Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  In the cornfield the men stood fast and tried to sense the earth’s intentions through the soles of their feet. Sombra de Dios was set on a narrow tableland in the western range of the Sierra Madre, a region of Mexico which often trembled as if in sudden fright. These shudders were usually brief and harmless, and the villagers had long ago learned to make jokes of them. “The mountain has been startled from its siesta,” they might say. Or, “The earth is once again shrugging at one of God’s great riddles.”

  But sometimes a tremor was more than a minor interruption of the day’s work. Sometimes it was a warning of imminent worse, an advisement that, for reasons known only to God, the earth was in a black temper, in a mood to bring ruin.

  For a long moment the men in the field waited to see if worse was coming. Then somebody uttered a loud derisive curse, and somebody else added to it. A pair of young machos expressing their fearlessness. Now others among them grinned and made dismissive gestures and made fun of each other for their frighted looks. They resumed their slow shuffle along the rows, plucking corn and dropping it into the long bags slung across their chests and dragging behind them.

  And then again the stalks rustled queerly. Louder this time. And the ground again quivered under their feet.

  Once more the men stopped working. Some slipped off their picking bags and began to ease slowly out of the field, casting anxious glances at the dark wall of the mountain barely fifty yards away.

  “It is nothing, nothing!” Anastasio Domingo called out to them. He was a village elder and the foreman of this season’s harvest. “A little trembling. It will pass. Don’t be such hens and get back to work!”

  Standing beside him, his eldest son Benito could feel the ground shivering softly against his soles. He was as eager as the others to abandon the field and put distance between himself and the looming mountain. But his place was at his father’s side.

  Now a low growl sounded deep in the earth—and the rest of the men threw off their bags and hastened away.

  “Father,” Benito said, shedding his own bag. But old Anastasio was not listening. He was glaring up at the mountain and muttering darkly.

  Its growl deepening, the ground began to quaver. Then it suddenly jarred sharply and men cried out and fell. They scrabbled to their feet and ran. And Benito ran with them.

  The ground buckled and men again fell—and again rose and kept running. The earth rumbled. The mountain shook against the sky. It began to shed black boulders. The huge stones bounded down the rockface and cut swaths through the cornstalks.

  Benito fell twice before reaching the wide clearing encompassing the village cemetery. Here the villagers were coming together in a terrified herd. Here was the only spot a falling rock had never reached, the only expanse of ground a temblor had never cracked open.

  Benito’s younger brother Lalo ran up to him, wide-eyed, yelling, “Father! Where’s father?”

  They searched the crowd frantically, and then someone shouted, “There, Benito! Out there!”

  Anastasio Domingo was still at the edge of the cornfield, all alone now between the mountain and the cemetery, bellowing curses at the sierra, shaking a bony fist. He tottered like a drunk on the undulant ground. A boulder the size of a sow shot past within feet of him.

  “Fatherrrr!” Benito cried. He started for the field but Lalo grabbed his arm and held him back, yelling, “No, Benny!”

  The ground at the base of the mountain wall ripped open with an explosive burst and a jagged gaping fissure lengthened swiftly and made directly for Anastasio. The old man tried to run but he still wore his picking bag and the load of corn weighed him down. The fissure rushed up behind him, the ground crackling as it parted, widening like monstrous jaws.

  The ground opened under Anastasio and the villagers screamed.

  The old man caught hold of the rim of the fissure and arrested his fall. For a moment he hung in the crevasse, only his head and arms visible as he clawed wildly at sand and stones in a desperate effort to pull himself out against the full weight of the picking bag hanging round his neck.

  Then the ground broke under his grasp and he vanished into the abyss.

  This time the village was almost undamaged. Much clayware had been shattered and a few pens had come apart and the animals had scattered and would have to be rounded up. But no walls had collapsed and no roofs had fallen. The creek had not drained to thick mud, not this time.

  Singly and in small groups the villagers approached the edge of the crevasse where Anastasio Domingo had dropped out of sight. They peered into the black void, blessed themselves hastily and hurried away with faces tightly fearful.

  The day after the temblor, Father Enrique arrived in the early evening from the neighboring pueblo of Tres Cruces and said a mass for Anastasio’s soul. But there was no funeral because there was no corpse to bury. The old priest spoke of God’s mysterious ways and of the great need for faith during our brief tenure in this vale of tears called Life. But his words did little to comfort the village men, and after he departed they gathered in the village cantina to drink with urgency and speak forlornly of the riddles of life and death.

  The room was draped in shadows and pungent with the sooty smoke of kerosene lamps. The men drank and gestured and shook their heads. It had been such a meager little earthquake, they told each other. All of them had seen at least a half-dozen temblors worse than this one, quakes that left the village in piles of broken adobe and littered with tiles and thatch, that buried entire cornfields under mountain rocks, that ripped open the ground in a dozen places—and yet had killed no one. Then along comes a dwarf of an earthquake like this one, a weak sister of an earthquake that drops only a few big rocks in the field and opens only one big crack in the ground—and yet, just like that, it takes a man off the face of the earth. How, they asked, was a man to make sense of such a thing?

  For a time they drank in morose silence. And then Marchado Ruiz spoke up in a loud slurred voice. He said he only hoped they had not held the mass for Anastasio’s soul too soon.

  Heads turned his way. Marchado Ruiz was a fool and everyone knew it, but even from him such a remark could not be easily ignored. Eyes narrowed at him in question. Lips drew tight in anticipation of stupidity.

  “What I mean,” Marchado said, waving his cup for emphasis and spilling pulque on the men sitting beside him at the long table, “is that maybe Anastasio was not yet dead.”

  Now everyone in the room was staring hard at Marchado Ruiz. Faces clenched in anger and men muttered darkly. What was this fool saying to insult the dead?

  “I mean,” Marchado said in the rising whine of one desperate to make himself understood, “that hole looks pretty damn deep, doesn’t it? I dropped a rock into it and never heard it hit the bottom. That’s deep, no? So, what I mean is, what if it’s so deep that Anastasio was still falling when the mass for his soul was said?”

  The room fell silent as a tomb.

  “The mass was supposed to be for a dead man, but if he was alive and still falling, the mass was too soon to do him any good, no? Now, maybe he died of fright as he fell, but I don’t think so, not a brave man like old Anastasio. Hey, for all we know, he’s still falling. It’s possible, no?” He looked around at his gaping audience. “I mean, that hole looks pretty damn deep to me.”

  Marchado Ruiz had never been able to tell a joke properly in his life. The only laughter he ever inspired was derisive and directed at his foolishness. But now somebody burst out laughing—truly laughing—and in a moment was joined by somebody else.

  And then suddenly everyone in the room was laughing—laughing hard, laughing with their teeth and eyes and belly, laughing with all their heart, roaring with laughter. They pounded the bar and tabletops with their fists and slapped each other on the back and howled with laughter. They bought drink upon drink for Marchado Ruiz and they put their fists to their faces and wept with laughter.

  All of them—even Benito and Lalo, who could not help themselves and would
later pray for their father’s forgiveness—laughed and laughed until their bellies were in agony from laughing, until their fists were raw and sore and their jaws ached and their eyes were burning dryly, drained of all tears.

  And then every man of them got happily drunk—and later, singing loudly in the moonlight, they went staggering home to their women and their beds. And in the morning, as the sun once more ascended over the mountain peaks, they were back at their work in the sierra’s long shadow.

  ALIENS IN THE GARDEN

  I

  There were, Julio thought, some clear advantages to working in the fields rather than in the groves. For one thing, you did not have to climb a ladder to pick tomatoes, so there was much less risk of breaking your bones. And a full basket of tomatoes did not weigh even half as much as a full box of oranges, a difference for which your back was grateful at the end of the day. And in the fields he had seen but a single snake, a little green one said to be harmless except to bugs, but in the groves he had known more than one man who had been bitten by a rattler.

  He was working swiftly but with care not to bruise the ripe tomatoes/plucking them from the vines and putting them in the basket, pushing the basket ahead of him along the low row of plants. He paused to wipe the sweat from his face, being careful not to get insecticide in his eyes.

  So now he thought of a ladder as a risk, he told himself, of a hundred pounds of oranges as a great burden. Sweet Mother of God, he was thinking like an old man. He felt a rush of anger—followed instantly by confusion because he did not know what, exactly, he was angry about. About being in this dusty field, of course, breaking his back under a roasting sun. Did a man need more reason than this to feel angry? But he knew it was something else, too, something more than the outrage of a life at hard labor, that for the past few days had been gnawing on his spirit like sharp teeth.

  “You there! Got to work goddammit!”

  Gene, the worst-tempered of the crew chiefs, had spotted him kneeling idly and gazing into space and was pointing at him from six rows away. “This ain’t no mothafucken pignick!”

  Although he still did not understand much English, Julio well enough understood Gene’s commands. Pinche negrito, he thought, as he resumed working. Goddammit you. Goddammit all of this. He suddenly wished he was back in the groves, the ladders and snakes and heavy loads be damned. In the grove you at least had some shade and so what if the air could get so thick it was hard work just to breathe? Out here you worked in the sun and you sweat like a mule and you crawled along on your hands and knees with your back bent and your spine cracking. You breathed dust and insecticide fumes all day long. The bug spray burned and stained your skin and you carried the smell of it everywhere, even after you washed. Goddammit! A man had to work hard all his life, yes, but not on his knees. A man was not meant to work on his knees.

  Well … a priest, maybe, he thought, and strained to smile at his own weak joke.

  II

  He had arrived in Florida three months ago, crammed into the back of a truck with fifteen other men at the end of a journey that began shortly after they crossed the Río Grande some thirty miles upriver of Laredo, Texas. Guided by a Mexican coyote—a smuggler of illegal border-crossers—they splashed across the river in the middle of a windy moonless night, choking on the muddy water and on their pounding hearts, fearful of being captured by la migra—agents of the American immigration service—or by the Border Patrol. They walked and walked in the night wind under a sky blasting with stars, shivering in their wet clothes, and then just before sunrise the truck came clattering out of the vague gray dawn and found them as planned.

  The driver was a freckled Anglo boy of about seventeen who counted the men and then handed the coyote an envelope and ordered them in wretched Spanish to get into the back of the truck and be absolutely quiet for the whole trip if they did not want to be captured by la migra. Watching them from the truck cab was a large pale Anglo in a cowboy hat who spoke not at all. The men clambered up through the rear of the box-shaped cargo compartment and sat on the floor with their backs against the sides. There were several plastic bottles of drinking water and some lidless gallon cans to hold their waste. Then the boy yanked down the rollered door and locked them in darkness.

  Julio had been among strangers even then. Most of the other men in the truck were from the same region of Coahuila state and had long been acquainted. A few of the others had come together from Nuevo León, and there was a pair of friends from Chihuahua. But Julio had come the farthest, all the way from Nayarit, a state unfamiliar to the others, and only he had come alone.

  The truck’s tires droned under them all day and night. The men’s excited jabbering gradually trailed off, and soon they were all curled on the floor and trying to sleep, occasionally cursing in the dark when someone made use of the piss cans and his aim was poor, or when a can was kicked over by someone’s careless foot or toppled by a sudden lurch of the truck. By the end of the first day every man’s clothes were damp and reeked of piss.

  Julio slept fitfully, dreamt of his wife’s dark eyes, his children’s faces. Once, on waking in the reverberant darkness, he felt as if his chest had been hollowed, felt such an abrupt rush of loneliness he had to clench his teeth against weeping.

  The truck made stops only for fuel—and every time it did, gasoline fumes rose thickly in the dark compartment, and the men warned each other not to light cigarettes. Sometimes the fuel stops were in a town and they would hear street traffic, and sometimes people shouting, and once they heard children laughing and guessed they must be passing by a school. Sometimes, as they rolled slowly through a town, they caught the smells of food and moaned quietly and told each other in whispers of the meals they were going to buy for themselves as soon as they received their first pay. During a stop sometime in the second day, the doorlock rattled and the door rolled up just far enough for the boy to shove into the compartment a large paper bag containing sandwiches and bags of corn chips. The sudden blazing strip of sunlight under the raised door was blinding, and the brief inward rush of fresh air burned Julio’s lungs as it cut through the stench he had become inured to. The sandwiches were made of bologna and dry bread—but every man gobbled his down in a few quick bites.

  Late the next day, they felt the truck leave paved road and begin jouncing over uneven ground. Nearly an hour later they came to a stop and the lock sounded and the door flew up on its rollers and the Anglo boy counted out ten of the men, Julio included, and told them to get out. The other six men were again shut inside the truck and the truck departed.

  They were in Florida. Julio had always thought it a beautiful name. Florida! It conjured visions of a lush land hung with flowers, a world far removed from the starkly rugged sierras where he grew up struggling for subsistence in cornfields full of stones. When he staggered out of the truck and saw the endless rows of rich green trees hung with golden fruit, he felt he’d been delivered to a garden of God.

  They were housed in small, battered, unfurnished trailer homes set in a wide clearing deep in the grove, four men to a trailer, and they slept on the floor. They were fed from a mobile kitchen, a camper-backed pickup, that showed up twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Its rations were the same at both meals—rice and beans, flavorless white bread, bags of corn chips, ice water. They worked every day from sunup to sunset, scaling ladders to pick the fruit at the higher reaches of the trees, dropping the oranges into the canvas bag hung across their chests, descending the ladder to empty the bag into a packing box, repeating the process until the box was full, then lugging it to a truck with a long slat-sided bed and there collecting a ticket from a crew chief before emptying the box into the truck. They were paid in cash every night, forty cents for every ticket, and even after the bosses deducted expenses for shelter and food, Julio was left with more money than he could earn in a week of hard work back home. He allowed himself some money for beer and candy bars and for gambling a little in the nightly dice games, and the rest he kept in a
thin roll held tight with a rubber band and tucked in the front of his underwear. Every night he fell asleep with his hand cupping the roll protectively.

  As he went about his work he daydreamed of the glorious return he would make to his village of Santo Tomás one day. He recalled the promise he’d made to his wife, Consuelo, that he would come home in the spring, no later than midsummer, for sure. And perhaps he would—if he did not decide to stay in Florida a while longer and make even more money. A promise to a wife was a serious thing, he reminded himself, but subject to change, of course, with the unpredictable circumstances of a man’s life. Maybe he would be satisfied with the amount of money he would have saved by this summer, or maybe he would wish to stay a little longer and add a little more to it. Would not a man’s wife herself, his children too, be better off with every dollar more he saved? A man’s family would be proud of him for such industry. In any case, when he at last returned home he would be rich and respected and envied for miles around.

  They had not been in the grove three full weeks before his sleep was shattered one night by sirens and by loudspeakers blaring in Spanish that everyone was under arrest and anyone who tried to run away would have worse trouble. Julio bolted from the trailer into the glare of encroaching headlights and spotlights of cars and trucks with blue lights flashing on their roofs. Cries of “La migra! La migra!” carried through the grove as men fled shouting in every direction. In panic he ran too, ran wildly, trying to escape the blinding lights, the crackling bullhorn voice of Legal Authority. He ran into the grove and was almost struck by a careening pickup truck that glanced off a tree. He jumped onto the rear bumper and held tight to the tailgate. The truck slued onto a narrow dirt trail and he was pulled into the bed and somehow—who could ever say how?—they escaped, five illegals of them and a single Anglo crew chief.