Dream Things True

by Marie Marquardt

  “Ooooh, you are in TROUBLE!”

  Alma turned to see her cousin Selena behind her, still wearing her yellow SpongeBob pajamas.

  “Mind your own business, Selena.”

  “I know what you did. I heard Uncle Lalo talking to Mami about it before he went to work.”

  Alma was tempted to ask whether Raúl had been there to hear it. If her brother knew, there would be more hell to pay when he got back from work, and too many questions that she wouldn’t know how to answer.

  “Please, Selena. Just go back to your TV show.”

  Selena’s sister, Isa, called in from the other room, “Did you kiss him?”

  Alma felt a warm blush rise to her cheeks as her lips recalled the tug toward Evan’s. But then she remembered the harsh voice of her father, tearing them apart.

  “Enough questions,” she said to her cousins. “It’s none of your business.”

  Selena huffed, shoved her hands onto her hips, and spun away.

  Alma walked to the living room, where Isa was sprawled on the couch, eating Doritos from a large bag.

  “Why don’t you make yourself useful and feed the dog, Isa?”

  “You’re not my mother,” Isa said angrily. “Plus, I fed Pelé yesterday. It’s somebody else’s turn.”

  In Isa’s thirteen-year-old mind, it was always somebody else’s turn.

  Alma opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink and pulled out a bucket and some soap. She dug around, looking for the big yellow sponge that her dad used to wash his Bronco.

  How was it possible that the best night of her life could be followed by this day? She probably should be grateful that her dad hadn’t woken her up with her bags already packed and thrown her in a bus headed for her abuela’s house in Mexico.

  The house phone rang. Knowing her cousins wouldn’t get up to answer, Alma dropped the bucket and ran to get it.

  “¿Bueno?”

  “Alma?”

  “Mrs. King? How did you know I was back?”

  She felt her heart expand, and a smile made its way across her face.

  “I saw your brother at the Dollar General.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alma said. “I mean, you worked so hard to get me to North Atlanta, and now I’m back where I started.”

  “Good Lord, child. You had two years of excellent schooling. You’re coming back to GHS with a perfect grade point average. Don’t you dare go telling me that it was all for nothin’!”

  Oh, how Alma loved Mrs. King.

  “So, how are you?” Alma asked.

  “Bored to tears, that’s how I am. The county finally forced me to retire.”

  “What?” How could they force Mrs. King to retire? She was the best middle school counselor ever. “I bet they’ll be begging you to come back after the first day, Mrs. King.”

  “Oh, I reckon they’ll muddle along without me.”

  Alma wasn’t so sure.

  “On the bright side,” Mrs. King continued, “I have more time for you.”

  “For me?” Alma asked.

  “I have a plan—”

  Another plan. Maybe this one actually would work.

  “—to get you into college, and we’re gonna find you a big ol’ scholarship.”

  Alma loved this plan. “I’m all ears.”

  “Can you meet me tomorrow?” Mrs. King asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, I have to ask my dad, but I think it will be OK. Can we meet after church?”

  “That sounds just fine. I’ll pick you up at Holy Cross.”

  “OK, sure,” Alma said. “And Mrs. King?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh, good heavens, child,” Mrs. King replied. “It’s me should be thanking you. The good Lord knew I needed a project somethin’ awful. So he brought you on back home to me.”

  “Then I guess I should thank the good Lord,” Alma said, laughing. And then, just for old times’ sake, she threw in some Spanish.

  “Hasta mañana,” she said.

  “Haabsta mayntanya,” Mrs. King replied.

  She always begged Alma to teach her Spanish phrases, but that woman was a lost cause.

  FIVE

  Dream in the Desert

  Cold flesh pressed against her cheek. The distant, droning noise came closer. Metal sliced through air. Dogs barked as a blinding light cut through the sky. Sand pelted against her exposed skin—searing, burning.

  The men leapt from a helicopter and lunged toward her, arms outstretched, heavy guns dangling from their shoulders. The dark-eyed man pulled her close, pressing her body against his chest. His uniform chafed against her hot skin. Into the heat that enveloped her, Alma screamed a silent scream.

  “Alma, Alma, despiértate, hija.”

  Alma flailed, pushing away the heat of the man’s hands—clinging to the cold.

  “Es un sueño, hijita. Es un sueño. Solamente un sueño…”

  Alma shot up in bed, disoriented. She flung herself away from the arms that encircled her. But these were not the arms of the dark-eyed man. It was her aunt, begging her to wake up, assuring her it was just a dream.

  “Ay, pobrecita,” her tía Pera said, grasping Alma’s shoulders. “¿El mismo sueño?”

  “Sí, Tía. No big deal.”

  “I wish you would tell me, hija…”

  “What? About the dream? Why would I tell you?”

  “No sé, tal vez…”

  “Tía Pera,” Alma said, sitting up on the edge of the bed, “dreams are just the random firing of neurons. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Tía Pera raised her eyebrows. “If they’re so random, then why do you keep having the same one, hija? Tell me that, sabelotodo.”

  Her aunt was calling her a know-it-all, which she probably deserved.

  “We’re going to be late for church,” Alma said dryly.

  Tía Pera glanced at the phone on Alma’s bedside table and let out a squeak.

  “Tienes razón, hija,” she said. “We have to pick up your tía Dolores from the plant on the way. Ya nos espera.”

  Alma jumped out of bed and began to dress quickly. If Tía Dolores waited at the plant for even a moment longer than she had to, they would all suffer.

  Alma’s aunt Dolores believed that all their relatives owed her their lives since she was one of the first to get a job at the poultry plant. Over the years, Tía Dolores had scored jobs there for most of her family members, which the family perceived as fortunate. They needed jobs, and the work at Silver Ribbon offered steady pay. She would never tell her family this, but Alma thought it sounded awful. She just couldn’t imagine pulling apart dead chickens all day. Or, even worse, chasing live ones. Her cousins who worked as chicken catchers spent all night scrambling after those birds—apparently they were more docile at night, but her cousins still came home in the mornings with bruised knees and less than a hundred dollars pay. No matter how desperate she got for work, she would never agree to work at Silver Ribbon. Never.

  As Alma tugged on her jeans, Tía Pera shook Isa.

  “¡Apúrate, hija! Hurry up!”

  Not wanting to stick around for the theatrics of her thirteen-year-old cousin, Alma grabbed her phone and headed toward the kitchen.

  A text:

  It’s Evan. I miss you (but definitely not U).

  Swoon. Again.

  “Hija, let’s go,” her tía called from the front door.

  Alma moved through the kitchen in a daze until Tía Pera grabbed her arm and yanked her toward the car.

  * * *

  Spooning a huge pile of grits onto his plate, Evan glanced toward Willis, hard at work in his puffy chef’s hat and white uniform.

  “One western omelet for our soccer star!” Willis called out cheerfully as he slid a four-egg omelet onto Evan’s plate.

  Willis knew everything about Evan and his family, down to the minute details of their favorite omelet ingredients: cheddar cheese, but not too much; two slices of crumbled bacon, extra
crispy; red and green peppers. Evan liked Willis, but truthfully he knew virtually nothing about him.

  “You’re holdin’ up my line, boy!” Willis called out, teasing.

  Evan stepped back as Willis moved efficiently on to the next omelet.

  Weaving his way through the crowded room, he wished, for a moment, that he and his rapidly cooling western omelet could become invisible. It always bugged him that Sunday brunch at the club seemed—despite the fantastic grits and expertly prepared omelets—to be more about chatting with the people at surrounding tables than eating. “Evan, my boy!” Mr. Watson’s booming voice dispelled his fantasy. “How are you this morning?”

  “Great,” Evan replied. “I’m looking forward to graduating.”

  “You planning to follow your uncle Sexton to Wake or your daddy to Washington and Lee?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Well,” Mr. Watson broke in, his face broadening into a wide grin, “if you decide to aim for a superior school, my offer’s still open to write you a letter for Vandy.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Watson. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “The dean up there is an old tennis buddy of mine.”

  “Great,” Evan said as he glanced involuntarily toward his heap of cooling grits.

  “Well, go on, son. Don’t keep your uncle waiting,” Mr. Watson said, shooing him along with his hand.

  “Uh, enjoy your breakfast,” Evan replied, turning toward his table.

  Evan finally sat across from his uncle Sexton. Evan’s uncle was a U.S. senator. He spent most of his time in DC, but whenever he was back in Gilberton, he made a point of meeting Evan for brunch at the club. That was pretty cool of him since approximately ten thousand people sought a meeting with him every time he crossed over the Georgia state line.

  “So what’s the plan, son?”

  Evan didn’t have to ask for clarification. He knew this was to be another college talk. He decided to ease into it.

  “I’m seeing some real interest from Wake Forest, which is great, and also from Chapel Hill. I’m pretty sure Georgia and Auburn are safety schools. The coaches like me.”

  “Well, that’s just fantastic, son. I’ll go on and call John Stapleton. He’s a big alum at Wake. And I’ve got about a dozen Tar Heels up in DC that I’ll get to put in a good word.”

  “That’s great, Uncle Sexton,” Evan said. But it wasn’t. If a dozen people wrote a letter, he’d be expected to accept an offer.

  “What about your daddy’s school?

  “W and L? Uh, it’s too small, and, uh, the soccer program…”

  “No apologies needed.”

  Evan took a deep breath and launched into the hard part.

  “Uh, Cal’s recruiting me, too, which is pretty exciting. I think I wanna go there.”

  “To Berkeley, California?” his uncle asked, a bit too loudly.

  “Yes, sir. Berkeley. It’s a great program. And, uh, the school is really good, too.”

  “And I’m guessin’ your momma’s not too pleased?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you know she could hardly survive livin’ out there after she married your daddy.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  Evan’s parents met when she was a sophomore at Sweet Briar College. She and her sorority sisters spent many evenings at the University of Virginia libraries, working on what they actually called their “MRS degrees.” Most of her friends liked to hang out at the law school, looking for future husbands, but Evan’s mom preferred the medical school library—she thought there were already too many lawyers in her family, and the last thing she wanted to do was marry a politician. Her family line was filled with them.

  As soon as his mom graduated, his dad gave her what she thought she wanted: a husband as far away from the world of Southern politics as possible, and a ticket to join him in Northern California, where he had begun a medical residency. She didn’t last long in California, though. Californians, she learned, lacked Southern manners and courtesy.

  Still, the “left coast” (the disparaging phrase Evan’s dad always used when discussing the San Francisco area) seemed to have a magnetic pull for Evan. Evan wasn’t really sure why. He just knew that the world was a whole lot bigger and more interesting than this town, and he needed to see for himself. For years, he had watched cousins and friends go away to college a couple of hours away and then come back to marry the girls they grew up down the street from. They all just settled so easily into their parents’ patterns—same club, same neighborhood, same church, same vacation spots, same lies. It made him sad to think that all those people couldn’t come up with anything else to do with their lives—anything even remotely original. He would do something else—anything else. He was absolutely sure of it.

  Evan’s uncle took a bite of his omelet and chewed slowly.

  “Damn, son,” he said, letting his fist fall to the table, “I don’t think I can help you out there.”

  “It’s OK,” Evan said. “I mean, I understand if you don’t support my decision, Uncle Sexton.”

  His uncle leaned back in his chair. “Well, of course I support you, son,” he said. “I can handle a little grief from your momma. I’ll even run some interference for you.”

  Evan felt his shoulders relax as relief coursed through his body.

  “I just don’t think I’ve got any good connections out there.”

  It came as no surprise that a conservative U.S. senator from the South was not well loved in Northern California.

  “I’m gonna do my best to come up with somebody to call, but you may just have to wow ’em with your fancy footwork.”

  “I can do that,” Evan said, smiling.

  “Oh, I know you can, boy. I’ve seen you out there enough times to be absolutely sure of it.”

  That was another cool thing about Evan’s uncle. Every season, he made it out to at least a couple of home soccer games, which was always a couple more than Evan’s dad.

  His dad preferred baseball.

  * * *

  Crammed into the bench seat of the minivan with her cousins, Alma watched as they turned the corner and entered the country road that led to the Silver Ribbon chicken processing plant. Dozens of American flags flew on the corner, lining the property of U.S. Auto Sales, a used car company that sold junky cars under the bilingual motto, “Buy here, pay here/Compra aquí, paga aquí.” Its location a block away from the plant gave U.S. Auto a brisk business among the bone poppers, cartilage removers, breast cutters, chiller hangers, and backup killers.

  Alma knew the details of every job at the plant since members of her extended family had done almost all of them. She knew that it was always freezing cold inside, that workers had to stand still on their feet for hours without talking or listening to music; she knew cleanup was one of the worst jobs, but that skin puller was one of the hardest. She knew that machine operators had the best jobs, and that working as a thigh inspector was unusually exhausting. But she also understood that this plant was the reason her family even knew that Gilberton, Georgia, existed. Without it, and without Americans’ apparently inexhaustible appetite for chicken parts, they might all still be farming the rocky soil of San Juan, their little town in Oaxaca, Mexico.

  Alma usually heard the plant before she saw it. A loud horn would announce the opening or closing of the gate in the barbed wire fence that surrounded the entire facility, and then another high-pitched bell would signify the end of the night shift.

  But something was wrong: she heard none of the normal sounds today. Smokestacks rose above the scrubby pinewoods that surrounded the plant, but no smoke rose from them.

  They pulled to the edge of the fence. The gate remained closed. Normally workers would be spilling out by now, and others would be lined up to enter.

  “Alma, look,” Raúl said. Her brother nodded toward a line of buses inside the empty yard. They were dark blue, with a gold seal on the side.

  Department of Homeland Security.


  Alma suddenly felt dizzy, as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down.

  “Madre de Dios,” Alma’s tía Pera whispered.

  The buses stood empty, and so did the yard, eerily empty. Men, still as statues, lined the perimeter of the gray building. They wore dark-blue uniforms, black pith helmets, and tall combat boots. Three letters stretched across the back of their bulletproof vests: “ICE.” And below those letters: “POLICE.”

  Alma swallowed hard and squeezed her eyes shut. Was this really happening?

  Raúl leaned forward. “Keep driving, slowly,” he said to their dad. “Don’t stop.”

  Alma forced herself to open her eyes and watch.

  They drove by, in heavy silence. Alma’s cousin Selena crawled over her to press her face and hands against the window. She stared out the window, mesmerized. At six years old, even she knew exactly what this was. How many times had they seen it on television? How many times had it haunted their dreams? An ICE raid. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would put anyone working at the factory without a legitimate Social Security number onto those buses, take them to detention, and then send them out of the United States.

  When they passed the building, Alma’s father pulled into an empty driveway and turned the car around. They had to go back. They had to see with their own eyes what they all felt in the pit of their stomachs.

  They drove by a second time. The metal doors of the plant rolled open, and the workers emerged in two orderly rows. The poultry plant seemed like a prison already, except that the inmates still wore their white hairnets, long white coats, and knee-high waterproof boots. The yellow cloths that covered their mouths when they worked hung limply around their necks. Handcuffs bound their wrists, and they walked flanked by more men in dark combat gear—dozens of them, with guns and sticks slung low around their waists. But no one struggled, no one ran, no one even tugged against the handcuffs. The workers all walked slowly, eyes down, staring at their rubber boots. They boarded the windowless buses that awaited them.