Manolo was tired. There wasn’t a part of him that didn’t feel exhausted, worn out, or sore. Some of the other men in the bunk house had aspirina; but that never helped. A few others kept bottles of whiskey or tequila, if they could get it. But Manolo Dunne had no interest in that, either. The only thing he had any interest in was sleep.
The problem was, of course, that mot of the other workers wanted to blow off stream. They had all just gotten paid. And after they paid down their debt at the farm sundry and whittled down the amount they sent home to their families, they wanted to spend the remainder on drinking and the loteria.
One of the workers, and bitter half-toothless muscle named Roberto, interrupted Manolo’s thoughts and asked if he was going with them.
“¿A donde va?”
“La cantina. What you say, Gringo? You coming? Or you gonna stay here and play with yourself again?”
Manolo shook his head.
Roberto through his head back and laughed. “Ok, Gringo. Whatever you say.”
Manolo laid back on his bunk and looked at his hands. When he started following the migrant workers, his hands and feet would blister and the other workers, who hadn’t seen blisters since they were children, would laugh at him. They had expected him to quit, especially Roberto. Then when they found out that not only had he been to college but that he was only half-Mexican – they started calling him Gringo. He hated it, but let it slide. Whether they called him Manuel, Manny, Manolo, Gringo, or Ratón didn’t really matter to him. When he was in college some of the other students had called him Spick and he had learned to ignore them. After he had proven himself, most of the other workers started calling him by his name. All except Roberto, who was only tolerated because he could do the work of ten men. Manolo figured it was easier to forgive an idiot when the idiot was able to crush your head like a soft melon. And so he let it pass, and held to his purpose.
The blisters had long since passed, but the aches and pains still remained. And soon, the crops would be harvested and the aches and pains would still remain; but then it would be time to move on – move south, where the warmer climate meant a longer growing seasons and more work. And when that was finished, most of the workers would either go to Arizona and risk being caught on an expired work visa – those that actually had them – or they would cross back over into Mexico and wait for the harvest season to begin again. Most of the workers were illegal, and those that weren’t kept this fact quiet. A work visa could be hard to come by, but it was easy enough to change your name when someone disappeared and didn’t need it anymore.
He tried to pick up the book he’d been reading – Rimbaud’s Illuminations—but he was too tired to focus on the words. They blurred in front of his eyes and made him drowsy. So he put it away and took out the pictures he kept in the back. One was a picture of his sister Beatriz at her 16th birthday party. She was smiling at the camera and hugging him the way she used to hug him when she was a little girl. The party had taken place at their grandmother’s house in Nogales. He remembered every detail about the party: the music, the food, the bright balloons and decorations. She used to call him Manolito. She was the only one who could call him that without getting punched in the face.
The other picture was of their mother before she died. Beatriz clearly took after her, except that she was darker skinned and her eyes were brown, where Beatriz had hazel eyes like his. According to Abuela, their father had hazel eyes. Manolo barely remembered him, though people who had known him insisted Manolo looked a lot like him. Manolo remembered bits and pieces – the smell of his Old Spice aftershave, the sound of his laugh. Sometimes he heard his father’s voice in his dreams and it always scared him awake. He also remembered the things his mother had told him about his their father – that he was a strong, kind man. That he had been a war hero. That he loved him and Beatriz and her very much.
He hid the pictures in his book because he knew none of the others would look there. Since he pulled his weight during work, they gave him less of a hard time about he books he liked to read and the scribbling he did in his notebooks. They kept trying to tell him he needed to stop pretending he was a worker and go back to school, where he could read and scribble all he wanted.
Manolo put the pictures back in the book and put the book back in his knapsack, under the thin pillow under his head. Then he closed his eyes and tried to drift off to sleep, because the morning would come early.
