By this time my fears are many. Fear of trains. Fear of robbers. Fear of starvation. Fear of drowning. Fear of polis. To this list I now add fear of eucaliptos.
This monster looms close to the casa, very close.
“Have you done this before?” I ask Lorenzo hopefully, and in Spanish, when the lady goes inside for the machetes.
“Never,” he says.
This eucalipto, it is like a hell-test. I do not know what I am doing. Neither does my compañero. Easily we could fail. And fall. But what if we have success? What if we get lucky and actually topple this thing? What if then it flattens the house?
The lady returns and keeps talking at us, louder and louder as if that will help us understand better, about extreme carefulness. About her precious house. About how if we go wrong she will call the police. Lorenzo understands her mean words. I understand her mean voice. My nerves are needles. But I cannot back down. I need the money.
Looking up at el monstruo makes me dizzy dizzy. Shinnying up is worse. I bind myself to the tree with a nearly falling-to-pieces rope. Holding tight to my machete, with strongest urgings, I talk myself to the top.
“Are you scared?” Lorenzo asks once he is also up.
“Aterrado.” I believe my smile is the weakest one ever tried in the history of people.
Then one by one Lorenzo and I hack branches off till the tree is pretty pelón. Like a pole. For fear of falling, we do not talk much, except I learn that Lorenzo is from Honduras. Far from home like me. And lonely. His voice tells me this last thing.
Here we are, two guys from far places, whacking at a tree we hold nothing against, for a hard lady who cares for nobody but her own face-stretched self, about to plunge to our deaths. Suddenly we both spurt forth with laughs—petrified ones. What am I doing, I wonder, up in this sky-scratcher tree, in this loco Los Angeles, when I could be safe in our milpita, shawled with blessed dust, pushing a plow behind Trini?
Being with deep dizziness, I pray that I do not chop myself with my machete, or fall and break my neck. Between Lorenzo and me this work takes some days, in which we are sweating and covered in wood chips and leaves, grazed by falling limbs and always overcome and reeking reeking with the eucalipto smell like medicine. It is itchy work. My worry is constant. What if our ancient ropes do not hold? We are up here like eagles with no aeries (word-of-the-day)—and no wings.
How could I have survived the Beast journey, the gangs, the polis, the big-river crossing, only to die by tree?
While doing this labor I remember the words of Señor Santos. Your work—in even the smallest things—it is a mirror of you. So, though I feel miserable, I labor well for this misery of a person.
As if it is not hard enough, the lady of the tree is so stingy she does not offer food, she does not offer water. But often, far below, like a nasty little dog, she barks cautions and orders. I just keep saying to her “No problema,” and I keep hacking.
When the big limbs are gone we shinny back down and set our machetes to biting into the trunk. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! My arms become aching from this tough work. Chopping an eucalipto is like chopping brick. And then comes the time that it begins to make a funny noise and to tremble. ¡Ay Jesús! We have no control over el monstruo. It has chosen to topple. To topple in all its big heaviness for the casa! The house will be squashed and I will be caught by polis. The lady screams. Lorenzo and I pray. As el monstruo falls I feel a wind, as if the thing is letting out all of its breath. Then—a miracle!—in a great rustle and crash it comes down—missing the casa by one pulgada.
Though we successfully miss her house by an inch, the lady is in full fury. Enraged completely.
“Fools! You are useless!” Lorenzo translates quickly. “You can’t speak English. You can’t do anything! You Mexicans are all alike!” She screams this, even though Lorenzo is from Honduras. “I will not pay you a penny! Go! You are a disease infecting our country! We need walls against you!” She slams the gate and locks us out. “And you call yourselves gardeners!” She shrieks one last insult.
I never called myself anything but desperate.
I am a young man with one bad eye, who hobbles, who has left his family, who has lost a tooth and been broken by bandits to reach this place to find honest work. Walls against me? She needs my work. She needs to let me in. My heart plunges like a crazy thing. That one, she is certain to call the police, so Lorenzo and I, we just get out of there.
“¡Suerte!” Lorenzo calls to me on the run when we part ways. Good luck!
“¡Igual!” Same for you!
I have lost a week of my life. I have lost my pay. Also I have lost some faith. There are good people in The Angels I am certain, but that lady, she is not one.
Somewhere near, in this craziness that is The Angels, I hear a siren. I believe I see police-car lights pulsing, so I hobble myself along as fast as I can. At night when I finally find my way home, I dream. Angry voices shout at me Job-stealer! Criminal! Go back where you came from!
Job-stealer? The truth is nobody else would take such a job. Nobody would chop down an eucalipto a machetazos but a desperate guy like me.
Why do they spit out such names?
Do they not know that I am a person like them?
Do they not see my face?
XXII
Time passes. Time and time. One year. Another. Moving slowly like creaking cart wheels. I work. Toño works. When I do not have work I do jobs around the house. Cleaning, washing windows, cooking also. Like that. We do not have a vacuum cleaner, so I sweep a lot. I always take longer than I need to, for the sound of the broom is a comfort, whispering whispering like Abue’s broom at home.
Once, ants seeking water and crumbs enter during a time of drought. I know what it is to be hungry and thirsty, so I do not want to kill them. I do not want to kill anything. Still we cannot live with swarms of ants, so with poison spray I “do them in.” That is an American way to say it.
When the bodies are dry I sweep them into a little heap—like coffee grounds—then put them in the trash. I spend some time then scrubbing the floor where the invasion took place, getting rid of the smell of poison.
While I am doing these chores, my mind floats. Toño and Sinaloa, they may love me, but they are one. I am an outsider, really. I begin to feel uneasy about other things too. I wonder, Waiting in the street for a job to come. Killing ants. Chopping random trees. Is this all there is for me?
I am alive, but not. Just breathing does not count as living.
“Look for signs,” Abue tells me still when we talk quickly on the phone and I ask where my life will go. “Follow them.”
The old man who is Toño’s neighbor but not neighbor. I see him whenever I pass his house to go home. At first I pretend not to see him. The safe path. But now we recognize each other. We do not speak but our eyes meet. Two lonely guys, I guess, living on the same street.
I decide not to wait for La Vida to carry me like a leaf on a stream. I think about things that I like to do, my mind rambling over my years. The big one is to shape tejas. In the olden way, as I did with Papi and with Señor Santos. Making a thing with your hands is good. In the work you leave some of your self.
With me tejas become a Thing. I ask Toño if he knows anybody who makes them. No, he does not. But he asks around, knowing that I am excited about this. Word goes out. Toño asks somebody. Somebody asks somebody else. This way is what gringos call “the grapevine.” And it works. One time before Toño falls into bed after his all-night work, he leaves me a Post-it. Not one word, but a tejas-place name. Somebody along his grapevine has recommended me, so I had better brincar, jump over there, and grab a job while I can. (This information fits on two Post-its actually.)
That is what I do. Brinco. I jump for this job. In The Angels this means I must take a bus, walk, take another bus, walk, and so on. All this costs. Time and money. And then maybe you will come upon the place you are looking for, if you do not get lost.
Mission Tiles is the name o
f the place. A mission is like a big church, so the name sounds good to me. I do not call first. I just go, thinking it is better to present myself, looking ready to jump into the work.
Mission Tiles is the furthest thing from Señor Santos’s small tile makings that I can imagine. It is a factory. Huge. Like a barn. But not with soft whinnyings of horses or lowings of cows. Not with a rooster or a cat to press its track into a soft tile piece. To say I was here. None of that. Knees to bend the pieces are not involved either. It is all clangings and bangings as tiles are spat out by big machineries onto what is called a conveyor belt.
This place also has the endless yelling of the foreman. He is called Half, nobody knows why. Another worker tells me that Half says he was once a marine and that he is proud to talk like one. That is, yell like one, in a constant ugliness stream. If this one is Half, I do not want the whole.
When I am working here, I think of Señor Santos, who probably never used a curse word, not even exclaimed “¡Ay Chihuahua!” I would not be proud of such a thing. Neither would a truly good marine.
All day long, workers, me also, snatch tiles one at a time from the belt. We smooth the edges, then put the tiles back. Always working fast. In here it is hot hot. Red tile dust covers everything, everybody. (I like this part. It reminds me of the blessing of the tile dust of Señor Santos, and the blessing of the dust of our milpita.) The finished pieces are baked and stacked. By machines. If we work too slowly—or drop a tile by accident—Half curses us and makes us pay for the broken one. Sometimes he just barges up to somebody and swats a tile from his hand, shattering it on purpose. “Clumsy idiot! A dollar for that!” He grins, grabs the money and stuffs it into his pocket. A dollar the worker needs.
These workers they are like me. No papers. At least not real ones. So Half bullies us and gets away with it. We can do nothing, except leave. And we cannot afford that.
When I am home and it is quiet I think of my family. I think of what they have taught me my whole life. Never quit a work. Be humble, be proud of your labor, finish. But this work it is different. There is no finish. There is nothing to be proud of working in this tejas place. I am humble, but machine tejas are not my path. My choices are few but still I have them. In this life there is something for me that is not a cold teja machine and a colder-still bully. I quit.
XXIII
On the floor a Post-it greets me. Eyebrows called. I am sleep-groggy. Eyebrows. Eyebrows. Word-of-the-day? But since when do eyebrows call?
“Eyebrows!” I suddenly hoot out loud. Cejas! I remember that before she left I gave her Toño’s number. I look at the ceiling as though there is a full moon up there, and I let loose a long wolf howl.
That one, of course she has a cell phone.
I am awake when Toño comes home.
“You got her number?” I ask first thing, without even a greeting for him.
“Whose?”
“Eyebrows’s! In Virginia of the West!” I say it as if any fool would know this.
“Eyebrows do not have numbers,” Toño teases.
“Come on, man, give it over.”
Toño makes a big show of trying to find it till finally I tackle him and start invading his pockets myself.
“Hands off.” We giggle like little boys.
“Tell me about Eyebrows,” he says, squirming from me.
“Eyebrows, brother. You wear them on your face,” I say, digging with my fingers to find the best tickles.
“Enough!” He begs, limp with laughs. Then with fake surprise he holds up a bit of paper and says, “Well now, what is this?”
I do not snatch the paper, for fear of tearing the number. I wait. Like a dog with a steak dangling just out of its reach.
“Ton-yo!” I plead, “We must call!”
“Now?” asks my brother, stretching out my frustration, knowing I am in his clutches. “What time is it in West Virginia?”
I do not care what time it is. I care about talking with Cejas. But I now slow down, going for nonchalance. “It is not midnight, if that is what you mean. I think it is a good calling time.”
“Who is this Eyebrows you have so carefully hidden from me?” Toño asks in a needling way. Ay! I think. Teasing is coming for the rest of my life.
“Toño, let me call her or I will keep you awake all day!” I shout. My nonchalance is vanished.
“Here ’mano. Enjoy your call.” He hands me his phone.
I close the door and start dialing. My hands are shaking. How funny. She is just a girl.
The cell seems to ring forever. Finally, somebody answers. A miracle! Cejas.
“Hola,” I say, feeling all of a sudden shy. “It is me.”
“Wolf boy?”
Then comes a small silence and Cejas says, “You are smiling, right?”
“Yep.” I feel my face splitting into two pieces with a grin.
Cejas jumps right in, telling me in runaway words how her life has been. “My mami is fine and she loves me and so do her new children which she had over here in Virginia and one is called Virginia for that reason and one is called West because that is the rest of this state’s name and Mami likes the joke of it and I am not hungry every day anymore and I work for a photographer, the old-timey kind with an old-timey camera that stands on stick legs and is heavier than I am and he droops a black cloth over himself like he is hiding and squeezes a bulb to take pictures of little kids and old people and all in-between ones and I get to run errands and give dulces to the little ones and I give sweets to myself also because my boss says it is okay and I hold up toys one is a bright red bird and I say “Watch the birdie” like old-timey photographers used to say and they do not watch the birdie but they do watch me because I make faces that make them happy and I believe that soon I will be snapping photos from beneath that big black cloth. . . .”
Cejas’s story gallops on and on, and I feel her sparkle zing right through the phone and into my hand.
We make a plan to talk again.
“Then you can tell me your story,” she says.
“Ha! I will be surprised to squeeze any words in,” I say back. My voice is still smiling.
When the call ends I feel absolutely wrung out like laundry. That is the Cejas Effect for you.
XXIV
Toño and I, we see each other when we can. He teases me with a “How is your girlfriend?” when he can. Also, when we are together we call home. One worry for me is that, so far away, the dear voices will grow weaker weaker. Just fade like clouds thinned in wind. But no. When I close my eyes, the voices, the faces, they grow strong. Especially Abue’s.
Aside from Toño and Sinaloa and a few calls to Cejas, I keep to myself. Here in this Los Angeles, impossibly enormous place, I am an island. Loneliness wraps me like a dark sarape, but I spill my heart to nobody.
Toño’s neighbor, the Japan man, is a withered-up one with about one hundred years on him, I believe. A whitehair, as I call him. Like me. Whenever I see him he is always sitting alone in his chair on his tiny porch. I have never seen him with a visitor, not even a neighbor. Deciding that he is not a spy as I first thought, I begin to nod when I go by. At least I think I do. A little dip of the head. The Japan man, he does the same. A nod. A bow really.
He bows to me, Beast Rider alone, swallowed by L.A.! I cannot ignore a bow. Among many things, Abue and Papi have taught me courtesy. Next time I pass, I Manuel Flores, truster of nobody, most of all not strangers, I lift my hand in the littlest wave, like a tiny small flag. This man, he waves back, and again he bows.
Soon I am stopping—at first a little, then longer and longer—to visit the man who I learn is Mr. James Ito and who I come to think of as “my viejito.” He bows. I bow. Respect we now show always upon meeting.
He is full of years and wrinkles and also full of solemnness. Yet there is something else about this old one, so bone thin but wire-tough. Always a bit ceremonious, he is the kind of person who causes you to use his full complete name.
Mr. James It
o, sí a most solemn one. At first speaking but little. But then he talks more, a slow river flowing itself along. Pretty soon I make a decision. When I am not working I will tell stories about my family and my home to this old one, to keep him from feeling alone.
Life is a twist. My plan to share stories with Mr. James Ito turns itself inside out. My stories fade away, for he begins telling stories to me. Of when he was young. Of his still-alive dreams. “We always need dreams,” he says. These visits soften my own loneliness.
My viejito tells of walking in the beautiful mountains of Oregon. He tells of gardens in a way that I know he loves the earth. Then I drift off, thinking of our milpita far away. And of my family. Once Mr. James Ito tells a story in which our lives cross, though he does not know it. He says that long ago, in his green years, he and his friends were in a car, rattling along fast fast when in the distance came the long mourn of a train. At this, I stiffen.
“We were teenagers and crazy from drinking,” says my viejito, “and just crazy from being young.”
I am stunned that such a one would drink spirits, but I keep this thought inside myself.
The tracks were right ahead. “Faster! Floor it! We can beat it!” The train was racing. The car was racing. Then with great suddenness—two friends were dead.
“I have a scar,” Mr. James Ito tells me in full solemnity. “It is long and white,” he explains, “cross-hatched where long ago stitches stabbed in. Like railroad tracks.” I would like to see it, but do not ask. He does not offer to show it either, being very full of dignity. Like a teller of fortunes he then gazes into my eyes darkly. “Avoid trains, young Manuel,” says Mr. James Ito, speaking about his experience. But of course it is too late for that.
We are both scarred by trains.
This same night I am awakened by a shout. Mine. I am panting, wet with sweat and trembling like a moth. Shards of broken-bottle glass tumble down down in slow motion through the vision I have had. One shard is etched with a machete blade. Another with a brand, a horned B. Some with the vicious faces of bandits. And polis. Toño is not home yet. For a long time I quake in the dark.
Beast Rider Page 7