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Cactus Flower
It's a sweaty forty-minute walk through the desert from the main road to the wooden shack.
Though the desert is flat and Rolando thinks he can see for miles into the faded blue
horizon, the shack remains invisible until it suddenly shoots up from the ground, becoming
distinguishable from the clumps of golden tumbleweeds and the sand hill leading up the
ravine, everything blanketed by the brightness of the sun. The leaves of the fresh head of
lettuce he brings from the fields wilt inside his oily fingers. He thinks about his toes
shrinking back from the steel-tipped boots, his scrotum pulling away from his sticky
underwear. The smell of dirt rises pure off the ground. His hand trembles at the thought
of an empty shack, of nobody inside to open the door for him and take the lettuce from his
hands, of no one to gasp in gratitude to assure him that despite the journey through the
sweltering heat the leaves at the center are cool and crisp. His fears dissipate with the
presence of his wife standing at the doorway, still as a cactus flower in her diaphanous
white blouse, which she wears not so he can peek at her small white bra or at the pudgy
abdomen he likes to grab while she's washing her hair bent over a bucket of water. She
wears it, she tells him, to let the faintest breeze blow on her blouse, so she can spread
her arms and cool her sweaty undersides. She's posing that way now, arms outstretched, but
this far back it's hard to tell if it's the desert breeze come her way or if she's
greeting him. He looks forward to tonight when they will feed each other lettuce leaves
and chew them slowly as caterpillars devouring the moisture. Suddenly his eyes go blank,
victims to the beads of sweat mixed into the dust he picked up from the fields, giving the
sweat a more powerful sting. He rubs his eyes with the sleeve of the blue flannel shirt,
taking in the sharp contrast of the smooth cloth to the coarse skin of his brown hand. Out
of focus, he tries to reclaim the image of his wife in her white blouse, and then saddens,
thinking Mirinda may not have seen him coming at all because she no longer stands at the
entrance to the shack and the door is shut, the padlock hanging heavy like a heart gone
solid and cold.
The candle flame twitches violently, threatening to leave him blind. The weather
changed during his nap, and he woke up surprised in the dark. The wind hurls small stones
against the wooden walls and bumps the window shutters repeatedly. Only when the wind
blows is Rolando painfully aware of the imperfections in the small one-room home he built
for himself in the middle of the desert, what the residents of the nearby town call
"el dompe" because they drop off their useless vinyl couches and urine-stained
mattresses into the nearby ravine though this area is no longer a county landfill and no
longer uninhabited. The whistling and hissing of the dust storm outside disrupt his
concentration so he sits without a word in his throat, slurping the Campbell's soup as
loud as possible to convince himself that the silence the wind has forced on him has not
upset his late-evening meal. Mirinda remains expressionless, staring across the table at
the way his large hand holds the tin spoon too delicately, as if she knows he's scooping
properly to please her. Even with the dim light she's beautiful, her features sharply
defined and smooth as mariposa lily petals. The shadows make her face grow thin, distant
as a portrait; but the flickering flame dancing gracefully in the deep ebony of her eyes
keeps her within reach. She is tangible and touchable like before. She is here again to
disregard the shadows as they flutter wildly like moths above her head. If they flee they
will take her with them. But until then they soothe him, giving him this gift, this light,
this woman, who said she was going to leave him and who didn't leave him completely.
Forgotten are the elbow cramp, the stiff neck and aching shoulder blades. He has the urge
to find the pretty marigolds he promised her when she agreed to follow him here to this
desolate place, far from the run-down trailer camps and low-income housing projects where
beauty like hers withers and dies. No, instead they are closer to the ground they left
behind in the deserts of Chihuahua, a space so large it is like living inside breath
itself. The peaceful evenings are long and familiar. The peaceful evenings bloom with
stars. Stars love Mirinda so much they confuse her for the moon and crown her head.
Suddenly the wind breaks in and snuffs the candle out. Mirinda disappears. He wants to
stand and ask her to forgive him for those pretty marigolds. The wind roars. He keeps
quiet, knowing that with such a wind his plea is weak and will remain unheard.
The wind grows stronger when he rises at four in the morning to pack his lunch and set
off on his forty-minute trek back to the road where the bus picks him up to deliver him to
the lettuce fields. When he opens the door the moonlight bursts in, lighting up the wooden
table, the tiny unmade bed with the yellow faded sheets, the gas-tank stove, and Mirinda's
white dresser. The looking glass Rolando gave her stares out the door, confronting the
moon with its own light. He squints at the glare, grabs his denim jacket and tries to find
the stone silhouette of his wife standing near the darkest corner. He shuffles out swiftly
and doesn't catch a glimpse of her. At dawn the desert is cold. He shivers at the thought
of the weary march getting back after work. Red flashlight in hand, he walks behind the
shack, bends over the broken-down Pinto to check for damage on the windshield. The green
paint looks clean, smooth as skin, so he rubs his hand across it then draws back quickly
when a nettle on the surface stings his thumb. Suddenly he's alarmed to be outside. The
landscape of desert rocks and manzanita patches appears shrunken, pulled in toward the
shack, which becomes its dead center. He feels trapped, like the snowman in the glass
bubble Mirinda enjoys shaking up at the swap meet to watch the tiny white particles drop.
For him the particles strike sideways, strike hard. He moves quickly back around inside,
exchanges the jacket for a thicker coat and grabs the brown paper sack, tightening the
grip to remind himself how many of yesterday's burritos he will have for lunch. He steps
out and shuts the door. The padlock snaps. He wishes to retreat, crawl beneath the yellow
faded sheets, which will always smell of Mirinda's nape, of a strong sunlight filtered in
through the dampness of her long black hair. He walks a few paces forward, hesitating
because there's something he forgot. He's afraid to turn around, afraid that when he looks
the shack will have vanished and he will find himself alone and vulnerable as the snowman
or the palo verde that looks twice as solitary at night. He keeps on walking, sensing his
distance from his home, a length that doubles when he thinks Mirinda's not inside stirring
like the delicate perfume she rubs into her earlobes so that any sound she hears is savory
and sweet. Mirinda, savory and sweet, desires no earring over this, the lip clamp of his
mouth that nibbles nibbles nibbles on the flower-scented skin above her jaw. He dares to
grin; he's compelled to whistle. He remembers he didn't eat the lettuce.
Rolando doesn't wait long for the bus. It's an old school bus painted over in white
with the agricultural company's name on both sides. He doesn't have to see it to know it's
coming because it's backfiring all the way down the road. In the early mornings the sloppy
paint job looks clean until it stops in front of him and the old yellow coat shows through
the wild strokes of white. The doors squeak open and the fat driver in a red plaid shirt
greets him with a nod of the head, shifting into gear before Rolando finds a seat. Rolando
paces reluctantly toward the space next to Sarita Mendoza, who wears a sweatshirt with
words in English neither of them can read. She likes to save a place for him near the
front. Before he takes a seat, Rolando nods at the other lettuce pickers. Don Carlos calls
him by the wrong name. He wants to relax for the next twenty minutes until he arrives at
the fields. He wants to tilt his head back and listen to the small transistor radio don
Carlos behind him is holding. But Sarita Mendoza wants to talk.
She likes asking questions. She asks about his wife because she suspects Mirinda
doesn't exist. She accuses him of lying to keep her from making a match of him with one of
her daughters. Today she invites Rolando and his wife to a family bautismo. He politely
refuses. She asks why. The glassy look of her eye makes him nervous. The bus hits a bump
on the road and he hears the blades of the short-handle hoes rattle in the back. He wants
to look down at the oval blister beginning to callus on his right palm. He wants to pick
at it but doesn't, imagining a more intense pain against his hand as he thrusts the hoe
into the ground. Instead he traces Sarita Mendoza's chapped lips, smiles and tells her
he'll be celebrating his third-year anniversary this weekend. She jokingly says he's a
liar. Rolando laughs with her, trying to think up an answer in case she asks where he's
taking his wife to celebrate. She asks. He still hasn't thought of anything, so he simply
says it's up to Mirinda. Can Mirinda travel to México? Sarita Mendoza leaves her mouth
open, the dry lips are cracked at the corners; one corner is clotted with blood. He
answers no, though he should have said yes because now Sarita Mendoza says he should have
married a woman with papers. All of her daughters have their documents in order and they
can all work in the fields, cook in the kitchen and perform both chores in bed. Rolando
shakes his head. He should try to stop by the bautismo anyway, she suggests, since she's
never met this mysterious woman he keeps hidden away in "el dompe." She's heard
so much about Mirinda she's willing to wear out her old huaraches on a trip to the middle
of the desert just to meet her. And if there isn't anyone there it won't matter because
she will bring one of her daughters along just in case. Rolando looks away, embarrassed.
He watches his cut lip grin on the dirty window. He didn't comb his hair. He forgot his
baseball cap. The red bandanna in his back pocket has been used on his nose all week.
He wants to correct Sarita Mendoza and tell her she's heard very little about Mirinda,
that woman, that goddess, that light. Mirinda, passion and appetite, can eat a whole
coconut by herself, using up an entire afternoon with a dozen limes and a bowl of rock
salt by her side while his heartbeat races to compete with that fervor she has for
breaking the shell with her hands—a fever that finally peaks with him taking her
fingers in his mouth and pressing his tongue beneath her nails to suck the salty juice.
Mirinda, fury and fire, becomes as silky as her sleeping gown when he braids his limbs
into hers, sweating off the humidity from their skins, surrendering themselves like cactus
owls on that tiny bed that prompts them toward one another no matter what direction they
stretch. Mirinda can touch every place on him at once and make each place jump twice.
Mirinda is more than a woman, more than a wife—she took his body in her fleshy arms
exactly three years ago and she still holds him there. And when she said she was going to
leave him, she said she was going to dissolve his soul, so he didn't let her leave, not
entirely, taking her neck in his hands and widening her mouth and forcing his power on her
love until it burst into the air like a puff of dandelion seeds, an explosion of stars in
the sky, an outbreak of marigolds. Such beautiful flowers. He's dizzy. Sarita Mendoza
gazes at him and he blushes.
When the bus finally stops she leaps up and hurries to the back, her gray sweatshirt
coming up on her stomach. She wants to get a good hoe, one with a clean sharp blade that
won't give her trouble when she's digging into the ground. The rest of the workers scurry
right behind her. Everyone hops off through the emergency exit door. Rolando looks past
the window and at the lettuce fields, the heads looking cool and bright. Beyond the
lettuce fields grow the grape fields and next to them sit the onion fields and rise the
orchards, all of them blossoming so majesticly in the desert. He works this land year
after year, intimate with its furrows and soils, yet he despises it for breaking his body
down, for keeping him alive and sucking back all that strength. He imagines returning the
following season, the fields lush and ripe again, displaying no evidence that he ever
touched them. He imagines Mirinda, buried beneath the broken-down Pinto, unable to comb
her long black hair or unable to darken her plucked eyebrows slim as marigold stems or
unable to redden those fleshy points in the middle of her upper lip. She left her
reflection behind in the looking glass. She returns to the desert to reclaim it and be
whole again, then she thins out into air to become that void he sees when he holds up her
mirror. When the white-haired foreman taps on the window, Rolando slowly rises from the
seat, unashamed to be the last off the bus. The air is chilly and smells of soil freshly
watered, the scent of cool lettuce lifts off the ground. On the other side of the road
lies the barren desert. At the other end of the desert Mirinda's ghost waits patiently
inside the tiny shack for him to step inside and breathe her scent of dusty wood. When he
arrives each afternoon, the shack listens carefully, detects his slightest movements,
excites its joints and rusty hinges and entreats Mirinda to respond. |
