Under the Feet of Jesus Read online

  —Just a few more trees before the dark hits, okay ’mano? Alejo asked, throwing some of the selected peaches away. Half of these are going to bruise.

  —Shit, I hate this.

  —Nobody buys fruit with bruises.

  —Ask me if I care.

  What Estrella remembered most of her real father was an orange. He had peeled a huge orange for her in an orchard where they stopped to pee. They were traveling north where the raisin grapes were ready for sun drying and the work was said to be plentiful. The twins wore diapers then, babies whose fists punched the air with hysteria. The boys managed to relieve themselves without ceremony by the side of the pickup, while Estrella and the mother had to walk to the middle of the orchard for privacy.

  They squatted within a circle of trees and the oranges hung like big ornaments above their heads. The mother didn’t consider it thievery when she plucked a few, so many were already rotting on the ground. The two were alone with no foreman to tell them the fruit they picked wasn’t free, no one to stop her from giving Estrella an orange so big Estrella had to carry it to her father with two hands. Her father’s boot rested on the insect-splattered bumper of their pickup. What impressed her most was the way his thumbnail plowed the peel off the orange in one long spiral, as if her father plowed the sun, as if it meant something to him to peel the orange from stem to navel without breaking the circle. Sometimes she remembered him with a mustache, sometimes smoking a Bugler tobacco cigarette, but always peeling an orange.

  The women in the camps had advised the mother, To run away from your husband would be a mistake. He would stalk her and the children, not because he wanted them back, they proposed, but because it was a slap in the face, and he would swear over the seventh beer that he would find her and kill them all. Estrella’s godmother said the same thing and more. You’ll be a forever alone woman, she said to Estrella’s mother, nobody wants a woman with a bunch of orphans, nobody. You don’t know what hunger is until your huercos tell you to your face, then what you gonna do?

  Instead, it was her father who’d ran away, gone to Mexico, the mother said at first, to bury an uncle just as they settled in a city apartment with the hope of never seeing another labor camp again. Estrella hadn’t remembered a lot of those years, except that the twins started calling her mama. What she remembered most was the mother kneeling in prayer or the pacing, door slamming, locked bathroom, the mother rummaging through shoe boxes of papers, bills, addressed correspondence, documents, loose dollars hidden for occasions like this; the late-night calls, money sent for his return, screaming arguments long distance, bad connections, trouble at the border, more money sent, a sickness somewhere in between. Each call was connected by a longer silence, each request for money more painful. She remembered every job was not enough wage, every uncertainty rested on one certainty: food.

  The phone was disconnected. She remembered the moving, all night packing with trash bags left behind, to a cheaper rent they couldn’t afford, to Estrella’s godmother’s apartment, to some friends, finally to the labor camps again. Always leaving things behind that they couldn’t fit, couldn’t pack, couldn’t take, like a trail of bread crumbs for her father. The mother didn’t know about change-of-address cards or forwarding mail and for a while Estrella thought the absence of his letters was due to their own ignorance.

  Estrella would never know of the father’s repentance. Never know if he thought of them as the mother did of him. She could see it in the wet stone of the mother’s eyes.—Is he eating an egg at this moment like I am eating an egg? Is he watching the moon like I am watching the moon, is he staring at a red car like I am, is he waiting like I am?

  It didn’t happen so fast, the realization that he was not coming back. Estrella didn’t wake up one day knowing what she knew now. It came upon her as it did her mother. Like morning light, passing, the absence of night, just there, his not returning.

  —You have no business in the barn, Perfecto wheezed in a voice like a whisper. His chest stretched as if his lungs were about to snap. The crying twins clung to Perfecto’s belt, each pawing for his attention. He bent his head, clamped his hands on his knees to catch his breath and his hat tumbled onto the ground. The boys ran to the barn to hear him scold Estrella.

  —Are you blind? Can’t you see the walls are ready to collapse? You could’ve hurt the girls.

  Perfecto sucked in air, his nostrils flaring. He wanted to say something else, but licked the dryness of his splintered lips instead.

  —Go help your mother. Get going. NOW! Arnulfo and Ricky ran off laughing, but Estrella was stunned by the force of his words. Her chest breathed and crackled like kindling. Most of her braid had unraveled, and her loose long hair bent lazily around her chin. She flipped a few strands over her ear and stared at him and bit her lower lip. Finally, her cheeks as red as hot embers, Estrella stomped away. Perla picked up Perfecto’s straw hat and handed it to him while Cookie wiped her runny nose with the back of her hand.

  Estrella caught up with her brothers. She grabbed Ricky’s striped green/brown T-shirt and shoved him forward, then jerked him back. He swung at the air with fists tight as walnuts. After a few jerks, she was satisfied with her revenge and let go. She heaved herself over the side board of the corral fence, flipped a leg and straddled it, then jumped down while her brothers ducked between two boards. Estrella led the way to the bungalow. Their heads bobbed over the shimmering of tall grasses.

  —Ay come on, Star, Ricky called after her. Don’t be mad.

  —He’s not my papa, Estrella said.

  —So? asked Arnulfo, trying to keep up with her.

  —Sew your pants, they’re torn, she snapped, and she ran, her hair bouncing like a black tassel. Her brothers followed suit, and the twins scrambled after. Perfecto walked behind them all, fanning himself with his hat.

  A car wreck waiting to happen, Petra had said. Estrella’s real father looked up at her as he pulled out the old shoelaces. The freeway interchange right above their apartment looped like knots of asphalt and cement and the cars swerved into unexpected steep turns with squeals of braking tires. Sunlight glistened off the bending steel guardrails of the ramps. Just you wait and see, Petra said in a puff of breath on the window glass, a car will flip over the edge.

  His new laces were too long and so he cut them with his single blade razor, the one he had brought with him all the way from Jerez, Zacatecas. He had pinched spit on the loose ends to rethread the laces carefully through the eyes of his shoe, then bent his chin to his knees as one foot vanished into a thick leathered shoe then the other. His back curved like a sickle against the window and her garlic-scented fingers ran up and down the beads of his spine. He was a man with lashes thick as pine needles, a man who never whispered; his words clanked like loose empty cans in a bag and she had to hush him in the presence of the sleeping children. Her fingers purred on his backbone until he stood up and walked out.

  The traffic swelled and cars lined up on the curving on-ramp of the freeway until the cars yanked loose like a broken necklace and the beads scattered across the asphalt rolling, rolling, and she waited, her breath gone until the rubber treads of the tires connected with the pavement again.

  He had the nerve, damn him, the spine to do it. She was almost jealous. The stories of his whereabouts stacked up like the bills she kept in a shoe box. Was it really him with a business in Ensenada selling bags of peanuts and ceramics? Was it him crossing Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles with a woman who wore pumps so high she was almost as tall as him? Could it be? Petra lied to Estrella because she shouldn’t know her father evicted all of them from the vacancy of his heart and so she lied right to her daughter’s face, right through the cage of her very teeth and then she realized that truth was only a lesser degree of lies. Was it he who had the nerve to disappear as if his life belonged to no one but him?

  She rolled the beads of the rosary between her fingers, made the sign of the cross, stopped his promises from flooding into her head an
d her mouth desperate, desperate for air. She was falling, toppling over a freeway bridge, her eyes shut to the swamp-colored trash bags squatting full of the family’s belongings scattered about the room. Only noises hinted at another life: a neighbor dragged a trashcan out to the curb (morning); a toilet flushed (someone is home from work); the twins crying (mealtime); cars screeching with murderous brakes, long piercing dial tone of horns (the first of the month speeding faster than any car), the siren ring of the phone stilling her heart like spears of a broken clock.

  Estrella had carried the fussing twins in the hoop of her arms, and sat them in front of an overturned zinc bucket and handed them wooden spoons. Petra could hear them right through the bathroom door. She had bitten the muscle of her thumb, tore flesh, then reeled herself back and ran cold water in the tub to vanish the blood drops like pomegranate seeds. The babies clanked the zinc bucket until the tin echos clamored and clinked like loud smashing car wrecks and Petra burst the door wide open. She clapped her hands against her ears and screamed Stop it, Stop it, Stop it! and the boys, terrified of her wailing, hid under the boxspring belly-ache down, until finally Estrella, with specks of green in her brown eyes, stood between her and the children, near the open cabinet where dead cockroaches brittled in the corner of the shelf and hollered You, you stop it, Mama! Stop this now!

  Nothing in the cabinet except the thick smell of Raid and dead roaches and sprinkled salt on withered sunflower contact paper and the box of Quaker Oats oatmeal. Estrella grabbed the chubby pink cheeks Quaker man, the red and white and blue cylinder package and shook it violently and its music was empty. The twins started to cry, and for a moment Estrella’s eyes narrowed until Petra saw her headlock the Quaker man’s paperboard head like a hollow drum and the twins sniffed their runny noses. One foot up, one foot down, her dress twirling like water loose in a drain, Estrella drummed the top of his low crown hat, slapped the round puffy man’s double chins, beat his wavy long hair the silky color of creamy hot oats and the boys slid out from under the boxspring. Estrella danced like a loca around the room around the bulging bags around Petra and in and out of the kitchenette and up and down the boxspring, her loud hammering tomtom beats the only noise in the room.

  Petra broke, her mouth a cut jagged line. She bolted out of the apartment, pounded down the plaster stairs through the parking lot and out into the street and ran some more. She stalled on the boulevard intersection divide and waited for the cars to stop, waited for him, for anyone, to guide her across the wide pavement; but the beads rolled on, fast howling shrieks of sharp silver pins just inches away from her.

  Petra inspected her hands, remembering how their bodies were once like two fingers crisscrossing for good luck. Blood was crusting on the dots of her self-inflicted bite. The endless swift wind slapped against her face. The twins so hungry and her feet too heavy, too heavy to lift. Echos of voices, shouts of anger, threats of some kind she could barely hear over the blasting horns. Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter Estrella trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man. One foot up, one foot down, Petra finally pulled herself across the lanes of the wide fierce boulevard and car brakes screeched and bumpers crushed, and headlights exploded like furious tempers. One foot up, one foot down no more dancing with the full of empty Quaker man.

  —You seen something? Alejo asked. The barn’s ash shadow grew so long it humped over the corral fence and shimmied with the waves and tumble of the tall grasses. Alejo couldn’t tell whether the figure was a dwarf adult or a stocky child who had slipped around the towering structure.

  —I didn’t see nobody.

  —The kid might get hurt.

  —We don’t have time for this. ¿Entiendes Méndez? Gumecindo was unusually adamant. We’re gonna do this or not?

  —What’s the hurry?

  —The dark. That’s the hurry.

  —Looked like one of the Garcia kids, Alejo said, and he laid his bags of peaches against a tree and jogged toward the barn, trampling a path through the grasses. Gumecindo followed close behind. Their shadows brushed over etched initials which were carved in the wood siding: IBT, Joe H, a gouged heart, a few dates, letters joined by crosses, por vida. Rubble of tin and glass shards shined from the golden camouflage of straw near a side entrance, and except for the dried bird droppings which crunched like gravel under their shoes, the barn was silent.

  —See? Nobody’s around. Alejo felt Gumecindo’s moist breath on his neck.

  Alejo slowly rounded the corner. Between the eaves of the cedar shakes, stray swallows flew out from the straw and sprigs and featherdown. He pressed his belly against the loping wall carefully. A loose rusty nail snatched a buttonhole of his workshirt yanking him back. His shirt tore with a rip so loud they heard flutters coming from inside the rafters of the barn.

  The cousins startled. Gumecindo nervously tilted his head straight up the wood sheeting until the sun glared like spokes of light that bore into his eyes and then the boy jumped out of nowhere, his short stumps of arms raised high, his face like a puff fish.

  —See him? Right over there, Alejo said and pointed. Gumecindo blinked and water welled up in his eyes. Dust peppered their heads and Alejo hoped the boy would stay outside the barn. The skin of the boy’s upper lip tugged up toward the beak of his nose and into one of his flattened nostrils. He had never seen the boy before. Two black seeds glared at Alejo from the bubbled whites of his eyes, though they looked as if they were fixed on a space far above Alejo’s head.

  —This is too weird, ’mano, Gumecindo said. He rubbed an eye until it was pink-red and walked to where they had first laid their bags and leaned his back on the peach tree. Gumecindo shoved his hand deep in the back pocket of his dirty trousers and pulled out a paisley kerchief and wiped his eyes to clear his blurry vision.

  The boy grew alert. Tossing shadows played on the mildewed trough and it struck Alejo as odd that the child was alone. The boy skittered about, playfully snapping his hands like loud castanets to catch the flitting shadows of the trees. Alejo felt relieved until the boy stumbled on some twigs and fell, and his elbow scraped against a broken glass. Alejo moved to comfort the boy, but the boy stepped back, his mouth a lopsided O as he held his bleeding elbow gingerly. It seemed to Alejo that he was crying, though all he heard were the wind-tossed trees. Even the gaping hole of his own shirt hung like a speechless mouth on his belly.

  Alejo laid his fingers flat with his thumb beneath. He looped one finger up like a handle of a teacup and a swan appeared on the ground and eventually caught the boy’s attention. The boy stared at the shadow swan gracefully swimming up and down the boundary of shade until it disappeared. Droplets of blood slowly trailed down the boy’s wrist and he moved closer to the edge of shadow, as if it were a blanket he wanted to lift and search for the swan, when suddenly an elephant sprung from that very slab of gray, its trunk trumpeting in the air.

  The boy was transfixed. He studied the elephant who metamorphosed into a long rabbit that hopped to and fro and then became a dog that jawed and yapped and sniffed the boy’s elbow to his delight. But it was the eagle, majestic wingspan of fingers, that made the boy forget his injury, the eagle that fluttered from the tower of shade, gliding its wings into the sunlight. Sprinkling droplets of blood, the boy chased the bird as it wheeled above a discarded tire and rippled over some glass shards until it zigzagged across the dented trough and finally returned to the tower from where it first appeared, and vanished.

  Not even a few drops of menstrual blood in his coffee would keep him from leaving. Estrella’s father tore the last stick of gum in two, giving Petra one half. He unwrapped his piece and placed it in his mouth and chewed, tossing the tinsel wrapper onto the floor. Then he
said he had to go and promised to return by the end of the week. But it was something Estrella said about his shoes with the new laces that made Petra realize he might not come back.

  —Estrella, mi’ja, Petra had said, Papi’s leaving. Say good-bye for now.

  —Mama, hide his shoes so he won’t go, Estrella pleaded. And it was too late, too late because the door slammed shut and Petra cupped the cry in her mouth, damming the pure white anger from spilling onto her daughter.

  So what is this?

  When Estrella first came upon Perfecto’s red tool chest like a suitcase near the door, she became very angry. So what is this about? She had opened the tool chest and all that jumbled steel inside the box, the iron bars and things with handles, the funny-shaped objects, seemed as confusing and foreign as the alphabet she could not decipher. The tool chest stood guard by the door and she slammed the lid closed on the secret. For days she was silent with rage. The mother believed her a victim of the evil eye.

  Estrella hated when things were kept from her. The teachers in the schools did the same, never giving her the information she wanted. Estrella would ask over and over, So what is this, and point to the diagonal lines written in chalk on the blackboard with a dirty fingernail. The script A’s had the curlicue of a pry bar, a hammerhead split like a V. The small i’s resembled nails. So tell me. But some of the teachers were more concerned about the dirt under her fingernails. They inspected her head for lice, parting her long hair with ice cream sticks. They scrubbed her fingers with a toothbrush until they were so sore she couldn’t hold a pencil properly. They said good luck to her when the pisca was over, reserving the desks in the back of the classroom for the next batch of migrant children. Estrella often wondered what happened to all the things they boxed away in tool chests and kept to themselves.