Happiness
Written by: joaquin
We pull up to the gate at 5:30 but have to sit until almost 6, waiting for enough light to filter through the fog so we can make our way into the fields. The marine layer doesn’t usually creep this far inland, but this week it’s been heavy, sticking around, settling into the valleys like wet smoky mud. Probably why the foreman was late.
Paco’s van smells like cheap whore and taco shop and I’m glad to be out.
He’s jawing at the foreman, trying to get an angle. He’s always looking for an angle. I don’t know how you get an angle on a strawberry field but Paco wouldn’t be Paco if he didn’t try.
It’s just us – Paco, Luis, Hector and me – and 4 or 5 older ladies that showed up in a beat-down Astro. They look like Indians – maybe Zapotecs – coffee skinned, compact, bundled up. They move efficiently, speaking a few words to each other in Chatino. Fair enough.
Paco walks over and jabs an elbow in my ribs. “You like that, cabron? You want to hit that?” I grab some flats and leave him to his sneering.
It’s been the four of us for about a year. Luis and Hector are brothers, don’t talk much, and only in Spanish. Most of what they earn goes back to Mexico, apart from Luis’ taste for Budweiser. Hector has two kids, though. Goes home for Christmas every year and comes back with two new pictures. Paco – I don’t know where he came from. I’ve heard him tell a half-dozen different stories and none of them sound true. Someone in Fresno told me they thought they recognized him from a wanted poster in Texas, which wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think he’s dangerous. I can just see how his mouth and his angles could have landed him in something that went way over his head. It might be why we always work the edges of the season, off-peak – always a week early, a week late.
After a few hours I stop and stretch. The fog is still thick. I’m glad. Good weather. I can hear Paco singing a corrido but I can’t see him. Glad again.
I pull a book from my back pocket and flip it open. Harvest Poems, by Carl Sandburg. Picked it up at a yard sale a few weeks ago. I always have a book in my pocket. When I get a new one I leave the old one in a laudromat or on top of an ice machine or newspaper rack. They probably mostly get thrown out, but I always imagine someone else picking them up and reading them, wondering where they came from.
Luis is standing right in front of me. Fog is tricky like that – makes me forget. Can’t see anybody all morning and all of a sudden someone steps out of nothing and there you are with your book in a strawberry field like an idiot. He can see I don’t need more flats but leaves me some anyway. I shove the book back in my pocket and start picking.
My back aches, so I bend my knees more. Pretty soon my legs ache. Paco always says I’m soft and he’s right. I’m from Pacoima. I’m second generation. I graduated high school and played baseball and used to write stories my English teachers said were good. Even took some classes at a community college, but that wasn’t going too well so I hooked up with my uncle to work the central valley. Just for the summer, to figure things out. That was 18 months ago.
Towards midday the fog is burning off, thinning out. The Zapotecs have almost twice as many flats ready as we do. We get our sandwiches and sodas out of the van and sit under an old pepper tree near the gate. I pull out my book. I like the poems of Carl Sandburg. He talks about unions and soldiers and Abraham Lincoln. I like most when he talks about work and workers. He was a poet but he knew about sweat and blood returning to earth. What it is to have dust in your lungs and sun in your eyes. He knew the people who dig coal, dig ditches, who pitch shale over their shoulders, looking for a vein of hope. People who sleep outside, hidden between tall clumps of pampas grass, staring up at a low splinter of moon with bellies full of stolen tomatoes.
Paco and Hector brush themselves off and head back out. Luis reaches into the cooler for his after-lunch beer. I read.
After a few minutes Luis clears his throat. “Hector was going to be a lawyer,” he says softly, “He was going to school in Mexico City and everything. Then he got Rosanna pregnant and had to quit. Had to work.”
He takes a long drink and watches his brother load trays of strawberries onto a flatbed. “He would have been a good lawyer.”
It’s the most he’s ever said to me. He reaches into his backpack and slides me a bus ticket to Los Angeles. The way he does tells me Hector doesn’t know. This is between him and me.
“It’s good work up here, but not for you. Paco hates when you read because he doesn’t understand. Hector, he hates it because he does.”
I take the ticket. It’s for tonight.
“You read better than you pick, guero.”
I don’t know what to say. I fold the ticket and tuck it into my book, searching for words. Finally I flip to “Happiness” and read it to him in Spanish, only I change Desplaines river to Rio Grande and Hungarians to Tejanos.
He looks at me blankly for a moment, then light begins to break across his face. He smiles, laughs, hoists up his tall boy can.
“A felicidad,” he says.
“To happiness.”