All You Get Is Me (17 page)

Roar.

I’ll B there.

F.

I’m bumping along on the narrow dirt road when a black truck passes me slowly. I recognize it from the pit bull in the back. The truck slows and stops about fifty feet ahead of me diagonally, blocking my way. I stop pedaling. Brody Burk eases himself out of the driver’s side and walks around to the back of the truck. He leans up against the tailgate and watches me.

“Afternoon, miss,” he says, slightly lowering the brim of his black hat. There’s a sweat stain along the hatband. His hat is meant for winter. No one around here wears a felt hat in the summer heat. I see that he also has sweat stains in the armpits of his fancy western shirt.

I don’t respond. There’s no room for me to pass on the right and I don’t like the look on his dog’s face so I start to squeeze my bike to the left of the truck. Suddenly Brody lunges at my handlebars and hangs on. I skid to a stop. He grins at me. The dog growls.

“I wonder if I could have a moment of your time,” he says with a Texas drawl, even though he was born right here.

My heart is thundering. I watch his big hand on my handlebars, holding tight. His other hand casually twirls a toothpick in his mouth.

“Ya know, this thing your dad is doin’, this campaign to save those dirty Mexicans, I’d really hate to see someone hurt along the way, or worse . . . dead, wouldn’t you?” He says the last part slowly with the emphasis on the word “dead.” I smell alcohol on his breath.

I say nothing.

“Because, ya know, when you think about it, if those Mexicans weren’t here in the first place, well, none of this woulda happened now, would it?”

I still don’t respond. I try to force my face into something that doesn’t look as scared as I feel. He takes his hand off my handlebars and grabs onto my upper arm. I look down at his fingernails, which are clean, betraying his cowboy image. He squeezes hard and I pull back. He hangs on tighter. He’s hurting me.

“You seem like a nice girl. Maybe you could convince your dad to leave this alone. Not much point in it anyway, ain’t gonna be no farms left around here soon, and then all them criminals can head back to that shithole of a country they came from.” He lets go of my arm and touches the brim of his hat. “You think you could do that for me, sugar? You think you could talk to him? Why don’t ya try?” He winks.

I start to pedal away from him; my legs are shaking. The pit bull lunges at me, barking. I almost shriek in fear.

“You have yourself a nice day now, ya hear?” he calls after me.

I arrive at the tar pits ahead of Forest, gasping and hot and terrified. I’m completely nauseous and I’m not sure I won’t throw up right there. I drop my bike and sit down in the shade of a live oak, taking deep breaths, trying to calm myself. It’s too hot to stay onshore. I yank off my clothes and wade into the greenish cool water. It calms my hot skin. I spread my arms out and float on my back, looking up at the sky, trying to banish Brody’s leering face from my mind. A few minutes pass and I hear Forest’s car. I tread water as he turns off the noisy engine and all is still again except for the gentle sloshing of water against the muddy bank. He pulls off his clothes and leaves them in a pile next to mine. He’s wearing swim trunks that could possibly be considered retro in L.A., but around here people would point and laugh. He wades into the water and swims out to me. He immediately sees that I’m upset.

“What? You’re shaking. What happened?”

I tell him. I show him the mark on my arm, the outline of Brody’s fingers. He puts out his arms and pulls me to him and we stay like that for a while, our legs moving just enough to keep us above water.

“I have to tell you something else too,” I say.

“Tell me.” His face is inches from mine. I feel exposed. I try not to cry.

“I went to a deposition today. I had to tell them what happened that day.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Yeah. My mom’s lawyer told her and she told me. She calls you ‘that farm girl.’”

“Wait, how long have you known?”

“A while.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”

I stare at him. Could someone possibly be this cool? Could I be this lucky? I kiss him softly and pull away, studying his face. His long eyelashes are wet and it makes his eyes look bluer and greener. He has more color in his face than when he first arrived, especially on his nose and his forehead and his chin.

“Now, I have to tell you something,” he says.

“Tell me.”

“I love you.”

“How long have you known?”

“A long time.”

“Why are you telling me now?”

“Because, I need you to know.”

Being loved by someone who isn’t your parent, someone who wanders into your life and slowly comes to know you and understand you, is sort of like being reborn. You walk around knowing that under his gaze, you are lovable, desirable, interesting, funny, and beautiful. No one has ever looked at me like this before. No one has ever made me feel this way with just a few words or a glance or a touch. The whole concept of two people falling in love like in the movies or on TV has always seemed so stupid to me. I’d roll my eyes and look away. But this thing I have with Forest is much more than TV love. It feels real. I love the way I feel knowing that someone is thinking about me this way. It makes me see myself in a whole new way.

I’m too afraid to tell him I love him back. I’m afraid he’ll think that I think I should. So I don’t. But I do love him. And I know that he’ll wait patiently for it like he does everything else.

That night I can’t sleep. The cool night air never arrives and I lay on top of my quilt spread-eagle with the fan blowing on me. I can’t stop thinking about Brody. I can’t stop thinking about what Forest told me today. Everything has me stirred up and I’m scared and giddy and restless. When I got home from the tar pits, I told my dad what happened. He cursed Brody Burk and called him an ignorant bully. Then he hugged me for a while and said how sorry he was that he dragged me into all of this. I already knew that he wouldn’t back down, though; I know my dad. He doesn’t respond to threats.

I hear a car in the driveway and check my clock. It’s almost midnight. As the sound of the car comes closer, red and blue lights start to revolve around my room. I hear the jumbled static of a police radio. I jump out of bed and look out my open window. A police officer is walking up to the house. Rufus is barking at him. My dad is already on the staircase. I hear the whine of the screen door and then I hear him talking to the cop. His tone of voice changes from fear to anger. I keep watching at the window as my dad and the cop walk over to the patrol car. The cop opens the back passenger door and roughly pulls Miguel out as though he’s a criminal. He undoes his plastic handcuffs. Miguel rubs his wrists and he and my dad speak quickly to each other in Spanish. The cop goes around to the other side and gets Tomás out. Even from my window, I can tell that Tomás has been beaten. One of his eyes is almost shut and he’s bleeding from a cut on his cheek. There’s blood all over the front of his white T-shirt. The cop releases his handcuffs and my dad speaks to Tomás in Spanish. Tomás shakes his head and looks down at the ground. My dad asks the cop why he handcuffed them if they weren’t under arrest. The cop says they were involved in a bar fight and they were being “uncooperative.” My dad asks Miguel if that’s true and Miguel shakes his head no and explains something to my dad.

“He says he couldn’t understand you. He doesn’t speak English,” my dad says to the cop.

“Well, he should learn. This is the United Sates of America. We speak English here. This is a quiet place. We’d like to keep it that way. In the future, we’d appreciate it if you’d keep your workers under control.”

The cop starts to walk away but my dad has to respond.

“I’m not a goddamn slave owner. My workers are free to come and go as they please.”

The cop turns back. “Sir, if your workers are here illegally, that makes them criminals already.”

I run downstairs and get out the first-aid kit. The policeman gets back in his car and drives off in a huff. By this time Steve is up too and everyone converges in the kitchen. My dad helps Tomás to a kitchen chair and has a good look at his injuries. Steve talks to Miguel, trying to understand what happened.

“Roar, get me a wet cloth.”

I run the water till it’s hot and get a washcloth out of the hall closet. I soak it and hand it to my dad, who dabs Tomás’s cheek. Tomás winces. My dad carefully cleans the wound and opens the first-aid kit. He disinfects the cut and tapes a dressing onto it. He takes a kitchen towel and fills it with ice cubes and presses it onto Tomás’s eye. Tomás holds it there with his hand. Rufus licks Tomás’s free hand. My dad pulls up Tomás’s T-shirt. Ugly purple bruises are starting to appear along his rib cage. He touches them carefully, looking for fractures.

Steve is still talking to Miguel in Spanish and I can understand enough words and hand gestures to figure out what happened. This was no bar fight. This was a message for my dad sent by the other farmworkers, probably the same people who risked their lives alongside Tomás crossing the border into the U.S. and probably the same people who were at his side when Sylvia died. The message is “stop.”

Chapter 16

T
he heat continues on, as relentless as my dad and his lawsuit. The day after Tomás is beaten, we get calls from the local paper in Stockton, the
Sacramento Bee
, and even a left-wing Spanish newspaper that’s printed in the Mission in San Francisco. Somehow my dad has become the unofficial spokesperson for a movement that the farmworkers are reluctant to own. He’s a shepherd without a flock, a preacher without a congregation.

Our own little town is buzzing as people weigh in on the issue left and right. One thing I’ve noticed about the people around here is that everyone has an opinion. Small groups gather anywhere it’s air-conditioned on Main Street to discuss the biggest thing that’s happened around here since Skeeter “Dumb-ass” drove his pickup into the front window of the post office (the joke around town was that he thought it was a drive-through). Some people are speculating that the insurance company will settle quickly before this becomes the social justice event of the century and they end up looking like the bad guys. Other people are saying that it’ll be a cool day in hell before an illegal wins a lawsuit against a citizen. The bad guy in this story keeps changing, depending on who you ask.

Tomás is fragile. He moves around the farm gingerly. His half-closed eye makes him look unbearably sad and I wish I could hug him and kick my dad in the knee at the same time. It’s been decided that when Tomás is feeling better, he’ll leave the farm and go to Reynaldo’s vineyards to work there for a while until things in this county blow over. My dad is obviously willing to endure a lot of “I told you so” from Reynaldo to keep Tomás safe. Steve is on the fence, but he says that things have come too far to turn back. Miguel is quiet.

That afternoon, shortly after lunch, a gray haze settles over the sky. The sun shines vaguely through the cloud cover. I don’t give it much thought—we never get rain like this—but as I’m gathering up bunches of washed radishes and tying them with twist ties, I feel a big fat drop on my scalp and then several more plop onto my bare arms and my face. I look up at the sky as the rain turns from drops to sheets and becomes a full-on shower, soaking through my Indian cotton dress and turning the dusty yard to mud. Rufus looks up too, confused. Rain like this can only be thought of in biblical terms. Locusts and a drought can’t be far behind. I look around at Steve, Miguel, my dad, Tomás, scattered about the farm. They’re all standing there, looking up. My dad has his arms spread wide. I know him; he’ll consider this a sign. I dash into the house and grab my camera. This is not something I want to forget.

It rains like that for hours, washing everything clean. No one takes shelter. We must look like a farm family in a Kansas dust bowl at the end of a drought season. After days and days of unbearable heat, the rain is such a joyful and unexpected thing that everyone wants to experience it firsthand. I inhale the rich wet-earth scent, hoping to benefit from this miracle somehow. Coffee-colored puddles gather in the tractor tire ruts, and the chickens make a ruckus like they think the sky is falling.

I wish that Forest were here with me. I know that he would feel the same way about the rain as I do. I know that he would see the joy in it. He’d probably laugh as the rain splashed off his upturned face.

In the early evening, the clouds move off in giant, tumbling cotton balls and the blue sky reappears. The air is thick with humidity. It’s Steve’s turn to cook and he makes vegetarian lasagna with our summer squash and tomatoes and eggplant. While Steve cooks, Miguel and my dad load up the truck for tomorrow’s market and restaurant deliveries. Tomás can’t lift anything right now but he still insists on working.

We gather around the dinner table, our strange little family. This is Tomás’s last dinner with us for a while but none of us seems to want to mention it. We speak quietly in Spanish and English, passing salad, bread, wine, and water. Ali Farka Toure plays African blues on the stereo in the living room. Rufus lies on Tomás’s feet as though he knows what’s coming and doesn’t like it at all. He still smells like wet dog.

After dinner I do the dishes, and the kitchen empties out. My dad has a meeting with his sustainable farming group and Steve goes to meet a friend for a guitar jam session. Miguel and Tomás go to the bunkhouse. As soon as I see my dad’s taillights on the driveway I dial Forest’s cell phone. He picks up on the first ring.

“Hi.”

“Did you see the rain?” I ask.