Amigoland

27

When they had passed the last of the grocery stores and car dealerships and tire-repair shops and fried-chicken restaurants and Pemex stations, the road narrowed from a bustling four-lane, with lush plants and shrubs growing along the median, to a narrow two-lane, with only a pair of white stripes that served as the shoulders. The ranch-style houses, mixed in with cinder-block houses, were set several feet from the road, leaving a dirt path on either side for those traveling by foot or hoof.
Near the edge of town, the driver stopped for a young man wearing a muscle shirt and baggy shorts, and on his shoulder carrying a wicker basket. His bellows of “?Tortas! ?Tortas!” roused Don Fidencio from his nap. He looked up in time to see the vendor had passed him and stopped to sell his food to one of the other passengers.
“Give me some money, before he comes back,” the old man said, leaning forward.
“Why do you want to waste money?” Don Celestino handed him one of the plastic bags the attendant had given them. “We have your lunch right here, already paid for with the ticket.”
He opened the bag and found two triangle halves of a sandwich and a small bag of Japanese peanuts. “Is this what you’re going to feed me for the whole trip? A ham-and-cheese sandwich?”
“It’s the same as the tortas.”
“At least those are hot.”
“That was all they put in the bags, Fidencio.”
When his brother didn’t take it back, he tossed the plastic bag onto the seat next to him. The bus driver stopped to drop off the torta vendor and then reached over to insert another videocassette. The old man was about to fall back to sleep when the bus filled with Hindu music from the feature film, translated into Spanish as The Evil Within Both of Us. A large group of men and women were singing and dancing across an outdoor platform. It seemed to be some sort of family gathering, with children and adults seated at tables around the edges of the stage. When the music reached its climax, the gathering was suddenly disrupted by the arrival of several armed and hooded men. The fathers stood up to defend their families and were gunned down at once, leaving only the women to guard their children. Bodies flew through the air in slow motion, women and children crawled under tables, but the performers continued their singing and dancing. After a few minutes, the old man had trouble following what was happening on the screen. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t keep up with the dubbed-over story line, and finally he turned toward the window. Standing in the center of a small plot of land half cleared of the surrounding brush, a shirtless man holding a machete at his side had paused from working. He stared at the bus as if he could make out the old man looking at him through the tinted window. Farther along, the few plots of land made room for the mesquite and huisache and granejo and paloverde, and eventually the vast sea of scrubland broken up only occasionally by a white cross and an arrangement of plastic flowers that marked the last site of an unlucky traveler on this road.
Don Fidencio had his eyes closed for only a few minutes before he felt someone tapping his shoulder.
The old man blinked his eyes open. “Why are you bothering me?”
“We’re almost at the checkpoint,” Don Celestino said. “I need your driver’s license or something with your photo and name so I can get our papers to travel.”
“I left all that in my wallet.”
“And now tell me how you thought you could go on a trip without your wallet.”
“It stayed back there inside my shoe boxes,” he said. “The ones you didn’t let me bring.”
The bus vibrated unsteadily as it rolled across the grated lines on the road and came to a smooth stop under the open-sided checkpoint. The highway continued south and north from this point, but with no other sign of life as far as they could see in either direction. An officer dressed in green pants and khaki shirt approached the bus with a clipboard in hand. Don Celestino reached the front of the bus just as the driver was opening the door to shake hands with the official.
“Excuse me,” Don Celestino said, “but the immigration office was closed at the bus station and they told me that I could get our visas here.”
“Over there.” The official pointed to a single metal office that stood directly across the other lane used for smaller vehicles. “Go knock, see if today you find him in a good mood.”
“And hurry,” the driver added, “or you’ll have to take the next bus.”
The men were still laughing as he waited for a large white truck with Texas plates to pass so he could make it across the lane. He found the office door open and an older woman in a long gingham apron mopping the tiled floor. “Is this where I can get a visa?”
“I only clean the office for the one who sits at the desk,” the woman replied.
A short pile of blank visa forms lay on the surface of the otherwise bare desk.
“You know when he’s supposed to be back?”
“He comes back whenever he feels like it, any more you have to ask him. I just clean the floor.”
He stepped to one side of the entrance to let her pour the water onto a patch of weeds, then carry away the bucket and mop. Back at the bus, the driver was already on the first step, leaning down to shake hands one last time with the official.
“You got everything you needed?” the official asked.
Don Celestino nodded and held up the two forms, folded in half, before he tucked them into the top pocket of his guayabera.
A few minutes later, as the bus was pulling back onto the road, Socorro asked him the same question but got a different response.
“And later if somebody asks, what are we going to do?” she said. “You never stop to think about how things might turn out. You think I can help you if the two of you get in trouble?”
“I was asleep,” Don Fidencio said, now sitting back up and leaning forward to hear a little better. “And anyway, if I was born on this side, for what do I need papers?”
“You still need them to be in either country.”
“So I’m not supposed to be here, but now I can’t get back over there? Is that what you want to tell me? Not here and not there?”
His brother looked at him and then at Socorro. “Just give me time and I’ll figure something out,” he said, and leaned back in his seat.
“Sure,” Don Fidencio said, “sure you will.”
_______
The bus barreled through an open stretch of highway, slowing down only when the red light above the driver buzzed, indicating that he had again exceeded the one-hundred-kilometers-per-hour speed limit. The buzzer, which was actually more of a high-pitched squeal, was interfering with the passengers’ movie, as well as the cassette tape he was playing up front for his own pleasure. The combination of the Norte?o music, the squealing buzzer, and the Hindu music from the movie forced him to ease his foot off the accelerator. The only other time he reduced his speed was when he found himself stuck behind a car or trailer with a driver who didn’t extend him the courtesy of moving off to the shoulder. On the tighter curves, he slowed down to a sluggish eighty kilometers per hour.
After feeling what seemed to be each and every pebble the bus had rolled over, the old man opened his eyes. Three more crosses marked the curve up ahead. A woman was pulling the weeds growing around the last of these shrines, each of them no bigger than a doghouse. Off in the distance he made out a teetering windmill still spinning, though only one of its blades remained in place. Halfway up a small hill, he thought he spotted a thicket of palo amarillo, the kind his grandfather used to search for when he wasn’t feeling well and needed to brew another batch of the stems. Together they would venture out into the monte without any clear direction, but turning this way and that way, down along a creek or up some gravelly hillside, as his grandfather picked up a trace of the vanilla-scented flowers. A moment later Don Fidencio grabbed the seat in front of him to pull himself up.
“I need to make water,” he announced to anyone interested in knowing.
“You went at the bus station,” Don Celestino said back over his shoulder.
“This time I can make it there without your help.”
“Yes, yes, without my help — and then if you have an accident and fall?”
“So then what, you want me to stay here and do it in the plastic bag?”
Socorro kept her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, while the two brothers continued arguing between the seats: something about a pecan, then a guava; something about shoe boxes; something about sacrifices; something about knowing better. Two days ago she’d wanted to come along on the trip, if only to spend more time with Don Celestino. She knew it was silly, but she imagined the trip would somehow make things between them more real. If they were away from home for a while, people would see them together out in public, like a normal couple, and it would continue when they got back. She had been trying to think of the best way of telling her mother, but then Don Celestino said they weren’t going after all. She was disappointed at first, though later that night she realized the trip would have been difficult for Don Fidencio. The man needed more care than they had considered before agreeing to take him. Those times they’d gone out to eat, he had refused to wear anything on his collar to protect his clothes. Afterward she’d tried to help him wipe off some of the stains, but they almost always had to return him to the nursing home with various wet splotches across his shirt and pants. Of course, the old man cared little about how he looked; she was the one who worried what people would think, especially the nurses and aides. And none of this was taking into account how he seemed to be losing a little more strength every day. It was difficult helping him get in and out of the car as it was. And now a bus? She had seen how the nurse’s aides struggled to get these poor old people in and out of their wheelchairs, their beds, their restrooms. What if one day he couldn’t go to the toilet on his own or bathe himself? What if they bought him the cane he insisted on using but then saw that he needed the walker? Though she had gone to bed feeling sorry for him, by the morning she had woken up thankful that his daughter had put an end to the whole thing. She didn’t know what to think when she first saw the two men sitting in the taxi at the bridge. What was going through his head, believing he could steal his ninety-one-year-old brother and run away to Mexico? This wasn’t going to make the man’s life any better. If anything, from now on they probably wouldn’t allow him to leave the nursing home even for a short while to eat lunch somewhere. And then one final thought had crossed her mind: What if the old man gets sick on the trip?
Maybe it was her fault for encouraging them to take the trip. Maybe even her fault for insisting that he introduce her to his family. If they hadn’t met, Don Fidencio might not have continued telling his grandfather’s story as much as he did. What did it matter if she met his family anyway? Or he met hers? She had met his brother, and it wasn’t as if anything had changed. Wasn’t it enough that she had found someone? Was she imagining this thing between them was more than what it was? The only thing she knew for certain was that she had more questions than answers, and sometimes only questions.
It sounded as if they’d stopped arguing. Then she felt Don Celestino standing up to follow his brother to the lavatory. She opened her eyes just as the bus climbed a low hill that opened up into a new valley. The blossoming white flowers of the yucca spotted the distant hills, and farther to the west, the huisache splashed orange-and-yellow hues along the horizon. A few cinder-block houses with thatched roofs stood at the end of a winding path extending out from the highway. When the bus reached the bottom of the hill, a young boy was standing by himself near the shoulder. He held a falcon tethered to his forearm, which was padded with the remains of what looked like a quilted blanket. A large wire cage stood next to him as he waited for his next customer to pull over. There was nothing around him except for more and more open range. The gust of wind and dirt from a passing truck caused the bird to flap its sizable wings and the vendor boy to extend his padded arm to avoid being swatted. As the bus zoomed by, the boy was still struggling to pull down on the tether with his other hand. Socorro turned in her seat until she finally lost him in the unforgiving scrubland.