[APPLAUSE]
I'm as moved as I knew I would be.
Thank you, Ingrid.
I'm going to keep my coat on because it is very cold,
and I'm not going to try to brave it like anybody else.
If I get hot, I'll turn it--
I'll take it off, like Aretha did at the Kennedy Center
Honors.
But I'll be mercifully short because I also get very shaky
when it gets cold.
So I'm noticing that I'm--it's getting into my bones.
I'm going to read--
well, before I share, I also want
to say thank you to you, Tyler, Diana.
Everybody at the Poetry Center for hosting us.
It is really great to read with Andrew and with Bojan,
and I want to say thanks to Graywolf for--
its just chance that we were all finishing
at about the same time.
They did not have to schedule our books the way
that they did.
But it's just a really fortunate way
to be able to share time together
because books are so lonely when you write them
so that the fact that all three of them came at the same time,
one right after the other--
I really just wish the University would
recognize how amazing that is.
It is.
It's pretty great.
I'm going to share just the first four
sections from a section story just because I'm
at the Poetry Center.
So I can intone the number before I
read the little section, and also you'll
know when the reading is going to be over because I'm only
going to read four of them.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a story that if it were in workshop,
I'd be asked to change the title because it's too long.
It's called "That Pink House at the End of the Street
on the Other Side of Town."
One-- "Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo,
had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when
the fields ran muddy and no one else would
brave the kind of cold that would not
lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves.
By spring, he'd returned to a pueblito called Pozos,
which made everyone ask why he'd go back
to a hole in the ground.
A frog crawling under the mud to wait out the heat.
That was El Sapo leaving sometime in early April
before the heat came, and then the others would arrive.
Fidelio and his twin brother, Modesto, who for some reason
was several inches shorter than him, Jerónimo,
more quiet and stark, who claimed to know Silvio
but nobody knew for sure.
Baldomero El Mero Mero, who boasted
that he was the one who had shown the others how
to start with a bus in Celaya, take it
to the outskirts of Tijuana and right
over there at a llantería owned by his old friend, Raimundo.
You could sneak through the dust yard of Raimundo's old tires
and cross to the other side, get to the highway on foot.
And if you were smart enough to hide your money,
catch a Greyhound to a place called
Goshen, where you'd go to the phone booth
outside of the station, look out at the cotton fields
as you dialed a number and told a man named Poldo
that you'd made it across.
A cousin by way of another cousin, a friend of the family,
from Celaya, from Ojo de Agua, from La Cuevita,
from Charco Blanco.
Yes, of course.
Yes.
A third yes, if you promised you had the money
to pay a little rent for a month.
That's how Eliseo showed up and poor Casimiro,
who wore thick glasses and peered into the fruit trees
with his whole face to see what he was picking.
But you'd have to know Spanish to know why all the other men
laughed at his name."
Two-- "Poldo was Leopoldo Ruelas--
as thin as his mustache, who came out of nowhere
and bought that pink house at the end of the street
on the other side of town.
That house had stood empty for a long time.
The paint chipped, and the weeds growing high in the bank
only sometimes coming to clean up the yard.
Not often because it was in a town
where just anybody could buy a house.
People rented and maybe they passed by the faded pink house
with the enclosed back porch and wished that they
could one day be its owner.
Poldo had to be born here to do that.
Mexicano, of course, but he knew how to get the kind of money
to get a bank to talk to you.
And he had a pretty wife who was taller than him, Belén,
who led a toddler by one arm and cradled a baby with the other,
and maybe it was she who decided to paint the house pink again.
That was one reason why people thought she was from Mexico.
If you bothered to dream about a house,
only a true Mexican would dream about a pink one.
Or one that was bright orange up on a hill somewhere
looking down at everything else in drab colors, or worse,
unpainted wood.
Belén, who always wore dresses and high heels
and knew just the store in Fresno
where you could get a good deal on clothing de buenas marcas.
Her little ones not yet old enough
for anyone to know their names, her little ones
weren't, but one looked like her, and the other one
already with Poldo's rat face.
Whether she was from over here or over there,
Belén was the kind of person who had long ago stopped
thinking about those days in some pueblito, where you hoped
into a little luck with a piglet given by a generous neighbor.
She had dresses now, and a family,
a husband who could walk into a bank.
She didn't have to sit around wondering if she should butcher
the piglet or fatten it up, feed it the scraps
or save it for later--
the hunger now or the hunger later."
Three-- it's two more.
Three-- "Poldo's truck left one morning and was gone for about
an hour, which was just about time for the ida y vuelta
to the bus station in Goshen--
the one that sat out by the edge of the cotton field.
He came back with one person.
That's how Eliseo showed up.
And just in time, too, because it was May, and the fruit
was coming in early.
Poldo needed every hand he could get.
Things were too busy to ask too many questions about why Eliseo
had come up all alone or about exactly how he knew El Sapo,
or where he got all the money that he kept pulling out
of his socks--
the left front pocket of his brand
new Wrangler jeans, the shirt pocket of his long sleeve.
He wouldn't last more than a week in the fields,
some of them said.
Too slender, too quiet, and drinking only one can of beer.
When he showed up, that made at least seven men
from the other side sleeping on the enclosed
back porch of the pink house at the end of that street.
He wouldn't last, some of them said.
He'd miss his mother too much.
And with a name like that too sweet for a full grown man,
you knew something bad was bound to happen to him."
Four-- "The only one who ever made enough money to keep
was Poldo.
He hit them up for every dollar, and he
asked when they couldn't say no at the Goshen bus
station, for space on the back porch to sleep at night--
a Saturday night collection to buy carne asada, and tortillas,
and beer.
A Sunday collection for a sack of beans
to last a week, for a ride out to the fields
in the back of the truck, for the favor
of having Belén stand in line at the Western Union office
to send money home and coming back with the receipt.
Sometimes, a few dollars interest
for having loaned out a week's pay to get started.
You needed your own cutting knife, your own gloves,
your own wide-brim, your own cazo y costal.
Another pair of pants, work shirts,
a fresh pack of underwear.
Everyone with the same calcetines
blancos hanging from the clothes lines.
Just a few dollars more from everyone
for a white bucket of detergent, a bottle of bleach.
The washing machine outside by the tool shed
sat idle all weekend, but you could slip Belén a few dollars,
and she'd have your clothes clean and folded
on the back porch by sundown's return from the fields.
And for the ones who couldn't always
bear so much of the men's laughter in the backyard
and the bored exhaustion around sundown,
Poldo left them with just enough in their pockets
for niceties, like a bottle of Tres Flore
or Lucky Tiger or English Leather--
something to put on for an evening walk into town
and a beer at John Henry's.
Just enough for a few last coins to drop in the jukebox, a baile
or two with a woman kind enough to say yes
but who wished she was someplace else."
[APPLAUSE]