“She’s a lady,” I sing, grabbing her by the waist and spinning her. “And the lady is mine.”
There are no cabinets in this kitchen, only a series of shelves made from two-by-fours and concrete blocks. Also a few plastic chests of drawers flanking the refrigerator, which never stops whining. Maria pushes me away and gets on tiptoe, pulls the salt and pepper down from the shelf next to the stove. When she cooks she likes to tell me stories about how, before she met me, she was wild, a partier, if not the Colliersville “it” girl, at least its “id” girl. Stripped at Miss Kitty’s. Ran with white boys. Drank everything in sight. Snorted it, too. I’ve calmed her, apparently, helped her grow up. Everyone says so. She’s worried she’ll go back to her old ways if I leave her and, like every asshole before me, I promise never to leave her.
She puts ketchup on my eggs and slides the plate toward me across the card table. The plate sticks on a crusty puddle of old jam, and before I can do anything, before I can say, “I’ll get that,” Maria is back with a wet rag, wiping the spot clean. The eggs are runny. Jealousy eggs.
My phone buzzes again. I’ve got it in my pocket now but the vibration makes a fart sound against the metal chair and Maria looks up from her food to stare at me, toast triangle dangling from her fingers.
“Who the hell is texting you a million times before the sun comes up?”
“I told you. It’s my mom.”
“Your mother certainly has a lot to say this morning.”
“She can be that way. Verbose.”
“Actually I wouldn’t know, would I? Seeing as how you haven’t introduced us.”
For five months now Maria and I have been a team, the dairy’s most dynamic duo, and for two of those, lovers, but she doesn’t know who I really am and soon I’ll be dead to her and everyone else and I’ll go back to my life in New York and write the exposé I was hired to. Before I know it, this entire time will come back to me only in dreams and an ache behind my eyes. Also faces. Maria. Small forehead, wide mouth caked in hot-pink lipstick, deep dimple in the chin. Basketball Juan and his shaving scar. Mrs. Gutierrez and her thick eyebrows, tiny nostrils, and teeth like cards falling. Nina Morales, who everyone says is a witch but only because she’s a lesbian and has a wart on her nose. The cows, too, those eyes. I think the cows are wise. I think they’ve forgotten everything we’ve ever known and I’ll say so in my article, but the editor will strike that entire section. Come on, she’ll say. You’re better than that.
I took the job at Yoder Dairy for the article, for my career, and for justice, but in just a few weeks it became all about Maria and this one-bedroom apartment next to the stairs. I’d had my eye on her for a while but who didn’t? Maria, who’s been in the States since she was eight and can speak better English than anyone, Maria and her black lace bras and animal-print pants and TVyNovelas magazines. Maria and her soft body and kind heart and hard mind. There isn’t much that gets by Maria. Except for me, of course. Not much she doesn’t see coming.
Except today.
“Who is it, Ramon? I mean really.” Maria’s big eyes narrow. A loose hair hangs from the arm of her T-shirt. One end’s in her eggs. “Tell me the truth.”
I don’t answer her. If I’m quiet, if I pretend to be affronted, she’ll give up and be sweet. If I say something, things will get ugly. Thrown dishes and screaming and threats. I eat fast and stare at the food. By the time the toast’s gone she’s hugging me and apologizing for being so cray-cray.
“It’s my fucking period. I’m sorry, baby. Tell your mama I said hi, okay? Tell her her son’s the handsomest man this side of forever.”
“She’s sick,” I say. What’s one more lie? “In the hospital. I’ll have to call her later.”
“Poor thing. You should call her now.”
“No time.”
Which is true. Maria glances at the cat clock over the stove and dribbles coffee on her shirt. “Oh shit.” We race each other to the bedroom and dress, grabbing clothes from the floor and laundry baskets and bags—you can indeed live without furniture, without HBO and artisan cheese and good coffee and air-conditioning—and we’re out on the street with the others before I can think of what sickness my perfectly healthy mother might be suffering from.
Mrs. Gutierrez is at the front of the line as usual. She tells us good morning, clutching her fat purse closer to her side. There are Nutter Butter cookies and homemade tamales in there. Also romance novels. She reads to me and Maria at lunchtime. Maria likes the cowboy ones best because the men wear chaps and the women aren’t white for once.
“Good morning, Mrs. Gutierrez,” we say.
“Good morning you two,” she says. “Another day in paradise.”
All of us live in the Ranasack Apartments because Helman Yoder, our boss at the dairy, owns the building and rent is peanuts. Of course, we don’t get paid anything either, so you do the math. Our Bottoms neighbors don’t like us much. There’s a whack-job militia man down the street who thinks it’s good fun to use printouts of Mexican faces for target practice and a few others who tend to spit when we walk by. The river floods at the first sign of rain, and no one ever comes to clean it up. No one comes to clean anything up. The streetlights are always broken and the yards are littered with pop cans and diapers and driftwood. Apparently Señor Yoder doesn’t believe in home repair. Windows leak and pipes leak and walls leak. We borrow five-gallon buckets like cups of sugar. When the river rises, the air smells like garbage and death.
Colliersville, Indiana, voted Most Livable City in America three times running.
When the bus pulls up, Mrs. Gutierrez waves us in front of her. She wants to sit with Mr. Aguilar and who can blame her? He always knows the weather report. Plus he’s a gossip and good-looking and a recent widower. I watch them flirt for a minute. It’s my last chance.
There’s a whirring sound and the heavy creak of metal on metal. Instead of opening the door, Fikus Ward, the bus driver, must have activated the wheelchair lift. We watch the platform settle on the ground, empty except for a single white shoestring, and then rise again. Someone at the back of the line claps and the door finally opens.
“C’mon, baby,” Maria says. She takes my hand and pulls me forward, tenderly. Remembering Mama, I guess.
Even though there’s nothing around our necks, we march single file because that’s what we did at first and habits don’t break. Plus, it makes getting on the bus easier and faster. No squeezing, no jostling, no fights. Fikus is eating an Egg McMuffin and flipping through AM radio stations. He drives the bus badly—all hit curbs and crossed centerlines and jerky pedal work—and Ulises has tried a hundred times to take the wheel but Fikus won’t budge, just grunts and says, “Mine mine mine mine,” off-gassing Old Crow all over the place.
He looks like rain has been falling on him for a hundred years. Except when Maria gets on.
“Good morning, Señor Ward,” she says to him, painting her accent on thick.
“Morning, darlin’.” Then he eyes her all the way down the aisle.
The only reason I don’t punch Fikus in his frog face is I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know any better. It’s like Ulises says. Boy ain’t right. And, unlike Señor Helman (or Señor Hell-man, as we call him from the privacy of our rooms), he has a heart in the right place, even if it pumps dumb.
The bus used to belong to the Baptist church. Maria and I sit in the same spot every day, in front of Ulises and right under a picture of Jesus blessing the little children. The children have pink, fat cheeks and sparkling eyes. Jesus stretches from one window top to another. He’s like Greenland on a globe. All out of proportion. There are Bible verses spiraling out from his enormous head: “Many waters cannot quench love”; “Jesus wept”; “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
Maria’s had two abortions. She says never again. She says, “With you, baby, everything’s different.”
There are twenty-nine of us total, most in our thirties, but there is a small pack of teens that s
ticks together and dreams of better jobs in bigger cities, and a few oldies but goodies who boss them around. When we take our seats, we’re as quiet as the birds. Not until Fikus drops us off at the barn do we say much of anything and even then we conserve our words, use only what is absolutely necessary to get the job done, because talking takes energy and it’s going to be a long day. It’s always a long day. Twelve hours typically. One time last month, when there was an accident with Big Bessie and her calf and all the milking machines malfunctioned at once, twelve hours turned to thirteen, then fourteen, and three women fainted dead away on the dairy floor, pale and panting and cold to the touch. Señor Helman had us carry them inside his house and stretch them out on the pretty area rug in the living room because the nearest hospital, he said, was too far away. His wife put wet cloths on the women’s heads and gave us glasses of lemonade and talked too loudly about tough economic times and stubborn cows and the heat. “Haha! But I bet you’re used to that.” Then she shrugged and haha-ed again and mumbled, “Poor souls,” because she thought she was safe and none of us could comprehend a single word she said.
Everyone thinks we don’t speak the language and we like it that way. That’s how we hear things we shouldn’t, things about no-good sons and out-of-wedlock, pregnant nieces and wives with alcohol and Percocet problems. Birdy Yoder or, as Maria puts it, Mrs. Yoder If You’re Nasty, falls into the latter category, a straight-up opioid and bourbon addict who started using when Helman decided to fire his nice white staff and hire us, Team Brown. Ulises was party to that particular information, overheard a whispered kitchen sink fight during which Helman refused to refill his wife’s prescription and she hissed that he cared more about “his Mexicans” than his own family. When Birdy saw Ulises standing there in the doorway she did what any good white wife would do—frowned and froze. But Ulises immediately assumed a sort of Speedy Gonzales demeanor, stammering and twirling his mustache, and I bet Birdy thought, Phew. I bet she was thinking, Thank God they’re illiterate and dumb. Otherwise …
Birdy being indiscreet is also how we found out about Wally, his love for dresses and lacy thongs and pink hair ribbons, and his “perverse thinking he was born this way, oh my God Helman can you imagine? We were there in the delivery room, both of us fully conscious. He came out of me an intact boy, there is no doubt in my mind. Why is our son doing this to us?” That was me in the doorway that time. I was there to tell Helman about a heifer gone dry and, because they both expected me to, I launched into breathless, broken Spanish, making all kinds of mistakes, slaughtering the subjunctive, and Helman said, “I can’t understand you. Speak English,” so I did, haltingly, like an Indian in a John Wayne movie. Palm raised, fingers straight as arrows. How.
In reality there are only a few of us who speak only Spanish. Jesus H. for one. Also Julio R. and Carlos S. and Elena V. and Elena’s four daughters, who all have painful acne, long legs, and perfect asses. Then there’s me, the one they call Ramon but whose name is really Gordy, who writes the Queen’s English and plans to blow the doors off this entire stinking operation in, oh, six hours or so.
Poor Mrs. Yoder, I think. Poor soul.
We smell the dairy before we see it. At five A.M. even odors seem loud, and once the scent of manure leaks in through the bus windows we huddle closer together and hope, perversely perhaps, for a crash, a fire, mad cow—anything that will take us back to our beds, even if we don’t have beds, just hot, musty cushions and the bodies of others.
“I’m hungry,” Maria whispers.
“Ask Mrs. G for a Nutter Butter.”
“Uh-uh, no more of those. I’m watching my figure.”
“I’ll watch it for you. So will Fikus.”
She smacks me on the arm, then looks down at her nails. They’re a mess of chipped glitter polish and jagged edges. Her hands are smooth on top, callused on bottom. They feel so nice that way, rubbing my back at night to get rid of the day knots. I pull her wrist up to my lips and kiss her veins.
“If you leave me for your text girl, I’ll kill myself.” She takes her wrist back and draws a nail across the underside. “Just like that.”
“You would never,” I say.
“What do I have to live for, huh?” Maria gives me a crooked smile. “This job? Fuck this fucking job.”
Like me, Maria is a “milker/general laborer/herdsman.” That’s what it says on our checks, anyway. “Sexist much?” she says, come payday. We’re all milkers/general laborers/herdspeople, except for Mr. Aguilar, who’s a “herd manager,” and a lot of the youngest workers who feed the beasts and sneak out as much as they can to smoke. No smoking for me and Maria. When the first milking’s over, she and Basketball Juan and I lead the cows out of the parlor and into the pasture to make sure they all get enough to eat before the next round. Then we inspect every single fucking teat for cuts and sores and signs of irritation, sometimes by squinting, other times with touch. The teats feel like deflated whoopee cushions.
We all love the cows. Love them as much as we hate them. On weekends, we eat pig. Pork rinds, bacon, chorizo. To celebrate our fourteen-hour paycheck I brought home steaks and Maria said, “Take them back. My God, I can’t eat Bessie.”
“I should go back to stripping,” Maria says now. “Anything is better than this.”
Behind us, Ulises amens. “Jesus Christ I hate this place.” Then he crosses himself. “Please forgive me, Lord. I am a sinner. I know not what I say.”
At the entrance to the dairy are life-size metal cows that in the morning dark look almost like the real thing. There are three of them and we’ve named them after the members of the Yoder family—the big boss man, Helman; his wife, Birdy; and their wannabe trans son, Wally. Cow Helman has long horns and a raised tail. Cow Birdy is fat and docile looking. There are silver flecks on her rump where the paint’s worn off. Cow Wally is small. His head is on the ground like he’s getting ready to charge. A few of the guys put a dress on Cow Wally a couple months back. A dress and a bright pink wig. Everyone thought it was pretty funny, everyone but Maria, who, the first chance she got, ripped the dress and the wig off Cow Wally and burned both in a barrel behind the apartments. Then she gave the presumed guilty parties—Ulises and Julio R.—a talking-to, called them bullies and bastards and worse. She made me swear I had nothing to do with it—I didn’t—and promise that if the like ever happened again I would kick the ass of whoever was responsible for such a cowardly and dickless prank. “As if the poor kid doesn’t have it hard enough,” Maria likes to say. “The kid is fucked.” She’s right. So I leave Cow Wally alone. I leave Human Wally alone, too, but I’m not above taking a pee break on Cow Birdy’s back right hoof when no one’s looking.
“Morning, Wally,” Maria says to the statue version. “Let’s make it a good day.”
The gravel drive up to the barn is pitted and Fikus hits every hole. The manure smell grows overwhelming. I reach out and palm the cool bus window and my phone buzzes one more time.
“Your poor mother,” Maria says, angling away from me. “I’ll have to send her a get-well card.”
The text reads, Bringing reinforcements. B ready.
My editor and I made an agreement with the authorities. I would go undercover, wear a wire, get the scoop, and gather evidence, foolproof, bulletproof, do what the cops had been unable to do themselves, and in return they would offer every worker amnesty, even Basketball Juan, who’s slow and might be a danger to himself. American citizenship.
“No ICE,” I’d told the cop. Randy. That’s it. Randy.
“Cool,” he’d said.
What did he mean by reinforcements? And even if everyone gets to stay, they’ll be jobless and it will be all my fault. Where will they work then? How will they live? They won’t go back home. I know that much. They’ll stay and rot next to the Ranasack like the washed-up carcasses of fish, of frogs, of puppies that have lost their way.
And they’ll hate me for a while. They’ll sit in the plastic chairs where I used to sit, drink
the same swill beer I used to drink with them, and say, Ramon. Fucking Ramon. Did you know his name was really Gordy? What kind of name is that? They’ll keep it down in front of Maria but still they’ll curse me, toss out the T-shirt I left behind. Rip up my picture. They’ll forget me like they’ve forgotten what it was like to live near the ocean where they grew up. They’ll say, The ocean? What was that? We’ll never see that again.
I will. I’ll see it. I’ll take the award money—my piece will impress the hell out of people who read such things—and buy a ticket to Cancún. That’s the big difference between me and Basketball Juan, between me and Maria and Ulises and Mrs. G. A plane ticket. A credit card. The option. I’ll hate Cancún, all bikinis and beer bongs. I’ll pick it as penance. I’ll drink the water.
But for now, I’m one of them. For now, I’m we and they’re me and there’s the bus ride coming to an end and Maria’s head on my shoulder.
“Ramon,” she whispers to me as we pull up in front of the barn where the lights blink on, an almost hello. “I think we should end this. You know, see other people.”
I jerk to attention, alarmed, then Maria kisses my jaw and laughs. Her teeth are smeared with lipstick but she’s still the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
“Just kidding.” She kisses me again, on the lips this time. Lingering. “April Fool’s.” Her fingernails trickle down my face and she shakes her head like, Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.
Collarsville
(May)
Daddy and Uncle Scottie are in a militia, which they say is a lot like high school only in the militia no one tells them what to do because they’re the bosses and they can chew gum and eat whenever they want. Also they shoot things. Paper targets mostly, but once in a while birds or squirrels or trees. And they do this agility-training stuff on an obstacle course Uncle Scottie built in our backyard out of old burn barrels and fence posts and sometimes they pretend it’s end-times and the government’s right there in their faces demanding that Daddy and Uncle Scottie and the other guys—there’s maybe ten in toto; it’s a pretty exclusive group—surrender their firearms and then it is so on. That’s when they start shooting up the ground, the barrels, anything that’s around. They shoot up the sky if they feel like it, and even though it’s May it feels like the Fourth of July and I’m like, This doesn’t resemble school in any way. This is anti-school.
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