Borderlands (9 page)

They were housed in small, battered, unfurnished trailer homes set in a wide clearing deep in the grove, four men to a trailer, and they slept on the floor. They were fed from a mobile kitchen, a camper-backed pickup, that showed up twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Its rations were the same at both meals—rice and beans, flavorless white bread, bags of corn chips, ice water. They worked every day from sunup to sunset, scaling ladders to pick the fruit at the higher reaches of the trees, dropping the oranges into the canvas bag hung across their chests, descending the ladder to empty the bag into a packing box, repeating the process until the box was full, then lugging it to a truck with a long slat-sided bed and there collecting a ticket from a crew chief before emptying the box into the truck. They were paid in cash every night, forty cents for every ticket, and even after the bosses deducted expenses for shelter and food, Julio was left with more money than he could earn in a week of hard work back home. He allowed himself some money for beer and candy bars and for gambling a little in the nightly dice games, and the rest he kept in a thin roll held tight with a rubber band and tucked in the front of his underwear. Every night he fell asleep with his hand cupping the roll protectively.

As he went about his work he daydreamed of the glorious return he would make to his village of Santo Tomás one day. He recalled the promise he’d made to his wife, Consuelo, that he would come home in the spring, no later than midsummer, for sure. And perhaps he would—if he did not decide to stay in Florida a while longer and make even more money. A promise to a wife was a serious thing, he reminded himself, but subject to change, of course, with the unpredictable circumstances of a man’s life. Maybe he would be satisfied with the amount of money he would have saved by this summer, or maybe he would wish to stay a little longer and add a little more to it. Would not a man’s wife herself, his children too, be better off with every dollar more he saved? A man’s family would be proud of him for such industry. In any case, when he at last returned home he would be rich and respected and envied for miles around.

They had not been in the grove three full weeks before his sleep was shattered one night by sirens and by loudspeakers blaring in Spanish that everyone was under arrest and anyone who tried to run away would have worse trouble. Julio bolted from the trailer into the glare of encroaching headlights and spotlights of cars and trucks with blue lights flashing on their roofs. Cries of “La migra! La migra!” carried through the grove as men fled shouting in every direction. In panic he ran too, ran wildly, trying to escape the blinding lights, the crackling bullhorn voice of Legal Authority. He ran into the grove and was almost struck by a careening pickup truck that glanced off a tree. He jumped onto the rear bumper and held tight to the tailgate. The truck slued onto a narrow dirt trail and he was pulled into the bed and somehow—who could ever say how?—they escaped, five illegals of them and a single Anglo crew chief.

The chief drove through the night, and at sunrise they arrived in the farming town of Immokalee, two hundred miles south of the grove country they had fled. The chief deposited them at the Ross Hotel, a name suggesting amenities far beyond the realities of that dimly-lighted, onetime warehouse of unpainted concrete block. The place was an open dormitory for transient field workers and offered the cheapest bunks in town at three dollars a night, a private locker for a dollar more. It was even more malodorous than the trailers in the grove had been. Cockroaches skittered across the floor and the walls were covered with crude sexual drawings and profane scrawlings in English and Spanish.

“Put bars over the windows,” one man said to Julio, looking around, “and it could pass for the jail back home in Sabinas.”

III

He had now been living in the Ross for more than two months. He woke every morning before sunup and walked to the Farmers Market where the contractors with fields to be picked called out the day’s wages. As soon as he hired on he’d board the crew bus and take a seat and doze off like most of the other pickers around him. The rattling bus would usually get them to the fields just before the sun broke redly over the trees—and even before they were off the bus, the chiefs would be barking for them to get to work, goddammit, get to work.

But the narrow escape from the immigration agents’ raid on the orange grove had been a reminder of life’s ready perils and that a man had better take his pleasures when he could. He began to accompany a pair of new friends, Francisco and Diego, to a cantina called the Rosa Verde almost every night. The bar was about a mile beyond the edge of town, and sometimes they did not stagger out of the place until the early hours of the morning. And sometimes, after bidding his friends goodnight and heading back toward the Ross, he ended up sleeping in the palmetto thickets alongside the highway where he later woke shivering on the foggy ground with a hangover like an iron spike in his skull. Sometimes he awoke early enough to hurry to the Farmers Market before the crew buses left for the fields, and sometimes he missed the buses—twice last week—but was able to hitch a ride to the fields.

This morning he’d again come awake in the palmettos. He was lying huddled on his side, his clothes damp with dew, and staring into the pink eyes and long whiskered snout of a curious possum within inches of his face. He let a startled groan and the ugly thing scurried into the brush. His hangover was monstrous. With painful effort he got to his feet, clung to a papery cajeput trunk and heaved up the residue of the pickled pigfeet he’d so avidly consumed in the Rosa Verde the night before. He was repulsed by the smell of himself, the rancid taste of his tongue. The sun was already above in the trees and he knew the crew buses had long since departed the Farmers Market. He stumbled out to the shoulder of the road and started walking in the direction of the fields. Not ten minutes later a pickup stopped for him. The driver was a happy Chicano who spoke execrable Spanish and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the rock song on the radio. He gave Julio an appraising look and grinned and shook his head. “Bunked in the Palmetto Hotel, eh?” he said in English. “Rough, man.” Julio didn’t understand, and so smiled and shrugged. The Chicano laughed and turned up the radio.

He got out at a crossroads and thanked the driver for the ride and from there hiked another two miles to the tomato fields. The day was cloudless, the broad sky almost achingly blue, the sun already hot on his shoulders. A hawk circled over a cattle pasture and a flock of egrets rose on slow-beating white wings and banked away over the pines. The crew buses were parked in the shade of the roadside trees, their drivers napping or leafing through comic books and nudie magazines. When the black crew chief named Gene saw him heading for the stack of empty baskets by the loading truck, he stalked toward him, yelling, “
You
there! You fulla shit you think you come out here and work any goddam time you feel like.
You!
I’m talkin to
you
, goddammit!”

Julio stood with a basket in his hands and stared without expression at Gene’s yelling, contorted face. He didn’t need to understand the man’s words to know what he was saying. But he knew he would work. All week the order had been for red ripes and the chiefs needed every picker they could get.

“Goddammit, this be the lass mothafucken time, you unnerstan? The
lass
!” The chief gestured angrily toward an empty picking row. “Go-head on, get you sorry ass to work.”

The moment he settled onto his knees and started picking, he knew the day would be a mean one. It was not yet midmorning and already the sun was burning into his back and scalp. His blue Kansas City baseball cap was back in his locker at the Ross Hotel and he would have to work the day bareheaded. He remembered a red bandanna balled in his pocket and dug it out. Although he was tempted to wear it capped over his head and tied under his chin, he didn’t do it—that was the way the field women wore them. He rolled it and banded it around his forehead. It would keep the sweat out of his eyes for a short while, until it was saturated, and then would be worthless because he could not afford to stop working every few minutes to wring it out.

Each time a picker filled a basket with tomatoes he carried it to the end of the row to be inspected by a checker; If the checker approved the load, he gave the picker a ticket worth the day’s rate for a full basket, and then he called for a toter to take the tomatoes and load them in the truck. At the end of the day, the picker turned in his tickets for their total worth in cash. Today each ticket was worth forty-five cents. Last week the call had been for green tomatoes, the hardiest kind and thus the easiest to pick, as well as to check and load. The pickers had been able to work fast and the checkers hardly glanced at the loads before issuing tickets for them, and the toters had dumped them into the truck as casually as rocks. But when the order was for red ripes everybody had to work more carefully and the process was much slower. The pickers had to be mindful to pluck only ripe fruit and the checkers had to inspect the loads closely to ensure nobody was trying to get by with hiding greens and pinks under a top layer of ripes—a deception not unknown to pickers trying to fill baskets as fast as they could. The toters had to be careful not to bruise the tomatoes in loading them in the trucks. The crew chiefs stalked up and down the field, commanding the pickers to work faster, work harder, and the pickers cursed them under their breath. The call for red ripes always put everyone in meaner temper.

The fields were sprayed nightly and Julio’s stomach churned at the smell of the oily insecticide gleaming on the fruit. Within the hour his arms would be blackened to the elbows. The air was dusty, and the broken fruit discarded along the rows was already swarming with bulbous green flies, and the pickers had to work with their mouths closed against them. He ached in every muscle. His pulse beat painfully against the back of his skull and his eyes felt too large for their sockets. The insecticide seared the cuts in his hands. Sweat was already oozing from under his headband and rolling into his eyes, and when he wiped at it with the back of his hand his eyelids were left burning. His tongue felt like an oil-caked rag.

A hundred yards away, set on a crate in the middle of the field, was a thirty-gallon water barrel covered with a wooden board. Throughout the day, the workers would go to the barrel and dipper a drink, but none of them ever drank fast enough to avoid a chief’s angry order to quit lazing and get back to work. The sight of the barrel roused Julio’s thirst like a half-mad dog, but he would not go for a drink, not yet. Not on a morning when he had started work after everyone else and before he had even picked his first basket. No, he told himself, it would be as always: he could not go for a drink until he had picked at least three baskets. It was a rule he had made for himself on his first day in the fields when he’d discovered that many of the pickers were drunkards working only for the money to buy their next bottle. They were the first to go to the water barrel every day, and few of them were ever able to work all the way through the afternoon. Any man who went for water ahead of such derelicts was ridiculed without mercy by the other pickers and deserved to choke on his shame. But Julio knew that by the time he had picked his first three baskets, all the bums would have made their first trip to the water barrel.

Everyone laughed at these bums, but kept their distance from them, too, for they all stank of something more than unwashed flesh and filthy clothes. The bums had a stink such as Julio had never before smelled on a living man, a stench of something dead, and it always made him feel a little afraid. One such wretch was working in the row to his left this morning, a sickly pale and red-eyed man whose grimace showed green teeth. Now and then Julio caught the smell of him and felt a small shiver even as bile rose hotly to his throat.

In the row to Julio’s right worked Big Momma Patterson, an enormous Negro woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, knee pads and gloves. She had been about ten yards ahead of him when he got to work, and she had since taken a full basket to the checker and started filling another, and the distance between them was now nearly fifteen yards. She was the best picker in the field today. The only one better was Sammy Bowlegs, a Miccosukee Indian who was at the moment serving sixty days in jail for setting fire to a woman’s hair in a barroom.

Julio’s hands and knees were now beginning to achieve their usual rhythm, his picking action gaining smoothness. His hands moved swiftly through the vines, grasping the tomatoes against his palms and snapping them free with a crook of the finger and a twist of the wrist, setting them quickly but gently into the basket. He pushed the basket forward and stepped up behind it on his knees. The same action again and again. When he filled his first basket and stood up, sharp pains ground into his back and his knees cracked loudly. He cursed and spat and picked up the basket and tried to swing it up to his shoulder as he usually did, but the action made him lose his balance and he sidestepped clumsily and his feet tangled in the vines and he just barely managed to drop the basket right-side up before he went sprawling. The derelict picker in the row beside him laughed and said something, and Momma Patterson looked back at him and smiled and shook her head. Gene came stomping down the row, swearing and gesticulating angrily. Julio retrieved the few spilled tomatoes and then jerked the basket up onto his hip and lugged it to the end of the row, ignoring Gene’s ranting as he did the flies raging around his head.

While working on his third basket he paused and leaned low over the vines and vomited quietly. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and was dizzy for a moment and then suddenly felt much better. Well, he thought,
that’s
done. By the time he filled the basket, the pasty drunkard in the row beside him had gone for water. Julio carried the basket to the checker, received his third ticket, retrieved an empty basket and took it back to his row, and then went to the water barrel and drank like a drowning man.