Come On In

in Phoenix and El Paso. Then San Antonio and New Orleans. He was a young man. His parents were still alive, and he still believed in the American Dream. He didn’t fear deportation as much as he does now. But then again he was young and doing all the things young straight men were supposed to do. Working long hours for women and fun times. He had picked up English easily and quickly learned to use it to his advantage, especially with White women who found him “exotic.” Women who asked him to talk to them in Spanish in bed. He figured it was quid pro quo, because they were both fulfilling a need. Though his need was more natural than their racist fantasy.

Reynaldo (this was before anyone called him tío) drank and slept and smoked and danced his way through the American Southwest that summer in 1985. He and his primo, Chico. Chico, who missed the rancho too much to stay in el norte but left him a little black-and-white TV and most of his cologne collection. This was Reynaldo’s favorite summer. No parents. Single. No major responsibilities. Just a 1964 cherry-red Plymouth Valiant taking him and Chico from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Perhaps this is where Marlene gets her incessant desire to roam. To be a pata de perro. She has always been this way. And he has always been this way—itching to wander, and aching when forced to stay put.

When she was little, and when Tío Reynaldo would come down to visit, he would take her on long drives through back roads throughout Southern California. She got to know the Inland Empire, her home, this way. Tío Reynaldo would take her on the winding roads through Reche Canyon to look for wild donkeys.

He had brought up the wild donkeys in conversation and Marlene didn’t believe him.

There are no wild donkeys in Southern California, tío, she said to him.

Why would I lie about that? Tío Reynaldo rolled his eyes.

I don’t know why. You just lie sometimes. It runs in our family.

Ay Marlene. Come on. I’ll prove it.

So they jumped in his old red-and-white Ford truck and went in search of wild donkeys.

The sun was setting and the hills on both sides of the road that twisted itself from Colton to Moreno Valley began the shift from dry desert landscape to being awash in the gold disappearing from the rays of sun that made the dangerously dry shrubs and brush seem magical before darkness completely overtook everything.

Marlene almost missed the little donkey standing by a fence post. Tío Reynaldo pointed it out with a whistle.

Ay, mira. There’s one.

Sure enough, Marlene looked up and sees the little brown donkey. When she looked a little to the right, she spotted about ten more donkeys, just chilling. That evening she and Tío Reynaldo spent a few hours driving through Reche Canyon and San Timoteo Canyon Road. This was a favorite pastime of theirs; wandering to just wander. No aim, no specific X.

They were quite the pair. Tío Reynaldo in his fifties, brown hair thinning, thick-rimmed glasses, stylish clothes that didn’t reveal that he spent most of his days changing oil or cooking kale and sweet potato mash or whatever the ever-changing and ever-hungrier American palate asked for. Then there was Marlene in her teens. T-shirt and jeans, flannel and jeans, blouse and jeans. It would be a sweet story to say that they enjoyed each other’s company from the first time they met, but that would be a lie. While she didn’t dislike Reynaldo, Marlene was indifferent during his visits.

She found him mostly tolerable and a little annoying because he was one of those adults who always made cheesy jokes and tried to be pals with the kids. It wasn’t until Marlene saw Tío Reynaldo playing the accordion and singing Ramon Ayala that he became more than an annoying uncle.

During a cold autumn night that smelled of birria and leña, years ago when she was a child, at a birthday party for a cousin visiting from Mexico, Tío Reynaldo transformed from tolerable and annoying, to someone fascinating and worth knowing. Marlene had already been sent to bed but someone’s aunt’s sister had brought out a guitar and was belting out Chavela Vargas with such sentimiento that Marlene knew, having never even been in love yet, what heartache felt like. What that particular sadness was. By the end of the song women were openly crying, and men were drying their eyes. Marlene sat in awe of what music could do to a person.

But when Tío Reynaldo picked up the accordion and started playing what could almost be called “the other” Mexican national anthem, “Tragos de amargo licor,” that was it. She learned that there was something more sincere in that man than she had believed.

Marlene thought of that moment whenever she hung around Tío Reynaldo and any time she’d go see him perform in bars or lounges she probably shouldn’t have been at. She thought about that moment now as the familiar tune poured from the radio and she turned the volume up without thinking. The song was midway through and Ramon was singing about how much like a coward he felt for drinking his feelings away. Tío Reynaldo and Marlene joined voices as San Timoteo Canyon got darker and the high beams were turned on.

But they stopped singing as they came up to some of the citrus groves that still dot Redlands. What the high beams highlighted was almost unbelievable to Marlene—a herd of donkeys amongst orange or lemon trees, though it was hard to tell which was which in the dark. There they were, cute and dumb looking, caught infragante and mid-chomp, oranges in their mouths, their eyes full of surprise as the high beams shined on them.

This is why Marlene loves Tío Reynaldo: because he’s always shining a light on dark places, always teaching her that the unknown isn’t always frightening. That the unknown is simply that, unknown, and