The Guardians (8 page)

When a chava gets brought into the gang it is truly a tragic fate cast upon a female. Except in the Old Testament I had never heard of such barbarism, Su Reverencia. He did not say rape. But that is what it is. What he said was that a girl throws a pair of dice and whatever number comes up, that is the number of guys who will have sex with her that night. Some of the girls are barely thirteen years old when they join. They also have to get “jumped in,” which meant that their future “sisters” all beat la chavita up together. I walked away from the ball court and leaned against the fence. I wanted to vomit.

What kind of mother and father are at home, I kept thinking all that night, who wouldn't ask what happened to their hija when she returned home half the chava she was when she left? Beaten up and raped by
kids who told you that they were going to be your “familia” from now on. What kind of family does that?

In my English class there is una chava who is in los Palominos. She can hardly read. (They pass failing students at my school just to get rid of them, Padre Pío.) Everything comes hard to her, all the subjects, I mean. Tiny Tears already has a baby. I asked her one day if she was planning on getting married once she finished high school. She stared at me with almost a scowl, as if she resented my question. I wanted to ask if she even knew who the father was but I decided to leave her alone. Tiny Tears hardly ever speaks. But behind all the makeup I fear is a very scary girl.

Su Reverencia, at night, as usted already knows, I devote prayers to Jesse and his brother in prison and to all of los Palominos, for God's light to enter their demented souls. Even if they do not have mothers and fathers who care, I beseech God y todos los santos that they find a way to forgive themselves. Jesse likes to tell me he forgives me for being such a nerd. He says he hopes he never hears of me on the news that I only joined the Church to molest altarboys. Then he laughs that loud cackling laugh that reminds me of a hyena's.

I used to hear hyenas when we crossed over through el desierto toward California when I was un chavito. They frightened me for sure—laughing all together, somewhere in the dark, getting closer. They travel only in packs. That's how they can be so vicious—the fact that there are many of them, they can get hold of a man and just tear him to pieces. They could eat a man vivo and afterward, laugh, todos juntos.

San Pío, thank el Señor for me, por favor, for all His blessings and considerations of His imperfect servant, but most especially for sending me this boy who is a mirror to my own spiritual shortcomings.

Su servidor, undeserving as I am

REGINA

I was tilling the soil for this year's garden when Gabo showed up with someone I never saw before to lend us a hand.

His name is Jesse Arellano. He is a thin young man with a shaved head and growing a goatee like Gabo's, except that it looks drawn on with charcoal. His first facial hair, and apparently, it was also his first time working on a garden. When he started to rake I noticed on his right hand between the thumb and index finger a blue tattoo of a cross. It was crudely drawn with dots in between the lines of the cross. I've seen that cross around a long time. It means you belong to a gang. That also means I wish he wasn't the only friend my sobrino has ever brought home. But Jesse did his best to help rake up the dead leaves, pine needles, and dried mesquite that had blown in and collected in the garden during winter, so I kept silent.

Gabo was fixing the gate to our garden just like his father would have done. Just before spring we mend it and every following winter the winds yank it every which way. We needed to reinforce the fence with new chicken wire, too, to keep the cottontails out.

I've been preparing my own mulch since I first took over this place. I use compost from food scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, and bring over cow or horse manure from nearby ranchos and mix it all up as top dressing. We loaded wheelbarrows and dumped it in the garden to fertilize the sand. That's all the soil we have here up in the mesa, where what grows normally is a whole lot of cactus and creosote with no help at all.

If you are serious about your garden you start getting ready about a month before spring. That's when it begins to look like winter's gone but
isn't yet, because on any night you might get a frost that will kill everything you just put into the ground with such loving care. Loving care is what I try to bring to whatever I do—otherwise why bother? “This year I'm planting three different types of tomatoes,” I told Jesse, “because Gabo loves his tomatoes. He eats them like fruit.” Jesse stopped raking and gave me a peculiar look as if up until then he had thought tomatoes came from cans.

“Well, that is because they
are
fruta,” said Gabo, who I have noticed is becoming kind of a know-it-all as his sixteenth birthday approaches. I gave him one of my looks and he went back to his nailing. Seeing him hunched over I remembered exactly the time when Rafa taught him how to hold a hammer. Gabo was about eight years old. “It's heavy,” I said to my brother. “He's too chiquito to hold up such a heavy tool. I'll do it.” I rushed to help. My brother put his palm up, while insisting that the child draw back the hammer with two tiny hands. Concentrating, Gabo's boquita was all puckered like an old man's. And then,
bam,
he got the nail square on the head. “¡Eso!” Rafa shouted, lifting up his son in the air and swinging him around. Gabo never let go of the hammer.

All summer crop dusters will fly low, spraying pesticides on the nearby farmlands, not to mention on the workers. A neighbor here on the mesa whose house is hidden by big pines sunbathes in the nude. The crop dusters, she says, circle over her property when she's out there. I don't care what they see as long as they don't accidentally spray any poison on me, or my plants. This year I'm thinking of joining a farmers’ market and taking my pesticide-free vegetables to sell.

Miguel told me about a cooperative of indio coffee-bean growers in Oaxaca that ended up making a prosperous international business just because they couldn't afford pesticides and produced organic coffee. I hadn't thought of myself as an organic farmer until Miguel put it that way.

One day me and him drove down to El Paso again. We drove up and down the street of los coyotes. We never saw nothing. What were we going to see? The window blinds were down on the house. Doors shut. No sign or nothing to give us any clues about what to do about mi her-mano.

While we cruised around I did get to hear all of Miguel's life without asking. He just went from one subject to another on his own. It didn't even seem to matter that I was there. Miguel just likes to hear himself
talk. From organic farmers and his concerns about the environment to what he thinks about the immigration issue. He talked like he was in front of his classroom. Me, with my hands folded on my lap, I looked like the pupil. When people talk that much around me I tend to get inhibited. And irritated. It comes from living with Mamá all my life. Who put the nickel in the nickelodeon? I used to say to myself about her.

“What's wrong?” Miguel asked.

“That cat got my tongue.”

“What cat?” He smiled. My friend was teasing me but I didn't know it. Not knowing when you're being teased also comes from being alone for inordinate amounts of time.

“You know?
The
cat,” I said. “I'm not a teacher like you, with always something clever to say on the top of your tongue.”

Miguel corrected me. “On the tip of your tongue.”

“See what I mean?” I said and then I shut up for a long while.

So Miguel kept talking, telling me all about his comunidad and all that they do to clean up the environment. And maybe in an attempt to make no big deal out of it, he slipped in the fact that he was a divorced man. “Yeah, my ex-wife and kids live across the street from me,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. If I were the bold type I would have said, “Oh?” to get more information. He looked at me for a second as if he expected I might have a question. I didn't. I had a million. A million questions I didn't ask. Then he went back to talking about his community activism.

That day, after we got the new garden ready, Jesse stayed to eat. Although he is on the skinny side, he devoured his meal, as my mamá used to say about such appetites, like he was going on a long trip. After gulping down two fat brisket burritos, he had half an apple pie. He got up from the table without picking up his plate. He was walking around the house, looking at my knickknacks on shelves and windowsills, when we both lost sight of him. I found the huerquillo in my bedroom.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. I was standing right behind him and startled him, I think.

“Nothing,” he said, leaving right away, “just the bathroom.” I looked around. Nothing seemed out of place. At the school I've had money taken from my purse twice. I checked my purse. There were two dollars and change in my wallet. Just like I'd left it.

“We can shoot some hoops tomorrow, if you want,” Gabo said, looking tall next to the shabby boy as he stood up to say good-bye to his friend with an extravagant handshake.

When Jesse took off in his old Impala, I asked Gabo about the handshake, the sprouting goatees he and his friend were growing, and the boy's hand tattoo. “Do not concern yourself with Jesse,” was his only response. “He is just my friend.” He started getting ready for work. “Tía, if Jesse keeps helping us with the garden, do you think it would be all right to share some of our vegetables with him to take home to his familia? I mean, we had a lot this past year and it's not good to let food go to waste, right?”

When had we let anything go to waste? I can all the surplus produce for winter. Anything that gets by me in the refrigerator or in the fruit bowl goes into the compost. But if it's halfway edible we throw it out to the cottontails, birds, stray cats, la Tuerta, and even the naked neighbor's dogs that she lets run all over the mesa.

I said, “Yeah, whatever,” to Gabo, answering the way the students do when they think I'm just one more person in their lives who doesn't make sense. Then I decided to share my latest business plan. “I got an idea of how we could make a little extra money with our garden. We could take the vegetables to sell at a farmers’ market.”

“Ay, Tía,” Gabo said, as if all my enterprises were just my idea of fun, “whatever happened with your new pie-baking business?”

Taking a good look at him then and there, I had to admit he was not the same boy he had been six months before, when my brother left him with me. You couldn't tell right away, especially if you didn't want to, but he'd gotten older, all right. His voice was deeper. The way he dropped his shoes at night when he came home from work and plopped down on the couch—he was Rafa, all over again—there, but always somewhere else in his head. It made me long for the child who said his prayers out loud every night. The last time I had seen him do that was before his papá had gone missing. All his innocence was oozing out of him a little every day and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

As for my business plans, after the splattered pie, I said, “Baking pies is risky business.”

“Like growing vegetables out here is not?” Gabo asked, without waiting for an answer but heading toward the bathroom to shower.

At the window I could see it was pouring rain down in the valley. The
sky behind los Franklins looked like a blackboard covered with chalk scratches. Soon, those heavy clouds would be heading our way The local forecasters had predicted clear skies.