A So-Called Vacation (2 page)

Gus had the taciturn look of someone who had been burned before. Finally he said, with an edge of disbelief, “So you'd fix cars in a migrant camp.”

“In a camp, yes. They're almost like villages.”

“So you'd be like a … village blacksmith.” Gus twisted the phrasing to heighten its absurdity.

His sister Paula whispered in his ear, “And if you believe Dad, you can be the village idiot.”

“You've never been in those camps,” their father added, “so you don't know. I could set up a makeshift auto shop. Just find me a shade tree and an assistant or two.” He fixed his gaze on his sons, who looked away.

Paula, who was packing snacks for an end-of-school party at her middle school, smoothed his hair, and plucked out an unruly gray one. “Dad, you work in a garage, with fans all over the place. And even then you're short of breath. You'd die if you had to work outside, in the heat.”

“California summers aren't like here.”

Their mother was not convinced either. “I doubt that any camp has enough cars to keep you busy.”

“I'll visit nearby camps. I'll work out of the van, like making house calls.”

“Won't the crew leaders mind?” she asked.

“I'll be doing them a favor. Their workers won't have to take time off to go into town for repairs. I'll be raking in the cash, so I might even give them a cut.”

“And what'll we do?” Paula asked. “Count it?”

“A little fieldwork wouldn't hurt.”

“I knew there was a catch,” Gabriel shook his head.

“With Dad there's always a catch,” said Gus.

“On slow days I could join the rest of you in the fields. You like to work in our garden, Paulita. Think of an agricultural field as a huge garden.”

“Dad, I don't like it
that
much. Besides, I can barely manage that small patch out front.”

“Of course, I'd have to camouflage my plan with stoop labor every now and then. A grower won't let us live in his camp without doing a little exercise.”

Paula stared straight at him. “Especially after you mess up your back and have to stay behind and work on cars.”

He stared back, dumbfounded that she had read his thoughts, but he recovered with a nonchalant, “Naturally.”

“But,
amor
, what's the closest our kids ever came to a produce field? Your childhood stories?”

Gus smiled, “Oh, right, the stories.” He exaggerated his father's accent: “Once upon a time, when men were men …”

Gabriel joined in. “What about the boys? Weren't there boys back then?”

Gus imitated their father's dismissive hand gesture. “The work either killed them or made them men.”

Without realizing it, their father repeated the gesture. “Look at me. I didn't die. All that work made me stronger.”

Gabriel almost added that if he had spent more time in school instead of the fields, they might be better off and not having this conversation. But that was the sort of low blow his own father might pull, so he held back.

“Besides, kids, who owns those fancy pickups I work on all day? Migrants! Pimply-faced teenagers, at that!”

“Well,
mi amor,
they work hard for their money.”

“In the hot sun,” Gus added. “That's why they have pimples.”

“I work hard, too. Yet my oldest kid rides a bus to school while some dropout kid drives a customized truck.”

The remark did not win over Gus, but it did silence him. Even their mother admitted, “He'll be eighteen next month. He does need a car.”

Paula grabbed her school snacks and ran to the door. “He'll need one this morning if we miss the bus! It's the last day!”

Their father tried making one last point over the teenage commotion, but by then he only had an audience of one.

“
Mi vida
, they've already heard that speech a hundred times.”

“Maybe it'll sink in on the hundred and first.”

B
y the time both brothers stepped off the bus, Gus realized that his anxiety had peaked during the past few days. All that week he had worried whether his grades in science and literature would keep him from becoming a senior.

“If I am held back,” he told his kid brother to soothe his own nerves, “I'll simply stay for summer school. Then Dad can't take me to California.” He managed an unconvincing indifference that only amplified his anxiety.

“You'll pass. And we'll all stay home this summer.”

That day, as Gabriel went from one classroom to the next, he felt the joyful exhaustion of a marathon runner approaching the finish line. It wasn't until his fourth period class that his father's absurd scheme crossed his mind. He wondered whether the migrant students felt the same relief about the end of classes. Perhaps there was little to cheer about if the only thing to look forward to was fieldwork. Maybe for them school was the lesser evil.

But when he thought of actually asking them to find out how they felt, he realized that all the migrant kids had left weeks before. He simply hadn't noticed because they rarely spoke and almost were never called on by teachers. They were invisible.

In-between classes he crossed paths with Gus, who timidly pumped a fist in victory. It was a bit premature to celebrate, since he had not yet gone to science, his weakest subject.

After school Gabriel went to the bus-boarding zone and searched for his brother's lucky yellow shirt, but after several buses left, he began to worry that Gus had been overly confident. Just then he felt a powerful, familiar grip on his nape.

“Hey, sophomore squirt!”

“Oh, so that's why you're late! All that sucking up to be a senior.”

Gus shoved him into a group of girls, and by the time he reemerged to congratulate him, Gus was already hugging his girlfriend Diane. Gabriel was reluctant to interrupt the lovebirds, but another senior thought nothing of ruffling their feathers.

“Kissing her good-bye, dude?”

Gus stiffened when he recognized Ben, the popular, fair-skinned Hispanic who had dated Gus's girl the previous year.

“No, no good-byes,” said Gus, still embracing her. “I'll be here in the fall,” he added proudly, “like any other senior.”

“I didn't mean fall. I meant saying good-bye for the summer.”

“I'll be here, too.”

“Oh, really? I heard you were heading to California, like those kids who already left.”

Diane looked at Gus, waiting for an explanation, but he simply said, “You heard wrong. I'm staying here.”

“I heard your family had other plans.”

Gus shook his head firmly, then glanced at Gabriel who repeated the headshake.

“I heard your dad asked my uncle about California. Something about farmwork.”

Diane stared harder, but Gus continued to concentrate his gaze on Ben.

“Why would anyone ask your uncle about farmwork? What, he's a migrant?”

Ben became flustered for a moment, but then recovered. “He's a crew boss. He contracts with farmers out of state, then sends them families to work.”

“Oh, so he's
sort of
a migrant.” Gus let him squirm under the stigma for a moment. “Well, your uncle heard wrong. Dad wants to take us on a two-week vacation to the West Coast.”

Ben leaked a sarcastic smile to show he knew he was being conned, then started toward the student parking lot. “Whatever. Anyway, I've got sunscreen in the convertible if you need some. Just go easy on the surfing or else you'll come back dark as a field hand.”

Gus drew his girlfriend closer. “Then we'll make a better match.”

Ben looked at her and mimed a phone call. “If you get lonely this summer we can go cruising with the top down, like in the old days.”

“Aren't your freckles still allergic to the sun?” she asked.

On the way home the brothers slouched in the rear of the bus to appear inconspicuous, but several students turned and gave them knowing looks.

“Great,” whispered Gus. “Now everyone knows. But it doesn't matter. What they don't know is that we have our own plans.”

“We do?” When his older brother didn't elaborate, Gabriel added, “I think Dad means it this time. He's already told half the town.”

“I don't care if he tells the other half. We'll just tell him we'll die of shame if we have to do fieldwork.”

“I don't think shame works with Dad. If we say we're ashamed to work in the fields, he'll say it's our soft, lazy butts we should be ashamed of.”

Gus, though, felt the time had come to fight back, with the same ammunition their father used ridicule, rather than reason. “Then we turn right around and throw the shame back at him. We'll ask him, and everyone else who might be listening, just one question. ‘In this day and age, what kind of father makes his kids work like peons?'”

“Isn't that going too far?”

“No. Making your kids slave in the hot sun all summer, that's going too far.”

“But weren't you thinking of being a lifeguard this summer?”

“That's different, Gabi! Being a lifeguard is cool. But a migrant …” The mere thought made his eyes harden. “No. I won't let him humiliate us like that.”

Gabriel had his doubts but still trusted his brother's tactics. Gus was not that clever, but he was tenacious, especially when he felt that his insecurities about his family's fortunes might melt his shell of athletic self-assurance.

Gabriel, being two years younger, didn't mind as much his image at school. What he did mind was spending the summer at stoop labor.

As soon as their father got home from work they decided to keep his mind off the topic, on the assumption that ignoring it long enough would make it disappear. So at the dinner table Gabriel mentioned how his grades had turned out even better than last year's. Gus, for his part, simply vowed to do better his senior year.

“Take your studies seriously,” said their father. “It's your best weapon in life.”

Gabriel never quite knew how to take those homilies on education. After all, when the migrant at the auto parts store had mentioned pulling his kids out of school early, his own father not only said nothing, he seemed to envy the man's initiative. Today, though, his father was all for education.

“After all …” he inserted with a melodramatic pause. “One never knows what the future brings.”

But in this case everyone at the table already knew what was coming: “My father left while I was still in grade school. He just leaned over and … whispered goodbye.”

When they used to hear the tale as children he would lean over them himself, as if reliving the episode by placing them in his shoes. But nowadays Gus already towered over him, so he was forced to gaze up.

“Those were his last words. Then he was gone.” He touched his chest ever so carefully, as though fearing he might suffer the same fate. “His heart, you know.”

They knew. They all knew from one moment to the next his father had left him forever. They knew too how the heart attack that killed him was so massive that by the time he hit the bedroom floor he was probably dead. At least that's what they knew from their father.

What Gabriel had not known until last year—what his father did not know that he knew—was that between those two incidents, the whispered farewell and the fatal fall, almost a year had passed. Gabriel had been interviewing his grandmother Olga for a family oral history project when she mentioned how her husband had left her for a younger woman. “He kissed our children goodbye and was barely out the door when I warned him she'd run him into the ground. I just never imagined she'd kill him so quick.”

“But Dad said his father collapsed on the bedroom floor after kissing his kids good-bye.”

Abuelita Olga, buffeted by life too many times, had learned to mitigate its absurdity with a deadpan irony. “Oh, he did fall dead on the floor, but in another woman's bedroom. Listen, with a heart attack like that, so sudden and so strong, he didn't even have time to kiss his own butt good-bye.”

For years Gabriel had vaguely sensed gaps and inconsistencies in his father's official version of the family's history, but had never given it much thought. “Does Dad know that's how it happened?”

She shrugged and put out a cigarette. Then she exhaled a cloud so dense that Gabriel marveled how anyone could hold in so much smoke. “I don't know. He never asked me, and I saw no reason to ruin his fantasy. You're the first to poke around with this homework assignment. Anyway, people believe what they want to believe.”

“Do you suppose it was justice from God? His death, I mean?”

By then she had lit a second cigarette and sighed out another billow. “Why would I want him dead? No, justice would have meant sending him back home to us, with a change of heart and a clean change of clothes.”