Masquerade

Independence Day

34 Masquerade Independence Day 1 Querida, Manana empesamos a recoger la cosecha de fresas. Tomorrow we begin picking strawberries. I will have money to send. El nijo del granjero Sanchez esta aqui. El se queda en el Rancho Los Cuevas. The son of the farmer Sanchez is here. He stays at the Ranch of Caves. They sleep in holes cut into the side of a hill. Like in a coffin. Next week we vote whether to join a union. I am for it. El Patro me veo. . . . The Patrone saw me talking to a reporter. He wanted to know what I told her, and patted the pistol in his belt. I will be careful. Soon we will buy a small farm in Apodaca. Mi amore, abrozos y besos para los chicos. Love, hugs and kisses to the children. Juan 2 Roberto, son of Juan and Maria Sanchez, brother of Jose, of Elena, of Juanita and of the infant Cesar named in honor of Cesar Chavez, is walking from Guadalupe outside of Monterey, to Nuevo Laredo, a distance of two hundred and 35 Edward Lewis fifty kilometers. From there he hopes to cross the border to Laredo, Texas, and make his way to California to find his father, last heard from six months ago. He is twelve years old. He has with him an old road map that a trucker gave him as a tip for washing his windshield. It might have been a mean joke but for Roberto it is a precious possession, circled now with the route he will take: from Laredo, west along the border through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, to Riverside, California, the postmark on his father’s last letter. From Guadalupe to Vallecido, half way to Nuevo Laredo, dirt roads connect isolated farms that raise scrawny cattle and hogs. The only transportation is by horse or burro. Every twenty or thirty miles a roadhouse bar or general store with mostly empty shelves breaks the monotony of the arid moonscape. Occasionally there are small pools of muddy water maintained for the cattle that roam the fields searching for anything on which to graze. For Roberto the muddy pools are oases. He drinks what he can and fills the pottery flask his mother made him carry. For food he depends on handouts from the impoverished farmers, scraps that he’s careful to chew slowly. Sometimes an abandoned barn or storage shed provides shelter. Mostly he sleeps in the open fields, near some brush if he can find it. He knows about the mountain lions and the cougars, and keeps the knife his father made clutched in his hand. No one he meets asks where he is going. Outside of Vallecido, a town of a few thousand, there is a dump, not the big city kind filled with garbage, (which would be a blessing), but where people get rid of things long broken and useless. You never know what you might find there, even something you could eat if you held your nose, 36 Masquerade so the strays in the area forage there, mangy dogs that are almost skeletons, desperate and mean. There are six or seven of them, not counting the one the others drove away and who stands in the distance watching sadly. Roberto guesses it had a home of some sort not too long ago because there is still some flesh on the bones, but scars across its body tell of beatings. One foreleg is broken and it bends outwards like it’s pointing accusingly at the man who abused him. Gray whiskers tell that he’s suffered more than a few years. Roberto sees what the dogs are after, the top half of a skull too heavy for any of the undernourished scavengers to move. It never enters his mind that it was once part of a human being. He drives the dogs away, picks it up, brings it over to the crippled animal, and stands guard while the gray bearded mongrel gnaws away at the delicacy, from time to time looking up to express gratitude to its benefactor. From then on wherever Roberto goes the dog follows; nothing can dissuade it. Finally the boy accepts that they will travel together, it’s better than being alone. It has to have a name, a name is an important thing. Roberto ’s mother and father would spend many evenings when the new ones...