There are times when your concerns circle around and around. The news this morning, with a caravan of refugees at the border between the US and Mexico at Tijuana, seems to be one of them. You'll find below a story I wrote in the mid-1990s and which was published in my collection
Finding the Enemy, (Oberon Press, 1999) that followed a lengthy visit to my parents in San Diego.
Manifest Destiny
The car doors were locked. Even from where she stood at the edge of the
embankment, Lucy could see that the buttons were pushed down. Her
mother would be all right. She had the radio on, there was no one
around besides the park maintenance crew cleaning the bathrooms. It
wasn't too hot, it wasn't too cold.
Yes, her mother would be
all right. She had even agreed she would be. "Go take your walk,"
she'd said. "Don't worry about me."
Nevertheless Lucy stifled
the impulse to check again. Bad conscience acting up. But for Lord's
sake, she ought to take advantage of this. When was the last time she'd
taken a walk by herself?
She turned to look for a path that led to the beach. Too long, was the answer. Two weeks at least.
That was when she caught sight of the seal, swimming north. At least
she thought it was a seal: a dark sleek form just beyond the breakers,
barely visible through the morning fog, still hanging over the water.
She found herself smiling for the first time in a while. The last time
she and Gordon and the kids had been down to San Diego, they'd watched a
harbor seal basking on the deck of a small sail boat. A thief who took
bait off fishermen's lines, who wouldn't be chased away, who
appropriated any small boat it pleased, according to the man who ran the
hot dog concession. But the kids had wanted to come back and see it
every afternoon.
They still talked about it, four years later.
They'd wanted to come too, this time, but of course it was out of the
question. They were in school and Lucy had too much work to do, moving
her mother. The move into the residence was done now, Lucy would be
going home in a few days, she would see them all. She shouldn't be
resentful that her mother wanted to come with her this Sunday morning,
too, when she'd promised herself one last walk on the beach.
But
this beach couldn't be a good place for seals, though, Lucy realized as
she watched the animal rise and fall in the surf. The State Park was
the most extreme south-western point in the Continental United States.
Ocean currents here swept sewage up from Tijuana, and from the
embankment, Lucy could see that the beach was littered with black
splotches of oil from off shore drilling. She also white plastic
bottles, small plastic tampon applicators, long strings of kelp, a pile
of feathers that probably was a dead bird.
Lucy shivered and not
just from the fog remaining in the air. She pulled her sweater tighter
around her shoulders, and held her car keys so they projected through
her fingers like the spikes on brass knuckles. She was sure there was
no reason to be afraid, this was a well-patrolled State Park, there was
absolutely no other car around, nobody would walk two miles from the
road in Southern California even to get a beach. Maybe even especially
to get to a beach, since there were so many of them.
Which of course brought up the question why she had chosen this beach to come to.
Partly to annoy her mother, she had to admit, because she had really
wanted to go to the beach by herself. But her mother had assumed she
was going too, and Lucy had given in without arguing. Certainly, if
her mother's aim had been to annoy, she'd succeeded. Moreover, as soon
as the woman had seen the freeway signs for the south county towns,
she'd started in again about how Ava had deserted her, how you couldn't
trust people like that, how the country would be better off without any
of them, how it was bad enough in towns but down here near the
border....
Lucy, however, was not going to think about Ava or her
mother right now. She started down the path that lead to the beach.
No, it was not a deserted path, obviously people used it a lot. Not
only was it well worn but also it was littered with soft drink cans and
the bright scraps of corn chip bags...
Lucy avoided looking at
the litter and concentrated on the other sensations. The air smelled of
licorice and rot. The first came from the foliage, the second from the
river which the road into the park had followed, past barren strawberry
fields, past places where water pooled in the river bed. Some water
must flow all year round.
That surprised her. Growing up, the
place had always seemed dry. The tap water, imported from Colorado
over 200 miles, tasted of magnesium. She remembered gasping at the
taste the first time she came back. But she also remembered seeing the
names of streams on the map: the Otay, San Diego, San Dieguito, Santa
Margarita and San Luis Rey rivers. All those streams coming out of the
dry hills, stream beds lined with greenery even in the summer. Ending
at the bay, which here owed its existence to the sediments deposited by
the streams and which formed a long barrier peninsula. She had a sudden
vision of how inviting the land must have looked two hundred years ago
when Spaniards set up their missions, when the Indians hunted and
gathered.
She pushed on. The plants muffled the boom of the
surf, and when the sun broke momentarily through the fog, she felt the
heat un-tempered by a breeze off the water. Suddenly, just when she
wondered how long the path could go on, she found herself at the edge of
a bulwark of rocks. Below lay a short stretch of beach. Beyond that:
the breakers. Where a head still bobbed, half hidden by a swirl of
fog. The seal?
No, no, not a seal, but somebody body-surfing,
she told herself. Somebody who couldn't resist the long expanse of
sand, running northwards so beautifully. But even as she began to
invent the idea of such a somebody, she thought of sewage in the
water. She would have gagged, but the rustle in the reeds stopped
her. She froze. She searched with her eyes, suddenly too afraid to
move.
There was a man was watching her. There, over there, half
hidden in the reeds. His hair was black, and so was his skin except
around his eyes, where his real color showed through, The pupils were
dark too, but the whites glowed. He wasn't as tall as she was, and he
was hunched over as if trying to make himself smaller. He was bare foot
and wearing only a black tee shirt and jeans.. His arms had been
greased like his face: camouflage, she thought. What you did when you
didn't want to be seen at night.
It was daylight, though.
Someone shouted, louder than the roar of the breakers. She looked
toward the noise, south, toward. One of the maintenance crew was waving
his arms, calling something she couldn't understand.
She tried
to see what he was calling too, but she heard another rustle in the
grass, saw the glint of the knife as it was drawn. The blackened face
split in the middle as the man stepped toward her, grimacing.
She wanted to scream, but she couldn't. All she could think of was what
her mother would say about her being killed on a beach near the
border. Her mother would find it either embarassing or ridiculous,
would blame her for doing something that reflected badly on the family,
or on some standard of behavior that no one had been able to define in
30 years.
Poor old woman, Gordon said after Ava left and Lucy's
mother had telephoned in a panic. Ava had come to clean and cook only
three days a week, but without her help the old woman was locked inside
her arthritis and her memories. Poor Ava, too, he added; too bad she
never got her immigration status fixed. But, he added, your mother needs
your help, go and get her settled in some place decent. I'll hold down
the fort.
Lucy had already decided she wouldn't tell him about
everything her mother said: how she called his father an old drunk
(true enough but never said aloud), how she accused him, Gordon, of
instability because he'd changed jobs a half dozen times, how she railed
against Ava for deserting her, even though it seemed pretty clear Ava
had only left because Immigration was after her and her husband.
Lucy wasn't going to say anything about the underwear either. She had
found mounds of it when she began to pack her mother's things. Three
dresser drawers were filled with pants and slips and camisoles which her
father had given her mother over the years, some of it still wrapped in
tissue paper. Beautiful stuff but there was no point in keeping it,
Lucy decided. None of it would fit because her mother was a shadow of
what she'd been. Besides she doubted if her mother even realized it was
there: Ava had done the laundry for the last three years, Ava put the
every day things in one drawer that Lucy's mother could reach without
getting out of bed.
So Lucy wrapped it all up with sweaters
and old blouses and what remained of her father's clothes and gave them
to Ava's church for its next rummage sale. Ava was gone, nobody
admitted knowing where she and her husband were hiding, but Lucy knew of
no better place to get rid of the stuff.
The night before the
move, however, Lucy heard a noise well after midnight. When she got to
the doorway of her mother's bedroom, she saw her standing, crying,
holding on to the edge of the dresser as if she would fall otherwise.
"My things," she said, "my pretty things." She looked up as Lucy
entered. "That slut took my pretty things."
"What slut? What things?" Lucy said. She knew, though, but she couldn't bring herself to explain just yet.
"Ava, the Mexican slut," her mother said. "She ran away, she deserted me. And she took my things."
It was pathetic. Even after Lucy explained what she'd done, her mother
didn't understand. But then maybe being old was pathetic. This was
not the time to reflect on the pathos of age, however. She had the man
in front of her now. And his knife.
She took a deep breath.
"You don't want to hurt me," she said. She took a step backward,
trying to decide which way to run. Back to the parking lot was sure
safety but she would have to go through the weeds again. As long as the
workman was up there, looking at the ocean, she'd be better off going
toward the water where she'd be seen.
The man in front of her
said nothing, and she realized that probably he didn't know much
English. An illegal, a wet back: what else could he be? Same thing for
the seal, the supposed-surfer out there in the water, she reaslized
suddenly. Not a seal at all, another one trying to slip across the
imaginary line out there, the border between the two countries. Greased
up like Channel swimmers, they must have started down the coast, and
swum north.
Lucy stood up straighter. She reached out her
hand to the man. "Give it to me," she said. She saw she probably
could not win a fight with him because, although he was thin and
obviously exhausted, he was desparate, and she wasn't. Neverthless,
she kept her hand held out and repeated; "You don't want to hurt me.
Give it to me."
On the little bluff, the man from the park crew
was screaming something. One of the other crew members was hurrying
toward the edge too. She looked toward them, her concentration
disturbed. The man in front of her shifted his weight, as he saw her
distraction. "No," she said firmly as soon as she perceived his
movement. "Don't do it."
The man's eyes held hers. Dark brown
eyes with flecks of green in the irises. Tired eyes. She sensed just
how much he resented her clean clothes, her well-fed aspect, her
English, her perfectly legitimate right to be in this country, on this
beach, part of the Anglo world. To demand that he give her something,
as if it were her right to take.
The workmen had begun to jump
from the low bluff down the beach, however, and the man looked over at
them. This time she moved in the moment of distraction. She stepped
forward on her left foot and brought her right knee up hard! into his
groin. He bent over, still holding the knife, but she turned and ran
toward the beach.
The sand was soft, and she stumbled. She
gasped for breath, and willed her legs to thrash forward because she was
sure the man was behind her, ready to attack her. It was not until she
reached the hard, wet sand where it was easier going, not until she was
nearly even with the park workmen, that she realized the man was not
likely to move out of his shelter. Especially not if he could see what
was happening at the water's edge.
There the black thing she had
thought was a seal washed back and forth where the waves, having broken
their backs on the sandy bottom, beat raggedly on the shore. The taller
of the two workmen was sitting down on the sand, taking off his boots,
and rolling up his trousers. The other man was yelling something at
him.
But he had been swimming, she told herself. The thing I
saw was moving northward, was alive. Unless she had seen it just in
its last minutes of exhaustion, just before it gave itself up to the
currents and the waves, just yards away from its destination. Now it
floated face downwards, and nothing moved except when rocked by the
rising and falling water.
The tall workman waded out and pulled
the body from the water. He and his partner stood for a moment, looking
at it. The body looked short and dark haired and greased black just
like the other man in the reeds. It also looked quite dead; the taller
worker nudged it slightly in the ribs with his foot.
Lucy knew,
and she assumed the workers knew that when a person is drowning, you're
supposed to turn him on the back, pull out the tongue and breathe
rhythmically into the mouth. But the men stood there, looking at the
body, as if too ashamed or disgusted to touch this person, to put mouth
to mouth, even though they had hurried to try to save him.
The
illogic of that annoyed her. She started across the sand again. Before
she realized it, she was kneeling next to the man, fishing his tongue
out, pinching his nostrils shut and breathing into his mouth.
"Hey, cool it, lady," the taller workman began.
She looked up, and as she did the man on the ground choked, and
vomitted up a quantity of saltwater. Then, it was clear, he started
breathing.
For a second she continued to kneel next to the man.
Her hands were covered with grease and the front of her blouse was
soaking wet. Poor guy. Like Ava's husband. Like Ava. No chance at
the American dream.
She stood up, and suddenly she found herself
shaking: her legs, her hands, her teeth. She was cold, she was
exhausted, she realized that probably she was very lucky. "He had a
friend, hiding in the reeds over there," she nodded her head toward the
bottom land. "He tried to jump me." The words were hard to say. She
seemed to have lost control of part of her body: she couldn't stop
shaking.
She had to wait while the Border Patrol looked for the
man in the reeds (he was gone, as Lucy was sure it would be), and then
they did the paperwork. She wondered what would happen to the other
man. Paramedics took him away, but it wasn't clear if a hospital would
admit him, or if he'd just be dumped across the border.
Twice
during the wait Lucy went over to check on her mother, standing where
the woman wouldn't be able to see her. Her mother sat staring out at
the stretch of sea and sky directly in front of her, her head no higher
above the door frame than that of a child. Safe behind the locked doors.
Two brown pelicans patrolled the waves. The tide began to turn and
after a while Lucy realized the beach was growing wider and dirtier as
the receding water left behind more garbage on the sand. Then, a half
hour later, the officers were through and she could go.
"Where
have you been?" her mother said when she unlocked the door. "I was
dying in here of the heat. I hope you got enough excercise to last a
while, because I don't intend to wait again."
Lucy nodded. "Of
course," she said, not trusting herself to say anything more. It was
only when she was behind the wheel with the key in the ignition that she
looked over at her mother.
The woman was crying silently. Then
she felt Lucy's eyes on her and she turned abruptly away. "Don't
look," she said. "Don't remember me this way. I wasn't always like
this."
They took I-5 up the coast on the way back, then
cut over at Palomar Road. The residence was out in what still was
almost country. Even on Sunday there were men in the fields, planting
gladiolas, potting poinsettias, and, in one place wearing white
contamination suits, goggles and hoods, spraying tomatoes.
The
trip took longer than Lucy expected; the traffic coming back from the
beaches was heavy. The road passed El Camino Real, passed the sign for
the San Luis Rey Mission, passed a group of men waiting for the bus to
take them home from the fields. Small, dark men, of course.
The afternoon smog had settled in, but Lucy still could see how the
upland rolled off north and south, cut by the streams she'd seen on the
map running down from the mountains to the sea.: San Dieguito, Santa
Margarita and San Luis Rey rivers, San Marcos creek, Agua Hedionda. All
names, she noted, left by the Spaniards, who must have traveled the
uplands when they went from one mission, one estancia to another. Long,
long ago.
They arrived in time for her mother to have a little nap before Lucy took her down to dinner in the dining room.
Her mother walked slowly, but she was out of breath before they reached
the door to the dining room. She stopped, although not (Lucy knew),
not only because her old body needed to. She looked around the room: at
the polished oak plank floor, the white stucco walls, the dark beams
spanning the space end to end. At the potted plants in the corners, the
yellow chrysanthemums on the tables, the white napkins, the 35 women
and the three men waiting to be served their dinner. At the white hair
and walkers, the stooped shoulders and shaking hands. And at the small
dark women who would serve them.
Then Lucy's mother straightened
up and started into the room as if she owned it. The waitress for her
table smiled. Lucy smiled back. It was the least she could do.
I had not realized that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the
publication of Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. It was the first
chapter book I ever read on my own--the first time took three months,
but thereafter I must have read it a dozen times.
