Amigoland

34

Two men, both short and dark, stood alongside the lonely highway. They wore straw cowboy hats, the bands soiled a dark hue as evidence of their labor. Earlier it had drizzled, and their bright long-sleeve shirts, one yellow and the other red, were still dripping from the cuffs. Next to them stood a nylon sack thick with bristling ears of corn. Empty soda bottles of various colors, potato-chip wrappers, and cigarette butts littered the gravel patch where they had come to wait for their ride.
Don Fidencio leaned back against the headrest as the driver edged the bus onto the shoulder. This would be no less than the tenth stop he’d made in the last two hours since leaving the station. They had missed the first-class bus earlier that morning and, in order to not waste any more time, his brother insisted they take the next direct bus, which, as it turned out, was direct but not nonstop.
Behind the two men, the shoulder dipped and then farther on extended toward what appeared to be a grove of some sort. One of the men turned and called to someone behind them. A moment later, as the dust and empty wrappers were still settling back to the ground, two young women emerged from where the earth dropped off. The same man held out his hand to a woman carrying a baby swaddled in a pink blanket; the second woman carried a wet tarp and a pair of plastic shopping bags filled with groceries. The four adults boarded the bus with the sleeping baby and the nylon sack. Once the bus pulled back onto the road, the old man yawned and turned toward the window again. The bus slowed for a curve in the road and then accelerated again on the straightaway. A wet goat stood tethered to a metal stake near the shoulder. Across the dense countryside there was no sign of a house or a farm or so much as a dirt path leading to the metal stake. Just a goat getting sprayed with the rainwater still on the highway.
They crossed a truss bridge with only two lanes and a while later passed a sign that read, BIENVENIDO A NUEVO LEóN. At least they were getting closer; the next sign indicated that it was thirty kilometers to Linares. The clouds from earlier had lifted, and what remained of them was covering the very tops of the mountains to the west. The blossoming huisache roused the countryside with alternating splotches of green and a yellowish-orange. Less frequent were the yuccas’ lush white flowers blossoming high above the rest of the scrubland. Even an old man with poor eyesight could tell the land had changed the farther from the border they ventured. He wondered if his grandfather had ridden past these same thickets when he was taken from his home. This thought sat with him for several kilometers until he tried to recall the last thing he had seen of his own house, but he moved on when he realized that all he could recall was the dank hotel room he had been in the last two nights, which he was trying his best to forget. They hadn’t arrived yet and he was asking himself what the point of it was. All this way to wake up dirty in his own bed? It didn’t matter how far they traveled because this wasn’t going to change his condition. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or the day after, the same thing might happen again, and if not that, then something worse. How far could he be from another stroke or from having to be fed and refed because he couldn’t so much as remember to swallow? And more unbearable things, those that he had heard happening down the hall — he could only imagine what the shouts and gurgles and sobbing were all about. If anything, the worst of it was probably more likely to happen than not happen. And so the shame he felt that early morning in the hotel had since been replaced with the simple and irrefutable truth that this was where his life was headed now; he had escaped one prison only to discover that there was no way of escaping his own failing body.
The old man had fallen asleep by the time the baby started crying. Only with the hum of the tires on the road and the soundtrack to the most recent romantic comedy did he manage to sleep through the wails.
The baby was still sobbing when Socorro caught the infant’s attention by opening her eyes and mouth wider than he had seen anyone do in his short life. He seemed confused now, not sure if he should return to crying or pay more attention to the lady with the curious face.
“Did you hear me?” Don Celestino asked.
She ducked just below the seat back and then peeked over the top, which caused the baby to giggle and hide in his mother’s shoulder before they started the game all over again.
“Socorro?”
“Why don’t we talk about it later?” This time she peeked around the side of the seat and sent the baby into a fit of laughter. “I think we are almost there.”
“Because already it’s been two days since we left.”
“I called her once, she knows where I am. What more do you want?”
The baby’s mother turned to see what was so funny and then stared at Socorro until she sat back in her seat. The mother placed the baby against her other shoulder, which did little to calm him. Finally she rearranged the blanket to cover the child and give him her full breast.
“She’s going to think I wouldn’t let you call.”
“Why are you so worried?”
“You ask me that question when you know the woman doesn’t like me?”
“And you think a phone call is going to change that?”
“Maybe one of these days she’ll change her mind about us being together.”
“Let me worry about my mother, and you worry about your brother.”
Don Celestino turned away, as if he were gazing out the opposite window at something he had spotted on the countryside.
“I don’t know why you want to make it worse,” he said when he turned back.
“And I don’t know why you always have to worry about how things look to everybody else.”
He glanced over his shoulder, as if he might need to go to the lavatory. Then he turned back toward the seats in front of him. At least his brother was snoring loud enough that he had little chance of hearing them.
“Sometimes it seems like you’re afraid,” she said.
“What is there to be afraid of?”
“Nothing.” And now it was Socorro who turned away. They were passing in front of a brick schoolhouse, long and narrow, with a chain-link fence surrounding it. Schoolgirls dressed in gray skirts and white knit shirts gathered in a large circle near one corner of the yard, while the boys, in their darker pants and white shirts, chased a soccer ball at the other end.
“How can you say I’m afraid?”
“Then tell me why it all has to be a secret with us.”
“How much of a secret can it be, if your mother knows and my brother is here with us?”
“And the rest?”
“We’re together,” he said. “Going places, seeing things together, like a couple. What does it matter, the rest of them?”
He was still searching for a way to make her understand when they pulled into the central station. They waited for everyone to exit before he helped his brother to stand up and make it down the aisle and off the bus.
Don Celestino carried their change of clothes and the toiletries in a small backpack they had bought the day before. He would have put his brother’s medicines in there as well, but the old man said he didn’t want to arrive in town with his hands empty, like some trampa. They walked in halting steps as they avoided the direct path of the travelers exiting the terminal and the candy vendors who were waiting for them with wicker baskets balanced atop their heads. As they entered the building, two little boys wearing identical red-checked shirts raced around the rows and under the seats, neither one paying much attention to their mother, who was yelling for them to come sit down. The bus driver, his tie loosened, entered the small, sparsely lit café at the far end of the terminal. Most of the turquoise-colored seats in the sitting area were filled with travelers waiting for their destination to be announced. Three bus lines operated out of Linares, but only two of these counters were open. According to the schedules listed on the wall behind the counters, each of the companies offered service back to Ciudad Victoria at least once every hour. If they were lucky, Don Celestino thought, they might be able to head back north as early as tomorrow afternoon.
Socorro held his hand while he kept a close eye on Don Fidencio ambling forward with his cane. They had barely arrived at the exit before a couple of taxi drivers began jockeying for their business, each offering to carry their bags for them. Outside, a row of six taxis stretched the length of the building. The drivers let their conversations trail off when they noticed the possibility of a new fare. Don Celestino led them toward a small green-and-white taxi with spoked hubcaps. The driver, a young man no more than twenty-five, wore baggy blue jeans and a white T-shirt underneath his Chicago Bulls jersey. He was sitting on the edge of his open trunk, talking to another driver leaning against the hood of his car.
Before they reached the taxi, though, the old man stopped suddenly and looked around. “I say we should go with another one.”
“For what, if they’re all the same?” Don Celestino tugged on Socorro’s hand, but his brother had already pulled away and was walking to the end of the line.
“That’s not how it works here,” the young driver complained. “The first one in line goes before the rest.”
But Don Fidencio had no interest in what he or the other drivers were saying or in stopping to respond. With the rubber tip of his cane he knocked on the door of a faded red taxi. The driver was an older man who had been napping in the front passenger seat. He quickly opened the back door and trunk before he realized his new customers had no real luggage.
When they were all situated, he swung the car around the long row of taxis, ignoring the shouts from the other drivers. “And to where can I take you?”
“You know this town?” Don Fidencio was sitting up front with his cane hooked on the seat; he still hadn’t learned how to fold it up, so it was best to leave the thing as it was.
“You ask if I know this town?” The driver took hold of the steering wheel with both hands, then shook his head and rolled his eyes up toward the material drooping from the ceiling. “I have spent all my years in this one place. Nobody knows Linares better than me. Nobody, nobody — that I can guarantee you.”
Don Fidencio made sure to glance over his shoulder at his brother.
“Those other boys with their new cars don’t know the half of what I have up here.” He pointed to the side of his head. “Now tell me, with what can I be of service?”
“We came to look for a ranchito that’s supposed to be somewhere around Linares,” Don Celestino said.
“Of those we have no shortage,” the driver replied. “Which ranchito is it?”
“Fidencio?” his brother said.
“Eh?”
“The name of the ranchito?”
“Wait so it can come to me,” Don Fidencio said. “I heard it so many times, every time he wanted to tell me the story.”
“Then you should know it.”
“It had a funny sound to it.”
“Yes, but tell him the name.”
“You want me to remember every last detail?” the old man said. “Like if it wasn’t enough that I can still tell you what happened to our grandfather.” He rubbed at the back of his neck for a few seconds, then ran his fingers across the stubble on his chin.
“If all you were going to remember was the story, we should have gone to some other place that was closer.”
“Maybe if he heard or saw the name,” Socorro said.
“Excuse me,” Don Celestino said, “but is there someplace where they have all the names of the ranchitos?”
The driver glanced into the cracked mirror, but he had to adjust it to find the passenger’s face. “At the municipal building, there they would have the records and names of the ranchitos, if that’s what you are looking for.”
“Then to the municipal building.”
On this command the driver turned sharply to the right and drove several blocks before he slapped the steering wheel. “Only that today is Saturday, and Saturday is one of the days when the municipal building is closed. If you had come yesterday, Friday, then they were open all day. Now they don’t open until Monday. Closed Saturday and Sunday, open on Monday. That’s how they do it here.”
“One more day is nothing,” Socorro said.
“You mean two days — today and Sunday.” Don Celestino counted them off on his fingers. “And then another day to travel back.”
“If all of you would be quiet, allow for a man to think,” Don Fidencio said.
The driver pulled over next to an open-sided furniture store that faced the street. A salesgirl came to the front and waited for her first customers of the afternoon. She was standing next to a brand-new bedroom set. Lamps, nightstand, and a queen-size bed with a carved headboard of an eagle in flight. She smiled at the old man in an inviting sort of way. Her lavender skirt accentuated her dark legs as far up as he could see. She’d either forgotten to button her shirt all the way or the poor button at the top had simply busted from all the strain. He finally had to force himself to shut his eyes so he could concentrate. Then he tapped his hand on his knee just to make sure he didn’t doze off while trying to recall what he had been told. He went over it from beginning to end — the news of a circus arriving in town… the trip into town on the limping mule… the muzzled bear in its cage and the midget man who went around collecting money from everyone… Papá Grande first hanging on from his uncle’s back and later from his father’s back, and seeing more because his father was taller, but also seeing the horses so far away and up on the bluff… then not seeing the horses on the bluff, but having a sense he would see the horses again… and not knowing what to say to his father, especially since the horses were gone and the bear was standing on its hind legs and following the midget in a circle… everyone laughing and laughing, and then screaming because the horses had finally arrived, but not alone… dropping down from his father’s back and hiding under a wagon… but then pulling away in time to see them kill the bear, and scalp the midget and then his uncle, and finally shoot his father down below, and him lying in the dirt, bleeding to death… and then the Indians gathering all the children, and his mother fighting to stop the one that had grabbed him, and then her front being covered in blood… and then they were riding away, faster and faster, from the only place he had known — all of what he thought he remembered from his grandfather’s story.
“It was either El Rancho Papote or El Rancho Capote.”
“That first one, Papote, isn’t even a word,” the driver said. “And the second one, if it is a ranchito, I never heard of it.” He looked into the backseat for some indication of what they wanted to do. “What if I drive around some more and see if it comes to him?”
They crossed through the middle of town, along the way passing the municipal offices. An army jeep rumbled off in the opposite direction as one of the three soldiers stood in the back of the vehicle, holding on to the roll bar with one hand and his Uzi with the other. The taxi driver had just passed a Pemex station when he slowed down and pointed to a street that rose as it approached a small bridge. “Over there is where we have the festival every year. If you want, I can show you where.”
“I want to see it,” Socorro said.
Don Celestino was staring out the window and didn’t seem to care one way or another about the festival grounds. His brother had his eyes closed again and was hoping he would fall asleep so the name of the ranchito might come to him in a dream.
The driver turned left and slowed down for the first of many speed bumps that awaited them every few hundred feet. The brick and cinder-block houses were set close to the street, each with its own fence of unpainted pickets or metal bars that had chicken wire near the bottom. The one or two larger houses had stone walls with shards of green and brown glass mortared along the top. Here and there bright-eyed bougainvilleas peered over the shorter fences. The smell of masa wafted through the car as they passed a tortillería every few blocks. In between were tiny family-run stores where men gathered outside to talk about their work or lack of it. The driver honked at a man in a cowboy hat who was riding a green bicycle in the opposite direction. Later he tapped the horn at a young woman wearing those blue-jean pants they liked to wear now.
As they crossed the bridge, down below they could see the thatched roofs of several ramshackle houses that edged toward the slow-moving creek. Chickens walked about freely and a hog remained tied to a utility pole. The houses became scarcer as the paved road turned to caliche and later to hardened dirt. They knocked about as the taxi heaved itself in and out of potholes or jerked to one side to avoid a large stone and, in the process, hit a larger one. Finally they came to a clearing where a dozen empty concession stands, painted in bright reds and pinks and yellows, extended across a small valley like a ghost town only recently abandoned. At the far end of the lot stood a small Ferris wheel, one of its top seats rocking back and forth with the light gusts of wind.
“What you see here is for the harvest, so the crops will be good,” the driver explained. “Every year for as long as I can remember, they have made the festival in the months of July and August.”
They drove over a low-water crossing made of concrete and wide enough for only one vehicle to pass at a time. On either side of the flat crossing, stones that once lined the creek lay now like dead fish washed upon the shore. From there they climbed up the embankment and found a paved road leading toward a church and then a fountain that appeared as if it had been dry for several years.
“That was about when it happened,” Don Fidencio said. “July or August, I remember now.”
“What if I drive out to the country like we were going to the dam?” the driver asked, glancing at his fuel gauge. “Maybe then the name will also come to you.”
For some time they traveled the same highway the bus had traveled earlier. On the road they passed a peanut field budding with hunched-over workers. The rising sun cast these truncated shadows in the direction of the road and the passing cars. A Ford car dealership gleamed brightly in the distance, followed by a larger farm-implement business displaying various tractors and combines. They reached a crossroads where a tall chain-link fence separated the edge of the road from two large factories, each with its own smokestack pumping grayish clouds into the sky.
“And those?” Socorro asked.
“In one, they make cereal for people to eat in the morning,” the driver said, “and in the other one, they have a dairy — the two of them, the cereal and the milk, right next to each other.” He pointed back and forth at them. “We only cared that they brought work.”
“So they hired many people?”
“The ones who hadn’t left already.”
Don Fidencio gazed out at the cinder-block houses and small lots, hoping to see something that might stir his memory. One woman appeared to be washing clothes in a white bucket, but then pulled out a goatskin and wrung the discolored water back into the container. At the next house a shiny new truck with Michigan license plates was parked sideways in the front yard. Two men were setting fence posts and looked up when they heard the approaching car. They waved to the old man in the passenger seat, but it seemed more out of curiosity from seeing a taxi so far from town. He was beginning to think he might not ever remember the name of the ranchito, or maybe his grandfather had never actually mentioned it.
The driver coasted around a wide curve and brought them in the direct path of the sun. He pulled on the visor, but it came unhinged before he could put it back in its original spot. “And can I ask why you are looking for this ranchito?”
“We wanted to see where our grandfather was from,” Don Fidencio said. “When he was only seven, the Indians came and stole him from his family, took him to the north.”
“They used to tell stories like that when I was a young boy.”
“After the Indians crossed the river, they left him there, and from then on he lived with another family over on that side. This was back about eighteen fifty, more or less.”
“Right around the time when it became the other side.”
The driver slowed down when they came upon a man riding in a cart. The wide brim of his straw hat cast a shadow across the hindquarters of the gray mule. When the driver reached the cart, he stopped along its right side, but then had to put the car into reverse when he realized the farmer had no intention of stopping.
“Excuse me,” the driver inquired, craning his head out the window, “but would you know where we could find El Rancho…”
“Capote,” Don Fidencio said.
“El Rancho Capote, sir. These people want to find El Rancho Capote.” He was having trouble guiding the car backward in a straight line and not dropping off into the ditch or, on the other side, hitting the mule.
“El Capote?” the farmer repeated without looking down, as if the words had suddenly crossed his mind. He was an older man, with sunken cheeks and a dark mustache that angled out from the corners of his mouth. When he shifted his weight in the cart, his tan pants rode up his leg a bit and revealed ankle-high boots, only recently shined by the looks of them. A young boy sat next to him, dressed almost identically.
“Yes, El Capote.”
“Never heard of that one.” He shook his head and then so did the little boy.
“Then what about El Rancho Papote?” the driver asked, jerking the wheel to the right when the car hit a pothole.
“Even less.” The mule swished its tail as if to agree with the farmer and the little boy. “Tell them they should look for something easier to find.”
“These men and the young lady have come from the United States and are looking for the home of their grandfather — the men say that the Indians took their grandfather.”
The farmer allowed his vision to drift away from the dirt road so he could peer into the taxi, the front and then the back, and then the front again.
“You say it was their grandfather who the Indians took?”
“He was a young boy when it happened, only seven,” the driver explained.
But the farmer was leaning over at the time, listening to something the little boy was telling him. When he finished, the farmer sat back up and twitched the reins to make the mule go faster. “Why not take these people to the municipal offices, where they know more and could help them?”
“Yes, I told them,” the driver replied, “but today is also Saturday.”
“What they should have done was come a day earlier.” The farmer was now looking only straight ahead. “Who would think to come on a day when people are supposed to be resting?”
The driver parked in the taxi zone and quickly stepped out of the car to unload the luggage, forgetting they had only a backpack and a plastic shopping bag. With little else to do, he came around and helped the old man out of the front seat and up the three marble steps leading to the front desk. Hotel Los Laureles came with the driver’s highest recommendations. They would be near the center of town and just across the street from the municipal offices, which they would want to visit first thing Monday morning.
“Here I am bringing you these travelers from the United States,” the driver announced with a wink. The clerk had been sleeping in an overstuffed recliner behind the counter and was now using his fingers to comb his hair back into place.
He pushed a clipboard and registration form across the counter. “Your information, please,” the clerk said, pausing halfway through so he could yawn.
The hotel lobby was attached to a women’s shoe store, which shined brightly through the adjoining entrance. A little boy sat on a purple sofa in the lobby, watching cartoons on a wide-screen television. His younger brother rode a Big Wheel around and around the sofa, changing his direction only when his mother yelled at him from the doorway of the shoe store.
This time Don Celestino made sure the two rooms he reserved were on the ground floor, next to each other. He paid the fare and added an extra twenty pesos for the man’s efforts.
“Then I will leave so you can rest,” the driver said once they were checked in. “If you need anything else, you can find me around the corner at the taxi stand. Just ask them for Isidro.”
After resting from their bus ride and misadventure through the countryside, they headed out to a restaurant the taxi driver had recommended. Socorro walked between the two brothers, holding on to each one by the arm and slowing down enough for Don Fidencio. Along the way they crossed in front of the municipal offices and only glanced toward the darkened windows. A security guard leaned back with his foot against one of the columns outside the two-story redbrick building. He was smoking a cigarette and chatting with a young woman who had stopped as she was walking by with her groceries in hand.
A pair of splayed goats roasted over an open fire in the front window of the restaurant. The hostess showed the lady and two gentlemen to a table in the center of the empty dining room. After having seen the open fire, they decided to share a large order of cabrito, which the waiter later brought out on a hibachi that he set up on a metal stand. Other than a light breakfast and what they had snacked on during the bus ride, this would be their first actual meal of the day.
“Please,” the old man answered when Socorro asked if she could serve him. “I don’t know how long it has been since I had cabrito. Sometimes me and Petra would go across to the other side to eat.”
“I remember you used to go on Saturdays,” his brother said.
“It must have been for our anniversaries, when we still celebrated them. We would go to the Matamoros Café because she liked a group that played there. Not that I really liked to dance so much, but you know how it is. That was the last time we went together, when we were still married, before she died on me.”
“How long were you married before she passed away?” Socorro asked.
“First she left, then she died years later, but for me she died the day she took her valises from the front door and left. Like that, I thought of her.”
“It must have been hard, no?”
Don Fidencio continued chewing the meat until he could swallow. “Maybe it was,” he said. “But to tell you the truth, her leaving is one of those things I don’t remember so good anymore. Not that I would want to, but that’s how it is. God doesn’t give me the choice of what I can remember and what to forget. In that way I was lucky, to not remember the things I could never change.”
Socorro waited for him to finish eating.
“And of what you can remember, what would you change?”
“Nothing,” Don Fidencio said, and set down his fork.
“Not one thing?”
“Only that I wouldn’t be here, still alive and giving people trouble.”
“Nobody here thinks that way,” his brother said.
“And later, when we have to go back across and I have nowhere else to go, you still think I won’t be giving people trouble?”
“Maybe when we get back, your daughter will change her mind and take you home,” Socorro said.
The old man turned and looked at his brother.
“You never know,” Don Celestino said, and shrugged.
But he did know, and so did the girl, and, of course, so did Don Fidencio.
It was still early in the evening, not yet dark, and people were just beginning to arrive in the jardin. An informal group of musicians carried their instruments up the steps of the gazebo. The French-horn player still had on a shirt with grease stains just below his name patch. One of the two female violinists held a toddler on her lap as she opened her case with the other hand.
Don Fidencio sat on one of the metal benches that was close enough for him to watch the musicians. Pigeons of all shapes and colors waddled dangerously close to his feet. They were lucky he had his hands full at the moment. His brother had bought him the ice cream earlier, just before he and the girl went for a stroll. The old man was taking great care in how he placed his warm tongue up against the frozen treat for a second and then slowly drew it back into his mouth. He didn’t know what his brother was thinking to bring the ice cream to him in a cone, when he should have asked for it in a paper cup. And not just a cone, but a cone the size of one of his shoes. Most of the ice cream sat inside the cone, but it was the top scoop that teetered about whenever he licked a bit too eagerly, which was the only way he had ever known to eat ice cream.
The cooler weather had brought out the sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, and so on who filled the square and together strolled or sat on the benches. Don Celestino angled his hand up toward his chest and secured her hold on his arm as they walked along with the other couples. In front of them a ranchero clomped along with his woman at his side. She kept her arms crossed over her chest while he rested a firm hand on the shoulder closest to him, as if she might suddenly try to run off. Some of the other couples carried infants in their arms or in strollers. A few paces ahead of them, an elderly couple walked holding hands as the gentleman used a tortoiseshell cane to make his way. His wife was wearing a stylish rebozo wrapped loosely around her neck. When they turned at the corner of the jardin, they stopped and she pointed at something across the street, then leaned over so she could repeat whatever it was she’d said, this time directly into his ear.
“Look,” Socorro said, motioning in the same direction.
A large group of well-dressed people had gathered outside the church. Seven or eight mariachis were forming a half circle in order to serenade the bride and groom.
“Do you want to go see?” she asked, pulling a little closer to him.
“For what,” Don Celestino said, “if they’re all the same?”
“Not all of them. This one looks like it would be fun to watch.” The bride and groom were taking their first dance in the courtyard as their guests clapped in rhythm to the music.
“We don’t even know them.”
“Other people are watching,” she said. A small group, including the security guard from earlier, had gathered along the edges of the courtyard.
“Maybe they like to see weddings,” he said. “Maybe they haven’t seen one with music.”
“And if someone invited you to one, you wouldn’t go?”
“Maybe, it depends.”
“What about for yourself, if you were to get married again someday?”
She had caught him off guard, and he had to think about how to answer her. “If I were to get married, then yes, I guess I would have to go.”
“But not because you wanted to?”
“Then for what other reason?” he said. “It would have to be because I wanted to.”
She looked at him for a moment, then turned her attention to the celebration across the street. The bride and groom were waving good-bye as they stepped into the back-seat of a black sedan adorned with a wreath of flowers across its hood.
“Why don’t we just keep walking?” Don Celestino tugged on her hand, but she stayed where she was.
The sun had dipped below the cathedral tower, leaving most of the jardin in the emerging shadow. Don Fidencio reached over and pitched the bottom half of his cone into a trash can. All he wanted now was to go lie down in his room. If he could remember which direction the hotel was, he would head out by himself. The musicians were ready to start their performance, the last strums of the mariachis growing fainter. Only when the jardin lights flickered on was Don Fidencio able to make out his brother and the girl. They were standing a few feet apart, and she had turned her back to him. And around them drifted all the other couples, arm in arm, hand in hand.