El Nino, page 3
In two years these McGarrigle brothers have become both taller and harder, their animals more in number. And that freckly McGarrigle dad is gone off to seal up the border with all the other local men whose ranches and farms have turned salty and whose irrigation ditches dried with the river.
“Dumb saps,” Marianne said. “Wouldn’t know exploitation if it came and bit them in the ass.”
The teenager Honey had sat beside on the Greyhound was going down to work on the wall too. His dad was already there, he said, clicking the bald steel toes of his construction boots.
“Nothing else to do down here. It’s that or move your farm north of Buzzard City.” That’s where all the illegals go, he said. “Those men took our jobs in the south counties, now the north ones. Their goddamn kids following them up there too.” He had leaned over to watch the bus driver unloading the bags and boxes from the luggage hold for the Control agents and their dogs to inspect. “Illegals hide there, underneath, going back and forth,” he told her. “I seen it once.” He stood, hands on hips, to get a better view. “Only now if you turn ’em in Control gives you — guess how much.”
Heat had buzzed through the open door, flashers clicked.
“Fifty whole bucks,” the teen sprayed.
But he’d get more money than that joining his dad at his camp along the Río Loco — he drawled the name law-co. San Wren was what he called the city across the Río Loco on the other side of the border. He explained that if she really wanted to sound local she’d call the illegal boys pollitos, the Spanish word for “chicks.” “Not like girls,” he laughed but “little baby chickens. They keep squeezing through any fence or boundary we try to put up.” He shook his head: part disgust, part amazement. “They’re real small, those boys, quick. You know Spanish?”
“A bit.” She had slid her hand into her purse so the teen would stop staring at her wedding ring.
The teen said, well, his dad didn’t want him to learn it. “But I catch words anyhow. I like the way they sound.” He took a deep breath and emitted a high, rolling “r,” breaking static.
It won’t be long before these orange-haired sons leave their sunken store and corroded pumps and go down to join their dad. As Honey tugs her suitcase through the gravel, the McGarrigle boys duck inside. The handrail is gone from the stoop and the mesh door is patched with fishing line. Her pupils pull in and out of focus until a counter and cash register materialize, behind which the boys keep watch. Shelves and drink coolers are mostly empty, newspaper racks bare.
“Can I have some water?”
The boys are unmoving.
“I thought offering water was just a given down here.”
The small boy returns from the back room with a Styrofoam cup half full. The gritty contents taste of a pool, yet the drink lifts the fuzz from her brain. The brothers watch her with tight, drawstring lips.
“You two are Luke and Jer McGarrigle.”
They blink. Big and small. Large and petite. Bone-rack thin and just plain delicate, twinned by desert dirt and a hard father’s harder rearing.
“I was calling and calling here, for two whole days.”
Luke lays his hands on the counter. “Our dad said not to answer that phone. Not ever.”
She holds out her cup but the boys shake their heads. Jer, the little one, points behind her. A few cans, a Coke, a Fanta, a pair of 7-Ups, are all that’s left in the drinks cooler. She takes some time deciding — inhaling the blast of cold air — settling on the last Fanta. It is gone in two long swallows.
“How do I get to my mom’s?” she asks.
“Ta whose?”
She feels the downward pull of that frown she gives her students. “Marianne Moore. She’s there up the road.”
“No, she’s not.” says Jer. “She’s not there.”
Luke, the big one, has harder eyes than his brother. “She even left the door wide open.” They themselves pulled it locked.
A forest of prickles rises on the back of her neck. “But she phoned me, just last week.”
The boys look at their boots.
“Not our fault!” Jer shouts. His brother hits him, thud: heel of palm to temple. The boy’s cap falls to the floor.
“Fault?” She steps back, knocking into her suitcase. “What was?” Her body breaks out in a different kind of sweat.
“The dog bite,” Luke says, slow and quiet. He tells her to ask Johnny-for-Jesus. “He came here to get astringent but we was out of it.” Jer’s chin is patched in red fuzz and his skinny arms are muscled. She stares until he speaks. “Big Indian guy. Super kind of —”
“Churchy,” says Luke. Or that’s what their dad calls him.
Jer steps in front of his brother. “Dropping water almost got him banned from his own reservation. Know that? Most of them Indians’re on our side too.”
She waves the boys towards the door and pulls out her wallet. “Let’s go. I’ll pay the gas.”
Jer nods at the window. Their dad took the truck when he left — a year ago now.
Fingerprints and heat cloud the lenses of her eyeglasses. “But my mom would have called us if she was hurt. My husband’s an emergency doctor. Don’t you know that?”
Jer shifts his pale eyes. “Where’s he then? Sent you down here alone on that bus?”
Out on the road something like a short-tailed rat skids after a gecko. And there are no cars, not a single one since the bus left. She fumbles for her change purse. She needs quarters if she’s going to use the phone outside. “So where’s her dog?”
The brothers say she is best to just turn around and go back home. “This ain’t no place for a lady,” Luke says. “’Specially one that spits the image of her mom like you do. Folks’ll get confused.”
She digs out enough for a flaccid Clusters bar, the red-foil wrapper faded to orange, and two more drinks — Coke and 7 Up — and then wheels her suitcase outside, the briefcase slipping from the top. The mesh door slams and sun smacks her in the face. The phone booth is a slow, burning torture. She calls home, but can only stand the heat long enough to let it ring ten times before she slams down the blistering receiver and takes a break. There’s no answer at Dinorah’s either. Without looking back, she wheels her suitcase down the road. The barking of McGarrigle’s animals fades out behind her.
Chávez
He’s followed the farms too far north and east now. How come he’s got so lost up here when he came to know the desert so well? He tries asking after Zopilote using the name Buzzard City, but none of these pickers have ever been there; nor do they know where it is in relation to Maclean’s farm. Only that there’s a bus once a day that’ll get you there. It’s harder in the city, they say. Need English there. Need friends.
The worn business card that holds his place in his Charlie Brown comic says Saint Moses Hospital, Buzzard City. Probably Saint Moses is a really high tower of white cement with a cross on top. It’ll be one of a clutch of towers — most of them glass — around which taxis will whistle up and down and back and forth just like on a highway. And beneath his feet the ground will shake with the thunder of subways and in the air the smell of hot dogs and fries and grassy baseball parks. He’s read this It’s a Big World, Charlie Brown comic enough times he’s memorized all the English. On the cover poor old Charlie is wearing a too-big ball cap and his even bigger mitt is dragging on the pitcher’s mound. And Chávez has read the information on the business card a million more times than that. A phone number is printed in the bottom corner along with the silhouette of this Saint Moses in profile with a corded beard and long, parted-in-the-middle hair. The cardboard is soft with the oil of his fingertips, so he holds it by the edges. It smells bleachy, like the vieja’s skin, so that is how Zopilote smells to him too.
San Wren is the only city he knows so far. It’s right on the Río Loco. Before they started building the wall you could look across the bend and see Matchstick County on the other side, so that’s why everyone crossed the border from there. And that’s why he got off in San Wren when he came up from Abuelita’s. The smell of charcoal and cars and whatever factory had made the Río Loco that weird orange slapped him right in the face and he wanted back to Abuelita’s mattress, the spice of chilis, hibiscus sweeter than any fruit, the pop of Pedro’s muffler when he rumbled up in the morning dark. He watched how people worked the soda machine then bought one for himself. Maybe it was four in the afternoon. Across from the station and through the zip-zip of traffic was a dull pink church with no windows, just a blank metal door. On the steps four boys were hunched over a card game. Their jeans were too big and their ball caps were worn backwards. They ate fish from tinfoil bundles, easing bones from their teeth.
He guzzled the soda and, turning his cap around too, crossed the road. The one boy who looked up had light eyes — made more so by his avocado-coloured cap. The corkscrew curls squashed underneath were thick and coarse. Staring at that hair wasn’t enough, you had to touch it. Chávez showed them his coins and said to deal him in. The boy in the green cap nodded and passed him a bottle of watery brown liquid. It burned his throat, but he didn’t let it show. This boy said his name was Juan. They were playing for cigarettes and also some candy that Juan said he’d brought back from a gas station on the other side of the border. Chávez won the first hand. The cigarette went behind his ear but he ate the candy — a long molasses stick, plump and sweet. No one else wanted a bite. When asked, he said his name. Chávez? Juan said there were already at least two great men with that name. He should choose something else.
No. He was Chávez, now and always.
Juan said, “Okay, Chavito, well, where you coming from?”
“You know Mendez? Left field for the Suns? Well, his village is on the other side of the valley from mine.” He said he intended to cross the border and go for Zopilote.
Juan laughed. “Yeah, you and everyone else, shithead.”
Chávez felt his neck get red. He took his roll of tattoo money from his pocket and said he needed to hire a coyote to get him across.
Juan flicked the roll and said it wasn’t enough. “Chavito,” he said. “You think it’s a game? Coyotes don’t come a dime a dozen, at least not the good ones who don’t rip off little village pollos like you.”
Pedro had told him the boys paying the coyotes were called pollos: chickens. Any young or sissy ones are pollitos. Pedro also said the smugglers were called coyotes because they were out to trick you. Once when Pedro was crossing, long ago before he wrecked his foot, a coyote had pulled a knife on him and the rest of the pollos he was with. They were scared and gave the coyote all their money and he even took the sturdy boots right off one man’s feet then left them in the desert to die.
“Each coyote for himself,” Pedro said. “Be ready, my boy.”
“Yeah, I know it’s no game,” Chávez said. “But I don’t have more money than this.”
Juan took off his hat, letting his curls spring out all over. He was wearing a collared shirt with short sleeves and a thick horizontal stripe that now makes Chávez think of Charlie Brown. It was even a bit daisy-coloured, too, especially under the arms.
“What else you got?”
Chávez lifted his T-shirt. Juan’s eyes widened at the skeleton key tattooed along his midriff.
“So?” Juan said.
“So I did it myself and I’ll do you.”
One boy put down his cards, licked his finger, and rubbed hard at the tattoo. “It’s for real,” said the boy.
Chávez lowered his shirt and Juan flexed his right forearm. The skin was smooth, the colour of coconut husk, with light purple veins running through.
“Juanita,” he said. “For my mom.”
Chávez said okay. While he drew a design in his notebook, Juan and his friends went back to the card game and the tinfoil of fish. Juan said he liked the design. He said, “You give me a tat just like that and I take you across the border.”
Juan drank deeply. Chávez unwrapped the darning needle, poured some alcohol on the tip.
In Maclean’s bunkhouse the darkness thins from cast iron to the cold grey of mourning ashes. It is always this way, these long nights after endless days.
Chávez lies there beside Roberto, thinking about Juan until he’s going to cry and someone’ll hear. How come the bad stuff comes out at night, all the ghosts he has? Or he imagines he is back on the road and the blue car is coming. He feels the fire in his lungs as he runs towards it — and then the gunshots ring out. Something about the driver’s face had looked all wrong. But that was okay because she was leaning over to open the door for him. Her left arm coming up, her face turned away.
“Where are you, vieja?” he says, over and over, whispering himself to sleep. “Where am I, too?”
Baez
As Baez clawed deeper at the hole, the earth cooled. Then it got slinky with worms and twisted roots. Baez’s nails turned up a stubby plastic tube she knew came from fire-cracker guns. Then there was another tube, and another. Old Blue’s fingers closed tight around each tube Baez dropped into the palm of the good hand — the hand that was not bit.
She remembers that Speckled Man and his orange-haired sons always darkened their station shack before the night was full. And her sisters-brothers-babies-cousins would go to sleep too, in a heap, breathing as one: up-and-down-up-and-down, together. But ever since Speckled Man’s sharp toe landed with a crunch behind her ear, she’d come to know so much, too much, and so she never did sleep. She listened to the night, its crackle, sniffing the air. Before she saw their shadows she smelled the brown men, brown boys. She knew if one was bleeding or sick, and how recently he’d peed. She knew which of them had eaten fish from a can or maybe those wiener stubs like Speckled Man scooped from a cloudy jar and flung into the cage just to see her sisters-brothers-babies-cousins bloody themselves over a bite of salty sponge.
Then on a bug-bright night — pit-pat-pit-pat — three brown boys came up from the tarry road, toe-tipping slow. Pit-pat. Pit-pat. Loud, and louder, close. Two brown boys stayed back but the third one approached. He was dried out. His eyes — steady on the heap of her and her sisters-brothers-babies-cousins — were raw and sick. She smelled the brown boy’s adrenal sweat flowering orange. He had new pee on his hands and salt on his jeans. The ball cap on his head was tangy with spent energy and also it smelled like the smoke of Speckled Man’s barbequed dinners — salty burnt mince he crumbled in her bowl.
The boy’s white tongue licked his white lips. He stuck a skinny bone of arm into her pen and then, fingers wriggling, gripped the lip of her bowl of buggy water. Slowly, sloshing, he pulled it in close. His fingers wriggled in her dish. And he opened his mouth so as to receive those wet fingers, the pearled drops, just clinging. And then it was that a line inside her got crossed. A fiery blaze opened in her, a great yawn, and her heart reared like a rattle-tailed snake and her jaws went wide, wider, widest: snap. The brown boy’s hand was muscled meat. Then the crush of bone. The brown boy’s eyes squished up. And then his mouth melted, crying, crying, pulling on the hand locked now in her jaw.
Her sisters-brothers-babies-cousins began to bark and yap, louder even than when clamouring over one of Speckled Man’s stubs of wiener. When she felt the brown boy’s fingers rip and tear she released him, warmth running down her throat. Unplugged, the brown boy ran, hand jammed into his belly. And Speckled Man with gun and sons came running from the station shack. One-two-three firecrackers exploded: one for each of the brown boys gone now into the desert night, one dripping blood and all of them crying.
Good girl, old girl. Speckled Man gave her and her sisters-brothers-babies-cousins new water and he dug his fingers into that sharp biting place behind her ear. Did good. Good girl. Speckled Man’s shack went dark again. Air settled back. Her sisters-brothers-babies-cousins again breathed as one, together, and then the blood that had drip-dropped-drip-dropped across the station’s gravel dried up into a trail of scab.
And it all went back to as it was. Again and again the pen and the shade and water dish and shack-gas-truck-honk and her days spent waiting for night when the brown boys went running past. In time the water in her bowl grew orange and rank. The field across the road turned white. The overalled farmers drove up with empty trucks and then they stopped coming at all. Speckled Man and his orange-haired sons did a lot of sitting in the shade. It went that way until the sons were taller than the pumps and she had two more litters with the biggest of her cousins. Old Blue came then. Speckled Man pointed to the holes she’d started to dig. Old Blue creaked to her knees, soothing the sore spot behind Baez’s ear, the biting that was always there. Then she buckled on a thick leather collar and took Baez away to the trailer where there were no sisters-brothers-babies-cousins. And instead of a fenced-in pen and toe kicks she got a word, said again and again in Old Blue’s flat clip of voice, again and again until the word was hers — Baez.
Honey
Fallen chain-link droops along the road, beyond which boarded-up house trailers, like the stumps of felled trees, indicate where once life had been. Stump after stump. The irrigation ditches are so parched the very concrete crumbles, and where purple lettuce once burst in perfect rows the soil is chalky. The grocery bags that dance in the wind are not from any stores that she knows.
She turns right at the crossroads, down Route 59, where the ten-armed saguaro cactus Marianne had called Old Faithful has gone even greyer.
“Mom? Hey! Marianne?”
Marianne bought the acreage for next to nothing when the soil went white and the farmers migrated further north. A dusty aluminum trailer lurks at the far end, behind dry scrub and bare mesquite trees. The shed Keith patched is still standing, beyond which a faint path leads out to a shallow wash where leafless ironwood trees twist up, going for the sun. Along the western horizon, the soft silhouette of a low mountain range gives off a purple glow. “My mountains,” Marianne calls them, capturing the textures in brown, gold, tangerine — even margarine — depending on the cut of the light. But really they are the Zari Mountains, named for the Indians who still live somewhere close and so must belong to those who share their name. Marianne said all this land is rightfully Indian.
