The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (17 page)

Po Boy was in the water paddling out before any of us had our boards off the car. We were hesitant, not knowing what the bottom was like or what else was going to be in the water with us. But soon we were all in the water doing what we did best—surfing. We were taking off on the largest waves we had ever seen and riding them like we did it every day. The bottom was large, smooth river stones that did not hurt your feet. It was funny, but as you rode into the shorebreak, the water rushing back out from the beach would clank the stones together, making it sound as if there were an audience clapping. All of us rode some pretty fantastic waves, but we all got blasted at one time or another. Like the set that came just before sunset which closed out the entire bay. It kept building on the uneven horizon. I was so scared, my heart almost popped out of my mouth. Perry had lost his board trying to roll under one of the first waves to break. Jay was way inside when the set hit. So it was just Po Boy and myself. I was farther out than he was, but he was not scared, rather he had never seemed to be having such a great time. The huge waves made him come alive. I looked down the face of one smoking giant that I just barely made it over and saw Po Boy bail off his board and body surf the drop, shouting at the top of his lungs.

The explosion after the wave broke was tremendous, somewhat like a waterfall. I didn't think I would see Po Boy alive again, but there he was in almost the same position on the next wave yelling his head off. He amazed me. It was a Po Boy that I had never before seen. …

It had been pretty late when we arrived, so we only got to surf about two hours before darkness overtook our magical bay with the perfect wave. We were exhausted after the short time of surfing with so much adrenalin flowing. We built a fire of driftwood on the beach and warmed up some tortillas and beans and drank some warm Cokes. We fell asleep under a sky that was not competing with electricity to show us its charms. We were definitely
smug in the knowledge that we had searched out and found what for us was a perfect wave.

The next morning I awoke to find my sleeping bag completely wet. The fog was in. And it was a thick fog. A slight movement was blowing in from the ocean, pushing small droplets of water past my face. Perry and Jay were still asleep. Po Boy was not in his sleeping bag. I arose, stretched, put on my Levis and sweatshirt, and walked over to the bushes. I came back and cut some kindling to start a fire. The newspaper was damp but finally I got some small flames going. I fed the flames some larger pieces of driftwood and soon had a fire. I boiled water for coffee. Jay and Perry awoke separately, used the facilities shall we say, and then took coffee with me.

“Where's Po Boy?” asked Jay.

“His board's gone, so I guess he's out there surfing,” I said.

“He's nuts.”

“I don't know if it's balls or lack of brains.”

We warmed some tortillas on the fire. Jay spread peanut butter and jelly on his and then rolled them like they were big cigarettes. Perry and I put butter on ours. We drank our coffee in the stillness of early morning fog. All we could hear was the roar of crashing waves. It was strange that the water was so close yet you could not see it, but only hear waves breaking. After a while Perry walked to the water and started yelling for Po Boy.

As it became later we could see that the fog was hugging the coast. Inland it was bright and clear, on its way to becoming hot once again. Yet the fog still clung to the ocean so that we could not see the waves or Po Boy. We all wanted to go. We loaded the car. Perry started the engine thinking that Po could hear it and he would come in. Perry honked the horn over and over. We walked to the water's edge and shouted again and again. Evidently he could not hear us. It wasn't like Po to completely disregard us. We walked up and down the beach looking for his surfboard. No sign. We were all thinking the same thing but no one would bring it up. If only the fog would lift. But it wouldn't.

Luis J. Rodríguez

Second Prize: Short Story

“Ayyyyy.”

A man's voice, then the tumbling of a body like a sack of potatoes down a flight of stairs.

“Pinche cabrón, hijo de la …”

A woman's voice.

“
¡Borracho!
Get out of my house!”

Next door to the disturbance, Rosalba tossed and turned on a squeaky bed, her fragile mirror of dreams smashed into fragments.

“You dog! Get out of here!” the woman's shrieks continued outside the bedroom window, a raspy stammering over the curses.

“But,
muñeca
,” the man slurred. “Give me a chance,
querida
. Let me in,
por favor
.”

“This house is not for
sin vergüenzas
like you,” the woman wailed.

A loud rustling sound pulsated through the window as the man toppled back onto a row of shrubbery. The whimpers of small children behind a torn screen door followed the man's moans. Rosalba carefully opened her eyes. Early morning sunlight slipped into the darkened room through small holes in aluminum foil that covered the window. The foil kept the daylight out so that Rosalba's latest husband, Pete, could sleep. Rosalba turned away from the heavy figure next to her, curled up in a fetal position.

Rosalba was forty years old with flawless brown skin and a body that could be in its twenties. She had fountains of hair down to the small of her back that she had kept long ever since she was a little girl. Only now, gray strands were intertwined with the profusion of dark ones.

Pete worked the graveyard shift at a meatpacking plant near their apartment on Olympic Boulevard. He slept during the day and labored at night until he wended his way home from the stench and heat. When he got there, Pete climbed onto the mattress, propped up by cinder blocks, to the comfort of Rosalba's warm body.

As the noise outside subsided to uneasy quiet, Rosalba felt a yearning to go someplace. Any place.

She carefully emerged from under the heavy covers and grabbed a dirty pink bathrobe with loose threads hanging from the hem. She tiptoed through the room, peered backward toward the bed, then slowly opened the bedroom door to a frustrating medley of creaky hinges. Pete, the lump beneath the covers, rolled into another position then lay still.

Rosalba entered the living room and stepped over bodies stretched out on mattresses strewn across the floor. There lay her twenty-four-year-old daughter Sybil; her daughter's four children, including the oldest, nine-year-old Chila; and Sybil's no-good, always-out-of-work boyfriend, Stony.

Rosalba worked her way to the kitchen and opened a cupboard. Cockroaches scurried to darker confines. The nearly empty shelves were indifferent to calls from her nearly empty stomach. The family survived mostly on nonfat powdered milk for breakfast, tortillas and butter for lunch, and corn flakes for dinner—most of which Sybil bought with food stamps.

“This life is draining the life out of me,” Rosalba whispered, as she stared at the vacant cupboards in front of her.

Rosalba interrupted her futile search for something edible and thought about the twenty years that had passed since she first crossed the U.S. border from the inland Mexican state of Nayarit. Her daughter Sybil was five years old then; Rosalba, strong but naïve, was twenty-one.

Rosalba fled her hometown. She fled an abusive husband that her parents had coerced her to marry when she was sixteen. She fled a father who announced he would disown her if she dared to leave. Rosalba finally concluded that the suffocation there would kill her more than being without a father, husband, or even her mother, who sat off by herself, unwilling to challenge the men that eventually overwhelmed Rosalba and her mother to the point of paralysis.

With Sybil, one beaten-up valise held up with tape and rope and her fortitude, Rosalba managed to stake a ride on a creaky old bus with exhaust fumes that leaked into where the passengers sat, making them groggy. Without arrangements or connections, Rosalba exited the bus in Tijuana, near the U.S. border, crowded with women, children, and single men who also risked everything for another life.

Rosalba cried the first night in the street. In her loneliness, she thought about the rancho where she grew up, tending to goats, chickens, and a couple of horses. She thought about their house made of mud and logs, although sturdy, with an open-air dome-covered oven in the patio. She thought about the scorpions and how she had to dust off the bed sheets, how once her mom sliced her skin and sucked the poison from a scorpion bite when Rosalba was a child. She still carried the scar on her back where her mother sewed up the wound with a needle and thread.

Rosalba also remembered how as a little girl she'd take an empty bucket to the village well and fill it with water for cooking or baths. And she recalled walking barefoot along dirt paths with bundles of clothes or baskets of corn that she balanced on her head.

She remembered a time when everything as clear, everything in its place—a time aligned with the rhythms of the universe, it seemed, when she felt her mother's love and her father's protection and a deep internal throbbing to do, learn, and be.

Things changed when she got older. When she became a woman, at the start of her first blood, when she began to hunger for herself. Everything turned toward the men, the chores, and the “duties” of wife and mother. So when she fled her family, she realized, she also fled the fond memories. Rosalba stopped crying and vowed to never let these memories weaken her resolve and force her back to a place where she also felt crushed.

Along with a small child, Rosalba knew she was in danger if she stayed in Tijuana. She followed other migrants through the permeable line that separated the two countries. Eventually, borrowing rides and the kindness of
strangers, she ended up in L.A. She realized then that if she ever harbored any notions about returning to Nayarit to her family, she'd have to let them go from that point on.

Unfortunately, Rosalba endured many scary nights staying in dingy hotel rooms with other migrants, mostly women, in downtown Los Angeles. She not only didn't have a man to help but no obvious skills except what she learned on the rancho. She had to survive being cast into a peculiar universe of neon and noise. This was a place where winos and the homeless resided on the sidewalk, where women sold themselves for sex to eat or get stoned, and where people on city buses never say anything to you unless they happen to be drunk or crazy.

In the middle of this, she met Elvia, a slightly overweight but vivacious twenty-four-year-old, who also had a five-year-old child, a boy. Rosalba and Elvia became fast friends. She now had someone to share her concerns, her appetites, her hopes. Elvia was also single and fleeing a world similar to Rosalba's, although more urbanized, being from the port city of Ensenada, Baja California.

Rosalba often took care of Elvia's boy while his mother worked in a sewing establishment in the Pico-Union district west of downtown. She loved watching Sybil playing with someone her own age for a change, to know she could finally have a semblance of a child's life. Everything seemed like it would work out fine, where Rosalba could seriously consider a little bit of happiness and stability.

But this part of her life ended with a terrible tragedy—when Elvia's boy accidentally fell three stories to the ground below from an opened window while Rosalba was taking a bath in the middle of the day. Elvia, devastated, left the place and was never heard from again. Remembering these things was difficult for Rosalba, and shaking her head slowly from left to right, Rosalba focused again on the empty cupboard before her.

“
Chingao
, there was never anything to eat then either,” Rosalba grumbled to no one in particular. Even though Pete was now working, his lean check barely took care of the rent, clothing, and bus fares.

She didn't mind the adults not eating, but the children … she was prepared to starve so the children could eat.

Rosalba didn't have the same concern for Sybil or Stony. She was certain they were into drugs or other illegal activities.

Why Sybil would end up with an ex-convict like Stony was beyond her. As a child, Sybil was shy and respectful. Someone once commented on the girl's good behavior as she lay in Rosalba's arms while both sat on a slicedup seat in the smelly bus from Nayarit to Tijuana. Even during their first years in the crumbling downtown hotels, Sybil didn't cause her mother any headaches. She stayed off in a corner, entertaining herself. Sometimes the
girl lovingly caressed Rosalba's face to wake her from sleeping on the couch too long. And despite the tragedy of Elvia's boy's deadly fall, Sybil maintained a good disposition.

That didn't last too long.

By ten, Sybil complained about everything. She spent more time on the sidewalks and alleys, with other children from migrants, next to crazies and drug addicts and disheveled men. She learned to talk back to her mother and run away when she didn't feel like falling into line. At about that time, Rosalba tried to teach her about helping others by taking her daughter across the U.S.-Mexico border, carefully escorting other migrants through brush and cactus, and assisting them with their entry into city life. But this only made things worse by opening Sybil up to a world fraught with danger and interesting characters—instead of turning away from this, she relished the excitement and uncertainty.

Soon Sybil began to hang out with older guys. One, an undocumented man who already had children back in Sinaloa, got Sybil pregnant with Chila—she was sixteen, the same age her mother was when she had her. This man was later deported and disappeared from their lives. After that Sybil frequented nightclubs and dance halls. She brought home many a sorry specimen; one of them gave her the other three children she bore—only to leave for Houston with another woman.

Rosalba, who thought her daughter might have learned something from these ordeals, felt further betrayed one day when Sybil brought Stony home. At first glance, Stony seemed nice. But as soon as he smiled, his missing front teeth and beady eyes made him look ominous—like a lizard with fangs. Stony had a look that Rosalba noticed in many Chicanos recently released from the joint. He never worked, but when pushed, somehow coughed up beer money. Rosalba figured Stony sold food stamps to buy booze.