Under the Shade of the Zapote

The wind arrived in Immokalee before the rain, smelling of scorched weeds and the fertilizer sacks piled behind the packing house. Diego sat on the edge of his metal cot, working a spool of green nylon string through the eye of a wooden needle he had carved from a scrap of pine. His fingers were stained with the dark, sticky sap of the green tomatoes he had spent ten hours picking before the sky turned the color of bruised lard. In his mind, the flat expanse of Collier County became the dry, scrubby hills of his home, where the water lived deep in the ground, in cold stone throats that smelled of maidenhair fern.

Here, the water was too close; it rose from the grass if you stood still for more than a minute, soaking through the soles of his work boots until his heels were soft and white. The storm began with a low rattle against the tin roof, like a handful of gravel thrown by an angry neighbor. The other men in the barracks were quiet, some sleeping with their hats over their eyes, others listening to the tiny, tinny speaker of a mobile phone playing a corrido about a horse that died in the desert. Diego pulled another loop of nylon tight, his knotting automatic and perfect, a habit learned from his uncle who had made fishnets near Celestún.

If he closed his eyes, he could hear the wind in the zapote trees back home, a dry, rattling sigh that sounded nothing like this wet, heavy roar that threatened to peel the roof off the barracks like a sardine tin. He had been twenty years in this peninsula of sand and humidity, always intending to return before the next planting season, but the earth here kept him rooted by his ankles. He tied the final knot of the hammock, shook it out until it hung like a vast, green leaf between the support posts, and climbed in, waiting for the sky to empty itself of water and light.