Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  10

  In the desert the sky is wide. I feel small here, small and weak and wordless. In San Francisco the fog erased the sky—but here nothing can spare you from the sky or the sun that beats us like children who must submit. There is more than space and time that separates me from my past. A month. I have been here a month—and already the desert has swallowed the yellow hills of California. I cannot picture them. California is dead to me, and somehow I know the path of the return has been obliterated. There is no going back, and nothing to go back to.

  We climbed Mount Cristo Rey today in all the heat to spread out Salvador’s ashes. I’ve always wondered why the living follow out the prescriptions of the dead. Why do the dead have such power? Maria Elena says quite simply that the dead are not dead, that they are more alive than the living.

  The climb up the mountain was hell and the sun felt as if it were hanging a foot above my head. The path was well-worn by pilgrims, and I wondered about the footprints all the way to the top. Maria Elena called what we did a pilgrimage. I didn’t much feel like a pilgrim. Pilgrims believe. I sometimes think the only thing I really believe in is believers. I believe in Maria Elena. Is that enough? I trudged up the mountain right next to her. We talked about our girlhoods. One hundred degrees—and we’re climbing a mountain and talking about our girlhoods. She talked a lot about Diego. She said she’d hated him because he was so helpless until she realized that she only thought he was helpless because he was deaf. But she only came to that conclusion sometime after she’d abandoned him. “After my mother’s funeral, I just walked out.” she said. When we grew quiet, she prayed a rosary in my ear. I listened to her whispered prayers as we climbed higher and higher. Looking down on the whole valley, I realized I was happy to be breathing, happy to have a nose and hair and sweaty skin. Despite all the rows of cardboard houses, the homes with bootlegged electricity that often destroyed entire neighborhoods in the night in flames, despite the pollution, despite the tamed and beaten river, the desert I was staring at was as sacred a thing as I had ever seen. Mama cried when she looked out over the desert. I didn’t want her to go, she’s so old and tired. She’s going away, but I don’t think she could go away without seeing the desert from the top of the mountain. She wanted to be there for the spreading of Salvador’s ashes, the child she had wanted more than me. She asked me to forgive her, and I told her there was nothing to forgive. She felt on the way down. I thought she would die there. I picked her up and Jake helped her all the way down. She looked so small next to him.

  Eddie and Jake talked a good deal the whole way. Eddie laughed a tot—but he always does. He’s easily amused, and he seemed to be particularly amused by the hats we were wearing—that and the way the dust was clinging to our sweaty skin. He teased his wife. “I remember when you didn’t let me see you without makeup.” He laughed and wiped her face with his shirt. I love that man—for his kindness and for his laugh. Jake was very thoughtful most of the way up. He seems more vulnerable to me now. Ever since Casas Grandes, he seems a little more lost. I think he liked having Joaquin’s ashes in his room. I think he hated to get rid of them, though when I asked him about it he said I was being ridiculous. “People aren’t ashes,” he said. “What I loved of him is long gone.” Somehow. I don’t think so. I told Jake he didn’t have to come on another ash-spreading expedition. He said he’d been to several with Joaquin and that he didn’t mind them, and that he had been wanting to see what the statue looked like up close.

  When we reached the top of the mountain, Maria Elena insisted on a prayer. It made me sad I hadn’t known my brother. The world we had been brought up in had made us strangers to each other and so we never belonged to each other. Sometimes I think the world conspires to keep us all separate from each other. We have to fight to belong to those we love—maybe that’s all we can hope for. I tried not to hate my father for separating me and Salvador because I didn’t want hate to be a part of the moment. I didn’t want any hate on top of that mountain—all I wanted was Maria Elena and Jake and Eddie—and Salvador’s ashes. When Nena finished the prayer. I flung his ashes in the hot wind. For an instant there was a gray cloud that came between me and the sun. And then the ashes spread like grains of sand. I placed the urn at the foot of Christ the King. No one said a word, and after we lingered for a white, it was time to go. It was getting hotter and hotter, and it seemed as though we were not welcome after we had completed our task. As I said his name, we started to climb down. His name has come to mean good-bye.

  On the way down from the mountain, we passed a group of pilgrims. Maria Elena didn’t notice them. She was looking straight down at her feet and fingering her rosary. There was a woman among them, and she seemed too old to be climbing a mountain in the hot sun. But a young man had her by the arm and was helping her climb. Our eyes met as I passed him. I have thought of his dark eyes all day. I remember them from somewhere. Who knows? I sometimes don’t know anything anymore. I thought it might have been Diego, but I have come to the conclusion that I am a very bad seer.

  About halfway down. Maria Elena had to sit down and rest. For an instant I knew what she was thinking: I think I’m pregnant again. I smiled at her, and I was certain she knew I had just read her thoughts. She walked right next to me the rest of the way down. She handed me a folded-up piece of paper. I started to open it, but she stopped me. ‘ ‘I woke up last night after dreaming some words. I wrote them down—I just wanted you to read them.” I asked her why she wasn’t giving the words to Eddie. “You don’t understand,” she said quietly. “The words in the dream were whispered to me.” She stopped walking, then paused. “It was Rose’s voice.” I stuck the piece of paper in my pocket. This afternoon I read the words she’d dreamed, the words uttered to her in Mama’s voice.

  1 am writing these words onto this page, and I am giving Nena back the words she gave me. We must never lose them. I know what they mean. So does Nena. I must try to at least stay in my body through Mama’s final season.

  I haven’t left my body for a week and I feel as though I’m suffering from withdrawal. I sat out on the front porch this evening and smoked a cigarette with Jake and drank a glass of wine. We talked a long time about Joaquin, and I wound up talking to him about Salvador, and how it was so strange that I’d wound up with my twin brother’s ashes. He’s still a little sore with me for having followed him and Eddie to Casas Grandes. He wanted to know if I had eavesdropped on their conversation. I told him I hadn’t, but I think he’s still trying to decide if I’m telling the truth or not.

  Eddie said it was a sneaky thing to do and he and Maria Elena got into an argument over the whole episode the minute they discovered what had happened. But during dinner, Eddie wound up laughing so hard over the whole ridiculous event that he fell off the chair. “Tomorrow, Paris!” he howled. Maria Elena and I weren’t as amused. Mama went the opposite way. She wept openly that night, releasing all the tension of the day. “If you ever leave me while I’m still on this earth, Elizabeth Edwards, I swear I’ll die cursing your name.” She made me promise to “stay within my form.” I didn’t argue with her, though I am not at all sure I intend to keep my promise.

  11

  AT DAWN ON Sunday morning, a day after the Christ had spoken to Diego, he and Luz and Mundo and the T-Birds began their climb up the Juárez mountains. Diego led them, his feet dancing as though a tune was playing in his body.

  “It’s a little steep,” Mundo said.

  “I thought you were a man. I thought you could take it,” Diego wrote. He stuck the note in Mundo’s hand and kept climbing.

  “This is harder than yesterday,” Mundo said as they stopped to drink some water. “There isn’t any road here. At least yesterday there was a road.”

  “Sometimes people make their own roads.”

  Luz read the note over his shoulder and laughed. “That’s for damn sure, Dieguito, but it doesn’t mean their roads take them anywhere.”

  Diego shrugged his shoulders, drank some
water, and kept climbing.

  When they slopped again, Mundo said something to Luz, then walked up to Diego, “Hey Diego, I don’t think we’re gonna make it to the top.”

  “Quit complaining,” Diego wrote. He was still angry with him and Luz for not believing. They were just humoring him. He kept climbing.

  Luz held on to Mundo’s shoulder. Diego looked back occasionally to see if everyone was all right. The T-Birds were talking to each other, but Diego wasn’t interested in what they were joking about. He could see them laugh, and he could see Mundo and Luz speaking to each other, but he just climbed higher not caring what they were saying to each other. They probably thought he was getting like Crazy Eddie.

  When they reached the top of the steep mountain, they took a rest and smoked cigarettes. Diego pointed to the statue of Cristo Rey on the other side.

  Luz nodded. “Diego, you’re going to be very disappointed when we don’t find anything up here. If we find anything at all, it will be Carlota’s bones.” She puffed on her cigarette. “But at least it’s beautiful up here, Dieguito—just beautiful! I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never been up here. At least you brought me up here, Diego, but please don’t cry if we don’t find anything. I hate to see you cry.”

  Mundo watched Luz speak, then looked at Diego. He said nothing.

  “Get the shovels,” Diego wrote. He gave the note to Mundo. Mundo called the T-Birds over. Diego walked around the back of the mountain and found a level place along the steep slope. He stood on the place and nodded. Mundo handed him a shovel, and he began digging. Mundo and Indio joined him. El Güero shook his head and looked at Luz. El Guante smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  The dust stuck to the sweat on Diego’s skin as he dug, and after an hour’s work he was covered with dust and sweat. Mundo looked at him and laughed. “Look at yourself, ese.” Diego laughed and kept digging.

  After digging a hole about six feet deep, Mundo stopped. “Time for a break,” he said. He climbed out of the hole and took a deep breath. Luz handed him a cup of water, and they both looked down at Diego who continued working. “Come and take a break—have a cigarette and some water. The sun’s too goddamned hot. C’mon, take five.” Diego wasn’t watching him, just kept digging. Mundo tossed a light pebble at him, hitting him on the back of the head. Diego looked up. “Take five,” he said. Diego climbed out and took a cigarette and some water from Luz.

  “Look, Dieguito,” she said, “enough, ya basta. You’re tired. Two pilgrimages in a row is too much for anybody. There’s nothing here, Diego, just a lot of brown sand.”

  He took a pad out of his back pocket and wiped off the dirt. “The statue didn’t lie to me,” he wrote.

  “It was a dream, Dieguito. Dreams don’t always mean what we think they mean.”

  “Dona Luz is right, Diego. We dug six feet and there ain’t no jewels. That Carlota took them with her, got it? She didn’t leave nothing for us.”

  Diego looked away from him.

  Luz grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him to turn around. “It’s only a story, mi Diego, just a small lie our grandmothers made up, that’s all.”

  Diego pointed toward the statue and jumped back into the hole. He kept digging like a wild man. “Please,” he prayed, “please.” The tears and the sweat stung his eyes until he couldn’t see.

  He dug until he was drenched in sweat and dust. He stuck in the shovel with the whole force of his body, again and again, feeling his muscles ache. “Please,” he prayed, “please,” The shovel went in and out of the ground, in and out until, with one last forceful jab into the earth, Diego felt the shovel hit something hard, something more solid than sand. He dropped the shovel and began jumping up and down. He waved his hands in the air. Luz and Mundo and the T-Birds watched him as he looked up at them and pointed toward the end of the shovel.

  Mundo jumped in and began digging with him until they slowly uncovered what appeared to be an old coffin. Diego said nothing, though his disappointment was obvious to Luz and to Mundo. “All this for a coffin,” Diego wrote.

  “There might be something in there,” Luz said.

  “Bones,” Diego wrote, “some rotting bones.”

  “I say we open it,” Mundo wrote.

  “It’s bad luck to disturb the dead,” Diego wrote.

  “We’ll say a prayer,” Luz said. “What have we got to lose?”

  Mundo motioned his friends over. “Help me pull her up.”

  “We’ll pull it out,” El Guante said. “We can get it.” The T-Birds helped Mundo and Diego out of the hole and lifted the box out into the open air.

  No one said a word as the coffin was lifted out of its place. Luz made the sign of the cross. Indio, El Guante, El Güero, and the others stood around the coffin and stared at it. Mundo poked at it. He looked at Diego and Luz—then looked at the coffin. “You open it, Diego, you should finish what you started.”

  Diego’s hands trembled—and for a moment he was unable to move. He placed his hands on the coffin and slowly opened the lid. He shut his eyes, waited, took a deep breath, and then opened it. He stared at the skeleton. So that’s it, he thought, this is the treasure, a skeleton. He walked away from it. No one said a word. Diego looked across at the statue of Cristo Rey and threw his arms in the air. He wanted to curse the statue, to drag it down with his bare hands and break it until it became as fine as desert sand.

  Mundo caught him by the arm. “It’s OK,” he said, “no big deal. Doesn’t matter, ese. We found something, huh?”

  Diego did not bother to look at his lips. He did not want to be consoled. Diego laughed, just laughed and laughed, tears running down his face. Luz and Mundo listened to the echo of his laughter as it swept across the valley.

  12

  MARIA ELENA SAT at her desk carefully studying the words she had written on a yellow legal pad:

  Juan Diego Ramirez, Your sister has come back to look for you. She misses you. Please come to her at 9000 West Yandell (Sunset Heights).

  She crossed out “She misses you.” It was much too public a sentiment to parade in a newspaper ad. As if anyone cared, she thought. She wondered if Diego still read newspapers. He had always been reading something, had always been lost in his books—like Eddie. In high school, Diego was the only one in the house that read the daily news, the only one in the household to understand there was a world bigger than their family.

  Maria Elena stared at her note again. It contained all the necessary information. It was enough. She thought of the poem she had dreamed. She hadn’t told Eddie about it. He would gloat. “You wrote a poem!” he would yell triumphantly. He would wear an I-told-you-so look on his face as if her conversion had been inevitable. But she had only written down what she dreamed, had only copied it—and she was only interested in the sentiment it carried. Eddie would be interested in the poem, the form, the words; she and Lizzie were interested in the dream, the voice that had whispered the poem to her. She would keep the poem a secret. She turned around and stared at him as he sat on the bed, his nose in a book. He looked up at her and smiled, then looked back into his book. She stared out the window at the garden they had started. The rows were neat but they had started too late—it would be a poor harvest. It would take a few years before the ground was fertile again. The twilight was calm, still, hot, Maria Elena brushed the sweat from her face. She wished for a breeze.

  “What are you writing?”

  “An ad for the newspaper.”

  “What are you selling?”

  “I’m not selling anything, corazón.”

  “Oh, then you’re looking for a new husband.”

  She turned around, and faced him. “The old one’s running just fine.”

  “He sounds like a car.”

  “He snores like one.”

  “Sometimes, so does the wife.”

  “Maybe you should trade her in.”

  “I don’t want to trade her in. She’s running just fine.”

  “Too
fine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He had a curious look on his face.

  “My body—it works too well.”

  “How can a body work too well?”

  “I’m pregnant.” She hadn’t intended to tell him—not then anyway.

  “What?” He threw the book in the air and let it fall on the floor. “Come here,” he said.

  She rose from the desk—the ad she had written still in her hand—and threw herself on the bed.

  He kissed her.

  “Eddie, do you love me?”

  “You still have to ask?”

  “You hate my prayers.”

  “Hate is a strong word.” He held her tighter.

  “You think prayers are silly—innocuous, at best.”

  “You think the same of literature.”

  “I never said that.”

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  She pulled away from his embrace and looked into his face. “So what are you going to do?”

  “You’re going to keep praying and I’m going to keep reading—and about every six months we’ll give each other looks, yell at each other, you know, it’ll go that way.”