The Dirt Chronicles

by Kristyn Dunnion

  That’d be just like her, take the side of a kid from a place she’d never even been, over her own husband.

  I have so been there. On our goddamned honeymoon, you prick.

  Ah, Sharon. You got me there.

  The following Sunday, also hungover, I decided to close the shop early. In fact, I couldn’t wait for this one family to finish their game. The parents looked vaguely familiar and were probably dweebs I’d hated in high school. They wore matching polo shirts, like from some depressing Sears Catalogue photo shoot. The kids fought. They were a whole new brand of ugly, a screeching, snotting ad for birth control. Watching them made me hate the world a little bit more than I already had when I’d got up that morning. Made me want to lock up this stupid shop and burn it to the ground. I reimbursed them half, since they played half the course, and kicked them the hell out.

  “Now you look here,” said the father.

  “Look at my dick,” I replied. The eyebrows, the open mouths.

  I slammed the door of the Coupe and cracked a lukewarm beer. I drove straight ahead into the heart of Leamington, where our town’s tomatoes get turned into ketchup in their big Heinz factory. I drove deep into the relaxed pulse of the town’s innards. It was full of farm workers on their day off. They were everywhere. They ran errands, phoned home, wired money. They sat on the town benches that were usually just real estate agent ads. Workers leaned against the giant photos of those smiling phonies in their beige suits. Canadians, I realized, don’t enjoy ourselves. We go about our uptight business all day and relax, or not, when we get home. Mexicans seemed to know how to use public space, how to spend time together. I decided to park the car and join them.

  I walked up and down the main drag, looked into windows, nodded and smiled at people. They nodded back. I followed one group of workers who headed toward the information centre in town, an enormous all-weather tomato where some kid sat all day, bored as a stick, reading Harry Potter, in case anyone stopped and asked for directions or wanted tourist brochures. As if. The men turned onto a path I’d never noticed. It was hidden by the giant tomato and a line of large thorny bushes, Ash no doubt. I hesitated briefly. That path led into what used to be an old parking lot. Smells found me almost immediately—smoke and meat, spices, and roasting corn. I could hear Spanish voices laughing and singing. The lot had been transformed into some kind of square.

  I felt like Alice in goddamned Wonderland.

  About fifty men were hanging out in this alternate universe. Some drank from small dark bottles of beer, others from round flasks they kept at their sides. They were having a good time, nothing rowdy, just relaxing. There were a few benches, all taken, and in one corner there was an old metal container being used as a giant barbecue. Meat sizzled on a makeshift grill, corn in the husk smoked along the edges. Two men worked the grill and filled plates for the others. Nearby was a second smaller grill with a flat sheet on top. A dark-haired woman was forming patties from pale dough, tortillas maybe; she slapped them into shape with expert hands and placed them on the hot metal sheet. She laughed as she worked, her voice drawing the shy men closer, waiting for the food to be ready.

  My stomach rumbled. Eating had not interested me lately, but these were some pretty good smells.

  A large-bottomed guitar was brought out, and a man began to play. It had a deep bass sound. He played a simple tune the others seemed to know. It was a bit rollicking, but as the other instruments joined in—an accordion, a regular guitar, a horn—it had an altogether different effect. Men began to sing. Larger bottles made their way around. I could have used a belt, whatever it was. This strange music drew me in. It was like country, but slower and more halting. Like a slightly drunken waltz. I liked it and didn’t like it at the same time. There was something about the plaintive calling in the voices that popped up from the small knots of men in the yard that tugged at my insides and threatened to let loose some uncontrollable emotion.

  I panicked. I looked around and noticed several of the other men’s eyes darting away. I was the only white Canadian here. Those around me were silent, even when I said hello. They kept their eyes on the ground and did not reply. The nearest ones had stopped joking around, too. I was spoiling the party. Fun crusher, me? I stumbled backwards, and blundered my way toward the path. The hush spread around me like a pox, and I felt every pair of shining dark eyes upon my back. I hurried, fatally, and twisted my weak ankle, an old hockey injury. I thrashed about in the Prickly Ash before falling heavily to the ground.

  The silence was remarkable. Even the music stopped. I could see the path from down there and decided to crawl onto it, thinking it was less conspicuous than standing back up to announce my situation. I hoped no one noticed. As if on cue, there was a resounding burst of laughter; chuckling baritones, a giggling alto choir, and several higher-pitched hilarious sopranos, who succeeded only in provoking the whole square into louder fits of hysteria.

  Humiliated, I lurched forward on my hands and knees, still tangled in the bush. Thorns tore at my flesh. A pair of Converse knock-offs blocked my way. I looked up. It was the kid again, wearing that same shirt. The kid’s black hair was longer than the other men’s, about my own length. His eyes were two black stones that shone wetly: pupils indistinguishable from iris, they were so dark. He reached out a calloused hand. He was muscular from working the fields and pulled me up easily. His skin was surprisingly soft to touch. He smelled of earth and Sunlight detergent and of a faint manly sweat that was not bad.

  “Thanks, man,” I said awkwardly. I was several inches taller than him. I stared at the shirt which fit him very well. There was a familiar tear on the left sleeve. I rubbed the matching scar on my arm—skateboarding wipe-out. A splotch of white paint along the shirt hem was a ghost from grade ten art class. This was my bloody shirt!

  He shrugged. “You got the nice car, right? The Coupe?”

  He had an accent, but his English was better than I expected. I nodded.

  “Bet it’s a fun ride.” He spoke softly.

  My cheeks burned. Blood and sweat trickled down my neck. I pulled a thorn from my scratched hand. I needed to get the hell out of there. I wanted my shirt back. I jangled the keys. “Want to find out?”

  There was that jigsaw smile again, lighting up his face.

  “You like Sid Vicious?”

  “What? That punk?” I sneered. I had regained my confidence and cynicism by then, zipping along the main drag.

  “You don’t like punk rock?” Geraldo said this with total disbelief.

  I refused to reply.

  We were cruising the strip, the Leamington “L,” the way it was done back when I was in school. You went from the McDonald’s drive-through to the town centre just past the giant tomato, took a right, and rode the strip right to the very end of the dock, slammed on your brakes, then turned around and did the whole thing over again only in reverse. Most of the action used to be either down at the docks or up in the McDonald’s parking lot—girls smoking and tossing their bleached hair, dudes looking to fight, couples making out. In grade eleven I’d hooked up with Sharon on this very piece of real estate.

  “Seriously?” Geraldo sniffed his Big Mac. He took a bite. “More than anything,” he said, his mouth full, “I want to be in a punk band.”

  Well, I nearly pulled over and made him give me the shirt off his narrow back. I was speechless. I opened an emergency beer that he passed me from the glove compartment.

  “No, but why can’t you like metal and also like punk? That’s silly. It’s all rock and roll, man.”

  I choked on the warm beer. It sprayed from my mouth, hit the windshield, dribbled down my chin, wetting the collar of my shirt. I coughed and breathed deeply. Those heretic words from Geraldo’s mouth washed over me as my chest relaxed and I wiped the set line from around my mouth, loosening the tension in my jaw. For the first time in my life, I heard some truth in that statement. Geraldo sounded almost reasonable.

  Later, I let him take the wheel. �
�You know how to drive, right?

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I been driving since I was nine years old.”

  It was some time before Geraldo elaborated. He meant he’d been driving the village tractor since he was nine, which is a very different thing. He drove slowly, carefully, right down the middle of the road. The tip of his tongue stuck out at one corner from concentrating. He had a glazed smile plastered on his stunned face. He did okay, considering he freaked if I urged him beyond thirty-five kilometres an hour. We kept to the back roads, and any company we met simply passed us, leaving the Coupe covered in fine dust.

  “Take a left and park.” I had to draw the line somewhere. Even combines were booting past.

  We sat at the top of the ridge, closest thing to a hill in these parts. There was a nice view of the farmland below that stretched a mile or two down to the shore. Sharon and I used to come here to neck in the old days. Before she moved in, of course. Before my parents died, leaving the bungalow to me, suddenly making me the most popular guy at school. Larry, party at your house, right? Right.

  “This used to be lake.” I pointed to the farm land below us.

  “Heh?” His eyebrows arched. I noticed they were graceful like a woman’s: not too hairy.

  “A-gwa,” I said loudly. “A long time ago all that was water. Now it’s soil. Dirt.”

  “Oh.” He nodded gravely. “My grandmother’s village had that, only the opposite. It got covered up. Disappeared.” He gripped the steering wheel. I watched the muscles move up his forearm, along his bicep.

  “Oh.” I inhaled. The smell of him filled me. I opened the passenger window the rest of the way. “What’s it like in Mexico?”

  “Very different. You never been?” He leaned toward me when he asked that.

  I felt stuck in this seat, bare without the steering wheel in front of me, like the car wasn’t mine anymore. I cleared my throat. “Just on my honeymoon. Some beach resort.”

  “Where is your wife?” Geraldo’s eyes glittered from his soft face.

  “Where’d you get that shirt?”

  “Some lady was selling her ex-husband’s stuff at a yard sale.” He laughed. “Like, she was really mad at him. I paid only fifty cents.”

  I drained the can and crushed it, one-handed, and tossed it out the window. “Geraldo, let me tell you something. Don’t ever get married. It’ll ruin your life.”

  “I am already. I had to marry, to come to Canada.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Your government said this. We must be married and go to church if we want to work. So we won’t stay here and get Canadian girlfriends. Make Mexi-Can babies.” He laughed.

  Was this true? That shut me right up.

  “We make a deal. We have a little room, but she do what she wants, and me too.”

  “Huh.”

  “She is pretty, but she don’t like men. Now the others leave her alone. And me, I want—”

  “To be in a punk rock band,” I said.

  He nodded vigorously.

  “Well, Geraldo. You sure got your shit together, don’t you?” It was about then that I decided to let him keep the fucking shirt. Suddenly, I didn’t care if I never saw it again.

  After I dropped Geraldo at the laneway to his farm, I headed home. I needed an actual cold beer and a talk with Jack Daniels. I poured the amber liquid over a big chunk of ice. I’ll sip it, I thought. Just a little. I wondered what Sharon was doing tonight, wherever she was. Sunday nights we used to go bowling, back in the day. Or down to Cedar Beach. In winter we’d rent movies and pile quilts around us on the couch to stay warm. We’re talking about ten years ago, before I got the heaters fixed.

  Try fifteen, jerk.

  I poured a second helping.

  Sharon used to say she loved that I could crush a beer can in one hand. She loved to fiddle with my long hair. Then suddenly it bugged her. She wanted it cut off.

  And grow up while you’re at it, Larry.

  Fuck ice cubes. I pulled straight from the bottle.

  “Arrgh!” I yelled at the large amp. I plugged in, turned that bad boy on. The guitar was seriously out of tune. It needed new strings. I managed to blast a few notes into the dark bungalow. My hands were stiff, too clumsy to do anything right. I gulped more whiskey. The burn comforted my throat.

  Why did broads fall for you the way you were—holding your liquor, cracking your jokes, feathering your hair while the rest of those turds from your class went bald—then demand you change? As soon as they owned your space, they wanted you to turn the music down, stop watching the playoffs. They cried if you didn’t do the dishes or if you didn’t do them right; when you didn’t notice their new hairdo; when you told them to lay off the chips or they’d never fit into their skinny jeans again. What is life for, anyway? You head off to that shit job she found (minigolf, seriously?), wearing a phony shirt with a clip-on tie that she bought. You come home for a crap dinner and lite beer, and find her banging some dude who looks a bit the way you used to, before she cut off your balls and zipped them into her purse, forever.

  Ah, Sharon.

  That Geraldo had the right fucking idea.

  All summer long, it was green and black and gold and red: walks in the fields, Sunday drives along the lakeshore in the Coupe. There was beer and whiskey. There were awkward moments, standing too close or bumping against him or stumbling together across the lawn, loaded. A buzz ran through me, electric, that zapped whenever Geraldo’s skin brushed mine. I’d shake it off and drink more. There was music, lots of it, blasted from my stereo and from my amp. Geraldo had a gift. He could play that guitar, make it sing like I never could. His face shone with joy when he wailed on it, chugging steadily and ripping off some scorching solo. I stared at him outright then. I felt like some groupie creep, a pre-teen girl with my very own private boy band in the living room.

  Late August was yellow and fiery orange. Geraldo grew slightly stooped from bending and picking, from the even longer days of heavy lifting and lugging that was harvest. His eyes sparkled less; he had little energy for playing guitar or anything else. By then I had stopped opening the shop during the week. Instead, I would drive out to the fields at first light and work alongside the men, all the burning hours of day and into the cooler night. My body ached from it, my hands were ruined, but it made me feel real to sweat and bend and dig and haul. I’d bring something for lunch, something for me and Geraldo. In the shade of a leafy tree, we’d eat these lousy sandwiches and shoot the shit. He’d try out lyrics for his imaginary band, Migrant, but mostly we’d just sit in our hot stink and chug water before going back to work.

  Unbelievably, some fields remained untouched other than by feasting birds if it cost more to pick and transport the produce than the owners would be paid for it. Instead, the food was left to rot. Neighbours would come after dark to fill their quiet baskets—midnight picking. Eventually, the soil would be turned over, tomatoes and all. Explosive harvest reds drained into mid-fall grey-browns. The air grew crisp. The nights got cold. Every year at this time, the workers were rounded up and sent home, back to Mexico, and our world returned to its usual cold, white winter.

  Migrant workers were not eligible for E.I. even though they paid Canadian taxes. I roared when I first heard that, but Geraldo quietly said, “We signed English papers.” Like that explained it all. When I trumpeted something about workers’ rights, he smiled cynically. His dark eyes pierced me. “We have the right to remain silent,” he said, and opened a fresh beer. “You complain, and they take you off the list. You can’t come back next year. Then your whole family goes hungry and ashamed.” The guilt was almost unbearable. It occurred to me for the first time that he might never come back.

  We were sitting in the Coupe on the ridge one night when I finally asked about that. He was too tired to go all the way to my place and come back for daybreak together. He smiled sadly. “Maria warned me on the phone,” he said. “The village thinks you’re a chupacabra, a goatsucker.”


  I knew the other workers didn’t even talk to him, if they could help it. But it never occurred that they’d blame me, the strange gringo, for poisoning him. I was stunned. Geraldo didn’t know if they’d asked the farmer to take his name off the return list, or if the boss man himself had decided.

  “Either way,” he said, “I’m different. They don’t like that.”

  Guilt ate at me. That’s when the plan started simmering. Years ago, driving home from the bar, I’d seen farm hands lined up along the side of the road. Boss man was handing back their special work permits as each man stepped onto the bus—a shitty loaner school bus. They were packed up and driven straight to Toronto Pearson airport in the middle of the night. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. It reminded me of an old photo I’d seen at school, an American plantation owner leading a chain gang of slaves to market. Don’t get me wrong, not all farmers are racist a-holes, far from it. They’re working harder than you or I to make a living so the rest of us can eat. Frankly, if we ungrateful fucks paid more attention to how food got onto our dinner plates, we’d know how hard it is for farmers to break even.

  Still, I felt no regret chugging northeast on the 401 on that particular pre-dawn day, keeping pace with Geraldo’s crew bus, none whatsoever. What I couldn’t believe was that the thing didn’t stop, not even once, on the four-and-a-half hour drive. I had to pull over to take a leak and get a jumbo coffee to keep my eyes open, which meant another pit stop in twenty minutes. I lost track of the bus, but finally caught up with it as it choked and shuddered curbside, in front of Terminal Three.

  The men wore their hats low, as usual. They shivered in sweaters. Our fall was cold for them. It crept in and chilled their inside parts. I think it scared them. Might have felt like death. They shuffled from foot to foot, holding their bags and souvenirs—toys for the children they’d been missing, gifts for their wives. Boss man hadn’t seen me yet, but the rest sure had. Blame radiated from their turned backs. I felt dirty, old, wrong in ways I never had before. For a minute I wondered if I should really go ahead with the plan. Maybe Geraldo’s life would not be ruined after all. Maybe they would forgive him back in their land, in their own language, far from North America and its rampant diseases: greed, sloth, lust, pride. If so, Geraldo and his pretty fake wife might just work things out.