Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  “Don’t call her that,” Chuy said without taking his eyes off her. He was enraptured by her proud posture, the liquid blackness of her hair, the play of muscle in her brown calves. He wondered if the children with her—a boy of about six or seven, a girl somewhat younger, and a boy of about three—could possibly be her own. She seemed too firm of breast and lean of belly to have borne three children.

  Just then the younger boy accidentally brought a furious slide of canned drinks crashing to the floor. The woman wore sandals and one of the cans struck her exposed toes. She gave a small cry and might have fallen had she not been supporting herself on the cart. Chuy rushed to her without thinking and dropped to one knee and tenderly cradled her uplifted injured foot. Two of the toes were already swelling darkly and showed beads of blood at the top rims of the nails. He suddenly envisioned how he must look and felt his face go warm. The children gaped at him. He looked up to meet her eyes, expecting anger at his liberty, scorn perhaps, but her aspect was only of faintly amused curiosity. She made no move to withdraw her foot from his gentle grasp.

  “Please, señora,” he said, “permit me to help you to get home with your groceries and children.” He was astonished at his own boldness, for he was not one to speak easily to women, not even to those of his acquaintance, never mind attend to the injured foot of one whose name he did not know. Up close, he saw that she was even lovelier than she’d looked from a distance.

  “Thank you, señor,” she said softly. “You are very kind.” And she smiled upon him.

  And so he took her home. And she insisted that he stay to have supper with them. And after they ate and she cleared the table they drank coffee with sugar and milk and smoked cigarettes and talked and laughed and listened to music on the radio. And after she put the children to bed and led them in their prayers and bid them good night she came out and sat beside him on the living room couch. And after a while, he made bold to kiss her. And she kissed him in return. And then they were touching, caressing, breathing hotly against each other’s neck. And then she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom and there they made love.

  And there, as he discovered a few days later when his urine came out scalding, he caught the clap.

  III

  Her first husband, whom she’d married at age sixteen in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Brownsville, Texas, where she was born, had been killed in an oil field accident outside of Corpus Christi just a few months after the birth of their son, Raul. He had carried no insurance and left her penniless. For the next two years, she lived with a pair of scolding aunts in Matamoros. She tended to her infant son and prayed every night for a means to get away. The means came in the form of handsome Salvador Escondido, whom she met one morning under the palms of the riverside park. They’d known each other a month when he asked her to go with him to Florida. The following day, with Raul on her lap, they were on their way in Salvador’s rattletrap Chevy.

  She loved Florida, its faithful sunshine and verdant lushness, its comforting long way from Texas and Mexico. During her four years with Salvador, she gave birth to two more children, María and Joselito. Then Salvador absconded and she had been obliged to provide for herself and the children however she could. At the local welfare office, she was time and again required to answer countless questions, asked for one document after another she did not have, instructed to fill out endless application forms she could barely understand even with the aid of a translator. She was made to wait weeks for official signatures and stamps of approval. During this long and complex process, she had supported her family by various means. She had taken in laundry and ironing. She had taken in sewing. She had taken in men. But she was careless and got pregnant again. With the help of a neighbor woman skilled in such matters, she was able to end the pregnancy without any effects more serious than a painful infection that lasted two weeks—and guilt that sometimes woke her sobbing in the middle of the night.

  But she was desperate for money, and so she resumed receiving men. Soon thereafter she contracted gonorrhea. Repeated treatments at the local clinic made no headway against the disease, and the clinic doctor, a young Chicano named Gonzalez with little sympathy for human weakness, asked her how she expected to get cured if she persisted in prostitution. Until that moment she had avoided the word even in her thoughts, and hearing him say it made her rage with shame. She said she was persisting in only one thing, keeping her children fed, and she stalked out of his office.

  Not until her welfare payments were finally approved and began to arrive in the mail did she stop seeing men and return to Dr. Gonzalez and his antibiotics. By the time she met Chuy in the Mariposa Market a few weeks later, she had assumed she’d been cured.

  IV

  All morning the rumor had snaked through the dusty, sunbaked produce fields: a raid was coming—a raid by la migra, the American immigration agents. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, but soon, very soon. The rumor was not an uncommon one—it went through the fields at least once a week. In fact, la migra did make a raid now and then, and it had now been several weeks since the last one, and so this time the rumor carried a feeling of great likelihood. Everyone could feel it.

  During the lunch break, Esteban sat with Chuy in the shade of a roadside tree and chain-smoked Marlboros and gulped two RC Colas and told Chuy he was not going to wait to find out if the rumor was correct. He intended to take the midnight bus to Miami. He had spoken of going to Miami ever since Chuy met him. Many mojados talked of going there but few ever did.

  “Miami, Chuy—that’s the place for us! The place is full with Cubans, with Latinos from everywhere, from Nicaragua and Honduras and Guatemala, everywhere! I know, man—I have been told by people who know. There are so many Latinos in Miami, nobody knows who’s legal and who’s not. Hell, nobody cares, not in Miami! And everybody speaks Spanish there, man, everybody knows that. In such a big city we will be a lot safer from la migra than we are in this little pueblo of a place where wetbacks are so easy to catch. Listen—in Miami we can be taxi drivers. That’s right! In Miami anybody can be a taxi driver. I have been told, man.”

  Esteban put his palms forward as if to ward off an objection, though Chuy had given no sign of making one. “I know what you are going to say,” he said. “You are going to say how can we become taxi drivers if we don’t know how to drive a car. That is your trouble, my friend—you are always letting little things get in the way of a good idea. The answer to your question is simple: we will learn how to drive. There, you see? The problem is solved, eh? Besides, there are many kinds of work in Miami. It is not like this place where the only work is in the stinking fields. We can work in a restaurant if we want to—a fancy restaurant where all the customers are rich. We can work in white jackets, man. We can be clean and never again have to sweat for our pay. Think of it! Is that not a thousand times better than working in a field of dust and poison under the goddamn sun and sweating your life away like some burro?”

  A thousand times better, Chuy thought. Ten thousand times better. He smiled and shook his head in amazement at the strength of his friend’s dreamy faith.

  Esteban thought he was shaking his head at his idea. “Ah, Chuy,” he said sadly—and then abruptly brightened again. “Listen, man, don’t forget about the Cuban women. Miami is full of Cuban women. Everybody knows they are the most affectionate women in the world. That’s right. They have tits as sweet as melons, the Cuban girls, and asses big and soft like pillows. Oh man, I get dizzy just thinking about them. Jesus Christ, Chuy! Miami is the place for us! What the hell do you have here that is so important you cannot leave it, eh? A donkey job picking vegetables in the goddamn fields. A lousy cot in a flophouse full of drunkards. An appointment with la migra is what you’ll have if you don’t come with me tonight. It’s what you will have very soon.”

  True, Chuy thought. The man speaks the truth.

  Now Esteban tilted his head and his face went sly. “But wait. Can it be the woman? Is that it? Is my good frie
nd Chuy thinking of her? No, no, that cannot be. My good and reasonable friend Chuy would never be so foolish to stay here just because of her.” And now his face was again serious. “Hey, man, really, not for her, eh?”

  Chuy averted his friend’s eyes and said nothing. He took a bite of his barbecued pork sandwich and sipped from his bottle of Dr Pepper and stared at the fields across the road.

  “Ah, Chuy,” Esteban said, shaking his head. He picked up a stone and flung it into the palmetto scrub. “You’ve been seeing her nearly every night for—how long?—almost a month, no? Well, that’s good, yes, a man should have all the fun he can. She’s damn good-looking and a hundred men in town would give their soul to the devil to be in your place and having such fun.” He paused and looked at Chuy sadly. “But it’s only fun, right, Chuy? I mean, you are not … serious about her? Hey, man, she was a—”

  “Don’t!” Chuy whirled on him. “Don’t say it!”

  Esteban made the raised-palms gesture again. “Yes, all right my friend, very well. I’m sorry. I spoke improperly.”

  Chuy turned away and looked out at the fields again. Esteban stood up and brushed pine needles from his pants and scanned the sky. He cleared his throat. He looked at Chuy and said, “Look, if … well, maybe I’ll see you at the bus station tonight, eh?”

  Chuy said nothing.

  Esteban put his hands in his pockets and kicked at a pine cone and started to walk away. Then stopped and turned to look at him again. Chuy looked at him without anger now. He shrugged without knowing what he meant by it. Esteban smiled crookedly and shrugged in return.

  The crew chiefs blew their whistles to signal the end of the lunch break.

  V

  At sunset the crews boarded the field buses for the ride back to town. They arrived at the Farmers Market in the dark, and Chuy went directly to the Ross Hotel, that onetime warehouse furnished in the manner of a ramshackle barracks with worn folding cots and battered surplus wall lockers. Most of its residents were field workers who would be in town only as long as the harvest season. Chuy had~lived here since arriving in Immokalee.

  He washed up at one of the large industrial sinks of tin and changed his shirt and combed his hair, then went to the long narrow counter by the front wall and reclaimed a shoebox containing his few possessions. Oscar, the evening manager and half-owner of the Ross, retrieved the cord-bound box from one of the closets behind the counter. The closets were kept locked and only Oscar and Martin—the day manager and other half-owner—had the keys. A month ago Oscar had discovered someone trying to force open one of the locks and he broke the thief’s spine with a tire iron. It was said that the closets of the Ross Hotel were safer than a bank.

  The moon was round and white and blazing just above the pines when he got to Esperanza’s block. He paused across the dirt street from the house and smoked a cigarette and listened to the hymns of the evening congregation at Our Lady of Guadalupe down the street. The windows of the house glowed brightly yellow, and the sight of the house infused him with a strangely bittersweet feeling, a confusion of yearnings he could not have explained to himself had he tried. Out here was darkness and chill wind and the odor of dirt as ripe as a ready grave. More than once he had staggered back to the Ross after a night in the cantinas with his friends and awakened on his cot at dawn with a painful head and this same raw-dirt smell in his nose, a smell ingrained in the dirty clothes he’d slept in and rising off the fresh mud on his shoes. He shivered in a gust of wind. His loneliness felt like a hand at his throat. And then he remembered last night. All day he had refused to think about it, but now, looking at the house, he remembered—and felt a rush of shame.

  Now the singing in the church ceased and he heard the children in the house laughing happily. He could faintly hear the music of the little radio she kept in the kitchen so she could sing along to it while she cooked. His stomach growled.

  He crossed the weed-and-sand front yard and knocked on the front door. The children’s voices rose excitedly, and then the door swung open and they clamored at the sight of him—Raúl, age seven and mop-haired and dark as an Indian; Maria, nearly five and already destined to break hearts with her beauty; and little Joselito, four years old and both shy and curious. Chuy ruffled Raúl’s hair and gave Joselito a quick tickle under the arm, then tossed his shoebox on the sofa and swept up María and swung her around as she shrieked with delight. He set her down again and she gave his leg a tight hug before running to rejoin her brothers at their game of Chinese checkers.

  He shut the door behind him and went to the kitchen. Esperanza was at the stove, stirring a pot of beans. She pushed a strand of hair from her eyes and looked at him with serious aspect for a moment before smiling and asking, “Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat something, yes,” he said.

  “Then sit at my table,” she said, “and I will feed you.”

  These had been the first words they’d spoken to each other under her roof, and the exchange had become a ritual on his arrival in the evenings.

  The table was already set for him. The children, as usual, had been fed earlier. As she retrieved a bottle of beer from the little refrigerator and set it before him, she said, “Chuyito, are you practicing to be a salesman?”

  He looked up at her, puzzled.

  “Why else, I wonder, do you continue to knock on the door for permission to enter?” She stood beside him and stroked the back of his neck. “You are hardly a stranger anymore, you know.”

  He felt his face go warm. “It would be impolite not to knock,” he said. “It is your house, after all.”

  She made a small smile and shook her head, then went to the stove to prepare their supper plates.

  She had told him much about herself during the past weeks. She had told him about her girlhood in Brownsville and her father’s small tortillería and the long hard hours the five of them—she and her parents and her two older brothers—had worked at making and packaging the tortillas, of the hard days after her father drowned at Padre Island one bright summer day while trying to save her oldest brother who drowned with him, of the loss of the tortillería to creditors, of her older brother’s running away from home a year later when he was but sixteen, of her mother’s subsequent illness and her long hard year of dying, of going to live with her horrid aunts and then meeting and marrying Raul and then living with the aunts again after his death on the oil rig, of coming to Florida with Salvador Escondido.

  Regarding his own past he had been deliberately vague and was both relieved and curious that she did not question him closely about it. Not until a week ago had he confessed to her that he was in the country illegally, half expecting her to tell him to get out of her house immediately, before she got in trouble with the authorities for harboring him. But she had simply said she knew that. When he asked how she knew, she smiled at him as though at a sweet but slow-witted child and ran her hand through his hair. “Ah, Chuy,” she said, “you are so obviously illegal, my little son, that the back of your shirt is still wet. It could only be more obvious if you wore a big sign that said, ‘I am a wetback.’ Every evening that you show up at my door I give a prayer of thanks to God that la migra did not get you that day.”

  For her part, she had told him even about the whoring. Only women who were ashamed, she said, lied to men, or women who were afraid of them.

  And then, three nights ago, as they lay contentedly entwined in her bed after making love, she had kissed his ear and said he ought to give up his cot at that awful flophouse where he lived and move in with her, since he was with her almost every night anyway.

  He had declined her offer with the explanation that such an arrangement would put at risk her welfare payments. She said she was willing to take the risk. If she lost the welfare she would go to work, maybe at the Farmers Market as a sorter, maybe even as a picker in the fields. Lots of women worked in the fields, she reminded him. He said that was true, but she had two children not yet of school age to care for at home, and
even if she found someone to care for them while she was at work, she should not, for their sake, take the risk of losing the welfare money.

  She narrowed her eyes at this suggestion that she lacked sufficient maternal concern, but she held her tongue and tacitly deferred to his reasoning and had not brought up the matter since. And thus had he kept his cot at the Ross Hotel and returned to it every night after leaving her bed—and after stopping at the Corazón for a beer or two with his friends.

  But now, watching her at the stove, he thought of the real reasons for his refusal to move in with her. Here was a woman who openly admitted to him that she had prostituted herself—and yet she was raising three well-disciplined children in the ways of the Church, teaching them proper behavior even as his own mother had tried to teach him, praying alongside them every night before they went to bed. Here was a woman who kept a clean house and cooked wonderful meals and showed him respect and fidelity. Here was a woman who had told him frankly and without shame that she could live without a husband—though she would prefer to have one—but not without the comfort of a good man in her house. What was a man to make of such a one? He saw her by turns as fragile and hard, guileless as a child and mysterious as a cat, sometimes saintly, at times beyond redemption. She confused him—and therefore frightened him—more than he cared to admit.