Chapter Two
All of the parents were more excited than their children about the move. They were so proud of themselves for becoming homeowners. They would stand arms akimbo in the center of each room and slowly survey what was now theirs, breathing deeply the smell of new carpet and fresh paint; they would stand arms folded in the front yard and face their possession with both reverence and smugness; they would greet each other with arms open and couldn’t make it through a sentence without using the term “American Dream”; they would put an arm around us and introduce us to their new neighbors and tell us to “say hi” to them and their kid, and then ask their new neighbor’s kid what their name was and then tell that kid what our name was, and it was assumed us kids would all become fast friends as well, but us kids kept our distance at first. Looking back, now that I’m older, it reminds me of when adults who work together or are in some club together keep saying they need to get their kids together, and so they have a party and assume the kids are getting together, and even if they are, eventually it’s time to go, and the kids hardly ever see each other after that, only at the occasional next party, and it’s kind of hard to pick up where they left off, so the kids pretty much give up and watch TV or play with their phones while the adults howl in the next room.
But we were stuck there, trapped at “Ranch Ranch”, so we did start to bond, and ours was a bond much stronger than our parents, because they disappeared into the distance of their commutes, and the exhaustion that accrued during the week that caused them to hibernate on the weekends. They were the ones who hardly saw each other; they were gauzy faces in the drivers’ seats of cars, shoes visible just before the garage door closed, vague silhouettes as indistinguishable from each other as the houses they had bought; meanwhile we took charge of the development and ran our own lives. The translation of Rancho Hacienda may as well have been “City of Children”.
And I truly mean children, as for the most part there were no teenagers either. The nearest high school was a 60-minute bus ride (in parroting the brochures for the development, the adults always referred to it as 60 minutes, never as an hour), and for those old enough to drive, maybe about 50 minutes in a car. So within a few months of our first school year on Ranch Ranch, all socially fluent teens attending the high school had made friends there and subsequently made arrangements with those friends to stay at their homes during the week in what we referred to as High School Town. They eventually pretty much stayed there on weekends too, for what was there for them to return to in our neighborhood? Napping parents on the inside, cocky disrespectful kids on the outside.
The teenagers who did linger, who couldn’t procure the connections to get out and instead made their peace with the commute, or the bus ride (which was of course even lower on the totem pole of lameness), were about what you would expect. We didn’t see much more of them than we did the ones who vanished. The teenaged leftovers would leave about an hour after the parents launched their pre-dawn drive, and return at dusk, a few hours before the parents returned in time to go to bed. And while at home, they stayed in their rooms, on their computers, in front of their TVs. To come outside was to risk facing us and the insults we would hurl at them, in addition to the dirt clods and fruit we would also hurl at them.
Occasionally one of them would try to play the role of a cool older kid and offer to buy us beer at the gas station mini-mart off the freeway ramp since the cashier was willing to sell it just to make his job more exciting, or one of them would offer to get us stoned, chief among them a boy named Chris, who tried to repel the humiliation of being left behind and riding the bus by growing his hair long and dressing in black. But we always declined because we therefore associated such things with such losers. If someone who actually was cool had offered us drugs and alcohol, then we may have accepted. But that person didn’t exist in Ranch Ranch. And certainly our parents would have noticed if any of their liquor was missing, as dependent on it as they were to help them dream up more reasons for why they were doing this to themselves and to their families, so we came up with all sorts of other ways to spend our days in our stucco corner of the valley.
School never posed much of a threat to our ample leisure time. It was essentially a one-room schoolhouse, with what amounted to three grades: K-2, 3-5, and 6-8. The teacher and her aides were accustomed to having a student population made up entirely of Spanish-speakers, the sons and daughters of the farm labor that lived in the blighted little anonymous town next to our gleaming eyesore. So in addition to trying to enhance the kids’ English proficiency on top of all the other subjects required, the instructional team was used to assuming that there would be little to no assistance available at home, thus inspiring them to design lesson plans heavy on in-class work with minimal homework, a plan that proved applicable to our situation as well, we the influx of English speakers whose parents were even more absent than those working the fields. The newly-created split between native and non-native speakers was bridged by utilizing us as de facto instructional aides. This further enhanced our sense of self, as we not only saw ourselves as the head of each household, but the head of our school as well.
The campus, if that’s the right word for it, was just down the road from the truck stop buffet on the other side of the freeway overpass, and looked like it was made by the same people in a couple of hours after they discovered they had some cinder blocks and rebar left over.
I don’t wanna haul all this crap back into town; let’s build something else over here.
Okay…there. Done. What do you think it can be used for?
I don’t know. A rest stop?
A little too far off the freeway; nobody will see it. A school maybe?
Hmm. A school. What the hell, why not?
We would all wait for the bus together in the space between Rancho Hacienda and the labor town. At first some of us were determined to ride our bikes, but vehicles reached highway speeds on the road between the two points, and though there were not that many of them and they tended to veer into the oncoming lane and give you a wide berth, it was difficult to keep your balance and keep away the visions of carnage. The bus turned out to be a great way to ally with the kids from over the wall, anyway, before we would get to school and have to adopt the dynamic of tutors and pupils. Their English wasn’t even all that bad. They could speak okay, they just weren’t very literate and it was hard for them to understand some of the stuff in the textbooks. (Plus some of them admitted they had played up their second language problems in order to coast before we got there and blew their cover, including my good friend Miggy. We let them keep up the ruse, however, as it made life easier for us, too.)
Chris, the only high school castaway who continued to perceive value in campaigning to be king of the teenaged leftovers, suggested we should ditch more often, as there were no parents around to supervise us. We told him that ditching would lead to letters home, which would draw attention to our situation and remind our parents how little control they were maintaining over us.
“And why would we want to do that? We don’t want your weed and we don’t want your beer, so why would we want your advice?”
We got off the bus laughing at him and calling him an idiot as he sat there with another hour’s worth of riding ahead of him, along with a few other teen stragglers strewn into their respective corners, while we cruised in to go through the motions of the hour-long tutoring session that was held before the opening bell rang.
Our showmanship in school bound us together and inspired one of our earliest covert operations: the border tunnel. We scoured the backyards that abutted the concrete wall dividing Ranch Ranch from the shanty town, looking for a depression or weak spot along its base. True, it was easy enough for us to come and go through my yard or any of the others whose property lines backed up to the two sides of the development that were not enclosed by the wall, and instead were sectioned off by a wooden fence that we could hop over. But aside from providing a more direct route between our
neighborhoods, the wall posed a more tempting challenge, a sense of the subversive in burrowing under it. The front gate, of course, was out of the question, as it had a security camera embedded in the key pad and some distant property management company would monitor it remotely and notify the adult in charge of the homeowners’ association that barbarians were storming the palace. Almost without fail as we exited the gate in the morning to wait for the bus and later entered the gate after school, at least one of us would stick our face inches away from the camera lens and scream “Get us out of here! Please! You’re our only link to civilization! Help us!” or something along those lines.
We found our ideal spot for the great dig in the backyard of my friend Blaine, who was my best friend when we first moved in. There appeared to be an area where nothing grew; the groundcover and shrubs planted along the wall as part of the complimentary landscaping remained small and withered, while the rest of the foliage relatively flourished. We surmised that the dead zone must have been created by one of the construction crews dumping some toxic material into the plot, perhaps the cement contractors who had won the bid for the wall. Having the site in Blaine’s backyard made it all the more appealing to our crew, as he was the most popular boy on either side, with a painfully beautiful older sister who was one of the expatriates spending almost all of her time in High School Town, living with a boyfriend and his family, so the prospect of improving our chances of glimpsing her provided additional inspiration. We had the tunnel completed within an afternoon.
We still had to find a way to camouflage the entrance on each end, however, and we knew where to shop for ideas: there was a section of the development that was unfinished, construction halted on a half-dozen homes in the farthest corner of the rectangle, away from our border and the front gate, where the wooden fences converged. The sales representative and head contractor had told our families it was under construction, but nobody ever came to work on it after we moved in. Perhaps none of our parents saw this as portending anything ominous because they were never home during the days when crews would have been completing that final phase. But our heads of household had developed such a keen ability to willfully ignore warning signs that they refused to acknowledge the houses stood frozen at the same point of incompletion the entire time we took up residence in plain sight of them.
But us kids, we noticed them. And once it became clear that no one was coming to claim any of the materials, much less use them to finish building the homes, we pounced.
In addition to being our own personal home improvement store with perpetual free shopping, the site served as a makeshift playground. There actually was an official playground in the development, squeezed onto a parcel that was smaller than any of the house lots, but we reckoned it was just leftover space that had been turned into a miniature park to help market Ranch Ranch as a great place to raise a family to prospective buyers, rather than to provide their kids a legitimately fun place to play. It had no swings, no merry-go-rounds, no moving parts that could result in a lawsuit; just a short slide drooping down from one side of a stepped platform and some monkey bars jutting out from the other, with a tic-tac-toe game between them that had the X’s and O’s on plastic rollers that spun like toilet paper. We never played on the structure as intended: the slide served as a bike and skateboard ramp, the monkey bars were for games of chicken in which we would hang facing each other while trying to kick one another in the groin, and we wrote dirty words on the tic-tac-toe rollers to create our own game called shit-fuck-piss.
As cat and dog turds started to accumulate in the rubber mulch that was supposed to provide a soft landing beneath the promotional tool disguised as a playground, we gravitated more towards the construction site. The houses were skeletal and yet to be fleshed out; they were all two-by-fours and plywood. The frames and roofs were in place, but stacks of drywall and faux southwest adobe shingles were stacked on both the ground floor and second story of each home, left under the assumption they would someday be installed. We decided that a section of drywall covering each end of our tunnel would keep it dry and prevent it from being filled in, but we had no tools to cut out a fitting size, and were too lazy to head back to our garages and root through our fathers’ toolboxes. Besides, it was so much more fun to drop sheets of drywall from the second floor through the gaps of the wall frame and watch them splash onto the pavement with a cloud of white dust rising as fragments shot in random directions. Then we would take a section that seemed close to what we needed and trim it down by virtue of either beating the edges with a stray section of two-by-four that had been cut and tossed aside by the framers, or by grabbing the promising piece and slapping it against an edge of the cement foundation or a corner of the frame.
At first the Mexican kids were wary of participating, as construction site raids had been a source of conflict in the early days of Rancho Hacienda’s development when some of their fathers had sent them on nighttime missions to swipe as many tools and materials as they could, while the development group responded by hiring a security guard armed with a paintball gun and a Taser. But our disregard for their past was brazen enough to help them get over any post-traumatic stress they felt, and soon they were wielding, launching, and slamming alongside us with just as much gusto.
Much of our reign was marked by destruction. We didn’t ride a bike to get from one place to another: we rode a bike to go full speed and slam the brakes hard to see how long of a skid mark we could leave; we rode to bowl headfirst into a bush and see if we could launch ourselves into a summersault over the handlebars and shrubbery and land on the other side feet first; we rode them to throw them over my fence into the arid open spaces and race each other in our own private Baja 500, no protective gear, injuries a badge of honor, the marks they would leave on our bodies eliciting satisfied grins of having been somewhere and done something, as would the discreet marks we left around The Ranch: the jagged nub remaining on the tree trunk from which we had torn off a branch, the number “3” missing from the keypad at the gated entrance, the slowly depleting stock of landscaping rocks that we used for war games, the drain pipe twisted askew beside the entryway of various houses at various times that served as our signal that a parent was home. We were always in the neighborhood, and we didn’t need to go so far as to write it on any walls, as graffiti would merely draw the ever-dreaded attention of the adults.
Our parents on the other hand constantly left written messages to remind us of their presence: on the dry erase board by the door reminding us to take out the garbage on Wednesday night, on the magnetic notepad stuck to the refrigerator door informing us of the dinner options that were in the freezer, on the yard sign planted in the front lawn broadcasting the family’s name with the help of some cartoonish roosters and hens that were drawn in orbit around the letters.
But those were just letters, just a name. Our real family during those days was each other, the latchkey kids of Ranch Squared.
Which sounds a bit like the kind of thing a gang member says to justify their decision to join, but our gang involved no initiation, no one sought to be a part of it; it was a purely natural process, a testament to the old trope that “it takes a village” to raise a child; though I imagine adults were included in the original expression of that village. But we were nurtured in the ways of the world nonetheless.
Anything gained from sibling rivalry, for instance, was gained tenfold in our village, as that rivalry was unchained and unmitigated and not limited to actual siblings. During games of chicken at the abandoned train station located a stone’s throw from the neutral zone between the walled city and the exposed one, each of us stood our ground far longer than I suppose we would have had we played in civilization, had there been a sense of something else to do other than prove our mettle. Our initial foray into the ghost station had involved throwing any piece of rusted scrap metal we could hoist at the passing train, but that had resulted in a call from the shipping company to the development company, who then co
ntacted the security firm that monitored the gate, who then contacted the homeowners’ association, and eventually all of our parents. Apparently throwing objects at a train is a felony.
Going big on our first screw-up helped us come to our senses early, however, and appreciate what we had. It stirred our insight into how necessary it was to keep our kingdom under wraps if we wanted to keep it at all, and that would involve avoiding the kind of parental concern we had fomented due to our felony act. There was some discussion amongst the parents that weekend regarding the possibility of a select number of them quitting their jobs or cutting their hours to spend more time at home. Our child tribe endured a tense couple of days while the adults deliberated, as we were suddenly jolted into realizing what an enviable situation we actually possessed, having been unable to grasp it while clinging to our resentment of being dragged there. Almost losing it so soon helped us turn a corner. We went from not wanting to see our parents ever again for transplanting us to the middle of nowhere, to not wanting to see them ever again so we could enjoy our dominion over the middle of nowhere. Any talk of any of the commuters staying home faded quickly thanks to us assuring them that such a thing would never happen again, because that’s what they wanted to hear, because their financial pickle would not allow them to hear anything else. The commute lived on, and we got smart about acting stupid.
We merely stood on the train tracks as long as we could before diving off, as risking your life to impress your buddies is not against the law. We studied the trains and gauged which ones at what times would stop at the factory on the other side of the tree line. Since all the trains that passed through were freight trains, which tended to be rather long, when they did stop at the factory, the last cars were near enough to our deserted station for the driver to contact the conductor, who would jog over and lecture us about what we were doing. When that happened for the first and only time, we made a snap decision to stay and let him talk to us, since running would guarantee another call, whereas standing our ground gave us a chance to charm our way out of it.
We listened to his stern warnings and noted that conductors don’t dress like they do in children’s books, at least not the ones working on freight trains, and then asked him what our old station had been used for. He was impressed that we had any interest in the past at our age and was glad to tell us.
“Never for passengers,” he said, warming up as though telling us a campfire story. “After all, you need people to have passengers, and with all due respect to your neighborhood here…” He surveyed the area with a skeptical gaze and we dutifully laughed.
“It was an agriculture pick up,” he continued. “These fields used to be a lot more prosperous, and trucks weren’t as much of an option back then.”
“What do you guys pick up from that factory?” Miggy asked.
“Who says we’re picking up?” winked the conductor.
“So what are you dropping off?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said, having some fun with us. But before he could give us a straight answer, his phone flagged him and he took the call, which apparently involved someone telling him it was time to go. He waved to us while he walked back to the train as the engine blew its horn several lengthy times.
We never did find out what goes on inside that factory behind the trees, but did learn which trains would keep barreling past it so we could utilize them for our tests of courage. It was important to pass those tests, because the reason you were forced to stand out there in the first place was due to losing the slap contest or the arm punching contest. And while our dads and older brothers weren’t there to throw the ball around, we were there to throw the ball at each other, and not just for dodge ball. Any game, whether it was pickup basketball at Blaine’s hoop in the driveway or Strikeout against the other side of the cement wall facing the labor town, they all resulted in the losers having to stand and absorb a pelting with whatever ball was used. Rivalry, competition, hard knocks…none of this was lost on us.
But we also learned to nurture tact and chivalry, too, as our village was not exclusively comprised of boys. There were girls as well; girls growing as tough and uncompromising as we were, but girls nonetheless, so acting stupid could only get you so far. There was a point at which some degree of social skills had to kick in, even when exhibiting cruelty. Thanks to our sisters-in-arms, we learned how a well-chosen back-handed compliment can be more effective than an outright insult, how silence can speak louder than a shouting match, and how if you do it right, a certain look can hurt worse than a basketball to the crotch. They taught us that they would prefer not to ask for things directly, and instead offer hints: a remark about the heat meant we were supposed to ask if they wanted us to turn on the fan if we were inside or offer them a cold drink if we were outside; wondering aloud if they had forgotten something meant that we were supposed to look for it; and the correct answer to a question (“which shorts look better on me?”) was often implied through tone of voice and inflection.
Nurturing those latter skills devoted to articulation and enunciation were more instinctual and required more experience, which we were happy to engage. Sometimes it was group experience, our two tides merging and swirling together, winding up in a game of tag that provided small opportunities for physical contact, or in flirty pods characterized by bad jokes that were supposed to show how wise beyond our years we were but mostly tested the limits of what was acceptable in mixed company. We were unified by immaturity and divided by glimpses into adulthood as this gender or that. We were more prone to extend the boundaries of our empire when we found ourselves co-ed, venturing forth by worming under the wall through our tunnel one at a time like a prison break, passing through the rural ghetto as if making our way through a bazaar in a third world city, until we reached the tree line, leaves crunching beneath our feet before emerging on the other side of our miniature dark forest to linger at the chain link fence surrounding the factory, barbed wire running along the top of the barrier and warning signs across the middle that proclaimed the electricity pulsating through it. All of the signs on the property that we could make out were warning signs: toxic materials in the tanks, extreme heat emanating from the silos, prosecution awaiting those who trespassed. The boys would dare each other to touch the fence and speculate on the best way to break in; the girls would speculate on what was happening inside, why there were so few cars in the parking lot, what was being produced, and where it was headed.
One day one of our fellow males, a little guy named Carl, tried to impress us all by peeing on the fence. The last discernable sounds that came out of his mouth were “Hey, check this out” before he was nearly turned into a eunuch by a bolt of voltage that flew through the liquid conductor he had created between himself and the source of electricity. His forced laugh turned instantly to primal screams and grotesque spasms. Miggy was smart enough to body check him like a hockey player and break up the current as Carl skidded across the dried leaves on his back. A weak fountain of urine sprinkled his pants and shirt as he slid, and the dribble continued during the tense pause after he stopped. Once we were certain it wasn’t the last pee he would ever take, the rest of us joined him on the ground as we collapsed in laughter and vowed to call him “Nub” from that day forward.
Those of us who grew comfortable enough with some of the girls to hang solo with them at times would voyage even farther, risking a bike ride together out to the fast food cluster that bordered the freeway ramp for a “date”. I liked going there with a girl named Shay who lived on the same block as me. Her mom worked at one of the restaurants and would float us some free food now and then. Not that it was entirely free. We had to listen to her complain quite a bit. She had sacrificed a job that she liked back in civilization in order to be a stay-at-home mom at Rancho Ranch, but the family had quickly realized that they needed the additional income to cover the father’s commuting expenses. Shay’s mom was not happy about this. Almost every conversation we had to endure when she
stopped by our table had to do with how much better her old job was: how she wouldn’t have to do this at her old job, or that at her old job, and how much money she earned at her old job, and how respected her old job was. I forget what exactly her old job was; it had one of those blurry titles that according to Shay, was a fancy way of saying she answered the phone.
Shay and I wouldn’t talk so much as we would eavesdrop. We would listen to the motorists who were on their way from Point A to Point B and were stopping for rest and refreshment somewhere in between those two points on the part of the line that is just a line. We always got a sorry kick out of it when someone would be talking on their phone and say something along the lines of “I should be there in a few more hours; I just stopped for a bite to eat in…in…I don’t know where I am.” And when we would get wind of where they were coming from or where they were going, and why, either via their phone if by themselves or the conversation they were having with their traveling companion, Shay and I would share what we knew about that place or that task, and if we didn’t know much about it, we would wonder about it. We would wonder what it was like to live there and have your own place and do that thing and make your own money, and go on road trips and have your own phone. We wondered when that would happen for us, and some days it seemed like it never would. It seemed like staring at each day was like staring into the distance beyond our fences, the space between us and whatever was over those hills too far and too murky to recognize.
When we did talk about our lives as currently constructed, that was when we got around to relationships, and attempt to understand what our imagined futures may hold when it came to the opposite sex. Confusion was the dominant theme of these discussions. Many refills of self-serve soda were spent with Shay expressing her frustration as to why every boy worshipped a girl like Blaine’s older sister, a girl none of us even knew and had only seen, or a girl like Lana Torres, a girl our own age whose struggles with English made her excruciatingly shy (although Shay attributed Lana’s quietness to aloofness). I had to pretend that I worshipped neither of them so as not to come across as being like every other guy. Shay never quite bought it, and she teased me often about my performance, but at least I was able to present myself as being in control of my admiration of them enough to offer some sort of perspective other than “she’s hot.” Meanwhile I had some questions of my own. It was easy to spend time with Shay, and I figured if I could find that kind of peacefulness with someone who made my heart race like Blaine’s sister or to a smaller degree Lana, then I will have found love. But those two features seemed to be so opposed that I doubted love was possible.
Lana’s mom worked at one of the other food stops in the exit complex, as did some of the other mothers from Miggy’s side of the wall, but their English was thin so they worked in the back mostly, and tended to avoid eye contact when they were out on the floor sweeping or wiping tables. They were much more comfortable when you met them at home; different people practically. The communication was still dicey, but they were willing to try out some English without becoming flush or tongue-tied, and they loved to teach us words and phrases in Spanish. Whenever we felt like we needed some mothering, we would tunnel our way over to The Barrio. The adult presence was still sparse, especially when it came to the fathers, who had to spend twelve-hour days in whatever field needed them within a hundred square miles; but there were at least a few mothers and some grandparents lingering about the households on any given day.
Their homes were also the source of any lessons we managed to learn about compassion and empathy during the course of our boundless machismo tournaments and our sloppy attempts at courtship. It was a chance for us whiny ex-suburbanites to see legitimate hardship firsthand. And we ended up putting in a little work now and then because of it, as we would help tend their vegetable gardens that served as the landscaping in their raggedy but functional backyards. They would use our fantasies of masculinity to con us into shoveling chicken shit into the compost heap, and spread the compost around the garden, and even slaughter the occasional chicken, as having actually killed something boosted one’s street cred, even if those streets were contained within the walls of Rancho Hacienda. Their homes smelled funny to us at first, like raw meat and chicken broth and cilantro, but eventually we got used to it, and realized that their homes smelled like life, while ours smelled like houses. Miggy’s house even had a whiff of bird cage, since every so often his grandmother would bring in a couple of squabs from the large flock they raised in a shed out back and let them fly around the house, laughing hysterically as she watched her three chubby cats try to catch them with no chance of success. They would eat late, waiting up for the fathers to come home so they could all sit down together and pray before dinner. I can’t speak for my fellow Ranchers, but I was also fascinated by the religious symbols that decorated most of their homes. Miggy’s family had a particularly graphic crucifix above the toilet in their bathroom. Miggy said his folks put it there to try and keep his older brother from jerking off. I sometimes asked to use the bathroom just so I could stare at it. It never quite convinced me that it had the power to convert the skeptical, but it was definitely a potent reminder that things could always be worse.
And most of all, unlike our houses on the other side of the wall, with our identical floor plans sparsely furnished on the inside, and our identical facades in one of three earth-toned colors that alternated from house to house to house on the outside, not every household in The Barrio was exactly the same. If there was one characteristic which bound them together it was creativity; the ingenuity required to face the hardships they had no choice but to face. And creativity was likewise something fostered by our child tribe. Granted our spirit of innovation was in the interest of deceit rather than survival, in order to keep our antics confidential, but from our cordoned perspective, it seemed just as imperative as raising your own food or scavenging furniture left over from when the truck stop renovated their dining room.
Motivations aside, there was no denying the brilliance of the camouflage we designed to cover the crude drywall doors at each end of our tunnel we had dug. We at first assumed that covering them with dirt would suffice, but immediately realized how ineffective this was, as if there was nobody willing to stay behind and be the designated dirt replacer, the side into which you entered would remain exposed. So it was once more to the construction site to browse the discards. Shay came up with the idea to use the faux adobe shingles to build a fake birdbath that we could attach to the cover on Blaine’s side, placing two of the curved southwestern style pieces together lengthwise at their edges to form a cylinder standing upright as the base, and breaking up three other shingles in half to give us six small concave pieces to place in a circle around the top of the base for the desired effect. Since we were definitely going to need tools this time, to fasten our mock birdbath to the piece of drywall, I ran and fetched my dad’s toolbox from our garage, and we figured we may as well use the hammers to break up the shingles we would need for the top. This part was of course the most fun, taking turns battering one shingle after another from the stack to see who could smash out the most usable sections. And while what we came up with wasn’t exactly precise, it didn’t matter much in light of Blaine’s backyard. His dad was originally from somewhere in the Caucasus; no one knew if he was Russian, Persian, Armenian, or Turkish, including Blaine. He always referred to himself strictly as American, and upon arrival to his new country had changed his last name to Ford, married a woman who looked like a prize awarded to the immigrant most willing to assimilate, and embraced conspicuous consumption as proof that he had earned The Dream. Apparently their house back in the suburbs had looked like a miniature Las Vegas casino, or at least the backyard did. They transported as much as they could reasonably fit into their current yard, so realistically we didn’t have to construct something so involved; we could have thrown together some random materials and spray-painted it gold and it would have blended in. But we took pride in
our work.
The concealment for Miggy’s side of the tunnel required a different approach. The wall ran alongside the buffer zone between Ranch Ranch and The Barrio, which was in effect a very wide alley that served as our main route to the abandoned train station, so the tunnel opening was not located in anyone’s yard. Aside from where we had trodden our path, the alley was choked with weeds year-round. The only other spot where the weeds had been flattened was the area around our drywall trap door, so we came to quick consensus that utilizing weeds to blend in made the most sense, but found that sticking actual weeds into some mud on top of the drywall didn’t work because the dead weeds would bow soon after installation. A kid named Arturo from the weedy side of the wall suggested using long slivers of wood from the scrap heap at the construction site as decoy weeds, one set of slivers that kept its natural wood color to imitate the weeds in summer and fall, and one set that we would paint green to blend with the winter and spring weeds. We all thought it was not only a brilliant idea on his part, but a selfless one at that, since he was in eighth grade and wouldn’t be around much longer to capitalize on it. He moved in with some family friends who lived near the high school soon after, but we continued to refer to the opening on that side of the wall as The Arturo Gate in his honor.