Got enough trouble with the two of them. He better start packing.
She doesn’t have to translate for Mario. It’s quite clear what Roger is saying. A hard man, el patrón, Mario said so himself.
But the girl is already on her way, Antonia pleads.
That’s his problem, Roger says, red-faced. I didn’t give you permission, he hollers at the cowering Mario. His nostrils flare, he lurches forward, his forehead lowered like a bull going after the red cape. It occurs to Antonia how much certain people remind her of animals. If he doesn’t calm down, Roger might end up with a heart attack. What if Antonia has to drive him over to the ER? When did life become so fraught? Pre or post Sam’s passing?
Roger stomps off toward the trailer. What’s he planning to do? Throw all of Mario’s things out in the yard?
Tell el patrón that I will find her another accommodation. Mario pleads. Por favor.
Roger! Antonia calls, and when he doesn’t stop, she runs after him. Mario will find her another place.
Roger swivels on the spot, taking Antonia’s measure, in case she has a trick up her sleeve. Where’s he going to put her? Your house?
It’s Antonia’s turn to shake her head. I can’t handle something like this right now. I’ve got enough troubles.
Roger stares back at her, his eyes small and mean in their puffy eye sockets, like the eyes of the pigs he fattens and slaughters and sells at his honor store. People drive out from town to buy his bacon and pork chops, his Thanksgiving turkeys, the fresh eggs he’s not allowed to say are organic because he’d have to pay some company to investigate and certify it is so.
You’re the ones always saying everybody’s welcome. Roger points at Antonia. He must mean Sam. A few years back Roger posted a sign by his mailbox, Take Back Vermont. No use pointing out the irony: he’s now hiring Mexicans. People can be full of paradoxes when their own pockets are affected. Sam retaliated with his own, Take Vermont Forward. Needless to say, the two neighbors did not see eye to eye.
Dr. Sawyer always was the bleeding heart, Roger indicts Sam now.
Antonia feels the anger rising inside her. The man has no delicacy. Maybe no one’s told him that Sam died of an aortic aneurysm? In spite of her efforts, the big wave hits, the anger turns to tears, soul-gouging sobs of someone who has been holding back her sadness, her fears for months. Both Roger and Mario come to her, one at each arm, as if she is too weak to hold herself up.
No need to start bawling, the farmer says gruffly. The girlfriend can stay, a week tops. Just a week, he adds, when her face lights up with relief. He scowls with the exertion of drawing this kindness out from deep inside him. A miracle that these feelings persist in his hard heart. Goes to show, she or Sam would have later commented to each other. Roger’s not as much a type as we thought.
We shall see. Que será, será. Mami again. Will all the dead be resurrecting now?
Back at the house, there’s a message on her machine. Doñita, por favor, dígale a Mario que el coyote quiere mas dinero para soltarme. The girl’s voice is shaky. Then a man is shouting. You want us to release your girl, you better wire what you owe.
Antonia keeps dialing the number, but no one picks up.
What now? Does she drive back over and tell Mario? Didn’t he say he was all paid up except for the bus ticket? Maybe the coyotes are pissed Mario didn’t buy the door-to-door package? Who knows? Mario, Estela, José—they are all residents of dragon country, no man’s land beyond the gated communities of belonging.
Let sleeping dogs lie for now. Antonia has done all she can. But as she gets into bed, she feels unsettled as well as irritated, above all else with Sam for leaving her alone to do justice to the things they believed in.
You want me to be a better person, then come back and help me out, she addresses the darkness of their bedroom. She watches with hawk eyes for the slightest sign of some kind. The air circulator hums awake. The outdoor floodlights flash on—she can see the glow from her bedroom window. Sam had those movement lights installed, thinking they’d deter deer from getting in his garden. Trigger-happy, they turn on if a squirrel darts by. If the wind is coming strong from the north. Drives her batty. Worrying each time that it might be an intruder. And now, especially. Out in the fields surrounding her house, the coydogs have started up their howling, a haunting sound, but not otherworldly, just a part of the natural world.
Anything else you need? she had asked Mario, a throwaway question in the circles she runs in, but in some parts of the world, among the neediest, what has been thrown away elsewhere gets recycled, put to good use. The lights flash on again and again, then fade away. Tomorrow, which is already today, she will call the electrician who installed them to have them taken down. She wants outdoor lights she can turn off and on. The world is a crazy place. But she doesn’t need to be alerted each time a dragon comes close.
two
Where is Burkina Faso?
She waits until a light comes on in the trailer, Mario and José getting up for the first milking of the day. And to think: this happens before dawn every morning, with or without her insomnia to note it.
Wouldn’t it make a great book? She had mentioned it several times to Sam. Short chapters about the people who keep our world going? Invisible people we don’t even know about?
Invisible to whom? Sam had a way of asking questions that always stopped her short.
It would make a great book, Sam agreed once she explained.
Antonia has a pile of these ideas in a shoebox she used to keep in her office at the college. For students who said they had nothing to write about. Here, pick one, she’d offer. She misses them, her access to the young. Another downside to being childless, which, she read recently, is no longer the politically correct term. Nonparent carries no judgment. Childless mother, a former colleague called herself. Maybe others share her intense need to get the words right. But what if their right words sound wrong to her?
Is this what happens to an imagination in old age, a bag lady of great ideas, a snapped necklace, the beads scattering? Years later, she finds the odd trinket: a shiny blue bead with a hole through it. Where did it come from? A lost piece that has left something else incomplete. Along with the shoebox, Antonia has a tin for such findings. Years from now, the item it was a part of will surface, and she will supply the missing bit, making the thing whole again.
Could that possibly be what the afterlife amounts to: an eternity of re-memberings? Over to you, Sam. She talks to him in her head. You always liked being the one to know. But the afterlife has changed him. He no longer seems interested in having the last word.
* * *
She decides to walk over to her neighbor’s. If she drives, Roger will hear the car, come out, ask questions. He gets a whiff of any trouble and he’ll rescind the week of grace. Last time there were rumors of raids on Vermont farms, Roger dismissed his workers. Mario and José are recent hires. Antonia has no idea where their predecessors went. Now that she has stopped volunteering, she’s no longer in the migrant gossip loop. Maybe Roger’s former workers went to another patrón in Vermont? To Canada? Maybe back to Mexico? Everybody knows not to build a house on shifting sand. Good for temporary shelters, but a home needs a foundation.
It’s still dark. The sun is not yet up. The road is deserted; tall pines on either side make for creepy stretches. In a few hours, the sky will flood with that early-spring watercolor light that can bring tears to her eyes. The road will get busy with what passes for busy on a dirt road in backcountry Vermont: the school bus whose driver waves by lifting a finger; the newspaper delivery man who she has heard has a terrible stutter—she wouldn’t know, she has never spoken to him; the garbage truck driven by a guy with a shaved head, a leering look, who slows down, then floors the gas, probably in disappointment that the little lady turns out to be a little old lady. All these lives that are not her life. Bless them all, she thinks, even the garbage guy—before she can think again that she has no credentials for blessing anyone.