Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  Up ahead, Aria could see the bright orange sign belonging to a Home Depot. The sun had not yet touched the painted stalls of the parking lot, which before business hours were vacant. A group of nine or so men were standing near the inlet where people pulled into the lot. Every morning men who were out of a job, or unable to get work for one reason or another, would stand there to see if someone with a construction project would hire them and pay them cash for the day. For the most part, though hardened by manual labor, the men looked benign enough. Still, Aria felt tense when she passed them. She felt herself walking quicker to try to get out of range.

  The hair on the back of Aria’s neck stood up as if she were being hunted. None of the men had made a sound when she had walked by. They had not cat-called, like she had prepared herself for them to do. They had simply watched her pass intently.

  It all happened so fast. By the time she felt the eerie feeling of predation and had turned around to check behind her, the man was already close. Upon seeing her notice him, he broke into a run in her direction.

  Aria bolted as if on automatic pilot. Panic and adrenaline sprinted through her veins. She tried to run sideways to evade him, but he was faster. Aria had unintentionally cornered herself.

  The man pushed her from behind, trying to throw her to the ground. But instead, the force threw her against the wall of an industrial warehouse. Her face buffered her fall. She did not notice the burn of the scrape, or the way the peak of the pain subsided when blood began to flow from her lips and nose, until after everything was over.

  Aria didn’t defend herself as the man had expected her to. She had been trained over the course of her life not to. Fighting the futility only put her more at risk. Instead, she froze and smiled at the man, hoping to pacify him or at least get it over with, with the least amount of violence possible.

  Caught up in the convulsion of whatever carnal instinct had been triggered, the man said nothing to her. He spoke only with the terrorism of his body. His fingernails carved red marks into the skin of her hips as he tried to rip and pull her pants away from them.

  The frenzy was interrupted by two of the men running toward them across the street. “Para ahora! Para ahora!” one of them yelled over and over.

  When they pulled the man off of her by the back of his t-shirt, he wouldn’t let go of her jeans. Aria’s legs were pulled high into the air before he let go and they smacked the asphalt hard enough that her heel was badly bruised.

  Her attacker swung a punch through the air at one of the men who had come to her rescue, but because he ducked, it only grazed his arm.

  “Go on … Go on, get outta here!” the new arrival yelled defiantly in her attacker’s face. Both of the men stood ready for a fight. Instead of taking them on, the first man ran. “Go on, get outta here!” the man yelled again, hoping the words would chase him even further from where they stood.

  He reached down toward Aria. “Hey, you OK, miss?” he asked in a heavy Mexican accent. “You’re cut up pretty bad.”

  Aria let him pull her up to standing position and she adjusted her clothes, which had been twisted by the scuffle. She was too shocked to respond. Her body started to process the trauma by shaking.

  “Hey, you need to call somebody?” he asked, still holding her arm and worried. Aria shook her head no. “Hey, I know somebody who could help,” the man said, still waiting for any verbal sign from Aria.

  Aria wanted to run away from this place. She wanted to take care of the aftermath herself and unburden the men who had come to her aid. But she thought about the fact that should any concerned passerby or cop drive past her, a bloody face would draw attention to herself, which just might land her in more trouble than she was already in. So she said “OK,” expecting them to point her in the direction of whatever place they were about to suggest. Instead, the man began to lead her away from the building and down the street. The other man followed them at a short distance, looking less than thrilled by the idea of leaving the opportunities they might miss at the Home Depot parking lot.

  “I’m Pedro,” the man eventually said, pointing to himself. “This is my brother Consuelo.”

  “I’m Aria,” she said, trying to meet the man’s friendliness with welcome. “Where are we going?”

  When she snapped out of the shock of what had happened, she was surprised at herself for simply deciding to blindly trust these men.

  “We know somebody who owns a store up there,” Pedro said, pointing further up the street. He seemed mildly insulted by the sudden distrust in her voice. He imagined her distrust owed itself to the fact that he was brown and she was white.

  The men led her to one of the little authentic Mexican stores that Aria had come to notice littered the city. Case upon case of cakes and breads were displayed in front of her. Half of an entire wall was covered with a succession of fresh and dried green and red peppers of every different size and shape. The entire ceiling was cluttered with piñatas, their tassels reaching low enough to brush Aria’s forehead.

  The smell of the place was overwhelming: a congregation of scents, from the sting of industrial cleaner to the hearty scent of Maseca corn flour, all of which were smuggled into the scent of cardboard boxes whose contents had leaked through them in the heat, permeating the trailer of whatever semi truck they had taken to get there. The slightly cheesy accordion strokes of an upbeat Mexican norteño band was playing across the speakers. Aria stopped to listen to the basic and repetitive guitar notes and the voice of the man singing passionately over them in Spanish.

  When they entered the store, Pedro greeted an older woman who was fussing over an assortment of tamales that were being held in a heated metal basin. They greeted each other with such geniality that Aria imagined them to be related. “Hey, come over here,” Pedro called to her. “This here is Doña Lolita. She’s a good woman. You can trust her.”

  It was obvious that Pedro had told the woman what happened. Concern and anger were evident on her face. “Come here, mija,” she said, leading Aria behind her through the crowded aisles. She opened a door to a tiny bathroom in the back of the store and ushered Aria inside, closing the door behind her as if she alone were taking charge of Aria’s chastity.

  Aria looked at herself in the mirror before cleaning herself off. The damage done to her face looked to be just on the surface, despite the blood and split in her lip. She waited for a while for the water to run hot, before deciding the place probably had no warm water. She wiped her face clean with the cold, chemical city water being pumped through the pipes, then rejoined the woman outside.

  “Have some pozole, mija,” the woman said, setting a steaming soup down in front of her on the table with a little side plate of raw, shredded cabbage, raw onion, dry oregano and a golden plain tostada. Guessing that Aria had no idea what to do with it, she took her hand and sprinkled some of the cabbage and onion into the soup and stirred it around with Aria’s spoon.

  “Thank you, but I can’t pay for it. I have nothing with me,” Aria said.

  The woman scoffed as if insulted by the fact that Aria presumed she would have to. “Don’t worry, mija. You’re so skinny you need some food on those bones of yours,” she answered with a laugh.

  Doña Lolita looked to be in her late fifties. Her coal black hair, which was entirely gray at the roots, was pulled into a tight bun. Her thin lips were coated with hot pink lipstick, far too bright for her complexion. Her eyebrows were pencil drawn on top of the gray eyeshadow that was poorly applied to her eyelids. Her brown eyes were the color of cola. They sparkled out from the mayhem of her makeup and acne scars. The lard-rich food she had cooked all her life had made her body and face plump. The feel of her was a strange mix of discipline and mothering.

  “You can have this, too … And this,” she said, placing three more items she collected from around the store in front of Aria.

  “Thank you so much,” Aria said, looking her straight in the face, totally overwhelmed with (and even more guilty about) th
e care she was being shown.

  “OK, is everything OK?” she asked, wanting to know if she could leave Aria to eat on her own.

  “Yeah, it’s wonderful,” Aria replied.

  Satisfied with her efforts, Lolita went to sit with Pedro and Consuelo at one of the other little tables in a corner by the meat counter. She had fed them too. At another table, a group of four women sat playing cards.

  Aria watched the men eat and talk to her. They were speaking in Spanish so she couldn’t tell what they were saying.

  Pedro and Consuelo bore furrows on their faces. Their clothes and skin were covered in splatters of bright white paint from whatever job they had been able to find yesterday. Their jeans and work boots were coated with cement dust and their calloused skin and bodies were beaten by manual labor into a kind of crudeness where all elements of mercy were lost. Pedro was friendly. The cruelty that life had shown him had not corrupted his propitious attitude. Consuelo was less congenial. The luster of his heart and inherent goodness was withheld behind a cautious demeanor. He spoke absolutely no English and followed his brother around as if doing so meant the difference between life and death.

  Aria could tell from their body language that this was not a lighthearted conversation. They were talking about how to navigate worst-case scenarios in case the police got involved with what had happened to Aria. In the emergency of the moment, Pedro and Consuelo’s conscience had trumped the care for their own safety. Both Pedro and Consuelo were illegal immigrants. They could not afford to exist in the eyes of the state.

  Pedro had come to the United States first, nearly ten years ago. A bad harvest season had made the owners of the farm where he lived and worked lay off nearly all of their workers, including Pedro. As a result he could not feed his wife and three children. Growing up in a little town just north of Jerez, Zacatecas, he would often see families whose relatives had moved to the United States, wearing fancier clothing. And at least some of their kids could afford to go to school. Pedro was illiterate. He had never had a pair of new shoes in his lifetime, much less been able to go to school. With no skills other than farming, he found there were no jobs available to him there. The threat of starvation made the risk of crossing the border, to try to work on a farm in California, a risk he had to take. A family friend in the States vouched for him by promising to pay a “coyote” the $5,000 he required to illegally transport Pedro across the border.

  Pedro kissed his family goodbye, promising to send them money, and got into the back of a semi truck transporting huge rubber truck tires. Five of them crossed the border in that truck. Aside from a few stops to get out and relieve themselves in the middle of the desert somewhere, each one of them was made to lie as flat as they could against the inner lining of the tires. This way, if anyone opened the hatch of the trailer, all they would have seen was merchandise. Pedro’s tears that day were tainted by the unnatural smell of rubber. Like the men who had made the journey before him, he did not take the risk lightly, simply on the promise of opportunity. Instead, he was torn in half. On one side the heavy doom of the deaths of the family he was responsible for. On the other, the only chance he had at preventing that fate from occurring.

  Pedro had taken jobs on several farms over the years before someone told him that he could make more money in a day than he made from farming in a week by standing outside Home Depot and taking the temporary jobs that people who came looking for cheap workers could offer him. Like everything in his life, he had thrown himself into it with no schooling. Having lied that he knew what he was doing so people would hire him in the first place, he had learned how to paint and lay concrete and put up drywall out of pure necessity.

  Pedro now found himself in another chapter of powerlessness different from the one he had faced back in Mexico. He lived his life like a fugitive. He couldn’t rent a house because his name couldn’t be on record. And even if he could rent a place from someone who would do it off the record, he would have to decide between his family’s survival and his own. If he rented a house and paid the bills and got groceries, nothing would be left over to send them down in Mexico. So Pedro hopped from place to place, staying with people according to their proximity to each job site that he worked on. No matter how hard he worked, he could never make enough to pay the price for someone to transport his family across the border to be with him. It had taken him three years to pay off the coyote that had brought him. And even if he could, it was too dangerous.

  Pedro didn’t have a spouse, parent or sibling living legally in the United States, so no one could sponsor him to get a green card. Even if he had, the price of becoming legal, as set by the American government, was more than $20,000, which was more money than any member of his family could ever dream of accruing. And whoever sponsored him would need to prove that they had an income of more than $30,000. No employer would pay him salary and insurance plus the legal fees necessary to legitimize him for work. And the American government would not recognize him as a refugee in need of asylum. With no options, Pedro had been living his life between the cracks of American society, wiring money to his family back in Mexico whenever he could.

  So many men, like Pedro, had left to find work that many of Mexico’s towns and cities had been reduced to ghost towns. Only old people and wives with children remained. Deprived of life and the animation of commerce, the dust of the desert was eating them away. Crime was a last resort for people who had no other way to make a living, and like roaches, men looking to make a living on that crime inherited the forgotten towns. Consuelo was Pedro’s younger brother. Being too young to leave with Pedro to begin with, he had stayed in Mexico to help take care of the family, including the wife and children Pedro had left behind. When he was old enough to work, Pedro concocted a plan to get Consuelo to the United States so that together they might make enough money to bring the rest of the family across the border.

  Pedro had sent him some money to pay a man to guide him across the border on foot through the Sonoran desert. Five men, three women and four children had crossed the 80 miles with him. In the 42-degree heat, with the mother screaming on the bankside, Consuelo had watched one of the children drown in a river they had been forced to cross. When Consuelo arrived, he was harrowed. The terror of life in Mexico had been replaced by the terror of living in a completely foreign land. The terror of getting caught and having the chance of a better life obliterated. Consuelo felt like an outsider. He and Pedro had manufactured their lives with a mindset of survival. An achievement mentality was a luxury not given or taught to them. Success was a new pair of shoes, a liter of Pepsi, the money they could wire back home. Despite leaving their country behind and the stoicism with which they conducted themselves, because of that terror, they clung to all the familiar parts of their culture for dear life as if trying to turn America into a new and improved Mexico. With the ongoing threat of a wall being built between America and Mexico, and the increased vigilance of the feared ICE immigration agents, their lives could only get worse.

  Aria looked around the room. On the wall in the corner was an altar topped with religious relics. A green and orange statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stood front and center upon it, her virtue and blessing presiding over the store. The altar below her had been draped with a bright yellow mesh scarf. Beside her was a collection of fake flowers displayed in a vase. A gunmetal rosary hung off of the corner so as to display the Catholic cross at its base, and beside that, a long green candle in a glass container with a painting of San Judas Tadeo. The candle had been turned upside down. As per tradition, the candle would remain that way until the wish that Lolita had made on that candle had come true. She had wished for a kind and responsible man to come into her life and never leave her.

  To Aria’s left, at another of the small tables, a group of four women sat around a game of loteria. Like bingo, the little place cards were arranged in front of them with pennies covering what squares had already been called. Aria could just make out some of the “tarot me
ets tattoo parlor” drawings on the squares. The women were betting on the game with quarters piled in the center of the table. Despite it being a game based entirely on chance and luck, they parlayed the money they would win, buffering the unpredictable and uncontrollable reality of the game with superstition.

  Aria worked her way around the chunks of chicken to lift the large kernels of hominy onto her spoon. The broth was spicy, the tomato base disguised by the heavy flavor of oregano and the richness of the chicken fat that glazed the top of it. When Aria had finished what she could of the soup, she opened the little fluorescent orange package of Gansitos that Lolita had placed on the table in front of her. The smell of them reminded her of Hostess cupcakes. She bit into the synthetic sweetness, white sponge cake with a stripe of strawberry jelly and pastry cream coated in a film of chocolate and topped with chocolate sprinkles. She ate both of the cakes in the package, trying to savor the taste of them.

  Watching her struggle with her drink, Lolita came over with an opener and popped the top off of the bottle of mandarin-flavored Jarritos soda. “Mija, let me do that,” she said, taking the metal cap with her to return to the table with Pedro and Consuelo.

  It felt sinful to chase cake with soda. The bright food coloring and carbonation were unsympathetic against her tongue. The sweetness of it made her teeth hurt, but it tasted reassuring.

  Aria felt like she had taken a turn down a street and wound up immersed in a completely different country. Had it not been for the specific situation that had brought her there, she imagined she would have been much less warmly welcomed. Her mind was not disquieted by the incident that had led to all of this. She was used to it. Violation was just an unlucky part of life and Aria felt like there was no point in dwelling on what could never be changed. Instead, she pretended to be on vacation. She tasted the foreign flavors and smelled the foreign smells. She let her eyes take in all the things in the store that she had never seen before.