Free Borderlands by James Carlos Blake Page A

but a single snake, a little green one said to be harmless except to bugs, but in the groves he had known more than one man who had been bitten by a rattler.
    He was working swiftly but with care not to bruise the ripe tomatoes/plucking them from the vines and putting them in the basket, pushing the basket ahead of him along the low row of plants. He paused to wipe the sweat from his face, being careful not to get insecticide in his eyes.
    So now he thought of a ladder as a risk, he told himself, of a hundred pounds of oranges as a great burden. Sweet Mother of God, he was thinking like an old man. He felt a rush of anger—followed instantly by confusion because he did not know what, exactly, he was angry about. About being in this dusty field, of course, breaking his back under a roasting sun. Did a man need more reason than this to feel angry? But he knew it was something else, too, something more than the outrage of a life at hard labor, that for the past few days had been gnawing on his spirit like sharp teeth.
    “You there! Got to work goddammit!”
    Gene, the worst-tempered of the crew chiefs, had spotted him kneeling idly and gazing into space and was pointing at him from six rows away. “This ain’t no mothafucken pignick!”
    Although he still did not understand much English, Julio well enough understood Gene’s commands. Pinche negrito, he thought, as he resumed working. Goddammit you . Goddammit all of this. He suddenly wished he was back in the groves, the ladders and snakes and heavy loads be damned. In the grove you at least had some shade and so what if the air could get so thick it was hard work just to breathe? Out here you worked in the sun and you sweat like a mule and you crawled along on your hands and knees with your back bent and your spine cracking. You breathed dust and insecticide fumes all day long. The bug spray burned and stained your skin and you carried the smell of it everywhere, even after you washed. Goddammit! A man had to work hard all his life, yes, but not on his knees. A man was not meant to work on his knees.
    Well … a priest, maybe, he thought, and strained to smile at his own weak joke.
    II
    He had arrived in Florida three months ago, crammed into the back of a truck with fifteen other men at the end of a journey that began shortly after they crossed the Río Grande some thirty miles upriver of Laredo, Texas. Guided by a Mexican coyote—a smuggler of illegal border-crossers—they splashed across the river in the middle of a windy moonless night, choking on the muddy water and on their pounding hearts, fearful of being captured by la migra—agents of the American immigration service—or by the Border Patrol. They walked and walked in the night wind under a sky blasting with stars, shivering in their wet clothes, and then just before sunrise the truck came clattering out of the vague gray dawn and found them as planned.
    The driver was a freckled Anglo boy of about seventeen who counted the men and then handed the coyote an envelope and ordered them in wretched Spanish to get into the back of the truck and be absolutely quiet for the whole trip if they did not want to be captured by la migra. Watching them from the truck cab was a large pale Anglo in a cowboy hat who spoke not at all. The men clambered up through the rear of the box-shaped cargo compartment and sat on the floor with their backs against the sides. There were several plastic bottles of drinking water and some lidless gallon cans to hold their waste. Then the boy yanked down the rollered door and locked them in darkness.
    Julio had been among strangers even then. Most of the other men in the truck were from the same region of Coahuila state and had long been acquainted. A few of the others had come together from Nuevo León, and there was a pair of friends from Chihuahua. But Julio had come the farthest, all the way from Nayarit, a state unfamiliar to the others, and only he had come alone.
    The truck’s tires