The Wetback and Other Stories

by Ron Arias

  By the second week the neighborhood had been placed under quarantine—in case the starving condition turned out to be contagious. Reserve troops from the Glendale Armory guarded all exits and entrances, while overhead two helicopters and several camera-equipped drones watched for anything suspicious, especially along the riverbank on one side and the Elysian Park hills on the other.

  About this time, Fausto lifted his eyes from a worm-eaten page, crawled past a dozing Carmela to the front door and feebly shouted, “I know! I know!”

  A male nurse stationed outside stared through the rusty screen at the decrepit figure on the floor. “You say something?”

  “Yes,” Fausto cried. “Take me to the baby’s house.”

  “Okay, but they’re not going to let you in.”

  The young man then carried Fausto across the street to Tiburcio’s house. The soldiers, reporters and medical people gathered on the lawn looked like a rookery of beakless, all-white penguins.

  “Hold on!” a soldier shouted to the nurse carrying Fausto, who was dressed in blue, flannel pajamas. “You can’t take him in there.”

  Fausto wagged a bony finger at the Plexiglas panel of the hooded soldier. “I know something . . . important,” Fausto said.

  The soldier hesitated, glanced at a nearby, nodding doctor and gestured with his rifle to the front door.

  A television cameraman hoisted his camera onto his right shoulder. “Hey, Trish,” he called to a slight figure at the curb who was checking her phone screen. “The old man!”

  By the time the cameraman pointed his lens in the right direction, it was too late: Fausto had disappeared into Tiburcio’s house.

  Inside, the nurse set Fausto down on a chair. “Get me a banana,” he said to the medical team.

  “What?” one of the hazmats asked.

  “A banana,” Fausto repeated. “A ripe one, not green.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Said he wants a ripe banana.”

  “So get him a banana.”

  “Right, a yellow banana.”

  Upstairs, Fausto found Tiburcio lying in bed under a sheet and two blankets. Tiburcio’s eyes were closed and his hands were folded over his once great belly. Fausto shook his friend by the shoulder.

  “Shh,” a voice said, “he’s going to say something.”

  “Fred, get the lights on this.”

  “Hey, quiet!”

  “Dammit, get the lights on.”

  “Shhh!”

  “Make room, cable comin’ through!”

  “Make room yourself.”

  “Shut up, you guys. The old man’s trying to speak.”

  The room turned quiet. “Bring the baby,” Fausto said, “and the banana.”

  After Lupe was brought in, Fausto had him placed beside his father on the blanket. Tiburcio smiled at his chubby bed-mate.

  Fausto now placed Tiburcio’s hand on the baby’s stomach. “Watch,” Fausto said, moving the hand to Tiburcio’s mouth. “First it goes in the mouth, then you chew it, then you swallow it, then it goes down to your stomach.” Fausto slowly repeated the words and motions.

  After the third lesson, Fausto took the banana, peeled it and gave some to the baby. Tiburcio watched Lupe open and swallow his first bit of solid food.

  “Now, do the same,” Fausto instructed, nudging the rounded top of the fruit between his friend’s quivering lips. The cavernous eyes blinked twice. Tiburcio bit down. “Yes,” his eyes seemed to say, “the taste of a banana.”

  The crowd of hooded penguins cheered, cameras clicked and one broadcast reporter snatched up the banana peel to dangle before the lens, then held a microphone to Fausto’s face.

  “Could you tell our viewers what you did, Mister?”

  “Tejada, Fausto Tejada.”

  “Mister Fajada, what exactly did you do?”

  Fausto, now eating a banana himself, swallowed, cleared his throat and took a swig of water from a plastic bottle. “It’s a remedy for curses and lost appetites,” he said. “It’s the fruit of Capricorn, the goat . . . ”

  The reporter frowned and waited a moment longer. “Is that it? A banana?”

  “A ripe one,” Fausto said with a mischievous scan of the expectant gazes behind all the rectangular, Plexiglas face masks. “The Tarahumaras of Chihuahua believe that goats eat everything—grass, leaves, flowers, hierbas . . . ”

  “What?”

  “Herbs!” a Chicano cableman shouted from the back of the room.

  “What did he say?”

  “Bananas and herbs.”

  “Louder!”

  “Bananas and herbs!”

  Fausto raised a hand and waited for the crowd to quiet down. “If you want a cure for the mysterious,” he said, addressing the camera, “you eat some . . . you know, whatever’s on the ground. But I knew Tiburcio wouldn’t eat that, so I gave him a banana, like the horoscope says. Actually one book said goats really only like the leaves of banana and plantain plants. But they get by on all the rest because most of them don’t live in the tropics. So they make do.”

  He nodded and smiled when he saw Tiburcio guiding a bottle of water to his mouth.

  “Bananas? The leaves? Mister Fachardo, you can’t be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “You expect us to believe this is a cure? Bananas? Really?”

  “Why not? It works for my friend. Try giving some to the baby’s mother. You’ll see. She needs it the most, poor thing.”

  Just then, another cordless microphone weaseled its way between two hazmatted figures. A shrill but muffled voice asked, “Mister Fajada! What if a person’s allergic to bananas? Or doesn’t like the taste? What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, ma’am. Look, I know I was taking a chance, pero más vale ser caprichudo que mudo.”

  “English, please, Mister Tejardo.”

  The cableman in back was laughing, then he shouted, “It’s an old saying! It goes something like . . . uh . . . it’s better to take a chance on . . . a banana . . . than to be silent.”

  “That it?”

  “Well, in Spanish it rhymes.”

  “Okay,” another reporter said, “but what are you saying, what does it mean?”

  “Don’t be afraid of taking chances,” Fausto said. “And you better do it soon—before it’s too late.”

  “See to it,” a deep voice ordered. “Immediately.”

  “Yessir!”

  Tiburcio, cradling the baby, tugged at Fausto’s sleeve and whispered, “Ask them if they’ve got anything else to eat.”

  Tiburcio got whatever he wanted and very soon everyone else did too. Donations from all over the country poured in for the hungry people of Elysian Valley. Most everyone had breathed on death, had even touched death, but fortunately there were no unhappy endings.

  Months later, when the ordeal was over, a proud Tiburcio could be seen parading around his newest offspring, swearing that—rumors to the contrary—his little Lupe would never work in a circus.

  The Story Machine

  That summer they discovered him by the river playing his old tape recorder to the weeds and dry rocks along the lower bank. His mouth was like Henry’s mother’s mouth, turned down at the ends. His thick eyebrows, hair flaring out at the edges, looked like Tina’s father’s eyebrows. The man’s wobbly saucer ears were those of Carmela’s uncle’s ears. And he had the smooth, muscled arms of Raul’s stepfather.

  The children stepped closer, at first hesitantly, then eagerly, to stare at this man with his machine and his green dog, the big spools of tape going around and around.

  They hardly noticed the dog, which besides its bright color was scrawny and had sunken, lazy eyes. Henry Mendoza, oldest of the four children, asked the man what he was doing with the machine

  “Playing stories . . . Listen.”

  The children sat down on the sloping concrete and waited.

  “How come it stopped?” Henry
asked.

  The man glanced at the top of the river bank. “It’s better if we go over to the middle of the river.”

  Tina shook her head. “My mom says I can’t go in the river.”

  “It’s dry,” the tape recorder announced, its spools slowly turning round and round. “Nothing will happen to you.”

  “There’s still some quicksand,” Carmela said, ignoring the machine. “Last year a boy died in the quicksand.”

  “Nothing will happen,” the machine said in a louder voice. “I promise.”

  “Why’s he green?” Raúl asked, pointing to the dog.

  “Is that you talking in the machine?” Henry said.

  “How do you do it?” Tina added, wrinkling her nose.

  “No more questions until we move,” the man said, and he rose like a tired bedspring, lifted the machine by the handle and went off toward the dry river bed. The dog scratched its ribs with a hind foot and waited for the children to follow.

  “All right,” the man said after they had gathered on a sandbar, “who wants to hear the first story?”

  Four hands went up.

  “Who was first?”

  “Me!” they all shrieked.

  “Let’s start with the youngest first. What’s your name?”

  “Raúl.”

  “Okay, Raulito. This one’s for you.”

  The machine spoke but this time it was Raúl’s voice.

  Tina’s father is mad. She forgot to empty the wastebasket and he punished her. She has to stand in the corner of the kitchen for a long time. Now she sees an ant crawling near the dirty dishes. She asks the ant to take her place so she can play in the sink. The ant says okay, and Tina gets down like an ant and starts to play. It’s a lot of fun because she can slide down the knife with the butter, jump in the cranberry sauce, do a somersault into the spaghetti and skim across the dishwater on a tortilla chip.

  The three children listening to Raúl’s voice on the machine turned to look at their little companion. He was silent for a moment and then he smiled, feeling a little proud. “Now it’s Carmela’s turn!” he said excitedly.

  Carmela blushed and her cheeks turned the color of an apricot’s ripe, reddish side.

  The man never touched the machine, and the reels of magnetic tape slowly kept turning. When the contraption began to speak with Carmela’s voice, which was very deep for a girl, the dog raised its ears and flicked its tail once.

  Henry wants to be a frog and hop around the house. But he doesn’t know how to be a frog. His mother is always sad and he wants to make her laugh. Finally he meets a big frog, a giant frog with green, bumpy skin. Can I borrow your skin, Henry asks, and the frog says, here, but don’t take too long, it’s all I’ve got. When Henry goes up to his mother, at first she thinks he’s a frog. Then she sees his socks are inside out, and she starts to laugh.

  The children laughed, too, and even more when the man’s green dog began to hop over the sandbar making sounds like a frog.

  Then it was Tina’s turn. The machine spoke with her small, squeaky voice: Raúl asked his stepfather if he would like to have a real son, not just a stepson. But his father wouldn’t answer. Right away they went to see the monkeys at the zoo. For a long time, Raúl said, you think I’m a monkey. And his father tickled him on his throat and made funny noises the way monkeys sometimes do.

  After a long yawn, the dog put its head in Carmela’s lap and completely relaxed under the soft strokes along its back.

  It was Henry’s turn.

  Carmela’s Tío Fausto is always bringing home bums and winos. One time he brought a lady who looked lost. She also looked very poor because she had holes in her sweater. Fausto gave her food, then drove her to where she lived under the bridge. Everyone knew she was bad, and Fausto even let her steal the clock that was on the television. Later on, he said he was glad she didn’t take the TV too.

  “I have to go now,” the man said, switching off the machine. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Carmela petted the dog’s green hair once more. Then it trotted after the man who climbed up the concrete slope and disappeared over the top.

  “That was neat,” Henry said, breaking the silence.

  The others nodded slowly like grownups, then ran across the sand, over the gravel and back to their homes.

  The stories were not kept secret. The four children told everyone about the man and his machine. Their parents smiled or asked silly questions or said something about not speaking to strangers. No one really worried. They were just kid stories.

  But the stories came true. The next day Tina’s father punished her and she played on the dirty dishes.

  Henry forgot to take off his socks, and his mother laughed.

  And because it was Saturday, Raúl went to the zoo with his father, heading straight for the monkey cages.

  Even Carmela’s story about her uncle and the lady came true. Only she didn’t take the clock. Instead it was a bar of Dial soap and an old bottle of her aunt’s perfume.

  Every afternoon the children went to the river. The man seemed to like it there, but he would always leave in a hurry as soon as the machine finished its stories. The only thing he told them was never to follow him and his dog. And they never did, mostly because they didn’t want him to get mad and maybe go away for good.

  Even though the stories came true, the older people still weren’t too curious about the stranger with the story machine. After all, they were harmless stories, something that made their children happy.

  But one day Carmela’s voice spoke from the machine and said that Henry’s older sister had died in a car accident. Henry felt like crying when he heard the words.

  When the children went home, as usual they repeated their stories. Henry choked when he came to the end of his. Soon the prediction spread throughout the neighborhood, and his older sister was locked in her room in case there was some truth to the story.

  Parents were furious. Tina’s father rounded up neighbors to follow him like a posse behind the sheriff. They were going to find the stranger—and who knew what they would do to him? The four children tagged behind, hoping their friend would not be found.

  After a long search, the posse discovered the stranger and fell on him like a flock of crows. He had been sitting with his machine and green dog, quietly chewing a carrot among the tumbleweeds under the freeway bridge. Before they could reach him and his barking companion, he turned to the crowd and hesitated, as if waiting for the children to catch up and go with him. Then he jerked to his feet and sprinted away with the dog. He seemed to fly, barely touching the ground, over the far bank, quickly losing himself among the freight yard trains on the Glendale side of the river.

  Henry’s mother found the machine, which in his hurry the man appeared to have forgotten. She raised it high in the air and flung it hard on the concrete. Then she tore the plastic tape into crinkled, spaghetti-like strips.

  Hardly anyone slept that night. Many were thinking Henry’s sister would somehow escape from her bedroom, drive away in the family car and die in an accident. But the next day came and went, and nothing happened to her. She even confessed that on the night that the story predicted she would die, she had slipped out a window to go see her boyfriend in Griffith Park.

  Since the accident story never came true, the Elysian Valley parents were relieved, some of them hoping that the stranger might return with a new machine to amuse their kids. But the four who found the man with the green dog remained in a funk for weeks. Then gradually, little by little, they remembered and began to tell and listen to their own stories.

  Acknowledgements

  A House On The Island—Revista Chicano-Riqueña: A Decade of Hispanic Literature, An Anniversary Anthology. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1982.

  Awakening—first published in this short story collection.

  Bedbugs—first version published with the title “Chinches,” in Latin American Literary Review 5/10 (Spring-Summer 1977).

  The Boy
Who Ate Himself—Quarry West (1980).

  Canine Cool—Original version published as “Perros” in Caracol 2/ 4 (1975).

  The Castle—Bilingual Review 3/2 (May-August 1976).

  The Chamizal Express—Open Places 37 (Spring/Summer 1984).

  Eddie—first published in this short story collection.

  El Mago—El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought 3/3 (Spring 1970).

  The Interview—Revista Chicano-Riqueña 2/1 (Invierno 1974).

  Lupe—Cuentos Chicanos: A Short Story Anthology. Revised edition. Eds. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Antonio Márquez. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

  Stoop Labor—Revista Chicano-Riqueña 2/1 (Invierno 1974).

  Story Machine—Revista Chicano-Riqueña: A Decade of Hispanic Literature, An Anniversary Anthology. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1982.

  The Wetback—original versions published as a chapter in the novel The Road to Tamazunchale (Reno, NV: West Coast Poetry Review Press, 1975) and in First Chicano Literary Prize 1974-1975, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Irvine, 1975.

  ALSO BY RON ARIAS

  The Road to Tamazunchale

  Five Against the Sea

  Moving Target: A Memoir of Pursuit

  Healing from the Heart (with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Lisa Oz)

  White’s Rules: Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time (with Paul D. White)

  My Life as a Pencil (a chapbook)