El Nino, page 14
The boy is gone. She calls out, bracing for a sudden crashing blow to the head, but then comes upon him after squeezing down a narrow crevice. He leans into a pool of water that cuts deep into the rock. He drinks from cupped palms, splashing his arms and face, cooling his bare feet. He is alone, a boy in the world, untethered to any people or place that she, at least, can imagine. She watches as he slips off his T-shirt. Like strumming a guitar, he runs his finger up and down the tattoo on his belly before rinsing his shirt and pulling it back over his head.
She crouches beside him, drinks like him. The water is warm. He calls the spring ojo de agua. Eye of water. There is a spa resort with that name west of Buzzard. The hospital had its last Christmas party there. The “eye” was a turquoise swimming pool that no one went into, dressed for cocktails as they all were. She tells the boy he is so smart to know these places.
“Good coyote.”
“Wash, vieja,” he says.
The face reflecting back in the water is gold with sand and scratched. Her glasses will not sit straight. Her feet scream with shock and relief when they hit the water. She takes off the sling, washes her calves, her arms, face, and neck.
The boy stretches in the shade of an overhang: eyes closed, knapsack for a pillow.
“My mom. How she look?”
The boy pretends not to hear.
She leans over and nudges his sneaker. “Marianne,” she says, “she sad? She scared?”
The boy crosses his legs and runs his fingers along the rock. She slings her arm in the T-shirt, oily with her sweat and rubbed skin, and tries to imagine him showered and clean, sitting on her leather couch digesting a well-balanced meal. She’ll have to take him into the city if she is going to pay him. She’ll get Dinorah to interrogate him. What will Dinorah say to this boy? Will she chide him or hug him close? Maybe Dinorah will turn out to be a distant relation and offer to take him home. He could be rehabilitated yet. First, he would have to learn English, go to school with regular children so as not to be ghettoized like other migrants in Buzzard. He is obviously intelligent in some innate, potentially dangerous, way. The makings of a corporate mogul, or a drug lord.
“Not scared, not sad,” the boy tells her in simple words. “She had the dog. She had a tree. I gave her water.” But he reminds her they have to get to her fast. At least as fast as what Honey thinks of as the no-man’s-land will allow.
The line on her finger from her wedding ring has already darkened. She takes it from her purse, tracing the engraving inside: her name, Keith’s name, the day of their marriage five years ago.
“Who is he?” the boy asks.
“My husband? He is good man.”
“A good man.”
She shoves the band onto her fattened pinky, twisting it to fit. “A wonderful man. An excellent doctor. In ER.” While he doesn’t get the Emergency Room part she manages to tell him how they met. Her translation of “lucky break” leaves the boy with a sour expression.
“His name?”
“Keith.”
“Dr. Keith.” He pronounces it carefully.
“Dr. Keith pay lots for helping me and Marianne,” Honey says.
The boy looks at her, big-eyed that she would think to remind him. “Of course he will pay. My life will be better then.”
She tells him they are good people, willing to help him. She tells him that a woman named Dinorah — a friend, she calls her — comes from the other side of the border too. “She know what you can do.” Does he want to go to school, for example?
Now his face clouds. “I don’t know. Something to make money, something not picking fucking fruit. You think that’s it for me, right?”
“You no English.”
“I can learn, vieja.”
She agrees. Anyone can. She tells him once Marianne didn’t know how to speak English either. “When she learn, she free. Now your turn.”
“My turn to be free.” As the boy opens another tin of spaghetti he repeats her words even more slowly than she had. He offers her the first bite but she pushes it away, touching the hard bits of his fingernails.
“Old food,” she says. “No good now.”
He shrugs, laughs at something, perhaps her stupid words. He asks how she knows Spanish.
“Nowhere,” is all she can think to say.
She sleeps somewhat, wakes to find the boy has somehow got hold of her purse and is going through her wallet. He looks closely at one of Keith’s business cards then zips it into a pocket on his bag. Money is scattered between his bare feet.
“Boy,” she whispers.
He starts, his body twitching.
“What you do?”
“Look.” The plastic coating on her identity cards has started to melt. Her Visa sticks to her library card, which is now glued to her faculty ID and driver’s license.
“You don’t look like her now,” he says, holding up the driver’s license. “Maybe it won’t even work now. Control would say you lie. Like any pollo going north to pick lettuce. You are not who you say.” And you are old, he says counting out her age on his fingers.
“How much money for that?” she asks, snatching back the license.
The boy is wrong: she is still that woman in there, with her lean neck and blond swimmer’s hair. Six feet tall. Corrective eyewear. On September 15, her forty-fourth birthday, she will have to make the annual trip to renew the stickers on the Ventura’s plates. Marianne will be there to celebrate with her this year. Will this boy? Or will he just be a topic of conversation? Keith will steer her, guide her, help her get over — what? This. That is what Keith does: guide, advise, chairing so many damn medical committees because he is not just a good doctor but a good man. His hands, when he reset her collarbone, were so warm and soft and capable, so free of a wedding ring. The spell of comfort and well-being he cast over her was total and unquestionable and as-yet unbroken. Keith will know what to do.
The boy shrugs. He could get some money for her ID. “I could sell who you are. Who you were.”
“Much, you think?”
He casts his arms wide. “I don’t deal any more with pollos. It’s dirty money, blood money. I find some other job.”
“Your mom need money?”
“I have a grandma only. Abuelita.” He says the name with a slow, curving lilt.
“Everyone has mom,” she presses. “I have my Marianne. Who yours?”
The boy tells her his mother had eyes his colour and wore pink high heels. She went north to work in a factory. He thinks she made it to Buzzard City though his grandma says she only got as far as San Wren. “She sewed clothes and sent money home to me and Abuelita.” And then she stopped. Like his friend’s mom, Juanita. Both of their moms are gone. Many women are gone. In his country Honey would be an old woman, just as he calls her, a vieja.
“What name your mom give you?”
The boy ignores her and just speaks on about his friend. His eyes shine and some slight upturn plays on his lips.
And where is he, the boy’s friend?
“Lost somewhere. We got separated leading some pollos across. Ocho came and shot at us and we all ran, scared. Ocho got the pollos.”
“And your friend?”
The boy shakes his head. “You’re wearing his hat.” The thought of his friend tempers the orange sheen of his eyes. His shoulders lose their angular tension.
She says the boy will have a better life in Zopilote. “Don’t worry. Please. I care for you there.” She does like Keith or Marianne, trying to find his eyes, to share a smile.
Worried? He has never worried before. What is it even to worry? He picks up the scattered coins and drops them into the zipper of her wallet. In paper, there is only one bill: a ten.
“You have a job?”
“Teacher.”
The boy whistles. He taps his right temple. “Smart vieja.” But not so smart out here. “You should not have left the car. The Jesus indio would have found you.”
She catches her wallet when he tosses it. She rummages through its pockets. He missed the picture of Keith she had long ago tucked into the billfold. It was taken before she knew him, when he was married to his first wife, whose half of the photo has been cut away. His hair was already grey, contrasting with his dark tan and open smile.
The boy takes the photo and peers into it, holding it close to his face. “He is an old man. But he has a good face. No kids?”
“No kids. Just me and Keith. Big love, lots of love.” She takes back the picture. Then says, “Who is indio? Johnny-for-Jesus, no?”
The boy calls him the Jesus indio but doesn’t know his real name. “He left water for us, like El Esqueleto.” But he and Marianne broke the rules by coming into the Las tierras vacías. “Only strong ones can come through here. Coyotes like me and Juan.”
Juan is the name of his lost friend, the lost son of lost Juanita, the owner of the hat on her head. He tells her how everyone wants to go through the Las tierras vacías.
“The land of no man,” she says to him in English. She asks if that’s why there is a bounty.
“Only the strong boys should be in your country, vieja, no ill boys, or slow or weak.” But didn’t he himself break the rules by helping boys cross? No. He justifies this by saying he makes no guarantees to them.
When she asks if he had pollos die on him or if he had to leave them behind, his face drains of its bit of softness and his shoulders square up.
“Yes. I did.”
“Died?” Honey whispers. “Pollos like me?”
He shakes his head. “No. I lost them and found them again, that’s all.” Then he says they’re lucky he did even that, didn’t have to. He takes care of himself first. He says he is perfect for her country, therefore. “Don’t you think, vieja?”
“Yes,” she says. “I think.”
Her keychain is a plastic cruise ship, a souvenir from last summer with Keith.
The key to their Ventura is capped in bright red plastic. The one for the condo is marked with blue. It is nice, in the sky, she tells him. “High, thirty-three. Up.”
He frowns, unbelieving. “One day I will see this, how you live.”
She smiles.
“You don’t believe me?” he spits.
“Yes, I believe.”
When he asks if she makes pictures too she cringes. “No. My mom.”
The boy would like to draw comics. Did he say already that he knows how to tattoo?
“Yes.”
He wants to see Honey’s ankle again. One day he will get his lines that thin. The boy’s finger traces a shape in the sand. A chess pawn? No — it is a keyhole. He touches his left forearm. “This is tattooed here, on Juan.” He met Juan in San Wren. They got together taking over pollos. “Together we were the best.”
“Look,” he points at a dark spot moving across the horizon. A coyote, he says. “Or else it is that crazy dog, the dog of El Esqueleto.”
No. “Baez have big, big head.”
The animal stops, watches them, its ears peaked. When it is gone again the boy goes back to drawing shapes in the sand. Or he writes Juan, only to quickly erase it.
“You read, write? How?”
The boy throws a stone at her foot. He shouts. “I went to school, vieja. I tried hard and I read each day. You think we’re stupid?”
“No. Just underprivileged, underdeveloped,” she says in English. “Buzzard, school, need money,” she says, trying Spanish again. “Many boys and girls no go school. You see?”
“I’ll teach myself,” he says. “I’ll speak English perfectly. And you’ll still speak shitty Spanish.”
He goes back to his shapes, his Juans in the sand.
Honey looks deep into Keith’s photo, perhaps as he is looking at the one of her he carries. He might right now at this precise moment be swimming in his hotel pool, getting his blood flowing after a long day sitting, listening, shaking hands with his international counterparts, nodding at their eager English. When he phones the condo he’ll assume she drove to the coast like she had lied and said she might. She closes her eyes. Water rushes against her skin as she dives into the Olympic-sized pool where she does her laps, resting only on Sunday when she bike-rides instead. Somewhere, a whistle blows. A coach barks encouragement from the deck. As her body cuts through the resistance of the water, her mind fuses with her arms, hips, bringing consciousness to her physical rhythm. Then there is the comforting fatigue that invades her shoulders as she climbs back into the Ventura, hair still damp, skin tight. Her belly weakens in anticipation of Keith’s protein-rich breakfast. She hears the boy’s Spanish but cannot respond. She is in the pool again, dissolving into the push and pull of her daily battle. Wriggling and blind, pressing ahead.
Chávez
Light thickens, gives to gold then falls across the floor planks, warming his back. It is quiet. He hears that on farms way in the north, pickers have to find their own places to live. They sleep outside in tents or under bridges and then walk long distances to get to the fields. He has to get out of this work. He hates it more than any other picker, he is sure. The smell of sweat and dirty sheets clouds the air, hard work and the zing of burgeoning testosterone. His stomach growls and thirst tightens his throat. Then the pickups pull in. The yard fills with chatter and clatter, the water pump creaks and creaks.
A crowd of ball-capped kids — boys and teens — spills into the bunkhouse, their shoes heavy with caked mud, knees and hands crimson. Straw clings to clothes, lips, hair. They smell bright with coconut suntan lotion and the rotten fruit caked under fingernails and in the treads of their shoes — some kind of sticky jam stew. They claim their beds, peeling dirty clothing from their humid backs, groping through gym bags and plastic sacks for something cleaner.
Most nod at him. Some smile, tell him their name, and others, too tired, simply look his way and blink. Mario comes in last. He finds his bed, unlaces his sneakers, lies down — hat on, eyes closed.
“Hey,” Chávez whispers. “Mario.” Mario does not respond. That’s because Mario was just the name Juan had made up for him.
Chávez leans over and touches the boy’s shoulder. “Hey.”
Mario sits up. Through the shuffle of bodies, the rustle of tossed shirts and pants, his bleary eyes land on Chávez.
“You?” His small voice gets lost in the clamour. “Those eyes.”
“Me.”
They stand, step forth.
“I thought you were dead,” Chávez says.
Mario’s face is less round. It has been almost two years. His gaze is tight: if he looks away or blinks, Chávez might disappear. And his voice when he speaks has both deepened and lost its Indian accent.
“What are you doing here?”
Chávez takes off his hat and removes the fold of dollars from the inside band. “It’s your fee back.”
Mario shakes his head.
“How about Diego?” Chávez looks around the bunkhouse for the brother. Though he sees the older boy in his dreams, he cannot remember his face.
Mario says, “My brother was not called Diego. You called him that.”
When he asks Mario what their real names are, Mario just shakes his head. “My brother died in the hills. Not far from where you left us.”
Chávez looks down at Mario’s boots. “But not you. You lived.” He wishes he could say he would give his life so Diego could have lived, but then he would be lying.
“God chose me. God left me alone, with no brother. I don’t know why yet.”
A crowd has gathered around them. One face is darker than the rest. Is this what they mean by black? Is this an African boy?
“I didn’t mean to leave you,” he says. “I ran scared. But I went back and you were gone.”
A sharp clang resounds from across the yard. There is a flurry of movement and bedsprings. Mario fades into the jostle of the supper rush.
“Bring me mine, hey,” some boy calls weakly from an upper berth.
In English someone else keeps saying he can’t open his hands because of some bee stings.
“One of you untie my boots?” The African boy sits on the edge of his cot, holding out his hands which are wrapped in ice packs. “Lost a whole day’s pay,” he says, shaking his head.
Mario bends over on one knee, changing into the boots that were his brother’s. Chávez shoves the fold of money into the pocket of Mario’s shirt.
“Please forgive me,” he says in English, the way he’s practiced, and then, though it’s more difficult, he repeats the line in Spanish. Then he walks out with the other pickers, turning back at the door. Mario is tucking the money between the bee-stung hands of the African boy.
Baez
She got the hole so deep the top of her head was lower than the rim of the ground. Behind her, Old Blue’s legs and shirt were splattered with dirt. With closed eyes, Old Blue picked at the sand and root and rock. She opened her mouth, ate from what was in her palm.
The morning after Baez bit Old Blue, Black Braid arrived early, sounded his horn. Marianne! Baez came out from under the stoop. Black Braid knelt over her, his wooden cross swinging and his dark eyes narrowing as they travelled over her fresh cuts and scratches, the shoulder where the Yellow Man’s stick had struck her.
Marianne!
The door to the trailer opened. Black Braid disappeared inside. Then he came out and drove away, fast. He drove back with cans of soda, food in a white bag, water with which he filled Baez’s bowl. Black Braid and Old Blue spoke in the trailer above her while she hid in the shade of the stoop. When they came out, Old Blue’s arm was wrapped in the grey towel that had hung by the bathroom sink. But it was not grey now. Now it was stained dark, as if all the colour that should have been in Old Blue’s face had drained into that piece of fabric. They crouched over Baez. Old Blue kept her towelled arm tucked in. Old Blue and Black Braid spoke. Old Blue cried. Old Blue filled Baez’s bowls and chained her to the post then pressed her face into her fur. Old Blue climbed into Black Braid’s truck and then they drove up the road.
