Dark Water (2 page)

On Friday after school, I decided to ask Hoyt if he ever hired guys from the street corner. I found him standing in his driveway, shaking his head in frustration while Esteban talked in Spanish on a cell phone. Esteban kept saying the same phrases over and over again, and I didn’t know what they meant, but I could tell he was calming somebody down.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Hoyt when Esteban had gone away.

“They’ve deported one of my guys.”

“How did they get him?”

It was a mystery to me how the border patrol made decisions. There were lots of day-labor pickup points like the
corner where I’d seen Amiel, and those places didn’t change much, so you’d think agents would know right where to go.

“He was at the grocery store,” Hoyt said.

“Does that happen a lot?”

“It didn’t used to,” Hoyt said.

“What will happen now?”

“We’ll get the money together to help him cross again, which means about four thousand dollars, or he’ll give up and go home.”

“So …,” I said, stalling until I could think of the right words. “Do you need any help in the meantime?”

“Why? Can you prune avocados?”

“Well, maybe, but I was thinking of someone you could hire.”

“Who?”

I didn’t know Amiel’s name yet, and I fumbled for a way to make a juggling mime sound employable. “This guy I saw at the corner of Stage Coach. You know, where they gather when they want work.”

Hoyt looked amused. “What, is he handsome?”

“No. I mean, that’s not why.” I told Hoyt about the mime routine and the headstand. “He just seemed unusual is all. And I feel sorry for those guys. They have it the worst, don’t they?”

“They’re probably bad workers or they drink too much. If they were good workers,” Hoyt said, “their friends and relatives would recommend them and they’d have jobs.”

“What if you don’t have any friends or relatives here?”

“They all do, Pearl.”

“But how? Somebody has to be first, right?”

Hoyt just looked at me. “Technically, yeah. But everyone I hire is recommended by a cousin, a brother, an uncle, or a friend. It works better that way.”

It reminded me of the riddles my dad used to ask me at dinner:

What can you catch but not throw?

A cold.

What goes around the world but stays in the corner?

A stamp.

If nobody knows you, how do you ever get a job?

To this I had no answer.

S
ometimes on Saturdays, if Hoyt had errands to run in town, he’d talk Robby and me into going with him in exchange for a donut, and that’s what he did the next morning.

It was late spring, meaning April, and the look of everything just about made you happy even if your father was a louse. The wild grass that had sprouted after the winter rains (my favorite two months of the whole year) had not yet turned to evil poky foxtails that drill into your socks and shoelaces. Most of the hills were a heartbreaking velvety green, and the others, where fruit trees had been stumped and painted white, looked like brown quilts knotted with white yarn.

I would have gone with Hoyt even if no donuts were involved. I loved riding in his truck because it was an old Ford with bench seats. It smelled like dirt, coffee, grease, and the scratchy wool Indian blanket that covered the front seat.
Robby and I called it the Ford Packrat because the foot wells were filled with irrigation tubing, receipts dating to 1985, hamburger wrappers, and rusty iron tools. We had plans to market something called the Ford Packrat XC80 if Robby pursued his planned career in industrial design.

My cousin Robby no longer speaks to me and is living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starting his second year at MIT.

On the day in question, though, that beautiful, green-grass day, I sat in the middle and angled my knees toward Robby. Robby at sixteen was tall and ethereal-looking, like his mother, my aunt Agnès, pronounced
Aun-yez
, not the American way. She was born and raised in France, a point of superiority to her way of thinking that made it hard for all of us, except Robby and Hoyt, to do anything but tolerate her. Robby played the clarinet and scored outrageously high on college tests and ran track and collected these cute but obscure figurines no one in America had ever heard of, which depicted the comic-book adventures of a bald-headed kid named Tintin and his white terrier, Snowy. I scored pretty high in English because, thanks to my mom, I read all the time, but Robby was the acknowledged genius in our family.

First we drove to Miller Pipe and hung around while my uncle picked out whatever pipe fittings he needed for the grove, and then we rode in all that sunshine to the Donut Palace, a tiny store lacquered in yellow Formica that was owned and ferociously sanitized by a Taiwanese family. I always got a chocolate-glazed, Robby always got a jelly-filled, and Uncle Hoyt always got a sugar twist. Hoyt could take or
leave the sugar twist, to be honest, but he hated to go anywhere by himself.

I was still nibbling on my chocolate-glazed when we rolled up to the four-way stop at Alvarado and Stage Coach, and Amiel was in his usual spot, juggling nothing and looking depressed. “That’s him!” I told my uncle. “The mime I told you about!”

“Keep driving,” Robby said with his usual semi-irritating authority. “We should close the borders to all mimes. And clowns. And folk dancers.”

Amiel, so graceful and brown and lean, was wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans, so he didn’t exactly have that I’m-a-mime look about him. To my surprise, Hoyt slowly swung the Packrat onto the dirt. Five men swarmed the truck right away, clapping their chests, gripping the doors, and shouting in English and Spanish until you hated yourself. They called Hoyt “Señor” and “Mister.”

“
Uno momentito,
” Hoyt said to the workers, his stock phrase, and I looked kind of desperately at Amiel, hoping he’d somehow impress my uncle.

“That one,” I said.

Amiel saw me, so he pointed to himself with an extra-long, extra-expressive finger. He raised one eyebrow. He looked in an exaggerated way behind him.

“Oh my God,” Robby said. “If he gets into a box, I’m going to shoot myself.”

The mime walked slowly toward the pickup, which was angled so that he was approaching Robby’s side. Hoyt patted Robby’s knee and said, “Roll down your window, Rob.”

It was that kind of truck, where you had to roll, so Robby did, but very slowly. “This is not worth a donut,” he muttered.

“You know how to use a chain saw?” my uncle called out Robby’s window at Amiel.

All the other men were still holding Hoyt’s door like they were in deep water and we were a boat. “
¡Sí!
Chain saw!” they said, but Hoyt was still looking out Robby’s window at the boy who was now six inches from me.

He was slender to the point of bony, with a smooth, narrow, mournful face. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown than his skin, like gold sand in a river bottom, and his nose might have seemed large if his eyes hadn’t been so arresting. In contrast to his straightness and tautness, his hair seemed uncontrollably curly.

Amiel held one hand in the shape of a
C
, a gesture I later learned was his gesture for “
sí.
” He strapped an imaginary pair of goggles over his creek-glitter eyes. He pulled on an imaginary cord and started up an imaginary chain saw. He shuddered and appeared unable to control the weight of it, then nodded to himself and smiled at us before starting to cut through an invisible tree limb. He stopped the chain saw and picked up the imaginary log and presented it to us.

Uncle Hoyt laughed. Robby groaned. The other men, the ones at Hoyt’s window, made disgusted noises and looked angry enough that I knew things would be worse for Amiel if Hoyt just drove away.

But he didn’t. “What the hell. Hop in!” Hoyt said, then he nodded at the oldest man hanging around his door handle, a
guy who couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall under his black cowboy hat, and said, “You too, señor.” I felt extremely happy and was full of affection for my uncle. I just knew he wouldn’t be sorry.

The very small old man and Amiel climbed into the narrow backseat.

“What’s your name?” Hoyt asked.

The tiny vaquero said he was called Gallo, and Amiel handed us a not entirely clean business card that said
AMIEL DE LA CRUZ GUERRERO. HARD WORKER
.

“Are you deaf?” Hoyt asked him, returning the card to Amiel.

Amiel shook his head and pointed to his throat.

“Well,
mucho gusto!
” Hoyt said, another of his stock Spanish phrases, and Robby looked like he was figuring out how fast he would have to roll if he jumped out of a truck going thirty miles per hour.

“Where are you from?” Hoyt practically shouted in Spanish to the old vaquero in the back. The truck was loud with the windows down, sunshine and wind whipping us all, the motor roaring. But it wasn’t just that. Uncle Hoyt, like just about everyone else, spoke louder in a foreign language, and I think he still thought Amiel was deaf. Bougainvillea flew by.

“Acapulco,” the old man said beautifully, like it was the name of a love song.

“This is my son, Roberto,” my uncle announced real slow and loud, and Robby shrank into the door. “I’m Hoyt, okay?”
he went on. Then he added, “This pretty señorita here is my niece, Pearl!”

“You daughter?” the old one asked in English.

“
Sobrina,
” Hoyt said.

“
Sí,
” the vaquero said. “
Sí. Sobrina.
”

By this time we were crossing the freeway to Rainbow, population 2,026, elevation 1,043. Rainbow had its own elementary school, café, gas station, and fruit stand but was otherwise just a strung-out collection of ranches, packinghouses, nurseries, and farms. Huge boulders were clumped in all the hills like brown sugar that’s gone hard on you, and lilacs and oak trees grew crooked and wild in their shade.

Six months from this day, a fire would leap from east to west, from Rainbow to Fallbrook. Eight lanes is a lot of concrete for a fire to cross, and I would have told you there was no way it could ever happen. In spring, everything is so conk-you-in-the-head pretty. Painted lady butterflies kept fluttering past the windshield, the air smelled like orange blossoms, and Amiel was in the backseat. I understood exactly why people wrote musicals.

We turned and headed toward the gate that Uncle Hoyt welded in adult education classes before Robby or I was born.

“Here we are,” he said, steering us under the sign that said
LEMON DROP RANCH
in loopy iron letters. When I was little, he would always sing,
Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me
.

In Rainbow, see.

We drove under the arch, gravel popping under the tires of Hoyt’s truck as I moved into the future, where I would be Perla and Amiel would sign my name by opening the oyster shell of his two hands and extracting a small invisible pearl, his long expressive fingers turning into a nest and then a bird, undulating so that you forgot his hand was a hand at all.

M
y mother and I lived uneasily that year in my uncle’s guesthouse, the oldest structure in Rainbow. The cottage was the original homestead of a pioneer named Lavar Mulveen, who came to Rainbow in the thirties to raise olives but ended up planting alligator pears, an early, fanciful name for avocados. I hated Lavar’s rusty bathtub and dysfunctional toilet, but I liked how the porch was a big extra room, which my mom and I had fitted out with an old wicker sofa and a lamp and even a needlepoint rug that Robby and I bought at a garage sale for three dollars. Everything that reminded us of my dad we pitched: his sports memorabilia (not true that you can get a fortune for old baseball cards), his record albums, his ultra-lux leather sofa, his ultra-lux glass-and-steel office furniture, the model train layout his dad built and which was like a tiny green kingdom in our garage when I was little, complete with
creeks and forests and bridges and houses and barns. We smashed it to pieces, my mother and I. I was King Kong and she was Godzilla. In case that seems slightly hysterical, I’ll tell you how he left.

It was a Friday in January, and on this particular Friday we were expecting my father to fly home from Phoenix, where he was turning apartments into condos, something you can’t do in a farm town like Fallbrook. He’d be gone for about a month at a time, and for those weeks it was like my mom and I were roommates. We never made our beds and we didn’t keep to any kind of a schedule and we watched girl movies after I finished my homework, and then my dad flew in and we cleaned everything up and my mom cooked fancy food and it was like they were dating each other in the type of movie we liked best.

At least, I thought that’s the kind of movie it was until I came home from Greenie’s on January 12. I’d made my bed in the morning, and the night before I’d helped clean the bathrooms and iron napkins and pick popcorn bits out of the lux leather sofa. I knew my mother was making lobster Newburg and bananas Foster. I knew she’d bought a new dress at Talbots because I helped pick it out.

I came into the house, the one on Macadamia Drive with a stained glass window of a hummingbird by the front door, and I saw that my mom had left pots and pans and food all over the kitchen. “Mom?” I said.

She was sitting extra still on the couch, like taxidermy. It’s hard to describe her because a parent is so close it’s like trying to see the glasses you have on. But she was a spunky,
forty-five-year-old version of the woman in the wedding picture. She still had long blond hair and blue eyes that matched and tanned freckly skin and the sort of cheerleader nose I didn’t inherit. She wasn’t as thin as she used to be or as my father seemed to want, but she still looked nice in the linen dresses and blousy shirts she liked to wear. What was odd, at this moment, was that she was not even looking at anything. Normally, if my mother was sitting, she was reading a ten-thousand-page biography of Thomas Hardy or folding laundry. Not staring at the empty fireplace.