Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (9 page)

Some time around noon Nate decided he would break for lunch and we, by necessity, did the same. Carlos and I, our legs dangling into a dry concrete irrigation culvert, pulled off our gloves and unwrapped the foil around the burritos we had made that morning from the tortillas and sauce of the night before. Nothing was said for a long time, as we caught our breaths and restoked our stomachs. I was staring blankly at my gloves, lying on the dirt, when I noticed that the palms were reflecting the sun. Suddenly I focused. “What the ...” I began in English, reaching over to pick one up. The inside of the leather work gloves, the part that touched the fruit, had a dull gray gloss, the color you get when you blacken paper with pencil lead.

I held the glove up and looked quizzically at Carlos.
“What’s this stuff?”

"Pesticidas,"
he replied. I thought about that for a moment. The tree leaves were all covered with a flaky white residue. When you reached into a tree, you almost always got snowed on by a small shower of dusty white flakes. Some stoical pickers wore bandannas over their mouths, banditlike, in order to avoid breathing the stuff. But most of the others, hot enough already, resigned themselves to inhaling it. These substances, I had been told, were dropped on the orchard by airplanes on Sundays, days "when everything stinks," as they put it. Good days, I supposed, to be somewhere else.
"That's why we wear gloves,"
Carlos added.

These pesticides, I had noticed, affected more than just gloves. Among the trees you never saw things you might expect to see: bees, spiders, mosquitoes, flies, never a single bird or nest. Not even any snakes or ground animals. This was convenient, as none of these things could bother you. But, the more you thought about it, the creepier it seemed. These orchards, oases in the desert, were gardens where every thing but one was killed. They seemed half dead.

For me the afternoon began like any other: fatigue came more quickly and bags filled more slowly; my eyes didn’t focus quite as sharply as they had in the morning. But for Nate it seemed to be going worse. Turning the tractor-train too quickly, he tore two big branches off trees at the end of a row—where the ranch foreman would certainly see it. With that gaffe, his mood, bad since the morning, reached new levels of sourness.

Ismael speculated that perhaps the dog he slept with had wet the bed the night before, or that Nate had been surprised during breakfast by a worm in his chaw. Whatever the reasons, Nate’s bile was approaching intolerable levels, for when he saw Victor drop to the ground a grapefruit he was trying to empty into a crate, he started visibly. When Victor, unaware that he was being watched, playfully picked the fruit up and lobbed it into the crate behind his back, Nate exploded.

“
Pinche
Mexican! What the fuck do you think you’re doin’? Think you can just toss these things around? Huh? Do ya?”

Surprised, Victor looked back at him blankly. Nate continued, ranting and baiting Victor. “Wassa problem?” asked Victor finally, feeling he had been unfairly singled out.

“Sa problem,” said Nate, imitating the accent, “is that yer a slob! Slob! Know what that means?” The veins pulsed on his forehead. Those around stopped picking. Victor, hot and tired, did not know, but then again it wasn’t necessary to grasp Nate’s words to get his meaning. Reaching for a grapefruit off a nearby tree, Victor lobbed it high into the air. We watched it arc down into the crate with a thud. The
tractorista,
a certain candidate for a coronary, picked up his own fruit and hurled it at Victor, who successfully dodged it.

“Git outta here! I don’t wanna see you again, you sonuvabitch! You get your fuckin’ ass outta here.” Victor disappeared into the trees, later to arrive at camp two miles away, on foot.

Nate stewed and grumbled the rest of the afternoon. Everyone strove to be inconspicuous and not catch his attention, and only I failed.

“Yer his buddy, ain’tcha?” he asked, when I emptied my next bag.

“Mmm,” I replied, uninterestedly. Being white, I had thought I might escape his wrath.

“Well, remember this.” Nate spat. “All the guys we see like you, they’re either drunks or fuckups. They don’t last two weeks. This work’s for Mexicans, and it’s Mexicans know how to do it. I ain’t seen one of you guys make it yet. And if you don’t hurry the fuck up, you ain’t comin’ back tomorrow. ”

There was nothing Nate could have said to make me work faster—anger is a great motivator. But I was near my limit, and realized my days were numbered. Every night I stumbled into the house on the verge of collapse. My neck and shoulders ached dully and stung if they were touched; pulled muscles restricted the side-to-side movement of my head. My palms were so tender from squeezing clippers and grasping fruit that I had to do everything with my fingertips.

Carlos seemed to understand my desire to succeed, if only to prove a point. As insurance against Nate having the pleasure of seeing me fired, every day he slipped me a few of his yellow tickets, the kind you got for each bag of citrus picked. At first these tickets turned up anonymously, in the pockets of my jacket or the aluminum foil around my
burrito
—his way of letting me save face. Later he just handed me the damp things from his own sweaty pocket. Perhaps he felt that, through the rides I gave in the old Chevy Nova I had bought, and my contributions to the Guerrero grocery pool, accounts would be evened up. I also tried to help with food preparation, but was always rebuffed. At first I took this simply as a gesture of kindness. But one night, when I was more vehement about doing “my fair share” than usual, Carlos laid it on the line.

“
Thank you, Ted, but the food you make, we can’t eat it.”
The differences between my Tex-Mex and their cooking, apparently, were bigger than I thought. American food products, even those cooked the Mexican way, were taking a toll on the new arrivals.

Picking was interrupted countless times a day, as workers hustled off to do the American Two-Step.

The men’s desire to learn far exceeded the energy I had left to teach. But two or three nights a week, with much help from Carlos and Victor, I set up an easel and tablet on the scrubby grass outside the house and began the call of
“¡Clase! ¡Clase!”
To my never-ending surprise, almost everyone would come, sitting in a large circle in the day’s last light. I handed out pencils, paper, and pieces of cardboard to write on—though I quickly learned that the spoken word meant more to my students than the written; a good half of them were unable to write anything more than their names. Just the same, in a strange way the teaching reminded me of outdoor college classes in New England in the springtime. Real learning was going on. The more English a man knew, the better his chances of getting out of the fields and into the city, of making some real money. We started out with numbers, the English alphabet, and greetings. Those with experience had already picked up some interesting English (“How you doing, baby?” I was asked nearly every week), but even they had difficulty with subtleties of pronunciation. Our sounds of
j, th,
and
z
don’t really exist in Mexican Spanish, for example. I emphasized the practical, the familiar, but these were not always the easiest words in English.

“Orange,” I would say.

“Ornch,” thirty voices would repeat.

“Three oranges. ”

“Shree ornchess. ”

Grammar was one of the most difficult things to teach, as few had studied parts of speech and English is so irregular. Some problems simply could not be anticipated.

“Victor, tell me in English how many grandparents you have,” I said.

“I have four grandfathers,” he replied earnestly, the Spanish word for “grandfather” signifying grand
parents
when used in the plural.

Probably because they were so gratifying, I somehow found the energy for my English classes. How many other teachers are showered with Thank yous (in English, I insisted) after every class? What else that I know could mean so much to people as different from me as they?

*

The fabulous Darla Derringer writhed her seductive way over to our side of the stage, and the guys tensed. They didn’t have this kind of thing back home. Darla, very close to naked, was a real dream
gringa
: natural-looking blonde hair, big white teeth, big white breasts, and pale skin, smooth all over. Also a dream was the way she seemed so attracted to the four Mexicans seated on the red-upholstered stools, seeming to dance especially for them, her stiletto heels tapping inches from Victor’s trembling hands. Little more than a besequined G-string appeared to separate her womanhood from the yearnings of the four ... nothing, perhaps, that enough dollars wouldn’t cure.
“Tantas curvas,”
breathed Victor,
“y no tengo frenos.”
(So many curves, and I’ve got no brakes.”)

But alas, it was 2:00 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon, and the five of us constituted half the clientele of the Zebra Club, an establishment boasting “continuous dancing, round the clock.” Decked out in their weekend best—clean slacks, shiny shoes, and colorful button-down shirts—the Mexicans were the only ones in the joint who looked like they might have a little cash. Well, besides me. And Darla had just tried me and not gotten her money’s worth. Would her luck change?

Carlos pulled out his wallet. Grinding slowly his way, Darla leaned backward, spread her knees, and gave him “that famous Zebra smile,” as the voice of the emcee, speaking over the music, put it. Taking a cue from a spectator at the previous set, Carlos folded a dollar bill in half the long way and set it on its end on the stage. Turning to show us her backside, Darla wiggled and then did a back bend—not easy in those shoes. Backward on all fours, blonde mane sweeping the floor, she opened her mouth, took the bill between her lips, and struggled back up to her feet.
“Gracias, amigo,”
we saw her say.

The other three all gave Carlos a visual ribbing as she danced for him—
¡Que chingón!
What an operator! He managed to take his eyes off her for a split second to acknowledge this, and then all of us watched as she wriggled away. Then the show was over.

Over another round of expensive Budweisers, we debated whether to invest in a table dance. Twenty dollars was the minimum charge for having Darla to ourselves, and the emcee, invisible to us in his booth, was egging us on. Carlos was for it. But the others, less enchanted, had their doubts: In the back of their minds, everyone knew this was the classic way that earnings were frittered away. Was ten minutes with Darla worth four hours of picking oranges? Carlos was finally forced to finance it himself. He found the performance so exhilarating that he paid fifteen dollars more for what Darla called a “grande finale”: an energetic succession of shimmies and gyrations, of the shoulders and pelvis respectively, that had us all captivated. So captivated, in fact, that when Darla suggested champagne, there was general assent. But, feeling the responsibility of a tour guide and having been a victim of the champagne scam before, I broke in.

“
You guys, for what we’re going to pay for that champagne, we could buy more than thirty beers at the Top Hat. And there’s girls there too. ”

They paused. Darla, not needing to understand Spanish to catch the drift, glared. Now that she had finished her dancing, she looked more exposed—and chilly—than sexy. I felt like getting her a bathrobe. Carlos stood up to leave, and the others followed. One thing I really liked about Mexicans was that, when they decided something, they tended to follow through without further debate or looking back. Carlos nodded at Darla and gave a little bow—so politely one would have thought she had been his date to the prom. Out the swinging door we went, and back into the Nova.

The day had started with a movie—
The Horseman’s Last Revenge
—at Phoenix’s only Spanish-language cinema. It was a drama about an American horse breeder (played by a tall Mexican wearing glasses and a ridiculous blond wig), his loose daughter (her wardrobe consisted of halter tops and cutoffs), and an undocumented Mexican, who was their stable boy. The daughter’s lust for “a real man,” someone “hotter, more passionate” than
gringo
guys, was satisfied by the unsuspecting Mexican, who was repeatedly seduced in the hay. Rescue was at hand when the Mexican’s wife arrived on the scene, but was thwarted when the wife’s brother, outraged at finding the lovers in the hay, killed the stableboy to satisfy the family honor. My friends liked it.

The six of us had left camp, the Nova almost skimming the road, as soon as we had shaken off our hangovers enough to move. You didn’t want to spend too much time at camp on weekends. The life there—unrelenting toil, no women, separation from home and family—took a high toll of frustration. It reminded me of tales I had heard of work in the isolated oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, or in the fish-processing plants of Canada’s west coast. All week long, with every sack of oranges, the pressure grew; and on weekends it blew. Within an hour or two of the distribution of paychecks, the place was nearly empty. Those who had cars—often they were owned by groups of guys—left for town. Relatives of the carless, usually from nearby ranches, came by to pick up some more. A few small-time
coyotes,
often the
gente inmigrada,
or longtime Mexican residents, might stop by to offer a lift for a small price. The die-hard campbound, those who lacked either connections or a desire to leave the relatively safe, familiar confines of the orchard, usually scraped together enough money to send a couple of guys on a trek down the road. In half an hour they would be back, carrying overpriced cases of Hamm’s from a grower who sold it from his back shed.