Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “Nobody touched you, lady!” the man barked.

  “Molester!”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” the man said.

  I moved past Ernesto and waved Rosalita to me. “Rosalita,” I whispered. “Vamonos. We’ve got to move.”

  “Todos ustedes,” Ernesto said. “Vamonos. Ahora.”

  The eleven women filed through the passage as Ernesto held open the door. The men working in back stopped what they were doing and watched us scurry by. A fat man in an apron held the plastic strands aside for us. Thunder crashed just as we exited the building. The sky had opened up, and a hard rain had arrived. It was mixed with small-sized hail that stung my face slightly when I looked up.

  Jaime met us at the corner of the building and led the way to the bus. “The keys were not in it, but I got it running,” he told me. “Do not shut off the engine.”

  We ran by DeLois in her car. She gave me a raised fist.

  “Let’s go,” I said to the women.

  They climbed into the bus one at a time, far too slowly for my taste. Each one looked more like my daughter than the last. Rosalita was the last to board. Unlike the others she did not look confused or even scared. She looked determined. She had soft features, but she had hardened them, not into a mask that was her face, but into one that made her face clearer to see.

  Jaime took my hand and pumped it vigorously. In his face I could see his admiration. “Good luck, friend,” he said. “Remember, do not shut off the engine. I won’t be there to start it again.”

  “Got it. Don’t kill the engine.” I stepped onto the bus, then turned back to him. “Thank you.”

  I might as well have been falling in behind the controls of the space shuttle, not that the cockpit of the bus was so foreign—it was, after all, just a big car—but the circumstances were so strange. The bus engine shook the whole structure. I waved to DeLois. I struggled getting the beast into first gear, remembered my father saying “grind me a pound” when I first learned to drive. It was raining very hard, and I could barely see. I searched for the wiper switch, found it almost accidentally. The one giant blade swept across the windshield. I crunched into second and became fearful of the stop sign at the top of the hill. I was certain I would stall if I stopped, so I decided I would keep driving even if there was cross traffic, trusting that any reasonable person would steer away from a big yellow bus being driven by an unreasonable person. I leaned on the horn as I came to the intersection.

  In the mirror, I saw the Nazi run screaming out of the grocery store, pulling what I thought was his phone from his pants pocket, but it was a pistol. He fired at us without regard or hesitation. Bullets hit the bus. The women screamed. Grace, Jaime, and Ernesto ducked back into the store for cover. I became fearful that they were in danger. The hard rain and the laboring bus engine made it so I could not hear the report from his weapon, but I saw the recoil clearly. I wondered where his bullets wound up. As the plan instructed, I turned onto the ramp that led north onto the interstate. At the very next exit I got off, crossed back over the highway, and turned back south. The big old bus roared on the wide road; the poor thing sounded as if it would never stop getting louder, it having only three gears and so no resolve. Unfortunately, noise did not translate into velocity. We were like a fat man running his hardest through sand.

  “¿A dónde vamos?” Rosalita asked. She was standing at my shoulder. She, in fact, startled me.

  “You should sit down,” I said.

  She didn’t move.

  “Siéntese, por favor,” I said.

  She sat right behind me, leaned forward. “¿A dónde vamos?”

  “Mexico,” I said.

  Rosalita turned to the others. “¡Vamos a Mexico!”

  The women cheered. For some reason that prompted me to glance at the gas gauge. I never believed in the optimist/pessimist half-full/half-empty thing, but I saw the tank as half-full, and I knew that we would never make it.

  Rosalita came back to me and spoke rapidly in Spanish. I couldn’t follow her. “Más lento, please … por favor.”

  “Who are you? What is your name?”

  “My name is Zach.”

  “Zach,” she announced to the others.

  “Señor Zach,” I heard a couple of them say.

  “Gracias, señor Zach,” Rosalita said.

  I nodded. I looked in the mirror and saw nothing suspicious behind us, just semitrucks and minivans, none of which stayed behind us for long. I checked my speed, wondered how accurate the speedometer was, not that the bus could have bettered the speed limit. I paid extra-close attention, afraid that if I did anything unusual—drove too slow or veered into the other lane—a cop would see us and pull us over. I was driving a stolen bus, and for all I really knew, I was guilty of kidnapping these women. I noticed that some of the women were huddled in the back. Something was wrong.

  “¿Que le occurre?” But no one heard me. “Rosalita?” She came back. “What’s going on back there?”

  “Una bala esta en Maribel,” she said, too calmly for me.

  “What?”

  “Su brazo. Ella está bien.”

  I calculated in my head. It would take the Nazis more than an hour to reach the market and the highway from the compound. Perhaps that long to discover that we were not headed north. I had to assume that they would figure that out. I hoped that they did not have comrades, law enforcement or otherwise, that they could call to search.

  “Why do you help us?” Rosalita asked, struggling with English.

  “Enviaste un mensaje,” I said, figuring I owed her the respect of struggling with Spanish. I grabbed the collar of my shirt and turned it up. “Mensaje. You sent a note.”

  “Sí,” she said, understanding. “I send note. ¿Por qué estás haciendo esto?”

  I didn’t understand her.

  “¿Por qué?”

  “My daughter told me I had to help you,” I said without thinking. “Mi hija me envió. Mi hija.”

  “I try English,” she said.

  “Gracias.”

  She looked back into the bus at the other women.

  “How is Maribel?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Tres horas,” I told her. “Mexico in tres horas.”

  She nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

  I imagined asking her about how she came to be there, about how she was taken, but I didn’t know how to ask and really didn’t want to know. The low, dark clouds were scattered across the scape, and so we moved in and out of downpours. The wiper remained on since I didn’t know where the switch was. When between storms I could hear just how quiet the women were—no laughing, no crying, no talking. There was the occasional cough.

  My phone rang and, like everything that day, startled me. I answered it, finding the big bus wheel hard to manage with one hand. It was DeLois.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “Yes. Are you all okay?”

  “All well,” she said.

  “Thank you. Tell everyone I said thank you.” I hung up before she could say anything else. I didn’t want to say that there was a wounded woman on board. And I needed both hands for the wheel. Just outside the town of Truth or Consequences the clouds disappeared, and the sun came out. I searched the dashboard and finally found the switch, turned off the wiper. The sun, the hot engine, the situation, made the bus hot. I opened the window beside me. After Truth or Consequences, I pulled off the interstate into a rest area. It was fairly deserted but not empty. There was a family of four at a picnic table. They had an old Labrador retriever that reminded me of Basil. Of the five, only the dog seemed interested in us.

  I was careful to leave the motor running.

  I walked to the back of the bus and looked at Maribel. Her arm was bandaged with clothing. The wound was in her lower right arm and the bleeding appeared to have stopped. She did not look well, but she smiled at me.

  “She needs a doctor,” I said.

  “After we get ho
me,” Rosalita said. She spoke to Maribel in Spanish. Maribel nodded to me.

  I said okay and walked back to the front of the bus. I pulled out my phone to call Lieutenant Deocampo while the women visited the washroom. They moved together, like a quarrel of swallows. I noticed that they all wore the same Adidas sneakers. Jeans, T-shirts of various colors, white sneakers with three red stripes on each side. Maribel walked with Rosalita. None of them looked back at me except Rosalita.

  Deocampo answered.

  “I have them,” I said.

  His silence betrayed his profound surprise.

  “Will you be there?” I asked.

  “When?”

  I had to step away from the running bus to hear him. “This bus is slow, very slow. Three hours, I think. At least that long to get to the bridge. I don’t know how long to cross. There are eleven of them.”

  Again, the silence.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “I am here, Mr. Wells.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “I will be there.”

  Hotter in New Mexico.

  Rosalita led them from the small brick building back to the bus. The picnicking family watched them this time. I stood by the open door like a poorly dressed chauffeur as the women, one by one, reboarded, not one looking at my face, each one saying, “Gracias.” Without the wind pushing through the windows, the bus had become extremely hot, but the women seemed less bothered or affected than I was. Maribel, now cleaned up, appeared slightly better, but when she tried to muster a smile for me as she boarded I saw through her.

  I put the beast into first and pushed forward. Just as I did, a child’s ball rolled in front of me and I instinctively braked suddenly. I should not have done that. The bus stalled. We sat there on the asphalt, helpless. The women didn’t understand a lot of English, but I believed they caught the gist of my one-syllable, stage-whispered exclamation. To compound the intensity of the situation, sitting stranded in that crippled sauna, the white man of the picnicking family walked toward us. He picked up the ball and came to the door, and I opened it.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “No worries,” I said. I looked at the rest of his family.

  “Problem with the bus?” He was muscular, short, wore a badly kept blond beard, though his hair was red. He had a tattoo peeking out from his sleeve but I could not make it out.

  “I guess.”

  Before I could say anything else, he stepped aboard. My heart was beating crazily. He immediately spotted the tangle of wires hanging from beneath the dash. He looked at me and then back at the wires.

  Rosalita left her seat and moved to stand behind me. Whether she intended the gesture to show that she was not afraid of me or not, that was the effect it had. Somehow the man, as he looked at the faces in the bus, at Rosalita, and at me, was able to ascertain something that appeared to make him soften.

  “Church group?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He looked over at the highway that was just visible, then down the aisle of the bus out the back window.

  “I used to drive a school bus in Denver,” he said. “I was always losing the key. Mind if I help?”

  “Please.” I started to leave my seat.

  “You don’t have to get up.” He reached past me and grabbed the wires. I could see that his tattoo was of a cartoon character, one I had seen but could not name, sitting on an anchor.

  “Were you in the navy?” I asked.

  “Marines.”

  “Same here.”

  “Semper Fi,” he said. “I hated the corps.”

  “Same here.”

  “You leave those two twisted together like they are. You take this red one and this green one and just make a spark. Like this.” He tapped them together, caused a spark, and the engine turned over. “Rev it,” he said.

  I did. I kept touching the gas to keep it going.

  “Got it?” he asked.

  “Thank you.”

  “Gracias,” Rosalita said.

  “You bet.” He backed out of the bus, looked again at the women. “You folks have a good trip.”

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  As we drove away, I didn’t know what to think. Had he intuited that these were frightened women and that I was helping them? Was he playing it cool so that he could run and call the police? Whatever, I had to assume that now our direction of travel was known. I got off the interstate at Williamsburg, bought water at a gas station, and decided to proceed south on the state route 187.

  The roadside was hardly empty, peppered as it was with rundown and shut-down businesses—tire retreads, radiator repair—and the occasional tiny church built out of the same aluminum siding as the shops. There was none of the quaint charm of northern New Mexico down here. There was little traffic, but only two lanes made it congested and slow going. We were another hour into the drive when I noticed that we still had half a tank of gas. The gauge was not working. I didn’t know whether there were three quarters of a tank or a mere three quarts; I had no choice but to continue on.

  Rosalita somehow detected my concern. “Okay?”

  “Everything is okay,” I said.

  The road turned southwest and ducked under the interstate, continued on the west side of it. The route promised to add hours to the trip, but I felt committed to it. I called Deocampo and left a message telling him we would be later and not to leave if we were not there when he arrived. All had gone smoothly from the first, but now everything seemed to be falling apart.

  I stopped at a convenience store with two gas pumps. I got out and walked around the vehicle realizing that I had no idea where the gas cap was. Regardless, I didn’t trust myself to be able to restart the engine even if I did figure it out.

  In the little store I grabbed jugs of water and put them on the counter. The cashier looked out the open door at the bus and then gave me a long study. “I got a bathroom around back,” she said. She was a gray-haired Hispanic woman. “It’s real clean.” Though her un-air-conditioned store was as hot as the bus, she didn’t appear to mind. “Who you got in that bus?” she asked. I was impressed by her directness.

  “Friends,” I said. “I’m taking them home to Mexico.”

  She looked at my eyes, into my eyes.

  I looked away.

  “Take some bags of chips,” she said. “On the house.”

  I thanked her and left. I looked back as I was stepping into the bus. The little woman was standing in the doorway. She offered a small wave.

  Again on the highway, it appeared we were headed into another thunderstorm. The sky grew dark, but at least the temperature dropped a degree or two. Rosalita offered me some water. I drank some and handed the bottle back.

  “¿Está bien?” I asked.

  She was quiet for a while. “A veces nos llevaron a una ciudad,” she said.

  I didn’t quite understand. Something about going to a city. I nodded anyway. “Pronto.”

  I became increasingly anxious about being on the little road. It was taking us away from El Paso, and I was afraid I would become hopelessly lost, so I worked my way back to the interstate. This was no better, as I merged the bus into nearly standstill traffic. It was already well past two. I called Deocampo and had to leave another message. His second failure to answer left me suspecting that we were being abandoned.

  We inched along. Rosalita’s English was about as good as my Spanish. I tried to ask her if everyone was okay, and I believe she told me they were hot but all right. People looked up at me from the cars. I felt naked. I was in constant fear of hitting another car. There had to be roadwork or an accident. From experience I knew it could be something as minor as a man changing a tire. Then I saw the flashing blue lights. Of course, I suspected it was probably an accident, but I couldn’t shake from my mind the possibility that it was a roadblock. It didn’t matter what kind of roadblock, sobriety, vehicle registration, whatever. I had no registration for the bus and couldn’t explain the
women. “Yes, I’m driving a stolen bus because I’m taking these kidnapped women back to Mexico.” As I said it to myself, I realized that it didn’t sound so bad, but it would not have gotten the women back to Mexico promptly, and that had become my singular mission, to see them home. And I had, in fact, stolen a vehicle.

  The flashing red light of a fire truck allowed me to breathe. I knew then that it was an accident. It turned out to be a car fire. A leather-jacketed man stood by as firemen sprayed foam on his ’64 Mustang convertible. I felt a rush of sadness for the man, surprised I had the energy to feel anything outside my bubble. Once past the scene the traffic flowed. We crossed the state line into Texas.

  It was just as hot in Texas.

  The bus’s engine made a new sound, made it again, then died. I coasted into a shopping mall parking lot. I tried to restart it and was able to get a spark and a turn of the starter motor, but I knew what was wrong. The bus was out of gas. I turned to look at Rosalita, then I stood and observed the frightened faces of the other ten. I waved my arm. “Vamonos,” I said.

  They followed me out onto the surface of the parking lot. There was a dry cleaner, a defunct computer shop, and a Thai restaurant. From where we stood, I could see the Santa Fe Bridge. We walked. If we weren’t conspicuous before, we were now. I looked like some pathetic cult leader. I didn’t help matters. I was so eager to get to the border that I walked much faster than I should have, leaving the women to nearly trot to keep up with me. In the heat my khaki shirt was soaked and stuck to me. Finally, Rosalita caught up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. I turned to face her.

  “Maribel is not good,” she said.

  Maribel was well behind me with two other women. I could see from thirty feet that she was fading. Her arm was bleeding again.

  I stopped at the cart of a man selling fruit and asked where there was a hospital. He pointed across a market parking lot at an urgent care sign.

  I went to Maribel. She looked so weak. To Rosalita I said, “Todos ustedes continúan.”

  “We stay together,” she said. She and the other women spoke feverishly to one another. I didn’t understand. “We stay together,” she repeated to me.

  And so we all walked across the parking lot and into the urgent care center. The place was already crowded. Everyone inside turned to regard us, almost as if with fear. Rosalita and I went to the desk.