Dark Water

Y
ou wouldn’t have noticed me before the fire unless you saw that my eyes, like a pair of socks chosen in the dark, don’t match. One is blue and the other’s brown, a genetic trait called heterochromia that I share with white cats, Catahoula hog dogs, and water buffaloes. My uncle Hoyt used to tell me, when I was little, that it meant I could see fairies and peaceful ghosts.

Then I met Amiel, and for six months it seemed true what he whispered in his damaged voice:
Tú eres de dos mundos
.

He was wrong, of course. You can only belong to one world at a time.

Now that he’s gone, I try to see things when I’m alone. I put one hand over my blue eye, and I look south. With my brown eye I can see all the way to Mexico. I fly over freeways and tile roofs and malls and swimming pools. I cross the Sierra de Juárez
Mountains and the Sea of Cortés to the place where Amiel was born, and I find the turquoise house with a red door. There are three chairs on the covered patio: one for him, one for me, and one for Uncle Hoyt. I tell myself the chairs are empty because we’re not there yet. I watch for as long as I can and when my eye starts to water, I remove my hand.

Tomorrow, I’ll look again.

P
eople move to Fallbrook, California, because it’s sunny 340 days of the year. They move here to grow petunias and marigolds and palms and cycads and cactus and self-propagating succulents and blood oranges and Meyer lemons and sweet limes and, above all, avocados. They move here to grow them, I should say, or to pick them for other people.

The houses are far apart when you’re out in the hills, where trees and petunias grow in straight lines for profit, but once you get close to town, the streets look like something drawn by a child with an Etch A Sketch. No overall plan, no sidewalks, just driveways going off in crazy lines that lead to other driveways, where signs point to other dead-end streets named in Spanish or English with no particular theme—
La Oreja Place
sticking out of
Rodeo Queen Drive
leading to
Tecolote Avenue
, which if it were a sentence would read “the Ear on the Rodeo Queen of the Owl.”

The ear and the queen and the owl are overrun with bougainvillea, ivy geraniums, tulip vines, and star jasmine, and that’s what makes Fallbrook beautiful from a distance but tangled and confusing up close. It’s a place where you can get lost no matter how long you’ve lived here, and there are only two roads out, something we didn’t think much about before the fires began.

I
first saw Amiel de la Cruz Guerrero on the corner of one of those Etch A Sketch streets, where Alvarado meets Stage Coach. I was fifteen and he was seventeen, although he told employers he was twenty. I was in my sophomore year of high school and my mother was substitute-teaching because my father had left us, and as my mother was constantly saying over the phone when she thought I wasn’t listening,
The wolf is at the door
.

Every weekday morning at seven-thirty we’d leave my uncle’s avocado ranch, where we were living free of rent (but not shame) in the guesthouse. My mother would drink her coffee in the car while she drove, and I would eat dry Corn Pops from a Tupperware bowl. Traffic would bunch up as all the cars going to all the schools had to inch through the same four-way stop at Alvarado and Stage Coach, one corner of which was a
day-labor gathering site, meaning Mexican and Guatemalan men would stand around on the empty lot hoping to get a day’s work digging trenches, moving furniture, hauling firewood, or picking fruit. The men stared intensely into every car, hoping to win you over before you stopped.
Pick me
, their faces said.
The wolf is at the door
.

But on this morning, the men had their backs to the road. Our car rolled slowly to the stop sign, going even slower than usual because the drivers of the cars were staring, too.

When we got close enough, I could see a lanky guy in a flannel shirt and work pants doing some sort of act. Fallbrook calls itself the Avocado Capital of the World, so you don’t live here without seeing guys pick avocados. Mostly it’s done on high ladders, but there’s also this funky tool like a lacrosse stick with a six-foot handle. You stick the pole way up in the tree, hook the avocado, yank, then lower the pole so you can drop the fruit into a huge canvas bag you’re wearing slung over one shoulder and across your chest. That’s what Amiel was doing that morning, only without the pole, the sack, the tree, or the avocado.

“What in the world?” my mom asked.

“He’s picking imaginary fruit,” I said.

She snuck a look. “That’s the oddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Can we hire him?”

She snorted. It was our turn to dart through the intersection just as Amiel de la Cruz Guerrero touched his imaginary avocado-picking pole to a live electrical wire and received an imaginary jolt, which made all the day-labor guys laugh.

T
he next day, he was juggling three actual, not mimed, soda bottles. “Look, Mom,” I said, so she peered over for a second.

“I hope he doesn’t litter,” she said.

“That sounded kind of racist.”

“There’s no trash can on this corner, if you haven’t noticed. And the neighbors will make a stink if junk starts piling up.”

The day after that, Amiel was standing on his head. While I watched, the guy next to him gave his feet a shove and he tipped over. “I guess the other guys think he’s showing off too much,” I said.

My mother sighed. “It could be he’s in the wrong field for his talents.”

On Friday, the boy just stood there, hands in his pockets like the rest of the men. He didn’t even look into our car like the others did. “Why do they come here?” I asked my mom.

“I don’t know why they pick this corner,” she said.

“I mean cross the border.”

“To work.”

“But they clearly don’t have work.”

“The hope of work,” she said.

That’s when I thought of Hoyt. My uncle Hoyt grew so many avocados that he had to employ people year-round to fertilize, water, pick, prune, and patrol fences to keep thieves from stealing bins of fruit worth thousands of dollars, a crime called—I’m not kidding—“Grand Theft Avocado.” All of his employees were Mexican. I asked him about it once, why every farmworker you ever saw in Fallbrook was Hispanic.

“I don’t know who picks corn in Iowa or lingonberries in Sweden,” Hoyt said, “but white teenage boys don’t pick avocados in California. Neither do grown white men. Not enough money in it for them. Or status.”

I didn’t ask if his guys were legal, because I knew generally who was and who wasn’t. The legal ones had drivers’ licenses. They could go home to Mexico on planes and come back on planes. The illegal ones worked seven days a week for years at a stretch, saved their money, then went home for about eight months to be with their families. Every time they went home, they had to borrow money to pay coyotes who smuggled them back in.

“Do you think they’re happy, the workers?” I asked. You could ask Hoyt questions like that and he wouldn’t get defensive.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Hoyt said. “You know Esteban, right?
His kids and wife are here because he has papers. He brought them legally about ten years ago. That was when I was building Robby’s tree house.” My cousin Robby. “I took Esteban’s kids up into the tree house because I thought they’d like to play in it. And you know what his youngest kid said? He looked around with this really serious face and asked, ‘Who’s going to live here?’ ”

Robby’s tree house was pretty nice, with cedar shingles on the outside and two framed windows and a peaked roof, but there was no electricity or plumbing or even a door, and it was about eight feet square.

“That’s because,” Hoyt went on, “in the village where they were born, plenty of people lived in places worse than that tree house. I’ll tell you what, Pearl. I’m going to take you and Robby with me to Esteban’s village in Mexico next time I go. I want you to see why he left.”