“WE APPRECIATE IT,” PACO SAID. “GET A FEW HOURS’ work in, make fifty, sixty bucks a week. Man, he’s something.” Paco drank from the can of beer he was holding, finished it, and threw the can out the window.
They were south of town now, past the main intersection, Main Street, Chino driving slowly, studying the buildings and storefronts on the left side of the highway.
“Yes sir, we appreciate it. Fat cowboy son of a bitch . . . Man, what’re you looking for?”
“The union hall,” Chino said. “Look for a sign says VAWA.”
“Vah-wah.”
“Valley Agricultural Workers Association. We must’ve passed it.”
“See him tomorrow,” Paco said. “Man, I got to go to Mexico.”
They checked in to the Fun-tier Motel that was pink and had a neon-green palm tree sign that would light up at night: one room with two beds for nine dollars. As soon as their suitcases were in, Chino pulled off his shirt and shoes and stretched out on his bed. Paco took the car keys and registration, saying he’d be back soon. Chino told him to pick up some roast chicken. They’d forgot all about the chicken. They’d forgot they were hungry.
Paco went out. Chino heard the car door slam. He heard it slam a second time and a moment later Paco was in the room again with a sport coat over his arm.
“We forgot something else,” he said. “How’d I look going through customs, they find this thing?” Beneath the sport coat he raised from his arm, Paco was holding a .38-caliber Colt Special revolver.
“Put it in your suitcase,” Chino said. “And listen, find out where Stanzik Farms is.”
Paco frowned. “What for?”
“Just do it, all right?”
“We going to work?”
“Maybe for a few days.”
“Man, I can’t stand that out in the sun. You know it.”
“Paco, get the chicken, will you?”
When he was alone, staring at the ceiling, Chino began to sort it out in his mind and see clearly they would have to go to work for a while.
The cops already had a look at him. If they caught him hanging around, not working, they could make up something and stick him with it. They might even call LA.
He could go directly to the union hall and see Vincent Mora, lay it on him. Maybe Mora would recognize him, maybe he wouldn’t.
But sooner or later somebody would recognize him, at least his name. So it would be good to have some time, study the situation, see what the workers thought of Mora. And the way to do that, go out and pick for a few days. The hell with Paco’s punchy head.
IT WAS STILL COOL AT SIX A.M., THE VINES WERE WET and darkened the pants legs of the pickers as they worked along the rows with their burlap sacks. Somebody said it was insecticide, the wetness, but most of them knew the field had not been sprayed in several days and that the moisture had settled during the night. Their pants and the vines would be hot dusty dry within an hour. The sun, which they would have all day, faced them from the eastern boundary of the fields, above a tangle of willows that lined an arroyo five miles away. The sun seemed that close to them.
From his pickup truck the foreman, Larry Mendoza, watched his crew working the rows: stooped, round shapes dotting the field, some of the men already ten or fifteen yards ahead of the older ones and the women and kids. There were only eight kids this morning younger than fourteen, a couple of them younger than twelve; he’d had to take them to make up his crew. He’d had to take the Anglo, strong-looking young guy who wore a T-shirt with the name of some university on it. He’d had to take the Black guy also. But at least the Black guy had picked before, not honeydew melons, but he had picked and knew what he was doing. The Anglo, Bud Davis, with his muscular arms and shoulders and cutoff pants and tennis shoes—like he was at South Padre Island on his vacation—couldn’t pick his nose. He stood up all the time stretching and rolling his shoulders to work the ache out of his back.
This week he had also hired a couple of new guys he had never seen before, from California, asking them what they were doing here when they could make more money at home. The one guy said, You want us to pick or you want us to go someplace else? Tough guy. He had given his name as Chino and wore a white cloth tennis or fishing hat. Christ, the people you got for pickers. The other guy, Paco, screwed off all the time, hanging around the truck drinking water; but he wasn’t the kind of guy you could kick in the ass.
“Hey, how you going to pick melons standing up?”
Larry Mendoza got out of the yellow pickup that said STANZIK FARMS on the door. He crossed the ditch to the field, skinny, hunch-shouldered Chicano striding across the rows, moving toward Bud Davis, the Anglo kid from Dayton, Ohio. The university on his gray T-shirt was Xavier. XAVIER UNIV. ATHLETIC DEPT. and a small numeral, 22, in a square.
“I was seein’ how much I had in the sack.”
“Fill it,” Larry Mendoza said. “That’s how much you put in. Then you stand up.”
“I’m gettin’ used to it already.”
The Black guy, Clinton Taylor, working the next row and a few yards ahead, was watching them. Larry Mendoza said to him, “You need something? You want some help or something?”
Clinton Taylor didn’t answer; he turned and went back to work.
“This one”—Mendoza lifted the honeydew from Bud Davis’s sack—“it’s not ready. Remember I told you, you pick the ripe ones. You loosen the other ones in the dirt. You don’t turn them so the sun hits the underneath, you just loosen them.”
“That’s what I have been doin’.”
“The ones aren’t ready, we come back for later on.”
“I thought it was ripe.” Bud stooped to lay the melon among the vine leaves.
Larry Mendoza closed his eyes and opened them and adjusted the funneled brim of his straw hat. “You going to put it back on the vine, tie it on? You pick it, it stays picked. You got to keep it then. You understand?”
“Sure,” Bud Davis said.
Sure. How do you find them? Mendoza asked himself, turning away from the college kid who had been here three days and would last maybe one or two more, till the end of the week. As he was walking away, back to the road, Mendoza’s gaze stopped on a woman several rows over. “Hey, mother, where are you, in church? Get off your knees or go home, I get somebody else.” Nobody was paying them a dollar ten cents an hour to rest. Larry Mendoza had started in the fields for forty cents an hour. He’d worked for sixty cents, eighty cents. He was making a buck sixty now as foreman, all year, and drove a pickup truck and his family lived in a house with an inside toilet.
“You hear me? I get somebody else!”
Like it was easy.
The contractor had promised him at least fifty more people—from Mexico if he had to go over there to get them—promised to have them here at six o’clock.
Crossing the ditch Larry Mendoza said to himself, Don’t look yet. Wait. He heard Mr. Stanzik say, What good is it I pay you to be a foreman you can’t get any people?
Then, as he reached the pickup truck, he said, All right, now look. You’ll see the bus coming, a whole crew inside, all grown men who know how to pick melons, been picking them since they were boys. Fast? You never seen men could pick so fast.
Mendoza looked and his gaze held. After a moment he was sure of it: yes, something was coming, way down the road, still a couple miles away, coming in from the highway raising dust. But he knew it wasn’t the bus. Shit no, that would be too easy for him. He had to worry every day and hire kids and have pains in his stomach. He had to take blame and abuse and a lot of shit from everybody, both sides, and still get the melons picked before they rotted in the fields. It wouldn’t be the bus. No chance of it. Though he said in his mind, God, make it be the goddamn bus, will you please, and not the strikers?
WELL, THE SACK WAS FULL NOW. HE COULDN’T GET any more in it. Bud Davis started across the rows with the sack bumping against his can and the back of his knee, making him walk stiff-legged. Ahead of him the colored guy stood up, twisted his sack closed, and laid it gently over his shoulder. Bud took his sack and did the same; it was a lot easier walking. He hurried a little to catch up to the colored guy, following him toward the stake truck that was parked in a side lane about forty yards away. There were a few others heading for the truck: Mexicans who carried their sacks by a shoulder rope and walked stooped over, the sacks almost touching the ground. Yesterday the foreman had caught a kid dragging a full sack and had screamed at him about bruising the melons and fired him on the spot.
“How many you get in a load?” Bud asked the Black guy, Clinton Taylor.
“I don’t count them,” the Black guy said.
“I got thirty this time,” Bud said. “Figure a pound each—take ’em over to the truck and unload, get a drink, take a leak every once in a while. I bet you make fifty trips a day, fifteen hundred pounds of melons—I don’t see how some of those women and little kids make it.”
“They don’t count,” Clinton Taylor said. “That’s how they make it.”
“How’d you like to do this all your life?” The guy didn’t answer and Bud Davis said, “I don’t even know what I’m doin’ here. Guy at school said it was good work, not much dough, but you’re outside in the sun, get a nice tan—”
He told himself, Christ, watch it, will you? And then told himself, No, it was all right, and tried to think of something else to say, staring at the black round shape of the man’s hair.
“You know, get away from home for a while, see some of the country. Maybe go down to Mexico. You had a good time down there?”
“It was all right,” Clinton Taylor said.
He talked to the guy because the guy kept to himself most of the time and didn’t seem to have any friends. The Mexicans left him alone, almost as if he wasn’t there. But it was sure hard to get anything out of him. All he knew was that Clinton Taylor was from Detroit and had been to Mexico and was broke and needed money to get home.
And the guy sure took his time. Bud had to shorten his stride to stay a few paces behind Clinton Taylor’s neat round head and narrow body, narrow hips and the high tight can of a colored halfback, moving like one, like almost all the colored halfbacks he’d ever seen. Clinton Taylor didn’t wear work clothes; he wore old clothes that had once been good, sport shirt and continental no-belt pants and regular shoes with thin soles.
“I don’t know,” Bud Davis said. “Bunch of us decided to do it. Then the guys started backin’ out. Two of us ended up coming down, took three days hitchhikin’, and the other guy went home yesterday.”
They reached the lane where the truck was parked. Clinton Taylor stopped and looked at Davis for the first time. “Why didn’t you go with him?”
“I don’t know. I’m here. I go home, all the jobs that pay anything’d be gone anyway.”
“You payin’ for your school?”
“No, my dad put the money aside for it.”
“Then what’re you workin’ for, you don’t have to pay for nothin’?”
“I got to make my own spending money.”
Clinton Taylor paused, still looking at him. “You got to make your own spendin’ money?”
“Whatever I need for at school. You know—go out on a date, maybe to a show, get something to eat. It cost dough.”
“You go out on a date, huh?”
“Weekends, yeah.”
“They much ass up there at that school?”
“Well, you know, certain girls, ones you know’ll go all the way.”
“Is that right?”
“Sure, like any place.”
Clinton Taylor grinned unexpectedly. “Go all the way. I like to see how far that is, that all the way.”
He turned with his sack of melons and went on to the truck.
Bud Davis followed. “What else you think I meant? It doesn’t matter what you call it long as it’s the real thing. Right?”
When Clinton Taylor didn’t answer, Davis tried to think of something else to say, and then decided the hell with it. Who needed to get put down by a dumb jig melon picker? If the guy didn’t want to be friendly, fuck him. He could tell this guy he roomed with a colored guy at school—Black guy—who talked to him the same way he did to his colored friends and never pulled any of that superior Black bullshit. But it would sound like he was playing up to him, like saying some of my best friends are Negroes or Blacks or whatever the hell they were supposed to be called now, so Bud didn’t tell him.
Clinton Taylor was already up in the truck. Davis went up the board ramp that had crosspieces nailed to it for footholds and carefully dumped his sack of melons on the pile building in the forward part of the truck bed. As some of the melons rolled down he placed them on top of the pile, making sure they’d stay. He turned and stood up in the hot sun glare to see Clinton Taylor still in the truck, looking off toward the road where a line of cars had stopped and people were getting out.
“Come to save our ass,” Clinton Taylor said.
Bud Davis recognized them from the day before, the same ones with the same VAWA picket signs, about thirty of them coming up the road, stringing out in single file as they approached the ditch that ran the length of the melon field.
“They always somebody want to save you,” Clinton Taylor said.
Davis watched them spacing out, staying on the other side of the ditch, off company property. The pickets were all looking toward the field now.
“I come here to work,” Davis said, “and the first thing I know there’s a strike on.”
“Nobody makin’ you join it.”
“I don’t even know what it’s about. More money’s all I heard.”
“Fifty cents an hour raise and some fringe. They tell the man that’s what they want or they walk out. He say go ahead and walk. So ’stead of gettin’ a buck ten an hour they get nothin’. You dig it?”
Bud Davis wasn’t sure if he dug it or not. There were farmworkers on strike and workers still in the fields, so there had to be two sides to it. Or more, counting the growers.
CONNIE CHAVEZ WORE A BLACK BANDANA TIED IN BACK, a pair of gold earrings, and a Texas straw hat over the bandana. She wore a denim jacket, Levi’s, sandals, and binoculars hanging in front of her on a strap. Connie was twenty, with two and a half years of college behind her and years of working in the fields behind that. Maybe she’d go back to the University of Texas and get her degree in political science, maybe not. Today, as a member of the Valley Agricultural Workers Association, VAWA Local 101, she was on the picket line at Stanzik Farms, and the strike—entering its second week—was the realest, neatest scene she had ever been part of.
She raised the binoculars and, for another moment, studied the figures scattered through the melon rows: like a herd grazing in the low vines. When she lowered the glasses, Connie Chavez said, “Let me have it.” The man next to her handed over a bullhorn.
“¡Vénganse! Por respeto, ¡hombres!”
The amplified words broke the stillness and brought the workers up from the vines to gaze this way, toward the road.
“Come over here, join us! Show them we all stand together for our rights.”
The pickets began calling to the workers, a few by name, motioning them to come over, waving picket signs from side to side, some of them waving red bandanas, twirling them in a circle above their heads.
“¿Dónde están su respeto y dignidad, hombres? ¡Vénganse!”
The workers remained motionless, the herd turned and held by the unexpected sound. Most of them had not noticed the arrival of the pickets and they took time now to study the line of people and read the picket signs they had read before during the past few days. Several of the signs said VAWA LOCAL 101 ON STRIKE. And others said UNITE FOR RIGHT! and $1.50 OR NOTHING! and simply ¡HUELGA! They watched the pickets as long as they could—taking this opportunity to rest and stretch their backs—until Larry Mendoza came across the ditch waving his arms at them.
“Get back to work! Where are you, at the show? You want to watch those comedians? You don’t get paid to watch them or listen to them—you hear me!” They heard him all right, coming across the rows among them, threatening them with the violent motion of his arm, as if cracking an invisible whip.
“¡No tengan miedo del segundo, hombres! ¡Vénganse!”
Connie Chavez aimed the bullhorn at Larry Mendoza. “Hey, Judas! How much they pay you to kiss Stanzik’s ass every day?” She made kissing sounds that smacked loud through the bullhorn and kept at him as Mendoza came back across the field toward the road. “That how you do it, Judas? He sells his own people for a dollar ten cents and kicks you if you drag the bag on the ground. Judas, you love melons, uh? I hear you go to bed with melons.”
The men on the picket line—there were only a few women besides Connie Chavez—were grinning now and laughing at Larry Mendoza, some of them taunting him, calling him Judas and melon lover. The man next to Connie Chavez said, “Hey, Larry, your melon got a friend? We go out together, drink some beer.” It was good to relax and laugh. Driving in from the highway a little while ago, approaching the fields, no one had said more than a few words. Now they felt better. Connie Chavez was good; she could talk like a man if she wanted and they never knew what she was going to say.
Larry Mendoza stopped at the edge of the field and stared at them from across the ditch. Until a few days ago he had never seen a picket line. He knew these people and yet now they were like strangers and he wasn’t sure how to talk to them.
He said to Connie Chavez, “Do I insult you? Do I ever call you names?”
Connie raised the bullhorn. “He asks if he ever insults you. You hear that?”
“I’m talking to you, not to them! Listen,” the foreman said, “I don’t care if you strike. Do what you want, but don’t bother people who want to work.”
Through the bullhorn Connie said, “He says he doesn’t care if you strike.”
“If you strike!”
“If you strike.” The bullhorn intensified and relayed the words. The people in the field had stopped working and were looking this way again.
“You don’t want to be reasonable,” Larry Mendoza said. “So why talk to you.”
“He refuses to speak to us,” Connie told the field, “because we are on strike for a just wage and he doesn’t want any of us, or you, to make as much as he does.”
“I didn’t say that—I don’t care how much you make.”
“Judas says he doesn’t care how much you make. His own words. All he cares about are the melons.”
“Listen, I care about my job.”
“Judas says he cares about his job, selling people for a dollar ten cents.”
Larry Mendoza waited, staring at Connie, trying to keep control of himself. “I don’t call you names,” he said then. “You want to strike, it’s a free country, go ahead. But don’t call me names, you whore, because I do my job.”
“He says it’s a free country,” the bullhorn told the people in the field. “Do you believe that? I’ll tell you what’s free. The government water the man uses to irrigate his fields. The government money he gets not to grow some kind of crop. But I don’t see anybody paying you not to pick the crop he doesn’t grow. Do you feel free? Raise your hands out there anybody who feels free. Tell me how many good jobs a Chicano can get in town. You want to pick melons or oranges, that’s your freedom of choice. Work for a dollar ten cents, or don’t work. How you like living in a free country?”
Larry Mendoza walked over to his pickup truck and got in. They watched the pickup drive off, then swerve toward the edge of the ditch, back up and come around in a U-turn. The pickup shaved them close going past, going somewhere in a hurry.
“There he goes,” the bullhorn announced. “He says for you to sit down and rest while he goes to the toilet. A nice inside one someplace. We ask Stanzik for portable toilets so you don’t have to go in the field in front of everybody. You know what he told us? That he can’t afford them. Man with five bathrooms inside his house. Lucy Ramirez work there and she count them. Think about it, picking his melons.”
“SOMEBODY NEED TO GET IN HER BRITCHES,” CLINTON Taylor said. “Take her mind off the bullshit.”
Bud Davis was across the row watching the yellow pickup streaking out of sight. Gone now, but everybody was working again. He said, “I didn’t realize it was a girl at first.”
“That momma’s a girl. I seen her one time, little short dress on, nice ass. Man, it’s all there.”
“You know her?”
“I’ve seen her. She don’t live at the camp. She work at the union hall for Mora.” Clinton Taylor’s gaze returned to the road, to the girl in the straw hat and denims. “Maybe she givin’ him pleasure beside work—I don’t know nothin’ about the man.”
“I’ve heard his name and that’s about it,” Bud Davis said. “The guy organized the union?”
“Pay three dollars to join, go out on strike and he pay you five dollars a week to live on.”
“Where’s he get it?”
“I don’t know. Strike fund.”
“You ever been on strike?”
“Man, they walk out, I walk away. You don’t make no money strikin’. Here you keep workin’ account of Mr. Stanzik don’t recognize the union. They tell him look, man, we a union that represent all the farmworkers. He say shit, you talkin’ you ain’t sayin’ nothin’. They say give us what we want or we go out on strike. He say go ahead, but anybody join the union will never work for him again.”
“Yeah, but what if everybody joined?”
“For what? How these Mexicans feed a family carryin’ a picket sign? Man, they all got ten kids. Lady has a kid, the old man come home drunk give her another one.”
“I don’t know,” Bud Davis said, “but if you can hold out—he’s got to pay what you want or he doesn’t get his crop in. It rots and he loses dough. Right?”
“Wrong.” Clinton Taylor shook his head, trying to get through to this dumb college boy from Dayton, Ohio. “Even if everybody around here walked out—I mean everybody—all the man’s got to do is go across the border, five miles away, and get all the Mexicans he want to pick his melons. Man, he only has to pay them people seventy, eighty cents an hour, they go home live like kings. Green-carders they call them. Only it’s blue.”
“What’s blue?”
“The card those people carry. Allow them to come into the country and work long as they want.”
“Well,” Bud Davis said, trying to understand it, “if Mr. Stanzik can get all the people he wants for seventy or eighty cents, what’s he paying us a buck ten for?”
“Hey, ask him, will you?” Clinton Taylor was running out of interest and patience at the same time. “I don’t know what’s in the man’s head. They pay me to twist melons, man. That’s what I’m doin’.”
Davis filled his sack and took the hundred-yard walk to the stake truck, parked farther down the lane now. There were a couple of pickers up in the truck, so he laid the full sack down gently and went around to where the canvas Lister bag hung from the side of the truck. Two workers stood in the strip of shade. The one he had noticed before, with the white tennis hat and the little brim turned down all around, was drinking from the beer can they used for a cup. The other one had soaked his handkerchief with water and wrung it out and was tying it around his forehead.
“That looks like a good idea.”
Neither of them said anything, though the guy with the white tennis hat looked over.
“They ought to have more cups, uh?” Bud Davis said to him.
Chino took a drink and lowered the beer can. “Why don’t you complain?”
“I doubt it would do any good.”
A couple of pickers came around the truck to the water bag. As they stopped, Chino handed one of them the beer can.
“I think I was next,” Davis said.
It was quiet for a moment, in the shade on the off side of the truck, away from the rest of the workers and the picket line up on the road.
Chino said, “You don’t drink after Chicanos, uh?”
“I drink when it’s my turn.”
He saw Clinton Taylor come around the side of the truck. Chino glanced over and Bud could see what was in his head right away.
Chino said, “You don’t drink after him either.”
“I said I drink when it’s my turn.”
Clinton Taylor stood watching them.
“Maybe the Black cat don’t want to drink after you,” Chino said to Davis.
One time at school, drinking beer, a guy had taken a cigar out of Bud Davis’s mouth, a Black guy. Bud asked him for the cigar and reached for it; but the guy held it up over his head, threatening to snap it between his fingers, saying he was too young to smoke, saying he was pretending he was a man, the guy’s white teeth grinning at him, trying to get him mad. It was Bud’s last cigar, so he wapped the guy in the nose, hard, with a jab from the shoulder, and took the cigar before the guy got any blood on it. The guy that had become his roommate.
He had the same feeling right now he’d had then and said to Chino, “If you want to argue about who drinks first, I don’t see any point in it. If you want to fight over it, I’ll knock your fuckin’ head off.”
Chino motioned to the side and said, “You want to fight him?”
Davis didn’t have to look over to know he meant Paco. “No, I don’t,” he said. “But if he does your fighting for you, then I guess I don’t have a choice.”
“You got the weight on him,” Chino said.
“But I’ve never been in a ring as a pro.” Davis looked over at Paco then; what the hell difference did it make? “And he has. I bet a lot of times.”
“Eight years,” Chino said. “Fifty-seven fights.”
Bud Davis was not dumb and felt he knew when to keep his mouth shut, but he had to ask it. He said, “How many did he win?”
Chino did a funny thing. Without changing his expression or his gaze, the grim, deadpan look seemed to relax. He said, “Shit, I don’t care when you drink,” and walked away.
A little later on, stooped in the rows picking, Clinton Taylor looked across the vines at Davis.
“Hey, you’d have fought that Mexican?”
“If I had to.”
“Mean if you had to? You just say no, I don’t want to fight the man.”
“I thought about that at first,” Bud Davis said. “Then I thought yeah, but what if I could beat him?”