All the Wind in the World Page 6

  I apologize to Gonzales in my most polite tone. “You’re mistaken,” I add. “I know horses, but I’ve never given anyone lessons on how to ride before. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  I crack my knuckles again and am flooded with a sense of relief. I stood my ground and am proud of it.

  But then, Gonzales, still looking down, deflates me by saying my name in a way that makes me feel as small and impermanent as a graphite tick in a ledger book. “I know this meeting is sudden for you.” He lifts his gaze. “But I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood the nature of it. I’m not asking you if you’d like this job. I’m telling you that you will take it. Two days out of the week, you will work with my daughter here in the yard and help with the horses in their stables. The other days you’ll work in the fields cutting maguey like you normally would. Your pay will stay the same, forty cents a day.”

  A moment passes. I wish I could grow wings and fly through the window and back out to the fields.

  Nothing good ever comes after the words “Let me show you something,” which is exactly what Gonzales says next. I am suddenly very tired as I watch him get up from his chair and make his way across the room. If his leg pains him, he doesn’t let on. He stops in front of a tall glass display case full of dozens of blue and green stones, all polished and shaped into oblong spheres and ranging in size from a small plum to a fist. Each is displayed on its own individual stand. Gonzales beckons for me to come join him. I do. I don’t really have a choice.

  “I don’t just collect them,” he tells me as I approach. “I wait for them. I travel to where they make their nests, and I wait, sometimes for several hours. Then, when they fly away in search of food, I climb up to their nests. If you come closer, you’ll see the holes in the sides. They have to be drained before I can display them, of course. Some of the holes are quite large because the chicks were close to hatching when I retrieved them.”

  I realize then what I’m looking at and fight back a gag. Those stones aren’t stones. They’re eggs, eggshells. And yes, at least one of them has a hole in the side of it the size of a penny.

  “These eggs come from species that are extraordinarily rare.” Gonzales taps the glass with his clean, rounded fingernail. “Many are endangered. But, you see, I have no interest in the birds themselves. If one of these species were to become extinct, this egg would be all that’s left. It would be the rarest of the rare.”

  I’m no longer studying the eggs but my reflection in the glass. It’s been forever since I’ve seen myself, and my first thought is that I resemble a scarecrow stuffed with straw. My eyes are dull; there are dark rings underneath them. My dirty dark hair sticks out from beneath my hat, and the buttons on my shirt aren’t properly matched with their buttonholes.

  Gonzales says my name again. I meet his gaze, but since he’s a few inches shorter than me, I have to tilt my chin down. This man is physically inferior to me, but he might as well be a giant. Like all jefes, Gonzales always gets what he wants, and I’m a girl who rarely gets what she wants. He knows this; he knows he has me trapped, and that makes me furious. He asks me if I know why he’s telling me about his eggs, and I get the sense that this is a question he’s repeated.

  I want to leave this house.

  “I’m devoted to the care and preservation of the rarest of the rare,” he says after it’s obvious that I’m not going to answer. “On a very small scale, that applies to my collection here. It more so applies to my family. I do whatever needs to be done to care and provide for my daughters.”

  I wait for him to tell me that the preference of some half-­breed field hand means less than dirt to him because at least he can grow valuable things in dirt, but he doesn’t do that. I wish he would because then I’d know what to do. I’d keep that insult. I’d fold it up. I’d tuck it deep inside, in a safe place with all of the others. That’s my collection. That’s what I hold dear: all the insults and all the names I’ve been called by people who hold positions of power—a collection so thick it could stop a bullet.

  Instead he says, “You’ll receive word when it’s time for you to start, most likely in the next few days. The truck is waiting to take you back to the fields. I know based on how much we pay you how eager you must be to get back to work.”

  I’M CLIMBING INTO the bed of the idling truck, going through all the things I should’ve said to Gonzales, when I hear someone calling out for us to wait. It’s Farrah. She runs up just before the truck takes off and smacks the side of it to get the driver’s attention. Then she turns her head away to cough. It’s a strange high, grating sound, almost like a whine made by a hungry dog.

  “You’re going to be working with my sister,” she says breathlessly.

  Farrah coughs again. After a moment, she straightens and adjusts her hat so I get a full view of her face. For the first time, I notice the yellow tint to the whites of her eyes and slightly grayish pallor of her skin. I see it now: the owner’s rare bird is sick.

  “Tell me about your cousin,” she demands. “Leo said his name is James.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What can he do?” Farrah asks. “Aside from harvest maguey. Leo said you two used to live in Chicago, so I’m assuming he has skills aside from harvest work. We need more hands around the house, and we were thinking he might be a good fit.”

  James’ list of skills and former jobs runs fairly long, but I don’t trust Farrah. I don’t want to give away too much. “He’s been a mechanic. He’s worked in rail yards and steel mills. Construction and demolition.”

  “Farrah!” The younger one, Bell, is standing at the entrance to the house. “Papá wants you.”

  “Can he also ride?” Farrah asks, ignoring her sister.

  “Yes.”

  He can ride because I taught him how. Before we came south to the maguey fields, I took him down to my grandmother’s farm. None of our animals were still there, but a black mare from somewhere else had made that land her own. She was only slightly feral, and James won her over easily, as he does.

  “Does he ride well?” Farrah urges.

  Again, her illness-­dulled face reveals a disarming amount of shrewdness. She keeps her eye on things, which means I should keep my eye on her.

  “Farrah!” Bell calls out.

  “I heard you, Bell!” Farrah shouts over her shoulder before turning back to me. “You’ll have your hands full with my sister,” she says. “She gets nervous around horses. There was an accident a couple of years ago.”

  “Was she hurt?” I ask.

  “No.” Farrah hits the side of the truck as a signal to the driver to pull away. She’s done with me. “At least not the way you might think.”

  SIX

  “She’s dying,” Leo says. “Wasting disease. Farrah knows it. Everyone in the house knows it. The only one who refuses to accept it is Gonzales.”

  It’s late. Hours after dinner. A group of us are sitting around a dying fire passing around a near-­empty jug of pulque. I’m avoiding James, but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of him, just a few feet away, sitting thigh-­to-­thigh with Odette. She has to be enchanted by the saturated color of his eyes lit by firelight and flattered he’s chosen to focus them on her in this moment. He says something I can’t hear—something effortlessly charming, I’m sure. He smiles and reaches for her hand. She lets him interlace his fingers with hers but then leans slightly back as if she’s suddenly bashful.

  James pulls her toward him. Odette falls easily into his arms and rests her hand on his chest. She’s so small compared to him, elegant almost, nearly weightless.

  That smell she smells on him, that spice like a wild animal: that’s my smell.

  James glances my way. His eyes narrow as if to remind me that I’m the one in control, that I can say the word and we can stop this whole charade. Instead, I stare back into embers of the fire and think of him and me, tangled in our quilts, tangled in each other, out East, in our little house built into the hill.
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  The jug of pulque makes its way to me. Normally, I’m not much of a drinker, but the servings at dinner tonight were smaller than normal—something about beetles getting into the sacks of cornmeal—and the alcohol makes me forget I’m hungry. I take a long pull from the jug, welcome the harsh burn, and pass it to Bruno, who passes it along to Leo.

  “How’s the younger one dealing with it?” Bruno asks. “Her sister being sick and all?”

  “She’s throwing fits,” Leo replies, wincing from the alcohol. “From what I gather, she’s always been a pain in the ass, but now she’s worse. You’ll be earning your money, Sarah Jac.”

  I snicker.

  I didn’t tell James that Farrah asked about him. The possibility of James and me working at the house together seems too good to be true, and saying something might jinx it. I did tell him about the eggs—how Gonzales proudly gazed at them the way some men gaze at pictures of their handsome families, how he was trying to teach me some lesson about capturing and cherishing precious, rare things. James listened, all the while frowning down at his boots. He said it was terrible. Those baby birds still in their shells were so helpless. Life’s so rare in this world that it’s a shame when someone goes out and steals what’s left of it.

  Leo takes another pull, tipping his head back so far as to expose the entire length of his throat. He then squints to peer into the dark mouth and gives the jug a shake.

  “Sorry,” he says, “I guess that’s the last of it.”

  At least now I have an excuse to leave. I rise to stand, restless to get away, for tomorrow to come so I can get back into the rhythm of my work and have some control over myself.

  “I can walk you back to your bunkhouse, Sarah Jac,” Bruno offers, also standing. He’s taller than me by at least half a foot, wide and solidly built. He seems like the gentle giant type, like he’d be warm to the touch or like he’d be able to shield me from cold night winds. The first couple of buttons on his shirt are undone, revealing the edges of his collarbones. There’s a tattoo there, something written in cursive, spanning the length of his upper chest. I want to know what those words are, what they mean, what kinds of secrets they hold.

  My eyes track up Bruno’s face, and he grins. He knows where my attention has been. His smile is generous, genuine, unlike tricky Leo’s. I’ve never kissed a guy as big as Bruno before. I wonder what it would feel like to be wrapped up by his arms, thickly corded with muscle, and enveloped in the sweet scent of the tobacco he uses in his cigarettes. I would kiss the ink on his skin. He holds out his massive hand, and I should take it.

  Instead, I shake my head. “I’ll manage by myself, thanks.”

  Averting my eyes from James and Odette, I make my way through the now-­familiar darkness to the bunkhouse. Once there, I fall onto the thin, bare mattress.

  I breathe in through my nose and release a loud, rattling exhale. Some people say it takes time to adjust to a new bed, but those people don’t know what my life has been like. Some nights in Chicago, I slept on benches or in stairways, with Lane huddled up close, the both of us shivering. Any bed is better than none. I lay there trying to push out thoughts of James and Odette and replace them with thoughts about sun and work and songs in four-­four time. I try to imagine Bruno beside me, warming me up in various ways.

  But instead, I think about That Time Outside Tulsa.

  That’s what I call it, anyway. James doesn’t talk about it at all.

  We were just off the train from Chicago, the first train we ever jumped. We had stars in our eyes. We were bulletproof. We were stupid.

  We had no idea about betrayal and its motivations—how a person could sell out someone else for a glass of cold water or a sandwich, how it was best to assume that no one ever did anything “out of the kindness of his heart,” and how all favors had to be repaid in one way or another.

  That Time Outside Tulsa was the reason we started to pretend we’re cousins. There was a jimador, a guy our age who was itching to work his way up to foreman. He and I cut maguey in the same fields while James worked as a mechanic, fixing trucks back at camp. During water breaks this guy would sit next to me, give me extra pieces of his jerky, offer up pointers on how to better use a coa and cut more maguey in less time. He taught me a lot. He said he’d been working in the fields for about a year, jumping trains by himself, following the harvests. He told me he thought James and I had something really special because we came out here together and that to see someone committed to another person was really rare these days. Having protection out here in the desert was a hard thing to come by, he said. He also wanted to give me a word of warning—to not make it so obvious that James and I were together. Not to hang all over each other around the campfire and whatnot.

  Just last season it happened, he said. Here, outside Tulsa. There was a couple, a girl who wove strips of faded cloth in her hair to look like ribbons and the boy who loved her. They were inseparable. They worked side by side in the field, ate off the same plate at mealtimes. Sometimes, at the campfire, she took the fabric out of her hair and wove it into his.

  One morning, both of them showed up in the coa line, and it was obvious something very bad had happened. Her eye sockets were purple and black from where they’d broken her nose. He had a bandage around a deep vertical cut they’d made in the soft skin of his elbow crease. A cut like that would take forever to heal and make it nearly impossible to work.

  “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” the guy asked me.

  I took a guess: “People were jealous?”

  “That.” The guy shrugged. “And money. They made threats. Told the boy to hand over his wages or they’d do worse to his girl. It’s the easiest and oldest con in the book.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “They left.” He paused. “Or they tried to leave. One of the foremen found what was left of them out in the plain. The circling turkey vultures led them to their bodies.” He placed his hand on my knee. “I just don’t want you to end up like her, Sarah Jac.”

  I remember nodding my head like I understood, even though I didn’t. I wasn’t as good then at reading signs as I am now. I didn’t notice the way he’d sit so close to me that our knees would touch, or how his fingers would linger too long on my hand when he was showing me how to use my coa, or how I’d catch him staring at me across the campfire after he’d been drinking pulque, or how he’d tell me I’d look better if I cut my hair, or how—toward the end—he’d sometimes call me by some other girl’s name. Rita. Or Diana. Something like that.

  I did notice, however, when, on the night of a bonfire, I was standing next to James and laughing, and the guy suddenly charged up, pulled me to him, and violently slammed his pulque-­soaked lips into mine. I threw the first punch; James threw the second. The guy swung back hard enough to break James’ nose before the fight was finally broken up and everyone staggered back to their bunkhouses.

  The next morning we found out one of the foremen had been killed. He’d been keeping watch when someone snuck up on him from behind and stabbed him through the ribs with his own knife. He’d been robbed of his watch, stripped of all the cheap brass buttons on his coat, and left to the coyotes that had torn off chunks of his face in the night.

  We were all brought out into the yard while the overseer searched our bunks. Eventually, he came out holding a knife and a watch. He claimed he found the items under one of the mattresses.

  “James Holt,” he called out.

  They led James away. There was a man on either side of him gripping his arms, and one behind, holding a rifle to his back to keep him moving. James swiveled his head to try and find me in the crowd, but the foreman behind him mashed the double barrels of his gun against his cheek.

  I had to work that day, but I don’t remember much about it. I do remember that when we got back to camp in the afternoon, I went around to the back of the bathhouse and threw up in a ditch until I was dizzy.

  Later that night was the
first time I woke to James’ hand clamped down over my mouth. He was not smiling then, like he was when he brought me to see Britain. That night, That Time Outside Tulsa, his eyes were filled with a frightening, near-­blank expression I hadn’t seen before and haven’t seen since. His hand was slick with sweat.

  We spent the rest of that night running through the frigid wilderness and then the following day delirious and half dead of thirst as the turkey vultures swooped overhead. I swore that if we lived we’d be smart enough to not end up like the boy and the girl with the ribbons.

  Finally, somehow, we caught a train south. By then, of course, I’d realized that James’ hand hadn’t been slick with sweat, but with blood.

  SEVEN

  Two mornings after my first trip to the Gonzales house, I’m called back to work with Bell and the horses. I watch Leo approach from the direction of the house while I’m standing at the end of the coa line, waiting to get what I’m sure will be another dull tool.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  At the stables, Leo offers me some fresh-­boiled coffee, which I refuse. This was one of my grandmother’s rules: don’t drink coffee and never eat breakfast. She believed it weakened a person’s spirit and hindered her ability to make clear decisions.

  In the yard, both Farrah’s Britain and her father’s white horse are already saddled. Bell is there, too, dressed in a tidy pair of overalls. Her cowboy boots are stiff from lack of use and shine like a polished red apple. Her orange-­gold hair is tied back in a braid. It glows in the early-­morning sun.

  She’s smaller than I remember, as if her sister’s illness has shaved away her own bones. I can’t help hoping she eventually disappears into nothing.