Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘What then?’

  ‘The doctor will tell you.’ He motions me to a chair and says something quietly to his daughter. I look down at Emmy fretfully, her skin has a greenish tinge to it, her eyes are two muddy hollows, then I catch sight of my own face in the mirror and realize it’s just the harsh strip lighting of the pharmacy washing us both with its tubercular glow. Out in the street, music blares from a boombox. The pharmacist’s daughter returns with two paper cones of Coke. She hands one to me and the other to jack.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, Jack.’ I give him a one-armed hug.

  ‘Can I have a quarter to weigh myself?’ Jack says.

  The doctor is large and sweaty with a small moustache that curls under his nose and droops down either side of his mouth lending him a mournful expression. He shakes my hand limply and introduces himself as Louis. He makes little grunting noises as I relay each of Emmy’s symptoms to him, examining her with an air of tired resignation. As a character in a movie, he is the abortionist who has been struck off, the alcoholic local doctor who digs bullets from the shoulders of heroes with a blunt instrument and a slosh of whisky to dull the pain. ‘I also have two children,’ he remarks conversationally, hooking the stethoscope into his ears.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yes, I like it,’ he agrees amiably. ‘My wife is a very good mother and an excellent housekeeper, she mops the floor five times a day.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ That’s a lot. I can’t take my eyes off Emmy’s face.

  ‘To me it looks clean after the first time, but I know the rules.’ He bends over Emmy’s chest. ‘Women are always right. Please . . . turn her round.’

  ‘Is she okay?’

  He puts a stethoscope to Emmy’s back. ‘Did you take her to the doctor before?’

  I go through the whole saga. The medical centre had been closed, Tucson had been too far.

  ‘Ahhh,’ he says, ‘you live in America,’ and I’m reminded that I am now in a different country. ‘You are very fortunate.’ He pulls gently down on Emmy’s chin to open her mouth. ‘You know what they say, “Poor Mexico, so close to the US, so far from God.”’ He shines a torch into the cavity of Emmy’s throat. His hands are soft and hairless, small as a child’s. ‘In America you make money but you’re on your own. In Mexico you are poor, but you are subsidized.’

  ‘You speak really good English.’

  ‘I had US residency once.’

  ‘So why don’t you work on the other side?’

  He sighs weightily. ‘I lost it when they bust me for running drugs.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Hey, it was only marijuana.’ He looks affronted. ‘Everybody does it, but I spent time in a federal prison. If they catch me on the wrong side of the border I go back to jail.’ He leans his hands heavily on his knees to stand up, then says something to the pharmacist, who begins rifling through the stacked shelves of small boxes behind the counter.

  ‘Is that it?’ I look from one to the other. ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘Finished? Yes.’

  ‘So what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She has an ear infection.’

  ‘An ear infection! Is that all? Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘But it can’t be – her temperature was so high, and the fit, I mean, it was really scary and I thought . . .’

  Louis pats me clumsily on the arm. ‘Fever is maligned and much misunderstood. The fever is to show you her ear infection, but the infection makes her dehydrated and dehydration forces up the fever. If the temperature is high enough she can have a little seizure, but I don’t think she will have another.’

  The pharmacist gives him a bottle of banana-coloured liquid.

  ‘Antibiótico,’ Louis says. ‘She must take this three times a day, after she eats.’ He smiles, seeing my hesitation. ‘You can trust me. She will be all right. Can you pay me twenty dollars?’

  ‘Of course.’ I’d happily have signed over the deeds to Temerosa.

  ‘If you need anything for your daughter, you can come back or ring me. We will post everything to you direct.’

  I thank him and pocket the business card he offers.

  ‘Take your daughter home,’ he waves in the general direction of the street, ‘and think of us over on the other side sometimes.’

  I strap the children back into the car. For a second I wish Robert was with me, just to have someone to take responsibility, so I could sit in the back and hold on to my daughter and keep her safe, but at the same time I know he would never have agreed to crossing the border, there would have been exhaustive arguments and wasted minutes and who knows what might have happened, who knows . . .

  I steer the truck across town following ‘To the USA’ signs but as I turn left to the border, I realize that while getting out of the USA might have been easy, getting back in is going to be another matter entirely. Instead of empty checkpoints, hundreds of cars are backlogged into six or seven lanes, creating not only a massive gridlock but also a raging night economy to service it. Street kids are everywhere, sidling through the gaps in the lanes, tapping on car windows and offering trays of gum and noxious-looking sweets in plastic bags. Some, so grubby it looks as if their bare skin has been rubbed with a dirty tyre, advance towards the windscreen, brandishing filthy cloths and mud-streaked water buckets. Parallel to the road, Mexican soldiers carrying rifles patrol the railway with dogs. Behind them the border rises up, green and menacing into the hills. There’s an intangible crackle and sense of urgency in the air. A cripple in a wheelchair, head far too big for his wasted body, expertly manoeuvres his way through the aisles, one hand extended casually, as though money might accidentally drop into it from the Good Lord above. Street vendors offer slices of watermelon sprinkled with red chilli, bottles of Santa Maria purified water and plastic cups of Jell-O. Under the awnings of closed shops, hawkers sell garish velour towels printed with images of virgins and saints and the Last Supper. As I edge the truck into the queue, one beckons. ‘Come on, baby,’ he croons, ‘everything you like is here, I bring it over?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Noh?’ He grins. ‘Okay then, baby, I wait for choo all day then maybe you come back tomorrow, huh?’ I give him a thumbs-up and swiftly wind up the window just as a girl’s face appears, pale, Western-looking. Cautiously, I wind down the window again.

  ‘Help me,’ she begs. ‘I’ve been robbed.’ She holds up a bag with a knife slash through the bottom. ‘They took money! My passport! I can’t get across the border. I need to call the American embassy, get back to my children. Please, just a few dollars?’

  It feels like a scam, but she’s an American, and in trouble, no doubt about that.

  ‘Look, I haven’t got a passport either,’ I say half-heartedly. ‘You could come with me.’

  The girl’s eyes flick to the children. ‘Just give me some money, lady.’ She rakes her nails up and down skinny arms. An addict. I fumble in my bag and thrust a couple of dollars out of the window.

  ‘That it?’ Her eyes are flinty. ‘Haven’t you got more?’

  I stammer an apology but she just spits on the ground and slips into the next lane.

  Only three cars in front of us now. Papers and passports are being passed backwards and forwards, car trunks being opened and checked. If I hadn’t been able to talk my way out of a speeding ticket, I haven’t got much chance of getting through this. I think of Winfred ripping me off twice and, wondering whether a bribe might be in order, surreptitiously transfer my bag to my lap. I’m not exactly au fait with the going rate for bribing officials in Nogales, let alone the methodology, but surely it will need to be handled subtly, the money passed over with skilful sleight of hand and a knowing look. Already the car in front is being waved through the barrier and I’m so busy siphoning the last few bills out of my wallet and stowing them up my sleeve that I misjudge the distance to creep forwards and overshoot the line. It can’t be by more than a few inches but you’d think
I’d come roaring through the checkpoint with a hand grenade in my hand and the pin in my teeth for the reaction it provokes.

  ‘Whaddayathink you’re doing!’ screeches the customs officer. ‘Get back over the line, GET BACK!’ He’s a chunky American with freckled skin and bulbous eyes showing a little too much white around the pupil. I hastily reverse. ‘No, not that far! Move forwards!’

  I jerk forward again until I’m about an inch from where I first stopped.

  ‘Do you think this barrier is a joke?’ He punches a button and a line of spikes shoot out of the ground right in front of the wheels. ‘Do you want to get yourself killed? It’s dangerous up here! The line is for your own security!’ He jumps out of his box and stalks over to the truck.

  In normal circumstances such officiousness would have me giggling behind my hand, but with no passport, no weapon of identity and dressed still in my pyjamas with a sweatshirt on top, I cower behind the steering wheel while he takes a long stick with a mirror stuck at one end and pokes it up the truck’s backside.

  He straightens up. ‘There’s a lot of mud on this vehicle. Where have you been driving it?’

  ‘In Arizona. I live—’

  ‘Citizenship?’ he interrupts.

  ‘American?’ I mumble hopefully.

  ‘Passport.’ He holds out his hand.

  My heart sinks. ‘Look, I don’t mean my passport’s American, I mean my passport is, in fact, English, it’s just that I’m living—’

  ‘Passports,’ he repeats. ‘All of them.’

  I chance an explanation. I mention doctors and fits and spasms, reiterate just how truly close to life and death this whole episode has been, turn round and point at poor little sick Emmy who needless to say is now sleeping soundly, her fever making her look as pink and healthy as a baby flamingo.

  ‘So that’s why I haven’t got the passports with me,’ I conclude.

  ‘Have you checked your bag?’

  ‘No, but they’re not—’

  ‘Check your bag, please, ma’am.’

  ‘Look, they’re not in my bag, I know they’re not there.’

  ‘Are you saying you deliberately entered Mexico without a passport?’

  ‘Well no, I mean, yes, but—’

  ‘Mexico is an international border. Crossing an international border without a passport is a violation of US law.’

  ‘I understand, it’s just that – as I said – it was an emergency.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ He takes a step forward. ‘You drive into Mexico without a passport – you don’t come out again.’

  ‘Look, officer, can I just give you . . . this?’

  He looks at the crumpled twenty in my hand. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, this?’ I look at the note as though relatively surprised to see it myself, ‘Well now, that’s a . . . well, it’s uh . . . money, actually . . .’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘It’s, uh, well . . .’

  ‘Ma’am,’ he says very loudly, ‘I hope that money isn’t intended as some kind of bribe?’

  I positively chortle with laughter and shrink further down into my seat. ‘Goodness me, of course not! It’s for, uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . for the toll!’

  ‘Pull over.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say wearily.

  I turn on the engine and press down on the accelerator. A hand slams flat on the windscreen. With a look of utter contempt, the guard backs into the booth, presses the button and the spikes disappear into the ground. He waves at another official. ‘No passport.’ He shakes his head, as though this is the most incredible thing he’s ever heard in his career as a US customs official. I mean, problem with a passport! Geez, can you believe that such a thing could ever happen at an international border?

  ‘What’s going on, Mummy?’ Jack says in a small voice. ‘This must happen all the time, right . . .’ Apprehensively, I follow the new official into the customs building, Emmy in my arms and Jack tagging along at my heels. ‘There’s a mechanism for dealing with this kind of thing, I assume? I mean, people must get their passports stolen every day?’

  ‘No biggie, ma’am,’ the new official says kindly. He presses a button and the elevator doors open into a waiting room of sorts. A long counter at one end is divided by a perspex barrier behind which more agents are rifling through filing cabinets and checking paperwork. ‘Wait here,’ he says, pointing at an unoccupied chair.

  I look around. The walls are painted an anodyne cream, lending the room a hospital-like air. Pinned alongside framed pictures of Bush and Cheney are various notices on immigration, the simian features of an FBI most wanted and warnings of the dire penalties of drug smuggling. A dozen people are waiting to be seen, all Mexican. A young couple holding hands. Two wrinkled men in cowboy hats and a teenage boy who leers at us with the burning, unblinking eyes of a junkie. A thickset Mexican with a shaved head and ears like kidney bowls stomps by, trousers tucked into black military boots, his navy uniform straining over every inch of his body. A walkie-talkie strapped to his waist crackles with some kind of code. ‘Three-twenty activity . . . south . . . two-seventy . . .’

  Our friendly official reappears and asks me for picture ID and I go through the whole story once again. Agent Harrigan, I read off his badge.

  ‘Not even for the kids?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

  Is there anyone I can call, he asks, who will bring the passports to Nogales? And I think of Benjamín, but even if I had the capability of reaching him, I have no idea of his exact legal status.

  ‘No.’

  He returns to the telephone. I haul Jack onto a chair and slump down in the empty seat next to him, Emmy heavy in my arms. I watch the clock as fifteen minutes pass, then another fifteen. Emmy’s eyes flutter open. ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ she says, ‘I want you to buy me a blanket a soft one for a five-year-old girl like me and I want you to give it to me so I can sleep with it and cuddle it and not be scared so much any more.’ I look down at her dirty face, at the tiny clusters of broken veins visible beneath her skin and shake myself into action.

  Agent Harrigan is still on the phone.

  I poke my finger in his arm. ‘Excuse me, what’s happening?’

  He holds a finger to his lips, but I am not to be shushed.

  ‘Look, there must be a system for a situation like this. What do you do with people who’ve had their passport stolen, for instance?’

  He places his hand over the phone. ‘Your passport hasn’t been stolen, ma’am. This is a case of wilful violation.’

  Wearily I begin again. Emmy’s fit, my headlong panic, the passports being left at home. I describe their exact whereabouts – on the bookshelf in the bedroom – hoping that the sheer mundanity of detail might reassure him. But no. I try to keep my cool, to control the prickle of sweat breaking out over my body. I try to convince him that if he will only let me go home, I can myself fetch the passports and bring them back later on in the day.

  ‘But ma’am,’ he says as patiently as he can, ‘without a passport we can’t let you go home.’

  At which point, all the repressed fear and frustration of the night begin to rise uncontrollably through my veins like the mercury inside Emmy’s thermometer, until finally I see red.

  The man sitting behind the desk bears the faintest scars of teenage acne. His black hair is wavy and greying at the temples and he’s handsome in an old-fashioned, rakish sort of a way.

  ‘Yes, how many?’ He speaks quietly into the receiver. ‘Keep the men there for another hour . . . yes . . .’

  Agent Harrigan herds us into the room then hastily backs out like a veterinarian assistant delivering some wild creature, a bobcat or deranged hyena, into the custody of somebody more qualified to use a stun gun. Still fired up, I’m tempted to deliver a parting snap, perhaps even sink my teeth into the beefy region of his upper arm, but I know when not to push my luck. The desk in front of us is ordered but not without personal touches. A photograph frame, a bronze statue
of Degas’s ‘Little Ballerina’, a gold name slide which reads Emilio Chavez . . . and suddenly I get a sting of recognition. Of course, Chavez, the Mexican-looking official up on stage at the Ague town hall meeting.

  ‘No . . .’ he sighs, ‘I will speak to the family myself . . .’ He places the receiver back in its station, then presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose as if to squeeze out a headache. ‘Mrs Coleman . . .’ he begins.

  ‘Look—’ I say aggressively, but he holds up his hands.

  ‘You want to go home, I understand.’ He studies the sheet of paper on the desk. ‘Arlington Road, London.’ He looks up. ‘You’re a long way from home, Mrs Coleman.’

  I nod. Tears prick my eyes.

  ‘This phone call concerned another young woman also a long way from home, an Ezme Santega?’ he continues conversationally, as though I might have come across her somewhere, a dinner party perhaps. ‘Ezme is an illegal immigrant who has been working in Tucson. In less than two years she earned enough money to pay a coyote fourteen hundred dollars to bring her brother across the border to join her but he never arrived. Instead the coyote contacted her and said her brother was being ransomed. She sent more money. Still he didn’t appear. She eventually sent all the money she had earned or could possibly borrow from her family, her neighbours, from other immigrants who were prepared to help. Still he didn’t appear. By the time she called us this evening, she didn’t care about being deported, she just wanted her brother back. Two hours ago, I sent men to the safe house outside Nogales where he was being held. Inside we found Kalashnikov casings and pools of blood. I very much doubt we will ever find the body of Ezme’s brother.’

  ‘Why would they kill him if she sent the money?’ It feels surreal to be having this conversation in the wee small hours of the morning with a Mexican who looks like Errol Flynn and talks like Tom Ridge.

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps less trouble to kill him than deliver him.’ He smiles at Jack who is slumped in his chair, raccoon-eyed with tiredness.

  ‘People tend to think of us as the bad guys, Mrs Coleman, but the last thing my agents are here to do is to hound women and children. Unfortunately, this border – any border – is home to unscrupulous smugglers of both human and narcotic cargoes and it is our job to apply the law. In your case the law stipulates that you should stay in Mexico until you either get hold of your existing passport or receive a new one.’