Issue 24

Jesus Quintero

In 1986 we moved from Linda, California, where I went to Cedar Lane School with all the migrant children, to the neighboring town of Olivehurst, where I would go to school with the whites. During the Great Depression, the poorest of the US—then—Oklahoma—left their dust bowl to get into this bowl: the concave bowl being California’s Central Valley north of Sacramento, and the rim being the mountains. Olivehurst was full of poor white people, and then we came. We were pioneers, one of the first Mexican families to call this Okie place home.

Like them, we were hillbillies. My parents came from the Mexican hills, los cerros, San Jose De Vargas, a third-world village. Pigs roaming the only dirt road, three-walled houses, a cauldron of food stewing outside under mesquite embers. Without a school at the ranch (the last person who attempted to educate the town had been shot), my father had the equivalent of a first-grade education. My mother, part of the community’s regal elite, bordered on the equivalent of a third grader’s comprehension, almost brave enough to read out loud when no one was nearby. Between them, they had the think-tank capacity of an American fifth-grade education, dependent on the adages of los misterios to explain what were nothing more than concepts found in basic science books. Anything that wasn’t understood was a miracle.

Like the Okies, we were attempting to assimilate and transfer our rancho burdens (la pobreza, los problemas) and exchange them for a series of unfortunate events: work, new neighborhoods, and adolescent rites of American passage, along with those volatile variables that mysteriously appeared without warning, an ominous premonition, our own Okie-Trash Santo.

La pobreza’s laws of physics created a parallax: that which was closer to us seemed to crumble more quickly than the plane at a distance. The old-world San Jose de Vargas ethos had taken root in our version of El Norte, expediting entropy. In our little world, we were stuck in our own vortex, a black hole that sucked the life out of everything. Our home on Ardmore Street was sagging, as though the foundation was crumbling under the collective weight, the gravity of my family’s history. It had blisters, the cheap paint bursting from the heat. It was the unforgiving sun: the paradox of both giving life and stripping it away. At least ours wasn’t as bad as the surrounding Okie homes that always looked like they had been struck by tornadoes. They had redneck industrial, abstract sculptures piled and displayed in their front yard, side of the house, even the roof, the randomness of objects working in conjunction: a gutted mattress filled with bicycle handlebars. Ruptured standing stereo speakers on top like a Koons bunny. Two tires as eyes and grill grate. Maybe part of a boat. Maybe a camper would appear next week, one that would never get disassembled for parts. And maybe a long-haired man would live in it, always shirtless with a dog chain as a necklace. And maybe he would then bring along the first car that would collect cobwebs, and it would eventually be used as an artifact for a sociology case study of the non-working class. Since the academics never showed up, however, it would slowly transform into a pawn shop, starting off with a broken baby stroller and ending with a weight bench, weights on top of the roof. Always, always, a busted TV and some couch, where we used to imagine watching a TV show, playing a game of charades, making sure that nails, glass, or screws didn’t poke through our bare feet.

Monopoly money strewn like confetti. Fake money everywhere. Pieces of games.

And bottles. Endless bottles of cheap aluminum beer, Old Milwaukee, in a Hefty garbage bag, waiting to be taken to be recycled, but not until they were bleached white by the sun. Our game was crunching them with our feet. Some father would offer us a drink as we got thirsty. Some shirtless kid with dirty popsicle remains on her chest would wander over, hair of a discarded doll, wiry and thick like a Brillo pad, look at me already with the universal countenance of a beggar. She’d take a sip as if from a baby’s bottle.

These were my friends. These were my neighbors. These colorful white people who treated me as their adopted child. This was my life. This was home. Dirty Mexican, Beaner. This wasn’t my own invective, hurled at myself. It was them, los Okies, who reminded me that I was dirt. They inculcated in me an indelible, profound sense of worthlessness, but they were just as vulnerable. The color of these white people was an off-white, tinged with the same color of poverty as my parents, mixed with equal parts despair, an egg-shell white. Maybe they were delicate and fragile like eggs, one bad drop away from cracking. Like us. Their door was always open. I didn’t even have to knock.

Unlike them, my parents were never home, always leaving early to work in the Yuba County fields. As farm laborers, peach pickers, they were always the first to be at work, el campo, and always the last to get home, la casa—leaving with the car’s lights on, 4:30 AM, and coming back with them on, 8:30 PM. They had no concept of nine to five. My parent’s penance was five to nine, a migrant’s dyslexic working hours.

I didn’t want my parents to know that something was tragically wrong, when they had come into this country for this opportunity—school. They had no idea what was going on with me personally or academically. They could never imagine, but I was still worried about humiliating them, especially since my father placed such an emphasis on being a “Quintero,” which had great value and honor for him, though it had lost its currency in the cultural exchange rate. Nobody knew how to spell it, let alone say it. Since their English was broken—no, shattered—and they only spoke a country Spanish, I could get away with mistranslating for them the urgent school calls filled with academic, institutional jargon. All the letters that piled up in the mailbox. They were too tired after work to look inside it, and, besides, they could barely peek inside the envelopes: it was just a reminder that they barely knew how to read.

I did what any good first-generation immigrant kid would do. I protected them by lying, using some cultural white lies that eventually began to spill into my own reality. I was much more an imaginary version of myself than the one that inhabited my body, struggling with what was what, keeping up with the tangled yarn I wove to keep them and myself at bay from the inevitable.

I was one of the only Beaners in a damn near all-white school, Yuba Gardens (the grounds being nothing but asphalt). In 1986, it was the worst place to live in the USA, and I was the worst student. My parents couldn’t afford the artifacts to segue me into this new world: the clothes. I used my older brother’s T-shirts, which hung below my knees. I wore the same pair of highwater pants from last year, every day—the only one I had. This made me part FOB, part wetback, part rural ‘Merican with dirty fingernails.

Two years later, I was in danger of flunking out of eighth grade, having to repeat it. As a student of life and in school, I was constantly in trouble—stealing mi ama’s car, a beige 1979 Plymouth Duster, so I could drive my little sister to school, using a couch cushion so I could see over the hood; stealing some acid we had concocted in science class so I could spill it onto a GT BMX bike frame, just because; and, of course, climbing up to the school’s ceiling to turn off the power supply during a school dance, back when record players were used.

The great thing about trouble was that it provided me with an immediate intrinsic worth. Being an accidental delinquent made me feel alive enough to be seen as though I mattered: I spent more time in the front office than in class, more time cutting school than attending it. The few times I was there, it was mostly after school, doing time in detention, or doing some form of “community service.” Yuba Gardens didn’t have the resources necessary to deal with problem kids such as myself. It didn’t have the funding to hire a bilingual counselor to deal with teenage, cross-cultural transgressions, so they provided me with the next best thing. In a last-ditch effort to get me out of there, an alternative to help me catch up on academic credits, the senior staff created a makeshift after-school program, providing me with an internship in order to make me cognizant of my bad choices. They paired me with a hard, avuncular figure, the only Latino “faculty” member at the school, who just happened to be a janitor; it was the academic equivalent of scared straight.

He was the first Mexican I knew who didn’t work in the fields, in el campo, el sol. Santos could have been a former inmate who held his last fiber of dignity close to his chest. As far as I knew, no one ever questioned the polarities between us, our shared references. We, too, were the same and not: citizens of the underground.

Like me, Santos worked with what he had, and it wasn’t much: how much was I worth, anyway? What was my value? Weirder still, what was his?

“Follow me,” said Santos. “Why didn’t you go to school today?”

“I did,” I lied.

“You shouldn’t cut.” He smacked my hand. His hands were scarred by bleach, knuckles swollen by fights gone by like they could bulge right out of his skin.

He opened his closet, filled with industrial supplies. “Here,” he said, exhaling to make up for his loss of words. “Take it.” He handed me a mop, staring me dead in the eyes. When I attempted to take it, he held on to it, so I had to yank it; he still wouldn’t budge, forcing me to pull on it like a lever, but I was scrawny and small, a runty human Chihuahua. “What’s your problem,” he barked, throwing the mop down on the hallway floor.

“Problem?” I lied. “What are you talking about?”

He guffawed in disbelief.

Since all the students were gone, the thwack of the stick echoed. “Pick it up.” He placed his hands on his hips, tapped his foot. “Are you listening?” Santos slowly sucked on his toothpick, one wooden fiber, a splinter at a time, until it disappeared. He spoke through the side of his mouth. “Huh? Why don’t you listen, eh?”

“Yeah,” I replied, despondent. I bent over to pick up the mop, held onto my pants since I didn’t have a belt. “I’m listening … yeah.”

I looked over my back, trying to read his next move.

“What’d I say, huh.” He disappeared into the closet, bent over. “Repeat it,” he said, his voice now dampened by the tight acoustics of his office. “Eh?!”

I weighed my options: what was the right answer? What hidden lesson, if any, was there within the statement: the mop, the required force to pull a lever, repeat. What idiomatic intent, what rhetoric within his statement could be gleaned to reveal the true meaning not just of my life, but all life in general? I heard a bucket spill over, and my feet were immediately soaked in water.

“You idiot,” he yelled. He’d deliberately kicked over the bucket of dirty mop water. “Pick it up!” The water spilled in the shape of a cartoon hand, then morphed into tree branches in winter.

I failed. I must have taken too long to formulate an adequate response, lost in these janitorial, Rorschach inkblots, finding beauty and possibilities in the mess and spills of life. Sometimes I would repeat what he had said, but that’s not what he had intended, not literally. Life was a form of tricky punishment, hidden trap doors that were triggered and motivated by some boiler-room of internalized oppression. Like in the classroom, there were lessons outside of the class that I couldn’t quite understand.

“Andale. Vamos … leggo.” Santos was heading towards the classrooms and hurried his steps, supplies in each hand, towels and rags looped around his belt. As he walked over his man-made puddle, his work boots left an imprint, that ubiquitous stamp that a Mexican animal was there: the small crucifixes, crosses down the spine of the sole, and the rays for traction along the periphery of the boot, reminding me of La Virgen de Guadalupe.

I quickly mopped the spill away and followed Santos, making sure that I walked exactly on his footsteps, just like I followed my father’s in the peach orchards, those familiar indentations on the earth’s soil, the same design: a worker animal’s paws with purposeful strides, steps almost a gallop to quickly get to their measly economic destination.

Santos had the stroll that indicated that he’d been in prison: his overblown chest puffed out as though it was the only humanity left inside of him, attempting to walk his two pectoral muscles like people walk their dogs. His forearms had some pastiche of prison art: the prison guard tower running the length of his forearm, clocks, a chola with the sombrero. His hands were in a permanent ‘C’ like Lego characters, engineered specifically to fit the following accessories: the broom, the mop, the plunger.

Santos opened the door to my math class, slid the doorstop in place—the rags on his side forever moving, a Newton’s cradle of ghetto physics. “Listen: get to work since you, you know …”  He hid behind his 80’s aviators, head tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle. He flexed his nostrils: “… Never mind. Just, you know, make it fast.”

He nodded his head to indicate, “Come in,” fidgeting with the key. Get to work. Do it. Although I was functionally illiterate, I knew the body language of my people, mostly indicating various stages of work, subtle commands to maintain energy, not waste time talking, the threat of small banter robbing precious work time.

I attempted to walk past him, but his girth blocked the entrance. “Listen …” He puffed his chest as though taking a hit. “You know what you have to do, right.”

He exhaled long and hard. I nodded my head and saw my reflection in his shades. He lifted them up and placed his hand on my shoulder, seeing eye-to-eye. I looked away. He squatted down, got to my level: “I need this place gleaming, do you understand? Look at me.”

I was taught to look at people’s eyes, but I wasn’t taught the power of maintaining a gaze long enough to register an understanding. I looked at Santos and nodded. There was this hard juggling act of not talking back to your elders and getting your ass kicked for ignoring them. I thought it was another lesson. There was always punishment. I was always wrong, a pendejo. I braced myself.

“I’ll see you soon, okay?” He patted my shoulder, gently.

“Okay,” I said, looking down at my damp shoes. “See you soon.”

“Chuy,” he said. “Chuyito.” His voice became soft. It was unusual given that his voice normally came out like ragged, rusty shanks, in the font of tattooed pinto letters with sharp edges. “No. Really. I’ll see you soon.” Santos had this unpredictable vato way in which he would vacillate from being an endearing person, speaking in the diminutive as though speaking to his abuelita, and then, mid-sentence, finish in fury or malintent, changing the color of his face and tone of voice, red and dark. This always kept me on my toes.

I feared him. Which meant that I respected him. A lot.

“Do you understand?” He tilted his head to take a look at my face at another angle to see if it registered. “See you soon, know what I mean.”

He placed his shades back down, pushed them up to the bridge of his nose, and shook his head in disappointment. He got out of the doorway to let me in to my assignment, this classroom that needed to be picked up, and he disappeared. His numerous keys chiming with each manic stride.

“See you soon,” I said. He didn’t look back, like I hadn’t said anything, like I wasn’t even there.

In eighth grade, I was in trouble so much that I had my routine down. I turned half of the desks on their backs, their bellies exposed. There was a sound to hearing their backs crash against the tile, the screeching of their heels in resistance before succumbing to the blunt force beyond their control—sass—a sound of power and dominance. I associated loud sounds with hard work, especially with a deep, steady breath accompanying it.

If cleaning were a subject, I would have been in honors. With the same immigrant intensity and speed, I used the Bepco freeze spray on the bottom of the desks, all lined up in rows like trees and vegetables. Once they were removed with a clean swipe from the joint scraper, I was rewarded by the fruits of my labor, the smell of mint from a Wrigley’s, grape from Big League Chew, watermelon from Hubba Bubba. I picked each one off the ground, that synthetic produce. Trash. Next …

I was being groomed as a form of cheap labor. By that point, it was automatic, something that I’d try to unlearn: the classroom was my own mini-orchard that needed my manual labor: desk cleaning, mopping, board erasing, erasers that needed to have the chalk pounded out of them—these words and ideas that in the end became nothing but dust—the emptying of garbage bags. Detention was supposed to be about humiliation, but my life had been a constant barrage of culturally awkward situations; it was my default setting. It was home, a home that made me feel safe.

Within five minutes, I was already sweating, the well-earned marker of a hard Mexican worker. This urgency I learned from my parents, the physical precedent set: seeing mi apa work, chingandole en el sol (bravo) reminded me of those old films in kindergarten that provided the viewer with twelve frames a second, and every so often the film would skip, missing a couple of frames, and the subject or character would magically reappear elsewhere within the continuum of the film, a quantum leap, breaking the sound barrier of work. He was irascible, an always on-edge man who could easily summon the peerless anger of a second-class citizen with a third-world past. He channeled that into his work: one second my dad was on the ladder—the next he was by the bin, dumping his peaches from his costal, his burlap sack. This was my first taste of magical realism, the illusion and trickery of seeing him defy the laws of physics, economics, and human limitations. I was supposed to transfer that example and apply it to my academics, but there was a disconnect, except if maybe I could pack books in a box, get them ready for shipment?

I worked so hard that I had enough time to shimmy Mrs. Brokaw’s desk open and modify the grade book and the attendance sheet. I picked the lock, went into the desk and simply retrieved the instructor’s official green pamphlet. Using my finger, I quickly found my name, and began changing 0’s into 8’s on assignments, started to place a checkmark where there wasn’t one, making it seem like I had been in school when I hadn’t been. When I was altering my records, it felt like the clock’s seconds hand clicked. I could hear the electricity humming within the school walls. My heart pounded hard, pounding against the inside of my chest as though I had a fist inside, working its Catholic magic. Por mi culpa. Por mi culpa. Por mi gran culpa.

It was always me against the clock, needing to work fast enough to get home before my parents did, back from working in the fields, smelling like sun and earth. The pounding of their steps to dislodge the last traces of dust, announcing that they were home.

What motivated me with cleaning, not studying, was my father’s clarion call, repeating my last name under my breath … soy Quintero … soy Quintero … soy Quintero … and then, in one fell swoop, when he was depressed, “I am nothing … Yo soy nada.” Without ever having the privilege of taking a reading class, not even the time to read a book, his vocabulary was limited, never working in nuance or subtly, always expressing himself in binaries.

After I cleaned the room, my attendance, and grades, I looked for Santos.

It was time for the next assignment, or was today garbage day?

There was a good chance that we could hit my science class. There was plenty of cleaning I needed to do there, and I was even getting paid to fix some other student’s problem. I was just getting warmed up.

“Santos!” I yelled, and my voice echoed throughout the vacant school. “Where are you?!”

Normally, Santos had a small Walkman, listening to some cassette tape, oldies, whistling in that Mexican way used to pace yourself, some cadence to measure the revolutions of the shoulder blade to buff out tough stains in tight circles. If he wasn’t cleaning, he was easy to identify by the dangling of his many keys, so there was no other option but to hear him. Even with clothes, this invisible man made sure he was heard.

“San …” I clasped my hands to make a bullhorn “… tos!” I blushed in shame when I realized that the voice that shot back at me with a thick Mexican accent was mine. Students used to laugh at my limited English, a set of refrigerator poetry bought at a flea market with missing articles, antecedents. Subjects and verbs rarely agreed since they were catapulted by my tongue, and I was always taught that agreeing was a form of weakness. There was always tension, drama, inside my house, inside of school, even inside of my fucking mouth.

“Hey!” A stray piece of paper hurled across the hall by the wind, and I was afraid that I was being watched by Santos. There were always these unspoken pop quizzes that he’d use to shape me up, always psychological. This absence could have been intended, his attempt to teach me another lesson that I had yet to find the meaning of, some profound moral to rectify my inner turmoil. Perhaps he’s hiding and gauging how I will respond, if I’m motivated and independent enough to show some initiative? These constant, unexpected situations were simulators meant to show me what a fuck-up I was, opting for some unreachable choice that managed to evade me. It wouldn’t be too long before it wasn’t fight or flight: I would simply freeze.

I quickly lapped the school, hoping to catch an open door, a sign he was inside, still on the premises, but all of the doors were closed and locked. Out of breath, I made my way home, and that’s when I noticed that his truck, always the last vehicle on the lot, was gone; the lot was empty.

It was time to go home and clean up, make la casa glisten as though slathered in manteca.

Our Mexican house was different from its neighbors yet not: the chain-link fence, the perimeter of our front yard, drooped in some areas as though made of rope that had lost its tension. Because of this, the chain-link would detach itself from parts of the beam, protruding outwards as though somebody had blasted it to make an escape. Ivy clung and suffocated parts of the fence, weighing it down, serving less as a botanical curtain for privacy and more as a guard to hide the bald, thinning yard. It was mostly packed dirt, etched with earthworm indentations, their own highway. They escaped by cracking the earth’s surface and burrowing deep into the earth’s marrow.

Clearly, we had one of the best houses on the block, I was thinking, even though the driveway was gravel that never seemed to do its job of leveling itself, always succumbing to the perpetual hole it attempted to fill, and that’s when I saw it … there … this anomaly that was out of its environment: a jewel of a lowrider truck that sparkled with life, metallic paint in a pattern shining in a constellation from its own galaxy. The color was a candy, root-beer brown, and it had the same sheen and transparent effect of a sucked Jolly Rancher.

Santos was there, right there at my house, there in our home.

Our place.

Parked next to it was my father’s truck: it always had a layer of orchard dust, mud sprayed and dried on its fenders. The parts that used to be red were now a dull pink from the sun, the vibrant color oxidized into a flat, muted dull that was now transitioning towards gray. There were so many times it had run out of gas because gas cost so much. It hurt my father seeing his hard-earned money disappear as he pumped, the numbers spinning as though it were years he was sacrificing instead of currency.

That truck always smelled of leftovers, food on the verge of spoiling, el lonche that my mother prepared, often at 3:45 in the morning, transforming into the smell of death. What? Mi apa? Home? Now? What—4:15 PM?

My father hated being there. Home was for the weak, as was rest, especially just sitting down like a pinche huevon; my dad quickly built a venerable reputation, always the hardest worker, always sought after. He worked like he was always late for something, which was often his next job.

He was the oldest child in Mexico, learned how to work when he was five, using his father’s jacket to retrieve the cattle, the sleeves from the coat dragging to the ground behind him. He was born to work, especially since he was made out of pragmatism, a biological tractor, an accessory to cultivate the land, not quite intended to fully develop as much as put in work on the physical end, and that’s it. In El Norte, among the pickers (peaches, prunes, olives, tomatoes, lo que sea), he was hunched over in a perpetual state, running and working in a panicked frenzy, part convulsion, part chiriporquias; my family and I were puppets being handled by someone with muscular dystrophy, a synchronized seizure operated by the delicate indistinguishable line between survival and poverty.

The door was always open, since running the swamp cooler during the day was a waste of money. I felt like leaving, going over to my friend’s house, and hiding out. Perhaps running away was an option. While I was weighing and contemplating my next move, Santos appeared in the doorway, he seemed to be leaving, but he saw me, his silver shades still on.

“About time,” he yelled from the porch. He rolled himself on the heels of his foot, his thumbs locked around the belt buckle sans his rags. “What took you so long?!” He was right below that Okie redneck woodwork purchased at the Yuba Sutter Fair, a Los Quintero sign.

My mother came out with a flyswatter, telling me, “Que dice? Watchusay?” My father peeked over Santos’ shoulder and hit his fist against his palm.

When I got inside, they were already sitting down, conference mode. To compensate for the small space, the living room was stuffed with excessively huge furniture. Our eighties vinyl sofas were creased like used brown-paper bags. The buttons had been removed, exposing the white stuffing that resembled wisps of smoke. To combat the decay and guide the eye beyond the deteriorating furniture, mi ama crocheted long doilies out of yellow yarn, three of them each on the backs of the sofas; on the coffee table were three (the biggest always at the center, flanked by smaller ones at the side). They were webs spun to redirect the eye, these geometrical kitsch adornments with the symmetry of a disease that afflicted the poor, kept spreading over time, eventually infecting the whole damn house.

“Como están?” Santos offered social niceties. Then to me, “Sit down.”

I ignored him; flippant by nature, partly resigned to the events that would unfold, my body was already going into shock, numbing itself. My ears started to flush red. I wanted to self-destruct, vanish, and splatter. Adrenaline coursed and I felt like I needed to go boneless like a dishrag.

“Hey!” My dad barked at me in a way that only an immigrant from another country can, that old world, Pavlovian command. “Sit down. Sientate.”

I would need leverage, need to be in the position to take off should the situation escalate. I already had a leg up since the front door was always open to cool off the house, but it always brought in a swarm of flies. There was the constant tapping from them crashing against the window, trying to escape.

“Sit down, mijo. Please.” My mother insisted, so I made space on the side table, right by the door, gently placing aside the fragile porcelain figurines. The micro ballerinas were one of her prized possessions. “Por favor.”

I trusted her. I sat down while I held and twirled the delicate ballerina.

“Gracias,” she said, using the flyswatter as a fan.

She looked out for the flies that buzzed overheard but were hard to spot. She traced the flies with her eyes to telegraph the trajectory, swatting away with the fly swatter, swinging, missing. Swinging. Splatter. Her shirt was transparent with the day’s sweat, revealing a wife beater underneath. She smelled of armpit, dark lines of dirt caked onto the creases of her neck. She was, as usual, in the periphery, there and not, always an extra. Hard physical labor made her exhausted, lifeless, a little pale.

Somehow, she always mustered enough energy to never let us go hungry. Always washed the dirty laundry that turned into mud in the washing machine, using a dash of gasoline to get off the tough stains. Cleanliness was akin to godliness, and who else was closer to God than all of us, the dirtiest people of them all—them Mexicans; them themless …

Santos clapped his hands. “Alright? Do you know why we’re here?”

“No,” I lied.

“Well,” Santos shot back. “Why are you here?”

It was more of an existential question, and my capacity to imagine was as limited as my father’s English. I shrugged my shoulders. Played dumb.

“What’s wrong with you? Guess?” They always ended the talk with rhetorical questions, expecting me to have profound answers to abstract social questions that required thorough, incisive responses, an understanding of philosophy, history, sociology, and especially psychology.

“School?” I offered, looking down at the porcelain figurine, twirling it with my fingers so it could spin.

“Yes,” said Santos. “And what about it? Huh? What do you think?”

“Think about …,” I replied, looking at the treasure in my hand, “ … what?”

He threw his hands in the air.

To survive, I had learned how to tune out, walk through life with my internal mute button, gathering pieces here and there, my Mexican, Chicano mind just not quick enough—yet—to process information while in panic mode. It was my own closed caption with the Spanish version, a translation of a word that may have been “off.”

Santos brushed me off, pulled up his pants a bit, and placed his shades inside his shirt pocket. He took the bottom of his shirt to wipe down his sweaty forehead.

“Look. Let me tell you why we’re here, okay?” He looked towards my father and began gesticulating, attempting to use his own form of sign language to express to my father what he had just expressed to me. “Aqui!” he offered. “Nosotros,” he made a circle with his index finger, stirring a big pot, to indicate all the people who were present. “Todos.” He brought his arms together to make a hoop. He may as well have been using Morse Code.

Mi apa, like the obedient student that he never had the opportunity to become, leaned onto the edge of his La-Z-Boy, half come again and half I’m listening, the body language of being at attention. He pinched his face in the universal sign of confusion, “Gwat?!” He shrugged his shoulders in the air a bit.

“Listen …,” Santos tried again. He looked up at the ceiling as if to retrieve the few Spanish words at his disposal … dusty, unused, clearly weathered. He blinked but nothing came out.

He frowned and gave up. “He’s not doing very well. Your son.” He pointed at me. “Him.”

My father’s facial expression remained the same, as if the words weren’t intended for him. Nothing registered, but he looked concerned, eyes fixed. His hair was still matted to his forehead from the day’s sweat, stiff by the salt. “Que dice?”

“…Your dad deaf?!” Santos was getting annoyed, perhaps it’s why he’d been leaving in the first place. It pained me that he spoke to my father in the same disrespectful way that he, at times, had done to me.

My mom got up and was attempting to swat away a fly that was trying to land on my father, who stood still, unfamiliar with the cues and formalities of a professional, serious interaction. He was a street mime on pause, waiting to be turned on by work, only work.

“How do you say that, what I just said?” said Santos. He scooted back onto the sofa, a little resigned. He took out a box of toothpicks and placed one in his mouth. “I need your help.”

I ignored him. Sweat was running down the side of my face.

“Chuy,” he whispered. “Please?”

I stayed motionless, mimicking my father. If I close my eyes, they won’t see me. If I stand still, this scene won’t play out, just a frozen frame.

“Hey.” My mom came over by me. “Watch out. Mijo. A fly?”

They buzzed and hovered like buzzards, they tapped on the window, so many of them that the window vibrated. Mi ama went over and splattered several. She closed the door and I heard the fresh pot of beans boiling. The windows began to steam.

“You? You speak Spanish?” my dad pleaded with Santos.

Santos nearly pinched his fingers together, held them up in the air. “Muy poquito.”

My father looked away. Rams lock horns; poor people lock eyes to gain respect. Looking away indicates a form of submission, being meek and subservient. Santos, this other, had enough gravitas to make this other, my dad, avert the gaze that attempted to dehumanize an object, push him further within his descending inferiority complex.

“Are you ready?” Santos said. “You speak Spanish, right?”

“Sí,” my mom responded. “My son? He good? He good English speak.”

“Tell him that you are the worst. Ready? Just translate it? Te va decir en español,” Santos told my dad. And, briefly, my father’s face relaxed. “Go ahead. Tell them in Spanish. You’re a piece of shit …”

I was always interpreting for them in those days, which meant seeing white people speak to me in a broken way as well. I had to interpret, piece together these dirty bits: Say you, to them, me no understand mucho Espanish. And they’d look at me the same way they’d look when talking to a toddler, attempting to transmit what they were saying much more with their eyes, the enunciation and intonation of words.

I got up and faced my father. I was weighing my options: how do I tell my father that I am a piece of shit. Worse still, a Mexican, but I couldn’t tell him that. He often reminded me of the shame of his dark skin, how he wished he could be whiter like his wife, my mother.

“I’m worthless,” I whispered. Some translations are meant to be lost in translation.

My dad looked at me with eyes of concern and anticipation. He had this innocent look of constant awe, of fireworks in the sky. It was his immigrant way of indicating that he was processing, registering the world and sounds around him, although he couldn’t decipher anything.

“What?! Speak louder. And tuck in your T-shirt?” he spat. “You are embarrassing us.”

“I’m no good. I’m a bad student,” I replied in a regular volume.

Santos interrupted and fed off of my momentum, despite my watery eyes, my quivering voice.

“Tell him that you are going to be in the worst classes in high school. You’re going to be in bonehead classes,” he said in a caring, empathetic voice, hard but firm. “That’s if! and a good if, if you pass.”

“Él? My son? He no good? No bueno?” my dad shot back, starting to button up his work shirt.

They may as well have been speaking in Nahuatl.

Me? The worst? Santos nodded his head, slowly, like it wasn’t even a point of dispute, just a slow, steady affirmation that hammered itself with each nod.

“He no good school? School? It no good?” said my father. My father attempted to rearrange his broken Spanish into a mosaic, twisting and spinning his words like a kaleidoscope, trying to find the difference between a pronoun and noun.

“No,” Santos shook his head in exaggeration; he took a deep breath and offered, “Escuela no bueno.”

My father looked relieved. “Oh.”

Santos had accidentally laid blame on the school, suggested its institutional offering was restricted, deficient.

“Muy malo,” Santos said and made the emphasis as though a response to a terrible dish. “Bad, you know? Malo.”

My father got up. He finally understood. I could tell he was fighting the urge to stand up and beat me into agave pulp. He caught himself and sat back down, grabbed the edges of his armrest and readjusted his weight. To calm himself down, he was picking away the cotton from the cracks of his La-Z-Boy.

“What’s wrong with you?” my dad spat. “What are you thinking?”

“Why? We he no goods?” my mother said.

“Look.” Santos got up and retrieved a folded paper from his back pocket. He unfolded with care, looking down at it, chewing on his toothpick. “Here. Give it to your dad.” He handed me a document. “It’s your report card.”

Santos looked at mi apa. “Grados?” offered Santos with uncertainty, a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.

My hands shook, I looked at the canary yellow sheet, my heart cracking my ribs open with fear. My temples throbbed, and my shirt started to stick to my back. The beans cooking in the kitchen were making our house a sweat lodge.

“F’s,” he repeated. “Muchos.”

I wanted to quickly transform the F’s into B’s with a mechanical pencil.

My dad got up and yanked it out of my hands. He squinted at it, read the subjects out loud but with a Spanish twist: Matematics, D; Ingles, F; Ciencias, F…

He stopped halfway and then swallowed, handing it back to Santos.

“It’s yours,” Santos said.

My father threw it on the ground.

“Tell them what else you did? Do they know what’s going on?”

God. Dios mio.

What had I done? I’d been spinning a yarn of lines, no, infrared lasers, and I had trapped myself in a corner.

What else had I done? There were so many things? I was a Native American story doll with heads protruding everywhere around me, telling and convincing myself of tales that contradicted each other.

Silence: the buzzing. The pot’s lid hitting against the rim from the pressure building inside.

I shrugged.

“Bah,” my dad responded, never once thinking that local, rural, Mexican colloquial village conjectures had their own restrictions and boundaries. “Bah,” he said louder, this time with his head up, not talking to the ground.

“What is that,” Santos offered, “… your dad’s a billy goat?”

Santos read a list of my crimes to my father, but what stuck out to me first was the word deficient. I wanted to interrupt him and recuse myself. No: why was he talking about “the fish net” (deficient?), but then this other word popped up: truancy. I thought the truth was crazy, part true and part lunacy. It must be so true, coupled with an adverb, ly, a high degree, confirming the veracity of the account. I accidentally constructed my own etymology and planted seeds to root words that would never come to fruition.

“But,” my father would say. “Why can’t he act like the white people? This is a white school? It’s the best.”

In Linda, my classmates had been the children of other migrants who picked the fields clean, anything that popped out of California’s skin. We were all on that skin together, living brown aphids—pests, a locust wrath. We were both harvested and dropped there, picked by the world and its mysteries for our labor.

Santos just continued, oblivious to whether we understood or not. He continued from some script that he’d memorized, some academic Miranda Rights: demerits, credit deficiencies, matriculations. How could we be American if we didn’t understand that English? We were puzzled like my cousins who had just arrived from Mexico, seeing us and our place for the first time, uncertain how to proceed, attempting to process while being too preoccupied by any thread of possible danger.

When Santos left, he shook my father’s hand, scratched by tree branches, peach fuzz, and juice dried up as micro stains.

Before he left, he bent over and offered me a toothpick.

“Gracias,” I said.

The door shut behind him, and I heard the lowrider start and disappear.

“Come with me, cabron!” yelled my dad. “Andale, pendejo. Let’s go out to the back.”

I stood there, frozen, looking at the poster of La Santa de la Guarda, the whitest thing—a saint guarding the whitest children crossing a dangerous bridge. It was affixed onto our seventies wood paneling, even though it was the late eighties.

We were stuck in the past.

Stuck in the old ways: here and there.

Of course, we once had a goat in the backyard. My little sister had become so attached to it, feeding it thorny weeds, snuggling up to its snout as she gently combed its goatee, using her fingers as a comb, stroking it until its eyes shut. Of course, at one point we did have chickens, a rooster that could not wake up before us, crowing to an empty house. Of course, there were other animals that were also “others.” Of course, there once was a nameless, anonymous pig in our garage. We had our own private petting zoo.

All those animals had been slaughtered in our backyard; I don’t think any of them had legal papers. Of course.

On the day of the slaughter, my little sister was told to take a bath while we all tried to corner the scared goat, which evaded us. Unbeknownst to us, La Santa Muerte had visited it on the day of its death to warn it of its fate. It managed to find the holes as we attempted to corral it within this enclosed Mexican, human fence that became tighter and tighter. The local compadre with a knife, dead center, instructed us, wanting us to hold it still once we wrestled it down, but it knew it was going to die. It magically leaped over us, headed for the road towards freedom, but my father threw a direct hit with an axe, right on the neck. It fell on its side, mid-stride, still in the air, the nameless creature’s legs still running like a dreaming, sleeping dog.

In that old way, that unbridled ingenuity and resourcefulness, our pet was hung from its hind legs—on our rusting swing set—bleeding out, all the blood rushing to its slit throat, exposing its blindingly white spine.

“Go get your bicycle pump, mijo,” instructed mi apa.

When I returned, the goat was already off the swing set, on the ground, and my father made a slit on one of its ankles. He inserted the tip of the air hose and encouraged me to pump away. As I did, the skin freed itself from the skin. The black hide with white patches puffed up like a balloon about to burst.

Like a chivo into a casco … not like a lamb to a slaughter.

My grandfather once took one of our chickens without any warning or indication, kind of like an old rancho reflex of survival: hungry = animal = death. He grabbed it by its neck, swung it over his head like a cowboy’s rope, over and over again like he was qualifying for the Mexican hammer throw in the Olympics. He showed me the neck and face like a sock resting across his cracked palm. He asked me if I wanted to keep it.

Like a chicken in a Mexican backyard … no, never like a lamb led to a slaughter.

Running: like a chicken with its head cut off: that stream of blood bending to the force of the speed, an antenna of an RC car.

But nothing had bled like the pig. Chavelo straddled it, pulled back on its neck like a camel clutch and slit, immediately filling the garage with a pink mist, a terrible gender reveal gone wrong. It convulsed and squealed, haunting the whole house. My tio took the tail end of La Muerte’s black robe and attempted to cover my eyes with it, but I still heard the gunshot when they were tired of the noise. It still smelled like the lab of death: gunsmoke—sulfur—and the unmistakable smell of pools of blood: iron, copper, zinc, fat …

Like a pig heading towards a Mexican quinceañera …

Not once. Not ever, never ever being a lamb led to a slaughter.

Before any party, a life has to be transformed into death before the celebration even begins.

“Do you know what sacrifice is?” my dad yelled at me, pushing me towards the back end of the yard. I tripped over my mother’s roses. “You have no idea!”

My dad howled with the primal pain of all of our ancestors before words were even born.

Between fits of rage, he paused to gather himself. “One,” he panted, catching his breath, his hair no longer stiff, electrified and alive. “One,” he held up his finger. “You were born here, idiot.” He was walking closer to me and I was now cornered. “Two: you speak the fucking language.” I could now smell his dried lungs, the smell of a dehydrated, taxed human being. “Three: you are legal. You have papers.” That was it. What else could one need?

He picked me up by my oversized shirt, lifted me a little and threw me to the ground. The collar was now stretched. I didn’t know if I should get back or stay down. I opted for down, knowing it’s easier to use my knees as shields to block the blows.

“And … you have school, you idiot? Do you know what an honor it is—an honor, my God—to be here.” He pointed at the ground with both fingers. “Huh?”

My father wasn’t familiar with API scores, property taxes, a school full of white teachers. Even before I got there, they had already failed me with those degrading looks.

“Yes,” I said, to make him stop, guessing what he expected me to say. I was always wrong, throwing wild punches at the world.

“You don’t know anything! You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

The scarcity of his emotion and experience, his poverty was penetrating us through our pores. He kicked me. I felt his industrial boot crash against my femur. I heard people laughing and giggling.

“We are with the best people. The whites?” he continued. “We moved away from the Mexicans, see?”

He spun around with his hands out to demonstrate the environment before us, his attempt to offer me the world. My Okie neighbors were peeking through the holes of the wooden fence, our mini border, enjoying the show. I heard someone say, “What the fuck are them sayin’?”

“Do you want to be like me? A fucking wetback picker?”

Sometimes the Okies would clean up their backyards by throwing their unwanted junk over into our yard. It wasn’t surprising to find some unexpected odds and ends magically appear on our side. As my father lectured, I marveled at a broken game that I hadn’t yet acknowledged, perhaps a recently discarded arrival. Milton Bradley’s Operation.

It was missing the pincers.

“Why can’t you be like them, huh? The white people?” My father pointed at one that he caught out of the corner of his eye.

“Fuck off!” wailed the Okie, taking a drag off a cigarette.

No response: above me nothing more than a thought cloud filled with an ellipse, searching, struggling, needing these words that were so alien to me. I wanted to say that they were born speaking the language, and I wanted to tell him that they were no better than us.

“Sí, papa … sí,” I begged him.

“Don’t be like me. I’m nothing.” He started sobbing in that third-world way, a profound lament that told the wilderness to have mercy on an injured prey. The last strategy for survival. “Soy nada, cabron.”

Operation: all of the pieces were missing and the metal edges rusted. Ants crawled in and out of where the nose used to be—the red bulb was shattered. I thought that maybe I could salvage it, but what could I use for the missing pieces? What could fill the space inside the Bread Box? Mi ama’s yarn could possibly replace and substitute for the rubber band. That’s when I saw a glistening, ruby-red jellybean stuffed into the butterflies in the stomach. The ants started to crawl up my fingers.

“Are you listening?!” My dad attempted to penetrate my skull. “Cabezon! Think! Think!” He pointed his gnarled index finger onto his temple, ready to shoot. His nails always had blood blistered underneath. I think; therefore, I am, but thoughts are constructed by the patchwork of syllables and phonics working in conjunction, these arbitrary sounds that had failed to render this reality, myself included.

I laughed instead at my unusual relationship with Operation, attempting to focus on the white cartoon patient needing help, that red jellybean inside, the trail of ants marching in unison, seeking substance from the insides, the most unlikely of places.

How does humor shield you against the world? How does it deflect what you don’t want invaded? What is still raw within you that only humor and a wry, sardonic wit can defend you against?

My father got upset that I giggled. He pulled me up by the scalp of my hair, perhaps having the muscle memory from when he picked onions. It felt like he was attempting to rip my roots out. The force had me wailing in pain, and I thought about the chicken, running, even after it was decapitated.

My hollow body became ready to be stuffed with knowledge.

“You are such a fucking mess!” he said. He demanded, “Get out!”

I cried, massaging my scalp, which was already forming welts from the pull. My father started pulling out his own hair from his sides with a lethal ferocity, attempting to split himself in half, coming up only with tufts of hair. It was his way of apologizing, country empathy—these conservative values from a primal past. Family First.

Of course. Of course …

I didn’t know what he meant: leave the house? Leave the town? Leave my people? Get out!?

We had just gotten to Olivehurst, which was better than our starter home; we hadn’t even gotten started.

“Kick his fucking ass!” an Okie said after swigging some Schnapps. He got up on the fence to get a better view. “Beat his ass. What are you waiting for, Beaner?!”

My father paused, shocked. He shot me the eyes meaning help, the ones that I’d become accustomed to read as a substitute for words he didn’t have.

There still isn’t a word that describes crying and laughing at the same time.

That’s what I did before I tried blacking out by holding my breath, already expecting to be misinterpreted for what I’d done.