He picks up an empty suitcase and sets it on the bed. Phoebe, he says again, that son of a bitch is going to pay for this every day until he’s dead. Believe it.
And maybe he will pay, one way or another, Victor thinks, but that’s got nothing to do with him, or Glory. The cops and lawyers and teachers and churches, the judge and jury, the people who raised that boy and then sent him out into the world, to this town—every one of them is guilty.
They load their suitcases and boxes into the back of El Tiburón, covering everything with a tarp weighed down by red bricks. It is just after four o’clock when they walk over to the motel office, and the desk clerk is counting his drawer when they hand over the keys to their rooms, first the young man, then the girl who comes downstairs every day around noon wearing the same Led Zeppelin T-shirt, towel in one hand, bottle of Dr Pepper in the other, and lately, a portable cassette player slung over one shoulder. In a few hours, the boy will wish he’d stopped what he was doing for a minute and thanked them for always paying their bill on time, wished them good luck wherever they were headed next.
* * *
The road map, when Victor lays it across the steering wheel, is two feet wide and three feet long. He folds it in half, then quarters, and then again until it fits easily in Glory’s hands. He points to the bottom edge of the fold, his index finger lightly tracing the border, a pale blue line that wanders between the two countries, its gentle bends and turns becoming sharper and more complicated as it meanders toward the gulf. It is a line that grows thinner each time the map is revised, Victor has noticed, the river diminished by dredging and fences and dams. It’s been at least a hundred years since old ladies sat on their porches just a few feet from the river’s edge and watched steamboats carry passengers to and from the Gulf while live jazz or country or Tejano drifted across the water, the music lingering long after the boats had passed by.
Two hours south of Laredo, there’s a ferry at Los Ebanos, Victor tells his niece. It can carry a dozen people and two cars on each trip across the river. Victor runs his index finger along a series of state highways and back roads marked by black lines wending their way across the desert and through the Chisos Mountains, stopping at Lake Amistad and picking up again on the other side only to spend another six hundred miles wandering back and forth across the border. Victor fetches the map from his niece’s hand, flips it over, and points at the jagged edge of land hugging the sea. And then we drive down to Oaxaca and Puerto Ángel, he says, fifteen hundred miles and roads so bumpy your nalgas will hurt for a week. He glances at his watch and looks toward the western sky. He does not want to be driving through this part of West Texas at night with Glory in the car, if he can help it. If we hurry, he says, we can be in Del Rio before dark.
* * *
On a two-lane highway somewhere between Ozona and Comstock, along a stretch of road so remote that they haven’t seen another car for nearly an hour, the El Camino starts hesitating on accelerations. When Victor swears and pumps the gas, the engine coughs and sputters like an old man, but they press on for another fifty miles. The sun is hovering just above the horizon when he mutters something about a clogged fuel filter and starts looking for a wide spot where he can ease the car off the road. Glory is half-dozing in the passenger seat with her cheek pressed against the warm window, trying to imagine what her mother’s hometown might look like, whether it will be much different from the old photos Alma keeps in a cigar box. Her hair has grown out enough to look like she means for it to be that way, and there is a fine sheen of sweat on her neck, even as the coming night threatens to send temperatures plummeting.
While her uncle curses and fiddles under the hood of El Tiburón, Glory steps outside and stands on her toes until she loses her balance. She’d love a cigarette, but Victor says a girl her age has no business smoking. Instead, she walks to the back of the truck and lowers the tailgate. She pulls a pack of gum out of her pocket and stuffs three pieces in her mouth. When she sits down, the metal is warm against the backs of her legs. Sweat gathers along her bra line and waistband, and she rubs hard at her eyes. ¡Pedazo de mierda! Victor tells the car. You’ll never be a classic.
A dead armadillo lies on the gravel shoulder a few feet away. Above the animal’s crushed armor, two buzzards circle lazily overhead. When the wind picks up just enough to gently lift the hair on the back of her neck and Glory notices that the wind is blowing the animal’s smell away from her, she lifts her face to the empty blue sky and breathes deeply.
Díos mío, Victor mutters, a flathead screwdriver tucked behind his ear. He tries to clamp a hose with a pair of pliers, but when he shuts the fuel line off and gasoline vapors rush to fill his nose, he staggers away from the engine, choking and spitting. Sit tight, Glory, he gasps, we’ll get her fixed up. He tinkers for a few more minutes and then pokes his head out the side of the car’s hood. Go fetch me a stick about four feet long and this wide—he holds up his pinkie finger to show her the width—so I can run it down the fuel line and clear the blockage.
Glory climbs onto the bed of the El Camino and stands up to face the big bunch of nothing that surrounds them on all sides. They haven’t seen a pumpjack since Ozona, and there are no buildings out here, not even a little farmhouse in the distance. The only signs that people have ever been here is the barbed-wire fence that runs along the highway for as far as she can see, and an open gate about fifty yards away. This is different, she tells herself when her heart starts hammering against her sternum. Out there in the oil patch, the earth was an empty table. Here the land is rocky and uneven in some places, flat and bald and red-faced in others. In the loosely scattered cactus patches, tiny blooms cover Texas barrels and fishhook and lace-spine. On the highway’s shoulder, a purple tansy no more than an inch tall or wide has shoved its way through a narrow crack in the caliche, a joyful noise in the midst of all that brown, and as Victor promised, there is a patch of buffalo bur with its bright yellow flowers and tough dark green leaves. When the plant dries out in a few months and its shallow roots begin to wither, the wind will tear it from the earth and send it rolling and tumbling across the land, a dead and dying conflagration of sticks and leaves set rootless upon the world—a tumbleweed. This is not the same place, Glory says out loud when the thin black hairs on her arms begin to prickle and stand up. He is locked up in Fort Worth.
The shoulder is narrow so she keeps an eye out for traffic and snakes, and a goddamned stick. When she reaches the open gate, Glory stops and peers past the cattle guard. A thin layer of fresh gray dust covers the metal grates and a horny toad stands in the middle watching a line of fire ants cross its path. Just beyond, a mockingbird sits atop a strand of barbed wire and sings a complicated song, some of the notes its own and some stolen, and who can tell. The air has begun to cool, but Glory can still feel the sweat running down her back when she walks to the center of the cattle guard and peers through the steel grates, half expecting something to reach up and sting or pierce or strike at her legs.
After the storm, a surge of water had rushed across the desert and filled the ravine, a flash flood so sudden as to catch a family of blue quail unawares, but now there is only garbage and rusting beer cans and shotgun casings. Her legs are damp against the heavy denim. The sneakers she wears are thin enough to be pierced by a piece of barbed wire or a cactus needle, and her socks barely cover the new scars that crisscross her feet and ankles. Standing now in the middle of the dirt road, listening to the steady drone of cicadas, she watches a pair of tumbleweeds roll aimlessly across the desert. There ain’t jack shit out here, she thinks, and a murmur of rage rises in her throat, a low burble directed at her uncle for bringing her here. When a roadrunner emerges from the brush and scampers across the road in front of her, Glory reaches into her pocket and curls her fingers around the knife she carries with her always.
Another fifty feet up ahead, dead and dying mesquite are lined up next to the dirt road like parade-goers. Knowing the branches will snap off easily, she moves
quickly, her anger pressing her forward, a warm hand in the center of her back saying Go. When she hands Victor the damned stick, she will tell him that she wants to go back to Odessa. He can go back to work and she will lie by the pool watching her scars turn darker, scarlet and shiny against her brown skin, and they will wait until Alma is able to make her way back to, and across, the border. Trying to scare off any animals that are surely hiding in the brush, she stomps hard across the earth and sure enough, the vibrations startle several little critters—a rat and a couple of blue quail, a family of prairie dogs already holed up for the night.
Glory is only an arm’s reach from the mesquite when she hears the clicking of a baby’s plastic rattle, a maraca filled with dried beans, the terrifying chica-chica-chica as fifteen hollow rings of cartilage knock against one another. An old diamondback comes gliding across the desert floor, a shallow wake forming in the sand behind her. She is thick-bodied and long, six feet of heavy muscle and skin marked by brown diamonds that taper to a brilliant series of black and white stripes. Her head is flat as an old wooden spoon and each of her sharply curved fangs is as thick and long as Glory’s index finger. She has already scented the girl when she stops in the middle of the dirt road and wraps herself into a tight coil. When she uses every bit of her scarce strength to raise her head and flick her tongue in the direction of Glory’s bare legs. When she tries to discern how big a threat this animal is to her and the ten young snakes she is about to deliver.
The old snake is weak enough that a strike, even if she could land it, would surely be a dry bite, but Glory can’t know this—or that the snake will only live for a few more hours, just long enough to watch the last of her young emerge from its amniotic sac and unfold itself against the pale earth, its body a bright shimmer of black and gold lit by the full moon.
Glory stands with her fingers curled around a pocketknife that might stop a man but is entirely insufficient to this moment, and although she was hoping to stay angry enough to claim some space of her own and fight for it, now’s not the time and this is not personal. This is the sun threatening to go down and one hell of a big rattlesnake blocking her path. She watches the snake and the snake watches her, tongue flickering, rattles shaking steadily against the air, an unrelenting buzz and hum. When the snake lowers her head and uncoils her long body and glides slowly into the brush, Glory counts to a hundred and listens for whatever might come next, and when her heart has stopped hammering against her breast, she tears a limb from a mesquite tree and heads back to the highway.
Glory and Victor won’t make it to Del Rio in time for sunset. When she returns to the El Camino, her uncle has removed the fuel filter and sprayed it down with Chemtool. While they wait for the filter to dry, they sit on the hood watching the sun go down and listening as the coyotes get revved up for the night. The harvest moon, when it rises, is blood red and beautiful against the darkening sky. Try floating with your ears under the water, Tina had said to Glory as they drifted across the swimming pool that afternoon. Listen for long enough, she said, and the sounds from the highway will blend together. A truck hauling pipeline or water, a flatbed turning onto the highway, the crank of a pumpjack slowly winding itself up, they will all start to sound alike. You can tell yourself you’re hearing anything, Tina said, her large white arms floating next to her like buoys. And will you look at that sky? It’s a wonder, a damned wonder.
On the other side of Comstock, they cut south to State Highway 277 and drive along the border through Juno and Del Rio. At Eagle Pass, the road to El Indio turns to gravel and then dirt, and the border pulls them closer. Victor drives quietly, keeping an eye out for a cop’s flashing lights in the rearview mirror, occasionally glancing at his niece in the passenger seat. Is she okay, this child who has never been more than fifty miles from the town where she was born?
Are you okay? he asks.
Fine—Glory rolls her eyes and smacks her gum and blows a bubble as big as her face—but next time, go out there and get your own damned stick.
He smiles and keeps his eyes on the road ahead, lightly scanning the narrow shoulders for armadillos and coyotes, maybe the occasional bobcat. A set of headlights appears on the horizon, and he watches it grow brighter and larger as it draws near. When a cop passes them, Victor looks in his rearview mirror to see if the car has pulled onto the shoulder and begun to turn around. Victor won’t be coming back to this beautiful place, Texas. For him, it is a diseased limb, to be quickly removed before the rot reaches his heart—something he had managed to forget in the years after coming home from Vietnam and finding work and keeping an eye on Alma and Glory. Although, he muses now, his homecoming from Southeast Asia should have been a good reminder. He had stepped off a Greyhound bus in downtown Odessa expecting to be met by his sister and instead came face-to-face with his old boss from the gas station.
The man wore his work overalls and a Shell cap, and to Victor, it seemed like no time at all had passed while he was overseas. Old Kirby Lee hadn’t changed a bit. On seeing the younger man, he pulled Victor into a big bear hug, his icy blue eyes flashing with pleasure. Well shit, Ramírez, you lucky spic. Looks like you’ll live to drink another Tecate, or three. And there was Victor breathing in the scent of gasoline on the man’s gray overalls, hugging his old boss back tight, tight, so tight the man began to squirm in his arms, and all the while Victor was thinking, He don’t mean anything by it, he don’t mean it, he don’t mean it. I made it home alive.
Victor drives on, the lump in his throat large enough to insist on silence. He is thinking about a summer when he picked grapes in Northern California. His fingers bled every night, and the hours were long, but he loved the country, and the woman who drove him into the city one Sunday to eat chocolate at the pier and walk through the park at dusk. He will miss thinking that he might run into her again, sometime. He will miss movie theaters and Blue Bell ice cream and brisket. He will miss a steady paycheck and the sun setting over the sand hills in Monahans, and he will miss hearing the odd, ugly cries of the cranes when he is sitting on the bank of the skinny and shallow Pecos River, a cold beer in one hand, his bird book in the other. The birds in Mexico will be more or less the same, but the river will be different. He will miss it.
Why don’t you tell me one of your war stories? Glory looks worried, and for an instant, Victor wonders if he has been talking out loud. Maybe in a little while, he tells her.
Are we still in Texas? she asks when they drive through El Indio, a village without a stoplight, gas station, or a single sign written in English. Yes, Victor nods. This is Texas.
Tell me a story about Texas, she says, or Mexico.
There are a dozen stories Victor could tell his niece. So many! But tonight he can only think of the sad ones. Ancestors hanged from posts in downtown Brownsville, their wives and children fleeing to Matamoros to spend the rest of their lives looking across the river at land that had been in their families for six generations. Texas Rangers shooting Mexican farmers in the backs as the men harvested sugar cane, or tying men to mesquite trees and setting them on fire, or forcing broken beer bottles down their throats.
They did it for fun, Victor could tell her. They did it on a bet. They did it because they were drunk, or they hated Mexicans, or they heard a rumor that the Mexicans were teaming up with some freedmen or what was left of the Comanche, and they were all coming for the white settlers’ land, their wives and their daughters. And maybe sometimes they did it because they knew they were guilty, and having already traveled so far down the path of their own iniquity, they figured they might as well see it through. But mostly, they did it because they could. Río Bravo, Victor’s papi had called it—furious river, river of villains and desperadoes—and Papi hadn’t meant him and his. He meant whatever lost souls lynched hundreds of men, and a few women, in the years between 1910 and 1920. He meant the Texas Rangers who in the summer of 1956 loaded two of Victor’s uncles onto a cattle car, along with twenty other men, and dropped them off in the Sier
ra Madres with a single jug of water and a one-liner—Y’all fight it out amongst yourselves, boys. Look in any ravine within fifty miles of the border, Victor could tell his niece, in any small wash or depression, look under any skinny mesquite that might bring some small relief from the hot sun, and you will find us there. You could build a house with the skeletons of our ancestors, a cathedral from our bones and skulls.
Instead, he tells her about her mother’s village, and how the sea is so crowded with red snapper, they jump into fishing boats just to get a little elbow room.
Unimpressed, Glory again pops her gum and blows a bubble so large that when it eventually pops, she has to peel it off her face. Tell me a good story, she says.
An opossum meanders off the shoulder and steps in front of the car. Victor taps the brake and swerves gently, relieved not to feel the thud beneath his tire. Okay, he says, here’s one that my abuela used to tell us kids. I’ll take you to her gravesite when we get to Puerto Ángel. It’s a sad story, he warns.
Is it a Texas story?
Yes.
Then tell it.
Near the end of the Red River War, when the Comanche and Kiowa had already lost but nobody was willing to admit it, a group of warriors came upon a rancher’s house. They broke down the door and found the rancher and his wife gone, but a baby sleeping in a basket next to the bed. They thought about stealing the baby, but it was late in the day and they were tired, and while they would take women and small children, babies were more trouble than they were worth. So they carried the basket out into the yard and filled the baby with arrows. Poor thing looked like a porcupine when they were done—Victor pauses and glances at his niece who stares at him with a look of delighted horror on her face—that’s how your abuela described it, not me.
Pues, the rancher and his wife came home—they’d only been down at the creek washing some bed linens—and discovered their baby. The poor thing was so thoroughly shot through with arrows that they had to bury her basket and all. A regiment of Texas Rangers heard about this. Half the regiment was old Confederates and the other half was old Blues, but they were one hundred percent in agreement that there was a score to settle, so they rode around the Panhandle until they found an Arapahoe woman with her baby. They figured they’d riddle the child with bullets and call it even. But some of the men didn’t feel right about this. Filling a baby with bullets was barbaric, they decided, and these men were not barbarians. Instead, they decided, they would deliver a single shot to the baby’s forehead. But they didn’t account for how large the cartridge, or how small the baby, and they were shocked when the baby’s head split like a melon—again Victor pauses—that too was your abuela’s phrase, not mine.
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