Where They Killed All the Indians
(May)
Fikus pulled up to the corner of Hate Henry Road and Rocky Way and flipped on the ambers. The crossing bar swung out and nearly hit a feral dog scooting its way through gravel to the other side. Damned cur, he thought. Damned nuisance. Better not bite her.
“Daisy! You ready back there?”
He found her in the rearview, giving him a thumbs-up. My God she was cute. So cute it hurt Fikus’s gut a little to look at her. Those dimples. Those crooked front teeth.
“Prepare for flight!” he said, and grabbed the remote that worked the wheelchair lift.
In the Bottoms, the cottonwood seeds were flying, pushed by a hard wind from the east. Dry snow. Christmas in May. It wouldn’t be dry for long. There were thunderheads gathering into knobby purple towers over the county dump. Lightning flickered between the clouds like children’s flashlight beams. Secret signals, Fikus thought. The day had turned eerie. Tornado watch. Strange green sky. Lilacs, gust-bent and fragrant, growing over the old Udall place’s garage, focused on him with the strange concentration of a periscope. When Fikus was a kid, Willa Udall slaughtered pigs there and made homemade sausage in her bathtub. Now the house was haunted, or so some said, with the ghosts of the pigs and the poor deceased Udalls. Hard to tell them apart, said the believers. The people and the pigs. The Udalls always did have squat noses.
Fikus hopped out of the bus and watched as Daisy rode the platform down to the street. The white swirled around him. A cottonwood seed landed on his tongue and he stuck it out at her. Then he swallowed the thing and patted his stomach. “Mmm-mmm good.”
“Ewwww,” Daisy said, scrunching up her nose. “You’re gonna grow a tree inside you.”
“Mayhaps a whole forest. And then I’ll spit it out, oh, I don’t know, just here—” He poked her tummy. Something hard hung there. Metallic, felt like. Bejeweled. He spied a chain around her neck. She cupped the necklace or whatever it was and laughed. He tickled her chin and she laughed again. See? She wasn’t scared of him. He was forbidden from touching the children but did it anyway because it was an idiotic rule and he wasn’t hurting anyone. Leave that to the priests and the perverts, he thought. “And then you’ll have a woods for your belly button. What about that?”
“No thank you.”
“You know your neighborhood used to be all trees? That was the Bottoms, back in the day. Prettiest, wildest place in all of Colliersville, Indiana. Trees and Indians. Indians and trees. As far as the eye could see. Now look at it. Three streets toppling into the river. Sad.”
“Indians?” Daisy asked.
The wind whipped up more cottonwood seeds, drove candy wrappers down the street. The little dog sat down under an oak ten feet away. He licked a sore spot on his leg, then raised his nose in the air and howled.
“Native Americans,” he hollered at Daisy, who had clapped her hands over her ears. “Feathers, not dots.”
The dog stopped howling and lay down in a pile of white fluff.
“What happened?” Daisy asked.
“To the trees or the Indians?” Fikus said, although it amounted to the same thing.
“The Indians,” she said.
“Oh, well…”
“Tell me. Please.”
Fikus took a deep breath. It wasn’t a pretty story and the bus was idling. But he couldn’t tell her no. That face. That voice. He should have had a child when there was still a chance.
“So, this young chief,” he started, “braids down to his ankles, decides to steal this Englishman’s daughter, right? There was a fort on the river, you know, where that barge sank a few summers back.”
“Fikus!” It was Tiara, Fikus’s eleven-year-old neighbor. She was halfway out the bus window, a scowl on her sharp face. “What’s taking so bleeping long? I’m worried about Murphy.”
“Who’s Murphy?” Fikus asked. Had a kid from someone else’s route snuck on the bus when he wasn’t watching? It wouldn’t surprise him. His bus was a madhouse.
“The fish I won today in the spelling bee duh,” Tiara said. “I want to get him home and in the tank before he dies. Or before we all die in a goddamned tornado.”
“Gimme a minute, Tiara.”
“Fine,” she said. She showed him her skinny right wrist clad in an oversize plastic watch. “One minute. I’m counting.”
“Fine,” Fikus said back.
“So…” Daisy prompted.
“So,” Fikus said. “Where was I?”
“There was an Englishman’s daughter and a fork.”
“A fort. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, the Englishman goes crazy. Just insane, thinking his beautiful daughter’s going to be deflowered by this savage longhair, and he gathers up a militia. The Englishman and his cohorts are kind of a ragtag bunch. They’ve got arrows, some rusty muskets, and only one cannon, but they’re determined. They think God’s on their side, so they hump it over to the Indian camp and they let loose. They go crazy. They turn those teepees to tatters, into toilet paper. They burn. They rape. They pillage. They hang men, women, and children from the nearest tree. They take moccasins and put them on their own smelly feet. It’s a slaughter, and when it’s all over, they chuck the bodies into the Ranasack.” He took a deep breath. “The end.”
Daisy wasn’t looking at him. She seemed to be thinking. Rain began to fall in big, cold drops and her wheelchair got a sheen to it. “What’s ‘deflowered’ mean?”
“Oh, well,” Fikus said, “it’s just a saying.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Forget it. My point is, the Bottoms is where they killed all the Indians. The ground’s soaked with their blood. Anything you grow here, grass, rhododendrons, dandelions, cucumbers, is seething with sin.”
Fikus was trying very hard to be a more spiritual person. He’d been raised a Lutheran, but his mother and father’s starched faith and the stiff services they took him to as a child did nothing to expand his world or his understanding of it. Now, in late middle age, he hoped to discover new sides to the story, to find out that everything—from human action to the prevailing wind currents to the soil and the life that sprang from it—was connected. Maybe even in a cosmic way. There were books on Buddhism, Sufism, the New Age movement, and Hinduism waiting for him back home. Not that he’d been able to get very far in them yet. His nightly routine usually left only enough time for a quick dinner, followed by whiskey, a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and bed, which wasn’t really bed, since he slept in his recliner, but he hoped to do better. He had goals.
“Are daisies seething with sin?” Daisy asked.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Fikus had gone too far. He was always going too far.
“But my home’s haunted.” Daisy’s eyes were fixed on his face now. “That’s what you meant.”
“This land is full of ghosts, just full of them.”
“Where you live, did they kill the Indians there, too?”
Fikus considered the question. Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park was up the hill and around the corner from the Bottoms. It was not, as far as he knew, the scene of an Indian slaughter, but it might as well be. The misery that went on there. It warranted its own monument. “We killed the Indians everywhere, sweetie. Especially in Indiana. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Maybe that’s why I see ghosts,” Daisy said. “I saw my mom out on our dock just a couple weeks ago. My daddy said it was the fog but I know it was her.”
“How?” Fikus asked.
“She had her curlers in.”
Fikus started to give Daisy a push toward home but didn’t get very far before a man everyone called Basketball Juan ran up to meet them, tossing Daisy the bright orange ball he carried wherever he went. Daisy caught it like a pro and tossed it back, a perfect chest pass. Juan said something to Daisy in Spanish and then the two high-fived.
Juan had a scar that ran from one ear to the other and a way of smiling at you like you weren’t really there, eyes wide and expressionless, mouth usually full of bright pink gum. Fikus didn’t trust him. He didn’t trust that dog—hovering like a bad smell—or the day, either. And then there was the fact that Hector, Daisy’s father, was nowhere to be seen. Hector made a point of meeting the bus and escorting her home nearly every day. A teacher at the high school, Hector typically snuck away during his planning period, and, Fikus presumed, having settled Daisy comfortably in her room with a book or a doll or a TV show, headed back to school to teach the final class of the day. Locking the deadbolt behind him, most likely, the Bottoms being the Bottoms. On the rare days when Hector didn’t show, Daisy was met by her babysitter, Marissa, a pretty junior who had the same free period as Hector. “This is my ‘Make a Difference Hour,’” she sometimes announced to Fikus, shaking her dark ponytail proudly. “Honors students are encouraged to leave campus, to go out into the community and serve. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to take little girls home and make brownies.” Daisy would look up at the older girl in mute adoration and, for some reason, that look hurt Fikus’s gut, too.
“Were you supposed to maybe get a ride to the high school?” Fikus asked Daisy. “Hang out with the cafeteria ladies like you sometimes do?”
That was another arrangement of Hector’s. When he had to stay late to grade or conference with a displeased parent, Hector would ask Daisy’s teacher to drive her to the high school, where, according to Daisy anyway, she became Shellie Pogue and the other cafeteria ladies’ favorite helper. Fikus had been informed of all this at his annual August training session. He was given two bulging red folders, one labeled “Daisy Gonzalez” and another “Alex Nelson,” so he would know how to handle any issues that might arise from Daisy and Alex’s “situations.” That was how his boss at the bus garage had put it. Situations. The folders were at home as far as Fikus knew, probably languishing under the newest Thích Nhãt H(nh he had yet to even think about reading.
Fikus leaned in toward Daisy, cupped his mouth, and lowered his voice. “Does your dad know you’re hanging out with that guy?”
She smiled and nodded. “Juan’s my friend. He’s teaching me how to play basketball.”
“Oh. Basketball.”
Someone inside the bus started screaming. This time it wasn’t Tiara, and that meant it was most likely Asperger’s Alex. The screaming grew louder, more insistent. It was definitely Alex. “I’ve crapped my pants, bus driver!” he shouted. “Crapped my pants! Crapped my pants! Crapped my pants!”
Alex had to say things four times and he wanted you to do it, too. If you didn’t, he would start honking like the geese that lived on the man-made lake behind his house in Wyndham-on-the-River and he wouldn’t stop until you said you were sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
“I hear you, Alex!” Fikus said. “I hear you, I hear you, I hear you!” He looked at Daisy, at her corduroyed legs and Velcroed shoes and small brown arms downy with dark hair. Then he glanced at Juan, who was smiling vacantly while he dribbled.
Fikus had certain rules he was supposed to follow as a bus driver in good standing with Colliersville Community Schools. Number one, don’t touch the children. Whatever. Number two, do not come to work intoxicated. Hungover didn’t count, right? Right. Number three, never let a child go home in the company of someone who wasn’t her parent or guardian. He thought about telling Juan to go away, to play with someone his own age for a change, but Tiara appeared again, waving one hand in front of her nose and thrusting the other one out over the street. In that hand she had a plastic bag half-full of water. An orange fish the size of a sugar cookie fluttered at the bottom.
“Fikus!” Tiara said. “Seriously. It’s been a minute. Plus, it smells like shit on this bus and I think it’s killing Murphy.”
“Just one more second.” Fikus turned, expecting to see Daisy still sitting there, but Juan was already wheeling her away down Hate Henry Road, the mangy dog following right behind, nosing at the dirt and weaving from pothole to pothole.
A day late and a dollar short, that’s how Fikus’s own mother often described him. He was always late and told kids violent stories they couldn’t possibly process. Plus, he was balls at discipline and, as far as he could tell, a bad Buddhist/spiritual person. He sucked at being present and mindful and couldn’t for the life of him meditate. Fikus sighed heavily and pulled himself back onto the bus. Tiara was in his seat.
“Move,” he said. “Go back and sit next to Sammy.”
“Can’t. Sammy’s got Alex’s poop in her hair. She played in it.”
It turned out Sammy hadn’t played in it. Alex had wiped it on her, trying to clean off his hand. But Tiara was right about one thing. The whole bus smelled like shit.
“I am a mess, bus driver!” Alex said. “I am a mess I am a mess I am a mess!”
“I know, Alex!” Fikus said. “I know I know I know. Let’s get you home home home home.”
Tiara found a spot far away from Sammy and Alex. Fikus put the bus in gear and drove up the hill, watching in his mirror Daisy disappear down the street. As he pulled out of the Bottoms, there was a flash of lightning and a spooky, charged delay. Then thunder so loud it rattled the bus windows. The girl, the man, and the cur were cut off from his vision by a sideways sheet of rain mixed with a wave of tumbling white seeds. The seeds seemed to silence things as they fell. To bring a hush. Like snow. Like Tiara telling everyone to shut the fuck up, they were making Murphy nervous.
Alex pulled his backpack down over his head and his books and pens and papers fell in a heap on the floor.
“I am too good for this world,” Tiara said. “I am before my time.”
Fikus turned the wipers on high and dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. The cottonwood seeds stuck to the glass in white splotches. Those seeds. This storm. He remembered his horoscope from that morning’s paper. It had dealt in some way with weather. Hadn’t it? Said something about an ill wind blowing no good.
Spilled Milk
(A month earlier)
Colliersville’s one full-time police officer texts me at four A.M.: The milk spills today.
It’s my alarm clock, that text. And my one-way ticket out.
The buzz of it wakes Maria. “Who the fuck?”
The room is cool and dark and smells like aerosol because Maria does her hair in the corner and the spray’s stuck to the walls and the floor. We sleep on a futon mattress under the window. The window frame is a mess of peeling pink paint that, when I worry it with my fingers, gets stuck under my nails and reminds me that if I were a real man I’d have scraped and sanded and stained that shit long ago. Or at least insisted our douche of a boss/landlord do something about it.
My phone vibrates again, knocking itself against a water glass.
“Seriously,” Maria says.
An amber line of light from a buzzing pole outside slices her in half. She’s naked and the light looks like a belt. It reminds me where to put my hand. Down the block a dog is barking. In the apartment below us a teakettle shrieks. So does someone on TV, yakking about skin lightener. The mind-blowing results. I had thought when I moved here that I’d at least be able to hear the river but everything else is too loud and it’s too quiet. Unlike my phone, which buzzes a third time.
I cup the screen and squint. What’s his name? Randy? Richie? Who cares. He thinks he’s Dick Tracy. Did you get that last text? Whatever his name, he’s clearly the anxious type.
“Who is it?” Maria asks again, sitting up. Her breasts sway. Shatter me. Propped up against the wall with that same line of light across her thighs she looks like someone I should paint. It’s her hair. Blue black and thick. When she braids it, it’s a rope to throw to a drowning man. Then there’s her waist, rounded but with ribs showing. Also her arms folded over her chest and the way her lips purse at the edges because she’s annoyed and wants to say something she shouldn’t. If I could paint I would give her her same eyes but take the sadness out, the waiting-for-everyone-to-screw-her-over out. But I can’t paint. All I can do is write. It’s a very sad story.
“My mom,” I say.
“Yeah right.”
I lean over and kiss her where her neck is sticky and whisper a song she likes about hips not lying.
“How about you be a hip then,” she says. “Stop lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
She shrugs. “Sure.”
“Time to make the doughnuts.”
“We got toast.”
“Yum.”
“And eggs.”
“Good enough.”
The kitchen light casts a green net and cockroaches run for cover. Maria wears a T-shirt and nothing else while she fries the eggs. She hums and dances in her bare feet, and her heels on the brick-red linoleum floor are dirty. Water could run under her arches.
“She’s a lady,” I sing, grabbing her by the waist and spinning her. “And the lady is mine.”
There are no cabinets in this kitchen, only a series of shelves made from two-by-fours and concrete blocks. Also a few plastic chests of drawers flanking the refrigerator, which never stops whining. Maria pushes me away and gets on tiptoe, pulls the salt and pepper down from the shelf next to the stove. When she cooks she likes to tell me stories about how, before she met me, she was wild, a partier, if not the Colliersville “it” girl, at least its “id” girl. Stripped at Miss Kitty’s. Ran with white boys. Drank everything in sight. Snorted it, too. I’ve calmed her, apparently, helped her grow up. Everyone says so. She’s worried she’ll go back to her old ways if I leave her and, like every asshole before me, I promise never to leave her.
She puts ketchup on my eggs and slides the plate toward me across the card table. The plate sticks on a crusty puddle of old jam, and before I can do anything, before I can say, “I’ll get that,” Maria is back with a wet rag, wiping the spot clean. The eggs are runny. Jealousy eggs.
My phone buzzes again. I’ve got it in my pocket now but the vibration makes a fart sound against the metal chair and Maria looks up from her food to stare at me, toast triangle dangling from her fingers.
“Who the hell is texting you a million times before the sun comes up?”
“I told you. It’s my mom.”
“Your mother certainly has a lot to say this morning.”
“She can be that way. Verbose.”
“Actually I wouldn’t know, would I? Seeing as how you haven’t introduced us.”
For five months now Maria and I have been a team, the dairy’s most dynamic duo, and for two of those, lovers, but she doesn’t know who I really am and soon I’ll be dead to her and everyone else and I’ll go back to my life in New York and write the exposé I was hired to. Before I know it, this entire time will come back to me only in dreams and an ache behind my eyes. Also faces. Maria. Small forehead, wide mouth caked in hot-pink lipstick, deep dimple in the chin. Basketball Juan and his shaving scar. Mrs. Gutierrez and her thick eyebrows, tiny nostrils, and teeth like cards falling. Nina Morales, who everyone says is a witch but only because she’s a lesbian and has a wart on her nose. The cows, too, those eyes. I think the cows are wise. I think they’ve forgotten everything we’ve ever known and I’ll say so in my article, but the editor will strike that entire section. Come on, she’ll say. You’re better than that.
I took the job at Yoder Dairy for the article, for my career, and for justice, but in just a few weeks it became all about Maria and this one-bedroom apartment next to the stairs. I’d had my eye on her for a while but who didn’t? Maria, who’s been in the States since she was eight and can speak better English than anyone, Maria and her black lace bras and animal-print pants and TVyNovelas magazines. Maria and her soft body and kind heart and hard mind. There isn’t much that gets by Maria. Except for me, of course. Not much she doesn’t see coming.
Except today.
“Who is it, Ramon? I mean really.” Maria’s big eyes narrow. A loose hair hangs from the arm of her T-shirt. One end’s in her eggs. “Tell me the truth.”
I don’t answer her. If I’m quiet, if I pretend to be affronted, she’ll give up and be sweet. If I say something, things will get ugly. Thrown dishes and screaming and threats. I eat fast and stare at the food. By the time the toast’s gone she’s hugging me and apologizing for being so cray-cray.
“It’s my fucking period. I’m sorry, baby. Tell your mama I said hi, okay? Tell her her son’s the handsomest man this side of forever.”
“She’s sick,” I say. What’s one more lie? “In the hospital. I’ll have to call her later.”
“Poor thing. You should call her now.”
“No time.”
Which is true. Maria glances at the cat clock over the stove and dribbles coffee on her shirt. “Oh shit.” We race each other to the bedroom and dress, grabbing clothes from the floor and laundry baskets and bags—you can indeed live without furniture, without HBO and artisan cheese and good coffee and air-conditioning—and we’re out on the street with the others before I can think of what sickness my perfectly healthy mother might be suffering from.
Mrs. Gutierrez is at the front of the line as usual. She tells us good morning, clutching her fat purse closer to her side. There are Nutter Butter cookies and homemade tamales in there. Also romance novels. She reads to me and Maria at lunchtime. Maria likes the cowboy ones best because the men wear chaps and the women aren’t white for once.
“Good morning, Mrs. Gutierrez,” we say.
“Good morning you two,” she says. “Another day in paradise.”
All of us live in the Ranasack Apartments because Helman Yoder, our boss at the dairy, owns the building and rent is peanuts. Of course, we don’t get paid anything either, so you do the math. Our Bottoms neighbors don’t like us much. There’s a whack-job militia man down the street who thinks it’s good fun to use printouts of Mexican faces for target practice and a few others who tend to spit when we walk by. The river floods at the first sign of rain, and no one ever comes to clean it up. No one comes to clean anything up. The streetlights are always broken and the yards are littered with pop cans and diapers and driftwood. Apparently Señor Yoder doesn’t believe in home repair. Windows leak and pipes leak and walls leak. We borrow five-gallon buckets like cups of sugar. When the river rises, the air smells like garbage and death.
Colliersville, Indiana, voted Most Livable City in America three times running.
When the bus pulls up, Mrs. Gutierrez waves us in front of her. She wants to sit with Mr. Aguilar and who can blame her? He always knows the weather report. Plus he’s a gossip and good-looking and a recent widower. I watch them flirt for a minute. It’s my last chance.
There’s a whirring sound and the heavy creak of metal on metal. Instead of opening the door, Fikus Ward, the bus driver, must have activated the wheelchair lift. We watch the platform settle on the ground, empty except for a single white shoestring, and then rise again. Someone at the back of the line claps and the door finally opens.
“C’mon, baby,” Maria says. She takes my hand and pulls me forward, tenderly. Remembering Mama, I guess.
Even though there’s nothing around our necks, we march single file because that’s what we did at first and habits don’t break. Plus, it makes getting on the bus easier and faster. No squeezing, no jostling, no fights. Fikus is eating an Egg McMuffin and flipping through AM radio stations. He drives the bus badly—all hit curbs and crossed centerlines and jerky pedal work—and Ulises has tried a hundred times to take the wheel but Fikus won’t budge, just grunts and says, “Mine mine mine mine,” off-gassing Old Crow all over the place.
He looks like rain has been falling on him for a hundred years. Except when Maria gets on.
“Good morning, Señor Ward,” she says to him, painting her accent on thick.
“Morning, darlin’.” Then he eyes her all the way down the aisle.
The only reason I don’t punch Fikus in his frog face is I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know any better. It’s like Ulises says. Boy ain’t right. And, unlike Señor Helman (or Señor Hell-man, as we call him from the privacy of our rooms), he has a heart in the right place, even if it pumps dumb.
The bus used to belong to the Baptist church. Maria and I sit in the same spot every day, in front of Ulises and right under a picture of Jesus blessing the little children. The children have pink, fat cheeks and sparkling eyes. Jesus stretches from one window top to another. He’s like Greenland on a globe. All out of proportion. There are Bible verses spiraling out from his enormous head: “Many waters cannot quench love”; “Jesus wept”; “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
Maria’s had two abortions. She says never again. She says, “With you, baby, everything’s different.”
There are twenty-nine of us total, most in our thirties, but there is a small pack of teens that sticks together and dreams of better jobs in bigger cities, and a few oldies but goodies who boss them around. When we take our seats, we’re as quiet as the birds. Not until Fikus drops us off at the barn do we say much of anything and even then we conserve our words, use only what is absolutely necessary to get the job done, because talking takes energy and it’s going to be a long day. It’s always a long day. Twelve hours typically. One time last month, when there was an accident with Big Bessie and her calf and all the milking machines malfunctioned at once, twelve hours turned to thirteen, then fourteen, and three women fainted dead away on the dairy floor, pale and panting and cold to the touch. Señor Helman had us carry them inside his house and stretch them out on the pretty area rug in the living room because the nearest hospital, he said, was too far away. His wife put wet cloths on the women’s heads and gave us glasses of lemonade and talked too loudly about tough economic times and stubborn cows and the heat. “Haha! But I bet you’re used to that.” Then she shrugged and haha-ed again and mumbled, “Poor souls,” because she thought she was safe and none of us could comprehend a single word she said.
Everyone thinks we don’t speak the language and we like it that way. That’s how we hear things we shouldn’t, things about no-good sons and out-of-wedlock, pregnant nieces and wives with alcohol and Percocet problems. Birdy Yoder or, as Maria puts it, Mrs. Yoder If You’re Nasty, falls into the latter category, a straight-up opioid and bourbon addict who started using when Helman decided to fire his nice white staff and hire us, Team Brown. Ulises was party to that particular information, overheard a whispered kitchen sink fight during which Helman refused to refill his wife’s prescription and she hissed that he cared more about “his Mexicans” than his own family. When Birdy saw Ulises standing there in the doorway she did what any good white wife would do—frowned and froze. But Ulises immediately assumed a sort of Speedy Gonzales demeanor, stammering and twirling his mustache, and I bet Birdy thought, Phew. I bet she was thinking, Thank God they’re illiterate and dumb. Otherwise …
Birdy being indiscreet is also how we found out about Wally, his love for dresses and lacy thongs and pink hair ribbons, and his “perverse thinking he was born this way, oh my God Helman can you imagine? We were there in the delivery room, both of us fully conscious. He came out of me an intact boy, there is no doubt in my mind. Why is our son doing this to us?” That was me in the doorway that time. I was there to tell Helman about a heifer gone dry and, because they both expected me to, I launched into breathless, broken Spanish, making all kinds of mistakes, slaughtering the subjunctive, and Helman said, “I can’t understand you. Speak English,” so I did, haltingly, like an Indian in a John Wayne movie. Palm raised, fingers straight as arrows. How.
In reality there are only a few of us who speak only Spanish. Jesus H. for one. Also Julio R. and Carlos S. and Elena V. and Elena’s four daughters, who all have painful acne, long legs, and perfect asses. Then there’s me, the one they call Ramon but whose name is really Gordy, who writes the Queen’s English and plans to blow the doors off this entire stinking operation in, oh, six hours or so.
Poor Mrs. Yoder, I think. Poor soul.
We smell the dairy before we see it. At five A.M. even odors seem loud, and once the scent of manure leaks in through the bus windows we huddle closer together and hope, perversely perhaps, for a crash, a fire, mad cow—anything that will take us back to our beds, even if we don’t have beds, just hot, musty cushions and the bodies of others.
“I’m hungry,” Maria whispers.
“Ask Mrs. G for a Nutter Butter.”
“Uh-uh, no more of those. I’m watching my figure.”
“I’ll watch it for you. So will Fikus.”
She smacks me on the arm, then looks down at her nails. They’re a mess of chipped glitter polish and jagged edges. Her hands are smooth on top, callused on bottom. They feel so nice that way, rubbing my back at night to get rid of the day knots. I pull her wrist up to my lips and kiss her veins.
“If you leave me for your text girl, I’ll kill myself.” She takes her wrist back and draws a nail across the underside. “Just like that.”
“You would never,” I say.
“What do I have to live for, huh?” Maria gives me a crooked smile. “This job? Fuck this fucking job.”
Like me, Maria is a “milker/general laborer/herdsman.” That’s what it says on our checks, anyway. “Sexist much?” she says, come payday. We’re all milkers/general laborers/herdspeople, except for Mr. Aguilar, who’s a “herd manager,” and a lot of the youngest workers who feed the beasts and sneak out as much as they can to smoke. No smoking for me and Maria. When the first milking’s over, she and Basketball Juan and I lead the cows out of the parlor and into the pasture to make sure they all get enough to eat before the next round. Then we inspect every single fucking teat for cuts and sores and signs of irritation, sometimes by squinting, other times with touch. The teats feel like deflated whoopee cushions.
We all love the cows. Love them as much as we hate them. On weekends, we eat pig. Pork rinds, bacon, chorizo. To celebrate our fourteen-hour paycheck I brought home steaks and Maria said, “Take them back. My God, I can’t eat Bessie.”
“I should go back to stripping,” Maria says now. “Anything is better than this.”
Behind us, Ulises amens. “Jesus Christ I hate this place.” Then he crosses himself. “Please forgive me, Lord. I am a sinner. I know not what I say.”
At the entrance to the dairy are life-size metal cows that in the morning dark look almost like the real thing. There are three of them and we’ve named them after the members of the Yoder family—the big boss man, Helman; his wife, Birdy; and their wannabe trans son, Wally. Cow Helman has long horns and a raised tail. Cow Birdy is fat and docile looking. There are silver flecks on her rump where the paint’s worn off. Cow Wally is small. His head is on the ground like he’s getting ready to charge. A few of the guys put a dress on Cow Wally a couple months back. A dress and a bright pink wig. Everyone thought it was pretty funny, everyone but Maria, who, the first chance she got, ripped the dress and the wig off Cow Wally and burned both in a barrel behind the apartments. Then she gave the presumed guilty parties—Ulises and Julio R.—a talking-to, called them bullies and bastards and worse. She made me swear I had nothing to do with it—I didn’t—and promise that if the like ever happened again I would kick the ass of whoever was responsible for such a cowardly and dickless prank. “As if the poor kid doesn’t have it hard enough,” Maria likes to say. “The kid is fucked.” She’s right. So I leave Cow Wally alone. I leave Human Wally alone, too, but I’m not above taking a pee break on Cow Birdy’s back right hoof when no one’s looking.
“Morning, Wally,” Maria says to the statue version. “Let’s make it a good day.”
The gravel drive up to the barn is pitted and Fikus hits every hole. The manure smell grows overwhelming. I reach out and palm the cool bus window and my phone buzzes one more time.
“Your poor mother,” Maria says, angling away from me. “I’ll have to send her a get-well card.”
The text reads, Bringing reinforcements. B ready.
My editor and I made an agreement with the authorities. I would go undercover, wear a wire, get the scoop, and gather evidence, foolproof, bulletproof, do what the cops had been unable to do themselves, and in return they would offer every worker amnesty, even Basketball Juan, who’s slow and might be a danger to himself. American citizenship.
“No ICE,” I’d told the cop. Randy. That’s it. Randy.
“Cool,” he’d said.
What did he mean by reinforcements? And even if everyone gets to stay, they’ll be jobless and it will be all my fault. Where will they work then? How will they live? They won’t go back home. I know that much. They’ll stay and rot next to the Ranasack like the washed-up carcasses of fish, of frogs, of puppies that have lost their way.
And they’ll hate me for a while. They’ll sit in the plastic chairs where I used to sit, drink the same swill beer I used to drink with them, and say, Ramon. Fucking Ramon. Did you know his name was really Gordy? What kind of name is that? They’ll keep it down in front of Maria but still they’ll curse me, toss out the T-shirt I left behind. Rip up my picture. They’ll forget me like they’ve forgotten what it was like to live near the ocean where they grew up. They’ll say, The ocean? What was that? We’ll never see that again.
I will. I’ll see it. I’ll take the award money—my piece will impress the hell out of people who read such things—and buy a ticket to Cancún. That’s the big difference between me and Basketball Juan, between me and Maria and Ulises and Mrs. G. A plane ticket. A credit card. The option. I’ll hate Cancún, all bikinis and beer bongs. I’ll pick it as penance. I’ll drink the water.
But for now, I’m one of them. For now, I’m we and they’re me and there’s the bus ride coming to an end and Maria’s head on my shoulder.
“Ramon,” she whispers to me as we pull up in front of the barn where the lights blink on, an almost hello. “I think we should end this. You know, see other people.”
I jerk to attention, alarmed, then Maria kisses my jaw and laughs. Her teeth are smeared with lipstick but she’s still the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
“Just kidding.” She kisses me again, on the lips this time. Lingering. “April Fool’s.” Her fingernails trickle down my face and she shakes her head like, Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.
Copyright © 2017 by Deborah E. Kennedy
