The Maldonado Miracle (2 page)

They were out by the great oak, in the sun-filtered dell that banked the dried creek bed, across the road from the Garcia house. The same road wound on down to the sea, passing the Maldonados' at one point. They'd played here for years.

"What will you do?"

"Fernando, I've told you. I'll go to school, like everyone else."

Fernando sighed. "And I've told you that wetbacks cannot go to school up there. I know."

"My father will arrange it."

"Jose, it is not a field that he can plant or a motor he can fix. There are authorities up there. You will be like a criminal."

Jose wished that he had not come up the road. He had come to say good-bye, not to hear these words or argue with Fernando.

Though there was doubt in his eyes, Fernando finally smiled. "Yes." They had been friends for a long time. "Write me, will you?"

"When I can.
Adios.
"

They shook hands, and Jose called for Sanchez, who was rooting around in the creek bed, looking for lizards that sought the scant moisture beneath the rocks.

The boy and dog went west along the road.

 

W
HY WAS IT
he could not tell Fernando that he was so frightened his stomach had turned into dough? And why did he have to lie about Maldonado being a foreman? And about Maldonado sending word that he was fine? Keep your guts! Well, he didn't want to admit that message.

He walked along, scuffing the dust.

There were many things about his father he did not understand. Sometimes it seemed that Maldonado thought he was twenty years old. That he had always been twenty.

"Jose, can't you lift that?"

"Papa, I'm trying."

"The bolt goes this way, Jose. Not that way. Use your eyes. You're not a child."

"Yes, Papa."

"You tell the horse what to do. The horse doesn't tell you."

"Yes, Papa."

"You have all the confidence of a rabbit, Jose."

A rabbit. A sheep. A goat. Confidence. It was hard to get, especially around Colnett.

Maldonado had so much of it. He did not seem to be afraid of anything. No man. No animal. Not even the dangerous creatures. Jose had seen him flick a poised scorpion with his fingernail. Another time, when he didn't have his hoe, he'd stomped a snake's head with his boot heel. And he did it without even thinking about it.

Yet there was one thing. The church. The Virgin Mary. God. Even priests. Maldonado prayed every morning. In the fields, he'd sometimes stop and look up to heaven.

 

"P
APA, LOOK
at my drawings."

"They're okay. Tomorrow we plant beans."

"Hector, look at his drawings. They're beautiful. He has talent. You should be proud."

"I am. I'll look at them tonight. Jose, how much did the cow give this morning?"

"Three litres."

"You still haven't learned how to do it."

"I'm trying, Papa."

He could hear his mother's voice. "They are beautiful drawings, Jose." Then a whisper. "I will try to get you some regular paper so you won't have to draw on bags."

When she was around, it was different. Maldonado was still Maldonado. But she was a. bridge. Sometimes a fort.

"I'll teach you to be the best farmer in Baja."

"I don't think he wants to be a farmer, Hector."

"What do you want to be, Jose?"

"I don't know." He was afraid to say.

"He wants to be an artist. Like Orozco."

"I've never heard of him."

Maldonado had not had an easy life as a boy, Jose knew. He had never really been a boy. Perhaps that was why he didn't understand.

"1 was behind a plow when I was five, Jose. It didn't hurt me."

"But, Hector, isn't it lucky that Jose can go to school?"

"I suppose."

 

T
THE DRAWINGS.

"I did this of you, Papa."

"Well, I guess it looks like me. But my ears aren't that big."

"I will do another one and make the ears smaller."

Another one and another one and another one. He could draw his mother easily—the large eyes and high cheekbones, the full lips, shining hair pulled back. But he always had difficulty with his father.

A
T THE ADOBE,
Jose sat on the low rock wall for a while, looking around, then got up to go inside and open his fiber suitcase again. There was nothing more to pack. Everything he owned was in it. Breeze poured through the open windows into the two bare rooms.

He returned to the wall and sat down again. He was glad he would not be there when the bulldozer bit into the weathered clay. One crunching sweep and the house would be a pile of rubble.

The laundry line was still up, stretched between a tree and a post. Once, he had done a drawing of his mother hanging shirts. It had not seemed important to keep it then. Now, he wished he had it.

"Someday you'll be in a museum, in a gold frame behind a velvet rope."

She'd laughed. "Jose, you're such a dreamer. No wonder your father gets upset with you."

It was a bad habit, he knew. That dreaming. But often, after all the work was finished, there wasn't much to do except dream. Go up to Fernando's or out to the ocean to see Enrique or make the long walk into Colnett village or the even longer one to the Camalu cousin.

Yet it had not been bad, especially during the school months, and there was always the future to think about. Perhaps a job in Tijuana or Mexicali. Once, he'd seen a man in Ensenada finishing furniture. He was rubbing wax on it, making the grain deep and glistening. Perhaps a man like that would need an apprentice.

"Don't set your goal on Tijuana, Jose. Think of Ciudad de Méjico."

The mere thought of Mexico City took his breath away. It was across the world. "Have you ever been there?"

"No," his mother said. "You know I haven't. But I know people who have. It is a great city. Millions of people."

It was hard to believe that there were a million people anywhere. "What would I do?"

"Go to art school. Use the talent God gave you."

Somehow she'd found the money to buy him an expensive book on the life of Orozco, the famous Mexican painter. He'd read it over and over again, keeping it wrapped in heavy paper.

So the dreams would go on.

 

H
E KEPT
looking around.

The well.

It had awakened him on countless dawns. The whirring of the spool, the faint splash, and then the creak as his mother had drawn up the first full bucket of the day. She had told him, when he was very small, an incredible thing—there were towns in the
Estados Unidos
where every house had running water. She'd never traveled farther north than Tijuana or Mexicali, but she knew many things.

The outdoor oven.

Its blackened mouth, set in the mound of clay that was like a high turtle's back had breathed out overpowering smells while she was still alive. He could see her waving the smoke away from her face, bending down, careful not to step on spilled embers with her bare feet. No matter what, they'd always eaten well. And he'd never lacked for clothes or shoes.

The animal shelter.

It was hardly a barn. Just some tin on posts with board sides to keep the horse and cow out of the rain and provide a place for the hens to nest. Beyond that, the barbed wire enclosure for the pigs. They roamed anyway, squealing and scattering when a truck slugged down the road. He'd drawn that, too, but it hadn't seemed important to keep it.

He looked at the flower bed that was to the left of the adobe, shielded from the almost constant wind. Most of them were dried up now. Only the tough geraniums still lived. He hadn't watered it in more than a month. His mother had always taken good care of it, cutting flowers to brighten up inside. She'd said it hurt her when they withered away.

One of the last things she'd said to him was "Don't get old before your time, Jose."

Yet he had the feeling this afternoon that his boyhood was over, even though he was not prepared for more. That was another thing he did not wish to dwell on.

He took a final look, fixing the place in his mind, thinking that someday he might try to draw it as it appeared now, with the wind rippling the trees and the dust already beginning to collect on the doorstep.

He jumped down off the wall.

J
OSE HAD ONE FINAL CHORE
—take Sanchez to Enrique's for safekeeping and say good-bye to the fisherman, though they'd done that a good five times on Sunday.

Enrique's place was two kilometers on down the sandy road which jogged in and out past Maldonado's small field of corn, splitting into two roads where a winter wash cut it. Cars or trucks going to Meling Fishing Camp, and sometimes
americano
campers or jeeps, bucked and ground over its ruts. But there weren't more than twenty vehicles of any kind each day, even in summer. Jose often thought it was the loneliest place on earth.

Enrique's shack stood at the point where the Maldonados' road converged on the trail that led north and south along the beach bluff. He'd simply come and erected the driftwood and tin shack on the low cliff over the ocean without asking anyone. He'd been squatting there for years, fishing and digging clams; taking abalone off the rocks at low tide or trapping
langosta,
the clawless lobsters.

Trudging along the road, crisscrossed here and there with the light tracks of rattlesnakes on the fine sand, Sanchez padding by his knees, Jose thought of the conversation he'd had with his father that night in April when Maldonado had decided to go to California.

"Isn't it illegal?" Jose had asked.

Maldonado's eyes had been grave. "Yes, but the other way it might take years. So many papers. A lawyer. I cannot wait. There is nothing here for me to do."

"Suppose you are caught?"

"They will simply send me back. I know other men who have been sent back. It is no lasting disgrace." He had been up there and knew about such things.

A long time before, after two severe droughts on the west coast of Baja, Maldonado had worked as a
bracero,
a contract field laborer, in the United States. For several summers he would leave Colnett and go to Mexicali in late spring. There was a government employment center there, and the men would cross to El Centro, California, in a bus. They would be gone for a few months and then return, the bus roof stacked high with rope-tied cartons which had once held lettuce or celery but now held clothes and gifts.

Jose had met the bus with his mother, driving up with relatives. It was a happy occasion, and they'd had a fine meal in a Mexicali cafe each time.

"If everything is all right, I'll send for you," Maldonado had said.

"And I will have to cross the border without papers?"

His father had been reluctant to answer but finally said, "It is nothing."

Nothing?

There'd been so many questions Jose had wanted to ask. About where they'd live, and what they'd do; about school. He'd been going to the three-room school near Colnett, just to the north. But his father had waved all the questions aside. Instead, he'd talked about the wonderful things he'd seen in California: the huge highways, the great buildings and stores, the fine homes. Once, coming in a bus from the San Joaquin Valley he had seen the lights of Los Angeles from the top of a mountain range. They were without end, he said.

He'd never been so talkative. He'd talked on about having running water, an indoor toilet, electricity, a TV set, a motorbike; maybe even a car. Jose couldn't sleep after Maldonado had turned off their white gas lantern.

 

L
ICK, THE MANGY
yellow hound that guarded Enrique's while he was out on the boat or clam digging, began making a fuss as they approached but quieted down when he recognized them. He growled at Sanchez and stiffened his back hairs, but they had long ago fought it out. Now, they'd have to learn to live with each other.

Jose went on around the shack and looked out across the kelp beds. He spotted Enrique about a mile offshore. Usually, there were big sugar bass under the tangled beds.

He "hallo-ed" across the smooth, glistening sea until Enrique finally turned and waved. The words "
A
few more minutes" carried back faintly on the light wind.

Jose went over and sat down by the shack, Sanchez following him to slump by his feet. He looked over to the northwest. Great Colnett always seemed to be sleeping, even when the sun glared down on it. When the weather was foggy or hazy, it was like a huge gray bear in hibernation. From its high brow, there was nothing to be seen along the shore until the Meling camp; then really nothing more for thirty or forty kilometers below. At night, in clear weather, you could not see more than three lights—gas lanterns—for thirty kilometers in either direction.

There was just kelp-littered beach, with round polished rocks grinding in the wash of the surf up near the low cliff shoulders. Thousands of gulls and the constant wide vees of flapping pelicans.

Jose listened to the clink and swish as the waves tumbled the rocks against each other. For a moment, he watched the gulls, staying in the wind and then wheeling down to make a noisy pass at the water for sardines. He studied the undulating wings of the pelicans. On shore, they were funny, awkward birds, but in the Colnett sky, they seemed dignified and graceful.

Then he heard the backfire of an outboard and a steady hum. Enrique was skimming toward shore.

He turned back in the direction of their house. His father had been wise to choose it. In the harsh land around them there was a narrow strip of sweet-water earth, cupped down between low hills, cactus-dotted and home to rattlesnakes and coyote. This strip of land, set by a small willow grove, was like an oasis. His father had found the abandoned adobe and made a deal to crop the land before Jose was born.

To the northeast, the Sierra de Juárez towered. Directly opposite Colnett was a smaller range, the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. To the south and east, above San Quintín, was the snow-topped Cerro de la Encantada range—the enchanted mountains. His mother had once said, "This is the good land of the sleeping giants. You must paint it someday."