Chapter Three
And so when the first of the foreclosure signs went up, we weren’t scared; we were angry. We were losing our independence. Our families’ finances and our families’ future meant nothing to us; what mattered was our families’ intrusion back into our lives. By the time the red-lettered signs started to sprout, I was in the home stretch of eighth grade, so I had been planning for an even greater measure of autonomy with a move to High School Town, going so far as to request interviews with some of my friends’ expatriate teenaged siblings when they happened to be at home so that I could gather some tips and form a strategy to ingratiate myself to my fellow freshmen and make my move away from Rancho Ranch as soon as possible. It was a rite of passage; and should one of those signs appear in front of my house, I would be denied it.
“Why does someone have to foreclose, anyway?” I asked Blaine one evening as we shuffled around the platform of the dilapidated train depot looking for things to throw.
He shrugged. “Can’t afford the house, I guess.”
“But if you still have your same job and you’re in the same house, how does that suddenly happen?” I was barely searching anymore and instead trying to formulate answers to my own questions, thinking aloud in Blaine’s presence.
“I guess the house must be worth less,” he responded distractedly, as he was still pretty engrossed in finding chunks of cement and catapulting them onto the tracks.
“Okay, but you’ve still got the same amount you’re paying, right? I mean, your payments are still your payments, and you could afford them when you moved in.”
Blaine seemed to be getting a bit irritated now. “I don’t know, Nick. Maybe the payments change. Maybe they don’t stay the same.”
I thought about that as he hit the far rail with a discus-sized piece of cement and we watched it explode into a half-dozen flakes. “Different payments,” I pondered, “that’s weird.”
“Why do you think I would know anything about this, anyway?” he scoffed.
“I don’t think that,” I said. “I’m just worried. High school is coming. It’s our turn.”
He jumped off the platform onto the tracks and picked up the pieces of cement. “Relax,” he grunted as he pivoted and started to throw them one at a time at the base of the platform. “My family has moved like a dozen times. There’s always a way. That’s what dad says.”
At the risk of interrupting his game, I ventured to ask, “Maybe your dad could give my dad some tips.”
“Maybe,” he said, still focused on how hard he could hit the wall beneath me. “Hey,” he stopped what he was doing. “Do you think Lana Torres likes me?”
“Um…” I recalibrated our conversation, “it’s possible. Everybody else does.”
“I’m not talking about everybody else. I’m talking about one very hot girl.”
All of us would have liked to be liked by Lana, so surrendering that hope required definitive proof. “She’s hard to read,” I dodged. “She doesn’t say much. She doesn’t even look at people much.”
“I think she does,” said Blaine, going into his windup and throwing his last pitch.
“You think she looks at people? Or you think she likes you?”
“I think she looks at me because she likes me,” he grinned as he surveyed the marks left on the wall below the platform.
“So why did you ask?”
He hopped back up onto the platform. “Just want to be sure, I guess. You really haven’t noticed her checking me out?”
“No, Blaine, I haven’t,” I snipped. “I guess I’ve been too busy wanting to be sure that we weren’t going to have to move.”
“That again?” he slapped my upper arm and walked past, “Take it easy, Nick. We’re good. It’s just a few signs. Your parents aren’t that stupid.”
He continued to the far end of the platform and hopped down the collapsed staircase to the ground. I either thought to myself or said out loud, “Well, they moved us here, didn’t they?” and followed him back toward the alley that split the neighborhoods.
When we reached The Arturo Gate, the trap door with the wooden decoy weeds stuck into it, I still felt anxious and needed some sense of comfort. Neither of my parents would be home for a few more hours, and Blaine’s self-love was progressing at a discouraging rate, so I decided to veer off towards Miggy’s house and see about hanging there for a while. I hesitated after altering my course to see if Blaine would notice. He was through the tunnel and on the other side of the wall before he did.
“Aren’t you coming?” his voice called over.
“Later,” I called back. “I’m heading over to Miggy’s.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “You’re going to Lana’s. Backstabber!”
I heard him laugh and a few seconds later heard the sliding glass door into his house open and slam shut.
I drifted into The Barrio and noticed that the pummeled homes didn’t look as bad in the sunset. I could imagine a professional photographer being intrigued by the way the shacks caught the setting light and cast shadows, inspiring the artist to create a series of prints lining the walls of a gallery or coffee house someplace far away, the collection perhaps called something like “The Twilight of the Working Poor”.
Miggy’s door was open, as always. I at first had marveled at the faith the denizens of the labor town had in each other, but Miggy set me straight by telling me nobody bothered locking their doors because if for whatever reason someone thought there was something worth stealing in any of the homes, they could simply push in one of the walls.
His grandmother was sitting in her plush dusty chair with one of the cats on her lap that jumped a foot in the air and fled when I entered. I apologized in Spanish and she responded with a stream of phrases I couldn’t make out, but seemed to assure me it wasn’t a problem; something about her “crazy cat”. Miggy entered and didn’t bother asking me if I wanted him to translate, as we had stopped doing that for the most part. He would instead just tell me how to react, and apparently my reaction in this instance was appropriate enough.
“You hear for dinner?” he asked.
“Well…” I hedged.
“Just say yes, you fucking freeloader.”
“Yes.”
His grandmother chimed in with some sort of admonishment.
I started to backtrack. “If it’s too much trouble…”
“It’s not you,” Miggy said. “She’s on me for saying ‘fuck’.”
Her voice rose again and Miggy went over and teasingly jabbed a forefinger up and down one of her arms while he said to me, “Why is it that people who can’t speak a language still know the curse words?”
She tried to swat away Miggy’s pokes, trying also not to laugh as she lobbed a couple of Spanish swear words at him. He let her be finally and gestured my way. “Let’s go fetch some eggs. This filthy-mouthed old lady can make dessert tonight.”
He translated what he said for her benefit and she waved him off as she got up and started to shuffle around and coo for her cats to come out.
We went into the backyard and raided the hen house for some eggs. Miggy left me with one and brought the rest inside. He came back out and we started our egg toss, stepping back a few paces with each successful completion.
“I’m going to miss this if we lose our house,” I said after a few rounds and some light trash talk.
“You think your parents are in the same kind of trouble as those other people?” he replied, catching the egg and gently guiding its momentum to the side of his body before tossing it back my way.
“I don’t know,” I caught the egg and faked a hard overhand throw before tossing it underhanded. “It’s just when I see a few of those signs go up at the same time, I wonder if it’s a pattern; plus they’re all in the first phase area, the first homes that were sold.”
“Why don’t you ask them if things are okay?”
“The people being foreclosed? That would be weird.”
“Your pare
nts, dumb ass.” Miggy gave me a few pump fakes before lobbing it over. “Ask them what their deal is.”
I caught the egg and quick-tossed it back. “I couldn’t do that. That would be even more weird.”
“What are you talking about?” he held onto the egg, pausing the game. “They’re your parents.”
“But I don’t really know them anymore,” I explained. “And I don’t think they would be honest with me about that, anyway. I’m starting to think nobody was very honest with themselves when it came to buying these God-forsaken houses.”
Miggy rolled the egg in the palm of his hand and, unlike Blaine, thought about what I said. For that alone I wanted to blurt out that he was now the best friend I ever had. But he responded as well: “Even if things are bad, hopefully they can hold out for a few more months, and you and I can find a place to stay in High School Town.”
I considered the possibility. I lost myself in visions of us living on our own during the week and going to high school together. By the time I snapped back into the present and announced “That would be cool,” the egg was already upon me.
We had a delicious dinner, a pungent tomato and chicken-based stew filled with almost every item from their backyard farm. Miggy’s grandmother had started preparing it earlier by reducing the chicken and tomatoes on the stove, then later on when his mother got home from work she finished it off by adding the other ingredients. His father and older brother joined us well after sundown when they finally got home after their shift in a table grape vineyard fifty miles farther up the valley. I provided the entertainment with the dried egg on my shirt. Having a good sport to make fun of seems to be an easy avenue for different walks of life to get in stride with each other. Miggy had an older sister, too, but she was a student at the high school who stayed in town during the week, and even though it was Friday, she was active in student government and was staying back to work at a fundraiser over the weekend. It was her connections that Miggy and I were hoping to exploit in our plans for next school year. We talked about that future for quite a while in his room after dinner. When we heard the rest of his family start to retire to bed, I figured it was about time I left.
The Barrio was pitch dark, but the street lights of Rancho Hacienda leaked over the wall and cast just enough of a glow for me to find my way to the tunnel. Now that I had been crawling through it for a couple of years and grown a bit, the tunnel seemed more like a big hole. If I lied on my back in its middle, right underneath where the wall stood, I could touch one end with my feet and the other with my hands. I did that as I returned from dinner at Miggy’s, to measure myself and gauge if each side was as far away as I seemed to remember them being when we had first constructed it. I decided that I hadn’t grown all that much, that I had tailored my recollections to make my time at Ranch Ranch seem like a longer part of my childhood than it really was.
Honestly, I never really established much of a presence in my old neighborhood that we lived in before our move to The Ranch. I read, played video games, and the few times I had friends over my parents seemed uncomfortable or irritated by them. I went over to a few other kids’ houses, but all we did was play video games, and eventually we seemed to realize we didn’t really need to be at each other’s houses to do that. My sociability started to atrophy, and it didn’t bother me. I was content with my books and games. It made no sense, really, that I had been the least bit concerned about moving to the middle of nowhere, as I was already there in a lot of ways. But it was a change, and I had become familiar with my own personal middle of nowhere. Thinking back on my arrival at The Ranch brought to mind those videos of animals who had been rescued as babies from some family tragedy in the wild and raised in captivity, and how when their wounds heal and they grow up and they’re released back into the wild, they just sit in their cages with the door open and peer out cautiously for a while, not really sure what to make of it all. They don’t recognize their own habitat at first. But it starts to dawn on them. Whether it’s the smells, or the sounds of others just like them braying nearby, or simply some sort of feeling, they venture out. The seal gets his first dose of the open sea, the lion feels that tall grass brushing his flanks with every step, the child takes a baseball bat to the neighbor’s garden gnome and hears no adult rebuke…and they’re off. The cage may as well have never existed.
We became more untamed than the pets that were initially part of our families when we arrived. Sometimes someone’s dog would escape from the backyard and sprint with no idea where it was going, just wanting to run somewhere, somewhere fast, tired of defending its small piece of territory through barking and rushing the fence, at last able to go on the offense, to chase something, chase down whatever it could find; one dog ran away, another was brought back to civilization for adoption by a parent’s co-worker, another dog took up residence with an elderly member of The Barrio after escaping, preferring companionship to nicer lodgings. All of the animals brought to The Ranch eventually vanished; the cats turned feral, the birds sat neglected, as none of us could be trusted to take care of the pets we once clung to during the first weeks of our residence; we were too busy setting an example for them, showing our animals what it was like to be limitless.
Now here I was facing the specter of being led back into the cage. I kept lying there in our tunnel, in that which I helped build, enjoying the coolness and smell of the moist earth, letting the darkness thicken around me, listening to myself breathe, finding comfort in thinking that if this is where we all end up, then so be it. Nothingness seemed so relaxing. A heaven full of things to do sounded exhausting; full of leisure sounded dull. This was just fine. I may have even lightly fallen asleep for a few moments, as my body abruptly lit up with adrenalin and wanted out.
I pushed up slowly on the drywall above me, being careful not to jerk our homemade birdbath off of its foundation. Though my head was not facing Blaine’s house, I could see that the wall and garden were illuminated, indicating that some lights were on in the house. I lowered the drywall back down and spun over onto my stomach before raising it again so I could assess the situation. The lights were on in their living room, but no one seemed to be there, at least from my vantage looking through the sliding glass doors. I decided to wait a few minutes just to be sure. Soon my caution was rewarded.
There, gliding into the frame, was Blaine’s older sister, making a rare appearance in their house, and an even more rare appearance in my line of sight. She had practically become a myth, but now here she was, wearing a tank top and boxer shorts. I nearly choked on some soil from the deep breath I took upon seeing her. She was smiling at whatever she was reading on the screen of her cell phone as she paced aimlessly, absent-mindedly strumming her stomach and breasts with her free hand. She then stood still facing the glass door and used both hands to type a message. There was a quick reply to whatever she wrote, and she was delighted by what the other person had to say. She looked around the room furtively, then held the phone in front of her at arm’s length and took a picture of herself giving a pouty smile. After checking to see that the picture met her standards, she sent it and within seconds was stifling a laugh at the reply received. She held the phone out in front of her again, but this time kept it closer and aimed it at her chest, lowering the collar of the tank top to a point where her breasts were almost completely exposed. She took the picture, and the exhilaration I felt was matched by the agony of knowing that it was not intended for me.
Whomever was the intended, her boyfriend I assumed, apparently increased his demands. She covered her mouth in manufactured shock and after looking around once more, seemed to realize that she needed to take this out of the living room. She dashed away and the lights went out. Within several seconds the lights turned on in an upstairs window. I hoisted myself out of the tunnel and replaced the drywall and its camouflage, then turned to focus on that window up above. I wandered towards its beam of light with my eyes looking skyward as though witnessing a UFO hovering just overhead. I s
aw her shadow moving on the ceiling. I saw her arms raise and the tank top slide over them. I quickly surveyed my surroundings to see if there was anything I could climb up to get a better view, but the trees were still too young, and the fence dividing their yard from the one next door too exposed. I looked back at the window helplessly. The shadow was no longer there. She was now below her lamp, either on the bed or the floor. I stared at the window hoping she would become visible again. My entire body throbbed, I felt indistinguishable from my erection. I barely maintained enough foresight into what might happen should I take off all my clothes right there and stroke myself in their yard to prevent myself from doing so. When the lights finally went out, I was afraid that a girl so beautiful would never love me.
Exiting Blaine’s backyard silently had never been a problem; I knew just how to unlatch the gate without a sound, knew exactly where the pavers were as opposed to the gravel. But I had to get my breathing under control before I could follow my standard escape route this time. It took several minutes, but finally the dampness and the darkness and the feeling of loneliness settled me down, and I was off.
Once on the street and walking home, I noticed some smoke rising from the factory behind the trees in the distance, and it occurred to me that I still did not know what went on inside there. And before tonight I did not know what Blaine’s sister looked like in underwear, and I never would have known had I not happened upon her, had I not eavesdropped on her. If I went up to the factory and shook the gate and asked someone what they were making in there, I doubt they would tell me. And if I had asked Blaine’s sister to walk around in a tank top and boxer shorts, she certainly would not have done that for me. So it was with my parents. If I asked them what our deal was, if we were going to have to move, I could not imagine them telling me.
When I arrived home I couldn’t really tell if they were there or not. I opened the door that connected the kitchen to the garage and saw both of their cars. I scanned the kitchen for a note or something written on the dry erase board and found nothing. I walked quietly past their room, pausing to press my ear against the door. I heard one of them snoring, the other breathing heavily just short of snoring. I decided I would go ahead and ask them if a sign with red letters would be staked to our lawn any time soon, let them reply however they wanted, and seek my answers through closed doors and open windows.