The Book Sense 76
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. . . . I was told by the editor of the newspaper to be out of town by the time the interview appeared. Someone somewhere decided that what I had to say was somehow dangerous. I thought this was a joke. Then an editor took me to the foyer where several of the paper's reporters had been executed. All I'm saying, I protested, is that poor people should be treated with respect. She lit a cigarette and said, Be out of town.

Things that seemed perfectly clear to me turned confusing and opaque.

In the interview, I offered the often-quoted comment from By the Lake of Sleeping Children that I, as a son of the border, had a barbed-wire fence neatly bisecting my heart. The border, in other words, ran through me. The journalist said, "Aha!" and scribbled with real vigor.

When the article came out, however, the comment had been transformed. I'm still not sure what it means. It said: "If you were to cut Urrea's heart open, you would find a border patrol truck idling between his ribs."

I was going to write, "Meanwhile, back home. . ." But where is home? Home isn't just a place, I have learned. It is also a language. My words not only shape and define my home. Words -- not only for writers -- are home. Still, where exactly is that?

Jimmy Santiago Baca reminds us that "Hispanics" are immigrants in our own land. By the time Salem was founded on Massachusetts Bay, any number of Urreas had been prowling up and down the Pacific coast of our continent for several decades. Of course, the Indian mothers of these families had been here from the start. But manifest destiny took care of us all-while we greased the wheels.

Them wagons is still rollin'.

I saw a hand-lettered sign on television. It was held up by a woman in stretch pants and curlers, and it said: America For Americans. A nearby man held up a sign exhorting the universe to speak English or go home.

The official language of the United States.

Well, sure. We speak English and, apparently, Ebonics. I want to call Chicano slang Aztonics while we're at it. Orale, Homes-we down, ¿qué no? Simón, vato-let's trip out the rucas of the school board, ese! Ese torcido rifa, locos!

It's all English. Except for the alligator, which is a Spanish word. Lariat, too, is a Spanish word.

In fact, here's a brief list, in no particular order. It might help you score points in a trivia parlor game someday. All words borrowed from Spanish:

Chaps
Savvy
Palaver
Hoosegow
Palomino
Coyote
Pinto
Marijuana
Vamoose
Stampede
Buckaroo
Adobe
Saguaro
Rodeo
Ranch
Rancher
Patio
Key (as in Florida Keys)
Florida
Sarsaparilla
Navajo
Nevada
Machete
Texas
Alfalfa
Bonanza
Bronco
Calaboose
Canyon
Colorado
Fandango
Foofaraw
Guacamole
Hackamore
Beef jerky
Lasso
Abalone
Vanilla
Chocolate
Cigar

For example. Perfectly acceptable English. Nary an Aztonic word in sight...

II

Poor Old Ma. . . .

. . . .After an untidy divorce from her first husband, my mother joined the Red Cross and sailed across the Atlantic on a troop transport to take part in World War II. She drove around battlefields making coffee and doughnuts. She was sitting in a bathtub in London when a buzz bomb went overhead, and the engine cut out, and it fell. She held the hands of flamethrower victims in a MASH tent. She hid in a farmhouse all night as German tanks rumbled past, no one hundred yards from the back wall. She entered Buchenwald with George Patton's troops and took ghastly photographs I was forbidden to see.

And then Mom was hurt.

She and two Red Cross pals were driving a Jeep near the front. I don't know where they were, though I suspect they were in Germany. The women had been serving coffee all day and were in a hurry to get back to base camp. I never knew who was driving.

They were in blackout conditions, so the headlights of the Jeep were taped down to small slits. The light was dim at best, less than the light thrown by parking lights today. It was getting late, and they were in mountains. The road was familiar to them, so the driver was taking the turns pretty fast.

I imagine them at the head of a ghostly train of dust, their hair flying, the laughter a bit too loud, almost daring the snipers to get them. Laughing in the face of the ever-hungry death that surrounded them. One of the women was named Jill, and I can imagine my mother calling her "Jilly" and "dear girl." The night was getting chill. The trees, ragged negative spaces around them in the dark, smelled heady and beautiful after a day full of the smells of smoke, mud, blood, terror.

What they didn't know was that a mortar round had taken out the middle of the lane on a turn. The driver hit the crater full speed. The Jeep became airborne, and all three women were catapulted over the edge of the cliff.

She never knew how long they were down there.

She used to tell me she'd awakened to the sound of screaming. She was on her hands and knees in mud. She was crawling in the blackness, trying to find the screamer. The mud was actually a pond made of her own blood. And then she realized she herself was screaming.

I realize now, when I'm trying to tell you, that I don't know where the Jeep went-if it exploded, or tumbled, or stayed on the road, or even if it came down the slope on top of them. And I don't know what happened to the "girls." It never occurred to me to ask. Though later, in other stories, there was a "dear Jill" who vanished over the edge of a cliff and was never found.

My mother's leg was nearly severed. It was cut loose and bleeding wildly. The scar disfigured her leg for the rest of her life. You never saw my mom in shorts. She was never able to drive after the wreck. She grew unreasonably fearful of cars, especially in the mountains. And there was no way, for some reason, she would allow you to drive her over a bridge. You could only get Phyl over such barriers as the Hudson River or the San Francisco Bay with a good shot of Baileys Irish Cream.

When their marriage became a long chess game of hate, my father would turn our Sunday drives into small torture sessions. He'd make our'49 Ford take Cuyamaca Mountain's curves a hair too fast, and my Poor Old Ma would frantically stomp her foot on the phantom brake, and my father would laugh at her. "Please, Papa," she'd mutter.

"Jesus Christ, Feliciana," he'd reply, blowing smoke through his nostrils. "We're only going forty-five!"

Feliciana was what he made of Phyllis, a name utterly alien to a Mexican. Most of the relatives called her "La Pillips." My dad's name for her roughly meant "happy woman." One of those tawdry little ironies writers pay a nickel for.

Sometime late in that catastrophic night, Mom became aware of flashlights zigzagging down the cliff toward her. She tried to stifle her cries, for she couldn't know what fate was descending. She was certain the Nazis had found her and would finish her when a light hit her full in the eyes and a good old New York G.I. yelled, "Jesus, it's goyls!" (Goyls, my mother always said, remembering this midnight saint and giggling. it never failed to make her laugh-the real, tinkling laugh, the happiness bell she so seldom rang. For the rest of her life, this forgotten soldier's accent turned her into a delighted six-year-old.)

The soldiers dressed her wounds. Again, imagination has failed me until this moment, when I write it. What was the scene? How many men from that patrol bent over her, cut her clothes away? My mother, with her actress looks, ripped and bleeding and naked in the tender hands of these armed men. What did she feel? Did her modesty protest? Was she embarrassed? Did my mother cry?

And the soldiers, out on killing business, suddenly transformed to sweaty angels. What a scene it must have been. I can hear them trying to calm her as they constructed some sort of stretcher and hoisted her to their shoulders. Their rough and dirtied hands holding her steady as they struggled up the slope with her. And the long and mysterious journey in their care. Did they find a truck? Did they carry her all the way?

My mother, bouncing through the night, bleeding her life away into the filthy undershirts of unnamed, faceless warriors.

Copyright © 1998 Luis Alberto Urrea. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

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Luis Alberto Urrea works in many genres: poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Though best known for his nonfiction -- his 1999 memoir Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life won the American Book Award -- Urrea has also earned numerous awards and accolates for his poetry and fiction. Born of an American mother and a Mexican father, Urrea uses his humor and love of language to explore themes of isolation and the search for love and acceptance, as well as to celebrate the world around him. Author of nine books, Urrea has written of his work with a missionary group administering to the poor living in the dumps of Tijuana and his journeys through the Rocky Mountains and the American West. He is currently living with his family in Chicago where he teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
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