Lechugeros by Tim Young

It was Manuel that read the new law.  He could translate English, and someone said he had been a lawyer, a prosecutor, until the Narcos pushed him North.  He sat on the tailgate and tugged at each finger of his gloves so he could take the paper they waved barehanded.  A sheepishness to him.  Tired, bookish eyes.  He squinted, and brought the paper closer.  It was the flushed light of first dawn.  Cold.  Maria watched his words slip out in a thin fog.

“Where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person. “

Manuel handed the paper back.  His long knife clattered on the truck bed and he flinched at the sound, embarrassed.  The foreman sat in the cab of his pickup with his radio turned to a country music station.  A muffled, jangling guitar.  Coffee steam blurring his windshield.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were an abogado.”

“Si but there are different laws here.”

Another voice.  “It means if you speed, they’ll see you’re brown and pull you over and you’ll be out of the country.”

“We’ll go to California.  I have cousins.”

“Texas.  They understand Mexicans.”

“You see this?”  A rattlesnake coiled in black outline on a bicep.  “From San Antonio.”

“How much lettuce did that cost you?”

Laughter.  The mountains purple knuckles bruising the horizon.  The crew waited for the air to warm and free the lettuce leaves so the layers could be trimmed without damaging the head.  It had been very cold last night in her cousin’s trailer.  The muscles in Maria’s back had seized into rock slabs that wouldn’t loosen until long in the day.  Bend, cut, trim, lift, bag.  She did the motions in her sleep.  Her hands puffed, gritty under the nails.  The wind here blew a fine sand from the desert that coated her pillow in the morning.  A few more days in this field.  Then another.  $8.24 an hour.  Better pay than a professor in Mexico.  Than a prosecutor.

“Dulce, Maria?”

She pocketed Cleto’s 50 cents and handed back a caramel.  It took a moment for her fingers to release the candy, for her brain to push her will through the tired nerves of her body.  Then she rewrapped the bag and tucked it next to her.  Cleto, the youngest of them, was always hungry.  She would sell all her candies today, and the waters she carried too.  A few extra dollars for abuela to care for Adoncia.  Manuel hadn’t liked the name.  “It’s pasado de moda, old fashioned,” he’d said.  But her little girl sucked the caramels until they dripped down her chin, laughing with brown triangles at the corner of her mouth.  Their little future that they worked for.

In the field the harvester grew definition.   Rows of conveyor belts under a tin awning.  Plastic sheeting.  Cardboard that smelled warm, clean in the sun.

“Estoy cansado,” Manuel would say when they lay down.  A few more mumbles here and there before he fell into the jerking snore of sleep.  She would fight her burning eyes a little longer, running  Adoncia’s soft hair through her fingertips.  Feeling the heat of her shallow breath, catching her when she ran from some terror in a dream.  In a few more years they would have enough for their own trailer. Adoncia would start school.  She would speak the English Manuel taught her in the mornings.  Toothbrush.  Shoelace.  Field.

“No no, mas agua Cleto.  Mas.  How are your shoes?”

The boy leaning away like a fencepost on the side of the road.  Three years in the lettuce fields had left knots on his soft boy’s face.  A panicked wisp of beard at his jaw.  Cleto was fast, a good cutter.  If you slowed to tend to a rock in your boot he would be behind you, passing the heads to the collector.  He liked to show his scars to the new crew members each season, looking for their reaction at the way the veins on his hands re-routed.

“You’re going now?”

“I have to.  I have to go.”

“You can wait.  These things pass,” Maria said.

“No no.  Today.  They don’t want us here.”

“We can get you legal.  My brother works at the courthouse.”

“They’ll watch him.  They deported the rest of my family.  I’ll go back.”

“Back?  What’s back?”

“They don’t want us!”  He threw his knife down.  The metal caught the sun, flashed in the pickup’s mirror.  The foreman, eyes locked behind sunglasses.  Blue-gray shaved jaw.

Wind swirled.  Adoncia would be running with the other girls at the park in her white dress with brown checks.

“This is what you want?”

“I want to work.”

“And you can work here, yes?”

“Si, but…”

“No.”  The foreman, in the open door of his truck.  Crossed arms.  A tightness to him.  “Lo lamento Cleto.”

The crew was silent.  Manuel stared at his boots.

Cleto stuffed the front of his shirt back in place and turned his back.  The fire of youth, that understood so little.

“He’s going to walk?” someone asked.

Sand in her hips.  The blunt shock of every step.  Maria pressed the bag of caramels into Cleto’s stomach.  The waters dripped in his hands.  He smiled.  Desert scree cracked under his heels.  Little puffs of dust that swept toward the river.

The foreman called for the shift to begin.  They shuffled forward into the fields.  Waves of green brushed against jeans browned by the valley soil.  “It is not my work, but I’ll do it Maria,” Manuel had told her.  They bent, cut, trimmed, lifted, bagged side by side.  Dust thick on their clothes.  Her back loosening, hands finding their rhythm.  The foreman’s white hat, wide-brimmed against the blue sky.