“It is the right expression, this one, yes—the end of his tether?” she asked.
Ethan nodded. “Yeah. It’s right on the money.”
SO GABRIEL BUILT THEM—Mirabelle, and by default Yolanda—a hovel of cratewood and galvanize down below the boathouse on the soft bank of the river. They lived there together through the heat of summer and the floods of autumn. Mirabelle woke every night, and every night Yolanda woke with her and held her and told her stories of the island where she was conceived and of their mother, Marietta, a woman Mirabelle had never known. Yolanda held her and told her how their mother met their father, how he once brought back a barrel of fifteen octopi from the reefs and filled their bed with them. She told her how their mother laughed, laughed a way Yolanda did not ever laugh, and screamed and chased him around the house swinging a still-squirming octopus like a weapon. They spent nights that passed like that into years: Yolanda returning home from the cane and waking when Mirabelle woke and telling her stories and rocking her through the winds and weird cries off the river.
And then Gabriel, who was nothing like their father, except that he walked as their father had and wore his beard as their father had, disappeared. In this way too he was like Camillo. One day he woke before the others and set out in the fleeing hours when the horizon wavered with the reflection of light on the other side of the mountains, light that had not yet risen but would rise soon. He set out in the hours where the dark clouds cracked like a black pot breaking into white ceramic shards, the same hours when Mirabelle was born and Marietta had died, in those hours of light announcing light, Gabriel, their father’s brother, stepped out into the world, walked away from the river, toward the fields, and was gone.
Just the three of them remained: Yolanda and Mirabelle and Jose, fending for themselves in de Caña. Yolanda said it again: “My sister is different, she could not work the cane or the river, she did not have the constitution for it,” and Ethan saw a child out of a Victorian novel, a frail, willowy thing taking walks in the country with her governess, coughing into a bloodstained handkerchief, coughing and gagging as his hands held her hair back and the bottle of cough syrup clattered into the bathroom sink.
Yolanda left de Caña after Jose was macheted in the street. They killed him for no reason, or none that she could tell. As far as she knew, he stopped at the cantina after work and drank guaro with his friends. There was no fight or argument. No one was insulted. He was cut down in the street on his way home. She tried and tried but there was no way to reconcile herself to what had happened. Her father’s death, her mother’s, and now her brother’s—a whole world of loss rupturing into her life. A freak storm strikes, a child of unusual difficulty is born into the septic tropical night, her brother’s arms are hacked from his body—there was nowhere to place it, no way to conceive of a world of such violent possibility. There comes a point, she said to Ethan, when something happens and the world changes and then nothing will ever be the same. If I’d stayed I would have died. So I left. I left my sister to the care of the nuns at Qultepe and took a river boat inland to the Guatemalan border from where, I was sure, I would find my way to the States.
What she did find as she traveled north was far different. She reached the Suchiate river in northeastern Guatemala. To make it to the States, she first had to make it to Mexico; to make it to Mexico, she had to cross the river in the night and live till morning. Once across the river there were two routes to the border: the north route or the northeast route. If she chose the north route, she could follow the train tracks, hop on the back of the Trans American Bullet and let it carry her into, and through, Mexico. The dangers here were clear: if one fell asleep, and many did, she would slip between the cars and onto the tracks, and even if she managed to stay awake, border guards and policía looking for bribes haunted the platforms where the train stopped. Still, for a woman traveling alone, this was the preferable route. The northeastern paths toward Hidalgo and Tabasco passed through the City of Martyrs, a makeshift border settlement where, while there was no train and few police, bandits patrolled the paths between the shore and the border.
Yolanda reached the bank of the Suchiate after a week-long trip north and east away from de Caña and the Caribbean coast, out of Copal and through Guatemala. It was dusk. She stripped and bathed in the river. She cleaned her clothes. Across the water, the rocky bank descended from a lush curtain of low jungle extending several miles into the fogbank that rolled down from the mountain horizon. Somewhere short of the mountains, invisible behind the fog and the jungle, lay the City of Martyrs, the migrant’s port of call, where she could find fresh clothes, Mexican currency, and a safe bed to sleep in. It would not be easy to reach. The river was wide and fast-flowing after months of rain, and even if she could swim it, to do so would make her instantly recognizable as a migrant when she reached the far bank. Mexican bandits and ferryman and border guards looking for bribes or worse spotted migrants by the disrepair of their clothes.
So Yolanda wrapped herself in a blanket and waited in the shadow of the low gum leaves for her things to dry. After she dressed, she sprinkled her hair with rose water she had bought for Mirabelle several years earlier, applied what makeup she had, and put on a surgical mask and unworn platform shoes. She hoped that whoever waited on the other side—the ferryman, the guards, bandits and street hawkers—would take her for a Mexican woman running errands in Guatemala.
She set out for one of the many raft launches. The sun had fallen and the lights appeared on the far shore, blinking between the trees like the moving lanterns of phantom guides. In the stories she had been told as a child, to follow the lights through the jungles was to follow the Duende—the spirit that lured children into the forest. But she was not her little sister, she was not afraid of spirits and did not believe in stories, and she knew as she watched the lights flashing out of the crooked coves of shadowed trees that she was drawn to them, that she would cross the river and move toward the lights the way the fishermen on her island followed stars, or the way the fish themselves rose toward the lure of the reed lanterns rocking below waiting spears. So be it.
Yolanda forced herself to look away from the lights on the far bank. The water of the Suchiate, always murky and silt-brown by day, had settled into a hard, stony blue. A blue of quarried rock or a pigeon’s breast—a blue so unlike the Caribbean waters of her youth that it seemed a different color altogether. In her days she had moved from the waters of paradise to life on a river, quite literally, of hardship. Now standing at this third water, she thought perhaps she was again entering a new life, heading into some new, charmed future.
The ferryman, when she reached him, was sniffing glue. He sat against the pylons to which his raft was moored and buried his face in a rag. He inhaled deeply, trembled and coughed and inhaled again. He let his hand fall to his side where it opened and closed about the rag like a weak pulsing heart. When she stepped into the clearing he raised his head vertebrae by vertebrae and glared at her through a web of fraught veins. His eyes lolled. He blinked and blinked and smiled.
“Good evening, miss. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve seen all day,” he said.
She didn’t doubt it. Water weeds strung his hair, a wet, red glue rash flowered around his mouth and nose, saliva seeped down his chin, and his clothes—a McDonald’s shirt and a pair of jeans cuffed several times to reach above his ankles—were soiled with water and silt. It looked like he had spent most of his day huffing glue and falling into the river.
“Do you cross the river at night?” Yolanda asked him.
He shook his head and then began to nod.
“No. Never. Not even once. It is very dangerous. There are rocks and whirlpools and tree roots and crocodiles. It is the most dangerous river in the world.”
She smiled, brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“Will you cross it for me? It is not quite dark.”
“Of course I will,” he said and tried to stand. “Get on.”
/>
YOLANDA SAT AND HELD her bag in her lap as the ferryman punted. The raft was not large, a plank of cratewood tied to two connected inner tubes. It bobbed on the current and dipped under his weight as he worked his punting pole through the water. She wondered how he could stand in his state, and then thought that perhaps, through some strange symbiosis of man and current and glue, the waters braced the pole and the pole balanced the man and together they jerked on in oblique angles toward the distant shore.
“Did you know, miss, you look just like my daughter?” he said.
Yolanda shook her head. In the dark, with his back to her and the sound of the water breaking all around, he could not see or hear her reaction. It didn’t matter.
“Yes,” he went on, punting, leaning, punting again. “You could be my daughter. She was very beautiful. Chubby and short like her mother.”
Yolanda tried to laugh. She was not chubby nor short and she thought, at first, that he was teasing her.
“Yes,” he said again. “Beautiful. I miss my daughter very much.”
He was not joking. Perhaps he had not seen her at all. Who knew what he could see through the glue haze and darkness and whatever else clouded his way over the river? Yolanda did not say anything. She watched the northern bank drift closer. There were more lights now between the trees, and sounds came, broken and distant, of cars and motored rickshaws. She would not ask him what happened to his daughter. He had his glue and his raft. She had the far bank, the Mexican border, and beyond. What should they do? Weep together? Tell each other sad stories? Huff aerosol vapors from a rag? The shore grew closer. The ferryman farted once and then laughed through tears. Yolanda touched her hair and then smelled the scent of rosewater and oil, her sister’s smell, on her fingers. She touched and smelled and touched again and held her hands close about her face. The raft scuffed against the rocky shallows. A bird screamed from the wooded shore. She gathered her bag and began to stand. The raft rocked. The scraping pole. The waiting lights, the jungle.
SHE KNEW SOMETHING was wrong when she broke into the clearing and saw the tree. At first she thought all the white pouches hanging from the branches were some form of chrysalis or cocoon, and then, when she drew closer, she felt relieved—it was nothing strange, just a tree where someone had hung her laundry, where many people had, a whole tree strung with laundry, a village’s worth, puffing in the wind. It troubled her, though, it was wrong, everything leading to the grove—the mud path away from shore, the empty, silent jungle, and the cleared area where the tree stood heavy with laundry—it all seemed to condense into a new, sudden dread. Then she realized what had bothered her: it was all women’s underwear and it was far from clean. The tree was a display, a trophy case. She turned to run but by then the circle had already formed.
This is where Ethan has trouble—where, on the bus ride away from Yolanda and out of Mexico, he finds himself running aground again and again. He can see the men’s faces, all of them the same and Yolanda not Yolanda at all, but a shadow or less than that, a life disappearing around the edge of a closing door. What bothers him is that he does not feel outrage, he does not wonder at a world where women’s panties are hung as trophies from a breadfruit tree. He sees it almost as something inevitable, the punch line to the world’s worst joke. He thinks he should nod his head, mouth of course, and move on, away from it and back into a city where he will raise his camera, snap some picture, something easy and old, on black-and-white film, something that he will overexpose, bare to more and more light, until there are no shadows or lines—everything burning back to white.
Does it bother him that they did not rape her? Because in his mind they do, and he doesn’t know what that means. It’s the same every time, the sudden twitch toward violence and Yolanda, maybe, bent across a tree stump, its wood hardening to metal under her skin, the lantern light flickering into a neon exit sign and the huddled rats, surprised, spreading out like bubbles of mercury rebounding away from a shattered thermometer.
What he cannot imagine is what she told him actually happened: the three men, different men, stepping out of the brush, firing pistols into the gang, shouting and firing and filling the air with smoke that, when it clears, leaves Yolanda alone, but for them—saved. Ethan cannot imagine this at all. The sudden heroism, its perfect timing. The knights in the forest, the rescued maiden. It’s unfair, impossible, and he cannot see it.
What he can see, though, is what happens next, the way they tell Yolanda who they are—coyotes—how they saw her cross the river and knew her for a migrant, how they followed her and saved her from certain rape and probable death, and now will be willing to escort her to the United States for the right price.
At this point, with the panic still pulsing beneath her skin and the metallic ghost of cordite and blood scenting the wind, she can do nothing but shake her head, no, and try to move on, but the smallest one, maybe the leader—Ethan imagines him as smaller, pocked face, a bandana, but he does not know—here Yolanda is brief, undetailed, cursory—blocks her way with his body, he smiles.
“Haven’t you seen, miss, the dangers that lurk here? How will you cross the border? How will you make it to the States?”
There is, of course, a threat here. She is alone in the grove with three men. They have guns and they have used them. She looks back over her shoulder toward the road to the river, beyond it the river itself and all the paths that led her away from home to this clearing. The sounds of the border town grow louder with the approaching dawn. The hotels are not far, the plantain carts and cantinas, the electric rickshaws. It doesn’t matter.
“How much?” she asks.
He names his price. It is expensive, but not prohibitive. She speaks English and there will be work in the States.
She nods. She goes with them.
YOLANDA STOPPED THERE and refilled her glass and nodded at his. Ethan covered it with his hand.
“You should have known,” he said. “It’s the same scam every time.”
He waited for anger to shoal in her eyes, for her to react the way Samantha would. Yolanda shrugged again, reached for the pitcher and poured some water into her rum.
“What choice did I have?” she said. “I went with them. At first it seemed like a good idea. They had already paid their bribes and we crossed into Mexico easily. We spent a week traveling east toward the sea. When we reached the coast there was a boat waiting, a cargo ship. They told me that it would ferry me to Miami.”
Ethan watched Yolanda as she spoke, the way her mouth opened easily around her story, the flatness of her expression. He found himself thinking, if I were to photograph her, what would I see? There’d be so little there—drawn lips, eyes of cut marble. He’d need a catchlight flashing on her iris, sparkling in some lucent expression of pleasure—he’d have to fake the emotion. How different she must be now from the woman who followed coyotes onto a boat. He almost couldn’t imagine it. But then, of course, he remembered the way that, after that night, Samantha’s life seemed to slide from her like a snake from its skin. So no, it was not impossible—Yolanda’s lack of expression or the way they loaded her onto the boat and led her down into the cargo hold, unbolted the door, pushed her in and, of course, by that time, by the time she could see all the other women huddled there in the hold, recoiling like insects at the sudden light and then clamoring toward the open door, the fresh air there and the chance, however vain, of escape—by that time, it was all too late.
Five nights, then, spent in darkness. Perfect darkness. Darkness darker than the developing room, darkness as a real thing, a solid, a body bearing down on you, something you could cling to: the moaning of girls, some no older than twelve or thirteen, the mold smell and urine smell and shit smell, the sloshing waste, the one small hole for air.
On the sixth day they opened the doors to the hold and one by one led the women to the deck. At first, Yolanda said, she could not see. The light flared on her eyes and blossomed, when she covered them, in painful tracers. She could not
open her eyes. The women around her could not open theirs. The men seemed content to wait. This was a bad sign. If they were docked in a U.S. port, they wouldn’t let the women writhe about there on the deck, wailing over their eyes. Yolanda knew that she would not like what was waiting for her.
When her vision adjusted, she saw that they were still some distance out to sea, not docked after all, but floating two or three hundred yards from a bare coastline of red crags and wispy shore grasses. The earth between the rocks and the weeds was a dusty ochre, as was the sky beyond it, stretching into the horizon. This was not Miami.
“Look there,” one of the coyotes said, and pointed into the eastern distance where, perched atop a cliff, an American flag flapped on an isolated flagpole. “See that flag?” he said. “Savor it, chicas. Because this is as close as you are getting to the States until you pay off the rest of your debt.”
“What debt?” one of the girls said. “We paid already.”
Yolanda knew better than to argue. She’d been tricked and trapped and there wasn’t anything else to say. This wasn’t a legitimate negotiation, not a price you could barter down.
Still, the coyote affected the attitude of a legitimate businessman.
“You paid us for the bribes into Mexico, but what about food? And petrol for this tanker? And bribes for the port guards? And the risk we took? Those costs, too, must be covered.”
Ethan stopped her there. He didn’t need the rest. As he’d said before, it was a classic scam and he knew how it went. How they were sold into prostitution for a certain amount of time, six months, say, to pay off their debt, but at the end of that time they had, without knowing it, incurred new debts—housing or food or corner space, it didn’t matter. The cycle began again. So it was about money. The whole long, sad story. She wanted him to buy her out of slavery. He felt a sudden relief. It didn’t even matter if her story were true. He could pay his way out of debt and guilt. It was so American and it was the easiest thing in the world.
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