Send Down the Rain(17)
“No, ma’am. Never said that.” I rubbed my neck.
One end of her lip turned up. “Your face is red.”
“I reckon so.”
She probed. “And?”
“I’ve seen bad men do bad things. This would fall into that category.” The flickering bathroom light danced on her skin.
She pointed at my chest. “You?”
I nodded.
She waited.
“I’ve known men like me to take advantage of women like you.”
“What kind of woman am I?”
“The kind that needs a little help getting out of a bad situation.”
“What’d these men do?”
“Took what they wanted. Disappeared when it was over. Leaving the girls worse off.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You might not now, but one of these days you’ll meet a guy, fall in love, and he’ll fall in love with you and those two kids in there, and when you open up and try to give him your heart, you’ll find a scar made by my knife. It’s the nature of this.”
“How do you know?”
I stared at the radio. “I just know.”
She rested her hands on top of mine and studied me. Finally she kissed me on the cheek. Oddly, it wasn’t sexual. It was gratitude. Something in the same shade as trust. She stood and held the robe at her hips. One last chance. I tried not to look but it was difficult. I laughed. “You’re not making this easy.”
She turned, “Good night, Mr. Jo-Jo.” She closed the connecting door behind her.
I whispered, “It’s just Jo-Jo.”
10
Catalina said her brother lived in a community of workers on the west coast of Florida, south of Tampa. She’d been there once before but it was daylight and Juan Pedro was driving, so trying to find it in the dark might be tough. To find him, we’d need to get there either early before they left for work, or closer to dark when they returned.
We pulled out of the hotel parking lot just after four a.m., drove about thirty minutes, and started looking for a migrant community without a formal name. Sunup came and went and we were still looking. We stopped at a diner for breakfast and then made sandwiches on the tailgate for lunch. My problem was not Catalina’s internal GPS. Her compass was pretty good. Our problem was finding a community that by its very nature didn’t want to be found. We drove close to three hundred miles in ever-expanding circles while not traveling more than fifty as a crow flies. Finally, after winding through some farmland, clear-cuts, and a couple of miles of dirt roads, we stumbled upon it.
Catalina pointed and spoke excitedly in Spanish. Rattling off a hundred words in six seconds. I wiped my forehead and rubbed my eyes. The edges of my vision grew fuzzy so I checked my blood sugar, but my numbers were normal. That meant something else so I forced myself to methodically count telephone poles.
The road led to a collection of trailers, campers, tents, and lean-tos in need of a match and some gasoline. Several trailers were half-charred from long-ago kitchen grease fires, split in two from the flames, long since abandoned. Trees had flattened a few, and then the trees were used as firewood. Only the trunks remained. Many were covered in blue or gray tarps, and based on the sight of buckets and basins strategically placed to catch rain, few had running water. Communal cook fires were enclosed in cement blocks and large jagged pieces of stainless steel and iron. Rusted, wheel-less cars sat on blocks. Unburnt trash was piled in mounds. Used refrigerators. Dishwashers. Baby strollers. The wheel of a tractor trailer, absent the tire, had been turned on its side and covered with a grate—serving as a charcoal grill. The ground was sandy white coquina mixed with sections of mud in areas of high traffic.
When I rolled the window down, the smell told me that the plastic-wrapped buildings in the rear were outhouses. The strong smell of human waste brought with it a wave of nausea. Between Catalina’s rapid-fire speech and the putrid smell, I switched objects and started counting trailers rather than poles. It didn’t help. My heart was already pounding in my ears.
The place was empty. Not a soul in sight. We drove around to a trailer with Leasing Office spray-painted on the side and sat there as the truck idled. I was a little hesitant to let Catalina walk in and ask around. If somebody came looking for her, I didn’t want her to register her face, which would get noticed on anybody’s radar. Catalina was beautiful in a place absent beauty, and because of that she stuck out like a sore thumb. But we both knew that whoever was inside would never talk to an older gringo with gray hair around his ears asking about a Mexican man who wasn’t legally here in the first place.
Across the park an older, bowlegged lady walked out of her trailer and carefully walked down the steps that led to and from her trailer. Judging from the way she was using the stick in her hand, she couldn’t see too well. I drove over, and Catalina stepped out and quietly spoke to the older woman. The woman nodded, finally smiling, exposing toothless gums and white, fogged-over, cataract-filled eyes. She patted Catalina on the arm and shoulder. Then she pointed toward the rear of the lot. Catalina stepped up into the front seat and we drove around back looking for a bright-blue front door and something about a few pink flamingos.
Catalina’s brother’s name was Manuel, followed by four other names. She said it so fast I couldn’t follow her past Manuel. We found a trailer with a blue front door. The owner hadn’t bothered to lock it, because the doorframe was rotten. And he, or some previous owner, must’ve had a thing for yard-art flamingos. Twelve perched atop the roof. Five lying down. Seven standing.