American Orphan

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  We cover six hundred miles in a snap, get to Green Mill in what seems an hour. After we get there, M asks if I can get him some more coke. I say I don’t know, but ask Frog King the next day. He sends me over to see this old man with a glass eye—I nickname him Ciego, the Blind One. Ciego and his son, a big tobacco farmer in his late thirties, control all the weed and coke coming into North Carolina. They bring it in boats through coastal Georgia, using the protective guise of oil company tankers, then truck it up to North Carolina in green-tarp Army trucks.

  I drive up to Ciego’s red-brick house on a hilltop, sit with him by his swimming pool. It’s a sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. Behind us, lining a whole side of the pool, there are dog cages and in each one a blue heeler. They yap at my arrival but instantly hush when Ciego scolds them.

  He’s like any of the good ol’ boys—mean-looking, unkempt, kill-you-in-a-second—except rich from selling marijuana and cocaine to the college kids in Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro and seemingly everywhere else in the South. It seems like the only thing of value to these men are Catahoula dogs, a jug of lightning and easy money. Ciego has plenty of all that.

  Ciego’s house is bit smaller than Frog King’s mother’s mansion. It’s showy, with alabaster columns topped with scrolled Roman capitals. Behind the house is a colonnaded swimming pool, parked all around are new trucks and cars, a plane, heavy construction equipment, acres of forest land and pastures with black angus grazing. But to see him, a stranger might take him for an old gum-sucking fool, a dull-witted drunk. He wears a crumpled baseball cap, sooty jeans, a faded, torn khaki shirt and grimy, manure-chunked farmer boots.

  We sit down in hickory lawn chairs facing the far side of the pool. He crooks one leg over the other. I notice something peculiar, so I ask, “What’s that wire sticking out down by your leg there, under your pants by your ankle?”

  “Heart condition.”

  I imagine doing all that pure cocaine gives even an enraged elephant in full charge a pause.

  We talk a little about the weed business. He tells me, “Them dumb feds camp outside my boy’s house, still can’t do a damn thing.”

  That would be the son who flies a plane-load of Colombian bud and cocaine each week right under the feds’ noses. The son who looks out his window every morning, flips off the feds and is richer than most Wall Street con-artists. He has marshalls, local cops and DEA agents on his payroll.

  I tell him what I need. He reaches into his shirt pocket, flips me a bag of jeweled rocks. While we talk, a white fourdoor Lincoln pulls up in the driveway. Four very tall, black men get out, sleek as panthers in very expensive white-linen tailored suits, all wearing the same sunglasses, all bare foot— yep, all bare foot, with very, very large feet.

  They laugh with Ciego, talk basketball, chances for winning the NCAA championship. Then Ciego reaches into the box beside his chair, pulls out a pound of cocaine wrapped in brown, wax-coated paper and hands the bundle to the tallest of the men. He doesn’t open the package, just smiles and stuffs it into a gym bag. With all the coolness and toothy-classiness of kids who have just found a golden egg in the grass on Easter morning, they grin at the world and stroll off casually. They get back into the white Lincoln and drive off: four swans in a fairy tale, floating on the sparkling water of the American Dream.

  “You know who that is?” Ciego asks.

  “No. . .”

  “Destiny picked that boy to be the greatest basketballer of all time. Ajon. Remember that name if you ever intend on putting money down on a game. Ajon.”

  I spent the last seven years in a cell without radio or TV. I never heard of anyone named Ajon. I let it go at that. But over the next decade, I witness Ajon rise to the ethereal chambers of greatness, one of the greatest basketball players the game’s ever seen.

  I keep a bit of the coke, give the rest to M. When he returns to Texas, I am grateful not to be going with him. Every time I go down and come back, Lila tells me I grind my teeth so loud when I sleep that she has to wake me. My body is conscious of my misgivings, reacts by warning me to stop. After every trip, when I fall asleep, I hear the drill bits of my molars grind into my skull and jawbone and reverberate in my cheekbones, down my spine like a miniature jackhammer that shakes me, trying to tell me, wake up before it’s too late!

  I have an addictive personality. When something is good, I ignore the warnings to be moderate. I go all out. But I feel the end of my smuggling days are near when the night frights start. I have this repetitive dream of walking back into DYA. I wake up sweating, gasping, realize with infinite relief it is only a nightmare.

  It is time to plan my departure.

  Beto’s voice in my head makes me hesitate to make any final decision. Recently freed, making decent money smuggling, what kid wouldn’t feel invincible, formidable, indomitable, untouchable? That’s me until the day I almost get busted coming through Tennessee. Until then, I’ve felt immune from capture.

  It’s late October, the winter is grungy: mud, cold, people’s dispositions mean and despondent. I’m heading up a long stretch of the interstate, it’s snowing so hard that I see at least a dozen tractor trailers jack-knifed in the median along the way. I’ve come through several times in the last two weeks, noticed narcs park at the overpass exits and gas stations. I never have to stop, thank God, since I have duel tanks on my pick-up.

  The feds still have Ciego’s son, and more importantly his weed business, on ice. The showdown Frog King talked about never happens, and I’m just as busy as before.

  I’ve got the weed packed in tall refrigerator boxes, about a hundred pounds per box. I see a narc pulling up beside me. It’s over for me, I think. I can imagine myself back in DYA. Shit, yes, I’m frightened. And sad. It proves I can’t live in freedom, can’t make it straight. I’m also relieved, a sense of at-last sweeps over me. No more pretending, no more taking risks or pushing the line.

  I have to get rid of the little vial of coke in my shirt pocket. Getting busted with weed might bring a light sentence, but the coke aggravates the situation. I figure I don’t have much in the vial in my shirt pocket. I could throw it out the window, but that’s impossible because the narc is right alongside me. I glance over at him to my left and smile, hoping a goodwill smile will make him leave. It doesn’t. I smile again, to make him think it’s just an ordinary morning and I’m an ordinary workman. But no, he knows, he is on to me.

  I see him make calls on his police radio. I know the truck’s paperwork is in order. As luck would have it, the twolanes narrow to one because of the snow-banks, he has to get behind me. This is my chance. I look straight ahead at the road, reach into my right shirt pocket, pluck the vial out, cup it in my palm, unscrew the cap with my thumb and insert the three-inch straw I have for snorting. I estimate I have only a few hits left, so when I jam the straw into the vial, lift it to my nose, inhale a hit, I realize my estimate is dead wrong.

  Tears stream down my face, my brain burns. My cheeks are on fire. My eyes blink like I’ve been hit by a baseball, my face grimaces into a mask cringing with pain. I have just taken the biggest hit of cocaine in my life, I feel a huge tiger paw slap me across my head. I wince from the pain of its claws burning in my nasal passages.

  Just then, the two lanes open again. When I look to my left at the narc driving next to me, he is shocked to see me crying, my face wrinkled up like a wadded up piece of paper. Then, something unexpected happens. I don’t know why, but he takes the next highway exit and is gone. It must have given him quite a shock—me crying, my face a crushed piece of paper between a writer’s two hands who can’t get it right. My face feels like its smoking, tiny nerve ends convulse, twitch, my lungs groan, landmines erupt in my brain.

  For the next twenty miles I see blurry, double, sometimes triple phantoms, ghosts leaping out from the roadside, mashing their faces against the windshield; other spectral visitors crowd the shoulder of the highway, waving me down, but I refuse to stop for fear of being taken to the underwo
rld. I know the devil is on my track as sure as a flame on a fuse. I pray aloud, plead with God to intervene, save my miserable, coke-overdosed ass.

  He does, but only for another showdown.

  What is it about this habit of proving to people I am worthy by subjecting myself to danger?

  I was only four years old when my cousins at the ranch in Willard had me hold Black Cat firecrackers while they lit them. I couldn’t feel my fingers for a week. They were delighted with my pain. Around the same time, another cousin put me barefoot on the back of his dirt bike, drove as fast as he could to purposely throw me off, zig-zagging recklessly through the prairie scrub brush. I lost my balance, the wheel spokes caught my foot, tore through my tendon. It made him laugh. He liked me after that.

  I was their freak show. It excited them to see how far I would endanger myself. When bigger boys were around, I’d rush them, barrel into them, hug their legs so they couldn’t ever leave me. They’d push me off, but I’d rush back at them, block their way to the door, box them—a five-year-old against a teenager. They’d slap me, I’d swing back. It was play to them, but I was serious in my fear of being left behind, alone. I’d make them drag me away.

  I was always the one at the orphanage to take the dare, the one-more-step kid who incited an emergency, who ran away even as the consequences grew in severity. I always disregarded the threats from older boys that if I didn’t stop doing something that bugged them, they’d beat me up. I wouldn’t stop and they’d bang me to the ground. I didn’t care.

  I’d steal the purses of the college girls who came to visit us at the orphanage on holidays. At day’s end, I’d climb up to the bell tower, crouch in the dusty space, scaring away dozens of pigeons. I’d sit, the dust and feathers everywhere, peer through the slats at the kids, the nuns, the visitors below and wonder why I couldn’t have what they had, why was I so lonely and they weren’t, why was I so different. I wondered how to remake myself more like them, to make people feel I wasn’t a disappointment. . . .

  I’m in the truck with Beto, driving down the highway with two hundred pounds of weed, peering through the windshield at the pigeons on telephone lines. Am I doing this to make people like me? Am I still a disappointment?

  It was 1966, and I was sitting in the bleachers under the big tent with a hundred other kids bussed to the circus. I kept looking up at Sister Rita next to me. I had a crush on her. Once, out weeding the garden by the dorm, a gust blew the fabric of her brown smock tight against her body and outlined her long legs and breasts. It was instant love. At the circus, a man with a whip was making tigers snarl and leap through a hoop of fire. Pretty girls in tights walked the ropes high up, others in sparkly outfits straddled elephants, did flips on the backs of trotting white horses.

  I was wearing a Lone Ranger mask and a Davey Crockett racoon hat. I carried a plastic toy rifle that I’d point at a kid called Big Noodle. I’d fire at him, but he wouldn’t die, he’d only act wounded, slash at me with his Zorro sword. My eyes stared up at the lady somersaulting free from her trapeze bar. I gasped, thinking that she’d fall to her death as she sailed in the air with no net below. At the last minute the man on the swing at the opposite pole swung out and caught her. In celebration, clowns spewed confetti from horns, a midget was shot out of a canon.

  There’s a photo of us the weekend we visited our grandpa in Estancia. I was dressed in freshly laundered jeans two inches too short and a plaid shirt. I even had a little hat on with a plastic propeller, like Spanky on “The Little Rascals.” In the afternoon, we stood next to each other for another photo; this time my clothes were dirty, my shirt hung out. I’d lost my little round cap with the twirly. By day’s end, my clothes, obtained from Goodwill, already worn and faded, were even more torn and filthy from playing on the prairie.

  Back at the orphanage a few days later, I sat with Camilo in a ditch flipping through Spider-Man and Superman comic books, talking about the circus we saw. To prove to him I was a circus boy too, I went over, grabbed a swing, pumped my legs to get as high as I could and I bailed out, flipped in midair. For a moment, I flew like the trapeze lady. Then I landed with a thud and broke my arm.

  A day after returning from another trip to South Texas, I sit on the stoop of Lila’s house, can still feel the break at my elbow from that playground fall. I cherish the break; it carries part of the story of my childhood when life was magical, a mystery of benign grace that swept through the day, covering me and everything I touched, saw, heard and tasted with a certain deep knowledge of goodness, living right and living hard. The fields in Green Mill have that same husky barechested thrust to the sky.

  In Green Mill, the October weather holds steady with cold, a fog covering the fields that doesn’t burn off until noon. I like the grayness of it all; it lends a certain intimacy to my melancholy. I grab my rod and head to the woods. By evening, I’ve caught two nice big mouth bass and a brim. I fillet them at the pumphouse, make a salad for Lila and me. While we eat, she says that she and her sisters are having a birthday party for her father, who’ll be 84.

  Saturday morning guests start to arrive, and with them lilies and poinsettias. The closest thing to a real birthday party I ever had growing up in the orphanage was group outings, the Shriners taking us out to see jugglers or the man who could swallow a sword and spit fire.

  Memories of Easter blind me for a minute; I swear that lilies emit light. I remember the lilies were everywhere, including at the chapel’s main altar and side altars. I knelt at the marble railing longer than anyone else just to look at lilies set in vases alongside tall, white candles embroidered with gold threads. The chapel was fragrant from the frankincense, myrrh burned in the brass censer. I remember Father Gallagher raising the chalices of wine and sacred communion wafer, intoning the liturgy in somber Latin, wearing a white smock over purple robes. The majesty of the scene lifted me up. I felt as if I was at some king’s court among European aristocrats: princes, queens, squires. In this milieu, I was privy to the Lord himself, present in all the votive flames at the side altars flickering in the exhalations of old widows and spinsters praying for the departed souls of husbands and children, or for Jesus, observing us from the twelve stations of the cross that lined the two facing walls of the chapel, His awareness of the pious as powerful as the morning sunlight blazing through the stained-glass windows. I just knew, in this epiphany, that my parents would come back, I’d be home again, that everything would be all right.

  I bowed my head in worship to Jesus, pulled a card of Him out of my pants pocket, kissed his wounded heart. I licked the picture to get his bleeding heart’s blood onto my tongue, then touched the picture to my forehead in reverence, being anointed, welcomed by Him, blessed with the miracle of my parent’s return. I skipped, danced all the way out of the chapel, down the long way hallways to the dining room lined with poinsettias. In the dining room, every table was aflame, lit up with lilies bursting with light. Later, I was under the shed while the nuns played solitaire, kids nearby were playing marbles, others by the sand box playing piquete, throwing tops, trying to split the opponent’s top with each throw. I got out from under the shed. I hopscotched, even though there were no chalked squares. I jumped rope and recited rhymes, even though I had no rope, because poinsettias and lilies filled the world with the message that all things would be well!

  And now, I see Fanny Bell and her husband Big Foot showing up for the birthday party carrying poinsettias. Lila’s sisters show up carrying bouquets of lilies, other guests proudly arrive with more and more poinsettias and lilies. I step up, smiling, young again, seven-year-old Orlando hungry for blackberry cobbler, peach pie, butter beans, corn-bread, yams, collards, black-eyed peas with red onions and pork. As I step onto the porch and go inside the old clapboard, my mind goes back to the visiting room at the orphanage, the Blue Room, also lined with pots of poinsettias. I was standing in the living room with a crowd of family and friends for the holiday. Even the fog outside snuggled up against the windows to shar
e in this holiday that smelled of rich earth, ponds and green weeds. The room filled with people I hadn’t seen in a long time. The Shriners were there, with their tasseled, purple fezzes and purple coats. Someone blew one of those paper roll-out whistles, the kids rushed out for a fire or bomb drill, in twos down the staircases. We packed into the courtyard, looking up at the sky, wondering when the planes might come and drop the bombs. Maybe Santa or an Easter bunny might show.

  Standing there with Lila and her sisters, for one divine moment, it all comes together. As I walk from my house across the blacktop to Mr. Chamber’s house, I decide these beautiful people are not the folks who shame a kid who carries the mark of trauma, whose eyes reveal him as too willing to please, too wild and crazy to prove his worthiness. He is a kid not usually invited to birthdays.

  People from all over Green Mill come kicking and stomping their big boots and high heels on the porch planks to pay their respects to their father, our neighbor across the country road. His birthday comes as an accidental redemption for me, affording me the opportunity to reassess what I’m doing with my life. I realize I cannot split myself in two. If Mr. Chambers has taught me anything, it is that good intentions evaporate, what’s left are the calluses and scars on a heart.

  This day, I see and feel the sweet cumulative abundance of a lifetime of hard work in these folks. These people respect Chambers’s honesty and integrity, how this skinny old shred of a man has given off ample grace from having certain principals he would never bend, much less betray. I so appreciate those bony hands almost made claws by age and weather. I appreciate that wrinkled grin of his, those corny jokes, his simple life steeped with field truths, seasonal despairs and harvest hopes. He is rich soil, and from that soil he loved a woman, grew a family, built a house, endured the cold and looked himself in the eyes each morning, never wavering in his gaze because of the foolishness he’d done dreaming the possible. He is not a man to commit the crime of deception against himself. He is as straight-forward and lackluster as that damn beat-up tractor of his. He got the job done; there is honor in that, even love at day’s end and grace in the way he walks to the woodstove at dawn to serve himself up a cup of coffee. His life is as simple as a nail in a board, and the board never comes loose. It’s held its purpose against the mightiest forces seeking to pull it apart.