Under the Feet of Jesus Read online

  In the morning light, Alejo saw mud and tar under his nails and this frightened him. He felt like splintered and chipped sea shells embedded in layers of the desert rock, so far away from the ocean. Something had gone wrong. The sea had receded without him. The sideboards of the truck clacked like broken dishes and the noise made him start:—¡Gumecindo!

  —¿Qué traes?

  —I’m not feeling well.

  —’Mano, the bump on your head looks bad.

  —I hurt, man.

  —Don’t go to work today.

  —Just help me on the truck. I’ll be okay.

  The piscadores looked at one another, stared at Alejo who sat embracing his belly and they squeezed away from him as if bad luck was as contagious as any illness.

  The thick smell of chemical and saltwater had not abandoned his nostrils and Alejo felt as if he reeked. His mouth salivated and when he spit over the sideboard, Ricky did as well.

  —What happened to you? Estrella pointed to his bruised and scraped forehead, You gonna be okay? The tall gray shadows of the eucalyptus trees flashed on his face as they drove along the road. There were three trucks in a row this time, bumping along to another part of the ranch.

  —I fell.

  —You oughta be more careful.

  —It’s already too late, qué no Star? He touched the dried scab on his forehead and when he winced with the pain, he caught a hint of solace in her face. It’s just too late.

  The desire to return home was now a tumor lodged under the muscle of Perfecto’s heart and getting larger with every passing day. It caused him to lose his breath, to close his eyes in the middle of the grapevines when the sun was high above the sky.

  Perfecto lived a travesty of laws. He knew nothing of their source but it seemed his very existence contradicted the laws of others, so that everything he did like eat and sleep and work and love was prohibited. He didn’t want to waste what little time he had left. With or without Estrella’s help, he committed himself to tearing the barn down. The money was essential to get home before home became so distant, he wouldn’t be able to remember his way back.

  He narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun. Feeling an unspeakable sadness, he sat under the vines for relief and he could hear his heart pumping in his ears. He staked the soil between his workshoes with his knife again and again. The soil dulled the sharpness of his blade as it did his own life.

  Later that same week, two piscadores fainted. The portable radio with a thunderbolt of twisted wire hanger for an antenna sizzled a report of 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Radio Cali, Rosarito, Baja California. A woman had called in and requested the D.J. play Las Mañanitas for her husband who turned twenty-one and the D.J. joked about their sex lives. Piscadores placed their burritos on the dented hood of the Ford pickup truck to heat them. The drivers pitched tarpaulin tents and tables for a noon break and those weak from the sun were given apricot and peach crates to sit on.

  They crowded under the shade, sitting on crates, or on their haunches, while others soaked their bandannas in water, then looped the wet cloth around their stinging necks. The sun burned their feet, their heads, their eyes. A young boy cried, his cheeks smeared with snot and dirt, and his mother hushed him with water and sugar, then wiped his face with the corner of her workshirt. Another woman sat on the step of the pickup and nursed her baby, a diaper over her modest breast. The plump, bare feet of the baby wiggled from under the cover and Estrella touched the pealike toes and the toes curled and this made her smile. To Estrella, this woman seemed so young. Her own age maybe? The woman looked away.

  Estrella relinquished her crate to the Señora Josefina. Ayy, she wheezed out as she sat. Ayyyy. The drivers passed water in paper cups and when the Foreman left, a few passed out white leaflets with black eagles on them. Estrella received one, folded it in half carefully and placed it in her back pocket for later reading. Her eyes hurt too much.

  A commercial spit out a man’s voice announcing Gigante Mueblería and easy credit porque hay un especial de sillones “Lazy Boy.” A caller asked the D.J. ¿Cuál es el criterio que usa la migra pa’ reconocer mojados? Canned laughter. Whose back was wetter, asked the D.J., those who crossed the river, or those who crossed the ocean? The caller didn’t get the joke and the jingle of another commercial cued in and Estrella thought of swimming and water and ice.

  No one had claimed the shade under one of the trucks. The truck leaked oil and hot water from the radiator and so Estrella inched her back against the gravel from the rear. The truck was elevated so that if she wanted, she could move sideways, but opted to lay on her back, her hands behind her head. Her shoes sprouted from under the rear brake light. She bent one leg and her idle knee touched the muffler pipe.

  The recline of her body against the baked earth made her drowsy and she yawned. She lay staring at the Ford’s blackened entrails which went in and out like a knot of pipes, then followed a long rusted pipe between the front and rear bumpers. She turned to see muddied boots and tennis shoes and sandals crunching back and forth, someone spilling water, paper cups and foil crumpled on the ground. She could not tell men from women by their shoes. Someone turned the portable volume to ten and Los Panchos sang out a sweet bolero loudly. The D.J. invited his listeners to sing along.

  The shuffling of various shoes moved to make space in the crowded slab of shade for a couple to dance. Estrella heard laughter and voices hooting at the dancers, and she watched them slide to the tune of picking guitars, if only for a minute and then the shoes closed in once again.

  His big high-tops approached the truck and she could clearly see the thick gray rubber soles against the black canvas, just as clearly as she could see the oil greased thick on the shock absorbers. His baseball cap dropped and he bent to pick it up and she saw his eyes, his forehead still black and blue. His face disappeared and she followed his big shoes as far as she could see. She could hear his body sliding from the front bumper.

  —Watch for the oil. She felt obliged to warn him.

  —Too late. I got some on my pants.

  —So sorry.

  —You know where oil comes from? he asked in a whisper, as if the sun had sucked out even the energy to speak in a normal tone. Now the music of the radio was barely audible over the talk of the piscadores. The D.J. joked with a man whose wife threw him out of the house. There was more canned laughter. Someone changed the station and a kaleidoscope of sounds resolved itself into the tuba clank of Banda music.

  —Probably a leak from the motor.

  —I don’t mean that.

  —Why you asking me?

  —If we don’t have oil, we don’t have gasoline.

  -Good. We’d stay put then.

  —Stuck, more like it. Stuck.

  —Aren’t we now? Estrella flattened her knee. She crossed her legs at her ankles, one pant cuff over another. Someone whistled to the song.

  —Ever heard of tar pits? he asked.

  —Peach pits, maybe. She heard him laugh.

  —Millions of years ago, the dead animals and plants fell to the bottom of the sea.

  —You like to talk, don’t you?

  —Imagine bones at the bottom of the sea ...

  —If you say so. Estrella yawned. She found it hard to imagine the cool silence of the ocean floor when her feet were itching with swelling sweat and she could feel the constraint of her shoes as if her feet were bound. But smell it yes, she smelled the kelp.

  —Bones and rocks and leaves. Falling. Slowly.

  Estrella studied the way the tire tread actually had a lacy diamond pattern like the scarf doily the mother spread under Jesucristo. Falling. She noticed the color white had faded out of the imprinted word GOOD-YEAR. Slowly. His words were hypnotic over the hum of radio waves.

  —The bones lay in the seabed for millions of years. That’s how it was. Makes sense don’t it, bones becoming tar oil? Estrella felt Alejo’s hand take hers and she could feel the wet of sweat rolling down the side of her breast. She
was used to bodies, those of her sisters and brothers, pressing themselves against her while they slept; or the body of the mother whenever she looped her arms around her without embarrassment at the strangest times, like while Estrella bit into a tortilla at dinner, or when she returned from the outdoor toilet. Estrella had even become used to Maxine’s bologna smell when she lay next to her while reading Millie the Model. But this skin was different, this heat was different, this scent.

  She became aware of his body shifting in the gravel, imagined where his face was, where the words came from. She could feel the hairs of her arm stand erect, and could feel the space between her shoulder blades molting sweat. She heard him swallow a dry swallow as if he needed a drink of water then heard him inhale, his breath pulling in streams of hot air. Estrella tried to distract herself by studying the nuts and grimy bolts and how tightly they were screwed onto the tire. She pulled her hand away gently to touch the bolts and rolled the blackened tar between her fingers.

  —Tar oil? You say tar oil, huh?

  —Once, when I picked peaches, I heard screams. It reminded me of the animals stuck in the tar pits.

  —Did people? Did people ever get stuck?

  —Only one, Alejo replied, in the La Brea tar pits, they found some human bones. A young girl.

  They were quiet. Estrella felt him take her hand again, her fingers soiled with the tar grease, and she closed her eyes. She did not resist, unaware of where he was taking her or how. Alejo carefully smoothed her fingers flat as if unfolding a map. His mouth pressed against the center of her palm and his lips, which felt as dry as baking soda, lingered until the heat of his air welded into the cup of her hand. Her fingers closed on his chin gently like the tentacles of a sea anemone. He then pressed his cheek against the nakedness of her palm and his bristles tickled and she smiled in her darkness, until Alejo kissed her again, but this time longer, damp and pleadingly and still. Her oiled handprint, the shape of her fingers, imprinted onto his face. And that was all he had to do.

  Estrella lay very still, very quiet, her eyes closed tightly, trying not to think of Exits and Entrances, of Stop signs and Yields. She fisted her hand with a grasp as tight as a heart and then slipped her hand in her front pocket. He was quiet and she wanted to blank out the hunger and so she tried to think of tar oil so black, it swallowed the radio and the baby’s plump toes and the shoes crunching all around the edges of her life. She uncrossed her ankles.

  Estrella ran, feeling the breeze on her face. If Maxine were here, she would have run to her, but instead she ran as fast as her clumsy boots allowed to the barn. She gripped the door frame of the barn and entered. She breathed in the musk hot scent of manure. The lace of webs which hung on the rafters fluttered softly. Beams of sunlight stabbed through the high ceilings and slanting walls, like swords in a magician’s box crisscrossing each other. Estrella couldn’t resist. She cupped her hands on one of the sunbeams, the motes of dust swirling upward, while the beam shot downward. She caught the flow of sun, felt the laser heat slowly penetrate her palms he had kissed, saw the blood of her body, a brilliant reddish pink rose, and she laughed. The safety pins on the cuffs of her sleeves glimmered like diamonds. She heard the creak of old wood complaining, and she heard the owls, their nervous claws ticking against the slope of the gabled roof and it was then she realized she was not alone. She looked around for the harelip boy, but saw no one.

  Now unafraid, she walked to the center of the barn where the chain suspended in an almost unnatural way. Everything else belonged: the stalls, the thick scent of damp hay, the straw spread on the flattened earth, the rusted pitchfork leaning against the deep grooves of weathered sheet wood, everything except the chain. She flipped her head back to stare at the ceiling and her hat tumbled to the floor, her hair tumbling to her shoulders. Why was the chain there? Was it part of a grain shaft of some kind? She noticed a trapdoor, squared by the sunlight near where the chain hooked the ceiling. She took hold of its end, yanked it like a bell ringer, lightly at first to test it, then jerked it with all her muscle, then jumped out of the way in case the chain was not hooked securely. She crunched her hat beneath her shoes. The chain barely resisted. It chinked in suspension as it did the first time she saw it. As she bent to pick up her hat, Estrella noticed her hands. Once filled with light, her palms were now tainted with brick red rust.

  Three

  Florente of the islands informed Gumecindo that his cousin Alejo had a sickness they called daño of the fields. This was not sunstroke or a flu, but worse. Alejo could no longer stand upright without feeling faint, his body weak from bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. He stayed behind day after day until Gumecindo didn’t know what to do.

  —He needs to be home, Perfecto advised. He pushed his bifocals up the bridge of his nose for a better look at the swerving worms surfacing from the soil imprints of his shoes. Perfecto had not seen them drop from the sky so the maggots must have burrowed out of the very earth he stood on.

  —¿Mande? asked Gumecindo, What did you say?

  —He needs to be home, Perfecto repeated. He slowly twisted the tip of his boot into the larvae.

  —But he can’t even move.

  —Maybe all he needs is rest, offered Petra. She pulled a plastic lid off a green can of coffee.

  —But we gotta get home soon, before school starts.

  —Give it more time.

  —The buses are already leaving.

  —They can’t wait?

  —I don’t know.

  The mottled afternoon clouds drifted like smoke over the crackling cooking pit and Petra, who dropped three heaping spoons of ground coffee into the steaming coffeepot, then sprinkled cool water to make the grinds fall to the bottom. A breeze gently lifted the scent of garlic and woodsmoke and fluttered Petra’s apron strings while the twin Cookie darted up the steps of the porch. All of this made Perfecto feel a little better and he stopped digging his boot into the soil.

  —Did Florente say it’s catchable? asked Petra, retying her duck-print apron strings into a floppy, looped knot.

  —It’s not. He’s seen it lots of times.

  Perfecto studied Gumecindo’s worried face, so young it was as bare of whiskers as Ricky’s. Perhaps, some time ago, in another country, he must have been that young too.

  —How old are you? Perfecto asked, because with the worms and the sky and all, he needed to know.

  —Fifteen.

  —¿Y tu primo Alejo?

  —Sixteen, almost.

  —Almost? Perfecto sighed. He took a zinc bucket and turned it over. Sit here, he said, tapping it lightly and Gumecindo obeyed. What can I tell you?

  —I knew something was coming down, Gumecindo said. He sat and hung his head and shook it, remembering the premonition of the screams. I just knew it. I could feel it in my bones.

  —When you feel it that deep, you should listen, Petra added. She polished an enamel cup with a dish towel. Cookie jumped off the porch and ran and tugged on Petra’s duck apron and Petra turned the twin’s face inward against her belly and tried smoothing down the tangled mess of her daughter’s hair. She automatically searched for the other twin because to see one twin was to see one shoe. Perla sat crosslegged on the porch, studying the trek of a red ladybug which crawled over her wrist and around to her palm.

  —Deja ai! Petra yelled, but Perla prompted the metallic bug with a fingernail. Cookie ran back to the porch.

  —Have you eaten? Perfecto asked Gumecindo, but the clouds in Gumecindo’s head drifted in and out of can’t wait, and shrouded Perfecto’s voice and he didn’t answer.

  Petra wrapped the towel around the arm of the coffee pot. She poured a cup and placed the pot back on the hot grate and offered coffee to Gumecindo. He took it with a pensive nod.

  —Do they taste crunchy? Cookie asked, now holding a handful of ladybugs.

  —Deja ai! Petra grabbed Cookie’s wrist and shook it. The black spots on the bugs’ red glossy backs split in two and leapt off. Petra knew she could
never turn her back on the children. Maybe we should bring him here, Petra said. She attempted to lift Cookie but felt the strain on her legs. Go play, she ordered Cookie, but the twin scanned the ground for the ladybugs.

  —You think so? Perfecto asked. I mean ...

  Petra settled on the crate and rubbed the inside of her right knee. She would double the garlic.

  —If we don’t take care of each other, who would take care of us? Petra asked. We have to look out for our own.

  Perfecto felt uncomfortable discussing Alejo in his cousin’s presence, but Gumecindo was lost in the dark of his coffee. He guessed that Gumecindo was already on the bus going home.

  —He’s sick, Petra. Sicker than any yerba, any prayer could cure.

  —It’s not good to leave people behind.

  —You don’t understand.

  —I feel it in my bones.

  —You can’t even stand up, Perfecto continued, punctuating the fact with a trembling wave of one big hand. He glanced at her veins which bubbled thicker into a color of a deep bruise when she stood on her feet too long. What makes you think you can help him?

  —What makes you think I can’t?

  —You have enough on your hands.

  —If Arnulfo or Ricky or my hija got sick, I would want someone to take care of them, wouldn’t you? She stopped rubbing.

  —This is different, Perfecto said, lowering his voice.

  —How? How is it different than us?

  —It’s too much, he answered, too much.

  —One never knows what obstacles God puts before us as a test.

  —A test? Perfecto asked increduously. The coffee overboiled and singed the flames.

  —You know what I mean.

  —You’re crazy, I tell you.