Juan Pablo and the Butterflies

by JJ Flowers

  JP, I am so scared.

  I don’t know what to do. I am going to go back to the bus stop, but I have no money for a ticket.

  Help me, JP.

  Leaping up, Juan Pablo rushed through the busy station until he spotted a Western Union station.

  JP: Is there a Western Union there?

  She must have been staring at her phone, because almost instantly she replied:

  Rocio: Yes.

  JP: Find out how much a ticket is to Mazatlán. I will wire you the money and meet you at the bus stop when you get off.

  Rocio: Where did you get money?

  JP: Long story. Hurry.

  Late that night, exhausted, scared again, Juan Pablo waited two hours for Rocio’s bus at the Mazatlán station. He hid in the shadows, hoping no one would notice him. Men and women, all carrying bags and suitcases, hurried onto buses and off, disappearing into taxis or cars in the parking lot. Two policemen, heavily armed, made the rounds. He pretended to play a game on his iPad until they had passed. The police stopped before three women wearing tight, sparkly clothes and teetering on high heels. Laughter erupted from the group. A policeman tapped one of the women with his baton and she stumbled forward, righting herself just before falling. Everyone laughed, even the wronged lady. The police moved on.

  Abuela, what is a prostitute?

  It is a very sad story.

  What had the man with the red boots done to Rocio’s uncle?

  What would he do to him and worse, Rocio, should they get caught?

  He forced these terrifying thoughts out of his mind.

  There were dozens of homeless children. If not homeless, then close to it. Ragged clothes, worn shoes or dirty feet, they wore hungry looks of desperation.

  You cannot save everyone, this is true, Juan Pablo, his abuela once said. But this doesn’t mean you don’t do your best. Sometimes the Sky People will put someone right in front of you and ask you to help.

  A boy, about ten or eleven, was making his way to each garbage can and peering inside. He carried two shopping bags full of plastic bottles. The boy looked at Juan Pablo and offered up a smile. Fear almost made him forget how to respond to this simple greeting, but he forced it and smiled back. The boy fished out his discarded bottle from the nearby bin. He wore grubby, beige pants, a too-big T-shirt, and worn flip-flops. Dirt smudged his lean face and his eyes looked large and hungry, too big for his face.

  “How much do you get for a bottle?” Juan Pablo asked.

  “Two pesos. I only need two more.”

  “Two more for what?”

  “It’s ten pesos to sleep in this alley.”

  “That’s a lot,” Juan Pablo said.

  The boy shrugged. “Sí, but it is safe there. No one will bother you behind the cantina. Sometimes there is leftover food, too. If the dogs don’t get it first.” The boy seemed about to invite Juan Pablo, but his eyes locked on Juan Pablo’s iPad.

  Some people believe money is the root of all evil, his abuela once explained. It is not. But that is not to say that too much money doesn’t pose very serious problems.

  Abuela, wouldn’t you say it is better to have that problem than the problem of not enough money?

  There is no such thing as not enough money. There is only a problem of not enough sharing.

  Juan Pablo reached into his pocket and withdrew fifty pesos. “Here,” he said.

  The boy’s smile was a thing of wonder. “Gracias.”

  Finally, the yellow and silver bus drove into the spot where the bus driver had told him to wait. The doors opened. Rocio was the first one out.

  Juan Pablo dropped his bags as Rocio fell into his arms.

  For a long while he just held her slim shape against his; his relief was keen. “I should never have left you. I thought you’d be safer.”

  She just clung tighter. He felt her shake with tears.

  “Come, we need to get out of here.”

  Rocio nodded as he led her out of the bus terminal. They passed through el Zona Dorada, the Golden Zone—the tourist area of the city. An older homeless boy had warned him that the police picked up unaccompanied minors there and shipped them to orphanages that were “the darkest place on earth, trust me on this, amigo.” They made their way quickly past the brightly lit streets, the knickknack shops, a multitude of peddlers, restaurants, and a dozen resort hotels. Rocio watched the passersby with fear now.

  She whispered, “What do you think they did to my uncle?”

  “I don’t know,” Juan Pablo replied. “Maybe he is safe somewhere. Maybe he saw the man with the red boots coming and he went vamoose.” He dared not offer another maybe.

  “Do you think . . . they could have killed him?”

  “No, no,” he answered as he stopped before a crippled beggar. A buzzing came to his ear, the dim static reminding him of his lost abuela, never far from his thoughts. He reached into his pocket and withdrew three pesos and dropped them in to the beggar’s cup.

  The man rewarded him with a toothless smile.

  “Why would they?” Juan Pablo asked, too scared by the idea of people killing innocents for no good reason, for any reason. “He has done nothing to them.”

  Yet, he and everyone knew of forty-three college students who disappeared and in the search for them, mountains of human remains had been found. None of these human bones were the forty-three students. Who were they then? No one knew, beyond that they were the legions of the disappeared, people who had been murdered by the drug cartels. They were the sad remains of the innocent, like Rocio’s uncle.

  This couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t. “You need to call your mom, Rocio.”

  Rocio stopped and pulled him into an alleyway. Her lip trembled and she burst into tears as she withdrew her phone to show him. There were twenty-eight calls from her mother. “She must know something is wrong.”

  “Rocio! Call her and tell her you are okay.”

  “I left a message that I was safe at my uncle’s, that the phone service is down, and that I would call her as soon as I can.”

  “You need to tell her what happened to us.”

  “I can’t. She would be so scared for us, and for her brother. She’d fly here right off and then what? She would lose her green card and her place in line. We would lose everything.”

  Rocio’s mother had less than a year before she became a citizen, the immigration officer promised. Until then, she could not fly back to Mexico, simply because she would not be allowed back into the United States.

  Juan Pablo understood this, but still he knew his abuela would want Rocio’s mother to know what was happening to them.

  “We need to get to America. Somehow. Many people have done it. We can do it,” she said, but without certainty, as if only now confronting the equally daunting and dangerous passage of crossing the border without proper papers. “I will call her when we cross the border and are safe. I will tell her everything then.”

  Juan Pablo considered this. His abuela always knew when something was wrong. Once, when he was ten, a group of kids kept threatening to beat him up if he didn’t “share” his schoolwork. His abuela had seen his fear the second he got home. That’s when his abuela got him an iPad so he could take classes online at the Khan Academy, and he had stopped going to school.

  Burdened by their packs, he directed her to the cobblestone streets of the old town near the southern end of the peninsula. There were fewer people here and it seemed much safer. The ocean stretched out to the west. The Bahía Dársena channel flowed with the tide on the other side.

  They finally found themselves looking up at a beautiful cathedral in the center of the peninsula. From where they stood, they spotted a lighthouse at the southern tip of the long stretch of land cushioned between the ocean and the harbor. Rocio’s phone said that the sport-fishing fleet and the Baja ferry building were nearby.

  “We should sleep there,” Rocio said. “The church will keep us safe.”

  Juan Pablo agreed. They fou
nd a place alongside the enormous building, hidden by the shadows of the steeple. They put sweatshirts on against the cold and kept close to stay warm. Juan Pablo closed his eyes, drawing in the sweet scent of Rocio’s shampoo mixed with the rich taste of the ocean.

  Still, his thoughts kept returning to the danger surrounding them.

  Even in the darkest times, you can choose happiness. You can choose your thoughts . . .

  He returned his thoughts to Rocio, close and safe in his arms.

  The thought brought him peace. Sleep followed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By early morning their carefully considered plans had fallen through.

  Juan Pablo and Rocio sat on a bench overlooking the harbor. The morning sun rose over the glass-like surface of the ocean, its warmth chasing away the cold. He drew a deep breath, watching a pelican floating in the bay, a seagull alongside, the unlikely friends as content as his abuela after a healthy birth. He tried to keep this happy thought in his mind.

  They tried to decide what to do next. The ferries did not allow children onboard without a guardian. They also only had enough money for one passage. He’d have to play his violin for three or four days to earn enough.

  Three or four days of danger, of risking being spotted . . .

  Somehow they had to get across the sea to Baja. He silently asked the Sky People for help, just in case it worked again.

  They passed an orange juice back and forth while they each ate a banana. Rocio tossed the banana peel into a rusty garbage can before she took out a brush and began combing the tangles out of her long hair.

  “Maybe if we ask the ferry captain if we share a bunk? Maybe he would cut the price of passage?”

  “We would need to find someone who would pose as our parent—”

  Juan Pablo stopped all of a sudden, spotting a butterfly floating by in the new sunlight. He leapt up and grabbed his violin and pack. Rocio dropped her comb in her pack and rushed to follow. Together they chased the flitting creature down the dock. As if distracted, the butterfly drifted aimlessly over a boat. An old man slept on the deck.

  “It’s a sign,” Juan Pablo whispered.

  Rocio nodded. They stared, trying to get the courage to wake him.

  “He looks really old,” Rocio whispered.

  The sun had colored the old man’s weathered face a dark brown. Wisps of stringy gray hair appeared from beneath a battered old baseball hat and his nose, even from a distance, looked swollen and shone with an unnatural pink. A bottle of whiskey rested in his hands as if he had been afraid to part with it. He wore a torn shirt and ripped, stained white pants, that was all.

  The boat did not appear any more promising than the man. The once white paint was now a dingy gray, chipped and as weather-beaten as the old man’s face. Fading letters spelled Catori on the bow. Juan Pablo racked his brain for a translation but he knew of no such word in either Spanish or English. Both the boat and its captain had lost a battle and given up. The boat hardly looked seaworthy.

  Juan Pablo searched for the butterfly for reassurance, but it was nowhere to be seen now. “Should we wake him?”

  “You do it.”

  “Why do I have to do everything?”

  “You are the man.”

  “Ha!” He could scarcely believe this air-thin explanation. “Why are we always equal, except when you want me to do something?”

  “Please? I’m afraid he will yell at us.”

  Sighing, Juan Pablo took a reluctant step forward. “Pardon, señor?”

  The man did not stir.

  Juan Pablo repeated it in a louder voice.

  He still did not stir.

  Rocio pantomimed someone drinking a bottle, indicating he was still drunk, sleeping it off. “You’re going to have to shake him,” she advised.

  Drawing a deep breath, Juan Pablo dropped his bags and stepped over the rail onto the boat. “Señor?” He gently shook his shoulder.

  The man finally started to wake. Kind of. One large, round brown eye opened.

  Juan Pablo introduced himself and Rocio. Another brown eye opened. The two received a surprisingly thorough appraisal. The man’s interested gaze lingered on Juan Pablo’s violin case before returning to the boy.

  “We need to get to Baja.”

  “You’re in trouble.” He did not ask a question, but rather stated a fact.

  Juan Pablo wondered about the meaning behind the words. Not only did this man understand trouble, but Juan Pablo somehow grasped that the old man would not be adding to theirs. He might not help them, but he would not hurt them. He sensed, too, that this man had so much of his own trouble, it had cloaked him in sadness, the kind of sadness, his grandmother said, that buries the spirit.

  He and Rocio exchanged glances before returning their gaze to the man. Juan Pablo nodded. The man looked away, toward the channel opening to the big blue. He stared steadily over this distance, seeming to struggle with some internal battle before turning back to them.

  “Someone is chasing you.”

  A good guess, Juan Pablo supposed. Again he nodded.

  “Not a parent or a relative.”

  Juan Pablo exchanged glances with Rocio again. She looked back at the man and shook her head. Though again, he hadn’t really asked a question.

  “How did you find me?”

  “A butterfly circled your boat,” Rocio ventured. “We are from El Rosario, the butterfly sanctuary. We took it as a good sign, like an omen.”

  The man absorbed her words and his eyes widened. “I saw a butterfly, too. And a great whale.” Struggling with some internal demon, he tried to rise but gave up before managing the task.

  “Can I help?” Juan Pablo started to drop his bags.

  “My only help comes in a bottle.” He looked at his half-full bottle and set it aside. He struggled again to rise. He came to his feet and stood for several seconds, teetering unsteadily.

  The demon won and he sat back down.

  It occurred to Juan Pablo to ask: “Where did you see this butterfly and whale?”

  “Here.” The man pointed between his two eyes. “Right here.”

  Rocio looked at him. In the way of close friends, he knew what she was thinking. That the man was loco. Maybe, but Juan Pablo remembered his abuela’s sight came that way too. Uncertain like the wind, and sometimes the funniest echo of a real thing. Once her sight showed her a giant lizard and she agonized over what it meant, until later that day their neighbors invited them to watch a Godzilla movie on TV. Another time she saw a hole swallowing up Juan Pablo’s legs. She worried that an accident might somehow cause him to lose his legs. He fell all right, but only tore two giant holes in his jeans. Another time she saw herself being pulled into the earth by her long braid and two days later, when helping a new mom with her newborn, her braid got pulled into a vacuum. The sight was never reasonable, she always said. Not really good for much but scaring an old woman.

  “I have always dreamed of seeing a whale,” Rocio said, and indeed she spoke in a dreamy voice. “Not on TV or in a museum. A real one,” she added, her voice changing with hope.

  “Me too,” Juan Pablo said.

  The old man’s smile was an unused instrument.

  His abuela used to say, Some smiles are a gift from above.

  “I need coffee,” he said. “And enough food to last the both of you two days at least, but just juice and fruit for me.”

  Juan Pablo could scarcely believe their luck. “You’ll take us?”

  “You have to buy the petro.”

  “How much?”

  He stated a number. Rocio gasped. The old man misunderstood, and looking out over the big blue, he explained, “The winds are good. The sea is calm. We can probably sail most of the way, but just in case, we have to have petro.”

  “Sí, señor. We will buy all the petro you need. Gracias, gracias.”

  Rocio and Juan Pablo leapt into action, turning and rushing off to the small store.

  As Rocio shopped for
their food, Juan Pablo got a cup of coffee.

  The store clerk, heavyset and friendly, asked, “Is this for the padre?”

  “Padre?”

  She motioned outside to the Catori. “The old man.”

  “Sí,” Juan Pablo said. “Is he a padre?”

  She nodded. “He used to be the most loved padre. Before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before”—she sighed, shaking her head—“all the trouble.” She said noncommittally, “No charge for the padre,” and waved him away.

  Juan Pablo returned to the boat with coffee but found the old man fast asleep again. He woke him gently, just like before, but this time he held the treasure of a strong cup of black coffee.

  The man accepted the offering, and Juan Pablo turned to leave. He stopped suddenly, as a thought broke through his excitement. “Padre, do you think we will see a whale?”

  The old man nodded. “The grays are migrating now. The mysticetes sometimes grace us with a sighting.”

  Juan Pablo could not hide his excitement. “Gracias, Padre,” he yelled before running off to help Rocio.

  He found Rocio at the market and told her the old man was a padre.

  Rocio’s eyebrows rose. “He does not look like a padre.”

  “There was trouble.”

  Rocio froze with alarm. “What kind of trouble?”

  Juan Pablo shrugged. He knew it mattered, but he didn’t want to worry Rocio more. “He’s probably retired now.”

  She searched his face, seeking reassurance. “The butterfly . . .”

  Juan Pablo nodded. “We will be safe with him.”

  Rocio nodded before returning to the task at hand. She found the peanut butter and dropped it in the basket. He thought to distract her and related the important news about the whales.

  “That’s right. They are migrating now. I will have my phone ready. I still have half a charge. I won’t use it till we see our whale.”

  “To see a whale. Just to be on a boat. I have never been on a boat,” Juan Pablo realized.

  “Me either. The best part is—”

  Juan Pablo finished for her: “No one can find us on a small boat in the middle of the ocean.” This was the best part. The man with the red boots could not reach them on a boat. The idea of being safe, really safe, if just for the space of the crossing, made Juan Pablo urge, “Hurry, Rocio.”