“Orlando. . . .”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“All right already. Takes money for rehab.”
“You spent the money I already sent for rehab. And the money you were supposed to be saving for our business.”
“I promise, if you send more, I’ll use it for rehab. Besides, I have to get serious. I got this disease.”
“Going off with a chick, getting high, screwing-our-whole-savings-away kind of disease. Married and-divorced-a-day-later disease.”
“No, really. . .”
“What? Cirrhosis of the liver? Hepatitis? Cirrhosis is a bad, bad way to go, you gotta stop the drinking and shooting up. . . .”
“AIDS.”
“What the hell?”
“I have sores on my back. Like scabs. From sharing needles. There’s medicine.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe five hundred a month. But I think its curable.”
“I’ll see what I can do. But Camilo, you have to promise me you’ll start rehab.”
Later, still sitting on the porch step watching the sky and trees, I hear Lila come out of her office and go into the kitchen. I call her over.
She stands behind the screen door. “What?”
“Can you borrow money from Frog King?”
“Bad idea.”
“Can you at least ask?”
She dials and speaks to Frog King, then hands me the phone.
“Listen, you and your brother were lucky to get out alive. He owes, or you do—one of you owes—for my goddamn truck. He dented the front fender.”
“I’ll cover everything.”
“Well, your word ain’t shit far as I can tell. I’m doing this for her. I’m glad that crazy son of a bitch is outta here before someone kills his raunchy ass. You better keep him out. Send Lila down.”
The last days of October. I’ve lost five pounds worrying about my debt. I’m still driving weed, trying not to get caught. I’m so stressed by the smuggling that I grind my molars when sleeping. By my reasoning, the shame of always being dependent on Lila for everything is also too much to bear. In my mind, that kind of justifies my smuggling. I’m tired of being tied to her in every way. No matter how anxious I am, smuggling is what I have to do for now . . . and do it hard.
October is harsh with cold, but I hardly even notice since I’m going back and reloading, sometimes with back-to-back runs to the Valley of Texas, or, as the natives call it, El Valle.
I stay at Centavo’s house, wait for the phone call to come load up. The weed is packed into a false bottom of a tow truck. They unbolt the top part of the tow truck bed with the winch on it, drop the bricks in, then re-bolt the top on and hitch a wrecked car to it with an American plate. At the border, they say they’re towing it back stateside to the owner, from where it was stolen. The guards wave them through, get paid a bonus for every car.
There are other ways they cross the weed: with ropes attached to inner tubes across the Rio Grande or ambulances carrying dead bodies freshly dug up from a cemetery. Crossings always include a payoff to the border guards on both sides.
Centavo is ruthless. On one occasion, waiting for a load to come in, Centavo and I go to Padre Island to kill some time at the beach. Whenever I’m waiting for a load, the anticipation builds to the point of exploding, but being on the beach listening to the tide calms my nerves. The tide whispers an easy rhythm of baby-lullabies, shushing, shushing. My eyes skim the gray water with a melancholy regret that I’m not back at Green Mill looking for a job or applying for night school. I tell myself the time will come.
Black folks down the beach barbecue. I recall with a tenderness the black folks seen that day in Green Mill enjoying themselves. Time seems to have whizzed by. I yearn to be doing what they’re doing.
Centavo gets up from the sand where we sit, walks to the outside bathrooms. A tanned man in Bermuda shorts and sandals enters right behind him. A few minutes later, Centavo appears; arms low at his side, face flushed. He sits down next to me, curses under his breath. I ask what happened. He says the man came on to him, says he cut him. His arm comes up. He shows me his knife, throws it into the sand to clean the blood off.
“Cut the punk’s neck,” he ends.
What’s wrong with you? I think.
The tranquil beach, soft waves vanish. Anger rises in me. For a moment I want to drag him into the water and drown him. I loathe people like him; can’t talk to express their feelings or what’s on their minds, so they operate on one mode: ignorant aggression.
I know he’s not just a driver. I’m certain he works for M as an enforcer, debt collector or assassin. He raises his bowie knife to the sky, stares at a blood streak he missed. Throws the knife again between his black boots, stabs the sand repeatedly until the blade is gleaming clean.
I know if I continue to smuggle weed, one day he and I will have a showdown. I also foresee that in time I’ll witness an even darker side of him. It’s not lost on me that he’s driven the weed up with me and M enough to know where I live if ever a misunderstanding comes between M and me.
Early November. On the phone Lila tells me Green Mill is quiet, in hibernation. I tell her it couldn’t be more different down in El Valle. Warm weather, clear blue skies. I sleep in a small room at Chuy’s mother’s house. The aromas of morning bring back childhood memories. I feel the way I did when I was with my grandma. I can recall how, when I was four years old, Camilo wrapped some presents for me and celebrated my birthday. Wrapped in toilet paper were rocks, which I licked, pretending they were candy. Then I folded and pocketed the cartoon newspaper clippings with pretty pictures. The last package was a scoop of special dirt. He said all three items came from a magic land and they’d give me the power to fly. I believed him. Since then, I’ve never had another birthday party.
I mention this memory to Chuy, and he declares, “No, no, you deserve a real birthday party!”
To celebrate my birthday, Chuy suggests we get something to eat. His favorite is barbacoa de chivo, or barbecued goat.
“But it’s not my birthday,” I insist.
“It is now,” he says. “You have two birthdays, the one when you were born, and the one we just give you.”
And so a few of his cousins and I pile into his low-rider and drive off—not to a barbecue joint, as I assumed, but way out of town along an isolated country road, where we pull up alongside a fence with a sign: KING RANCH, NO TRESS-PASSING.
Chuy points to a trailer set off in the field. “That’s the guard.” He presses his index finger to his lips. “We have to do it quick and quiet. No noise. Let’s go.”
I climb out of the car with the others, Chuy pops the trunk. Each of his cousins grabs a small bat, we all creep toward the field, climb over the fence.
“Follow me,” Chuy instructs.
I’m not quite sure what he has in mind, but I’m definitely not going to beat some guard over the head with a bat. I’m relieved when we sneak past the trailer. The guard is occupied watching an NFL game. The door is open, the game on loud. I can see him in a hard-backed chair, drinking a beer and eating Cheetos.
We crawl past on our bellies until we come to a herd of goats. At the same time as I realize what this is all about, Chuy’s cousins spring out of the sage brush and creosote bushes, and in one smooth swing crushes the skulls of a few goats. Immediately, they drag them through the brush and carry them over the fence.
Chuy and I are the last to get ours, and as we’re stuffing it into the trunk, shots ring out. I turn, see the watchman standing outside his door with his rifle aimed at us. He shoots again as we drive off.
“Nothin’ but a meatball, carnalito.”
We get the goats safely to Chuy’s and barbecue them. The whole barrio turns up to enjoy the fiesta, eating goat tacos and drinking cold beer as the story is told and retold with more and more invention. It’s here at the barbecue that I meet Beto, a squat, thick-shouldered, middle-aged fieldworker from Mercedes
, Texas.
Beto and I start driving one round-trip a week. Bigger loads. More money. He suffers from breathing problems, his lungs damaged from work in the pesticide-sprayed fields. With a wife and two lovely daughters in middle school, he has to keep the bills paid and life going. Meanwhile, Chuy’s life unravels. He is doing a lot of heroin. He goes his way, I continue on mine; it’s an old story—you’d think it wouldn’t surprise me by now.
To hide the loads, we buy wrought-iron lawn furniture, Mexican clay pots, rugs, wall decorations, pre-Colombian figurines—all cheap stuff to conceal what we’re really carrying. Once we arrive in North Carolina we unload the weed at Frog King’s as quickly as possible. On weekends we go up to the big flea market in Leesburg, Virginia, sell our lawn furniture and Mexican curios within a few hours. Southern folk have a fascination with Mexican goods; seems they’re decorative, inexpensive and broaden their cultural appreciation.
Anyway, the money is pouring in, and when money pours in, it’s awfully hard to go back to thinking about making a legitimate reentry. There is always something else I need to buy to set up the future, and although money isn’t something I measure my life by nor does it give me any special esteem or make me feel better than others, I blow through it as easily as it comes. I give it away to the Mexicans working in the fields, throw big pachangas and barbacoas at parks, send thousands for my brother’s rehab and for our future, and buy two almostnew trucks for me and Beto and a new car for my sister.
I no longer am a disappointment.
I outfit my truck with dual gas tanks, even install a generator alongside the motor so that in case I break down on the road, I can crank it up and plug in, have lights, heat and radio. Frog King is happier than an anteater with six tongues. Every time I deliver a load, he gives me a bonus of a thousand dollars, offers me anything I need, from whores to drugs. I can’t believe a man his age, late sixties, can party as hard as he does, can drink white lightning from a mason jar every day, wheels and deals with cracker-scum and Nazi-scammers selling stolen guns and heavy construction machinery, exchanging one hundred thousand dollars printed in prison for five thousand in real money.
I’m also off running more errands, more favors for Frog King. When I’m home, if he needs something, he calls me. It’s pretty clear I’m his go-to man. I keep it low key. Whenever I can, I’m off by myself, reading a book of poetry or a novel.
Lila suffers more bouts of brooding. I’m seldom around. It’s has been quite a while since we even sat at the same table and shared a meal. We hardly talk. I feel a pressing urgency to get out of her house. I can’t take the arrangement much longer, although it’s good to see her busy translating Spanish poetry and writing letters to her colleagues. At heart, she’s an intellectual—forget the other side of her persona. For days, she works translating Nahuatl poetry, working in a silent cocoon all by herself. We live together but have separate lives.
When I’m home, I select books from her library in the main room, read about Mesoamerican culture, how indigenous peoples view the world, as well as about new breakthroughs in the interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphics, Mechican poetic structures, Incan metaphors, Aztec religious beliefs, cultural principles of poetic deities, etc. Despite the obvious gnawing away of both of our souls, of being inhibited strangers in each other’s presence, the perplexing anxiety of living together permeates the air. Face-to-face, we are aloof, maintain a cool demeanor. We don’t have sex.
One day I open the carton of my personal belongings my sister sent what feels like forever ago to sort out my papers and notebooks and store them in an out of the way place. I open one of the drawers in the steel filing cabinet in my (Griselda’s) office. A picture falls out from a folder. It is the photo of me taken at DYA, wearing institutional denims. There are strands of Lila’s red hair mixed in black wax, handwritten notes with moon chants on them. When Lila gets home from work, I ask her about it. She says she went through my box, looking for our letters to each other. She admits the hair and wax are a ceremony meant to insure my safety while I was on the road doing the smuggling. I think it’s her voodoo ritual to capture my soul to remain hers forever.
I also find a pile of burned letters, ash, hair and chants. I ask her to burn them all, dump them in the field behind the house. Scatter them. No more voodoo stuff.
She does as I ask with solemn decorum, no expression of shame, fury or argument. I put it behind me, resume straightening my office, enjoy Griselda purring at my feet, nibbling my toes, licking my heels with her harsh, abrasive tongue.
Then I am gone again, on the way to south Texas in the big truck. While Beto drives, I open some of the books I borrowed from Lila’s library. I find notes among the pages Lila had written during her college days. One says:
Never trivialize the journey with quaint whiny quips. The journey is a hallowed one, not about grandstanding for sex or fame or money, it’s a spiritual quest to unfold your soul like a star just discovered in the universe, one that can sustain a worthy human life; it connects you to the Great Mystery, quit pretending. Be worthy to call yourself a human, it’s a calling, a mission, a rare gift from the Creator of all life, do not mock it, do not be a charlatan.
After we pass through Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I read Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the words grab me with such force, I turn to Beto and announce, “That’s it, done. I quit hauling weed.”
Beto frowns. “Not a good idea, amigo.” He thinks a little and says, “I can give you a list of reasons why that is not wise. The money we’re making is a blessing from God.” He makes the sign of the cross. “Even the lawn furniture and Mexican textiles, the shirts, sandals, sombreros . . . the gringos can’t get enough. We don’t want to disrespect God’s wishes.”
He flashes me an expression of incredulity. For a moment, the God-thing almost validates our criminal activity. I look at him, agree in silence that the money is good, God is very good.
He insists, “Happens once a lifetime, carnal. You don’t know how I’ve lived in poverty for so long . . . this is as close to heaven as I imagine heaven could be.”
Austerity, hard, lean days are written all over his brown face.
“But I need to stop.”
With every trip, a bone-handled dagger slowly makes its way deeper into my heart. The longer I spend my days and nights driving the highway, smuggling dope, the harder it is to fit back into a normal life. It is impossible to reconcile my smuggling with my desire for that normal life. But a voice in my head repeats, “Gotta raise enough money for my brother’s rehab and our business before I leave.” Is it my excuse or my justification? I am not sure anymore.
Smuggling masks my inefficiencies, balances the playing field between me having and not having something, conceals my inadequacies and reveals my skill, because, to tell the truth, although I am not really able to face the lousy mess my life is, I am, I hope, slowly repairing it. It doesn’t matter that the means in question are illegal. It is what I have. I am not sure whether I am making more garbage or cleaning up the wreckage. I am certain of one thing, though: I instinctively know, if I ever open those old doors of my past, to the shack hidden in the woods, the scream that will ensue from that child will leave me a broken man.
This is as good as it gets sometimes. I have to take the good with the bad, live in the gray area. I have to learn to accept it: two Chicanos in a beat-up five-ton truck going down an American highway at three a.m., hauling weed to people who can’t live without getting high. I’m helping them get by another miserable, despairing day.
Beto continues encouraging me off and on over the miles. He’s adamant about our opportunity. “You have it backwards. Money’s everything, happiness is not. Show me how you can use happiness to pay a hospital bill? Or buy school clothes for my girls?”
I have no solution. I keep telling myself all I have to do is make a little more money, then I can stop . . . but I recall that that is the swan song of so many kids in DYA. I half-believe there is no turning back, that it’s im
possible to change. But I know I am wrong. I can stop right now, get out of the truck, hitchhike to wherever. But I don’t. I’m lost, confused and realize that my life means so little that in some ways going back to DYA could be a relief. Maybe it’s where I belong. Despite all these doubts, something pushes me to take more risks. I have an attitude, I push the edge, postpone a decision on leaving the lifestyle for a while.
It is the money factor. I need more.
To complicate my exit strategy, my ego is gorged like a glutton, thinks I’m indispensable. That I’m needed is a great feeling, takes the place of the self-esteem I don’t have. Frog King asks me to be his personal driver; I’m flattered. He says Colombian weed is coming back up, flown into Georgia by a father and son team, from there the boys truck it up to North Carolina. Unless the Mexican weed becomes superb, better than the Colombian, which is not going to happen anytime soon, we should leave the business down in Texas until the Columbian bud dries up.
I start driving for Frog King. No limo or black Caddy SUV. No, it’s an old beat-up blue farm truck. I still do a couple more trips down to the Valley with M, take weed to Ronny and his father up in Danville, Virginia, where they run one of Frog King’s casinos/cathouses.
On one of those trips south, slowed by traffic accidents, there are check points, police roadblocks and rain. DEA agents are all over the border. I get no sleep for two days. While passing New Orleans late at night, I mention casually to M I’m so tired, I can hardly keep my eyes open. Not even sticking my head out the window to let the full force of the wind hit me wakes me up, coffee isn’t doing the trick. So we have to pull over at a rest area.
He produces a small brown vial from his pocket, offers me a hit. I’ve never done cocaine. As soon as I snort it, my brain inserts itself into a 220 outlet of accelerant bliss that ignites every cell in my bloodstream with crystalline sizzling.
I can drive and drive. . . .
American Orphan Page 13