CHAPTER SIX
From Nogales, Nick drove them on to Magdalena, where they stopped for an early lunch and a stroll afterward to walk off the machaca and arroz con frijoles. Pamela looked striking, the quintessential gringa, six feet tall in her cowgirl boots, radiant hair bouncing as she walked. Feeling like a tour guide, Lisette took her into a couple of shops in the plaza, showed her the church of Santa María de Magdalena, with its reclining statue of Saint Francis Xavier, believed to heal incurable diseases, and then Father Kino’s tomb, his exposed bones stretched out beneath a painted dome depicting idealized scenes from early mission life.
“What a lovely town!” Pamela said, as if its attractiveness surprised her. It probably did, after the unpleasantness at the border and the Nogales slums and fifty miles of rubbish-strewn desert highway, scrawny goats feeding on the trash, barbed-wire fences beribboned with plastic bags.
“It’s a magic town. See, it says so right there, to make sure you get the point,” Nick remarked, mocking a street banner proclaiming the title the tourist board had conferred on Magdalena: PUEBLO MÁGICO. He didn’t have any use for handicraft shops and miracle-working statues and the skeleton of a priest dead for three centuries. “But maybe we oughta get back on el magico roado?”
“All right,” Lisette said agreeably. “It’s another three hours.”
Behind the wheel, fancying himself to be once again in control, in command, he swung back onto Mex 15. She forgave his sarcasms, the juvenile pig Spanish. He didn’t have to be here with Mom and her “friend.” He could have gone to Scottsdale to spend the holiday with his father and his vapid stepmother. A day quail hunting with Dad and his English pointers, another day riding one of Stepmom’s Arabians, a Thanksgiving feast attended by their rich friends, the women decked out in Zuni jewelry no Zuni could afford in a million years. Some life the kid had, son of the Mayo Clinic’s chief of neurology, a renowned lecturer invited to speak at symposiums all over the country, and now married into Scottsdale’s horsey-set elite, the handsome doctor with the Ricky Ricardo hairstyle and his arm-candy wife photographed at black-tie benefits. Everything Lisette despised, and yet—she was jam-packed with contradictions—she was pleased that Nick had advantages she could not have imagined when she was nineteen. But it wasn’t all Tony, Tony, Tony, was it? She’d had a hand in it. If she hadn’t surrendered her ambitions to raise Nick and cook and take care of the house and smooth the way for Tony’s advance, where would Nick be today? If she hadn’t escaped Watauga County, if she had not studied and studied and gotten accepted to the University of Miami med school, she never would have met his father and Nick would not exist.
BIENVENIDOS! SANTA ANA. 1645, read the arch spanning the highway. Pamela marveled at the town’s age. As old as a New England town. “You don’t think of western towns being so old,” she commented.
Darling, you are much too intelligent to have made such a banal and geographically inaccurate observation except for the sake of conversation, Lisette thought. To Pamela, she said, “Well, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Then Nick: “You haven’t taken Mom’s seminar on the Spanish settlement of North America?”
“Apparently not,” Pamela answered, wounded by Lisette’s wisecrack. Not seriously. A grazing wound.
“Coronado was in Kansas, way before it was Kansas,” Nick said. “Fifteen forty or something like that. And Santa Fe was settled thirty years before Plymouth Colony. Like Anglos were parvenus.”
He must have recently learned that word and was giving it a road test, Lisette thought.
“Newcomers. The English were newcomers, not parvenus,” she corrected, taking an unmaternal pleasure in embarrassing him. Because he had his father’s agile mind, he sometimes thought he knew more than in fact he did. “A parvenu is someone who suddenly comes into money, or into a position of power, but doesn’t have the style, the dignity that goes with it.”
“Christ! I thought I was on a break from classes. Did she forget her mellow-out pills this morning?” Nick asked Pamela.
“They don’t work on her—her system rejects them.”
Lisette liked them joking about her; it showed that they felt comfortable with each other.
Nick was still trying to reconcile himself to the fact that his mother was gay. He accepted it but had yet to absorb it completely. Lisette had noted the way he referred to Pamela as her friend, all but enclosing the word in air quotes. And she sensed that he felt a residual resentment, dating back to the divorce and her departure for med school in Mexico. Only eleven years old, he’d felt, justifiably, that his mother had abandoned him. There was a distance between them that had made her coming out more difficult than it might otherwise have been.
Not, however, as difficult as it had been with her family. It was shortly after the divorce, while she waited to hear if she’d been accepted to med school in Guadalajara. She was living in Phoenix with the first of her lovers, whom she had passed off as a roommate to her mother and brother. The charade became unbearable. She wrote two long letters, revising them several times. Her mother was a devout Baptist; Gene was religious, too, though churchgoing was for him as much a social occasion as it was an act of worship. She did not expect that her news would meet with a happy reception, and she was not disappointed. There was no response for a month; then Gene phoned her. She’d barely had a chance to say, “Hello, how are you?” before he took her on a guilt trip: What she did with her own life was her business, except when it affected the lives of others. The divorce had been hard enough on their mother, but this, this devastated her, it had turned her golden years into pure garbage. A blessing Dad didn’t live to see this day. Mom is praying for you, Gene said. And so am I. Their minister likewise. They’d spoken to him, and he’d recommended a Christian camp where homosexuals could find freedom from their affliction through the love of Jesus Christ. My affliction? Lisette said, incensed. My affliction? Like I’ve got a disease? Like I’m crippled or something? Are you kidding? The conversation went downhill from there, and ended with Gene declaring that if she would not help herself, then neither he nor their mother had anything more to say to her. She hadn’t heard from them since. Not a word. She was as good as dead.
Nick had been too young to be told anything then. After he’d started the U. of A. and she’d taken up with Pamela, she knew it was time. On one of her visits to Tucson, she invited him over for a home-cooked meal. Pamela thought it best to make herself scarce and went out with some friends from the Art Department.
Lisette saw little of herself in her son, only the high, acute cheekbones and aquiline nose passed down from her Catawba ancestors. Otherwise, he was all Tony. Tony’s pale-sand complexion, his thick hair, shoe-polish black, his height and athleticism—Nick had played baseball in high school and was on U. of A.’s team, a first baseman. She waited till after dinner to reveal her secret. He reacted with a kind of hip indifference. Like no big deal, he said, though she could see by the way he blinked, as if staring into a bright light, that it was a bigger deal than he was willing to let on. Ask you a question? Sure. Did you ever love Dad? I suppose, sure, in my way. Well, he told me that when you guys split up, you told him that you never loved him, not for one minute.
“People say cruel, stupid things when a marriage breaks up. I didn’t mean it,” Lisette said. “I loved him in my way. Trouble was, my way didn’t do him any good. Me neither.”
She spared him further details: how the pretending to be what she was not and never could be, how the sham orgasms and faked emotions became impossible to sustain any longer, so that, toward the end, she could not feign simple affection, much less passion, her body rebelling against the masquerade, recoiling at Tony’s touch, her mouth, seemingly with a will of its own, turning aside when he went to kiss her.
“Ask you another question?” Nick said. “Did you love me, or was that just in your way, too?”
That stunned her, brought her to tears. She rose from her chair and embraced him. “Of co
urse I did, and I still love you. My God, Nick, yes.”
* * *
After putting Santa Ana behind them, they crossed monotonous plains broken occasionally by vineyards and olive groves. Vultures specked the sky. Nick stopped for gas at a Pemex station outside Hermosillo. Lisette was pleased that Pamela did not complain about the condition of the ladies’ room. A short distance south of the state capital, they turned off Mex 15 onto a secondary road that ran east through cactus-studded flatlands, descended into the Río Yaqui valley, crossed the river, and made a long, grinding climb into the foothills before topping out at a pass crowded with oak and juniper. On a mesa below, a mosaic of green woods and winter-browned meadows spread like a quilt under the Sierra Madre, tiering toward the sheer rock escarpment that limned the border with Chihuahua. Pamela, quite taken with the view, asked Nick to stop. She wanted to photograph the distant cliffs; their color in the afternoon light, a roseate gold, was fantastic.
Looking down, Lisette’s attention was not on the scenery but on a police roadblock about a quarter of a mile away. A patrol car, roof lights flashing, barricaded one lane; a white pickup truck was parked on the shoulder opposite. A car approached in the left lane and stopped. Two uniformed figures gave it a quick inspection, then passed it through. She watched it struggle uphill toward her, an eighties-era station wagon, dusty, dented, its rear bumper almost scraping the pavement from the weight of its passengers, nine people at least. The scruffy driver, upon spotting her new, unblemished 4Runner, flashed his headlights in warning, and it was obvious that he wasn’t warning about a hidden speed trap.
“I’ll take it from here,” she said to Nick when Pamela was done photographing.
“I’m not tired,” he said.
“See those cops down there? Let me deal with them.” She and Nick switched places. She said, “They might ask for ID from all of us, so make sure you’ve got your passports handy.”
Nick saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”
She cruised downhill, not too fast, not too slow, a Goldilocks speed, and braked without fuss when the cops signaled her to stop. They wore ski masks and bulletproof vests. An insignia and the words POLICÍA ESTATAL marked the patrol car’s door. State Police. Two other men, also in ski masks, occupied the pickup. They were wearing camouflage shirts, like hunting or military shirts, though a single glance told her that they were neither hunters nor soldiers. This was Mexico in the year A.D. 2012—it required you to size up a situation and make judgments at megahertz speed. In the next instant, she decided how to play this situation.
Both troopers came up to her side of the car. She lowered the window and said cheerily, in a pronounced American accent, “Buenas tardes! What is … I mean, Que es problema?”
“Estamos en busca de auto robado. Comprende?” said Trooper One, the heftier of the two.
“I think so. Creo que si. But this car belongs to me. Esta auto es mia. I have the registration papers … uh … tengo los documentos para esta auto.”
“No es necesario,” he said, then asked for everyone’s identification. They handed him their passports, which he pretended to examine while Trooper Two sauntered around to the rear, presumably to check the license plate; then, without asking, he opened the cargo door and examined their ice chest and luggage.
“Qué son estos?” he demanded, rapping the ice chest with his knuckles.
Lisette turned around to look at him over the rear seat. “Food. A turkey and a cake. Un pavo y una tarta.”
He slammed the door shut, hard enough to send a tremor through the car, moved to Pamela’s side, and tapped the window. Lisette opened it with the control button on her armrest. He bent slightly and looked inside, quickly at Nick, longer at Pamela. All that could be seen of his face were his lips and his eyes, under whose insolent gaze Pamela hunched her shoulders and clasped her hands tightly on her lap.
Both cops walked away from the car to confer.
“Who the hell are these guys? They give me the creeps,” she said, barely moving her lips, like a ventriloquist.
“State Police. Giving people the creeps comes naturally to them.”
Trooper One returned with the passports. “Son ustedes los turistas?”
Lisette paused, as if she were translating the question. “Oh, yes. Sí. Turistas.”
Risky, this play-acting. If the cops found a pretext to search the car, they would discover her Mexican passport—she held dual citizenship—in the glove compartment. Things might get complicated then.
“Así, señora. Adónde vas? No hay muchos turistas vienen aquí. Comprende?”
She immediately grasped the reason for the question. Although her assessment of the situation had probably been correct, her response to it had definitely been wrong. Only now she had no choice but to continue her performance.
“No comprendo.”
Trooper One tried his English: “Where do you go? Turistas not coming here.”
“Ah! Comprendo. Para San Patricio. To visit a friend. Un amigo in San Patricio. Un padre americano. The turkey and the cake are for him.”
He gave a dismissive jerk of his head, then backed off a step and, with a swat at the air, told her she could go.
Lisette said, “Gracias, adiós,” and drove on. She let out a sigh of relief, more audible than she wanted it to be.
“Okay, Mom. What was with the dumb-tourist bit?”
“Usually, the cops can’t be bothered with dumb turistas. They just let you right on through, no questions asked. Didn’t work quite so well this time.”
“Because they’re looking for a stolen car? I heard him right? That they’re looking for a stolen car?”
“That’s not what they’re looking for. It’s the standard line narcos use when they set up a roadblock. Next thing you know, if you’re a Mexican who looks like money, your car ends up in a cartel motor pool and you end up held for ransom.”
Seeing, in her peripheral vision, Pamela turn to look at her, Lisette regretted what she’d just said; but she couldn’t think of a way to walk it back.
“So they weren’t police, they were crooks?” Pamela asked.
What the hell, Lisette thought. She’s not a twelve-year-old. Might as well tell her the facts of life now so she’ll know what I’m asking her to get into later. She fell into her sachemic mode, which she relished: the tribal matriarch, wise in the ways and dangers of her world.
“They’re cops working for the crooks. The crooks are the bozos in the pickup. They’ve got to be with a mafia called La Fraternidad—the Brotherhood in English. The Brotherhood controls everything around here. Kidnapping is one of their subsidiary industries.”
“Whoa!” Nick leaned in, sticking his head between the front seats. “You mean that—”
“No, but the thought passed through their minds, I’ll bet,” Lisette said. “All the traffickers, and that includes the cops on their payrolls, obey the first commandment of the trade: Thou shalt not do what is bad for business. Kidnapping innocent Americans is very, very bad for business. That’s where I screwed up, pretending we’re gringo tourists. In a good year, this part of Mexico gets maybe a dozen more tourists than, let’s say, Somalia.”
“It made the cops’ antennae twitch? It made them think that maybe we’re not so innocent?” asked Pamela in the cautious but hopeful way of a quiz show contestant.
“Good for you,” Lisette said. “They were asking themselves, ‘What are these gringos doing in the dangerous Sierra Madre? Two women and a young man. Are they idiots? Or are they possibly freelancers trafficking without a license from the cartel?’ That would have made us legitimate targets. They decided we’re idiots.”
“Whoa-ho! Like we had a close call!”
“No, Nick. It wasn’t all that close. It wasn’t awesome.”
* * *
YouTube COMMUNIQUÉ #1
VIDEO: Full screen of a man in a ski mask and baseball cap, seated at a desk. On the wall behind him are: a photograph of Emiliano Zapata, a pencil sketch of Che Guevara
, and a portrait of La Santa Muerte.
AUDIO: Good day, brothers and sisters, from the comandancia of the Brotherhood. This will be the first in a series of video communiqués we will issue from time to time. We have three purposes in making these announcements. First, to present accurate accounts of certain events in Sonora. You cannot trust the newspapers or the media because they are liars who serve the rich and the powerful. Second, to correct the misinformation, the deceptions, the filthy falsehoods our enemies spread about us. Third—and this is the most important—to enfold you in the beautiful butterfly wings of the truth, for whoever is without truth is without God, and who is without God is lost.
It is I, La Mariposa, the Butterfly, who addresses you today, all citizens of Sonora and in particular those who dwell in municipalities that have formed self-defense militias, so-called. Last week, the comandante of the autodefensa in pueblo San Patricio challenged the army and the Federal Police to bring him human heads. He said this on television, speaking as the harlot Salome spoke to King Herod. She demanded only the head of John the Baptist. This man wants three heads: mine and two of my colleagues’, members of the Brotherhood’s Executive Committee. Not only that—he called for the authorities to bring him our DNA. I’m not joking! He wants the very substance of our beings to be sucked from our bodies and brought to him! And yet we are called bloodthirsty barbarians.
This is an example of how our enemies spread dirty lies about us even as they do the very things—and worse—that they accuse us of doing. To this so-called comandante, La Mariposa says as Saint Paul said in Romans, chapter two, verse three: “Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourselves—that you will escape the judgment of God?”
This man who calls himself a comandante is a hypocrite in all things, a landowner who grows walnuts but who pays his workers a few pesos and forces them to work long hours when his walnuts are harvested. Who would not pay just taxes levied so we of the Brotherhood could distribute money to the poor. Listen, comandante, to the words of Saint Matthew: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
Some Rise by Sin Page 8
