Border Child

by Michel Stone

  As they spoke a shiny blue truck approached from down the hill.

  “Diego,” Emanuel said, pointing toward the street.

  Diego parked in front of Emanuel’s apartment and stepped from the truck. In his dark jeans, boots, white shirt with silver snaps, and cowboy hat, he looked like “the Magnificent” should, indeed, be part of his name.

  “Boring match so far. We need to score,” he said.

  “Half’s just started,” Emanuel said. “Our guys need to step up.”

  “Rafael Márquez is the man! He and my cousin are good friends, you know? He’ll come through for us.”

  Héctor glanced at Emanuel to see if he were as awed as Héctor by Diego’s connection to a member of the national futbol team.

  Emanuel shrugged. “I hope so,” he said.

  “Come ride around with me, Héctor. Check out my truck, eh? You got anywhere else you’ve got to be?” Diego said.

  Héctor had hardly seen Diego since the day they’d met. Because he was saving every peso he made, Héctor didn’t go out drinking at night with Emanuel and Diego, and so he had never ridden in Diego’s fancy new truck.

  “No, I got nowhere to be for a while,” he said. Then lowering his voice, “I’m making a delivery for Santiago tonight.” He never spoke to anyone about his work for Santiago and Ignacio, but Diego had arranged their introduction, so speaking to him about work didn’t concern Héctor.

  “Come on, then,” Diego said.

  Héctor slipped into the truck’s cab, where Diego had the station playing the World Cup match turned up loud. The truck smelled as Héctor imagined it would, of fresh, rich leather and a hint of pineapple from the small, fruit-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Along with it dangled a silver crucifix on a thin leather string and a framed photo of a young boy and girl dressed in Sunday clothes.

  “My niece and nephew,” Diego said, when he saw Héctor eyeing the photograph. “Their first Communion photo.”

  “They live here?” Héctor said.

  “No, they’re my sister’s kids. They live in Mexico City. My brother-in-law’s in politics, you know? He’s a big shot. Always has to be near the action.”

  Héctor couldn’t imagine someone being a bigger big shot than Diego, as beloved as he and the divers were here in Acapulco.

  Before they’d traveled a minute, Diego lowered the volume a bit and said, “So how’s your job with my friends? You like your work?”

  “I do,” Héctor said. “They’re nice guys. They pay me as promised, you know? It’s been good, and I thank you, Diego, for hooking me up.”

  Diego lit a joint and sucked in the pungent smoke for what seemed to Héctor an impossibly long time before offering it to Héctor. Though he wasn’t much of a marijuana smoker, he’d been feeling particularly carefree this night, and besides, one day he could tell people he’d smoked a joint with Diego the Magnificent de La Quebrada.

  Héctor pulled on the joint, the sweet taste of the bud smoke filling his lungs until he erupted in an embarrassing fit of coughing.

  “Hey, it’s good shit, this, you know? Take it easy, Héctor,” Diego said, laughing. “So tell me about your job. You like it. That’s good. My friends say you do fine work, that you’re loyal and don’t ask questions, and you always deliver as scheduled.”

  Héctor nodded, studying the passing cars and houses, but the edges of the world had softened, and he wondered for a moment if the rain had somehow melted everything just a little bit. He wanted to ask Diego if he noticed the melting, but instead he nodded. Then he realized Diego had stopped speaking, and now it was Héctor’s turn to talk. What had Diego just said?

  “I like my job,” Héctor said. “I have another delivery tonight, out to sea and back. For Santiago. And Ignacio,” he said.

  “You like the money you’re earning from them? It’s good, right?” Diego said, turning onto a street unfamiliar to Héctor. They were traveling east, away from the bay and the sinking sun, farther into the hills. In the distance, above the trees, a thin smear of smoke rose into the clear but darkening twilight sky.

  “The money is what I’d hoped for. After tonight, though, I’ve got to move on, Diego. The people in Matamoros believe they’ve located my little girl. I still think of her as a baby, you know? But she isn’t. She’s a little girl now. Walking and talking and shit,” he said, and for some reason this was funny, the idea of a walking, talking little baby, and he began to laugh.

  “That’s good, Héctor,” Diego said, drumming fingers along the steering wheel to the beat of the music on the radio. “Hey, congratulations. I know you’re very happy about this. I can see you’re tickled about this news.” Diego started to laugh, too, which somehow made Héctor laugh harder.

  Amusement could be contagious; Héctor had forgotten that. So long he’d gone without lightness, without easy thoughts, and now tears of holy laughter streaked his cheeks.

  When he slowed for a breath, he said, “I’m grateful to you for landing me a job, an income. It’s the only way I could get to the north and hunt for Alejandra.”

  “Do you have enough money?” Diego said.

  “I think so, yes. What I have now has to be enough. I have to go, to get there. The longer I wait the colder her path may become.”

  “Héctor, do you know what you’ve been transporting in those boxes on your runs from the cliffs?” Diego’s tone remained light, and he continued to smile, but his words, the subject of Héctor’s late-night shifts, had been something Héctor had made up his mind he must not consider. This he’d decided after his first run, the night he almost tossed the cooler into the sea.

  “No. I don’t ask,” Héctor said. “That’s not my concern.”

  Diego had turned down another road, narrower still, that split a ramshackle neighborhood of shanties, corrugated-tin structures barely fit for feral pigs. Héctor wondered how the occupants could have possibly stayed dry in the rains that had pounded them relentlessly all day.

  “That’s true, Héctor. That is not your concern, and that is why my boys, Ignacio and Santiago, have sung your praises. So,” he said, slowing to a stop in front of a small clearing between two shacks where five boys kicked a ball in the last light of day, “I have another job for you, a little more serious, but a good bit more money. It involves making runs for some other guys I know. They’re looking for someone like you, a deliveryman, of sorts.” He was studying Héctor now. Héctor could feel Diego’s eyes on him, but he watched the boys playing futbol. He imagined that if Diego lowered the volume on his radio he could hear the boys’ shouts, their carefree boyhood joy. What was Diego offering him? What was he saying?

  “That’s kind of you, Diego. Very generous, I’m sure. But I have to go, you know? To Matamoros. To my daughter.”

  “What are those guys paying you, Héctor? Like eight hundred pesos a delivery?”

  Héctor nodded.

  “My friends, my other friends, they can triple that,” Diego said, easing his truck back onto the road.

  They wound their way deeper into the hills, Diego’s pace slower now, the road bumpy and puddled, where the shacks were fewer but even shabbier. They were nearing the darkening coil of smoke that hung low in the still air over the green hills.

  Neither spoke for a minute, and Héctor considered that if Diego’s other friends could triple Santiago and Ignacio’s pay, he’d make in one delivery what he’d made after three trips for his current bosses, and though he’d been working for them for a few weeks now, tonight would be only his third delivery. His thoughts weren’t clicking at a normal pace, but he considered how much more money he would have made these past weeks if he’d been working for these other people. Instead of twenty-four hundred pesos, which he would have in his pocket by tomorrow, not counting the additional money from the fishing charters, he’d have…What would he have? He tried to do the math. Three times eight hundred times three.

  Diego rounded a slight bend, and in front of them a gray car smoldered on
the rutty roadside, flames licking its trunk and hood. As they neared the car, to Héctor’s horror he saw movement behind the windshield.

  “Holy Mother of Christ,” he said, glancing from the car to Diego. Diego’s gaze remained on the car.

  Diego stopped a distance from the car but close enough that Héctor made out a man sitting in the driver’s seat, his forehead bloodied. The unmistakable stench of gasoline hung in the air.

  “Holy Jesus,” he said. “Holy Jesus!” He had to help this man. Héctor sprang from Diego’s truck, but then froze beside his open door. What could he do? He had to smash the window.

  Heat from the car rose in visible currents, mixing with the blackening smoke. Héctor waved his arms and called to the man inside, almost hidden now behind wicked flames leaping from beneath the hood. The man appeared unresponsive at first, his head against his chest as the blaze grew around him. Héctor searched wildly for anything to smash the window, knowing he had to get to him before the inferno engulfed the car.

  He searched for a stick or a pipe, anything to slam against the window. Litter lay about the roadside: juice cans, broken beer bottles and plastic soda bottles, and paper scraps, but nothing helpful. He looked to Diego, but Diego remained in his truck, shaking his head as if already resigned that Héctor’s cause was futile.

  Héctor ran toward the nearest shack where a skeletal cow stood tied to a post. Frantic, he searched the sparse yard for anything to break the glass. He saw nothing but a child’s plastic toy truck and a single bike tire, bent with broken spokes. He grabbed a blackened pot from a cookstove beside the shack, flinging its top to the ground, and ran back to the car.

  The flames licked higher now, the smoke thickening, and Héctor ran to the car’s front, raising the pot above his head, wildly looking for the best place to break the glass. Crusty, days-old beans oozed from the pot down Héctor’s upraised hand and wrists. The man, who’d seemed unresponsive at first, now shook violently and shrieked for help with such fierce and absolute terror that Héctor knew no one, save for demons and those who’d burned in the pit of hell, had ever matched.

  “I’m here! I’ll help you!” Héctor screamed, heaving the pot against the passenger-side window, hoping not to shower the man with shards.

  The window webbed into a thousand cracks with the brunt of the pot, and Héctor’s second blow smashed the glass into the car. The sudden rush of air fed the flames like a bellows, the heat blasting to an unbearable inferno. Héctor ripped off his outer shirt and wrapped it around his hands so he could reach in and unlock the door, but as he stepped closer, to his horror he saw that the man’s wrists were chained to the steering wheel where they jerked with such force the bones would surely snap, and the full evil before Héctor paralyzed him, rendering him useless, incapable of anything. He met the man’s crazed, animalistic eyes for the briefest moment before they rolled back into his head, his singed hair and scorched clothing now smoking and melting like something from only the vilest regions of the netherworld. The man convulsed with such intensity, Héctor could not breathe, and he stumbled backward, though he could not look away, the man’s screeching and the fumes of burning hair demanding Héctor bear witness to the horror.

  Then the car exploded with such force that for an instant in his terror and confusion Héctor believed someone had kicked him to the ground, perhaps the demonic monster who had perpetrated this vile and grisly act. He sat in the street dazed, watching the blaze and the sickening black column of smoke that now drifted in no hurry into the hills.

  Héctor was certain of the man’s death, the funk of burning flesh, hair, and rubber permeating everything about him, and with bile rising in his throat, he stepped into the weary cow’s yard and vomited into the mud.

  “Let’s go,” Diego called through his open window, his demeanor serious, commanding.

  Héctor wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and noticed angry blisters rising there, his mind a tumble of thoughts and images he was incapable of processing into a coherent comment. His shirt? Where had he dropped it? He looked around and saw the blue bundle, smoking beside the cow. He left it there and slipped into the seat beside Diego, where he noticed the black soot coating his arms, chest, and jeans.

  They were going down now, out of the hills back toward the bay, and at once Héctor wondered if Diego had somehow known the burning car would be there, if witnessing that horror was somehow Diego’s intention. Otherwise, what had their intended destination been?

  As they passed by the lot where the boys had been playing ball, now empty and in dark shadow, Diego turned up the radio as the second half of the World Cup match had resumed.

  Héctor wondered what the man had done to bring about such torture and whom he had crossed. He suspected the victim to be about his age, certainly no older than twenty-three or twenty-four, though that was impossible to know. He prayed that when he’d looked into the man’s eyes, he’d conveyed his sympathy, rather than reflecting back the complete wickedness he’d witnessed, and that the man died knowing the last face he’d seen had shown compassion for him. Héctor leaned his head out the open window and sucked in the passing night air, trying to escape the smell of himself and hoping to keep at bay the sour vomit lingering in his throat.

  After a moment, Diego said, “If you stick around here a little longer, you can earn enough money not only to retrieve your daughter but to give her the things a little girl such as she deserves, you know? I don’t have children, but I imagine a good papa wants to give his girl dollies and pretty dresses, the finer things that the poor bastards living in rat squats like that can’t even dream of.” He jutted his chin toward a hut where a withered abuela scraped something from a skillet into the dirt, where a black rooster and two yellow hens pecked at it.

  When Héctor didn’t speak Diego said, “I’d like to know what you think is in the coolers you haul on the Gabriela at night, Héctor.”

  Héctor turned toward him, a sickening stench still lingering in his nose and the strangeness from the marijuana tingeing his thoughts so that nothing about him felt balanced or normal. The world lay off-kilter, and he struggled to form words.

  “I don’t…” he began, shaking his head. “I don’t know. Marijuana, I guess, maybe cocaine. I assume drugs,” he said so slowly he believed something might be permanently wrong with him.

  Diego shook his head. “And how do you feel about that? Are you bothered by that thought?”

  Though something had shifted deep inside Héctor, he was certain Diego’s tone had changed. Diego was working his way toward something with these questions, but an unfamiliar hum in Héctor’s brain couldn’t let him understand exactly where Diego’s end of this conversation was headed, and so he spoke with honesty and brevity.

  “Like I said, my job isn’t to think about that. No, I can’t think about that. If I did I’d compromise my goal, my determination to get my child.”

  Neither spoke for a while as they descended the hill toward the tranquil sea, now invisible before them.

  In the morning the sun would rise and illuminate the sparkling bay that graced thousands of postcards in the shops he’d passed each morning since he’d arrived in Acapulco just a few weeks ago, but now the Pacific lay before him like spilled ink.

  “I’m glad to know you take your work seriously, Héctor. You’re a good man,” Diego said.

  They passed a boarded-up hotel, graffiti lacing its every surface so that Héctor could only guess what the façade had looked like in its prime. He wondered at the many fancy guests who had likely stayed there before this city’s crime and dangerous reputation choked out much of Acapulco’s business except for those along the luxury high-rise hotel strip, and even their seemingly peaceful existence remained so because of the police who patrolled the area with vigilance in their new-model trucks with long-range semiautomatic weapons. He wondered how many of the occupants of the closed hotel had gone to the cliffs of La Quebrada to see Diego the Magnificent plunge into the foamy sea and surfa
ce with his wide smile intact and a thumbs-up to the electrified crowd.

  Sunrise here had become Héctor’s favorite time of day, not just for the empty streets and the morning’s coolness but because he felt safest, and the air smelled better in the predawn stillness than it would the rest of the day. In the evenings, like now, the air thickened with the stench of barrel fires and pollution that faithfully rose into the hills and settled there, lingering long after midnight, permeating the poorest neighborhoods with the effluence of all of Acapulco’s contamination.

  He wondered if he would ever escape the stench from tonight. Somehow the smell felt like a tattoo, an invisible but real tattoo of odor instead of ink, one that would reside permanently in his nose and taint all other smells for the rest of his existence. He shook his head to clear the thought.

  Diego slowed to a stop. They were in front of Emanuel’s apartment, but Emanuel no longer sat in the plastic chair under the palm tree, and Héctor suspected he’d gone into town to drink with Ana María as he did most evenings.

  Héctor opened the door and stepped from the truck, feeling that courtesy dictated he should thank Diego for the ride, but why? No hint of gratitude rose within him, but rather a cold wretchedness he could not name.

  “Think about the opportunity I’m offering, okay, Héctor? Stick around a few more weeks. I know people who can fill your pockets, man.”

  Héctor nodded and turned onto the short walkway lined with conch shells that led to the apartment.

  As he neared the entrance he realized Diego had not pulled away, and he glanced back toward the street where Diego remained. Their eyes met, and Diego put the truck in gear but didn’t leave. He seemed to have something yet to say, though Héctor couldn’t guess what that could be. The entire evening’s encounter with Diego felt dreamlike and fuzzy, as if somehow wrapped in soft, suffocating gauze.