--ASKING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART
Strawberry Fields Forever
We get there before the rooster
crows, before the Mexicans have even arrived, the sun glowing like a stubborn
blister over the upraised nub of distant plains.
My brothers are slumped in the
backseat of the station wagon, arms folded as if in strait jackets, asleep,
Denny trombone-snoring, Robby’s nose an off-tune harmonica. They both have gobs
of drool sliding down their jaws.
Mother’s head is turned toward the
window, as if there’s something of interest outside, though it’s just acres and
acres of strawberry fields forever. Her hair is stacked high like a blonde fern
with a scarf tied over a good part of it. She’s got a cigarette pinched between
her fingers as she almost always does. The smoke twists toward her cheek, wisps
the color of moths massaging her skin, but then it floats up and away,
eventually absorbed into the hood of our car.
Mother says to the window, or to me,
“Look at that jackass. What a poor
excuse for life.”
She’s talking about Jack, the foreman.
He’s drunk already, or leftover drunk from the night before. I watch him
stagger and sway, splattering piss across the ground, jeans drooped below his
hairy buttocks.
“What a pig. A fucking pig.”
Mother’s voice is coarse, low, like a man’s.
I wonder if she knows I’m listening.
It seems she does, yet most times it’s like Mother’s talking to herself,
speaking the things in her mind.
I saw her kiss him once—Foreman
Jack—by the left side of the trailer while we were lined up to get paid for our
flats. I can’t recall what made me look, why I stretched my head east instead
of west, but I did see his mouth jump toward her proffered lips, Jack’s tongue
a purple salamander, wriggling. It was somewhat savage and immediate. I think
my mother may even have spat on Jack’s face after the kiss, though I can’t be
sure.
“Fucking renegades,” Mother says, as
the trucks and make-shift buses pull in sending whorls of dust devils into the
air. “They’re ruining our country.
Before Nixon’s out of office, they’ll have taken over.”
Men—short, stout men; men wearing
too much clothing for a day that’s destined to be sweltering; bronze-skinned
men; shy, slow-moving men—they hop from the back of the pickups with similar
pounces, then turn to help the next one off, their hands upraised.
I’ve always found the Mexican people
to be kindest on our planet. None of them here know much more than a few bits
of English, but each time they pass by me, I always get an “Hola” and a smile.
“They have their own fucking
country. Damn right they do,” Mother says, reading my mind, a trick of hers.
“They come here, never pay any taxes, steal our jobs, live on the Uncle Sam’s
dime, and do you know why?” She’s still facing the window. Her cigarette is
mostly all ash, curling like a gray talon. “Because it’s too harrr-ddd in
Mex-eee-co. Because they’d rather get their goddamn handouts from us.”
I don’t reply, don’t speak, just let
the nervous silence settle in between us on the vinyl car seat.
I’m wondering when she’s going to
give the signal for us to get out, collect our punch cards and empty flats. She
rolls down the window, tosses her butt, digs inside her purse and retrieves
another cigarette, lights it with a squint that prunes the skin around her
lips, inhaling then exhaling a broom of smoke.
When she opens her eyes, she’s
staring at me and a sharp chill bites the back of my neck, but I keep my gaze
set. I know better than to play chicken with her, yet for some reason I don’t
feel like letting her win today. She reaches her hand up to my face and I think
she’s going to caress my cheek or maybe slap me, the latter she’s done plenty.
Instead, she snaps her fingers on the edge of my nose. It gives me a
start.
“Dumb little shit,” she says,
nothing in her expression, neither malice nor glee. “Wake your brothers. I’ll
pick you up at two.”
I’m the youngest and I know I look
the most like him because I keep the sole remaining photo of him in an old box
insider the trailer where we live. In the picture, Dad is nearly as skinny as
me now. He’s wearing high-waisted trousers synched with a thin belt and a silky
looking short-sleeve shirt. His black hair is slicked back and he’s leaning
against the hood of a gleaming old Chevy. He’s deep in thought about something,
eyes narrowed, forehead creased. I’ve
always wondered what was on his mind that day and if it was Mother who snapped
the shot.
“Are you deaf?”
“No, Ma’am.”
I feel like stone, petrified, so she
punches the car horn with her palm, while my brothers bump into each other.
“Let’s go,” she says. “You going to
let the Mexicans beat you to the punch?”
The trick to being a standout
strawberry picker is to do it on your knees. In order to keep the weeds out, or
for some such reason, the rows are filled with rocks the size of golf balls. It
hurts like hell, kneeling on them, like someone’s thumping you with a ball-peen
hammer, but after an hour or so a numbness sets in. Everyone else sits on their
butt and scoots as they go, even though it’s more difficult to reach your flat
that way. Almost everybody eats as much as they pick, which is forbidden. Me, I don’t eat a single berry, even when my
belly’s screaming at me.
Every
time Foreman Jack checks my flat and punches my card, he spits a brown patch of
chewing tobacco over his shoulder. He never speaks, just mumbles or grunts.
There’s a skinny boy around twenty years old who stacks the flats in the back
of the pickup. He’s got Foreman Jack’s wide forehead and tiny dog ears, so I
figure he’s Jack’s son. Though I’d like to have a dad, I’m glad I’m not related
to Foreman Jack.
My
knees are already numb.
One of the migrant families brings
their infant with them each day. I suppose they’ve got nowhere else to take
him. He’s stuffed into a Moses basket at the far end of the east field where
the sun is weakest and where his bellowing can’t be heard by Foreman Jack, who
spends the bulk of his time swigging whiskey on the end of the loader, pausing
to take a piss or punch one of our cards when we bring a flat up for
inspection.
The baby’s name is Jose, which means
Joseph in English. He’s a cute little butterball, pouches for cheeks, skin the
color of root beer, with a runny nose half the time. I don’t tell Mother, but
each day I skim some of my pay and stuff it in my sock. At the end of the
season, I’m going to give what I have to Jose’s family so they can get a sitter
when they want to leave the house. A baby shouldn’t have to be like a handbag
you set on the floor at a check stand, or like an infant that gets left in the
sun, caterwauling for hours.
The sun is an omnipresent enemy, scalding and
cruel. Sweat streams down my ribs, in my eyes and I smell rancid, sour and
tangy, like vinegar mixed with urine.
My brother, Rob, says he’s going to
be a professional boxer when he grows up. I’ve got no cause to disbelieve
him. He throws hooks that leave
basketball-sized bruises, and his uppercut can crack teeth. Denny doesn’t know
what he wants to be. Me, I’ve decided I want to be a doctor. I know how
ridiculous that must sound. There’s junior high and high school, then college
and more college afterward, and everything I know about college is that it
costs millions of dollars. So, I’m thinking about moving to Mexico when I’m a
few years older. Don’t know how I’ll do it, or where I’ll live once I’m there,
but I figure, it being such a poor country and all, college will be cheaper,
plus there will be folks who need tending to that can’t afford fancy doctors,
so I’ll be their guy.
After a few hours picking, my back and ribs
always start to hurt.
When I get older, I’ll understand a
lot more about how the world works. That’s what Mrs. Masterson says every time
I ask a question in class. She’s a really nice lady. Sometimes she slips hard
candies into my hand after sixth period. I’ve learned to wink back after she winks
first.
Mrs. Masterson is probably a world
class mother as well. Though I know it’s an awful sin, there are times when I
imagine I’m her son and we’re doing normal things that other families do on TV,
like eat dinner at the table talking about the day.
So here’s the best thing I’ve
learned about who I am—I’m me and nobody else, and just because others have it
good, doesn’t mean I can’t try to better.
Father Dugan told me that. He’s the
priest at the cathedral we used to go to before Mother decided it was all a
crock and that the drive was a waste of gasoline. The day Father Dugan gave me
his advice, I’d been in a ruckus with two of the Schneider boys. They were
making fun of my berry-stained hands, saying I had leprosy. When Sister Fiona
showed up, it looked like I was the one who had started it.
Afterward, instead of getting
lashes, Father Dugan took my hands. He looked at my stained palms then right
into my eyes. He said shame was the devil’s way of making a person feel less
than, and that I had nothing to be ashamed of. When I started to object, he
shook his head and told me I was special, and the way he said it, teary-eyed
with a hitch in his voice, well, it seemed true.
Mother shows up around two, sun glare glinting off the station wagon’s
chrome parts, the rest of the paint coated in dust the color of gunny
sacks. She’s smoking a cigarette and
squinting from the smoke that snakes into her eye. It looks as if she’s sizing
me up, trying to figure what kind of boy I am, or what kind of man I might be.
Rob
and Denny hustle to the car, walking bow-legged, like a couple of gunslingers.
I take my time. I don’t want to lose the bills I’ve stuff inside my sock for
Jose’s family.
In
the passenger seat, I tie a rubber band around the rest of the money I’ve
earned and put it on the seat between Mother and me.
I
roll down the window to let the hot wind dry my sweat and make a mess of my
hair. In the side mirror, I watch the strawberry fields shrink then fade into
the distance.
