Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  WESTERNS

  People start asking us where we’re from, what we do for a living, and what we’re doing all the way “out here.”

  We drove here from New York, I say.

  We do radio, my husband says.

  We are documentarists, I sometimes say.

  Documentarians, he corrects me.

  We’re working on a sound documentary, I tell them.

  A documentary about nature, he follows.

  Yes! I add. About the plants and animals of these lands.

  But the farther out we drive, the less these little truths and lies about us seem to appease people’s need for an explanation. When my husband tells an inquisitive stranger in a diner that he was also born in the south, he gets a cold nod and raised eyebrows in return. Then, in a gas station outside a town called Loco, I get asked about my accent and place of birth, and I say no, I was not born in this country, and when I say where I was born, I don’t even get a nod in return. Just cold, dead silence, as if I’ve confessed a sin. Later, we begin to see fleeting herds of Border Patrol cars, like ominous white stallions racing toward the southern border. And when Border Patrol officers in a town named Comanche ask us to show our passports, we show them, apologetically, and display big smiles, and explain that we’re just recording sounds.

  Why are we there and what are we recording? they want to know.

  Of course I don’t mention refugee children, and my husband says nothing about Apaches.

  We’re just recording sounds for a documentary about love stories in America, we say, and we are here for the open skies and the silence.

  Handing back our passports, one of the officers says:

  So you came all the way out here for the inspiration.

  And because we won’t contradict anyone who carries a badge and a gun, we just say:

  Yes, sir!

  After that, we decide not to tell anyone where I was born. So when—once we’ve finally arrived in the town called Geronimo—a man with a hat and gun tucked tight into his belt asks us who we are and what we all are doing, and tells us that whatever we are looking for, we’re not going to find there, and then asks why the heck our son is taking Polaroid pictures of his signpost outside his liquor store, we know we should just say, Sorry, sorry, and then jump back in the car and drive off. But instead, for whatever reason, perhaps boredom, perhaps fatigue, perhaps simply being too immersed at this point in a reality so far from the framework of what we see as normal, we think it’s a good idea to stick around a bit and maybe make conversation. And I stupidly think it’s a good idea to lie:

  We’re screenwriters, sir, and we’re writing a spaghetti Western.

  Then, to our bewilderment, he takes off his hat, smiles, and says:

  In that case, you’re no strangers.

  And he invites us to sit around the plastic table on the little porch outside his liquor store, and offers us a cold beer. To one side of the table, on top of a plastic chair, there’s a muted TV playing a commercial about some malady and its even more terrifying remedy, the cord tense and running through a half-open window, presumably connected to a plug inside the store.

  Twisting the tip of his tongue into a w, the man whistles, and his wife and son come out immediately from inside. He introduces her to us as Dolly. Then he tells his son, a boy about the age of ours whom he calls Junior, to go play with our children, and points to the empty lot in front of the porch—a barren space full of segments of chicken fence, half-fallen pyramids made of empty beer cans, and an array of uncanny toys (many baby dolls, some with their hair cut short). Our children walk behind Junior toward the lot. Then Dolly—a young, muscular woman with long arms and silky hair—brings us beer in white plastic cups. From the porch, I watch my children for a few minutes as they try to negotiate the rules of a rather violent game with the boy. His hair is cut in exactly the same way as some of those baby dolls’.

  We should be scared in the marrow of our bones, I realize, when our host starts to question our professionalism. It’s hard to tell if he’s questioning us about it on the basis of our appearance, or merely because of our obvious lack of knowledge about spaghetti Westerns. He, it turns out, is an expert in the genre.

  Do we know The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw? And The Taste of Violence? And Gunfight at High Noon?

  We don’t. Our plastic cups are soon refilled, and my hand—sweaty—reaches over to take a long gulp of the newly poured beer. I keep looking at his muted TV screen, on top of which is a plaster mold of someone’s malformed denture, trying to remember where I’d seen or read a similar image—perhaps Carver, perhaps Capote—while my husband rummages in the back of his mind for names of directors of and actors in spaghetti Westerns. He is visibly struggling to win at least one point in credibility with our host. But he’s not managing too well, so I interrupt him:

  My favorite Western is Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó!

  What’s that you say? the man replies, studying me.

  Sátántangó, I repeat.

  I remembered this title from so long ago, when I was still in my post-teenage effluvium of intelligence, pretension, and marijuana. I’ve never actually finished watching Sátántangó (it lasts seven hours). So I was completely misusing what little cinematographic education I have and taking a chance—emboldened by my third quick cup of beer. Lucky for us, the man says he’s never watched it, so I can retell the movie’s plot in a convincingly Western key. I tell it so slowly and in such painfully precise detail that I’m sure our hosts will grow tired of us, find us too boring to cope with, and let us go. But the man is suddenly uplifted by the spirit of Bela Tarr. He has a terrifying, drunken idea:

  Why don’t we rent it online and watch it together in our house?

  We could all stay for dinner and even sleep over if it got late “and crazy”—he says these last words with a wide grin, teeth too perfect to be real. They have plenty of room for visitors. I play out the possibility in my mind, flashes of horror: dinner would be microwaved, the movie would be successfully rented, the seven of us would sit around another TV set, and the movie would begin. My previous plot summary would in no way be reflected on the screen. So the man, first annoyed and then maybe enraged, would switch it off. He’d have realized we’d been lying to him all along. And in the end, we’d all get murdered and be buried in that empty lot where the three kids are still playing now.

  We suddenly hear our son wailing, so his father and I rush toward the empty lot to see what’s happened. He’s been stung by a bee and is screaming, rolling on the dusty ground in pain. His father picks him up, and both of us exchange glances and nod at each other. I seize the opportunity to overreact, and pretend to be very upset and worried. My husband says, following my lead, that we have to rush to a clinic, because the boy is allergic to many things, and we can’t take the chance with bees. The man and his wife both seem to take allergies seriously, so they help us back into our car and give us directions to the nearest clinic. As we are waving goodbye, the man suggests we take the children to the UFO museum in Roswell, after the boy gets better, that is, but as a reward for him acting like a “real man” despite the pain and possible life-threatening danger. And we say yes, yes, thank you, yes, thank you, and drive off into the blue-green dusk.

  We drive fast, without looking back, while the pain of the bee sting slowly subsides in the boy’s body, and the mild intoxication of all those quick beers wears off from our consciousness, and the children want us to promise we’ll take them to that UFO museum anyway, even if the bee sting crisis is now over and wasn’t so bad after all, and we are feeling so guilty as parents that we promise, yes, yes we will take you, and we talk about what we will see in that museum until our two children fall asleep, and we drive in silence as night settles in, and find a parking spot in front of a motel outside Lawton, carry the two of them from the car to their bed, and then fall asleep on our own bed, hugging each other for the first time in weeks, hugging each other with all our clothes on, boots included.r />
  PRISONERS

  It was 1830, he begins to tell the children as we stand in line at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Lawton the next morning. Andrew Jackson was the president of the United States at the time, and he passed an act in Congress called the Indian Removal Act. We get back in the car with donuts, coffees, and milks, and I study our map of Oklahoma, looking for the roads to Fort Still, where Geronimo and the rest of the last Apaches are buried. The Fort Still cemetery for prisoners of war should be about half an hour’s drive from where we are.

  Geronimo and his band were the last men to surrender to the white-eyes and their Indian Removal Act, my husband tells the children. I don’t interrupt his story to say so out loud, but the word “removal” is still used today as a euphemism for “deportation.” I read somewhere, though I don’t remember where, that removal is to deportation what sex is to rape. When an “illegal” immigrant is deported nowadays, he or she is, in written history, “removed.” I take my recorder from the glove compartment and start recording my husband, without him or anyone noticing. His stories are not directly linked to the piece I’m working on, but the more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present.

  Geronimo and his people surrendered in Skeleton Canyon, he continues. That canyon is near Cochise Stronghold, which is where we are going to arrive, soon, at the very end of this trip. In the final surrender, which happened in 1886, there were fifteen men, nine women, three children, and Geronimo. After that, General Miles and his men set out across the desert surrounding Skeleton Canyon and herded Geronimo’s band like they were herding sheep aboard death ships. They walked north, for ninety or a hundred miles, to what are now the ruins of Fort Bowie, nestled between the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains, near where Echo Canyon is.

  Where the Eagle Warriors lived? the boy interrupts to ask.

  Yes, exactly, his father confirms.

  Then they walked another twenty miles or so to the town of Bowie, he tells the children, who are probably a bit lost in the geography. There, in Bowie, Geronimo and his people were crammed into a train car and sent east, far away from everything and everyone, to Florida. But a few years later, they were crammed back into a train car and sent to Fort Still, where most of them died out, slowly. The last Chiricahuas were buried there, in the cemetery we’re driving to today.

  We pass empty lots, a Target, an abandoned diner, two urgent care centers right next to each other, a sign that announces a gun show, and finally reach a streetlight, where an elderly couple and a little girl are selling puppies.

  Are you still with me? my husband asks the children as he stops at the red light.

  Yes, Pa, says the boy.

  But Papa? the girl says. Can I say something, too?

  What is it?

  I just want to say that I’m getting bored of your Apache stories, but no offense.

  Okay, he says, smiling, no offense taken.

  I want to hear more, Pa, says the boy.

  During the war, their father continues, the aim was to eliminate the enemy. Wipe the enemy out completely. They were very cruel, very bloody wars. The Apaches would say: “Now we’ve taken the warpath.”

  But always for vengeance, right, Pa? Never just like that with no reason?

  Right. Always for vengeance.

  Turn left at the next exit, I interrupt.

  I’m trembling, he tells me. He says he’s not sure if it’s the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee or pure excitement. Then he continues talking. He tells the children that when any of the great chiefs, like Victorio, Cochise, and Mangas Coloradas, declared war on the white-eyes, they brought together all the warriors from all the Apache families and, together, they formed an army. Then they would attack towns, and destroy them completely.

  I’m trembling, look, he repeats softly.

  His hands are, indeed, shaking a little. But he continues telling the children this story.

  When they wanted to loot, the strategy was a little different. The looting was done by only seven or eight warriors, the best of them, and always on horseback. They’d ride onto ranches and steal cows, grain, whiskey, and children. Especially whiskey and children.

  They’d take the children? asks the girl.

  Yes, they would.

  A quarter of a mile, I whisper, my eyes navigating back and forth between the map and the road signs.

  And what would they do to the children? asks the boy.

  Sometimes they killed them. But if they showed certain signs, if they demonstrated that they could become great warriors, they were spared. They were adopted and became part of the tribe.

  Didn’t they ever try to run away? the boy asks.

  Sometimes they tried. But often, they liked their lives with their new family much better than their old lives.

  What? Why?

  Because children’s lives then weren’t the same as they are today. Children worked all day on the farm, they were always hungry, they had no time to play. With the Apaches, life was hard, too, but it was also more exciting. They rode horses, they hunted, they participated in ceremonies. They were trained to become warriors. On the farm with their parents, all they did was work in the field and with the animals, all day, every day the same thing. Even when they were sick.

  I would have stayed with the Apaches, the boy declares after giving it some thought.

  Me too? the girl asks.

  And immediately, she answers her own question:

  Yes, me too. I would have stayed with you, she tells her brother.

  We are approaching the gates to the military base. Always, we’d thought it was called Fort Still, but now we see the sign ahead:

  Welcome to Fort Sill, the boy reads aloud. It’s Fort Sill and not Fort Still, Pa. You have to say it without a t. For your inventory, you have to get the name right.

  What a pity, says his father, Fort Still is so much better for a cemetery.

  Checkpoint, the boy reads.

  And then he asks:

  There’s a checkpoint?

  Of course, his father tells him. We are entering territory of the United States Army.

  The thought of entering army territory makes me uneasy. As if I were immediately guilty of a war crime. We roll down our windows, and a young man, possibly still in his late teens, asks us for our IDs. We hand them over—me, my passport; my husband, his driver’s license—and the young man looks at them routinely, without paying too much attention. When we ask him for directions to Geronimo’s grave, he looks into our real faces for the first time and smiles a sweet kind of smile, perhaps surprised by our question.

  Geronimo’s tomb? Keep going on Randolph, all the same road, follow it all the way to Quinette.

  Quintet?

  Yeah, make a right on Quinette. You’ll see the signs there that say Geronimo. Just follow them.

  Once the windows are closed and we start driving down Randolph Street, the boy asks:

  Was that man an Apache?

  Maybe, I say.

  No, the girl says, he sounds just like Mama, so he can’t be an Apache.

  We follow the instructions—Randolph, then Quinette—but there are no signs that say Geronimo. On lawns and along paths, we see war relics and decorative artillery, planted like shallow-rooted saplings: howitzers, mortars, shells, rockets. A toddler-sized missile painted pink points to the sky like the phallus of a wild colt, ready, eager, and disquietingly cute. The girl confuses it for a play rocket ship, and we don’t contradict her. We pass barracks converted into libraries and into museums, old and new houses, playgrounds, tennis courts, an elementary school. It’s an idyllic town, protected from the world outside, perhaps not too different from the thousands of university cloisters sprinkled throughout the country, like the one my sister lives in now, where young people trade a lifetime of family efforts for credits, which become scores, which become a piece of paper that will not guarantee them anything else, nothing at all except a lifetime of living in phantasma
goric limbos between half-voluntary deployments, job searches, applications, and inevitable redeployments.

  Do they live in a tomb or a tomba? the girl asks.

  What? None of us understand the question.

  Do Geronimo and the rest of the bunch live in a tomb or in a tomba?

  At the same time, we all say:

  A tomb!

  But it’s still some miles before we see the signs that point us to the tomb. It’s the boy who spots it first, concentrating hard to fulfill the task handed down to him. He points and cries out:

  Turn right! Geronimo’s Grave!

  The road winds up and down, over train tracks and across little bridges, leading farther and farther away from the schools, the houses, the war relics, the playgrounds, and into this woodland, as if even now the Apaches were a threat to be kept at a distance. As if Geronimo could still come back and retaliate any day.

  We are approaching a clearing in the woods, dotted symmetrically with gray and whitened tombstones, and the girl shouts out:

  Look, Papa, over there, the tombas!

  We pull over in front of a large sign, which the boy reads aloud as we unbuckle our seat belts:

  Apache Prisoner-of-War Cemeteries.

  We unlock doors, step out of the car.

  On a metal plaque fixed onto a stone at the entrance to the cemetery, there is some kind of explanation of what we’re about to see. The boy is in charge, he knows, of reading site-specific information. He stands in front of it and reads aloud, his prosody well attuned to the necrological hypocrisy of the plaque. It explains that three hundred Chiricahua Apaches rest in that cemetery, where they were buried as prisoners of war after they surrendered to the US Army in 1894, and commemorates “their industry and perseverance on their long road to a new way of life.”