Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  “Keep down,” Troy said to her. “People are up by now.”

  Martha lowered herself but she saw the sun-bleached green state sign when they passed it—ALPINE, POP. 5971. They took a left before they were all the way into town and from her vantage point on the seat looking up out the window she could see the tops of trees, almost leafless, and the tops of municipal light poles and after a few minutes what she took to be the uppermost seats of the bleachers of a high school football field or a rodeo arena. Then the treetops came less often until there were no more and they seemed to be out of town again, back on the open road. The sun was up on the left side of the car and began to illuminate the condition of its interior, which she had sensed in the dark—filth: empty RC Cola cans, food wrappers, pulverized corn chips, and gobs of dried food spread on top of a dungheap of dirt-gray socks and other items of clothing filling the footwells; the back of the driver’s seat had been gashed in several places as if someone had attacked it with a knife, and the yellow foam stuffing bulged out. A vinyl Dallas Cowboys sticker in the shape of a pennant had been pasted across the gouges, to stanch the hemorrhaging or maybe just for comic effect. The seat beneath Martha’s head smelled like her brothers had up against her in bed after a day of moving pigs in August. She reached and pulled hard on the window handle and cracked the window and no one in front objected. She tried not to breathe through her nose and looked out at the sky, covered with streaky white clouds like smears across the purity of the blue.

  After the car picked up speed again she said: “I want to sit up now.” Harlan looked back and told her she could and she pulled herself upright and took in the new landscape for the first time. It was starting to look like Mexico now—terrain that rolled instead of lying flat for plowing and grazing, wilder scrubland covered with miles of yellow grama grass and cholla cactus that made her heart leap because this was Mexican cactus that you never saw further north in Texas. She remembered that the drive from Cuauhtémoc to Juárez in a broken-down pickup had taken a little more than six hours and so she estimated that the distance to Cuauhtémoc from where they were now in Texas, so far south, probably wasn’t much longer. Her mind went ahead of them, further south, to the Rio Grande and she started to think about the river—which she had never considered as a river but as a divine demarcation inscribed on the earth by God himself to separate two profoundly separate places. Now she thought that it was just a river after all, in places not even a very good one, a dirty, shallow course through a countryside more or less exactly the same on one side as the other for miles north and south. The river wasn’t important, really, even as a barrier. It wasn’t anything. Some of the year, in some places, you could wade across it the way you would a muddy irrigation ditch, without even getting your shirt wet. She remembered something an old woman in the campo had told her about how German women performed auguries in rivers in ancient times, reading omens in the currents, but they wouldn’t be able to predict much in those parts. The Mexicans called it the Río Bravo, the wild river, which had some truth to it in the winding of its course. But Grande seemed wrong to Martha, an American exaggeration only because it drew a portion of the form of their country.

  She was making herself sleepy again. She looked out at the road, a narrow crumbling two-lane asphalt strait with no shoulder except for a margin of dirt that the traffic kept clear of brush on either side. She could see five miles ahead and spotted no vehicles coming toward them or headed the same way. In the front, the larger brother reached down into the rucksack at his feet and produced a plastic ice bucket that he had apparently taken from the motel room. He also took out something else wadded inside, a beige polyester foam blanket that Martha recognized as the kind she had seen on the motel beds. He turned and handed the blanket over the seat to her. Then he situated the bucket between his legs and took a large wad of tobacco from a paper pouch and shoved it behind his lower lip and spat every few minutes, ruminatively, like the old men Martha had known in the campo.

  “It smells very bad in here,” Martha said.

  Harlan spat into his bucket. “This car is a hovel, Troy,” he said. “Couldn’t you have rustled us something better?”

  Martha leaned over and rolled her window lower.

  “Roll up the goddamned window. You’re going to freeze us out.”

  But she left it open to the cold wind singing in. Harlan held on to his bucket with one hand and rolled his window down, too. The roar in the car grew deafening and began to oscillate in their ears.

  “The girl’s right—we need to air this pigsty out,” Harlan yelled and he began to laugh, the first time Martha had seen either of the men express any kind of strong emotion other than anger. Harlan clamped his hat on top of his head with the flat of his hand. “Smell that Texas air! Don’t it feel nice? Breathe it in while you’ve still got the chance.”

  Troy let off the gas and allowed the Biscayne to slow until the sound from the windows was replaced again by the rumble of the car’s big V8 engine. He rolled his window down, too, and flipped up the collar on his suit jacket and pulled it around his neck and let the car wander to the side of the blacktop as the speedometer needle fell below thirty.

  Harlan began to whistle and then to sing, his voice drifting aimlessly:

  My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay

  So fare thee well, darlin’, I’m goin’ away

  Your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too poor

  They say I’m not worthy to enter your door.

  Troy reached down and turned on the radio. It was tuned to a border X station playing a song with a pretty melody, an old-timey country ballad, maybe a church hymn:

  In a little rosewood casket

  That is resting on a stand

  Is a package of old letters

  Written by a lover’s hand.

  But the lyrics of the song bothered him and he turned the radio off again.

  “We’ve got two hours, maybe not even, Harlan. Can you hold it together that long?”

  “I’m holding everything together. I’m holding it together just fine.” Harlan leaned and spat out the window instead of into the ice bucket and began to whistle again. “You know why? Because I’ve decided not to worry anymore. I woke up this morning and I decided—what’s the use in worrying? This train’s headed in one direction and it ain’t ever coming back. I’ve decided I’m all ready for my new life in Old Mexico.”

  The clouds had thickened and the sky had turned a dark gray, like a lead helmet over everything, but it didn’t rain. Troy picked up speed and eased onto the pavement again. Martha rolled her window back up and so did the men. She took the polyester blanket and spread it across her lap and tried to tuck the ends behind her shoulders but it was more like a piece of sponge than a blanket and it kept coming loose.

  “Mexico is okay,” she offered after a while, in response to Harlan, who was surprised to hear her try to make conversation. “In the country, in the desert, it’s pretty, if there’s enough rain. And the best thing is that people leave you alone.”

  Harlan didn’t say anything for a while and then, not turning to look at her, he asked: “Were you born in Mexico?”

  “Yes. But my father was born in Manitoba, up in Canada, where the Mennonites lived after Russia. He was young when they went down to Chihuahua, so he doesn’t remember much about the north.”

  Martha looked at the craggy side of Harlan’s face in the shade of his hat.

  “Where did your people come from?” she asked.

  Harlan glanced back at her this time and seemed perplexed by the question. “English, I guess. Or Irish? Maybe German. Nobody I knew ever talked about remembering family coming over from anywhere. I don’t know anybody who knows about a country before this one. Except the Mexicans in town. It all happened too long ago, I guess.”

  “Is it strange for you not knowing?”

  “I never really thought about it,” he said. “Maybe that is strange.”

  After a while he
asked: “Is it true that some of you Mennonites live without electrical power?”

  Martha pulled at the foam blanket. “I was five before I saw the first electrical light bulb of my lifetime. A man from Chihuahua drove through the campos in a demonstration truck one night trying to sell us generators, and in the bed of his truck he had one hooked up to a Christmas tree all covered in big red and green bulbs. One of my brothers told me that if I looked at electric lights I’d be blinded so I covered my eyes until I couldn’t hear the truck anymore and everybody laughed at me so I threw a rock at my brother’s head and my mother wore me out with a switch.”

  “Is it also true what they say about Mennonites, that you keep everything in common, like Jesus said to do?”

  Martha considered the question carefully. “I don’t think so. There were things in our house, on the farm, that I always thought of as ours, by ourselves. But if somebody really needed something you gave it to him. If somebody needed help, you helped him. To build his shed or kill his hog. When somebody died, the family didn’t have to go out and dig the grave. Other people always came to do it. In German you say Glassenheit”—she said it with a heavy accent, and it sounded as if it had come from someone else’s mouth. “My mother said there was no right word for it in English. She said it meant something like”—Martha closed her eyes to remember—“to hold on by letting go, to increase by diminishing, to win by losing.”

  “Mmm, that’s got a pretty sound,” Harlan said. “You sure speak English real well.”

  “My mother was born here, in Texas.”

  “Where’s your mama now?”

  “She’s still in Mexico, in the campo, with my brothers and sisters.”

  “Why are you up here, then? How did your daddy end up in jail?”

  Martha fell silent for a while.

  “My papa and I left the way of life.”

  A couple miles later, she said: “I think I’m tired of talking now.”

  She stared ahead between the two brothers as the car passed under a line of soaring electric transmission towers that carried power at a right angle to the road and into the distance on either side on the rolling grassland. At the wires’ lowest ebb hung dozens of bright orange aircraft orbs, silhouetted against the sky so that they looked like flocks of spherical birds flying toward Martha in a line.

  The land ahead began to look more rugged now. Low reddish limestone cliffs jutted up from sandy scrubland to which they seemed to have no geological relation. Past the towers, through a line of these cliffs, the road dropped sharply into an immense basin that swept toward the Chisos Mountains, the land between scattered with dark volcanic palisades like embodied shadows. Beyond the mountains segments of the river could be seen and past the river Mexico, visible for the first time.

  Troy reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror so that he couldn’t see Martha anymore. He thought about how much time he had spent in his adult life looking into rearview mirrors, usually the mirrors closest at hand, giving himself a good going over, rehearsing expressions to make sure they came off as natural, unremarkable. He found rearview mirrors extraordinarily useful, but for what seemed like days now the only thing he’d seen in one was the washed-out face of this sullen Mennonite girl and the treacherous road behind her and all the parts of Texas he knew best receding into the past.

  “When we get to the border we’ll take you to the bus station and give you fare to El Paso.”

  “I don’t need fare from you,” Martha said. “Just leave me at a bus station. I can take care of myself.”

  “You’re going to get a little money and what you do with it and yourself from there on is your own business.”

  At the edge of the town of Lajitas, not really a town but a momentary confluence of trailer houses and telephone transformer poles, they passed a small aluminum-sided café whose lights were on. Troy doubled back on dirt town roads and drove briefly north again on the highway to a rest stop he had seen, with a circular aluminum table attached to a circular bench, under an aluminum replica of an umbrella that had probably once been covered with festive pink and blue stripes but was mostly bare metal now, flecked with paint chips. Troy told Harlan and Martha to wait while he went for food and to sit facing away from the road in case a car came by.

  It was biting cold out now—colder than it ever was in this part of Texas in the fall. Under the heavy sky the sotol grassland looked gray and burnt. Martha pulled the hunting coat around her and walked twenty yards out into the brush to pee. When she came back, she saw Harlan sitting as his brother had instructed him to, with his back to the road, looking out onto a blankness of earth, and she thought about what someone would think if they drove by and saw a man sitting that way at a rest stop, in this kind of weather. They would probably slow down to see what he was looking at and when they saw it was nothing they would go tell somebody in town about the strange man at the rest stop. But Martha joined him on the narrow curve of bench facing the same way, east, toward where the sun might have been if they could have seen it. The light seemed to emanate equally and ineffectually from all parts of the sky.

  She was getting tired of sitting in silence.

  “How old were you when you started?”

  “Started what?”

  “Thieving.”

  “Little girl, I never stole a thing in my life. If you were paying attention, you’d notice my brother has stolen everything that’s been stolen so far. I’m just along for the ride, same as you are.”

  “You stole that blanket and that bucket back at the motel.”

  “I’d say that sorry excuse for a motel owed us that, wouldn’t you?”

  Martha got up and walked to the road and looked one way and then the other. The Texas Panhandle had felt emptied of people but this part of the state, the closer it got to the river, seemed almost devoid of human presence, as if mankind wasn’t supposed to be here at all.

  Harlan looked at the girl as she stood near the road and thought that if it weren’t for her hair, she would probably be able to pass for a boy. She had no breasts yet, or figure. The only parts of her that looked feminine in the least were her slender wrists and hands, with long, delicately tapered fingers whose nails had been chewed down to the quick. She looked like she didn’t eat enough and never had—her pale blue eyes were striking and her face was pretty but her features were angled and hard-lined in ways that made her appear much older than she was. She seemed wizened in her mind, too, aware of things she shouldn’t be yet—of what would happen soon when her body changed and boys her age and men much older began to look at her. She seemed to resent the burden of it before it even arrived.

  Harlan took a wad from his pouch and felt the nicotine warmth spread slowly from his mouth down into his chest.

  “I read in the paper once how a couple of those Apollo astronauts got sent down here to this part of the Big Bend to study the land, so they’d be ready to deal with the craters up on the moon. Can you believe that?”

  “One night on a little TV my papa and I had, we watched an astronaut play golf on the moon and it made my papa laugh . . . he doesn’t laugh very much,” Martha said. “Do you think those men really went up there?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose I have a reason to think they didn’t.”

  “I think it was probably just a good TV show. To make people want to believe it, to make them feel better.”

  Martha looked at the ground and bent and picked up a beige rubber band nearly invisible amid the pebbles. She tested it, stretching it out with her fingers. She came back to the bench and sat down beside Harlan again and reached behind her head and began to braid her hair into a long rope that hung over her right shoulder. When she was done she wound the rubber band tightly around the end and sat very still again. The breeze had picked up now, causing the metal rest stop umbrella to creak like an old windmill. Martha took her arms up into her coat and wrapped them around her and Harlan pulled the brim of his hat down over his face.

  “How
old are you, girl?”

  “Eleven. But I’ll be twelve next January.”

  “You need to go back to your mama and your family in Mexico.”

  “I can’t go back there anymore. I’m going to go with my papa.”

  “You’re no more than a child. How are you going to get to El Paso to find your daddy? And him locked up besides.”

  She thought about how to tell the lie.

  “He’s getting out soon. He’ll find me.”

  Martha watched a V of geese fly overhead, so high she couldn’t hear any sound they made.

  “Where were you headed with your brother? Before this happened?”

  “We were going to try to find someone I knew. A woman. I was married to her. She left me and took all my money.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I married her in Del Rio. She said something about Presidio once. But she could be plum across the country for all I know. What Troy was planning to do if we found her I don’t know. I don’t think he knew, either.”

  Harlan got up and spat past the edge of the rest stop’s concrete slab and sat back down. “I hadn’t seen Troy in years. I didn’t have no expectation of seeing him again. I don’t know how I let him talk me into going with him. Or why he came back, either. I think maybe he just ran out of road. You can’t go on living that kind of life forever. But you can’t leave it so easy.”

  A light rain began to fall. Martha climbed up on the metal table and sat with her legs folded under her, to get the cover of the umbrella. Harlan pulled up the collar of his work shirt and put his hands in his pants pockets and sat where he was, letting the water drip off the brim of his hat between his knees.

  EIGHT

  Nov. 15, 1972

  Sometimes a man’s face doesn’t look like who he is—it’s just an accident of the bones. The brow is too severe and the jawline is too sharp. The mouth is pulled down fighting into a semblance of anger even when none is intended.