Under the Feet of Jesus Read online

  Alejo placed the frame atop the sheet of paper haphazardly. He flattened a few vine leaves to watch the freight cars race past him in the distance. Only after the train disappeared did he see Estrella wiping the sweat from the inside of her straw hat with a bandanna. She retied the bandanna across her nose and securely fastened it with large black bobby pins which weighed it down to protect her lungs on days like today when the fields were becoming dust-swept. All he could see was her bandanna fluttering with her moist breath. Alejo had been working right next to Estrella all along. How could he not have known?

  Under his cap, a breeze raked wisps of hair which fell on his forehead and it felt so good on his face. He wanted her to notice him and figured if he hoped enough, she would. But all she did was continue her work, spreading the grapes evenly, then lifting the frame. His own paper slipped from under the slender frame and tossed and bounced away like old news down the long row of grapevines and he dashed forth to retrieve it.

  For a moment, Estrella did not recognize her own shadow. It was hunched and spindly and grew longer on the grapes. Then she noticed another overshadowing her own, loitering larger and about to engulf her and she immediately straightened her knees and rubbed her eyes. She went over to the vine clutching her knife.

  She saw a piscador running down the row, as if the person was being chased by something. The hot soil burned through her shoes as she made her way to the other side of the row. There she saw the bend of a back, and at first could not tell whether it was female or male, old or young, and Estrella called out. The back unfolded and it was Toothless Kawamoto. He pressed his hand on the small of his back and arched. Estrella sensed the awkwardness as he stood there uncertain as to why she called. Estrella thought quickly, and offered him the one peach she had saved to eat after work, a reward to herself. She held it up and he nodded and she tossed it to him, a long arc in the air, and he caught it with crooked fingers and placed it near his water jug with a smile so wide, his mouth looked like a vacant hole. He thanked Estrella, but it was she who was thankful.

  The honking signaled the return of the trucks and the piscadores gathered their tools and jugs and aches and bags and children and pouches and emerged from the fields, a patch quilt of people charred by the sun: brittle women with bandannas over their noses, their salt-and-pepper hair dusted brown; young teens rinsing their faces and running wet fingers through their hair; children bored, tired, and antsy; and men so old they were thought to be dead when they slept. All emerged from the silence of the fields with sighs and mutters and, every now and then, laughter. A mother fingered a kerchief and poked the horns in her son’s ear, while another teased the chin of her baby. The piscadores slapped themselves to chase away the dust of the day while children proudly hooked the necks of their fathers. A teenage girl playfully pounced on the shoulders of her boyfriend and laughed.

  The Foreman produced a tablet of tables and columns of numbers, scribbled rows completed, names, erased calculations while the piscadores climbed the flatbed trucks. Gumecindo stood on top offering a hand to pull a piscador up. Alejo shoved his cap in his back pocket, fixed his hair in the side view mirror of the truck. He waited near the rear bumper to lift a child up by the waist to the outstretched arms of a mother.

  Alejo sought Estrella. The trucks followed the railroad tracks which passed the orchards and fields, rumbled and rocked and jerked to a stop whenever someone knocked on the rear window. Before the last truck departed, Alejo’s glance finally fell upon her. He watched her stooped body step on the ties of the railroad track as if she were cautiously climbing a ladder.

  Estrella walked because of the playing field, her basket, jug, and knife bundled under the crook of her arm. She waved to the piscadores and the children waved to her from between the side panels of the trucks, then continued her walk along the tracks, almost regretful she had not taken the ride.

  She reached the baseball diamond before dusk, the skies like whipped clouds with linings of ripe nectarine red. Estrella sat on the rail track, still hot from the day’s sun, and hugged her knees to her chin. Two Little League teams played on the green of the lawn, behind the tall wire mesh fence. The players had just run out on the chalked boundaries. Parents and other spectators sat on lawn chairs behind the batter’s bench or scattered about on the bleachers, ice chests at arm’s reach. Estrella wished she had not surrendered her peach and thought how perfect the evening would be if she had the fruit to eat.

  She squinted at the batter in his bleached white uniform going up to bat. Number Four. He seemed blurred in the mesh of fence. Her brother Arnulfo had talked about playing baseball. Ricky wanted to fly.

  Another truck rolled past and she waved and they waved until she was alone on the tracks. The remaining sunlight clung to the clouds like a faint trace of lipstick. The sound of contact, of a ball splitting a bat, dull snap of wood, turned her attention to the game and the spectators cheered and she saw the ball suspended above left field and the players converged, their arms to the sky, the ball like a peach tossed out to hungry hands. The spectators rose and Estrella jumped to her feet to see mitts form holes like Mr. Kawamoto’s mouth readied for the catch. One short player in a blue uniform took the ball out of the cradle of his glove and held it up as she had done with the peach and the audience broke out in sporadic applause.

  Still on her feet, Estrella turned to the long stretch of railroad ties. They looked like the stitches of the mother’s caesarean scar as far as her eyes could see. To the north lay the ties and to the south of her, the same, and in between she stood, not knowing where they ended or began.

  Estrella gathered her knife and basket. She startled when the sheets of high-powered lights beamed on the playing field like headlights of cars, blinding her. The round, sharp white lights burned her eyes and she made a feeble attempt to shield them with an arm. The border patrol, she thought, and she tried to remember which side she was on and which side of the wire mesh she was safe in. The floodlights aimed at the phantoms in the field. Or were the lights directed at her? Could the spectators see her from where she stood? Where was home? A ball hit, a blunt instrument against a skull. A player ran the bases for the point. A score. Destination: home plate. Who would catch the peach, who was hungry enough to run the field in all that light? The perfect target. The lushest peach. The element of surprise. A stunned deer waiting for the bullet. A few of the spectators applauded. Estrella fisted her knife and ran, her shadow fading into the approaching night.

  —¿Qué diablos te’ ta pasando? asked the mother. She kneeled beside the zinc basin filled with water where the twins were squeezed in and taking a bath. Towels and calzones and trousers and T-shirts dried on a rope tied from a small tree to the pillar of the porch. A silver washboard lay on top the oak stump. Other shirts and pants clung onto the ground scrub surrounding the bungalow. The mother held a steel can full of water over Perla’s head, then poured. ¿Por qué corres?

  Estrella had run past the cooking pit, the table with its pots and pans and chipped dishes, jumped on the porch of their bungalow almost stumbling on a missed step. She dropped the empty water bottle and basket, and her pisca knife, and a piece of foil she saved to wrap tomorrow’s lunch tumbled off the porch.

  —Gonna teach someone a lesson.

  —¿Qué dices? What?

  She opened the tool chest, her breathing hard, and rummaged through Perfecto’s tools until she found the thick pry bar.

  —Put that away.

  —Someone’s trying to get me.

  —It’s La Migra. Everybody’s feeling it, the mother explained. The twins began kicking each other over space and the fighting upset the mother more. Te voy a dar un nalgazo con la correa. She fished for Cookie’s hand in the murky bath water to smack it, but smacked Perla’s by mistake which caused a wail of injustice and more shoving.

  The mother struggled upward, straightening one knee then the other, and Estrella noticed how purple and thick her veins were getting. Like vines choking the moveme
nt of her legs. Even the black straight skirt she wore seemed tighter and her belly spilled over the belt of waist, lax muscles of open births, her loose ponytail untidy after the laundry.

  Today had been wash day. She had used the last of the ground yucca roots for soap and had to grind more stiff root which meant more work. Her knuckles were raw white against her coffee skin. The mother used the remaining rinse water to bathe the twins, although night approached.

  —How you feeling today, Mama?

  —Ya no hay ajo. And this was all she needed to say. The mother ate five cloves of garlic pickled in vinegar every day to loosen her blood and ease her varicose veins; without the garlic, her veins throbbed.

  —Maybe we can get some.

  —What do you think? she replied. Her body seemed as faded in the dusk as the duck-print apron she wrung her hands in. She held a towel, hooked Cookie’s armpit and Cookie resisted, slapping the water in protest, splashing the mother’s face. Yo ya no voy a correr. No puedo más. With one clean sweep, she lifted Cookie out of the basin and walked to the table, her rubber slippers clicking.

  —No sense telling La Migra you’ve lived here all your life, the mother continued as she dried her face with the towel. Cookie dripped like a soaked kitten on the table and whined about being cold and the mother dried her diligently, buffing her hair, her little birdbone chest, moved to her belly, apricot vagina, finally to her rubbery thighs and legs.

  —Do we carry proof around like belly buttons?

  —Something’s out there, Estrella said.

  —Ya cállate before you spook the kids.

  —Where’s Arnulfo? Ricky was sick today.

  —Stop it.

  —And Perfecto Flores?

  —Con eso basta.

  Estrella sat on the porch. She laid the crowbar across her lap, grasping it with two fists until her hands began to sweat. Her eyes hurt badly, and she wanted to close them but knew the mother would need help to make dinner. Perla stuck her toes out of the gray water and wriggled them.

  —Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them. The mother paused, still not turning around and Estrella could see the track of bra etched across her T-shirt back.

  The mother raised her voice over Cookie’s whining. —Tell them que tienes una madre aquí. You are not an orphan, and she pointed a red finger to the earth, Aqui. The mother turned abruptly and fished Perla out next, and the twin began wailing. Estrella watched from the porch as the mother worked to dry Perla, this time jumpy, more concentrated. Cookie, her buttocks like shiny garbanzo beans, tan white against the brown of her skin, climbed down the table, and splashed back into the water.

  Estrella closed her eyes, not wanting to open them again.

  —¿Y tu primo? asked one of the piscadores. The group waited by the trees for the truck. One of the women pulled her long hair through the circle of a rubber band and her chestnut hair sheened against the bright sun. Some of the piscadores tied triangle bandannas around their heads anticipating the heat.

  —Taking a leak, replied Gumecindo.

  —¿Cómo? He seemed not to understand.

  —A poco no sabes ai take a leak?

  —Qué es eso, take un leak?

  —¿En serio? Gumecindo mused.

  —Regaron las plantas, replied a man whose lunch was tied to his waist in a pouch and carried the aroma of a wife’s cooking.

  —¿De dónde eres?

  —Del Valle del Rio Grande.

  —¿Es un estado en Mexico?

  —Texas ya es parte de los Estados Unidos.

  —Ay, said another, nodding his head as if he had known that Texas was a part of the United States all along. He tipped his water bottle and wet a kerchief, dabbing his face which was the color of worn leather and which made him look older than his thirty years.

  —Sí lo sé, said another. Muy bonito. Muchas chicharras.

  —¡Como música de maracas!

  —Si lo sé, Gumecindo sighed. He could almost hear the thick rattling of the cicadas in the trees which lined the park on Chávez Street back in Edinburg. As children, Alejo and he would cover their ears at the maraca noise. Gumecindo glanced around for his cousin. He had never thought it such beautiful music until this morning. The F700 diesel Ford truck bumped forward.

  Alejo urinated behind the trees while the driver blasted the horn impatiently. He hurried to zip up but the steel teeth jammed and he saw two children peering from between the sideboards. They stared at him running toward the truck, one hand covering his half-closed zipper, the other holding onto his lunch. His baseball cap flipped off his head and he backtracked to retrieve it, his hands full, and the children covered their mouths in laughter. The driver went over to the back bumper and unhooked the door and someone offered a hand. Alejo and Gumecindo each grasped it in turn and heaved onto the truck. The driver closed the door, then slipped the iron bolt through the notch and returned to the front seat and the truck started with a jerk.

  Ricky shoved Arnulfo, who shoved Estrella, who shoved Perfecto to make room for them to sit. Perfecto leaned near the rearview window, one arm over the truck bed while the other cradled his hat which sat on his lap like an expectant child. He scooted to one side without opening his eyes. Arnulfo’s head lay on Estrella’s lap and she ran her fingers through his hair gently and this reminded Alejo of sea froth reaching through the sand of a beach. She nodded hello, then tucked a few strands of loose hair over her ear. Only her mouth seemed visible under the shade of her straw hat.

  Alejo could feel the steel of the zipper against him. He palmed his hair back, fingered his baseball cap, and Gumecindo elbowed him, pointing his chin and Alejo pulled himself away from his cousin’s teasing. Her chest jiggled like flan custard beneath her shirt whenever the truck bounced.

  —It’s sure gonna be hot today, isn’t it, Star? The other piscadores turned to Alejo then turned away. He tugged the flap of his baseball cap down, tried his voice over the noisy muffler.

  —The lone star. Like the Texas flag. Estrella kept her glance over the sideboard and he vied for her attention again. It’s such a pretty name, Star.

  Finally he repeated it, his voice rising over the muffler and the black exhaust and the shouting startled her and this embarrassed him. Gumecindo rolled his eyes in disbelief. But her cheeks began to round slightly as her lips began to widen and Alejo’s lips grew into a smile as well and Gumecindo looked away trying not to laugh.

  —My papa was the one who named me that. She pinched Arnulfo’s ear as she stroked his hair and he grunted a complaint. She glanced at Perfecto who slept soundly.

  —What does he call you now?

  —My papa’s gone.

  —Dead?

  —Things just happen, she said, without conviction.

  —What about him? And he pointed to Perfecto. When he heard Alejo’s voice, Perfecto opened one eye under his bifocals, but did not flinch, then closed it once again for the remainder of the trip.

  —Huh?

  —What about him?

  —I can’t hear you.

  —What things happen? he asked.

  —I don’t know. Things. She shrugged her shoulders and busied herself reading the faded washing instructions on the label of Arnulfo’s T-shirt.

  —How many brothers you got? Alejo asked. She bit her bottom lip as if she was thinking. He could barely see her almond eyes under the shade of a hat which was beginning to unravel at the rim.

  —That’s kinda a funny question.

  —You don’t like questions?

  —Not really. Only asking maybe.

  —What’s your full name?

  —Talk louder.

  —Last name. What’s your last name?

  —What’s it to you? she snapped back.

  T
he truck slowed, then bumped cautiously along the railroad tracks. The piscadores bumped into one another like loose change in a pocket, until the truck crossed the tracks and continued its journey to the far end of the ranch. Arnulfo sat up and yawned and began to whimper, but Estrella gently drummed her fingers on his lips to hush him. The truck finally stopped, and everyone stretched and gathered up their muscles. The driver released the bolt of the back door, and the first of the piscadores were herded out of the corraled flatbed.

  One hand in his trouser pocket, fingering a polished chip of obsidian stone, a few pennies. The other hand rounding a fat blue bottle of cola.

  Estrella sat on top of the corral fence. She swung her legs, her untied shoelaces dangling like drawstrings. The chalk-white disc of the full moon shed light that slipped over the contours of the orchards, then over the roof of the distant barn, and reached the corral and finally lit the tips of her boots. Alejo stopped to the left of her, rounding the bottle, an elbow propped up on the corral board.