by Robert Hough
— No.
— Then why you got a rodeo saddle?
— It’s borrowed.
— The horse too?
— Sí.
Both men started laughing. The driver slapped the top of his right leg. — Whoever you borrowed it from ain’t gonna be happy when he sees what you did to his horse!
Francisco looked up and down the desolate, baking roadway. He returned his gaze to the two and asked: — Where are you going, señores?
— Uhhh … Rosita, said the driver.
A few seconds transpired. The two men looked at each other, and then the driver stepped down and said: — So. You need a ride or not?
Francisco narrowed his eyes; he knew that the men were contrabandistas, shuttling liquor into the United States. His choice was clear. He could either accept a ride from these suspicious characters or he could face the prospect of spending a night in the desert, where, in addition to a ravaging thirst, he’d fall prey to hunger and falling temperatures and every manner of scorpion and stinging spider.
He rode between the two men, both of whom smelled of sweat and liquor and stale, settled-in smoke. The saddle was between his feet. Behind him, beneath the tarpaulin, he could hear bottles rattling. When the driver turned off the roadway onto a tiny dirt track that headed in the general direction of the river, Francisco realized that they were no longer heading to Rosita, if in fact they ever had been.
— Stop the cart, he said.
— What for? asked the driver.
—Just stop the damn thing and let me walk.
This prompted both men to chuckle and the driver to say: — You ain’t goin’ nowhere.
A few seconds later, as the wagon slowed to manoeuvre around a boulder, Francisco put his right fist into his left hand and drove his right elbow into the face of the bandido on the passenger side. The man fell into brambles, holding his spurting nose. Abandoning the saddle, Francisco leapt from the cart and began to run towards the roadway. When he heard the cock of a pistol and the driver saying Hold up, pendejo, or I’ll shoot you in the back, Francisco instinctively stopped and slowly turned. The driver came around the cart with his pistol pointed at Francisco’s head; when he reached a point where a blind man wouldn’t have missed, he squeezed the trigger.
— Hijo de puta!
— What happened? said the passenger as he picked himself off the dirt.
— The gun jammed, cheap piece of shit.
— Try it again.
He spun the chamber and again aimed the gun at Francisco’s forehead. Again it refused to shoot.
— It won’t work. Let’s go.
— Try again, pendejo. I think he broke my goddamned nose.
— I said forget it, let’s go.
A minute later Francisco was alone in the middle of an endless Coahuilan scrub. He stood motionless, the emotions within him so intense that his body refused to accept them as his own. This state of grace did not last long: he began to shake so violently that he fell to his knees and vomited a translucent slime, after which he rolled over and closed his eyes against the white sun, panting so fiercely his ribs hurt.
When he caught his breath he turned over and, for no good reason, began pawing at the earth like an enraged dog, till his fingertips were ragged and his nose ran and his lungs felt heavy with dust. He stayed there, on hands and knees, panting. When he finally regained his breath, he rose because he had to, and rummaged through his knapsack. He drank the small amount of water left in his bottle, which somehow only magnified his thirst. Commanding himself to think, he looked down the twisting, bleached track that had led his would-be killers to this spot: it was little more than a pair of ruts in the sun-baked earth. One option was to walk back along the path towards the roadway and hope that the cool temperatures of night might bring out a few travellers. He turned, squinted his eyes in the opposite direction, and spotted what looked like a thin, mud-red interruption in the relentless desert. This, he concluded, was the Río Grande. He devised a new plan, this one motivated primarily by thirst. He would find the river, and there he would drink muddy water, refill his water bottle, and return in the direction from which he’d come, hopefully flagging a ride with some travellers who might, if all went well, refrain from murdering him. If it turned out that he had to spend a night curled up in the desert, he’d find himself a sandy lee and do just that.
He put his head down and trudged. With only the barest hint of a path, he had to veer around every manner of agave and yucca and low, spiny cactus. He kept thinking of Violeta — of her green eyes and wavy black hair and her soft, graceful manner. After a half-hour of delirious marching, the sound of the river grew into an actual stirring, the thin, mud-red line a slowly moving banner. He pressed on, his gaze focused just ahead of his tired feet. With time, his thoughts deadened and his actions became robotic. His tongue swelled, and he could think of nothing but the baking, tuberous presence in his mouth. His thoughts of Violeta dwindled, and the sounds of the desert no longer came to his tired, sunburned ears. Even the fear for his own survival — a fear that had propelled him in this direction in the first place — disappeared, and when Francisco finally stumbled upon the gently sloped banks of the river, his first reaction was to stop and peer curiously at the rush of grey water, as if he had no idea what it was or how he had found himself here.
It all came back: the river, the desert, the horse, and the saddle with the nice embroidery and how he had nearly got himself killed over it. Then he was running towards the river while simultaneously pulling off his clothing and making weak, strangulated yelps. He jumped in and splashed madly and tasted metal in the cool, delicious water. When he finally crawled out, he reached his hands towards the sky and, eyes clamped, let his naked body dry in the sun.
Eventually he opened his eyes and dressed and, shortly after, noticed he was not the first person to have graced this spot. A few metres away were the blackened remains of a firepit, along with a jumble of paper bags, half-eaten tortillas, torn bedrolls, cooking utensils, and old clothes. In the middle of the firepit was a rusted old coffeepot that bore a large dent on one side. A bit farther on, someone had nailed two mesquite branches into the shape of a cross and pushed it into the beach. Francisco was considering his next move when he heard rustling. Before he could react, he looked up at the top of the bank and watched as a lone hombre emerged.
The man was dark and had a compressed mestizo nose. He was shorter than Francisco, though just as stocky. He was maybe twenty-five years of age.
— You are crossing? asked the man in a thick southern accent.
— No, señor.
— Then why are you here?
— A pair of criminals left me here.
— Criminals? Really?
— Contrabandistas, actually. They stole my saddle and would have shot me had their gun not jammed. Then they left me out here.
— Dios mío.
Seconds passed. Francisco asked: — Where are you from?
— Chiapas.
— You’re a long way from home.
— I have relatives in Texas. What about you?
— I’m going to try to walk back to the main road and get a lift to Piedras.
— Ay, that road. I was out there for hours before I got a lift. And even then it was in a donkey cart. I’ve been travelling all day just to get here from Sabinas. It’s the heat. By the way, was that your dead horse I passed? There were so many flies I had to put my hand over my mouth.
— Sí.
—Jesús, hombre. Talk about luck. You want to eat?
The man opened his backpack and took out a bundle wrapped in brown paper. They both sat on a fallen mesquite branch and shared tortillas and jerky and water. Gracias, Francisco kept saying, between bites. Muchas gracias, señor. As the sun began to dip and turn a deep, spectral orange, the man started a fire with the half-burnt wood left in the pit.
— Looks like we’re here tonight.
Francisco tightened his collar over his throat
and prepared for the cold of the desert. Meanwhile the man stared into the flames, his face flickering with tones of red and yellow and blue. He fetched two potatoes out of his knapsack and edged them into the ash. After a few minutes of pushing them around with a stick, he stopped and looked at Francisco.
— You know what you should do? Swim with me in the morning. There’s a good, newly paved road on the gringo side, and you’ll catch a ride into Eagle’s Pass in no time. They have actual cars over there, not just wagons pulled by burros. There you can cross back over into Piedras.
— I’d get caught.
— Even better. Let immigration drive you there themselves.
— Won’t they beat the mierda out of me?
— If they took the time to beat up every wetback they found they’d never get any work done. Sometimes they even give you a sandwich.
Francisco thought about this. — You want me to swim to los Estados and let the immigration people take me back to Piedras?
The man shrugged. — It’s what I’d do.
He slept curled like a baby, his right side resting on scrub and his head on his knapsack. It was cold that night, his sleep thin and shivering. Well before daylight, he felt a cold hand touch his shoulder. Francisco stretched and rubbed his eyes as the Chiapan collected his things in the moon’s low shimmer. Once his possessions were packed, the stranger put his backpack over his shoulder, walked to the water, and said I’ll see you on the other side before slipping quietly into the river. Francisco rushed to the edge and watched him swim towards the far bank.
Francisco crossed himself and then slipped into the water. As he struggled towards the far bank he thanked God that the current happened to be running in his favour — like most Coahuilans he was a perfunctory swimmer at best. He emerged at a spot on the bank about thirty metres west of where his travel companion had climbed out and gone on without him. As Francisco walked towards the roadway running along the gringo side of the border, the first scarlet rays of morning fell from the east. He reached a wire fence denoting the existence of a ranch. When Francisco began to climb it, his foot slipped and he tore his shirt. Upon inspecting the damage, he shouted curse words that faded slowly in the chilly, vaporous air.
He walked a little bit farther, reaching the two-lane border highway just as the sun cleared the horizon. It was still cool, and in his dripping-wet clothes he had to shuffle on the spot to stay warm. Fittingly, a black and white sedan was the first car to pull over.
One of the policemen had latino features. He, naturally, did the speaking.
— Buenas días, joven.
— Buenas, señor.
— Did you swim across the Río Grande this morning?
— Sí.
— I take it you are not a resident of los Estados Unidos?
— No, señor. I’m sorry.
— Well, in that case, I think we’re all going to take a little ride.
An hour later, Francisco found himself in a locked room with about two dozen other illegal immigrants, all of whom had wet clothes and frightened expressions and an air of inextinguishable fatigue. Around nine o’clock they were given fried-egg sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. At ten o’clock they were packed into a small bus with doors that locked only from the outside; as it wound its way through Eagle’s Pass, Francisco peered at real yankee barbershops and real yankee saloons and real yankee grocery stores and he marvelled at how healthy everybody looked and how clean and new their hats were. In the bus there were not just Mexicanos but Guatemaltecos and Salvadoreños as well. They were all dropped off at the border. As they were under the authority of the police, they were saved the indignity of having to pay a small bribe to enter their own country. This irony caused Francisco to grin for the first time since he’d left Corazón.
Once on Mexican soil, Francisco took off his still-damp knapsack and hunted for the picture of Violeta’s brother, which was creased and moist and had torn diagonally from the lower left corner to the centre. Again he grinned, albeit bleakly. He had yet to ask a single person whether the muchacho in the picture looked familiar, and already he had survived the death of Antonio Garcia’s horse, a murder attempt, a night spent shivering in cold desert scrub, a swim across el Río Grande, and an arrest by the authorities. He was bone-tired and filthy and longed only for the comforts of home.
With some emergency pesos he had sewn into the bottom of his knapsack, he bought himself an order of tacos de menudo and a one-way ticket on a rickety, belching bus that had the words Jesús Es El Numero Uno written in blue paint across the sides and front. It took him three and a half hours to return from Piedras Negras, as opposed to the traumatizing thirty-six hours he’d needed to get there. Throughout, he sat between a nun and a Kickapoo Indian who snored like a small breed of dog, his head resting on Francisco’s aching shoulder.
Around noon he was dropped on the roadway outside of Corazón de la Fuente, at which point Francisco lowered his gaze, cursed his own failure, and trudged home in the unrelenting sun.
{ 9 }
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LITTLE PLAZA FACING THE home of Roberto Pántelas was an old stone well that had provided the original mission-dwellers with water. Spanning the sides of the well was an arch made from hand-cut stone. When building it, the Franciscans had used no mortar or dowelling of any kind: only an exact proportion of weight to height had kept it up through centuries of wind, rain, war, and locust assault. Along the side of the arch was an inscription that, it seemed, had been chiselled by a mason with a paucity of forethought: God is a fountain, and that fountain is the heart of joy, and that joy is our reminder of the grace of God, and the grace of God is our guiding light in our battle against heathenry and …
The lettering, which had grown so puny that squinting was required to read it, ended there. Still, it was speculated that this inscription had inspired the town’s name — Heart of the Fountain — it being patently obvious that there was no other fountain within the municipal limits. There was also no geyser, stream, creek, or reliable puddle — only the distant gurgle of the Río Grande. For centuries the people of Corazón had relied on the well for water, only to watch their supply turn silty, and then sludgy, and then muddy, until the day came when the famed well of Corazón de la Fuente offered only worms, beetle husks, and the occasional lifeless vole. The rope that serviced it frayed, then broke. Fifty years on, everyone in Corazón (save for Madam Félix, whose brothel benefited from rudimentary plumbing) got their water from a rusty, clanking pump installed north of the village.
The well was now used for a different and, some would say, curious purpose. Residents would stare into its inky depths and reveal their secrets. No one knew quite how this tradition had started, though everyone was in agreement that the Pozo de Confesiones, as it had come to be known, had tranquilizing powers, and that talking to its echoing bottom somehow left one feeling calmed. Francisco Ramirez, as one example, visited the well immediately after returning from his failed search for Violeta Cruz’s lost brother. He hung his head into its mushroom-scented depths and confessed that, had he been armed, those two contrabandistas would now be lying dead on the desert floor, their foreheads graced by a bloody third eye, their organs grazed on by buzzards, their eyes plucked out by scavenging beetles, their skin broiled by the relentless heat, their testicles gnawed on by ravenous sidewinders …
Inside his little home, the molinero listened, and grinned. Given the proximity of his living room window to the Pozo, coupled with the way in which the elderly disappear in front of those not beset with old age themselves, he was always the first to hear fresh gossip in town. He was the first to know that the cantina owner suffered nightmares stemming from the day in which a unit of Villa’s army had shot up his cantina and then set it alight after dousing the furniture with prize tequila. He was the first to discover that the hacendero was in love with Madam Félix, and yet could never marry a woman with such a disreputable profession. He was also the first to know whenever one of the Marias got pregnant a
nd had to pay a midnight visit to the curandera, where the unwanted child would be delivered to heaven upon a carpet of magical utterances.
Fortunately, he was a gentleman above all else. It was one of the reasons he had always been so popular with women. He never betrayed secrets or used overheard admissions to gain advantage. It was a pledge that he had made to himself: he would never, ever act upon knowledge gained because of his proximity to the well. It was also a pledge that, after decades of adherence, he would finally disobey.
That evening, one of the town’s señoritas, a girl named Laura Velasquez, came to the well. It was a clear night, and the packed white dust of the plazita looked auburn under the desert moon. The molinero watched as she stopped before the well’s aperture and, after a moment, began to tremble. A second after that, he could hear her weeping softly. This surprised him. Yes, it was true that physical beauty had not graced Laurita the way it had graced some (well, most) of the town’s other señoritas, and that, at the age of twenty-one, she had been a spinster for so long her marrying years were generally considered behind her. It was also true that her teeth were, by any definition, unconventional, and that the mild discomfort they caused her while chewing had affected her eating habits, rendering her somewhat less than curvaceous.
By the same token, she had always struck the molinero as happy, as the sort of person for whom simple pleasures were sufficient. She was remarkably kind, and the molinero figured that this was the source of her contentment — she was always running errands for the sickly and delivering food to shut-ins and knitting bonnets for newly arrived babies. In the eyes of the old molinero, she was the sort of woman who might have joined a convent and led a life whose rewards included quiet contemplation and a profound connection with God.
And yet here she was, hair lit by moonlight, shoulders shaking with grief, tears dripping down her long, thin nose. It was a sight the molinero could barely stand to witness: in the workings of a small town, the satisfaction of a person like Laura Velasquez functioned as a sort of inspiration for those who were far luckier but who nevertheless considered themselves to be having a bad day. Her inner peacefulness, the molinero understood, functioned as a source of illumination, particularly in difficult times, and the last thing Corazón de la Fuente needed was for this light to be extinguished. Oh no — the pueblo could survive poverty, bloody upheaval, and whatever other ludicrous, blood-soaked indignity Mexican history would dream up next. But he wasn’t sure it could survive a dampening of Laura Velasquez’s spirits.
