Catherine anchored her hair behind her ear and began to hop in place. "Hey," she said. "This looks good. You think he's going to get better?"
"He should," said Ben. "With antibiotics. If he has what I think he has."
"Just so they don't get deported or something."
"You really ought to stop worrying about that."
"All right," Catherine sighed. "I guess I better go. It was nice meeting you and everything. Later on, I guess."
She turned to the boy with the long black ponytail, the brother of Angel. "Hasta luego," she said. She nodded at the other boy, the one with the pug nose and pomaded hair, and he nodded back at her. "Angel" she called. "Buena suerte. Ahora vas a mejorarte." Angel smiled weakly.
"What did you say?" Ben asked.
"I told him he's going to get better."
"You'd better catch your bus now."
"Okay," said Catherine. "Later on."
She left then, without looking back, her jeans hems scraping the ground. The driver hopped onboard behind her. The door closed, the air brakes gasped, and the bus pulled out of its covered bay, described a wide and steady arc, and disappeared into the west.
Angel's brother got in the ambulance, but despite Ben's polite entreaties, Coleman refused to take the other boy. There was no legal place for him to ride, they couldn't stow him in the back with Angel, and besides the hospital was on Fuller Street, he could walk it in less than an hour. The ambulance pulled out with Angel and his brother, and the third boy watched it go. He stood in the loading bay with his plastic bags, his collar turned against the cold. To Ben, the cold seemed to rise from within. He felt sick to his stomach, feeble, and listless. The wind had subsided, the sun was out, the bay stood empty of passengers; there was only the boy with the pomaded hair standing there, scratching his chin. Ben watched him and then, sighing, limped back into the bus station. He slumped on a bench, rubbed his side, and watched the boy beyond the window, who seemed content to stare down the bay where the ambulance had disappeared. After some time, the boy trudged through the door and stood by the window with his bags beside him. He didn't look at Ben.
"No hablo español," said Ben. "Habla you inglés?"
"No," said the boy. "No inglés"
"No inglés," Ben said. "That makes things difficult."
They watched each other. The boy shrugged. He was short and sturdy, with a smoky complexion. "Hos~pi~tole," Ben said. "Your amigos went to the hos~pi~tok. Do you think you might want to go there?"
"No hospital Apples. Trabajo." The boy's fingers plucked invisible apples, placing each in an invisible picking bag belted at his waist. "Manzanas," he said. "Trabajo."
He swiped his brow in stylized fashion, then flicked his wrist toward the bus-station floor, as though flinging sweat away. "Trabajo, trabajo." He tapped at his chest. "Quiero trabajar. Apples."
"Okay," said Ben.
They went out into the loading bay and walked down First Street with the wind at their backs, the boy trailing slightly behind as if in deference to the gringo doctor, Ben limping and laboring beneath his rucksack, stopping twice to lean against streetlamps while the boy waited patiently. In the bookstore on Wenatchee Avenue, Ben bought a copy of Spanish for Travelers and an English-Spanish dictionary. Then he and the boy sat down on the sidewalk, their traveling gear against their legs, while Ben leafed through the books. Through his one good eye, the print wavered, but he found the word to harvest. "Cosechar manzanas?" he asked the boy. "Is that what you want to do?"
"Si," said the boy. "Manzanas."
"Cosechar manzanas," Ben repeated. "Muy bien. Okay."
He pawed through the gear in his rucksack carefully until he found the map of Chelan County rolled up in its cardboard tube. Then he unfurled it against the sidewalk, where the boy held two of its corners down, and pointed out the town of Wenatchee— "aquí" he said, "Wenatchee, aquí"—and with a finger Ben followed Highway 2 until it reached Orondo. "Orondo," he said. "Amigos?"
"No le comprendo a usted," the boy answered. "Orondo? Sí? Orondo?"
"Do you want to go there? Cosechar manzanas in Orondo? Amigos in Orondo?"
"No" said the boy. "No amigos aquí." He tapped his chest, his breastbone. "Solo," he said. "No amigos aquí. Solo, comprende usted?"
"Comprende," said Ben. "Me too."
He sat for a moment looking at the boys shoes—battered black chukkas coming apart at the welts, probably salvaged from a Dumpster. The boys odyssey, clearly, had been much longer than Bens brief trip across the apple country. He was dusty, sun-beaten, and smelled of earth; his plastic bags were tattered. He had probably traveled a thousand miles, sleeping under trees and bridges, out in the open country. Ben paged through his dictionary again, looking for the right words. "Hambre" he said, after some time. " Hambriento. Restaurante. Alimento. Something like that. Lets go eat, okay?"
They went to a restaurant on Wenatchee Avenue, mostly empty at that hour of the day, a close place smelling of cigarettes. Ben ordered tea for himself and a T-bone steak with fried potatoes for the boy, and while the boy ate a roll and butter, Ben struggled with his Spanish books and tossed garbled questions across the table. The boys name was Emilio—he offered only that, no surname. He was not a brother to the other two, whom he'd met picking pears near Yakima. The others knew of apple-picking work, so Emilio had accompanied them northward. Now they were gone, but he still wanted to work. In Orondo, somewhere else, anywhere.
His plate of steak and potatoes arrived, and Emilio pondered it. "Muchas gracias, señor"he said, then rained salt and pepper over the potatoes, steak, and boiled green beans. He ate neatly, unhurried, using his knife deftly. Scratches—white streaks—crossed the backs of his hands. His fingers were thick and callused, blunt and cracked at the nails.
Ben sipped his tea and asked no more questions. The hardship of communicating allowed for silence, as did the boy's reserve. Ben didn't ask Emilio, though he wondered, how he'd come to be alone, how he happened to be separated from his family, if he had any family to speak of. What sort of world he'd left behind, what sort of life he'd lived until now, how it felt to be rootless and adrift, always in pursuit of work, unable to speak the language. These things were beyond telling, certainly beyond Ben's Spanish for Travelers, since the life of the boy—of anyone—was a life, in the end, and no mere story to be told across the table. The essentials could not be culled from the rest without divesting both of certain meanings.
As he watched Emilio at work on his food, cutting and eating with instinctive dignity, Ben accepted that the boy wouldn't trade his story for a meal. It was really a desirable thing in a companion, this reticence, this taut reserve, because if it meant no answers, it also meant no questions. The boy had not used his talents as a mime—as a wielder of gesture, expression, and signs—to interrogate Ben about his black eye, as if to suggest that Ben, too, was entitled to his secrets. So if Emilio preferred to have no story, Ben was happy to oblige. Just a boy eating a lucky meal, a thousand miles from home.
Ben bought him a piece of apple pie a la mode and a second glass of milk. Then he went to the phone booth by the rest rooms and called the Job Services Office. "Apple-picking work," he told the receptionist, and she transferred his call to a job specialist, who introduced himself as Hector Martinez. Yes, there were jobs in agricultural labor, but these were all of short duration, the apple harvest was nearly over, the work would be done in days. "Where?" said Ben. "Where do I go?" "That depends," answered Martinez. "Where are you right now?"
"I'm at a phone booth here in Wenatchee. Wenatchee Avenue."
"Okay," Hector Martinez said, in the tone of a public servant trained to be empathetic, within limits. "Have you been into our office before, or have you registered with us recently, or did we refer you in the last twelve months or anything like that?"
"No," said Ben. "None of the above."
"Okay," said Martinez. "Just let me get to the right screen on my computer and ... okay, your name."
"La
rry Miller," Ben told him. "L, A, double R, Y. Miller as in the beer."
"As in Miller beer, okay. Your social security number?"
Ben made one up. He invented a date of birth, too, and an address and telephone number. The act of formulating a false identity with such ease and authority made him feel pleased with himself. "A few years back I was out here," he said. "Up by Malaga, the Wolfhound Orchard. Something like that. Wolfhound."
"Wolfhound Orchard," said Martinez. "Let me check my job list."
"I'd like to get there again, if I could. It was out of Malaga, I think."
"Wolfhound Orchard. It's not a problem. They have some positions. We can do you a referral."
"I appreciate that," said Ben.
When he was done on the phone, he limped back to the table and nodded at Emilio. "Trabajo"he said. "Manzanas. Trabajo. There's work for you en Malaga." He dug out his map of Chelan County, unfurled it across the table, and traced for the boy the route to Malaga, down the west side of the Columbia on the Malaga-Alcoa Highway. "Cosechar manzanas," he said. "Manzanas to pick, aquí."
They walked up Wenatchee Avenue, passed Kim's Tae Kwan Do School, the Central Washington Water office, assorted furniture and auto parts stores, a tavern called Brews And Cues. Outside the Valley Pawn Shop, Ben slung his rucksack onto the sidewalk and leaned over a newspaper vending machine with his head propped against his forearm. The urge to vomit swelled and subsided while he rubbed his side in that stooped posture and gradually came to feel up to the task of pushing forward once more. But the boy reached for the rucksack when Ben did, and looked at him inquiringly. "Muchas gracias," Ben said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "De nada," the boy answered.
They continued up the avenue, Emilio hauling both their bags, Ben shivering in his tin-cloth coat, until they came to the U-Save Auto Rental. The clerk eyed them suspiciously—an old man with a battered eye, at his side a dust-bitten apple picker, shoes split open at the toes, loaded down like a hobo. She could not conceal her disdain, but she rented them a half-ton Ford for thirty-seven dollars a day with a reminder to return it full, lest there be a sur charge for gasoline they wouldn't feel happy about. When she dropped the keys into Ben's hands, she made certain not to touch him. "We expect the truck back clean," she said. "I don't know what you're planning with it, but we expect to get it back clean."
"Medical waste," Ben said. "Plus landfill runs for a rendering plant, and some organic fertilizer."
The woman blanched and touched her hair with the tips of her painted fingers. "Well, I don't know," she said.
It was a new truck with cloth seats and big padded armrests, its cab done up in royal maroon, and as they drove down Wenatchee Avenue, luxuriating in the motor's smooth silence, Emilio tried the power window. He worked it down a few inches at a time, then up until it sealed out the road noise. Next he worked the power locks and felt the nap of the seat. "Try the radio," Ben suggested. "Música, or something like that." He turned it on and searched the channels until he found a station broadcasting in Spanish. "Aquí," he said. "Okay?"
"Okay," the boy said. "Gracias."
"De nada," said Ben. "Está bien."
They came to the river bridge but didn't cross, and passed into South Wenatchee. There was laundry hung to dry in the wind, a car without wheels on jacks in a yard, a tractor-trailer parked in front of a dilapidated two-story warehouse. The road ran high above the old rail yard and looked down onto the decrepit roundhouse, icehouse, and sand house, the turntable with weeds growing through it, abandoned boxcars of the old Great Northern and Burlington lines, and a web of iron tracks. The Apple-yard Terminal Ben remembered from long ago was empty of apples now. Glass insulators still decorated the power stanchion cross beams. In a corner of the yard sat dry, weathered bins stacked six and seven high. The paint had peeled in scabrous blisters, and the plywood beneath had been bleached by the sun to a washed and pale gray.
They passed the Shaw Orchard and the Atwood Orchard—full bins waited at the sidings there—and came to the Stemilt Creek—West Malaga cutoff, where Ben paused at roadside, idling, to consider the way to Joe Miller Road. The country before him lay dense with fruit trees, all the way to Jump-Off Ridge, the roads winding among canyons and draws and up through the manicured Stemilt Hill orchards, which looked as graceful as the plain of the Po, as undulant as the vineyards of the Apennines. A listless pond sat in the shade of Russian olives where Stemilt Creek ran out of the mountains. A brace of widgeon milled on the far shore, feeding in the interstices of marsh weed.
"Madre y padre hacienda " Ben said, pointing east and south across the river. "I grew up right over there."
"Bien" said Emilio, and smiled.
They drove up into the Stemilt Hills, the orchards large and well kept, the hills above Malaga that had once been in grapes, English walnuts, and pears. They gained a thousand feet until they were high above the river and traversing switchbacks and tight-loop turns through orchards cut into the sides of hills; past a tarp encampment of fruit pickers and a few worn trailers along a creek; past a row of pickers' cabins; past a silent cherry-packing shed tucked under a turn in the road; up to the crest of Stemilt Hill, where the wind blew hard across cemetery stones and beat against the windows of the Grange Hall. Here the view gave out to the east, a long vista over the tops of trees and beyond the river to the wheat plateau, and all down the hill were pickers on their ladders, working in the apples. "Manzanas," Ben said to Emilio. "Aquí, manzanas. Cosechar manzanas aquí."
Emilio nodded and scratched his head. "Está muy bien," he said.
Ben pulled over at the community church and sat with the engine idling. He didn't feel he could continue. His side felt as if it might burst, and it was painful merely to sit upright.
"I have to get out for a few minutes," he said. "Un momento, Emilio. Okay?"
He stumbled out into the cherry trees behind the Stemilt Hill Community Church and lay in the grass battling the urge to vomit and slowly rubbing his side. In this position, curiously, his nausea felt endurable. He curled up around his tumor and suspended it there at the heart of his viscera as gently as he could. He understood that the cancer in his gut had a mass and density, a friction and gravity. A dark stone weighing in among his organs, a rotten pit nestled in his flesh. The cause of his illness was something tangible: a festering object in the mucosa of his colon, penetrating through the muscle wall but also narrowing the bowel lumen, causing serious constipation. He was headed for perforation, with its accompanying infection and septic death; his colon would be split open like a banana skin, its contents would spill into his abdomen—his watery excrement, his meager diarrhea, curdling and sloshing between his organs.
There was a quiet, humble fluttering—small birds on distant limbs. There was the pale heat of the sun against his cheek, the smell of orchard grass. Ben became aware of his breathing, and of the steady rhythm of his heart. He became aware that he wanted to live, to have and hold such things as a cherry orchard in midautumn in river country. It was this world he wanted and no other. There was no sweeter world he knew of.
Despite himself, he vomited, slouched on his hands and knees. Stomach acid burned hot in his throat. His nostrils stung, and he panted heavily, at the mercy of his body. The pits of cherries were everywhere. Fallen leaves stirred in the wind.
On Joe Miller Road, Ben slowed to a crawl to pass by sidings bristling with apples, the trees flowing down and out across the hills, the rungs of ladders disappearing among leaves, the bins laid out between the shaded rows, the tractors hauling bins to the sidings. In some places, at the edge of the trees, pickers rested in groups of three or four, but mostly they worked with dogged persistence, with the patient madness of harvest. It was the time of year when the silence of the orchards was subsumed by the voices of pickers. Hung from limbs were coats and hats; propped between branches were canteens and bottles. In the orchard grass the dogs lay about; children sprawled in sunlight, dreaming; men and women stood high in their ladders, reachi
ng into the tops of trees, leaving limbs bereft of fruit. They pulled the branch props one by one and descended rungs with their bags bursting-full, easing the apples into the bins for fear of bruising them.
Ben asked a woman at her mailbox if this was the way to the Wolfhound Orchard, then drove another mile south. On the west side of the road was the Hardens' mailbox, just before a siding thronged with bins, two men laying hands on the fruit. A tractor emerged from between the trees to set another bin in place, and a forklift loaded a truck. Ben pulled over and, though the hour was late, slid his sunglasses on. He felt ridiculous, doing it. He felt he must look like a blind man, wearing sunglasses at dusk, in October, with the sun behind the hills. But one of these workers—the tractor driver, say, or the man on the forklift—might be the night rider who had stolen his shotgun, the thief Ben had come looking for, yet whose face he had never seen. This William Harden who ran his wolfhounds after coyotes in the moonlight. Harden would remember the battered eye, Ben's signature feature of late, Ben's calling card in the world.
He recognized his entire day as a kind of protracted stall. Things had gone awry, aslant, but now he was back on course. There was no turning back now, nothing to lose that wasn't lost. What could Harden do to him? In the morning, when he had rested enough to gain the strength, he would find Harden and take his gun back.
Ben parked the rented truck around a bend and stepped into Joe Miller Road, one arm wrapped across his gut. Emilio emerged from the truck, too, and hauled out their traveling gear. Ben paused to button his jacket and to take in the color of the sky in the west, which had gone purple now. The shadows were deepening across the hills. The timbre of the light was quieting. The orchards that had looked so inviting in the sun were sullen now in the desert gloaming. The world lay altered by the imminence of night, as though a curtain was dropping over it. Yet out on the low rim of the western horizon the sun streamed into the high eastern sky, which held its unearthly light.
East of the Mountains Page 23
