We all wear masks, all the time, happily every after. Wish me not to be in my daughter’s graveyard.
The man adjusted his headphones, hit the throttle, and accelerated across the grass. Exhaust rose, bitter and gray. The mower lurched toward the mausoleum, weaving between the oldest rows of markers. The smoke settled, thick as a battlefield’s.
The smoke. Gray now. Surrounding her. Gushing from the thicket.
The woods were on fire.
“Jacob!”
The first bright flames leapt from the evergreen branches, leaf litter crackling, the wind lifting the smoke and pushing it across the earthen beds of the dead. Renee thought she heard a final “Wish me,” or it may have been the roaring echo of an earlier fire, one whose embers glowed deep and red and ceaseless inside her heart.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Carlita had taken Joshua’s virginity at the age of fourteen, the same age at which Jacob had discovered the brutal numbness of alcohol.
On the backside of a hill on the southern corner of the Warren Wells property, a row of cramped mobile homes housed the Mexicans who worked the Christmas tree farms, spraying pesticides and planting seedlings to replace the spruces and Fraser firs that had been harvested in previous years. Many of the workers had temporary agricultural visas, enduring thirty-hour bus rides each season to earn American dollars. Illegal aliens were cheaper and never complained about working conditions, so the papers were often passed to different hands if a worker said “No mas” and caught an early bus back to Guadalajara.
“Who the hell can tell a Jose from a Joaquin?” Warren Wells used to say in his unassailable logic. “They’re all brown beaners to me.”
The twins were fascinated with the small tribe of strangers that were their closest neighbors. Jacob wasn’t allowed to go near the tree fields because of the pesticides, whose stench cloyed the air for weeks after a spraying. Mom had warned of the drunken fighting that went on in the Piney Flats camp, and she implored her husband to hire “honest white men” who attended Baptist church and kept their drinking and violence behind closed doors where it belonged. It was at the family dinner table that Jacob’s imagination had fired, and the dark-skinned men he had seen moving like silent ghosts between the Fraser firs took on a mythic quality. After Mom died, the twins found more and more freedom as Warren Wells grew preoccupied with his ever-expanding empire.
He and Joshua had talked about them one night in July, weeks before the sailboat incident. Dad was on the porch smoking and looking out over the mountains, plotting ways to buy and build on more of them. Joshua had played a game of “Wish Me,” and Jacob had answered, “Wish me a peek into the Mexican camp.”
“You’re too chickenshit for that, brother.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You wouldn’t last five minutes. They fight cocks and spit blood.”
Unformed sexual imagery flashed in Jacob’s mind. “How do you know?”
“Don’t you know nothing? What do you think I’m doing after school while you’re up here doing your stupid homework?”
“Liar.”
“I’ll wish you, then. Put on your pants and shoes and let’s go.” Joshua sat up in bed, the crescent summer moon bathing his shoulders, his eyes glinting like wet beetles.
“No way. Mom will kill us.”
“She’ll have to catch us first.” Joshua slipped on his shirt, leaving it unbuttoned as he put on his jeans. His legs and arms were more muscular than Jacob’s, and the hair that rose from his groin to his belly button was thicker than his twin brother’s. Joshua always said that though he had been born second, he had become a man first.
Jacob trembled with a mixture of dread and excitement as he hurriedly dressed. They climbed out the window onto the sloping roof, edged to the back of the house then worked their way down by leveraging against a long metal pipe that contained the utility lines.
The dew was cool and crickets fidgeted their legs. Fireflies blinked against the black curtain of forest and a sullen moon hid behind clouds of warship gray. Jacob’s heart jumped like a trapped rat in his chest as he followed Joshua past the barn and across the hay fields. From the top of the rise, he looked back and saw the Wells house with its small yellow squares of light. The structure appeared to be a stage set, a lifeless thing that was waiting for something to happen.
They slipped into the trees and down a worn path the Mexican workers used when they carried hand tools from the barn. A creek ran below the trail, and its silver music played against the night sounds of the woods. The canopy overhead blocked most of the moonlight, but Joshua appeared to carry a map and compass in his head, leading Jacob through the stands of oak, buckeye, and maple without pausing to get his bearings. Soon they emerged into the regimented rows of Fraser fir, the trees a little taller than the boys and soon to feel the chain saws of autumnal harvest. At the bottom of the slope, the trees gave way to seedlings and a clearing where the box-like trailers lined an uneven dirt road. Music and laughter spilled from the open door of one of the trailers then someone shouted what sounded like a curse in Spanish.
“They’re playing cards,” Joshua said. “They do that on weeknights. They only fight cocks on Saturday night.”
As if to punctuate Joshua’s words, a rooster let out a cackle, seven hours too early. Joshua could make out the gray walls of a pen behind the trailers, chicken wire wound between crooked posts and plywood nailed across the openings.
“How many times have you been here?” Jacob asked.
“Not enough. Not yet.”
They hunched and crept through the dwindling firs, then crouched just beyond a power pole whose lamp cast a cone of pale bluish light. Inside the noisy trailer, men sat around a table, shirts off, skin moist in the heat. Cigarette smoke wended out the door and rose toward the moon. The clink of glass was sharp and dangerous, as if bottles would soon be broken and used as weapons. The men were talking rapidly in Spanish, flipping cards, stacking American bills.
“They’re gambling,” Jacob said.
“Big deal.”
A short, barrel-chested man exited the trailer and stood in the soft rectangle of light that spilled from the door. He wore a ragged bandanna on his head and smoked a turd-colored cigarillo. He hawked loudly, spat toward the darkness, then fished at the front of his pants and sent a stream of piss arcing into the dusty yard.
“Over here,” Joshua whispered, shifting between the brittle bones of dead ornamental shrubs. “This is where the action is.”
They worked their way to a tumbled outbuilding near the chicken shack. The shed was constructed of warped planks, tarpaper, and bulging plywood. Joshua opened the door with a shriek of rusty hinges, and Jacob glanced back at the urinating Mexican. The man swatted at a mosquito, sending his stream oscillating out in front of him. The boys entered the shed, the only light a dim, lesser gray that knifed between the wall’s cracks.
Jacob bumped his head on something dangling from the ceiling, and a rain of grit went down the back of his shirt. He put his hand up and felt the leathery object. It was a salted rack of ribs, smoked and cured and hung where the rats and dogs couldn’t get it. The room smelled of wet hay and used motor oil, and the air was stale. Joshua moved to the wall, motioning Jacob forward, his arm like a strobe against the lighted cracks.
There was a knothole in the wall the size of a silver dollar. “Cheap peep show,” Joshua said.
Jacob squinted through the hole and couldn’t see anything at first. Then he realized he was looking at one of the rear mobile homes. He rolled the gaze of his right eye downward and saw a window, its dirty curtain like a soft gauze veiling the scene beyond the glass. On the bed was a girl with black hair and eyes, reading a book by candlelight. She wore a bathrobe whose whiteness was in sharp contrast to her tan skin. She appeared to be slightly younger than Jacob and Joshua, though the swells on her chest beneath the robe suggested an early push toward maturity.
“What do you think?” Joshua said, as if he were showing off a star baseball card fresh out of the pack.