In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

fl fl fl Eloquent Gesture If you grew up in dry, rolling, huizache country—like my buddy Carlos— tree planting in the Pacific Northwest took your breath away. Carlos had never seen trees the size of what came out of the Cascade foothills on logging trucks. He climbed and planted and climbed, and at every corner, there was a backdrop to spin your head. The sierra went on and on. It made you feel self-conscious and insignificant both, working with picturepostcard vistas over your shoulder, peaks and glaciers and miles of what mexicanos called, indiscriminately, los pinos. Planting what were in fact eight hundred Douglas fir seedlings a day, you entered a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. You fought loneliness with beer and CDs, hitchhiked fifty miles to weekend dances, paid twenty dollars for a dozen Christmas tamales, fell in love with three or four waitresses, and got a DUI—all in the course of adapting to life in a land that inspired, flummoxed, and outraged a person. But the loneliness never let up. It went underground, then surfaced, depending on the time of year, as well as on what kind of money you had in your jeans, because relief cost money. Every time a nanosecond of loneliness leaped out and broke your heart, you paid, if only via large bar bills and small scrapes with the law. At age twenty-eight, nearly six feet tall, Carlos Charles looked like a guy used to waking in cheap motel rooms and walking through slash all day. Was that his real last name? ¿Que qué? Nobody ever knew. Because he had it all rehearsed. He was the son of a jipiteca runaway taken in by a childless Kickapoo couple living under the Eagle Pass bridge, ¿y qué? He had green eyes, brown hair, and eyebrows that bunched and twitched every time he had a decision to make. Somebody said he did three years in the penal because his mother turned him in as accomplice to the holdups that his kid brother was sentenced for. Amá had convinced herself that her younger boy shouldn’t do all that time alone. 16 the permit that never expires The kind of guy Carlos was, he did his three without complaining, got out and headed north, and sent for his kid brother. It was a life that suited the younger brother very well. He was slender and good-looking and had a liquored-up genius for mimicking the accents of people, how they walked, held a coffee cup. But it was a talent that called for more restraint than he knew, el pobrecito, as one Saturday night—celebrating the end of a planting contract—it got him gut-shot. Older brother Carlos, drunk, managed to load the kid in the bed of a pickup and took off barrel-ass for town, through seventy miles of high-desert Oregon, under a bunch of 3 a.m. stars. Until he ran out of gas, and the kid bled to death parked on a nondescript road shoulder under a big ponderosa by a creek. As light broke over a mountain pass, Carlos’s eyebrows were bunching and twitching. He was sitting behind the wheel of a pickup beside his dead brother. A local church agreed to ship the body home, so Carlos, the very next day, occupied the seat farthest back—curtain closed—on the first bus out of town. Couldn’t bear to look at one more pinche beercommercial vista full of trees. Heading east through sagebrush country , he thought about going home to Eagle Pass, but got off instead in a little college town and then—lightning rod for cheap irony that he was—caught on with a landscaping crew composed of out-of-work mexicanos. They gathered in the Home and Garden parking lot at dawn and went off in twos and threes with subcontractors or homeowners. And the economy that had brought him here in the first place? It took the form of an olive green canvas bag with a shoulder strap. The bag held foot-long Douglas fir seedlings, five hundred of them, thick as a pencil, which got planted every six feet, or sometimes simply buried by crews behind schedule. They said that after swinging that hickoryhandled hoe-dad for a month you could strike a kitchen match on your palm. The crummy, a rattly Dodge, carried eight guys, wearing T-shirt and flannel shirt, sweatshirt and jacket, three eggs and a pound of...

Share