Finally Salimony got Alejandro’s mother, who gave him Alejandro’s father, who gave him directions. Patrick drove to a convenience store and they bought a cold twelve-pack and three bags of expensive jerky and one artificial rose — pink, unrealistic, wrapped in a clear plastic cone and heavily scented.
The Reyes home was a travel trailer in a row of other trailers, all lined up for shade along a windbreak of drooping greasewood and oleander on the edge of a cotton field. Behind the windbreak was an irrigation canal. As he approached, Patrick saw that the trailers were old and faded, their shapes softened by weather and time. There were big air conditioners dripping water, some resting on wooden decks in front of the trailers, and some propped up on concrete blocks. Between the coaches, vehicles were nosed into the shade of the windbreak too, and they were older and dusty and some had folding sunscreens over the dashboards. He saw laundry drying on lines and children playing stickball and others sitting on upended wooden produce boxes in front of a TV that someone had set up under a portable shade screen. The sun hit the TV screen so brightly Patrick couldn’t make out what they were watching. He saw a group of five or six young men, wiry in their singlets, heavily tattooed, drinking beer and eyeing him. “Pendejo wasn’t exactly from Beverly Hills,” said Salimony.
“This was your idea,” said Messina.
“Who cares where he came from?” asked Patrick. “The aqua-colored trailer, right? Here it is, so let’s do this thing.”
They stood on the spacious deck and Patrick knocked on the door. He heard the roar of the big air conditioner sitting on bricks beside the aqua trailer. Overhead was a slatted roof intertwined with vines with fragrant white flowers. The deck had colorful pots of bougainvillea and geraniums and canna lilies. There were two barbecues and a fire pit made with the perforated canister of a clothes dryer.
A man pushed open the door and stood in the doorway. He was dark and slender, maybe fifty, Patrick guessed, with a weathered face and thick gray hair. He wore a white yoked cowboy-style shirt tucked into clean pressed jeans, and work boots.
“We served with Alejandro,” said Patrick. “We just wanted to tell you he was a good man.”
“I am Raydel, his father. It’s too small in here. Wait, please.” Raydel pulled the door shut and a few minutes later he came outside followed by a thin dark woman. She had black hair and wore a light blue dress and she smiled without looking at the young men. She carried two white resin chairs from inside and Raydel set out three more from the stack on the deck. He introduced his wife as Theresa. She went back into the trailer and returned with a framed portrait of Sergeant Reyes in his dress blues. She set it on the railing of the deck, facing them. Pendejo looked proud and happy. He was not a hard man.
They sat in the shade and Salimony gave everyone a beer, and the rose to Alejandro’s mother, and he opened the jerky and passed the bag. “He hated the rations,” said Salimony. “Alejandro got those packages from you, with the spices and dried chilies and those weird pickled carrots you Mexicans eat. And he’d mix them with field rations and come up with real food. He was the best cooker in the whole battalion. I think you should know that he was doing something he liked when he died. He was cooking for us jarheads. Standing right out there by a barbecue he’d made all by himself. He was brave.”
Salimony’s leg bounced and he drained his beer and crumpled it and got out another.
“He was honored at the Three-Five memorial at Pendleton,” said Patrick. “Two of his best friends spoke about him. I didn’t see you there.”
Raydel nodded and sipped his beer. “We decided not to go,” he said. “It is a very long way.”
“It’s only about six hours from here,” said Messina.
Raydel looked at him and Theresa stared down at the deck. Then she looked at Patrick and he saw she was fighting something back. “We have no papers. When we go somewhere there is the chance we will be stopped and deported. The Marine base would be very dangerous. Here, people know us and we are safe. So we don’t go away from here.”
“Half the laborers in Fallbrook are illegal,” said Patrick. “It’s a tough way to live.”
Alejandro’s father set his can on the deck and crossed his hands on his lap. He had the relaxed, conservative movement of a man who had worked his life outside. “Alejandro was born in Tijuana. We brought him here when he was one year old. I always have work because I know farming and I work very hard. But he did not want this. He wanted something better. He join the Marines because he wanna become a citizen here.”
“He wasn’t even an American citizen?” asked Salimony.
Raydel and Theresa both shook their heads. “We have three more children,” she said. “And they were born here so they can always stay. But Alejandro, he live under the same fear we have. He wanna be a cook.”
“They should make him a citizen even though he’s dead,” said Salimony. He upended his can and drank the last drop.
“I wondered about such a thing,” said Raydel. “But I don’t want to cause attention. My other son, he’s gonna join too when he’s old enough. He don’t like to work but he wants to fight.”
“Well,” said Salimony. “Alejandro is a citizen of my country no matter what nobody says. He made me some kind of soup when I got sick over there. God knows where he found anything good to put in it. A whole pot of it, enough for me and ten other guys. I didn’t get why Alejandro wouldn’t stand up for himself. He was older and us young guys kinda pushed him around. Four or five of us jumped him one day, roughed him up good. It’s for fun, but he acted like he wasn’t there. Now I get it — he was afraid if he fought back they’d find out and toss him out of the country when he came home.”
“There is a program for those who come home to be citizens more quickly,” said Theresa. “That was his plan. Then to open a restaurant.”
Raydel had the same thousand-yard stare that Bostik seemed to have so often. Patrick looked at the picture of Alejandro, then stared down into the opening of his beer can and tried to banish the image of pink brains on a tan wall behind a barbecue. He was thankful that Alejandro’s dad didn’t have to see that.
Chapter sixteen
The morning was the coolest of the month and Ted felt winter in his feet. His task was to strip off the herbicide-tainted paint he’d put on some eighty tree trunks. Archie patiently demonstrated how to use the pressure sprayer, cautioning Ted that a direct ninety-degree blade of compressed water would cut into the tree surely as an axe. Archie fired away at an angle, “lifting” off the possibly poisoned paint that Ted had applied. “If the bark starts coming up, your angle’s wrong.”
“I got it, Dad.”
“I’d like to get a full day of work out of you.”
“Moving the compressor will be pretty hard on my feet.”
“You think the compressor is heavy, Pat and I will be lugging bales and putting down straw.”
“The compressor is heavy, too.”
Ted grunted and as he pulled the heavy wheeled contraption tree to tree over the leafy, ash-frosted earth. He got the thing going but the pressure seemed insufficient so he put on a different nozzle. And sure enough, once he got the hang of it the paint came right off. He was surprised how thick it was and found it hard to believe he’d failed to triple rinse the spray canister. He had no knack for practical physical things. Ted put in his earbuds and cranked up Cruzela Storm. A voice like new motor oil, he thought, clean and smooth and durable, and a similar color, too. Her main theme was, keep going in adversity, keep your cool, and your faith. Her subtheme was, people will try to take what’s yours, so learn to stand up for yourself.