Daughter's Keeper (7 page)

Olivia leaned back heavily into the sofa cushion. She felt exhausted by the discussion before they'd even had it. How could she explain to this man for whom all of the United States seemed like one vast scam, one that other, bolder men knew how to work, that there were some things he just couldn't do?

“What's going on?” she said. “Just tell me what's going on.”

For a while Jorge was quiet. Then he began to tell her about the humiliation of standing on the corner, day after day, sometimes getting picked to work, more often being passed over. She had heard this all before, but when she tried to tell him that, he hushed her and talked on.

“They drive up in their trucks and look us over like we're cattle or pigs. And you can't just stand there, waiting. You have to rush the truck and beg for work, because if you don't, they choose someone else. If you don't look eager, they won't hire you. The worst is that that's not even enough for them. You must look eager and willing to work, and you must also grovel. Yes boss, no boss. Otherwise they pick someone else, someone who kisses their asses.”

“I know,
papi
, I know,” Olivia said, reaching her arms around him.

He shook her off. “You
don't
know. You can't know. You've never had to feel that humiliation. You've never had to beg for work. You've never had to smile that pathetic
campesino
smile.”

“I have to suck up to customers every day. I know exactly what it's like.”

“It's not the same. You know the worst, Olivia? The worst is when I
do
get the job. When they
do
choose me. Because when I jump into the back of the pickup, I look behind me at the men standing there, the ones who got left behind. And maybe one has six kids back in Guatemala who will go hungry this week because I'm taking the job that would have let him send them money. And another one has a sick wife who won't see the doctor because the money to pay the bill is going to end up in my pocket, not his.”

Jorge told her that a few weeks before, when he'd come by the restaurant late one night to pick her up, he'd confided in Gabriel about his difficulties finding work. Gabriel listened and sympathized. He had come to America on the Mariel boatlift, and he, too, had had problems finding a job. Then he told Jorge about two friends of his,
gringos
, who were willing to pay top dollar for methamphetamine. The problem was, the guys couldn't find ­anyone to buy from. Gabriel told Jorge that Mexicans had taken over the meth market and the old biker sources in the desert were starting to dry up. He said if Jorge could find someone, or even someone who knew someone, with connections, the two of them could make some easy money. The
gringos
wanted about five thousand dollars' worth. At a 50 percent markup, Gabriel and Jorge would clear a nice profit.

“But, Jorge, you don't know any drug dealers. You don't know anybody like that!” Olivia said.

“I don't, but who knows who knows, you know?” Jorge smiled. “I just started asking around, and one of the guys I met on that gardening job last month, he introduced me to Oreste. Oreste's been around. He knows some guys who are connected to the Mexican Mafia. They bring the crank in from Tijuana.”

Olivia shook her head, wondering how the man who had laboriously copied Pablo Neruda poems onto blue paper with purple marker and decorated them with cutouts of little white doves for her could have become someone who so casually discussed the Mexican Mafia and methamphetamine connections.

“You'll get caught.”

“Nobody's going to get caught. It's all between friends, you know? Gabriel's friends, my friends.”

“You didn't even know this Oreste until two minutes ago. He's not your friend.”

Jorge stroked her hair and began unbuttoning her shirt. “Don't worry,
mamacita
. I'm not going to touch the stuff. I'm just going to introduce some people. That's all. Look, I'm a man, Olivia. It's a man's job to care for his woman. That's all I'm doing, caring for you.”

As he slid her shirt open, he began to kiss her between her breasts. She sighed, wanting to argue with him, but she understood how emasculated he felt. A while ago, he had started secretly ­taking money out of her wallet, and while at first she'd been angry, she soon realized that he was trying only to save himself the humiliation of asking, so she forced herself not to mind. What was hers was his. That was the way it was supposed to be when you lived with someone, when you were in love.

She leaned back in his arms, not giving up, just, for the moment, giving in.

The first time Olivia and Jorge had made love it had been in a motel on the outskirts of San Miguel. She had paid for the room. They'd been meeting every evening for a couple of weeks, after she finished her Spanish classes. He hadn't gone back to Guanajuato after the conference. Instead, he spent his days at the
Universidad del Valle de Mexico
, the private secondary school and college in town, trying to organize the students there into a union. She would find him waiting for her outside of the
Instituto Allende
where her classes were, leaning against the wall, usually with one or two of his friends. Then they would all go back to the
Universidad
for a meeting or a rally. That was what charmed Olivia most about Jorge: his politics and his politicking. A state university student on scholarship, he nonetheless managed to inspire the private school students, most of whom had previously been concerned only with maximizing their earning potential. Jorge taught them to care for
el pueblo
and
la lucha
. He organized demonstrations in support of the Indians of Chiapas and against the government's brutal quelling of their rebellion. He convinced the students to paint murals of Che Guevara on the school's walls and to boycott classes taught by any professor not sympathetic to their cause.

Olivia was enchanted by it all. She adored the banners and the pamphlets and the earnest conversation that she could just barely understand. Jorge's poems about freedom and liberty and the color of her eyes swept her along in a tide of something part love, part politics—the combination so heady, it did her in.

One evening, after hours of impassioned but seemingly fruitless debate, Jorge stood up in front of a gathering of twenty or thirty student leaders, and, quoting Marx, Castro, and Public Enemy, begged them to strike like their comrades at Mexico City's public university. The students of
Universidad del Valle de Mexico
were afraid that their private institution could and would expel them. Jorge convinced them that it wasn't enough to speak sympathetically of rebellion. They had to act. By the end of his oration, they voted overwhelmingly to strike.

That night, Olivia walked with the boy she imagined to be a young García Lorca down the
Avenida de Zacatecas
and out to the main road. They found a motel—the kind of place where cars drove into private carports in front of each individual room and their drivers pulled shut the flimsy metal doors behind them, hiding them from view.

When they checked in, the old woman at the counter asked if they were staying the night or
un rato
—a little while. Before Olivia could buy them an entire night on the sour sheets and thin foam mattress, Jorge muttered, “
Solo rato,”
and took the key.

Unlike their necking, which had been languid and passionate, night after night on a bench in the park or in doorways along the street, the first time they made love was rushed and almost grim. When they walked into the dank little room, Jorge undressed quickly, motioning her to do the same. Olivia, who, despite the evidence of poetry and white doves, had more of a sense of romance than her lover, could have ignored the forty-peso room and imagined them in a canopy bed with an entire lifetime to spend in each other's arms. Jorge, it seemed, could not. He tore the wrapper off of a condom, entered her roughly without any preamble, and came almost instantly. He was dressed again before she'd even had a chance to inhale. They walked back the way they came, holding hands, but only because that was the way they'd walked there, and the contrast of not touching would have been too stark. He left her at her room, and she didn't see him again until the next afternoon, when she found him waiting in his usual spot outside the
Instituto
, a bouquet of purple irises in his arms.

That night marked what might have been the end of Olivia's infatuation with Jorge. Her disappointment with their lovemaking seeped into the rest of her relationship with him, and although she continued to echo his words of love and devotion, part of her felt like a fraud. She could not bear the thought of herself as a dilettante who casually took up with a Mexican man in a kind of excess of touristic fervor—too many of the American girls she met in Mexico seemed to have a travel checklist: see the sights, eat the food, sleep with the men—but at the same time her attempts to imagine a future with Jorge failed her and ultimately inspired her escape back home. When he had arrived in California, his skin caked with grime, his hair stiff with dust, and his pockets emptied by the “coyote,” she had pushed all doubts out of her mind. He had sacrificed too much to follow her, and there was no longer room for ambivalence.

***

Olivia was a good waitress. She wasn't particularly interested in food, and she never knew what wine went with what dish, but she was attentive to and friendly with her customers, complimenting their choices and encouraging them to try a piece of flourless chocolate cake or an appetizer of sautéed calamari. While her solicitude came naturally to her, she was competent and amiable because she got better tips that way, not because she liked her customers. She came close to hating them at times, particularly late at night when groups of men, liberated from their decency by the absence of their wives and girlfriends, made jokes that they ­mistakenly believed were beyond her comprehension and grabbed her ass.

By 11:30 at night, Olivia's smile was so tight it hurt. After she pulled off her white apron and bundled it into her bag, she had to grip her cheeks with her hands and massage her face back into something resembling a human expression. She dug her hands into her pockets and pulled out the wadded bills. Ninety dollars. Pretty good. Enough to pay the electric bill.

Jorge was waiting at the bar, deep in conversation with Gabriel. The two men had hair identical in color—a deep, shiny black. The physical similarity ended there, however. Whereas Jorge was thin and sharp-faced, Gabriel, although not particularly tall, was massive. He had the over-developed biceps and chest of a man who earns his muscles lifting ­free-weights and the handles of Nautilus machines. He didn't look particularly strong, just large, as though his muscles were carved out of soap. His hair was clipped short, and he wore a row of earrings in one ear. If she hadn't heard stories in the waitresses' changing room of his sexual escapades, Olivia would have assumed he was gay. As it was, between the wife who occasionally showed up at the restaurant and the various waitresses he bedded, it was unlikely he would have had the time or the energy to have sex with a man, even if so inclined.

Olivia put her arms around Jorge's waist. She leaned against his back, feeling the cool slickness of his windbreaker against her cheeks. He spun around on his stool and kissed her quickly on the mouth. Turning back to Gabriel, he said, “Okay, call them now and we'll be there in twenty minutes.”

“We'll be where?” Olivia said, as they left the restaurant and crossed the parking lot toward the car. “I don't want to go anywhere. I've been working since 4:30.”

“Don't worry,
chica
. It'll just take a minute.”

Olivia stopped in front of her car and threw her purse on the hood. It landed with a thud. “Jorge, what's going on? Where are we going?”

“It's nothing, Olivia. Don't worry. We're just going to make a stop. Two stops. But it'll be fast, I promise. You won't even have to get out of the car.”

“Jorge, is this the deal? Are you out of your mind? Do you really expect me to go along with you while you do a drug deal?”

He leaned against the car and said beseechingly, “Look, it's no big deal. You're just going to wait in the car.”

“No!”

“Okay,
mami
. But I need the car.”

“Fine. Just drop me off at home before you go.”

“I can't. You heard me tell Gabriel I'd be there in twenty minutes. I don't have time to drop you off. You're going to have to take a bus or something.”

Olivia groaned, imagining the long, late-night bus ride. She hadn't any idea which bus to take, or even if they were still running this late at night. She considered the dent a cab ride would make in her night's earnings. She'd probably lose half, at least. Maybe even more. She looked around the parking lot to see if any of the other girls were still there, but they'd all run for home as soon as they'd cleaned up their stations and zeroed out their tabs. She knew the manager was still there, and she considered, just for a second, asking him for a ride. But what would she say? “Can you drive me home? My boyfriend needs my car to do his meth deal.”

“This sucks,” she said in English.

“
Cómo
?”

“
Nada
.” She reached for her bag and dug around for the keys. She tossed them to him. “You drive.”

Jorge handed the keys back to her. “I don't want to have to park. I'm just going to pull up in front and jump out of the car. You have to drive.”

She shook her head in disgust, although she was relieved that he didn't expect her to do anything other than wait for him in the car. She unlocked the doors and got into the driver's seat, throwing her bag in the back. Jorge sat next to her, jiggling his leg and tapping his knee with his fingers. He flipped open the mirror on the visor and smoothed back his hair.