“It won’t be that easy,” Pequeña says.
“They’re up and down that highway all the time . . .” I tell her, hoping it’s true.
When we head toward the highway, I think of sitting in the minibus again sipping water. For now, that keeps me going. When I hear the sound of cars again, I think of water. As we inch farther out of the brush, toward the highway again, I look for a white minibus or van. And think of water.
Suddenly—lights.
“Wait here.” I run out and wave my hands at the headlights, blinding after so much darkness, and close my eyes as the van approaches.
It roars past me.
Flashes of bright dots fill my vision. I blink, trying to see, as I hear the beep of a horn, and see more headlights. Then Chico and Pequeña running to a van that has stopped for us, that we board, and pay this driver just like the last one, and continue on, before we have to do it all again.
Each time feels like maybe we never made it out of those trees and fields. Each time I wonder if we really did. The same silence. The same crunching. The same darkness.
The same blindness as we make it back to the road.
Another white van. Another driver.
The same exchange of money.
The same sips of water.
On and on and on.
But by the third time, my feet feel like they’re on fire. And my head bobs back and forth in exhaustion, just like Pequeña’s and Chico’s do, as the van’s tires whir us to sleep.
* * *
~~~
I’m not sure how much time passes before I fall sleep. But even in my dream, I am traveling. I’m in the back seat of my father’s El Camino and there he is, driving with Mamá next to him in the passenger seat. I can’t see his face, only the back of his head, but I know it’s him. We ride—top down, wind blowing, bass booming. The air smells of ocean and sand, seaweed and salt. My father stares straight ahead. I keep wishing he would turn around. There are so many things I want to ask him. So many things I want to say. But I say nothing. And he keeps driving, face forward.
Mamá nestles up next to him and he puts his arm around her. She looks back at me, smiles, and opens her mouth to tell me something.
A loud screech fills my ears.
Then someone yelling.
Others screaming.
A man cursing.
“¡Hijo de su pinche madre!”
“¡Cuidado! ¡Cuidado!”
“¡Dios!”
I open my eyes just in time to see something blurry in the headlights, I think.
I’m thrown violently against Chico, who is half out of his seat. Pequeña is on the floor. The driver jerks the wheel and we are thrown in the opposite direction. Chico holds on to me, Pequeña holds on to the seat. The sound of screeching tires. I wait for the impact, for something to come slamming into us, but only the sound of it comes. The boom of metal hitting metal.
The driver glances anxiously in the rearview mirror as he gains control.
“What happened?!” Chico yells.
“Did we hit him?” a man in the row behind us calls out. There are four other people in the van. A man, a woman, and two teenage girls. I don’t know if they’re together or not. The two girls hold on to each other. The woman is sitting, shaky hands covering her face.
“He ran out, out of nowhere,” the driver says, still in shock, though the van is steady and in his control again now. We look back and see cars positioned haphazardly across the highway. People out of their cars, shouting, pointing at something on the ground.
“Oh my god,” Pequeña whispers. Chico’s eyes go wide.
Was someone trying to flag down the van? Like we were?
I look toward the driver, who is wiping his face with one hand as if trying to bring himself back from the shock.
My body itches from nerves. I take a deep breath.
Pequeña is looking at me, her face exhausted and scared.
“Is any of this real?” she says.
“We’ll be okay,” I tell her. I sit back, try not to think about what’s behind us.
The van continues on.
I turn and ask the man behind us, “What time is it?” He looks at his watch.
“Four thirty.”
Four thirty? More time has passed than I thought. I turn back to the driver. “How far are we from Arriaga?” I ask him.
“We’re in Arriaga,” he says.
“Really?”
He nods. “Really, joven. You got lucky, sometimes those bastards are too lazy to set up checkpoints at night.”
“Yeah, real lucky,” the man behind me mutters to the woman. “He almost got us killed.”
But Chico, Pequeña, and I look at each other. We’re here, in Arriaga. Where La Bestia lives. Where she waits for us.
“Some make it. Why not us?” I whisper to them. Chico smiles his stupid smile, Pequeña sighs with relief, and I feel my heart swell. Not too much, I tell it. Don’t feel too much.
Moments later, the driver is pulling into some run-down area lined with shops and vendors. The man, woman, and two teenage girls rush off together as soon as the van comes to a stop. But I have no idea where we are.
“Will you take us to the tracks, to where La Bestia starts?” I ask the driver.
He shrugs. “It’ll cost you more, but yeah . . . I can take you there.”
I watch the world outside, people in other cars, headed who knows where.
While we head to the beast. The beast who will deliver our dreams.
Pequeña
We ride in the van and I think of the fields where we ran, where I buried bloodied pads in a small hole while Chico and Pulga gave me privacy and kept watch. Where I layered myself with more.
It’s less now than before, and I will my body to stop bleeding. To stop draining. To reserve my energy as much as possible as I run away from Rey. As I run toward safety and maybe . . . dreams?
But lately, I’ve forgotten to dream. No, that’s not right. I made myself stop dreaming.
The day after Papi left, when Mami came back from going with Tía to get the housekeeping job at the resort, she’d looked at me with a smile on her face that wasn’t really a smile.
“Pues, mírame, una sirvienta,” she said, the maid’s uniform in her hand. “Ay, Pequeña, I tried. I endured things from your papi because I thought it would mean better for us, for you, if we were together. But now you get to see me go and change the sheets of the rich and los americanos. Clean the shit they leave behind.”
Mami is beautiful. She could have probably married any man she wanted. But she’d loved Papi, whose love ran out, and who then ran far away from us.
“It’s an honest job,” Tía Consuelo told Mami. “You’ll get tips. Sometimes.”
Mami’s eyes filled with tears and mine did, too. The way Mami shrank into herself, like she was so ashamed, hurt me more than even when Papi left. Tía hugged her. “I’m sorry, Lucia. I’ll help you learn some basic English and maybe then you can waitress,” she told Mami. Tía Consuelo had learned enough conversational English the year she lived in the States.
“I know, Consuelo . . . and I’m grateful, like I’m supposed to be. How else could I support us? It’s just not something I dreamed of doing.”
“Los sueños y los hombres son para las pendejas,” Tía Consuelo said, squeezing Mami closer to her. Mami let out a half sob, half laugh, agreeing that yes, only dumbasses believed in dreams or men. And then they told me and Pulga we were going to celebrate Mami’s new job, a new future. So we got on Tía’s scooter and rode to the Miramar, where Pulga and I ate and Mami and Tía drank beer and said, laughing, “Sueños y hombres son para las pendejas!”
I decided then they were right. And I told myself dreaming up a future wasn’t worth the pain that would come when eventually, inevitably, it woul
d get crushed.
“Look, there it is!” Chico yells, and he’s right. “Oh my god, that’s it!” Already we can see the train. Dusty steel that looks like it’s traveled through hell. I hear Pulga gasp next to me as we near the tracks, and my heart races as something like a dream feels like it’s being born inside me.
“Listen,” the driver says. He turns around to look at the three of us directly. “You see that?” He gestures toward a warped chain-link fence. “You can climb the fence or find an opening. There are openings all along there to get into the Ferromex train yard.”
Outside the smudged, dirty window of the van, the yard looks mostly deserted. But there sits La Bestia. Waiting for us. My stomach flutters with anticipation.
Pulga looks excited, too. “Okay . . .” he says, digging into his pocket for the money we owe the guy.
“Listen,” the driver says again. “How old are you boys?”
A sense of dread comes over me as I glance at the man’s face. I’m relieved he thinks I’m a boy, but why does he want to know our ages? Why, even, hasn’t he collected his money and thrown us out of the van already and driven away?
Pulga clears his throat. “Seventeen.” His voice is harsher as he spits out the lie, and I can tell he wants to seem older, tougher. I can tell the driver doesn’t believe him. There’s a hesitation around the edges of Pulga’s voice that reminds me he is just as much a little kid as Chico.
The driver looks at each of us. “I have three boys—a couple years apart but about your ages. Listen . . . be careful.”
Pulga nods. “How much extra do we owe you? For the drive to here?”
The driver shakes his head. “Forget it.” But his voice is tinged with regret, as though he’d like nothing more than to collect more money from us and be on his way. As though he’d like nothing more than to dump us wherever and forget about us. But something won’t let him. “Just be careful, you understand? The three of you have no business making a trip like this. Do you know how dangerous this is?”
“Yes,” Pulga says. “But . . .”
But if he only knew what awaits us back home, maybe he’d take us all the way to the border. All the way to the States.
The driver nods. “I know. I know.” He hesitates a moment, and out of nowhere says, “That guy who ran out onto the road last night . . . he couldn’t have been too much older than you boys.” He lets out a deep sigh, and I wonder if bringing us here, not charging us a single peso, wasn’t some kind of penance. “Bueno,” he says finally as he takes off his cowboy hat and runs his hand over his hair before putting the hat back on. “Que Dios vaya con ustedes.”
Pulga nods, and we climb out of the van—one after another—into the hot, dusty day and head toward the fence. We walk along it until we come across an opening, just like the driver said.
“You think he’s for real?” Pulga asks, as we look back and notice he’s still there, looking in our direction. “For all I know, he is calling someone to let them know he got three suckers here.” Pulga looks around. But no one comes.
“Who knows,” I tell him, and I think of how we can’t trust anyone, but how the only way to do this trip is by sometimes putting your life in a stranger’s hands.
A minute later, the white van drives off and we are walking along the tracks alone, except for a man in a neon worker’s vest walking next to the train on the tracks.
“Come on,” Pulga says. We avoid him and hurry toward some trees a bit in the distance, where we can sit on the ground and try to go unnoticed.
I look at the train cars; some are graffiti covered, some are plain gray steel and rust. Closer now, I can see the Ferromex name in faded paint on the side. I notice a few people in the distance, emerging from a building, approaching the worker. Relief pours over me when I see their backpacks. Here are others just like us.
“Those guys are gonna get on the train, too,” Pulga says, eyeing them. “They’re asking that worker when it’ll take off, I bet.”
“When will it?” Chico asks.
“I don’t know,” Pulga says. “I mean, sometimes it takes a day or two, maybe more. People just camp out and wait.”
“For days?” Chico asks.
“Sometimes. But the train is already here, so I don’t think we’ll be here for days. And the worker is inspecting it so I’m betting it will leave soon,” Pulga says, his eyes still taking in the worker, the yard, the train.
I look at the run-down buildings along the track. All of them look abandoned, with broken and dusty windows. But then I see some figures moving behind the windows. For a moment, I wonder if La Bruja is here, watching over me. I stare, trying to conjure her up, trying to make her fly out of one of those windows. She’d swoop down toward me and take me away, let me hold on to her hair as she flies me through the sky and takes me somewhere safe. Somewhere I won’t be afraid to dream.
She will take Pulga and Chico, too.
And go back home and get Mami and Tía, and bring them along.
Even that small baby.
Some kind of pain shoots through my chest and for a moment, I feel that baby’s mouth, sucking at my breast. Still demanding of me even as I get farther and farther away.
I wrap my arms across my front and the feeling stops. I stare back up at the windows. Nothing is there. No one comes.
It’s only my mind, playing tricks.
“I’m so hungry,” Chico says. We ate yesterday, but my stomach is rumbling, too.
“Here,” I tell him, pulling some cookies from my bag that I’ve brought all the way from home—the cookies Mami and I would eat for breakfast in the morning. They’re broken and practically crumbs, but I pour them into each of our hands.
“You know what I could go for right now?” Chico sucks up his crumbs. “The tamales, frijoles voltiados, ponche, and hot chocolate we have on Noche Buena.”
My mouth waters at the thought of the food Mami and Tía prepare for Christmas Eve—especially tamales with that rich, earthy recado made of toasted pumpkin seeds, a strip of red or green chile, an olive, a few garbanzo beans, a little nugget of pork, all nestled in perfectly seasoned masa, wrapped in a slick banana leaf, waiting to be opened like a gift.
I swallow the saliva that has gathered in my mouth.
“And some of your mamá’s chirmol,” he says to Pulga. “With a fried tortilla, that salt on top like she does when it comes right out of the oil. Man . . . or oh, Pequeña! Your mami’s rice,” he says to me. Both my stomach and my heart are hit with fresh pangs of pain. “Or the sopa mein from El Miramar,” he whispers. “That place has the best sopa mein.”
“It does,” Pulga says.
“I know . . .” I say, closing my eyes and getting lost in the smell of the food cooking at El Miramar, that smell that hits you while you’re still on the street, before you even enter the small restaurant. The one where Tía and Mami celebrated her new housekeeping job, and where we started going every Thursday and the owner would fill our bowls of sopa mein with extra noodles because he was in love with Mami. We’d sit and slurp them, having contests on who could suck them up fastest while Mami and Tía drank their cervezas and talked about life.
La vida this and la vida that, our mothers would say. And look exhausted by la vida, before looking at us and smiling.
“Stop,” Pulga tells Chico as he rattles off more food.
“I could eat a mountain of chuchitos. God, I could eat a thousand of them. One right after the other. I’d sit in a corner with a pile of chuchitos and just peel each one and shove them into my mouth. All that masa melting on my tongue . . .”
“Man, stop it! Don’t talk about food anymore,” Pulga says, but he’s laughing and I can tell he doesn’t mean it. Even as our stomachs moan and echo with emptiness, the memories feed our souls.
“Close your eyes,” I tell Pulga.
“I want to keep watch . . .�
�
“Just for a second, close your eyes. Both of you.”
I tell them to imagine they’re in my kitchen, and I explain how my mother makes her rice. The hundreds of times I’ve watched her wash and season it. I tell them to picture Pulga’s mamá in the kitchen, too. Cooking that chicken she prepares en crema. And Chico’s mamita is there, too, making tortillas from freshly ground corn.
“Can you see them, cooking for us? Can you see us, sitting with them, sharing food?”
The tears are streaming down my face before I realize it, and I am wiping at them, reeling back from the table to the bright, dusty yard.
I look at Pulga and he is sitting up, his eyes are watching the yard, trying to look tough, refusing to cry.
“Don’t be a macho, Pulga,” I tell him.
He gives me a dirty look. “I’m not. We just . . . we can’t get emotional, or lost in the past, you know?”
But he’s wrong. “Maybe thinking about the past is exactly what will make us keep going . . .” I tell him. I need to make it for myself, but also for Mami. So she won’t see what would’ve happened to me if I’d stayed.
He shakes his head. “No. That’s what will keep us back.”
I stare at him, not sure whether the fierceness I see in his eyes is a good or bad thing. It seems different than the little-kid toughness he’s always used to cover up his sensitivity. This is harder. Colder.
It worries me.
The sound of clanking and rumbling fills the yard, and instantly, Pulga is on his feet, looking toward the tracks. One of the cars is moving, then another. The workman in the vest is walking along beside them, inspecting. But the train only moves a few feet before it stops and sits idle again.
“It’s gonna leave soon,” Pulga whispers. “But if we get on now, we’re gonna bake under that sun.”
“I definitely don’t want to get on till we have to,” Chico says. “I heard the steel is burning hot.”
“Won’t that worker guy kick us off if we get on?” I ask.
Pulga shakes his head. “Nah, they can’t keep up with everyone. The most they’ll do is ask for some pisto.” Pulga rubs his fingers together and I nod. Everyone can be bought.
We Are Not from Here Page 15
