Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series

by Michael Herman

“No. After it went belly up, they bought it. The former owners quit the business when a court told them they couldn’t legally call their product ‘tequila’ since it wasn’t grown in Jalisco, Mexico. It had to do with some NAFTA agreement.

  “When my parents and uncle took it over, they shut down the touristy stuff and then focused solely on producing and bottling the tequila-that-shall-not-be-called-tequila. They don’t sell it. They just age it in preparation for some future ‘prestigious’ release under another name. It’s a long-term investment. My uncle is the moneybags behind the plan.” Moneybags, that’s my mom’s word for him. As a kid, you absorb things like that and surprise yourself when they pass your lips, making you realize just how much we’re shaped by our parents.

  “See the white and gray thing that looks like a snake that starts at the main highway and winds its way through the agave field to the center buildings? That gravel drive is the only way in or out. The previous owners built huge earthen mounds around the farm perimeter, and the serpentine entry drive edges for privacy. As you drive up the narrow gravel entry, the mounds that line the drive have cutouts in them to give peekaboo views of the fields and farm structures beyond. It was their idea of building up excitement for the tourists before you hit the center where everything opens out for your grand arrival.”

  My parents had shown me pictures of what it was like before they owned it. There were flags and balloons and tents, like it was some kind of desert carnival. But that’s all gone, taken down by the owners before they sold. Now the mounds are like mysterious leftover artifacts embracing a pain-in-the-butt-to-navigate entry, no grand circus at the end. But my parents and uncle love the unofficial privacy.

  “See the long building in the center? That’s our house. The big building nearby is a barn. That’s where all the distillation and bottling equipment is. The trailer with the red roof is where our farmhand, Don Juan, lives most of the year. The rest of the buildings are for equipment and supplies storage.”

  The farm is a universe within a universe with its own set of physics, sometimes bustling with seasonal activity, or alternately withdrawn in lonely baked-on-solitude surrounded by earthshattering silence. Some of the itinerant workers complain that the natural laws of the universe don’t work properly here. They say the agave doesn't mature like they do in Mexico. My uncle chalks it up to micro-environmental conditions. They counter that there are strange lights at night and unusual winged creatures amongst the agave. And what about the odd sounds from below the earth? My uncle says they need to stop smoking devil weed.

  I’ve been to the web page Zia is on. My memory of it is clear. “Check out the pictures at the bottom of the page. See the one that’s at the entry from the highway?”

  It shows a decrepit ten-by-twenty-foot wooden sign, mounted a man’s height off the ground, facing the highway. It whispers Organic Tequila Distillery and Ice Caves in faded white paint over a golden background, with a hot sunrise radiating lines in sleepy red and orange.

  “Ephemeral, like a ghost from the past,” is how my uncle described it before he and my dad nailed a red, white, and blue banner over the sunrise, announcing, “Temporarily Closed.”

  “You’re showing me all this because this is where you were hurt?” Zia asks, ever the clear, concise and clarifying adult. It’s an aspect of her personality I like. She never confuses me when we talk.

  “This is where it began, Zia, one weekend, on a Saturday morning.” I close my eyes, which of course are already glued shut under the gooey wrap. It’s more a mental closing, a pause to bring me back to that morning. Slowly, I assemble the fragments of the story for Zia so I can paint a verbal picture. Full recall and then understanding is our mutual goal. I start with my dad and uncle.

  “My dad, whose name is Bob, and my Uncle Ted are slaving away with a diesel-powered trencher and a hand shovel and a steel pike, cursing a just-uncovered boulder impeding their project. A long straight line is scribed on the ground in inches-wide white chalk. Sweat darkens their faded shirts around the necks and arms. Droplets fall from their reddened faces. My dad looks like a circus clown with his baggy cargo shorts bulging from the tools stuffed inside. My uncle is a hobo clown with an unshaven face and worn-out shorts spotted with paint. Black boxers peek out from a tear in one of his pockets.

  “They both wear centuries-old leather boots that my mom said a few times were, ‘good for the garbage pile’—a comment that fell on deaf ears. She once threw my dad’s in the trash and placed new ones in his closet. Without a word of protest, he retrieved the old ones and wore them as if nothing happened. When my mom saw the old ones still on his feet, she shook her head and mumbled something about leading a horse to water. The new ones remain in his closet, unworn.

  “Two buildings away and around the corner, there’s my mom, Maggie. She’s as athletic as my dad, and when she’s mad her brown eyes turn black—very intimidating. Once some motorcycle guys thought they’d have fun with my twelve-year-old sister, Twizzle, outside her school. They really scared her. When my mom found out, she got their names, tracked them down, confronted them, and ever since, it’s, ‘Hello, Mrs. Brown. How are things, Mrs. Brown? Nice to see you, Mrs. Brown’—with no sarcasm, only respect. She won’t say what happened, but one of the guys in my class said it had something to do with that big Bowie knife she carries.

  “Anyway, my mom is two buildings away from my dad and uncle. She’s stretched out on a Mexican blanket on top of one of the mounds, shouldering a .300 Winchester Magnum sniper rifle nestled into a couple of sandbags, sighting off in the distance to a target about a mile away. When she’s focused like that, you can stand ten feet from her and still feel her energy. Wearing thin loose khaki pants with hiking boots, she looks like one of those green plastic army men I got as a kid: stiff and unbreakable.

  “Twizzle, with her newly streaked hair, is kneeling next to her. She’s looking through a large scope mounted on a tripod while balancing a can of cold soda on top of her head—her idea of multitasking. Bright yellow letters spell out Piss Off! across the back of her shirt.

  “My six-year-old brother, Forbes, dressed in camouflage and holding binoculars way too big for him, is seated in a kid-size lawn chair next to her. A plastic bow with suction-cup-tipped arrows lies next to him. He is amazingly focused for someone who is essentially a puppy. You just know he’ll be a fearsome pit bull when he‘s grown.

  “I’m standing on top of the end of the mound that leads into the big center circle. I’m watching a dirt cloud kick up along the entry drive. A beat-up green Honda Civic is racing up the drive, hitting the turns too fast, driving up the sides of the mounds and then back down onto the driveway. It’s Soliloquy, driving like she always does, treating the mounds like they are banked extensions of the road made for race car freaks like her. She’s sixteen, like me, and sort of an honorary sister. She spent a lot of time with my family when we were growing up.

  “She’s deadly this morning, drive-by deadly. As she gets closer, I climb down off the mound and wait at the edge of the drive for her arrival. Sometimes she comes flying up to make a sliding stop, throwing gravel everywhere. Sometimes she honks as she blows past me and does a doughnut, throwing gravel everywhere. Sometimes she veers toward me and stops just inches away, throwing gravel everywhere.”

  “I think I’m seeing a pattern here,” Zia comments.

  “This time she drives up, driver-side window down, left hand on the steering wheel, and cradled across her lap is a huge pump-action water gun I don’t see until she’s right on me. She cuts loose, hitting my chest and face with a huge blast of lemonade-flavored water. She yanks on the steering wheel to do a 360 and then returns for another blast at me, which I answer by thrusting my head out with my mouth wide open and eyes closed. If she hits me with the car, I’m dead, but I trust her abilities. She nails me with another blast of lemonade water from her gun.

  “Finally, Soliloquy stops, jumps out of her car, and does a victory dance, gun raised above her head in
triumph, laughing and yelling, ‘Insurgents score one! Insurgents score two!’”

  I’m dripping wet, soaked shirt and shorts, water running off my hair and down my forehead and into my eyes. I’m the target destroyed. But, rather than bow to the circumstance, I pull myself together to calmly state the obvious.

  “You missed,” I taunt her.

  She dances up to me, grabs my belt and shorts, and then shoves the gun down into my pants. She cuts loose again. Then, with her nose almost touching mine, she asks in a wicked, quiet, sulfur voice, “Did I get you that time, or is it so small that I missed?”

  She is so close and so beautiful, desire fills me. But like an animal caught in fight-or-flight terror, I freeze. Taking my silence to mean she’s outdone me, she bats her eyes, smiles that evil smile of hers, and whispers into my ear, “I thought not.”

  “Uncle Ted yells, ‘Solly, throw some of that our way.’ The diesel engine on his trencher roars when he guns it. My dad yells at him to stop.

  “Soliloquy pumps a steady stream across the space between them. It splashes onto his shoulders and neck. He tips his baseball hat in gratitude and yells, ‘Pennies from heaven to ya, lassie,’ in his best brogue, which he’s been using since he returned from a trip to Scotland and Ireland a few months ago.

  “My dad is focused and straining to dislodge the rock from the ground. Soliloquy throws an arc of water up in the air toward him, but he ignores it and pushes on the five-foot steel pike he has jabbed into the ground under the buried boulder. You could smack him with a plastic baseball bat when he’s like that and he’d be oblivious.

  “Twizzle and I, years ago when we were smaller, attacked him with our tiny foam bats while he was preoccupied with another trench. We were on the prowl for a Bigfoot monster when Twizzle pointed at him and yelled, ‘Bigfoot!’ We raced up to him and wailed on him from behind until we wore ourselves out. He took our beating without a whisper of complaint. My mother finally called us away from him, even though he never gave our pestering the slightest acknowledgment. But when walking toward my mom, I looked back and saw him watching us, grinning. He winked and then went right back to work.

  “The sound of a rifle shot punctures the air. It’s my mom placing a round, probably within the twelve-inch circle on the target at the foot of the signal tower a mile away.”

  “One mile away?” Zia questions in disbelief.

  “Measured and verified. Her favorite target. My mom’s not your normal mom. She’s athletic, as in professional-soccer-player athletic. That’s how my parents met. They are both soccer players. My mom was on a soccer scholarship when she ran into my dad, who was training to make the US Olympic team. Ironically, she made the women’s Olympic team while he was passed over for the men’s team. She went on to play pro but injured herself in a game that ended her career. She opened up a string of women’s-only gyms but eventually sold them. Now she coaches kids’ teams and plays casual intramural.”

  “So what does that have to do with a target a mile away?” Zia asks, pulling me from my digression.

  “Oh. Forgot to mention. The gyms all offered self-defense classes that eventually added training with weapons, including guns. She beat out a lot of military-trained snipers, even has pictures of her being handed trophies by them. She became this superhero. She was on all the talk shows; it was part of marketing the gyms. She kicked butt at one time. My mom conquered limits, jumped over edges, and crossed borders. It seemed there was nothing she couldn’t do. The shadow she cast was exceedingly long.”

  “Didn’t you tell me once that your mom is thirty-six? And she accomplished all that and still had time to have children? Messenger, you’re sixteen. That means your mom would have had you when she was twenty and still in college on a soccer scholarship. How does someone play soccer when they’re pregnant?”

  “I’m adopted,” I clarify. “My birth mother was a druggie/alcoholic lesbian. While she was cleaning herself up in rehab, she got pregnant. When I was born, she named me Messenger because she viewed me as a positive message from God. Unfortunately, her female partner, Alice, saw the infidelity as betrayal and viewed me as the unwelcome reminder of that treachery. For her, I was a message from the devil. My birth mom, Carol, thought things would work out. They didn’t. And after three and a half years of my presence driving a wedge between the two of them, they proposed passing me off to my dad, who was already in my life as a sometime babysitter.

  “My dad, thinking a married couple would have a better chance of adopting than a single guy, proposed to my mom. She accepted, they got married, and the adoption was finalized a month or so later. Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice and Maggie all celebrated the closure. But as best-laid plans sometimes go awry, Carol, my birth mom, slid back into drugs and alcohol and, within a year, my family lost touch with her and Alice. My Dad says the worst thing Carol did for Carol was to give me up, but it was the best thing for him, my mom, and me.”

  I pause while Zia gives a small round of applause. She is an excellent audience. The reconstruction of the morning is proceeding nicely even though I’m being assaulted by memory fragments as I speak; Soliloquy on the ground bleeding, my dad and uncle running for the house, my mom yelling. I slide them aside.

  “So anyway, there we are, one big happy family out in the desert, working and playing, minding our own business. The heat is brutal even in the shade, so it’s no surprise when Soliloquy asks, ‘Where’s Big and Girlfriend? I expected to find them in their cute little blow-up pool keeping cool.’

  “I make a face. ‘At the vet’s. Twizzle left a box of chocolates out and they found it. Gobbled it up then got really sick. Chocolate poisoning. My Dad took them to the vet’s where they treated them and kept them overnight. Don’t say anything to Twizzle about it. She feels bad enough as it is.’”

  Big and Girlfriend are our male and female 110-pound Weimaraners.

  “‘Where’s Don Juan? Shouldn’t he be helping your dad and uncle?’

  “Don Juan is a gentle native of Mexico with half-moons gathered under his eyes. His weathered face makes him look wise, like a fisherman with sea-secrets who moves easily across liquid borders. He claims his being born on a moving bus halfway between cities gave him innate nomadic tendencies, hence his unfettered traveling between California and Mexico. He lives alone in a trailer my parents purchased with him in mind. I’ve never met his family, but he sends money to them back in Mexico City.

  “He once told my uncle that, where my uncle’s forefathers might have owned slaves, the white farmer now has migrants like him to do labor. My uncle was shocked and said, ‘Don Juan, if I’ve done something to offend you, please accept my apology.’ Don Juan laughed, patted him on the shoulder, and assured him he’d done nothing offensive. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and asked my uncle to watch a video a friend of his emailed to him. My uncle described it as ghastly. The only sounds in the video clip came from the man behind the camera. What my uncle saw in the video were severed male human heads lined up in a row on their bloody necks. Some of the heads had eyes closed, others had them half open. They were set on a plain concrete slab against a stark concrete block wall. Then the camera panned over to a tangle of headless corpses. Some showed evidence of torture. Some were naked. Others were semi-dressed. Don Juan said it was a video made by the cartels to intimidate their enemies. He said the cartels had driven him from his homeland and he was grateful for the opportunity afforded him by my uncle and my parents.

  “I tell Soliloquy that Don Juan is in Tijuana for the weekend to see friends and that he’ll be back on Monday.

  “Soliloquy says she needs a soda. We keep the main supply in the barn with the distilling and bottling equipment. She grabs my shirt and pulls me toward the barn, saying, ‘We need to talk.’

  “I’m wondering what the talk is going to be about, when, just as we walk through the barn doors, she stops, raises her nose, inhales deeply, and proclaims, ‘It smells like history.’

  “For me, the odor in
side the barn is the potpourri of old wood and tequila distillery that I take for granted. But I follow her lead, breathe deep, and then, considering her statement, realize she’s right. Everything that has ever graced this barn with its presence is still here. There are traces of sweat, animal dung, hay, cooking sugar, burnt agave, aging wood, bourbon, wine, women’s perfume, and men’s cologne.

  “‘Pigeon shit,’ she declares. ‘Can you smell it?’ When I suck air through my nose once more, sure enough, it’s there on the back of my tongue, subtle yet decisive.

  “‘I love this barn,’ she confesses. ‘Even if you’re alone in here, you’re never alone. You’re another moment in time with all the other moments, each leaving hints or clues; breadcrumbs for the next moment to share.’ She spreads her arms out and throws her head back, facing the ceiling with her closed eyes. I wait silently while she basks in the collected moments; I don’t want to break the spell.

  "Time stretches out while ambient sounds creep in: the tinking and clinking of my dad and uncle digging away at the rock, another shot from my mom, a pigeon cooing in the rafters, the distant drone of a prop plane motoring through the sky, a skree call from a hawk floating somewhere above the agave fields.

  “Soliloquy is the first to break the silence. She pulls a postcard out of her hip pocket. ‘Ireland,’ she says, flashing the card in front of my face. ‘That’s where she is. Kissing the Blarney Stone and drinking Irish coffee.’ The card has a picture of a castle opening onto a body of water with its image mirrored on the reflective surface. ‘She says she’s been visiting ancient pagan sites. But the curiosity of her journey was the Emlagh Bog 2,000-year-old 20-pound chunk of butter that was unearthed from the bog and is still edible.’”

  “2,000-year-old butter still edible?” Zia exclaims, surprised as I was when Soliloquy told the tale.

  “Supposedly. Soliloquy explained that it was not unusual for people to bury butter in peat bogs in ancient and early medieval Ireland. She said that with low temperature, low oxygen, and a highly acidic environment, bogs provided excellent preservative properties. Anyway, the card is from her mom, whom she hasn’t seen in a long time. Soliloquy is always ecstatic when she hears from her. And usually, when she gets a card, she goes on and on about her, about how great it will be when she comes back home to visit. Her mother always sends her letters from the various exotic places she’s traveling in, and then Soliloquy reads the letters over and over. They’re her link to a mother who is more fleeting than real. Sometimes when she talks, you can see the ache in her eyes that glitter like glass–a window into her struggles of having a missing mother.”