As she always did when men spoke Spanish around her Martha wore an exaggeratedly blank face, but she knew that Aron knew she understood everything, so she was especially careful not to look in his direction. She looked instead at Jonas, whose face had begun to color. He made as if to talk back but thought better of it and furiously shoveled two more heaping spoonfuls of raisin pudding into his mouth before bolting from his chair, struggling to unwedge his bulk from the table before stomping back to his room, shaking the flimsy trailer floor.
Martha saw him only once more after that. In the dark of their shared bedroom that night, with several bottles of beer in him, Jonas bragged to Isaac about what had happened on the couch the previous afternoon. The girl had been asking for it for weeks, he told him, and so he finally gave it to her.
“You’re so full of shit, Joey,” Isaac said. “I’m tired to death of your shit. Shut up and go to sleep now.”
“Hand to God, I’m not lying to you,” Jonas said and cast about in his mind for something to lend the power of authenticity to his account: “Let me tell you, brother, she had the prettiest pussy you ever saw.”
The next morning Martha left for the café and Jonas drove away early to the garage to beg for his job back. Isaac found Aron behind the trailer hoeing at a stand of weeds and related the night’s conversation to him, terrified at the thought of what he was saying but far more terrified that Aron would find out and suspect he knew. Aron waited inside for Martha to come back home and the moment she entered he grabbed her and flung her to the floor and clamped a hand around her throat and ordered her to tell him the truth, which she did between convulsions of terrified sobbing, choking on her tears.
Aron stood up and fetched his toolbox calmly, as if he were only on his way to work, and went to find a neighbor woman who sometimes drove him. He surprised Jonas in the parking lot and ran him down before he could reach the pickup. For the better part of an hour, until the police and the ambulance finally arrived, Aron waited next to Jonas’s heavy, heaving, bleeding body, surrounded by milling Mexican garage hands uncertain what their responsibilities should be after such an incident, so they just stood close by in case he tried to run.
Jonas remained in the hospital for three days. Aron spent two weeks in a close, noxious jail cell with fourteen other men, two of them young Mennonites he didn’t know and never addressed. After the incident, Martha was taken in by the family that ran the hotel and restaurant, and a few days after Aron’s release, back at the trailer by herself, she saw Jonas for the last time, when he came to pick up his possessions, left outside in a cardboard box.
He climbed slowly out of the passenger side of a pickup driven by a small Mexican man she didn’t recognize and walked up the driveway, limping with his right leg, looking nervously up and down the street. He came close to the kitchen window, behind which Martha was watching, fairly sure he knew she was there, though he never looked in her direction. A few times in her life Martha had seen boys’ faces and hands battered and swollen after fights but she had never seen anyone beaten as badly as Jonas had been. The middle of his face was covered with a knot of gauze that concealed what had happened to his nose. Both of his swollen brows were shaved clean and dabbed with Mercurochrome and the left one had been sewn up along the length of its ridge, with black stitch-ends that poked out like porcupine quills. The welts on his cheeks had turned the sickly color of verdigris, and even his eyelids looked raw and pink, like a rabbit’s. Martha watched him, frightened but electrified, barely moving or breathing. He was almost unrecognizable, not simply because of his face but because of the way he carried himself now, with a kind of gravity she had never seen him display, like that of a much older man, though it also looked as if he had been crying. The man who had driven him leaned out of the window and said something and Jonas slowly picked up his box, containing everything he owned in the world, and carried it to the truck without ever looking back toward the trailer.
After Cuauhtémoc, Aron and Martha never stayed in another place again for more than a few months. They lived in Chihuahua City in a motel room with a kitchenette until some misunderstanding unknown to Martha caused them to have to leave. They went up the federal highway to Juan Aldama for a time and then all the way back to Nuevo Casas Grandes, but it was too close to the colonias and Aron worried that they had been spotted, so they quickly packed and went as far north as possible, to Juárez.
In each place Aron mostly took farmhand work, the easiest to get. But farming other men’s land was hateful to him, especially on the big sprawling corn and milo operations where he said it felt as if they were mulching money itself to fertilize land being over-farmed into sterility.
One morning in the summer of 1971, after they had been in Juárez for two weeks paying for a room they couldn’t afford, Aron told Martha to stay put and wait for him and he took a bus into El Paso to find a man he had met several years earlier at a grain elevator in Cuauhtémoc. The man, Preston Salas, was white but had a Spanish surname and looked strangely almost Mexican, with straight black hair and dark brown eyes. He was from the Texas Panhandle but for many years had conducted business along the border and into Chihuahua. In Mennonite parlance he was known as a coyote, though too many Mennonites had come to know this too late. Salas and a silent man he introduced as his younger brother had shown up under the names of Ed and Bill McConnell at various colonias just before harvest time in 1969, toward the end of a long drought that had pushed many families to the breaking point. Carrying cash and presenting themselves as independent commodities buyers trying to establish a beachhead in the valley, the two had paid above-market prices for corn and beans and pigs, and came back writing checks for more. The checks cleared, buying Salas and his partner entrée to dozens of family kitchens and council offices, where they struck the kinds of deals they had been pressing for. This time they brought in a fleet of produce trucks and livestock trailers and cut checks for astonishing amounts that turned out to be as worthless as Preston Salas and his so-called brother, who were never heard from again.
Aron had avoided becoming a victim only because his spread of oats, half eaten by crown rust, was too meager to attract Salas’s attention. Later, in Cuauhtémoc, he had learned Salas’s real name and discovered that after Chihuahua he had ended up serving prison time in El Paso in connection with a hospital bid-rigging scheme. Tracking him down was easier than Aron had thought it would be: He simply looked him up in the residential directory of the telephone book, which had three densely populous agate pages of Salases, Abelardo to Zarita, but only one named Preston. Aron dialed the number and they had a brief telephone conversation before Salas agreed to see him, in a tiny vinyl-sided ranch house in Ysleta where he lived alone, nine months out of jail and still on probation.
The difference between the man Aron remembered and the man who opened the door was so striking he thought he had come to the wrong address. The Salas he met in Mexico had looked like a middle-aged lawyer in a pearl-gray Stetson. This one was dressed in cutoff shorts and a yellow T-shirt with a picture of a woman in a skimpy bathing suit on it. He looked a decade younger and much thinner, with a weedy mustache hanging over an irresolute mouth. He still wore a good hat but a ponytail hung beneath it now. He ushered Aron into a living room unfurnished except for a brown velour love seat and a small television set on the floor whose power cord snaked across the carpet. He lit a cigarette and held out a plastic bowl of corn chips, which Aron, holding his own hat in both of his hands, declined. They conversed in Spanish, which Salas seemed to understand better than he let on. Aron spoke in a measured, businesslike manner, using no more words than he needed, laying out his circumstances with the colonia and stating his offer plainly: If Salas could stake an intermediary, one who wouldn’t be recognized in Cuauhtémoc, to return and set up as a buyer, Aron could supply him with more than enough private information about debts and market arrangements among Mennonite cheese makers that he could easily go back in and make big check-buys from several of the
m.
“How much does that mean for you?” Salas asked, picking a piece of tobacco off his tongue, looking Aron in the eye.
“Forty percent,” Aron said.
Salas smoked and considered the proposition before saying that he found at least two things hard to take on faith in such a scenario—one, Aron’s willingness to sell his own people down the river; and even more, his people’s collective susceptibility to getting cleaned out again so soon in exactly the same way they’d been cleaned out before. But Salas’s look didn’t corroborate the doubts coming out of his mouth; the look told Aron how much he needed the money, too.
“They took my family away from me, everything I had—so I’m owed, that’s why,” Aron told him, standing while Salas sat. “The other thing is something you already know: They all believe too much in the goodness of man ever to be able to guard themselves very well against somebody like you.”
Salas kept his gaze leveled on Aron, exhaling smoke without turning his head.
“Somebody like you, too,” he said, grinning.
After several more minutes of useless talk Salas said he would mull it over and get back in touch, but Aron knew what the answer would be. He walked up the hallway toward the front door. Salas called out sarcastically after him: “God be with you, my brother.”
Aron put his hat on his head and opened the door and walked out without looking back.
“And you.”
Aron ended up agreeing to thirty percent, and the arrangement would have worked except that he entered into it with someone whose luck was even worse than his own. He learned later from a lawyer what Salas hadn’t known, that the U.S. Customs Service had put a tap on his phone and started to sift through his mail because they suspected—erroneously, as they were to discover, to their annoyance—that he had been hired by a still-incarcerated cellmate to shepherd a shipment of marijuana from Ojinaga into the Big Bend. Customs investigators had made no progress in the case, so they waited a few weeks, transcribing Salas’s calls to Chihuahua setting up the check fraud and then they took him in for violation of his parole. As a courtesy, the agents reported the arrest to their counterparts in Juárez, who cursed at them in English over the phone for making work. But when the Mexican agents typed Aron’s name into the system, they turned up the kidnapping warrant that had been outstanding against him since not long after he had taken Martha from the colonia.
She was alone the next morning when three Juárez municipal officers with unholstered pistols came to the door of the cinder-block apartment house in Libertad to which they had traced Aron. Martha opened the door. The men stood speechless for a few seconds, having never seen a Mennonite girl except in pictures in the newspaper and, even then, not expecting a face so alabaster pale, hair so blond it manifested as silver in the morning sun. The men looked at her and then at each other for several moments until one of them broke the silence by taking out a piece of paper and reading a formal-sounding statement. Like a lot of Mexican police in the area, the three seemed less like officers than like regular people who had shown up out of curiosity to see what the actual police were doing.
In uncertain circumstances with Mexicans, Martha never revealed that she knew Spanish. But that morning in fear she forgot herself and told the officers that she was alone and that her father had left for his field job and that she didn’t know when he would be back. She said she didn’t know what the word secuestro meant, though she did, and then, fumbling wildly, she told them that they had come to the wrong apartment because there was no Aron Zacharias here. One of them dutifully read the arrest order again and a look of flushed panic spread across Martha’s face. She began speaking in rapid, guttural Low German and tried to shut the door but the biggest cop stuck his shoe almost casually against the jamb. Martha backed away from the door and began to weep with her mouth closed as they filed one by one into the sparse little room, which contained a sink, a two-burner stovetop in one corner, a rollaway bed folded in two, an aluminum lawn chair, and a small chest of drawers, atop which sat a small black-and-white television with a hoop antenna. The youngest of the three cops, who was rail thin and looked no older than sixteen or seventeen, whispered to his superior: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen an albino in person.” The older cop opened the bathroom door cautiously and peered inside. “She’s not albino, pendejo, she’s menonita.” The three began awkwardly gathering the clothes and the few other things that seemed to be the girl’s—a purple plastic hand mirror, a faded crocheted blanket, an unclothed rag doll of indeterminate gender that Martha had become ashamed to be seen with but could not bring herself to leave behind—and put it all into a clear plastic bag they had brought with them. Martha squatted down on her bare heels near the door and began to wail openly, a keening that sounded more terrible because of the way she tried unsuccessfully to keep it under control.
She reverted to speaking to the men in Spanish again, insisting that they had come to the wrong address.
“Nobody’s done anything wrong here,” she said. “We are Mennonite. We follow our own laws, higher laws, not your laws.” The men, who were used to conducting their business in far worse circumstances, ignored her. She stood up and started to yell now. “If my papa comes back and I’m not here, he won’t know what to do! He’ll go out of his mind!”
The senior-most-looking officer, who had a large paunch and mustaches like two old gray mops, paused in his efforts to stuff Martha’s possessions into the bag and told her with an unusual degree of kindness in his voice: “Niña, don’t worry, he’s not ever coming back here again.” To get her into the car, he and the others had to carry her by the arms down the narrow metal staircase in front of the apartment house, as old women and children and a handful of teenaged boys emerged down the landing to see the cause of the noise.
The children stared and the women shook their heads and crossed themselves. When the officers were far enough away from the building one of the teenaged boys yelled out, “Pinches oinkers! Why don’t you go find some girls your own age? Comemierdas!” Then he laughed a high-pitched whinny and the other boys threw punches at him and everyone shuffled back inside as the police car pulled away.
Martha was taken to the police station, then to a small municipal clinic where two stout, stolid nurses had to hold her down to force her to undergo the examination they needed to give her. She was registered into a Catholic home for orphaned girls in downtown Juárez, where she refused to speak and barely ate or slept for two weeks. Numerous attempts during that time to contact her mother through the colonia met with no success until word finally came from an elder of the campo that her family had given permission for her to be handed over to an aunt, a woman named Johanna Bonner, in Texas, who had agreed to pick her up at the border bridge. Martha remembered seeing Johanna only once, an occasion when her aunt had passed through the campo on her way to Cuauhtémoc and a great effort had been made to keep the children from her, which transformed her visit into a momentous event talked about for years afterward by those who were young at the time.
Anyone listening to accounts of that visit would have thought Johanna had murdered her husband and children or left the church for a life of prostitution. But her only offense had been to flee a hard life and a loveless marriage at sixteen to head north to the United States, to a settlement of more progressive Mennonites who had also left the strictures of Mexico and bought several sections of cotton land around Seminole, Texas. She began to go by JoAnne instead of Johanna. A few years later she married again, a Southern Baptist minister, and settled down to a respectable, reasonably happy life as an itinerant small-town preacher’s wife. She hadn’t heard from anyone in her family in more than two years, and it had been even longer since she and Anna, her sister closest in age, had spoken. When her uncle Cornelius asked her to take in Martha, Johanna told him that she barely remembered the girl but she didn’t object or ask for an explanation that she knew would not have been forthcoming. He conveyed the basic facts of Martha’s lif
e since she had been taken from the campo and said simply that Anna had asked him personally to make the request, which he did with great misgivings. Johanna and her husband prayed for guidance together that night kneeling in their bedroom, but there was never a serious question of a choice.
Johanna drove to El Paso by herself before sunup one Saturday morning, smoking the whole way. She had had her hair done and she wore a teal-colored pantsuit she had picked out in advance. She told her husband that it scared her to think about being in Mexico again, even if only just over the threshold, and that she wanted to look as little as possible like the woman she had been when she lived there. She drove past the U.S. Customs checkpoint and across the Good Neighbor International Bridge down to a narrow parking lot alongside the anchorage of the crossing, a newly built bridge into her old country, still gleaming and festooned with bright American and Mexican flags. She saw the girl standing outside the aduana with two federales, one of whom held a small canvas bag with her things. The officers looked Johanna over boldly and appreciatively as she got out of the car and started to walk toward them. She threw the half-gone cigarette she was smoking onto the asphalt and tried to put it out with the toe of her high heel but it kept smoking behind her as she covered the length of the parking lot toward her niece. The federales didn’t ask her to produce any identification or sign any documents but they seemed to be under some kind of specific orders to accompany Martha all the way to Johanna’s station wagon with their hands on her narrow shoulders and watch her safely into the passenger seat. If Martha had leapt from the car and bolted just after they passed the boundary of the parking lot, the men probably would have just stood there and watched her disappear into the salt cedar along the river. They handed Johanna a newly issued forest-green Mexican passport in Martha’s name. She thanked them in Spanish and asked the one who seemed to be in charge if there was anything she needed to know, besides the facts she had already been given.
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