Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  “I want you to take me to El Paso right now.”

  Troy maintained his position near the car as if it was a thing that had been established in negotiation. Harlan advanced a few steps, turning his head to listen.

  “Like I said, now, we’re not headed to El Paso, so we can’t take you there. Maybe your papa can come here and pick you up.”

  “My papa can’t come pick me up.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at him for a second. “Because he can’t go anywhere. They have locked him up in El Paso. Over on the other side. In Juárez.”

  Troy received this information without being able to fit it anywhere into his conception of the girl in front of him.

  “Will you tell me your name now, so we can talk?”

  She paused, seeming to gather her thoughts. “I don’t have anything to talk to you about,” she said. Her voice was growing shriller now. “I know your name and that’s enough. You take me to El Paso and I’ll never tell your name to a soul, nor his over there, I swear it on a Bible. But if you leave me here, I’m going to tell the police everything. I’m going to tell them that you hurt me, that you touched me in the nighttime where you’re not supposed to touch a girl. And they’re going to track both of you rotten pendejos down and lock you up for the rest of your born days. So you better start driving. Or else you better kill me and get it over with.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Harlan, who had been lured almost back to the car.

  Troy put his open hands out in front of him. “Hey now, nobody’s gonna kill anybody here.”

  He could hear the playacting in the girl’s voice, the way she managed to say everything she said because it wasn’t really her saying it—it was some tough girl she’d seen on television. But it didn’t make much difference because she meant what she said and she wasn’t getting out of the car.

  Troy approached gradually, bending in humility, addressing her through the glass. “We need to get you back to your family, to your aunt. She can take you to your papa. We can’t be traipsing around the countryside with a little girl that doesn’t belong to us.”

  “I’m not going back to Tahoka.”

  Troy ventured a couple more exploratory steps.

  “Well, then, we need to figure out a way to make a deal here because we’re not going to El Paso. We can’t take you anywhere. If you’d just open the door and maybe let—”

  Whatever words came next were smothered under a blanket of sound so immense it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, except that Troy had seen the girl’s hands move. The station wagon’s horn bawled from beneath the hood, at first with a sour, bovine uncertainty but then with gale force that split the morning. Hearing it, Harlan turned and began walking down the road, as if the sound signaled the end, definitively, of everything that had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours. Troy backed away with his hands above his head in surrender.

  The blast lasted several seconds before dying out in a train of echoes. The girl faced the wheel, slumped into it, staring at the center with both hands joined there at chest level. Then she bent in again and the sound reexploded, flushing a covey of bobwhite quail from a mesquite patch on the far side of the road, the drone masking the flutter of their wings.

  The sound was so deafening Troy felt it as a physical assault. He ran up to the driver’s-side door and pounded on it frantically. “Okay, okay, okay! Goddamn it! Let up! Ease up!”

  Through the window he saw the girl’s hands rise but remain poised together, one atop the other. It took him a second to realize that the sound had stopped and he could be heard.

  “That’s enough! There’s no need for any more of that! You want to go to El Paso? We’ll take you wherever the hell you say. We’ll take you clear to Hong Kong if that’s where you want to go.”

  The girl didn’t look at him but withdrew her hands and used one to clear her stringy hair from her face before letting both sink slowly into her lap. She looked strangely formal, like someone posing for a picture. Troy’s face was pressed nearly up against the glass now and his breath made coins of fog that evaporated and replaced each other rapidly in the dryness.

  He stared in, not knowing what would happen next. And then, with his eyes locked on hers, without thinking about what he was doing, he punched the key still in his hand into the keyhole and reached for the handle and yanked the driver’s door open as hard as he could, pulling the girl, who had grabbed for her own side too late, half out of the car with it. He reached down where she dangled from the handle over the road and grasped her bony upper arm and wrenched her from the car onto her feet, standing her straight upright on the hard dirt. And then with the momentum generated by this action he swung neatly around into her place and plunked himself into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind him and locked it with the other hand.

  After everything that had come before, this rapid exchange of positions ended up appearing oddly nonviolent, practically prearranged, a do-si-do during which the stunned girl made no sound and ended up standing awkwardly beside the car facing Harlan, seeming utterly at a loss about what to do next—except that she made no move to run.

  When she heard the engine jump to life behind her she startled and scooted several steps from the car and turned to look at Troy, who had put the wagon quickly down into drive to try to free its back wheels from the bar ditch. The engine heaved and the tires seemed to grip and the car’s enormous back end rose a foot and a half off the road. But it was only a bluff; the dirt under the wheels crumbled and the tires sank back into the breach and spun free, kicking up a plume of red dust like a rooster tail. Troy gunned it and dropped the motor into a lower gear, but the engine only screamed and the tires spun faster, shimmying, going nowhere.

  The dust cloud drifted toward the lake, casting a shadow beneath it. Troy rolled down the window a few more inches and yelled at Harlan, thirty feet up the road behind the girl, the two of them staring dumbly together toward him:

  “Go find something to help me! Grab a goddamned piece of wood, a fence post. See if you can lever us out.”

  But Harlan didn’t take a step from where he stood. Troy gunned the wagon again and finally let off and the engine idled down.

  Shaking his head exaggeratedly to make the gesture visible, Harlan yelled back, cupping his hands to his mouth:

  “I ain’t gonna. I ain’t leaving a little girl out here in a field like this, Troy. Let her back in the car. Or I ain’t coming back, either.”

  Planted where she was next to the car, the girl almost blocked Troy’s view of Harlan and Troy felt as if he was talking to her.

  “We can’t have her in here, Harlan,” Troy yelled. “It’s bad enough as it is.”

  “Well we’re gonna take her somewhere. We ain’t leaving her. Least I’m not.”

  Troy’s heart pounded now. He was so furious he felt as if he couldn’t see, and a vision suddenly came to him of everything that was happening, except observed from high above, from a helicopter, soundless but distinct: two grown men and a ghost-pale girl against an eternity of scrubland by a gyp water lake, going through the movements of an obscure ritual or fit of madness whose object seemed to be an immense immobilized vehicle. And from further out, on every road within a two-hundred-mile radius, other vehicles, too numerous to count, hurtling toward them, converging on the spot where they stood. The absurdity of it rained down around him. He thought about getting out of the car and just walking away, but he knew he no longer had the ability to disappear like that, the way he once had. He thought about climbing on top of the station wagon and stretching out spread-eagle in the sun, closing his eyes and sleeping for a whole month, not letting anybody wake him, not even the police, because he knew it was all over now. It had been over since he decided to come back home, but he never imagined it ending like this, in complete idiocy. He felt bad that Harlan was going to get caught up in it, especially with a child involved, but that’s just the way things happened—Harlan had no
record; he probably wouldn’t end up doing much jail time.

  Troy looked at the girl, who hadn’t moved but seemed to be crying silently now, her impassive face glinting in the sun. Harlan stood where he was, holding his ground. The sun behind him made him into a silhouette and obscured his face beneath his hat. Troy killed the engine and sat for a long time looking out toward the two of them through the dusty glass. The sound of a passing semi rose and swelled and died away and he thought about the nearness of the paved road.

  He unlocked all the locks and opened his door, the bottom of which scraped against the caliche. He walked back to the bumper to see how hopelessly mired the wheels were in the ditch and then he stared at the girl. Though it was difficult to tell, she didn’t appear frightened or angry, just wholly forsaken, as if she had nowhere else to go.

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  There was no answer.

  “We’re not taking you to El Paso.”

  She looked somewhere over his shoulder.

  “We’ll drop you close to the nearest bus depot and give you fare and you can go wherever you want to go from there. It’s the best deal you’re going to get. And if you want it, you better make up your mind because our problems just became yours. If we sit out here yanking each other’s chains, you’re going to end up in somebody’s custody like we are. No El Paso, no nowhere.”

  The girl didn’t acknowledge she had heard what he said but she walked rapidly back to the station wagon and opened the passenger door and got in and pulled it shut hard behind her and reached and pushed down the locks on both back doors. She leaned over the front seat between the headrests and retrieved the large canvas coat lying in the footwell and with it in tow she pushed herself over the backseat, returning to the place where she had somehow made herself incorporeal for so long, listening to every word they had said. She didn’t lie down this time but took up a seated position facing forward, legs crossed Indian-style, and took the coat and pulled it over her shoulders and didn’t move again.

  Troy waited a minute, watching her, then went to the driver’s-side door and opened it slowly and sat sideways on the seat and restarted the engine, listening more closely this time to discern whether it was functional. The girl stared through him toward the windshield. She addressed him calmly, flatly: “Leave both of the back doors locked. You can throw your stuff in over the front seat. If you unlock either of the back doors I’ll scream. If you try to touch me I’ll scream and I will bite you.”

  Troy stood up and put his fingers to his lips and whistled over the sound of the motor. Harlan looked at him without moving, but Troy knew he would come back to the car.

  With a piece of cedar post wedged under the back tires it took ten minutes to get the wagon up from its rut, mostly because of the extra weight of the girl, who sat firmly in her place in the back, watching them. After Troy and Harlan had both settled themselves inside, she leapt suddenly over the backseat toward them and wrestled the left passenger door open. For a second it seemed as if she had changed her mind and decided to bolt, but she sprawled over the backseat with her body stretched out and choked and vomited onto the road, somehow managing to get none of it on the car. When she finished, she closed the door and pulled herself back over the seat and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of the coat and resumed her previous position.

  Under way again down the dirt road, the car made a ragged, disturbing sound behind the dashboard, like the clattering of an old film projector out of sync. To their right the sun was already well clear of the horizon. Troy looked down at his wrist and realized he had lost his watch during everything. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the hard set of the girl’s face.

  “Once we get to the main road, you get yourself down, out of sight, like you were when you got us into this. Understand?”

  Harlan turned around to get a good look at the girl for the first time, but she had already sunk behind the seat. He thought about whether Troy was thinking of pulling over and throwing her out before they reached the paved road, and what he would do if he did. But Troy just laid on the gas and the dust whorled behind them in two vortexes and when they reached the Y of the farm-to-market road the wheels hauled left, heaving the car sideways onto the blacktop, due west. The girl’s head rose up slightly to see the two lanes of pavement, empty in both directions.

  SIX

  The longer Aron stayed in the hole the further back into the past his memory ranged. He started to retrieve powerfully vivid images of riding in a dark train car, in the middle of the night, swaying and rocking, trying desperately to stay awake because he didn’t want to miss any of what was happening to him. It was the first time he had ridden in a train; it was the first time he had ever even seen one, inside or out, and his mind couldn’t encompass it. He was ten, maybe eleven. His father, also named Aron, his two younger brothers, and his two sisters, one older, one younger, were in the car with him, crowded up against each other on the seats and the floor. The baby, Naomi, not yet two, dozed on their mother’s lap. She had been holding a rattle made from a tobacco can with peanut shells sealed inside but she had let it drop to the floor and it rolled around among tangled arms and legs as the train rocked back and forth. The porter in St. Paul had allowed them to crowd into the tiny roomette sleeper as a family because he knew by sight who they were and what they were doing—heading back to Manitoba, like many Mennonites from Mexico he had seen in those years. The train was half empty anyway so it wouldn’t matter. The family looked like the rest had—like mourners, dressed head to toe in black except for the little girls, whose head kerchiefs were embroidered with small blue and yellow flowers.

  Aron was against the fold-down bed, near the window, and he could see by the moonlight that the land was becoming flat again, like West Texas and the Chihuahua grassland. On the train platforms he made out in English some of the funny names of the towns they passed through—Carlos, Winger, Plummer, Thief River Falls. They had not been able to take much when they left the campo; everything Aron thought of as his own occupied a third of a cardboard suitcase with his brothers’ things.

  Before the sun rose they came to Noyes, the last American city before Emerson on the Manitoba side, and Aron’s father told them to wait in the train while he took care of the papers. But after he left, the porter told them they couldn’t stay in the train and so his mother, crying softly now, dragged the suitcases and trunk with the help of the boys into the station, a small wood-paneled waiting room with benches built in along the walls. Aron’s father stood with his hat held respectfully over his chest, talking to the ticket taker. The man had come out of the little booth into the open doorway, looking around as if he needed help. When the man saw Aron’s mother and the rest of the family pulling their possessions into the station he looked down at the floor and shook his head and started talking to Aron’s father again, more slowly. But he spoke English and couldn’t understand much said to him in Spanish, nothing in Low German. After a while the man went back inside the office and Aron’s father came and stood next to his mother and told her that it was going to take time; this is what happened at borders and it was too early in the morning. But when the sun came up two other men arrived, wearing uniforms a different color from that of the ticket man, who emerged from his office again and stood alongside the others, looking gravely at Aron’s father; one of the new men spoke Spanish and Aron overheard him telling his father that as far as he could determine he and Aron’s mother were not Canadian citizens; they were Mexicans. And the children were certainly Mexican, having been born there.

  “But I was born here, in this land!” Aron’s father said in Spanish, trying to keep his voice under control. “Mrs. Zacharias was born here. We are citizens of the Dominion. We are Manitobans.”

  “You’re not in Manitoba, sir,” one of the new men said. “You’re on this side of the line, and we can’t let everyone come back just because they say they belong and want to. We have laws to follow. We can’t do anything about the laws.”
>
  The men took a shoebox full of the family’s papers and told Aron’s father to come with them. After a few hours, three women from a local church arrived with a pot of chili and hard rolls for the family. But right behind them came two men who looked like police officers, indicating with their hands to Aron’s mother that they needed to take the luggage. They carried the suitcases and the trunk out to the platform and opened them and spread everything—clothes, blankets, tools, kitchen utensils, keepsakes, undergarments—out on the paving stones. They tied white cloths like doctor’s masks around their faces and using a silver canister with a brown rubber hose they sprayed all the family’s possessions against hoof-and-mouth disease as Aron and the other children watched transfixed through the station window, their mouths full of bread.

  “Schau! Regenbogen!” Aron said to his brothers and sisters, and a rainbow did hover momentarily over the white mist that emerged from the hose and spread over the platform. It looked like a beautiful earthbound cloud but it stank like kerosene. The women from the church seemed embarrassed and said nothing to Aron’s mother, who sat rocking the baby, staring dead-eyed at the windowless wall on the other side of the station.

  By nightfall, the family was aboard another train, their tickets paid back through St. Paul, their luggage separated from them in a freight car, fumigated for no reason. Aron had no recollection of passing through Minnesota again or how they got from there the rest of the way back to Chihuahua, and years later the whole journey came back to him less like a memory than like a dream, punctuated with flashes of strange passing landscape, sudden waking, fear, and hunger.

  Once they got back to the campo nothing seemed to change; he didn’t remember anyone even welcoming them back, only people acting as if they had never tried to leave. That summer was as dry and hot as the one before and they all worked just as hard on the land and the only difference was that the new house where they lived was smaller and more flies got in through the window screens.