Above is a picture and the story I've written to go with it is below. I'm going to be doing the same with a number of pictures to try and compile for a book. Make comments, please, and let me know what you think!
Tear Up The Hills
He was flying. Above the earth and a part of the clouds, he could feel the weight of the small motorcycle beneath him. He was tempted, for a moment, to close his eyes and experience only his descent back to the ground, but he resisted. Concentrating, instead, on shifting the bike into position for the jarring impact he knew was coming.
"Manny! What the hell?!"
Manuel Gutierrez looked up, shaken from his reverie. Reluctantly he looked over at Little Doug.
"Wha'?"
Doug pointed to the palette that Manny was lifting from the dock. The forks on the lift he was driving were at a dangerous tilt from the weight.
"Madré de dios..." he breathed and lowered the palette back to the ground to get another grip on it. "Gracias, amigo. That would have been bad."
Little Doug smiled and shook his head.
"Manny, you've already been here for a extra four hours, man. Go home. How much overtime you gonna do?"
Manny shut off the forklift and sighed. He took off his cap, ran his fingers through his thick black hair and rubbed his eyes.
"As much as it takes, esé. I only got two weeks left 'til Oscar's birthday."
He looked down at his left forearm. In dark letters beneath a blazing heart was the name of his late wife, Yolanda. He felt a weight in his chest and his throat was tight. He had lost her to the cancer four years ago but it might as well have been yesterday. The pain didn't go away. Not like the prist told him. He didn't feel better. Time didn't make it any easier.
Little Doug pulled plastic around another palette and yelled out, "I still think you ain't gonna be able to make enough in time. Once they take all the taxes 'n shit out ain't nothin' left. 'Sides you're killin' yourself and that's the truth."
Manny put his cap back on his head and nodded. "Yeah," he said, "you may be right but I'm real close. I got this cousin over at the junkyard keepin' an eye out for any good stuff. I might get lucky."
He'd been saving every penny hecould set aside for the last six months. His co-workers all knew, by now, that he was trying to get together enough money to surprise his only son with a dirt bike for his twelfth birthday.
He thought about Oscar and the distance that had grown between them in the past two years. It started around the time they had moved out of Manny's parents house into the little trailer just around the corner from the warehouse. Oscar had been so angry because he had to move away from his cousins and his friends. "You'll make new friends." Manny had told him. But, the friends that Oscar was making weren't the kind any father would want their son to have.
Already, at age eleven, one of Oscar's friends had been stabbed to death. Another was arrested, just the week before, for selling pot at their school. No matter how much he encouraged Oscar to hang out with "better" friends he always seemed to associate with punks and thugs that Manny didn't approve of. Oscar was an angry little boy who was, too quickly, turning into an angry young man.
Oscar's teacher, a pretty little chica with thick red lips, like his beautiful Yolanda, kept telling Manny that what his son needed was love and understanding. "What he needs," He told her, "Is to learn some respect. Love don't work with these kids, today, señorita. You got to teach them to respect themselves, respect their family and respect their elders. That's love. Where they gonna' learn that, eh?"
Manny turned the motor over on the forklift and pushed the forks farther under the palette filled with spools of copper wire. He lifted it slowly, at first, and then sped away from Little Doug who was now standing at the tiny little podium next to the loading dock making marks on a shipping invoice. Manny prayed silently that Doug was wrong. He had to make enough to buy that dirt bike. No matter what.
His mind wandered again for a moment as he thought about the trips he'd taken with his father out to the desert. His Uncle Manuel, whom he was named after, would pick them up in his great big Ford truck and they would drive out to the hills past Galley Lakebed. They would spend the whole weekend tearing up the hills and feeling wild. Manny's father was a cruel man, most of the time, but he was always different on those trips. When one of the bikes broke down, and they always seemed to do it when Manny was riding them, his father didn't yell and scream at him like he usually did. Uncle Manny would throw the truck into four-wheel drive and the three of them would pick up the bike and haul it back to camp. Then they would spend hours pulling it apart and fixing it up while his father and Uncle drank cheap beer and smoked cigarettes and talked to Manny about how engines work. That was when Manny discovered that his father wasn't the stupid pindejo that he'd always assumed he was.
"Oh, yeah." Manny said out loud as he dropped the load of wire onto a storage rack and spun the lift around to head back to the dock. He imagined himself sitting on top of the bike his Uncle Manny had left him when he'd died, just after Oscar was born. He also imagined that speeding along next to him was Oscar, both of them smiling and gunning their engines. "Me and my boy gonna tear them hills right up."
