Sour Milk
A Short Story
Pascual struggled to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t slept since the bus left Empalme. But the thing he had always wanted to see was coming into view.
Hunger, too, helped keep him awake. He had already traveled for twenty hours and now the border swung into view, not as he had imagined it— a clearly defined line like a chalk line or a rope— but rather something much more confusing and amorphous. It looked much the same on both sides: a sprawling jumble of cheap cinder block houses with tin roofs, crooked streets, mongrel dogs, mud puddles, electrical wires strung out between poles, and vendors standing alongside of the road, waiting for the caravan of buses to pass by, so they could sell their wares to the passengers. People stood beside small carts on wheels or ramshackle food stands with improvised roofs for shade. The border was just as hot and dusty on each side, and Pascual looked longingly at the Coca-Cola signs, for he was almost as thirsty as he was hungry and sleepy. He kept nodding and falling asleep, then jerking awake again as his head fell forward onto the back of the seat in front of him. Other men on the bus leaned out of the open windows as the dust and heat poured inside. Pascual choked on the fine yellow dust, which mingled with the blue-grey smoke of cigarettes. Then he, too, stuck his head out, so the blast of wind would wake him again. He fingered the few remaining coins in his pocket— which had once been a wad of hard-earned money. He had spent the bulk of it on bribes to get documents. No one had told them about the bribes. He could feel the plague of the mordida even, like the first signs of a malignant illness, even before he left the pueblo. He had felt it the fine words of the mayor and other officials who had praised the bracero program, in terms that extolled the revolution and glorified Mexico, filling everyone with self-importance and expectancy beyond reason.
If it hadn’t been for Ramón, his younger brother, perhaps Pascual would have turned around by now.
The rumbling of the diesel engines of the buses coming along the road in a caravan echoed the rumblings of the stomachs of the men inside them. Pascual rummaged in his pockets again to find the coins he might have missed there the other times. He searched among scraps of papers and gum wrappers and coils of loose thread and found a couple of pebbles. He put a pebble in his mouth and sucked on it for moisture. He tried to swallow, but the dust and desiccation constricted his throat. The dust caked the lining of his nostrils and settled out of the yellow sunlit air on the top of his straw hat and on the shoulders of his sweat-stained shirt. His back ached from sitting in the cramped, worn-out seat next to the window. Ramón and two other men stretched over him and leaned out the window and shouted and laughed. A man who had an old, battered guitar pressed his fingers into the fret board to make a chord and strummed the strings with his other hand and mouthed the words of an old song— searching in his memory for a song of the border, perhaps.
Women and children scurried alongside the bus and surrounded it on all sides, whenever it slowed or came to a stop at an intersection. Streets lights hung from loose wires suspended overhead, along with the remnants of old kites and worn-out tennis shoes dangling from their laces. Political posters and advertisements plastered the walls of buildings and on billboards that stood on rickety scaffolds— poster on top of poster— as elections came and went, with hopeful candidates replacing corrupt ones. Becoming corrupt themselves, they gave way to other hopeful men in the same suits and ties and cowboy hats, with toothy smiles and slick slogans.
“Will they feed us when we get there?” said Ramón. “I’m starving to death.”
His words betrayed a feeling that the men never spoke— that they were all so many cattle in a cattle car.
Pascual shrugged and feigned indifference. All along he had feigned a lot of things, especially knowledge, as he had always done. Ramón looked up to his older brother for guidance and instruction, ever since their father had died from lung disease. He had been a miner in a place called Tonopah, in Nevada, up north, digging silver for a mining company, and came home and started coughing. The doctor said he had something in his lungs, which Pascual imagined at the time as a clot of silver that had collected all the silvery dust his father had inhaled over the years, digging the silver out. His father coughed and coughed and spit up blood and went to Durango for an x-ray, and the doctor said he could see the dark spot on his lung from the silver, or maybe from the blood or dust. Pascual didn’t remember exactly and hadn’t really understood at the time. But a few months later his father had a hemorrhage and died, choking on the bright red blood. Maybe he had tuberculosis, even before he went to work in the mines, said the doctor.
Pascual had taken his place. Ramón and the other children began to depend on him, even though Pascual was not much older than Ramón, the next oldest one. He had to act like a man, pretend to know things he didn’t really know and be reassuring and calm and in control. When he set out on the journey north, at first he thought he knew what to do. But his knowledge and composure had eroded along the way and turned to dust, like the dry yellow dust in his throat and his lungs. He began to fear that he might suffer a similar fate and come home again like his father had.
He had to pretend to know and not to know, because to admit he had had six years of schooling— to act smart and knowing— would disqualify him from the bracero program, which wanted farmers and not smart alecks and troublemakers, strikers or communists. At the same time, he had to pretend to know more than he did, more than he could have known with so little schooling— not enough to comprehend what the doctor had said about his father. But he tried to act smart and worldly. He didn’t want to be “taken in,” as so many others had, like the men who had obtained the coveted work permits at the induction centers, who then had given them to the police as they waited for the bus to the border. But the police had told them a lie and then turned around and sold the permits to other men for a lot of money. Pascual himself had borrowed money for the program, which was supposed to be free. But everyone along the way had demanded money.
Ramón at each step looked to Pascual for guidance to do the right thing, looked for any signs of uncertainty, especially when Pascual had almost run out of money. Finally, they had come to this invisible border.
“Well,” said Pascual, “no doubt they will feed us now, and no doubt we will go to work, and soon we will get our first paycheck, and pretty soon we will be rich men.”
“Look at that lady there,” said Ramón, pointing to a stout woman who stood next to a food cart. “She looks just like Aunt Julia.”
Pascual scowled, just as his stomach scowled to be so empty, and so it spoiled his good humor and made him cross. “No, she doesn’t,” he said.
Aunt Julia had nursed both Ramón and Pascual when their mother had been sick after childbirth each time. A frail woman, she had died soon after her husband.
“Maybe she cooks good, too,” said Ramón, licking his parched lips. “I wish I had a bowl of her menudo right now.”
Rich, fatty menudo, thought Pascual, in spite of himself. He had tried not to think about food, and now Ramón was reminding him not only of food but also of home. Neither young man had ever been away from home before, not alone anyway. When the family went anywhere— if they moved from one pueblo to another to find work, such as to the Laguna to pick cotton in season— they always went together. So a man always had a woman around to mend his clothes and wash them, to cook a hot meal. Now they would have to do these things themselves, for themselves, and the thought made Pascual feel lonesome and scared.
“She doesn’t have menudo,” said Pascual, looking at the lady again. She wore her hair in two long braids and had the fat shapeless body of a woman who had borne several children. Two or three of them assisted her. She had come to the roadside in an old cart that rode on car tires. A donkey stood harnessed to the cart. He wore a comical straw hat and chewed a mouthful of yellow straw. The woman and her assistants— two daughters probably, one in her early teens and the other about ten— helped her as she hauled a heavy battered milk can out of the cart and set it on a small rickety table. The canister had a spigot in the side of it from which the woman began dispensing milk into an assortment of bottles— pints and quarts mostly. The milk looked creamy white, thick and rich. These milk merchants went about their business quickly and efficiently, in a place where the buses had to slow down and stop as officials at the border entered the bus and checked the documents of the braceros. While the officials, in border uniforms, did their work, the men leaned out the windows and made small purchases and discussed among themselves what looked good to eat or drink and whether they wanted to spend their money on it. Mostly they chose to suppress hunger and thirst and wait for the meal they expected to eat soon at the border reception center. Anyway, a pint of milk didn’t seem so appetizing as a bowl of menudo would have been.
The women with the pails of milk beseeched them indifferently, in the worn tones of the hawker— the roadside salesman who sells any- and everything. “Leche, leche,” the women called out. “Leche fresca, para la radiographía, con el fin de pasar la prueba. Pure white milk for the x-ray. In order to pass the test.”
“What are they talking about?” said Ramón. “What is the radiography? I thought we had passed all the tests already.”
Once again Pascual tried to appear all knowing, to conceal his own fear and uncertainty. He listened to the other men on the bus as they talked about the reception center. Some of them had passed through the center before, so they knew something about it. In any case Pascual presumed that they did and listened without appearing to listen so that he could pretend that he hadn’t overlooked something so important as the tests that awaited them. But he couldn’t make any sense of the jumble of conversations and inside the bus, which the noises outside frequently drowned out anyway. Automobiles honked from every direction as motorists tried to get around the caravan of buses. Hawkers approached from all sides and shouted up at the men, who leaned out of the open windows. One or two of the hawkers set up a box or a small step ladder and climbed up to the windows and reached in, fanning the air with hot food in wrappers, or clinking together ice cold bottles of soda. Pascual and Ramón pooled their money but found that they barely had enough for a tortilla and beans.
Ramón began to haggle with an arm and the top half of a young face that he could see just over the windowsill. But Pascual stopped him. “We may need the rest of our money later,” he said. In spite of himself, he was beginning to panic. As long as he had money, he had been able to negotiate the complex labyrinth of tests and corrupt officials through bribery. But now he had nothing, just enough to buy a gringo sandwich and some soda pop.
“Don’t buy anything,” he said to his brother. “Wait here, while I talk to those guys in the back.”
Pascual went to the back of the bus and joined a small group of braceros that had assembled around an older, more experienced man. He listened. Others had already asked the same questions.
The older man had salt and pepper hair and a mustache of the same color and had kept to himself mostly with quiet dignity. Ramón had noticed him right away among the other men, because he seemed to know what to do and how to conduct himself, even to the point of feigning an obsequious manner in the presence of powerful officials at the migratory center in Empalme. At first Pascual felt contemptuous of these older men who seemed to forfeit their dignity for a chance to work in the fields north of the border. But as he himself went from station to station at the center, he began to do the same thing. He assumed a slouching posture, kept his head down and his eyes averted, his hat held deferentially in his hands in front of him, spoke in short sentences and feigned ignorance and lied about his level of education. His scratched his head and shrugged when someone asked a question designed to expose a rebellious attitude toward authority. When he had to remove his clothes and stand in a line of naked men and submit to delousing and other indignities, he didn’t complain. From time to time the older man winked at him as if to say, “See how we can pull the wool over their eyes.”
“For the most part,” the man said now, “the tests are the same. Only the gringos are worse than the Mexicans.” He told some stories about men who had been examined like animals and rejected for frivolous or unjust reasons. “Potential troublemaker,” was one such a reason.
The other men bummed cigarettes from anyone who had one and smoked nervously, and like Pascual, tried to conceal their anxiety.
“Only one test is new,” said the man. “El rayo equi, the x-ray. With this machine the doctors can peer into the body of a man and take a picture. It shows everything that is inside of a man, the bones and the lungs and the veins where the blood flows.”
“What is the purpose of the x-ray?” a man asked. He wore a rumpled dark blue city suit and a pair of worn-out brown oxfords so that he looked like a businessman down on his luck. Pascual wondered how he had made it so far through the gauntlet of tests. The man wiped his sweaty brow with a soiled handkerchief and clung tightly to a bundle of belongings in a woven sack, such as an Indian might carry to market. At the same time, he held a half-empty bottle of milk in one hand.
“They will be looking for broken bones and bad lungs, things like that,” said the older man.
Pascual began to fidget nervously. He tried to swallow but his throat had become tight with desiccation and road dust. Fortunately the other men asked the same questions that weighed on his mind.
“What if they find something?” said one of them.
The man shrugged. “They send home the ones who might have tuberculosis. The gringos have a great fear of diseases. They pen up their borders to keep out the germs. “
“But there is a way to defeat the machine,” said the man in the rumpled suit, who began to glow like a saint in aretablo. Everyone turned towards him now. He became the new center of attention and seemed to bask in it, even as the yellow dust-motes of sunlight seemed to make a soiled halo at the back of his head. “The lecheras told me how to do it,” he said, pausing to take another swig from the milk bottle. “You must drink a whole liter of milk, at least. Two liters is better. The milk will whiten the x-ray and cover up the defects, such as the lesions of the tubercle bacillus.”
The man sounded learned enough to overcome their skepticism.
Pascual tried to remember what the doctor had said about tuberculosis in his family. He remembered, or imagined, the x-ray the doctor had shown the family at the time. He remembered especially the dark cavity in the right lung, high up under the collar bone, like a hole in a tree, like rotten fruit, or the entrance to a cave or a mineshaft— like the tunnel his father had entered every day for so many years, at a place called Tonopah, north of the border. Could he, too, have holes in himself that he didn’t know about, one that the radiographía would discover?
Pascual thought about all the effort he had put into getting this far— the humiliations he had suffered, the money he had spent— and then he imagined the greater humiliation of returning home. As the new head of the family, he would have to face the people there and tell them that he had failed— that the gringos had stopped him on account of the x-ray, a thing he couldn’t even explain.
The border policemen had almost finished examining the papers of the braceros and were leaving the bus. Nevertheless the bus remained where it was in the slow-moving line of vehicles that struggled forward toward the crossing. The lecheras and the other hawkers trotted along outside, trying to wring a few pesos from the last holdouts.
“Leche para la prueba,” said the woman with the long braids, clinking together the bottles of pure white milk that frothed and foamed up towards the neck of the bottle, mixing back in the cream that had risen to the top. “Para la radiographía.”
“Give me your money,” said Pascual to Ramón, after returning to his seat. Ramón was flirting with a girl outside the bus window.
“What for?” said Ramón.
“I’m going to get us something to eat,” said Pascual.
Ramón dug into his pants pockets and retrieved a handful of coins, to which Pascual added his own. After counting them, he haggled with the lechera through the window and bought two liters of milk.
“Milk?” said Ramón, as he watched the transaction. “Just milk? I don’t want any milk. Why didn’t you get the menudo, or some beans, at least? You spent all our money.”
“Don’t worry,” said Pascual. “You don’t have to drink any. I’m going to drink all of it.” Pascual drank half a liter right away in big gulps, then wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. Ramón was staring at him. “I’m drinking the milk so I won’t fail the test. You remember when father died, don’t you? Maybe we got the same thing.”
“So what?” said Ramón.
“So,” said Pascual impatiently, “if they find out when they take the x-ray picture, the gringos will send us home. You don’t have to drink any. But don’t blame me if you have to go home alone.”
Ramón took one of the bottles and drank a little before handing it back. “Tastes like shit,” he said.
Pascual finished his own bottle and then the other one, too, drinking it in big gulps before returning the bottles to the lechera. “At least we have something in our stomachs now,” he said.
“I’m still hungry,” said Ramón.
Pascual burped as the rich creamy milk frothed and foamed in his stomach, like a rich broth. “You know,” he said, still watching the lechera as she packed up the milk cart, “she does look like Aunt Julia, come to think of it.”
Ramón laughed. “And she even gives us milk,” he said. “Only we don’t have to suck on her tits to get it.”
“No,” said Pascual, who didn’t laugh. “But at least Julia didn’t take our money. She just gave and gave.”
In a town called El Centro, just across the border, the men got down from the buses and formed themselves into a line outside the reception center, where they would undergo more examinations. Then— the lucky ones, at least— would go to work for the growers who hired them.
At the center, more than an x-ray awaited them. But the x-ray was the only thing Pascual could think about. He had hoped to get it over with right away. He wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact the milk he had drunk had upset his stomach and he felt a little ill. Probably he drank too much of it too fast. Maybe he was just tired from twenty hours on the bus and a lot of other troubles along the way. But the x-ray never seemed to come, so he had to worry the whole time, as he went from station to station along with the other men, just as he had done at the induction center in Empalme, as if the two sides of the border were mirror images of one another.
Pascual stood in the slow-moving line, pressed closely fore and aft between other braceros. Ramón, in his eagerness to eat something at last, had gone ahead.
At the first station the men stripped down and showered together in a large room with many showerheads and drains in the floor. Pascual had never showered together with so many men at once. He looked about nervously in case any women were watching. Afterwards, he covered his privates with his hat, or with his documents when he had to set the hat down. He lowered his head as a man went through his hair with gloved fingers, looking for lice. Then another man, wearing a surgical mask, sprayed him all over with insecticide. Pascual closed his eyes tightly as the man operated the spray gun. Each place along the way was bewildering and noisy and crowded with other braceros. At one point, a gringoyanked his mouth open with his thumbs and examined his teeth. For a few seconds here and there, he stopped thinking about the x-ray and allowed himself to believe that the entire story had been a hoax, which someone had invented to scare him.
The braceros got dressed again and entered another building, where men in white coats took their temperature and blood pressure. Farther on, Pascual could see a strange machine behind an open curtain and a man seated at a desk. One by one the braceros in the line entered the small room that contained the x-ray machine.
The doctor was a short near-sighted man with thinning hair combed backwards across his head. He wore circular spectacles and a white coat over his street clothes. His name, “G. Osborn, M.D.,” was embroidered over his breast pocket.
Following instructions, Pascual took his shirt off again and laid it aside. An assistant showed him the proper way to stand in front of the x-ray machine, which had a large, square glass plate at one end of it. Pascual hunched his shoulders forward, while at the same time keeping his hands behind his back so that his chest made a basin like a shallow soup bowl.
Dr. Osborn smoked a cigarette and didn’t say anything at first. The assistant, a thin young man with a bad complexion and red hair, took Pascual’s documents and set them down on the table in front of the doctor, who thumbed through a trade magazine until the patient was in position. Then the doctor moved behind a long, telescoping black tube that had a small window at the end of it. He and the assistant spoke to each other in curt phrases. The thin young man, using a Spanish phrase, told Pascual to hold steady. Dr. Osborn turned some dials and pushed a few buttons until the machine came to life with a mechanical spasm and whirred for a few seconds until a bell rang. Meanwhile the doctor peered through the scope. The assistant then pulled a large photograph in a frame out of the machine and hung it in front of an illuminated glass pane on the wall. The doctor puffed and puffed and blew smoke until the cubicle filled up with it. The whole procedure lasted no more than a couple of minutes but seemed much longer to Pascual. He choked and coughed on the smoke. The doctor peered at the x-ray picture, which looked like a photographic negative, and finally said some words in a rapid mumble, while the assistant wrote on Pascual’s document.
Pascual fidgeted nervously. The doctor must have found something, he thought— a black spot, something rotten.
“I’ve come as far as I can,” he said to himself, feeling tired, hungry and discouraged. “The doctor is going to send me home.”
His stomach began to churn and rumble again. A large bubble of gas welled up in it, forcing its way upward. Pascual tried to suppress it. He clamped a hand over his mouth, but the gas came up anyway, and he belched. The assistant now glanced at him. Pascual belched again but didn’t feel any better. He felt a sharp pain in his stomach, then another, greater than the first. He moaned.
The doctor now looked at him for the first time. His eyes looked like small pale glass marbles. He looked Pascual up and down. “Stomachache?” he said in Spanish. “Dolor del estómago?” Pascual shook his head. The doctor and his assistant looked at each other knowingly. The assistant chuckled.
“Was it milk?” said the doctor, with a smirk on his lip. “Did you drink too much milk? Spoiled milk?” He picked up a large stamp with a wood handle and stamped twice loudly on an inkpad. “Don’t tell me you fell for that old wives’ tale.” He slid Pascual’s document under the stamp. “It doesn’t work,” he said, stamping down hard onto the paper two or three times. “The milk just stays in your stomach and gut. It doesn’t get into the lungs. You can’t fool the x-ray.”
By now Pascual had doubled up. He moaned again, louder than before, as the doctor handed him his papers and the assistant threw his shirt over his shoulders. Pascual looked helplessly at the papers. His strategy hadn’t worked. He had failed. He would have to go home again. He started to leave, looking around for the bus that would take him back across the border. But the doctor stopped him.
“You don’t have tuberculosis,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “You passed.”
Outside the dining hall, Pascual caught up with his brother.
“Hey, we made it man,” said Ramón. “We’re home free. Pretty soon we’re going to get a paycheck. Then we’ll celebrate. Drink some beers.” Ramón laid a hand on his brother’s back.
Pascual nodded, but only because he couldn’t speak. Another sharp pain had bent him double. A slight moan escaped his lips. He bit his lower lip to stop the sound.
“You okay?” said Ramón.
The milk continued to rumble in his stomach, just as hunger had rumbled there before. Perhaps he had drunk the liquid too fast. He ought to have taken his time. He should have drunk it in small sips. Or maybe it was spoiled, like the doctor said. Now it felt like he had drunk a live eel.
“You were smart, man,” said Ramón. “You passed the test of the x-ray machine. You fooled them gringo doctors. They caught some guys. Sent ‘em home. I was worried. Maybe I should have drunk the milk, like you. But I passed anyway.” Ramón laughed his smart-aleck laugh and clapped his brother on the back again.
By now the men had entered the dining hall and sat down at rows of tables and began devouring the food. The large room echoed with the noise of tin plates and rattling table service and with the voices of the men as they talked about the tests and about who had passed and who had failed. Some men had already left to board buses that would take them back across the border. The lucky ones remained behind, to eat the bad food at the center.
Pascual hoped the food would settle his stomach, which growled like a dog. Another sharp pain went through his midsection, so he had to double up for a minute. With the next one, he dropped his fork.
“You okay, hermano?” Ramón asked again.
Pascual tried to straighten up between the spasms that racked his frame. “Sure, I’m okay,” he said, lying. He was a trying to reassure his brother, and at the same time he was teaching him a lesson in how to be a man.
“Maybe I should get the doctor,” said Ramón.
“No, no,” Pascual hissed through clenched teeth. “Don’t say a word.”
Pascual began to feel like a fool. A whole bunch of monkeys were doing tricks and chattering in his stomach. But in his stomach, they remained, and they had only two ways to go, downward or upward, perhaps both at the same time. Already his gut was becoming loose, like freshly mixed cement— a slurry of bad milk and stale food and stomach acid. The sour milk had stayed right where it was the whole time. It hadn’t leaked out into his lungs or blood vessels or anywhere else. It hadn’t clouded the x-ray picture. Like Ramón, Pascual would have passed the test without it. He could have passed without making himself sick in the process, on the foul milk of a border wet-nurse. She only looked like Aunt Julia, because she knew how to disguise herself.
The men finished their meals, got up and collected the tin platters and table service, and dumped them into barrels of dirty water on the way out of the cavernous room.
“I don’t think I can make it,” said Pascual.
“Sure you can,” said Ramón. “Just stand behind me. Hold onto my shoulders if you have to, keep your head down. Pretty soon we’ll be on the bus. Then you can throw up out the window.”
Pascual could see the line of old yellow school buses that awaited the newly minted braceros in front of the reception center. He tried not to look either to right or left, while the line inched forward. He tried to hide. He tried to shrink and hunker and disappear, among the press of braceros that filed slowly toward the waiting buses, whose coffin-like doors gaped and beckoned.
Pascual had been strong for a long time, stronger than grief and loss, stronger than crooks and politicians, stronger than poverty. But he was not stronger than the snake that coiled around his stomach and squeezed hard and rejected and said NO in a loud voice of protest, against every indignity he had ever swallowed. “No, no, no,” it said. Pascual stopped his ears and clenched his jaws and tried to push back and down. But it was no use. The snake-fist squeezed once more and ejected him clear of the press of men and sent him staggering aside toward an irrigation ditch, until he tumbled into it and heaved a mess of sour spoiled milk and bad food into the little purling stream of brown polluted water. He retched and retched. Exhausted, he sank down into the nauseating mess.
“That man there,” someone said, in a loud peremptory voice. “Take him out.”
Two men seized Pascual by the arms and dragged him back towards the reception center. As he hunched over between the men who dragged him, he looked back and tried to find Ramón among the crowd of braceros getting onto the buses. But he saw only shirt backs and straw hats, as the men squeezed through the narrow doors and disappeared inside. A few men leaned out of the open windows. One or two shouted triumphantly. The buses started up with a rattling roar, extruding great clouds of noxious gases, and headed down the rutted dirt road, going north into the farms and fields of California.
Pascual watched the departing buses, then turned back toward the center. Already his mind was bent on getting across the border again— one way or another.