The Madonnas of Echo Park (6 page)

Tenant sits down with a loud
plumph
and slides into the booth with a drink.

“Tough work out there today, wasn't it?” he says, not waiting for my answer. He drains his glass in two gulps. His face has deep but smooth crevasses, scrubbed free from guilt, fear, or shame. “You know that behind every American worker are a couple of Mexicans doing his job? Course, you can't see them because they're so goddamned short.”

Tenant clinks the ice in his drink, eyeing me to see whether it's okay to laugh. It's strange he needs this permission.

“I'm sorry. That's a bad joke.” He chuckles. “Came out an insult. You Mexicans are the new niggers in this country, which is a real shame 'cause nobody in this damn country realizes how hard all you
guys work. No offense meant. I like you. I like you because I can trust you. In fact, I want to give you something.”

He pulls five one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “That's for today. That's for you.”

“I get eighty-five dollars for the time I worked,” I say.

“No, that's the pay for the other men. You're more of a manager. This is
manager
pay.”

“I'm not a manager,” I say.

“Sure you are. See, a work site is a dangerous place. Accidents happen every day. We almost had one on the way over here with that bus, right? That's why we need someone to manage things for us. You know what a manager does, don't you? He makes sure everything runs smooth, and if there's a problem, he takes care of it. We have a problem, and because I trust you, I want you to take care of it.”

Adam walks into the restaurant and heads straight to our booth. He's changed clothes, and his arms and hands have been scrubbed with soap; there's not a sliver of dirt under his fingernails.

“Hec here's going to help ‘manage' the problem you created earlier this afternoon,” Tenant says.

“Fine with me,” Adam says and motions a waiter I don't see for a drink. “As long as he knows how to keep his fucking spic mouth shut. One call to La Migra and he's headed back to Mexico.”

I know this, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me because Mexico doesn't exist for me. I have no memory of it. I was a few months old when my mother brought us to Los Angeles from my birth home in Guanajuato. We settled in a Mexican neighborhood called Chavez Ravine but were evicted when the city took back the land to build Dodger Stadium. Mexico is as foreign to me as Mars, Paris, or Florida. I have no heartbreaking story of the journey here; the heartbreaking story
is
here, in this small couple of square miles of land called Echo Park. Running through the desert, trying to stay ahead of the border patrol or the Minutemen or the coyotes or the rats isn't the story. It isn't the
getting
here, it's the
staying
here.

“Accidents happen every day, don't they, Hector?” Tenant asks, sliding the money over to me. “Now let's have a few drinks, a nice meal, then you'll manage our problem and that will be that. Okay?” I pocket the money while Tenant and Adam discuss the Victorian job.

It's night outside when we're done eating. Tenant opens up one of the side compartments on the pickup truck.

“Your first managerial duty is to get rid of this thing,” he says, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “The lake's right down the road. I'll leave the details up to you.”

The sledgehammer lies atop a thick sheet of black tarp. Small clumps of black hair are matted to the hammer's tip with blood and a hardened, gelatinous membrane that looks like skin.

“Go ahead,” Adam says. “Pick it up.” I reach for the hammer and then pull my hands away.

“Do you have gloves?” I ask.

“Fuck you,” Adam says. “Wipe it down before you ditch it.”

While I tie the sledgehammer in the tarp with some frayed twine, Tenant whispers something into Adam's ear. They look at me and laugh.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“Don't worry,” Tenant says. “Bad joke. You wouldn't understand.”

A short walk down a hill from the restaurant is Echo Park Lake, where the annual Lotus Festival is being held this weekend. Every July, thousands of people from across the city sample Polynesian, Filipino, Malaysian, and Hawaiian foods, most of which are served grilled with pineapple and on wooden skewers, along with the assortment of offerings from Mexican taco stands and cotton candy, popcorn, and funnel cake stands. Wandering amid throngs of people flitting back and forth in front of me like fireflies, I see dozens of inconspicuous places I can leave the sledgehammer. A foul-smelling stall in the public men's room; a battalion of Dumpsters lined up near
Glendale Boulevard; any of a hundred trash piles collecting behind the food stalls. The most brazen approach would be to walk up to the lake, lay it on the ground, and kick it into the water. Yet whenever I think of leaving it somewhere, the conditions don't seem right. I catch someone talking on their cell phone looking at me strange, or I see several open spots in a trash pile—where someone could nose around and stumble across it.

I wander from the spinning buckets to the jerking buckets to the thrashing buckets to the Ferris wheel, whose neon lights sizzle and pop into brightness. Basking in this light is a young woman feeling her way through the crowd, like a blind person searching for her misplaced sight—lost but determined. She's about my daughter's age and has a sweaty, radiant glow, the kind you get from spending your day in the sun or being in the sudden presence of the miraculous. That's what I felt watching her. She could very well be what my daughter would look like now, bursting with courage, desire, and pain of her own instead of the hurt and longing she inherited from me. That day at The Option was fifteen years ago. What would she think of her father wandering around a park filled with happy families on a summer night, trying to dispose of a murder weapon? I had five hundred dollars in my pocket, enough to get me as far north as San Francisco, and I hadn't even made a pathetic attempt to run. Was I too exhausted to act a coward?

A cluster of fireworks explode in the sky, lighting my path to a large trailer serving as the LAPD's portable drunk tank. Several cops are standing on the trailer's steps enjoying the display. I stand with them and bask in the flickering lights until one of the cops notices me.

“What you got there, pops?” a Mexican cop asks.

“It's a murder weapon.” He takes a step forward, unsure if I'm drunk, his hand falling to his holster. “I've been paid to dispose of it.” I hand the sledgehammer over.

“Okay, why don't we come inside and talk about it?”

The drunk tank is lit with fluorescent lights, loud as humming-birds.
He scrapes a metal folding chair across the floor and sets it next to his desk.

“Okay. Are you a citizen?
¿Es usted ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América?
”

“A citizen?”

“Sí, Americano, de dónde eres.
You speak English okay, but I need to ask anyway.”

Anyone who works on the street knows there's a rule in L.A. the cops have: Special Order 40, or what the
trabajadores
call
“santo cuarenta.”
The cops can't stop you if they think you're an illegal, only if they think you're an illegal about to commit a crime. This is to encourage illegals to come forward if they have information about a crime. They also can't hold you for more than twenty-four hours if the one thing they've got on you is that you're an alien. It's tougher in L.A. for illegals now, meaning cops have to ask you where you're from no matter what. But as long as you lie and tell them you're from here, they won't check your background or report you to immigration. As long as you lie.

“¿Es usted ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América?”
he asks again.

As long as you lie.

“Hello?
¿Es usted ciudadano?
”

Everything I have earned in this life by lying, I have lost. By lying.

“Sir, I'm not going to ask you again.
¿Es usted ciudadano?
”

The cop took down the story, asked me to sign a written statement, then turned me over to central processing, where the facts of my illegal status were noted on a long sheet of ruled paper. I had no birth certificate, no proof my daughters were citizens, no legal paperwork, no official state ID cards, no passports, no check stubs or electric bills—nothing to establish that I'd been in this country for years. I had lived in that invisible space where people like me live, the place
between darkness and blindness where you try to make a life and everything is paid for in cash and sweat.

A public defender tried to attach me as a material witness in an ongoing murder investigation to halt my deportation, but Tenant, Adam, and Diego's body couldn't be located, and aside from the bloody sledgehammer, my statement was the single piece of evidence they had. The case was declared inactive, and I could be deported to Mexico right away.

“Don't worry,” my public defender said. “You can be back in Los Angeles by tomorrow night. We'll get you home.” But where was home?

Before sunrise we were corralled, our wrists cuffed in plastic twist ties like the necks of garbage bags, and shuffled onto a long, olive green bus with iron mesh on its windows and a steel partition between us and the driver. The bus drove through Downtown, an abandoned area with plenty of room, until it reached a steep freeway overpass, which we had to speed up on to get to driving speed. It was the way an airplane must feel taking off—speed, force, and elevation—and I got that twisted knot in my stomach again, that feeling I had when, over the ledge, I saw Diego's body.

Laid out in front of the dawn like a rug made of jigsaw pieces was Los Angeles. Through the wire-mesh window screens, endless fly strips of houses,
homes,
and the skeletons of those yet to be built; naked mounds of land that would soon be smothered by new homes, built with the hands, and on the bones, of the old landlords, homes in such a starry multitude that I was confident there was one for me, and in that home there'd be enough space for my small life, and the hopes I'd bring back with me.

S
pring is here and it makes my joints ache. All those jacaranda blossoms on the walk outside to sweep up. Jacaranda trees thrive in Los Angeles, like blondes and Mexicans. There's no getting away from them, not even in my dreams. They've haunted me from childhood, when I believed a jacaranda tree would save me. Can you imagine such a thing, a tree saving a life? A silly girl thought so once.

I'd been sent to my grandmother's home in Chavez Ravine by a mother whose face I didn't remember and whose cruelty Abuelita wouldn't let me forget. The dirt road outside my
abuelita
's house led to an outdoor
mercado
and was covered with an amethyst sea of pulpy jacaranda that felt like old skin and calico under your bare feet. I'd collect sprays of young jacaranda, then run down the road with them, petals raining from my arms.

When the white men came to build a baseball stadium for playing their games, they smoothed the land out like a sheet of paper to bring in their trucks and bulldozers that would destroy our homes. But there was a problem. The land was uncooperative and petty, swallowing contractors' flatbed trucks and, I prayed, the workers
themselves into sinkholes and collapsing earth atop surveyors' flags. The jacaranda trees gave them the most trouble. They felled the mightiest bulldozers, which couldn't tear them down without themselves being damaged. I thought that if I grew a jacaranda tree in my room, it would anchor our home to the land and we wouldn't have to leave.

I found a thin branch with several young sprays and set it in an old wooden
batea
. We had no running water, and the rainstorms that fled across the ravine didn't give the dry, cracked ground a chance to soak up what poured out of the sky, so at night I'd slip out of my window barefoot to steal water from a neighbor's well.

I planted the
batea
in our swept-smooth dirt floor and waited for the spray to bear seeds whose roots would burrow deep into our ground. Two of the buds matured, plopping atop the water's surface before they could open, but the rest weren't growing fast enough and the sounds of the bulldozers kept getting closer and closer. I poured heavy gulps of water into the
batea
to get the other buds to bloom. I didn't want to hurt them. I wanted to give them more of what I thought they needed.

That night, a bad dream crept to my bed like a relative with filthy thoughts. I was a jacaranda blossom struggling to stay alive but whose violet color was dripping off my petals into a standing pool of water. But I was also me, laughing as I held the dying blossom by its bud under the water. I reached up with as much strength as I pushed my body down, drowning both my selves. There was the
drop drop drop
of running water, then a hard patter, then a shrieking roar, a scream pouring out of my mouth as I awoke coughing strands of spit on the side of the bed I shared with my
abuelita.
It was a vivid nightmare, one that revisits me, a persistent yet incurable sickness.

Fumbling to the
batea
through the rough darkness, I saw that the other buds had shriveled up. Two jacaranda flowers were submerged underwater. I cradled them out of the vase to dry them, but their milk and seeds popped out as the flowers tore apart in my hands. My
abuelita
heard me crying and without asking where the water had come from told me that a drowning flower moves toward the water, not away from it. Its stem may be strong enough to stand on its own, but when its petals grow wet and heavy, they drag the flower back into the water and that causes it to die.

Aurora Salazar, the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine, learned this lesson when she was dragged by her wrists and ankles like a shackled butterfly off her land. And I would learn that lesson many years later working for Mrs. Calhoun. This is what women do, when they have an ocean of dreams but no water to put them in.