Seed (2 page)

They’d set up camp there and the whiteboy’d spoken to them late into the night. They’d fed him pickled Satori radishes and snake meat. In the morning, they’d shaken hands, left the whiteboy with a jar of canned potatoes, and a promise.

….

Hunger gripped Brood, momentarily so powerful he knew nothing else. Then it receded, resuming its normal place in the back of his mind. A raw nerve, like a toothache he could never quite shake, that ran the entire length of his body. He sucked hard on the rabbit meat, trying to trick his body into believing it gave him real sustenance.

A hint of salt. He recalled his mother teaching him how to eat a tomato, before the migrations had begun.

“Like this.” She’d opened her wide mouth, pressed tongue to tomato’s ripe edge. Brood recalled a greenhouse, clear scrap plastic tacked over a wood frame, attached to a sheet metal shanty where they’d lived. A small windmill had churned overhead. Pollo had been there, a baby sitting naked and silent in an empty metal irrigation tub, his eyes even then registering nothing outside, scanning instead some unfathomable inner topography.

Brood had done as his mother’d showed him. Licked the tomato’s smooth skin, dribbled salt from a tin can, marveled as it clung to his saliva. Then bit into it and…heaven. His mother had worn cutoff fatigues and the dark skin of her knees had pressed into the soft earth between two rows of tomato vines. She’d shifted and clumps of dirt had clung to her skin, part of her.

“Yo.” Hondo jerked his head at the sermon. One of the
Chupe
acolytes had moved into the crowd and now stepped methodically from one migrant to the next. He was big, over six feet, well-fed enough to be strong. He glared down at them, shook a galvanized steel bucket in front of their faces. The migrants broke under his hard gaze. They reached deep into hidden places—sewn folds in blankets, pockets, orifices. Pulled forth small handfuls of Satori seed. Brood leaned forward, watching. He swallowed hard.

The bucket rattled with seed. Seed the government doled at the Amarillo stadium to migrants with family and plot claims up north. Seed gotten by other means by those, like Brood and Hondo, whom the government deemed ineligible. The ones who had no provable family.

“Look at that,” Hondo said. “Straight up robbery right in front of everybody. We should be this good.”

“You know anything about preaching?”

“
Dios y yo somos así
.” Hondo held up two crossed fingers, and Brood shook his head.

“Met shit less full of shit than you.”

“Don’t tell nobody.” Hondo smiled wetly and pressed a finger to his bearded lips. Then turned serious. “Heads up.”

“Donation.” The
Chupe
towered over Brood. He pushed the bucket close to Brood’s face and shook it. Brood peered down inside at the small heap of seed. Wheat, corn, cucumber, tomato, barrel squash. All smooth, regular, and every single seed zippered by a tiny Satori barcode. “Donation,” the
Chupe
growled. Brood looked up, saw high Indian cheekbones mottled by burn scars.

“You Tewa?” he asked.

“Nah,” The
Chupe
said. “Cherokee. Fuck you care?”

“Got some Tewa friends up north. Thought it might be a small world.”

“Well any friend of the Tewa…” The
Chupe
gave Brood a humorless smile, burn scars twisting deep lines into his face. He shook the bucket again. “Time to donate,” and his free hand curled into a massive fist.

“Relax, homes.” Brood held up a hand, placating, and reached inside his zarape. Produced another hunk of rabbit meat. He considered it for a moment, then tore it in half and set one piece in the bucket. The other he placed in his mouth. “
Dios los bendiga
.” Smiling up at the big
Chupe
, chewing.

“Don’t want no stringy ass rat meat,” the
Chupe
said.

“Not rat,
ese
.
Conejo
. Much better for a big boy like you.”

“No fucking
conejo
neither. Satori. You got your dole yet?”

Brood laughed. “I look like a family man to you?”

“Fucking gutter Spics all got dependents, don’t pretend you don’t.”

“He’s my dependent.” It was Pollo who spoke. He kept his gaze fixed lapwards, his voice a carefully enunciated monotone. The hand holding the needle rose, weirdly independent, marionette-like, and pointed at Brood. “My dependent,” he repeated, emptily. “We under age, so no Satori. No Satori. No Satori.” His voice trailed off in hollow repetition, a fading echo. The
Chupe
stared. Scars puckered cruelly as a sneer worked its way across his mouth.

“Donation,” he commanded. Pollo didn’t respond. His shoulders remained curled over, eyes fixed on the needle, once again dipping rhythmically into the shell of charcoal ink he held. The
Chupe
stuck forth a canvas-wrapped foot and with a toe poked one of Pollo’s bandy legs. Pollo began to rock back and forth. He quietly moaned.

“Fuck’s wrong with you?” The
Chupe
bent down, peering close. “You Tetted up, boy?” Pollo said nothing, just kept oscillating, eyes empty, the needle dipping, dipping, dipping.

Rage rose in Brood’s chest, the eruption of some deep and vicious brotherly instinct. Beneath it, the unspeakable fear, as real and constant as hunger, something he never let his mind touch, but which sometimes infected his dreams: what he would do if he ever lost Pollo. What he would be…nothing but a mouth, wandering the dust of seasonal migration routes, trying to feed itself.
Espiritu enojado
, a hungry ghost. His muscles drew taut, the urge to do serious harm barely checked. He kept his voice real quiet as he spoke.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with him,
gordo
.” His hands snuck under the zarape—gripped the hooked blade, wrapped around the chipped wood handle of the ancient .32 he’d found one summer in old Juarez beside the body of a skinned dog. “He just like that.”

The
Chupe
turned. Eyes narrowed as he saw the look on Brood’s face. He glanced down at movement beneath the zarape.

“No fucking Satori,” Brood told him. They held each other’s gaze, a moment of perfect mutual understanding, then the
Chupe
nodded once. He grinned twisted yellow teeth, about-faced and strode away.

“Thought you was about to have some fun,” Hondo observed. He unconsciously probed a finger into the scabrous pock of a sun sore on one cheek, and chuckled. “Guess Cherokees ain’t stupid.”

Pollo kept tilting back and forth, metronomic, unable to stop once in motion. Brood laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder, stilling him. Bones, hungry and fragile, protruded against his palm.

“You stupid?” he hissed.

“Helpful,” Pollo said.

“Somebody fuck you up, you stick your head out like that.”

Pollo turned his head, for an instant met Brood’s eye. Defiance there, and pity, and something deeper that reminded Brood of their mother. Then it was gone and Pollo sank once more back into himself, a boy who couldn’t stay afloat in this world.

The prairie saint and his three
La Chupes
milled around for an hour after collecting their seed, waiting for the wind to abate. When it did, two
Chupes
gathered the Tet girl under the arms and they all left abruptly, sauntering past the gathered migrants, disappearing into the hot light at the end of the long empty corridor. The bucket of Satori dangled like a taunt from the Cherokee’s hand. Brood, Hondo and Pollo waited a few moments, then Hondo scratched the sun sore on his cheek, shed the foil blanket and stretched, all sinew beneath his ancient Kevlar. He wrapped up the foil blanket and then picked up the Mossberg from where it had lain concealed beneath him.

“Gear up.”

….

A line of migrant caravans stretched along the scar of I-27, as far south as Brood could see. Aiming for where the stadium rose, gleaming in the late February sunshine, a monolith of old world concrete. It towered, stuffed with Satori seed, over the ruined twen-cen brick of Amarillo’s downtown. Three fat government zeps hung there, anchored to its rim.

“Looks like you got a shot,” Hondo said, peering over the top rail of the corral they’d chosen as a blind. The prairie saint and his
Chupes
had led them to the far outskirts of Amarillo’s ruins, to a district of gutted agri-warehouses. Crumbling concrete domes protruding like the backs of half-buried beasts from farmland gone white with alkali. “You got a shot?”

“
Sí
,
esta bien
,” Brood said, “assuming the wind don’t pick up.” He laid his blanket gently in the dust and unwrapped it, revealing the broken-down compound bow and seven aluminum arrows. He pieced the bow together and plucked its double-folded string as though it were a harp. It twanged briefly, and he nodded, satisfied. He pulled a tiny spotting scope from the pocket of a quiver he’d fashioned from a vinyl rifle holster, put it to his eye and peered through a gap in the corral’s dry-rotted slats.

Across a hardpan lot, four
La Chupes
mingled at the warehouse’s arched entrance, close enough in the scope that Brood could make out acne on necks, nascent mustaches, the Cherokee’s mottled skin.

“Ninety-four meters.
Muy bien
, definitely. Don’t know how fast I can hit all four, though. And who knows how many more inside.”

“We’ll wait. Just before dawn.”

“I like dawn,” Pollo said quietly. He intently traced lines on his FEMA’d legs with a piece of charcoal. A bird, a snake, a rabbit and a rat, all linked in a complicated series of arrows. “Everyone’s asleep. Except me. I’m the only one in the world.”

Brood knelt beside him. He took the boy’s chin gently between his fingers and forced his face up until wide, dark eyes met his own. Pollo’s pupils dilated as though facing bright light, but he did not look away. Brood smiled.

“Exactly, little bro. Nobody but us.” Pollo gave a quick smile, then pulled away and leaned with one shoulder against the fence.

“Pollo.” Hondo reached under his Kevlar vest and withdrew an ancient polycarb pistol, it’s grip barely large enough to get two fingers around. “Take this, little homes.” Pollo glanced furtively at the gun, at Hondo, locked his eyes on the ground. The tats on his chest seemed to grow as he swelled with obvious pride. He reached out and Hondo laid the tiny pistol in his hand.

“Fuck’d you get that?” Brood demanded. Hondo shrugged

“Had it.”

“Up your ass? Ain’t seen that pistol once in ten years I known you.” Brood thought real hard, mentally cataloging every nook and cranny on the wagon where Hondo might’ve hidden the pistol, and came up with nada. “Well, don’t give it to Pollo. He liable to shoot his own dick off with it. Or worse, mine.”

“
Entiendo
exactamente cómo funciona
,” Pollo stated. Without looking, he pointed to his paper pant leg. There, beneath his charcoaled fingertip, Brood saw a tiny diagram of the pistol, pieced out and linked by arrows, so precise it could have come from an instruction manual. Brood leveled a finger at Hondo.

“You cagey,
chamuco
.”

“I know exactly how to use it,” Pollo said.

“
No te preocupes
,
ese
,
no está cargada
.” Hondo showed happy gums. “Ain’t seen bullets for that thing since before you was born.”

“And when to use it,” Pollo insisted.

“
Chale
.”

“And when not to use it.”

“We got a extra gun hand.” Hondo’s dreads swayed as he jerked his head in Pollo’s direction. “Ain’t no use without no gun.”

Brood turned to Pollo and found the boy sitting in the dirt, leaning back against the fence. He had already secreted away the pistol and begun drawing once more on his FEMAs, apparently considering the matter settled.

“Just ’cause you got a gun doesn’t mean you do anything with it,” Brood told him. “It’s just for emergencies.
Entendido
?”

“
Entiendo
.” A smile split Pollo’s face. His eyes remained empty.

….

“Yo,” Hondo hissed. “’Bout that time.” He sat on his knees, watching through the fence, one hand gripping the Mossberg.

Brood blinked in the cold night air. The wind had died and stars blazed, clear as bullet holes in the Texas sky. A sliver of dawn light edged the horizon, backlighting the stadium. Brood reached out, felt Pollo’s knee, solid and real, and realized he had been holding his breath, submerged in some dream he’d already forgotten. He exhaled, rolled over, peered through the corral’s slats. The warehouse’s entrance flickered with firelight. Two
La Chupes
sat there in the dirt, wrapped in blankets. They were still, hopefully asleep.

“How many inside?” he asked.

“Four. Plus some girls.”

“I didn’t see no girls.”

Hondo glanced sidelong at him. “You sleeping.”

“
Mierda
.”

“Like a baby.”

“Shit.”

“Snoring.”

“Fuck you.” Brood looked down at Pollo. The boy slept wrapped in a blanket, curled against the fence in a way that reminded Brood of a nested bird, small and fragile. “We do it like usual?”

Hondo nodded. “Just don’t put no arrows up my ass.”

“Only if that’s where they need to be,
ese
. Wait until I get there before you go through the door this time.”

Hondo slung the Mossberg over his shoulder, pulled a skinny meat carving blade from somewhere beneath his Kevlar. A puckering sound came from his mouth as he smiled in the darkness, then he disappeared silently around the back side of the corral.

Brood picked up his bow, let its familiar weight settle in his palm. Plucked the string twice with the calloused tips of his fingers, tuning himself to it. He reached for the quiver. Only one of the arrows had a tip, a four-razored broad head. The shaft of this he’d marked with a ring of black electrical tape. The other six arrows were headless, but the bow drew with enough force to punch even their blunt noses through a cinderblock. He pulled out three of these, nocked one, leaned the other two against the fence.

“’Bout that time,” Pollo whispered. Brood turned, found his brother watching, eyes bright and alert. Completely there.

“Don’t be scared,” Brood told him.