She thanked the officer, and the car slowly disappeared down the street. Before she got to the stairs, someone pulled at her arm.
"How dare you come here?" Helen said to Bob.
He pulled her into some pine trees framing the side of the house.
"You killed him," she declared.
Bob shook his head. "I didn't even make it on time for our appointment. He had fallen by the time I had arrived. I was the one who called the police."
"I'm going to tell the police about us." Helen was ashamed that she had not been more revealing during the police interview. All she mentioned was that Bob had been their agent. Purely business.
"That we were having an affair? What do you think that will do to your daughter? People will talk. You'll be implicated, you know."
Bob was right. Tongues would wag. Helen Miura was having an adulterous affair with a white man. Diana would be shunned by the parents of her peers. Her family shamed. And if something happened to Helen, who would take care of Diana? Mama couldn't do it on her own. Helen's parents were too old, and Helen's siblings had their own children to raise. Helen knew what it was liked to be one of many. She didn't want that to happen to her Diana.
"I'll wait for you. Even a year. In respect of your husband's death."
Respect? Helen felt like screaming, tearing Bob's hair out. I know what you have done. She wanted to spit in his face, but she used all her rage to manage a slight smile on her lips.
# #
That night Helen lay in their double bed by herself. The doctor at the Japanese hospital had dropped by some sleeping medicine for Helen. Something to stir into hot water. But Helen didn't want to sleep. She didn't deserve to sleep.
Helen reached out for the crumpled sheets Frank had slept in the night before. She planned to never wash them. Instead she would save them in a box so that she could periodically go and smell her late husband.
She wrapped the sheets around her legs and stared at Frank's pillow. There were a few loose hairs coated with oil.
She felt now that Frank, in his death, could see everything. He could see her deception, the romantic trysts in Bob's car and on the beach.
"I'm so sorry, Frank," she whispered. And then she knew what she had to do.
# #
Helen's parents had an old family friend, Kaji-san. Kaji-san, a Japanese immigrant like Helen's father, had been a fisherman as well. He was rambo, rough. A lot of Terminal Islanders had been that way, cured in the sun and salt water. But Kaji-san not only had callused hands b but a callused face, dried up crevices like earthquake faults.
After the war, Helen's relatives had taken the old bachelor for a while before he got back on his feet and opened a Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo. To everyone's surprise, Kaji-san succeeded and before long, he had even purchased a boat that was docked at Redondo Beach Pier.
Kaji-san felt indebted to Helen's family, so much so that they even stopped going to his restaurant because he never took their money. But Helen needed a favor now, and Kaji-san was, of course, more than willing to comply. Deep down inside, he had questions and concerns. Helen had lost some weight—she was thin to begin with, but now her high cheekbones were even more prominent and defined. Frank's death had definitely taken a toll on her, but Kaji-san knew that Helen would never do anything rash. She wasn't that type of woman.
Helen arrived at the empty restaurant three hours before her appointment and let herself in the back with Kaji-san's key. She needed the extra time to get ready.
Bob came early, too, fifteen minutes early. Helen could tell from the flush in his cheeks that he was excited. She even let him give her a peck on her cheek. That much she could tolerate.
Helen had him sit at the wooden counter and served him a piping hot cup of green tea.
"I've never had green tea before." He sipped carefully and then grimaced. "Bitter."
"You'll get used to it. This tea is expensive; you'll insult me if you don't finish it."
By the time the teacup was empty, Bob's head rested on the wooden counter. Helen went to the kitchen and put on her rubber gloves. And then rolled out the wheelbarrow.
One time she had been out on the fishing boat when her father had caught a blue fin tuna. It had been a magnificent fish, almost six feet tall, almost three hundred pounds. It took three men to handle the fish. The fish first needed to be stunned. Helen's father used one of her brother's baseball bats. This time Helen used Frank's.
The fishermen found the soft spot in the fish's head and then pushed a spike in its brain. Helen was amazed how easy it was to kill a huge fish like that. It shuddered as if it was hoping for another chance for life and then became limp.
There was a method to cutting a blue fin tuna. You first needed some time to bleed the fish so that its sheen would still be maintained. And then go right to the internal organs in the gilling and gutting of the fish. Later you would cut the fish's meat into chunks and sell them by the pound.
Helen could skip many of the steps she had learned as a child. The most important tools here were the knife and the mallet. She was thankful some family friends had watched over her father's tools while they had been in Manzanar.
After Helen was done, she carefully packed different parts of Bob in three different suitcases and cleaned the cement floor of Kaji-san's kitchen. She had brought extra bottles of bleach for the task. She then drove to Redondo Beach Pier and took Kaji-san's motorized fishing boat as far as she could, and dropped each suitcase into different parts of the ocean. The water was black as the ink of an octopus, and for a moment, Helen imagined a huge sea monster emerging from the darkness and tearing her, too, into shreds. But her mind was only playing tricks on her. After closing her eyes hard and reopening them, she found that her fear had disappeared.
# #
Shortly thereafter, Helen, Diana and Mama moved into the wood-framed house in southern Gardena. Next door was a flower farm and packing shed.
"That Miura widow is a cold one," the flower grower's wife said to her husband as they were bunching up flowers at night to get ready for the two o'clock morning drive to the Flower Market in Los Angeles.
The flower grower, Tad, just nodded, so that his wife would be under the impression that he was listening.
"Never says hello. She was on one of those beauty queen courts back in 1941. But she wasn't the queen. Too stuck-up for the judges, I think."
Tad grunted. He wasn't one to spread stories. But he knew who she was. One day when he was driving back from the flower market in the morning after the children went to school, he saw her in the middle of his snapdragon blooms, next to one of the oil derricks. She was screaming and crying; at first he thought that she had been injured. When he slowed his panel truck, she straightened her hair and rubbed the smeared makeup from below her eyes.
"You okay?" he asked from his open car window.
She stared back at him, her eyes shiny like wet black stones. She then spoke, her voice barely audible above the rhythmic squeak of the derricks. "Are any of us?"
Tad's panel truck remained idling as the widow slowly walked back into her house and closed the door.
In El Valiente en el Infierno, (The Brave One in Hell), a 13-year-old Mexican boy makes a treacherous midnight crossing into California in search of his father. The boy's courage is tested when he runs into two gun-toting American vigilantes, and the confrontation will change all of them forever. The story originally appeared in The Road to Hell.
EL VALIENTE EN EL INFIERNO
(THE BRAVE ONE IN HELL)
By Paul Levine
I am not afraid.
That is what I tell myself.
Just after midnight, five hundred meters from the border fence, I keep still, squatting on the ground beneath a mesquite tree. Buried in the sand are motion sensors and infrared cameras.
My name is Victor Castillo. I am 13 years old.
Back home, in my village, a man warned me not to do this.
You are looking for el
cielo. Heaven. But you will find only el infierno. Hell.
Still, I am not afraid. In a matter of minutes, I will be in the United States. By breakfast time, I will be with my Aunt Luisa in a little California town called Ocotillo. She is a nurse, but an even better cook. The best huevos rancheros in the world. Homemade tortillas, the eggs not too runny, the red sauce spiked with jalapenos. We will have a cry about my mother, then mi tia will put me on a bus to Minnesota, where my father works in the sugar beet fields.
But first, there is the fence. It slithers down a rocky slope and disappears between distant boulders, like an endless snake. We move from the cover of the trees to a ravine filled with desert marigolds. I hope the golden flowers are a good omen. We climb out of the ravine and up to the fence, the links glowing like silver bullets in the moonlight. The man who calls himself El Leon - "The Lion" - snips at the metal with wire cutters. He wears all black and his long hair is slick with brilliantine.
In the States, they would call El Leon a coyote. In Mexico, he is a pollero, a chicken wrangler. Which makes the rest of us - Mexicans, Hondurans and Guatemalans - the pollos. The chickens. Hopefully, not cooked chickens. If we are caught and turned back, I don't know what I will do. All my mother's savings - $2,200 - are paying for my passage
The wire cutters fly from El Leon's hands, and he curses in Spanish.
This is taking too long.
Above us, a three-quarter moon is the color of milk. Under our feet, the earth is hard as pavement. Somewhere, on the other side of the fence, La Migra, the Border Patrol, waits. I listen for the whoppeta of a helicopter or the growl of a truck.
El Leon, please hurry!
He keeps working and keeps cursing. I sit on my haunches, inhaling the smell of coal tar from the creosote bushes. From a pocket in my backpack, I take out a photograph of my mother, her face pale in the moonlight.
El Leon works quickly now, the links cra-acking like bones breaking. Finally, he says, "You first, chico."
I duck through the opening, then hold the wire for a Honduran girl. Maybe I should say a Honduran "woman," because she is pregnant, her stomach a basketball under her turquoise blouse. But she is probably only seventeen or eighteen and is traveling alone, and she looks too young and too scared to take care of a child. On her feet, huarches, sandals made from old tire tread. I hope she can keep up with us. A selfish thought, I realize, and immediately feel ashamed. My mother taught me better.
The pregnant girl places two hands on her stomach, bends over, and squeezes through the fence. Following her are two campesinos from Oaxaca who smell like wet straw. The men wear felt Tejana hats, cowboy boots, and long-sleeve plaid work shirts. Then the rest, fourteen in all.
Ten minutes later, we are climbing a dusty path, moonbeams turning the arms of cholla cactus into the spiny wings of monsters.
Los Estados Unidos. I am here!
Do I feel different, changed in some way? I am not sure. The rocks on the ground and the stars in the sky all look the same as in Mexico. Maybe mi mami is looking down at me from those stars. Her weak lungs gave out five days ago, and I recited the oraciónes por las almas over her grave.
"Let me see her again in the joy of everlasting brightness."
The stars have "everlasting brightness," so yes, I pretend she watches me, even though I never believed half of what the priests said.
I travel alone to find my father. My two older brothers have been with papi for nearly a year, carrying their weeding hoes all the way from our village in Sonora to a town called Breckenridge in Minnesota. Beets, strawberries, cabbage. Melons, corn, peas. Whatever is in season and requires hands close to the ground. The work is hard, but the pay is good, at least by Mexican standards.
Now we walk along a rocky path that crawls up the side of a hill sprouting with stubby cactus like an old man who needs a shave. El Leon yells at two Mexican sisters, calls them parlanchinas - chatterboxes - tells them to keep quiet. He has a rifle slung over a shoulder. But why? Who would he shoot?
The older sister is still babbling, something about every house in California having a swimming pool, when El Leon hisses, "¡Cállense la boca!"
He cocks his head toward the hill. I hear something, too.
A clopping.
Growing louder. Horses!
A gunshot echoes off the hillside.
"Vigilantes!" El Leon yells.
My stomach tightens. Our village priest warned me about the vigilantes. Not policemen. Or National Guard. Or Border Patrol. Private citizens, gabachos, calling themselves the Patriot Patrol. Maybe protecting their country or maybe just taking target practice with their friends. Maybe one day shooting Mexicans instead of road signs and cactus.
"Run!" El Leon screams.
But where? On one side of the path, a steep upward slope. On the other, a creviced, dry wash.
The two campesinos leap into the wash and take off, the spines of prickly pear tearing at their pant legs. El Leon leads the others back toward the border. But I cannot follow them. ¡Mi papi está en los Estados Unidos!
I scramble up the steep slope, grabbing vines, pulling myself hand-over-hand. The horses are so close now I can hear their hooves kicking up rocks on the path.
"Yippee ti-yi-yo, greasers!" A gabacho's voice. Gruff and mean.
Two men on horseback in chaps, boots, and cowboy hats. One man holds a large revolver over his head and fires into the air.
"Git on back to Meh-ee-co! Look at 'em run, Calvin."
Calvin, a big man with a belly flopping over his jeans, coughs up a laugh. "Whoa, what do we got here, Woody? Looks like a piñata on Michelins."
I see her then, too. The pregnant Honduran girl in her tire-tread huarches, trying to hide in the shadow of the hill.
"Someone aims to have herself an anchor baby," Calvin says.
I know what the man means. Anyone born on this side of the border is automatically an American citizen. Doesn't matter if you're from Mexico, Guatemala, or Mars. If Osama bin Laden fathered a child in Los Angeles, the kid would be an American.
"Welfare and food stamps and diapers all on the taxpayer's dime." Woody spits out the words.
Gripping a vine at its root, I keep still. Afraid to dislodge a stone. Afraid the gabachos will see me. And ashamed of my fear.
On the path below me, the girl tries to run back toward the border, but the best she can do is a duck waddles. The two men cackle and whoop. Calvin grabs a lariat from his saddle. "Where you goin' chica? The amnesty bus already left the station."
He twirls the lariat and tosses it over the girl's head, where it settles on her chest. He pulls it tight, nearly yanking her off her feet.
"No!" she screams, clawing at the rope. "¡Mi bebé!"
"If there really is a kid..." Calvin hops off his horse. "Let's have a look, chica."
He struts toward her, bowlegged, his belly jiggling over his wide belt,
which is studded with silver buttons.
I want to fly down the mountain and take the gun away. If they give me any trouble, I will shoot one in the kneecap and the other in his big, fat belly. Isn't that what a valiente - a courageous man - would do? Take any risk, fight any foe, protect the weak, punish the wicked. But I am a boy. And they are grown men with guns.
"You with that coyote calls himself 'El Leon?'" Calvin demands
The girl's head bobs up and down.
"El Leon's a narcotraficante. You carrying his cocaina instead of a kid? You a mule?"
"No! Mi bebé!"
"C'mon. He always uses kids and women to carry his drugs."
"Not me. ¡Te lo juro por Dios!"
Calvin slips the lariat off the girl, then yanks up her blouse.
Even from this distance, I can see her bulging stomach, creamy white in the moonlight.
"She ain't lying," he says to Woody, patting the girl's belly. "Maybe we should deliver the baby right now. Save the county some money."
The girl screams.
"You got a knife, Woody?"
<
br /> "You know I do. Bowie knife."
I must do something, but what? My arms feel like they're dipped in boiling water. I try to get a better grip on the vine, but it tears from the dry earth. I dig my sneakers into the slope.
Calvin says, "Who's gonna operate?"
"You do it, Woody. I can't stand the sight of blood."
The girl chants in Spanish. Asks God to take her own life but save her baby.
I do not expect God to answer her prayers. He did not answer mine when my mother was sick. It is up to me.
Can a valiente be afraid?
I tell myself yes. If he acts with courage, despite the fear.
I grip the vine with my left hand, pick up a rock with my right. Round and jagged, the size of a baseball. I throw the rock at Woody, the gabacho still on his horse. It sails past the man's head, clunks into the dry wash.
"What the hell!" Woody turns in the saddle, faces the slope, revolver in hand.
"Up here, pendejos!" I yell.
"It's a kid," Calvin says, pointing. "Right there, Woody."
"C'mon down here, you little jumping bean," Woody orders.
"Come and get me, culero!" I throw another rock, adjusting for the downward arc. Woody never sees it coming out of the darkness, and it plunks his shoulder. He yelps and his horse does a little dance under him. He turns the revolver toward the slope and fires. A bullet pings off a boulder. Not even close. I think maybe he is not such a good shot.
"I work for El Leon!" I yell, waving my backpack in the air. As if I'm carrying cocaine and not just a pair of jeans, two t-shirts, and a first baseman's mitt.
"Little greaser's the mule!" Calvin sounds as if he's just made a great discovery. Now, I think maybe the men are not too smart, either.
"I may be a mule, but you're nothing but chicken-hearted banditos!"
I start up the slope again, clawing at rocks to make my way.
"Stop, you little punk!"
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