When The Dust Settles

When The Dust Settles
By – Robert Goldsborough

      My name is Hector Miguel Alvarez, I am no one and I come from nothing.  I am dictating this to my friend who can write and type this in proper English for me.  He has asked me to speak slow and straight and to start at the beginning.  So I shall.

      My youth tasted like the brown dirt that surrounded me all the years I grew up in Enmedio.  My mother was a saint to me and my four older brothers and my younger sister.  She worked hard in the dusty fields to make sure that we all had food and a roof over our heads.  When the winds blew up from the south I remember her climbing the short adobe walls to nail down another piece of tin so the sky would not shine through.  Every night our one room house would fill with the smells of her and my sister’s cooking.  The black beans had the grit of the fields and the corn tortillas tasted of the earth that was all around us.  My brothers and I would stoke the fire with the wood we cut to make sure that the food would stay hot.  The fire danced inside the adobe stove and singed our hands.  I don’t remember my father, but Luis, my oldest brother, told me how he had left after my sister was born.  My father had gone north to America to find better work, but we had never heard from him again.  Life was fine in Enmedio.  We lived at the western edge of the Sierra Madres no more than a hundred miles from the Gulf of California in the state of Sonora.  I woke every morning to watch the sun blaze over the mountaintops.  I miss the sunrises at Enmedio.  My mother would always be gone before I woke; you had to be early to the fields to make the most money.  When my brothers were old enough they could go to the fields and help mother.  We always had enough food when they worked.  My mother was a strong person and realized that men could not stay in the fields forever, so, when Luis turned eighteen she drove him out of our home and told him that it was time for him to make something of himself.  I remember listening to Luis cry outside the door to our little adobe house for days before he finally left.  Lucita, my sister, and I snuck him a pot of corn mash to take with him.  We cried for days when we knew that he had gone.  My brother Arturo became frightened before his eighteenth birthday and fought with mother saying that she was wrong, he was only sixteen, but Mother knew.  Arturo tore at Mother’s aprons and would not let go of her ankles as she walked him to the door.

         “No Mama.” He cried but Mother would not hear it, she kept her eyes at the tin ceiling so he could not catch her crying.  Ramone would be the next brother that turned eighteen, but he left one night just before his birthday.  Mother would not talk about it.  Before Ramone had left I had turned fourteen and Mother said that I was big enough to sleep with her.  I know that this made Ramone angry.  There was not enough room in Mother’s bed for him anymore.  When Ramone left, Ignacio, my last brother, and I would be the only ones to share in Mother’s affections.  Lucita was a girl and could not comfort Mother in the ways that my brothers and I could.  I enjoyed comforting Mother.  When Ignacio would not want Mother on top of him I let her touch me instead.  She would comfort me as I was comforting her.  Mother taught me the ways she liked being touched.  Sometimes she would get too rough, but I learned to enjoy that also.  I even started comforting Lucita; I wanted to.  She used to fight with me when I crawled into her bed, but I know that was because she had not been shown how to give comfort.  There were nights, at first, that I would have to hold her down with my hand over her mouth so Mother would not hear, I did not want Mother jealous as Ramone had been, as Lucita learned the less she struggled.  I loved my family.  Ignacio left us before his eighteenth birthday like Ramone, but not out of jealousy, he had always wanted to leave and find our father.  Lucita was the only one who cried as Ignacio walked off over the mountains with his pack and pot of corn mash.  That night Mother came to me for comfort and was too rough; she spoke words I did not understand and hurt me.  The next day I could not go to the fields and Lucita stayed with me.
         “I want to leave with you on your birthday.” She said.  I explained how that would hurt Mother and how this was her place.  Lucita said that I was worse than a stray dog.
         “Only an animal gets pleasure from its kin.”
         “What do you mean?”
Lucita looked away and pointed at the dog across the road sunning itself under a thorn tree.
         “Ask him.  You are both beasts.” 
I hit her across the face with an open hand and she started to cry.  I reached down between her brown thighs to make her smile.  She hit me in my face.  As I blinked away the tears I saw Lucita cross the dirt road and start kicking the dog.  She kicked the animal until it did not move.  I knew she meant that for me.

         Seasons passed as seasons do and one day in the heat of summer my mother came to me across the fields.  She stood in the sun, legs bowed from the years of labor, with her thatch basket over her shoulder.  The light showed the shadows that her face had collected.  I stared at my work digging up roots and making piles of them.
         “Tomorrow it will be your eighteenth birthday.”  She said.  I said nothing.  I watched her walk away and become smaller.  At home that night I was cooked a large meal and ate it all.  The three of us sat in silence as my sister packed a pot of corn mash.  I wanted to tell them that it was okay, I would stay, I was the last boy left and it would be good for me to be here with them and help.  In my heart I knew these words meant nothing.  I was no longer the boy that filled his mouth with the dark taste of dust; I was a man and a man had no place here amongst these women.  Before dawn I rose from my mother’s bed, kissed Lucita on her dreaming brow and walked out of our little adobe house.  I knew that Mother was right, I was too big to stay in that small home, and the sunrise over the mountains gave me my direction.  I found the government highway 14 after a few hours walking east and decided that I would follow that gray ribbon through the mountains to wherever it led.  I did not cry until I followed the road out of the Sierra Madres and saw the flat land of Chihuahua before me.  I cried for my mother, I cried for my sister, but I cried the most for me.  I would no longer tend the adobe stove’s burning heart, taste the grit of the earth in my mother’s cooking; I was alone and no one would comfort my sadness.

         I followed my road as it wound through the foothills to trace through the brown deserts of Chihuahua.  In the heat of what felt like a new world I walked and begged rides as the gray concrete headed north.  I knew that somewhere my father was living in America to the north, but I never thought about leaving my country.  I traced my way along the border towns east working for change and scraps until I found a new road and a new direction.  I was heading east again, back towards the sunrise.  The sun never looked the same as it did in my little Enmedio, but it felt good to go towards its rising.  When Highway 15 threatened to take me south I changed roads again and followed Highway 2 east.  There were more cars heading east along 2 and I found many a kind person who was willing to share the ride, food and conversation.  I heard about a marvelous city that had a twin so I decided that that would be my destination.  It had been several hard weeks of slow travel to find my way, but when I saw the lights of Juarez I knew that was where I was intended to go.  I walked across the border of the city under its great yellow arch.  Everywhere there were people; more people than I had ever imagined.  I found out that Juarez was intertwined with an American city called El Paso and that you could walk to the edge of Mexico and see its lights shining just as bright as Juarez across a large mass of concrete which held the Rio Grande.  I went to the fences many times to watch the Americans, looking just like me, driving their cars only a small distance away.  I learned that Juarez was full of work.  Many American companies had established factories on our side of the border and most of the population of Juarez worked in these maquilas.  I went to as many maquilas as I could, but they only wanted young women, not young men.  After days of wandering the city begging for small coins I was offered a job, I would be a cleaner of an assembly line at a factory in the heart of Juarez near Patriotic Avenue.  I worked hard and the money helped me get a room at a motel close to my work.  My job started late in the evening and lasted until sunrise.  Every night I would rush through my labors so I could finish in enough time to greet the sun, then I would walk back to my motel buying my meal from a street vendor who sold all kinds of meats wrapped in flour tortillas covered in peppers.  My life was becoming good again, but I missed my home and my family.

         Juarez is a town crowded by beautiful young women during the day.  The mujeres, that can afford to, come by the busload every morning as I leave my factory.  I liked to watch them talk and swish their dresses as they walked down the streets to their jobs.  None of their pretty dark eyes looked at me; I was dressed in my dirty uniform as I passed them in the streets.  I dreamed about them as I slept.  I thought about them as I worked.  I became homesick for the arms of my sister.  Not all the women can ride the bus into town for work; some have to walk through the surrounding desert from their villages.  I started going out to the desert on my days off to watch these maquiladoras as they made their walks across the solitary dust.  I would hide in the predawn gloom amongst the sagebrush and desert shrubs.  Their beautiful bodies appeared from the dark like ghosts from my dreams.  They excited me.  When I saw them I became inflamed and would touch myself the way my mother used to; but I would imagine it was one of the women touching me instead of my own hand.  When I returned to my room at the hotel I would see the faces and bodies from the desert and I would talk to them, they would talk back, and then I would show them what I wanted.  It was not like teaching my sister, these phantoms did everything I wanted them to do and I asked for more from them.  The visions would not stay for long with me and I had to visit the desert more often.  I grew bored with the images I took and decided that it was time to take one for real.  I waited for one that I could not resist and when I saw her I made myself known and went to her.  She was small as my sister had been and struggled as I grabbed her arm.  I put my hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, but when she would not lay in the dust with me I hit her.  She cried as I reached up her smooth legs and twisted her panties away from the mouth that was between her thighs.  She refused to let me teach her how to hold and touch me, but I did not care; I would take her.  She kept streaming tears even though I whispered over and over that it was all right and I needed her. I had to be rough to show her how I felt and hit her with an open hand.  Her nose opened up and dropped scarlet into the desert’s brown.  When I had released in her my head spun like a top; I had not felt that way before.  I stayed on her caressing her face as she continued to sob and shake.  She would not stand with me, but I did not care.  She had given me comfort and a release that I had never known.  The next week was wonderful and I excelled even better than before at my job.

         I visited the desert many times while I was in Juarez and many women gave me comfort and release.  Sometimes I had to be rough and sometimes I had to hurt them.  I am a man and I take what I need from a woman, that is the way of the world.  I loved them all.  I loved them better than I loved my family.  I prospered in Juarez and received accolades for my abilities at work, but I had no friends.  My work hours prevented me from being awake during the day and my passions kept me busy at night.  There was no time to meet new people that I enjoyed being around.  I was okay with the situation; I preferred my solitude anyway, but my isolation from others was my downfall in Juarez.  There were murmurings going around town about maquiladoras that were going missing in the deserts outside of town.  I had heard these whispers since I had arrived.  I had seen the pink crosses painted on poles, the homemade ones that were scattered around town with wreaths at their crux.  I never thought too hard on it.  But the rumors were talking about murders and bodies being found buried in the deserts, my deserts.  The rumors put me on edge, but I continued to go out and find mujeres that enticed me.  I should have been more careful.  I was hiding one night as I always did in the low shrubs watching the darkness for the women to appear when a hand grasped my shoulder and dragged me to my feet.
         “Who the hell are you?”  A man, just taller than me, with a bandana tied around his face had a firm hold of me.  I had already opened my pants and started caressing myself in anticipation of the women when I was caught.  The man stared at my open pants and than back at my face.  He hit me hard with a fist that felt like iron and I crumpled at his feet.
         “You’re some kind of pervert, aren’t you?”  I lay there holding my ribs without responding.  I noticed there were others with him and they were all wearing bandanas over their faces.
         “Who are you?”
         “That’s none of your business pervert.”  His boot marked the end of his statement in my side.  I moaned and he spat a curse on me.
         “You’re on our hunting grounds, pervert and we don’t like strangers here.”  I rolled over and started to crawl on my belly like a snake.  The man kicked me again.  I saw another figure come up from behind and I tried to stand.  Then, like the wind, they were all around me; I was trapped by pummeling fists and kicking boots.  I bled and felt the warmth growing around each new pain they inflicted on me.  The sun was high in the sky when I woke.  My body refused to move when I told it to, so I lay there until the sun set again.  My skin burned from the sun but I could not move.  At nightfall I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled back to town.  I did not make it.  Someone had found me collapsed on a large pink cross and brought me to the hospital.  I awoke the next day in a clean bed made of white.  Tubes ran to and from my body, but my pain was dulled.  It was three weeks before the doctors let me go and by then I had lost my job and my room at the motel.  I had lost everything.  There was nothing left for me in Juarez, not even my ghostly maquiladoras.  It was time for me to go, but I did not listen to my own advice.  I wanted to know who had taken everything away.  I asked around town, even the Policia.  When I received no answers I went back to my desert.  I waited for days, and then I saw them.  Three black trucks that spit dust into the air came from the south.  I kept my distance, but watched everything.  There were a dozen of them all with their faces covered.  They had guns and ropes and sharp tools.  They too hid in the shrubs.  Out of the dim light a solitary girl walked into their trap.  I wanted to scream to her, to warn her, but I already knew what the penalty for that would be.  So, I just watched.  The entire band fell on her with swinging steel and pounding fists.  When it became quiet again I saw that they were taking turns at her, but this was not love this was foul and bestial.  I thought of my sister kicking the dog to death and I felt the same way.  When they finished with her they dug a hole and buried what remained.  I ran back to town and hid until the sun was up and on my side.  It took me eight days to find the black trucks, but I did and I went to tell the Policia.  No one at the station would listen to me.  ‘What was I doing out there,’ was all they asked.  It only took me a day to realize that the Policia already knew about the gang that went out to the desert because the gang was coming after me.  They had cornered me near my old job, but I had slipped passed them.  I made it to the fences when the three trucks stopped and unloaded the masked men.  I was shaking like my precious mujeres when they grabbed their guns and rope and came towards me.  I did not think as I scaled the chain link fence that separated Mexico from the Rio Grande.  I dropped to my feet on the concrete and ran towards the shallow river.  The men screamed and shot at me, but I kept running.  I splashed through the brown water and up the other side of concrete.  I scaled the American fence and kept on running.  I was out past the border guards and west of gates.  I ran past the Chamizal memorial and straight to the train yards.  I hopped the first moving train I saw and never looked back.  I think it took me a few days to realize that I was in America.  I was just glad to be alive.

         I rode the Union Pacific rails until I reached Houston.  I had passed through several towns on my way east, but I had never imagined a city like Houston.  The lights blinded the stars; the buildings touched the sky, and the people where uncountable.  People dressed in exotic fabrics rushing about with phones ignoring everything but their immediate world.  Roads with so many cars that never slowed down.  I was almost run down in the street while I was staring up at the buildings glistening in the sun.  Everywhere I looked there where pink faces.  Some of the people were tanned, but it was hard to find my people of the true darker skin.  Everyone spoke English.  It took me a long time to find a friend I could talk with.  His name was Emmanuel and he worked in the kitchen of a restaurant downtown.  He explained how to get working papers and where I could find a job to earn the money to pay for them.  When I went to the docks to ask for work I saw the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in my life.  The muddy brown water reached far beyond the horizon.  I wondered how far the waves traveled to reach this shore and I thought about how far I had come to reach this shore.  The foremen had hired a lot of us from across the border.  We all had questionable rights to work, but the bosses put us to work anyways.  Dozens of us ran around the concrete docks loading and unloading the ships as they pulled into port.  I handled crates from China, boxes from Japan, fruit from South America, cars from Europe.  I smelled odors from distant lands that told me the world was even bigger than Houston.

      It was two weeks before I was able to afford the papers that Emmanuel said I needed.  I met the printer at a copy store in south Houston near the university.  He took my photo and after an hour handed me my working papers.  My name was no longer Alvarez; it became Ortiz.  I used the papers to get a better job as a cook.  I worked hard at the grills serving bad imitations of the food I had grown up with to the white faced people that could not slow down.  They never talked to me, but smiled and went their way.  I started to understand how America functioned.  All the blancos had the money and the power and I was just a worker.  The blancos never looked in my direction when I was not at work, but they all demanded that I work and work hard for them.  I started to hate them.  I hated how beautiful they were.  The money I made started getting spent on things that would improve the way they saw me.  I bought shiny black botas and a new suit.  On Friday nights I would take my pay to the clubs, dressed in my new clothes.  My suit was glorious.  It was the color of the noon sky over Enmedio with large points down the back of darker stitching; the front had many pockets with trim and big blue buttons.  When I tried on the suit in the shop I had felt like a boss or a governor, but in the clubs the people ignored me and made me feel small.  I continued to parade my suit for many weekends.  I wanted one of the beautiful blanca women to fall in love with me.  They acted as if I was never there.  All those stupid blancas needed was for me to show them what a man I was.

      It was early on Sunday morning, long before sunrise, when I had found the first blanca that I knew I could take. She was alone and had too much to drink.  I watched her stagger down the sidewalk from the club she left.  There were no taxis, no cars.  The city felt deserted just outside the club district.  I hid in the shadows following her at a distance.  I watched her thin dress swish across her showing a little leg here and even more there.  My mind filled with thoughts of her that burned all the way down to my groin.  I could feel myself growing with desire.  It had been in Juarez the last time I had found someone that stirred me this way.  She was no maquiladora; she was much more.  I crept closer making sure that she did not notice me.  She stumbled and fell in the parking lot of a Vietnamese restaurant.  We were crossing through the small Asian area of downtown.  I went to her as she struggled to stand.
      “Here is my hand.” I said in my best English.  Her glossy eyes stared through me as she took my hand.  I let her hand drop and I fell on her.  My hand held her mouth tight while its twin fumbled with her thin dress.  She felt like a snake under me as I put myself inside her.  Her body had a warmth that I was not used to.  My maquiladoras burned like the desert was between their legs, this blanca had a fire that wanted to consume me.  Before I had exhausted myself she passed out.  She was mumbling in her sleep as I kissed her face.  Her lips even tasted different than what I was used to.  She tasted sweet, as if the brown dirt of the earth had never touched her.  I carried her to some bushes and made her more comfortable.  As I smoothed her yellow hair a car pulled into the parking lot.  I heard the doors of the car open.
      “Hey.  You.  What are you doing?”  I could not see the figures faces because the streetlights were behind them.  I did not respond.  I was thinking of the masked gang in Juarez.  I ran.  My feet carried me over the fence bordering the parking lot and across an overgrown field.  I ran under the highway and into a dark neighborhood.  The houses were small and asleep.  I hid in bushes and waited.  A blue car drove past my hiding spot with a bright beam of light looking at the sleeping homes.  When I felt the car leave I walked home.  I had rented a tiny apartment over a garage not far from downtown.  I had no distractions and few furnishings so I walked around a lot.  When I walked inside my home I lay down on the floor and cried.  Why was life so hard, I thought.  All I wanted was comfort.  I slept where I lay.

      The next morning I knew that my time was over in that great city.  I packed my suit and botas and went back to the train yard that brought me.  The first train I found with an open box was heading west.  That was where I went.  As the metal creaked on the tracks I hung my legs out the doors and wondered what I was going to do next.  Everywhere I went I felt hunted.  In Juarez it was by a masked gang, in Houston it was most likely the policia.  All I wanted was what I needed.  My mother had instilled the need within me.  Why was I being persecuted for this?  I was always careful.  I might as well never be anywhere.  That was it.  I should just stay on the move.  The trains would always come and go.  I could stay in some small town for but a brief while, to earn some money and buy necessities, then move on with the next train.  I had my next destination, nowhere and everywhere.

      I stayed on the train all the way west, to see where it went.  The line ended in Los Angeles.  I took a job cleaning a theater that showed movies of men and women late in the evening.  I only stayed for a week before I jumped another train and headed back east.  The tracks wound through hundreds of small towns throughout California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.  I was never more than a handful of miles from my country.  I began to anticipate the towns as I traveled.  The route was etched in my brain.  I knew where I could get off and work for a few days and when the next train would be through next.  I found towns everywhere that had women that I could find comfort with.  My decision was the right one.  Not to say that I did not have close calls.  There was the conductor outside of Tucson that threatened to have me arrested; I jumped off and had to walk a day through the desert, but I enjoyed the scorching sun.  A train ran late near Del Rio and I thought the border guards would catch me.  Then there was the reason why I bought the knife.  I had just spent some time in San Antonio working as a cook in an Italian restaurant on the riverwalk, I grabbed a train heading back west.  The train had broken down just east of a small town called Sierra Blanca, a few hundred miles east of El Paso.  I left the train so I would not get discovered in the inspection.  Sierra Blanca is small, but it prides itself on its wealthy community and its golf course.  I walked into town and snuck onto the lush green golf fields.  It was early in the morning so I found a shady tree that would cover me to sleep through the hot noon sun.  Some golfers, dressed in their silly patterns, prodded me awake with their clubs.
      “What are you doing here amigo?”  I shrugged at their white faces and went in search of somewhere else to be.  In the center of the town square is a town hall much like most small towns in Texas and surrounding the hall like a barricade are shops and diners.  I found an old soda fountain shop and went in to eat.  Behind the counter was a beautiful blanca.  She was dressed in white with an odd shaped paper hat.  She tried to talk to me, but my English was never very good.  By the time I finished my sandwich I knew that I would have her.  I strolled about the town, napping in the shade, and waited for the sun to slip from the sky.  As it grew dark I went to wait for the young blanca to leave her job.  I watched her lock up from across the street.  The town was closing up everything for the night.  I followed her as she walked away from the square and out towards the edges of town.  She wore a blue sweater over her white uniform and carried a cumbersome purse.  She would stop every few yards to stop and adjust the purse straps on her shoulder.  I began to burn with a passion for her.  When I was sure that we were away from anyone who could see us I pounced.  She screamed and fought until I gagged her with my hand.  She did not taste as sweet as other women that I had, but she was still right for me.  I finished and stood over her while she cried into the dirt.  She breathed out tears and inhaled the dust.  I looked around and noticed that we were within sight of the train tracks that had brought me.  The train sat still, but puffed its engine.  I thought how lucky I was, the train was fixed and here waiting for me.  I walked towards the train and away from the crying blanca.  I heard a noise from behind me that she could not have made.  I turned to look over my shoulder.  There was someone standing over her.  He looked to be a big man, wide and tall, but I could see little in the growing dark.  I hurried towards the train.  She screamed and I turned again.  It was not a man standing over her.  It was a beast.  The thing was quite taller than me with long arms.  I did not know it then, but I later found out that it was the color of the desert and ran with its hands and legs.  It had the mouth of a large bird and with this beak it was pecking at the girl’s face.  Strips of her skin peeled away and down the thing’s throat.  The girl swung with blind fists hitting the beast and causing her to bleed even more.  The thing wore knives on its back and its hands were the talons of a bird.  One of its talons sliced through her throat and she stilled.  I ran for the train as it pulled away.  Inside the train car I trembled until morning.  I bought the long knife at a hunting store at my next stop.

      I started to see the beast as I traveled.  Sometimes it would run alongside the train with wide strides of its arms pushing its legs forward.  It was hard to see, even in the daylight, because it was colored so much like the desert.  If you looked away for just a moment it would disappear into the dust.  I always had my knife close by.  I saw the thing only a few times in those months and when I felt like it was gone I would get the courage to find another girl.  The beast would show up around these times, but it never seemed to notice me.  I was thankful of its lack of interest in me, but I began to worry about the blancas I left behind.  I would buy newspapers in the towns I had visited and tried to find evidence of the beast.  There were growing numbers of mutilated girls in the towns I had passed through.  This worried me.  I did not want any of my blancas to die by the cruel claws of that beast.  That is why I came to the policia.  Someone needed to be warned about the beast that pecked away at the poor girls I had left in the dust.

      The policia did not understand, of course, they never did.  They accused me of murdering those women and I had the knife that proved them right.  When I took them to where I had seen the beast kill they thought it was even more evidence to put me away.  They locked me in jail and sent me for trial in Texas; they wanted me to pay for what I had done and in Texas they could see to it that I received the ultimate punishment.  The trial was swift and to the point.  No one would listen to my story.  That is why I now sit on death row waiting to die.  That is why I am dictating this to you now.  I never killed those women.  I never did anything wrong.

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