It was a peculiar notion, but then you had to consider Estevan’s background with the teachers’ union. He would think in those terms.
They seemed uncomfortable out of the car so we stayed on the move after that, driving down an endless river of highway. After my VW, driving Mattie’s wide white car felt like steering a boat, not that I had ever actually steered anything of the kind. Estevan and Esperanza didn’t have proper drivers’ licenses, of course-that was the very least of what they didn’t have-so to be on the safe side I did all the driving. The first night we would try to go straight through, pulling over for naps when I needed to. Lou Ann had made us a Thermos of iced coffee. For the second night, I told them, I knew of a nice motor lodge in Oklahoma where we could most likely stay for free.
Estevan and I talked about everything you can think of. He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people’s shirts, just above the heart.
“Not that I know of,” I told him. It occurred to me, though, that it might be kind of appropriate.
He told me that the national symbol of the Indian people in Guatemala was the quetzal, a beautiful green bird with a long, long tail. I told him I had seen military macaws at the zoo, and wondered if the quetzal was anything like those. He said no. If you tried to keep this bird in a cage, it died.
Shortly after sunset we left the interstate to take a two-lane road that cut through the mountains and would take about two hundred miles of New Mexico off our trip. I wished we could keep New Mexico in and cut out two hundred miles of Oklahoma instead, but of course Oklahoma was where we were going. I had to keep reminding myself of that. For some reason I had in the back of my mind that we were headed for Kentucky. I kept picturing Mama’s face when we all pulled up in the driveway.
I squinted and flashed my lights at a car coming toward us with its brights on. They dimmed.
“Do you miss your home a lot?” I asked Estevan. “I know that’s a stupid question. But does it make you tired, being so far away from what you know? That’s how I feel sometimes, that I would just like to crawl in a hole somewhere and rest. Go dormant, like those toad frogs Mattie told us about. And for you it’s just that much worse; you’re not even speaking your own language.”
He let out a long breath. “I don’t even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. In Guatemala City I missed the mountains. My own language is not Spanish, did you know that?”
I told him no, that I didn’t.
“We are Mayan people; we speak twenty-two different Mayan languages. Esperanza and I speak to each other in Spanish because we come from different parts of the highlands.”
“What’s Mayan, exactly?”
“Mayans lived here in the so-called New World before the Europeans discovered it. We’re very old people. In those days we had astronomical observatories, and performed brain surgery.”
I thought of the color pictures in my grade-school history books: Columbus striding up the beach in his leotards and feathered hat, a gang of wild-haired red men in loin cloths scattering in front of him like rabbits. What a joke.
“Our true first names are Indian names,” Estevan said. “You couldn’t even pronounce them. We chose Spanish names when we moved to the city.”
I was amazed. “So Esperanza is bilingual. You’re, what do you call it? Trilingual.”
I knew that Esperanza spoke some English too, but it was hard to say how much since she spoke it so rarely. One time I had admired a little gold medallion she always wore around her neck and she said, with an accent, but plainly enough: “That is St. Christopher, guardian saint of refugees.” I would have been no more surprised if St. Christopher himself had spoken.
Christopher was a sweet-faced saint. He looked a lot like Stephen Foster, who I suppose you could say was the guardian saint of Kentucky. At least he wrote the state song.
“I chose a new name for myself too, when I left home,” I said to Estevan. “We all have that in common.”
“You did? What was it before?”
I made a face. “Marietta.”
He laughed. “It’s not so bad.”
“It’s a town in Georgia where Mama’s and my father’s car broke down once, I guess, when they were on their way to Florida. They never made it. They stayed in a motel and made me instead.”
“What a romantic story.”
“Not really. I was a mistake. Well, not really a mistake, according to Mama, but an accident. A mistake I guess is when you regret it later.”
“And they didn’t?”
“Mama didn’t. That’s all that counts, in my case.”
“So Papa went on to Florida?”
“Or wherever.”
“Esperanza also grew up without her father. The circumstances were different, of course.”
In the back seat Esperanza was stroking Turtle’s hair and singing to her quietly in a high, unearthly voice. I had heard enough Spanish to understand that the way her voice was dipping and gliding through the words was more foreign than that. I remembered Estevan’s yodely songs the day of our first picnic.
