by Jaime Cortez
* * *
For three days, we let the books lay in the soil of the fallow tomato field. Troubled though I was, I still enjoyed exchanging conspiratorial glances with Cesar, to know the girls were baffled, to know the dirty books lay in the soil, awaiting their day like fleshy seeds. On the fourth morning at dawn, as we slept, a tiller tractor made its first pass over the field and the box of porn. All morning long, it crisscrossed the field, its great steel discs cleaving the soil, breaking it into ever-smaller clods with each pass. The dirty books did not fare well, and by the time we’d awoken and stepped outside, we could only watch helplessly from the edge of the field as the tiller scattered the slivered magazine pages across the dirt. Late summer breezes kicked up dust and centerfold remnants. My nana Lupita emerged from her kitchen to use the outhouse. On her way there, she saw a pink scrap of centerfold. It was, of course, the worst possible bit she could have picked up. She studied the photo through narrowed eyes and after a moment deciphered it. “Jesus, Maria, y José,” she whispered under her breath. The Devil was hard at work, but she knew exactly what to do. Nana alerted the neighbor Doña Paquita, quarantined us in the house, and the two ran about like fussy hens, chasing down every scrap they could find and tossing it in a paper sack. The burning of our pornography was perfunctory and largely unmourned. We were war-weary and ready for a truce.
For weeks afterward, scraps missed by Nana and Doña Paquita would appear in corners—bits of tit, snatches of snatch, hanks of hair, and bouquets of tightly clenched toes that skipped along the dusty worker camp. Fat Cookie instructed everyone to grab every nasty scrap and collect them in a weathered cigar box that would serve as a reliquary. Periodically, we opened the box, laid the pieces out on a tabletop, and studied them with Talmudic intensity. We tried to piece together a proper nude, but could only assemble grotesque Frankenforms with outsized lips, mismatched limbs, and demented eyes that elicited not titillation but uncontainable laughter that swept us off the ground and tumbled the lot of us, like a perfect wave.
Fandango
Whoa. A gringo is coming to work in the garlic fields. I see him first thing Monday morning, right as everyone is about to start working. We are all putting on our gloves. My grandpa is sharpening our shears. The gringo goes to the stack of bushel baskets and takes one. He sees me looking at him and smiles and waves. He is the reddest person I ever seen. His hair is red, and his face is burnt red. Even his eyelashes are red. Most of the garlic toppers at Gyrich Farms are Mexicans, like us. The women, the men, the kids. Heck, even the dogs all have Spanish names, so they’re sort of Mexican too. That’s why seeing a gringo here is surprising, like a Bigfoot.
My ma shouts, “Buenos dias, Juan Diego!” at the red gringo. She and my pa wave and wave at him, with both hands. The gringo acts like they aren’t even there. He keeps walking away, but then he finally notices them. His is mouth drops open, his red eyebrows go up, his blue eyes open wide, and he waves back.
“That gringo’s name is Juan Diego?” I ask Ma.
“That’s not a gringo, that’s Juan Diego,” says Ma. “And he’s from Aguascalientes in Mexico, like me.”
“He worked here at Gyrich Farms two, maybe three years ago,” says my pa. “Then we never saw him again. Now he’s back. That man is the fastest garlic topper you’ll ever see.”
“So he talks en Español?” I ask.
“No,” says Ma.
“He talks in English?”
“No, Gordo,” says Ma. “He doesn’t speak English, doesn’t speak Spanish. He’s mute.”
“What’s that?”
“Juan Diego can hear, but he can’t talk.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, and we won’t ask, because it’s none of our business,” says Ma.
“Some people have bad luck,” says Pa. “Pobre Juan Diego. He was probably born that way. Maybe he got sick when he was little, and his tongue wouldn’t work anymore.”
“That’s weird,” I say.
“It’s not weird, it’s sad” says Pa. “Think how hard it must be to have no voice. To never talk.”
After a few days of working with him, I see that Juan Diego does talk. Kind of. He has big ol’ catcher’s mitt hands with red hairs and freckles on the back, and if you watch his hands and face, you can sometimes figure out what he’s saying. Every day when I see Juan Diego at work, he’s nice to me. He smiles, he waves. I wave back and say, “Hola, Juan Diego, how are you?” He smiles and sticks his thumb up to show he’s doing okay. Then I stick my thumb up too. After a while, I can understand a bunch of the things he’s saying.
Back of the hand across the forehead means: “Whew, it’s hot.”
Circles on the belly with his hand means: “Your lunch looks good. I’m ready to eat too.”
Drinking from an invisible cup means: “I’m thirsty.”
* * *
Dad was right. Juan Diego is fast. He’s like the Flash with his hands. Snip, snip, snip! Fast, fast, fast! Stems and roots go flying when Juan Diego gets to work, and the garlic heads pile up in his basket like magic. Sometimes he tops more than forty bushels a day. I can do ten, maybe twelve if the garlic is big and nice and dry so the stems and roots are easy to cut. Ma is one of the fastest girls. She can do about twenty-five or thirty bushels a day. Pa does about the same.
At the worker camp, Juan Diego shares a little room with two brothers. The room is on the ground floor of the big house. The brothers are Benito and Manuel. They both look like they should be in high school, but Pa says they can barely read, even in Spanish. They always come to work at Gyrich Farms alone, with no mother or father. Everyone calls them Los Tigres, because they have greenish eyes. The brothers look like indios. They’re very brown with shiny white teeth and super black hair. Ma guesses they’re about sixteen or seventeen years old. I’m not even ten, but I’m as tall as both of them. Los Tigres are small, but they’re tough. Manuel is the older one. He lifts weights, and he has a thick scar on his neck that looks like a fat caterpillar. Benito, the little brother, looks more normal and not so scary. Los Tigres are too old to hang out with us kids and kind of young to be with the men, so mostly they hang out with each other. But sometimes on Saturday nights, they hang out with the men.
One Friday after work, I pass their bedroom window at the big house, and I see them sleeping in their tiny bed with their shirts off. I stop and watch them. They’re right next to each other, face-to-face. When they breathe, their chests go up and down at the exact same time. They’re perfect twins, even if they’re not twins. They’re sleeping so hard I wonder if they started the weekend drinking early. Los Tigres are kind of famous for being champion drinkers in the camp. That’s a big deal, because all the men at the Gyrich Farms Worker Camp drink on Saturdays like they’ve been walking through the desert all week to get to a Coors tallboy.
The Saturday night drinking fandango happens all summer when the garlic and tomato harvests are happening. After dinner, the men bring broken branches and scraps of wood to the tractor barn to start a fire. It’s not even cold in the summer. I think they just like making fires. Once the fire gets going, the guys bring chairs from their kitchens: blue chairs, orange chairs, new chairs, ripped chairs. My pa had a big green easy chair that lives in the tractor barn under a big blue plastic sheet. Pa’s chair looks like it got into a long fight with some bears. It has long rips in it, and you can see the dirty cotton sticking out. It has one broken leg, so it’s kind of wobbly. But that ugly chair is my pa’s throne. He loves it, and nobody else gets to sit there. When Pa goes to get his big chair, he rips off the plastic with both hands, like a magician uncovering a pretty girl. Then he drags his chair out into the circle, and he always parks it in the same spot, with his back to the wall, facing the entrance.
My Tio Hector brings his little red record player and albums. He plugs the player into a long extension cord connected to another long extension cord that goes into his kitchen window. My tio always carries in his stack of records, but to b
e honest he only needs to bring one, because most of the night they play one thing again and again. Vicente Fernández. Oh my God, it’s always and forever Vicente. Vicente doing rancheras. Vicente doing boleros. Vicente shouting out the gritos. Ay ay ay! Vicente is the king of the drunk guys who are only happy when they’re sad.
When all the chairs are out and the record player is plugged in, they need one more thing—the most important thing. Beer.
Everyone brings beer. Six-packs, tallboys, cases, big brown bottles like the hoboes drink by the train tracks. Olympia, Hamm’s, Lone Star, Schlitz, and especially Coors. When one of the guys travels to Mexico, he always comes back with big ol’ honking bottles of Tecate or Estrella. They call the big Mexican beers “caguamas,” and everyone gets super excited and they pass the bottles around. The caguamas are special. I can tell because when they drink them, they close their eyes and they look so happy, like hungry babies with baby bottles. Then they go “aaaaah,” like Tecate comes from heaven, instead of dusty old Mexico.
Tonight I decide to hang out with the men while they drink. Most of the other boys in the camp don’t like to. When I told Sylvie I was going to the fandango, she asked, “Why are you going to hang out with those drunks? They’re dangerous.”
“Because I want to.”
“This is a bad idea, bozo, but go ahead. You’ll get what you get.”
I grab a bucket, flip it upside down, and that is my throne. I sit outside of the circle, almost in the dark. I stay quiet. It’s nice, like being invisible. When I try to stay for the fandango, Pa usually tells me to get out, but sometimes he lets me stay. Tonight, he lets me stay. Probably I shouldn’t stay. Bad things happen at the fandango—not every time but a lot of the time. Some drunks are happy. Some are sleepy. Some are sad. Some like to sing. Some are angry. They’re like the Seven Dwarfs; everyone’s different. The problem is that some of the guys get mean or just need to fight. When they fight, it’s exciting but really scary, like when you’re watching Godzilla fighting a big monster and they’re knocking down buildings, stomping on buses, and throwing around tanks. It makes you want to run like the people in Tokyo trying to get away from the monsters. Drunk guys are scary, and to be honest, I think the guys are kind of scary even when they’re not drunk. Including my pa.
I remember once when Manuel scared me. He lifts weights all the time. He doesn’t have money for real weights, so he has two paint buckets full of rocks and water, and he lifts those. He lifts them to the front, to the side, and behind his back. Sometimes his face looks like the lifting really hurts, but he keeps on lifting. I was walking home when I passed the big house. He was standing in front of his room lifting his buckets up and down. I started looking. He didn’t have no shirt on. He had some hair on his stomach and on his chest. When he lifted his arms up, I could see the muscles popping up, big as a softball. I wasn’t doing nothing to him, only watching, and he saw me, and he started mad dogging me. I was confused and thought, Is he mad at me? Why is he mad at me if I’m only watching? I kept watching him lifting the buckets and puffing out air like a little dragon. Then he stopped lifting weights and he came to me. He stood right next to me, angry. I could smell his chest, his breath. I froze like a possum on the road, about to get run over. He pulled back his fist and went to punch me, but he stopped his fist right in front of my face. I jumped back and tripped. I landed in the dirt, covering my face.
“What? You scared of me, Gordo?” he asked. He was smiling, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “No answer? Well, you should be scared of me, Gordo.”
“How come you’re saying that? What did I do?” I asked him, but my voice came out tiny.
“What did you say?” he asked. I wanted to answer but my voice wouldn’t come out.
“Speak up, Gordo. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you speak up like a man?”
“Because I’m not a man.”
“Then what are you?”
“A boy. I’m a boy.”
“That’s what you think,” he said. Manuel hated me. I did something wrong, and I still don’t know what it was, but it made me feel bad.
I walked away and turned the corner as fast as I could. I felt better once he couldn’t see me. Becoming invisible would be the best superpower. I think that a lot of people don’t like what they see when they look at me. I’m doing something wrong all the time, but I don’t understand what it is. That’s why I sometimes stay with the men on Saturday nights. They’re normal. With them, maybe I can learn how to be a normal boy, a real boy, instead of me.
But do you know what else? I stay because the guys are really funny. Oh my God, they always have something funny to say about somebody, except my dad because he’s scary and Big Rafa because he’s Big Rafa. So many jokes. About El Cuatro’s hairy ears and how he’s really half rabbit. About Barrilito’s big stomach and how he’s gonna have a baby, no two babies, twenty pounds each, any day now. About Chulis’s pretty face and big butt and how they want to marry him instead of his sister. When Chulis stands up to get a beer, they start with the kissing noises, and sometimes they pinch his butt.
“Why don’t you go and grab your mother’s ass instead?” says Chulis. And everyone laughs and loves it.
Some of these poor guys are like the chickens that get their head pecked all the time by the other chickens. Have you ever seen that? It’s bad. A bunch of the chickens gang up on one chicken, pecking and pecking on the head and neck and back like it’s their job. After a while, the poor chicken is almost bald or even bleeding, but they never stop pecking. I once saw a big red rooster pecking and pecking at this one little chicken. The little chicken was all bunched up, squatting in the dirt with its head down, but the rooster kept on pecking and pecking, like it wanted to kill the little guy.
I get picked on all the time for being fat, cuz I can’t throw a ball, for speaking English all wrong. So when I saw that little chicken getting picked on, I got pretty mad at the rooster and came up behind it and kicked it as hard as I could. I got that fucker right under the ass and he flew up like a red football and he tried to fly, but instead he crashed on his side. The rooster stared at me, ready to attack.
“How do you like it when someone picks on you, fucker?” I asked the rooster. The rooster turned its head a little bit sideways like he was thinking, then he came running at me. I got scared and ran, and he was right behind me. Crazy rooster! I grabbed a mop from the porch, and swung at him. BOOM! I nailed him right on his side and he rolled two times. He got up. He tried to flap his wings, but only one came up. The other one didn’t move.
“You wanna fight?” I asked him. He walked away with a bad limp. Shit. I really racked him up. I felt bad. Maybe I broke something. I kept thinking I was going to get it if the rooster died. I shouted at him, “Hey chicken! Don’t die! And next time, don’t be a bully!”
So the men start drinking, and after a couple of beers, Juan Diego leaves the circle and in a moment he returns with a big square bottle in his hand. He holds his bottle above his head and waves it around like a trophy. Everyone gets real excited, and they’re calling his name. Chulis and Cuatro even make excited monkey noises.
“Monte Azul! My favorite!” says Cuatro. “Today we drink like kings!”
Juan Diego smiles, opens the bottle, takes a big drink, and passes it around. Everyone does the same, and they’re so excited to be drinking this. They close their eyes and take big drinks, and then they let out air and shake their heads, like they can’t believe it’s so good. Wow, it must be so good. The bottle gets back to Juan Diego, and he stands up and brings the bottle to me, and he points at my chest and pretends to drink from the bottle.
“You want me to drink?” I ask him. He shakes his head and everybody starts laughing. I’m laughing too, like it’s a big joke. But he keeps holding the bottle in front of me. I look at my dad, cuz I don’t know what to do, and my dad nods his head a little at me, telling me to take a drink. Okay, I will.
I take the bottle and look at Pa again, and he’s
nodding and smiling. His eyes are shining. Everyone is quiet now. I grab the bottle with both hands, hold it up to my mouth, and take a big gulping drink, then two more. Juan Diego grabs the bottle from my hands and some tequila spills on my shirt. Everyone is laughing and cheering! Some of the guys are standing and jumping up and down, pointing at me.
“That’s my Gordo!”
“Caramba, un tequilero campeón,” they say. When they see my face all scrunched up from the bad flavor of the tequila, they laugh some more. It tasted awful, but now everybody likes me. For once, all the guys like me! They joke and joke about my drinking, and I feel good. I move my chair closer to the fire. Cuatro makes room and tells me to sit next to him, so I do. He puts one arm around me. This is really nice. I’m in the circle now.
The guys drink some more, and they get louder and funnier and scarier. I think I’m a little drunk too because I’m giggling and giggling, and I can’t stop. Then my Tio Hector gets up and flips the Vicente Fernández record on the record player. All the guys start singing along to “Volver, Volver” with their arms around each other, shouting gritos into the air. Louder and louder they sing the sad song about wanting to go back, back, back to her arms.
I look and I see that Juan Diego is crying. His face looks like he just broke a leg or something. It’s the saddest crying I ever seen, because Juan Diego didn’t make no noise, only a sound like air coming out of a small hole in a tire. Oh my God, I never seen a man cry so much. I feel myself start crying. I wipe my eyes, because I don’t want them to see me crying, but it doesn’t matter anyways because everyone has stopped singing and drinking. They’re looking at Juan Diego. Someone asks the group what’s wrong with him. Tio Hector gets up, goes to Juan Diego, crouches down, looks him in the face, and puts his hands on his shoulders.
