In The Young Century
MY GRANDFATHER WAS IN A MOTORCYCLE GANG IN THE NINETEEN-TEENS. He lived in L’el Shoal, Nevada with a man named Felix who customized motorcycles that he built exclusively by himself in a garage that he also built. He allowed my grandfather to live with him above the garage because my grandfather, albeit poor, was savvy with machines, and very attractive. The young and unmarried Mexican women of the town would follow him home like lost kittens in the rain—helpless at his raw charm. My grandfather had in his charisma a bold streak, which gave him a power and magnetism often working in his favor. It was this lucky part, unfortunately, that precipitated the joining of a gang.
Once there was a man who came thru L’el Shoal in the early summer of 1919 bringing with him three young women of breathless beauty – his daughters. He had been taking them all, five originally, with him across the west in an effort to marry them off to men of trade and culture. In place of the first two daughters, his caravan contained a refrigerator and a gramophone. I do not know all of this story’s lurid details, however my grandfather, being impetuous and observant, went to the man with Felix’s prize motorcycle, offering it for all three of the remaining daughters. The man was reluctant, but my grandfather triumphed. He had spoken with the women the evening previous—sneaking into their camp only an hour after learning of their presence. The women saw his heart and asked him for help. They felt their sisters were married off to ancient, unkempt men who would only neglect them. In order to reunite with their sisters the remaining three vowed to stay together and were attempting to hatch a plan when my grandfather arrived.
Felix was dually upset, as you can imagine, on hearing that his most favored possession had been traded. Then he met the daughters, who were of the understanding that it was in fact Felix’s generosity which had saved them. My grandfather smiled the rich, knowing smile of the stealthy hero when he recalls the moment that the sisters retreated to the bedroom with Felix in a gesture of much gratitude. The kind of smile I believe he wore that night when he sat in a wooden chair in the long driveway before the garage. The end of his short cigar a dusty red star against a black sky dancing with specks of white fire, as he came to tell me the story of how he met my grandmother.
She had put her fist through glass to get out of a burning building when she was young. Her right hand had long soft indents of scars running past her knuckles and up onto her wrist. My grandfather told her that upon seeing her scabs and scars he knew that she had a place in heaven because it looked as if an angel had already tried to grab her by the hand and take her where it wanted. But it wasn’t an angel, it was a ferocious fire. A fire she started, and not accidentally…
Late in her thirteenth year she began work in a factory in the town of Campus near the county line. She made coats and worked both as a seamstress at a sewing table and a large spooling machine. The coats were big and designed for very cold temperatures. The kind Campus, Nevada, would never see. Almost a hundred workers occupied the cramped and dingy two-story building. Her uncle, her last living relative with whom she lived, also worked in the factory, there on the second floor, assembling zippers from thick silver teeth that came in big metallic canisters and glittered like shards of moon rock. Of course my grandmother, much like my grandfather, had a flash-in-the-pan quality about her that gave of sex and temper. Rebellion and direst justice. Qualities that she did not share with the authorities in the factory.
My grandfather smiled the rich, knowing smile of the stealthy hero when he recalls the moment that the sisters retreated to the bedroom with Felix in a gesture of much gratitude.
On her sixteenth birthday, and just as she and her fellow workers were getting back to their stations after a celebratory lunch, one of the suits came onto the floor to tell them that they were again to take a cut in pay. This time almost a quarter of the rate, which had been reduced by nearly ten cents a month previous. The workers froze, aghast at the news. A middle aged woman broke the silence, crying. Her cries soon escalated to wails as she sank to the floor. “I have to feed my children. My children will die! How will I feed them? My babies!!” Two women rushed to her side but she seemed inconsolable. My grandmother, standing a few feet away felt her hands reach up to grasp the sewing machine and the table to which it was crudely attached. In one motion she dumped it with an undeniable crash to the floor. The crying woman looked up. Pairs of eyes shot surprise at my grandmother, and through the sea of gazes one of the floor managers darted toward her.
She sped in the other direction, toppling other sewing tables after her. By this time three floor managers were giving chase, but she was small enough to dart under the low-lying metal casing of the large industrial spooler. There was a lot of noise and shouting by this time, but my grandmother knew just what came next. She reached for her cigarette matches in her apron pocket and began to light the massive bobbins. Moving down the row, crawling fast and watching from the floor as the flames climbed the yarn and smoke began to billow at the ceiling. The workers went fast for the exits when she was pulled from under the spooler and tied to a sewing table chair by a floor manager. She tried to fight him, but the smoke was beginning to make her eyes itch and water. The fire had spread almost instantly. Flames snatched furiously over everything as the windows were being thrown open so all could make an escape. My grandmother toppled the chair and got low to the ground. She felt for a match as she knew some had tumbled from her pocket while she was being tied. She found a way to strike it and burn quickly through the yarn, the same she had used day after day to make the thick winter coats. She coughed hard on her hands and knees, unable to look up. Her eyes and lungs crowded by smoke.
My grandmother was always keen of her surroundings and knew that the quickest way to extract herself would be through the hole in the floor. An open chute where the finished coats went into oversized laundry bins. She only hoped that there would be enough coats to catch her, and there were, though the basket was nearly on fire. In the dusty factory the blaze spread as if it had been set in a dry forest and now the first floor was charring rapidly. It was then that she shattered the window and freed herself. Bleeding from deep gashes to her knees and arms, her eyes burned and felt as if they were swelling. When she could get up a moment later she limped to the front of the building and began to call for her uncle. One of the workers ran to her. In a coughing daze grandmother did not recognize her. “Mila…Mila! Your uncle brought out a young boy just a moment ago, but he raced back for you! No one could find you! Mila… Mila! Do you understand!?”
Mila turned back to face the building only to watch the second floor collapse into the first. Knowing her uncle had been trapped she screamed, and had to be held back from the entrance. A floor manager appeared, patchy black from the smoke, and struck my grandmother, attempting to apprehend her. Two men moved in on the floor manager and in a flash everyone was crowded around the fighters.
Grandmother escaped and ran from the factory and the workers to the apartment she and her uncle shared. He had the only key, and she had to break yet another window. She felt her hand begin to ache once she was inside. She moved to lie on the soft worn thatch rug of the center room floor. Catching her breath, coughing, she felt over the back of her hand and picked out a long razor of glass. After discarding still more glass from her arm, she crawled to a basin to rinse off the blood. Sixteen years old and she looked to herself in the smudged punched tin mirror as if she’d just turned sixty. Falling asleep in the bath she awoke with a jolt hours later, suddenly consumed with the dream that she was being drowned by a floor manager. A few tiny shards of glass hovering and glimmering at the top of the pink water.
Before the light of the next morning she collected most of her things and all the money she could find in the apartment and began to walk out of town. A long walk on roads that wound out through dried up river valleys and were not traveled by many. L’el Shoal was still thirty-eight miles away when she was picked up by a man in a brand new gray car. Somehow they got around to talking and he admitted he owned a factory and should she come work for him. He’d make a comfortable life for her, he said, and when she protested with remarks made deliberate and simmering with pride, he decided to put his cigar out in a gash on her knee. Like a tiger sprung from a trap she responded by swinging her heavy bag into his face, caving his nose in. The car lurched and she tumbled out into the loose gravel, the tiny rocks pushing into the bandages on her ankles and hands. Her brand new burn wound round, quarter sized, wet and trickling.
Grandmother sixteen years old, and my grandfather was twenty-one. This age gap didn’t make much difference. Not when he helped her up out of a ditch near town early the next morning, her body stiff but yielding. Small enough to fit between him and the motorcycle. Her pack on his back. His jacket reversed and over her shoulders to shield her from the wind. She had always liked to sleep. But working at the factory kept her from six in the morning to seven in the evening. Grandpa said she slept for two days straight. “Got up to piss and drink some water once shortly after that. Then I knew she’d be okay.” he recalls. The light in his eyes appears to brighten: “Next night I came home late and she is waiting up. She asks me where she is and what day it is, and if she can have some coffee or a cigarette. I say yes to the coffee, then tell her I only smoke cigars. She says “Not while I’m around.”
He takes it to mean she doesn’t like the smell, but we know it’s something different. She does not leave the garage for a week, though she knows she can and is not afraid. One night my grandfather helps her clean and re-bandage her wounds and she admires his way and the closeness of him surges through her. She moves to kiss him and he accepts her. She offers her kisses like she was made out of love and nothing else. For my grandfather, memories of what it was like to be kissed by other women drop away like the last stars at daybreak. In the days that followed, he taught her how to ride a motorcycle.