Drift
(an excerpt)
Helen Spica (Senior, Grosse Pointe, MI)
Your brother has been dying for seven years and you didn't know it. How could you have? But still, when your mother tells you he's dying, that he's been dying for a long time, you feel that familiar drop of your heart into your stomach, and anger rams into you like an express train. You want to punch her, punch her until she tells you the truth, because of course your brother's not dying. He's nineteen. He's not going anywhere.
But your mother's not lying. Her eyes are wet, and she doesn't cry easily; she's a strong woman. She says they've been to the doctor and he said it: your brother can't hang on much longer. She wears a cross around her neck and she's holding it now, rubbing it between her thumb and index finger as if it's going to make a bit of difference.
It used to be that if you ever wanted to find your brother, all you had to do was walk down to the old filling station. The neighborhood boys made a basketball court in the parking lot a few years ago, nailed a hoop up to the side of the garage, and that's where you'd always find them after they'd come back from work.
Your brother and all the other males around here work in the almond fields. You can see them from the filling station parking lot, only separated from your houses by a chain-link fence and some barbed wire. You haven't seen a sunset in a while, but sometimes you see a faint orange and pink through the factory smoke and the pesticide particles, a glow you know can only be made by the sun slipping down the sky. It sinks over the almond fields so that in the evenings, when you sit in the back of a broken pick-up truck and watch your brother play ball, you look for it, search for that light just above the trees.
The boys play until it's black as pitch and they can't see to pass the ball anymore. You sit in the bed of the truck and watch your brother play, and he's faster and stronger than any of the other boys, and he knows it. He knows it, and you can always tell which guys he doesn't like because he's tougher on them, never passes to them, slams them against the side of the garage. Like Nico or Santos-you've been with both of them and your brother hates them for that because he's your Big Brother, and, as he's told you before, that's his job.
But he's a good brother, even if he's a hypocrite sometimes, even if he's slept with all your school friends and doesn't even try to hide it. They try to tell you about it, giggle when you walk past the court, want to give you all the details, and you turn to them and say, "I don't want to know about my brother's dick." And you've been so mad at him you've tried to punch him, like when he beat up Dimas in the school parking lot after you made it with him for the very first time. But you missed your brother's head and hit the wall behind it, and five bones in your hand smashed. And your brother drove you to the ER as fast as he could, ran six red lights even though you kept telling him it didn't hurt that much, you were fine, and his face said he was more worried than you were.
Your mother works at the Italian market in town, selling food you can't afford to people who live in the mountains. You hear from kids at school that the air up there is cleaner, but you live about as low as the land gets, sandwiched between factories and fruit fields. You've never thought it was a bad place to live, because you've never been anywhere else and besides, you've always been happy here. Sometimes when you work with your mother behind the deli counter your peers from school come in and they look at you with a smirk, and you know it's because you're serving them. You're the lowest latitude; your brother picked the almonds that they are now buying in white wrapping and stuffing their faces with. You know what those almonds mean. You know that your brother comes home powdered white with pesticides, his legs shaking under him from walking the rows of trees all day, sweeping up almonds after the shakers have knocked them down. Those almonds are the only work your brother can get here, the same way they were the only work your father could get, because they're not even supposed to be in this country, are they? And your brother, he works harder than anyone you know, but still he's not wanted for anything but almond trees, so sometimes when you wrap up your classmates' meat you spit in it if your mama isn't watching.
But it doesn't matter. You can spit in their food or fight with them at lunch all you want; they still live on higher ground. Their fathers are lawyers and their mothers don't work eleven hours a day carrying meat from a freezer, and their brothers aren't stuck in a fruit field between sprayers and shakers and sweat-covered foreheads.
Your mother tells you it's the pesticides. And when she tells you this she touches your face, because you're in this too, aren't you? Every day when the wind blows east that white dust picks up off the almond trees and comes right into your house and all your neighbor's houses. And the boys playing hoops at the old filling station get it most of all. They've been standing in it all day, a mix of the sun and the chemical spray. You're all breathing in the drift. That's why your brother sealed the windows shut one day and wouldn't tell you why. That's why he was always saying he was saving up for you so you could get out of here, but you never knew where you were going or why he felt you had to leave.
