Little Bastards in Springtime (45 page)

“Jevrem, it’s us,” they shout.

And there is Ujak Luka standing by the open door of the van in dusty clothes, bushy beard on his face, straw hat on his head, worn sandals flapping on each foot, two barking dogs on the seat behind him.

“Jevrem,” he says. He’s smiling a wide, delirious smile. “There you are, you crazy boy. I’m so glad you called. I was expecting you.”

“Jevrem’s here, Jevrem’s here,” the girls sing.

I walk to the van, one girl hanging on each hand. When I
get there Ujak Luka grabs me and hugs me like I’m his long-lost relative or something, squeezing me, kissing my cheeks, my forehead. I feel his whole body shaking like he’s on spin-cycle and he keeps spinning and my shoulder is getting wet and the girls are singing, Daddy’s crying again, Daddy’s crying again.

“Okay,” I say.

“Yes, it is,” he says.

It’s late, so there’s not a lot of traffic on the coast highway. We fly along it like we’re all in the same surreal dream. The two dogs pant in the back with the girls, a small poodle-type dog and a large shaggy dog, and every now and then I turn around and look at the four of them squirming in a pile and I’m confused. These aren’t the girls I expected, this isn’t the car I imagined, Ujak Luka isn’t the dangerous motherfucker I was working up the nerve to meet. Maybe Ujak Luka is in a witness protection program, or maybe these are his fake kids, the kids of his bodyguard, a way to throw his underworld pursuers off his scent. Because I don’t remember any cousins, I don’t remember being told about their birth. I look down at the worn mat at my feet and see straw, clumps of dirt, a little wooden car, a granola bar wrapper, a paper cup, some CD cases. Ujak Luka keeps looking over at me and smiling his huge face-splitting smile. He’s nothing like a gangster or Hollywood heavy-hitter. He’s more like a Mexican singer on his way to a country wedding, like he’s about to haul out a battered old guitar and sing about peasants and true love in a field of dust and dry grasses.

“Your mama called a few days ago,” Ujak Luka says, finally. “The first time since your baka died.” He pauses, but I don’t say anything. “She said,
my boy is coming to find you, be there for him.
”

He looks over at me again, waiting for me to jump in and add something, but I have nothing to say.

“And I said, yes, of course.” Ujak Luka speaks slowly, crisply in accented English, then very fast in Serbo-Croatian. “I said, of course, I’m here for him, I was here all along, I tried to be in contact with him but you wouldn’t let me. That’s all I got to say to her. She said,
goodbye, Luka
, and hung up the phone. I called her back but she didn’t answer. What more can I do? If someone’s heart isn’t open, there’s nothing you can do. But she’ll come around, she’ll realize someday that everyone has their own path, that there was more than one right way to respond to that fucked-up situation. She’ll find a way to forgive me for leaving. Now, with you here, she has to be in touch, right?”

He grabs my thigh so hard with his gnarly hand that I jump and swear.

“I’m not here for Mama or the family or the past,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “I understand.”

‡ ‡ ‡

I
’M SITTING AT A LONG WOODEN TABLE IN A LARGE
farm kitchen, listening to a dozen men and women shouting over each other in Spanish. They’re so into it, whatever they’re saying, they sometimes stand up when they speak, they sometimes bang their fists on the table, intense as revolutionaries or drunken gamblers. I follow the debate around the room like it’s a beach ball in a seaside game, even though I don’t understand a word, and I forget why I’m here. There’s a plate piled with food in front of me, real food, homegrown and home-cooked, but I can’t eat any of it, not even a bite.

Rosario, Ujak Luka’s wife, says, “Oh, poor Jevrem, the sun got you good. Look at your burnt nose.”

She brings me a glass of water with ice cubes and lime and sugar, tells me to drink, drink. And it’s true, I’m burning up, light-headed, trippy. The debate goes on and on and I sag in my chair and finally Rosario signals to Ujak Luka and he leads me upstairs.

On the second floor, I sense breathing, dreaming children tucked away somewhere close by, the two girls who stroked my hair and sang into my ear all evening, the two-year-old boy with his “no’s” and non-stop running, and the boy baby they say looks exactly like I did when I was small. I hear the twitching and snoring of the animals, two cats and two dogs and a rabbit that sleeps in a doll’s cradle, which they showed me before they went to bed. We climb another steeper staircase to the attic, and Ujak Luka leads me into a small room with slanted walls and narrow bed covered with a patchwork quilt, a small lamp beside it.

“Here,” he says, “you will get some peace and quiet.” He leans against the door frame staring at me like I’m some kind of exotic animal. “It’s so nice to see you,” he says. “It means a lot.”

I sit on the bed. “Are you a farmer?” I ask him. It sounds ridiculous, but I have to ask.

He laughs hard when he hears my question. It’s so funny to him that he dabs tears off his cheeks with a handkerchief.

“I’m sorry, Jevrem,” he finally has the breath to say. “I’m sorry.” He looks at me. “Yes, I’m a farmer.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because you look so amazed.”

I shrug my shoulders and smile. “I don’t know. We all thought you were a crime boss or something.”

“You and the rest of the world.” Ujak Luka turns to leave.

“Will you stay?”

“Stay?”

“Here, in California? Or go back?”

“Go back?”

“Yes, go back home.”

Ujak Luka turns and comes to the bed. He grabs my shoulders. “Jevrem, Jevrem. I am at home. Home is here.”

“But they need people to build things up again over there, it’s not going so well.”

“Humanity needs people everywhere. Things need to be built up everywhere. We’re all just nomads of existence until we die, and humanity is our people.”

I stare at him.

“Our war wasn’t regional, Jevrem, it was global. Everything is linked and we’re all in the same matrix of causes and effects and consequences, all of us, the whole world over. Who cares where your ancestors came from, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got important work to do here, for my people here. They’re all the same issues, anyway.”

After his little speech, Ujak Luka gives me another of his fierce bone-crushing hugs and ducks out of the room. I turn the light off and get into the bed. I lie staring up into the darkness and listen to the creaking of Ujak Luca’s house and the voices from downstairs rising and falling and the humming of the land outside the window.

I
FEEL
normal when I wake up. My head is clear and I’m no longer burning up. I look out of the attic window and see a large yard with swings and a pile of logs for climbing, I see a barn, a barnyard with chickens, a tractor, some trucks, a pile of manure, a bunch of goats, three cows, two ponies. I see green planted fields rolling in every direction over small hills.

The kitchen is still filled with the Spanish-speaking shouters, as if they’d been talking all night long. They cheer and say
hola!
when I come in. They tell me to sit and eat, they tell me I’m too young to travel across the continent all by myself, they tell me California is best, they tell me all the places I should visit. And they say they can see I’m Ujak Luka’s nephew by the way I come into a room, the way I sit down at a table, the way I turn my head to listen, the way I nod and smile when I don’t understand, the way I stay silent when everyone else is talking, biding my time. All those things. I eat scrambled eggs with tomato salad mixed in, I eat spicy sausage, I drink a hundred cups of black coffee, I smoke a thousand raunchy cigarettes along with the rest of them. And they continue to debate, making their points, scribbling notes, agreeing and disagreeing, as focused and on fire as last night. Maybe there is no need for sleep on this coast with its crystal-clear light and warm velvety nights.

Ujak Luka comes in carrying a bag of rice, followed by Rosario with the baby and all the kids, who swarm around me, climb me like a tree, and ask me a hundred one-sentence questions.

“They’re discussing strategy and tactics, in case you want to know,” Rosario says, shushing the kids, pointing at the debaters, putting food on plates.

“For what?” I ask. I actually want to know.

“The usual issues, decent housing, a living wage, documentation, the end of pesticide poisoning, NAFTA,” she says, swinging the baby up to her shoulder.

“And right now,” Ujak Luka says, sitting down next to me, “there’s a special campaign. In places like Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Nuevo León, Baja California, Tabasco, Morelos, militant peasants are continuing to rise up and we are with them, doing what we can on this side. You see, the Mexican
capitalists and landowning classes who exploit Mexican cheap labour are supported by powerful interests in the U.S.”

I nod. All of this reminds me of Baka, this sitting in farm kitchens organizing the resistance.

“Do you know why the Mexican poor are kept that way?” Rosario asks, settling the kids in front of their food.

I look at them and calculate in my mind. Ujak Luka and Rosario must have had one every year or so since they met.

“Do you know what would happen to the American economy if cheap labour no longer came north searching for a decent life?” Ujak Luka answers with another question, that teacher thing.

Rosario points at the baby. “His name is Jevrem, we named him after you.” She smiles at me and the baby smiles at her. “But we mostly call him Javier, it’s more common around here.”

“Industry on every continent needs its pool of cheap labour,” Ujak Luka says.

The girls look over at me and nudge each other as they eat their food. They don’t seem to be listening to a word, but I know that someday they’ll remember these moments and what was said in unexpected detail.

Rosario turns to me. “You must be a student of history and politics and economics if you’re serious about building a just world. Are you serious about building a just world, Jevrem?”

“What?” I say.

“Here.” She gives the baby to me. “Hold Little Jevrem.”

The baby is a hot little ball of muscle. He jerks his head around powerfully, paying attention to every bright shiny object in the room, responding with a contraction of limbs to every raised voice. He clutches my hair with steel-trap fingers, he gnaws on my nose and chin with hard little gums, his breath hot and sweet-smelling. I’m happy he’s named after me, but
I feel tired when I think about his life to come, how he will spend his childhood trying to understand this crazy world. And underneath the tiredness there’s something new, a little sprout of excitement for him, all the things he will touch and see and taste for the first time, how good and blissful that will be.

Ujak Luka finishes his toast and grabs my arm. “Let’s go out to the fields,” he says. He takes the baby from me and passes him to a woman wearing a red T-shirt with a black clenched fist on the front.

We wander in the hot sun through carrots, spinach, strawberries, squash, beans. Straw-hat-wearing American teenagers are weeding, debugging, hoeing, wheelbarrowing. They smile and say
hiya
when we pass them by, looking superhuman with their big frames, plump muscles, even tans, shiny hair, damp T-shirts, can-do attitudes.

“Good kids,” Ujak Luka says. “Local high school kids and WWOOFers from other states and Europe. Canada as well. The Mexicans on this farm are busy with something else, let me tell you.” Ujak Luka bends over to inspect a plant. He picks a leaf and shows it to me.

“Organic,” he says.

It does look especially perky.

“You see?” he asks, tearing off a piece and offering it to me.

I nod, put it in my mouth. It tastes dark green. Earthy, mossy, like the forest floor back home.

“So what do you want to do with the rest of your life?” Ujak Luka looks at me hard. “I’m assuming you’ve left your previous activities behind. I’m assuming that you’ll never do that bullshit again.” He crushes a leaf between his thumb and finger, then smells it. “I’m assuming that you’ve repented and suffered some internal agonies for the suffering you caused.”

“Yes,” I say. I feel my sunburnt cheeks with my fingers. The one thing I didn’t worry about when I worried about coming to stay with Ujak Luka was a lecture about repenting. But he’s right. I deserve internal agonies for passing my shit on, it’s the number-one problem in the world. “I guess I want to do a bit of good for once, you know.”

Ujak Luka laughs, slaps my back, and does a little dance in his sandals.

“Good old Baka,” he says. “Did she give you the why-don’t-you-boys-do-some-good-for-once speech? Did she tell you about the railways they built with their bare hands? For free?”

I nod, swallow hard.

“Well, it worked,” Ujak Luka says, totally serious now, grabbing my shoulders with both hands, like he does. “My whole childhood all I heard from her were stories about the peasants feeding the partisan fighters and in that way subverting fascism. My early dreams and visions were of produce and chickens, that was my idea of moral perfection. I’m not joking.” He turns and looks out over the fields beyond the barn. I nod my head again. I know exactly what he means.

“It’s all connected, what we do here and now, what happened back then. It’s up to us. What we do with those experiences. Do you know what I mean?”

I don’t say anything. I’m not going to be a farmer, I can tell everyone that right now, including Baka up in communist heaven. In this moment, I wish more than anything that she was here, standing with us in this field. She would be so happy, Ujak Luka and me discussing the good life.

‡ ‡ ‡

A
T THE
farmhouse, I finally call Sava. The girls stand very close to me, hold my hands, whisper long sentences into each other’s hair.

“Andric,” Sava says. “I’ve been waiting for you to call. Jesus, what took you so long?”

“I’m at Ujak Luka’s,” I say. “He’s an organic farmer, his wife is a labour lawyer, and Mexicans are planning a revolution in their kitchen. Baka is a fucking genius, that’s all I can say.”