JUKEBOXES & COFFINS
We finally stopped and had a real breakfast in a diner, which had a jukebox. And it was perfect, except there was an old man in the booth in front who was wearing a tie with a picture of Jesus Christ stuck with nails to the cross, and on top of the tie he was wearing a silver chain with another cross hanging but with no nails and no Christ on it. I was nervous because I thought you might say something about Jesus Fucking Christ, which you had discovered made Pa and Ma laugh every time you said it. But luckily you didn’t say anything about that, I think because the man made you a little scared. I was also a bit scared of him and took a picture of him without even looking into the lens, just resting the camera on our table and calculating the focus. He didn’t even notice when the shutter went who-ching because he was talking nonstop to the waiter and to us and to whoever would listen to him. He ordered pancakes and kept on wanting to talk to Pa and Ma about salvation, and then told the two of us jokes, one after the other, horrible jokes about Indians and Mexican people and Asian people and brown people and black people, and basically all people except people like him. I wondered if he didn’t notice that we were not like him. Maybe he was a little blind. He was actually wearing very thick glasses. Or maybe he did notice and that’s why he was telling us all those ugly jokes. When his breakfast came, he finally shut up. Then he cut a huge square of butter, rubbed it on the pancakes using his fork, and asked us where we all were from. Ma completely lied and said we were French and from Paris.
Back in the car, you made up your absolute best knock-knock joke ever, which Pa didn’t understand, ’cause it was half in Spanish, but Ma did, and so did I ’cause I also understood Spanish:
Knock-knock!
Who’s there?
Paris!
Paris who?
Pa-re-ce que va a llover!
And Ma and I laughed so hard that you wanted another go, and then you told your second-best joke, which was this:
What did the knock-knock joke say to the other kind of joke?
And we all said: What?
And you said: Knock-knock.
So we said: Who’s there?
And you said: Knock-knock!
So we said: Who’s there?
And again you said: Knock-knock!
It took us all a minute, but then we got it, and we all laughed, with real laughs, and you smiled out the window looking all proud of yourself and were about to slip your thumb into your mouth but didn’t this time.
CHECKPOINT
That day after breakfast, we drove so long without stopping, I thought I would die. But I was glad to leave that town full of cats and that old man with the cross on his tie, so I didn’t complain, not even once. In the car, Ma read the news on her phone and read something aloud to Pa about the lost children arriving safely back in their country, where people in the airport had given them balloons. And Ma sounded angry about them getting balloons, and I didn’t get why. She used to give us balloons, too. We would walk down the street to the store and we would get a balloon each, a real one filled with helium, and she’d write our names across them with a marker. I’d hold on to the thread of my balloon as we walked back home, and I always played a game, though I don’t know if it even counts as a game, which was that I wasn’t holding on to the balloon but rather the balloon was holding me. Maybe it was just a feeling and not really a game. After a few days, no matter what we did to try to save them, our balloons would start to get smaller and would drift around the house by themselves, just like Mama’s mom, who you don’t remember because you were tiny and she only visited us in New York once, and then she died. But before she died, she also used to drift around the house, from room to room, complaining and sighing and moaning but mostly being silent and kind of getting smaller. The balloons we got would drift lower and lower in that same way as she did, closer to the ground, until one day, they were under a chair or in some corner and our names on them were wrinkled up and small.
We finally stopped to buy food in a city, because that night and possibly the next night, we would sleep in a house in the Burro Mountains that Ma had found on the internet and had rented. The city where we stopped for shopping was called Silver City, which Pa told you was made of real silver except it had been hidden by coats of paint so that enemies would not come and take parts of the city away. You got obsessed with this, and while we walked around the streets, then into a supermarket, and up and down the aisles, you thought you saw hints of that hidden silver everywhere, including in all the canned beans, and a bottle of Windex, and even a box of Froot Loops, which you called frutilupis, the same thing Ma called them, though I suspected you were only pretending to see hints of hidden silver in the frutilupis because you wanted Ma and Pa to buy them for you, which meant you were sometimes smarter than they thought.
We drove a little farther after that, and when we arrived in the Burro Mountains, it was still daytime, which was good for a change, because when we arrived to rest or sleep in places it was usually sunset or nighttime, which meant we had to be in bed soon, which made me think Pa and Ma always wanted to spend as little time as possible with us. But this time, we arrived in full daytime. Two very old grown-ups, a lady and a man with cowboy hats, showed us into a small and dusty house, made of clay, I think. Then the man and woman showed us the two bedrooms, and the little bathroom between them, and then the space with the kitchen, living room, and dining table. They walked so slow and explained so much, you and I were getting antsy. They gave Pa and Ma the keys, and told us how things worked and what not to do, and showed us where the trail maps were, and the walking sticks for hikes, and asked us if we needed anything else or had questions, and luckily Ma said no, so they finally went away.
Pa and Ma got to pick their bedroom, and we complained that we had to share a bed in ours while they each got their own bed in their room, but they scolded us, and we didn’t complain more. We were happy to not be in a motel for a change, or in a creepy inn or a bed-and-breakfast. We helped them unpack some things, and then they gave us water and snacks, and opened beers and sat out on the porch with a view of the mountain ridge. You and I explored the inside of the house on our own for a while, but it was small, so there was little to explore. We found two flyswatters behind the refrigerator in the kitchen and took them back outside to the porch, where Ma and Pa were. We offered to kill all the flies so they could relax, said we’d only charge a penny per fly, and they accepted. Hunting flies was harder than we thought, there were so many. We’d kill one fly and ten new flies would appear from nowhere. It was like a vintage video game.
Pa and Ma said they needed a nap, and went inside, and meanwhile you and I collected rocks and pebbles from around the house, being careful when we picked up rocks in case there was a scorpion, wanting to find a scorpion but also not wanting to find one. We put all the rocks and all the pebbles into a bucket we found next to the trash cans at one side of the house, and we spread them on the table. When we’d finished arranging them all on the table, you looked at everything and said that it was like the turtles in the Sargasso Sea that I’d told you about. I asked you why, ’cause I was not understanding you, and you said because, because look at all the turtles floating there, and you were right, the pebbles looked like turtle shells from above.
Then when we got bored and got hungry we went into the kitchen and found tomatoes and salt, and I showed you how to bite into tomatoes, salting them before each bite, and you loved it even though you usually hated tomatoes.
ARCHIVE
Later in the afternoon, you killed a dragonfly by mistake and started crying like a waterfall. I tried to convince you that you hadn’t killed it, that it just had died at exactly the same time you caught it inside the glass jar, which was possibly true because the dragonfly had just frozen in there, and it was still beautiful even though it was completely dead, its wings still spread like it was flying without mo
ving. It didn’t look like it had been hurt. It was not missing any parts of its body or anything like that. Still, you cried like a madchild. So to stop you from crying, because Pa and Ma were still taking a nap inside the house and I knew if they heard you they would wake up and come blame me, I told you to be quiet and said, listen, let’s bury it, and then I’ll show you an Apache ritual so that its soul can get unstuck from its body and fly away, which I know is stupid, but I still felt inside me that the idea was good and also even true, though I’d just made it up. So we took spoons from the drawers in the kitchen and a glass full of water to wet the ground if needed, and we walked to a shady spot in front of the house under the shadow of a large red rock and got down on our knees.
The ground was harder than I thought with all those roots clutching to the powdery sand, and even the water we poured on it did not make it much softer, and we hit and dug so hard that we bent the spoons till they were ruined and you were laughing so loud, saying the spoons looked like question marks, which you’d been practicing to draw in school when we were in school still. But in the end, we had a hole big and deep enough to bury the dragonfly, the two spoons, and even a penny, which you threw in for good luck, because you are superstitious like Ma. After that, I had to come up with the ritual because I hadn’t thought of that part yet.
I told you, you go pick up pebbles, and I will go inside and steal a cigarette and matches from Pa’s jacket. And so we did that and then we met again in front of the little grave, where you were making a circle of pebbles around the covered hole. You were doing a good job, but anyway I told you to try to make it nicer, and when you finished, we sat crisscross applesauce in front of the grave and I lit the cigarette and blew some smoke into the grave and managed not to cough and then put the cigarette out with my shoe on the stony rubbish the way Pa and Ma do. To finish, I threw a handful of dust on the grave, and then I tried singing an ancient song I’d heard Pa playing once, maybe an Apache song, that went ly-o-lay ale loya, hey-o ly-o-lay ale, but you kept giggling instead of being serious. So then we tried singing something we both knew, like “Highwayman,” and we sang words like “sword and pistol by my side, sailed a scooter round the horn of Mexico, got killed but I am living still, and always be around, and round, and round.” But we had forgotten half the words and were just humming most of them, so finally we decided we needed to sing the only death song we knew by heart, which was in Spanish. Mama had taught it to us when we were both littler and it was called “La cama de piedra.” Finally, you got serious, and we both stood up like soldiers and began: “De piedra ha de ser la cama, de piedra la cabecera, la mujer que a mí me quiera, me ha de querer de a de veras, ay ay, ¿Corazón por qué no amas?” We sang, louder and louder, until we got to the last part, which we sang so loud and so well, I felt the mountains were standing up to listen: “Por caja quiero un sarape, por cruz mis dobles cananas, y escriban sobre mi tumba, mi último adiós con mil balas, ay ay, ¿Corazón por qué no amas?” When we finished, you said maybe we should kill more insects and bury them and create an entire cemetery.
SAMPLES
In the evening, Pa made dinner, and you fell asleep with your head on the table before we even finished. After dinner, he carried you to our bed, then said he was going on a night walk and left with his recording equipment. I helped Ma clear the table, and said I’d wash the dishes. She thanked me and said she’d be out on the porch in case I needed anything.
When I’d finished washing up, I joined her outside on the porch, where she was reading her red book out loud, speaking into her sound recorder. There were many moths flying around the lightbulb above her, and when she saw me there, she switched off her recorder, looked a little embarrassed, like I’d caught her doing something.
What you up to, Mama? I asked her. Just reading and recording some bits of this, she said. I asked her why. Why? she repeated, and thought a little before answering. Because it helps me think and imagine things, I suppose. And why do you read out loud into your recorder? I asked. She told me that it helped her concentrate better, and I made a face like a question mark. So she said, come here, sit down, try it out. She was pointing to the empty chair next to hers, where Pa had been sitting earlier that day. I sat down, and she handed me the book, opened to a page. Then she switched her recorder back on, and stretched her arm toward me so that the recorder was near my mouth. She said, go on, read this bit, I’ll record you. So I started reading:
(THE SIXTH ELEGY)
The yard where the children had boarded the first train, and the dark jungle after it, were long gone. Aboard that first train, they’d crossed the dark wet jungles of the south, making their way up toward the mountains. In a small village, they’d had to jump off and catch another train that came only a few hours later. On this new gondola, better somehow, less grim, painted brick red, they climbed to the cold cusps of the mountains in the northeast.
The train rose high above the clouds there, almost floating, it seemed, above the thick milky blanket of clouds that stretched far toward the eastern sea. It carried them up along the winding mountain path above ravines and next to plantations laboriously crafted by many human hands into hostile rocky ridges.
Far from towns and checkpoints, human and inhuman threats, but also somehow closer to death, the children were able to sleep unshaken by night terrors for the first time in many moons. They were all asleep and did not hear or see the woman who, also asleep, rolled off the side of the roof of their gondola. Tumbling awake as she went down the jagged ridge, she’d torn open her stomach on a broken branch, and kept on falling, until her body thumped flat, into abrupt emptiness. The first living thing to notice her, the next morning, was a porcupine, its spines erect and its tummy ballooned on larch and crab apples. It sniffed one of her feet, the one that was unshod, and then circled around her, uninterested, sniffing its way toward a bunch of drying poplar catkins.
Only one of the two girls aboard the gondola, the younger one, realized that the woman was missing. The sun had risen, and the train was passing through a small town perched on the western edge of the range when all of a sudden a group of strong, stout women, with well-kept long hair and long skirts, had appeared next to the tracks. The train had slowed down a little, as it often did when crossing more populated areas. The people aboard the gondola were startled at first, but before they could say or do anything, from below, these women started to throw fruit and bags of food and water bottles up to them. Good fruit: apples, bananas, pears, small papayas, and oranges, which everyone peeled fast and almost swallowed whole but which the girl kept, tucked under her shirt. She had wanted to wake the woman up to share the news of the free food. But she was not aboard the train anymore, it seemed. She wondered where the woman had gone, and thought maybe she’d just jumped off at a stop to join her family in one of those misty towns while everyone was asleep. The woman had been kind to her. One night, when the girl, shaking with jungle tremors, had screamed and wailed and cursed for water, the woman had given her the last sips from her canteen.
The girl remembered the missing woman again a few mornings later, when the train was passing through another town in the lower valleys. The tall mountains were now far on the eastern horizon, and the children saw some people standing beside the tracks in the distance. They gathered along the edge of the gondola’s roof—hands ready to catch flying food—but instead received rocks and insults. Whispering, as if she were praying to some fallen angel, the girl said: You were lucky, dear flying lady, to miss this part of the ride, because we almost got killed by stones, and I wish you had taken me with you, wherever you are, and good luck.
The beast pierced and puffed smoke, in and out of dark tunnels long ago dynamited and carved into the layers of the black heart of the range. The children played in these tunnels—held their breath as the train sped into the darkness, only allowed to breathe again when their gondola had made it across the arched threshold back into the light, and the val
ley opened up again, like an abysmal, blinding flower, under their eyes.
MAPS & GPS
We play this game, too! I told Ma. And she nodded as she turned her sound recorder back off.
We used to play it when we were riding inside the car, driving on mountain roads where there were tunnels. We all held our breath as soon as the car went into the tunnel, and were only allowed to breathe again when we reached the other side. I usually won. And you always, always cheated, even if the tunnel was short and the cheating not even worth it.
Can we read a bit more? I asked Ma. She said no, that was it for today. We were going to wake up early the next morning and walk down to the creek, and maybe farther into the valley, so we better go to sleep. She handed me the car keys and asked me to put the book back in her box, Box V, so I did. And then the two of us went inside. She left the keys on top of the fridge, which is where she always left keys, and poured me a glass of milk. Then we went to the bathroom and brushed our teeth together, making monkey faces in the mirror at each other, and finally we each went into our bedrooms and said goodnight, goodnight. You were taking up all the space on our bed, so I pushed you as far as possible to your side. But as soon as I turned the light off, you inched right back to me and threw your arm around my back.
NO U-TURN
I had heard echoes before, but nothing like the ones we heard that next day when we all walked out into the Burro Mountains. Near where we used to live, back in the city, there was a steep street that went down to the big brown river, and the street had a tunnel above it because on top of that street, and on top of that tunnel, there was another street going across the other way. Cities are so complicated to explain because everything is on top of everything, with no divisions. On weekends when the weather was warm, we used to ride our bikes from our apartment on Edgecombe Avenue, first up and then downhill until we reached that steep street and went under that tunnel under the other street to reach the bike path that went along the river, the four of us, each on our own bikes except you, Memphis. You sat in a child’s seat at the back of Papa’s bike. Always when we reached the tunnel, I held my breath—partly because I knew it was good luck to hold my breath, partly because under the tunnel it smelled of wet dog fur and old cardboard and pee. So I kept silent and held my breath in the tunnel. But always, every time, Pa shouted the word echo as soon as we reached the tunnel, and then Ma I think smiled at him and also shouted echo, and then you copied them and shouted echo from behind, and I loved the sound of the three short echoes bouncing off the walls of the tunnel while we came out through the other side and I finally breathed again and only then I shouted echo though there was never any reply because it was too late.
Lost Children Archive Page 23