Shadowbahn(26)
tracks 05 and 06:
“La Bamba” and “A Matter of Time”
Originally a B-side from Veracruz by way of Pacoima, sung in Spanish, the first song is a fifties hit, a cover of a recording from half a century earlier when records barely existed. The Mexican-American singer is seventeen, lost and presumed dead a year later when, on tour in the Midwest, he “wins” the coin toss that puts him in the seat of a doomed single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza; he is mourned by a Latino L.A. that needs a survivor more than a martyr. In fact, dazed and confused, on February 2, 1959, the young troubadour lifts his head from the Iowa snow to ponder the small plane’s smoking rubble, then painfully struggles to his feet to walk . . . where, he doesn’t know, and later can’t say exactly how long it is before he comes to find himself in the land of his ancestors. For the next twenty-five years, as all other promises he makes to himself fade with youth, he holds on to the one to his Mexican family of a better life in the land of his birth. Many nights he risks everything attempting to cross an unforgiving border, from the other side of which—once he’s finally made it to safety—he will send for his wife and children. “It’s only a matter of time,” he assures them. The evening of his final try, well into middle age and slowing down, he holds his wife close and whispers in her ear, as he always does, that everything will be all right. But this time he has a funny feeling, and she does too.
When she was eight, in
the backseat of her father’s car driving through the canyon where they lived, Zema would see in the center village the brown men gathered beneath the trees who had hitched rides from the coast six miles away. They waited for someone like Zema’s father to come hire them to trim trees or build a fence or repair a driveway or paint a garage door.
? ? ?
If Zema’s father parked in the village to mail a letter at the post office or buy his daughter corn chips at the general store, the brown migrant workers would stand from where they sat beneath the trees and wonder if he had work for them. “Nothing, sorry,” her father would say.
Sometimes her father wouldn’t
stop even if he needed to, because he hated telling the brown men he had no work for them. Sitting in the backseat, Zema became afraid when she heard people talk on the radio of how the men she saw through her window were criminals and smugglers and drug traffickers. The news spoke of the men as a horde, advancing across a border barely a hundred miles away.
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Characterizations of the brown men were especially vivid to the eight-year-old of a different brown, evoking as they did animal stampedes and locust clouds. Before her father turned off the radio in disgust, Zema would be startled by descriptions of the insect-people as physiologically misshapen from massive quantities of narcotics that they hauled in secret. She worried that when her father told the migrant workers, “Sorry, nothing,” they might become angry, although they appeared only disappointed, if they appeared any way at all.
One afternoon, the
younger brother of one of Zema’s classmates tumbled twenty feet down a crevice behind a neighbor’s backyard. Crushing part of his small skull, the four-year-old oozed life onto the rocks while medics and the fire department above surveyed the ravine helplessly for where the boy might be located under the growth and brush. The event electrified the canyon within minutes. It brought to a standstill the traffic that poured from the northern valley to the sea along another Highway 27 that shared its number with the small road that Zema and her brother would drive out of Texas years later. A helicopter fluttered indecisively with no idea where to set down in order to haul the boy up. Crowds gathered and Zema held her father’s hand for the final time that she ever would, as the two watched with everyone else the first responders who called the boy’s name. Then, as though a moon passed before the sun, the hillsides went dark from the migrant workers descending onto the overgrowth of the ravine. With machetes, they hacked away the brush until, within minutes, the four-year-old was revealed. Hoisting above them ladders from the fire engines, the migrants formed a bridge across which firemen clambered, harnessing the boy, who was lifted by helicopter and transferred to the nearest hospital. Undergoing brain surgery and emerging from a coma, he walked out five weeks later with a steel plate in his head—a lid on his life, in which Zema imagined that now and then she might see the flash of the canyon sun.
we want the airwaves
As Parker and Zema cross from Kansas into Nebraska, with the gray clouds above that look like rain—except these days the clouds always look like rain, especially the clouds that never rain, which is all of them—scorched desiccation bears them into the future. Having hijacked all music, Parker and Zema penetrate deeper the continental center as more flags display the traditional thirteen red and white stripes with a black field where stars ordinarily would be. Some feature an incensed and glaring Jesus, sandy hair pushed back behind his ears like a biker’s. Others depict a former president X’d out in red, the way newsmagazine covers used to X out deposed tyrants and wartime enemies.
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As much as possible, Parker sticks to the highway, where the Camry can’t be intercepted. As best he can, he times his approach at traffic lights so as not to come to a full halt. But at an otherwise empty four-way stop in a suburb outside Dodge City, in seconds the neighborhood emerges from their houses, a hundred people pouring out of doors across their lawns. Surrounding the car, shaking it from side to side, the people pound the Camry roof and beat at the windows. A chant rises: Let us hear! Let us hear!