Naomi Hirahara - Santa Cruz Noir

When I helped her pile everyone back into the car, she asked me what I was doing the next morning — if I wanted to help her again, maybe at her house. She showed me on my map and I wrote down her address in the margin and all of a sudden I had a job! Just for the mornings, but it was a start. I didn’t need to have a degree, or a resume, or fill out any paperwork. I could go ahead and call myself a teacher if I wanted.

It’s funny because working at a day care turned out to be a lot closer to sex work than you’d think. You have to be present in your body and not overthink things. You have to trust that your body is being used for good. Also, it helped that my immune system was bulletproof from all those years dancing. I had developed a lot of patience too.

By the end of the week, Marta and I already had this mother/daughter thing going on. Nothing like what I had with my own mom, thank god. The house was warm and comfy, and with all the kids and cousins around, it felt like family real quick. I thought it was a blessing to find her so soon after moving, to be welcomed in like that. It was special. I tried not to talk about my past or that I was still sleeping in my car, but she worried. She packed me meals to bring back and gave me a whistle. When I made a crack about who would hear a whistle all the way out there — she opened her purse and tried to give me her knife.

One day, we were back at the beach with the kids and she said that Ricky might have a lead on a place for me. I think she called Ricky her brother or brother-in-law; but maybe Ricky was another cousin?

Hoo-boy, Ricky was hot. I’m going to be blunt about it because one thing that makes me nuts is when people can’t just call it for what it is. Ricky was a stone fox and no sane person would refute it. He wore these tight black jeans and boots all caked with mud, Western shirts with snaps. Mustache. You get the picture. He fixed stuff around Marta’s house, like the garbage disposal and the toilet, and he had a formality about him that turned me on. He passed me a tub of margarine one time at dinner and my hand touched his, and I thought I was gonna die.

Now this whole time I was assuming Ricky made his money as a fix-it guy and a fisherman. He had poles in his truck, and he was always unloading coolers into the backyard, hosing them out, filling them with fresh ice. There were a lot of fishermen around, selling cod or rockfish out of their coolers by the gas station or near St. Patrick’s.

If you pressed me, I guess I’d say it was illegal. Maybe you had to have a license? People sold a lot of stuff around Watsonville. Tortillas, tamales, churros, blankets, flags. And I’m sure there were drugs, like all places, but I didn’t see them. I was around a different crowd back then, mostly older Catholic people who worked hard and had one eye on la Migra .

Ricky came twice a week — sometimes with kids, sometimes not. He had an “office” that was a converted bathroom where he took the little ones. Marta said he was checking for lice, signs of chicken pox. The kids’ parents were too scared to take them to the public clinic. God, I remember hating my nits getting picked too; I would cry my head off, just like they did.

One morning I got to work — I usually showed up around six thirty and we’d eat and get everything set for the kids to arrive — and Marta hugged me so tight. She told me Ricky had a place I could live for cheap. A place just for me. It was out in Corralitos, where there wasn’t much except for a meat market and a lot of apple orchards. But it was sitting there empty. There had been a huge flood the winter before, the famous one that triggered all the landslides, thousands of them, and the cabin had gotten pretty well dumped on and waterlogged. It was going to be moldy, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t fix. Spring was coming, and we could open everything up and let it dry out.

We laid out the snacks for the kids and then Ricky showed up. He arrived with two little ones I hadn’t seen before, though I don’t think they were his. The number of kids fluctuated daily, I think, because most of the parents worked in the fields, and not all the moms worked every day.

Marta never turned away anyone, even when kids were swinging from the curtain rods and diapers were running low. It was chaos, but it worked somehow. Some of them practically lived there. One set of twins, a boy and girl (named Albino and Blanca — White and White, if you can believe it), had been staying overnight every weekday for months. Their mom was deported after being pulled over for some traffic nonsense and it was impossible for their dad to take care of them and work at the same time. Marta was keeping them until they could fly down to Mexico with another relative to be reunited with their mom.

I thought those kids were lucky. In rich neighborhoods, you couldn’t have a group of more than three children in a home without the California Department of Social Services breathing down your neck, and here were all these babies getting loving care practically for free.

I should’ve taken my own car to see the cabin instead of riding with Ricky. I knew that the minute I started talking to him, my mouth would be leaking honey. I hated that about myself — used to be if there was an attractive man around, my whole everything changed. My voice got softer, I held my body differently, I said the stupidest shit. I had just learned to get ahold of myself and I didn’t want to ruin things.

Then Ricky opened the car door for me and Marta put a jade plant on my lap and I started to fall apart, ever so slightly.

The cab of his Chevy was tidy. I remember the carpet on the floor was freshly vacuumed in those long professional-detailer strokes, first one direction and then the next. He had a cup holder attached to a sandbag laid across the hump below the stick shift and an air freshener with la Virgen on it. He kept his eyes on the road, even when I couldn’t stop thanking him. I was so grateful to be given this fresh start, yet I was probably giving off a vibe of wild desperation.

We wound back onto the country roads, past orchards, getting farther and farther from the ocean. It was only about twenty minutes away, but it was rural, and I didn’t have a sense where I was at first. He pulled off the road and we dropped down into a driveway. The cabin was a bitty thing, surrounded by brush and fallen branches, but it had two windows in the front with window boxes underneath them. I imagined I would fill them with flowers, maybe herbs — buy a bright yellow watering can and even learn to cook. I didn’t have any furniture, but I did have a welcome mat. For some reason I’ll never know, I had grabbed it from me and my old man’s place when I stormed out the door. I think it was my way of saying, Now you gotta wipe your feet somewhere else, asshole . Dave probably hadn’t even noticed it was gone.

Ricky walked around to the back and I followed him. He climbed up on a pile of wood, hoisted open a small window, and went through it, headfirst. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he popped up from the other side of the window, like, Ta-da! It was the first genuine smile I’d seen from him, and I laughed.

I started to climb in myself and he was saying, “No, no,” and motioning toward the front door, but I dove in right after him. He helped pull me all the way through by my armpits and the minute my feet hit the floor, it was on. We were going at it. We were kissing and pawing each other, we wrestled ourselves into the main room, and then we were peeling our pants off and rolling around on that filthy, disgusting floor. God, it felt good.

It wasn’t until after that I could see what a real mess the place was, and boy did it smell bad too. Garbage and animal turds and big holes in the walls. It looked like whomever had been squatting had vacated awhile ago.