Free Borderlands by James Carlos Blake Page B

droned under them all day and night. The men’s excited jabbering gradually trailed off, and soon they were all curled on the floor and trying to sleep, occasionally cursing in the dark when someone made use of the piss cans and his aim was poor, or when a can was kicked over by someone’s careless foot or toppled by a sudden lurch of the truck. By the end of the first day every man’s clothes were damp and reeked of piss.
    Julio slept fitfully, dreamt of his wife’s dark eyes, his children’s faces. Once, on waking in the reverberant darkness, he felt as if his chest had been hollowed, felt such an abrupt rush of loneliness he had to clench his teeth against weeping.
    The truck made stops only for fuel—and every time it did, gasoline fumes rose thickly in the dark compartment, and the men warned each other not to light cigarettes. Sometimes the fuel stops were in a town and they would hear street traffic, and sometimes people shouting, and once they heard children laughing and guessed they must be passing by a school. Sometimes, as they rolled slowly through a town, they caught the smells of food and moaned quietly and told each other in whispers of the meals they were going to buy for themselves as soon as they received their first pay. During a stop sometime in the second day, the doorlock rattled and the door rolled up just far enough for the boy to shove into the compartment a large paper bag containing sandwiches and bags of corn chips. The sudden blazing strip of sunlight under the raised door was blinding, and the brief inward rush of fresh air burned Julio’s lungs as it cut through the stench he had become inured to. The sandwiches were made of bologna and dry bread—but every man gobbled his down in a few quick bites.
    Late the next day, they felt the truck leave paved road and begin jouncing over uneven ground. Nearly an hour later they came to a stop and the lock sounded and the door flew up on its rollers and the Anglo boy counted out ten of the men, Julio included, and told them to get out. The other six men were again shut inside the truck and the truck departed.
    They were in Florida. Julio had always thought it a beautiful name. Florida! It conjured visions of a lush land hung with flowers, a world far removed from the starkly rugged sierras where he grew up struggling for subsistence in cornfields full of stones. When he staggered out of the truck and saw the endless rows of rich green trees hung with golden fruit, he felt he’d been delivered to a garden of God.
    They were housed in small, battered, unfurnished trailer homes set in a wide clearing deep in the grove, four men to a trailer, and they slept on the floor. They were fed from a mobile kitchen, a camper-backed pickup, that showed up twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Its rations were the same at both meals—rice and beans, flavorless white bread, bags of corn chips, ice water. They worked every day from sunup to sunset, scaling ladders to pick the fruit at the higher reaches of the trees, dropping the oranges into the canvas bag hung across their chests, descending the ladder to empty the bag into a packing box, repeating the process until the box was full, then lugging it to a truck with a long slat-sided bed and there collecting a ticket from a crew chief before emptying the box into the truck. They were paid in cash every night, forty cents for every ticket, and even after the bosses deducted expenses for shelter and food, Julio was left with more money than he could earn in a week of hard work back home. He allowed himself some money for beer and candy bars and for gambling a little in the nightly dice games, and the rest he kept in a thin roll held tight with a rubber band and tucked in the front of his underwear. Every night he fell asleep with his hand cupping the roll protectively.
    As he went about his work he daydreamed of the glorious return he would make to his village of Santo Tomás one day. He recalled the promise he’d