Forty-Four Book Eleven (44 series 11) Read online

  “New Mexico?” I mumbled, wondering how far it was and if this was the wrong bus.

  The first man in line stepped forward, told the driver his name, and hopped aboard. Everyone else followed suit until the line had disappeared and then it was my turn.

  “Name?” the man said, looking at me and playing with his goatee in his fingers. “I don’t remember you from yesterday, and we’re not hiring any additional workers right now.”

  I thought about walking away but then said, “I should be on the list.”

  “Mentirosa,” one of the glaring women said as she dangled her head out from an open window. “This pinche gringa got here last night. She’s not on no list.”

  “Take it easy, Lupe,” the man said, looking back at me. “What’s your name?”

  “Callie Walker.”

  Walker. How appropriate, I thought. That’s what he was going to tell me to do when he didn’t find the name on his list. Take a walk.

  He looked down at the sheet and I felt a quick, sudden surge of energy like when Samael was around. Except that when I looked for him, he wasn’t there.

  “Yeah, here it is,” the man said a moment later. “Walker.”

  I walked to the back of the bus as it rolled out into the street and through the sleepy city. The bars, strip clubs, and sleazy movie theaters were closed, but their signs and bright lights were still flashing. We passed a lot filled with tents, a church, some old apartment buildings and houses. In the distance a giant, lit-up lone star was strung across the terrain of a tall hill, reminding people of where they were.

  We soon left the city behind and all the light disappeared as if a switch had been flipped. After a while the heater kicked in and I took off the windbreaker and used it as a pillow against the window. I listened to the low hum of the engine cutting through the blackness, wondering how long the ride would be and what crops grew on Davis Farms.

  As I sat there in the dark, my mind drifted back to the time the rearview mirror on the Jeep had come unglued. It had just fallen off one day, dropping down at my feet while I was driving. I drove around like that for a few days. Before Jesse’s dad had reattached it for me, I had found myself glancing up at its familiar spot on the windshield only to find that it wasn’t there. Maybe that’s how it had to be for me now. Maybe I needed to rip away the rearview mirror in my mind and leave it by the side of the road.

  There was no looking back now. Not if I wanted to stay sane. Not if I wanted to hang on to the only thing I had left. My freedom.

  But even as I had those thoughts, I closed my eyes, longing for home.

  CHAPTER 8

  It took more than two hours to get there. I slept through most of the drive, waking up only when the bus hit a bump. It was still dark outside and I yawned as the little town of Hatch came into view. We drove past restaurants with clusters of chiles hanging off the eaves, burger shops featuring chiles, a giant rooster on the roof of a gas station with chiles in its mouth, and souvenir shops that seemed to sell nothing but chiles. Banners and signs were strung across streets and buildings and water towers proclaiming, “Welcome to Hatch, The Chile Capital of the World.”

  Even at this early hour, the sweet smell of roasted chiles floated in the air and drifted into the bus.

  Something told me I was going to be picking chiles.

  After a few minutes we pulled into a dirt lot. The driver turned off the engine. Everybody was awake now, talking in low voices, but no one was moving or getting up.

  The man next to me, who had been quiet the entire ride over, smiled. He was probably in his fifties and had a fatherly energy to him. He had some gray and white sprinkled in his hair and mustache.

  “Ernesto,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. “Callie.”

  The conversation died there. I probably knew seven words of Spanish and I suspected his English was in the same state. But it was nice to have a friendly exchange. Ten minutes went by, then fifteen, with everyone just sitting in the dark. As the first bit of light began to color the eastern sky, people finally sprang to life, hopping up from their seats almost all at once. Ernesto put on the old John Deere cap he had been holding in his hands. I got my Dodgers hat and put on the windbreaker. But when I slid one of the backpack straps over my shoulder, he shook his head.

  “No, señorita,” he said, pointing to my bag. “Leave it alone.”

  He had an old pack he had left on the seat, and I then noticed that everybody else had also left their bags. I dropped it and got off the bus.

  Along with the distinctive aroma of the chile peppers, a rush of cool air hit me when I stepped outside and saw the immense field with row after row of the neatly planted vegetables. The sun was just peeking up over the horizon, the first rays bouncing off the shiny skins of the chiles. It was beautiful even if I couldn’t see the different shades of green.

  I followed the workers to stacks of gray buckets that were next to a couple of large trucks. A white man in his late twenties stood nearby, rubbing his hands together and blowing into them as he greeted the crew in Spanish. He seemed kind of young to be in charge and I figured he was probably a hired hand or maybe even the owner’s son.

  “Buenos días,” he said to the women ahead of me, touching the rim of his felt cowboy hat.

  “Buenos días, señor,” they said together.

  I grabbed a bucket and could tell that he was staring at me. I glanced over and met his eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  I nodded and forced a little smile.

  I could still feel him watching me as I headed over to the fields. When I turned around again, he was looking my way and it made me nervous. I was pretty sure he wasn’t on the lookout for a runaway murderer. But I clearly stood out. That’s why he was watching me, I told myself. I wondered again about the logic behind Samael’s idea, the part about “blending in” here.

  I kept my head down and followed the rest of the workers. They fanned out but seemed to pick their spots in an organized fashion, no one going too far afield. A man tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a spot. I went over to it even though it was next to the girl who had tried to keep me off the bus. I expected her to shoot me another death stare, but she was already busy working.

  I put my bucket down.

  I didn’t do much at first. I examined the plants, watched what the others were doing and tried to copy their moves. They were fast and focused. They were all on their knees in the mud and had started picking in a wild frenzy. Their fingers and hands moved at a blur over the plants, plucking the peppers, before tossing them into the containers and going back for more.

  I didn’t want to get my jeans dirty but I already stuck out enough. I didn’t need to stand or crouch down while everyone else was on their knees. I dropped down on the wet dirt, the cold mud immediately soaking through the denim.

  No one wore gloves and at first I thought that was odd because they would be handling chiles all day long. I remembered having some jalapeño juice squirt in my eye once when I was making Ty some enchiladas and I thought I would go blind and die, not sure in which order. But after a few moments I realized that these were a larger variety of chile that packed little or no heat.

  Most of the workers were men and I was struck by how many of them were older, in their forties, fifties, sixties, with some even older than that.

  I didn’t know how much money they got for each bucket, but it wasn’t rocket science to realize that the faster they went, the more they would make.

  I began plucking and tossing and plucking and tossing, my eyes checking too often to see how much progress I had made. The bucket was large, not like a bucket at all but more like a medium-size trash can, and my chiles just disappeared into it like the bottom had been cut off. I had heard that you weren’t supposed to look at the pail when milking a cow either and this seemed like the same thing, only worse.

  I tried not to look but couldn’t help noticing that most of the other workers had already made a f
ew trips to the truck, while I hadn’t filled my container once. When I finally did, I was shocked by how heavy it was. It had to weigh at least twenty pounds. It made sense now why the men and women had hauled the buckets up on their shoulders as they walked down the rows.

  When I reached the truck, I noticed that the man in the cowboy hat was staring again. Maybe he did recognize me. For all I knew I had been featured on the most recent episode of Snapped, that TV show about women who commit murder. I looked down, avoiding his eyes, and threw the chiles into the heap. He handed me a plastic token.

  I nodded and turned to leave.

  “Don’t forget your bucket,” he said with a thick twang.

  I reached over and grabbed it and saw that he was smiling.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” he said, lifting a leg and resting it on the truck’s bumper.

  I shook my head.

  I kept working, picking away at the chiles as the cool morning air turned warm and then hot and stifling as the sun climbed higher and higher. I was sweating like I had never sweat before in my life, including all the soccer games I had ever played in. It was pouring off of me. But I wasn’t alone. All the other workers had developed dark stains on the back of their shirts and underarms. At least I was beginning to fit in.

  But then I noticed I was still wearing my windbreaker. Everyone else had their jackets wrapped around their waists. I realized I had a long way to go before I fit in.

  The workers’ hands never stopped. They were lightning quick, moving through the leaves like Wolverine or Edward Scissorhands. Some worked in teams. An older woman a few rows down worked next to a boy of about sixteen who would turn in the pail to the truck when she was finished and then bring back her token. A few others worked like that too, taking turns hauling while the other one never stopped picking. And the whole thing took place in silence, a deathly quiet blanketing the field like the volume had been turned off. I was surrounded by more than fifty people but I might as well have been alone in a graveyard. They must have known that any sort of talking would only slow them down, would only take money out of their pockets at the end of the day.

  By midmorning my hands were raw with cuts and blisters, my back stiff and sore. I took a break and used one of the two portable bathrooms that lined the edge of the field. It smelled like it hadn’t been serviced in several years and I held my breath for as long as I could but it was no good. Great waves of nausea rolled through my stomach.

  I staggered back out to the field.

  One of the men in the next row, wearing a plaid, long-sleeved shirt, watched me for a moment and shook his head. He came over and knelt down, taking a chile from the plant and showing me how he broke it.

  “Así, güera, así,” he said. “Like this. Make more fast.”

  “Gracias,” I said. “How much?”

  I held up a token.

  “Eighty,” he said.

  Eighty cents. I had twelve of them in my pocket so far. Just under ten dollars. Ten dollars for four grueling hours of back-breaking work. There had to be a better way.

  I pushed the numbers out of my mind and got back to work, finding that the new technique made a difference. I filled the bucket, lugged it over to the truck, and got another token. And then I did it again and again and again. Another hour or so dripped by, and then another and I was done.

  Broken. Spent. Exhausted. Finished.

  I looked around, wondering when it would all be over. I had lost track of time but we must have been out in that field for at least six or seven hours already.

  But nobody stopped.

  I did my best to keep going, pushing through the throb in my back and legs. My hands had ballooned up like I had stuck them in a beehive and it hurt just to move my thick fingers.

  In another hour or so, a loud horn blared across the field. But the workers kept picking, faster even, and I realized they were trying to finish filling their buckets. Some teamed up and combined their containers, while others sped up to an almost inhuman level. Mine was about three-quarters full, but I was more than done. They could keep their damn eighty cents.

  I went over and turned it in.

  I was surprised when he gave me a token.

  “I’ll let it go this one time, miss. But from now on you gotta get up to the top to get credit.”

  “Thank you,” I said, knowing I sounded pathetic.

  I followed the others back on the bus where I fell into my seat and chugged a bottle of water. We drove down a dirt road and stopped. More trucks were parked by the side along with a few more bathrooms. We got off again, those three little steps by the bus door nearly killing me.

  A hot breeze blew as we walked over to a group of three men. The older one was sitting at a table with a large steel box in front of him. The other two stood behind the table, watching us like they expected an armed robbery to go down at any moment.

  As the workers formed a line, a truck pulled in, kicking up dust. The bed of the pickup was filled with ice chests and two women got out and began setting up food and drinks.

  At the sight of the money and the smell of the food, the workers started coming to life, talking and laughing finally. Mariachi music came from the food truck and they all headed in that direction after they got paid.

  Maybe Samael was right after all. Maybe this kind of life was okay for now. Other than the pain, it was a perfect place to hide. Nobody would be looking for me here. These people didn’t care about me or my story. They were too focused. Even that glaring girl, Lupe, seemed to have lost whatever she had against me once she started working.

  But maybe the best part of being out here was that while I was picking chiles, I had barely thought of Ty and Kate and Ben.

  If for no other reason, that alone would bring me back in the morning.

  CHAPTER 9

  I hadn’t made quite as much money as I thought.

  The tokens added up to nineteen dollars and change, but what I didn’t know was that the roundtrip bus ride to and from Hatch cost five dollars. Then I had spent three dollars at the food truck for a burrito and a Coke. So after everything was said and done I was left with eleven dollars in my pocket for the six or seven hours in the field plus all the time on the bus. It hardly seemed worth it, especially with the abuse my body had to endure. I realized I was slow, but still. No wonder the workers stayed at a shelter. How much would a room in one of the rundown motels cost? Too much, even for the fastest of the pickers.

  I was almost happy to see the El Campesino sign again when the bus finally made it back to El Paso.

  I went inside and found the woman who had taken my name the day before and asked her where the nearest thrift store was located. She told me there was a Goodwill that was a few blocks away and even drew me a little map.

  As I hobbled down the street, an intense gust of sadness blew into me like dust on a country road.

  I thought about Ty and how after work we would sit on the porch with a couple of beers and talk about our days. A week ago I would have cried remembering that, but now the memory was lost in the bottomless numbness that had swallowed my life. Progress, I supposed.

  I shuffled slowly down the store aisles, my back and knees stiff and throbbing, looking through the racks of clothes for the long sleeve light cotton shirts that the workers wore. I found a few plaid ones that looked close enough to a fit, and put them in the cart, along with a pair of pants that I didn’t bother to try on. I also picked up an old Real Madrid sweatshirt to help with the morning chill. I almost put it back down but then realized it would be the perfect disguise. Abby Craig wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that.

  Finally, I got a Little Mermaid watch to help keep track of the time and an old Walkman that came with a bundle of cassettes, wrapped together in a rubber band for ninety-nine cents.

  On my way back to the shelter, I nearly dropped my bag when I saw him walking toward me, the baseball cap tipped to one side.

  CHAPTER 10

 
Jesse.

  I ran up to him as best I could and hugged him hard.

  “It’s so good to see you,” I said when I finally let go.

  “You, too, Craigers,” he said, wincing.

  “Did I squeeze you too hard?”

  “That’s not possible. It’s just that, well, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but is there any deodorant in that bag?”

  “Sorry about that.”

  He smiled and kissed the top of my head.

  “I kid,” he said. “Mostly, I kid.”

  But I knew he wasn’t joking. The rankness of the dried sweat in my hair and clothes was almost a living thing, floating around me in waves.

  We walked over to a side street where we sat on the curb and he took my hand and kissed it.

  “I always knew you had a green thumb, but this is ridiculous.” I looked down at my hands and noticed that they were stained and dark from touching all those peppers. “But seriously, how are you holding up?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s such a mess, Jesse,” I said, looking down at my muddy shoes. “It’s all such a damn mess.”

  For the first time in forever, Jesse didn’t offer up some sort of snappy comeback or try to spin it into something more positive. He just looked at me with sad ghostly eyes.

  “I know it is,” was all he said.

  We sat there for a while without speaking.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said finally. “I know you don’t see it right now, Craigers. And that’s okay. To tell you the truth, I don’t see it yet, either. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s like a ghost you can’t see. I guess that’s not a very good analogy, huh? But the point is, your future’s out there. A much better future than the one you can see yourself ever having right now. You have to have faith.”

  I turned to look at his face and saw that he was no longer sad. Whether he was trying to be strong for me or really believed what he was saying I didn’t know, but his eyes were filled with sincerity.