“I can carry ten times as much.”
Rafael knew the voice and he steadied himself as the strong hands and arms below set the plywood down. The face of Vito looked up at him.
“Que voy, tío,” Vito said and smiled.
Rafael climbed down and walked under the portal along the colonia—the series of apartments connected with construction scraps he had scavenged from job sites. They sat on a bench. Rafael poured them coffee from his thermos and then sipped.
“I make use of everything: bricks, lumber, wiring, odds, and ends.”
Nearby some workers gathered around an oil drum crackling with kindling and as they warmed themselves they smoked and drank coffee.
Rafael had no expression on his face but as he spoke the solemn tone of his voice told it all.
“I didn’t tell you, but my brother was a fighter. I trained and managed him. He was ranked in the top ten. He died while jogging, a heart attack. I made a promise to la Virgen that I would never get in the fight game again. But I’m telling you, you kicked some serious ass that night.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve caused a lot of trouble for everyone, even my dad. His stroke was probably because he worried so much about me.” And after a pause he added, “And my mom, too, her death was probably my fault in some way.”
“They’re taking good care of him. Your father is fine.”
“When can I see him, go back?”
“We’ll arrange it soon.” Rafael stared at him, trying to answer a question in his mind.
“When I’m beating a man down, there’s something so sweet, feeding me something in my soul that gets rid of the pain of living every day.”
“So the ring is the only place where you don’t fuck things up?” Rafael said.
Vito nodded.
“I said I make use of everything, Vito. I even make use of losers that run away.” He put his arm around Vito and patted his shoulder. “Va esta bien,” he said.
“And boxing?”
“We’ll talk in the morning,” Rafael said. “Get something to eat, and get some sleep. Be ready to go at dawn.”
27
At four the next morning, even before the sun crested the horizon, they rattled across the prairie, down a dirt road, for an hour, and just after daybreak Rafael finally pulled up in front of an old adobe house. Vito slammed the door of the old homemade welding pickup and Rafael growled at him to take it easy on her. They went down a hill toward a smaller hut with smoke coming out of its chimney. Vito followed him down the winding dirt path, knee-high prairie grass and cacti brushing against their legs.
Men started appearing from all sides and women, too. Boys with dogs raced by in the nearby woods. They walked passed a kiva, then a well-worn ceremonial plaza and open-air stands with signs advertising Chicano food, snow cones, mutton, and chili. The moon illuminated a whitewashed adobe church with stained-glass windows etched with brown saints. Vito had never seen anything like it: one of the windows had an indigenous Virgen de Guadalupe. They came up to a few houses. Chickens scattered and dogs raced beside bumpers of arriving trucks.
A man came out and embraced Rafael in such a rough but intimate way that Vito knew they were old friends. The sun was shining on their faces and crows scattered from trees. Rafael signaled Vito to wait and the two old friends walked over to a lean-to with a blackened horno, an outdoor oven, for cooking mutton and fry bread and drying chili. Next to it was a stack of piñon wood. Blue corn dried on the rooftop and red chili ristras dangled from vigas and latillas.
Another man came up to them. To Vito he seemed important, dressed as he was in white leather pants with a red and blue wool belt and black moccasins with white beads. The three spoke, then nodded for Vito to come and all of them walked back to the house on the hill, Vito following at a distance.
All kinds of people filled the house now and the living room was jammed with grandfathers and grandkids on the couches, talking. Some people held small drums, others rattle gourds; adults laughed at infants trying to dance; pots of red chili, green chili stew, fried potatoes, pinto beans and tortillas, deer, and elk meat simmered on the woodstove. On the walls were pictures of Christ, the brown madonna, Santo Niño de Atocha, and indigenous carved wooden statues representing fire and thunder spirits and season spirits called kachinas.
Vito helped himself to triple servings of corn, barbecue lamb ribs, pinto beans, potato salad, and green chili stew. Then he joined the group of men leaving and they crossed a cornfield, then followed a ravine to a grove of cottonwoods that surrounded a teepee in a grassy clearing where another group of men talked around a bonfire. Horses whinnied from corrals hidden in the trees where mangy barrio dogs darted in and out of the shadows.
The men stripped down to their boxers, piling clothes and shoes on the grass. They became solemn as an older carnal joined them, stood at the fire, and prayed. Then the men bowed and turned to the four directions and followed each other into the teepee.
A pit of hot volcanic rocks burned deep red in the center. Rafael sat across from Vito in the circle and stared right through him, more serious than Vito had ever seen him. He was a different man. The prayer leader signaled for more rocks and as the assistant, the fire keeper, carried them in with a shovel, the prayer leader clacked sacred sticks together and began to hum.
Flames flared wildly and the fire popped and sparked and flashed and leaped between Vito and Rafael. The prayer leader chanted—he welcomed the elders from the east, south, west, and north, spiritual brothers who had come from different barrios to participate in the magic. He sang not so much to the people inside as to the spirits of his ancestors. The fire keeper entered and fed the fire, entered and fed the fire, until the prayer leader motioned that it was enough.
After each of the elders sang their power song, a zinc pail filled with peyote tea was passed around and each person scooped the ladle and took a drink. Vito looked up over the dancing flames at Rafael, who nodded, and Vito dipped the ladle in the pail five times and drank heartily. The rest of the carnals drank only two scoops, and their eyes assessed him, measuring him as one warrior might another. Rafael looked at Vito fully, taking him in, until his brown eyes brimmed with his image and Vito could discern nothing in the look except a familiar but distant intelligence that was both cosmic and earthly. The tea was bitter and grainy with sand. By the time the pail had been passed around the circle a few times, Vito was well on his way to meeting the spirit animal that had protected and watched over him all these years.
Physical location and the parameters of the day-to-day reality Vito existed in dissolved. Matter blurred into an infinite universe wherein he was soaring high above the mountains, listening to the conversation of the fire. Each flame was an individual dancer, speaking to him in a language he fully understood. The flames made contact with the deepest part of his heart, reconnecting him to events he had already lived but could only now, for the first time, understand.
The fire spoke to him about his father and instructed him how to repair the bridge back to Casimiro’s heart. He was bathed in a light, absorbed like a drop of water into a glowing sponge with a million tiny dark holes that led to individual memories of his life. In his mind Vito saw Rafael, worried for him, asking around to everyone about him. He followed Lorenzo and Carmen across the fields where the rest of the migrants were and he hovered above their shoulders as they stooped and cut and carried. Out of the darkness his mother Nopal appeared. She was singing, each word a spark dimly burning in the dark. Suddenly, the volume of her lyrics thundered in his ears and shook the air, shattering his disembodied self into a thousand pieces breathed in by the fiery center of the sun.
Then, only peace.
He found himself lying on his back in a boxing ring in a lush meadow at the foothills of a mountain forested with tall pine trees, the upper half covered in snow. He looked up and did not see stars or sky but hot burning ringlets, halos, millions of them descending all around him. He propped himself up on his elbow, looked around
, and saw in his corner his friend from the junkyard whose name he had forgotten. Also in his corner was the father of the boy whose gloves he had found in the trunk of the car. He looked in the opposite direction and saw a fighter standing over him, rage glaring in his eyes, nimble on his toes, eager, on the verge of mauling him.
It was the same face that he had seen when he was a child: it belonged to the man who had walked out of the cantina with his mother through the back door—where they later found her dead, her throat sliced.
It had happened so quickly, the few people smoking cigarettes hardly had time to realize why this woman had shrieked and collapsed. A man kicked at the mongrels licking her blood on the asphalt.
Vito screamed, and then, starting out as a speck in the center of the fire, he grew larger and larger until a shadow silhouette consumed him, fell over him, and sunk into his flesh and he was it—a man standing up with arms spread wide and dancing, dancing, dancing in a ring, boxing gloves raised high.
They came out of the teepee at dawn.
Vito’s eyes tracked Rafael as he walked outside to a shed overlooking the prairie, dotted with sheep, to the east. His mind was reeling with what he had heard the fire say in his vision, each word packing a thousand volts of meaning. The fire had talked to him and he was willing to keep it his secret, store it in the back of his mind so he could make choices based on this healing and heart-strengthening experience.
Even as he walked outside the flames from the sacred fire danced before his eyes and filled his mind. A couple of men pulled in with a horse in the back of their truck. It was excited and yanked its head away from the halter rope tethered to the iron rack. The flames obscured them. They hushed Rafael’s voice greeting the two Chicano cowboys. Vito turned toward some kids kicking a soccer ball and chasing a goat but he didn’t see them. The flames were on them, burning them into vapor and misting the air with the shapes of his mother, father, and brother. His phantom family glanced at him as they made their way down the dirt road, away from the ceremonial teepee.
A breeze carried the scent of his mother’s hands rubbing sage together, and the fragrance of cooking smoke made the air as sweet as a fruit orchard. Mexican music came from somewhere. Everything seemed so still, a hovering, glowing stillness, burning through the hardness in his heart, unearthing a trove of memories from the fields—people in camp, his brother’s laughter, Carmen’s intelligent brown eyes, his father’s mysterious look when he searched Vito’s face for a sign of maturity, the junkyard and the smell of the sunlight heating up oil and metal and tires and pigeons lined on telephone wires—the flames passing over each image as if it were a magnifying glass, smoldering his emotions to a melancholy regret that made his eyes water.
28
December 2005
It was Friday and a group of field-workers were hanging out in the warehouse, playing poker, waiting for Lorenzo to show up with their checks. As they played they drank beer and talked, worrying about not having work. One of the guys pointed to the warehouse entrance, large enough to drive two tractors through at the same time, and said, “The boss bought that harvesting machine as big as that entrance. It picks up everything and we have to sort through the chili on the belt trying not to get bit by snakes, spiders, and scorpions.”
“Those harvesters are taking our jobs.”
“If we don’t end up in prison first. You’ve seen what they’re doing—building prisons way out in the desert so no one knows they’re there.”
One man looked up, “I know, I was there. Some bad shit going on. In one day I saw ICE bring in over three hundred immigrants—every day, three hundred are processed, it’s gestapo-killing madness, but instead of Jews it’s Mexicans. Somewhere out there, there’s two thousand immigrants being used for medical experiments, like guinea pigs.”
The rest of the men looked at him with skepticism.
“It’s not a lie,” he insisted. “I’ve seen those places: no windows, ambulances coming and going with dead people. They have their own buses and vans for transporting prisoners. They put immigrants with criminals and there’s rapes, beatings. Poor, poor people in there. They’re forbidden to talk, no lawyers are allowed—”
“Can’t talk, no?”
“It’s the truth! And then the detainees vanish, gone. ICE claims they deport them, but if so, why doesn’t anyone see them again? There are no records of the immigrants in those desert prisons, where are they?”
One poker player said, “I’m not sticking around. I’m going farther north after this season, harvest trees in Oregon. The paper industry pays better than this chili crap.”
“Cannery for me, in Detroit,” said another one. “They give you health insurance, permanent work, no seasonal stuff.”
Lorenzo showed up and sat down, handed out checks to the workers, and said, “Deal me in.”
He got a good hand and joked, “Since I’ve taken over my father’s job, I’m going to give you paid vacations, health insurance, and I’m going to raise your wages.” He was dressed up in a black leather vest, white matador’s shirt, leather boots, a gold Movado watch, a silver neck chain with a turquoise cross, and his prized cowboy buckle and black Stetson hat with the snake-skin hatband.
“And I’m a ballerina,” the oldest player quipped.
One of the younger players said, “My dad told me that in the sixties the Brown Berets used to organize the field-workers, they were like Black Panthers, but Chicano. Maybe they can organize us?”
“Pendejo, they’re not around anymore.”
Lorenzo’s cell phone rang and he walked away to talk. Another pickup. Outside of Juárez, Mexicans were growing bumper crops of chronic, the best weed in the world. And for Lorenzo, business was booming. He spent every weekend in Juárez and returned late Sunday night; then, weary, eyes hollow, cheeks gaunt, he would unload duffel bags from his pickup and vanish into the back storeroom in the warehouse for hours.
He upgraded his security, bought a safe, installed a hydraulic lift to go up and down the well, and had electronic gadgetry to keep eavesdroppers from listening in on phone calls. Sometimes as many as six customers were lined up in show-room pickups with out-of-state plates behind the warehouse where they loaded up and left quickly, down the dirt road and back to the highway.
29
March 2006
Carmen was industrious and never far from his side, weighing chili sacks on the truck, boxing produce, rinsing chili, and spraying down vegetables. When weather forced workers inside and the soil was so rain-soaked they couldn’t step on it without sinking in to midcalf, when wind ravaged the harvest and scattered leaves and peppers all over the road and most workers went home, she’d be typing away on her laptop.
Late at night there’d be a light on in one of the two warehouses and workers knew it was Carmen, doing research and gathering information from government sites to help improve the migrant’s quality of life.
Carmen cataloged and analyzed the data gathered from the workers, creating statistical charts of family history, where they came from, the details of their journey north, general health, education level, and their culture. In addition to keeping the personal records of the camp workers, Carmen also kept the books. Either in the warehouse or under the tree in the compound, Carmen could often be found leaning intently over her screen and scribbling in her legal pad, tabulating the money coming in from Dimitri and going out to pay the Mexicans who were smuggling the weed in.
Americans had an enormous appetite for good weed. She couldn’t believe the demand for it. The marijuana loads were getting bigger and the money was increasingly hard to hide. It was almost as if the camp were a tribe and the migrant workers Indios who shared the gambling proceeds. Lorenzo always found reasons to give small bonuses and each worker appreciated it with his or her silence.
Despite this, the revenue was overflowing and Lorenzo and Carmen had to bury sacks of cash behind the warehouse. But as the volume expanded, so did Carmen’s imagination about what to do with
the money.
If someone had told her years before about the amount of money that could be made selling a weed that grew from the earth, she would have laughed. But Bible-Belt gringos with bulging briefcases couldn’t buy enough of it. African American attorneys from Vegas and Cleveland, and directors and actors from Los Angeles, flew into El Paso and Las Cruces in private jets and loaded up U-Hauls. Out there, beyond the chili rows and the shacks of the migrants, was an unending market of consumers who could purchase more than was possible to supply.
Carmen hired a live-in nurse to care for Casimiro. She hired field-workers to make the Pullman more accommodating, lowering shelves and tables and constructing ramps. She bought a custom wheelchair with special tires for traction so he could wheel to the fields and watch the workers. Once a week, a doctor visited the camp and dispensed medication to him as needed.
Women pointed out her kindness and men commended her, saying their children should do as good a job taking care of them in their old age. Carmen’s larger-than-life charity grew to saintly standards one Wednesday afternoon when a new van arrived, fully equipped with the latest technology for the handicapped. By voice command, doors opened, the steering wheel lowered, wiper blades activated, and a hydraulic ramp unfolded to the ground. If there was an emergency, besides the lights going on and the horn blaring, a voice recognition program automatically called 911 and had a satellite system alert authorities to the van’s location. And from then on, Carmen was the unrivaled adopted daughter, the one woven into folklore.
Under Carmen’s guidance, Lorenzo installed televisions in the warehouse and while women packed boxes for shipment or inspected chili streaming past on the conveyor belts, they listened to their favorite soaps. He hired teachers from the local community college to conduct on-site ESL classes three times a week; he graded a big dirt field into a baseball diamond, chalked it, set up a backstop, bought gloves, balls, and bats, and launched the camp’s first baseball team, christened the Little Hot Peppers; he paved a court and installed a basketball net; he bought playground equipment for the kids; and he hired an accountant to teach the workers how to fill out government tax forms, keep books, and budget household expenses.
A Glass of Water Page 9
