I feel bad for them, starting with my very first ride from the airport when I arrived in North Carolina. The brown people were blurry in the distance, hunched over in the shimmering heat, shrouded figures wearing cloth headbands, masks, sombreros and baseball caps, carrying baskets of fruit, berries, carrots, beets or onions to flatbeds to be weighed-in.
All of their used cars are parked parallel to the rows. Coming back from a day of fishing, I see them sitting in tents in camps that lack sanitary facilities. They have no clean water and little of anything else. At least at DYA we had water and lunch breaks.
Imagine cooking every day on a portable butane stove. Imagine water for all your needs poured out of jugs filled at a nearby field faucet. Imagine living on a bare diet of tortillas, beans and rice. Imagine the heat. If you get hurt or bit by scorpions or cottonmouths, there is no medical recourse; you just keep working through the illness. You cannot afford to stop. You work until you drop or die, through the unbearable heat, inhuman conditions and miserable wages. Kids miss school, adults hide from La Migra like escapees and white bosses exploit them in as many ways as their limited imaginations can scheme up.
I know all this about them but don’t talk about it. In fact, I try not to think about it, force it out of mind, but I know if I want to get real with myself, I have to admit that these people are prisoners. In concentration camps, white bosses get wealthy off their slave labor. More than once, Lila goes out to read paperwork for them, advise them of their rights. She drives them to the emergency room, brings them towels, diapers, sanitary napkins—the basics for a meager life. She translates for them, speaks on their behalf in court, helps register the kids for home tutoring programs at night, drives them to Walgreens to get them medicine, sets up appointments with the immigration service, finds civil rights lawyers for them and fills police-abuse claims for them against whites who routinely rape the women or embezzle their pay.
If I could help I would, but I don’t know how. Then, my plan starts to materialize with an opportunity that drops into my lap the day after my meeting with Frog King. Two guys pull up in two pick-ups and drop off five grand in a paper lunch sack. One of the pick-ups is the same one with a camper shell that Frog King had brought over before, when he wanted me to leave town. Now, he wants two hundred pounds of weed.
After the rain, it smells so good Rodrigo and I, a fieldworker friend of ours, sit under a huge magnolia tree, having a beer. Later, we walk over to the pump house to hang out as we do once or twice a week, drinking and talking about Mexico. When I mention my problem, he says he knows where to pick up marijuana.
He seems honest enough, I know he won’t run off with the truck and the money. He just had a baby, his wife is still in the hospital. They need the extra income. So I ask him to make the run to the border and back. I pay him enough to cover their hospital bills. He has contacts, he promises the weed is good. I give him the five grand and the truck and wave goodbye. He tells me he’ll see me in about a week.
October weather is bizarre. The news keeps warning of hurricanes in the Atlantic that can hit North Carolina. Rain. Sleet. Snow. One evening, the trees collude in the illusion of creating a gothic castle, where a menacing spirit abides in the pendulum blades of icicled branches. Light drips. The woods turn black. Trees crack in deep throes of agony, and the earth turns from autumn, readying for the coming winter.
Summer returns for two days. I pass the General, a massive bass, suspended in water just under the surface. He floats around the spill-over pipe. Brandon has staked his claim on the leviathan bass and has warned me never to catch him myself. But that bass is always there, gloomily brooding with those epic, bulbous eyes, just below the surface, staring up at me. On that clear morning, I see all the hooks and spinners flashing from its lips and mouth, evidence of its dismissive arrogance to Brandon’s repeated attempts to snag him.
I read Black Elk Speaks, Peltier’s prose and Trudell’s poetry to find some wisdom to extricate me from this quandary. Lila and I find ourselves at home. I expect Peter to come through the door at any moment. I repeat a prayer in my head over and over, a prayer asking Black Elk for blessings.
Soon, Peter and I walk to the pond behind his grandpa’s. It is quiet, tranquil. We fish. Fat insects buzz in the air. We kick back behind the cattails on the bank, I tell him about circling a pond last evening and running into my first cottonmouth, coiled up in an exposed tree root by the bank.
The weight of the green- and yellow-leaf world weighs heavy on the air. A cauldron of green trees, green expanses all drip, spring, climb, fan, wave, crowd, push and claw forth like hordes of starving prisoners abandoned by their keepers. As if commemorating the change of seasons, the damp, green world explodes from its pressured confines and foams from the dirt, erupts into the air, careens everywhere; dense, pressed, packed. One second it riots wildly; another instant it bellies underground only to come crawling feverishly up to the raw concessions of lofty trees in the next moment, creating walls of lush green blossoms, leaves and branches in every direction.
I see something stir on the far side of the bank and pucker the surface. The water ripples, bubbles appear next to a big log, half in the water. A white crane floats in above the treetops, perches on the log for a minute or two, then flies off. I reel in, toss, aiming for the log. I feel a soft nibble. Peter sees the whole thing happen. He drops his rod, comes up beside me, instructs me to yank my rod back, reel in, snap the rod back . . . but the line is limp. I reel in the loose line. I’ve lost whatever it was.
Then I feel the slightest tremor coming through the slack line into the rod. I keep reeling. Then I see it. I toss the rod back, wade in, grab the line, start pulling as fast as my hands can move. Peter is behind me. He picks up my rod, reels the slack line in as fast as the spool can spin. I reach both my hands into the water, grab the hooked line just above its mouth. I drag the fish to the bank. It does not put up a fight. Not one flap in defiance, as if trained to come to me calmly, recline in my hands and surrendering peacefully.
Yes, it is Brandon’s. The General. What’s done is done.
From tail to head it is at least a foot longer than Peter, who is tall for his eight years. I take my belt off, pull it through its gill and give it to Peter to carry home. He slings it over his shoulder, tail brushing the ground. Back home we put it in the tub. We fillet it in the pump house, and then I cook it in the oven. I’ll never forget Peter and me at the table, along with a few other Mexicans from down the road. They keep repeating that I should have weighed it at the store, because it probably was a new North Carolina record for the biggest bigmouth bass caught in a pond.
When Brandon comes through the door, his face has an expression of disbelief. All he can say is, “No, you didn’t, you didn’t. . . .” And then, “Fuck it.”
He takes his soiled baseball cap off, runs his hand over his balding head. His blue eyes behind his spectacles stare at the culets on the table a while before he joins us. As he gets drunk, he talks about everything from good weed to girlfriends and, of course, to fishing. He has me retell the story a hundred times of how the fish put up no fight, no fight at all.
I say, “Well, Brandon, you know, I saw the General almost every day. He likes to swim around the overspill pipe and catch bugs that drift toward him. I’ve watched water spiders gliding on the water, and the General gulp them in with his huge lips. He resembled one of those brawny, muscled dock workers in black and white movies. No, he looks more like a saber-tooth tiger with fins. He was huge, with all kinds of broken lines, hooks, metal reflectors stuck on his lips. I tell you what, though, he had to be one smart fish to break that many fish lines . . . also, he seemed to know I was standing up on the bank looking down at it.
“Standing there by the overspill pipe, its big eyes would ogle me . . . big bulbous marbles that lazily protruded from its head. They stared at me with a smile in them. Brandon, buddy, I didn’t mean to catch him.”
It is a good break from the crap Lila and I were
suffering. Despite the seasonal changes, nothing changes much between her and me. I don’t ask her why this is happening or to try to comfort her. I close the door to our bedroom, turn on the bedside radio, listen to AM hate: white guys ranting about how America is theirs. “Blacks and Browns” are destroying it, even as whites murder and ravage communities of color. I can only tolerate it for a minute or two, then I change the channel to the liberals on NPR spouting their wisdom from high above the people of color. They don’t see their own biases or entitlement. Both White Hate Radio and NPR carry the same thrill for me I experience at a carnival when I peek into the freak tent.
The October days come and go with dungeon-door finality. I slowly admit I am in debt to Frog King even more. I decide to drive down to break the news. I borrow Lila’s car, go by myself. I tell him straight out I got ripped off. I don’t know what to expect, but it’s certainly not the response I get.
He whales out his barrel-chested, heave-ho guffaw, growls, “I’ll be damned.” Then he says, “Well, what the hell, here’s another five grand. I’ll see you when you get back.”
At the house, I go through my papers in my boxes, search for the slip of napkin where I had written the numbers of my friends when I got out of DYA. I find it and call.
“Who is this?”
“Who’s this?”
“You think this is a TV game show? Who’s calling?”
“Is Chuy there?”
“Maybe. . .”
“Orlando!”
“Ese gűey! I didn’t recognize your voice. How the hell you been, vato?”
I feel an old excitement in my chest like a tornado’s just touched down, blowing away everything that isn’t rooted by God.
Chuy is at the airport in Dallas to pick me up. Despite all his former tall tales of money and nice cars, he has neither. He drives a ’63 Impala with no brakes. Chuy is short, maybe five-feet-two; the huge car dwarfs him so much that when he drives, it seems like a child is sitting on a milk crate in the driver’s seat, clutching the steering wheel, just barely able to peer over the dashboard.
“Pinche, ¿qué chingao está haciendo, vato?” He has a single front gold tooth that shines when he smiles.
“What have you been doing?” I ask.
“Hustling, selling a little heroin and weed for pocket change. Keeps my habit fed, my girlfriend happy. And you?”
“Not much, just gotta clear up a mess I made.”
“With that chick? I thought for sure you’d never get back in the game.” He slaps my arm. “¡Pinche vato!” He teases me with a little half-grin, shaking his head.
“Not with her, Chuy.”
“Same old ups and downs.”
Small he might be, but no one to mess with. He wears blue oval shades, has a line of blue, tattooed tear drops going from the corner of his left eye down his cheek. He’s got nicks and scars, a head full of black thick hair that he constantly combs—in the car, in a café or standing outside on the sidewalk. His hands are always busy smoothing his hair. He is meticulous in his mannerisms, impeccable in his dress. A Chicano locote to the huesotes (bones), he’s done serious time. He looks small on the streets, but behind the walls and in the know he is feared. And pity anyone about to step on his spit-shined shoes.
Added to this list of congenial attributes, he is a heroin addict—un tecato. He has the suave look of an Arab Prince assassin; he just doesn’t have the money or power. He’s as ruthless as a banker when it comes to slapping interest on a loan, cunning as a Wall Street broker when it comes to deception, evil as an insurance CEO—all the characteristics that give him longevity and success in the criminal world.
As remarkable as his looks are, they are the least of his charisma. It is his walk, talk and facial expressions. Hard to explain. His walk is the Constitution with all the Bill of Rights; it’s a kind of rooster’s cocky swagger but in a sideways statement. He throws his weight to his left foot, swings his right leg and hip around. Neither Benjamin Franklin nor Thomas Jefferson could exert more authority in their walk than Chuy. Hamilton might, being a street urchin himself— both had it down.
I’m saying his bearing was brazen defiance; it took years in reformatory to learn how to strut like that—a warship emerging from the mist, everyone in its radar radius a rowboat. He has that kind of samurai-sword confidence. Chuy is flypaper to women. White, Ivy League, black, fish-stockinged ones stick to him.
And the way he speaks, with the provocative cajoling of a mentor to his student, with the edgy humor of a pimp, plying out the approval or agreement under duress. Nothing, I mean nothing, is ever anything to him. “Ain’t nothing but a meatball,” he says, whether it’s robbing Fort Knox or invading a country like Mexico to hijack the cartel’s load of cocaine or money—ni madre, me lo pelan, nothing but a meatball.
He doesn’t put much importance on any crisis, everything is insignificant. He can glide himself through any catastrophe, ain’t nothing but a meatball. He usually doesn’t deal with weed, only the hard stuff, but there’s someone he knows, El Tote (pronounced toe-tay), and we’re going to see that guy. As we drive through Dallas, I reflect on the last time I cruised in a low-rider to pick up a load of weed in a Dallas barrio, when I was festering with poverty, had no money, food or lodging. I had promised myself then it was the last time.
“Pendejo, glad you’re here.”
I look out the window at the worn clapboards and stuccos, and think, God only knows what I’m getting myself into again. Unsupervised snot-nosed kids playing in the dirt, drop-dead gorgeous girls swinging on porches or hanging out on steps or on the hoods of cars while baby crew-cut thugs drink forties, pose in khakis and wife-beater shirts, religious medals hanging from chains around tattooed necks. There is a pervasive stink of oil—oily smells, oily ground, oily gravel driveways, oily sidewalks and oily pavement. Even the elm leaves have an oily residue, the grass blades an oily film.
No matter what my dilemma is, I know Chuy’s response will be, “Ain’t nothing but a meatball, ese.” I know in his heart, it saddens him that I’m back in the game. I disappoint.
When we arrive at the gas station, Tote is leaning against a Coca-Cola machine while he wipes his axel-greased hands on a mechanic’s rag. I notice three young wanna-be gangsters around him, whispering, looking spooked. They turn to Tote, who shakes his head. Looks like they’re trying to convince him of something, but he’s against it. One guy walks off, the other two reluctantly follow, then all look back at Tote. He shrugs as if to say No-can-do.
Tote is huge, a giant bowl of menudo. I figure, four hundred and fifty pounds. His hair is cropped close to the scalp above his toast-complexion skin. Everything about him is round, if he tipped either way, he’d roll and keep rolling. His eyelids are layered skin; when he opens his eyes on you, it seems like a long time until they actually fully open to shroud you with their lazy but shrewd suspicion.
We park, walk up to him. Chuy gets right into it.
“Yeah, vato,” Tote says, “I can get all the weed you want. And no, I don’t have any on hand.”
Yes, he’ll give us a great price, but he has to call his brother M on the border in McAllen, Texas. M will drive it up. Maybe a week, maybe two, depends on what’s going down at the border.
Chuy says he’ll drive down to get it, so I give him the money. He agrees to drive it all the way up to Green Mill. He’s excited to go into business with me. We have history, backed each other up in fights inside. You get to know a kid when you see him stripped of his dignity, stomped, kicked and in the face of it all, he pulls the old mule-teeth hee-haw on his tormentors, pisses them off enough to make them swear they’ll kill him.
On the flight back to North Carolina, I consider how the world is below me, an earth, round and filled with billions of people, all are striving to make a life for themselves. Some make it, others don’t. Here I am, twenty-two-years old, trying to put together a lousy deal that will pay off Frog King and make a little cash on the side for me to get something goi
ng with my brother.
I don’t know whether to clap with optimism or sit down, lay my head on my knees and cry. No matter what, I have to go on with it. I’ve committed myself. I fell into the trap of owing Frog King. He knew exactly how to play a desperate man.
Lila picks me up at the Durham airport that evening. The first thing I do when I get home is wrestle on the floor with Griselda, take her for a walk, nap with her in my arms on my bed. The unintended consequence of my absence is a widening gulf of silence between Lila and me, but having Griselda to dote on eases my distress.
A few days later, I’m standing at the screen door when Chuy drives into the yard. He gets out of his car with all the pomp and triumph of a returning champion entering an arena in front of thousands of adoring fans applauding his victory and streaming confetti. We drive the weed to Frog King’s. I figure once we deliver the load, I’m free of the debt I owe. I not only plan to give him the weed, but also use my portion of the profits to pay for the truck Rodrigo stole. The biggest reward for me is getting free of the debt to a backwoods mafia don.
I carry the two hundred pounds into Frog King’s bunker, stack the bricks four high and take a seat on the couch. I stare at the columns of two-pound bricks wrapped in brown butcher paper, wonder how weed has become so valuable. So many people smoke it I guess. On top of the TV sits a rattlesnake ashtray filled with bullets. It seems like wherever there is space—couch, side tables, desk, dinner table—there are pistols and bullets. I sit facing his big La-Z-Boy chair, once again note the elegant, burnished, cherry-wood grandfather clock—time stopped at 12:45 pm. Must have been the time he leaned too far back.
I can hear farm commotion outside: tractors crossing the compound, trucks going by, farmhands yelling, dogs barking. The door swings open, the foreman, wearing a red feed-store cap, plaid shirt and jeans, asks, “He around?”
I shake my head no.
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