Read an Excerpt
The Mexican Flyboy
By Alfredo Véa UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Alfredo Véa
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8703-7
CHAPTER 1
THE MEXICAN FLYBOY
1961, in a vineyard somewhere in California.
According to the local newspaper, the day the skydiver died had been the windiest day in the history of the valley. Two residents claimed to have seen a funnel cloud touching down near the winery. The speculation was that the winds had caused the skydiver to fall to her death. On that turbulent day, all of the Mexican farmworkers had been rudely harried from their assigned rows — driven out like trespassers and vagrants. With bandanas lashed across their faces and hands clutching their hats, fifteen half-blinded men had tripped and bumped their way back into the bunkhouse and slammed the door behind them. Inside the building, two old men who were standing in the kitchen watched as the workers stumbled toward the door, peering at them through a window and through thick clouds of dirt and debris.
"There goes six inches of topsoil. Too much dust on the leaves means no sugar in the grapes," muttered one old man. "This wind is going to last awhile. I can feel it. I smelled this kind of wind once on a job in Argentina." He flared his nostrils and inhaled deeply. "Yeah, it's going stay for five, maybe six days. Maybe more."
"No birds can fly in this," said the second man as he leaned even closer to the window and squinted his eyes. "Shit! No birds can fly in this! I've never seen this kind of storm. It's a good thing all of the men are inside. I counted all fifteen of them, but look! I think I can see someone else out there," he said, almost to himself. He raised a gnarled hand, pointing vaguely, while his friend strained his eyes in that general direction.
"I don't see a thing." Then they both saw it. They glimpsed something moving in the middle of the dust storm about a hundred yards from the bunkhouse. The small form seemed to be walking unerringly toward the entrance of the Quonset hut. "Is it a lost fawn? No, it's a man."
"Either he's very far away or he's a very small man. It can't be a child. Not out here. It's three miles into town, almost four."
In a few more minutes, they knew that it was a small boy who was coming. He marched across an open field that was filled with rusting irrigation pipes and coils of trellis wire. He stared almost defiantly into stinging whorls of mulch and sand. Without covering his face or eyes, he walked straight across the parking lot, then pushed open the door that the frenzied farmhands had just slammed shut. He stood in the doorway and in the epicenter of a pile of leaves and gravel. The boy seemed stunned by the sudden silence of the interior and by all of the startled, questioning faces staring at him. He closed the door behind him. Then in total silence he cast his eyes around the room before walking to an empty cot and putting his belongings on the mattress.
He was slight, with the usual brown skin and dark eyes of a Mexican. There were no laces on his shoes, and his big toes stuck through the leather. He was not wearing socks, and his filthy clothing was limp and threadbare. There were holes everywhere in his pants and shirt. He had pelo chino, curly hair, but it was filthy and stained with the oddest streaks of red. He peered again toward the dusty gaggle of braceros who were huddled together in the rear of the Quonset hut. They seemed suspicious, almost afraid of him. "Solo vino," they said warily, one to the other. "Solo vino." The one who comes alone.
Men who had been pouring water over their heads to wash away the dust that had lodged in every pore now stood staring at the boy as the liquid dripped down their shirtless bodies and onto the floor of the communal shower stall. Men who had made it to their bunks rose to their feet to stare at the newcomer. Men who had been speaking fell silent. The boy turned toward the old men who were still standing at the window.
"My name is Simon. Do you have work for me?" he asked softly. The two men looked at each other, then back at the boy. He was tall enough to reach the hanging grapes. They looked at each other again and nodded in unison. The Filipino cook walked to a nearby closet and found some blankets. The other man — the field foreman and cellar master — pulled a grape knife from his coat and tossed it onto the bed. The boy lifted the knife to his eyes, then cleaned the oxidized blade on his shirt. He dropped the tool into a tattered sack.
"Are you hungry?" asked the cook. "Tienes hambre?"
* * *
In the hours before the lady dropped from the sky, the boy had moved away from the salsa and fish sauce induced detonations and gas warfare of the bunks and cots, and made up his bed on a long wooden dining table. The table and its benches separated the unconscious babbling and foul stink of the sleeping area from the relative peace and quiet of the cook's tiny kitchen. When he abandoned his cot, he took the blankets with him, along with his most precious possessions: a dirty cloth bag packed to the top with comic books, a jar filled with tiny gears and springs, a filthy shoebox, and a few pieces of clothing.
For almost a full hour he slept fitfully, until he was awakened by a wrinkled pair of large-knuckled hands grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him gently. There were tears running down the young boy's cheeks, and his heavily patched clothes were soaked with sweat.
"Simon! Simon, it's just a bad dream. Wake up, boy! A bad dream!"
The Filipino cook had come limping into his dark kitchen and, after putting away his hand-carved cane, had roused the trembling boy. Without moving his gaze from the child, the old Pinoy lit a single candle and began filling a five-gallon pot with water. He wet a dishrag and wiped the boy's scalding brow. Then, when he was assured that the boy had recovered from his nightmare, he fired up two burners on a huge five-burner stove that was covered with an impenetrable accumulation of soot and grease, and with the fossilized sediment of ten thousand spills of soy sauce and salsa El Tapatío.
It was his custom to brew tasteless, translucent coffee for breakfast that almost no one ever drank. He would always mix enough pancake batter to feed an army, although no one but the dogs and goats would ever eat those flapjacks. But it didn't matter. The field workers would pay him anyway. The Mexicans always honored the labor much more than the product.
But lunch and dinnertime were a completely different story. At those meals, for a single, magical hour, the old man would stop feeling like a lowly camp cookie and transform into a snooty, self-indulgent French chef at one of those white-tablecloth restaurants. The tired boys would trudge in from the fields and wolf down his steaming mounds of pork adobo and fried rice, and at dinner the cook would pour wine from a gallon jug of Mountain Red. The workers would devour his pancit baboy, dininguan, bitter melon, even his Filipino approximation of enchiladas — but Mexicans never, ever ate breakfast. It only slowed them down.
While the cook was shuffling back and forth from the stove to the icebox, the half-sleeping boy on the table sat up and turned toward him. After quickly getting his bearings, he jumped down from the table, stepped into the little kitchen, and dipped a tin cup into a small steaming pot still full of yesterday's coffee. He lifted up the frayed strip of electrician's tape covering a slot that had been cut into an old ammo box. But his hands were shaking so violently that it took three tries to get a penny to disappear into the slot. The lid of the container had been glued down, and the slot was taped shut every night for security. It was the cook's bank — where he kept his liquid assets.
On the last day of every month for the last twenty-some years, the old cook had used a butter knife to pry and tease most of the coins and paper money out of the slot. Then he would limp into a nearby town to buy a postal money order and an international stamp. Like clockwork, he would send the money off to Manila — to an address that he had tattooed into the skin of his left wrist. Number 3 Cabugao Street, upstairs apartment. He didn't know who lived there now, but he hoped that it was one of his relatives who had opened the three hundred envelopes he had already sent.
"That old coffee is for me. I'm making a new pot for you and the boys!" the cook shouted in the softest loud voice that he could manage. He didn't want to wake the men; they still had another hour of sleep coming. He tried to take the cup of stale coffee from the boy's small hands but wasn't fast enough. He glanced up at a small clock in order to time the coffee so that it would be ready just when the men woke up. He shrugged dejectedly, then asked, "What has happened to all of my clocks? I had three of them a few weeks ago. Now two are missing, and this one here has no hands." He shrugged and reached into an ancient paper bag.
"Here's some socks and shoes. I think they'll fit." He put them on the table.
"Thank you," said Simon excitedly.
The cook lifted the shoes that the young boy had been wearing and studied them. The leather was shredded, and the soles were hardly there at all. He shook his head, then dumped the old shoes into a bin. "How far did you walk?" he asked. As the boy was putting on his new socks, the cook noticed that his feet were covered with old calluses and some recent sores. "We should wash your feet. I have some salve. How far did you walk?"
Simon did not look up. As he put on his new shoes, he noticed a dead fruit fly floating belly-up in the rainbow-colored grease slick spreading on the surface of his coffee. The poor thing had probably flown into the noxious cloud of steam above the cup and been overcome by it, falling to its death. With trembling fingers, he finally managed to pluck the dead insect from the liquid without crushing it. He laid the tiny corpse belly-up on a nearby napkin. Grimacing, he put the cup to his lips and swallowed the awful potion in two gulps.
He bent down to inspect the deceased insect. Passing his still-quivering right hand slowly over the bug, he whispered, "Abracadabra," but nothing happened. "Simsalabim, simsalabim." Then he chanted, "Milagrosamente, milagrosamente." Still nothing happened. The little bug was stone-dead.
"Don't bother with that bug," said the cook angrily. "He's better off. There's no magic in this world. Why are you shaking?" he asked in a much gentler voice. "Tienes frio? Are you cold?"
"No, señor, that's not it. I'm not cold. In my dream I heard a woman's voice. I swear it's true," whispered Simon, whose lips were purple and trembling. His lifted his eyes from the napkin and the final resting place of the deceased insect. They were wide with residual fear from the wistful, doleful sounds that he had heard during his sleep.
"I was so scared. She could barely whisper, and her skin was as white as paper." He shut his eyes to compose himself for a moment. "She was in so much pain. She looked at me and said something to me. At first I thought she was real scary, but then I saw how scared she was ... she had tears in her eyes. But it wasn't death that made her afraid. The sleeping men over there are all having the same dream, just like me. They're saying it was her sobs that drove them from the vineyard," said Simon with a nod toward the bunks. He listened to the groans and mumbling of the men and translated.
"Now they say that she's coming soon."
The cook glanced at the fifteen Mexicans jammed into the sleeping area. None of them was awake. Aside from all of the snoring and farting and the occasional ecstatic moan of a wet dream, he hadn't heard a thing from any of the work crew.
"She's trying to break out of heaven!" said the boy with a look of profound wonder on his face. "She's been held prisoner up there, and she wants to break out. She hates heaven! She just hates heaven!" He had babbled that sentence over and over again in his sleep. Now the words came to his lips as he drank his cold, bitter coffee.
"She hates heaven."
The old cook emptied an entire can of Maxwell House coffee into the boiling water, then turned off the burner below. Next he cracked some eggs and scrambled them briskly. In precisely three minutes, he would pour the egg mixture along with all of the shells over the surface of the hot water. It would coagulate and cook and drag the grounds down to the bottom of the pot.
"This was how the GIs made coffee at Corregidor before it fell. The Americans called it cowboy coffee." The cook remembered the GIs smoking their Lucky Strikes and Camels and swilling cowboy coffee and arguing endlessly over which of their states back home was the best place of all.
"When I get outta here, I want to go back to sweet Oklahoma."
"To hell with Oklahoma," yelled another voice. "It's so goddamn full of Okies! Arkansas is the best state."
"Hell, Arkansas's got nothin' but Arkies in it! California is heaven."
"If this is heaven," said the Filipino cook with a sneer, "then I hate heaven, too."
He wiped his hands on his dingy gray apron. Reaching under the sink, he pulled out a large, discolored canvas pouch that had once been painted an elegant shade of red and stitched with thick black string. He opened the two buckles on the pouch and removed a stack of artillery maps and some yellowed topographical charts of the Philippine Islands. As a young man, and a promising bantamweight, he had proudly carried the pouch from one boxing match to the next.
When the war broke out, he had lugged it through jungles and swamps for over two years before being captured by a Japanese patrol. Before he could destroy the contents, the Japanese soldiers seized the maps he was carrying, looked at them for a minute or two, then tossed them back to him with a laugh. He had protected a stack of worthless papers for two years, guarding them with his life. Now he had been carrying those same maps for twenty years. He shrugged to himself, then dropped them into a trash can.
"Here," he said to Simon while setting the bag down next to the boy. "That sack of yours won't protect your comic books much longer. It's got rips at every seam and a big hole on this side."
The boy studied the sturdy bag and beamed from ear to ear. He immediately began transferring his collection of comic books to the indestructible map pouch, which bore the word BOXEO on one side.
"They were trying to form an Olympic boxing team in the Philippines," the cook explained. "Everyone who made the team got one of these bags and a beautiful pair of boxing gloves. I made the team," he said with a groan. "Then they go and bomb Pearl Harbor," he whispered with a sadness that could not be measured. His shoulders sagged in exactly the same way they had sagged that day long ago. "They go and bomb Pearl Harbor."
The cook picked up one of the books and surveyed the cover as Simon hopped off the table and walked to the trash can. The boy pulled the maps back out of the can, folded each one carefully, and put them all back into the pouch along with the comics.
"Mandrake the Magician?" said the old Pinoy. There was a look of concern on his face. He picked up a second book. "Doctor Strange? What's wrong with Batman and Superman? What's wrong with Captain America?"
"Batman is just a big muscleman," answered the boy as he admired his sturdy new bag. "And even a kid knows that you can't lift a skyscraper by one tiny corner of the building. The corner would crumble away. The sidewalk would collapse under Superman's feet. Those three guys just beat people up," he said as he carefully placed the remaining books, one by one, into their new protective vault. "Batman and Superman and Captain America can't see why people are the way they are. They can't see why people do the things they do. They can't change a person's thoughts the way Mandrake can."
The cook noticed a small Mason jar that had been hastily wrapped in a dirty T-shirt. He lifted it up to eye level and peered through the dirty glass. He nodded to himself. Now he knew for certain what had happened to his three clocks. He smiled as he watched the peculiar boy close the bag and buckle it shut. "I hate heaven," he repeated to himself as he reached for a pack of cigarettes. He nodded with satisfaction as he watched the boy put on maroon boxing shoes and purple socks. Both were emblazoned with the Philippine flag. He laughed, then wandered outside to look for his Portuguese friend and have a quiet cigarette somewhere out there near the limestone caves.
Still groggy and shivering, Simon reached into his pocket for another penny. His gaze happened to fall upon the center of the napkin: the corpse was gone! The boy searched the napkin frantically. The tiny deceased had dragged itself to the very edge of the paper and was slowly flexing its miniature cellophane wings. Simon's jaw dropped wide open. The magic had worked! As the dumbfounded boy lifted his arm into a ray of light to closely inspect his powerful and mysterious right hand, the fruit fly lifted off and flew away.
* * *
In every vineyard in California, the foreman was known simply as the old Portogee — the grimy, growling viejito who loved grapes much more than he loved people; the man who talked endlessly to himself and usually slept alone, buried deep in the dank coolness of the wine caves.
But this morning he was still lying on a cot that he had picked up at the storage rooms and, after trying five or six unsatisfactory locations, had plopped down smack dab in the middle of the arroyo seco vineyard. It had taken him almost three hours to accomplish this important task, but he had finally succeeded in positioning his small bed at the exact spot where three separate winds came together after dancing and skimming separately across hundreds of acres of vines and down three steep gullies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Mexican Flyboy by Alfredo Véa. Copyright © 2016 Alfredo Véa. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
