She’s emerging through the static: big-titted Fronterista in chaps and mirrored sunglasses. You’ve got mother’s milk on your breath, chica. You’ve got a juicy pera, death’s-head thighs, semiautomatic eyes. You’re a shock to our guts, our inflamed rectum. We do a Mixtec boogaloo, an Otomi polka, a Yanqui tango. Now we’re setting the Nova bouncing like a madrefucking lowrider.
At our last stop to pee before the border, we find an empty peanut shell and a naked girl in a maguey plant. A shotgun shell and a naked girl. Sea shells. Some spent shells. Coyote has to hold Conejo back, bind his filthy mouth shut with his belt.
She looks crazy as a Huichol, the moon in her eye, the sun in her head. We shudder in the heat.
She says: “Gemelos,” and nods. As if it has never been said before. As if she is naming us. There is a busted-up Nahua keyboard in the dust, a blown-out VGA monitor, a snake or two. We walk around the saguaros, listening to the snap of Wal-Mart bags like little flags flying from the fingertips of the chollas. There is a bullet- riddled phone book. An empty zapato. There is the tall fence. And the Franciscan shelter where they hold the kids who don’t make it over. They reach out through the barred, oval windows, grasping for birds and bugs, and the hooded monks pluck them out with giant tongs. Then they send them back around again to the rear, limping misshapen forms.
“Where are the others?” we ask.
Coyote touches our ears. “What others, periquitos? There’s always only been you. You two. The two of you.” He looks around. He smiles. “They paid for two.”
We suckle the girl’s dark, fat nipples, her milk picante, ashy, thick as the sludge of Tia’s latrine. We bite. We tug. We tear. We have to try so hard, the girl’s coaxing fingers in our hair. She digs in her nails until our scalps bleed. Coyote gets it all on video. She sighs as we sniff her almeja. We crawl up into the uterus and have never slept so well. We sprout feathers and short hair. There is something else curled up in one corner.
The stars are out when we return covered in blood. We have the taste of flesh in our mouths. We just want to dance beside the flaming maguey, let our arms and legs rotate free like the severed, spouting limbs of holy martyrs. We stomp the earth. One bare foot touches a rock. All our blood and sugar runs from our ears, mouths, eyes, assholes. The shit, chocolate, tears, and salt. Watch your fingers! We bite! It’s been a long day. Pretty soon, we’re over it. It passes.
It’s dark.
Coyote licks us clean and puts us to bed while Conejo and a devil play cards for all the diablitos in Hell. As he wins, Conejo eats the diablitos, crushes their strong little bones between his rotten molars, throws the shells on the ground. But the devil keeps gambling. He plays two deer, a frog, and death. Conejo plays a rooster. Coyote packs beeswax in our ears and covers our aching eyes with dried pasillas.
“It works,” we hear the devil say. “I’ve tried it. My wife, too.”
We’ve been in line for hours and hours, the Nova crawling through the last chance tianguis. Conejo is buying gifts in American dollars: blankets and T-shirts, stinking herbal remedies, shot glasses, ashtrays, and Aztec sun stones carved from Tehuacan coprolites. We huddle, maize seeds in a matchbox. We pray they don’t search us, or ask if Coyote’s our daddy, or what school we go to. We are suffocating and sick, double-wrapped in plastic bubble wrap. Coyote is practicing calm responses, but that chingada Conejo can’t stop giggling.
“We were visiting,” Coyote will say.
“Our tiny little mothers,” Conejo will say. “Pobrecitas!”
“Please step out of the car,” the armed agent will say.
It’s the Padres ahead one nothing in the bottom of the fifth.
We take a chance for a glance. Through the line of cars we can see to the other side. We see the yellow welcome sign beside America’s freeway: Our Papa stumbling drunk on his way home, our Mama running from La Migra dragging our American-born sister Conejita behind by one hand, her feet just leaving the ground.
It’s all true, querida! All true!
She is flying! They can fly! Ninos fly in Gringolandia!
And now we are too too too, out of the Nova, over Coyote and Conejo spread-eagled on hot concrete, we are flying as if through a windshield, through glass, through steel, through the smoke and haze, the choke and maize, the toke and craze, the Coke and phrasebook, we’re flying. It’s the way the chicken flies to the pot. Which came first: the fire or the flame? We are flying: feathered and boned to you, querida Mama, naked and new, Papa, sin entrails y contrails, la raza limpia, raza pirata. Oscuro? How do you say? Deportesation? No. It’s the way ESPN flies to Fox. Satellite eyes. You’re beautiful. Something small on a wind crossing over. But before we forget.
Adipose. Otiose. Adidas. A radio. Game over.
“Coyote Takes Us Home” began with the image of a beat-up 197 °Chevy Nova packed with contraband children heading north toward the U.S.-Mexico border. I had heard, or thought I had, about U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stopping a car with immigrant kids hidden in the side panels. I can’t find that story now, but there are plenty of others like it: Andres’s parents leave him behind with relatives when they head north to find work in America. Lupe’s parents will send for her sometime later, when they can afford it. Gabriel and his twin brother stow away on a train, or a relative hands Carlos off to a professional smuggler, a Coyote. Their parents are waiting in Phoenix. Maybe they’re forced to pay an additional two thousand dollars to get Carla to Pennsylvania from Arizona. Maybe the operation gets busted in Las Vegas and Julia is deported to a shelter back in Mexico. They’ve got to start over. These kids are from Honduras. Those are from El Salvador. Jorge shows up. Or maybe he disappears somewhere between San Diego and Chicago. “The history of Mexico,” Octavio Paz writes, “is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins.”
That search gets a bit more complicated once you move next door. “Coyote” explores the confusion of personal and cultural history inherent to sub rosa immigration. What do these kids carry with them on the ride? What should matter to them if they’re leaving anyway? What is the true name of the place where they’re going? The story is obsessed with trash. Much of this detritus comes from folktales told to Howard True Wheeler and published in 1943 by The American Folklore Society as Tales from Jalisco, Mexico. I like the collection’s subtle correspondences to Mexican history. Some tales featuring coyotes and rabbits seem to have pre-Colombian roots, while the variants on stories familiar from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm may have drifted over in the long wake of Cortes. A third group of stories, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, reveals mixed parentage. Their dark sense of humor and travesties of religious authority seem familiar to me, the most Mexican. The laughing peasants have my father’s sense of humor, and his mother’s. She came to America from Tequila, Jalisco, in 1924. He was born in Texas. I grew up in Sacramento, California. So, for me, “Coyote” is also a sort of ticket home.
KIM ADDONIZIO. Ever After
THE LOFT WHERE THE DWARVES LIVED HAD A VIEW OF THE CITY AND hardwood floors and skylights, but it was overpriced, and too small now that there were seven of them. It was a fifth-floor walkup, one soaring, track- lighted room. At the far end was the platform where Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Bashful slept side by side on futons. Beneath them, Happy and Dopey shared a double bed. Grumpy, who pretty much stayed to himself, kept his nylon sleeping bag in a corner during the day and unrolled it at night on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The kitchen was two facing zinc counters, a built-in range and microwave, and a steel refrigerator, all hidden behind a long bamboo partition that Doc had bought and Sneezy had painted a color called Cherry Jubilee. The kitchen and bathroom were the only places any sort of privacy was possible. To make the rent they all pooled their money from their jobs at the restaurant, except for Dopey, who didn’t have a job unless you counted selling drugs when he wasn’t running them up his arm; and Grumpy, who panhandled every day for spare change and never came up with more than a few wrinkled dollar bills when the first of the month rolled around. Sometimes the rest of them talked about kicking out Dopey and Grumpy, but no one quite had the heart. Besides, the Book said there were seven when she arrived, seven disciples of the goddess who would come with the sacred apple and transform them. How,
