Telephone

by Percival Everett

  It was hotter in New Mexico.

  The knock at the door came as I was drifting off to sleep and scared me near to death. I considered not opening the door. If I had had a usable window in the washroom, I would have climbed through it. DeLois’s voice poked through my haze of fear and I came around. I still held grave reservations about opening the door, but I did. I did and I found DeLois and five other people, three women and two men, all looking rather serious.

  “DeLois, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “We’re here to help.”

  I gave the parking lot a quick survey. “Come in.”

  They walked in and stood by the round table by the window.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your Jeep. There are only two motels in town,” DeLois said.

  “And I know the manager,” a short, round white woman said. Her hair was done up in a tight gray bun.

  “Who are you people?” I asked. I might have sounded irritated, but I was more confused than anything else.

  “They’re from my poetry workshop,” DeLois said.

  “Poets?” I stepped back and sat on the nearer of two beds. “Could you all just go home?”

  “We want to help.” This from a tall, lean young man I thought might be Hispanic or maybe Native.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  They took this as an invitation to introduce themselves.

  “I’m Jaime,” the young man said.

  “Grace,” from a tall black woman with braids.

  “Rosalva.” She was extremely short, the youngest looking. She wore platform boots that were at least four inches high.

  “Ernesto.” A Hispanic man about my age with an impressive salt-and-pepper mustache. He wore a Desert Storm jacket.

  “Georgia,” from the old woman with the gray bun. I looked at her concho belt and wide skirt and thought, Of course.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t want to know you people. I need for you to go away.”

  “This Thursday?” DeLois asked.

  “What?” I shook my head.

  “Are we doing this or not?” from Ernesto.

  “Where are we taking them?” Georgia asked.

  “The police,” Rosalva said.

  Jaime laughed. “We can’t trust the police.”

  “The police in Albuquerque,” Rosalva said.

  “Can’t trust any police,” the young man said. “That one, Jeff, he used to be a cop over in Belen.”

  Everyone was silent for a few seconds.

  “So, no cops,” Jaime said.

  “He’s right,” DeLois said. “No cops of any kind.”

  “What about the tribal police?” Georgia asked.

  “He goes fishing on Thursday,” Ernesto said.

  They all laughed.

  “We really can help,” DeLois said. She walked over to the coffee maker and grabbed the pot, stepped into the washroom and filled it at the sink.

  “Help with what?”

  “I know what you’re up to,” she said. “Why else would you be here? You left and then you came back. I don’t know what your story is, but you’re doing the right thing. We all think you’re doing the right thing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “You know.”

  “Maybe we can hide them in our homes,” Grace said.

  “Fifteen of them?” Ernesto said.

  “Not a good idea,” Rosalva said.

  Jaime turned, pulled back the curtain and looked out at the parking lot. “Those are some nasty dudes. Bad motherfuckers.”

  “Jaime,” Georgia said, objecting to his language.

  “Well, they are,” Jaime said. “They scare the shit out of me. They’re KKK or something. Nazis. They wouldn’t think twice about killing any one of us.”

  “That’s true,” Georgia said.

  “Mexico,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was hearing my own voice. I felt I had either surprised myself or betrayed myself.

  They looked at me, confused by my having spoken.

  “What?” from Ernesto.

  “Mexico,” I repeated.

  “That’s brilliant,” Georgia said.

  “How many are there?” DeLois asked.

  “I don’t know. Twelve, fifteen.” I couldn’t believe I was talking to them. “It doesn’t matter. We’re not doing anything.”

  We sat for what seemed like a long time without speaking. Finally, DeLois asked, “How many men were with them last time?”

  “Two,” I said. “I saw two.”

  Another silence.

  “I’ll need to take their bus,” I said.

  It was hotter in New Mexico.

  The next day I found Lieutenant Deocampo’s telephone number and called him. He answered and was clearly surprised to hear from me. “Señor Wells, how are you?”

  “I’ve been better. If I come to the border with some refugees, will you take them?”

  “Refugees?”

  “Rosalita Gonzalez and some others.”

  “What exactly are you saying, señor Wells?”

  “I am bringing Mexican citizens across the border. They have been held captive here, and I am bringing them to Ciudad Juárez. Will you meet me there?”

  There was a long pause on the other end.

  “Lieutenant Deocampo?”

  “Sí?”

  “I’m not crazy,” I said.

  “I know that.”

  “Okay. So, will you be there?”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. I don’t know what time.”

  “How many?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe thirteen, fourteen. Does that matter?”

  “How are you moving that many people?” he asked.

  “Will you meet us?”

  “Are you in danger?” he asked. “You should call the police.” He listened to my silence. “Señor Wells?”

  “I’ll call you with a time.”

  “Señor Wells?”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Ten ciudado, mi amigo.”

  “Thank you.”

  In my dream I was climbing a steep mountain face, rocky with patches of ice here and there. I was driving pitons, tying knots, snapping in carabiners, the whole deal, but I had never climbed in my life. So, even as I went about my business as if I knew what I was doing, what I was doing was absolute nonsense. It soon became clear to me that I didn’t even know whether I was going up or down the mountain. I was climbing with a man who looked very familiar, but I did not know him. I wondered, there in my dream, if it was possible to know someone in a dream whom I did not know in my waking life. What would it have meant to recognize my companion? While I was thinking about that, all of the pitons popped out of the face, all of the knots became undone, all of the carabiners snapped open, and suddenly we were falling, side by side, into the abyss. My unknown friend looked at me, smiled, and said, “All I can tell is that gravity is a motherfucker.”

  “True enough,” I said.

  “That and God hates me,” he said.

  “Hate him back,” I said.

  The rain fell nearly every afternoon. Thunderheads would form over the mountains and collect through the day. The lightning was in the air, to be felt even when you couldn’t see it flashing. But it also flashed, sometimes as great, wide sheets of white and at others like the cliché bolts of Tesla’s coil. It would have been comforting to connect the power to some, well, power, but it was merely electricity. As beautiful and as dangerous as it was, it was merely chemistry and physics, not engineering. I watched the storm moving away in the darkness as I stood in the parking lot of the Motel 6. There was a fast food restaurant next door, and I was considering it, as I was out of fruit. Sarah, no doubt influenced by her mother, had shamed me into giving up such food. “Slow suicide,” she called it.

  Earlier that day I had gone to the San Antonio public library. The building was not much larger than the bookmobile that used to drive around my Chicago neigh
borhood when I was a kid. I got online and read about the dead and missing women of Ciudad Juárez. I had seen it all before, and it was no less shocking or sad for prior knowledge. Next to me, at another terminal, sat an older Hispanic man who, I thought, was reading over my shoulder. He smiled at me.

  “Nice library,” I said.

  “I come here every day,” he said.

  “Is that right?”

  “I wait here while my daughter works.”

  “I see.”

  “We live over in Belen.”

  “That’s far away,” I said.

  He nodded. “But this is where the job is. We used to live way up near Taos. I had some sheeps.” That’s how he said it, sheeps. “My daughter thinks I might get sick and she’ll be too far away.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s not like she can do anything. She’s no doctor.” He paused. “She works at the Lotta Burger. It’s a good job. I hope she can keep it.”

  I thought he was looking at my screen. “Shame about those poor women,” I said. I adjusted the monitor to face me more.

  “What?” he asked. Then, as if it all came to him at once, “Death comes when it comes. That’s what I tell my daughter. I’m ninety-two. I don’t want to sit in the library all day. I guess she would rather have me die in the library instead of my own bed.”

  “I’m sure that’s not what she’s thinking.”

  “She’s not thinking,” he said.

  “Death scares people,” I said.

  “Guilt scares people,” he said.

  “I’m sure that’s not what she’s thinking about,” I said, obviously without knowing. I looked at his scraggly gray goatee. “Guilt is a terrible thing.”

  There I was at the dusty edge of the parking lot of that very Lotta Burger where the old man’s daughter worked. At least I imagined it was; how many Lotta Burger restaurants could there be in San Antonio, New Mexico? There was only one car parked there, a very out-of-place late-model silver Audi SUV. Beside it, under the yellowish light of the Lotta Burger sign, stood an expensively dressed couple, an older white man and a younger white woman, neither terribly attractive. They ate soft serve ice cream on cones and looked happy. Lightning flashed far off over White Sands Missile Range.

  It was hotter in New Mexico.

  It was atypically overcast on Thursday morning. The dark clouds had a greenish tinge, and rain was a fairly foregone conclusion. I sat in the front passenger seat of a midseventies Saab convertible, parked at the south end of the Smith’s grocery store parking lot. It was Georgia’s car. She sat behind the wheel, earbuds in her ears under her gray bun. We were waiting.

  I was going to try. Now I was not alone. I had help. I had poets. I did not, apparently, have good sense.

  “Do you like music?” Georgia asked me, pulling the bud from her right ear.

  “Yes,” I said. “Jazz, I guess.” It occurred to me as I tried to answer that maybe I wasn’t a music lover. I had no real, concrete response to her question. “What are you listening to?”

  “You’ll laugh,” she said.

  “I doubt that.”

  “Jefferson Airplane. Do you know them? Grace Slick?”

  “I’m sure I’ve heard them,” I lied.

  “‘White Rabbit’?”

  I smiled stupidly.

  “Would you like to hear some?” She offered me her headset and phone.

  “No, thanks.”

  We sat without speaking for a while.

  She ate from a bag of Doritos, her headphones again engaged. “This is a great thing you’re doing,” she said. “Not many people would do it.”

  “We’ll see if I go through with it.”

  “You will. Can you believe we live in such a world?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mind if I ask why you’re doing it?” She turned off her music, stared with me at the fairly busy parking area.

  “I don’t know. It’s good to help someone.”

  “Wish more people felt like that. There’s so much hate. I used to know Stephen Stills.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.”

  I was lost.

  “They were a band in the sixties. Stephen wrote ‘Love the One You’re With.’ You’ve heard that, I’m sure.” She sang a few lines.

  “Sounds familiar,” I said.

  “Things were very, very different back then,” Georgia said. “Woodstock. There was a lot of love. Those were the days.”

  “Yes, they were. The good old days.” She didn’t detect my irony.

  “DeLois thinks you’re great. Crazy, but great.”

  “She’s half-right.”

  Georgia laughed. She looked at the sky. “It’s going to rain. Is that good or bad for what you’re about to do?”

  I said nothing.

  “Mexico should be building a wall to protect themselves from us. Don’t you think?”

  I hadn’t thought about politics at all, about Mexicans or Americans, black, brown, or white. I was there to take Rosalita Gonzalez and her friends home. I was there to save somebody, anybody. I needed that.

  Across the parking lot, beside the grocery store building, was DeLois’s little Datsun. Grace sat beside her; I could see her hair. We had a rough plan that was really no plan at all, it more or less coming down to me sneaking the women out of the market, into the bus, and then driving us to El Paso and across the border into Mexico. I had never been one to take drugs; however, a few well or even poorly prescribed pills would have been very helpful at that moment.

  Ernesto was a friend of the grocery store manager, so he and Jaime stood around wearing aprons, pretending to work there. The only thing our plan had going for it was that it was rough. Being rough, it was also elastic. One observation from my last market encounter seemed important and finally comforting: I had seen no guns. Of course, that did not mean that there were no guns, but I had seen none.

  An hour passed, the clouds thickening, the air becoming increasingly humid and hot. I was sad about the drizzle because that meant the convertible top had to remain up, and I could have used the air. DeLois and Grace looked to be chatting away, hands moving, heads bobbing. Ernesto and Jaime chain-smoked and leaned on push brooms. Georgia had a book open in her lap, but I suspected she was sleeping. It had been a while since a page had been turned.

  I was frightened enough as things stood. I was exercising poor or nonexistent judgment in the face of a superior enemy with far more desire and capability to do harm than I. However, one word turned that fear into outright terror: poets.

  “My wife is a poet,” I said, surprising myself.

  “Really?”

  “She’s published two books.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Margaret Petry.”

  “I know her work,” Georgia said. She was excited. “We read a poem of hers in our workshop.”

  “Small world.”

  “It really is, isn’t it? Wait until I tell DeLois. Imagine that. I’m going to tell her right now.” She unplugged her headphones from her phone and placed the call.

  “What’s up?” DeLois asked.

  “Guess who Zach’s wife is?”

  There was a long silence on the other end.

  “Margaret Petry.”

  The silence continued.

  “Remember? We read her poem in class.”

  Grace let out a yip. “Oh yes,” DeLois said. “That was a good poem.”

  Georgia looked at her phone. “She hung up.”

  A couple of minutes later, Georgia offered me a small bottle of water.

  “No, thanks.”

  “So, do you have any children?”

  “Bus,” I said.

  “What?”

  “There’s the bus.”

  It was hotter in New Mexico.

  There was the bus, looking like a yellow cruise ship docking near the side of the building where DeLois and Grace were parked. There was only one man with them th
is time. I did not remember him from the compound. Unfortunately, I was easily spotted in this landscape, and even if he saw me from a distance before, I would be remembered. I counted the women as they filed out. Eleven.

  “Okay,” I said. I slid low into the seat.

  Georgia started the Saab. She drove us past the bus and around to the back of the store.

  The plan was simple enough, I had told myself, realizing that that alone should have been a very large red flag. But luck had already gone my way. There was only one man guarding them.

  Ernesto opened the loading dock door for me. I was immediately shocked by how cold it was inside. I followed him through a wide doorway of hanging strands of plastic, nodded to a couple of men working back there. They seemed surprised to see me, but in no way did they appear alarmed. Ernesto stopped me at a pair of swinging doors with round windows. The man held me back with a hand flat against my chest, his other hand gripping the black rubber cushion of one of the doors. The tightness of his grip told me how terrified he actually was. I was moved by this. This was no mere game, and these people, these poets, knew it. They were simply good people. They were there helping me because they were good and decent people who wanted to do a good and decent thing. On the other hand, I didn’t know why I was there.

  The plan was simpler now, what with only one guard to be distracted. Grace would take care of that. Grace, Georgia, and the store manager. DeLois would remain in her car, having served many of the Nazis in the diner and so likely to be recognized. Rosalva would walk by all the women in the aisles of the market and whisper to them in Spanish to go to the back corner of the store. Jaime worked on cars and was certain he could get the bus started. He also believed that the key would simply be in it. He claimed no one ever removed a bus key. I didn’t question that.

  The women began to collect not far from me, near the egg section. Then I saw Rosalita and she saw me. I put my finger to my lips, asked her to remain quiet, calm. There came a woman’s scream from the front of the store. The scream startled all of us, perhaps no one as much as me. Then I could hear Grace’s voice.

  “This man touched me!” Grace shouted. “Manager! Where’s the manager!”