He peered into the cab and saw the reason. Señora Mendoza, her hair up in a scarf, her lunch box on the dash, sat beside the passenger door. His father and Char’s mother must have come straight from work—Salva checked his watch—which meant they had been waiting together for half an hour.
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t bother to point out that he hadn’t known they were coming or to explain that the reason he was late was because Coach Robson and Markham didn’t see eye to eye on when it was important for Salva to be at practice. Papá would have sided with the principal.
Señor Resendez descended from the cab for his son to enter.
Salva deposited his stuff in the pickup bed, careful to avoid the patches of grease, then climbed into the cab and greeted Señora Mendoza, whose response was terribly polite for a woman who had spent an extra thirty minutes in a pickup after a twelve-hour shift. She worked under his father, so her schedule was subject to his. And Señor Resendez, despite—or maybe because of—being manager, always accepted the longest hours.
“¿Cómo fue tu primer día?” Papá asked about his son’s day.
Salva shrugged. As first days went, it had pretty much sucked. No phys ed. AP English. Markham’s surprise meeting, for no reason.
Salva’s father didn’t need to know any of this.
“You have homework?” came the next question as Señor Resendez steered out of the parking lot.
Twenty pages of Paradise Lost to read for the Mercenary, but Papá didn’t need to know that either. “It was only the first day,” Salva replied.
He expected a complaint about how every school day should be used to the fullest, but the actual response was a surprise. “Bueno.” Señor Resendez grinned over his son’s head. “Señora Mendoza and I think you should teach Charla to drive.”
¿Qué?
“You have time tonight. Is still light for more hours.”
No, no, no, no, no. His father knew Char didn’t have a license. She wasn’t legal, unlike her younger brother, and she couldn’t get a permit without documentation, so it hadn’t been safe for her to take driver’s ed. Though, of course, that’s why she needs the lesson. Salva needed a reason to refuse that his father might actually accept. “Mira, this pickup es imposible.” Salva pointed at the wires springing from the dead stereo and at the open glove-box door that refused to shut. “You can’t expect her to learn to drive in this…” Hunk of junk.
As if to prove the point, the vehicle chose that moment to stop in the middle of the road and jerk up and down before returning to forward motion. His father relaxed the gas pedal and crawled past cop corner at about fifteen miles per hour.
“You see, Papá. It barely obeys you.”
A decent argument. One that might have worked with someone else, but his father had an ulterior motive. “You are intelligent, hijo. You can help her.”
Salva was not so sure. He hadn’t managed to help Char learn her multiplication tables or memorize the names of all the countries in Europe. And he certainly hadn’t been able to help her pass the state’s high-school standardized test.
“But Papá”—this time the protest was weak—“where would we practice?”
His father sobered. “Take to her to the Fentzsen place. Mr. Fentzsen no will mind.”
Salva felt his chest go cold. He hadn’t been to the Fentzsen farm since Mamá’s death four years ago.
The pickup shuddered to a halt outside the Mendoza home, and Salva and his father bailed from the vehicle so that Char’s mother could climb out. The door on the passenger side hadn’t worked for years. She exited, then hurried inside to suggest the idea of the driving lesson to her daughter.
What were the chances Char would turn it down? Though she had never liked studying with Salva, even when they were dating. Maybe she wouldn’t care for this either.
But the brief grasp at hope departed as Char emerged from the front door. Her hairstyle had changed since lunch, the ebony strands tied back instead of sculpted with spray, and she had exchanged her too-tight jeans for a pair of very white, very short shorts.
His father greeted her with a huge smile and a joke in Spanish that she didn’t seem to get. Char’s mastery of Spanish was worse than her English. Then Papá gave her a hand up into the pickup. “You two go,” he said. “I can walk home from here.” Then he squeezed his son’s shoulder and admonished, “Be a gentleman.”
Battle lost, Salva accepted the keys and climbed up next to Char. She had seated herself in the middle, instead of sliding over to the window, despite the fact that the rip in the center section of the seat must have scratched her bare thighs.
He turned the key, pushed the gas pedal, and felt the engine die. Oh, this was going to be great. “Sorry,” he said as he revved the engine for the second time and felt the pedal catch. “Hope this doesn’t mess with your plans.”
She didn’t reply.
Of course not. This was Char. Nothing to say to each other. It had been like this their whole dating experience. Why would she want to relive that?
“So…how was your day?” he asked in a pathetic attempt at conversation.
She just shrugged, her hand dropping to the seat. Alongside his thigh.
They headed through town, her body inching closer to his every time the pickup chose to stop and jerk.
He tried again. “What classes are you taking?”
“Study hall.” Then the volume of her voice sank. “R. English, R. writing, R. math.” The R stood for remedial. There were no options on the remedial track. The topic died.
Silence. He tried to focus on the road. Houses faded in the rearview mirror, and the fields engulfed him, the strong scent of dust and sweet onions assailing his nostrils. Then memory invaded—his mother at the head of the harvest crew: her long black braid swinging, her straw hat shading her face, her laughter chiming with the voices of the other workers, her shouts of command to the truck drivers, her strong grip as she showed Salva how to top onions, her complete and total exhaustion after a day in these same fields.
The pickup stopped again, jerking him out of his memories. He’d missed a turn. Salva swerved up on the bank and brought the vehicle around.
Char clutched the dash. “Is something wrong?”
Now she talks. He backtracked a hundred yards, then curved the vehicle onto a straight stretch of emptiness. The gravel beneath the wheels was thin, and the dirt blew up like powder.
Salva pulled over to the side of the road. “Okay, this is the clutch. This is the gear shift. The gears go in a pattern, but the picture has rubbed off so you’ll have to remember the locations.” He rattled on for about a minute before he realized he was talking for himself. Char had never learned well by listening.
Get a grip. He ran his hand through his hair, then swung open the door and hopped out of the pickup. “So we’d better switch places.”
She slid into the driver’s seat, not getting out, which meant he had to climb back in over her. Be a gentleman, his father’s advice rang in his mind.
Sí, Papá, but what do you do when she’s not a lady?
Salva talked Char through the use of the mirrors, only one of which was still adjustable, then explained how to start the pickup. “Don’t worry if the engine doesn’t catch the first time. It doesn’t a lot. Just listen and feel the vibration beneath your foot; the feel should change when it works. Then you can let up on the clutch.”
She tried.
Nothing happened.
She tried five more times. Each time, the engine revved, then died when she lifted her foot.
On her seventh try, the whole pickup shook like Mount St. Helens, then died again.
Her eyes had widened, and the color had drained from her face, the same look she had always had right before fleeing the homework table.
“Look.” Salva lowered his voice. “You don’t have to do this. We could just drive around and tell them I gave you a lesson.”
“No,” she said, soft but serious. “I won’t end up like m
y mother.”
He wrinkled his brow.
“I won’t be like her,” Char insisted, “having to count on someone else to take her to work, stuck in a nothing job because Renaldo’s father brought her here and then abandoned her without a visa, scared all the time that he will come back and want Renaldo and she won’t have any power because she’s not a citizen. And too scared to try to become one because she might risk what little she has here.”
Salva stared, not sure he’d ever heard Char say so much at one time in his life. Of course, she was right. Unless she could drive, she would be trapped.
“Okay,” he said, “how about if I start the pickup, and you work on the steering?”
Relief flooded her eyes.
He maneuvered over her again, revved the engine, and shifted into first, then second. He couldn’t slide back to the center of the seat without causing a wreck, so he wedged himself by the driver’s door, trying not to lean on it because it had been known to fly open.
He didn’t have much time to think about that, though, because Char had taken over the gas pedal with her own foot. The pickup roared, then almost died, but eventually took off in a long wobbly line. Her fingers clutched the steering wheel so hard, her knuckles shone white.
The vehicle reached a fork. “Take the left,” he said. “It curves, so try to stay on the right side of the road, just in case someone might be coming.”
She bit her lip and nodded.
They started off around the corner.
The wind picked up and blew a tumbleweed across the gravel.
She gasped, and her hands vibrated.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just—”
A pheasant. The bird burst from the stubble right in front of the tires.
Char cried out and jerked the steering wheel to the right. The pickup rocked up on the bank, then swerved back, skidding and heading straight for the ditch.
“Watch out!” Salva shouted.
And she dropped both hands from the wheel. “Just take it. Take it!”
He jammed his feet underneath hers, grabbed the wheel, and held his body up with his grip as the driver’s-side door swung open.
Char’s panicked scream ripped through Salva’s eardrums.
Though he was the one in danger, hanging on to the wheel and blocking her from the open door. He pushed on the brake, felt the vehicle thrust forward, fighting his command, then finally stagger to a halt.
Char was still screaming.
Salva’s chest heaved, his heart thundering above his rib cage. He didn’t care what his father said. Someone else could give her lessons.
4
HELL OR HIGH WATER
D. Salva slumped down in his chair and stared at the letter printed at the top of his essay with a felt-tip marker. In green. As if that made it any less of a killer mark. His father was going to burn down the single wide. This was so not all right.
Lifting the front pages with a trembling hand, Salva flipped through the essay. Maybe he’d deleted a paragraph without realizing it. Or maybe he’d switched the latter half with Pepe’s chem lab report. But no—nothing was missing.
“Mundane” was the only comment the Mercenary had bothered to insert.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a D. Or even a C. Well, there had been that health project last year in which the class had been told to film public-service announcements; but that had been a group assignment, and he couldn’t be responsible for pulling everyone up to his level. He hadn’t even been allowed to choose his group members. But that was one of those hokey projects worth about 2 percent of his grade.
This was different. And the D was all his.
He left his front page folded over so no one could see the mark and let his focus drift over to Luka. Who was not dying. A thick green B-was displayed for all to see square in the center of his desk.
“You got a B?” Salva whispered.
Luka raised an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to make me feel bad?”
“No, man, I barely even passed.”
“Seriously?”
Salva didn’t have to respond to that because the Mercenary had finished dispensing her hemlock and was making her way back to the front of the room.
“Overall,” she said, her flinty eyes seeming to drill right into him, “I thought you had a lot more potential.”
Salva’s gaze sought refuge in the ceiling. There was something much safer in looking at the overhead panels with their hundred holes per square than in watching a teacher on a power trip.
“Some of you,” she went on, “actually wrote nice little elementary-school essays with five sentences per paragraph, five paragraphs per essay, and a thesis that started with “My essay is about…” Real anger grated in her voice.
He pressed his spine against the upper edge of his chair. At least someone had done worse than him.
“Most of you just wrote tripe.”
His gaze fell.
Tripe? Luka mouthed.
BS, Salva interpreted. And, well, yeah, what essay wasn’t BS? Did teachers really think students today didn’t have better things to do than analyze classics that had been read and reread a billion times? If there was anything worthwhile to say about Paradise Lost, it had been said three hundred years ago, and Salva really didn’t care to improve on it.
“The point of an essay”—the Mercenary’s face had turned the shade of an overripe apricot—“is to analyze the literary work in a meaningful way, and to apply to it one’s own unique perspective. Or vice versa.”
She was messing with language now. Letting it mean what she wanted it to mean and pretending that was an excuse for communication. Salva prepared to tune her out.
Except he really couldn’t afford to get a D in this class.
Which meant he was going to have to listen to this woman. So he could learn how to write for her. Maybe he wasn’t God’s gift to writing genius, but he knew where to put quotes and commas. For most teachers, that would get you an A right there. And he always made sure he had three pages, a thesis, and a clear beginning, middle, and end. What more did she want?
It was an essay, por amor de Dios. There was no purpose to an essay. It was just one of those things teachers invented so they could torture you with them. And he was as good at following the rules as the next guy, so maybe not an A. But a D?
The Mercenary parked herself in front of the walking disaster area. Beth Courant was just as much of a mess sitting as she was walking. Her backpack lay sideways, jammed halfway under her desk and open, spilling not one, but three loose-leaf notebooks, about twenty pencils, a calculator, and spiraled bits of paper. Not to mention a very torn-up copy of a romance novel titled A Long and Fatal Love Chase that had made its way out into the sacred teaching zone in front of the Mercenary’s foot.
Salva tensed for the explosion.
“Ms. Courant, here,” the Mercenary said, “seems to be the only one of you with the creative guts to go out on a limb and break it off.” She picked up the half-stained paper from Beth’s desk and raised it into the air like the Union flag in The Red Badge of Courage. At the top of the paper, there was a huge green A. “Here she argues that by describing the worlds of heaven and hell, purgatory and earth in vivid detail, Milton defies the schism between science and religion and bridges the space-time continuum.”
My God. Salva cringed. If he was going to have to come up with a thesis like that, he might as well drop out now and start paying union dues at the onion plant.
“Fortunately for the rest of you, I allow students to revise their first piece of work.”
Why? So you can drip poison all over it again?
He returned his gaze to the ceiling and began to invent geometric proofs with the holes in the panels. The rest of the class period dragged by like an overblown big-budget movie with a series of false endings. When the bell finally rang, Salva didn’t trust his own senses.
“Don’t worry.” Luka elbowed him. “This, too, shall pass
. Ya know, I got a B.”
“How?” Salva grimaced. If the running back claimed, like the Mercenary’s star pupil, to have interpreted a bridge through the space-time continuum, then maybe this was all a nightmare and morning would come to the rescue.
Luka chuckled. “How do you think?” He nodded toward Nalani.
Ah. The correct study partner. Salva surveyed the tall girl with the dark Italian-Hawaiian features. She was decent enough looking, he supposed, if you ignored the straitjacket posture, her failure to follow through with things, and her color-coded notes.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Luka added. “She’s my study partner. You get your own.”
Nalani filed away her notebook and reached down to retrieve the romance novel for her best friend, the walking disaster area, who gave a brilliant smile and started yammering away without seeming to notice she had just set her calculator on the desk beside her. Heads together, both girls left the room, leaving the calculator behind.
The Mercenary’s stupid metaphor rang in Salva’s head: The only one with the creative guts to go out on the limb and break it off.
Luka trailed after the girls.
Salva flipped his essay back to the front page and gave a long hard look at that D. Which shifted into visions of a burning single wide, a lifetime at the processing plant, and his father yanking his son off the football team.
D for desperate. He scooped up his backpack, wove his way around two desks, and retrieved the abandoned calculator.
I am an utter failure. Beth stared down at the poster beneath her. The words Sell, sell, sell! sprawled across the white paper as though painted by a three-year-old. How in a nine-hour period could she travel from triumph to devastation? This morning, when her essay had been quoted, she had felt like nothing in the world could hold her down, and now…she had been defeated by a few simple fund-raising posters.
Her knees ached. School had been over for an hour and a half, and she had been here, alone, crouched down on the hard surface of the multipurpose room stage for the whole time. All to achieve nothing better than this.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating.
Though not much. She scanned her previous endeavors, then leaned back.