by Matt Ritter
At lunch, Mary stepped out of the cafeteria and sat on a concrete bench watching them from a distance. The soldiers were eating on the grass. Their leader seemed sullen and sat by himself facing the distant fields while the four younger men ate, smiled, and laughed at each other.
After lunch, Mary checked their progress from the gym, where she had told the children to stay inside. In the mid-afternoon, the soldiers stopped work abruptly, set their tools and unused fencing material in a pile under a covered walkway, put on their helmets, gloves, and rifles, and marched out toward the Salinas River. When the soldiers had disappeared beyond a long field adjacent to the school, Mary let the children into the play yard. Mary distractedly pushed a little girl on the swing while other children played, some of whom inspected the work of the soldiers.
“What are they building, Ms. McElroy?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are they done building it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they coming back?”
“Probably.”
Just then, where the Salinas cut a depressed scar through the Valley floor and a line of cottonwoods rose above the flatlands, the sound of gunshots came to Mary and the children. A moment later, more gunshots. Each distant explosion poked at Mary’s nerves.
“Alright, everyone, they’re just training. It’s time to go back inside,” Mary said loudly as the children were gathering around her. “Jason, collect your brother and go around the school and make sure everyone knows it’s time to come back into the gym.”
That night it barely rained, and Mary had difficulty sleeping. The faint smell of garlic and the sound of rain on the flat asphalt roof of the classroom had grown to comfort her. She thought of one of her older students whose parents had disappeared from Gonzales early on. Two weeks ago, a UP guard came to the school from the ramp guardhouse to look at the children. The guard asked the boy, who was fifteen, to come with him, and he never returned.
As she laid awake, Mary wondered about the fate of all her children. Were they to be collected by the UP, at younger and younger ages, to defend the Valley at its edges and never return? What would become of Gonzales when there were no more children? What would become of her? There were already few adults left. How could this be happening to her town, to her Valley? The recent arrival of the soldiers was unsettling. They weren’t interested in collecting the children, and not knowing why they were at the school made her nervous.
Mary didn’t sleep for most of the night. Drizzle from a sky that refused to fully rain coated the buildings and water ran in thin sheets at the bottom of the gutters. A loud drip rhythmically pounded the metal drain box outside the classroom. She fought the urge to let in the dismal hope that her disappeared husband would someday return. It was a thought she could no longer entertain. His faded image in her mind made it too difficult to go on with her daily work of running the school, keeping the children healthy, acquiring enough food for everyone, and in the short time that remained, teaching them to read and write. She kept her only remaining photograph of him, of their wedding party, between the pages of a bound notebook on the shelf, which she hadn’t opened in months.
In the night, Mary rose from her mattress to get herself a drink of water. She carefully moved to the sink in the low light. After drinking, Mary spread the blinds on the window above the sink and peeked out into the wet schoolyard.
A shock went through her, and fear spiked in her chest. Mary didn’t know if what she was seeing was real. On the other side of the yard, Captain Wilson was standing like a statue looking directly at her classroom. The drizzling rain was coming down all around him, and he was completely soaked. Mary quickly let go of the blinds, and they snapped shut. Her heart pounded, her knees felt weak, and she hadn’t taken a breath. When she opened the blinds again, Captain Wilson was nowhere to be seen. Mary went to the classroom door and with shaky hands confirmed that it was locked.
Just before dawn the next morning, after lying awake for the rest of the night, Mary sipped her tea and tried to read. She had stared at the same page for ten minutes. Far to the east, an apricot-colored string of light came over the Valley wall and laid across the soft back of the Gabilans as the sun began to rise. Mary was relieved by the light it brought to the school. At that moment a familiar sound came to her, that of a fence post pounder driving a metal post into the sod in the yard. Mary went to the window and looked out to see that the night’s drizzle had ended, and the sky was clearing. Each ping of metal on metal drove her attention outside.
At the sink in the corner of the room, Mary looked into the small mirror that hung on the wall behind it. She would be twenty-six in three weeks. She pulled the skin on her upper cheekbones to the side, making the significant bags under her eyes disappear. She quickly washed her face and brushed her teeth as another post was pounded. She left the empty tea mug in the sink, finished dressing, slipped on a pair of shoes, and went out the door and down the ramp of the classroom.
She was on her way to the gym when she decided to stop and look at the soldiers. The four younger men worked on a post in the enclosure's corner while Captain Wilson looked on. He turned to see Mary watching them. He nodded to her with a strange smirk, and all the fear from the previous night came rushing back. She hurried off to wake the children.
That afternoon Mary sat on a bench in the schoolyard. It was cold, and in the moments when clouds cleared, the sun warmed her slender hands as she shuffled through papers, reading paragraphs written with large pencils by small, awkward, untrained hands. She made comments on the papers and drew the occasional smiley face while watching the soldiers working on their fence.
It was now three-sided. Horizontal bars connected each post, and they were rolling out the chain link between the posts. At the corner, they cut the chain-link from the roll and returned the roll with all the other fencing supplies to the adjacent area under the covered walkway. Each soldier put on his jacket and flack vest, and within minutes Mary was watching as they marched off into the fields, with Captain Wilson trailing them.
On that second day, no gunshots rang out from the river. Mary oversaw the children on the play yard, watching the weather carefully until it was nearly dark when she corralled them into the cafeteria for a dinner of baked beans, carrots, and cornbread. During dinner, the sky opened up with a boom and pounded the cafeteria roof with sheets of rain. Mary half hoped that the soldiers had been caught out in it and would never return. As soon as she had the thought, she felt guilty for having it. Either way, such was not the case. After her evening reading with students, during which she had to speak louder than usual because of the noise of the rain on the arched gymnasium roof, Mary looked out to see the light on in the soldiers’ classroom.
The hard rain subsided to a drizzle during the middle of the night. Mary slept poorly, with a desk propped up against the classroom door, eventually waking as morning light filtered in through the classroom windows from the clearing clouds. While making her bed, she heard the familiar sound of the fence post pounder.
Twenty minutes later she was down the ramp and under the walkway on her way to the gym. She stood for a moment to watch the soldiers closing the gap on their three-sided fence. The water from the night before had darkened the galvanized steel of the chain-link, beads collected in the wire joints of all the fencing diamonds and reflected the sun.
“How are you feeling?” Mary asked Helen Taft in the gym after shouting her regular morning commands. Helen sat on the edge of her made bed, looking down at her shoes with her head in her hands. Mary sat next to her and put her arm around her. Helen felt cold, and Mary pulled her in tight.
“When are my parents coming back?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. Hopefully soon.”
“I miss them. I couldn't sleep last night.”
“How is your ear?” Mary asked, pulling Helen’s hair back. “Have you been using the ointment I gave you?”
“Yes. It’s not bothe
ring me.”
“Alright. Well, it’s time to eat breakfast. Do you want to help me get the apples from the refrigerator and cut them?”
Helen looked up at Mary, tears blooming in her soft eyes. “I want them to come get me so bad. I don’t like living here.”
“I know, sweetheart, but we have to get on with the day and hopefully they’ll be coming back to get you soon. There’s work to be done. And, besides, right now I need your help.”
Helen nodded and blotted her tears with the back of her hand.
That afternoon the soldiers worked in the trampled grass coiling the top of their fence with a loose spiral of razor wire. One of them had gone to the truck and returned with a gate that connected the last two posts. Like a stretched slinky, they pulled the last bit of razor wire over the top of the gate after securing a heavy, locking latch to the adjacent pole. When the gate was attached and the chain-link fencing wired securely to each post, the soldiers were finished with their square enclosure, six feet high all around and thirty feet wide on each side.
It was late morning on the third day when the soldiers lingered proudly by their newly erected fence after returning the remaining materials to their truck. Mary watched them from her bench wondering what they were so adamant about keeping out of their little square patch on the grass. A chill ran through her when it occurred to her that maybe the fence wasn’t meant for keeping something out, but for caging something in.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Will and Zach hustled behind Jose Alvarez and his band of armed men on a well-worn path through fallow fields. Unsown tomatoes spreading wildly into the barrens crowded the edge of the path and clung to their old fruit like oversized flesh-toned raisins. A humid sweet rot and the smell of manure rose in the midday heat from under the feet of the men in front of them.
In the downvalley distance, the guard towers were the first to come into view, followed by the high wire fence. Beyond the fence was a complex of cream-colored low buildings that seemed to rise unnaturally from the unbroken plane of dark brown agricultural fields surrounding them. As they approached, Will could see that the fence was breached in several places, and one of the guard towers was almost entirely burnt. They went down into a paved ditch, squinting against the hot reflection of the white pavement, then up onto an area of sparse grass and red dirt at the base of the tall fence.
“What is this place?” Zach asked.
“The old Salinas Valley State Prison,” Will said as they passed under an arch cut in the fencing. “How’s your leg? You seem to be limping more than usual.”
“I’m fine. Just a lot of walking. It’ll be nice to sit down for a minute.”
Jose stopped and made a loud whistle into the prison yard, then turned to Will and Zach. “Soledad was destroyed during the wars of the regional breakup. Long before we occupied this place. We’ve been here several years, completely empty when we found it.”
Jose pointed to what looked like a stack of bleached sticks piled against the inside wall of one of the guard towers. “See that?”
“What is it?” Zach asked.
“That’s a pile of bones. Skeletons were lying undisturbed all over the yard when we got here. Thousands of them. Everything but the bones had rotted away.”
“What happened?”
“When the wars came, the prison guards locked the inmates in the yard to die in the rain.”
Zach stared at the pile of bones and grimaced.
Jose continued, “It must have been terrible. Thousands of caged men screaming, fighting each other as they died. The place was like an aboveground graveyard when we found it.” Jose studied Zach. “Why aren’t you with the UP fighting at the border?”
“My leg is hurt.”
Jose looked down at Zach’s leg. “You sure? You’re not working for the UP?”
Zach looked indignant and slightly worried. “No,” he said loudly, then looked at Will.
“Can he be trusted, Will?” Jose asked, turning to Will.
“He’s good. Stop messing with him,” Will said, and the look he gave Jose ended the conversation.
Jose smiled at the other men. “Come on, let’s go inside. Lunch is being prepared,” he said, then he whistled a second time.
Will could see that two of the guard towers were occupied, each by two men with rifles, who watched them as they walked. They came through a narrow corridor between adjacent buildings into an internal courtyard surrounded on all sides by two-story buildings. The courtyard had a small patch of overgrown grass and a wide blacktop surface with a basketball court and a line of handball walls. One of the handball courts was occupied by four children who stopped their game to turn and watch the two new visitors. The courtyard smelled of something cooking.
They followed Jose and the other men into a cinderblock building on the far end of the courtyard whose metals doors had all been removed. Stepping inside, Will was nearly overwhelmed by the smell. Several women were around a long table preparing food, and a stew pot boiled over an open fire, filling the room with a hearty sweetness that made Will’s mouth water. The old fume hood, once used in the kitchen when gas and electricity were available, now served as an open chimney for the fire pit. The stove was replaced by a blackened steel rack on which sat a large silver pot. Down the wall from the open fire was another fume hood, this one attached to a crudely built brick oven. The women looked up and smiled disinterestedly at Will and Zach as they entered, then went back to the preparation.
Jose put the two confiscated apple pies on the table. “We have dessert,” he announced. The women laughed. Hearing their laughter, Will realized he hadn’t heard laughter since before he and Hannah had been collected.
Other people from the prison complex filed into the modified mess hall.
“Please, sit,” Jose said with a hand outstretched to the front of the long table. Will and Zach sat while Jose brought them two mugs and poured a thick green fluid into them. Will sipped it, then drank the rest in one gulp.
“What’s that?” Will asked.
“Nopal juice. At least the rain doesn’t kill the cacti.”
“Or any crops for that matter,” Will added.
“If it did, that would be the end of all of us.” Jose studied the green drink. “It’s the crops that the outsiders want. Our fertile soils.” Jose spoke directly to Zach. “They have nothing outside this Valley. The San Benicians are not our enemy. They’re as desperate as we are. What land they have is dry and poisoned, yet we battle them while our rich soils lie fallow.”
“Wouldn’t they take everything from us? Our Valley?” Zach asked.
“Oh, my friend, the lies you’ve been told. The right questions aren’t even asked anymore.”
“What are those?” Zach asked.
“Is there a better way? How do we stop this endless warring? How should we be treating our neighbors? What do they want from us, and is there enough for everyone?”
Will looked around the room. People stopped to listen to Jose.
“For the Valley! Right?” Jose said loudly. “There is a better way. We can make an overabundance of food in this Valley.” Jose waved his hands around the kitchen. “We have nobody to grow it. Imagine if all those soldiers, all those wasted lives, could return to the fields.”
Jose continued, projecting his voice throughout the room. “Instead, the Administration has become blind with power. Corrupted by their own short-sided vision. They no longer care for the people of this great Valley. The Administration and the UP must be stopped.”
Will watched Jose closely. It occurred to him that Jose had become a different man in the years since he’d last seen him, with new and altered loyalties and convictions. Until that moment, Jose had never struck Will as a leader. He caught Jose’s eye as he stopped talking and felt momentarily self-conscious. Jose sat next to them to drink from his own cup.
More women and children came into the room, then other men behind them, removing their hats as they entered. They washed in two dee
ps sinks at the side of the room, then each stood waiting while a bowl of stew was ladled for them. Steaming pans of cornbread, fresh from the brick oven, smoky and caramelized, sat at the center of each communal table.
A small towheaded boy with eyes a pale metallic shade of blue left his mother’s side and walked cautiously toward Will and Zach. He pointed at Zach. “You have hair and eyes like me.”
“I do,” Zach said, looking down at the boy, smiling.
“Why are your eyes so red?” the boy asked.
“Come back over here,” his mother called.
A woman carefully set two bowls in front of Will and Zach, each with a healthy cube of cornbread balanced on the rim.
“Thank you,” they said in unison.
Both looked up, waiting like hungry dogs for the command that it was alright to eat.
Once the room was filled with people seated in front of their food, Jose said in a loud voice, “Everyone, we have two special guests today. My old friend and war mate, Willie Taft, and his traveling companion Zach Taylor. Here’s to them, for making it out from under the oppressive control of the Valley Management to be with us.”
Everyone drank and someone yelled, “For the Valley” from the back of the room, and “For the Valley” was repeated.
Will and Zach looked at Jose. “Eat, my friends.”
An hour later Will and Jose stood in the courtyard watching from a distance while Zach played handball with the children.
“I’m so sorry, my friend. It sounds like Hannah was wonderful.” Jose put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “What happened to your cheek?”
Will touched the dried Steri-strips with the pads of his fingers. The pain had subsided, and for the first time in days, his jaw wasn’t aching.
“I killed a man. The one who wounded Hannah as we were escaping the camp.” Will stroked his wound, lost in thought. “I couldn’t talk her out of going with me. He cut me, too, before I got to him. Once we were out, I, I couldn’t stop her bleeding.”
