Under the Same Sky

by Cynthia DeFelice

  Jason was clearly tired of this conversation. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “We’re going to miss the previews.”

  As we walked across the parking lot to the movie theater, I saw the Mexican guys coming out of the grocery store and heading for an old, beat-up truck with Florida plates. I hoped Randy wouldn’t see them and make another dumb comment.

  He looked at them, then looked at their truck. Loud enough so I was sure they could hear, he said, “That’s why they don’t leave—they can’t. They’d never make it back to Mexico in that piece of junk.”

  Jason laughed. I kept walking with my head down, just wanting to get away before there was any trouble.

  I didn’t know why Randy’s remarks got under my skin so much. I’d heard stuff like that plenty of times before. Mom and Dad said it was ignorant talk. I’d never paid all that much attention. It never seemed to have much to do with me.

  I didn’t actually see Space Ape. Not long after I was settled in that dark theater, my eyes closed and stayed that way. I woke up blinking when the lights came on. Congratulations, I told myself. There goes five bucks, down the drain.

  6

  The next morning, as we gathered by the truck, Manuel reached into the rear bed, handed me the big water jug, and pointed to the faucet on the side of the barn. While waiting for the jug to fill, I watched Luisa, who was sitting in the truck, eating what looked like a tortilla. Was she pretty, as Meg had said?

  I’m not a big expert on girls. I’ll be the first to admit it. But I have to admit, too, that Luisa was nice to look at. She hadn’t pulled her long, dark braid back and put a baseball hat over it yet, and it hung in a shiny rope over her shoulder, a few loose strands of hair blowing around her face. Her expression was kind of daydreamy, until she caught me looking at her. She gave me a quick smile before she turned away.

  Manuel had caught me looking, too. He gave me a long, dark scowl.

  I felt like asking him what his problem was, but just at that moment one of the guys yelled, “Hey, Joe!” He had on the same Yankees cap and jacket he’d been wearing on Saturday. I was pretty sure his name was Frank. When I glanced his way, he was pointing to my feet, a huge grin on his face.

  I looked down. The water jug was full and overflowing onto the ground. David, the guy with one arm, said something in Spanish, and there was a burst of laughter from the others. It sounded good-natured, but, looking back at Manuel, I noticed he wasn’t laughing.

  Feeling like a real jerk, I screwed the cap on the jug and bent to lift it. I don’t know how many gallons that thing held, but it weighed a lot. I couldn’t even budge it with one hand. Grabbing the handle with both hands, I held it up in front of me, leaned back against the weight of it, and taking ridiculous little shuffle steps, I finally got it over to the truck.

  I knew my face was flaming red from exertion and embarrassment—and anger. I was sure Manuel had wanted me to look foolish in front of the whole crew. The memory of his muscled arms made me even madder somehow, but that gave me strength and determination. With a giant effort, I hoisted the jug up onto the open tailgate of the truck.

  Dad came out of the house then to speak with Manuel. The sight of them talking seriously, man-to-man, did nothing to ease the tightness in my chest. Then Manuel was gesturing and Dad was nodding, and Dad let out a big smile and shook Manuel’s hand. I looked away until I heard Manuel come back over to the truck.

  When everyone else started climbing aboard, I did, too. I sat like a stone, not saying anything to anybody as we rode bumpily to the same field we’d been in on Saturday. Manuel didn’t order any change in positions, so I took my place behind the planter, and the agony began again.

  Everything went along as boringly and painfully as it had on Saturday, until somewhere around two o’clock that afternoon. We were on a break at the end of a row. Two of the guys were messing with a little transistor radio, trying to get a station with Spanish music. One had introduced himself as Jorge, the other had told me his name was Carlos. Jorge was kind of chubby, and Carlos was taller than everybody else, including me, though most of the guys were shorter. Standing with them was a guy who looked pretty old.

  There was another guy whose name was Rafael, but half the time the others called him Mula. They were teasing when they said it, busting him for being lazy. I’d noticed that he tried to get away with slacking off whenever he could. Manuel was always coming up behind him and pretending to kick him in the rear. It didn’t take any genius on my part to figure out that mula meant “mule.”

  They used nicknames a lot. Sometimes they called David, the one-armed guy, Rechoncho. I figured it meant “stumpy” or something like that. It wasn’t that they were making fun of him. They just didn’t try to ignore his injury or pretend it hadn’t happened, which is the way most people I knew would have acted.

  They called Manuel Capitán, not sarcastically, but in a friendly and respectful way. They had a whole bunch of affectionate-sounding nicknames for Luisa. I was just Joe.

  Sort of halfway paying attention to what Jorge and Carlos were doing with the radio, I started pouring myself water from the jug. All at once, the air was filled with terrified screams. Luisa came bursting out from behind the hedgerow that divided the fields, her arms pinwheeling around her head, her hands batting at a huge cloud of ticked-off, stinging hornets.

  Everyone began yelling in Spanish. I didn’t know what they were telling her to do, but it was obvious that she was way too panicked to listen to their advice. We all stood helplessly by while she raced around the field shrieking and swatting at the air and trying unsuccessfully to escape.

  It was unbearable to watch, but none of us seemed able to turn away, either. Then Luisa tripped on the unevenly plowed earth and fell face down with a loud whump. Manuel ran over and threw himself on top of her, trying to protect her body with his as the hornets continued to swarm.

  Then I remembered seeing a can of hornet spray rolling around in the bed of the truck with all the tools and other junk, and I hurried to get it. I’d used the stuff before to bomb wasps and their nests, but I’d never sprayed it at insects that were attacking people. It was poison. Was it poisonous to humans? I hesitated.

  But the sound of Luisa sobbing and the sight of Manuel and her lying there with yellow jackets buzzing all around them were too horrifying. I had to do something. So I stepped closer, hollering, “Close your eyes and your mouths—tight!” And I let rip with the spray bomb.

  Twitching insects fell all over the place and quickly died. Some flew off, and I sincerely hoped they were going somewhere to die, too. The world became very quiet.

  “Are you guys okay?” I called shakily.

  Manuel straightened his arms, looked down at Luisa, and said something in Spanish. She answered, also in Spanish, crying as she spoke. She sat up and swatted at the carcasses of insects that lay on and around her.

  “Careful!” I shouted. “They might not all be dead!” I grabbed her arm to pull her to her feet and away from the fumes and the hornet bodies. Manuel followed, choking—probably from the spray he had breathed.

  He held Luisa’s face gently in both his hands and examined it. Even from where I stood, I could see the swelling and sore-looking red spots. I could tell, too, that Luisa was trying to say she was fine, even though her eyes were swelling shut as we watched. Suddenly she sort of slumped, and Manuel caught her.

  For a terrible moment I was afraid she was dead, then realized that she must have fainted. Manuel had lifted Luisa up and was carrying her over to the truck, shouting in Spanish. I’d never seen an unconscious person before and I was really freaked out, so it took me a minute to realize Manuel was talking to me as he laid Luisa down on the front seat.

  “English!” I shouted back. “Speak English!”

  Manuel was so upset that at first he just stared at me, then he seemed to hear what I was saying. “You—take the truck. Hurry! Su madre—” He shook his head and switched back to English. “Your mother. She fix Luisa,
sí? She knows how to do. Hurry!”

  “You take her!” I said. “You drive! Go!” The idea of being the one responsible for getting Luisa to safety scared me.

  For a few seconds, Manuel looked unsure. Then he said, “No. Your mother, you can tell her everything. You go. I stay.” He looked at me frantically as if he were willing me to understand something.

  There wasn’t time to argue about it, that was for sure. “Okay,” I said loudly. “I’ll go. Okay,” I repeated, trying to be calm as I got behind the wheel of the truck. Every farm kid, even one like me who hadn’t done much work around the place, knew how to drive a truck or a tractor. I didn’t have a license or anything, but I was allowed to go anywhere on our land and on the farm lanes.

  I had never been behind the wheel of that big truck before, though, and I’d sure never driven with a girl in a dead faint on the seat beside me, and I was really nervous. Things I’d heard about allergies to bees kept racing through my head. I knew if someone was having as bad a reaction as Luisa was, there wasn’t much time. People could die from insect stings if they didn’t get help quickly.

  Thinking about that didn’t do anything to calm me down. I felt even clumsier than usual, fumbling with the keys, then stalling, not once but three times before I got the stupid truck going.

  It was no comfort that all the guys were standing there watching and waiting, and that Manuel looked ready to jump out of his skin. Couldn’t he see I was hurrying as fast as I could?

  I tried to concentrate on finding the gears, and soon I was lurching down the lane toward home. Poor Luisa was bouncing around on the seat and practically sliding onto the floor, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I had to keep both hands on the wheel to steer through the deep ruts in the road.

  As I pulled up next to the house, I honked the horn and hollered for Mom. She rushed out, and together we carried Luisa into the house and placed her on the couch. The whole time, Mom was asking questions and I was answering them the best I could. The really scary thing was that Luisa’s neck had started to swell also, and her breathing was beginning to sound strangled, as if her throat was closing up, too.

  Mom ran for the first aid kit, leaving me there with Luisa, and I kept saying, “Don’t die don’t die don’t die don’t die,” until Mom got back. She had something in her hand that looked like a pen, but that I later found out was a syringe with a drug for people who were allergic to bee stings.

  Mom stabbed the end of the pen into Luisa’s arm, and almost immediately Luisa’s breathing became easier and more even. Then Mom asked me to get a big plastic bowl from the kitchen in case Luisa felt sick to her stomach.

  When I got back, Mom was using little tweezers to remove all the stingers that were stuck in Luisa’s skin. She mixed baking soda with cold water and spread it over the red spots, and covered the worst places with plastic bags full of ice. She put a washcloth over Luisa’s eyes, and an ice bag on top of that. The whole time she never stopped talking to Luisa, who was awake but still woozy. Mom kept saying, “Lie still. Just rest. The worst is over.”

  While Mom dialed 911, I got a drink of water and tried to settle down. Mom told the person on the other end of the line what had happened and what she had done.

  “Yes, she seems to be breathing quite well now,” Mom said. “Yes, the swelling’s going down. No, no vomiting. Pretty alert, yes. No. No. Yes. Okay, then, thank you.”

  When she hung up, she looked relieved. “It sounds as if you’re going to be just fine, Luisa.” Then she murmured, almost to herself, “Jim teases me for worrying about accidents, but you just never know…”

  To my dismay, she turned to me and said, “As soon as you finish that drink, Joe, you’d better get back out to the field and tell Manuel she’s all right. He must be worried sick.”

  A look of concern passed over her face then and she said, “He got stung, too, didn’t he? You tell him to come back here right away if he’s feeling the least bit strange, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Why didn’t he drive Luisa himself?” she asked then.

  “I don’t know. I tried to get him to do it, but he told me to.”

  Luisa spoke up in a weak voice. “He probably thought he should keep working. You know, ’cause he’s crew boss.”

  “For goodness’ sake,” Mom said, shaking her head with a mix of admiration and exasperation. “That’s just like him. Now, Joe, you go tell him Luisa is going to be just fine, and that I’ll keep her here with me until he gets back.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly, thinking that I was obviously not as dedicated to work as the great Manuel. I wouldn’t have wished a hornet attack on Luisa or anybody else, believe me. But now that it had happened, I’d been secretly hoping it would give me an excuse to stay home. Playing Nurse Joe and sitting beside a sick girl was not something I’d ordinarily volunteer for, but it was a lot more appealing than going back to the cabbage field.

  When I got there, Manuel practically leaped off the tractor and started asking a million questions about Luisa. Finally, he seemed convinced that she was really okay. He had a lot of red welts on his face and arms, but he didn’t look anywhere near as bad as Luisa, and he waved me off when I repeated Mom’s offer to go back to the house for first aid.

  Fortunately, there had to be an even number of people feeding the wheels on the planter, so I got to take Luisa’s place next to Gilberto. Halfway down each row, Manuel stopped the tractor and we all took turns jumping off the planter to go back and do the job of checking the plants. That was better, but not much. Feeding the plants into the rubber fingers looked easy, but it took me a while to get the hang of it.

  After a period of time that felt like days instead of hours, we left the field and bounced back to our driveway. Manuel followed me right over to our house, but hesitated at the kitchen door for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure he should come inside. It was the second time that day I’d seen Manuel unsure of himself. I wondered if the real reason he hadn’t wanted to drive Luisa here was that he didn’t feel right about barging into our house and yelling for Mom to do something, even in an emergency. I hadn’t thought of that at the time, but, looking at Manuel now, I suspected I was right.

  For a second or two I paused, enjoying Manuel’s discomfort. Then I took pity on him. “Come on in,” I said. Hearing voices in the living room, I motioned for Manuel to follow me.

  Luisa was sitting up now, laughing and talking with Meg and LuAnn. She didn’t look so hot, with her blotchy red swollen face covered with white dabs of Mom’s magic potion. But she told Manuel she felt much better.

  “I work tomorrow, no problem,” she said earnestly to him.

  He scowled and murmured something in Spanish that probably meant, “We’ll see about that.”

  Mom came in then and looked Manuel over. She dabbed some of the white stuff on his blotches, and gave him some to take back to the trailer to use on Luisa later. Then she gave him a box of syringes. “From now on, one of these stays in the glove compartment of each truck,” she said. To Luisa she said, “Is this the first time you’ve had a reaction like this?”

  Luisa nodded.

  “I don’t want to scare you, but the next one could be even worse. You should carry a syringe with you whenever you can.” Then, gently but seriously, she added, “And from now on, when you go through the hedgerows you’ll have to be extra careful, okay?”

  Luisa looked down. She was embarrassed, I could tell, though Mom hadn’t meant to make her feel bad. It was a fact of life that sometimes we had to pee when we were working, and we just went behind the rows of bushes between fields. That was what Luisa had been doing when she stirred up the hornets’ nest.

  Manuel stepped up and took her gently by the arm to leave. “I work tomorrow, no problem,” Luisa repeated to Mom.

  “Let’s wait and see how you feel,” Mom answered.

  After thanking Mom about a hundred times, Manuel and Luisa left.

  Naturally, Luisa’s accident wa
s the main topic of conversation at the dinner table that night. While everyone talked about how scary it must have been, and how lucky Luisa was that Mom was there and knew what to do, I mulled over something that had been on my mind ever since I’d known Luisa was going to be okay.

  All of us on the crew had been upset by Luisa’s accident, but Manuel had acted really crazy. I kept seeing him throw himself over Luisa’s fallen body, and remembered how desperately he’d questioned me about how she was doing. I recalled, too, the black stare he’d given me that morning when he found me looking at her.

  When there was a lull in the conversation, I asked, “Is Luisa Manuel’s girlfriend or something?”

  Everyone at the table looked at me as if my head had turned into a cabbage or something.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “She’s his cousin, pea-brain,” LuAnn said. “You’ve worked with them for two whole days and you never figured that out?” She shook her head.

  Feeling obligated to defend myself, I said in a tone as snotty as hers, “For your information, pea-brain, that’s exactly what we were doing: working. We weren’t out there comparing family trees.”

  “Stop it right now, you two,” said Mom. To LuAnn she said, “Joe wouldn’t necessarily know they were cousins.” To me she said, “Manuel feels very responsible for Luisa, because she’s young, and a girl, and so far from home.”

  I’d been meaning to ask about that. “How come she’s the only girl here, anyway?”

  Mom shrugged and said, “Her family needs the money she’s earning.”

  “Doesn’t she have parents?” I asked. “Don’t they have jobs?”

  “Well, yes,” Mom answered. “But they’re back in Mexico. They can’t make much there.”

  “She misses them,” Meg piped up. “She told me.”

  “I’m sure she does, honey,” said Mom. To me she said, “When Manuel was getting the crew together, he told Luisa’s family about us, that we would treat Luisa well. So here she is.”