“Ay, Dios . . .” Nilsa says, staring at me, trying not to cry. “Forgive me, please. Look . . . look at my son.” I look at Nene through tears.
He’s staring back at me with sad, tired eyes.
“I have to keep going,” Nilsa says. “For him. You understand? Perdóname . . . perdóname,” she says, and turns to Alvaro. “Vámonos,” she says. Alvaro takes a deep breath and nods. He closes his eyes and says a prayer before making the sign of the cross on my forehead.
“Que Dios los guarde,” he says.
“Please,” I say as they begin walking away one by one. “Please . . .”
The brothers look at me. “Here,” one of them says, opening his backpack and grabbing a few more protein bars and his bottle of water. “You take this . . . We’ll pray for you.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Perdón, hermano,” he says. His brother says nothing, but looks sorry as they both hurry to catch up with Gancho.
Pulga is sitting in the little structure.
I grab on to him, pull with all my strength, but he won’t budge.
The group gets farther and farther away, smaller and smaller as night falls. And with each step they take, I am filled with more and more fear.
This can’t be happening. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Please, please . . .
One of the brothers looks back, I think. I can hardly see them now. And then suddenly, they disappear and I can’t see any of their silhouettes anymore.
“Please,” I whisper to Pulga, my tears coming faster, my nose running. “We have to make it!” I yell at him. Even as I realize no, we don’t.
No, we won’t.
And this is it.
This is it.
This is how we’re going to die.
Pulga
I hear a desperate kind of crying. Pequeña. Her voice is somewhere far away, and she keeps pleading with me.
But there is so much darkness, I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed.
We have to make it, I hear her say. And suddenly I remember home. I remember my room. I can almost hear the fan. And I can see Chico, how he looked when we first met.
It was just after he beat Nestor with that one punch, and Rey came and slapped us, and Chico’s mamita was still alive, and we were just beginning to learn each other’s secrets.
I’d brought him to my room, and lifted my mattress and showed him all my stupid notes on how to get to the United States. All the notes I’d been keeping and hoarding and no one knew about. And I told him about my father and California. And how I was going to go there someday.
Up until then, it’d been a dream that never had voice. A dream I hadn’t admitted even to myself.
That day, I said it aloud. It felt like destiny. Even though I lied to Mamá every day after by promising never to leave.
But here is what happens when you utter dreams—
They haunt you. Even if you discard them, they refuse to let you go.
They whisper in your ear as you walk through the streets, as you take in your surroundings, as your barrio splatters red with blood and black with death.
And it doesn’t matter if you never say your dreams again, because they’re inside you.
And they embedded themselves in your heart and grew.
And you believed.
Even if it was an impossible dream.
I’ll go with you! Chico had said, that stupid smile on his face.
Because your words planted that seed in his heart, too.
And you thought, We’re going to make it!
But you didn’t know then, that dreams weren’t enough.
And even though a part of you feels sorry for Pequeña because she still believes in it all, you don’t feel enough to help her out. You don’t feel enough to prolong the pain. Even as she drags you out of some hole in the earth and pulls you to your feet. Even if she throws your arm around her shoulders and makes you walk.
You don’t help. You don’t try.
“We’re going to make it,” she whispers. But we won’t.
Because now I know—those dreams were never meant for us.
Pequeña
They walked toward that other range of mountains. I’ll keep walking in that direction. I’ll drag him the whole way if I have to. Because I can’t crawl into a hole and wait for death. I can’t go into my grave alive. We can’t have come all this way for nothing.
I keep my gaze in the direction of the mountains. I drag Pulga’s dead weight next to me, stumbling and falling.
“Stop this,” I tell him through clenched teeth. “Why are you doing this? Stop it. Fucking stop!” I yell at him as his body gets heavier, as my body gets exhausted so quickly, so easily. I listen to the sounds of the desert, coyotes and rustling and the sense that we are so alone and also not alone. That something is out there.
I hear a kind of hushing wind sound then. And that sound gets louder, and suddenly I can make out words, like the desert if full of people whispering. For a moment, I think maybe someone is out there who can help. But when I look, there is only darkness, even as the voices get louder. Even as I hear people praying, calling on every saint, people talking to one another, people crying out for help.
Then I see them—walking in front of us, beside us, all around us.
Ghosts.
“Pulga?” I look over at him, wondering if he sees them. But he’s just looking at his feet.
They don’t see us, they don’t notice us. They walk, slow and slouching. And I watch as they fall. I hear the squawk of vultures, and when I look up, I see birds like glowing white shadows, circling the sky. I hear as they cry and plunge down to the bodies that have fallen. I watch as they peck and eat the ghostly flesh. I smell death and rotting.
And then the figures flicker back to life. Bodies get up. Begin again. They have no rest.
That’s going to be us.
If we die out here, this is where we will always be.
“Please,” I tell Pulga. “Please walk.”
And he does. For a while he does. Until he doesn’t and I have to pull him along.
Little by little we cover some ground, as the ghosts die and revive around us, as the desert reminds me over and over again of all the death out here.
We walk. And we stumble. And we fall and I get so tired.
So very tired of it all.
* * *
~~~
When I open my eyes, the sun is staring down at me like the eye of an angry god. I look and see Pulga just behind me. And I realize we dropped, we passed out sometime during the night.
I hurry to Pulga. Please don’t be dead, please, not you, too. Please be alive.
I reach him and he looks dead.
“Wake up,” I tell him. “Wake up, Pulga, please . . .” I say over and over again. I smack his face gently and his eyes flutter and I call his name louder until he opens them.
“Get up!” I tell him. “Get up.” He slowly staggers to his feet and we start to walk. But the sun, it already feels like fire and is so bright. I look toward the mountains in the direction we are trying to go and they look still so impossibly far away as the sun gets hotter and hotter with every passing second.
Images of me being cooked to death, of my skin smoking and toasting like animal meat, fill my head as we walk.
With each passing second, our bodies feel like they are shriveling up, like the sun is sucking every bit of water out of us. My lips are split and dry and sharp every time I run my tongue against them.
If I were sweating, I would wipe my sweat; I would lick the wet saltiness from my hands and drink it. But we don’t even sweat anymore. The sun rages, heating up our insides, our organs and muscles and blood.
I’m so thirsty. A strange image of piercing my skin and drinking my own blood runs through my head. And I know the sun
is getting to my brain.
Bright white flashes in my mind and makes my head throb with more pain. Thoughts flit in and out quicker than I can catch them, and I keep walking.
I feel like I am in slow motion; sometimes I think I’m just walking in place. Every desert shrub looks the same, wild and dry and ugly. Like us.
“Chico,” I hear Pulga whisper. His voice is unreal. His voice is dust.
“No,” I tell him. I don’t want him to see Chico, I don’t want him to walk toward him. Tell him to turn back, I say to Chico. And I want to cry, but I can’t. And I want to tell my mind to shut up because what it keeps telling me is We’re dying, we are actually dying out here.
I think I hear some kind of squawk and I look up at the sky. I see black dots, or maybe they’re vultures. Maybe they already have their sights set on us, ready to feast on our bodies.
No.
“We’re okay,” I whisper to myself. And then I see it. I see water.
Water.
Beautiful, shimmering water.
“Water,” I say to Pulga, raising my hand to show him, even though he can’t see. Look! Look! There it is! Water to jump into, to shock our whole body awake.
“Hey!” someone shouts from far away, from where the water sparkles in the distance. “Hey, come here!” And I look and it is me. It is me, all the way over there, on a bloodied mattress, using it as a raft in all that water. It is me, with the long black hair I used to have, that I used to love, that Mami used to comb into two long braids when I was little. It is me, waving her arms as she stands on the mattress, looking at me and Pulga.
None of this is real, I tell myself. You’re hallucinating.
I feel the way my nose tingles, and the way my breathing quickens, and the warmth behind my eyes preparing for tears.
But the tears don’t come.
It is only the feel of crying. It is the way you cry when you have no more tears. I blink over and over as I see myself, and then Pulga is on the mattress, too. And Chico.
Chico.
And we are all smiling, and jumping, and waving. I’m watching a movie of all three of us, as we once were. We are not real—were we ever like that?—but I don’t care. I love us.
I laugh and I wave back. I see the white of Chico’s teeth as he smiles, and the orange glow of his cheeks as he throws an arm around Pulga. And Pulga, laughing, clapping his hands together as if he is so proud we made it this far, and there I am, in a white dress, so clean and pretty and glowing, standing next to them and looking at them like they are two halves of my heart.
Look at how we glow, with life.
Pulga moans but I don’t want to take my eyes off the three of us.
“Look,” I tell him, “Look at us.”
I walk faster, slipping Pulga’s weight off me. I walk toward all that water.
“Pulga!” I shout. But then I look back; I see he has fallen to his knees. I stumble to him. Come on, come on, I tell him, don’t die. But he doesn’t hear me. I don’t hear me. My voice is less than a whisper, it doesn’t exist.
I lift his body again, pull him along beside me again.
Come on . . . please . . . come on. Please. Please.
* * *
~~~
I hold him and I beg God, please, please, please. I look over at the three of us on the mattress, at the way we’ve stopped laughing. At the way we are staring at me and Pulga here in the desert. But then over there, Chico begins to convulse, and blood comes out of his mouth as he falls. Pulga falls to his knees. And I stare down at my dress, watching as it goes from white to blood-red.
We’re dying, my mind tells me.
We’re dying.
The image fades.
“We’re okay,” I tell Pulga, to keep him here, in this world. But my words are barely a whisper. I don’t even know if I say them out loud. Or if hears them.
Up ahead, I see dirt being lifted up toward the sky. And then a white truck, barreling toward us. And I don’t know whether it is real or not, even as it gets closer.
Closer. Closer.
So close, so impossibly fast, until it is braking just inches in front of us, a cloud of dust surrounding us.
Then the slam of a car door. A man in green coming toward us. Border Patrol.
We’re on the other side. We made it.
My body pulses with renewed energy at the realization. I start crying as I try to tell Pulga, We did it, we made it to the other side! but the agent shouts at us before I can say anything.
“Vengan aquí,” he says in Spanish even though he looks like a gringo. He pushes us toward the truck. Pulga sways back and forth as the man pats him down. Then he pushes me against the truck, pats my shoulders, my torso, and then my breasts—where he stops. Where his hands linger and I know he knows.
“Oh . . . okay,” he says, laughing as he squeezes my breasts. I jump back and he pushes me harder against the car, presses his weight against me as he says something in English that I don’t understand.
The car’s surface is burning hot, but my blood goes cold. Even when he’s done, I can still feel his hands on me, his mouth next to my ear as he felt my breasts. He’s saying more things in English I don’t understand and a few words in Spanish. “No muevan. No muevan,” he says, telling us not to move, to stay put as he walks around to the back of the truck. When he walks past, he stares at me. His face is red and leathery. His eyes are cold and judgmental. And he looks at me like he can do anything he wants to me—to my body.
And he can.
I hear a loud thud as Pulga falls suddenly, as his arms and head bang on the metal of the car on the way down. And then I hear the Border Patrol agent yelling something as he comes to see what happened, a water jug in his hand that he begins pouring right on Pulga.
And that’s when something in me tells me to run!
I look toward Pulga. I have only seconds, no, less than seconds, to decide.
He’s safe. He’ll be taken in. He’ll be okay, I tell myself.
¡Corre! ¡Corre! ¡Corre! my mind screams. Now!
So I do.
I run for my life.
Or toward my death. I don’t know.
But in that moment, it’s all I can do.
I run.
Pulga
I hear yelling, shouts and commands, but I don’t know to who. I see tires, a truck. And then water splashing over my face.
The shock of it cuts through my darkness like a scream, letting in the sun overhead that bursts into sight achingly bright. I bring an arm up to my face, shielding my eyes from it, but still it flashes in my head.
Somebody is asking me something; the voice is warped and thick. My ears go mute at first and then are at full volume again as the blurry figure talks its warbled talk. Then I am drinking water and he is pulling me up to my feet even though I can hardly stand. He shoves me into the back seat of the truck, where it is cool and dark as the static of a radio breaks the silence. And even through all this, the relief of how good the air-conditioned car feels, and to finally be out of that blazing desert, is immediate.
He’s blurry and his figure comes in and out of focus. And I look for Pequeña and see her nowhere. I remember her standing next to me as the guy patted me down.
And then she was gone.
She’s out there. And we are driving away. And he is saying something about muerte. Muerte.
I stare out at the desert, reach for the door latch, but there’s none. I put my hand up to the glass, searching for her.
My eyes fill with tears, my vision is blurred, and my heart, whatever is left of it, shudders in my chest.
Pequeña
You’ll die!
There’s nothing, nothing out there!
There’s no one to help you!
You’ll be lost!
Forever!
S
top running!
Turn back!
Turn back!
My mind flashes with warnings, with the promise of death. But my legs push me forward. When I look over my shoulder, I think I’ll see his terrible face, his terrible mouth, his breath heavy in my ear. Oh . . . what do we have here?
But there is nothing, no one. Still, I run. I run faster—over brush and squat dry bushes, over boulders and rocks. Past rocks stacked high. My feet run, trip, stumble, pick me back up. I’ve spent days, weeks running. I don’t think I can stop.
I don’t.
I think of running until I die, until my body gives out.
But I want to live.
So I slow, because my chest is burning and wants to explode. Because my feet are on fire and my body feels like rubber. My blood and heart pump so furiously, it is all I can hear.
I scan every direction for that truck, waiting for it to come over the horizon, toward me. There is nothing but a thin white line. A glowing white line, a border, one between land and sky. Between heaven and earth.
Panic shoots through me, through my mind as I realize what I’ve done. As I realize I’m going to die.
I feel the sobs in my throat. How? After everything, how can this be the way it ends? I search for the truck that was there, that came and took Pulga away. It was just moments ago that I left Pulga there on the ground.
How could I just leave him alone like that? I have to go back to him. I have to find that truck again. I turn in the vast emptiness, for any flicker, any movement, anything.
There is nothing.
Nothing.
My head gets full and the world tilts one way, then another. I can no longer tell where I came from, or where I was going. The world becomes blurry. The sky and ground are one. And my body won’t go on.
I waste energy sobbing tearless sobs, and I crawl under a tree that smells of burning. The thorns of little hidden nopales slash at my face and neck, tiny little cuts that sting and burn as my mind keeps telling me the horrible truth.
We Are Not from Here Page 27