“What a rip-off!” I yelled back at Canada.
They were highway robbers! And worse. They’d stolen my last liberty of the summer. Now I had nothing left to look forward to. Nothing was left between me and my return to servitude on Camano Island.
“Fucking bastards!” I yelled.
Oddly enough, the United States Canada Peace Anniversary Association had elected to celebrate the world’s longest peaceful border by riveting an engraved stone and aluminum standing ashtray onto our traffic island. Now it was the embodiment for all that was wrong in my life. I spit and swore at the ashtray: “Fuck you!” Then I began kicking it over and over. Kick, spin, kick. Tony sat on the bench reading, making an effort not to notice me. In the middle of my next spin, I saw a bristling Customs agent crossing the street from Canada. I kicked harder, perfecting the form of my roundhouse the way Leopoldo had shown me.
“Sir! Hey! That’s public property, sir!”
I kept kicking, like a kung fu professional in the dojo.
“Sir!”
I stopped and turned to address the moustachioed face of authority. “Fuck you! You don’t like it!? Well, this is what happens when you fuck with people’s lives!”
The face shook with impotent rage and crossed back into Canada.
Tony spoke into the intervening silence. “Josh, come here.”
“No.”
“Please, sit down for a second.” He patted the bench next to him. “You know who my hero was when I was a kid?” I didn’t know, which was strange because I thought I knew everything there was to know about him.
“Hold on,” I said. Who was it? Who could have been his role model when he was little, kidnapped from his family, and raised by an abusive Cuban lady? I unclenched my fists and sat down to think about it. It couldn’t have been Arjuna, or some Hindu character, because he wouldn’t have been exposed to them yet. Someone from TV probably, since there were no friendly faces in his childhood. Who were those old-time tough guys?
“Was it John Wayne?” I guessed.
“Nope.”
“Dick Tracy?”
“Nope. Give up?”
“Yeah.”
“Bugs Bunny.”
“No it wasn’t.” He was trying to be funny.
“It was. Bugs Bunny was my hero. He still is. You could stick a shotgun in his face. You could throw him in boiling water. You could try to kill him any number of ways. But he never lost his cool. He never let them see him angry. If you go around, Josh, giving in to your anger and being violent, you’re going to scare people. And eventually you’re going to hurt someone, and then they’ll lock you up, or worse. Just because you’re being bullied doesn’t mean you get to pass it on.”
I wanted to tell him to shut up, but I knew I wouldn’t get a rise out of him. He’d just go back to reading his stupid book.
Eventually a southbound bus came across the border, and we left the 49th parallel to recover from the biggest threat to American-Canadian relations since the War of 1812. We’d only covered a few miles before we realized we had nowhere to go. Claudia wasn’t due to pick us up at the bus station in Mount Vernon for another week, and we had no way to contact her.
We climbed off the bus in the city of Bellingham, where we wandered around the suburban streets, counting down to the end of the week. In the evening at our hotel we played chess and quizzed each other on the Roman names for Greek gods. It was an old game. When I was little Tony told me the Greek myths as bedtime stories.
It was his turn. “Ares.”
He’d given me an easy one. “Mars,” I said.
“Hestia,” I volleyed back.
Tony thought about it. “You got me, Joshey, what is it?”
“Her Roman name was Vesta. She was the goddess of the hearth.”
“Good one.”
“Why do the Greek gods have Roman names anyway?” I’d never thought to ask before. “I mean, why didn’t the Romans have their own gods?”
“Because the Romans were nothing but thugs.” Tony’s face filled with emotion. “Everyone thinks of Rome as this magnificent empire—buildings, science, art—but everything they had they stole from the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Greeks. The only thing they came up with themselves, the only thing they were good at, was violence. They figured out how to put together these unstoppable armies and they destroyed anyone that wouldn’t bow down to them.” Rome was reminding me of Leopoldo again. “When they destroyed Carthage, they even tore up the paving stones. Then they salted the Earth to make sure nothing would ever grow there again.”
“I feel like my life is Carthage,” I said.
Tony’s face soured. “Don’t worry, Mr. Josh. I’ll talk to Claudia.”
“She won’t listen to you.”
“She doesn’t have to listen to me. She just has to listen to reason. No one has a right to treat her like that. To treat you like that. She knows that. She’s a feminist, Mr. Josh.”
“It doesn’t matter. She won’t hear you,” I said. “She’s been conquered.”
Tony heard me, how serious I was, and lapsed into silence. “Well, if that’s true,” he said slowly, “at least you’ll always have me.”
We had reunion rituals, my mother and I. Time-honored traditions dating back to the summer she’d left me for Mexico. When we saw each other again, we jumped up and down. We smiled until it hurt and hugged each other hard enough to make up for lost time. Then she was supposed to notice how much I’d grown, how much taller I was, what a crazy haircut someone had given me. The tradition ended on the steps to the ramshackle bus station in Mount Vernon. Uncle Tony had given her plenty to comment on. I had a shiny corporate haircut, a brand-new Casio wristwatch, a faux leather jacket, and a blue book bag filled with dreams of school for the fall. But if she noticed she didn’t say anything. She was wearing muddy velour pants and a filthy yellow tank top, stained with sweat and drizzles of sap. She’d left the machete in the car and was eager to get back to it.
“Claudia, notice anything different about me?”
“You look like a city slicker.”
She greeted Tony with perfunctory efficiency and warned him that his week with us couldn’t be a vacation. “We’ve got a lot of work to do before the rains come. Leopoldo is already worried about the two hours I’m wasting picking you guys up.”
“So he’s already mad?” My voice carried a note of exaggerated distress. I was playing it up for Tony.
“No, I wouldn’t say he’s mad,” Claudia patiently explained. “In fact I wouldn’t say he has any negative feelings at all. I think he’s just curious, Josh. Really trying to understand why you’d leave right when the hard work began. We’ve been busting our asses, Josh, and I guess I’m a little curious too.”
Leopoldo had won the game before it even started. He’d obviously been working on my mother all month, and now I was cast in stone as the lazy, ungrateful child. We crossed over the Skagit River without speaking. Tony chipped at the icy silence from time to time with “Ooh, look, Claudey, cows!” but no one was laughing.
When we arrived, Leopoldo was too busy hauling logs to say hello to us. He’d yoked himself with a chain to a fat length of spruce and was furrowing the forest floor in a painful progression of inches. His bare torso flexed mightily against the shiny silver links of chain. His face contorted with grimaces and growls, and he slowly, triumphantly dragged the large chunk of tree out of the circle of stumps, my mother running around uselessly behind him the whole time. This impressive feat accomplished, he made the time to come over and meet Uncle Tony. They were an odd mismatch, these two men. Uncle Tony towered far above Leopoldo, looking like he’d been plucked from the Eastern Philosophy section of a bookstore in North Beach and accidentally dropped into a rainforest with Bruce Lee’s Mayan cousin. Tony carried a jacket and newspaper under his right arm, and a black umbrella hung from his left wrist. Leopoldo shimmered with sweat and sized Tony up like an opponent going into the next cage match. Then he offered Tony a crushing hand
shake and spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. Tony was slow and rusty in his childhood tongue. Leopoldo took advantage of it, never letting Tony slip back into English. Then it was back to work.
Tony and I were tasked with finding more rocks for the fire pit. After an hour of climbing through bushes we found ourselves lost. “Can’t we just stop and ask for directions?” asked Uncle Tony. He was joking. We were shown the way home by a thunderous crashing in the distant canopy where Leopoldo was bringing a tree down. When we climbed back into the little clearing, Uncle Tony sang out: “Oh, Josh, where’s the bathroom?” This time he wasn’t joking. I pointed to a large stand of ferns, and Tony cringed the same way he did when he forgot to put sweetener in his coffee. He disappeared into the bushes with two rolls of toilet paper, a gallon of water, and a bottle of soap. He came back an hour later declaring he was never going to go to the bathroom again.
We still didn’t have a big enough clearing to hold the great pyramid Leopoldo was going to build, but we had enough room for Claudia’s planned art studio. The ground remained studded with stumps, but Leopoldo had concluded they were impossible to pull up, so we would simply integrate them into the building design. “Stumps as foundations!” Claudia loved the idea. She was animated by the new buildings that would soon rise from the forest floor. She twirled her fingers where her kiln would sit and waved at the imaginary corner for the nonexistent potter’s wheel. We talked our way, mother and son, further into the forest, leaving the men by the campfire to roast soy dogs with Crazy John and Erica.
We talked about the coming fall, and Claudia agreed that I could give school a try again if I were willing to risk the public middle school in Stanwood. I told her I was more than willing. I was eager! But she was hardly listening, still smiling to herself as if enjoying a most wonderful dream. Then she shared with me the full ballad of Leopoldo, chanting on and on about him with stories I’d never heard before. She told me about Leopoldo’s days in the dormant volcano with the FMLN. His time in the jungle when the Revolution was near collapse. His nights of agony and survival in the torture chambers. About the pretty girl he’d rescued from the death squads and about how he’d reluctantly agreed to be her lover when she’d insisted. How they’d fallen in love and how the death squads had raped her and torn her body apart one rainy night. And there were things she couldn’t tell me: Leopoldo’s nom de guerre, the secrets of his escape from El Salvador, the identities of government officials who’d risked and even lost their lives to ensure that Leopoldo survived. She was in love with him in a new way now. She didn’t say it, but I could see she was drinking in Leopoldo through every pore. She was lost and gone. He’d taken her from me.
That night we slept on plastic sheets laid against the forest floor. Tony crinkled back and forth and sighed loudly into the darkness. Leopoldo was up before dawn, hacking branches down over our heads. And he spent the rest of the day agitating against Tony, pulling Claudia aside to discuss each new problem with this strange man I’d brought into camp. Claudia became the herald of their mutual displeasure, and she wasn’t afraid to let Tony know what he’d done wrong. He’d never once offered to help chop down trees or haul logs. What he had been given to do, the simple task of collecting rocks for the fire pit, he’d failed at. Instead of volunteering to sharpen the saw blades or strip bark from the logs, he’d been spotted sitting on a stump, reading a book. Who did he think he was? Reading a book while everyone else was working? What kind of a role model was he trying to be?
Tony took it all in without saying a word in his own defense. Instead he sought redemption by peeling an entire sack of potatoes. But that wasn’t enough. I overheard Leopoldo complaining to Claudia the next morning. “I can tell by the way he speaks Spanish that he is Mexican.” Mexican. The dreaded word hung in the air, and then Leopoldo connected the dots. “He remind me of one Mexican I know, same long fingers, he move the same. He was a knife fighter, and he try to take my woman. Why you think he is here, Claudia, why?”
The time for the showdown had arrived. Leopoldo screwed up his face tight and swaggered over to the stump where Uncle Tony was still hunched over his potato peeler, trying to be useful.
“Why you come here?” Leopoldo addressed him in English. “Huh? You buy all the fancy clothes for the boy. You make to embarrass me? Because we are poors? You know I cannot buy him these. You watch, but you no work.” His fists were clenched now. His red tank top clung to his rising chest. “I know why you come. You come for to take my woman. To San Francisco. But she already make up her mind. She choose me. She no want you here no more. We making a family here. Now you have to go.”
Tony stood up very slowly. He carefully put the potato peeler down on the stump. Leopoldo took a step back and readied himself for the fight. But Tony walked away silently and gathered up his jacket, umbrella, and black duffel bag from the plastic sheeting. When he came back his head was bowed and he spoke in soft tones. “Leopoldo, con permiso,” he began, and asked permission to speak with my mother alone in private. Leopoldo thought this over and finally nodded his head yes. “Come on, Claudey,” Tony nodded to my mother, “let’s talk.” They walked out of the circle of stumps, Tony shuffling, head down, Claudia marching behind him, her jaw fixed tight.
Leopoldo paced back and forth behind me. I pretended to wipe the mud off of my shoes with an old T-shirt, leaning forward to pick up scraps of conversation. Claudia’s voice ratcheted louder with each rebuttal. She was throwing it back at him. She didn’t know what he was thinking, didn’t know what planet he was living on. Uncle Tony didn’t raise his voice until the very end. He concluded with: “Then you are crazy, aren’t you, Claudia!?”
We drove Uncle Tony back to the bus station in a devastated silence. Tony stared out the window at the cows through a cloud of despair. Claudia gripped the wheel from behind a steely mask. I sat in back with mute tears flowing down my face. I’d stopped sobbing by the time we’d loaded Tony’s duffel bag into the car, and my heaving and wailing had subsided by the time we crossed over onto the mainland. I was left with a jagged swelling in my throat and a heaviness in my chest.
At the bus station, Tony bent down onto one knee to give me a good-bye hug. His eyes were puffy.
“Am I ever gonna see you again!?” I cried out, wanting him to make it all better somehow.
“I don’t know… Josh,” he choked out. Then he was sobbing, and we just held each other crying, a strange island of defeat in a bustling crowd of people jostling their way toward opportunities elsewhere. Tony walked away from me slowly, his head held down in permanent sorrow. I waited for him to turn back one last time, but he didn’t. He disappeared onto the bus and was gone.
I cried the whole return trip to the island. When we climbed back into the circle of stumps, Leopoldo was in a great mood. He was a big smile, enjoying a cigarette in a patch of sunlight. He put me in a headlock and then gripped me around the shoulder. “Look, Josh. I cut down a big tree.”
The next day my mother wrote in her dream journal:
Tony went home yesterday both genuinely distressed and enjoying his sense of self-pity and innocent suffering… Poor little Josh—it seems that heartbreak + premature separation has been the theme of his life all this year… I felt that I was rescuing him from a dangerous state of trance and that his terrible pain was akin to drug withdrawal—have the strong conviction that he will become less and less eager to share unreality with Uncle T… Josh was shaken apart—but seemed in the process to have broken free of his slick city shell… he emerged the loving and sensitive child I have so sorely missed. Leopoldo said, “It feels like we got you back again” and Josh cuddled into him with a great sigh of relief.
What she mistook for a sigh of relief was actually a groan of surrender. The walls of my life had been razed to the ground. The earth had been sown with salt.
FOURTEEN
If a Tree Falls…
On September 2, 1986, I awoke in the predawn darkness, damp, flecked with tree needles, but eager for the da
y. I was eleven years old and it was the first day of middle school. Not home-school, not some meditation school. A real school, well lit and warm. Full of books and certainty and opportunities to shine. Tony had told me that if I worked hard enough I could be a lawyer or a doctor or anything I wanted. School was my chance at a better life.
I hadn’t slept well, partly because of the anxiety that came before the first day of school, and partly because of the “bed” itself. We were sleeping on the forest floor on wooden pallets salvaged from the dumpsters behind Thrifty Foods. Our communal “bed” was lined with flattened cardboard and topped with an old tattered tarp. The ribs of the wooden pallet dug into my hips and shoulders all night. When I turned over, the whole thing rocked, threatening to wake up Leopoldo, which would have thrown him into a rage. In the middle of the night some nocturnal creature had come sniffing through our campsite. A raccoon? A badger? Something bigger? Whatever it was, it came so close I could hear it crinkling the tarp as it probed Leopoldo’s side of the “bed.” After that it was hard to fall back asleep.
I was already dressed. I’d slept in my school clothes, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find them in the misty darkness. Claudia had found the camel sweater and brown slacks I was wearing at the Salvation Army, likely donated by the estate of some small dead professor. She had patched up the holes in the elbows and one knee with a blue paisley fabric. They were the best clothes I had.
I rinsed my fingers clean with water poured from a reused plastic milk jug. First the right hand and then the left, leaning forward with my legs spread wide to avoid getting my pants wet or splattered with mud. I rinsed out my mouth next, gargling the icy water and swallowing it. My gums ached from the coldness and my tongue clung to the stale taste of leached plastic. I poured out more water into the palm of my hand and rubbed around my eyes. I ran my wet fingers through my greasy hair, combing out bits of forest debris. I hadn’t had a real shower in weeks and didn’t own a toothbrush, a hairbrush, or a mirror.
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