The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (52 page)

RAY: (
Coldly
.) You finished?

TERESA: Yeah, I'm finished, shithead.

RAY: You're right, I never dated a Hispanic woman. You know why? I never met a Hispanic woman who attracted me.

TERESA: Fucking prejudiced against your own people.

(As he speaks,
RAY
starts moving in menacingly, backing
TERESA
up until she falls back onto the sofa.)

RAY: (
With contained fury
.) That's bullshit. It's just that I find Hispanic women brazen, coarse, vulgar, intemperate, uneducated, unrestrained, amoral, and generally uninteresting. You dress vulgar, and act it!

TERESA: All of us?

RAY: Yes!

TERESA: Including your mama?
(A long angry silence.)

RAY: (
Through his teeth
.) Please leave.

(TERESA
gets up, straightens her clothes, and heads out
.)

TERESA: (
Imitating a Hispanic street-corner wolf
.) “Mira, mira, nena. Lookin' fine, honey. Wassamadda, mami, you too good for me?” (
Pause
.) You know, maybe we act … vulgar because that's what men act like they want from us.

RAY: Not me.

TERESA: Of course not. Coconut. (TERESA
walks out with a victorious smirk and a snap of her fingers.
RAY
sinks into a chair. Lights dim on
RAY.)

Patricia Santana

First Prize: Novel

The screech of burning rubber, the inevitable hard crash of metal colliding. The first one on Conifer Street to hear these sounds and make it to the telephone dialed “0” for the operator and shouted: “Crash on 5 North between Palm Avenue and Main Street.” Most of the neighbors on Conifer Street were already congregated at the end of the block, standing by the chain-link fence at the embankment, observing the bashed-up cars below. Any passer-by would have thought it was a block party.

“Is anybody hurt? Can you tell?” Carolina asked our neighbor, Marisa.

“No, it doesn't seem so, but I can't tell. The crash is over by the Big Sky Drive-In,” she said. Marisa looked past Carolina's shoulder, over toward our house. I was sure she was wondering if our gorgeous brother Octavio, whom she had loved probably her whole life, might come out of the house to see the accident too. I bet she was hoping.

Socorrito, who seemed to live in her fluffy blue mules and Hawaiian-print shift, shuffled over to where Mamá stood. “This is very strange, Dolores,” she said in a whisper, but loud enough for my antennae ears to hear. “Have you noticed how many car accidents we've had in just these past months? At least four a week.”

Mamá was silent, shielding her eyes from the sun which was slowly falling in the west. Her face was stern, the kind of expression I was used to seeing on her when she was studying the monthly bills or watching Walter Cronkite. Her green eyes were now dark and worried, an entanglement of impenetrable greenery. But I knew what she must have been thinking because I was thinking the same: so many car crashes since Chuy had left.

“What do you make of these plane crashes, too?” Socorrito said. “The one in Venezuela, that Arab one, and then one in Monterey, wasn't it? I have a cousin who lives there. His wife is an
espiritualista
, you know, but just practices on Fridays. She's Catholic the rest of the week.”

Mamá turned to Socorrito, now giving her full attention.

“Well, this wife of my cousin says these are signs. All these crashes,” Socorrito said. “What do you think, Dolores? Here on the freeway and in the air, what kind of signs?”

The sirens were wailing now, approaching the scene of the accident. A familiar sound—especially lately.

“Mamá,” Mónica called out, expertly latched on to the chain-link fence as if she were a graceful spider on her web. “Can we go down to the fields to get a better look? The girls said it was okay with them. They'll watch us.”

Distracted by something Socorrito was saying, Mamá nodded her “yes”. We hopped off the fence and scurried down the embankment into the field, headed for the Big Sky Drive-In.

“Wait, here comes Octavio,” our friend Marisa shouted. “Let's wait for him.”

Octavio came sauntering toward us, a proud macho swagger. I could understand why Marisa loved him. Who wouldn't? He had a sexy stride, his abdomen thrust slightly forward. He was confident, knowing perfectly well that Marisa was crazy about him, always had been since they were little kids. I was proud to be his sister.

We bounded out into the brush, the sour grass. Carolina, Ana María, Mónica, Luz, Octavio, Marisa, and an assortment of other kids from Citrus Street. We scattered and whooped with joy, running wild, hopping over sagebrush, some pieces of rusty barbed wire, a dented hubcap, a rotting bike tire. The car crash was the last thing on our minds. We only wanted an excuse to hike down into the field, what had years ago been a dairy farm owned by Swiss immigrants, the Vandebergs.

Ana María had wandered off to pick a bouquet of wild flowers, daydreaming about Tito, no doubt.

Octavio, who had been saying something to poor lovesick Marisa, suddenly turned to us and called over to Carolina, “Hey, let's go into the culvert.”

Carolina didn't say anything at first. She looked over to where the giant drainage pipe ran under the freeway. “But what about the kids? We can't take them with us.”

“Why not?” Octavio said, walking over to Carolina, Marisa close at his side. “They wouldn't understand the graffiti.”

“But Mamá and Papá have said they never want to catch us over there.”

“So,
¿y qué?
How many hundreds of times have we been there? What's the big deal? I'll take responsibility if they find out.” It was obvious to us sisters that Octavio was showing off for Marisa, acting real grown up and in charge. We loved him too much to want to ruin his show.

So we gathered Mónica and Luz, and Ana María, Octavio, Marisa, Carolina and I walked across the field toward the freeway, leaving the other neighborhood kids behind in the field.

I could see the Conifer Street neighbors above and beyond us, all seemingly huddled together. I couldn't hear their words, which were drowned by the whoosh of the cars gliding down the freeway, but for a moment I hesitated, wanting so badly to run back up Conifer Street and be in the secure hubbub of their conversation. Mamá and Socorrito were standing next to each other, talking seriously about something, while Mrs. Wiltheim directed her binoculars toward the Big Sky Drive-In, immersed in the gory vivid details of the accident, no doubt. There were many people congregated at the end of Conifer Street, these car accidents becoming the main reason for our impromptu neighborhood meetings. Once we had determined the gravity of the car crash and had sent the victims speeding on their way in the ambulance—and after the fire engines sprayed clean any spilt gasoline on the road—our neighborhood remained standing at the end of the block, by the chain-link fence. Doña Abundia kept close tabs on the soap operas, never missed an episode. So should Mamá have been too busy on any given day to have watched a segment of “La Cruz de Marisa Cruces,” then Doña Abundia, at these spontaneous end-of-the-street meetings, was happy to supply the missing segment.

I turned my gaze from the cozy, familiar scene on Conifer Street and looked toward the culvert. I was trembling, maybe because of the sudden cool gust of wind or, maybe because I was excited and nervous. I had never been inside it.

Octavio led the way. “There's a lot of mud and crap, so watch out,” he said. “And remember, you all swore you wouldn't tell Mamá about this.”

The drainage pipe looked like a monstrous, concrete hair curler and ran the width—east and west—of the freeway. The traffic just above us seemed to roar and reverberate in our heads. I felt as if I were Jonah entering the bowels of the whale.

Although it was dim in the pipe, I could make out the uneven, angry graffiti: MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR! FUCK YOU. KISS MY DICK. US OUT OF VIET NAM. FUCK THE GOOKS.

The stench was putrid—dank and humid, smelling of urine and vomit and shit. Green slime outlined the stagnant water running the length of culvert.

“Uuuuuuuy,” Octavio spookily said, his ghost-call echoing against the concrete walls.

“Let's go home,” seven-year-old Luz said, whimpering. “I want to go home.”

“
Ay, m'ija,
” Octavio said. “It was only me. I didn't mean to scare you.” He picked her up and carried her in his arms. “Come on, we're going to the
other end and then back. Then home, okay?” Safe in her brother's arms, Luz nodded her okay.

At the end of the tunnel, the round bit of light seemed years away.

In those moments, I wished I could be Luz, that I could be carried protectively in my brother's or sister's arms. I was feeling frightened, uneasy. There was about the whole place, this cold gray tube of concrete with its angry, defiant graffiti, a sense of doom. I felt imprisoned and lost in the stinking, bloody entrails of a monster.

We walked to the other end of the culvert, the west end, and peered out. Not much could be seen, just the same overgrown brush as on the east end.

“Hey, look,” Mónica said, “whose are those?” Lying nearby was a brown, raggedy sweater, a pair of black muddied men's shoes, and grocery bags set out as ground covering amongst the bushes.

“Probably some wetbacks camping out,” Octavio said. “They camp out here all the time before going onto L.A. Come on, let's go back.”

“What's a ‘wetback'?” Luz asked Octavio as we all entered the culvert, heading back.

“It's those people who sneak across the border illegally from Mexico.”

“Why do they sneak across?” Now ten-year-old Mónica wanted to know.

“Because they shouldn't be in this country,” Octavio explained. “So they sneak in.”

“Why are they called ‘wetbacks'?” Luz asked.

“God, Octavio, that's a hell of a way to explain it to them,” Carolina said. “How insensitive.”

“Okay, Miss College Girl, you explain it to them.”

“Well,
m'ijas
,” she said, “first of all, you've got to understand that there are a lot of poor people in Mexico with no jobs, no money, no food. So they come to the United States to find jobs and get paid for their work…”

“So then they sneak in,” Luz said, “I know that part. Did Mami and Papi sneak in too when they came from Mexico?”

“Shit, Carolina, now look what you've done,” Octavio said, laughing. “You've opened a great can of worms.”

“No, they didn't,” Carolina said, giving Octavio a look. “I'll explain it to you when we get home. Look at this shit. We've got it all over our shoes. Now how are we going to explain this to Mamá?”

“Don't worry,” Octavio said, “I'll handle it.”

Making our way back through the stench and the mud, surrounded by rude words and epithets on the hard, thick concrete, the excitement of this adventure had died out. We were quiet, concentrating on avoiding the dank spillage that made a stream in the center walking with legs as spread out as possible, waddling.

There were secrets here I knew nothing about, echoes that reverberated from the cold hard walls and into my soul. The graffiti itself hid messages I read over and over. At some point these messages were impenetrable and yet begged to be understood. Who wrote them and when? In the late night? In broad daylight? The clothing strewn on the ground—who was the owner and why was he living here in the bowels of this subterranean freeway giant? If Lydia were here right now, I was sure we could come up with some good explanation.

“Wait, I want to look at something,” Octavio called out to us. “Go ahead, you girls.” And to Marisa he said, “Come here, I want to show you something.” He put Luz down, and she ran over to me. Holding my hand, we cautiously walked to the east end, trying to avoid stepping in the muck. Everyone was too busy keeping her shoes clean and out of the stream of sewage to take much notice of Octavio and Marisa, who lagged behind.

“Ouch,” I said, my ankle twisted. I crouched down to ease the pain and at the same time turned to look back at the other end of the long pipe where we'd just been. Octavio was kissing Marisa, grabbing at the front of her blouse. I quickly looked away, feeling hot in my face. I knew Octavio didn't really care for Marisa. He had other girls who made his heart go wild, but not poor Marisa. I felt sick to my stomach.

Once out of the tube and in the fresh air, my stomach was in convulsions, and I vomited on the field, a few feet away from our busy Interstate 5.

The spring air had grown cold in the twilight, and I shivered all the way home.

“You okay, Yoli?” everybody kept asking me.

I nodded, too confused and hurt to look anyone straight in the eyes, except for Marisa. She was sad. She too knew what Octavio's sexual advances had meant: they meant everything and nothing. Just a quick thrill for him.

Make love, not war, I wanted to shout. I felt dizzy and weak. Fuck you, I wanted to answer.

We slowly climbed up the embankment to our street, all of us exhausted. The informal neighborhood meeting had long dispersed. The street was silent, empty, except for the sound of our slow, shuffling feet.

We paused in front of Marisa's house and waved good-bye. Then past Socorrito's. I imagined her on the phone this very moment, reporting to her
comadres
the strange phenomenon: so many car crashes ever since Chuy Sahagún took off on that noisy motorcycle. The “German Spies” were probably in their neat, organized home commenting on the many accidents since April. Did they also think of Chuy Sahagún? Unnatural phenomenon: shooting stars colliding.