A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  “Fm remarried.”

  “You can leave him and come back to me,” he says.

  I am confused by my father’s helplessness and by my mother’s bluntness.

  “I can’t let you go. I dream it’s possible, that we have a chance.” He clenches a wad of dollars from his pocket and throws the money up in the air. “That’s what you always wanted—money. And it was never enough. What I got in my front pockets is what my life is worth. When they’re empty—I got nothing but the next pool game, the next card game.” He sees the wedding ring he bought her and brightens. “You still have the ring?”

  “Memories.”

  “You still love me,” he says triumphantly.

  She takes the ring off and throws it. “I don’t need it.”

  As if something is burning in my father’s throat or cutting him inside, he chokes out the next words. “Cecilia! You have to come back to me!”

  “You’re wrong,” she replies. Her voice is soft, almost forgiving. She looks beautiful, her green eyes and black hair, her light skin. She’s wearing a blue dress, with blood on it from my father’s bleeding arm. “I got tired of your drinking, hitting me. Of being scared, wondering when you were going to come home, if you were going to be drunk. You’re the most handsome man I ever met. I loved you then and I love you now, but I can never be with you. I’m too scared.” She starts to sob and tries to stop.

  My father turns his head away from her. He too is crying, looking up at the moon and stars. I start to weep, quietly, so they can’t hear me.

  She continues. “I’ll tell you one thing so you know. When I left with Richard that night, we stayed at a motel. After he fell asleep, I went outside and started hitchhiking on the highway. I wanted to come back. It was cold and cars kept passing me, blowing me back. No one would stop. If one had stopped”—she’s crying and wiping her nose and eyes—“I would have come back. But afterward, I went to the room—” She pauses to clear her throat and gain control of her crying. “Richard doesn’t drink or hit me. That’s why I’m with him, not because I love him.”

  A row of headlights jolts toward them across the field.

  “—My brothers!” she gasps.

  I watch two of the cowboys hold my father while another cowboy keeps hitting him until he crumples to the ground. My mother tries to stop them but they push her into the weeds. I am paralyzed. One second I am watching them beat my father, and the next instant I’m sprinting blindly into the night; my soul leaves, spins out of my body and flies into the street, the buildings, the trees. My body is a hollow dark shell floating without sensibility. I finally recognize where I am and hide in the shed for a long time. I can’t come out. I think the world is ending and all of us are going to die. It’s so dark. I hear my Uncle Santiago’s voice beyond the dark, calling my name, Jimmy, Jimmy, where are you? Then my grandpa’s voice calls me. The shed doors open. I can hear someone’s footsteps nearing me. I’m under a fifty-gallon oil drum, in total darkness, and I push against the rusty sides, trying to come out to hug my grandpa. I push and push against the barrel but it won’t budge. Then I hear a voice, but it’s not my grandpa anymore. I keep pushing to lift the barrel and get out.

  Are you okay, are you all right? Someone is shaking me, and I’m flailing to lift the barrel. . . .

  “Sonofabitch needs medication!” A voice said. I opened my eyes and focused on the guard’s face, peering down through the swill slot. “Looked like you were fighting off the devil himself!”

  My need to revisit the past was stronger than ever, and my memories were saving me from becoming a zombie in this place with no color, no stimulation, nothing to feed my senses. It unsettled me a bit to know I was in two different worlds, but I was elated by the things that were surfacing in me. I couldn’t explain it. However, I knew that my imaginary life was reviving my defenses against the numbing effects of isolation time in the hole, which usually numbed a prisoner’s desire to fight to stay human. Prison makes the prisoner gradually accept the sterile emptiness of prison life. I didn’t want this to happen to me. On one level I understood this, but I had no real purpose in mind for diving into my past, beyond just simple enjoyment. To kill dead time, I filled the void by entrusting myself to my memories. My body felt young, my heart appeased, my soul vital with renewed determination. I couldn’t wait to travel out over the prison walls again. I floated above myself and looked down and saw myself on the cot, then eased out into the world and events all occurred again as if for the first time, growing clearer, closer. I was living again as I had been, as I was.

  I am free, past the floodlights on the yard, gliding back to the same good feelings in memories, where I smell the familiar fragrances of cedar and alfalfa. Drifting on a strong wind over great distances. Everything below is tiny, minuscule, like lines on a map. I fly down into the canyons and hills, swooping over grasslands, fearing nothing, filled with joy.

  I am five years old. I realize it’s spring, time for the fiesta of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The people cook posole, menudo, pinto beans, and tortillas. Musicians play accordions and fiddles. Our Lady of Mount Carmel is lofted along streets amid prayers, and a man behind the procession shoulders a cedar cross. The people arrive at a field outside the pueblo and set the cross upright and carpet the base with a mound of flowers.

  At dusk, stone benches are set with food under the cotton-woods. Lanterns hang from branches, a makeshift board floor is set up for the dance area, and vigas with oil lanterns mark the corners of the dance floor. Musicians start up, drawing people away from the food to dance.

  Mieyo and I are playing in a thin trail of water in an arroyo. After an hour I walk over to a tree where Emiliano is sitting on the ground telling a story. People sit around with children on their laps and listen.

  “When La Virgen de Guadalupe tied the belt of her robe in a knot, it was to symbolize that two peoples would join, Spanish and Indian, and from those two were born El Mestizo, us, La Raza.”

  “How do you know this, Emiliano?” a man asks.

  “It is written in the Mayan and Aztec codices that Our Lady would appear at a time when she was most needed.”

  “But what of the other gods?”

  “They are mixed too.” Emiliano raises his eyes to the moon. “La Virgen combined with Tonantzin. We combined our Indio gods with Christian ones to make them in our image.”

  A woman from one of the tables calls “Antojitos” and I follow children rushing from all directions to the woman. Antojitos are baked sweets—cookies, cakes, sweet breads. I start jumping up and down in line when I see that Juanovera is one of the women handing out the sweets. When it comes our turn, she gives me and Mieyo extra big pieces. I sit on the ground and watch the men around the fire. The flames howl at their faces. Old men toddle past to fill their cups with more homemade wine.

  I go walking and see men parked in pickups, wearing work caps, bearded, drinking beer. “It was bad last year,” one says. “My cattle were standing in the fields and when I came close to them I saw they were frozen stiff, standing up dead. Even my dog froze on the porch.”

  I walk to Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s altar under a tree and notice the soft tissue paper from shoe boxes Father has brought Grandma cushioning the statue. There are boxes with small gifts in them to Our Lady. They remind me of my mother, of the terrible afternoon when, weeks after she left, a box arrived with our clothes and toys in it. She was not coming back. There was no language, no prayer, no medicine for the pain and loneliness. I stare at the boxes, notice the tiny specks sparkling like distant stars in the soft tissue, and say a prayer for my parents to come back.

  My sadness dissipates as I look around and see Grandma sitting with the other women. She is humble and steadfast, aware that life is a gift, gratefulness in her smile. Gray hairs stick out from her chin, gnarled humps of toes bulge out of her scuffed shoes, and cataracts cloud her eyes.

  “¿Quieres algon ‘pa comer mejito?” a woman asks.

  I shake my head that I
am not hungry.

  Drinking with his friend Felix the sheriff, Refugio is slurring. “Attaboy, sommagun, whoaaa, horsie.” Grinning spittle, he waves his hand to shake someone else’s but stumbles instead into the friend’s arms. I go to the campfire where the old men are gathered around, sitting and smoking. Music gives them relief. Others are eating, men group together talking, Refugio and his friends are drinking, Emiliano is telling stories, kids play in the arroyo, dogs sniff around.

  I am filled with a serene, communal sense of belonging. I notice how the men’s hands are so thick and strong and heavy. Once they grab—at the iron, the tool, the earth—they never let go until matter is bent to their will.

  I am looking into the fire when a strong gust comes down from the mountain and blows out the lanterns. There is a swirl of hectic activity, people rushing to their vehicles and wagons and horses with food trays, helping the elderly to safety, folding up tarps, and rushing for cover. I find shelter from the wind in the cracks between two huge boulders and watch people fleeing headlong.

  Had I been able to share my feelings that moment, I would have said what I was able to add years later, lying on my cot in an isolation cell in total darkness. I would have said I felt the many lives that had come before me, the wind carrying within the vast space of the range, and all that lived in the range—cows, grass, insects—but something deeper. Old women leaving their windows open so the breeze can pass through the rooms, blessing the walls, chasing away evil spirits, anointing floors, beds, and clothing with its tepid hand. The breeze excites larks to jackknife over the park pond, knocks on doors to ask people to remember their ancestors, peels paint off trucks and scrapes rust from windmill blades and withers young shoots of alfalfa, cleans what it touches and brings age and emptiness to dirt roads. This breeze blows on my brow sometimes when I’m on the prairie, and I feel immortal; it whispers, Better times will come, and I believe my dreams will come true. The breeze chases the young heels of children and pulls at little girls’ ponytails, draws red happiness out from their hearts and pools it in their cold cheeks, scruffs youth up, tugs at old women’s long-sleeved bereavement dresses, sweeps away veils and handkerchiefs and dries their tears. It roars up from canyons, whistles from caves, blows fountains of green leaves across the air, loosens shale from cliffs, tears cottonwood pods, and bursts them to release fluffy cotton that sails past puffs of chimney smoke.

  I felt it all, the magic that Emiliano had urged me to feel and worship, to surrender to. The wild wind tossed itself on top of grass ends and nibbled seeds, danced with dust, took hold of the devil and swung him around a cactus, through sagebrush, to the music of a hundred insect wings vibrating and snakes hissing. It scurried on, laughing a chill down the spines of vaqueros on horseback, making their ponies lay their ears back, attentive to the spirits. It howled and thrashed in arroyos and launched itself in swoops, veering off sides of boulders and loose tin, creeping into the pueblo, scattering its ancient sandy prayers. The wind reclined in flame and swung itself to sleep, played with tumbleweeds, untwined itself like a slow-opening music box, and gave to the naked woman sleeping with her lover a threadbare love song, to the man meditating on life under a tree its lyrical wounds. The wind, the wind, the wind: ruffles curtains with its remorse, flings the child’s weeping complaint over post fences, muffles grief in the graying hair of middle-aged women, thuds at back doors and windows, slaps broken lumber against hinges, makes dogs cower behind houses, destroys tender gardens, effaces names on cemetery headstones, and makes my heart ache as blowing sand buries a wedding ring in the field. I felt all my people, felt them deep in the hard work they did, in faint and delicate red-weed prairie flowers, in the arguments over right and wrong, in my people’s irascible desire to live, which was mine as well. I felt their will was growing inside me and would ultimately let me be free as the wind.

  EIGHT

  I was lost in the shifting phantoms of the past, and yet I still struggled to reach a present that seemed beyond my grasp. Time and space were jumbled in my mind. I had a hard time concentrating. And so when the door to my isolation cell unexpectedly opened, I squinted at the shadow in the doorway, wondering if my imagination was playing tricks on me.

  When I began to search my mind to explore my memories of Estancia—bouncing in my uncle’s truck through crisp cotton-wood leaves around the pond, going to the foothills across a creek—suddenly a blade edge would glint and my knife would stick in the Mexican’s stomach. The silver blade would chop the pastoral scene to pieces: the Mexican’s face cringing in agony and shock, the cook fearfully crouching under the stainless steel table as oatmeal boiled over on the stove and mixed with blood trailing into the floor drain. I tried pushing the violent images away but it often didn’t work, and I was relieved that a guard was really here to escort me.

  As I dressed, my sense of smell was sharp and I could sense the morning air outside mixed with the stale inside odors of sweat, bad breath, rusty steel, and concrete. At first I felt morose and gloomy, but within minutes I started to feel the excitement of being released after a long time of isolation.

  Skinnier, unshaven, blinking like a madman, I held my pants up with my hands as we descended the concrete stairway. The air grew lighter and cooler. It felt good to walk more than three paces at a time. I followed the guard down to the ground-floor tier, and then through several gates that divided segregated units on punitive lockdown. I kept telling myself everything was the same, but it wasn’t. I was seeing things as if for the first time because something was different inside me.

  I felt better than I had in months, almost lighthearted. Above and to my right were grimy windows unwashed for decades and welded shut with bars. The sun coming up through the bars was warm and beautiful. A few prisoners on death row to my left were writing letters. I wondered how they endured each day, inching toward the appointed hour. My escort unlocked the last gate. Guards moving in other parts of the cell block set off vague echoes. We passed the main guard station and went out on the landing that opened to the yard, where everything seemed wide open.

  I looked around, taking everything in. It seemed I had been away for a long time. The main-yard walls and cell blocks and the main guard tower in the center loomed menacingly, in stark contrast to the freedom I was feeling. Yes, something had opened up in me and started a new stirring in my heart. I didn’t need to explain it, just to enjoy it while it lasted.

  All I wanted was a cigarette, a hot cup of coffee, and my own cell in the block. I wanted to get back to work, go to chow, and exercise. Newly arriving prisoners, carrying freshly starched prison blues and brogans to DC, glanced at me, pretending not to be afraid. I knew they were as scared as I had been, and I gave them a begrudging glare. They still had to prove themselves in here. Other cons marched in twos to work in the fields, passing the open-air shower stalls attached to a section of the main-yard wall by the gates. At the commissary window, cons lined up to buy cinnamon rolls, cigarettes, and coffee, envelopes, pencils, and writing pads, the cost deducted from money on the books earned at twelve cents an hour.

  Wind whirled and clouds obscured the sun. The sky darkened with rolling thunderheads and lightning. Adrenaline rushed wildly through my twenty-two-year-old body. The air turned dusky, and spotlights flickered on above the razor wire on the walls. At the main gates, shift-change guards were turning over keys and clipboard rosters to the next shift. Above them, sparrows chirped excitedly, veering around the razor wire and the Wheelhouse, swooping over walls and away from the sullen-faced tower guards. It began to sprinkle; I lifted my face to the sky and closed my eyes to feel the rain on my skin. In isolation, how often I had dreamed of doing this very thing! Suddenly Big Foot was standing next to me. He yelled up at the Wheelhouse guard that we were going to the warden’s.

  Parked outside the door of the square cinder-block office was the white golf cart with a canvas canopy in which the warden rode around the yard with his guard-chauffeur.

  It was a lot cooler in
side. The concrete floor was waxed to a high dark gloss and the walls were painted flat gray. To my left was a light blue windbreaker and white cowboy hat; a leather shoulder holster hung on a steer-horn coat rack. A leaky swamp cooler hummed at the window and blew on Warden Howard, sitting at his desk. I watched him on the phone, his face mashed against the receiver as if he were trying to bite whoever was on the other end. He was clean-shaven, with heavy bags under his blue eyes, and he was fingering a religious medal on a chain beneath his shirt. A sunburned hat line ran around his forehead. He wore fancy brown boots, a blue pearl-button shirt with fancy threading, and Western dress jeans with pointed pockets.

  Howard glanced at me, and I could feel the anger in his eyes. Just before I had rolled into prison, he’d come from Ohio, where he was a warden at a time when prisoners there had taken over his prison. He had driven a National Guard tank into the compound and blasted away at cell blocks, blowing up both cons and hostages. After he put the riot down, Arizona officials hired him for Florence, where there’d been a rash of gang killings and two guards murdered. He restored order by allowing guards to beat cons for any disciplinary infraction. Then he segregated the gang bangers. He ruled through intimidation, beatings, and lockdowns, and by taking away time served and imposing his own sentences. He could not be sued for breaking laws, so, being immune from punishment, he did what he wanted and flaunted his authority.

  He exhaled through flared nostrils and jerked his husky shoulders to get the tightness out of them. Still on the phone, he stood and stared out the window at the yard. The swamp cooler lapsed, then surged to its normal speed. Accustomed to convicts listening to him without interrupting, he now listened, his ruddy faced flushed, his lips grim. Impatiently, he swiped at his thinning brown hair and snapped a string of curses into the phone about how his wife was upset because the plants were delivered dead. He demanded live ones and slammed the phone down.