by Billy Kring
She bought enough paperback books and comic books to fill each sack to the three-quarters level, then she bought some twine with her last money and tied the sacks at the top. After that, she used the remaining twine to make straps so the sacks would rest on front and in back of her body when she stood and walked. It balanced the load, even though it was heavy.
When she arrived home hours after dark, Adan showed his panic and clutched at her, almost crying with worry. He had no one else in the world. She calmed him and had him help her remove the heavy sacks, then she showed him the treasures inside. Adan was elated. Books in English, books in Spanish, with some the same book in both languages so he could translate the harder words, and the comics were adventure, pure and simple. He read voraciously after that, and his mother encouraged him.
At night, she would tell him stories of his father and how they met and fell in love. As the months passed, they continued living as before, with occasional people coming by to pay his mother for natural remedies or to perform curing spells on loved ones.
One evening, when it was only the two of them, she gave Adan a photo that had been sealed inside plastic. “This photo was taken by your father, Vincent.”
He touched the photo, moving his fingers over it as if to feel his father’s presence. She said, “He was such a good man, mijo, my son, and you are much like him.”
“Where is this? You are standing by a big rock near a white church.”
“In a small village called La Linda. We were married there in the church, two years before this picture was taken.”
“Can we go there?”
“Not now. The town is abandoned, as is the church, and it is a dangerous place far from here.” She smiled, wistful. “Your father carved our initials in that rock by the church.”
“I would like to go sometime.”
“We shall see.” She touched his cheek.
Two weeks later, she told Adan they were going on a special trip. A friend showed up in a beat-up nineteen-fifty Chevrolet pickup and took the mother and son on a long, bumpy, dust choking twelve-hour ride through the mountains and along rocky, uneven roads to La Linda, and the church. The driver was in his sixties, an old friend of Adan’s father named Poli, and happy to drive them. “Your father,” Poli said, “Was much of a man. Honest, brave, and most of all, good inside,” He touched his chest, “In the Corazon. He helped many people out in this area. He loved it here, loved the solitude, he said, and the sky. I believe he would have built a home in a place such as this.”
“What happened to him?” Adan asked.
Poli glanced at Adan’s mother for any warning sign, but got a nod to go ahead, so he told it. “Vincent had come back here, to the church for something important. I drove him, along the very road we used to get here, and we talked as the road passed under our wheels. He said things would soon change in his own family, with his father and brother.”
“What was it?”
“He did not say. He asked me to leave him at the abandoned church for a while, and to drive into the ghost town to keep watch for any sicarios from the cartel. They were around very much at that time.” His eyes turned sad, but he did not cry.
Poli took a deep breath and continued, “I was gone maybe thirty minutes when I saw a dust trail coming from the east and straight for the church. I hurried back, but when I arrived, the vehicle had driven away, across the rough hills where I could not follow. Vincent was nowhere to be seen.” He stopped talking and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “I tried to follow, and kept the dust trail in sight for an hour, then it disappeared. I searched for the entire day, but that was the last I saw. I returned to tell your mother what happened. There was nothing else I could do.”
Adan felt sad, and his stomach felt funny, but he understood. “Thank you for telling me.” He thought a second and said, “Do you know what he was doing at the church?”
“I don’t. He was at the rear of it by the big rock.”
Adan nodded, and walked off to be by himself. Poli drove them home the next day after that, another long, bouncing, twelve-hour trip in the tough old pickup. In the following months Adan read daily, with his mother’s help on the more advanced books. He also noticed her weight loss and illness, which caused a growing fear in him. Losing her would be a terrible blow, and he prayed nightly that she would get better. She finally became so ill that even people needing remedies stopped coming by. No matter what happened during the day, she always told him of her father, the white mansion, and how the grandfather forced them apart and had his men force her back into Mexico to stay. They even bribed the immigration official at the port of entry so her crossing card was revoked. That crushed her spirits, but by then she was pregnant, she said, and all her love was for the beautiful son she bore some months later.
She always hugged him when she said it, and her eyes seemed soft and brown as a doe’s.
He remembered her last words.
Your father is a good man, but he didn’t know about you when they took him. If you can find him and tell him about me, he will welcome you. He lived in a white mansion far out on a ranch near Terlingua. It was his father who forbade us to marry. He sent men to take me away, back to Mexico, but they did not know I was with child, with you. It is justice for you to unite with your father.
Too tired to say any more, she drifted into a deep sleep and died before sunup the next morning. Adan dug the grave and buried her behind their one-room adobe home forty-five miles south of the Rio Bravo.
He remained in the home for almost a year, reading the books, eating the last of the stored beans and using a small sack of corn masa to make tortillas by patting the masa between his hands. Adan cooked them over an open fire of mesquite sticks that heated a flat sheet of tin that rested on stones placed at each corner of the fire. He also ate the few fresh garden items they grew.
Then the men of the Cartel moved into the area with their guns and drugs. He saw some of them more than once. A short, stocky man who was the leader that they called Flavio and a slender black man who was always with him. He heard the name John Factor, and always recognized him because of his black skin and the ever-present pistol with the long silencer he carried in his shoulder holster. They were the top ones. A few others showed at the same time, then more and more, and Adan left on foot one night, wearing huaraches that he made from an old tire and strips of leather cut from a discarded boot. One of the Raramuri, the mountain-dwelling Tarahumaras who ran such long distances had come through one day and showed him how. He wore what he had, the clothes on his back.
Adan reached the nondescript ranch house a mile south of the river, and the one where most smuggling was organized before groups crossed the water. He had no money, but the men and the hard-faced woman with eyes that glittered like black flint lived there, and told him he could work his fee off around the ranch. They said she could sell him when they moved him across the river, and far way into Colorado.
It was two AM when enough people showed up for the passage, everyone loaded into vehicles, with twenty in the first vehicle, a van. The van driver put the vehicle at the edge of the shallow water crossing on the river as violent thunderstorms cracked and rumbled over the mountains east of them. The van crossed the river, so crammed with people Adan was sure it would sink out of sight, but the sturdy vehicle crossed the gravel bar with only a little struggle.
The gringo and two Mexican men then opened the trunk of the green Ford, and the gringo covered the small light inside, using a cloth. He pulled out the bulb just as a wet, cold wind blew toward them from the river’s flow, the wind moving upriver and against the car, and all the while the lowering darkness showed a river rising very fast.
The lightning flash and immediate boom of thunder made Adan duck as the smugglers pushed and shoved and hit them to force the people in the trunk. One smuggler shot at an elderly man while he was in there, struggling to get out. Adan was so close that the muzzle flash lit everyone in stark relief.
Water
gurgled and hissed as the river rose, and the front wheels of the car were already several inches under water. When Adan moved too slow, the gringo picked him up bodily and tossed the young boy into the trunk. As the trunk began to close, Adan panicked and slid out as the lid closed down, catching his pinky finger by the tip and pinning him to the car.
Everything happened fast after that, and one of the Mexican smugglers jumped behind the wheel, gunning the car into the water, trying to get across as the filthy, debris-filled flood swept down the river. The water’s front edge seemed so filled with tiny, floating bits of wet debris that it resembled a monstrous, undulating black eel reaching from bank to bank.
Adan jerked and struggled to pull his finger loose from the trunk, but it wasn’t until the water swept the Ford into the current and it banged hard against several boulders that he felt his trapped finger rip apart at the joint. Pain so sharp and severe, he opened his mouth in a silent scream, but his panic ran fast, and the adrenaline numbed the finger enough that he flopped through the water and clambered up the far bank in time to watch the car float around the bend of the river amid a roar and hiss of water and trees, of dead cattle and fence posts with the wire still attached wrapped around one of them. He watched in fright as thick brush piles tumbled downstream in an alien river the color and thickness of chocolate milk. A last muffled scream escaped from the car as it floated and bounced downriver.
He trailed a dripping red line from his stump that he noticed when lightning flashed. Finding a location on the bank, he sat and gave attention to the throbbing wound producing a pain that felt larger than his hand. He wiped his eyes and whimpered when he first touched the mangled stub, but there was no one to help him, and he knew it.
Knowing the gringo couldn’t see him in the dark, Adan moved up the bank, freezing when lightning flashed. At the top, several clumps of prickly pear cactus grew by the edge of a small ravine, and he used a sharp-edged rock to cut one flat, green pad from the plant and scrape off the needles and waxy skin, leaving the slick, moist inside glistening every time the sky lit the desert like a strobe.
Scraping the inside into a mushy, tablespoon-sized mound, he put the injured finger’s stump into it and felt an immediate coolness and lessening of pain, enough that his eyes stopped watering. He left it there while he thought about what to do. His shirt was still wet and had several torn parts along the lower edges, so Adan ripped one of them off, giving him a remnant almost a foot long. He used the cactus pulp as a poultice and wrapped the cloth around it, leaving extra folds over the tip for padding. It helped.
He wandered in the dark and wetness until a half-collapsed goat shed showed above the short guajillo and creosote bushes. Adan crawled under it, almost collapsing from exhaustion and shivering from the cold and damp. The space, maybe fifteen feet by ten feet, was dry under the low tin roof. It smelled strongly of goats and sheep, and the ground and old hay on it were covered with animal droppings. Adan went to the driest area under the one still intact roof corner and curled up in a ball, until he faded into unconsciousness despite the storm and wind-driven rain peppering the rusted aluminum roof like a small machine gun. Even when the rain turned to pellets of sleet and rang the roof like a metal drum, he didn’t stir, his injured hand cradled to his stomach for protection. Staying in the shed for three days became necessary because of the fever and chills that overtook him. He drank water from a small watering trough beside the shelter, but had no hunger. At the end of the second day, at an hour before dawn, his fever broke in a light sweat that covered his face and body under his clothes. At sundown of the third day, he left the shelter and hunted for something to eat. Grasshoppers were easy to catch, and he made a meager meal of them, tossing the insects into an old, rusted can and placing it on the fire he built from several dead mesquites. The coals made a hot fire, and the insects died fast and crisped to something like overcooked potato chips, but they did not taste bad.
Scratchy yes, but not a bad flavor.
That day he walked to the edge of Terlingua but didn’t show himself. Adan remained hidden until dark. He saw several trash cans around, and made for them when it was so late, people stopped moving on the streets. A few of the cans had leftover food in them, some half-eaten meals on paper plates, but not a lot of it. He found a discarded coca cola bottle and filled it from a water faucet beside a building, and took it back to his hiding place outside of town.
He didn’t go far over the next several days, but remained in his place near the town. Luckily it didn’t rain again so he remained dry, and when he found the serape, he could keep warm. Several Border patrol vehicles passed on the roads, but he wasn’t spotted, and once a pickup truck with a large star like a badge on the doors stopped and checked the draw he was in, but didn’t come far enough down it to find him.
His finger felt better after that, still achingly tender but not like it was infected. Adan decided it was time to hunt for his father. He began by picking a direction and walking that way until midafternoon. He didn’t want to walk back after dark, at least not then, with no moonlight. When he didn’t see the big white house, he came back to his place and either ate what he’d saved from the day before, or he went into the trash again. Every day he picked a slightly different direction and went out again. For months.
He saw many houses, most of which were small and nondescript, with others nothing more than mobile homes on blocks, and a number of those in poor condition. But there were a few nice ones, and among them were two very large and grand ones, but none of them were white. One adobe was huge, with tan walls and the tips of peach trees peeking above the bordering wall. He looked at it from a low hill a quarter mile distant, and saw the place was busy with people and a few animals. Livestock was in the fenced pasture, mostly cattle, but a few horses as well.
Adan felt frustrated, but continued going out every day, walking mile after mile, searching for the fabled white mansion of his father, only to return tired, dusty, thirsty, and hungry. Most days he had food, but not every day. Water, he had because of the coke bottle and town faucet.
When he walked in another direction one day and chanced upon the golf course at Lajitas, his luck changed a bit. A man gave him money to buy golf tees in the shop for him, and when he brought them back to the golfer, the man gave him five dollars as a tip. After that, he went to the course several days a week, sometimes getting to make a little money, sometimes getting only hard stares from some of the people there.
Always, always he continued to hunt for the father he never met, this Vincent, the man who his mother said was kind and good and would take care of him and all his needs. Adan began to think she told him lies about this man because of her illness and because she didn’t want him to worry. He couldn’t find any mention of Vincent Hart except for the single time he overheard the name Hart, said by a man at the golf course when he added, “That damn Mike Hart is worthless.”
The Hispanic man beside the golfer said, “All he does is drink and chase women. Mike would screw a wood pile if he thought there was a snake in it, and he lives to spend his daddy’s money. Never had a job in his life. No valé nada.”
“When his brother was around, Mike was better.”
Was it his father they mentioned? Adan sat straighter.
When they noticed Adan listening to their conversation, they stopped talking and drove to the next hole in their white golf cart. Another young Hispanic boy about Adan’s age sat near the putting green watching all this.
He said, “What you want to know about that rich guy for?”
Adan looked at him, “Who are you, that you know so much?”
The boy chuckled, “The one whose dad worked for the Harts once, that’s who. Now, what you want to know?”
“What’s your name? Let’s start with that.”
At that moment, a Border Patrol sedan drove down the highway and Adan moved so he couldn’t be seen by the vehicle’s occupants. When he looked for the other boy, he had disappeared. When the sedan cont
inued until it was out of sight, the boy stepped from behind an oleander.
He said, “My name’s Dario, what’s yours?”
“Adan. I saw you hide when the Patrulla drove by.”
“Just like you, except you were smoother. Been doing that long?”
“Long enough.”
“So, what is this interest you have in the ricos?” He indicated a general northeast direction with a backwards movement of his head.
“You know of it? The great house and ranch?”
“I’ve been close enough to see it, but I know a little about the Harts.”
Adan took a seat on the grass beside him, “Tell me.”
Dario told him what he knew.
“The original Hart in this country came from Ireland, County Cork, during the great Irish famine. He joined John Glanton when the scalphunter and murderer began raids into Mexico to kill entire families of the long haired campesino farmers and peaceful Indians, not judging between them and the fierce ones, because the Mexican government paid a nice bounty for Apache scalps, and they didn’t check to the validity of where the scalp came from. Men, women, children, the Mexican authorities paid for them all.”
Dario shifted his seat and continued, “When the Mexicans figured out where all the scalps came from, they stopped paying, and tried to get the murderer Glanton in their sights, but he died before they had a chance to do it. So, Hart had to find other work, and that was hard to find in those days. They recently rebuilt Glanton’s home downriver from Presidio. It is called Fort Leaton now. I have never been there myself, but you can see it easily enough from the border.”