Becca rubbed her eyes and said, 'I thought she quit?'
'It's a special.'
On the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, Becca's dad stood on the stage surrounded by the thirteen Mexican children. Darcy and Becca had gone to the Mansion the past Sunday to meet the kids. The audience gave the governor a standing ovation.
'He didn't spray his hair.'
'Josefina looks pretty in that yellow dress.'
On the television, her dad introduced the children, first the boys and then he turned to Josefina, who was almost hiding behind him.
'And this beautiful young lady is Josefina.'
The camera captured her face as she slowly raised her brown eyes to him.
'?Yo… Josefina… soy hermosa? '
'Yes, you are beautiful.'
Tears rolled down Josefina's cheeks. She hugged Becca's father.
'Bode Bonner… el hombre… es mi heroe,' she said on national TV.
Lindsay did not know where Marisol Rivera lived, so she and Pancho walked the colonia asking everyone she saw if they knew her. Up and down the dirt roads with the black satchel over her shoulder she trudged, stopping from time to time to tend to minor injuries and apply antibiotic to children's sores. The wind brought the smell of the river into her nostrils and the dirt of the desert into her mouth and inside her clothes. She spit dirt then retrieved her water bottle from the satchel and rinsed her mouth. But her thoughts were on this child so desperate to have a life torn from within her so that she might live beyond the wall. The sadness of the thought crushed her spirit that day.
It was just after five when Pancho barked.
Down a little dirt side path near the river she saw residents gathered around a small shack. A sense of fear enveloped her. She ran to the shack with Pancho at her side. The people parted for the Anglo nurse, and she ducked her head and entered the shack. She gasped at the sight of so much blood. She thought she might faint, so she went to her knees. A wire clothes hanger seemed to float in the blood. The girl lay in gray dirt made red by the blood.
Marisol Rivera would never live beyond the wall.
'I'm against abortion.'
'No, you're not.'
'I'm for abortion?'
'No, you're not for abortion either.'
'Then what am I?'
'A politician who wants to be president.'
They had flown into Chicago that morning and arrived at O'Hare to a hero's welcome. Jim Bob had tweeted ahead. They checked into the Ritz and then went to the studio. After taping the show, Mandy took the kids back to the hotel for a room-service dinner and a pay-per-view movie; Bode, Jim Bob, and Ranger Hank took a cab to Morton's for a thick steak. They now sat in a booth drinking bourbon; Hank drank a soda. He stood when a middle- aged couple came up to their table and held out a menu for Bode to autograph.
'Easy, Hank. We're fourteen hundred miles from the border.'
Bode signed the menu. The couple then leaned in and took a self-photo with their cell phone, as had strangers at the studio, on the sidewalks, and in the entrance of the restaurant. After they left, Bode turned back to Jim Bob.
'Abortion is a wedge issue the Democrats use to split Republicans and women.'
'It ain't the only issue splitting men and women.'
Two attractive young women wielding iPhones now stopped at their table.
'Governor, will you take a photo with us? We're followers.'
'Two pretty gals like you? You bet.'
He stood between them and wrapped his arms around them. They squeezed in tight and smelled intoxicating. He liked Chicago. They held out their phones and took a few photos then thanked him. Bode returned to his seat but he and Jim Bob watched the girls sashay off.
'Nice followers,' Jim Bob said. But his thoughts soon returned to politics. 'So your position on abortion is: You hate to see a life ended. You don't think the Supreme Court should make up the law to suit their politics. The people should. Democracy should. But we have more pressing national matters to deal with right now, like the economy and deporting those damn illegal Mexicans.'
'You sure that'll work?'
'This is what I do.'
Bode downed his bourbon.
'She reminded me of my mother,' he said.
'Which one?'
'Not the girls… Oprah.'
'You're mother was white and Irish.'
'She has a sweet face.'
Like his mother before the cancer. Once she died, his dad's days were numbered. The official cause of death was prostate cancer, but the real cause was loneliness. He couldn't go on without her. Then it was just Ramon and Chelo to raise Bode Bonner the boy. But now Bode Bonner the man wondered: If his wife did not come back, would he die of loneliness, too?
SIXTEEN
Boca Chica lay two hundred miles southeast of Laredo.
They left in the pickup truck just as the sun rose over the Rio Grande and drove south on U.S. Highway 83, the river road. The river ran south from Laredo for almost a hundred miles, then veered east on its zig-zag journey to the Gulf of Mexico; the highway followed the river. Their journey would take them to Colonia Nueva Vida.
'You didn't kill that girl,' she said.
Marisol Rivera had died at five and been buried by sunset in the small colonia cemetery. There was no police investigation, no autopsy, no news report, no obituary in the local newspaper. There were only tears.
'Or your mother.'
Jesse did not speak for several long miles. She worried that she had overstepped with him, mentioning his mother. But he finally spoke.
'My father did not want me, and my mother died having me. Dying is a way of life on the border, I know that. But I cannot understand why God made it so.'
'He didn't.'
He stared at the road ahead for a time before he again spoke.
'You are right. I forget. There is no god on the border.'
They rode in silence for many miles.
Jesse Rincon had made this journey many times during the last five years, only Pancho to provide company if not conversation. Driving the river road through the brown borderlands, he often contemplated his life and the choices he had made, and always he would revisit his choice to return to the colonias. His medical school classmates would be well into their private practices by now, well into families and financial success. What would his life be like now if he had made the same choice? Wife and children… a nice house in the suburbs of Houston or Dallas or perhaps Austin… vacations to the ocean or mountains twice each year… teaching soccer to his son or daughter… his sons and daughters, for he had wanted a big family, perhaps because he had only his uncle growing up. All those dreams he had envisioned as a child in Nuevo Laredo and as a student at Jesuit and Harvard, and he knew that was to be his life.
But then he came home when his uncle died.
