“Sure. And you know what I’d be? Just one more doctor in some medical group or other.”
“What’s so terrible about that?”
“I’d be easily replaced. ‘Fungible’ is the word. A fungible cog in the medical machine.” She slammed the tailgate shut, a little harder than necessary. “I love these people, Pam. They need me.”
“Have you ever thought that you love them because they need you?”
“Have you been talking to Nick? That sounds like him.”
“I need you, too,” Pamela said, turning on her heel to go back into the house. “You’re so solid. You’re my rock.”
* * *
The drive to San Tomás, two and a half spine-cracking hours in César’s farm truck, left Riordan feeling as if he’d been inside a clothes dryer, though he ignored the discomfort. Going into the mountains always invigorated him; it made him feel closer in spirit to Father Kino and the early missionaries, striking out into the wilderness, though at the present stage in history the Sierra Madre was more a moral than a physical wilderness.
They rattled through the village, which was nothing more than a few dozen mud-brick shacks, scattered like puzzle pieces across a flat expanse a thousand feet below the crest of the Sierra Madre, the slopes shaggy with pine forests scarred by the clear-cuts made by pirate loggers. Stringy-looking chickens ambled about, pecking at the ground, and goats nibbled on the abundant rubbish. Plastic tarps enclosing a latrine flapped lazily in the wind.
Riordan spotted Lisette’s Dodge parked on a low hill between a house and the rural public health dispensary. Driving at her usual death-wish speed, she’d easily outrun the rattletrap truck. César went down a side road—a burro path, really—turned around, and backed up to within ten yards of the foot of the bridge, flung across a gorge in the Río Santa Teresa, sixty feet wide and as many deep.
“Mierda, look at this thing,” he said after they got out to inspect it. Standing well back from the edge—as close as he dared—Riordan could see that it sagged in the middle, forming a curve like the rocker of a rocking chair. Planks were askew, separated by gaps a foot wide. Two tall pine trees, spaced several feet apart, anchored the bridge on the near side. The suspension cables—thick ropes—had been wound around them and tied off with half hitches. He could not imagine crossing the rickety, jury-rigged structure. That people did testified as much to their fatalism as to their nerve and agility.
He put on his lined denim jacket. Spring weather, if not spring itself, had arrived in San Patricio, but at this altitude, better than seventy-five hundred feet, winter hung on. From the truck, the three men unloaded two-by-six boards sawn to three-foot lengths, coils of synthetic and manila rope, eyebolts and other hardware, plus power tools and a diesel generator to run them.
César studied the bridge again, hands on his hips, chest thrust out, as if he were confronting an adversary. “First thing we gotta do is tension those suspension cables,” he said.
He cranked up the generator, plugged in the power drill, bored pilot holes into each of the pine trees, and screwed eyebolts into the holes.
“Okay, Padre, you and Moises grab the right cable from in front of the tree and you pull on it. Pull hard.”
This brought Riordan much closer to the edge of the gorge than he cared to be—within three feet. The rope bit into his soft, priestly hands as, shutting his eyes, leaning backward against the cable’s resistance, he stood behind Moises and hauled like a tall-ship sailor raising the main.
From behind, César called, “Leggo now.”
Riordan released his grip and stepped back, relieved. César had untied the cable, passed it through the eyebolt, and lashed it to the truck’s tow hitch. He then got behind the wheel and eased the truck forward. The bowed cable began to straighten and tighten, and as it was lifted higher than the one on the left, the old, loose planks tipped into the river below. There wasn’t much water in it; Riordan heard a sickening clatter as the boards struck bare rock.
Now the cable had to be refastened to the pine. César untied it from the tow hitch. With all three men holding it taut, they circled the tree in what looked like a primitive dance and wrapped it around the trunk in neat coils. César secured it to the eyebolt with an elaborate knot. The left side was tensioned in the same manner, as were the thinner handrails above each, and it was satisfying to look at the four lines, now strung ruler-straight over the chasm.
His pitted face flushed from effort, César winced and slapped his breastbone. “Too much salsa on my eggs this morning.”
“I don’t know why you took this on, but these people will be glad you did,” Riordan said.
“I don’t know why either.” He bowed his head thoughtfully. “Maybe I want to do one last thing for them before I go to El Norte.”
“Leave a legacy?” asked Riordan.
César laughed. “Yeah, maybe they’ll name this bridge after me. The César Díaz Stupid Bridge. The municipality should be doing this job. We are looking at what’s wrong with this country—nobody wants to do anything, but everybody wants to be somebody.”
“That’s why you’re leaving. Mexico is screwed up, you said.”
“‘Fucked’ is what I said. Mexico is fucked, and she has fucked herself. If she was only screwed up, I would stay.”
“I would like to talk you out of it,” Riordan said earnestly.
“Save your breath. I don’t like sleeping with a loaded pistol next to my bed. I don’t like walking around with a personal bodyguard. Do you know I was scared to come out here? I came anyway, maybe because I was scared. But I’m tired of looking over my shoulder all the time.”
“You organized the autodefensa. You’re fixing this bridge. Mexico needs people like you.”
“Oye, Padre Tim. Save your sermons for Sundays. The decking comes next.”
He took one of the two-by-sixes and, kneeling down, centered it over the suspension cables and drilled a hole into each end, about three inches in. After threading short strands of synthetic rope through the holes, he tied the board to the cables, then pushed it forward and attached a second plank.
“So, that’s how we do this,” he said, and handed a tape measure and carpenter’s pencil to Riordan. “You mark the boards in the exact same place, both ends. Moises, you drill the holes. I do the rest.”
And so they began. Very soon they were operating as efficiently as a production line. Riordan traded off with Moises on the drill, the first manual labor he’d done in years. He gloried in it—the drill’s whine, the smell of new wood, the thudding generator—and thought of his mentor, Father Batista, never reluctant to pick up a hammer, a saw, a shovel.
Within an hour, the deck reached out some ten or twelve feet. Its weight and the friction of rope on rope made it impossible for César to shove it forward and add new planks from behind. He had to do it from the front end, with a sixty-foot drop in front of him, the bridge swaying each time he walked out onto it. Riordan couldn’t watch. He took off his jacket—now, past noon, it felt more like spring up here. Two more planks, another two. The decking reached more than halfway across when César signaled to shut off the generator and called for a break.
He flopped down against one of the pines, the flush gone from his cheeks, his complexion faded from cinnamon to pale sand.
“Jefe, you feelin’ okay? You don’t look so good,” Moises said.
“The generator,” César said. “Those fumes, makin’ me a little sick. Gimme couple minutes.”
“Lunchtime, jefe. You need somethin’ to eat.”
Moises went to the truck and brought back a cooler stuffed with María’s chicken fajitas and cold cans of Coke. His normally ravenous appetite sharpened by the labor and the mountain air, Riordan tucked in. César merely nibbled.
While they ate, a trio of young women wearing long Mayo skirts approached. One held a dirty toddler by the hand; the other two carried infants in shawls slung over their backs. Evidently, news of Riordan’s arrival in San Tomás had sprea
d; the women asked if he would bless them and their children, which he did, crossing each forehead with his thumb.
“Padre, will you say a Mass for us?” begged the woman with the toddler.
“Maybe, when this is finished.”
They thanked him and shambled off in the dust.
“Muy bien. De vuelta del trabajo. Back to work,” César said, and got to his feet, leaving his lunch half-eaten.
* * *
Lisette and Pamela waited to see Javier Morales, the blind girl’s grandfather, in the kitchen of Cornelia Valdez, his eldest daughter. Evangelina and her widowed mother, Alma, lived with Cornelia, a curandera who had attempted to treat her niece’s eyesight with herbal remedies. Alma and Evangelina were not there when Lisette and Pamela arrived. They were with Javier, Cornelia said. She sent one of her children to find him; he was the head of the family, so he made all the decisions.
They sat down at a picnic table that must have been salvaged from a trash dump—initials, names, and dates had been carved into its surface. The kitchen, attached to Cornelia’s house by two rough-hewn beams, was open on three sides, a kind of ramada roofed with sheet metal laid over woven tree branches, its dirt floor partially covered with tattered straw mats. Ashes smoldered in the oven, made of sun-baked mud; bundles of herbs hung from the crooked rafters. They gave off a mixture of pleasant, if unidentifiable, smells that relieved less savory odors, like the stench from a nearby latrine.
Doing her best to ignore the squalor, Pamela sat with her legs crossed, hands clasped over a knee, a bland expression drawn over her face to hide her discomfort. Lisette had warned her that San Tomás was backward, but she hadn’t expected anything quite this backward. The dirt, the stink, the flies, the scrawny dogs foraging in trash piles. She’d gasped when, going to a rain barrel to wash her hands, she’d seen nests of pale brown, long-legged water spiders covering the surface rim to rim. Less than thirty miles away, San Patricio seemed in another world.
Waiting for Javier, Lisette whiled away the time by talking to Cornelia about her powders and potions. Curing Evangelina’s blindness was beyond her powers, Cornelia admitted, but she had restored health to other people, a lot of them, and offered to reveal her secret remedies the next time Lisette visited San Tomás.
Finally, Javier, a retired municipal policeman, arrived. He pulled up in a new, chrome-trimmed pickup far beyond the means of a man living on a pension. The rumors Lisette had heard were probably in the bull’s-eye: he oversaw the Brotherhood’s agricultural enterprises in the region around San Tomás. Entering the ramada, he dismissed Cornelia with a twitch of his head but was courtly toward Lisette and Pamela, doffing his hat in greeting. He was about sixty years old, and built like a mailbox. With his steel-gray hair, bushy gray eyebrows, and clipped gray beard, he looked more like an Old Testament patriarch than a kindly grandfather, and he projected such an air of stern, confident authority that he seemed half a foot taller than his five feet six. Regarding Lisette with the steady but indifferent gaze of a cat, he sat down and said in a voice accustomed to command, “Muy bien. Usted hablar, vaya a escuchar. Entonces vaya hablar tú, escuchar.”
“Dónde están Evangelina y Alma? Se vienen?” she asked, unsettled by their absence.
“Ellos están en mi casa. No se preocupe por ellos.”
“What’s he saying? What happened to the girl and her mother?” Pamela whispered.
“He said that I should talk and he’ll listen, then he’ll talk and I’ll listen. They’re at his house, we’re not to worry about them.”
“But they—”
“Quien es esta mujer?”
“Mi amiga. Una americana,” Lisette replied.
“Qué está haciendo aquí?”
He might have been retired, but he retained a cop’s suspiciousness. She explained that Pamela was there to meet his daughter and granddaughter because her father had arranged for Evangelina’s treatment in the United States. She added a kicker to show that she was not easily intimidated: “Disculpe, abuelo. No puedo hablar si sigues haciendo preguntas.”
Pamela leaned toward her. “Now what?”
“He wanted to know who you are and why you’re here, and I told him. I also told him that I can’t talk if he keeps asking questions. You, too, Pam. I’ll fill you in when we’re done.”
Despite her facility in Spanish, she struggled to describe Evangelina’s condition and its treatment to Javier in layman’s language. Vitrectomy and retinopathy wouldn’t do. There was bleeding behind her eyes, she said. A delicate procedure was necessary to stop it. This procedure would take a couple of hours, her recovery about a week. She assured him that she and Pamela would accompany his granddaughter throughout the journey; they would visit her in the hospital as she recovered. Evangelina would be home in less than two weeks. She pulled the airline tickets from the manila envelope and showed him the departure and return dates. He did not give them a second glance; he continued to look at her with his unwavering, neutral stare.
But before his granddaughter could leave Mexico, Lisette went on, these forms had to be read and signed by her parent or a guardian. She explained their purpose and pushed them across the table. Javier did not look at them.
“Abuelo, por favor, lea y firme ellos,” she said.
“No es necesario para leerlos. Ella no va a los Estados Unidos. Ella se quedará aquí,” he responded in a tone that left no opening for argument.
“No entiendo. Por qué? Por qué razón?”
An implacable look washed the indifference from his eyes as he raised his chin and said, “Debido a que la matarán y cosechar sus órganos.”
Utterly unprepared for such an answer, she was stymied for a retort. He could not have shocked her more if he’d struck her.
Javier rose and put on his hat and said he was through listening and talking and had nothing else to say. Lisette grabbed his sleeve, pleading with him to wait, to please wait. He could not possibly believe such a crazy thing, could not possibly believe that she would allow any harm to come to Evangelina.
She was doubtless an honorable woman, he said. But she was being deceived. He had been a policeman for thirty years, and he knew what happened to Mexican children in the United States. Sometimes their bodies were found, missing their hearts, their livers, their kidneys.
She demanded to know where he had heard such nonsense.
“No es una locura, señora, y no tiene sentido,” he said, with a thrust of his stubborn jaw.
“Lo siento, perdón, abuelo,” Lisette apologized, and begged him to reconsider. Evangelina would suffer no harm, except that she would go totally blind without the operation. Shaking with frustration, she tried to punch through his armor of ignorant obstinacy. You are the one harming her by keeping her here, she said, passionately. You, Abuelo Javier—
“Terminando,” he replied through compressed lips. “Buen dia, señora.”
Helpless, Lisette watched him climb into his chrome-gilt truck and drive off. Then, swamped by a sadness that was first cousin to grief, she gathered the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope.
Pamela frowned in confusion. “What the hell? You said you’d fill me in, so fill me in.”
“He won’t give his consent. The girl stays right here.”
“What? Why?”
“You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“He thinks—no, he’s certain—that she’ll be killed so her organs can be harvested.”
Blinking rapidly, Pamela looked at her without speaking.
“I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”
“My father … he thinks that my father would … harvest her organs? Dad doesn’t like to step on ants, and this Javier thinks he would…?”
“It’s not personal, Pam. He doesn’t know your father from a hill of beans. He’s just got this idea that Mexican kids who cross the border end up with their hearts and livers on the black market.”
“That poor kid … his own granddaughter …
You couldn’t talk any sense into him?”
“I tried. He wasn’t listening.”
Pamela brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead, then swatted at a fly. “All that trouble my father went through, that you’ve gone through.”
A goat so thin its bones could be counted hobbled up to the ramada and stuck its nose in the ground, as if eating dirt. The sadness welled up in Lisette, her eyes filling as an image of Evangelina formed in her mind, the girl aged and infantilized at the same time, shuffling with the uncertain steps of a woman of ninety, or clinging to her mother’s hand like a toddler.
“I should have checked with him before…” Her voice quavered. “I should have seen this coming.”
Reaching across the table, Pamela clasped her hands. “None of that, okay? It’s not your fault that the guy is an ignorant jerk.”
Lisette wasn’t feeling very rocklike at the moment, only wrung out, defeated. She grabbed the envelope and stood. “Let’s go home.”
“How do I explain this to my father?” asked Pamela as they went to the pickup. “I can’t tell him that the girl isn’t coming because her grandpa thinks he’s going to kill her for her organs.”
“No. But some version of the truth will have to do. I’ll e-mail him.”
Taking the envelope gently but firmly from Lisette’s hands, Pamela pulled out the airline reservations. “It would be better if we told him in person, the both of us,” she said, pausing at the car to gaze out over San Tomás’s shabby sprawl, the scarred mountains beyond. “I could use a break from Mexico, and I think you could, too.”
Lisette swung back into the truck and coaxed the engine to life. “You go ahead. I’ve got work to do here.”
“It can’t wait?” asked Pamela, climbing in beside her. “You wouldn’t have been doing whatever it is if this had worked out the way we thought it would. I don’t see the difference.”
“I think you do.”
They bumped down the village’s single street. Black water flecked with garbage trickled in the culverts alongside it. Pamela tilted her head against the window and let out a long sigh. “Maybe I do. I admire you, Lisette. You know that. But what I really don’t see, when I think about that old bastard, is why you love these people so much. I’m sorry to have to say that.”
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