Excerpt from

 

The Coffin Maker

 

By Carolyn Wall

 

 

Michael found us jobs in a Texas town so small, it had no name. 

We passed that whole winter sleeping on the stoop of a farmacia.  Like most shops along the border, it had iron gates were padlocked at night, and in return for the stoop, it was Michael’s job to drive off thieves by chunking dirt clods.  In addition to carving and selling my saints, it fell to me to restock Michael’s arsenal. 

Then one afternoon he hurled a rock through a car window, and everything went south – including us. 

A cop pulled up and got out of his car.  He asked my name and how old I was.  I told him Flannery Christian – a name I’d made up -- kicked him in the shin and ran like hell.  But the cop ran faster, and two minutes later that patrol car lit out of there with me in the back, the front windows down, and dust the color of old blood roiling in.  Out on the farm road, telephone poles rushed by like they’re late for something.  I tried to count them so I could find my way back, but the poles ran off into mustard fields, and anyway it was getting dark.  There was nothing to look at but red lights on the dashboard and a metal grille that kept me from climbing over the seat and gouging that sorry cop’s eyes from his head.

He was white like me, and still wheezing from the chase.  We made a U turn and crossed into Mexico, and I sat back against the seat with my arms folded and my chin on my chest.  I growled every obscenity I’d ever heard.  He ground at the gears till the tires whines and spat stones, and when some smacked the gas tank, he swore again.  My throat was parched.

I guess I slept because when I woke, we were following a track so narrow it sometimes wasn’t there. 

We drove through a dark town and up to a gate.

 “We’re here,” the cop said.  “Don’t get ideas about takin’ off, girlie. Ain’t nothin’ but desert anyway.”

When the cop opened his door, I saw in the dome light the dark redness of his neck, and that the heat had made great rings of sweat in his armpits and on his back.  He let me out, and I stood in the amber light of several telephone poles.  The whole place was surrounded by razor wire.  Inside this compound, a metal hut sagged on stilts.  Behind that, dry dunes rolled away to a warren of shacks set against a short cliff face. Breathing was like sticking my head in an oven.  

The cop hustled me up three steps and into the store, where there was enough junk to supply the people of China for a year.  Michael once told me that, in Hong Kong, each person inhabited a square yard of space.   Every yard here held dented cans of corn, jars of screws and buttons, stacks of old Farmer’s Almanacs, holy candles, and what looked like rusted parts for a plow.

A pair of bare feet appeared through a hole in the ceiling, and a girl came down the ladder.  A brown cotton dress was stretched over a small melon of a belly, and her splayed fingers seem to hold it up.  For a Mexican, she had the brightest blue eyes I’d ever seen.  Then a fat, jowly came down after her. 

“I brung you another,” the cop said to the man.  “She’s feisty.”

“Ain’t they all.”  The man pressed something into the cop’s hand. 

The cop turned to me.  “Radke’s a fine white American, little girl.  He’ll put you to work, let you earn your keep.”

Double hell with that.   But before I could deliver a spit, he was gone, and his dust was settling out in the yard.

Radke said, “Missy, you get a pail and scrub brush and start on them steps.  Lupe, you show her how it is.”

There was nothing to this Lupe but a blade of backbone and that ball of a belly.  Her hair was black and lank.  She reached down a box of soap flakes from a shelf and shook some into a pail.  Then she lead me out to the spigot.

“First,” I said.  “I gotta pee.”

“There.”  She pointed to an open box whose door swung out.  The seat was splintered plywood with four sawed-out holes.  A gassy stink surrounded it like a halo.

She stood and watched me.  Even at night, this place was lit up.  I guess that was in case someone tried to escape.  I finished using the john.

The girl’s accent was thickly Spanish.  “I am Lupe.  Hi’ girl.”

“You’re his kid?”

She shook her head.  “Hi’ woman.  I am having a baby.”

She didn’t look much older than me. 

“You canno’ have it,” she said.

Why in hell’s acre would I want her baby?  It was easy to see how things worked around here.  There were no foster homes – only people like Radke who made money off poor folks and bent them till they broke.  “How many kids are here?” I asked.  “And where do we sleep?”

“Ess too many kids.  You take feed sacks back there. But no’ me -- I sleep wi’ him.”   She sat on a pile of old magazines in the yard, and watched me scrub. 

“These steps aren’t coming any cleaner,” I said.

She shrugged.  “I know.  E’ryone starts here.” 

After a while, she used the same water and brush to scrub me till my skin was sore.  Then she gave me cold frijoles on a cracked tortilla and an empty rice sack to sleep on.  I settled down in the back of the store but had slept only a short time when she shook me awake.  It was dawn, and I was to be given a permanent job.

Radke, it seemed, slept on a sagging bedstead in a plywood shed out back of the store.  His space was hung like an Arabian tent with old bedspreads and fish net, and it fell to me to clean his space.  While Lupe looked on, I stripped the sheets and boiled them in baking soda, scrubbing at the dried, yellow stains that I knew the two of them had made.  I was to do this every few hours, whether he’d used the bed or not.

Later on my first day, I was introduced to the hard-dirt compound and the barrio that dipped and leans against the back cliff.  On the roof of the twenty or thirty connected shacks, was a clothesline and a couple of rain barrels that had probably never seen a drop of water. Two narrow staircases led up and down.  While I was up there hanging sheets, a car pulled up behind the store across the way.  Radke slammed out through the back screen door, and the damnedest commotion erupted. 

This time it was a different cop.  He jerked open the patrol car’s rear door, and there in the yard was my Michael Herrera, kicking up dust and giving them hell.  I would have laughed, I was that happy to see him, but the cop had him down, with one knee on his belly. I saw that Michael’s lip was swollen and bloody, and one eye had purpled shut. 

He wasn’t alone.  A smaller boy got out of the car and hunkered on his knees, like he was hiding his face or maybe saying a prayer.  A little girl got out too.  She wore a dirty pink dress, and her thumb was in her mouth.

“I let you up, boy,” the cop said to Michael, “you don’t act like some wild animal.  Else I’ll beat the shit outa you, don’t think otherwise.”

“And what about him?” Radke meant the kneeling kid.  Across the compound I could still count his ribs. “I ain’t seen his worth.”

“His name is Viego ,” Michael said, rolling in the dirt, holding his ribs.  “Leave him be.”  He looked across and up, to where I was holding wet wash.  His eyes widened, then slid away. 

 Radke and the cop talked.  The cop got in his car and drove off, and I watched Radke grip the backs of the boys’ necks.  He took a key from a ring on his belt, shoved and kicked them across the yard, and opened a shed door.  Inside I saw sacks of rice and flour and a pair of plain, flat coffins.  He shoved the boys in, and the lock clicked.  Then he looked Miss Pink Dress over, took her arm and disappeared with her into the warren of shacks below me.  Two weeks passed before I saw Rosie again.

This place was not like anything I’d seen before.  Gray dust was everywhere – it coated the steel-toes boots and trowels on the shelves in the store.  In this dry place, where water was trucked in and expensive, this earthy film was endless.  It rose up around our legs and bare feet. 

There were maybe forty people here. 

It was too hot to cook, except early in the morning when the old women fried their tortillas and mashed red beans.  The only fire was for my wash water and an occasional secret pot of coffee.

Sometimes Radke drank himself into an early stupor and passed out in the shop, or on his bed, or in a shack that many families shared.  On those occasions, those families scattered like hens, and I was free from sheet duty.  Otherwise, I sat outside his gauzy tent flap in a straight-backed chair and waited.

He chose women from the barrio.  What amazed me most was that these women flirted and clamored to be with him.  Inside his tent, I could hear him grunting and thrusting.   The women shrieked and giggled and bounced on his bed.  Others merely lay there, enduring.  When he was done, he rolled the woman onto the floor and booted her out of the room.  It was my job, then, to strip the beds and collect the fouled sheets.  I hung them up and took them down.  My iron was always ready. I folded and stacked them beside my chair.  I was glad I was only making the bed.

  When Radke finally slept, I slipped away and curled up behind the shed.  It was cold out there, and I often forgot my hopsack and wished I’d stolen a goddamn sheet.  Some nights, Michael came and lay down and threw an arm around me.

“Michael--”

“Shush now, Fan.  It’s you and me, remember?  Together forever.”  I didn’t know what jobs he’d assigned to the boys.  Radke had contracts with various road and building companies.  Daily, folks went out in the big truck.  Nights, Michael was honey poured over my soul. 

On the other hand, Rosie was a whining butterball.  She was too lazy to use the outhouse, and her underpants were always wet.  She feared the washtub, and she swiped from our plates.  Before long, however, her smell became the way of things, like the dry bread that stuck in our throats and the murky water that made stomachs cramp. 

Of all the kids here, the one I didn’t get was this Viego Remos.  We called him Remy, and although we tried, he never spoke to us.  His eyes were sad.  He spent most of his nights hunkered down and rocking.  He seemed always to be searching for something in the dirt.    

One evening when we’d all finished work, I wandered over and asked him the one question that nobody here asked.  “Boy, where’d you come from, anyway?”

His skin was dark, his black hair unruly, and he was angular with sharp-bladed knees and elbows.

I said, “I saw the cop bring you.  You’re a puny thing.  Didn’t anybody feed you?”

He shrugged.  “Priests did, I guess.”

His eyes were fringed and deep.  He was younger than me.

“You lived in a church?”  If any place was safe, it seemed like that ought to be.  I once asked Michael about God, but he didn’t know much.  I’d heard about heaven being in the sky, and that Jesus’s mother wore a white dress and a blue shawl and was a virgin when he was born.  But I questioned the whole thing.  I had faith in whatever I could hold in my hand.

“How come you don’t lay down?”  I asked.

“There was a bed.  I slept under it.”

“Why’d you wanna do that?”

He shrugged again.  “The room was for floggings.”

Something too big was under my ribs.  “They whipped you?”

“Not me.”  He seemed to have trouble making the words.  “They had these leather straps.  They came in and – and whipped their own backs until they bled.”

I scrunched up my eyes.  This boy was tender.  He was a length of willow that’d been whittled too close.

He said, “They gave me rags to clean them up after.  But the blood kept coming.  It ran on the floor.  The only dry place--”

“—was under the bed,” I said.

He nodded.

“Remy?”

He looked at me, one eye squinted even though it was dark.

“If I had a bed, you could sleep under it.”

“OK,” he said.

 

Nights, when Radke was on a tear, Michael and Viego and Rosie and I slept in the coffins.  There I dreamed I was cradled and nothing could reach me

If I stayed much longer, I would surely die.  So I made a plan similar to Bean’s.  I grabbed Michael and Remy and hunkered down for a meeting among the dunes behind the shop.  Lupe, however, passed by and overheard. 

She hissed like a snake.  “I am coming away with you!”  

“Hell, no,” Michael told her.  “You’re Radke’s stooge.  We’re not telling you nothing.”

That’s when Lupe doubled over with her first labor pain. 

I ran for the abuelas.

While water poured thick between Lupe’s legs, she kicked her heels and swore in Spanish.  In Radke’s tent, she sank down on the bed, eyes closed.  One of the grandmothers came and lifted her dress.

I watched with eyes narrowed.  If this got beyond me, too scary to watch, I’d peek between my lashes, or just close my eyes.

Lupe’s lower patch of hair was thick with blood and something else.  With each cramp, her whole body shuddered and heaved.    I ran a hand over Lupe’s great hump of a belly and felt the movement, the kicks, the distress.  I wondered at the thing inside, how it knew it was time.  Clearly this child had become too big for its space and wanted to come out.

I understood how that was.  I often felt like my skin was too tight.  So -- what was this thing inside me that needed birth?

Rosie sat in her corner on the floor.  She was too young to see.  Her scalp crawled with bugs.  I was going to have to shave her hair.  Right then, I took a stick and shooed her out. 

Rolling and heaving, Lupe raved in broken English, swore that Radke’s kid was ripping her apart.  Said if he ever came near her again, she would drive his nose up into his brain.  I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to hold her hand, and sometimes she let me.  I stroked Lupe’s hair.  She was slick with sweat.  Finally Radke had her moved to one of the shacks so she wouldn’t bleed on his sheets.  There, she beat the thin mattress so hard that the heels of her hands turned black-and-blue.  Her strange eyes were alternately dead and on fire, each scream announcing another clutch of her belly. 

After I’d cleaned Radke’s bed, I was assigned to sit with Lupe.  Toward morning, when the worst pain came, I found a stick and shoved it between her teeth.  She chomped and twisted and bit it in half.  I washed her face in cool water and wiped muck from her thighs.  My own stomach hurt, and I wonder who placed me in charge of so much.

Around dawn she pushed out an infant the color of blue chalk.  The baby was slippery and covered with gore.  By now there was a crowd.  Someone thumped the baby’s chest and puffed into the mouth until the skin flushed pink, and it sucked in air and let out a scream.  It was a boy, no bigger than a bread loaf.  I marveled that he’d come from darkness into so much light, and I felt sorry for him.  I found an old blue towel and wrapped him in it.  I longed to go on holding him, watching his hair dry, feel the feathery fluff against my cheek.  I wanted to taste and smell him, get a peek at the heaven he’d just come from. 

But they took that red-faced, squalling baby, and tucked him in at Lupe’s breast.  He was hungry, and noisy in his suck-sucking.  Lupe turned her head and fell asleep.

Then Radke came, his own face jowly and mottled, belly hanging over his pants.  His fingers were like sausages.  He pulled back the sheet and looked the length of Lupe and said to her, “Tomorrow, girlie, you’re back on the job.”

I shivered.

Besides the bedding, I took on the care of the baby because I wanted to.  I cleaned him and changed him and washed his small diaper.  In an orange crate, I carried this dark-skinned doll.  A number of half-wild dogs skulked around our camp, and every morning I sat out in the sun picking fleas from the baby’s hair.  I’d cut Rosie’s to a mere half inch; she wasn’t speaking to me.

Lupe’s baby fascinated me with the strength of his hands and his fat little toes, the way his eyes grew wider every day. 

Strange, though, how Lupe never quite woke from birthing him.  It was like they pulled something else from her, too.  Her eyes were left dull, and her face seemed bleached.  Although I waited and waited for her to name the baby, she never did.

I wondered what would become of this little guy.  He had eyes I could fall into, a belly button that was healing, and outrageous lungs.  They gave his feeding over to a great bulk of a woman who was nursing her own.  When baby’s tummy was full, I took him back and cuddled his softness and blew on his black hair.  I let him into my heart, to live behind my ribcage, and for a time the old agonies that plagued me let up. 

Radke moved Lupe back in with him.  

            Then, one night, from behind the camp, came an explosion so enormous it made the ground tremble.  I tucked the towel around the boy and ran out with the others.  Beyond the cliff, something enormous had fallen from the sky. 

 

 

We climb to the roof.  Radke brings a ladder, and we scramble from there to the top of the cliff.  Beyond, I see the wreckage of a plane, wing parts and cockpit scattered in a thousand bonfires.  A few old women stand in knots on the rooftop, gasping and wailing.  I wonder at that.  How can you mourn for someone you don’t know?  But they cross themselves and say their prayers. All night, the fires keep burning while I sit up top and listen to the Hail Marys, and then Radke takes the ladder away.  In the morning, he drives a truckful of us out to see what is left.  Michael and I cling to the boards and jounce along.

            Hardly anything remains of the plane – twisted ribbons of metal, a shoe thrown from a body.  We find shards of bone and a few hanks of cloth.  A couple of billfolds, a piece of surviving jewelry or two, forty-four dollars that did not burn. 

The old men ask Radke about burying the body parts.  They call him “Boss” and keep their eyes on the ground. 

But Radke just snarls.  He’s interested in what can be sold or traded, and he’s only the first kind of vulture to show up.   Coyotes and bobcats will arrive soon and drag away the broken carcasses. 

We dig through the wreckage with sticks and flinty pieces of rock because everything else is too hot to touch.  It’s Michael who turns up the first bit of glass.  I see him pluck it from the still-smoldering junk and lay it in his palm.  He sidles to me, grinning, and we watched it wink, white and pink and blue in the light. 

            “Here,” he says, holding it out.  “It’s for you.” 

            I turn it over and study its shape.  One of Radke’s stooges catches the sparkling light, and he lets out a roar.  Radke lumbers over and grabs it from my hand, his piggy eyes wide.

I reach for it, but he pulls away.  I kick him in the knee.  “That’s mine” I say.  “You give it back!”

Radke’s lips are thick, and his voice is dusty from all the yelling he does.  “Everything’s mine, girlie.  Ain’t you learned that yet?”

 I fling myself at him and beat him with my fists.  His arm shoots out so fast, it lifts me up and drops me in the dust.  Michael sees, and he rushes at Radke, and one of his men comes on the double.  I lie there with the sun in my eyes and my jawbone buzzing, hearing Michael’s knuckles popping against bone.  Radke, with his jowly red face, hollers at the others to search for “more of them goddamn glass pieces.” 

He kicks at my feet and drives up dust and spits phlegm in the dirt.  “An’ you, little girl, you gonna start showin’ me respect.  You call me boss man, else I’ll have him whipped further.  You hear?”

With his face in the dirt, Michael grunts.  I know he’s telling me not to give in. 

“Well?” Radke says.  “You say, ‘Yes, Boss.’”

I say nothing.  None of us kids call him anything respectful.  Behind his back we utter all kinds of foul things.

Radke says, “I’ll get you, little girl.” 

Then he stomps up and down the wreckage yelling, “Y’all will be searched, and anybody hidin’ one of these under his tongue, ‘tween his toes, or up his ass, I’ll have him executed.”

Executed? 

The closest thing I’ve seen is when the truck comes back at the end of the day hauling one or two workers who clocked out on the job.  Most of those are old or sick, and the others say they practically laid down on the dirt.  I wonder if they’ve lived their whole lives in this place.  If they did, I can’t blame them for giving up, and sometimes I wonder what took them so long. 

They come home in a heap of bones and skin in back of the truck.  Their bodies are heaved out and thrown into a dead pit that Radke keeps hollowed out on the west edge of the property.  Some nights, Michael says he feels like he’s near dead, too, that every day Radke tries to make him nobody.  But Michael wins, because he is strong in his mind and his heart is clenched like a fist.

Even as a jailer, Radke is a failure.

Decisions are left to the two greasy weasels who oversee us.  They’re burnt red from the sun, dull-witted and mean-faced.  They shuffle around in shoes with holes.  Weasel one carries a whip.  Weasel two has long, slender hands and quick, strong fingers.  No surprise, then, that the only thing they do with any skill is beat us.  Usually, Radke stands by, screaming like a girl.

On that day, as we pick through the rubble, sweat stings our eyes.  Radke cabbages onto three more stones, and makes us keep searching until the sun is down.  With his back lashed and raw, Michael stumbles, but we’ve all been taught to suffer in silence, and he knows to keep his mouth shut.

I’m mad as hell and swear that if I find one of those bright stones, I will swallow it and not say a word.

We climb into the truck and drive back to camp.  On the way, one of the men tells us his papa was a jeweler in Jalisco, and that the stones we found today are diamonds.  Tired as we are, there is much hooting and whistling. 

We have missed the last line for frijoles.  Never mind -- most of us have socked away a handful of cooked rice or potato peelings. 

            This evening, though, I pay attention.  I watch from the dark as Radke draws the stones from his pocket.  He holds each one up to his wide, mealy nose.  Then he slides the stones under his mattress.  After a minute, I guess he thinks better, for he pulls them out and goes into the store where one light is on.  I see him reach for the pint jar on the sewing goods shelf, unscrews the lid, and poke the stones down among the dress buttons.  Above his heavy jowls, Radke’s lip curls.  He puts the jar back on the shelf. 

I trade crackers for a wedge of raw cabbage.  Then I go off to the shed and lay on my hopsacking with my arm for a pillow.  Four stones – maybe diamonds -- among all those buttons.  And there are four of us – Michael, Viego, Lupe and me.

One night soon I will steal them.  Out in the dunes, I will dig a hole and bury those stones.  Then someday I’ll come back for them.  And when I do, I’ll put an end to the Row, and I’ll set every one of these people free.

 

 

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