6
“Faster, Pa, faster! ˇMás rápido!”
“Come on, Pa, you c’n go faster’n that!”
“Pa, as fast as you c’n go, Pa, as fast as you c’n go!”
“Like a car, Pa, like a car!”
The prow shot forward, chasing my father as he reached top speed, and the craft darted into the straight lane that would take us to 103rd Street. My heart unleashed and racing, I looked up into the row of trees at the shoreline, saw swift
islets of blue sky coursing brightly through the green current of foliage. Along the shoreline my father’s pace gradually slowed until he seemed to be moving at half speed. Whenever he glanced backward, we saw sweat trickling down his forehead and following the line of his eyebrows to join the streamlets running from his temples. Beads of perspiration swelled at his hairline and slid down his neck into the blue denim shirt, which deepened to a dolphin color. Far beyond the fence, their smoking stacks thrust into the sky, the steel mills took on the appearance of enormous, dark, steam-driven vessels.
7
At 103rd Street my father veered due west. Ahead of us, at a distance of several blocks, loomed the 103rd Street Bridge. All his pacing had led to this, was a limbering up for this ascent. Many yards before the street rose, my father began to increase his speed with every stride. He did it gradually, never slackening, for the wagon was heavy and accelerated slowly. I placed the gallon jug of water between my legs and tightened them around it as he reached full speed just before storming the incline. He started up unfalteringly, tenaciously, with short, rapid steps and his body bent forward, his natural reaction to the exaggerated resistance sud-denly offered by the wagon. From a point high in the sky the pavement poured down on us. Immediately my father was drenched in sweat. His face, in profile now on the left, now on the right, became twisted with exertion while his broad back grew to twice its size under the strain. We held our breath, maintained a fragile silence, and did not move, our bodies taut from participation in his struggle. All the way up we lost speed by degrees. His breathing grew heavy, labored. His legs slowed, seeking now to recover with more powerful thrusts what they had lost with a diminished number of strokes. His jaw tightened, his head fell, sometimes he closed his eyes, and we could see his tortured face as his arms swung desperately at some invisible opponent, and still he went up, up, up.
8
When the pavement leveled off, he yielded for a moment, broke into a smile, and then, summoning reserves from the labyrinth of his will, lunged forward furiously, as if galvanized by his victory, and reached full speed at the moment the wagon began to descend. Miraculously, he freed himself from the harness, turned the shaft back into the wagon, and jumped on. Winking at us, he fell to his knees and leaned hard on the shaft. He was happy, wildly happy, and saw that we were too, and he laughed without restraint. “Miren, vean, look around you!” he shouted to us.
We were at the summit and the world fell away from us far into the horizon. To the east, steel mills, granaries, railroad yards, a profusion of industrial plants; to the north and south, prairies, trees, some houses; to the west, main arteries, more plants, the great smoking heaps of the city dump, and, farther still, houses and a green sweep of trees that extended as far as the eye saw. Years have changed this area in many ways, but that landscape, like a photo negative, glows in memory’s light.
9
We had churned up the mountainous wave of the bridge, and now, as we coasted down ever faster, we screeched and I could feel my body pucker. Our excitement was different now. It came of expectancy, of the certain knowledge that we would soon be sailing. We were safe with our incomparable pilot, but we howled with nervous delight as we picked up speed. Down, down, straight down we fell, and then the guayín righted itself and my stomach shot forward, threatening for a fraction of a second to move beyond its body.
When the wagon finally came to a stop, my father got down. Again he harnessed himself to it and pulled us onward. He moved with haste but did not run. Looking into the immense blue dome above us, we knew our journey would soon end and we began to shift uneasily, anticipating our arrival. With cupped hands we covered our faces and grew silent while the wheels beneath us seemed to clack-clack louder and louder each time they passed over the pavement lines. At the divided highway my father turned south. We would be there in minutes.
10
The wagon stopped. We dropped our hands, exposing our faces, and climbed down. The full stink of decomposing garbage, fused to that of slow-burning trash, struck us. Before us was the city dump—a great raw sore on the landscape, a leprous5 tract oozing flames and smoldering, hellish grounds columned in smoke and grown tumid across years. Fragments of glass, metal, wood, lay everywhere, some of them menacingly jagged where they had not been driven into the earth by the wheels of the ponderous trucks.
My father had learned that the dump yielded more and better on Saturdays. Truckloads of spoiled produce were dumped that day, truckloads from warehouses, markets, stores, truckloads of stale or damaged food. We would spend the entire day here, gathering, searching, sifting, digging, following the trucks’ shifting centers of activity.
Along a network of roads that crisscrossed the dumping grounds, trucks lumbered to and fro, grinding forward over ruts, jerking back-ward, all of them rocking from side to side. My father took some burlap sacks, scanned the area, and pointed to the site where we would work. He went toward it quickly, followed by my oldest brothers. Lázaro and I stationed the wagon beyond reach of the clumsy vehicles that were already dumping and then made our way to the site. We started to work on a huge pile of deteriorating fruit, picking only what a paring knife would later make edible.