He’d forgotten to make his lunch and sat by himself in the cafeteria staring at a blank page of his sketchbook and doing his best to ignore Diego.
“It sucks when your mom doesn’t like you enough to pack you a lunch,” Diego said when he passed Jaime’s table on his way to the other side of the cafeteria.
Jaime twirled the pen in his hand, wondering if he could fling it at Diego like a javelin. Instead, he drew a deep line in his sketchbook that tore the page. He liked it better when he understood less.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
Jaime looked into the purple-rimmed glasses and wide black eyes of Carla. He could feel his own face matching the color of her frames.
“No food.” He pointed to everyone else’s lunch and shrugged, before realizing he should have lied and said he’d eaten already. He wanted Carla to think he was cool, not pitiful.
She set her tray down and pointed to the hot lunch line. “You can get some free lunch.”
He looked at her in disbelief. Did “free lunch” mean what he thought it did? Why would anyone, especially in this country that hated immigrants and jailed them for no reason, give him free lunch?
Either she could read minds or he spoke his concerns aloud in perfect English without even knowing it, because she grabbed him by the arm and led him to the lunch line.
“Hola Juanita,” she greeted the lunch lady and then continued in English. “This is Jaime. He needs some food.”
“¿Tienes la forma?” She walked over to a table and waved a form at him. He shook his head no. She sighed and brought the form over to him. “Have your parents fill this out so you qualify for free or reduced meals.”
“I don’t think I—” He stopped himself before saying anything else. Juanita seemed nice, but he couldn’t go around telling everyone who spoke Spanish that he didn’t have papers.
Juanita waved the form at him again. “Doesn’t hurt to fill it out anyway. Anyone can do it.”
Jaime read through the Spanish form she handed him. It asked how much his family (Tomás) made per year (no clue), information about food allergies (none), and basic questions like his name and school. Nothing about his immigration status.
“Now, I can’t have you starving today.” Juanita pointed to each of the two gray slops of food in front of her. “Do you want beef or cheesy mushrooms?”
“Go with the mushrooms,” Carla motioned to the less gray one on the left. “It’s actually really good with the pasta.”
“Bueno,” he shrugged at the mushrooms, though honestly, they weren’t his favorite. He doubted he’d notice if he were eating brains; he already felt like a zombie.
Doña Juanita piled his tray with the mushrooms, pasta, some green vegetable, a red apple, a sugar cookie, and a carton of milk.
A group of girls had moved their lunches to the table where Jaime had been sitting, saving them both a spot in the middle. Carla jumped into their conversation as soon as they sat back down. A few times Carla or one of the other girls asked him a question and he lifted his shoulders to say he didn’t know, not sure what they were asking or talking about. He ate all his food, just like Abuela had taught him, but afterwards he couldn’t have said what anything tasted like. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure what happened the rest of the day.
On the bus back home next to Seh-Ahn, he hugged his knees to his chest and shook his head no when Seh-Ahn placed a hand on his shoulder to ask what was wrong.
When Miguel was killed, there was nothing that could bring him back. With Abuela being attacked, the damage had already been done and he was too far away to help out. But Don Vicente was here. In a detention center. Not yet deported. There had to be a way to help him.
If this were a movie, Jaime would organize some kind of jailbreak that involved tools baked into cakes, blacked out security cameras, and underground tunnels. But in real life he knew none of that would work. For one thing, he didn’t know how to bake a cake.
As much as he thought, he couldn’t think of anything that would realistically change what the future held. Don Vicente would have to return to a country he no longer called home.
Not being able to change the past was a helpless fact of life. Not being able to change the future made the helplessness a hundred times worse.
• • •
A wave of intense heat hit as soon as Jaime left the air-conditioned bus. Not the humid heat from back home, but a dry heat that seemed to beat down directly from the sun and cause the spring shoots to curl up in hiding. No sweat gathered on his forehead, as if it evaporated before reaching the surface of his skin. He could hardly believe that just last week snow reached his knees and his ears burned with cold.
He waited at the entrance of Meester George’s ranch for a long time as he scanned the ridge and rolling hills of the property. Maybe Tomás had been lucky at the sheriff’s office and the police were able to pull some strings. Maybe the detention center realized their mistake and Don Vicente didn’t belong there with the criminals. Any minute a birdcall would echo over the ridge and Pimiento would come galloping across the desert, dodging cacti and rocks.
But no. Don Vicente did not ride up to meet him.
Jaime began the long walk back to the trailer. He turned with a bend in the road and the sun shone right into his eyes. He squinted and kept walking.
“Tsssssssssss!” The sound of an angry insect caused Jaime to stop. He shielded his eyes and glanced around him. Nothing. He looked around again before looking down. There, not more than two hands’ length from his left foot, lay a coiled snake. Its triangular head lifted from its fat diamond-patterned body and its forked tongue flitted from its mouth.
“Tsssssssssss!” the noise continued. The snake’s tail shook to create the noise Jaime mistook for an insect.
Other than the snake’s tail and tongue, neither moved. He couldn’t. Not with his foot so close and his jeans not thick enough to prevent a bite. Snakes sensed motion and could strike faster than the eye could see. Jaime blinked and forced himself to breathe calmly. Back home he and Miguel sometimes caught snakes, held them for a few minutes (or Miguel would hold them while Jaime drew them in his sketchbook), and then set them free. Only from afar had Jaime encountered a venomous snake, and he was pretty sure this one was not the kind you picked up and relocated.
They stood there, staring at each other. The snake’s glare was so intense, Jaime wondered if it could even see him or if it was compensating for its poor vision by focusing extra hard.
After a few minutes, Jaime figured the snake probably wasn’t going to strike unless it felt threatened. It had had plenty of opportunity, and even if it was hungry, it had to know it couldn’t swallow Jaime whole. So they’d reached a stalemate. Jaime couldn’t move because the snake would misinterpret the action as a threat, and the snake wouldn’t move because it was a snake and incapable of logical thinking.
The snake continued to give him an evil stare until it seemed convinced that Jaime would neither attack him nor turn into a bite-size morsel. Finally, it uncoiled its body and slithered into the bushes, marking an extra tally on its scoreboard: Snake 1,527,952, Scared Mindless Human 0.
It took several minutes for Jaime to be able to continue on his way and several more for his ears to stop pounding with the sound of his heartbeat.
He turned his gaze to the dirt road and shuffled his feet down the long track to the trailer. About halfway back, his brain buzzing with thoughts of Don Vicente fighting off snakes that came up through the plumbing of the detention center, the sound of an engine interrupted his reverie. Tomás. Except instinct told him it wasn’t. Too loud. Like the roar of a diesel engine; Tomás’s truck ran on gasoline.
Because of the curves in the road, no vehicle was visible, but a cloud of dust rose over the nearest hill. Jaime crouched behind a juniper bush on the side of the road. His uniform shirt was green today and his jeans were blue. He prayed that he couldn’t be seen. And also prayed that señor Serpiente didn’t have a spring cottage hidden
nearby.
The truck was huge, white, shiny, and new with four tires on the back wheels. The driver wore a tan felted cowboy hat over his gray hair. He had a look of authority on his red face as he zoomed by. Immigration officers had found them.
Jaime took off as soon as it passed. By the time the dust settled, the truck was out of sight around the next curve. There was no way he could get to the house before the vehicle; even if he had been on Pimiento he doubted the horse could have outrun the truck. All he could do was hope that Tomás had told Doña Cici about the vampire rule of not letting immigration officers in.
With the homestead in sight, Jaime paused to catch his breath. He left the track and cut across the field to sneak up closer. He was so focused on avoiding any long twigs or coiled ropes that could be a snake, he forgot about the other natural dangers. His left sneaker collided with a barrel cactus and he bit his lip to keep from crying out. No time to pull out the spines; he limped forward with one eye on the ground and one eye on the homestead.
The truck stood in front of the kitchen door to the big house as Jaime limped behind another juniper. Could he possibly go around the side, enter through the front door, and get Doña Cici out before the officer found her? Unlikely. Doña Cici lived in the annex next to the kitchen.
A diversion then. The cows with their newborn calves were still in the corral instead of grazing with the rest of the herd throughout the vast ranch. If he could cause a stampede, then . . .
His plans stopped as two figures walked toward the fancy new truck. The red-faced officer. And Tomás.
He couldn’t let them take Tomás again, except his legs refused to move. Tomás didn’t look like he was in immediate danger—he walked normally beside the man, but his head hung low so Jaime couldn’t read his expression.
They stopped in front the truck, the red-faced officer leaning against the hood with his arms crossed over his broad chest. The two men were talking but too far away for their voices to carry. The officer finally pushed himself upright and shook Tomás’s hand before entering the kitchen of the big house as if he owned the place.
Tomás looked after the man. His shoulders slumped and then he turned, dragging his boots back to the trailer. Jaime waited in his spot for a few more minutes before bursting toward the trailer. The cactus spines poked through his shoe to prick his toes at every step but he didn’t slow down. He leaped up the metal steps and threw the door open. “Who was that?”
Tomás leaned on the table, resting his head on his arms. He looked up and stared at Jaime with red, sleepless eyes. “That’s Mr. George. I have to find two replacements for Don Vicente, immediately. Preferably guys with papers.”
And he dropped his head back onto his arms with a thunk that made the table collapse.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The table fell on Tomás’s knees, which made him swear so loudly Abuela must have scolded him from heaven. Tomás tried to raise the surface back to table level, and continued swearing when it dropped back to bed level.
“The mechanism is busted. I can’t fix it.” And he threw the cushions on the table, flopped on his back, and covered his eyes with his arm. Vida curled up in the crook of his arm, waiting to comfort him whenever he was ready.
Jaime stood in the middle of the trailer as helpless as a fish in the desert. His fear of snakes now seemed frivolous. Tomás needed him.
He thought about Abuela and what she would do. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
“No.”
Jaime raised his eyebrows. The Tomás he knew never turned down food. “Have you eaten?”
“No.”
Jaime took off his shoes and pulled out the cactus spines that had gone through the synthetic leather. They left red marks on his foot but at least it didn’t hurt anymore when he moved. There wasn’t much on the food front. Between Abuela and now Don Vicente, grocery shopping hadn’t been a priority. He stood on his toes and rummaged through the small cabinet above the sink. He found a packet of saltines in the back. In the waist high fridge, Doña Cici had left them soft goat cheese and in the door stood a half-eaten jar of homemade red jam. The letters were faded but Jaime could just make out the word “capulín.” He didn’t know the word and figured it must be Mexican for some kind of red berry. He opened the lid and ran his pinkie along the rim to taste it. Sour but sweet at the same time. Perfect.
He fixed himself and Tomás some crackers with cheese, some with jam, and some with both. He held the plate next to Tomás so Vida wouldn’t get it and bossed his older brother like their grandmother would have done.
“Eat. It’ll make you feel better.”
Tomás shifted the arm covering his face and glared at Jaime with one eye. But then he sighed, and took the plate out of Jaime’s hands as he sat up.
“Does this mean that Meester George doesn’t think Don Vicente is coming back?” Jaime asked as he nibbled on a cracker.
“It means that there’s too much work for me and Quinto to finish calving season on our own, even with Mr. George here.” Tomás popped a whole cracker in his mouth and pulled out his phone to check the time. With a full mouth, he made a sound like he remembered something but had to wait until he swallowed to speak. “I got you something.”
A plastic bag sat by the door. Tomás leaned over from the bed and pulled out two smartphones in hard plastic boxes. “For you and Ángela.”
“Pero, I don’t need a phone.” Jaime held the box, not even sure what to do with it. It wasn’t as if he had any friends to contact.
“I want you to keep it with you anyway. Take it to school or when you leave the trailer. Doña Cici accidentally left the landline off the hook and it just about killed me when I couldn’t contact you last night.”
Jaime turned the plastic packaging over. The black screen shined and glared at him like a mini television, or a security camera. “We can’t afford it.”
Already Tomás had spent too much on them—when Jaime asked if they could buy a mango last time they were at the grocery store, Tomás had looked at the price and shook his head no. Such a fancy phone had to cost millions more than a mango. And any extra money they had should go to Guatemala.
Tomás tilted his head from one side to the other like he didn’t want to admit that Jaime was right. “I opened a family plan. It is a bit more than what I was already paying, but it’ll give me the peace of mind that we can reach each other when we need to. Here, I’ll set the language to Spanish and program our numbers into it.”
Tomás showed him how to use it with taps and swipes. Once Tomás finished, he handed the phone over to Jaime, who threw it in his school bag like a hot potato. If he couldn’t even get in contact with his family in Guatemala then what was the point?
Ángela’s reaction to a phone when she got home was completely different. She clutched it to her chest and stared at Tomás like he was some kind of god.
“You got me an iPhone?”
Tomás shook his head. “No, it’s the free phone they gave me with the plan.”
Ángela looked it over carefully before turning it on. The fact that it wasn’t worth several hundreds of dollars didn’t seem to bother her. “How many minutes can I use?”
“Call and text as much as you want to people here. Guatemala of course costs extra. But there’s only five hundred megabytes of data per month, so save that for e-mails or Skyping your parents and don’t download music or anything unless you’re at a Wi-Fi hot spot.”
Ángela didn’t seem to have heard anything beyond “as much as you want.” She squealed like Cinderella getting to go to the ball, before lunging at Tomás for a huge hug. Once she released him, she dug through the front pocket of her bag and pulled out a sheet with phone numbers. Like an old pro, she started adding numbers to the phone without having to be shown how. Within minutes, her phone beeped with the arrival of new messages from her friends. Show off.
Maybe Jaime should ask Seh-Ahn if he has a number. Or Carla, though calling a girl on the phone required more nerv
e than he thought he had. Then he’d have to talk to her. In English. He wasn’t ready for that.
And he and Seh-Ahn seemed to do just fine without talking.
By the time he got on the bus the next day, Jaime didn’t even want to think about phones. Ángela’s kept beeping with messages all night until Tomás threatened to throw it in a cow pie. Except Tomás had used more explicit words. Ángela silenced it then, but a few times while Jaime lay awake, he caught the glare of the phone reflecting against the wall. And all through breakfast (burnt eggs and toast, Tomás had “cooked”), the phone had flashed continuously as if it were breathing.
Pulling out his sketchbook once he sat next to Seh-Ahn, he turned to the back side and the last page. He pushed thoughts of flashing and buzzing out of his mind and tried to shut his ears to ignore Ángela’s rowdy friends in the back.
He drew a creature of his own creation—four arms, four stalk eyes, human body (complete with belly button), but then wheels like an army tank for legs. Behind the creature, he drew a cactus. He drew the creature again, this time next to the cactus to show that while the cholla wasn’t a tall cactus, the creature wasn’t much taller. Then he drew a close-up of the creature’s face, its mouth open with sharp teeth and all four eyes staring at the sky. He couldn’t decide on a nose or ears, so he left the creature without but did add a few whiskers around its open mouth.
Next to him, Seh-Ahn pointed at the drawing and then pointed at himself. Jaime passed the sketchbook over with a shrug. Seh-Ahn didn’t ask what the creature was, and not for the first time, Jaime was glad his bus friend never asked Jaime to explain himself. Seh-Ahn pulled a pencil from his bag and before Jaime realized it, the other boy had scribbled some words on the sketch. Criticism? Praise? But when Seh-Ahn returned the sketchbook, Jaime saw they were speech bubbles like in a comic strip.
Above the first image, Seh-Ahn had written, “I’m so hungry! There’s nothing to eat.” Jaime smiled. Not only had he understood Seh-Ahn’s words (at least he hoped he did), but the idea of his creature being hungry hadn’t even crossed his mind.
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