Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  Harlan snorted and began to pick at his breakfast with a plastic fork. “You’re full of shit. You hold the world record for being full of shit. Next time don’t get me no eggs.”

  In the backseat Martha had already finished eating her burrito with her hands and put the container on the floorboard and stretched out on the wide seat with her ponytail hanging over the edge. The rain sounded heavier, like sleet, and the windshield wipers labored against it. The car passed a cluster of white wooden crosses where an accident had happened along a sharp curve, and then several miles later a couple of far more elaborate memorials, the kind often seen in Mexico, built like ornate birdhouses from painted wood and plastic glass, filled with crosses and rosaries and sometimes laminated photographs of the dead. In Texas the highway department didn’t allow such big markers, but these probably remained because so little traffic passed along this road; nobody official had bothered to clear them away.

  Through the veil of rain Martha saw the thin serpentine branches of ocotillo coiling up into the air alongside the road, another sign of the border and the nearness of Chihuahua. The narrow, intermittently paved road, Farm-to-Market 170, was known as the River Road and it ran through half of Big Bend National Park, meaning that almost no one lived along it. Troy had driven it years before, and it looked exactly as he remembered it, a road that seemed not to have been plotted and cleared but etched over thousands of years by the passage of animals and people following the course of the water. On a curve along a low crest the river suddenly became visible beneath them for a few seconds, a narrow slab of gray flanked by a ragged oxbow lake. The land on the other side was almost too obscured by mist to perceive and looked more like a continuity of water than the terrain of another country.

  Between Lajitas and Presidio they passed only one other vehicle, a huge white RV with an elderly couple up front, both wearing the same kind of transparent green golf visors. The man and the woman, perched in their seats fifteen feet above the road, waved down enthusiastically, as if from a different reality, where it was a nicer day and the bleak landscape through which they were all passing in the rain looked far different. Martha instinctively returned the wave before remembering that she shouldn’t and withdrew her hand.

  They came into Presidio in the early afternoon, past a billboard bearing a faded image of a mustachioed cowboy riding a bronco out of the middle of what seemed to be the sun, except that the core of the sun was jet black and ringed with a lariat. Around the circle of the sun and the lariat were written the words: WELCOME TO THE REAL FRONTIER. PRESIDIO, TEX. EST. 1683.

  “Is it true that it’s that old—older than the United States?” Martha asked.

  Troy turned and shot a look out of the corner of his eye. “You need to get down out of sight now. We’re nearly into town.”

  She sunk into the footwell, which felt as big as a bathtub, and could hear Harlan’s voice:

  “It wasn’t called Presidio back when it was founded. It was a mission then, with some long Spanish name, something to do with a burning cross, some miracle some Indian saw one night, if I remember. The U.S. of A. was still a long time in coming. Back then, this whole country was a frontier. You could call any of it anything you wanted as long as you had more guns than the next cowhand that came along.”

  Troy slowed the car when the road began to look more like a street, running past tangled telephone-wire junctions and trailer houses and a John Deere outlet that should have been surrounded by pickups on a Monday afternoon but was dark. When signs began to appear at the intersections he rolled his window down and up again to clear the water and tried to read the street names. Before they had arrived anywhere that seemed like a proper town, he turned right onto an unpaved road and took it to its end, past tiny adobe-walled houses with corrugated metal roofs and chain-link fences. Thin trees straggled between them, with leaves twirling off like little dying helicopters. Troy crawled past a few houses before stopping in front of one that looked much like the rest. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper and looked at it.

  “What’re we stopping here for?” Harlan asked, trying to see the house outside the car through the scrim of water running down his window. “Who lives here?”

  Troy sat silently with the engine running, looking at the house and the houses around it and the few cars parked close to them. “Don’t do anything, I’ll be back in a second,” he said, and he wrestled his arms out of his jacket and pulled it over his head before opening the door and trotting to the mailbox at the edge of the driveway alongside the house. Nearby, a dog set up a culpatory howl. Troy stood by the mailbox for a moment and waited, then opened it and pulled out all the mail and jogged back to the car. With water running off him onto the seats he shut the door and shuffled through the dozen or so envelopes in his hands, looking closely at the handwritten names and the typed ones behind the cellophane windows. Then he opened the door again and dropped all the letters into the mud and put the Plymouth into drive and pulled away.

  Harlan turned his body on the seat to face Troy directly.

  “Is that where she lives?”

  Troy glanced several times into the rearview mirror before turning onto another dirt road and settling back into his seat, wiping the water from his face with his sleeve.

  “Does she live there, Troy? Who told you to look there?”

  “Somebody who knew her.”

  “Did she come here after me or was this where she lived before?”

  “I don’t know any of that.”

  Harlan leaned closer. “Did you ever talk to her? Did she talk to you?”

  Troy lifted his foot off the gas and let the car coast along a row of houses facing a barbed wire fence, along which three coyote carcasses were strung to the top wire, hanging like old fur coats.

  “No, Harlan. I don’t even know her. You’re the one who knew her. She was your wife.”

  “You seem to know people who know things about her I never did.”

  “Well I guess they didn’t know anything, did they? Or she’s not getting mail under her name. But I highly doubt that. I don’t think she’s there. She probably never was.”

  Harlan turned to look over his shoulder, back toward the street they had left, wanting to see now what the houses looked like.

  The car began moving again, sluggishly in the mud, swimming from one side of the road to the other. The rain picked up and the wipers made a hard, muffled sound like a bass drum playing outside.

  From the backseat came Martha’s voice again:

  “We’re here in town now. Can you please take me to the bus station and let me off? Thank you very much for the ride.”

  Troy turned onto a paved street and the car felt solid beneath them again.

  “First we’re going to the bridge to see if there’s a line. I don’t want to get stuck on this side of the river with you around to be seen. Just stay down and we’ll all say our goodbyes before you know it.”

  He continued driving west for several blocks toward the milky sun, which seemed to be at least halfway down the sky. For a city as old as Presidio, it was remarkable how undeveloped the city blocks still seemed, half-formed, with more dirt roads than paved, houses scattered off the roads at odd angles. Lots were filled with old cars and leaning telephone poles with wires loping low to the ground, like a tethering system designed to keep everything from drifting into the river. The frontier drive that had pushed westward toward every inch of American border seemed to have lost its way here, or never arrived.

  Troy turned south onto Highway 67, a broad, well-paved road, the only one in the city that felt like a stretch of government pavement, bordered with tall streetlights. Though palm trees weren’t seen in any quantity at this latitude, the highway, as it neared the international bridge, was lined at regular intervals with tall elegant Mexican palmettos. They seemed to have been planted there with United States transportation funds to usher drivers into a more exotic clime, except that when the road became M
exican Federal Highway 16 through the Chihuahuan desert a palm tree wasn’t seen again for hundreds of miles.

  The bridge, a two-lane wooden trestle from the thirties, was not the property of either government but belonged to a local businessman who occasionally made the newspaper because he had managed for years to prevent a federal bridge from being built upriver, leaving him the only private owner of an international crossing in Texas; his bridge was the sole means of passage into Mexico for six hundred miles between Laredo and El Paso.

  As Troy approached it, he could feel the nearness of the border almost physically, in his chest. The rain had let up but the soil, drought-hardened, struggled to take in so much water at once and the excess pooled in the ditches and ran downhill to the river. It had grown so cold outside that ice slicks began to form on the pavement and Troy slowed, looking for them. Only a few cars moved on the road as they got closer, and Troy hoped the rain would keep the crossing traffic at home. But when they rounded the final bend before the road descended to the river he saw a line of cars and trucks stretching for several hundred yards toward a place he could not see but assumed was the toll shack and the Border Patrol checkpoint.

  He drove closer but began to fear getting pinned into a lane, so he pulled the Plymouth over to the shoulder and flipped on the emergency flashers and told Martha to stay as far out of sight as she could. He got out and walked briskly along the side of the road toward the bridge, looking straight ahead, as if none of the vehicles he was passing were there. Harlan watched him until he could no longer make out his form in the water that thickened into the distance. Pickup trucks with beds full of Mexican men and families holding coats and tarpaulins over their heads inched by; the occupants stared out with eyes that looked stunned by what nature had allowed, a kind of cold never experienced this far south even in the depths of winter. When the people passed the pulled-over Plymouth they slowed and glared at Harlan inside it, as if he was the cause of the backup that had forced them into such misery.

  Next to where Troy had pulled the car, on a concrete expanse, a huge bronze statue of a man carrying a gavel in one hand and his hat in the other stood between two widely spaced palm trees. Looking up, Harlan didn’t recognize the figure, who had a big round face and a sullen glare, but he was able to make out the words on the plinth, which named the honoree as Anson Jones, the final president of the Republic of Texas before it dissolved in 1845, ending Jones’s dream of independent nationhood. The gilded words on the plinth said: “The Revered of Senates and the Light of Cabinets! The echo of his words lingers in the Councils of his Country, alone unheard by ears deaf to the claims of merit, dull to the voice of Honor, and dead to the calls of Justice. To them the sand; to Thee the Marble!” But then after such praise the eulogy ended strangely, concluding with no explanation: “Departed 9th of January, 1858, by his own hand. May he rest in Peace, Safe in the arms of the one Disposing Power, Or in the Natal or Mortal hour.”

  After several minutes, Martha’s voice, deep and hollow from her position down in the footwell, broke Harlan’s reverie.

  “Do you think he’ll come back? Maybe he’s just going to walk across.”

  Harlan turned to speak but remembered the audience passing outside the windows and looked ahead as if he was alone in the car.

  “He’ll come back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know how I know. Leaving’s about the only reliable thing Troy’s done his whole life. But this ain’t the way he’d do it.”

  The inside of the car seemed to shut out all sound from the world.

  “I’m cold,” Martha said finally.

  Harlan fiddled with the Plymouth’s heater controls and put his hands against the vents but felt no warmth coming out. The traffic alongside them had ground to a stop, but occasionally groups of slow-moving, hunched-down people passed on foot, passengers who had also gotten out of their vehicles to walk to the bridge and find out what was wrong.

  Moving through one of these groups in the opposite direction, threading his way through cars, Troy reappeared. He got in soaking wet, shivering, and put his hands under his armpits inside his suit jacket.

  “The rain’s got the river too high and the bridge is nearly swamped,” he said. “The goddamned thing’s made out of wood, like a bridge in some old Western movie. They’re afraid for it, with that much water pushing at it. They’re letting just a few cars over at a time. The rate they’re going we won’t get across before nightfall.” He looked through the watery windows at the people straggling along the road, more now, some carrying bags and boxes, hoping to be allowed to walk across if they couldn’t drive. “We can’t sit like this waiting with her in here.”

  He put the car in reverse and began backing up carefully along the shoulder past the long line of unmoving vehicles piled up behind them. At points people blocked the way and took their time stepping off the pavement to let them pass. A couple of kids slapped the side of the Plymouth and said things in Spanish that only Martha, balled up under her coat, could understand. When they finally came into the clear, Troy put it in drive and arced across the road into the opposite lanes, passing two brown sheriff’s cars that seemed to be headed in to handle the mounting crowd.

  He pulled into the nearest gas station, wondering how long it would be before the Plymouth was reported stolen. To appear normal, he asked for a fill-up and stood under the canopy as the attendant pumped, watching a pair of sparrows defy the cold to peck insects from the car’s grille. He went inside and asked the clerk for the location of the bus station.

  “There ain’t no bus station in this town,” the clerk, an elderly white man, said, looking Troy over closely, failing to place him. “There’s a place where the bus stops, if that’s what you mean. The afternoon bus to El Paso comes through about five-thirty if it’s running in this kind of weather.”

  “Where’s the stop?”

  “At the café.”

  “Where’s the café? Does it have a name?”

  “It don’t need no name. There’s only one. Head down O’Reilly that way to Erma, then left up to Bledsoe.”

  Troy found the place, designated as the bus stop by a small Greyhound sticker in the front window next to a Texas flag sticker and another of Our Lady of Guadalupe. By its colors, teal-blue trim with cream cinder-brick walls, the café seemed to be affiliated with a motel just across a service road, the Three Palms, with the same paint job and three feeble-looking palm trees growing near a sign depicting three palms in silhouette. Troy parked on the gravel stretch alongside the café and got out, glancing at the cars he could see in the motel parking lot. “Just stay in here for a minute, stay down,” he said as he shut his door. “I’m going in to figure out about the tickets.”

  Martha opened the back door and stepped out.

  “I’m getting out now,” she said. “I’m staying here.”

  She stood where she was, waiting for him to say something or grab her.

  He looked her over thoroughly for the first time, in her faded pinkish flower-print shirt, with her thin bare arms.

  “Put your coat on,” he said.

  She reached inside and got it and Harlan opened his door and got out, too.

  “I need a cup of coffee,” he said.

  Troy looked at Harlan and the girl, who both stared back at him.

  “Come on, Troy. For God’s sake. What’s the use of sitting out here now?”

  The interior of the café was bare-bones—no booths, only a few tables with clear plastic coverings and metal-legged turquoise chairs pushed beneath. The high horizontal windows were completely covered with short dusty curtains so that no light from outside entered and the fluorescent lighting was almost painfully bright. A woman stood behind the counter, a big Mexican-looking woman, and a solitary patron, an elderly Mexican-looking man wearing an old cowboy hat, sat slumped near her in a chair facing away from the tables, staring at a black-and-white television above the counter showing a football game with the soun
d off. Harlan and Martha stood near the door as Troy approached the woman and nodded cordially down at the man, who seemed not to be a customer but connected somehow to the establishment. Troy asked to buy a ticket for the bus.

  “No, sir,” the woman said. “You buy it on the bus from the driver. It’s cash only. It’s twelve dollars.”

  The man in the chair—who upon closer inspection looked profoundly old, his cheeks covered in rough gray stubble that someone probably shaved for him—laughed and Troy thought it had something to do with the ticket situation. But when he looked at him, he saw the man wasn’t paying any attention to him. He was staring at the silent football game and mouthing words at it, winking and chuckling at the screen. He turned his deeply wrinkled face up to Troy and looked into his eyes for an uncomfortably long time and then back at the television and pointed to it with an outstretched arm and nodded gravely, as if something was happening on the screen that Troy should know.

  Troy turned to the woman, who might have been the man’s daughter or granddaughter.

  “Is he trying to say something to me?”

  “No, no. He can’t talk.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine. We like to say he just got lost in thought one day and never found his way back out again.”

  She smiled in a way that suggested she delivered this line to all out-of-town customers, though there was also something about the café that made it seem as if this woman and old man were the only ones who ever passed through its doors. Troy looked down again and the man stared back at him with a baleful glare, the way old people who have lost their minds sometimes do, a face that said: You probably know who I am but I don’t anymore, and that’s not fair.

  Troy thanked her and glanced toward Harlan and Martha, who stood uncertainly near a table by the door. Troy went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him and looked at himself for a long time in the rust-pocked mirror. He had the acrid taste of fear in his mouth—it had been there for days—and he could feel his heartbeat surging behind his ears. But the face he saw in the mirror was that of a man who looked perfectly normal, absolutely calm and composed, the face of somebody else, the way it had looked his whole life but even more so today. He went to one of the urinals, a tall ornate old-fashioned model that seemed to be a relic from a prior establishment or a prior century. It resembled a marble sculpture, and while he peed into it he lowered his forehead slowly onto the broad top, which was cool and damp to the touch. Despite the cold outside it felt soothing against his skin, consoling, like a gift, the closest thing to a religious feeling he had had in years.