El Nino, page 4
“Mom?”
Marianne’s been driving the same dull-blue two-door Tribal for what must be twenty years. Its saggy belly skims the gravel patch that is the driveway, windows pale with dust. She rubs a circle in the glass with her sleeve. The car is packed with cardboard boxes, garbage bags, and loose junk — dinner plates, lampshades, a clock radio. But the doors are locked and the handles hot. Insects pock the windshield, and on the passenger side of the glass a long, violent crack: a rock launched, a bat smashed.
There’s a water pump behind the trailer. Heaving on its crooked arm, she slurps from a cupped hand then washes her face and, lifting her ponytail, her burning neck. Any minute Marianne will come striding out, smiling: Honey, what the hell are you doing here? But the plywood door stays shut.
It is all high-pitched stillness. The front yard is pitted with dozens of wide, shallow holes Baez must have dug. But the post by the front stoop that Marianne had chained her to is gone. The rough hole left behind suggests it was wrenched with great strain from the ground. As Honey stands and turns, she finds herself within a loose ring of rodent carcasses, dry bones, patches of fur, lumps of blackened scat which circles the trailer.
“Who needs a gun with Baez around?” Marianne had said after bringing the animal home from McGarrigle’s. “Or deadbolts either.”
The key with the red nail polish opens the door. A pent-up blast of heat, old sweat, and dirty fur strikes her in the face. Daylight juts through the kitchen’s sealed windows, falling jagged on the floor. The wool blanket in the corner is covered in short, bristled shedding. Chewed rubber balls and some grizzled strips of rawhide litter the linoleum. With urgency and ecstasy Honey kicks away her sweaty Nikes then rolls off her socks, leaving them to dry on the stoop. She eases her puffy feet into the grey flip-flops by the door.
“Baez?” Her voice is strange, muffled, like she’s got cotton in her mouth. “You in here, girl?” The words roam through the hollow interior. “Mom? How about you?”
Chávez
He forgets the name of this new town as soon as it’s said. He’s glad the vieja’s not around to hear these mistakes. When he gets to Zopilote, his English will be a million times better than that shitty baby Spanish she babbled in. At the end she was talking English mostly anyway. What if he had understood her? If she thinks of him at all, she will think he’s dead. He should be dead. He is defying her and life and God by still breathing.
He breathes. He buys a pair of blue Nikes at a thrift store, good as new, then hitches a ride with a pair of brothers in wide hats and finger-printed glasses. He tries to tell them he is lost and wants to go towards Buzzard City.
“Please,” he says.
When they hear Buzzard they shake their heads and point down at the floor, meaning south. They let him out at a small-time pepper farm called Fiesta, where he agrees to the farmer’s offer of a bed and cash in hand every Saturday. No overtime. Sunday’s a half day. There are bikes to ride to town if he’s got the energy. The farmer has no hair. Squiggly veins run from forehead to crown. His eyes open too wide. He gives Chávez a rubber bucket and a long knife for cutting stems. The gloves are huge and smell like puke. Out in the field a group of fifteen or so boys are crouched under a shade tent. They share their sandwiches of meat and bright mustard and soft white bread, cold milk from canteens. They eat fast so they can sleep for ten or so minutes. A couple of boys from a place further south than his village sit up with him, smoking. They say the pepper harvest could last months. None of them know Zopilote. Only that it is too big, too hard.
“We’re sons of farmers. That place would eat us alive.”
But if Chávez picks a few hundred pounds of peppers, he’ll have enough in a week to buy a bus ticket and keep moving — south. He knows that much now. Farms, like the water, are more and more in the north part of the earth and if he wants to find the vieja he’s got to resist the pull of quick money and travel back down. But with what? The farmer pays only twenty-five cents per bucket so you have to be real smart with the way you move your body and no matter what, don’t start to think. That’ll slow you, kill you if you let it. If you don’t get ten buckets in a day, you get the farmer’s boot. In less than an hour his hands ache from grasping peppers just right and pulling the knife across the thick stem. He’s ten times slower than any other picker.
They sleep in an old barn with no windows and a curtain for a door. The mattresses are hard-packed, but at least they each get their own. These pepper pickers have dug a pit out back. Like in the desert, even if it’s warm, you need a fire sometimes to stop from being scared. Evening, they sit around just smoking. He is one of the oldest because fewer boys are coming up now. They talk about the wall cutting across the Río Loco. The part between Matchstick County and San Wren is done now. They say it is as thick as a truck and high as the sky.
“You seen it?” Chávez says.
A couple say, yeah, it’s a fucker of a thing but there’s a tunnel you can take to get under.
“The wall’s nothing. It’s Ocho and his dogs that scare me,” says a boy in a cap with a horseshoe logo. “You ever see him?” This boy’s face is tanned dark, hands padded with callouses.
“A traitor,” says one boy called Manny.
He’s littler than Chávez. Over some kind of canned supper — they make their own food here at Fiesta, lining up for their turn at the hot plate — he’d told Chávez that when he came here he’d layered on all kinds of thrift-store clothes so he looked bigger and the farmers would hire him.
“Yeah, it’s bullshit,” says Chávez. “Ocho’s for himself.”
He licks a finger, rubs his Nike swooshes, stained now with squished peppers and dirt, and listens to Horseshoe Hat talk about Ocho. There are a few boys among them who crossed the border along the eastern coast and don’t know about Ocho. Horseshoe Hat calls him a bounty hunter.
He says, “Ocho was a coyote one time. But then he sold out to Control. Now he’s making a business of capturing any other boys he finds crossing to Zopilote. It doesn’t matter if he gets pollos or coyotes, he turns them over to Control.”
“How much he get for doing that?” Manny asks.
“Bounty’s called at fifty bucks a boy,” Chávez says into the fire. “Then Control drives them back to the border. Sometimes, for repeats, they put the kid in a detention centre somewhere hidden and you never hear from him again.”
Manny says he knows stories of that place too.
“It’s a lie,” Horseshoe Hat announces. “Don’t you know? Never listen to anyone with them orange eyes like this one.” He points his finger right at Chávez. “They’ll take you for a ride and then cut your throat.” Horseshoe Hat holds his hands close to the fire, calloused palms smoking. Hey, have they heard about how Ocho got his hand bit off by a coydog? “That’s why he’s called ‘Eight.’ He’s only got eight fingers. It was that coydog-bitch of El Esqueleto’s that bit him.”
“You’re talking shit,” Chávez says to him. He doesn’t look up from his shoes. “What do you all know about El Esqueleto?”
But for the hiss and pop of kindling, there is silence. Then some boys shuffle, shift. They groan, stretching their cramped legs and bent backs. Someone passes a bottle of Tylenol. “Don’t take more than four at a time, man.”
“I know all there is about El Esqueleto,” Horseshoe Hat says finally to Chávez. “She was creepy and tall and left food in the trees.”
Says Manny: “What you mean ‘she’? I thought it was an old man.”
A boy in an Exxon cap goes, “Well, whatever the fuck she was, that animal of hers was nasty.”
Manny leans in now: “Why did she keep that fucking dog? To bite us?”
Chávez says: “Can’t you see? She was alone in the world except for it.”
“So tell us — was she really truly crazy?”
“No, man,” Chávez says. “If you ever felt a love like she had for that dog, you wouldn’t say it’s crazy.” Now he’s the one that’s crazy, he sees it in their eyes. Chávez shakes his head. “Only thing she loved more than the dog was the desert.” He sucks on his tobacco.
“Well,” says Horseshoe Hat, “that old bitch loved the desert only because she never had to cross it.”
“Yeah,” they all go. “Fuck her. What’s she know?”
Someone says: “She just left water out, like we were dogs or something.”
“That water saved me,” says the one in the Exxon cap. “Maybe without her I would have died.”
Horseshoe Hat spits in the fire. “I never took from that old bitch. I’m no dog.”
Chávez says, “You sure, man? ’Cause you sure talk as dumb as one.”
While the other boys laugh and make howling sounds, Chávez watches the dying embers spark. In the distance the farmhouse lights blot out. Six hours now till morning.
“And she did cross the desert, you assholes,” he tells them, getting to his feet. “I saw her out there dying.”
Sometimes he wishes he had died out there. Because this is not alive. He’s just a body working hard. He’s a belly to fill, a back to ache, a bowel to move in a hidden place. He is eyes blinking in the dark of some nowhere farm and he is a brain that needs to sleep but can’t sleep like the boys and boys and boys all around him. He gets up and walks back to the barn. The walls are so split he can see the moon coming through from the other side. He closes his eyes. He sees the vieja. He wants to forget her. But he wants his money more.
Baez
Old Blue’s water bottle was half full. In the shade of the skinny mesquite Baez had sat before Old Blue and, head tilted back, received the warm liquid as it slid down her throat. She licked Old Blue’s lips, the salt, the blood, the dirt. Old Blue’s eyes kept crossing in the middle but then her sunburned face opened into a smile. From above came a razor hiss. A muscled bird with a tiny bald head had landed. Old Blue looked up. Then, very suddenly, her face melted. She looked over at the hole, scritch-scratched in the sand. Good girl, Baez, she said.
Across the yard, Baez sees the brown boys blink at her. And from the other side of the plywood wall, her children emit their first morning yowls. Tattoo emerges from the sooty trailer. He wears only white shorts. The food bag is loud, water sloshes. Then it is her turn. She is still. With a toe Tattoo slides the water dish towards her. Then he returns with a shovel and a pail to scrape up her shit of which there is almost none. She lifts her head, pushes herself towards him using her hind legs. His eyes on her are hard. The hair above his lip has thickened, as have the tattoos on his arms, or is it the arms themselves that are thicker? His shoulders are broad now. He is growing big like her babies did. He locks the gate behind him. When she dies will they bury her? Or will they throw her to the birds and bugs, like they did her daughter born blind, her black-and-tan son when his back leg broke?
She remembers Old Blue’s trailer, hidden in brush and mesquite tree. By the front stoop under which Baez liked to sleep, there was a thick metal post. Old Blue chained her to this most of the time. While she could not reach the road, the trailer being tucked away and back like an animal shying, the chain was long enough she could go as far as the stand of ironwood trees down the wash behind the shed. She would follow Old Blue down there and wait while Old Blue hoisted food into the tough ironwood branches and left water jugs at the base. The brown boys crossed her land like they had crossed the gravel lot of Speckled Man’s. Old Blue fed and watered them, while Speckled Man drove them off. She did like Old Blue wanted and let the brown boys come. So long as they stayed back under those ironwood trees, Baez stayed quiet.
Mornings, before full sun, Old Blue would pull on her round hat and take Baez walking. When they were away from the road, Old Blue unclipped Baez’s leash. In spring the land erupted with bright pollen and was thick with buzzing, bugs and bugs and breeze. And there were rabbits, big ones and baby ones, unblinking lizards, foxes, rats — life to which Old Blue was mostly blind. But still Old Blue smiled and hummed, her bones creaking.
Old Blue had a favourite crop of rocks where she would sit with paper and pencil and put down what she saw. Baez chased birds and hunted lizards, spying snakes and being spied in turn. And just as there were thorns and spikes to tear her nose as she followed the tumbling, rumbling smells, there were always footprints too: small ones, pitter-patter ones. These were the tracks of the same ball-capped brown boys that crossed Old Blue’s land — always heading towards the north. She followed them until Old Blue called her back. Once, though, she took a set of tracks beyond Old Blue’s Ba-ez! The smell she followed was ripe and purple: it was the smell she licks from herself now, the smell that brings the bald birds in. The tracks bottomed out where the smell burst up as a blue-black cloud. The boy’s body was a torn-up swell. Bones poked out of skin that was no longer brown and the ground was stained with leaked fats. Near was a bright spot of ball cap; yonder the sack he’d carried on his back.
Old Blue shook when she saw the body. She went yellow, fell right down like the whole ground had suddenly shifted: crack went her elbow against a rock. On her knees, she held her hands to the sky and then she hugged Baez’s neck. She cried all the way back to the trailer where she filled her cup again and again with hot amber from the big bottle under the sink. Then she fell asleep at the table, hands hanging at her sides. Old Blue did not get up to fill Baez’s food bowl. She did not get up when the man with the long black braid drove up in his stickered-up truck. He, Black Braid, came right in. Hey, Marianne. Baez stayed in her corner, rumbled low. Black Braid wore a wood cross around his neck. He had a bag with hot cooked food. He fed Baez from the bag. Then he shook Old Blue awake, fed and watered her too. His hands were slow and strong. When Black Braid put Old Blue to bed he pulled the shoes from her feet and tucked the covers under her shoulders and chin.
Black Braid came back the next day with a shovel. He whistled to Baez. She took him into the desert, to the dead boy. He hid the body with a blanket and with two fingers touched his forehead, chest, shoulders, side to side. He whispered a bit, looked up at the sky. The blade of his shovel scraped as he dug down into the hard-packed ground. When the hole was to his thighs, he drank a jug of water. Then he lifted the bundled body and placed it in the hole. He put the dirt back, packing it into a mound. The death smell was gone. Black Braid had some small stones in his pocket. He arranged them on the mound into a cross, like the wood one he wore, then he said some more soft words, crouching down. He whistled for Baez. They left the dead boy where no animals or birds would get him. There was safety inside the earth.
When Tattoo goes back into the trailer, there comes the far-off beating of wings. A hulk of bird touches down on the top of the trailer, among the up-turned panels that drink the energy from the sun and feed it to Glove and Tattoo’s radio. The bird’s bald head is small, its body muscled; feathers black and brown. Is it the same bird as Old Blue’s? Its rotten meaty smell is the same. The bird bounces from foot to foot. Then in three slow, hard wing-beats it exchanges the trailer for the uppermost reaches of Baez’s tree. Its white-skinned feet cling to a sturdy branch. The bird leans over and through a sharp, hooked beak hisses for Baez to hurry up.
Honey
The dark trailer smells of old fur. She could be in a dusty flora and fauna museum at one of the national parks. Marianne’s been packing. Plastic bags stuffed with clothes burst their twist-ties, and a clumsy stack of shoeboxes leans near the door. The dinner plate Marianne uses for an ashtray is heaped with crushed Phantoms. The O’Brien’s bottle on the kitchen table is going on empty, the amber contents just meeting the bottom of the silver label; the rose teacup beside is syrupy with what must be years without a real washing. Last time, Marianne was giving things a quick rinse whenever the county turned on the water: seven until ten in the morning, five in the afternoon until eight at night. The bandage box by Marianne’s creaky kitchen scissors is empty; whiskey and blood stain the clumps of tissue strewn among crusty bean bowls and sliced bread gone to powder. She twists the sticky lid from the whiskey bottle and sips, sloshing the burn around in her cheeks like it’s Listerine.
“Mom?” Her call floats in the static. She sips again.
Each of the paintings that crowds the trailer tells a story of the desert, a vision of what Marianne calls “upmost transcendence.” Watercolours — which Keith always says are inherently ironic in such a thirsty place — are tacked to the chipboard walls; stretched canvases are stacked, leaning against legs of chairs and tables. Sketches, curled into loose tubes, tumble from the countertops and roll onto the floor. A crimson dollop squeezed on a piece of glass has hardened to a knob and unwashed brushes have dried into arrow tips. Like the painting of Baez in their living room — a present for their two-year anniversary — each image is signed with a simple MM in the corner: a pair of flying birds and also the initials of Marianne Moore. Mother, Mom.
She remembers the flicker of laughter in Keith’s voice when they first saw Marianne’s trailer rising at the end of the road. “Your mother’s going to live here?” He had slowed the car right down, shuddering as gravel pinged the Ventura’s paint job.
Marianne had stood waving on the stoop. She’d cropped her snowy hair, as close as she could get to the root. Some kind of muscled bitch, long of snout and mottled as a bruised banana, crouched at her feet, woofing, pulling against the strong old hand gripping her collar. When the animal hushed, Honey had mounted the stoop, heart tightening at all the new wrinkles around the bright beads of her mom’s eyes. She said nothing about Marianne’s shorn scalp — how pink, how like a baby — just wrapped the familiar body in her arms. And she was wrapped in turn, relaxing into Marianne’s same sweet odour of sweat and Phantoms. Then the animal’s nose nudged between them. Honey let go of Marianne’s hard shoulders. She knew it was wrong to call this animal a dog when it was so obviously one of those half-coyotes. But she’d always hated the sound of “coydog.”
