“I DON’T KNOW,” CHINO SAID. “MAN GETS KNOCKED on his ass they form the line again, asking for it. Why don’t they pull the guy out of the truck?”
One of the pickers, a young man about twenty, said, “That’s Ray Doyle. He’s a foreman.”
“So what he’s a foreman?” Chino said. “He hit the guy. You saw it.”
There were a number of pickers near Chino, in the rows behind him and in front of him, all watching now as a station wagon drove off with Ambrocio Varrera in the back end. A few hours earlier he had been in the field with them.
“I think that strike leader went with him,” Chino said. “Very kind person. Or he’s getting out of there so it don’t happen to him.”
The young picker who had spoken before said, “They believe in him. You talk to people, they say he knows what he’s doing.”
Chino turned to look at him. “What’re you still working for?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” the young guy said. “But I think the strike’s a good thing.”
“You don’t want to stand around in the road for nothing,” Chino said. “That’s the way I see it too. If you got a bitch against the foreman or the grower, then do something, don’t stand there. Right?”
“That’s right,” the young guy said.
“Show them you mean business,” Chino said. “Maybe come out here at night, stomp a few acres of melons, kick ’em in or smash ’em with clubs.”
“That’d be something,” the young guy said. “The foreman comes out in the morning, finds all the melons smashed to hell.” He grinned thinking about it.
“There are all kinds of ways,” Chino said.
LUIS TAMEZ HAD BEEN NEXT TO AMBROCIO IN THE LINE and had seen the man take a stance, hands on hips, facing the direction from which the truck would come, and had told the man to put his feet together and hold the inside edge of the cape against his right hip, and the man had grinned and said yes, that’s what it was like, except the truck didn’t have horns. Sure it had a horn, Luis Tamez said, but not the kind that could hurt you. The man had grinned at that also and said he wished he had something to cape the truck with. So Luis Tamez had given the man his red bandana that he had been waving all day at the field-workers. He had seen the man’s expression when the truck hit him and had seen the red bandana go up in the air, but he didn’t see it anywhere now.
They made a bed in the back of the station wagon with two car seats and a blanket and drove off with Ambrocio to the hospital. No one had asked the police to help them, to take the man in their car or lead the way with their siren. The hell with the police bastards. They had actually given the man a ticket and had threatened to arrest anyone who continued to object and yell at them in Spanish, saying they were obstructing the law. The other one, not Harold Ritchie, did this; though Harold Ritchie was there and didn’t argue with him. And it was strange that Mora didn’t argue with the policeman. He said a few words to him, then spent his time with the man, Ambrocio Varrera, and had gone with him in the station wagon to the hospital. They were to form the line again and say nothing to the policemen.
With the bullhorn Connie Chavez told the people in the field what had happened. “Did you see it? That foreman deliberately ran over Ambrocio Varrera. That’s the kind of man you work for? He runs over the father of children and puts him out of work because he joined the union.”
As Connie Chavez continued to talk to them, Luis Tamez watched the foreman Ray Doyle, who was over by the side road with the policemen, talking to them but most of the time looking this way, his hands on his hips. Now saying something to Harold Ritchie. Harold had always been pleasant and courteous, a friend of his grandson killed in Vietnam; now he was a policeman and he was different. Luis Tamez was thinking, Why are policemen different? What changes them? He saw Ray Doyle coming toward the picket line.
The foreman kept to the field side of the road and stopped about twenty feet away from Connie Chavez, the only one he was looking at, staring at her with his heavy arms hanging ready, hands curled open as if he might come over and grab her. Connie ignored him until he raised an arm and pointed at her.
“You put that away, you hear?”
Through the bullhorn Connie said to him, “This thing? You don’t like it?”
“I’m tellin’ you, put it away.”
“Or what,” Connie said, “you run over me?”
“That man stepped in the road,” Ray Doyle said. “He was foolin’ around and it was his own fault he got hurt.”
“Come on,” Connie said. “Get your truck, let’s see if you can do it again.”
“I’ll take that thing away from you is what I’ll do.”
“Now your foreman threatens me,” Connie said to the field. “How do you like to work for someone who assaults women?”
Luis Tamez watched the foreman turn and walk away and knew the man was burning with anger and that it was going to begin again and the man wouldn’t be able to control himself. Luis Tamez was certain of this; but what incensed him more was the confident way the man walked, so sure of himself with his tight T-shirt and muscle and cowboy boots, not caring what was behind him or what they thought watching him.
No one saw Luis Tamez go to his car and start it and work it out of the line—a ’54 Chevy that had traveled 160,000 miles on three engine blocks and nearly two hundred used tires. They didn’t see Luis Tamez until he was driving past the picket line and the foreman had reached his truck that was nosed into the side lane and almost broadside to the road. The foreman had the door open and was getting in when Harold Ritchie yelled out and Doyle looked around to see the ’54 Chevy coming at him. He hung there between the open door and the seat as if he might jump out and run for it. But it was too late and he knew it and he was barely able to get inside before the Chevy, doing about thirty, slammed into the door and the side of the truck. With the wonderful sound of the crash a spontaneous cheer broke from the pickets. They waved their signs and yelled as loud as they could as Luis Tamez backed off and rammed the truck again, turning the front end into the ditch. They yelled at him to hit it again, hit the son of a bitch. But Luis Tamez had to swerve to avoid hitting Harold Ritchie, who was in the road now, and when he slammed into the truck’s rear fender this time he hooked his bumper and the troopers dragged him out of the car.
For a moment he couldn’t believe it had happened—until he heard the cheering and the people calling his name. Then he was grinning and trying to wave to the pickets as Harold Ritchie and Bob Almont held him and finally got the handcuffs on him. Harold Ritchie said, “God Almighty, Luis, what’s the matter with you?”
“Cop,” Luis Tamez said. “You want to arrest me, do it. Quit talking.”
He was grinning again—his face showing in the side window—
as the patrol car drove out past the picket line.
THE UNION HALL WAS A STOREFRONT ON THE HIGHway with a sign painted on the plate glass that said VAWA HEADQUARTERS. Chino decided he must have been watching the cop tailing him and that’s why he didn’t see it coming into Trinity. He remembered the used clothes store and the run-down stucco tourist court on the north side of the union hall. He had left Paco asleep in the room at the Fun-tier Motel. It was past eight o’clock now and full dark.
The place was lit up inside and there were more than a dozen people standing around and sitting on the folding chairs along the side walls. Some of them looked at him as he came in. Maybe they had been out there and remembered his white hat. He walked to the counter that divided the hall part of the room from the office area and asked a girl behind the counter for Vincent Mora. She said he was out, but should be back soon. He looked closely at the girl and knew she wasn’t the one with the bullhorn.
There were VAWA strike posters on the walls and the face of the counter, travel posters of Spain and Mexico, and hand-lettered announcements—Todo el mundo está invitado a la rezada . . . There were newspaper pages with columns marked in red. There was a photograph of Emiliano Zapata on the wall behind the counter and a statue of the Virgin Mary on a stand.
There was one vacant seat. Chino took it and sat there smoking a cigarette and reading the announcements about the twenty-five-cent meals and day care for the children of the strikers and one that said, “Our kids don’t have blue eyes, but they go overseas to fight!” There was a lot of crap like that on the wall to read. He’d seen plenty of it. As soon as there was a reason for an organization somebody would start making posters and soon the walls would be covered with them. A person says, Sure, I’m fighting for La Causa, and ask him what he does and he says, Man, make posters, what do you think?
When Connie Chavez came in Chino knew right away who she was. No hat now. Tight jeans and a T-shirt. Not as good looking as he thought she’d be, but not bad. About five-three, nice little can that stuck out, and real tits. She needed to fix her hair though and put some of that stuff around her eyes. She looked washed out and tired, like she’d been picking melons.
Vincent Mora, behind her, looked older. Not six years, about sixteen years older. Tired-looking and showing some gray in his hair, but the same ugly horse face and the cigarette in his mouth—coming in nodding and trying to look pleasant, touching people on the shoulder. Several of them were talking at once, asking him questions, and he had to hold his hand up for quiet.
“Ambrocio’s going to be all right—”
Someone said, “They let him in the hospital?”
“He’s in the hospital,” Mora said. “Luis Tamez is in the county jail charged with felonious assault, and if anybody’s got five thousand dollars on them we can get him out.”
He answered questions about Ambrocio and Luis Tamez and was telling them about seeing Ray Doyle, the foreman, in the emergency ward of the hospital—turning and looking around to talk to all of them—when he saw Chino. Mora paused and his gaze lingered.
Connie Chavez was behind the counter now. She saw it, Mora’s expression, and recognized the man in the white hat. Then Mora was telling them Ray Doyle had needed eight stitches over his right eye and had a terrible headache and maybe a sprained wrist. Everyone grinned and cheered. As they began talking to each other Mora turned to the man in the white hat again. A moment passed before the slight smile of recognition touched his face, acknowledging that he knew the man.
“Francisco de la Cruz,” Mora said. “Chino.”
Now Chino was smiling a little, not giving it too much. “I wondered if you’d remember.”
“How many did you bring?”
“Guys? Just me and a friend. We heard about the strike you know so we come see what’s going on.”
“Working in the field—that’s a new one.”
“It wasn’t bad, a few days. I got to talk to the people, see what they think.”
Mora waited a moment. “How’d you like some coffee?”
Chino nodded. “Yeah, Father, that’d be fine.”
Mora stared at him and there it was again, the tell-nothing expression. Connie saw it. She watched Mora turn and walk away and the one called Francisco de la Cruz, Chino, follow him around the counter and into Mora’s office. She had heard the name before. Chino. Something she had read with his name in it. A newspaper clipping in Mora’s file. Chino de la Cruz.
She said to the other girl at the counter, “What did he call Vincent? Did you hear him?”
The girl shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Why?”
“I thought for a minute,” Connie said, “he called him Father.”
“IT SLIPPED OUT,” CHINO SAID. “FROM HABIT.”
“Chino, nothing has ever slipped out of you in your life.”
“They don’t know, do they? You haven’t told anybody.”
“What difference would it make?”
“Maybe it would scare them a little. They respect you more.”
“I’m no longer a priest,” Mora said, sitting across the second-hand desk from Chino in the ten-by-ten-foot office that was windowless and had only a calendar and a crucifix on the walls. “I haven’t worn a collar in eight years, so why bring it up? I could have been a streetcar conductor or worked in a factory.”
He stopped as Connie Chavez came in with two cups of coffee and placed them on the desk. She looked at Mora. He thanked her, and when he said nothing else, she left and closed the door.
“You keep it a secret from her too?”
Mora lit a cigarette. “There’s a difference between not telling something and keeping it a secret. If people find out, all right, what difference does it make? I was ordained five years and that’s all, no mystery. It’s done all the time these days.”
“You’re worried about something.” Chino picked up his coffee and blew on it. “Or you’re wondering what I’m doing here.”
“I’ll admit it crossed my mind.”
“I’m going to help you. I told you I been watching things. I don’t think you’re doing so good.”
“Is that right?”
“Nobody’s scared of you. They don’t even know if you’re serious.”
“Now you’re a labor expert,” Mora said. “The last I heard, you were working in the laundry at Folsom.”
“Five years and three months.”
“How long you been out?”
“Little over a year.”
“You went back to East Los Angeles?”
“San Fernando.”
“That was it,” Mora said. “And organized another pachuco gang.”
“A self-defense group. You heard about it, uh?”
“I read something in La Raza. What do you call it? The brown something—”
“The Brown Hand.”
Mora nodded. “Mano Castaña. Ex-cons teaching kids how to fight cops.”
“How to defend against police brutality,” Chino said.
“That’s right, intimidation, persecution, and entrapment.” Mora’s tone was mild, almost musing. “It’s been a while,” he said. “I’ve forgotten some of the words.”
“How to avoid being shot in the back for resisting arrest,” Chino said. “Hit him first. Take the lead-weighted club away from the man and lay it across his face. He taught us how to do it.”
“Now you want to teach farmworkers.”
“They’re not pissed off enough to do you any good.”
Mora shrugged. “They know what they want.”
“Knowing and getting—listen, you want to bust this grower. All right, I’ll show you how, not take so much time.”
“Why? I mean why do you want to help?”
“For the good of my soul, Father, what do you think?”
“I think we’re wasting time,” Mora said. “Let’s drink our coffee and you can tell me what it was like in the pen.”
“I’d rather ask you something,” Chino said. He was at ease, sitting low in the wooden office chair. “I want to know who says you got a better reason for being here than me? You the new hope of the poor people? Tell me, who says your way is the only way?”
“Experience,” Mora said. “Six years organizing in Coachella and the grape fields while you were in prison. Another reason—you see this as busting a grower. I want him to recognize a labor union.”
“It’s the same thing. You want to win, I want to win.”
“Why?”
“For them—for myself, the same reason anyone’s here.”
“The cause,” Mora said. “The movement, uh?”
“Whatever you like to call it.”
“You still carry a can opener?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Thirty-three stitches across the guy’s stomach,” Mora said. “What do you use now, a gun?”
“I use what I have to. You use a bullhorn and put everybody to sleep.”
Maybe you do waste words, Mora was thinking. And maybe it was a waste of time talking. But Chino was here and he could not close his eyes and make him go away; so he said, “There’s only one way to win. On the picket line. We stand there with our signs until the man sees we mean it and he begins to reason with himself. He doesn’t want trouble. He wants his melons picked and sold to make a profit. He doesn’t want fights and arrests, and having to spend his time in court. He’s a businessman. So finally he talks to us and we let him bitch about the lousy market and high costs and the risks he takes, we don’t say much. He already knows what we want. And pretty soon, after some more bitching, he agrees to most of the demands and we settle. Then do you know what? He feels pretty good about it, generous, like he’s done us a favor. We go back to work and everybody’s happy.”
“That’s it, uh?”
“The only way.”
“If he feels good, I don’t see you won anything.”
“I know you don’t,” Mora said, “because you don’t want to bargain with the man, you want to punish him, kick his teeth out, and burn his fields—the East LA pachuco out to teach the gringo a lesson. Do you know what you’re doing? Using La Causa as an excuse. And when you’re called on it, you say, ‘No, man, it’s nothing personal. Man, we’re avenging years of serfdom and oppression.’ ”
“That’s what I think, uh?”
Mora drew on his cigarette and stubbed it out. “Do you know, I spend half my time reminding people this is not a half-assed revolution, or a club for kids in Che Guevara T-shirts. It’s a farm labor strike, nothing else.”
“You say it,” Chino said. “But underneath it’s a Chicano fight. You know it as well as I do. If it wasn’t Chicano you wouldn’t be here.”
Mora said quietly, “We move a step at a time, put one foot in front of the other. First we get them a pay raise. Right now we have a chance of winning a strike, but not a riot. That’s why we can’t have violence.”
“They get rough, then what? Start swinging clubs?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Mora said. “Once we commit ourselves to a strike we have to do it legally. If they hit us, we cover our heads. No matter what they do we have to fight it legally or take it until they get tired and stop.”
“It’s going to happen,” Chino said. “First they try and scare you off, break a guy’s leg. Next they get out the guns, scare hell out of your people.”
“They’re showing the right signs,” Mora said. “You were there today.”
“I mean when it gets rough,” Chino said. “Shit, they don’t even know yet it’s going to be a war. You haven’t told them what’s going to happen, have you?”
“It doesn’t have to happen.”
“But it will, because the grower and the cops don’t have to put up with you.”
“Chino, I have to pick up Mrs. Varrera at the hospital and I have to call a bondsman and do a few other things before I ever get to bed. You understand?”
“Still carrying the whole load,” Chino said. His eyes raised to the crucifix on the wall. “You still pray?”
“I pray,” Mora said.
“So you still got enough priest left in you to believe God gives a shit who wins and it’ll be you because you’re on the side of right.”
“You don’t have to be a priest,” Mora said, “to have faith and hope.”
“Hope your people don’t run. That’s all you got to hope for. But when they do, or when there’s some blood on the ground, then you’ll see you’re not the last hope of the poor people.”
“I’m a labor organizer,” Mora said, “and maybe not a very good one. I know that. This is the first strike I’ve planned on my own and that I’m solely responsible for. So we’ll have to wait and see whether I should stay in the business or not.”
“Just a labor organizer.” Chino nodded, sitting up and putting his hands on the edge of the desk. “Maybe. But do you know what I think, Father? I think you’re giving me a bunch of bullshit. I think the only reason you’re here, you want to see your name in the paper again.”
“Chino, I’m tired. All right?”
“You don’t want to talk about it.”
“There are things I have to do. I told you.”
“Some other time,” Chino said. “I’ll be around.”
When Chino had gone Mora sat at the desk and smoked a cigarette, and then another one, before he left to pick up Mrs. Varrera at the hospital.
BUD DAVIS TOOK A SIX-PACK OF LONE STAR WITH HIM to the Whataburger place. He sat there surrounded by brightly lit tile and chrome and people he didn’t know hunched over tables and put away a double Whataburger with everything on it, an order of fries, and two of the beers. He sat by himself, staring at the highway through a wall of glass and seeing his own reflection superimposed on the cars that lined up for the stoplight—everybody going someplace—and when the cars moved on he could make out the packing sheds and docks that were along the tracks on the other side of the road—dark and deserted-looking in the early evening dusk. He said to himself, What the fuck are you doin’ here?
He walked north on Main Street carrying the four Lone Stars, taking his time and looking in the store windows. Half the signs were in Spanish. Most of the people he heard were speaking Spanish. The feature at the Rialto movie theater was a Spanish-language picture made in Mexico. He kept walking and after six blocks there were no more streetlights and the road turned to blacktop.
Out in the darkness to the left, beyond an irrigation ditch and a mesquite thicket, was Gloria, where most of the field-workers lived. It was called a colonia, though he didn’t know why: a few yellowed-looking lights off there in the darkness and the sound of a dog barking. In the daylight Gloria was a scattered line of shacks made of adobe and tin and scrap board, hardpacked yards littered with kids and thrown-away junk and maybe a washing machine and a gutted car body without wheels. In the back, in the weeds, were outhouses and a stagnant drainage ditch they called Gloria Creek. He’d been over there a couple of days ago in the stake truck when Larry Mendoza was looking for pickers and had got only an old woman and a couple of kids about twelve. They don’t feel like working, Mendoza had said, they go to Padre Island fishing or hang around a café. Christ.
It was almost another mile to Stanzik’s property line and the migrant camp where Bud Davis was living. The camp had been built ten years before, during the bracero days, when thousands of Mexican nationals were brought into the valley each season to harvest the crops. Now the corrugated shacks and the partitioned rooms in weathered one-story barracks were rented for a dollar a day to migrant families and strays like Bud Davis who came for a short time and moved on.
They didn’t do much in the evening, the people who lived here. Some of them went to town and got drunk and Bud Davis wouldn’t see them until morning. Some of the women did their laundry in the evening, in the washhouse where there were two cold water taps. Someone was always at the latrine, going in or going off in the bushes if the can was in use. There were kids all over the place, shrill voices from time to time in the darkness. There were a few girls his age, but they were dogs, fat dumb-looking girls he’d have to be pretty hard up to mess with. He didn’t know where Clinton Taylor went at night. Maybe there was a colored café in town or he went to one of the Mexican joints on the highway. Most of the people sat outside. He could see them in the light that showed in the open doorways. They’d sit there for hours and he’d hear the Spanish words and sometimes their laughter and not ever know what they were talking about. Usually there would be a radio playing somewhere, but most of the sounds at night were Spanish and there was always a smell of woodsmoke.
There were a couple of men on the steps of the barracks where his room was, smoking cigarettes, and they nodded when he sat down with them. After a silence one of them said, “How you like work in the field?” Bud Davis said, “Fine. I kinda like it, being outside. It’s hard on the back though. I suppose till you get used to it.” They grinned and nodded again, but didn’t say anything else. After a little while he went inside.
He’d brought a sleeping bag, which was a good move, since the company didn’t provide bedding or blankets; but it was too hot to get inside the thing. He used it as a mattress, spread open on the cot. He undressed down to his undershorts and had another beer before it got too warm. Sitting there thinking, he decided that even if there was something to do at night, he’d be too tired to do it.
The sound of a car engine woke him up: a big-bore high-compression engine with a rough idle. He listened to it and then heard voices speaking in English and laughter: young male voices. He lay quietly.
One of the voices said, “Come on, man, where’re the girls? We’re lookin’ for some ass. . . . Tell ’em we’ll pay ’em. Two bucks an hour. Make more’n they do in the field.” And laughter again. And another voice saying, “Come on, he don’t know anybody.” And the first voice saying, “Man, we used to get it here all the time.” The heavy rumble of the engine continued, though there were no more voices. Finally the engine sound rose to a howl and the car accelerated out of the closeness of the frame buildings.
Bud Davis lay in the darkness with his eyes open, listening to the car in the distance and counting the gear shifts. When it was quiet again he said to himself, Man, really, what the fuck are you doin’ here?
It was the next day that he walked out of the field.