Valentine(36)

Word of the raid spreads quickly through the community, thanks to Sra. Domínguez, who, having gone back to retrieve her sweater from a break shack, watched from the small window as the other women were taken into custody. After the van drove away, she stood there for nearly an hour, as if her feet had been nailed to the concrete floor, and then slipped quietly through the front gate at shift change. For months, people will talk about the sad blessing of Lucha Domínguez forgetting her sweater, a lightweight cotton cardigan that she carries even in the spring and summer, not only because she is often cold but because the indigo cloth reminds her of the night sky back home in Oaxaca. Otherwise, it might have been weeks before husbands and children and sisters knew for sure what had happened to Alma Ramírez and Mary Vásquez, Juanita González, Celia Mu?oz, and a sixteen-year-old girl who had joined the crew barely a week earlier, and who was known to the other women only as Ninfa, from Taxco, in the state of Guerrero.

*

Three days after the raid, Victor knocks on the door of Alma’s apartment. Don’t worry, I’m not giving up a room at the Ritz, he tells his niece as he sets two duffel bags and a sack of groceries on the carpet. The bunkhouse at the man camp in Big Lake has a leaky faucet and crickets the size of jalape?os. He holds up both index fingers and moves them gently apart, an inch, two inches, to show her how big they are, then looks around the apartment appreciatively, as if he hasn’t been there for dinner at least twice a week since he returned from the war. As if he doesn’t see the pockmarked and water-stained drywall, or the carpeting that curls up along the baseboards, or the window blinds so old the slats will crack in half if Glory does not open and close them with care. As if the faucet doesn’t leak here, too, the tap a steady drip that stinks like rotten eggs in the summer. As if crickets don’t swarm behind the walls here, too.

Los grillos, Alma had called them a few weeks earlier, and Glory rolled her eyes. Jesus Christ, how hard is it to say cricket? Ay mija, no maldigas al Se?or.

Speak English, Glory said. Act like you belong here, for once in your life.

Glory watches her uncle fetch the rest of his things off the sidewalk and then step over to the sofa bed where she sleeps. He sets down a third duffel bag, along with a small wooden crate that holds two books, a bag of potato chips, a carton of cereal, a gallon of milk, and two six-packs of Coors Light. This here’s nicer than my place, he says, you got covered parking here. Keep the hailstones off my El Camino, eh, Gloria?

Glory claps her hands over her ears and walks backward toward her mother’s bedroom. When she reminds her uncle, he looks at her blankly. Call me anything, she has begged her mother and uncle, even the district attorney on the one occasion she sat for an interview, but not that. Now, Victor says, Why not, m’ija? It’s your name. Because every time I hear it, she wants to shout at him, I hear his voice.

It is a few minutes past four o’clock and the apartment complex sings and sighs with the noise of little kids coming home from day-care centers and vacation Bible schools. Mothers and big sisters shout at them to hurry up and help with chores. Box fans hum in the open windows, pushing hot air into the small courtyard. Ranchera drifts across the parking lot, and Glory again fights the urge to go into her mother’s bedroom, climb into bed, and put all the pillows between her ears and the world. Out there in the oil patch, he played his music loud, stopping to switch the channel from one country and western station to another, once to a late-night punk show on the college radio station she used to love. And why wouldn’t he play the music loud? Who was out there to hear? Nobody is coming to help you, he told her, and he was right.

Glory is still in her mother’s bedroom when the property manager, Mr. Navarro, knocks on the door. They cannot stay here, he tells Victor. Mr. Navarro has heard about the raid at the plant, and he doesn’t want illegals living in this complex. Victor tells the man that his niece, Glory, was born right here in Odessa, at the medical center.

?Y tú? the old man says.

Victor answers in Spanish, which Glory cannot understand. Here in Texas, her mother has always insisted, Spanish is the language of janitors and housekeepers, not her daughter, and kids who speak Spanish at school land in detention, or worse. Still, Glory knows the substance, if not the content, of Victor’s words. Like his niece, he is also an American, he tells the man. He earned his citizenship serving two tours of duty in Vietnam, cabrón.

A few minutes later, her uncle knocks on the bedroom door and says he is going to find them a different place to live, a better place. So start packing, Glory.

It doesn’t take long to gather up their lives. Four years earlier, Glory and Alma walked into the furnished apartment carrying three suitcases and a milk crate filled with kitchen items. Now, Glory lays her clothes in one suitcase, and Alma’s in another. She folds her mother’s bedspread and strips the sheets off the bed, packing them, along with their pillows and her knife, into the third suitcase. There is a wooden cigar box that smells faintly of cedar and holds photos of family back home in Oaxaca. Where the sandy beaches are white as salt, Tío says, and the red snapper tastes like butter. Glory sets the box in her mother’s suitcase, nestling it between a pair of blue jeans and her mother’s favorite blouse.

In the kitchen, she opens the cabinet next to the stove. Into the milk crate go Alma’s cooking pot, her tablespoons and coffee cups, the chipped plates they found in the church store, and the plain wooden cooking spoon Alma carried with her across the border eighteen years earlier. It stirred beans and stews when Alma shared a one-room apartment with half a dozen other women who were sending money back home. Glory sometimes felt that spoon swat her ass when she was little, and the year she turned ten, Alma threw it across the kitchen and asked Glory to stop once and for all asking about the father she had never known. Well, where is he? Glory asked. ?Pues, quién sabe? Maybe California, maybe dead. ?Y a mí qué me importa?