by Roger Bruner
San Diego? I didn’t know where it was. In America, they said. Where was that? Sure, I’d seen pictures in the magazines Tomás brought the other girls, but I couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at.
I’d overheard Tomás tell those girls all about the “modern conveniences” that were part of his daily life: cameras, ovens, refrigerators, washing machines. And what of electricity and running water? Was any of it real?
That didn’t matter.
I had to get away from the villagers—they loathed me and I loathed them back. If I remained in Santa María I would have no means of support for myself and my baby. And even though I could have endured a lifetime of ridicule and rejection, I didn’t want my baby to suffer the same way I had.
Tomás, the villagers know you are too greedy to resist their demands. Without their produce to provide your easy income, you might have to do manual labor—and work as hard as they do just to survive.
So they wouldn’t kill him. They needed him to carry their special produce to San Diego to exchange for food, clothing, and day-to-day necessities—just as the men in his family had done for generations.
The very existence of Santa María depended on Tomás. He and the villagers needed each other. Didn’t he realize that?
When I began laughing at his gullibility, his face contorted in pain and bewilderment.
The village Elders hadn’t bothered to share their plans with me; they took my cooperation for granted. I resented that. So I would not give them my decision one moment sooner than I had to.
“I will answer you tomorrow, Tomás.”
With strength I could ill afford to waste, I rolled back onto my knees, pulled the blanket tighter, and resumed rubbing my wet skirt against the rock. My baby protested painfully.
“I’ll be dead before tomorrow.” Tomás had almost whimpered.
I looked at him again. Although the sun was warm and the air still, he had begun to shiver. As if winter had just set in and caught him unprepared.
I shivered, too, for a different reason. No matter how I tried to deny it, our lives were inseparable.
“I will ask them not to kill you until tomorrow.”
2
Although I waited as long as I could for my clothes to dry, they were still damp when I put them on. I couldn’t visit Chief Elder Diaz wearing only a threadbare blanket.
I had never approached him before—I hadn’t dared to—and he had never spoken to me. Not once in sixteen years. I was going to see him now only to keep my promise to Tomás. As I knocked at Elder Diaz’s door, I thought about the decision I would have to make later that night.
Decision? Ha! What kind of decision is accepting the inevitable?
My presence didn’t appear to surprise him. He would have smiled and invited any other villager inside. Even the youngest child.
Not me, however.
I hadn’t expected a warm welcome. I was satisfied that he didn’t say, How dare you come here, Rosa No-Name! and turn his back on me the way he would have done before today.
He didn’t need to say anything. His piercing black eyes told me to hurry and get this over with. He must have expected me to speak first.
I gulped several mouthfuls of fresh evening air. “Gracias, Señor.”
He knew what I meant and how little I meant it. I didn’t respect him or his position of authority. Nonetheless, I pretended to defer to his office by avoiding eye contact and staring at his right earlobe instead. “I will decide tonight. If I go, we will leave before dawn.”
He nodded. If the villagers stoned Tomás, they would wait until tomorrow.
Before turning to leave, I grew bolder and looked Elder Diaz in the eye. I would be the loser—no matter what—and we both knew it.
He turned around and went back into his shack.
~*~
Once I got back to the tiny cave I’d lived in since the villagers quit keeping me in their shacks, I removed my clothes and wrapped up in the less-worn of my two blankets. I needed to keep my meager wardrobe as clean as possible for the next day’s trip.
I hugged the narrow floor-to-ceiling rock column that had formed in the center of my cave over the centuries and pressed my forehead against it. As if it might provide wisdom and insight. Although its firmness and solidarity assured me that some things in life don’t change, it didn’t offer any alternative courses of action.
“Rosa? Rosa No-Name?” I almost missed hearing the female voice that seemed to whisper out of the darkness.
“Here.” I scrambled to the cave entrance. I didn’t need light to find my way. I didn’t have any.
I looked around, but saw no one. Had I dreamed of the voice that called my name?
“Over here.” A rustle of bushes pinpointed the area where Señora Valdes crouched in the shadows.
She had visited me once before. Six months ago on a night similar to this one. She had come secretly to keep the villagers from noticing her visit and gossiping about the fact she would deign to talk to me.
She had given my abdomen a thorough examination before revealing what I wouldn’t have known or even suspected on my own. I was two months pregnant. “You will have a daughter,” she had said with the slightest of smiles.
Although she hadn’t smiled or spoken to me since, that visit created at least the illusion of a bond between us. She might have denied it to anyone—especially herself—but I believed her heart contained at least a seed of tenderness toward me. Why, I couldn’t imagine.
Neither could I imagine why she had come to see me now.
We stayed outside, even though the air was cool and I was starting to shiver. She wouldn’t have come inside the cave even if the moonlight had permitted safe entry.
In spite of the darkness, I could see she was frowning. Elder Diaz must have sent her. I waited for her to tell me that only a very foolish girl would fail to leave Santa María when she had an opportunity like mine.
I was wrong. Elder Diaz wouldn’t have sent her, much less permitted her, to bring this news. “Do you know what crop the villagers raise for Tomás to take to San Diego?”
Why was she asking a question like that? “They haven’t put me to work yet, even though I am sixteen and the other sixteen-year-olds work in the fields or in the warehouse.” I didn’t try to hide my resentment.
“They should have allowed you to work.” Her voice hinted of sadness. A cloud blew across the moon, making her face nearly invisible. She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “Do you know what a promise is?”
“Saying you will do something and then doing it no matter what.”
I was thankful the darkness hid the blush that was warming my face. I couldn’t keep from thinking about the once-promised clay water pot Tomás had failed to give me.
“You are correct. Will you promise never to reveal what I am about to tell you—to anyone? It is the village secret.”
My heart pounded so hard I thought the whole village might hear it, even though nobody lived close to the area of the caves. How often I’d wondered what the villagers grew and why it required such secrecy.
Why was she going to share that information with me—and tonight of all times?
Before I could say, Yes, of course I promise, she said, “This is something you need to know in case Tomás fails to do what he promises.”
My left hand quickly covered my gasp as I waited for her to continue.
“For almost a century, the villagers have grown and processed marijuana to take into the United States and exchange for the things we need.”
“What is—?”
“I can’t explain marijuana now, but it is a valuable crop. The authorities say it is illegal—a bad thing—to grow, distribute, and use. Or even just to own. The real issue is sneaking it from Mexico into the United States, where it’s legal only in some places.”
Although my understanding of illegal was hazy, my heart shot into my throat. That explained why the villagers hid small fields of this special crop within cac
tus mazes. Why the warehouse was the only locked building in Santa María. And why the teenagers didn’t begin working until they were old enough to fear the penalty for revealing the village secret.
“Visitors never come to Santa María,” Señora Valdes said. “Not even census takers and tax collectors.” I shrugged at those unfamiliar words. “They don’t know where the village is. They can’t find it, and we must keep it that way. When villagers go to San Diego with Tomás from time to time, they understand that the welfare of the village depends on their complete silence among strangers.”
Señora Valdes explained that Tomás undoubtedly benefited from this arrangement more than the villagers did. At the same time, she admitted, he took all the risks.
Next she told me how to coerce Tomás into marriage if he balked. She called it extorsión. Extortion.
“Do you promise not to involve me in any way and to do everything in your power to protect the village from outsiders?”
“I do.”
She couldn’t see the tears that formed rivulets in the dust on my face. No one had ever asked me to make a promise before. No one had trusted me that much.
In spite of Señora Valdes’s trust, one thing ate away at my insides. Something I’d spent years trying to find out. If I couldn’t learn the answer before leaving Santa María, I would have to give up. No way I could possibly find it in San Diego.
So I took a chance. “Do you know who my parents are, please?”
“I…I know who your mama is. I cannot—I will not—tell you who she is.”
The sadness in her voice shocked me. If anything, I had expected my question to irritate her. Or perhaps even anger her.
She evaporated into the darkness before I could beg her to change her mind.
I looked into the night sky and pondered my future. Long ago, a still, small voice had assured me that—regardless of the villagers’ accusations—I wasn’t responsible for my pregnancy. I wished that voice would speak to me again tonight.
I waited with more uncertainty than hope. Hour after hour I waited. Sleep would be impossible. Then I heard it. The wind itself seemed to whisper, “Go with Tomás, my daughter.”
My heart melted. No one had ever addressed me as daughter. I imagined the wind holding me safe in its embrace.
“Do not be afraid. You will someday become Rosa My-Name, but do not think about that now. Although Tomás may hurt you, he faces far greater dangers than you do. Learn everything you can while living in the city. The things you learn will prepare you to return to Santa María and do my bidding here.”
“Who are you, Señor?” I said aloud. “Does the wind itself speak the Spanish language?”
No one answered.
3
Still wrapped in the two blankets I had slept in, I got up well before dawn and walked barefooted—I had never owned footwear—to the chilly river. After washing my hair and bathing, I toweled myself dry with the more ragged blanket and dressed in the skirt and blouse I had washed the day before. I draped the better blanket around my shoulders like a shawl.
I found Tomás asleep on the ground outside the storage barn, his upper body covered only by the same graphic T-shirt he had worn then…eight months ago. His face looked puffier and more bruised than yesterday—if that was possible—and he shook in his sleep as if he were cold and miserable. One of the younger village men sat nearby with a thick stick on his lap, ready to keep Tomás from leaving without me.
After awakening Tomás, I spoke to his guard. “We will leave…now. Before the other villagers awaken. Open the warehouse so he can get his van.”
The guard didn’t permit me to enter the large building or even glance inside. Instead he led me to a spot some yards away. Tomás needed only a moment to start the engine and drive the van through the large double doors to the spot where I stood waiting.
I cringed at the thought of getting into that van again.
I used to picture the whole village gathering around the little red sports car Tomás sometimes drove to Santa María, jealous that I was leaving with him to live in luxury north of the border. When he put the top down, everyone would see the fancy clothes he had bought me.
I had abandoned those childish dreams long ago.
Instead, I would leave the village unnoticed in the pre-dawn blackness, a passenger in the van with the tinted windows that had shaded the conception of my baby.
And I would wear the only clothes I owned—timeworn hand-me-downs that would soon have too many holes to consider modest. At least they were clean. I pulled the blanket tighter.
“You won’t need that ratty thing,” Tomás said as he snatched it from my shoulders. “My van is heated, and San Diego is warm. You don’t expect to live in a cold cave there, do you?” He sounded annoyed. “My apartment is always comfortable, summer and winter.”
I didn’t know what to expect—or even to hope for. Life in San Diego would be better for my baby and me than life in Santa María. I’d told myself that repeatedly since the previous afternoon. Convincing myself of its truth had proven impossible.
Life in Santa María had taught me skepticism, not hope.
“It is not ratty. About the comfort of your apartment, I will wait and see.” I grabbed the blanket back and wrapped it around one arm as if daring him to take it again. “I will keep this blanket until I am sure I no longer need it. Then I will wash it and put it away. I will get it out occasionally to remind myself that the part of my life I most need to forget is truly past.”
The voice of the wind had said, Those things will prepare you to return to Santa María. As much as I believed the voice—as much as I respected it—I would do everything in my power to prevent that prophecy from coming true.
I would never return to Santa María willingly.
~*~
Bushes brushed the sides of the van with such ferocity I thought they might break the windows to protest the way the van pushed through them so heedlessly.
Tomás glanced in my direction before looking ahead again. “This is just a dirt pathway. It eventually ends at a pathetic gravel road. We won’t reach good road till we get closer to San Diego.”
As if I’d ever seen a road, good or bad.
Tomás hadn’t bothered to warn me about the numerous, bumpy ruts that threw me this way and that. My arms ached from holding on to keep from bouncing out of my seat and hitting my head on the ceiling, and the pain from my baby’s ceaseless kicking made me long for the birth process I so dreaded.
Huh? Tomás didn’t bounce in his seat. Why not?
When I looked more closely, I noticed some type of belt holding him in place. I glanced down at my side. Humph! Why hadn’t he bothered to tell me I had one, too? And why hadn’t he advised me to use it? Did he resent me enough to use my own ignorance to kill me before reaching San Diego?
I thought I would never figure out how to fasten the belt, but—after playing with it a number of minutes—I finally heard it click in place. It pressed so tight across my body I couldn’t breathe at first, and the baby went crazy kicking against the restriction that pressed against her body even through mine.
Tomás finally reached across to my side of the van and did something to loosen the belt. Now I felt more comfortable, and so did my baby.
Soon after that, he turned the heater on and I fell asleep.
Several times, however, I woke up feeling dizzy from the wild careening of the van as he swerved and then bumped into something on the roadway. I looked in the rearview mirror and felt nauseated at the sight of raccoons, squirrels, and other wild animals lying mutilated on the road behind us.
Although I had assumed Tomás found those creatures impossible to avoid, his victorious sneer made me wonder.
“Excellent driving,” I said upon awakening to a swerve that hadn’t resulted in a deadly thump. “You missed that one.”
His glare told me he hadn’t taken my comment as a compliment. “Don’t be sarcastic. To keep my record perfect, I must go back and d
o better.”
I laughed. He had to be teasing.
Then he jerked the van to such a violent stop I wondered if the belt would hold, and I discovered that he didn’t tease about cruelty to animals. He spun around and sped back to the spot where a rabbit was still sitting at the edge of the road.
Tomás didn’t miss that time, and my baby slept as restlessly after that as I did.
4
A loud discussion between Tomás and someone in uniform—I had no idea who he was—broke through my daze. The fellow laughed and pointed at Tomás’s face. “And what does the other guy look like?” I couldn’t hear Tomás’s response.
The man—Tomás told me later he was a border guard—quit laughing when Tomás got his wallet out and began flipping through some wrinkled green papers. He pulled several of them out. The guard grinned but shook his head.
When Tomás took more papers out, the guard beamed and nodded toward the van with his head. After raising the window, Tomás spoke words of anger I had never heard before.
“When I came to Santa María yesterday,”—he glared at me—“I didn’t know I would have to bring home a pregnant teenager just to stay alive.” Then he laughed—raucously. “Otherwise I would have made better arrangements for crossing the border. I never have trouble like this when I am carrying produce.”
I giggled. Who would have thought that smuggling illegal produce across the border would be easier than moving a very pregnant young woman from a village that didn’t want her to a city that wouldn’t care who she was?
“Produce doesn’t require birth certificates or passports.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and shook his head. “It doesn’t need papers to identify its citizenship. It just has to remain undetected.”
When he laughed again, I sighed. Was he making fun of me for being too big to hide?
What was citizenship, anyhow? If it had anything to do with my identity, I could say, “I am Rosa No-Name from Santa María in western Mexico” as often as I wanted. What would it prove? To the authorities, I would have no more official identity than Tomás’s roadkill.
