Dr. Brinkley's Tower (6 page)

The following afternoon, a little blue Ford automobile with a speaker mounted on its roof cruised through Corazón de la Fuente. Ears perked at the sound of Geraldo's crackling, distorted voice:
Listen up, changos, good news, tomorrow's the big day, report to the site tomorrow, good news, good news, it's all starting tomorrow, seven a.m., don't be late, tomorrow's the big day …
This went on for the better part of an hour. The Ford careered along Avenida Cinco de Mayo and Avenida Hidalgo,
around both the central plaza and the second, smaller plaza, and through the wider pathways of the ejido, causing many of its impoverished residents to believe they were being evicted.

The following morning, 127 men, a few dozen of whom actually lived in the neighbouring village of Rosita, congregated in the work field. Each wore a cowboy hat, patched Levi's, and huaraches fashioned from tire shards and lengths of old string. In short order they were given shovels, riveting gloves, and second-hand steel-toe boots. This was followed by a five-minute lecture on safety, which was translated, perhaps too concisely, by Geraldo:

— These gringos were too cheap to get you helmets, and if a beam falls on your head it'll squash like a plum. So for the love of Christ, be careful.

The assembled workers all nodded and went to work. Their efforts were directed by the sub-foreman, who, in typical gringo fashion, lacked both patience and foreign-language skills. There was excessive yelling, confusion, and swearing in both Spanish and Kickapoo, one of the Native languages spoken in northern Coahuila. Still, by nine o'clock even the most obtuse of workers had gleaned enough to know that his job was to dig one of three large craters in which the foundations of the tower would be placed. A trio of huddles formed, the backs of the men facing the depthless white sky, the rays of the sun piercing work shirts thinned by repeated washings. Owing to the dictates of machismo, the workers didn't stop often enough to drink water, such that within an hour their tongues began to swell, their lips began to crack and sting, and their skin began to show the first rubbery signs of dehydration.

At ten-thirty there came the clanging of a large metal cowbell. This puzzled the workers until it was explained that they were now allowed to break from their labours. They stood, groaning, hands on their lower backs, and proceeded to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and drink cups of real coffee provided by the building company. A second ringing indicated that their break — which couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes — had expired. Shocked, the men returned to work.

At lunch they were given ham-and-cheese sandwiches and Coca-Cola. During their afternoon break they smoked and drank coffee and complained that the muscles in their shoulders were starting to ache as badly as the muscles in their lower backs. At four o'clock the bell rang again, signifying that their workday had ended. The workers hung around for a while, looking at the immense depression they had created in the soil. They then trudged off to their homes, where repasts of bean and tortilla were already being warmed over low, smouldering fires.

The workers returned the next day, and the day after. In the middle of the fourth day of digging, the cowbell sounded at a time that was neither their lunch nor one of their breaks. The men stood and looked curiously at each other, muttering
Qué pasa?
Within minutes, Geraldo was pacing from one group to another, informing them that they were done, the holes were big enough, any further and they'd hit mud. Not knowing what to do, the workers mostly plopped themselves down on the soil and pensively smoked, those with flasks of pulque considerately passing them around. Dutiful wives, many of whom had watched all day from the sidelines, saw
the work stoppage and rushed to give their husbands quesadillas flavoured with pickled chili.

Within the hour, trucks piled with bags of concrete mix began pulling up to the site, and it now became the men's job to offload them next to the three caverns in the ground. The men worked late that day, apparently earning something that Geraldo described with the English word
overtime.
They went home past sundown, their way guided by torches. The next day the men were divided into three groups. There were those who dumped the concrete mix into wheelbarrows, there were those who mixed the heavy substance, and there were those who began filling the first of the foundation pits. Midway through the following morning, a cantilevered crane arrived on a flatbed. A group of men were borrowed from concrete duty to help offload the crane, and by mid-afternoon the workers were helping guide the first of the foundation girders into the damp concrete. By the end of the day a beam protruded diagonally from the first hole, its tip gamely tilted towards the imagined summit of the tower. For the people of Corazón de la Fuente, that single rigid beam had a symbolic value: it was the town, reaching towards the promise of the sky.

This was achieved late on a Friday afternoon. The men lined up to be paid, each receiving a packet containing as many pesos as they typically earned in a year. Around five o'clock in the afternoon an impromptu performance was given by Los Inconsolables del Norte (who had been practising and who no longer played with quite such a wheezing, anemic quality). Someone's abuela, a sturdily built little woman with eyebrows as thick as caterpillars, initiated the dancing. She
was followed by laughing children, a few off-duty Marias, and a coterie of señoras in snug, brightly patterned dresses. As always, the last to join in were the men, who looked stiff-backed and worried about scuffing their boots on the twists of discarded metal that lay about everywhere. This sparked a wholesome, familial riotousness, without any of the fistfights and pistol firings that so commonly mar Mexican festivities.

Someone started a bonfire, and a grinning local arrived with a deer that he had shot, skinned, and gutted that very week. Dinner was impaled on a spit and placed over the flames, the buck seeming to gain an expression of mildly indignant surprise. When it was cooked through, shreds of meat were sprinkled with salt and lime, wrapped in flour tortillas, and served to anyone who was hungry. Francisco and Violeta ate together, their faces reflecting the light of the fire, while everyone around them drank and laughed and danced. Soon after, children were dispatched to kitchens and cellars to fetch buckets of fermented agave punch, most of which was as potent — and about as flavourful — as nitroglycerine. Liberal servings were passed around in the traditional gourd-shaped glasses known as jícaras.

The faces of the townsfolk, caught in the low flames still warming the deer's underbelly, turned speckled and orange, like something glimpsed in dreams. Everything wavered. Children ran in excited circles, like ricocheting points of energy. Men hung arms over shoulders and sang wheezing corridos about lost love and survived battles and the luscious torment that was life in México. A pistol, and then another, came out, the owners passing them around while boasting about the damage they had caused during the revolution.
There was a surfeit of firing into the air, all of which was accompanied by pronouncements of love to the moon and the stars and the sand and every one of the women in their sad, miraculous country.

IT TOOK A WEEK AND A HALF FOR THE BASE OF DR.
Brinkley's tower to peek out of all three corners of the foundation. Yet once it did, it grew exponentially, the three sections of the structure tapering towards one another not unlike a famous tower that, the workers were told, had recently been erected in some distant European city called Paris. The more fearless of the workers — meaning the Kickapoo Natives — began earning additional wages by fitting and bolting beams, their bodies looking small and vulnerable from down below. Much of the work on the ground was now done by men with their chins pointed upwards, their round faces flushed by the restoration of their dignity.

Accordingly, the worry so firmly etched into the faces of the townspeople eased, making room for expressions of gaiety. Music, produced by accordions or wind-up Victrolas, could now be heard coming from windows in the early evenings. With full bellies, the residents took to walking the plaza after dinner, a profoundly Mexican pastime that had been
lost during the revolution, when roving bands of psychopaths were a chronic preoccupation. Carlos Hernandez's cantina was now so busy in the evenings he had to import homemade liquor from other towns to keep his customers satisfied and his pulque buckets full. The town store, which was operated by a hirsute individual named Fajardo Jiminez, did a roaring trade in tortillas, toothpaste, soap, salsa, dried cornmeal … in all of the staples that, in times of deprivation, the poor spent hours each day making for themselves. Soon the residents of Corazón de la Fuente grew used to sounds that had all but disappeared over the past decade: the sound of happy chatter, of accordion music being played by jubilant fingers, of boots tapping the dust in impromptu waltzes, of children excited by the end of the school year, of men bragging about things they'd done when young and strong and filled with bravado, of women gracefully burping away the indigestion caused by heavy meals, of couples celebrating in the way that couples always will — in the early hours, their children asleep, their hammocks swaying with movements inspired by merriment and love.

For Francisco Ramirez, the coming of summer had definite, if unintended, consequences. In his final exam of the school year he was too distracted by the promise he had made to Malfil Cruz: maybe he could ask to borrow one of Antonio Garcia's horses to use in his search for Violeta's brother. Francisco considered the notion some more, growing so excited that he botched a series of questions regarding the Pythagorean theorem. The more he thought about it, the more he felt it would succeed. The hacendero was nothing if not an honourable man, a lover of women and horses, a believer in tradition, a
student of México and all its glorious conceits. Above all else, he was a subscriber to the time-honoured code that exists among gentlemen, and it was for this reason that Francisco visited the hacendero the very next morning, his disastrous mathematics exam already a trivial memory.

He found him right where he knew he would find him: in the small paddock siding his artillery-ravaged mansion, happily brushing the stallion he had recently purchased from a fellow rancher who lived near the border of Chihuahua. It was good to see the hacendero looking so content; while everyone in town had suffered personal losses during the revolution, nobody had lost as much financially as Señor Garcia. Before the start of the fighting, he had owned a body of land whose head lay just shy of Piedras Negras, whose feet lay close to Sabinas, and whose belly was sufficiently concave to allow for the existence of Corazón de la Fuente. Likewise, the hacendero's horses had enjoyed the run of a ten-hectare enclosure, and they were kept at night in an enormous ventilated barn constructed by members of a Mennonite community who farmed wheat southeast of Chihuahua City. Then came the series of violent coups that comprised the revolution.

Porfirio Díaz had fled like a frightened preschooler, and the army of Francisco Madero was the first to requisition some of the hacendero's land, which was put to use as a campground for revolutionary forces. This requisitioning happened again under Carranza, and again under Huerta, and again under Obregón. With time, the various revolutionary governments sold off most of the hacendero's land and converted what little was left into the communally owned ejido, the beneficiaries of which were mostly tubercular peasants from the south. Each
day, it seemed, another family arrived and another tin-roofed hovel, reeking of sweat and smouldering coal, was erected on land that had been lovingly tended by generations of Garcias. Scattered in and amongst the shantytown was the farming equipment donated by one of the provisional governments. Most of it was never touched, the peasants having neither the knowledge nor the inclination to use it. As a consequence, it was mostly left to rust in the harsh northern weather, its principal function now to give lockjaw to shoeless children, who regularly cut themselves while playing war games with old scythes and tillers.

— Francisco! exclaimed the hacendero. — How are you? Have you met Diamante, my new caballo?

Francisco reached out to touch the horse on his muzzle, only to have Diamante snort haughtily and retreat a few steps.

— Careful, primo, cautioned the hacendero. — He's got a bit of a temper.

Though Francisco did not own a horse and was not from a family of horsemen, he was nonetheless a norteño, born with an appreciation of things equine as surely as he had been born with feet and hands.

— Ay sí, said Francisco. — He is magnificent. You're one lucky hombre.

The two chit-chatted for a few minutes, mostly about the hacendero's new horse, the heat, and, naturally enough, Dr. Brinkley's tower. When there was a natural pause in the conversation, Francisco finally cleared his throat and announced his purpose.

— Señor Garcia, I came here today because I need to ask you a favour.

— And what would that be?

— I was wondering if … pues … I was wondering if I could borrow one of your horses.

— And what do you plan to do with it?

Francisco hesitated, cleared his throat, and spoke. — I am searching for the son of Malfil Cruz.

The hacendero paused, forcing himself not to grin. — Well, then, he said. — When a woman requires our help, we must do what we can. How long will you be gone?

— I don't know. As long as is required.

— And you do realize that there is bus service in northern México now?

— I do.

— Yet you want to feel the wind in your hair, and hear the drum of hooves on hard-packed earth. You want to be free, and not bound by bus schedules and clanking diesel engines. I understand this, Francisco. Diamante, of course, is out of the question, as he would kill you within the hour. You can take one of the grullos.