El Nino, page 15
Now, an engine sounds, coming near. A not-so-white white van chugs up the path towards the trailer; the orange arrows on the side are chipped and bleached out. Behind the plywood, her children take to their feet, yowling. Their caging rattles. Jittery scent cuts the air. The Cactus Men are two. These ones are sunburned, near as tall as Old Blue, with bristled faces. Instead of eyes glassed in black, theirs are silver reflections of the desert. But the shaggy, saggy greeny-brown from head to boot is the same. Some Cactus Men came to Old Blue’s once too. They walked about the trailer, the fields, wrote in their notebooks and went away. Then, like now, a brown-and-yellow dog was belted into the front seat. It is not the same dog that Speckled Man once mated her with, but it could be. And it could be her mother, too. She has that dog’s blood in her just as she had that other dog’s children in her womb.
Glove leads the shuffling brown boys to the white car. Tattoo carries their packs. A Cactus Man opens the back door. Their dog’s barking rollicks the buzz of day, fuelling the frenzy of her children again. Amid the shaking, breaking, cracking air, the second Cactus Man locks the hands of the brown boys behind their backs with bracelets, and, hands under armpits, lifts each up into the rear. When the door slams shut, the brown boys, through the window glass, turn into sharp black silhouettes.
The Cactus Men give Glove some bills of crinkled paper then disappear into the bright dust. Glove and Tattoo count the money that once would have stacked thick. Once, there were many boys for Glove and Tattoo to catch. Soon the Cactus Men will not have to come with their dog or their money. Baez will have died by then, her children released into the desert. Then, maybe, the Cactus Men will take Glove and Tattoo back over the grey wall too.
Honey
The soles of Marianne’s tennis shoes are starting to crack. Rocks keep getting in. And the left one is rubbing her heel raw. She would kill to get her Nikes back. But it is every boy for himself here. She would have stolen them too.
The ground is scaled crust. Somewhere below there must be burps of moisture, for some things do grow: silk-haired cactus and squat twists of tree; creosote and low, silvery bushes in whose branches wrens have nests and under which rabbits hide. The holes they see dug around a mesquite are from coyotes, which, the boy says, can get deep enough to grasp roots and suck the moisture from them. And there are snakes, some alive and many dead, bellies baked. Their carcasses are strung out beside dropped water bottles and cans and diapers and rolls of toilet paper; a comic book, a dusty boot. She picks up a toilet roll and puts it in her purse. She does not pee here. The boy says to save it up. Don’t sweat, either. With each drop of moisture she doesn’t replace, she loses a little bit of her life.
They stop and the boy eats the last tin of spaghetti.
She says again it is bad, as in expired, but cannot make him understand.
He smacks his lips and rubs his belly — “Yummy-yum, vieja. Too good for you?”
He says they are almost out of water again. He says a person can live maybe two days here without it.
The pain in her arm is down to a five. She opens and closes her stiffening right fist and with this hand touches her head. The cut is closing. Beneath her palms Marianne’s jeans are soft. She rubs her legs, releasing the smell of that animal.
“Tell me, again. My mom, she say what to you?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but staggers instead. He doubles over and clenches his belly, dropping the plastic bag.
The boy’s face is slick with a different kind of sweat and his eyes water. He pushes her hand away from his forehead and walks on.
“The hills there,” he points. Then the boy halts, crossing his legs. “Please,” he groans. “Please go away.” His shirt sticks and his body rolls with trembles. “Go,” he says, his face is beaded. “Go, go,” he hollers, gripping his gut and clenching.
“Go? Where?”
He screams something. His face is pale then it purples. She picks up his bag and water bottles and huddles in a stretch of pale grass, some yards away. She rocks on her heels. The sky lightens.
He calls to her. He waves for her to come. He is reduced in colour and size, his jeans swallowing him. Beneath the bill of his cap his eyes are blistered and his cheeks are streaked with the dry salt of tears.
“Fucking spaghetti,” he whispers, his voice shakes. “I am vacío.” Empty.
He takes his bag and bottles without a look and walks on towards what are now red and lavender hills.
“You need salt and water,” she says. She knows this from Monica. Or was it Keith? The boy lets her put a hand on his thin shoulder. He blinks up at her. The hand that dangles limp at his side is cold and wet.
“Let me help you,” she says in English. “We have to do this together.”
They pull each other up a slope that grades into a ledge obscured by scrub and tree-shell. And the mountains? Gone now, receding back and back like a forgotten dream.
At the plateau the boy drops to his knees, curls into a ball.
She ties the boy’s plastic bags around any living green she sees within the scrub, forming neat balloons. Dawn has come and gone. In a few hours the boil will be on. The boy sleeps in the shade of a high, curved boulder. Figures move along the southern horizon sprawled below. They are too far away to call to.
The boy opens his eyes. His head is hot in her hand. She pours the last of the water into his mouth. He sleeps again — if he dreams, it will be of sparkling rivers and cold Coke. His lids flutter, birds beneath.
She drapes him in one of the T-shirts he has in his pack. She takes her purse and an empty water bottle. In the plastic bag, she finds the boy’s penlight and Juan’s hat, which she pulls on.
“I go not far,” she tells the boy, shaking him.
“Once there were two little pollos,” he says. “Vieja, I’m sorry they died.”
“It’s okay,” she tells him in English, too tired to use his language. “You can only do your best, little boy, that’s it.”
When he is still again, she slips down into the desert basin. She can hardly breathe. Like in outer space, there is no oxygen here, it is just dry.
Up on the hill, she spots the boy’s boulder, a soft, tumbled egg rocking on its wide bottom. She closes her eyes and locks it in.
North and west. She stumbles over pant-cuffs, Marianne’s denim clothes stretched and torn, burned by the sun right through to the skin. Behind her the hill with the boy’s oval rock has disappeared into the horizon and before her, hills stretch on, rippling out. Marianne is in this place. She will find her and she will still be alive.
To remember her way, Honey speaks what she sees, loud and full, using all her voice:
Boot prints
Snake tracks
Plastic blue razor
Jackson’s sardines
Frigo mango juice can
Luna Springs water bottle
Scarecrow cactus
Stick like a bone
T-shirt rag
Hills rolling like m-shaped birds
And every five hundred steps she drops a hot metal key from the cruise-ship ring. Thud, in the sand: condo, car, desk, Xerox room, pool locker, Marianne’s trailer. The keys to the Tribal are still stuck in the ignition.
Tire iron
Heart-shaped rock
Ocotillo skeleton
Behind her the dropped keys glisten, nuggets of shimmer and shine. And up ahead, there is a shallow wash. In it, a twist that is barely an ironwood tree, bottomed by a brittle patch of creosote. She huddles beneath the tree, drinking in its shade. A rumbling erupts through the hot sand. She sits up. A cloud of dust comes barrelling down — no, up — from the south. The low-riding dune buggy materializes, a gutted scream, a tarnished gleam. As it nears, the driver’s helmet shimmers, then the passenger’s: or rather, the gunner’s.
She stays still.
Sand explodes, some ten feet off.
The second shot, taken from fifty feet, is as wide as the first.
She flattens herself. She is part of the earth.
The teens hoot and wheeeeee. An animal, maybe ten yards away, rushes past. Mottled orange and grey, perked elfin ears, and dropped tail. A coyote. It goes north, into the distant hills, feet barely touching the ground. Its motion is sleek against the azure sky and white sand beneath. There is a puff of dirt with each of its footfalls. It bounds forth, close to her tree, its eyes pierced with terror. Behind it, the dune buggy, sun-drunk, spins out after its target, the gunner hooting. Then, along with the coyote, it disappears into the horizon and is gone.
Chávez
Yellow jackets had hidden in the fingers of Ishmael’s gloves. His right hand got stung four times, his left just once. He keeps them iced overnight, going to and from the chest freezer out in the yard where the pickers keep soda and beer. In the morning the swelling is down.
Mario picks far away at the other end of the field, while Ishmael and Chávez get rows alongside each other. Ishmael shows him how to clear the plants fast but without getting too many nubbly green fuckers — Peacock shits his pants over anything unripe. Peacock watches them so they don’t eat too much and will even check to see if their tongues are red. The pickers get to eat the bad fruit: wormed, misshapen, overripe, and under-grown. Peacock’s sons do the watching too — they march up and down the rows in their big brown boots and shirts with no sleeves and if their sunglasses are not on their faces they wear them on the backs of their necks.
“That is just stupid-looking,” Chávez says to Ishmael.
They laugh. They speak English together because while they both go “huh?” over each other’s accents, Ishmael’s Spanish is worse than Chávez’s English. They say how if these farmers were smart they’d plant their crops on something like a factory conveyor belt so all them pickers wouldn’t have to break their backs bending over.
“Know what?” Ishmael says human beings are not supposed to plant that may strawberries or any other crop. “It’s crazy!” You should have a few rows for your family, your neighbours, and that’s it.
Chávez nods. He thinks about Abuelita’s little garden and her market cart and how she herself told him it was time he went north. “Come back when you have enough for a house, some land. Make a life for yourself, by yourself. I am almost through with mine.”
“But here,” Ishmael says, “they worship one god.”
“What god?”
“The god’s name is profit.” Ishmael stops picking and looks hard at Chávez. Bits of straw are sticking out of his dense, curly hair. How does African hair feel to the touch? Does he comb it? And will Ishmael ever get a sunburn? And if he tattooed Ishmael’s skin, would the ink even show up?
Ishmael says, “You do realize we’re slaves, right?”
“Slaves — sure.” He wipes his face on the back of his arm. Berries suck. The plants are so low you practically have to crawl on your belly to get your hand under them. “But only for a while.”
“And then what?”
“Oh, I got some money coming.”
“Like your granny’s going to die and leave you a million?”
“Naw. Just a debt that’s owing. I’m going to Zopilote to collect.”
“To where?”
He smiles. “Buzzard City.”
Ishmael sizes him up, eyes narrowed. “West, isn’t it? Down a bit to the south? That’s where I’m gonna go.”
On Saturday they take bikes into town. There are all these old-fashioned Christians: ladies and girls in bonnets and long skirts, men with beards driving horse-and-buggies. The ladies sell homemade bread as good as Abuelita’s and speak a weird flattened Spanish. He and Ishmael eat on the curb and then he looks through the book bins in the thrift stores while Ishmael hunts for T-shirts with sports team logos. He had thought the pink people in towns stared at him — but Ishmael really gets it. Eyes pop out of people’s heads — that’s before they look away. And any store they go into, they get breathed on right down the back of the neck.
“They’re not all bad,” Ishmael says of these pink people. He wants to go to Buzzard because he figures there he won’t feel so black anymore. Chávez tries not to think about Ishmael as black and after a while it works. He is his new friend who is very smart and careful the way he watches the world with his narrow brown eyes and who happens to live inside a warm purply skin.
The night air is chill. Peacock gives them firewood, only they have to split it with an axe that is dull and heavy. Some pickers have bought marshmallows to roast, but most spent their pay on cigarettes, canned peanuts, and soda. Others, older ones, have beer and whiskey but hide it because Peacock is some weird kind of Christian. “A fucking wacko.”
Chávez tells them that “cock” means a penis and the pickers all laugh. Then he translates “pea.” That’s fucked up, they all say, screwing up their faces. What the hell? “It’s like if your name was Mr. Bean-Dick. Or Lentil-Wang.” Chávez smiles. He doesn’t tell them his dictionary says peacock is also, technically, a bird.
One or two pickers say that if you want to get to Zopilote you need to have a bit of dough. Otherwise you sleep on the street and some pink fuckers stomp your ass.
The flames crackle, shooting sparks up towards a full-faced moon. Blossoms sweeten the air — grape hyacinths are popping — competing with the sour smell from the town’s beer factory that the western breeze draws in. He sticks close to Ishmael. He keeps catching Mario watching him from across the fire but then Mario always looks away. Ishmael says he gave the money back to Mario. Without knowing what it was all about, Ishmael told Mario not to be a fuck-up and just take it. Ishmael said to him and then to Chávez, “You two are as good as even.”
Someone passes whiskey. There is talk of Las tierras vacías. Chávez translates for Ishmael. “Empty land. Even though, really, there always seemed to be lots of life around. Birds and boys and crazy whites.”
“Ten times it took me to cross,” says an older picker, between sips of Bud. “Each time Control caught me. But that was before.”
Another says, “Me, I got over in twelve.”
A kid in a cap with a bumblebee on the front tells them he got rounded up and almost died in the back of Ocho’s buggy. “Then some kid with these scissors came and got us out.” Bumblebee says that kid saved them from who-knows-what. “He got left to deal with Ocho.”
“So he got a shit-kicking in other words?”
“Butt-fucked too, I bet.”
“Yeah, I heard Ocho’s a fag for sure.”
“Or just bored. Like being in jail or something, the way he lives just him and his dogs and that other kid.”
“Yeah, what’s his name?”
No one knows. Just that he has lots of tattoos.
Then Chávez says, “So what’s with the dogs?”
Bumblebee shrugs. “Like he used to have a gun but that got robbed off him.”
The kid with the beer goes: “Control don’t want no dead bounty, right, so he takes them down with the dogs.”
Ishmael says it’s the same as where he is from. “Some of the dogs are wolves, though, I swear, and they only go for our black asses, no one else’s.”
What country is he from?
No one has heard of the name.
“It’s small,” Ishmael says. “But it’s in the Bible.”
He and Ishmael walk back to the bunkhouse. By flashlight they throw all their money onto Chávez’s mattress. Next Saturday they’ll have enough to get as far as a chicken farm Ishmael’s heard of, further west near Lucinda County.
“That’s where you make the real dough,” he says.
They find the town on Chávez’s map.
“How much savings you think we need?” asks Ishmael.
Chávez scrounges in his bag for the book he’s reading:
A Christmas Carol. The cover’s ripped off and the pages are brown. He passes Ishmael the bookmark, holding it by the edges.
“So this Dr. Keith owes you money?” Ishmael says.
Chávez says, “It’s his wife. We got to find her there. I got five thousand owing.”
“No way? What for?”
He takes a breath, leans in, and tells Ishmael the story — or most of it, anyway.
Baez
Scritch-scratch.
Finally her nails had hooked into the tough, muscled roots by which the mesquite drank. Chomping and chewing and sucking, she wrestled a hairy tangle from the earth. On her belly, she pulled herself from the hole, plopped the roots into Old Blue’s lap. With nose and paw, she prodded Old Blue awake. Old Blue did not move. From her face there still came a misty whiff of air. So she butted Old Blue until the old woman fell away from the tree, crumpling into a limp pile. She barked. Old Blue’s eyes opened: however tinted were the whites, the green pupils as yet pierced into focus. Old Blue’s good hand found the dirty root in her lap. She kneaded its tendrils then she held it out, shaking her head. Good girl, Baez. So Baez ate the root, jawing until its molecules were sucked clean. And when she looked up, licking her lips, Old Blue’s eyes were closed again.
After he’d taken Old Blue away, Black Braid had come back to the trailer. He was alone. He filled her bowls. When he knelt down, cooing at her from where she hid under the stoop, his face was blank, backlit by morning sun. Then he left again.
Nights alone she barked the brown boys away — one or two at a time now, few, fewer, few. And nights Yellow Man came with his truck, but just flashed his lights and did not stop. Then Black Braid did not come. Her bowls dried. Searching for any lost traces of Old Blue, she stretched her chain to the ironwoods, roamed the section of field through which the brown boys came trampling. She killed mice, lizards. She laid their bodies out in a ring. And she chased a white-tail rabbit, blasting ahead until she connected with the very tip of its tail. And then the collar choked her. As the animal criss-crossed away, she strained forth, cutting off her air until she felt the post in front of the trailer slipping. She ran and tugged, ran and tugged, struggling against the chain’s reach. The fur around her neck thinned, the skin beneath burned, and when a night of that passed and day came again the post popped out of the ground. She ran then, into the desert, towards the mountains. There was nowhere else to go. Behind her, the chain dragged and the post clattered, bumpity-bump, across the gravelled terrain.
