Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  But on the dark winter morning that he left for Cuauhtémoc City, he drove a neighbor’s borrowed pickup to the tiny cinder-block-and-plywood farmhouse he had built with his own hands and, by the light of a Coleman lantern, found Martha on a mattress sleeping between two of her younger sisters and pulled her up in her nightgown and told her to be quiet and took her with him. The pickup was pulling away before Martha saw her mother, Anna, coming through the door onto the swept dirt yard in front of the house. Children filed wonderingly out into the yard behind her, seemingly more children than lived in the house. Martha remembered seeing her mother standing there in her own white nightgown, barely visible, the whole scene made dreamlike by the reddish glow of the taillights over the yard. She remembered her mother making no attempt to run after her or scream for her father to stop. She seemed to have come outside only to witness her daughter’s leaving.

  Martha and her father shared one half of a trailer house with running water and gas but no electricity on the eastern edge of Cuauhtémoc City in a lot behind a small roadside hotel. The hotel was attached to a two-story stucco restaurant that sold hamburgers and tacos to truckers and workers from a livestock feed elevator down the road. The trailer came furnished, meagerly, and had an old swing set in front, indicating that a family had once lived there, but one of the set’s pipe legs was now broken, causing it to lean over like a statue of a horse in perpetual stumble. The trailer was divided in half, the rear occupied by two Mennonite men in their early twenties who had also left the Old Colony church, by choice, and had come to the city to learn automotive work. The two living quarters were separated in the hallway by a curtain made from a child’s blanket decorated with an image of a huge, idiotic-looking cartoon rooster Martha had never seen before but that the men told her was an American creation named Foghorn Leghorn. The men helped Aron get a job at a service station patching truck tires, a job he considered to be biblical retribution but he took it because he had no choice.

  He had never been a man of many words and after they moved into their new home Aron said even fewer, speaking to Martha only to tell her what to cook or what he needed, though what he seemed to need most was her simple presence, as if she stood for everything he had lost and the remote but still conceivable possibility of getting it back. In the way a nine-year-old does, Martha understood this, and it gave her a feeling of usefulness that tempered her fear of him and what might happen to them. She accepted the fact that it was just the two of them now without a second thought, the way she accepted most things in a life over which she had never had the least control. She missed her mother sometimes, but she missed nothing else about the farm or the colony and she truthfully didn’t care if she ever saw it or anyone from it again, not her sisters or her brothers, her house or her few friends.

  She had turned nine not long after they arrived, but Aron didn’t remember it was her birthday and she didn’t tell him. She slept by herself in the living room of the trailer house on a spavined, mustard-striped couch, the first time she had ever slept without other bodies, hot or heat-seeking, crowded up against her. She had to rise at dawn to make breakfast—the way she had for as long as she could remember—by herself now, instead of helping her mother. But after Aron and the two men had gobbled it down and left for work, a solitude unlike any Martha had known descended inside the ramshackle daylit trailer. At first the time alone frightened her. It felt so good she was convinced it must belong to some category of sin that nobody had told her about, but after a couple of weeks she stopped worrying about indulging in it. The only sounds that managed to reach the trailer house were those made by the occasional truck pulling into the rear parking lot of the café and a nest of mourning doves roosted somewhere in the trailer’s rain gutter, loudest in the couple of hours after dawn. Without electricity there was no possibility of a television set, as she had dearly hoped, but one of the men owned a silver-and-black Sanyo Channel Master transistor radio and she would sneak it from his room and put it back after she had listened to it.

  Mennonites in Chihuahua spoke Plautdietsch, Low German, and the men and boys were allowed to learn Spanish, but Martha knew more Spanish than she let on and she and her siblings all learned English from their mother, who had been born in Texas. So sitting with the radio at the kitchen table, she always tuned it to one of the X stations to hear country-and-western music and the American news, which seemed at that time to be mostly about a war and about a general unhappiness spreading across the United States.

  She was allowed to walk across the alleyway to the café, where the women would sell her hamburger meat, eggs, butter, tortillas, and coffee from the kitchen, on credit Aron would settle at the end of the month. After a few weeks the women let Martha stay and keep them company after the lunch rush. Cuauhtémoc, a town then of about ten thousand people, had been all but built by the Mennonites since their arrival in Chihuahua in the early twenties, but even in those years almost none lived in the city. The prosperous ones from the more liberal colonies drove down in pickups before dawn to run their businesses and buy their supplies, then headed north again before sundown. The Old Colony men came on weekends in their covered buggies, parking their horses between cars. The café workers regarded Martha with a kind of wary curiosity, realizing that she and her father were exiles but unsure whether this came about through choice or banishment. Some of the younger women—subscribing to the belief in the area that Mennonites were forced to wander the world in order to protect the terrible secret that they kept family relations far too close—reached the same conclusion about both possibilities.

  The long summer days spent by herself grew oppressive sooner than she had expected, emboldening Martha to venture further from the trailer after Aron and the men had eaten lunch and headed back to work in their shared pickup. She would walk in the opposite direction along Avenida General Sepúlveda, the main conduit leading into the city from the apple orchards and cheese factories that lay east toward Chihuahua City. Sometimes she went as far as the big plaza, where the trunks of the trees had been painted waist high with slaked lime to protect them from leafcutter ants. Amid these short irregular white columns old men sat on benches, breathing through their teeth and speaking to each other very rarely, stirring only to throw little rocks when stray dogs wandered too close. Sometimes a small group of soldiers came for marching drills on the swept dirt. Their uniforms didn’t all match and some wore canvas puttees on their legs that resembled the white-trunked trees and reminded Martha of pictures of soldiers she had seen in a book about the First World War.

  Four loudspeakers stood at the corners of the plaza, sometimes playing scratchy recordings of polka marches and sometimes broadcasting official municipal announcements nearly impossible to understand. Tarahumara Indian women squatted on the grass at the edge of the main path with their babies, selling ollas and pine needle baskets, the women inexplicably wrapped in heavy woolen rebozos in the towering heat. The Indian women and girls covered their heads with scarves the same way the Mennonite women did and Martha wondered if it was for similar reasons. Not long after they came to the city she had stopped wearing her scarf but she still wore the dark-print calico dresses her mother had made for her, the only clothes she owned, and with those and her hair and her face no one in Cuauhtémoc could mistake her for anything other than what she was. Walking down the streets, peering into the windows of panaderías and dress shops, she was careful to keep her distance from passing Mennonites who might be able to identify her. By the third month in the city she even dared to take the municipal bus, riding it to a long street on the edge of town with the strange-sounding name of Sin Nombre—Nameless. She wondered if this was its real name or if the mapmaker just helpfully labeled places no one had gotten around to naming yet. Sometimes she got off at the mirador, whose steps she would mount to look out from the high viewing platform over the state of Chihuahua, wondering why anyone would go to the trouble to build a scenic lookout in a place like this, too flat and far away from the Sierr
a Madre for them to look very impressive. But from the top you were able to see a pretty little waterfall, a thin stream that tumbled down about fifty feet during the rainy season from a cleft in the rocky terrain on that side of town, and this year uncommonly good rain made the San Antonio Valley just to the north, where she had spent her entire life, spread out like a deep green carpet with its grazing pastures and fields of oats and corn. She had never been to Cuauhtémoc City before her father had brought her to live here, but she and her sisters and brothers had heard about it since they were babies and had tried to imagine the sumptuous streets its mystical Aztec name had been coined to describe. Looking out toward the valley from the platform, it stunned her to see just how near the city had been all along. She could have walked here from the campo in a day’s time, though doing such a thing would have been inconceivable to her then.

  Life in Cuauhtémoc settled into an unvarying routine of housework, tedium, and ministering to Aron and the two men, broken up only by the trips into the city that she feared her father would discover but came to see as her right. So many things about the years she had lived in the colony began to feel like memories from someone else’s life, while the life she was living now in the little trailer house seemed as if it could go on indefinitely, as long as the work kept bringing in enough money for food and rent.

  The end came before they had been in the city a year, one afternoon in October. It was gray and raining. Martha had stayed in to make a caldo for Aron for his birthday, with good beef she had saved up for, cooked according to a Mennonite recipe handed down since Russia but almost fully Mexicanized now, flavored with chilis and epazote. While she was browning the beef Jonas, one of the two young men who shared the trailer, came in loudly through the screen door, startling her because neither he nor his friend Isaac ever came back to the house in the afternoon before quitting time. The larger of the two and older by a year at twenty or twenty-one, Jonas was the only one who had paid any attention to Martha, addressing her dismissively on the rare occasions when he found her by herself. He displayed his arrogance during these encounters by speaking to her in Spanish, as if it was a secret language they shared. Jonas was built straight and solid but had an unusually thick neck and a big moon face that cast an undeserved impression of plumpness over the rest of his body. He told her to call him Joey, the name he used at work and the one his friend Isaac now used, but she refused and went out of her way to pronounce his given name clearly.

  Martha had borrowed Jonas’s transistor radio from the top of the dresser in his room and when he barged into the trailer she turned to the kitchen table to try to grab it and hide it, but she couldn’t reach it before he came into view. Jonas didn’t take off his wet straw cowboy hat and hang it on the peg near the door but walked straight into the kitchen and dropped heavily into one of the chairs.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, listening to the music from the radio and looking at Martha, who was turned half toward him uncomfortably at the sink. “You like this radio of mine?” he finally said in Spanish, picking it up off the table and turning it around to admire it. He moved the dial to static and then back and thumbed up the volume knob until the chorus of an old ballad—

  He went up to her mother’s house,

  Between the hours of eight and nine

  And asked her for to walk with him

  Down near the foaming brine

  —blasted harshly and metallically through the narrow rooms of the trailer.

  She didn’t answer him.

  “You like all the batteries I’m always having to buy for it, too?” he asked.

  She wiped a film of grease and flour from the countertop and didn’t turn to look at him. “Why are you home so early?” she asked finally over the racket of the radio.

  “I’m sick. Even a strong man can get sick sometimes, you know?”

  But she knew he wasn’t sick—she could smell the sourness of beer and cigarettes on him through the heaviness of his damp clothes. She worried he might have lost his job. “Where’s Isaac?”

  Jonas stared down at the expanse of the unset table and looked as if he might go to sleep there. But he hoisted himself up from his chair and began swaying rhythmically to the song on the radio, looking like an overgrown child learning to dance. “You ask a lot of questions,” he said, and waltzed clumsily up to her, waving a hand in the air, scuffling his boots on the buckled linoleum.

  He grabbed her before she could turn around to ward him off. He wrapped his arms around her in a way that seemed almost gentle, except that his arms were heavy and hers were pinned down to her sides. She didn’t make a sound as he started in but she tried to stiffen her body and tuck her face down into her chest to avoid his attempts at kisses, which landed on her neck and the side of her head.

  Without seeming to exert himself in the least, he lifted Martha so her feet weren’t touching the floor and walked with her the five steps out of the kitchen into the living room and fell bodily with her, atop her, onto the yellow couch where she slept, flattening the breath out of her when they landed. As it was all happening, Martha didn’t feel anything that seemed like fear and she couldn’t decide what to feel besides painful embarrassment. Jonas had his head buried in the couch cushion over her right shoulder and his wet hat had fallen onto the carpet. His breath was starting to heave. Up close like this the sharp odors of axle grease and sweat from the garage mixed with those of the beer and smoke, but beneath everything she also thought she smelled something unfamiliar, sweet and musky, some cologne he must have put on.

  He might have been able to accomplish what he started but when he reached down for his pants he realized he was wearing his overalls and as he struggled heroically at his chest to undo the brass fasteners, Martha felt him shudder and heard him let out a quiet whining sound, as if he was about to cry. He stopped shifting on top of her and lay panting for several seconds as she began to get her breath back underneath him. He pushed himself off her and bent down, still huffing hard, and retrieved his hat and clamped it down onto his head and stood next to her, looking at her lying on the couch. His face beneath his hat was blazing, flushed with the kind of embarrassing blood-red that only fair-skinned Germanic people can get. He didn’t speak. He simply lumbered back to the kitchen, where he retrieved his blaring radio and turned it off and walked back toward his room, putting his hand against the wood paneling to steady himself. Martha sat up and pulled her dress back down over her pale legs and looked at it carefully to see if there was anything on it. Then she got up and went to the screen door and looked out to see if anyone walking by might have heard what happened, but no one was around and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because in truth the two of them had made no more noise than the birds in the nest on the top of the trailer.

  The rest of that day and the next passed without incident, a normalcy that seemed unreal to Martha given what had happened, until she made up her mind that this was what normal felt like now. She thought hard about everything and decided that she didn’t hold against Jonas what he had tried to do, though she wondered how she would feel if he had succeeded. Even now she liked him more than she liked Isaac, who was silent and passive and ate with his mouth hanging open like a cow. That evening the two of them emerged glumly from their room as they always did and crowded into the kitchen, taking their places around the little dinner table, lighted at night with a battery-powered lamp. With a mound of zwieback in a wicker basket there was barely room for the caldo, which sent up a column of steam from a speckled Granite-Ware roasting pan, the trailer’s only cooking vessel besides an old iron skillet.

  After grace Aron said nothing to Martha about the dish she had labored over for him, but he made a point of ladling himself a much larger helping than anyone else got and he smiled as he ate it, a rare sight. As usual, nobody spoke during the meal. Jonas kept his eyes meticulously away from Martha’s but every now and then she would catch him looking at her with a mixture of menace and fear. Martha avoided his gaze, too,
not because she was afraid of him but because she already resented the fact that she would have to worry about his fear of what she would do, a fear she probably could not diminish even if she swore to him on a Bible that she wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

  As they were finishing their dessert, Aron abruptly broke the silence at the table.

  “So where were you today?” he said to Jonas in Spanish, not looking at him, staring down into his bowl of pudding.

  Jonas didn’t raise his head or the spoon he had just buried in his bowl.

  “Estaba enfermo,” he said finally, and then slowly lifted the load of pudding to his mouth.

  “No you weren’t,” Aron said and after a long silence added: “You don’t like to work. And you drink too much. Te despidieron.”

  “They didn’t, either,” Jonas shot back, looking around the table at the accusing eyes on him. “Those cabrones. I quit.”

  “Either way, you don’t have a paycheck now,” Aron said. “And you don’t talk like that in front of the girl.”