to leave us alone, to let us be, that look of supplication becomes a lament over the years, sensually imbuing my days with an emotional plea to the world for mercy, for understanding, for a kindness that never comes. Over time, that look morphs into a cold stare of accusation that the world has betrayed me. Anyone looking at the next picture of me in DYA in denims would want to keep me locked up forever.

  I emanate a brazen defiance, my hair combed back pachuco-style. Like the actors in West Side Story, my rebellious, haughty posture says to the camera, “Soy Chicano. You think I care?” Nobody serves up a cold-hearted snack of I don’t-care like me. My eyes say, “Nothing to live for.”

  But you do, Orlando. You longed for a life with someone to love you. And now? Now you decide to go back into the game, even if it goes against all you ever dreamed of doing with your life. Why? All Lila ever really wanted was for you to abide by your written words, to get a job, go to school, settle into the routine of daily living. But you were too afraid to look for a job because you didn’t know how to answer questions, how to fill out applications, how to enter an office, sit before a stranger, ask for a job. You thought you could only wash dishes or dig a ditch. You were too afraid to sit in a classroom because you were never taught to sit in a classroom. You would have loved it, but you were too afraid the kids would laugh at you, mock you as being stupid, jeer that you were crazy. You rationalized their rejection of you by telling yourself you were too far behind to ever catch up. Besides, you were not like other kids, so you went back to what you knew because you’re so afraid of the world, you couldn’t bring yourself to share that with anyone.

  What happened to all your day dreams, your looking out of your cell window, vowing to yourself that this time it would be different? This time you wouldn’t be a disappointment. Remember how every night between the hours of six and eight you’d stand at the bars of your cell, feel as if the hell you were in would never end, you prayed, begged, beseeched the Lord to help you make it out. Once out, you’d change. Now this?

  Your life was a sideshow, and you lived in that sideshow purgatory, always behind the curtains, watching the event of life at center stage go on without you, you peeking through the curtains at the people living life.

  How you feared that world, the people in it, how you ached to get as far away from it as possible. That you might actually do something else. That you might learn how to live without being a criminal. That you might save your life by creating a better one. You hoped so badly for that salvation. That you might abide by what you wrote in the letters expressing your desire for a good life, that people might be proud of you, that you might raise your arms to heaven like a convert, changing everything about your life, recovering the truth in yourself, feeling wonder for the day again, making that wonder a common feature of your day-to-day life. How you would serve your community, how people would be happy to see you, be next to you. You’d find yourself growing deeper, more meaningful, appreciating yourself, feeling centered
, grounded, swaying to the rhythms of the stars and releasing your jealousy, resentments, anger—embracing your loving self, ceasing to do what others expected, following your own heart, so you could leave behind your disguise as a hardened youth, a tough thug, become a beautiful, amazing you.

  The question of how to bring up a load of marijuana festers in my mind. I rehearse each proposition, decline it and think of another plan, test it, question it, think of alternatives. I know that if I can only get one load up here, I’ll have enough money to set things straight, buy a used truck, help out Lila, maybe even have enough to pay for a return trip home to live with my brother and get a job going.

  It helps my thinking to be out and about. I spend a lot of time fishing the ponds, crossing blacktop roads where Mexicans and Central Americans toil in the tobacco fields and chicken plants. I wave, they wave back.

  I know a few. Lila is friends with their Anglo wives and they sometimes come over for dinner. Bending with short hoes, they pause, in a friendly way kid me to join them, to do some real work. I smile back, hold my rod up and vanish into the forest in search of another pond.

  Depending on the harvest time, there’s maybe a dozen or so; heads, necks, the entire face veiled in grimy cloth to protect against the sweltering heat, toxic pesticides and insects. No matter how hard they work, you can see the Mexicans were not getting rich; their battered trucks, rusting cars filling the parking lots at pig farms, meat packing warehouses, dairies, slaughter houses, chicken, egg farms, all types of construction industries. . . . Not only men. I see the bloodsmudged faces of children coming out of warehouses where they slaughter pigs. Women arrive at dawn, truckloads of them, to work at dairy farms. In the fields, I see scores of laborers—children, women, men—stooping over plants, trimming, hoeing, cutting and picking. It’s modern slavery.