The Importance of a Piece of Paper

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Late that night she awoke, thinking she heard horses neighing, and went out to the barn, figuring that Pancho’s horses had gotten out of the corral. She expected to see the big bay mare tearing at the orchard branches. She opened the screen door and stood on the porch, staring at a rusted, ancient res truck parked there, the radiator smoldering with steam. It sputtered and rattled as Red Wind turned it off. He got out and motioned her over to the bed of the pickup. Pancho was in the back. He rose and embraced her.

  “I’m fine,” he said, his arm in a sling.

  “What’s that?” she asked, puzzled by the bundle of blankets piled on the other cot.

  “Jaylen,” Pancho said. He was tied down underneath to a willow branch cot.

  “Oh.” She couldn’t believe it and pulled back the blankets. Jaylen smiled up at her.

  “Grandpa tied him down, to keep him from moving around and bleeding all over,” Red Wind said.

  “I’m still not feeling that good,” Jaylen said.

  “Let’s get him inside. How are we going to do this...” Marisol said. She started to untie one of the knots but Pancho took out his pocketknife and cut through several of them.

  “That was your good rope,” Red Wind said.

  “I know it was. Let’s get him in the house.”

  The Valentine’s Day Card

  The nuns were always celebrating holidays. For Christmas we made paper snowflakes and snowmen, taped them to windows, and sprayed the whole scene white. For Easter we were herded into the kitchen to boil eggs and paint them, and then later we went to a park and had our egg hunt. For Halloween we cut pumpkins and sold them to outsiders, who lined up around the front of the main building and bought trunk loads full. We were always engaged in some holiday enterprise to distract us from the fact that we were orphans and not like the rest of the kids in the world.

  None of us would admit it though. We all told each other that we had parents and they were planning to come pick us up any day. That any day lasted for years sometimes but no one ever questioned it. We just believed it because we were all telling the same lies to help us believe that we really hadn’t been abandoned. And I suppose I believed my own lies more than anyone else, because when Valentine’s Day came and we had to make cards, I told everyone that I was making mine for my mother who was coming to visit me.

  My problem was I couldn’t read or write yet. I was about ten years old; I remember sitting in the back of the class scribbling unintelligible doodles on my sheets of paper and glancing out the window at the St. Mary’s Grotto, watching how the sparrows landed.

  Sister Rita kept looking at me and telling me to get busy and when she finally came to check on me and saw I had nothing but funny pictures—faces with exaggerated noses and bulging eyeballs and thick fleshy lips—she laughed to hide my shame. She was one of the nicer nuns. She knew that I was just learning to spell, and she suggested that I create a card for my mother by drawing one out.

  She gave me glitter flakes and Elmer’s glue and different colored yarns and shiny tiny stars and a new box of crayons and scissors. I went to work immediately. Everyone in the classroom, about forty kids, were making their poems rhyme with pretty-sounding words that conveyed their love for their aunts or moms or dads. Instead of a poem, I was going to draw the best card ever made, and I boasted to everyone that my card was for my mother.

  I labored over that card for days. I cut perfect little angel figures and glued them on. I lined up bright blue and red beads and circled them around butterflies I had made. I even worked when class ended and the rest of the kids went out to the playground.

  I was part of a group that always did fun stuff like throw flips from the monkey bars or see who could swing the highest and sail out of the swing and land the farthest. We were even in a go-cart building competition; we were making them out of old warped planks and baling wire and rusting bicycle rims. Staying in the classroom all afternoon, I missed playing baseball and basketball and even torturing the big state fair winner pig, Oscar. We used to go to the pigpen and rouse him from the mud and poke long sticks at his testicles to see his weenie come out and get hard. It was like a big red bow. We all giggled and ran away it was so embarrassing.

  I was missing all this fun because I was so intent on making this Valentine’s Day card for my mother. The making of it completely absorbed my day and I hardly even raised my head from the desk. I carefully etched out lines with different crayons, drew hummingbirds and roses, and traced paper cupids from a book. I filled in the empty spaces inside the card and on the covers with sparkle strings, nuts, and shells, and I even pasted pieces of real blossoms and grass and leaves around the letters M-O-T-H-E-R. At the end of the week we had to hand in our cards and when I did Sister Rita patted my back and said I had done a good job. She announced that the boy who created the best card would win a big box of cherry-filled chocolates and that we would all get to present the winning card to the person it had been made for.

  I knew that I wouldn’t win because many of the other boys had written real poems and they were long. So I wasn’t too worried about it. Besides, making the card for those five days I felt like I really had a mother and that I was making one for her because she was coming to visit. It all seemed very real to me while I was constructing my card, and though I knew it was just make-believe, it was good make-believe because I was happier inside than I had felt in a long time.

  So it came as a big surprise to me when we all rushed into the classroom Monday morning and Sister Rita announced I had won. Along with the box of cherry-filled chocolates, she gave me a first-prize ribbon. I hadn’t written a poem, but every boy in the classroom thought I had and gave me a rousing five-minute standing applause; some of them even jumped on desks and yelled and hollered until Sister Rita had to get everyone settled down again.

  That night, after handing out chocolates to my friends, I sat on my bunk cross-legged with a blanket on my lap and carefully picked chocolates and ate each one with great enjoyment. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world.

  Then something bad happened. Since I had won for the best card, it meant I had to give the card to my mother, and I knew in my heart that my mother would probably never come to see me. That was a bad night for me, and for hours after the lights were out I kept worrying about what I was going to do, and then I came up with a good idea.

  That night I waited until everyone in our dormitory was asleep and I got out of my cot and dressed and snuck out of the dorm. As soon as they found out I had no mother for real, every kid in the orphanage would laugh at me. I made my way through the cold dark to the main building, went inside, climbed up two flights of stairs to my classroom, and went in.

  The moon was bright outside the windows and it made the room even quieter and colder than it was. I sniffed the playground smells of my friends lingering around the desks— Peanut Head, Big Noodle, Cuckoo Clock, Tony Baloney. One of the radiators along the wall popped a noise and I jumped back in fright. The paper hearts and flowers taped to the windows smelled like sweet perfumed candies. A big black moth fluttered against one of the panes. I crept up to Sister Rita’s desk, pulled her drawer back, and found my card right on top with a big ribbon on it that said “First Place.” I took off the ribbon and tore up my card and poured the pieces into the trash can next to her desk. Then I went back to the dorm and got into bed like nothing had happened.

  I didn’t go to sleep right away because I kept thinking about the card and how pretty it was; I really liked it and wished I could have given it to someone. My grandma would have been perfect, but she had died over a year ago. I tried not to feel bad but I did, and so I closed my eyes and pretended I was meeting my mom in the visiting room and all the kids were there and I was handing her the card and she was crying and hugging me. I fell asleep like that.

  The next morning, I acted like nothing was wrong. We dressed, went to Mass, then went to breakfast, and after chores the school bell rang and we all mobbed our way into our classrooms. We no
rmally said a small prayer to begin the day but this morning we didn’t. Sister Rita stood in front of the classroom and, almost in tears, denounced the evil perpetrator who had done such a thoughtless thing to my card. She had taken out all the scraps of torn-up card from the trash can and now she held them up in a clear sandwich bag for the class to see.

  Her bottom lip was quivering when she said, “Who could dare do this! I want the person who did this to come forward!”

  My head was spinning. I placed my hands on the desktop to steady myself because Sister Rita was staring at me, the other kids were glancing furtively in my direction, and all were thinking what a terrible crime it was. Then my body, carried by some power other than my own will, moved toward the front of the room. The air became opaque. I wanted to scream out something about my mother to break the horrible silence closing in on me from all sides. I was nearing Sister Rita’s desk and vaguely overheard her say she was taking away all playground and recess privileges until the culprit came forth. As I started forming the words “I... my... mother...” she stopped mid-sentence and glared down at me. Then something softened over her features, and I thought she was going to cry as she took my hand and walked me outside of the classroom.

  “I did it because the only mother I have,” I whispered to her, “is in here,” indicating the heart in my chest. “Even though I tore that card up, she still has her card.” Sister Rita seemed to understand because, instead of spanking me as I expected, she knelt on the floor and hugged me.

  Enemies

  Chancla, Boogey, and Bomber had one thing in common—they all wanted to kill each other. None of them had had a visit in the four and a half years they had been down in the dungeon. They had no wives, no children, they didn’t know where their parents were, and they hadn’t seen their brothers and sisters in years. They could die tomorrow and no one would grieve them, no one would miss them, no one would even know they had lived and been on earth.

  Even the prison administration had forgotten them. There were only two people who had them on their radar: the old brittle-boned tier guard who seemed on the verge of crumbling when he slowly rose from his chair in the corner to unlock their cells—once a week to give them a shower and once a week for an hour of exercise in the cage behind the dungeon—and the obese chow guard who carted in their meals—three times a day, sliding their pewter trays under the cell bars and returning an hour later to pick the trays off the landing floor where they had settled after the three convicts hurled them against the wall.

  They were like three warriors from three warring clans stranded on an island who had long ago given up hope of ever rejoining their tribes or being rescued. It had been four and a half years since they had worn clothes. They rose and ate and slept and paced their cells in their boxer shorts. This was their world, day in, day out, and it never varied. Minutes crept by monotonously, and the three convicts would stare at the bars, amused by the rats racing by to snatch away morsels of the crusty leftovers stuck to the wall; by the spiders weaving cobweb after cobweb in the protective mesh screen covering the old ceiling lightbulbs. For at least one hour a day the men would stand clutching the bars of the cell, looking out on the tier, pushing their mouths into the space between the bars, and growling how they were going to kill each other.

  When the warden first sent them down to the dungeon, Boogey was in the Black X gang and had already been in prison for eight years. He was twenty-nine years old, out of Georgia, and angled like a plow blade. He looked like Mike Tyson—square jaw, beady dark eyes set wide apart, shoulders brawny as a draft horse harnessed in a quarry pit. He lived with a constant craving to crush his granite cell to dust, and the fact that he could not do it caused his fury to course down from his red-clay heart through his blood vessels, intestines, and stomach. It simmered through his features and his gestures glimmered dangerously with rage in the sweltering dungeon.

  Bomber was a skinhead and an expert at making bombs. The other two were constantly goading him, speculating that a bomb must have gone off in his mouth because his teeth were worse than rusty railroad spikes. He was twenty-three years old and mean as a wounded badger. But he hadn’t always been this way. Once he was a big, plump-cheeked, cornbread-eating, innocent Kentucky kid with a bucktoothed smile, who spent his days out hunting and fishing. He helped his mom wash clothes in the wringer washer and hang them on the clothesline, and herded his six siblings safely along the creek to school and back. Now, in the privacy of his own mind, he often wondered about the exact moment he had gone bad. Real bad. Armed robberies. Assault and battery. Murder for hire. Contracting out his services to burn buildings for insurance companies. The list went on and on, and over time his life of deception and violence had molded the very contours of his body into the unmistakable shape of crime. The vertebrae in Bomber’s lanky, sinewy torso seemed to coil when he slept and then move like a rattlesnake when he woke—vanishing in an instant and reappearing to strike from behind. He had shoulder-length white hair, albino eyes, white eyelashes, and venomous tattoos on his pale skin that advertised his hatred for spics, niggers, and Jews.

  Chancla, an American-born Spanish kid from Seattle, down eleven years on two counts of smuggling massive amounts of white Asian heroin, was a handsome criminal. From his neck down to his ankles he was tattooed. But his tattoos were not of vulgar symbols; they were elaborate adornments of high and low art—van Gogh’s idyllic wheat fields rolled over his left shoulder and down his back; Stan James’s Big Sur ocean waves lapped at his rock reef heart; an Ansel Adams’s sunrise over the Grand Tetons spread across his right shoulder blade; a bar graph necklace of musical notes from Van Morrison’s song, “Take My Trouble Away,” hung around his neck; a Mexican marketplace brimming with fruits and folk knickknacks covered his stomach; I Ching cryptograms banded his biceps; lightning streaked down his forearms and ended in fiery talons at his knuckles; and draping his legs was a Venetian tapestry of merchants in gondolas floating serenely in a channel. When he wasn’t in prison, he could get any woman he wanted with absolute certainty. Any woman Chancla’s eye landed on, Chancla got. She could be married, single, of any ethnic or religious background, old or young—it didn’t matter, she would fall under his strange hypnotic magic. Women adored his glossy black hair, his almond skin, his shy smile and strong white teeth, his ballet dancer’s physique, and his gold earring plugs studded with rubies. Most of all they loved the quiet attention he gave them. At its truest core, his life could be understood only through the innumerable love affairs he had had. He yearned for the day when he could be free and in the arms of a woman, a thousand miles away from the prison dungeon and the monotony of daily death threats from Boogey and Bomber.

  It was against the law to keep a convict in the dungeon for more than ninety days. Boogey had been placed in the dungeon by the reclassification hearing committee because he had stabbed several rival convicts. When the guards had discovered a cache of drugs and weapons during a shakedown of Bomber’s cell, Bomber had received ninety days in the dungeon as punishment. Chancla was caught making love to a beautiful sixteen-year-old boy who had been tried and sentenced as an adult, and was sent down to the dungeon for ninety days. For all three men, those ninety days turned into another sentence on top of the sentence already handed down by the courts for their original offenses. In the past they had sent word to the disciplinary committee through the chow guard, arguing that the prison was committing a crime by keeping them down there, but the committee members ignored them. Illegally confined to the dungeon, with no money to pay a lawyer to fight their case, and no access to law books if they wanted to fight it themselves, they had resigned themselves to the dungeon forever.

  Four and a half years without sunshine and hardly any exercise, while being constantly confined and forced to breathe the stale, rancid air, had made them more than a little mad, and every afternoon each one spewed his frustration on the others, vowing at the first opportunity to eliminate the other two. Pacing their cells day after day, seas
on after season, they planned out their vengeance and tormented each other with detailed accounts of the horrors they would inflict and the gruesome methods they would use— dismemberment, burning, decapitation, disembowelment, perverted sexual torture, and hanging.

  Of course, though they would not admit it to each other or even to themselves, in their innermost private thoughts each dreamed of leaving the dungeon and joining the general prison population back out on the yard. Each wished it was in his power to amass consecutive days of good behavior and enjoy more freedom and privilege—such as going to school, attending social activities hosted by visiting civilians, and eventually even working up to conjugal visits.

  But it would never happen, because one morning Captain Morgan came down to the dungeon and announced to Boogey, Bomber, and Chancla that they were all being released, no strings attached.

  The three convicts immediately thought that they were going to be sent out back behind the cell block and shot and buried. It would not have been the first time; on occasion the guards would take a convict out in the middle of the night and he would never be seen again. But even this threat to their lives didn’t bring the three of them together. Instead, they snarled at each other and acted as though the second their cell gates opened they would be on their prey like a hawk on a sparrow.

  The first guard came and let Chancla out. He was forced to put on clothes, which made him feel strange and vulnerable, and he was so certain that he was being taken out to be killed that he ignored Bomber and Boogey and asked the guard, “Why they letting us go?” The guard didn’t answer. Chancla’s paranoia grew when he was chained up at the ankles, then around the waist, and then handcuffed at the wrists. He shuffled awkwardly out of the dungeon, filled with mounting dread and despair. It was not the way he wanted to leave.