about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infinity of nothing-it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on the chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.
Do you see? No, I’m not sure I do either.
I wasn’t the only one suffering. “It’s like being born under glass,” the woman from Veracruz was saying. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
The Land Rover rattled through a huge sand-filled pothole on the coyote road.
“As long as we don’t break an axle we’ll be ok,” Pedro muttered, and as if in response, the engine grumbled, stuttered, stalled, caught again. Jesus, that’s all we need. Outside of Delicias, Pedro had to start it with a hand crank. He boasted that the old Land Rovers were better than the new ones, but none of us was reassured.
I affected an unconcerned yawn and reached in the bag for my bottle, but when I took it out I saw that it was empty. The tortillas were gone, the tequila was gone, the water was gone.
The kid from Managua nodded at me. He’d been twitching in his seat for twenty minutes. Jumpy little torta. Could be a sign of anything from schoolboy nerves to an ice habit.
“
My type. A dozen years ago.
“I’m out of water,” I said.
The kid nodded, reached into his own grubby backpack, and produced a bottle of tap water.
“Thanks,” I said, reaching for it.
“Five dollars,” the kid said.
I smiled and shook my head.
“Four,” the kid persisted.
“You’re kidding.”
“Three.”
But I was done talking to this Nicaraguan street punk, this half-chingla trash. Clearly he was a mother of the first order. Give him a taste of this and a year from now he’d be coyoteing grandmas in meat lockers, leaving them to fry on a salt pan at the first sign of the INS.
I leaned back against the side of the vehicle and continued staring out the window.
A cerulean sky.
Cloud wisps.
Tardy moon.
I wondered where we were. The brief hint of mountains was over. The desert was becoming white.
“One dollar,” the kid said, tapping me on the leg. I looked at the long-fingered, grubby-nailed paw resting on my knee. I removed it with my left hand and replaced it on the kid’s lap. I stared at him for another sec. High cheekbones, coffin-shaped face, and a kind of faux menace in his sarcastic grin. I could tell that he thought of himself as a heartbreaker. Shit, he probably was back in Managua. Girls under sixteen or widows over fifty would be susceptible but everyone else would see right through him.
He was wearing an oversize black T-shirt and blue Wrangler jeans that had been hemmed by a tailor. His shoes were interesting. White Nike Air Jordans that seemed to have two different soles. He was dressing up, but he was dirt poor-in his brother’s pants and someone else’s used sneakers.
Still, that was no excuse.
“One dollar for a refreshing drink,” he insisted.
I decided to work him a little.
“Where I’m from,
The deaf old woman genuflected.
The Indian kid looked uneasy. “And what do you know about it,
“It’s just a saying, forget it,” I assured him.
His eyes frosted over and he looked at me with disdain, and I knew the hook was in. Too damn easy. Poor kid, I thought, and returned to the view of the flatland. A few scrabble trees, a dried-up creek.
“Ok, fifty cents, you can have it… Hell, you can have it for nothing.”
I yawned.
“Go on, take it,” the kid said finally, resting the bottle on my knee.
No point torturing him anymore. “For your sake,” I said.
He smiled with relief. A big easy grin. A kid’s grin. Life hadn’t ground that out of him. Hadn’t seen too much of the world.
Twenty-one, twenty-two. Half a decade separated us. Half a dec and a lot of experience.
I unscrewed the bottle top, took a drink of the tepid water, and passed it back.
He put his hand over his heart. “Please think nothing of it,” he replied formally.
Somewhere, at least for a while, he’d been raised right with a lot of sisters and aunts. It made me curious.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Francisco.”
“I heard Pedro say you were from Nicaragua.”
“Originally, but I lived in the DF for a few years.”
“The DF?”
“That’s the Distrito Federal, you know, Mexico City, and then after that I moved to Juarez.”
Shit, I’d been planning on saying that I was from Mexico City too. Have to change that idea. “I see,” I said hastily. “So what are your plans in America?”
“I want to make money,” he said flatly. The old man murmured, the little kid grinned. Of course. I was the odd fish here. That’s why everybody went to America.
“Why didn’t you cross in Juarez?”
He leaned forward. “Vientos Huracanados,” he said in a whisper.
I nodded. One of the newer, nastier drug gangs. They don’t kill you. They go to your house and kneecap your children. Then they go to your mother’s house and torch the place with her in it. And then they go to the cemetery and dig up your father’s corpse and behead it. Not to be fucked with.
“What did you do to them?” I asked.
Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it.
“I was a mechanic in Belize, I can speak English,” the Guatemalan kid chimed in. I nodded and put my sunglasses on-see, that’s why you don’t make conversation; now here I was caring about two people.
I pretended to doze.
The two boys started to chat about soccer and the old man next to me began chanting some ancient Gypsy ballad.
After a while I really did sleep.
Hector says the mammalian brain is the most amazing thing in the world. Even when you’re asleep your brain is taking stock of things, measuring the temperature, processing auditory input, sniffing the air.
When I woke I knew immediately that something was wrong.
The bitter taste in my mouth was adrenaline.
The Land Rover had stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s a car in front of us,” Francisco said.
