XXV
Mr. James Ito. His face is a secret, hiding many things, I believe. But his is a heart that hides nothing. I do not always understand what he is saying, but I feel safe with him. Nearly from the beginning—a great wonder—I trust him. And so, soon soon, I Manuel Flores who tells nobody anything, find myself sitting beside him on a small wooden chair sipping tea from tiny cups with no handles and revealing to him the complete story of my Beast journey.
Like tears held in for a very long time, out the words come. Pouring pouring. Mine is an ugly tale, apart from the few saints who float in and out—Gabriel, Señor Santos, Warrior Woman of the train station, Serafina, the doctor, the villagers and the children, and, of course, jewel-eyed, dream-lit Cejas, friend of friends.
When at last the flow of my words slows and thins, when I have recounted the final chapter, silence comes. Too respectful to stare I believe, my viejito glances at my hair. He says only, “So. That explains it.”
Then Mr. James Ito lets the silence work. I turn over in my mind these things I have been saying. And I realize in this moment how much goodness has been woven into my story. I think that from now on I will try to forget the bad. Papi would say that, like the maíz, good reaches for light. I decide. I also will reach for light.
Into the afternoon we sit side by side on two small chairs on his tiny porch, tiny teacups long empty. Mr. James Ito and I, each drifting along on his own thoughts. Two white-hairs together, remembering.
XXVI
“May I take your picture?” I ask Mr. James Ito one day. “My friend Cejas of the train gave me this camera.”
At first Mr. James Ito looks puzzled by this request, seeing nothing in my hands. Then, as I move toward him he sees that the camera is imaginary and gives one of his rare and shallow smiles.
“By all means,” he says with a slight bow and poses like an old-fashioned gentleman, stiff and somber but with a twinkle hiding somewhere close.
I bow also to begin.
I show him the result.
“A good likeness,” says Mr. James Ito in a satisfied way.
Mr. James Ito lives in a tiny house. Much tinier than ours. It is a long time before he invites me in. Maybe, like me, he is also not a truster.
When Mr. James Ito first asks me to enter, I feel that there is something more happening than just white-haired me going into a house. That he has made a big decision, to be my friend, look out for me.
Abue taught me that people are sent to you, “guides” she calls them, to cross your path and to help you through life. There are bad ones also who try to drag you to hell-places, but you do not follow them. Like Papi’s maíz you go for the light. Maybe Mr. James Ito has come to guide me in place of Abue and Papi. With his many years like the rings of a tree, his many wrinkles, his life crosses mine to give his many wisdoms. He is a sage. (Word-of-the-day.)
As we go into the house our eyes meet. We know our new situation.
I notice that Mr. James Ito leaves his sandals outside of the house. I leave my shoes outside also. Looking down at them I think, Once I wore no shoes. From this time on, when inside someone’s home, I go in stocking feet.
“Why do you remove your shoes, hermanito?” Toño asks.
“For respect to the floor,” I say. And to myself, I think, And to remind me of home, where I was shoeless.
This small place of Mr. James Ito has not one speck of dust anywhere. It is without many furnitures and neat neat. In the entry there is nothing but a grainy photograph, just one, black-and-white, hanging like a holy thing. It shows a field stretching away away, and in the furrows a family pausing from their work, grinning, all happily. One of these people, I believe, is Mr. James Ito, but young young.
The picture at once gives me a pang for home. For our milpita. I go close to it. “What grows there?” I ask, hoping for corn.
“Strawberries,” Mr. James Ito says. His voice is quiet, his eyes sad.
Quickly I look away and notice a surprising thing that I cannot stop staring at. I walk up to it and smile, for this is the tiniest tree that I have ever seen. Also the most beautiful, with its perfect little leaves, its graceful little branches. And the tiny plot of earth that holds it seems to say, I am the land, a small piece but precious. I am enchanted.
“Do you like this tree?” Mr. James Ito asks me, though his voice says he already knows the answer. The field picture that saddened him he forgets it seems.
“Oh, yes.”
“It is a bonsai,” he tells me. “A dwarf tree. It took many years to make it so.”
“You made it this way?”
“I did.” No pride. Only truth. His speech is as spare as his home.
“How many years?” I ask.
“Seventy years and I still work.”
“What took so long?” I blurt, then feel my face flame from my rudeness.
One of Mr. James Ito’s smiles skims his face butterfly-like.
“Patience is the way. It takes a lifetime to create beauty. But one must keep working at it. To add beauty to the world—goodness too—these things are of importance.”
The Angels is all flashy and big. Big cars. Big buildings. Big signs. But beauty is right here in the smallest thing.
“May I take its picture?” I ask at my politest.
“Of course.”
“Click.” There it is, Mr. James Ito’s bonsai, for always, thanks to Cejas.
Here, in my new—and old—friend’s house I feel Papi and Abue holding my hand from afar, showing me the way.
After the visit I float home.
Toño is already gone but I leave a Post-it where he cannot miss it. It says one word: bonsai.
The bonsai has enchanted me, but it is the strawberry field that haunts me.
XXVII
After seeing the beautiful bonsai I want to grow something. To care for it. Not a tiny tree but something of my own home, also beautiful. For a long time I think on this and at last make a decision. I will grow a plant of chiles. Not bonsai chiles, just regular ones.
Near the sky-scratchers of The Angels there is a big Mexican market. One Saturday Toño goes with me to select a plant. The One. There are many chile plants to choose from—too many—all small, which is what I need. I look. I look. I look more. Till I find the perfect one, leaves green green, fruits red like fire.
“This is it!” I at last announce to Toño when he is almost popping from impatience. “This little plant, I call her Hot Stuff,” I tell Toño, for I hope her fruits will be truly picantes.
“Great,” he grumbles after the long wait.
My mind has by now turned green. In the plant sense. I am spinning plans already—of how best to care for my little beauty. This little Hot Stuff, she must compete with a most heavenly bonsai tree with seventy years of age.
The little chile plant, she grows superbly (word-of-the-day) from the windowsill of our cocina. When the sun beams upon her, the chiles shine like tiny ornaments of Christmas. Each will offer a taste of home.
When we are cooking, we can walk up and take a chile or two from the living plant and toss them into the cook pot to hotten things up. Whenever I take a chile, I always bow a little bow like Mr. James Ito and to the generous little plant I say, “Muchas gracias.”
Another Saturday I go again to the market and I buy bean plants. Along with chiles, I will grow frijoles.
“Tell me about the field,” I say when I visit Mr. James Ito again. “Please,” I add to soften the words. I know I should not be so pushing with my curiosity, but the photograph, I cannot shake it from my heart.
Again Mr. James Ito’s eyes go sad. A skin of memory darkens them. For a long time there is silence, then Mr. James Ito says only, “It is gone.”
“And the people?”
“Gone.”
Not one to give dear details, he leaves it at that.
Heartbreak fills the room. I wait.
“Pearl Harbor came,” he tells me in a speech very big for him. “Japanese Americans like
me were locked up. Our family field was taken, the field I grew up in. The field of my heart.”
Silence again.
“What did you do?”
His eyes go darker. As if he is seeing something that I cannot see.
“I became a soldier. For my country.”
My words come slowly. “For Japan?”
“For the United States of America.”
We go quiet for a moment. Then I say, “I would never want to kill people.” I have seen enough death already.
“Yes,” muses Mr. James Ito looking off into somewhere far away. “Killing, in the end, answers nothing.”
“You have a gun?” I ask Mr. James Ito, thinking how could this peace man own such a thing.
“I did. But when the war was over and I was going home, I took my rifle apart piece by piece and flung it into the sea.”
After this hard talk we both fall silent, and I hope for his words of wisdom to come. Instead, he says something surprising.
“Sometimes,” says Mr. James Ito as if in another world, “when I am least expecting it, I catch the scent of strawberries.”
A great longing overcomes me. Suddenly I wish to stand among the rich dark furrows with Guapo and Trini, alongside my family, to hear the shuffling plants of maíz, to smell the earth.
I walk home, the milpita filling my soul.
XXVIII
My Abue fills my thoughts.
“Look for signs. Follow them.”
I look, but they do not come. “Go your way, Manuelito,” Abue says when we talk, “but seeking with your heart. Only then,” she says, “will magical things happen.”
So I keep trying to do this. I feel always now an unrest. Stronger than before. What is the path for me?
The Angels, it is an okay city, maybe even a great one. But here life is fast fast. Cars. Buses. Motorcycles. And cell phones cell phones cell phones. Everybody is connected, but I believe that nobody is. They just talk, but not to faces. It is all speed and brains numb from phones and advertisings. Toño says that some people count up every step they take. All day. Imagine! Instead of living, they count footsteps! Crazy beyond crazy! I remember what I thought when I first saw this place. That maybe this L.A. is another kind of beast—one that dazes you to death.
Almost any day the sky here is gray. Where are the wild blue sky acres? Where is the beauty? Everything is buildings. Freeways. Streets. Sidewalks of concrete. Where is the land?
The strangest thing. One day, near where we live, I come upon a plant of maíz. By itself. Alone. I am struck with wonder. Why have I never seen this one before? Suddenly I sense a great stillness. Like an angel passing.
This corn is struggling to grow through a crack in the sidewalk. It is stunted. Short. But it is green. In spite of drought, it holds out its arms with hope and waits for rain.
Each day after this, I visit the plant, bringing it water in a little bowl. I stop and stand beside it.
“Hola, Señor Maíz,” I say with respect. “I bring you water so that you will grow tall.” I hold out my arms like the plant of corn. I realize that we two are the same, struggling to survive in this place of cement where beauty is hiding hiding. Struggling where we cannot truly live, where we do not truly belong.
When I first see it, in my mind I place a circle of magic around the corn. Here, to this plant, is where I come to find my thoughts. Here I sit down inside the circle, a place of safety for me. And I think of what I will do for my life. On what path to place my feet. Passersby do not seem to notice a young man sitting beside a corn plant in the middle of a magic circle, seeking. Of course they do not. This is Los Angeles.
One night I dream of the corn plant. It is no longer growing in a city sidewalk, but instead sprouts up from a field near our pueblito. The plant grows fast—up up up—reaching higher and higher before my eyes. And it begins singing. Words I cannot make out, and yet I know their meaning. Taller taller it grows, to fantastic size, till its wide shadow shelters a small corn plot. Ours.
I wake from the dream and sit upright. Look for signs. Follow them. I hear Abue’s voice again. Out of the mist of this dream, one thing becomes clear clear. Dreams change. Once my dream was to be with Toño. No longer. All that has happened has led me to this moment. My mother dying, Toño leaving, The Beast journey, Señor Santos, Cejas, Serafina, Mr. James Ito with his field and bonsai. These things have pointed the way my heart has been seeking all along. There have been hints. But the small plant of corn, my deep heart knows, it is my true sign.
For some time I stay in bed without moving, in the absolute and holy stillness.
Long ago my Abue told me that within me I held all of the family dreams. I know now what she meant, that I should stay with them, to tend our little plot. Now—in the quiet, in the dark alone—I know what I will do. I will go home.
No border patrol will stop me from leaving. Probably they will give me a heavy shove to go. I come from People of Corn. I will return to my family and be happy again with the small things of life. I will do what Flores people have always done. Like my father and grandfather and all those before them I will walk behind an ox and plow the dirt and the dust will lift and shawl down upon me like a prayer, the dust, the very breath of the earth. I will tend our milpita and the maíz that it gives. I will be a tiller, a planter, a keeper of the land. Beneath both sun and rain, with my sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters I will labor. Sí, I Manuel Flores will become a farmer.
The absence-pain, it is hurting my heart already. To say goodbye to Mr. James Ito, that will be hard. But in his sage way he will understand. He has lost the field of his heart. He will want me to return to mine.
To break away from Toño is a different thing. How do you tell your brother that you are leaving, that you know you will never see him again? I begin to plan words in my mind. Do not miss me. Do not be sad. No matter how far away, I am here always by your side. Using Abue’s words I will say, Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.
As I plan, a deep ache grows. Toño. It was a terrible struggle to reach him. It will be a harder struggle to let him go. How will I do this without breaking both of our hearts? Impossible. But how can I break them softly?
My words seem rough. Not good enough. I keep thinking, but I cannot make them come out right. I cannot sleep. Then, once as dawn approaches and the sun begins to turn the gray sky gold, I realize something. I need no words.
That afternoon, when Toño wakes up, I am waiting for him in the kitchen. From sleepy eyes he looks at me and I look back, long long. I stand up. I embrace my brother. And he knows.
Quiet beyond quiet. Only the grillos are singing. The dust of the land scents the night. Above him, the wide sweep of sky is spangled with stars. But the young man does not know this. His eyes are only upon the adobe house, ahead a small distance.
An old dog of once great ferocity awakens. In his throat a growl begins. Then by some deep spell the growl becomes a whine. Suddenly, the dog stands beside the one who is coming.
And he dances in the dust like a thing possessed. And he licks the hand of the limping young man. The young man ruffles the big bucket head, holds the old dog close to his breast. He kneels to touch the blessed earth and then—he is rushing rushing, for the house.
GLOSSARY
a machetazos—By machete blows.
abrazo—Embrace, hug.
Abue—Short for abuelita, grandmother.
¡Alto!—Stop!
asesinos—Killers.
aterrado—Terrified.
azúcar—Sugar.
Bandidos—Bandits.
Belén—A girl’s name.
Bestia—Beast.
brincar—To jump.
bruja—Witch.
cabrón—Jerk.
cacahuates—Peanuts.
café—Coffee.
cálmate—Calm down.
casa—House.
Cejas—Eyebrows.
chile—Chili pepper.
chones—Slan
g for calzones, underwear.
cocina—Kitchen.
comales—Griddles.
compañero—Comrade.
completamente—Completely.
coyote—Paid smuggler of migrants across borders.
desayuno—Breakfast.
diez—Ten.
dinero—Money.
¡Dios mío!—My God!
dulces—Sweets.
el—The (masculine).
El Alacrán—The Scorpion.
El Chavo Viejo—The Old Kid.
El Norte—The North, United States.
eucalipto—Eucalyptus tree.
exceso—Excess.
fantasmas—Phantoms.
frijoles—Beans.
frontera—Border.
Gansitos—Little Geese (brand name).
gracias—Thank you.
gracias a Dios—Thank God.
grillos—Crickets.
Gringolandia—United States.
guarros—Pigs.
hasta—Until.
hermanito—Little brother.
hermano—Brother.
hola—Hello.
¡Idiota!—Idiot!
¡Igual!—Same to you!
inquieto—Restless.
la—The (feminine).
¡Ladrona!—Thief!
“Las mañanitas”—Mexican birthday song.
lobo—Wolf.
loco—Crazy.
Los Intensos—The intense ones.
maíz—Corn.
maldito—Bad guy.
’mano—Bro.
¡Me mataron!—They killed me!
“México lindo y querido”—Mexico lovely and dear (song title).
mi viejito—My old man.
Beast Rider Page 8