Dedication
To my mother, olivia,
and my father, victor
Contents
Dedication
1 The Baseball Glove
2 Rico’s Pool Hall
3 Charity
4 The Bullet
5 The Garden
6 The Rifle
7 The Boxing Match
8 Family Affair
9 Dying of Love
10 A Test of Courage
11 Going Home
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
Questions for Victor Martinez
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
The Baseball Glove
That summer my brother, Bernardo, or “Nardo,” as we call him, flipped through more jobs than a thumb through a deck of cards. First he was a dishwasher, then a busboy, then a parking attendant and, finally, a patty turner for some guy who never seemed to be in his hamburger stand for more than ten minutes at a time. (Mom believed he sold marijuana, or did some other illegal shamelessness.) Nardo lost one job for not showing up regular enough, another for showing up too regular—the boss hated his guts. The last job lost him when the owner of the hamburger stand packed up unexpectedly and left for Canada.
The job Nardo misses most, though, was when he worked as a busboy for the Bonneville Lakes Golf and Catering Service. He says it was the only time he ever got to touch elbows with rich people. The parties they catered served free daiquiris, whisky drinks and cold beer, really cold, in big barrels choking with ice. At some parties, like the one he got fired from, they passed out tickets for juicy prizes like motorcycles, TV sets, stereos and snow skis. The last party had a six-piece band and a great huge dance floor so the “old fogies,” as my brother called them, could get sloshed and make fools of themselves.
As it turns out, he and a white guy named Randy took off their busboy jackets and began daring each other to get a ticket and ask a girl to dance. Randy bet Nardo wouldn’t do it, and Nardo bet he would, and after a two-dollar pledge he steered for the ticket lady.
“I could’ve hashed it around a bit, you know, Manny,” he said. “I could’ve double- and triple-dared the guy a couple of times over, then come up with a good excuse. But that ain’t my style.”
Instead he tapped Randy’s fingers smooth as fur and walked up to the ticket lady. She peered out from behind the large butcher-paper-covered table at the blotches of pasta sauce on his black uniform pants and white shirt—which were supposed to go clean with the catering service’s light-orange busboy jacket, but didn’t—and said, “Ah, what the hell,” and tore him out a tag.
Before the little voice nagging inside him could talk louder, Nardo asked the nearest girl for a dance. She had about a million freckles and enough wire in her mouth to run a toy train over. They stumbled around the dance floor until the band mercifully ground to a halt. She looked down at his arm kind of shylike and said, “You dance real nice.”
Now my brother had what you could call a sixth sense. “Es muy vivo,” as my grandma used to say about a kid born that way, and with Nardo it was pretty much a scary truth. He could duck trouble better than a champion boxer could duck a right cross. He made hairline escapes from baths, belt whippings and scoldings just by not being around when punishment came through the door. So I believed him when he said something ticklish crawled over his shoulder, and when he turned around, there, across the dance floor, in front of the bandleader about to make an announcement over the microphone, was his boss, Mr. Baxter—and boy was he steamed!
Mr. Baxter owned the catering service, and sometimes, my brother said, the way he’d yell at the busboys, it was like he owned them, too. Mr. Baxter didn’t say anything, just pointed to the door, then at Nardo, and scratched a big X across his chest. Just like that, he was fired.
The way Nardo tells it, you’d think he did that man a favor working for him. “Don’t you ever get braces, Manny,” he said, as if that were the lesson he’d learned.
At first Nardo didn’t want to go to the fields. Not because of pride, although he’d have used that excuse at the beginning if he could’ve gotten away with it. It was more because, like anyone else, he didn’t like sobbing out tears of sweat in 110-degree sun. That summer was a scorcher, maybe the worst in all the years we’d lived in that valley desert, which our town would’ve been if the irrigation pumped in from the Sierra were turned off. I could tell how searing it was by the dragged-out way my mom’s roses drooped every morning after I watered them. The water didn’t catch hold. The roses only sighed a moment before the sun sucked even that little breather away.
Although it was hard for Nardo to duck my mom’s accusing eyes, especially when Magda, my sister, came home slumped from the laundry after feeding bedsheets all day into a steam press, he was refusing to work anymore. Whether one tried threats, scoldings, or even shaming, which my mom tried almost every other day, nothing worked. We all gave it a shot, but none more vigorously than my dad. He’d yell and stomp around a little space of anger he’d cut in our living room, a branch of spit dangling from his lip. He’d declare to the walls what a good-for-nothing son he had, even dare Nardo to at least be man enough to join the Army. He vowed to sign the papers himself, since Nardo wasn’t old enough.
The thing was, my dad wasn’t working either. He’d just lost his job as a translator for the city because he’d drink beer during lunch and slur his words. Ever since losing his job, and even before, really, Dad had about as much patience as you could prop on a toothpick. He was always zeroing in on things he wanted to be disappointed in, and when he found one, he’d loose a curse quicker than an eyeblink. Even when he wasn’t cursing, you could still feel one simmering there under his lip, ready to boil over.
Even though he’d worked as a translator, my dad’s English wasn’t the greatest. Some syllables he just couldn’t catch. Instead of saying “watch,” he’d say “wash,” and for “stupid,” he’d slip in a bit of Spanish, “es-tupid.” But when he said “ass” or “ounce,” stretching the S with a long, lingering slowness, there was pure acid in the set of his teeth.
“If only Bernardo had jus whuan ounss, whuan ounss…” my dad would say, making the tiniest measure between his thumb and forefinger, but with a voice the size of our whole block.
For his part, Nardo stayed home lifting weights and doing sit-ups and push-ups, and nursing any piddling little pimple worth a few hours of panic. He was a nut about his handsome looks, and must have tenderly combed his hair at least twenty times a day in the mirror.
I wasn’t like Nardo. I suppose years of not knowing what, besides work, was expected from a Mexican convinced me that I wouldn’t pass from this earth without putting in a lot of days. I suppose Nardo figured the same, and wasn’t about to waste his time. But I was of my grandpa Ignacio’s line of useful blood. All his life, no matter what the job, my grandpa worked like a man trying to fill all his tomorrows with one solid day’s work. Even in the end, when he got sick and couldn’t move, he hated sitting on the couch doing nothing. He’d fumble around the house fixing sockets and floor trim, painting lower shelves and screwing legs back on to tables, although the finished chore was always more a sign of how much his mind had gotten older than anything else.
For a while, I hustled fruit with my cousins Rio and Pete. Their dad, my uncle Joe, owned a panel truck, and together we sold melons, apples, oranges—whatever grew in season—from door to door. But when my uncle hurt his leg tripping over some tree roots, and his ankle swelled up blue and tender as a ripened plum and he couldn’t walk, except maybe to hobble on one leg to the refrigerator or lean over to change channels
on the TV, he took the panel truck away.
Without work, I was empty as a Coke bottle. School was starting soon, and I needed money for clothes and paper stuff. I wanted a baseball mitt so bad a sweet hurt blossomed in my stomach whenever I thought about it. Baseball had a grip on my fantasies then, and I couldn’t shake it loose. There was an outfielder’s glove in the window of Duran’s Department Store that kept me dreaming downright dangerous outfield catches. I decided to stir up Nardo to see if he’d go pick chili peppers with me.
“You can buy more weights!” I said a bit too enthusiastically, making him suspicious right off the bat.
He looked up at me from the middle of a pushup. “You think I’m lazy, don’t you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Yeah, you do. You think I’m lazy,” he said, breathing tight as he pushed off the floor.
“I said no!”
“Yeah, you do.” He forced air into his lungs, then got up miserably wiping his hands.
“But that’s all right, little boy, if you think I’m lazy. Everybody else does.” He started picking at a sliver in his palm. “I’m not really lazy, you know. I’ve been working off and on.” He greedily bit the sliver, moving his elbow up and down like a bird’s wing. “If Mom wants me to go,” he said, finally, “I’ll go. If that’s what she wants. But I’m telling you right now, if it gets hot I’m quitting.”
Miracles don’t wait for doubters, so the next morning I asked my dad if we could borrow his car, a Plymouth, which Nardo could drive despite the tricky gearshift. Dad was pretty cheery about me getting Nardo out of hibernation. He gave us some paint cans for the chili peppers and practically put a Christmas ribbon on the large brimmed hats from Mexico he’d bought years ago. The headbands were already dark with sweat and the straw furry with dust, but they’d protect us from the sun.
When we arrived at the chili field, the wind through the window was warm on our shirtsleeves. Already the sky was beginning to hollow out, the clouds rushing toward the rim of the horizon as if even they knew the sun would soon be the center of a boiling pot.
The foreman, wearing a pale-yellow shirt with a black-leather vest and cowboy boots with curled tips, refused at first to hire us, saying I was too young, that it was too late in the day—most field workers got up at the first wink of dawn. Besides, all the rows had been taken hours ago. He laughed at the huge lunch bag bulging under Nardo’s arm, and said we looked like two kids strolling out on a picnic.
Although he could fake disappointment better than anybody, deep down I believed Nardo wanted to give picking chilies a try. But a good excuse was a good excuse, and any excuse was better than quitting. So he hurriedly threw his can into the car trunk and made a stagy flourish with his hand before opening the side door.
Seeing him so spunky, I thought it nothing less than torture when the foreman said that, fortunately for us, there was a scrawny row next to the road no one wanted. The foreman must have thought it a big joke, giving us that row. He chuckled and called us over with a sneaky offer of his arm, as if to share a secret.
“Vamos, muchachos, aquí hay un surco muy bueno que pueden piscar,” he said, gesturing down at some limp branches leaning away from the road, as if trying to lift their roots and hustle away from the passing traffic. The leaves were sparse and shriveled, dying for air, and they had a coat of white pesticide dust and exhaust fumes so thick you could smear your hands on the leaves and rub fingerprints with them.
My brother shrugged. His luck gone, there was not much else he could do. The foreman hung around a bit to make sure we knew which peppers to pick and which to leave for the next growing, not that it mattered in that row.
We’d been picking about two hours when the sun began scalding the backs of our hands, leaving a pocket of heat crawling like a small animal inside our shirts. My fingers were as rubbery as old carrots, and it seemed forever before the peppers rose to the center of my can. Nardo topped his can before I did, patted the chilies down and lifted it over his shoulder, his rock of an arm solid against his cheek.
“I’m gonna get my money and buy me a soda,” he said, and strode off toward the weighing area, carefully swishing his legs between the plants. I limped behind him, straining with my half-filled can of lungless chili peppers.
The weighing area wasn’t anything special, just a tripod with a scale hook hanging from the center. People brought their cans and sagging burlap sacks and formed a line. After the scale pointer flipped and settled, heaving with the sack’s weight, the peppers were dumped onto a wooden table-bed. Tiny slits between the boards let the mixed-in dirt and leaves sift through.
There was a line of older women and young girls with handkerchiefs across their faces. They stood along the sides, like train robbers in cowboy movies, cleaning the leaves and clods of dirt, pushing the peppers down through a chute. When the sack at the end bloated, one of the foremen unhooked it from the nails and sewed the opening. Then he stacked it on a pile near a waiting truck whose driver lay asleep in the cab with boots sticking out in the blurry currents of air.
Standing near the table-bed, my eyes flared and nose dribbled a mustache of watery snot. The dried leaves and the angry scent of freshly broken peppers was like being swarmed by bees. No matter how hard I tried to keep my breath even, I kept coughing and choking like I had a crushed ball of sandpaper stuffed in my throat. I wondered how the women were able to stand it, even with the handkerchiefs.
The only good thing about the weighing area was that they paid right after announcing your load. This lured workers from Mexico needing quick cash for rent or emergency food, and people like me who had important baseball mitts to buy. It also brought business to a burrito truck behind the scales owned by the labor contractor. It sold everything from chicken tacos, chili beans and egg burritos, to snow cones and fudge bars.
The prices, though, made Nardo complain real loud: “You know how much I paid for this!” he exclaimed, when out of earshot of the foreman. “Eighty-five cents! Eighty-five cents for a damn soda! And to top it off, it’s one of those cheap jobs with no fizzle or nothing.”
We picked steadily on, but by noon both Nardo and I were burned out, with our tongues flagging in the heat, and a good sprint away from the nearest picker. Farther up, under clouds boiling like water on the horizon, a staggered string of men worked two and three rows apiece.
“They’re wetbacks,” my brother explained; “they pick like their goddamned lives depended on it.”
I looked over at the Mexican man working on the rows next to ours and nodded agreement. He handled four rows all by himself, using two cans, and trading handfuls from one can to the other. He’d go up two rows, then down two rows, greeting us on his return with a smile and shy wave. To save time, he placed burlap sacks every twenty feet, and every half hour or so he’d pour a loaded can into the closest. Behind him, three sacks already lay fat and tightly sewn. We eyed him, amazed by his quickness.
“Maybe that’s what we should do,” I suggested.
Nardo shook his head. “Are you crazy?” he asked with conviction. “It’ll take us the whole damn day just to fill one lousy sack.”
He was right. We weren’t the best pickers in the field; we weren’t even close to being the worst. We stopped too much, my brother to eye the girls near the weigher, and me to watch the man and compare hands. His were wings in a blur of wonder, mine stirred a pot of warm honey. The way he moved, too, made me think he’d make a terrific shortstop, what with the way he shifted from plant to plant, his knees like a triangle, tilting first one way then another. He was a whirlwind when gathering up his cans and burlap sacks, and eyeing him this way, with admiration, almost made me forget my own tiredness, although he never seemed to tire, never seemed to rise much above the plant, but hid inside the quivering leaves until with one flickering toss, a rain of yellow peppers showered the air and dropped into his can.
I was marveling at him when Nardo tapped me on the shoulder. “Look what’s coming,” he said,
pointing his chin at a van creeping up the road.
Cars had been insulting us with dust and exhaust fumes all morning, so when I saw how this van approached, like a dog sneaking up on a bush, I knew something was wrong.
The van was green, a dim, starved-for-light green, like the leaves on our row. Its windows were open and the man behind the wheel had his head out scanning the rows. Suddenly people began to stand up, licking the air and stretching as if peering over a high wall. There was fast talking in Spanish and frenzied commotion as suddenly forty or so people all at once jumped up and started running. They didn’t even bother going through the furrows in scissor steps like Nardo had done, but ran in waves, trampling over plants and tipping over cans. Those last to run brought up the rear, steadying their hats with one hand and thrashing their snapped-up coats in the other.
I still didn’t know what was going on. My first thought was to run, but when I saw three more vans and a large labor bus pop out of a narrow road in the cornfield bordering ours, I knew that Immigration had come for the people.
No one had seen the other vans place themselves at points along the cornfield. The people just ran wildly in panic toward them as if their first thought was to hide in the stalks. The quicker ones got caught at once, their paths cut off by officers holding out their arms. They surrendered without a word. The slower ones veered off into the open spaces of the cordon and dove into the field. Most were caught in the first sweep, except for some who ducked under the arms of the officers and hustled down the road; but they, too, were quickly run down by another van and escorted inside.
The handful who hid in the cornstalks seemed to have gotten away. We all cheered and waved our arms as if our side had won. Some of us jeered at the officers, my brother Nardo the loudest.
Everyone quieted down, though, when some of the officers formed a line along the field and disappeared into the stalks. A while later they came out yanking on the shirt collars of those we thought had gotten away. Everybody sighed and said nothing.
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