A Glass of Water Read online

  A Glass of Water

  OTHER TITLES BY JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

  PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS

  Memoir:

  A Place to Stand

  Poetry:

  Healing Earthquakes

  C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans

  Fiction:

  The Importance of a Piece of Paper

  A Glass of Water

  JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

  Copyright © 2009 Jimmy Santiago Baca

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9892-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For my kids Esai and Lucia—but expecially for my love, Stacy, who helped me over the last three years while I wrote this book, helped me emotionally and spiritually and made the time for me to write. Also, to my friend Marcos, who worked in the fields in Yuma and gave me the title for the novel, who told me a glass of water is the most important thing to a field-worker. Thank you.

  A Glass of Water

  Part One

  1

  Everyone is gathered in the camp compound around a bonfire to drink and eat and remember my life. I feel their boots above me shifting dirt, the air groan with the aroma of barbecued goat. I hear the field-workers blow their noses, cough, and spit out leaf dust, and as the afternoon wears on a dozen or so get drunk and weep over memories of me on stage and how I expressed their sorrow or joy in my songs. Others start fistfights because their memories of my singing scorches their reason. The quiet, humble ones pass out on the dirt.

  In each heart, to every one of them, I remain a green-feathered parrot in a golden cage of memory, but when I was living each day was a smattering of eggshell fragments smeared with predator’s saliva. La Muerte, or Death, prowled the margins of my days, peering out from bounty hunter eyes, INS patrols, vigilante groups, and ICE and border patrol agents.

  But I was determined to dance for my oppressed people; my heart urged and so I did. I was an eagle, hatched to fly where I wanted, a woman on a journey who arrived a thousand times to blunt the blade of cruelty, to scald her eyes with anger’s fire because she could not accept the sorrow of life, was unprepared to hear children’s voices in the soft evening breeze speak of slaughters carried out by soldiers along the New Mexico border.

  Now, as I listen to the mourners, lowering their eyes as they mention my name, smelling of beer, cigarette smoke, and sweat, truck keys jangling from rings at their belt loops, I realize they knew me quite well.

  I want to tell them something but I have seeped in under alley stones and dirt to blood’s birthplace, and my language is the molten core where fire and matter merge to create the music of minerals that become earth, and if you look at the hills and mountains and fields, you gaze at me, I am near you, next to you, beneath, above, and beside you.

  I hear one man saying, “She was a better singer than Chavela, Lola Beltrán, or Amalia Mendoza but things don’t work out sometimes; why a man would cut her throat, silence her—dear, dear God.”

  2

  Thirst was on me my first step in the field, it churned in my stomach, cried in every muscle, demanding water. Thirst was master.

  I sometimes hallucinated leaf dew was a gourd of water—my fingers, shoulders, and neck lost their aching and time seemed to get lost somewhere, to float around and around over the fields like a bird that had nothing to do as sweat dripped down my back and brow, and everything seemed to loft in the air when the illusions came. You couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t taste anything, couldn’t see anything, and you had no clue where you were; you were put in a place where no one else was, you were all alone and you were happy and pleased and you finally thought you had reached the paradise you had been working for all these days, working all your life for this place and it finally came to you in this muddy field with fleas and flies and wasps and all sorts of flying bugs biting and itching at you. Here it came, landing on your drenched T-shirt and shading your eyes for a moment, an eternal moment, and whisking you off. Every nerve had a calmness you never experienced, you had never even realized such peace existed because no one had ever told you about it, no book or Bible ever preached a place like this that came to you when you were at your lowest ebb and you couldn’t take anymore and you couldn’t believe in anything else.

  I knew it wasn’t real but I couldn’t help but look and stare and lick my lips at the mirage fading into shimmering heat waves and I’d keep on bending and picking as thirst nested under my tongue, becoming a deep hungering darkness that ground itself into my bones and brain and gave me no rest or mercy, a thirst that made me believe I was the worst-off human being in the world. That kind of thirst, that kind of despair came over me and never let me go. I became its prisoner and I belonged to it forever. It owned every part of my life, it claimed me completely.

  And that was how I lived. I worked my life around it, made my dreams around thirst, decided on plans around thirst, always kept it in front of my eyes and in my mind. I never once got up and didn’t have to think about thirst, never once did I look out over the horizon or at the sky and not think about thirst, and no matter how many glasses of water I gulped down, it seemed to grow and it became larger and wanting more, always wanting more.

  But when that man cut my throat I never had a thirst so fierce, a thirst for life as mine was being drained. I would have drunk urine or vomit at that moment, my mouth contorting for one more drop of life, death inching and edging its way on me, shriveling in every pore and sucking my soul out, my raspy throat stinging like bees maddened by a poker, my tongue swelling, my lungs suffocating. And through clenched teeth, as I begged for one more second, I quenched myself on memories of my two boys back in the bar crawling around the floor under tables, me doing my sound check on the stage mic, gasping through my tears and blood, worried my baby boys might be sitting on the floor biting into a pebble as if it was candy or catching hands under dresses, and my beautiful husband waiting on me to return. I tell you, never a thirst so fierce as wanting one more second of life with my family.

  3

  January 2006

  Casimiro was burning brush and tumbleweeds. The night sky twinkled with stars and the red-hot moon was slowly fading. He raked and scooped up embers in his shovel, glanced at his watch—it was a little after 5:00 a.m. He stepped near the heat and the crackle of the flames pleased him. Within the hour he finished scorching the northeast corner of one field and started banking smoky mounds of burning ash.

  He privately begrudged God for allowing Nopal to have been butchered so savagely. She deserved better than that. He knew the proper way of enduring Nopal’s absence was through prayer but it didn’t do much to alleviate his chronic melancholy. His Catholic faith offered little relief and the only way to tolerate her absence was working dawn to dusk.

  His stomach churned with the memory of the crime he had committed in Mexico. It was a curse that followed him, trailed his footsteps to America like a black scorpion in the dirt, a wh
ite one under the sheets, a clear one in the water basin he washed his face in every morning, a red and green one in the rows of chili he worked, and a golden one in the blistering sun on his brow, the poison of its many stings settling in his empty heart.

  The last Saturday afternoon of her life they’d varnished the floor and stained the paneling in the Pullman car they called home, Nopal humming his favorite Mexican corrido, which she had written about his coming to America when he was sixteen.

  In September 1983, in the village of Villa de Alonzo, Casimiro was given the gruesome task of pitching corpses onto carts and hauling them down to the crematorium. The village had almost been wiped out from some kind of strange virus. The work done, he put his torch to the roof timber of homes and as the flames devoured houses they shredded every aspect of his identity, reduced his previous life to a meaningless mound of smoldering ash. And it was an obvious sign: God’s message was to start his life anew, and so, invigorated with a renewed faith that better things lay beyond the horizon, he bid the remaining inhabitants adios and left.

  But that was not the only reason he left.

  He remembered his father saying, “Sometimes a man is so poor, all the pride he has is in the last cigarette he’s smoking.” And it was true. A day or so into the trip he sat on a boulder and smoked his last cigarette, feeling a little pride that he had escaped, inventing a story in his mind in case he needed to explain himself to authorities, a story to replace the real one left back in Mexico.

  And though he had tried to bury the incident in the ashes with the houses in his village, each dawn the pistol and the man’s expression when he shot him charred his mind and heart, and he could sniff the air every day and smell it, breathe it into his lungs. The crime was his burden to carry in life, carry alone until he died, keep it close to his heart and tell no one lest his two sons inherit the affliction.

  He sensed, however, that the curse had already taken what he loved most in life, his wife, Nopal.

  He coughed now as the field smoke blew his way. “What do you think, pájaros? It was my fault, is it not so?” he asked the sparrows skimming the blackened field, referring to the fact that he had saved Nopal that day, married her and had children with her, only to have her taken from him.

  The sun was coming up. He resumed tending the burn line. He appeared dreamlike—an aging, five foot six silhouette against a horizon blushed with daybreak, a shadow wearing a dirt-stained baseball cap to shade his eyes from the smoke, denim collar up around his neck and ears, waistline riding high, and khaki trouser cuffs stuffed into his oversize boots, red bandanna over his nose and mouth to keep from breathing the smoke. The bandanna was the one Nopal used to wear in her hair.

  The breeze spiraled smoke as he sifted dirt over a flash fire, dousing flash points as they materialized. Now and then he blew on a twig to get a flame, carrying it lit to redirect and control the fire line’s widening circle.

  Nearby, prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets bolted across his line of vision, panicked quails chirped excitedly, rattlesnakes melted, scorpions and tarantulas squirmed to cinders, and coyotes howled beyond in the semidark.

  He heard a hiss, a squeal, and a rack-tack sound which he believed was a spirit, humoring itself at his expense. He watched as the spirit twitched its windy tail, teasing smoke to flurry around him and knock his hat off, gusting ember clouds and ash dust that choked him, and he jaunted off, slapping his chest.

  He took a water bottle from his coat pocket and gulped, snorting phlegm out through his nostrils and spitting until his saliva was clean and he could swallow.

  He watched the wind spirit skim ground as weeds huffed up and danced back and forth on the breeze. After a bit he worked the charred ground again, shoveling dirt to douse small fires that had rekindled over the boundaries, and watched as hundreds of tiny flames flashed then dwindled.

  He was thirty-nine. He had been in America twenty-three years but it seemed like he had arrived only yesterday. Leaning on his shovel, mesmerized by hundreds of lit embers, he retreated into memory.

  I am standing in the desert, looking around, expecting something to happen, it is very strange and confusing to me.

  I walk most of the time at night but I decide to walk even though it is daytime. Soon I see an object in the distance. I turn in its direction, thinking hopefully there might even be a person and it would be refreshing because it has been weeks since I talked, except to myself, to the coyotes and lizards I see along the way, or to God when I pray.

  I hurry to reach it so I can rest under some shade—the heat is unbearable but I vow to get in another ten miles after a brief siesta. What is it, out in the middle of nowhere? A plane crash? An old miner’s shack? Maybe God will tell me the purpose of sparing me. Maybe God will work His will through me.

  I am finally in front of a truck. I smell the foulest odor I have ever smelled and I want to get as far away from it and keep running until I turn back and see nothing but open desert.

  I call out for God to help me and I hear a single little voice and I think it’s my imagination. God’s voice sounds strange. I hear it again, weaker.

  I say out loud, “Now, is this really happening, are you people really people? Can you hear me, are you really there? I am here and the sun is above and the air is still and I walked here a little while ago.”

  I take a rock, break the lock, and push the big door, and as it goes back sunlight floods the dark space. There is chicken wire blocking access into the back part of the truck. I try to move it, handling it roughly, and swing the screen away. There is another barricade of plywood and cardboard siding. I shove the barrier aside and the smell is unbearable.

  I fall to my knees, praying as fast as I can for God to know that I was not involved in this crime. I weep. I want the poor victims to know I am here. I want them to hear me and my crying grows louder into groaning and through my tears and groans I shout prayers, yelling words like a madman, turning around on my knees in circles, until the voice comes again.

  It takes away my breath. I am lightheaded and am going to fall over, feeling I might pass out, thinking I am lost in another kind of reality and, looking around, I beg the angels to protect my soul.

  I hear the voice, a woman’s voice.

  My mind has gone blank and I can’t think of what to do because it is so overwhelming. Maybe I got hit over the head, maybe I am having a nightmare. I am really asleep and I need to wake up and get on the road but I’m too exhausted to raise myself.

  I can’t come up with an answer and it scares me and I try to tell myself not to be scared, that there is an answer for everything that happens. I am trying to move, trying to speak, trying to do something, to move an inch with my feet or raise my arm, maybe, to motion in the air, but I can’t do anything.

  I pray to God to help me decide what to do next and little by little I start to move. First my feet and hands, then I turn my head and see bodies tangled on top of bodies twisted and bloated, piles of rotting bodies, all tied together with rope, shirts crawling with maggots, drenched in slimy intestines, mucus, and body fluids, straw hats, neck medals, and rosaries still clutched by dead fingers, gunnysack belongings strapped on backs infested with flies and insects.

  My body has seized up, petrified where I am standing, but in a panic, with great effort, I slowly pry one foot up, then step forward until I grip the ledge of the truck bed, squinting intently at the dark in the back, searching for God’s voice and I find her.

  4

  February 1984

  He found her—thin, hair falling out, shoulder bones and ribs gaunt. For the first two weeks he had to help her walk and eat. She quivered and trembled but eventually she put on weight and regained her vitality. She was a stunning woman.

  They cut prairie grass to sleep on alongside the Rio Grande under cottonwoods and willows, shared the fish and rabbits they caught with others going north—Juanito, to Iowa to the Tyson chicken factory; Benito, to California wine country; Maria, to North Carolina t
obacco and soy fields; Chaco, to New York to wait tables, cook, and wash dishes.

  They had been traveling slowly but surely north when one afternoon, against the horizon, a huge, monstrous snarling machine came at them. It grunted, magnifying in growling size as it neared, guttering dust, diesel oil, and exhaust smoke. They froze.

  It was going to run them over, tires almost on them, when suddenly the driver geared down and the earthmover coughed soot as it crunched to a stop. They were dwarfed by the tires the height of a two-story house and because they had heard no manmade sounds for so long the machine’s idling, shaking the earth beneath their feet, was all the more terrifying.

  A man in goggles leaned out of the cab and yelled, “What’re you doing out here?” He sized them up, then instructed, “Keep walking that way, you’ll run into my place. Wait for me.”

  The man shifted gears and drove off with a ponderous explosion of dirt that settled for minutes in its wake. The engine roared the air until it vanished and then, as they walked, waves of silence hummed over them.

  Late that afternoon Miller hired them on a temporary basis to cut the weeds around his house, weeds so tall a horse could stand in them and not be seen by an observer.

  Casimiro was resourceful and Nopal ingenious as they renovated Miller’s place. They tacked on roof shingles, installed a sturdy wraparound porch railing, planted apple and pear trees, yanked out old piñon posts and dug new holes, stretched a mile of good fencing, finished off his garage, welded an entrance gate, and laid stone along the edge of the blacktop driveway leading up to Miller’s imported English front door, which was embossed with a coat of arms and family initials.

  The day Casimiro and Nopal showed up, Miller had fired four Anglos who, combined, couldn’t do the work of one Nopal. The couple did the work of five good men and Miller paid them what only one would charge. He was impressed and kept them on.