The Importance of a Piece of Paper Read online

Ramon had grabbed a heavy stainless steel soupspoon and smacked Terrazo across his cheek, cutting it. Terrazo kicked him in the ribs and cracked two as Ramon shrieked with pain. Ramon’s torn white shirt was streaked with blood, his face bruised, his eyes purple and swollen. Terrazo’s face was oozing red from the mouth, his cheek cut and neck scratched and clawed. The toaster crashed to the floor, then the enamel coffeepot. They fell back, punching recklessly, grabbing and slugging each other and holding on tight, then slugging again.

  Julia stared at the food all over the floor and, nearby, the shattered picture frames that once hung on the wall above the TV. There was one picture of her and her husband Frank when they were married. Another one of Frank and all three of the kids on the yellow backhoe he used to drive. Then another one on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the summer they went to Disneyland, taken in front of a crazy shop that sold scary masks from famous movies; another one in front of the Chinese theater across the street.

  But the photograph her eyes lingered on the longest was a large frame with seven smaller photos inserted in a circle pattern. These were the photographs taken when her boys were between the ages of ten and fifteen, when they were the closest—one photograph showed them roaming the Rio Grande riverbank all day, another earning a few dollars working in the apple orchard, and another captured them swimming in the ditch—in every picture they were smiling and laughing.

  She went to the stove, picked up the big silver pot with the red chili in it, and threw it at them. Scalded, they had no choice but to stop. She set a chair upright and whispered for them to sit, and they picked up two chairs and sat across from each other. They glared at each other.

  “This day was my day, the only thing I asked of you was to let me have one day... one day... but you couldn’t, could you, no, no, your needs always come first.”

  They could see she was trying to control her anger but it was rising in her strained voice, in the sharp edge of her words.

  “Mama,” Ramon started but she cut him off.

  “Which mama are you talking to?” She looked at him with tears streaming down her face, then screamed, “Which mama?”

  Ramon was speechless, confused.

  “The one you’re ashamed of, that your family thinks is stupid and backwards? The one you never visit because you’re too damned busy. Tonight, you betrayed me.”

  Julia turned to Terrazo, “And you, which mama am I tonight?”

  Terrazo said solemnly, “I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry.”

  “No sorries—no more,” Julia said. She heard firecrackers and gunshots and she heard herself say, “It’s the way things are. Your friends, drinking, smoking weed, laughing. You cared more about being with them than with me.” She looked at both of them. “Why? Why? Why couldn’t you let me have even a day that was mine? It was too much to ask, too much.”

  She rose, paced around the debris on the kitchen floor, and started picking stuff up. When they tried to help, she lifted her hand and said, “I’ll do it.”

  She glanced at Omar and saw him peering frightfully from the blanket she had wrapped around him on the floor. She smiled. She picked up the photo of the three of them and stared into the smiling brown faces of her children. Omar was in diapers, Terrazo in cowboy clothes, hat, and holster, Ramon in a suit. She wiped the blood off the photo, nodded to the boys to help her, and they picked up the table and set it on its feet. She took the chairs and arranged them. She placed the photo on the table and sat down.

  She retrieved her purse from the floor. She opened it, took out a leather pouch, plucked two plastic packets of hair from it, and put them on the table. “When you were born, I cut locks of your hair and carried them for good luck, all these years.” She took two more plastic packets from her purse. “These are your umbilical cords.”

  She took out a bunch of dollar bills and looked at Ramon. “Is this what you live for?” She tore the money into small pieces and threw them at him.

  Ramon said, “Mama, what are you doing?”

  She screamed, “Which mama are you referring to!” She stood in the middle of them. “The mama who worked day and night for you without ever even a thank you?”

  She turned to Terrazo. “Or the mother who took you food every weekend in jail?

  “The mother who worked extra jobs, cleaning houses and taking wash in and sewing clothes, to get you through college, Ramon?”

  Then back to Terrazo: “Or the mama who went on a date, and when she came home, you wouldn’t let her touch or kiss you good night, because you accused her of whoring around?

  “Ramon, do you remember, I went dancing one night? I smelled of a man’s cologne, you told me I had beer on my breath; you said that I was a bad woman because I didn’t stay here like a saint every night of every day of my life? One night I go dancing, and you accuse me of being a whore!”

  She looked at Terrazo. “Do you know how hard it was to go every Sunday, every Sunday on a Greyhound bus two hundred miles round-trip to get one hour of visiting with you?” Terrazo started to say something but she cried, “Say nothing!” Her eyes were dark and furious. “How many times, my little Terrazo, I sat here worrying for you. How many times did you ever help? Not once. You were too much of a man, too tough to help your mother mop the floor, clean the bathroom. Pick up your clothes. You threw everything on the floor, the couch, the bed, knowing your slave would pick it up. While you were out drinking, taking drugs, proving you were a man, getting more tattoos, going back to jail, I worked to send you money so you could have your candy bars and cigarettes.

  “And you, Ramon, old enough to cook but never once did you cook a meal for yourself. You waited until I came in from work to do it. Yes, I was a slave and a whore. And look at me now...” She was feeling light-headed.

  “It’s the Fourth of July.” She paused, looking around at the mess, and said quietly, “Leave me alone. Go to your wife and daughter. Whisper to each other about how it is unsafe here, how this is not a good place to visit. Go Ramon. And Terrazo, you go with your friends, fight, prove you are a man, do your drugs— leave me and Omar.”

  They got up, both bending down to pick up broken plates, but she cried, “Leave!”

  She went into her bedroom, put on her nightgown, brushed her hair, lotioned her face and arms, and came back out. She sat on the couch and after a while heard them leave. With the base of her palms pressed against her eyes, she wept for a long time.

  She wiped her face and walked into the kitchen. She slowly climbed up on the counter and opened a cabinet above the stove and reached way back. She never drank and this was old stuff she’d saved for years for a special occasion. The label read “Chinaco Tequila.” She uncorked it, poured herself an amount equal to four shots, and then walked over to Omar.

  “Salud mejito,” she toasted and drained all of it but a small swallow for Omar. “Here,” she said, and Omar took it and drank it, grimacing from the hot taste. She knelt beside him and asked in a soft voice, “Omar, do you want to dance? Come... let’s dance.” Omar’s eyes were darting at every firecracker sound, and to calm him, she said, “Hear the dogs howling and barking? They don’t like the noise either.”

  She helped him up. He stood there, arms hanging down, hands picking at his pants. She went to the closet in the living room, took out the old phonograph, and set it down. She turned on the porch light, and then carried a kitchen chair out to the tiny porch facing the dirt street. She carried the phonograph outside, set it on the chair, plugged it in. She took Omar by the hand and led him outside.

  She put on an old Mexican record, placing the needle on her favorite song, “La Paloma Blanca.” It started scratchy and she turned it up. She positioned him in front of her and he followed as she led and talked to him. “This is the song your father loved so much.” A few minutes later Omar’s attention was drawn to a leaf blowing across the lawn and he raced after it. Julia turned up the volume as loud as it would go and music sailed into the neighbors’ windows. She danced alone as neighbor
s came to their doors in pajamas and stood in silence watching her.

  She swung her invisible partner around, dreaming she was again in the arms of her husband who had left years ago for Mexico and never returned. Sometimes, she thought, the heart’s memories are more real than anything else. She was with the very first boy she had ever dated, Lorenzo, and he swung her, gliding her through the steps, her head tilted back, her hair falling over her shoulders and down her back. She turned, dizzied by her own fantasy, and laughed as firecracker rockets shot up, spraying red, blue, green, and gold colors across the night sky.

  Her legs no longer hurt, her knees no longer burned with arthritis, her gray hair turned black and lustrous, her waist shrunk to a size twenty-six, and the wrinkles and worry grooves on her face smoothed to a sixteen-year-old’s unblemished glow. The fireworks ceased, and the night sky filled with her Mexican music. Sparks from the dying bonfire crackled. The neighbors stood mesmerized by Julia. She did not see them or hear Omar whimper when he rolled over on his hand and twisted his pinkie, nor was she aware of dogs slavering at the chain-link fence by the road. She was her boyfriend’s sweetheart again, and she danced under the porch light and didn’t even feel her bare feet crunch on the broken beer bottle glass, leaving her bloody prints on the concrete slab with every happy dance step she took.

  The Importance of a Piece of Paper

  Adan arrived in Albuquerque very late at night. After visiting briefly with his sister Marisol and brother Pancho, the youngest of the three, he was so tired that he went to bed. A few days earlier he had called to say he had some important business to discuss with them.

  Marisol rose at five, content that they were together, and went outside to collect eggs, having decided to make their favorite breakfast. She rummaged around the sheep pens, in the chicken coop, under bushes where the Rhode Island hens liked to lay eggs, and when the wicker basket was full, she set it down and pitch-forked armfuls of hay to the sheep and horses. Then she sat down on an old willow chair under an apple tree and watched the morning sun slowly crest the Manzano peaks to the east and wondered what was on Adan’s mind.

  She walked over to the small bridge and leaned on the railing, looking into the water at her reflection. She knew she was still pretty even though she hadn’t had a boy tell her as much since her college days. Her beauty was in her distinctive contrasts; her eyes and hair were dark as crow feathers, and her almond-brown complexion was like the smooth sand in the ditch that ran by the junipers. Her voice was vibrant as a green leaf, drifting out around her as though twirling in the ditch water’s uninhibited clear current, easily riding its meandering course.

  She heard a flock of Canadian geese somewhere overhead. In the arroyo sage tree to her left, a red-tailed hawk swooped down and perched, bouncing buoyantly on the limber uppermost branch, watching the fields for a mouse. The cries of the migrating geese got louder, and then as the dawn light grew, she saw the formations of geese and mallards flying high in the sky. The light was on in the bedroom where Adan was working on legal briefs on his laptop. Pancho had gone into the barn to feed and groom his special horse, Zapata.

  They had their lives set, they were doing what they wanted, and Marisol occasionally felt a painful jolt of regret that, at twenty-eight, she still hadn’t completed her masters. A year ago she had quit her studies in the Chicano department at the university in Albuquerque when her mother died from an illness, followed by the death of her father in a gruesome car accident. She had planned on returning to her studies after her father’s funeral, but then life took her in its momentum and carried her to this point.

  At first she had only planned to stay a while and help her brother Pancho care for the farm. The farm didn’t yield much money, and with the hundred acres they had inherited and the little money their parents’ insurance had left, they barely made it month to month. They sold alfalfa, apples from the orchard, sheep from the flock, and they leased out pastures to ranchers for grazing their cattle.

  Pancho applied his energy and attention to training Zapata and spent days away from the farm, traveling hundreds of miles with friends to look at horses rumored to be good racers. Marisol also stayed on the farm because she worried Pancho’s temper would land him in serious trouble. Over time, she hoped to teach him to handle his affairs with people in a more easygoing, diplomatic manner.

  Before their parents’ deaths, he’d been married and living in a trailer with his wife and baby girl in Belen. He got it into his head that his wife, Isabel, was having an affair while he was off training horses. He went to a bar one night and beat a man nearly to death, and after it happened two more times, Isabel was so afraid of him that she left. He never got over her leaving him, even though it was proven later that she had been true to him. Now, every two or three months, he’d take off for a few days, get into some drunken brawls, and come home and be fine for another two or three months. Marisol couldn’t leave him alone to run the farm.

  Pancho still couldn’t even talk about his little girl. At the mere mention of her name, he’d spiral into a brooding mood for days. And Marisol couldn’t talk to him about what interested her—the books she had read, documentaries she’d seen on PBS, lectures from controversial writers she’d downloaded on her computer. She still held the hope that one day she’d be able to return to finish her master’s degree.

  She got up and walked back to the house. Entering through the back porch door, she placed the basket of eggs on the counter near the window, and with her right hand on the slop sink, leaned down and slipped off her dirty boots and grimy socks. She ran cold water over the soles and with a wire brush scraped off clumps of mud and manure. She threw her socks onto a pile of dirty laundry in the corner next to the washing machine. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail; she had on jeans and a red and blue plaid shirt with its tail tied in a knot at her waist. Her features were blushed red from early exertion in the cold fields. She placed her boots inside the door against the wall to dry and then went into the kitchen and turned on one of the stove burners.

  She took the coffee can from the cabinet above the kitchen sink, scooped out some coffee grains, and poured them into the coffeepot. She paused to watch Pancho cantering the black colt around in a circle on a training rope in the front yard. Pancho wore faded jeans, a rope belt and silver buckle he’d won bull riding in a local rodeo, the loose end of the belt hanging over his right leg, plaid cowboy shirt, scuffed tan cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat stained with grimy sweat lines. He was cooing to the colt, and soon its ears perked, its legs anxious to run. She admired the way he handled it, how colt and man worked in unison, the two of them becoming a single elegant creature. When Pancho looked at her, she motioned him in. Then she went to Adan’s room and told him breakfast was ready.

  After they had finished breakfast—fresh tortillas with red and green chili, eggs, and ham—all three relaxed at the kitchen table sipping coffee. Adan now set his leather briefcase on the table. Pancho straddled his chair from behind, resting his arms on the top of the chair back as his brother pulled out a manila folder and laid out the papers.

  “Here’s Mama and Papa’s will,” he said, looking every inch the successful lawyer in his blue suit, beige tie, expensive tan loafers, gold watch, and matching tie clip. “I’ve gone over it and want to talk about selling my part of the land.”

  The statement seemed to deafen Marisol and Pancho temporarily. It was as though he was speaking in a foreign language.

  Marisol slapped flecks of hay off her jeans, bit on her upper lip, walked to the stove, poured herself another cup of coffee, and then sat down again. Her large brown eyes turned to Adan. “What?” A heavy silence hung in the air like an anvil on the verge of crashing down on them. “That’s the craziest damn thing I ever heard out of you,” she said. She looked at Pancho in wide-eyed disbelief. “Can you believe this?”

  “It’s bullshit,” Pancho began. “You never really worked this farm. It’s not in your blood. Since you were young, you’ve
always been studying the books and still do. That’s your life, not this farm. So how is it you figure you’re entitled to sell land you’ve never given a shit about much less broke sweat over?” Pancho reached down and scraped dried manure off around his boot soles. He took his cowboy hat off, ran his finger back through his long black hair, scratched his scalp, and put his hat back on.

  Adan sighed and clasped his hands on the tabletop. “Don’t start bringing up our whole lives here Pancho. It’s not a personal thing, not against you or anyone, I’m just selling what’s mine in the will, what I inherited from our parents.”

  “Well, you can’t do that,” Pancho said, dangling a small length of rope over the chair and swinging it in small circles by his boots. He snapped the lasso up into his hand in one quick motion. “I need to get them horses fed and be with them the rest of the day. But before you leave, I want you to think about how this farm has been in our family more than three hundred years.” Pancho was restless; he was by nature edgy with himself and others, more comfortable by himself or with his horses most of the time.

  Adan said, “I understand that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I need the money to get my practice off the ground.” He knew it would be difficult for them to accept his decision because it had always been understood that the land was never to be sold or broken up. But he was determined to follow through. It was a matter of survival.

  “We all need money to get something done, but not at the expense of our parents’ wishes. I looked up to you for going out on your own, making it, becoming a lawyer. I used to talk you up to everyone. But lawyering has made you weak—you got no heart. You waited until Papa and Mama died to turn on them.”

  The silence between them swelled with a tension that was almost volatile. Each stood his ground, detached, until Adan, a red thread of anger in his tone, calmly said, “You want me to justify my decision to you, little brother. We haven’t been close in the last few years. Sorry that my law school took all my time, that my visits became more and more infrequent and we grew apart. But don’t ever say I stopped loving you or my family. Life took me in one direction, you in another.”