The foreman who’d given us the scraggly row rushed over to see what was going on. He took off in a huff saying “son-ova-beeches,” and worse. I thought he was going to cuss those Immigration guys off, but instead he stood by meekly watching the officers corral the people before loading them into the vans. I tried to find the Mexican on the row next to ours, but I didn’t see him. I hoped he’d gotten away.
The officer in charge approached the foreman and said something we couldn’t make out, but it sounded like a scolding. The foreman came back and knelt down by the water tank. “Damn son-ova-beeches,” he said again, flicking his hat off and raising dust as he slapped it against his pant leg. He poured himself some water and glared over at the Immigration officers as they packed in the people and roared off in a boiling cloud of dust. A crowd of us stood around covering our eyes. No one bothered to go back to work.
When the air cleared, a man tottered back from the spot where the vans had assembled. He was an older man with salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and a slightly longer and darker mustache. He was nursing his right knee.
At first I thought maybe he’d gotten away, but then someone recognized him and laughed, “Hey Joe, you’re not a wetback. You’re a bracero.”
Joe came slowly over and took off his hat and covered his stomach as if he’d been caught naked. He shrugged an apology and said he couldn’t help it, when everyone else began to run, he got so excited he ran too. He looked down at his legs as if they’d betrayed him. He said Immigration let him go as soon as they saw he had too much meat on his bones to be a wetback. Everybody laughed. Then his family, whose confused uncle he was, came over and led him away. Nardo and I laughed too, but for some reason I thought he was the best man in the whole field.
Of the twenty or so people left, everyone claimed they encouraged the Mexicans not to run. They said Immigration guys usually don’t go into the fields to check for citizenship unless they have a good reason. If you acted like you belonged, sometimes you could fool them. They said none of those ungratefuls took them at their word, though, and for that they had only themselves to blame.
One of the listeners, a tall pimple-faced guy with blotchy cheeks and the skin of a fig, only paler, shouted out, “Pinches gavachos don’t give a damn about harassing us! Gavachos do what they want.” He didn’t wait for anybody to answer back, nor did he pick up any cans or equipment, but walked quickly away, swung open the door of a rusty Buick and drove off.
“I guess he came alone,” Nardo said musingly. He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his wrists, then became more alert. “Hey, we can pick on any row we want now.”
“That man’s crazy! Those people don’t live here, anyway,” said a short, moist-faced guy with tight bunched-in cheeks and pants that settled unevenly around his waist. When he walked, one of his legs looked shorter than the other. He went over to one of the rows a Mexican had been picking on and lifted up a pair of old shoes. The soles were crusted with mud and the leather scarred and furrowed like the faces of old men who’ve worked in the fields all their lives. He held them at the tips of his fingers and away from his precious nose. The man who wore them probably had taken them off in the heat to stick his toes in the moist, irrigated soil. A small chorus of laughter went up when he held them high, then fell when he dropped them back to earth. He rummaged some more down the row until he found a sack bulging with chili peppers.
“Hey, I’m gonna keep these,” he declared, and began dragging the sack.
When everyone saw this they all began to scramble around for the other abandoned sacks, claiming their right by how close their rows had been to the Mexicans beside them. The sacks belonging to the man working on the rows next to ours were laying, tightly sewn, on their sides. Nardo walked over and placed his hand on one. Two other guys came over to argue about whom the others belonged to, but my brother was stronger, and after some half-serious pushing and shoving they walked away grumbling.
“Look, Manny,” Nardo said, excitedly spearing up his shirtsleeves. He lifted one sack by its ears and pounded it on the ground, packing the peppers down its belly. “We got more here than it’d take us two days to pick. Hey, you can even buy your mitt.”
I thought of the baseball glove, all clean and stiff and leather-smelling, and of myself in the cool green lawn of center field. I imagined already being on the baseball team at school, and people looking at me. Not these people picking chilies or those sent away in the vans, but people I had yet to know, watching me as I stood mightily in center field. I looked down at the sacks, then far out in the distance at the clouds of dust folding and unfolding where the vans were pulling away. I wondered how long I’d have had to work to fill those sacks. The weariness of it stretched as wide as the horizon.
2
Rico’s Pool Hall
Rico’s Pool Hall was Dad’s favorite spot in the whole world. Among four pool tables made of solid wood, cobwebs of smoke drifting to the ceiling, the air smelling hearty of varnished wood, field sweat, beer and farts, he breathed easy. All day he talked to his buddies about Mexico, and about schemes for making money and escaping back to Mexico—although some of the men there were born in the United States.
Kids weren’t allowed in the pool hall, but Rico let me stay sometimes while waiting for Dad. I’d sit on a stool at the far end of the bar, watching guys lean against pool cues, smoke and cuss one another out. I even saw a fight once where a guy threw a cue ball at a man in a Texas hat and smacked his teeth clean off the gums.
Because of his drinking, and because of the milk she said drained into the gutter whenever he drank, Mom hated to see Dad go to Rico’s. She was always dragging me along with her to bring him home. On the day after the chili peppers, we were all piled in the car—my little sister Pedi whining about the heat, Magda clapping her hands to the rock-and-roll music inside her head, Dad complaining about a streak of clever pool shots he was working on before Mom yanked him rudely away. No telling how much money he could have won, he kept saying.
Steam puffed from my mouth and my nose ached from the heavy tar smell of melting asphalt. That’s when I did a stupid thing. I put my arm on the car door and shouted, “Dammit!” as I jerked from the searing metal.
Sitting in the front seat, Mom heard me, and before I could plead excuses, she reached over her shoulder and smacked me one on the mouth. There were certain rules that needed no part of a brain’s labor for Mom to smack me one. If she caught me cursing, or breaking a glass, she’d pound my arm. Twice if the curse had anything to do with girls, or the glass had milk. Also, whatever gossip could cling to our family for as long as people’s memories lasted, I was to avoid.
With my Dad, it was more simple. If I grew a bit too raucous, he’d put a vise grip on my shoulder and whisper hot breath inside my ear. “Settle down quick, Manuel,” he’d say, “or elsse.”
Luckily, he was still too soaked from drinking at the pool hall to pay me any mind. He did get into it with the three Garcia brothers, though, who were lazying around their front yard.
“¡Qué chingados!” he exclaimed, as we drove into the parking lot. “Those bastards, drinking beer and laughing out of their mouths. They’d suck their mother’s last milk if she wasn’t dead.”
Dad was angry at the Garcias for destroying his dream. He had bought this croquet set, with which he planned to play with the neighbors while lounging away the hot afternoons. But on the first day we brought it home, the Garcias came over like wild chimpanzees. Bobby wrestled a mallet out of my hands and tossed it into a tree, and Stinky stole a wire wicket while Dad’s back was turned. Dad vowed never again to favor our neighborhood with culture.
I slunk my chin low while Dad slowed the car and gazed acidly at the Garcias. They pretended these big, idiot smiles, and seeing them act so disrespectful, Dad yelled out the window, “Where’re your girlfriends. Did you send them off to work for you?”
This riled Bobby and Stinky, who were old enough to have girlfriends but didn’t. They started pu
shing their chairs around searching for a rock, but Dad laughed and pumped the gas.
He was chuckling under his breath when he pulled up in front of our house, made of Sheetrock and a gravel-tile roof. Shaped like box hotels in a Monopoly set, the houses weren’t pretty or stylish, but in spring the grass flowed to every porch like green water lapping against the hulls of houseboats, and that was beautiful. But now it was summer, and the heat had sucked the grass blond.
Dad seemed to like his clever joke, so I figured the next best thing for him was to start in about the Welfare, and sure enough, he fired his two cents into that one. Actually, Mom started him off, so I shouldn’t blame Dad, totally. She mentioned how some men from the projects were earning money from jobs the Welfare gave them. She’d seen them coming home with metal lunch pails and shirts flagging out of their pants.
“But you know how the Welfare is,” Dad said. “They want to know everything. A social worker comes over, acting like we’re criminals. Then the whole neighborhood knows we’re getting Welfare.”
He looked dazed, Dad did, like if you tapped him on the shoulder he’d bolt off running down the street. Mom just pursed her lips. She knew he was just groping for something to complain about. Besides, half of the projects were already getting Welfare, and the other half were trying to get on. This didn’t stop Dad, though.
“They’ll make a copy of my driver’s license, Rebecca,” he insisted, “and it will stay in their files.” After grinding his finger about fifty times in the air, he added, “Besides, I have never done anything in my whole life that would make me beg.”
“Would you rather let the kids starve?” Mom asked, indignant and, as usual, making a ton of sense.
This reddened Dad’s face more than the beer had already, but even he knew those canned meats and yellow bricks of butter the Welfare gave away wouldn’t be half bad.
But it was no use. Dad believed weasely guys already owned the world, and anything you could do to get over on them was useless. He believed people were like money. If you were a million-dollar person, you had a grip on things, a big house maybe, and a crowd of suckers you could push around. You could be a thousand-dollar person or a hundred-dollar person—even a ten-, five-, or one-dollar person. Below that, everybody was just nickels and dimes. To my dad, we were pennies.
Finally, he slowed down the wheels in his brain. “I’ll get a job,” he said, sullenly, “don’t worry about it, I’ll get job.” Then he got out of the car and rushed inside, slinking through the hydraulic screen door.
Mom just gazed at the empty space where he had disappeared, then smirked her lips away from her teeth. She’d heard it all before. Ever since he lost his job with the city, every day he’d zoom on about the Welfare, or about the Garcias, or how he was going to get another job, this time on a higher floor.
I always wondered why he got so tossed around by things, why he’d roughen his voice and tire himself out complaining. Mom was more quiet. Whenever she worried about something, she’d bite her nails and look up at the sky; not like she was staring at the clouds, but like the whole sky was the most marvelous sight she’d ever seen.
When they started shouting and throwing their arms around, which I knew they’d do as soon as Mom walked in through the door, it was best to disappear. Even the walls sweated. Mom’s shrieks chased away the panicked air; Dad’s voice was coarse paper shredding to pieces. Sometimes I’d climb the elm tree out back or race over to my friend Frankie’s, where the TV talked all day with nobody listening.
As I left, I saw my sister Magda through the window listening to records. She was singing to herself, stabbing her hands in the air like a belly dancer. “Everything’s awright. Everything’s gonna be awright,” she sang.
I speeded across the parking lot, my eyelids heavy under the sun, grumbling over my mom’s criminal unfairness. My lip was pulsing from where she had slapped me, and a swatch of blood smeared when I dabbed it with my fingers. My steps were snapping crisply on the dry shoots of blond grass when I reached the Big Lawn, where almost all year round the guys in our projects either smacked a baseball around or ran football plays, while our mothers, on plastic chairs, visited with one another, drinking iced tea and sprinkling gossip on the backs of those who got up to do chores.
Suddenly a dog crashed out of some side bushes, grunting and hunkering low, froth blowing from his mouth. I was afraid he was coming to clamp his jaws on my leg, but then I saw the Garcia brothers, Bobby, Stinky and Little Tommy, chasing him with sticks. Stinky let fly a rock and it whizzed past my ear. Whether he was aiming at the dog or me, I wasn’t sure, but they sure weren’t going to catch the dog. Its paws were practically blistering on the asphalt.
The Garcias slowed down to a trot and veered toward me. Stinky, who was sweating enough to drip drops on the ground, was wearing a dingy gray T-shirt and jeans that looked as if they’d been scraped with rocks. Little Tommy had on a yellow-plaid shirt. Bobby wore a long green Pendleton shirt with red and gold patterns. His arms were straight at his sides, like he didn’t want to wrinkle anything, and his mouth crooked funny when his head tilted back.
“Hey, it’s the Hernandez boy,” Bobby said over his shoulder to his brothers. Then, turning to me, he said, “Hey, Hernandez, I hear your fawder’s got a job in the Welfare?”
I didn’t bother denying it. Nothing anybody said could sink in with the Garcias.
“Hey, Manny.” This time it was Stinky, twisting a stick in his hand, acting like he’d just thought up something terrific. He was in my grade at school, but about three years older than everybody else. He had ratty shoulders and two large can-opener teeth. His black hair was swatted smooth with pomade, and his voice sounded like two knife blades rubbing together.
I’d always been afraid of him. Every year at school he made it a habit of punching me around to show he was still boss. Once he broke a bone in my little finger, and I lied to Mom about it, saying that I got it sliding into second base. Another time he separated the soft rubber on the bridge of my nose, and I had to tell her I got hit by a pop fly.
Stinky was either hitching up his pants or trying to pull a knife out of his back pocket, I couldn’t tell. “Where’re your girlfriends, huh, Manny? You got any girls on you?”
Bobby, the oldest, came over and slung a lazy arm over my shoulder. I thought maybe he wanted to give my head a knuckle burn, but instead he looked into my ear as if peering into a microscope. He started fiddling with the collar of my shirt, twisting it like a necklace around his finger. His breath smelled gamy, of beer and sour pork. “You think your dad could get us some girls, Manny?” he said. “Your Dad knows a lot about that, huh?” He pulled on my collar. “Whataya say, Manny?”
Then he yanked hard again on my collar. I jerked back for balance but slipped and smashed my hip against the sidewalk. I stood up in an eyeblink, not wanting to be lying there with the Garcias around. Inside me something knotted, began to gel, then jiggle, as if shaking loose from under a trembling light. Even Little Tommy could tell I was scared. He was bouncing up and down, his scrawny legs working furiously, his fists clenched above his ears.
Stinky shoved his way back in and pressed his palm against my chest. “Hey, Manny,” he said, “why don’t you fix me a date with your sister, ése?”
“She doesn’t go on dates,” I said, but right away knew that I’d made a mistake by talking.
“Oh yeah, why don’t she go on dates, huh?” Stinky asked. “What? Does she think she’s too good for me? Is that it, ése? Is she too good for me now?” Stinky’s fist was wound tight and he was jabbing it close to my face. I could see little white lightning bolts between his knuckles.
“My dad says she’s too young.”
“Too young!” Stinky exploded, fanning open his fingers. He started flinching his arms. “Man, she must be nineteen or something!”
Then Little Tommy, looking ornery and offended, huffed over and planted his bony chest against mine. He had a big smudge of dirt on his cheek and a g
lob of gum stuck in his uncombed hair. He glared at me with his tiny anger, but Stinky wasn’t finished, and again elbowed his way between us.
“Who in the hell does your sister think she is anyways…the Queen of Sheba? I oughta kick your frickin’ ass right here, just ta show you no one’s too good for me.” He slowly cranked back his fist as if to clobber me, but then Bobby, who looked sleepy, like someone had poured Karo syrup over his face, shoved him away.
“Get back, Stinky! He’s just a punk.”
“Hey, it’s Manny who wants to fight, not me,” Stinky exclaimed, exaggerating his voice. “Look Bobby, he’s making a fist at me!” When Bobby turned, Stinky steered around him and flung a blow at my chin, his fingers whiffing the air near my nose. “Hey, you wanna fight?” he said, stepping back and shuffling his feet around like a boxer admiring his moves.
Stinky was wild about himself. He began clowning around, winding his arms and bluffing blows at my face. “I’ll break your nose again, boy,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I’ll make that bump on your nose bigger. You’ll lose ten pounds just taking in my punches.”
Pushing Stinky away, Bobby turned to me with a creamy voice. “Whatsa matter with you, Manny, don’t you like us?”
Just like that, they lost interest in me, and started walking across the Big Lawn toward the Yellow Projects. A cold ache of fear thawed in my chest, but I didn’t move, thinking that if I did, they’d reel around and start bullying me again. When they were a little farther away, Stinky turned around, waving at me like I was his best friend in the whole world—which, actually, even after all the times he beat me up, I really think he believed.
“Next time, Aw’m gonna kick your ass!” he said, smiling friendly.
I decided to head back home. I didn’t want to risk running into them again. The sky was scarred with clouds shaped like giant hoof marks, but the sun was hot and sputtering on the rim of the horizon. It was like walking into an ocean of heat.
Parrot in the Oven Page 2