by Неизвестный
“A what?”
“Tanktop. Like, you know, men's underwear shirt, like you wear.”
“I'll take it,” I said.
She ran to her bedroom.
“Jesus Christ,” Rey said. “Can you imagine? A piece of underwear, like these skells were wearing when I used to arrest them for beating the shit out of their wives, and now my daughter thinks it's cool to wear something like that?”
“Laura,” Amada shouted. “Come here.”
“Hey, Stelllllllllaaaaaa!” Rey said.
“Marlon Brando?”
“From Streetcar.”
“Yeah. I think Amada wants to give you some underwear.”
I went into her bedroom and changed into the tanktop, or underwear, I wasn't quite sure what to call it. We tried on two pairs of jeans, one fitting very tight in my hips, but the legs long enough.
I modeled it all to Rey's disgust.
“You're not gonna call that underwear by that name.”
“Oh, Dad. Get real. Besides. It looks really sick on her?”
“Sick is right.”
“No,” I said. “She means cool.”
“Cool. What was once called great. So we've gone from great to awesome to neat to cool to. . . what?”
“Bad,” Alex said. “Phat. Now people say, like, sick.”
“So what do you say if something's really bad?”
“It's gay.”
“What!”
“Everybody says that. To be uncool is to be gay.”
“Do you have any idea,” Rey asked, “what you're saying?”
“Oh, come on,” Amada said. “We don't mean gay. Like my mom. Leave it, Dad.”
“You girls going to be okay here?” Rey asked. “A day, two days?”
“How much beer have you got?”
“Amada, don't start. And I don't want to see on my next month's dish TV bill that the two of you are watching adult movies.”
“Oh Dad. We are so not going to have that conversation.”
“Come on, Rey,” I said. “Leave them. It's already three o'clock.”
“Does she actually watch adult movies?” I asked Rey as we got into the Humvee. “Do you know that, for sure?”
“For sure.”
The Tubutama mission rose on the horizon several miles before we dropped off the main road and headed due south. We drove slowly past the white façade and faded brick front entrance walkway, but Rey showed absolutely no interest in the mission.
“Look at the details,” I said. “Look at those beautiful round windows on either side of the archway.”
He whipped around a corner onto a dirt street. We passed a one-room adobe house so wrecked that only the walls were standing, covered with spray-painted gang graffiti. Inside I could see the coiled-spring remains of an old mattress. Through the doorway and across to the only window, a fourteen-inch aluminum car rim lay on its side atop the window ledge. Next to the house, a junkyard spread in all directions, an unusual sight in Mexico where cars rarely rusted and even totally-stripped frames were reusable. Rey parked near a mock teepee constructed of long mesquite ribs, the interlocking top of the teepee at least fourteen feet high.
An old man sat outside a garage built entirely of sheets of corrugated tin, nailed haphazardly to some internal structure. But it wasn't flimsy, and it wasn't unprotected. The sliding garage door was double-ribbed sheet metal, and the entire garage was surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with a row of razor wire. Two pit bulls ran around excitedly inside the fence as we got out of the Humvee.
The old man said something in a quiet voice, and both dogs immediately dropped to the ground. As Rey approached the gateway, one dog raised up on his front haunches, a streak of white running diagonally from left to right down his face, but he dropped again when the man spoke to him.
“El Grandee,” Rey said.
“Ehhh! Reymundo. Who's the chiquita? Is she for sale?”
“He's harmless,” Rey said to me.
“His language isn't harmless.”
“Oh, yeah. You get that old, that withered from decades in the sun, you see what it takes to get your blood rotating. Wiggle your hips for him.”
“Rey!”
“Just do it.”
I wiggled. El Grandee put his hand over his heart and sighed. He said something else to the dogs, and they ran around the corner of the garage out of sight.
“Come on in.”
“I hate dogs,” I said to Rey.
“Laura, meet El Grandee. Actually, it used to be just two words: Grand Dee.”
“Dee for Dennis,” the man whispered. I could see an oxygen bottle behind his chrome-legged chair. “You'll excuse me, you got me so excited, I've got to get a sniff here.” He put a breathing tube around his head and turned on the valve of the oxygen cylinder. “Hey, so long,” he announced as loud as he could to the open air.
“We just got here,” I said.
“Si. Seeing you, and then having to take this oxygen, I figured I'd better say goodbye to my hardon.”
“You're awful, old man.”
“El Grandee. Like those rich people, from the old days. Owned the big ranches, where you could ride for a week and still be on your own land. I walk so slow, pulling this oxygen tank, I get the same feeling just going around my garage.”
“I need a bike,” Rey said.
“Hoy. A bike. Are you in luck?”
“Depends.”
“Got a girl's Harley for you. Five thousand. American.”
He led us to the garage door and struggled with it before Rey put his shoulder against the edge and slid it back. Inside, there were no lights, but somebody had long ago cut rectangular skylights in the roof and laid plastic sheeting over the top. Seeing me look up, he laughed.
“Anybody get as far as the roof, they fall right through the plastic. First, they get by my fence, then they get by Rudolpho and Fernando. Anybody who can do that, they can steal anything in here. Of course, then they've got to get out. Here's the beauty.
“An '88 sportster, some call 'em huggers, I don't say hugger. Model eight eight three. Was gonna turn it into a chopper complete. Add a 1200cc upgrade kit, tons of chrome, some ape-hanger handlebars, an extended front fork. But money talks, Rey. You want it for five, it's yours.”
Rey started to look it over and then saw another bike in the corner.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Reymundo. What the hell you gonna do with a '79 Mexican Policia bike, eh?”
“Perfect,” Rey said to me. “Everybody over twenty years old will know this is a police bike. They'll leave us alone. Grandee, this bike's got to be hot.”
“Ay yi. I was going to send it to a guy in Arizona. Get it across the border. Will sell for ten thousand up there. I don't know, I don't know. . . ”
“Eight thousand,” Rey said.
“Oh no. Even for you, even to get out of the trouble of getting it across the border, eight is nowhere near large enough.”
Rey knelt to look the bike over.
“Pretty scratched up.”
“Spray cans, wonderful inventions. Any color, just sand things down to bare metal, lay that good color straight on.”
“Kinda dirty. Somebody obviously went down on it, just laid it on the dirt and let it slide until it stopped. One brake lever's bent but looks operational. Tires are weather-checked, still enough tread to get us where we want to go.”
“Where's that?”
Rey took some tools, straightened the sissy bar behind the seat, and checked for anything else that might be loose from the slide. When Rey tried to crank the engine, El Grandee checked around for a battery, since the one in the bike was dead. After several attempts, the engine started. Rey got the carburetor adjusted with some fiddling.
“Pipes are loud.”
“It's a Harley, Rey. What Harley isn't loud.”
The headlight and brake lights worked, and even though it was burning oil, Rey was satisfied. I he
ld out eight thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.
“There it is.”
“It's not enough.”
“It is what it is.”
“Eight isn't enough. Go nine. Look. It's got a hand shift. That was rare, back in '79, you didn't see no hand shift.”
“Grandee, this is no fucking cow auction.”
“Tell you what,” El Grandee said. “Sweeten the pot here.”
He dug into an old cigarillo box and removed an unsealed packed of decals that said POLICIA DE SAN LUIS POTOSF.
“Put them on the saddle bags, that make you look like what you want? I've even got a whip antenna. 'Course there's no radio, but hell, you got that antenna. And look. A police foot siren. Police odometer. Eight seven. That's the bottom. I counted out the money and we left.
The Cocospera mission was sixty kilometers from Imuris, the road winding back and forth up a mountainside and frequently crisscrossing the Magdalena River. Down below the bridges I could see the old tracks, where travelers had to ford the Magdalena.
With both of us riding on a totally unfamiliar vehicle, Rey had some trouble balancing the Harley for at least twenty kilometers. Then he rapidly grew familiar with the clutch and throttle and remembered how to lean into a curve while compensating for my weight. By the time we hit the mountain road, he was averaging sixty kilometers an hour, at times reaching one hundred. He also learned to ignore my panic as I wrapped my arms tighter around him.
Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocospera.
Years ago, a continent away, I'd seen the Sphinx. I barely remember the long body, the head, the broken-off nose. My strongest impression was that it reminded me of the wind-eroded sandstone wonders of Utah. The Cocospera mission had that same look. A massive building fallen into disrepair, abandoned a century and a half earlier when Apache raiding parties finally drove out the last of the Franciscan fathers.
“Horses,” Rey said, as we dismounted from the Harley and wobbled a bit on unsteady legs. “That's what killed this mission. Horses.”
“Wind,” I said. “If we'd ridden another fifty kilometers, I'd be worn down also.”
“Spanish conquistadors. Brought horses. Apaches learned how to ride, learned how to raid from their strongholds all over Sonora.”
“Forget the history lesson. Let's find Jonathan's van.”
But despite holding no services, the mission was far from deserted. The nearby desert floor was crammed with a tour caravan of some fifty Airstream trailers, and nearly a hundred people were gathered in front of the mission. Piped scaffolding rose over forty feet, protecting the façade.
“Father Kino and the Jesuits built a simple mission in the seventeenth century,” a tour guide was saying into a bullhorn. “What you're looking at was added by the Franciscans another century later. This scaffolding was erected in the '80s by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.”
“The van,” I said. “Let's find the van and get away from these people.”
“Let me ask you,” the guide shouted. “Anybody have a corn tortilla around here? Not so likely. You see those women by the side of the road, making the large, paper-thin flour tortillas? They're using flour. Not corn. Father Kino taught people to plant wheat. They've been doing that for centuries. Wheat and livestock, that's one of Father Kino's legacies to the people of the Sonoran Desert.”
“Over there.” Rey pointed. “That bluish van, looks like a delivery van.”
Behind the Airstream trailers I could make out the tail end of the van. We got back on the Harley, circled the crowd and their Airstreams, and parked out of sight.
“Locked,” he said.
I picked up a large stone and flung it through the windshield.
“Jesus, Laura.”
“I just want to get in there.”
“Yeah, but why not through the door. It's a helluva lot easier.”
He raised a triangular slab of sandstone and slammed the pointed end into the driver's side window. Running the rock around the window frame to scrape away the remaining glass, he reached inside and opened the door.
The back of the van had been converted into a camper.
Two narrow bunk beds ran along the passenger side, unmade beds, with green sheets and lightweight cotton blankets lying about haphazardly. A drop-down table was set into the opposite wall, with two Naugahyde seats built to face the table. In the back I could see a combination shower and toilet stall.
“What are we looking for?”
“One thing I don't see. Whoever lived in this van.”
“You go back to the mission. See if there's a caretaker. If you can, find out where they took Jonathan. When they took him.”
“And you?”
“I don't know.”
“You think there's something in here that can help us?”
I slumped into one of the chairs, fingering odd bits of paper taped to the wall. After a few moments, Rey left me alone. Nothing I could see had any relevance to me. Workers' broadsides, union announcements, all in Spanish, told their activist tales without my even being able to comprehend them. Every square inch of available floor and shelf space was filled with stacks and stacks of Xeroxed handouts, fliers, booklets, pamphlets.
Just in front of the toilet and shower combination, a small tabletop folded down from the van wall. A journal lay open, all entries in Spanish, the last entry from five days before. I kicked something under the tabletop and pulled out a small wooden box. Sitting on the lower bunk bed, I opened the box top and dumped the contents on the mattress.
My past spilled out.
A copy of the picture of my father on a rodeo bronc. Right arm ready to swing like a machete. From the depths of my memory came the Life magazine photograph of the beheaded Indonesian guerrilla.
I turned the picture over.
Jesus Christ!
And there I was with Jonathan in front of his stolen pickup.
I couldn't even remember when the picture was taken. Barely fifteen, I looked so impossibly young and innocent I could not, I tell you, I could not remember ever being that way.
Newspaper clippings of AIM events. Pine Ridge. Pictures of the dead FBI men.
Everything I looked at I turned face down. I didn't ask for and did not want the memories, but had to look at everything. And then I found them.
Two pictures of Spider.
One when she was six or seven weeks old. We'd been running from BIA police, somewhere in South Dakota or Minnesota, no, it was the Badlands. Some guy from Iowa was playing with his new Polaroid, posing his wife until she got annoyed, and so he asked us to pose and gave us the picture.
At least I'd seen that one. The other picture was of a woman in her early twenties. On the back, Jonathan's almost unreadable scrawl with a red ballpoint pen.
spider—22nd birthday 4488 Lexington Avenue West Hollywood
Underneath this in pencil, he'd written something else.
La Pintoresca(?) Pasadena (?)
Tall, model-slim, model-beautiful, brown hair cut very short and neat. I couldn't make out the color of her eyes, but I could trace the shape of her cheekbones, her mouth, her nose, her neck. I just couldn't make out how this woman could be Spider.
How she could be my daughter.
Clutching the picture, I climbed out of the van and went looking for Rey.
He saw me, started to say something, and noticed the picture.
“That her?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see.”
He did the same thing I'd done, running his index finger over the face.
“Beautiful.”
“Hardly looks like me.”
“Got your eyes, your neck. Even got the slope of your nose, the way your face indents below the forehead and comes out onto the nose.”
He handed back the picture.
“Did you find a caretaker?” I asked. “Anybody who knew about Jonathan?”
He nodded, looking troubled.
“And? And?”
“The worst possible thing for us.”
“They took him a long ways away? To the US? To Mexico City?”
“Not that simple.”
“For god's sakes, where?”
“The central Nogales jail. It'll be a nightmare just getting in to talk to him.”
28
“Quien es?” the man said, stumbling into the filthy interrogation room. By habit, he looked down, not wanting to confront anybody, not wanting to be beaten again. Rivulets of partially dried blood ran from his left temple down the side of his face.
“Jonathan?”
He started to look up, but couldn't raise his eyes above the boot level of the two policia standing against the door at full attention. Trying to stand, he grimaced, holding his ribcage and sinking painfully to the stained concrete floor.
“How much to leave us alone?” I asked the guards.
“One hundred,” one said.
At the same instant the other said, “Two hundred.”
“Here's two hundred each. Go outside.”
They hesitated.
“You gave them the money too quick,” Jonathan murmured. “You didn't bargain. Now they want more.”
“Fifty dollars each,” I said, “when you come back in half an hour.”
“Fifty dollars is worth only ten minutes.”
“Half an hour. If you make no noise, if you don't once open the door, I'll make it seventy-five each. That's all I've got.”
One of them extended his hand, and I put four hundred-dollar bills in his palm. They left. I heard each of the three deadlocks turn, then a metal bar slam into place across the outside of the door.
“Jonathan?”
Without moving his head, he raised his eyes to look at me, frowning.
“Who are your ”You don't remember me?“
Something in my voice caught his attention. His whole head came up.
“I can't focus. Can you wipe the blood out of my left eye?”
One of the guards had left a half-empty bottle of spring water. I moistened a piece of my tee and gently blotted around his eye socket. He rotated his arms and legs as well as he could against the restraints, twisted his torso and neck back and forth.
“Nothing broken?” I said.
“Not yet. Who are you?”