Stars Always Shine (18 page)

A drippy, dewy dampness chilled the air, and the striving sun beamed down with futility. Place’s hands ached even more as he worked in the draft of the stall barn, carefully cleaning and painting individual walls and preparing each stall for its own tenant. The list of meticulous projects that Jacqueline had left kept Salvador and Place busy as the year gave up its final days.

Mitch looked out the kitchen window as the rain continued a dreary pace that had started in the dark hours of the night. The two horses hovered at the gate as they waited anxiously for their morning feed. Gin and Tonic butted the fence and gave short runs at the ducks in their anticipated nervousness for their first portion of the day. Mitch checked the clock, and with the strained waiting of the animals, confirmed that it was well past their feeding time. In a corner of the hay barn, Place methodically painted old shutters that Jacqueline had recovered from a yard sale and wanted attached to her new milk barn apartment.

“Has Salvador fed yet?” Mitch asked, interrupting the quiet daydreaming that Place was immersed in.

“Huh?” he answered as if someone woke him from a deep sleep. “What? I’m sorry. I was in the high Sierras, at my mountain ranch where the snow falls quietly and the steam from your breath tells you you’re alive.”

“Where’s Salvador?” Mitch asked and added, “Has he fed yet?”

“I guess so,” Place answered. “I mean, I assumed he had. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him this morning.”

“Well, you better go check on him,” Mitch said. “He might be sick or something.”

Place knocked on the door of the little help house and waited. He knocked again, and then tapped at the front window calling out to Salvador, “¡Hey americanito! ¿Qué pasa, hombre?”

“Estoy enfermo,” Salvador replied through the door, his voice harsh and his tone abrupt.

“¿Necesitas algo?” Place offered as he moved closer to the door and put his ear up to it.

“¡No!”

“Okay, amigo. Pero llámame si necesitas algo. Voy a dar alimento a los animales,” Place said and waited for a response.

“¡Ándale pues, guay!” Salvador lashed back, exuding obvious anger.

Place stood silent for a moment, shocked by the electricity of Salvador’s words. He tried to make sense of them. He remembered that Salvador had once told him that in the winter he got sick and that there were days at a time when he couldn’t work. Place had suggested that it was fatigue from the long summer days, and Salvador had assuredly but nebulously told him it wasn’t. “¿Pues, cómo sabes?” Place had asked and offered that people could get the flu or a cold from working too hard. Salvador could only tell him he knew it wasn’t from the usual winter ailments. As he walked to the hay barn to feed the animals, Place thought about his angry father. His father often abused the family with the same derisive tone that Place now felt from Salvador, and he felt those words down to the marrow of his sensibilities. They were words that hurt, and the users knew that words could do that. That words and language could sting, cut, and burn the spirit as much as a physical and frenzied beating could.

As Place slowly fed the anxious animals, he thought about Salvador and wondered how much he really knew about him. It had been so simple to assume that once a person helped somebody, he would in turn be grateful, thankful, filled with friendship. But Place knew enough from Mitch’s litigious anecdotes that people were complex animals, and that part of that complexity was due to language, expression, and feeling. “The fact that we speak makes it hard for us to really know each other—and even harder to communicate,” Mitch often warned Place as they lay in bed thinking about how they had only each other, never sure of even that. Place wondered if Salvador was happy, and then laughed inwardly as he tried to define for himself what happiness is or would be. He realized that with Salvador in his life, he felt more secure. It was a comforting network with Mitch on one side and Salvador on the other. Both accepted Place with his weaknesses and insecurities and both made him feel as if he were with his own people. But Place never considered that Salvador might aspire to more than being his coworker, or even his worker should Mitch and Place purchase their own small ranch. Place didn’t consider that Salvador’s goals might reach beyond being a ranch hand or migrant farm worker. In a way, Place’s view of Salvador was very American, very Jacqueline.

“What did he say?” Mitch asked Place as he resumed his indoor chores.

Place thought for a quick moment. He wanted to lie, feeling both confused by the behavior of his companion and ethnically embarrassed. With each introduction to new ways of living, new ways of thinking, and new ways of doing things, Place became slowly resigned to the idea that all of his people were eventually what he was suspecting Salvador was and what he knew his own father had been. But Mitch had also taught Place that people couldn’t be looked at like set items from a racial catalogue that has a description of characteristics and tendencies, batteries not included. She brought to Place’s attention, on those few occasions when he slipped, that for him to think of his own father as being typical of a certain people was to do just what many people did when they thought about Mexicans, Blacks, Jews, Asians, doctors, ranchers, lawyers, farmers. “People aren’t like that, Place, you know that,” she would remind him.

“He’s sick, like you said,” Place answered as he carefully positioned a newly painted shutter off to one side to dry.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mitch demanded, her training now talking as she sought out facts and taxied another question down the runway that launched answers toward the truth.

“I don’t know,” Place said and looked at Mitch with eyes that discouraged further questions.

Mitch knew because she knew people, that Place did not wish to talk to her about Salvador. She knew too what Place’s volcano—sleeping but volatile—look could mean. It was a disturbing and detached gaze that did not frighten her for her own protection, but concerned her more for Place’s well-being. It was that same eye-filled expression on a blank face that Place had once described to Mitch when he recalled the last day he saw his father. When she had seen that look for the first time and firsthand, she wondered desperately if Place knew he had inherited it. Out of patient respect, she never asked.

“Well, if he needs something, we can help him. Tell him that,” she said as she walked away.

P
lace looked over at the ducks as he flung extra flakes of hay into Gin and Tonic’s corral. It was important to feed the burros enough so that by the time he reached the other side of their piped-fenced yard, he could spread out the table-scrapped vegetables to the ducks and they could eat peacefully, if only momentarily. The ducks were smart. They knew to peck and pick at their meal while maintaining a careful watch on the rude roommates that were the two burros. They knew to waddle-run behind the safety of the surplus piping any time the burros felt the urge to charge at them, which was often. In their bowls of dug-out dirt, they roosted low and watched between the rails of pipe panels that leaned toward the more solid fence as they kept wary eyes on the two larger animals.

Place watched with rocks in his hands as the ducks came out shyly and cautiously like weary men shuffling to a soup kitchen line. He hurled rocks at the burros the moment they even looked toward the ducks, hoping that if he did that consistently, the long-eared pests would associate getting hit by a rock with looking at a duck. Place was mildly proud of the associative training he felt he had invented, although he never expressed this to Mitch, and he was pleased that as soon as their extra work was caught up, he and Salvador would build a special little pen adjacent to the corral so that the ducks could have their own safe space. Place and Salvador had talked about it one day when they decided that the ducks seemed nervous and anxious like inner-city children who wonder when they will get caught in the crossfire of bigger kids, knowing it’s only inevitable. The two men laughed suspiciously as they devised a way to make the new duck pen portable, so should Mickey and Jacqueline pull up unexpectedly, they could disassemble the pen quickly and inconspicuously and shove the ducks back in with Gin and Tonic where Jacqueline had mandated they should be. In their conspiratorial planning they joked and called Mickey and Jacqueline vulgar names—in English and Spanish, as if to deliver double-tongued curses.

The ducks ate quickly and Place urged them to slow down. They looked up at him as the scraps filled their throats and they honked half-quacks of satisfaction as they cleaned the ground of their afternoon meal.

“You’re welcome,” Place said as he doled out more peelings, cores, and crumbs.

He walked back to the deck and sat and watched as the hazy sun gradually turned into a semicircle and then went to another part of the world. The deck had become Place’s mental observatory, the place where he could philosophically stargaze and wonder about the things that were important to him, the things that confused him, the things that hurt him. This evening’s musing would focus on Salvador. He wasn’t sure how to approach him, and the growing darkness with the slowly burning stars dotting its canopy seemed to calm him.

Place leaned back against the picnic table after drawing long and deliberately from a can of beer and looked for the star ridge he had identified weeks earlier. Lethargic clouds moved slowly toward the Sierras, and when Place thought about the mountains he remembered a recent day when Salvador and he had repaired a quake-damaged structure.

“¿Dónde está la sierra?” Salvador had asked as he scanned the ground scattered with assorted tools and looked for the saw.

Place, intrigued more by the language than by the question, asked “What’s that? ¿Qué es un, uh, una sierra?”

Salvador explained to Place that “una sierra es a saw.”

“¿Como las montañas?” Place had asked, uniquely interested.

“Sí, mexicanito,” Salvador answered, “like las montañas.”

This conversation led to geological speculation as Salvador and Place discussed the intricacies involved in naming the cragged peaks. Place suggested that the mountains couldn’t be properly named the “saw mountains,” and Salvador agreed. With meticulous analysis they studied the saw, turning it upside down so that its teeth pointed upward like a neat row of tiny mountains. Place continued, “In English, they would have to be the ‘saw-tooth mountains.’ That sounds better.” Salvador, not really understanding the words and responding more to the tone, replied with his usual accommodating “Yes, mexicanito, es better.” But their linguistic observations didn’t end with that compromise as Salvador asked what “teeth” were. Place jokingly replied, “What you don’t have too many of,” and then immediately retracted the joke as possibly a hurtful one and one better left unexplained. Again they studied the saw as Place showed Salvador that the word “teeth” was used to describe a saw and also teeth in one’s mouth. Together they marveled at the strangeness of words. Salvador added a footnote that in Spanish, only animals and people had teeth—not saws.

Place stared deep into the patches of silvery-dotted black as clouds continued to open and close the night sky like horizontal curtains. The hypnotic stillness of his nocturnal gazing lulled him into a peaceful rest as he slowly started to fall asleep.

Place wasn’t sure if the dull thud he heard was from a dream. He opened his eyes slowly but wide in an attempt to sharpen his senses. The thud thumped once more and in a cymbalic crash the piping from Gin and Tonic’s corral came smashing down. Place was slow to react as he stood at the railing of the deck and looked out toward the corral. The nighttime shadows revealed to him the two burros darting and skidding, raising their front legs high and coming down hard on round bodies of feathers. A muffled quack, one stomped and cut short through death, burped out and evaporated as it reached Place’s ears. He ran toward the corral and behind him he could hear Mitch running along the deck. As he reached the corral gate, one of the burros chased the sole-surviving duck. As it smashed headlong into the wire and bounced back, the burro stomped it and its mate came to join in on the stomping like Nazi youth beating a solitary figure solely for being different. The duck rose once and with a deformed waddle scooted forward and sideways closer to the fence. A webbed foot jutted out at a perpendicular angle as the struggling duck fell forward with each inching movement. Its neck lunged ahead of it as if to take desperate steps or futile grasps as it propelled itself along the fence, receiving random stomps and obnoxious nudges from the fascist burros. As Place spanked the wire mesh fence with his open hands, he yelled a harsh “Yaa! Yaa!” and cursed words to beings that did not hear him and did not care.

Place and Mitch stood dumbly as they looked at the dead ducks, their bodies flat in the places where hoofs had stamped into them. Slowly moving blood crept in multidirectional spokes from the hubs of their bodies, and in an odd way showed that in death there are signs of life. Quietly, Place walked to the barn to retrieve a wheelbarrow as Mitch entered the corral and scooped up the birds with a shavings rake. Gin and Tonic paced nervously as they walked the trail of blood along the fence left by the last struggling duck. They reared their heads back snorting occasionally and jutted their necks forward and upward as if to salute an invisible power. They kicked out behind themselves in a daring gesture announcing personal space and took high, exaggerated steps to declare victory and ownership of a small country of land that was now
their
corral.

Place walked like a zombie as he pushed the wheelbarrow to a potential gravesite. His tears were angry ones, and he gulped damp, foggy air as his breathing grew jagged. Rosa and Coquette eagerly pranced alongside the wheelbarrow, smelling fresh blood and anticipating a vulturous meal.

Mitch followed closely, and quietly she asked, “Place, where are you going?”

“I’m going to bury these poor losers, if that’s okay with you, Michelle.”

“Place, let’s not bury them,” Mitch started. “Let’s take them down to Miwok Creek. We’ll just throw them along the creek. They died in a bad way and it’s better if we let something else at least have their flesh. You don’t want to bury contaminated souls.”