Lord of California

by Andrew Valencia

  Chris came to the farm one spring as part of a group of hired men fresh up from the state camp in Cutler. He had worked as a foreman for half a dozen farms around Dinuba, and with two of our regular foremen skipping out before the first grapes started to swell on the vine, he was brought on at the last minute to tackle the work of two men and be responsible for twice the load they’d carried. It was tough work even for a seasoned hand, and not much more money to compensate it, but if Chris was unhappy with the arrangement, he never complained about it in front of Mom or me. We never heard him complain about anything, in fact. Besides a few of the younger guys who’d grown up in the camps and in the fields and on the road, he was the only white man I’d ever known who didn’t seem to think the work of the farm was beneath him, who didn’t glare at my brothers and me on our way to school like they were wondering what sort of topsy-turvy world it was that saw Mexicans in the big house and white men working in the field. And after I found out about his military record, about how he’d fought in an actual American Army regiment in the wars before disbandment, there was nothing Mom or anyone else could do to keep me from trailing after him every chance I got.

  He was good about it, too, always having a dumb and bratty kid like me underfoot. Sometimes in the summer he’d even let me sit beside him on the fence while he was taking his lunch break. I never saw him with any food other than the standard sack lunch the people at the state camp sent the laborers off with every day before dawn. It was always the same—cold meat and cheese wrapped in a cold tortilla, a packet of potato chips, a hard-boiled egg, and a piece of overripe fruit left over from the previous season. He’d sit atop a fence post with his heels on the board and devour first the egg and then the orange and let the shells of both fall onto the loose ground beneath him. I’d watch him through the corner of my eye. I could tell he was all alone just from the lack of variation in his lunches. It made me excited, and it made me sad, imagining what he’d done—or what had been done to him—to leave him with no one who cared for him. Even the most disagreeable pickers still arrived in the mornings with snacks and cakes and greasy tamales prepared by family members waiting for them back at the camp. Even those who had no one to begin with, the orphans and outcasts and runaway fathers, still managed after a time to be adopted out of necessity into some such group of traveling misfits. A man with Chris’s talents would’ve never found himself alone. Not unless he wanted it that way.

  One afternoon I got gutsy and decided to see for myself what was lying underneath it all. I made like he was one of the eggs from the state camp kitchen—one crack at the base of the shell and you could peel the rest away piece by piece.

  Did you spend a lot of time on farms like this when you were my age? Only reason I ask is cause you seem real comfortable out here in the vineyard.

  Chris stared out past the tree line with his eyebrows pinched together and a shine of sweat across his forehead. No one grows up feeling comfortable around the vines, he said. God help anyone who starts acting relaxed with this crop. That’s when the bugs swarm in and pick you right down to the stem.

  I nodded at the careful wisdom of his remark. I wanted to be like that when I grew up, to be so settled and sure of myself that my opinions rang out with the music of perfect infallibility. Did they have a lot of grapevines where you grew up?

  I never saw a vineyard in my life until I was already a man, he said. I grew up back east, where the snows fall a foot thick in the winter. You ever seen snow up close?

  The real answer to his question wasn’t something I had to think about. After living my whole life in the valley, snow was nothing to me but a word, a mirage that painted distant mountaintops on a clear day in winter and vanished from sight and thought the rest of the time. There was no reason for me to lie, and I didn’t understand why I did. My Dad took me to see the snow one time, I said. He took all of us. We made snowmen and raced each other on skis and snowboards. It was a fun day.

  Chris wasn’t the sort of guy who needed to look right at you to have a conversation. Most of the times we talked, in fact, he tended to scan the terrain in front of him with my words falling in his ear as I spoke facing it. This time, though, he turned and looked at me like something about the tale I was spinning didn’t quite add up. Which it didn’t. I turned from his gaze and looked off across the field to the shaded area under the ash tree where most of the pickers liked to eat lunch. It was always the same problem for me, the same old Catholic dilemma. I was honest just enough to be bad at lying, and I lied just enough to get caught.

  Did you see a lot of snow overseas? In the war?

  He shook his head. No, he said. No snow, no rain, no relief of any kind. Nothing but sand and heat and flames rising up from the land. Falling from the sky.

  Why were you over there?

  Well, he said. They told us it was to protect the country from terrorist attacks. But really it was to show that we were still capable of getting something done. A lot of other countries were watching us close near the end. We did a lot of bad things just to prove we still could.

  And then the states disbanded anyway.

  That’s right. I was lucky. Some of the guys who got left behind on foreign bases had to pay their own airfare to get back to their families. Some never made it. And some didn’t bother trying. Wherever they were when the news hit, they decided to make a fresh start there. Who knows? If things had turned out different, I might have changed my name to Abdullah.

  I don’t know why anyone would come here if they didn’t have to.

  That made it twice in one conversation that he turned to look at me straight on. I smiled and laughed so that my question would seem sarcastic in retrospect, even though, to be honest, I had meant every word. It made no sense to me that someone would leave the east, even a disorganized and disbanded east, and come to the most boring corner of the world to pick fruit for state-subsidized subsistence wages. To him I must’ve seemed like a spoiled little shit, disparaging all the blessings I’d received even as the man in front of me was relying on the ag bureau to keep his stomach full throughout the day. But Chris didn’t try to scold or correct me. He just took a match and a crumpled cigarette from his shirt pocket and struck the match on the post and took a slow drag as the bluish smoke unfurled through the air.

  I wasn’t going to stick around to see the shit-show unfold, he said. Once the Army stopped cutting paychecks to the soldiers on the ground, I knew it wouldn’t be long before everything fell apart. I went AWOL from a V.A. hospital in Texas and lived in twenty different places in as many years. Mexico, Central America, sorts of places a man with security training could make money easy without having to answer too many questions. But I couldn’t keep it up. Not at my age. So now I’m just trying to work my way north one job at a time.

  I looked at him with my mouth partly open and my eyes partly closed. AWOL, I said. You left the Army without permission.

  Without leave, he said. But yeah, I did. I’m a deserter. I deserted the American Army. Along with some five hundred thousand others.

  Okay. I get it.

  But how do you feel about it? It’s okay. You can tell me the truth. I won’t get mad.

  I guess, I guess it’s all right. Like you said, they stopped paying you a wage.

  That’s right. And if I’d stayed any longer, I’d have been there when they finally had to cut out the chow as well.

  I get that. It’s just. I don’t know. I don’t know if I could ever run away from something after I’d made a promise to it.

  He looked at me close and breathed the smoke from his mouth back in through his nose. What about your family? he asked. Sounds to me like you’ve got plans to run away from here the first chance you get. Won’t they feel like you broke a promise then?

  I don’t want to run away from them, I said. It’s this place. I want to get as far away from it as I can.

  This place isn’t so bad. I’ve seen plenty worse.

  Doesn’t matter. I was born here and I’v
e spent all my life here so far. So I don’t want to grow old and die here. I want to live somewhere different.

  Different is a point of view. It all depends on where you’re standing and where you started off. This valley was different to me when I first came here a couple years ago. And if you were to see the place where I grew up, you’d say it was different enough to suit your needs, but after a time you’d see it’s just the same product in different packaging. There’s plenty a man can do to improve his situation, but not if he’s always looking around the bend for the next thing that’s new and different. That’s what I think anyway.

  No, I get it, I said. There’s nothing new under the sun.

  He shook his head and smiled like I was cute for playing the wise old sage at the ripe age of fourteen and a half. It’s true I was full of shit, trying to sound smart with words taken straight from the monsignor’s mouth. There’s nothing new under the sun. That was one of his favorite verses, and the more he repeated it the more willing I was to believe that even my own self was a plagiarism of some earlier version from long ago. Every year on my birthday I grew more anxious about who I was becoming. If there really was nothing new in the whole course and history of the world, then boys like me were probably a dime a dozen in the grand design. But then why was it so hard to find someone who spoke my language?

  As I was contemplating my own weirdness, Chris took the last drag off his cigarette and carefully twisted the flame out against the post and flicked the butt into the dirt far from the dry grass that bordered the fence line. Let’s assume you do make it out of the valley one day, he said. How do you expect to make a living once you’re out there?

  I don’t know, I said. I haven’t thought that far ahead.

  Well, what are you good at?

  Not much, really. I tried going out for sports at school, but I didn’t have any skills.

  Skills come with time and practice. Right now is the time for you to decide what you’re interested in. So what interests you? I take it farming doesn’t exactly do it for you.

  I gave out a small fake laugh. Not even, I said. That’s part of why I want to leave so bad, cause there’s nothing to do around here.

  I see you out walking around sometimes in the late afternoon. Over by the packing house. What do you do over there all by yourself?

  Nothing. I don’t do anything.

  The more Chris pressed me for answers, the more his questions froze me, until finally I was sitting off the edge of the fence rail with my mouth hung open like a mounted bass on a fisherman’s wall, too embarrassed to admit how deep my weirdness really ran. Every farm boy and girl in the valley had some private habit they indulged in alone, out in the orchards and fields where no one was watching. Some streaked and others jerked it. Others daydreamed, and made hidden fortresses out of the trees, and lost themselves in hidden fantasies that were too loud or disconcerting to risk exploring inside the house. As for me, there were things I knew children were capable of doing that could raise adult eyebrows immediately, and I prayed that Chris wasn’t like other adults, cause at the rate we were going, I was bound to reveal my secrets to him in one way or another.

  I like to burn ants with a magnifying glass, I said. I know it’s stupid and gross and I shouldn’t be doing it at my age. But like I said, there’s not much to do around here, especially in the summer. Figure I might as well put the burning sun to good use. But please don’t tell my mom. She wouldn’t approve.

  Chris nodded slowly, looking down at his own dangling feet and the dry curdled dirt beneath his heels. More than a month since any rain had fallen and the earth still held the shape of its last heavy swelling. Long memory it had, the poor dry sand-soil of our country. You ever kill any larger animals? he asked. Anything that walks on four legs instead of six?

  God, no, I said. My thighs squirmed against the fence rail. Torturing animals, especially pets, was one of the sure-fire ways for a farm boy to land himself in trouble with the teachers and administrators at school. Just talking about it, even jokingly, was sometimes enough to get him sentenced to counseling, to weekly sessions with a district headshrinker that were longer and more humbling than any parish confession. And even supposing you made it out unexpelled, no one would look at you the same again. You’d live out the rest of your time in school alone and friendless, eating lunch with the retards on the retard bench. I’m no psycho, I said. I never hurt any cats or dogs. I swear.

  Chris gave me another look like he thought I was being funny. I’m not talking about that, he said. I mean real hunting, with a rifle. I’m asking if your father ever took you out and taught you how to shoot.

  I blinked and lowered my head and knocked my shoes against the boards to dislodge the stuck-on dirt. I could picture Dad at home in July with the sunlight absorbing into the dark fabric of his suit as he strolled leisurely between the rows of sagging vines, thumbs through his belt loops, strange smile stretched out over his face. Every one of our grapes was destined for the raisin box, to spend the hottest months of the year shriveling on burlap mats on the ground while fruit flies risked poisoning for the chance to taste the warm sweet juices inside. But for the few weeks each summer when Dad was around, before the drying commenced, he liked to play the part of the winery baron, to run his hands over the grapes and feel the yeast clinging to his fingers. Sometimes, when he thought no one was around, he would raise his heavy arms over his head and shout some triumphant phrase in French or Italian, I didn’t know which.

  He wanted to teach me shooting when I was younger, I lied. But Mom wouldn’t let him. She said I was too young, and it was too dangerous.

  Understandable, Chris said. But do you think she’d let you learn now that you’re older?

  I don’t know. Maybe.

  Chris smiled. I keep a couple of .22s in storage up at the camp, he said. If the misses says it’s all right, I’d be happy to teach you how to use one of them in the afternoons and evenings. The neighbors’ orchards are deserted then. We won’t be a bother to anyone.

  While my head maybe sprang up a little faster than I would’ve liked, I still did a good job hiding just how exciting the prospect was for me. Yeah, sure, I said. That could be cool.

  Okay, then, Chris said. I’ll talk to your mother this evening.

  Sounds good.

  He nodded and fished through his pocket for another cigarette and another a match. Sometimes in life there are moments that are so liberating you’re almost repelled by the new sensations they carry. Still I said a prayer of thanks under my breath. I knew in my heart that Jesus might not approve of hunting for sport, that he was a shepherd and not a butcher, and he laid down his life for his flock. But I wanted to learn. I wanted to hunt. I wanted a new kind of communion with a different kind of blood.

  Who am I, if not my father’s son? What am I, if not my brother’s keeper? Brother’s keeper. Keeper and captor. Poor confused prisoner. Poor little Oscar, dead before I was even alive. Little brown body covered in red sores. Sores. Bubonic plague. Brown body, Black Death. Father Ramsey used to show us the medieval pictures in his theology book. Hooded figures with long proboscises walking side by side with the image of death. Unclothed Santa Muerte, sexless before fields of the ulcerous and dying. Total breakdown of society, custom and decency abandoned. One family member falls ill and the rest band together to help. Half the family and the sick are sectioned off by the healthy, two halves living in mutual quarantine side by side under the same roof. Bread tossed through windows into rooms whose doors are never unlocked, loved ones waiting with dark eyes and guilt-ridden hearts for the moment the food stops vanishing. Hear the bells of the death carts making their rounds through fetid streets. Would you kiss him one last time in parting? Could you bear to throw her face-down upon the stack? They believed the air had turned foul and betrayed them and looked to leeches to thin out their blood. They believed it was sin that had brought the scourge upon them, and laid whips upon their backs and shards of glass beneath their feet and crowned
themselves with thorns to suffer as He had suffered. Blood was always the answer, until it became the problem. Blood of the Redeemer turned spiteful overnight, Old Testament voices echoing amid hoarse and congested cries. Blood of the family rendered meaningless as all stared down the same cataclysm, all alone, all fending for their own sake. Got to get away. See him running now, escaping to the country. Histories forgotten, names invented out of nothing. What’s that? Oh, yes, Mister Cooper. John Cooper. Why, no, I don’t know nothing about the troubles going on down south. From the north originally.

  Sins of the modern world piling up around us, like dark-age corpses in a lye-caked pit. Mother abandons her husband. Father neglects his families. Grandparents desert their homeland and desert their troubled daughter and desert their adopted country for the homeland they deserted before. No principles anymore. No faith in blood of any kind, divine or otherwise. Jennifer had faith in blood. Can’t fault her there. Only words to keep her in our corner, shrugged off as soon as the shit hit the fan. Excrement in the fan. Shit-caked walls. Only words to keep any of us together. Broken vows, promises unkept. No shame going AWOL as the nation takes its last breath. Not my nation, though. One had to burn for the other to rise. Phoenix from the ashes, Arizonians camping outside our borders. Patrolman thinks himself slick if he can sneak a shot through the fence links to thin out the herd. A real badass, vanguard of the Republic, defeating evil through murder one sunspotted grandma at a time. I could be the real deal, though. I could fight in a real war. I could endure and keep my post and stay standing while others fled. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. A whole valley full of them. Beautiful death, virtues extolled, glorified forever by God and by Caesar. And yet I feel my own knees buckle. And yet I feel my own heart sink. The hired hand will flee when the wolf approaches. Godless Chinese or ghoulish Russian. What would they say if they saw me standing at the gate, under the Bear Flag, with my brown skin wavering in the fickle light of distant fires? Would they burst out laughing? Yes, they very well might. Where is your blood? the Han will ask. Where is your blood? the Cossack will ask. Here, here, I will say. See, it is only half of me, but it is real. What, that half? they’ll reply, faces grinning under the shade of red and white banners. The father who lied to you, who from the moment of your birth tried to tie you to the land like an illiterate peasant? For that blood you will die? For that you will risk everything?