THE OLDS 98 CAME UP THE ROAD DOING CLOSE TO forty. It braked hard and swerved as it reached the line of parked cars, then fishtailed in the ruts, and the pickets at the near end of the line jumped back, afraid the car was out of control. It rolled past them and two white patrol cars came in through its dust.
“Stay where you are,” Mora said to the pickets. “Nothing to worry about. They come to see what a strike looks like.”
The yellow pickup came past them slowly, Larry Mendoza’s elbow on the windowsill pointing at them while he looked straight ahead. He crept by, giving them time to see the horn-shaped sound speaker in the back of the truck, mounted on a crate against the cab, facing the tailgate.
“Now we get speeches,” Connie said.
“Or entertainment.” Mora watched the truck turn into the side road, where the police cars were parked, back out, and turn to face them. “I think it’s hooked to the radio.”
“The idiot, brings the cops to help him find a station.” Connie Chavez raised the bullhorn, turning to the field.
“Attention! ¡Óiganme, señores! Your foreman has returned from the toilet. Try to look happy while you work for a stinking dollar ten cents an hour.”
THE WHORE, LARRY MENDOZA WAS THINKING, ANXIOUS now to get started. But he had to wait.
Across the ditch standing by the Olds, Captain McKellan was saying, “What I want to know is where you think you’re at.”
“Sir?” Harold Ritchie didn’t know what the man was talking about. They were out in a goddamn melon field.
“You’re on duty, are you not?”
“Yes sir, I got it on the radio and come right out.”
“Well, if you’re on duty, would you mind telling me why you’re out of uniform?”
Jesus, he’d forgot all about the hat.
“I guess I left it in the car.”
“You guess you left it in the car.”
“Yes sir, I did.”
“Left it in the car,” the captain said solemnly. His driver and the two other troopers, one of them Bob Almont, stood over by the irrigation tank waiting, acting as if it was none of their business. Larry Mendoza waited at the side of the pickup truck.
“Your hat is as much part of your uniform as your pants. You wouldn’t go out without your pants on, would you?”
Ritchie eased out a little grin. “No sir, I wouldn’t.”
But Captain McKellan wasn’t being funny and this tattooed ex-Marine hotshot had better bet his ass he wasn’t. He said, “If we didn’t want you to wear your hat we wouldn’t have given you one, would we?”
“No sir.”
“Didn’t you have to wear a hat in the United States Marines?”
“Yes sir, on duty.”
“But you believe you don’t have to working for this department?”
Quit, Harold Ritchie was thinking.
“Well, do you?”
And Larry Mendoza, waiting by his wired-for-sound truck was thinking, Why did you call them? Official gringo cop bullshit. Yes sir, no sir. If he had known Harold Ritchie was already out here he wouldn’t have called.
“Yes sir.”
“You do believe you don’t have to wear it?”
“I mean no sir, I don’t believe you don’t have to wear it. I believe you do.”
Get in and blow the horn, Larry Mendoza thought. God, that would be good if he could do it. But he’d have to be drunk and quitting the next day.
“Harold, you been with us what, about two years?”
“Twenty-eight months this week.”
“Harold, I been in the department thirty-seven years. Not once, in that time, have I ever been on duty without my hat on.”
Run, Harold Ritchie thought, but found himself nodding thoughtfully, not sure what he was agreeing to.
“Well, that’s all I’m going to say,” Captain McKellan said. “Harold, you’ve got a good record. You’ve served your country. I just don’t want to see you begin to acquire a bad attitude and fuck up your life. If you know what I mean.”
“No sir, I don’t want to do that.”
“Then put on your hat, son, and let’s go to work.”
Larry Mendoza hopped inside the pickup, turned the key, and revved the engine, ready to go. Captain McKellan came up on the passenger side, where the wires trailed in from the speaker and hooked beneath the radio: the official face of a police superintendent wearing his hat and tinted glasses, framed in the side window.
“You sit tight, you understand?”
“Why don’t I go by them once? Show them what I got?”
“Because I said to stay here.”
Tell him who you work for, Mendoza thought, but couldn’t say it. He nodded and watched Captain McKellan start down the road toward the picket line, taking his time, followed by his four troopers with their hats on straight over their eyes.
BOB ALMONT TOLD MORA AND THE PICKETS WHAT they had to do. First, move over to the other side of the road, away from the field being worked. And second, space out so there would be ten feet between each person. Vincent Mora said there was no statute that required pickets to do this. Bob Almont said he didn’t need a statute, he was telling them. And if they didn’t obey this minute they’d be arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. Harold Ritchie and the other two troopers stood facing the picket line with Bob Almont. Captain McKellan stood off by himself; he didn’t see the need to speak to these people directly.
He watched as his troopers moved the pickets to the other side of the road and spaced them out, extending the line almost up to the police cars on the side road. When he saw Mora coming over, walking right up to him, he couldn’t believe it.
“What’s this for?” Mora asked him.
McKellan was looking past Mora, along the picket line. “I believe the trooper explained it.”
“Can’t I ask you?”
“You congregate out here like a mob, we’ll arrest you for unlawful assembly, inciting to riot, causing a disturbance, or anything I feel we can make stick. Does that answer your question?”
“No, I asked you what’s this for. Why are you doing it?”
“I just told you.”
“We haven’t broken a law.”
“And we’re here to see you don’t.”
“Look, we haven’t done anything—”
The captain was facing him now, staring, and Mora knew he wouldn’t be able to talk to him. The captain didn’t understand, because he did believe he had answered the question. It would take years to get through to him, to make him see his own point of view; or else it was already too late. Mora said, “You have any Chicanos on your force?”
“Latins? We have a number of them. Why?”
“Why don’t you send some of them out here?”
“I’ve never talked to you before this,” Captain McKellan said. “I hope I don’t have to again. I hope you get done whatever it is you’re doin’ here and go back to where you come from.”
“Can I ask you one more question?” Mora waited, making the man say something.
“What is it?”
“Do you think I’m a Communist?”
The man stared at him, the lines in his face hardened as he restrained himself to remain civil and not lose his temper.
“Well?” Mora said.
And the captain answered, “You said it, mister, I didn’t.”
Mora smiled. He turned and walked back to the picket line.
CONNIE CHAVEZ PICKED OUT A WOMAN IN THE FIELD and pressed the trigger of the bullhorn.
“That’s your little boy carrying a sack of melons bigger than he is? You don’t care, uh, if it deforms him for life? Stanzik doesn’t care either. Why should he care about your children if you don’t? Hey, what’s he pay them, fifty cents? That’s how much more he should pay you. Then your children don’t have to work. Think about it while your child is getting bent out of shape. Señora, tiene que—”
The sudden blast of music drowned out the rest of her words and she saw the people in the field, all of them, look up. She turned then to see Vincent Mora in the road, stepping out of the way, and Mendoza’s yellow truck coming toward her, rolling slowly past the picket line, bringing the high-volume, intensified sound of a girl singing, with full orchestration, “Who Can I Turn To?”
She saw Larry Mendoza smile at her as he went by and saw the speaker, in the back of the truck, that was blaring the song at them. The truck continued on, past the parked cars, to an open area of road where Mendoza stopped to turn around.
Connie raised the bullhorn.
“Now they give you music,” she said to the people in the field. “You get music instead of a fair wage. It’s very nice, but you can’t eat it, can you? Try to feed your family with music. Try to buy bread—”
The truck returned and the girl’s voice, winding up the song, telling them she had no one to turn to, covered Connie’s words. Connie waited. She liked the song and she thought maybe the girl singing it was Vikki Carr. When the truck was beyond the picket line, approaching the side road where the five men in uniform stood by their white patrol cars, the volume dropped and there was the faint sound of the disc jockey’s voice or someone delivering a commercial. Connie aimed the bullhorn in that direction.
“Hey, Judas, you square, get XECR, Reynosa! We want to hear some rock!”
To the people in the field she said, “If you have any requests give them to the gentlemen over there in the uniforms. They work for Judas. Tell them what you want to hear.”
The radio volume increased abruptly and Mendoza’s truck came at them again, bringing to the picket line and the melon fields the ornate piano styling of Roger Williams and “Autumn Leaves.”
JUST BEFORE NOON, CAPTAIN McKELLAN AND ONE OF the patrol cars drove away, leaving Harold Ritchie and Bob Almont to watch the pickets and keep them spaced ten feet apart. Bob Almont made up another rule. He said if they wanted a drink of water they had to get it one at a time. If there was any milling around that station wagon he’d have to arrest them for unlawful assembly. Mora didn’t say a word. He got a cardboard box full of sandwiches from the wagon and passed them out to the pickets. Then he got the cooler and carried it up and down the line pouring a cup of Kool-Aid for whoever wanted one. Bob Almont watched him and said to Harold Ritchie, “I’m goin’ to tangle with that one before we’re through. You wait and see.”
Ritchie said, “I don’t know what they want to stand out in the hot sun for. It ain’t doin’ them any good.”
After a while he got tired of all the oldies but goodies Mendoza’s radio was playing and when the truck stopped to turn around, Ritchie said to the foreman, “That wasn’t a bad idea Connie had. Why don’t you get XECR for a change?”
Mendoza said maybe later; he had to go back to the yard and call the labor contractor. After he left it was a relief to have quiet again. But it wasn’t a minute before Connie Chavez had the bullhorn going, talking to the workers who were sitting around by the stake truck now, eating their lunch. Ritchie didn’t listen to her at first. He was hungry and thinking about where he’d go eat when the relief man got back. Then he caught a word and began listening to her.
“How does it feel, Anglo, to take a poor man’s job? Take food out of the mouths of his children. You get enough to eat. That’s all you care about.”
“SHE TALKIN’ TO YOU,” CLINTON TAYLOR SAID.
“I didn’t take anybody’s job.”
They were sitting on the tailgate of the stake truck eating their lunch. Bud Davis had a couple of fifteen-cent grocery store pies, a peach and a pineapple, and three packs of peanut butter cheese crackers. He was frowning, squinting in the sun glare, to hold his gaze on the girl in the picket line. From here he couldn’t even tell she was a girl, except that he knew her voice now. After a moment he turned on his side and eased back to support himself on one elbow. The peach pie was good; he should have brought about five more.
“We see you,” the bullhorn said.
Abruptly he pushed himself up to look through the spaced sideboards of the truck body.
“You can hide from us,” the bullhorn continued. “But you can’t hide from yourself. You know what you’ve done.”
“What the hell she talkin’ about? I’m not trying to hide.”
“She’s picked you out to work on.” Clinton Taylor looked over at the road, his tablespoon poised in the air. He was eating cold Franco-American spaghetti and meatballs out of a can.
“She must mean somebody else.”
“She ain’t talkin’ to me. And everybody else I see is Mexican.”
They were scattered about in small groups, most of them on the off side of the truck where the water bag hung, sitting in the narrow strip of shade, eating sandwiches and packaged baked goods and beans and chili from cans. They brought their lunches with them, all but a few whose children came out at noon with containers of hot food and tortillas and TV dinners. And usually they drank cold pop that Larry Mendoza’s brother brought out in his car and sold to them for twenty-five cents a can.
“Hey, Anglo, what do you do with your money? Spend it on beer and girls?”
Some of the workers sitting on the ground near the truck looked up at Bud Davis, as if expecting him to answer. The guy in the white hat and his buddy, the fighter, were drinking beer and watching—sitting in the sun drinking a six-pack.
“What she pick me out for?”
“She tellin’ you,” Clinton Taylor said. “Listen to her.”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
“The man whose job you took,” the bullhorn voice said. “You know what he’d spend it on? Food for his family. Clothes for his little children. Used clothes, because that’s all he can afford. Ropa usada, Anglo. You see the stores on the highway where we have to buy somebody else’s old clothes because the man won’t pay us enough. You wear used clothes, Anglo, at that Xavier University?”
“How’d she know that?” Christ, he felt like he was on a stage.
“What do you need a job for?” the bullhorn asked. “Your daddy pay for your school, doesn’t he?”
“She don’t know you,” Clinton said, “but she sure reachin’ you.”
“Likes to hear herself talk,” Bud Davis said.
“Anglo, stand up so everybody can take a look at you.”
He didn’t move. He felt the workers near the truck watching and took a bite of peach pie. Several more workers came around from the off side to see what he was doing.
“Come on,” the bullhorn coaxed him. “They can’t see you hiding in the truck.”
That was enough. Bud reached above him, grabbed a sideboard, and pulled himself up.
“There he is!” the bullhorn announced, and some of the pickets cheered and waved their signs. Bud watched them. He finished the last bite of pie and waved back, raising one arm straight up in the air.
FROM THE ROAD CONNIE COULD MAKE OUT A RAISED arm, but she had to bring up the binoculars to see the detail of his gesture, his hand in a fist and the middle finger pointing to the sky. She said, Screw you, too, buddy. But she also smiled, lowering the glasses, and felt a little rise of expectation, of almost excitement.
He disappeared behind the bullhorn as she said into it, “Hey, Anglo, what do you want to pick melons for? Big strong boy like you—you should be holding a sign. Come on over here. See if you can lift the one that says Huelga. You take Spanish at that school? It means ‘strike,’ Anglo.”
She studied him again through the glasses. His arm was down and he was eating something, still looking this way, leaning on the side rail the way you would stand at a bar or a counter. Relaxed and sure of himself. Or else pretending it. Connie wasn’t sure; but she had a feeling she could bring him out of the field if she nudged him with the right words, needled him gently and worked on his pride. Once they were standing up it was hard to let them go.
Through the bullhorn she said, “They teach you anything about trade unions in college? How about the National Labor Relations Act? It says workers have the right to organize a union, present grievances, and strike if necessary. But not farmworkers. All other workers can have a union except farmworkers. How does that grab you?”
He was still on the truck, listening, still looking this way.
“Think about it. Why are farmworkers different than other workers? Why can’t we go to federal court and make Stanzik recognize our union? Why can’t we make him sit down with us and listen—”
And she was cut off—with the Anglo still out there hanging on her words—by the intensified twangy sound of a country and western melody. The yellow pickup had rolled in without her hearing it and was almost in front of her when the music blared out of the speaker and filled the air with Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.”
A STANZIK FOREMAN BY THE NAME OF RAY DOYLE WAS driving the pickup. As soon as he spotted Vincent Mora in the line he came to a stop, got out, and walked away from the ear-shattering sound. He saw Mora raise a hand to get his attention, but Ray Doyle ignored it and made the man come after him.
Mora said, almost shouting, “You want to turn that down a little?”
Doyle gave him a look, only that. And when Mora stopped, Doyle kept walking, looking at the faces in the picket line now, telling them with his gaze, I know who you are and I’m going to remember it—giving each one a cold squinty stare, not saying a word to any of them, though he knew them all by name. Doyle wore a Texas straw and a striped T-shirt to show off his stocky build, his thick short arms hanging away from his body and barely moving as he walked over to the police cars.
Ritchie said to him, “What happened to Mendoza?”
“That dumb bastard,” Doyle said.
He nodded to Bob Almont, who was sitting on the front fender of his patrol car. He didn’t know Almont too well, Almont was older. But he had gone to high school with Harold Ritchie and played football with him, though they hadn’t hung around together too much.
“He was supposed to have fifty more people out here this morning. I sent him down the bridge to look for the goddamn labor contractor.”
Abruptly, in the middle of a mournful note, Merle Haggard stopped singing. The two troopers and Doyle, all three of them at the same time, looked over to see Mora standing by the pickup.
“If he fooled with your truck,” Bob Almont said, “you can make a complaint.”
Doyle was already walking away from them. Harold Ritchie said after him, “Ray, if you turn it back on, get XECR, all right?”
Ray Doyle didn’t give the pickets his look going back past them. He kept his eyes on Mora, who was standing in the road waiting for him.
“You keep your hands off Stanzik property,” Doyle told him as he approached.
“I did it for you,” Mora said. “To save the battery. I thought you maybe forgot you left it on.”
Ray Doyle didn’t see anything funny. He said, “You stay away from this truck.” Then looked over at the two troopers. “They’re supposed to stay over the side of the road, ain’t they?”
Bob Almont nodded and called back, “Else they’d be obstructing traffic.”
Doyle said to Mora, “You hear him? You stay over there and you don’t move. Understand?”
“How about this?” Mora said. “You don’t play the radio for a while, we won’t play the bullhorn. Everybody take a rest.”
As Doyle brushed past him and got in the pickup Mora knew there was no way to talk to the man. He was stubborn or had no sense of humor or was simply stupid. Like Captain McKellan. Like, God, so many of them. The truck started up and he had to get out of the way. As it shot past him the sound of a Nashville girl, with a hopeless sob in her voice, pierced the stillness. There was static then and quick pieces of sound as the selector ran through several stations, came to a wailing blues rock male voice, and stayed there.
LEON RUSSELL, BUD DAVIS SAID TO HIMSELF. HE WAS pretty sure, though he couldn’t think of the name of the piece he was doing.
“How’d you like to be up on the road hearing that?” he said to Clinton Taylor. They were in the rows again working, twisting the ripe melons from the vines, down in the dirt again, in the heat and sweat of a summer harvest.
“I can hear it fine from here,” Clinton Taylor said. He looked up, resting on his heels for a moment. “The sweet sound of Dr. John the Night Tripper.”
“Uh-unh, it’s Leon Russell.”
“What you talkin’ about, Leon Russell?”
“I think it is.”
“It’s Dr. John, man, don’t you know that sound?”
Bud Davis was kneeling up now, watching. He said it again, though only to himself this time, How’d you like to be up on the road? That’s where it was going on. It was like the people in the field were here to watch the activity on the road. He’d like to sit in the shade and watch it a while.
He’d like to get a closer look at that girl with the bullhorn. He wouldn’t mind talking to her either.
He said to Clinton Taylor, “I’ll bet you five bucks it’s Leon Russell and not Dr. John or anybody else.”
RAY DOYLE TOOK THE TRUCK UP THE ROAD PAST THE troopers’ cars, turned around, and came back with his foot mashed down on the gas pedal, aiming the truck directly at the pickets and then cutting it just enough to skim past them and see the awful look on their faces as they saw him and pushed and threw themselves out of the way. He gave them a safety margin of about a yard on the first pass.
He drove about a hundred yards down the road toward the highway, letting them begin to think he was leaving, before turning around and coming back at them again, cutting it a little closer this time, catching a glimpse of Mora with his arms outstretched as if to hold the people in line; but their eyes were on the truck, not Mora, looking defensively over their shoulders at the front fender and headlight coming at them and most of them moved well out of the way to make sure the truck wouldn’t hit them. They grimaced and waved at the dust that rose in the truck’s wake, dust and flying gravel and the heavy sound of the rock music on top of them and then past them and now Mora looking up and down the line, telling them to hold their ground.
“Stay where you are!” he called in both directions. “He’s not going to hit anyone, he’s trying to scare us. Stay where you are and try not to move.”
He was aware of the cops standing by the patrol cars with their arms folded, keeping out of it. That was all right. Maybe they could show the cops something in the way of guts—Look, we’re serious—that would impress them and open their minds a little. He was also aware of the people in the field watching and they were more important. He knew he could win some of them if the picket line would hold and not come apart. But it was their first test in the presence of physical danger and he wasn’t sure of them. So he knew he would have to show them himself—by taking a half step into the road and standing with his hands on his hips, seeing the truck coming again and hearing the scream and wail of the music increasing, seeing the truck coming right at him, then making himself look out at the field the moment before the rushing sound and the dust and the outside rearview mirror grazed past within inches of his face. It was easier to stand and not move when the truck came back, because there was no rearview mirror on the right side.
On the next pass some of the pickets held their signs out in the road and waved them, as if to taunt or provoke the truck, giving it something to aim at, then jerking the signs out of the way as the truck rushed past.
“Don’t fool with him,” Mora called to them. “When an idiot gets angry you don’t know what he might do.” They grinned and nodded; they were getting used to this and were more relaxed. Mora said, “Stand where you are. That’s all we have to do.”
As the truck came at them again, Mora’s body tightened. He didn’t realize he had closed his eyes until he opened them as the truck passed and he saw the truck skimming close to the pickets and saw a man in a plaid shirt near the end of the line holding a red bandana in his two hands, in the formal pose of a matador offering the bull his cape—Ambrocio Varrera, one of the men who had come out of the field. Mora recognized the man the moment before the right fender of the truck caught the man’s right side—as he tried to push away from the impact—and slammed him thirty feet down the road and into the ditch. The truck had swerved at the man, Mora was sure of it.
The sound of the speaker went off abruptly. The truck was still moving up the road, but slowly now, as if Ray Doyle, the foreman, wasn’t sure what he should do and was making up his mind or giving the police time to stop him.
Mora got to the man in the ditch as the two troopers came across the road and Bob Almont, pulling a leather book from his hip pocket, said to the people crowding around Ambrocio to get out of the way and let him through. Mora could see Ambrocio then and Connie Chavez, bareheaded already in the ditch, sitting so that she could support the man’s head on her thigh. There was blood on the side of his face that Connie was touching gently with her bandana. Ambrocio seemed stunned, his eyes open but glazed. Mora could see that the man’s right leg was broken between the knee and the hip.
He said to Bob Almont, “It’s called assault. I don’t know what kind of assault, but that’s what it is and you saw it.”
Bob Almont had the leather book open and was writing. “No, what I saw is called obstructing traffic, and soon as somebody tells me what his name is, I’m goin’ to give him a ticket for it.”