I helped him to his feet.
“Want to walk now?” I asked.
“Yes, I can’t go into the barn now without them asking questions, can I?” he said, not really as a question.
“Nope, let’s walk. Show me the chile garden again, joto,” I said, but I said it in a really sweet voice that sounded so awkward coming out my mouth, like a pussy cat’s meow coming from the mouth of a lion.
“Okay,” he said.
All I ever had to say was “chiles” and John would perk up. Strange, strange boy.
We walked through the chile garden and into a few rows of corn stalks that reached up to the sky, taller than any Chavez or Garcia heads.
I grabbed his hand.
“Thank you,” I said with that same meow from before.
“For what?” he asked.
“For falling on the ground like the clumsiest dumbass I have ever met in my entire life,” I said. Just like before, I said it with sweetness.
And then that rare smile of his popped out in the form of two fattening and bloody lips.
“No problem,” John said. “I can fall again.”
He flopped to the ground. He actually made a joke.
I knocked him on the top of his head.
“Get up,” I said.
I grabbed both of his hands and pulled him up. We were nearly thirteen, and neither of us had ever even come close to kissing someone, so when he stood so close to me, I felt like my knees melted.
I knew then why he ran away from me, why he disappeared that day by the truck and ran so fast that I could barely see him go.
This feeling was really weird, and I didn’t know what to do with it. We just held hands. Like magnets, we leaned in toward each other to touch lips.
And that’s when my father grabbed John from behind, pulled hard on his shoulders, and threw him hard to the ground.
“You two will remain in my sight for the rest of the day—for the rest of your lives,” my father said. “Mierda!”
He dragged John by his shirt out of the rows of corn. I followed them.
“Get up,” my dad said to John. “Follow me. You too, Della.”
He walked fast toward the house, through the front door, and into the kitchen.
“I found these two in the cornstalks,” he said.
Señora Garcia had come back from church, and she stood with my mom in the kitchen, cleaning.
“They were this close to making niños,” he said.
Señora Garcia’s face looked like it was going to slide off. Her mouth dropped open. She said nothing. She made a sign of the cross so big that she nearly touched her toes with the bottom of the cross.
“Were they naked, Francisco?” my mom asked.
“No, but they were about to kiss,” my father said.
“Could you see his chorizo?” my mom asked.
Señora Garcia made another huge sign of the cross.
“Well, no,” he said.
“Then they weren’t gonna make any niños out there, Frank,” she said. “Now let go of that boy and shut the hell up.”
“Sit down,” Señora Garcia said. “Both of you.”
We both sat at the table.
“You are not allowed to be alone together anymore, okay? It’s that time of life, and you are too young to be fornicating. It’s a sin,” she said.
John was always so quiet. He loved and respected his mom and dad, and I had never seen him talk back to them, ever. They were so kind that he never really needed to, not like my mom who would tell you she loved you in one sentence and tell you to get the hell out of her face in the other.
But that day, he talked back.
“I love her,” he said. “I love Della.”
Within a second, Señora Garcia stood up, grabbed her son’s ear, pulled him out of the house, yelled to the other children and her husband to get into the Auburn, and drove off.
John fell hard three times that day.
I fell really goddamned hard too.
Chapter Twelve
John
1933
“AREN’T WE GOING TO THE CHAVEZE’S TODAY?” MARIA ASKED my dad from the back seat of the Auburn.
“No, I think we’re just going to have a family day, today,” my mom said. She held her crucifix necklace in her hand, raised it to her mouth, and kissed it.
“Está bien,” Maria said. “But I will miss the little boys. I look forward to seeing them every week.”
“And John will really miss Della,” Manuel said. He smiled at me and blinked his eyes seductively.
“No I won’t,” I said. “I won’t miss her at all.”
We rolled up our car windows. All of us did. We shut out the high winds on the edge of New Mexico. We lived, for ten minutes while heading into town, in our own capsule of time and space, separated from the heavy dust in the air that hovered over the cracking earth of the high plains.
We bumped along the dirt road and into town where my dad pulled into the only gas station. We all stayed in the car. Even though the interior air had begun to heat up and we all sweated next to each other in our seats, we left the windows closed, encapsulated together in the modern world. Victor Galvez, a dark man like us, who had retired from the mines and worked the pumps at the station, walked around the car and peeked in the windows, touching his hands to the glass to wave at us kids and our mom.
Victor filled the tank. It cost a lot money to fill it for sure. But my father dug into his pocket and pulled out $1.65, which included Victor’s tip for filling us up. Victor gave the seven-cent tip back to my dad and patted him on the shoulder, nudging my father toward the driver’s side door. The old man tapped on the back window and waved at Maria, Manuel, and me. We waved back.
Paulo climbed over the front seat and onto Maria’s lap, pressing his nose and mouth against the window. Mr. Galvez placed his hand on the window in the face of my little brother, and Paulo let out a howling laugh.
The Sangre De Cristo, the closest mountain range, lay ahead of us like it had been framed perfectly to fit in the edges of the windshield. Snow sat on the high peaks, but green had begun to sprout at the edge of the tree line.
I could have sat in the back seat of the Auburn for the rest of the day and thought about Della. She covered my thoughts. I wanted to jump in the front seat, grab the wheel, and turn it back toward Della’s house. I didn’t care. I loved her. I had found the girl I wanted to marry. She swam in my mind. I touched one hand to the other and pretended it was hers.
My dad drove out toward the mountains. The sun had moved across the eastern plains and settled on the face of the mountains. We parked at the base of the hills that gradually moved in waves up toward the rocky cliffs.
“Everyone out,” my father said.
The smell of sage brush and pine swam around us. A breeze streamed down from the summit between the canyon’s walls.
From the back of the Auburn, my dad pulled out two baskets of food and handed them to me and Manuel.
I peeked under the lid of the basket and immediately smelled fresh pastries. He must have picked them up from Rosa’s Bakery in downtown Trinidad. We ate there once a year after Easter Mass. That was it. We sat on two fallen trees next to the creek. Deer ran above us through the patches in the trees—huge mule deer with small tails and horns that had fuzz on them.
We sat near the desert pines and ate our pastries. The only thing that was missing was Della.
My father’s parents had passed away very young, his mom dying of untreatable breast cancer in the early 1900s and his father dying of a heart attack at fifty years old, just a few years before Manuel was born.
They lived in Trinchera, moving from central Mexico in their teens with the railroads. My dad used to talk about them after he had a few drinks on Sunday afternoons. He missed them que horrible, he would tell us. It was his father who taught him how to work the chiles in the garden and his mother who taught him how to cook them. She, too, taught my mother how to cook them when my pare
nts were just dating, inviting my mom into her kitchen to walk her through the process of preparing a large meal for a large family.
My mother’s parents, however, were still alive and lived in Reno, Nevada. I really knew nothing about them, except they left for Reno the year my mother married my father, two days after the wedding.
“They didn’t like my color,” my dad said. “I was too dark for them. They wanted your mom to marry a white man. They said she should because she could pass and that she deserved a white man and not a dark Mexican who couldn’t do anything in this world.” He scoffed and slammed his hand onto his knee every time he told us that. “And the mines won’t take a white man’s wife and leave her alone with all their children the rest of her life, used up like a dish rag or cotton diaper.” He had to stop himself before rage took him. He did that by shoving a beer bottle to his lips and muttering into the brown glass.
AT THE FOOT OF THE canyon that afternoon, my dad didn’t say another word about my maternal grandparents. Manuel, who had just turned fifteen, had already begun to act like a young man, walking off into the trees and coming back with firewood without being asked to do so. Maria sat next to my mom and held her hand while Paulo chased after Manuel and carried sticks back, the sticks in his arms nearly as wide as his bones. Manuel patted the boy’s head. He was seven years old and still followed his oldest brother around like a pet.
The early spring rains came so fast that day. They came like God had turned them on to wash us out of the world. They came on like the rains of Noah’s flood. They came on like rage from the darkest clouds I had ever seen in the sky, before then and since. They came on and drenched us and our food and our hair.
The sound of water rushing in the stream echoed through the canyon, and the large slap of rain hit the rocky canyon walls and rustled the pines.
The winds followed the rains. They rushed down over the summit. They pushed the trees like a man shoving children who got in his way. The winds blew hard and mad.
We ran to the Auburn. We jumped in. We pulled off any wet clothing that we could. The bare chests of children filled the back seat and steam covered the windows. My mom threw food our way, and we ate until the dark covered us, the rain and wind still pounding the Auburn when my father finally gave up on the weather subsiding.
The Auburn barely made it out of the canyon. The hard dirt on the road had softened. It seemed to reach up and grab the tires of our new car, but my father twisted the steering wheel back and forth and eased his foot slowly back and forth on the gas pedal until we wiggled out onto the road that led back to Trinidad.
We sang songs together, our voices low against the pounding of the rain outside and our breath beginning to conjure steam on the windows, while my dad slowly followed the lighted path in front of the car. The heavy rains made the road in front of him blurry through the windshield, and the winds pushed us back and forth on the road, the broad-sided Auburn catching the winds like a sail. We had many, many miles to go to get home when the front tire popped. Its unevenness pulled us onto the small shoulder of the highway. The wind and rains remained angry and pounded and pounded on the car.
My dad told everyone to stay in the dry cab, even Manuel who said he wanted to help change the tire. My father told him ‘no’ in a harsh, gruff voice that planted Manuel into the bench seat.
Within minutes, my dad had removed the spare on the back of the car, hoisted up the front of the frame, and began to undo the thick and lumbering nuts that held the tire onto the wheel.
He worked on the tire for ten minutes. The crackle and crank of the metal crow bar against the lug nuts and metal rim shook the car beneath us. When he was done, he stood up and walked back toward the car in the rain. He started to jiggle that handle as quickly as he could, frantically trying to get the door open, but it had stuck. The cold rain had made the metal stick to the frame.
Headlights flared behind us.
They filled the back window.
He finally got the door open and tried to jump inside, but the big truck that barreled down the highway smacked his body and flung him and the door fifty feet into the road.
From within the winds, from the heart of the rain, I heard a solid thud and then my father’s body roll against the earth.
In our headlights, he lay in the road, motionless.
My mother’s scream deafened me.
Manuel opened his door to run out, but my mother slammed him back into his seat with one arm. She made the sign of the cross and then opened the car door and ran out into the blurry, wet scene on the other side of the glass.
We watched her run out to my father. We heard her scream, “Mi amor! Mi Amor!”
More lights came on the other side of the road, and as the next car crested over the hill, it swerved to avoid the stopped truck that had hit my father. Its back end slid, pushing its front end toward my mother.
I wanted to somehow stop it, to reach out and stop the movement of time and the world and the heavy and road-splitting metal truck that slid toward my parents.
“Dios mio!” Maria yelled out.
Paulo cried.
I could not open my mouth, but my heart leapt to my throat.
The lights hit the dark outline of my mother who had knelt down to drag my father out of the road. Her shadow reached down to pull my father toward the car. His body was just a broken pile of flesh in her arms. The second car hit them both.
Her shadow flew into the sage brush and tall grasses, followed only by the roll of my father’s body into the gully on the side of the road.
The wind and rain stayed angry.
Maria and Paulo cried and gasped like the wind and rains. Manuel ran to my father. There, he found his head nearly crushed by the blow of the car. I ran to my mom. She looked like she always looked, beautiful, but when I tried to pick her up, her body folded over.
“He’s dead,” Manuel yelled out. He cried into the night.
I held my mother. I did not cry out into the night. I did not say a word, but in my head I screamed, “Lord Jesus, why have you killed my mother? She loved you!”
Chapter Thirteen
Della
1933
I HAD DEVISED A REALLY GOOD PLAN, AND IT INVOLVED GETTING John to grab his cajones and kiss me at school. Or behind the school. Or on the way to where the truck met us to take all us rancher kids home. We all had bags to carry our books. I would treat mine like a mistle toe, but instead of holding it up above our heads, I would hold it out in front of me, grab him by the arm, and kiss him.
We had almost kissed in the corn, and I really wanted to, but more than just completing that kiss—I hate when things are incomplete; it drives me crazy—I wanted to get it over with so that he would stop running away from me, so I wouldn’t have to trip him, and so that he would wipe that stupid, awkward expression off his face.
I got to school early that day. It had been eight days since we stood in the corn fields. John had walked me to the stop every day the last week, but he stood five feet away from me. And, of course, he ran away when I reached for him to help me up into the back of the truck. I didn’t need his help, but goddamnit, it would have been nice to touch again. I had fallen so hard for him that in the back of my mind I cursed myself for it.
“I am not the type to fall for a stupid boy, especially el stupido like John Garcia, seriously, Della?” I said to myself every day before school the whole week after the almost kiss. But every time I saw him, I just wanted to hug him and, yes, kiss him. I’d never kissed anyone besides my mom and dad—rarely my mom who hated affection—and the tops of the heads of little brothers, and after John and I had gotten so close, I wanted to finish what we started. I ached to finish it.
I was so mad at my dad for ruining things, and even angrier at Señor and Señora Chavez for not coming over the next Sunday.
“What the hell?” I yelled into the air on my way to school.
“What’s wrong with you, Della?” Ernie asked.
“Nothi
ng Ernie, callete, okay?” I said. “Shut it.”
We didn’t have a phone. There were no lines that went out into the prairies. If we did, I would have called John and told him to grab his cajones because we were going to finish that kiss today.
At school that morning, I stood and waited for John, Maria, and Manuel to come clogging up the road toward the schoolhouse, Maria always leading the charge. She was smarter than her brothers, and I loved her. We rarely talked, but she always—very naturally—took care of my little brothers when they came to our house, so I didn’t have to. That’s a legitimate reason to love someone. Beyond that, she was probably the kindest person I had ever met. There was no cattiness to her, only a soft, loving, and warm glow. She was always happy. White boys at school would tease her because she was so dark like her dad, saying things like, “Your dad must have been covered in mining soot when he screwed your mom because you came out almost black.” She never listened to them. She only smiled and headed into school and sat at the front of the classroom and opened up her books and smiled at the teacher when she began to speak. The teacher had no choice but to smile back at Maria.
The whole group of miner kids rambled up the road toward the school house, but the Garcias were not with them. By the time the last kid walked past me, I was infuriated with John, his parents, and his family.
I grabbed the last boy’s arm and yelled at him, “Where the goddamned hell are the Garcias, Peter?”
“I don’t know, Della, now let go of me,” he said. He tried to act tough, but I knew I scared him.
The bell rang for school, and I had to walk in without finishing my kiss.
“It must be some stupid religious holiday or something like that and Señora Garcia is keeping everyone home to pray,” I said out loud. She’d been known to do that for the feast of whatever the hell saint is was, especially for any feast that involved Mother Mary, and John would always come to school the next day talking about all of the ways they put chiles into their dinner.
I walked into school, my hands tucked beneath my armpits and with a heavy scowl, and watched the door the entire day. The ugly clock ticked above the teacher’s head. Ernie nodded off at the exact moment the warm sunlight shone on him through the thin window glass, and I had, without knowing it, dug a long, thin canyon into my wooden seat with my fingernail. I just wanted to see John come through the door that day, that very specific damned day, but the Garcias never showed up.
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