Border Crossings

by Michael Lee Weems

  It wasn’t a very long plane ride but she hated the blackout of information. There would be no CNN on this flight, which she’d been glued to all the night before, and she was still woefully ignorant of what steps had already been taken, having only what she got from the news last night and what Jim told her on the phone the day before. Her clients weren’t going to like her suddenly dropping everything, but she didn’t care. This wasn’t the type of request where you tell a friend you’re too busy. That poor girl, she thought. And poor Jim. She could only imagine what he and Amy were going through right now. She looked down at her watch and groaned to herself. Every minute ticking away was bad news. She thought about the one time she’d met Kelly Woodall. It was around the time of her own great tragedy. Her fiancé, David, was good friends with Jim, which is how she became friends with him. David and Jim were both avid cyclists and rode on the same team each year for the Austin MS-150 charity challenge. But one early morning as David had been on a ride, he’d been struck and killed at a fairly quiet intersection that had a bush that stuck out too far, blocking the truck’s view, and a driver who was going way too fast, running late for his shift. Several months later she’d been in Houston on a case and after the trial had called Jim to see if he wanted to get together. Much to her surprise he invited her over for dinner with the family. Kelly had been just fifteen or so, a very pretty girl, she remembered.

  It wasn’t surprising Jim would think to call her. He knew she did a lot of international law involving things mostly a little further south in South America, but occasionally her travels led to Mexico and she knew a few people here and there who were some decent people to know in a crises. She wasn’t sure how much help they could be under the circumstances, nor how much help she could be for that matter, but it was something. And right now something was better than nothing.

  When the plane touched down she ran into some issues with customs and it took a couple phone calls to get sorted out. But it wasn’t long until she was in a similar taxi that Kelly, Kendra, and Jamie had taken the night before last on her way to the hotel where it all happened. She was shocked when she pulled up to the resort. It looked so, well, vacationly . . . not the sort of place anyone would have guessed had something like what had happened happen.

  Two days after seeing the men with the body in the graveyard, Juan and Julio were in the market square looking through trashcans for something to eat. “Who do you think she was?” Juan was asking Julio.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. He was elbow deep in an effort to fish out a quarter of a burrito someone had thrown away. He pulled it out, swatted it a few times to get some coffee kernels off of it, ripped it in two, and handed Juan the other piece. “Looks okay,” he told him.

  Juan took it happily, “She looked white.”

  “She was,” said Julio. He thought again about the drug dealers and what would happen if they knew the boys had seen them. “I don’t think we should talk about it. It’s best to pretend it never happened.”

  Juan finished his piece of burrito in one bite. “I’m still hungry,” he told Julio.

  “Me, too. Go check that one,” he said, pointing to another trashcan.

  Juan ran to another bin and began rummaging through it. He held up a piece of bread but then something else caught his eyes. He put the bread back in the trash and called to Julio, “Look!”

  “What?” asked Julio perturbed, still looking through the trashcan where he’d found the burrito. “You find anything good?”

  “Yes!” cried Juan.

  Julio looked up expecting to see Juan holding food, but instead he had a newspaper in his hand.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  Juan ran over with the paper in his hand. “Look at the picture. Blond hair.”

  Julio took the paper and stared at the front page. Neither boy could read, but there were two pictures, one a color photograph of a girl with blond hair wearing a cap and gown, the other a sketch of a man. In the sketch was included a chain about the man’s neck with a medallion, and next to both pictures, a very big number in American dollars.

  “What does it say?” asked Juan.

  “I don’t know,” said Julio.

  “That’s them, right? She could be the woman and this guy is wearing a necklace like the guy we saw, right?”

  Julio stared at the picture and tried to remember what the body he’d seen looked like. The hair was right, so was the skin tone, but the facial features were hard to match. Still, it was a dead body they’d seen. That might make her look different, he figured. And the sketch did look like the man from the graveyard, especially with the necklace. “Maybe,” he told Juan.

  “I think it’s her,” said Juan. “See? That says American, right?” He pointed at the headline, American Tourist Kidnapped! He’d seen the word America or American many times, and it was one of the few he could recognize. “And what’s that?” He pointed to the reward part, but although they both knew it was a dollar amount, neither recognized the word reward although they figured rightly what it was. “It’s a reward, isn’t it?”

  Julio looked at the girl in the picture and thought deeply. He knew his basic numbers but did not know how much the number in the paper was. He did know it was a lot. The more zeros, the more money, he knew. It might even be thousands of dollars. And just like that his curiosity caught up and passed his fear. He had to find out what this story said.

  The boys decided to take the paper to a nearby vendor everyone called Aunty Nita. She worked a little lemonade stand that also sold chicken and beef kabobs. She was old and hobbled about on a cane spending most of her time sitting in a little plastic chair, either cutting the chicken and beef or cooking it over a little wood-burning stove she had. Her bad leg kept her from standing all day, pouring lemonade or ringing up sales, and she probably would have been unable to run her little stand if not for the assistance of her niece, Maria, a young woman in her late twenties with a round face and a big smile. Aunty Nita was missing most of her teeth and her tongue seemed to constantly be moving around her gums, as if though she were always checking to make sure her few remaining ones were still there. Her face was wrinkled and her gray hair always pulled back so tight in a bun that it looked like a helmet, and she was a very grumpy old woman as the boys had learned over time. But she was also a very informed woman, another thing they’d learned about her over time. That tended to be the case with nosey people who were always listening in about others. Plus, her niece was always very good to the boys, so they decided it’d be the best place for to learn a bit of news.

  As they walked up to the counter Maria greeted them friendly, “Hola, ninos.” She looked over her shoulder. Aunty Nita was watching them carefully, stabbing little chicken chunks with a wooden stick. “I can’t give you any lemonade,” she whispered, “Aunty Nita’s watching. But if you wait around, she’ll go to the bathroom soon, and I’ll give you a cup to share.” Aunty Nita had a bladder as bad as her leg. The boys had been coming to the market almost a year, and Maria was one of the few vendors who didn’t chase them away and curse them. Instead, she was always very nice and sometimes gave them lemonade and the occasional kabob when Aunty Nita hobbled off to relieve herself, something which Aunty Nita suspected and absolutely abhorred. So she was none to happy to see the boys this day. “Are you giving those street urchins free lemonade?” she asked from her little chair.

  “No, Auntie!” said Maria. But Aunty Nita got up from her chair anyway. “What do you want?” she asked the boys. “Do you have money? If you have no money then you have no business here. Go away before you scare away my customers.”

  “Please,” said Julio. “Can you tell us what this says?” He pushed the paper on the counter.

  Aunty Nita looked at the paper and the boys as if annoyed with them, but she picked it up anyway. She squinted her eyes and her lips moved a bit as she tried to form the words, her tongue occasionally flicking forward along her gums. Maria leaned over her shoulder to look at it als
o. “It’s about the American girl that’s missing,” she said, both to the boys and to Aunty Nita.

  Aunty Nita looked at her reproachfully, and then back at the paper again as though swiftly reading it. She handed it back to the boys, “Ah, yes,” she said. “So it is. My eyes aren’t what they once were, so it takes me a moment to focus is all.” She’d already heard about the story, anyway, so she didn’t really need to read the whole thing to know what it said. “You shouldn’t be so nosey,” she told the boys. “But if you must know, a tourist disappeared and everybody’s looking for her. They’re offering a reward.”

  “How much?” asked Juan, excited.

  The woman eyed them suspiciously. She leaned towards the boys, “Enough. Why? What business is it of yours? Have you seen this woman?” Her wrinkly hand pointed to the picture and her tongue swirled around behind her lips.

  Juan’s face lit up in a smile and he looked as though he was about to tell them everything, start to finish, but Julio stopped him by stomping on his foot. Juan, not quite grasping why Julio stomped his foot, quickly responded by kicking Julio in his shin. Julio, unfazed, still managed to recover the situation. “No, we just thought she was a famous singer. I told Juan she was, but he said she was an actress. We were just trying to settle it.”

  Juan suddenly realized his error in letting his face say too much, so he nodded in agreement. It seemed to have worked, at least for the moment. She looked at them as if waiting for one to crack, but could read nothing definitive in their wide-eyed faces. “Well, if you do see anything, you come tell me and I’ll help you boys. You’re too young to get a reward, anyways. You’d have to get an adult, so if you see something, you come tell your Aunty Nita. If you find out where the American girl is, I’ll give you both some lemonade and help you get the reward, okay?”

  “Okay, Aunty,” promised Julio.

  “Okay, then,” she told them. “Off with you.”

  As the boys ran off Juan was practically skipping in excitement, “I knew it! That’s who we saw. We know where she is!”

  “Be quiet,” said Julio.

  “I wonder how big the reward is.”

  “Stop looking so excited. She’s still watching us.”

  Juan looked over his shoulder and Aunty Nita was indeed following them with her eyes. As they scampered off and out of sight, she turned to Maria. “I don’t want you giving them free lemonade. They’re like dogs; they’ll keep coming back if you feed them.”

  “Yes, Aunty.”

  Later that afternoon Aunty Nita began to have a gnawing feeling. Those boys know something, she thought. She couldn’t get Juan’s expression out of her mind. He’d been excited when she told him what the paper said. And they way they’d walked away, with him practically skipping and the other looking over his shoulder . . . they knew something. She told Maria she was going to run an errand and went to the caseta. There on the wall was the hotline number for Kelly Woodall. She dialed the number and reached the anti-kidnapping unit. “I’m calling because I think these two street urchins might know something.” She was transferred to one of the Detectives and told him about the incident. “If they do know something and it leads to the girl, then I would be the one to get the reward, yes? After all, I’m the one calling. Those two are just trying to hide something, but I’m trying to help.”

  “Yes, yes,” assured the officer, “don’t worry. Now are they still there at the market?”

  “No, they ran off, but they’ll be back. They always come back.”

  “Here, let me give you my direct number. If you see them again, you call me directly.”

  “We should tell the police and get the reward,” Juan was telling Julio.

  It was something Julio had been pondering since the day before when Aunty Nita told them what the paper said about the American. “Maybe,” he said. “It’s still dangerous. And Aunty Nita’s right. They won’t give us the reward.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not old enough. We would have to have an adult. If we had parents, then they would get the money until we were old enough, but no parents means no money.”

  Juan was frustrated by this reasoning. “That doesn’t make sense. They have money for anyone who knows where the American is. We know. What difference does it make how old we are?”

  “It’s just how they do things. They won’t give two street kids that much money. They’ll find a way to trick us and keep it for themselves.”

  “So what do we do? We could get Aunty Nita to help us. She said she could help.”

  Julio shook his head, “She’d definitely keep it for herself.” He picked up a piece of paper wrapper on the sidewalk and began twisting it in his fingers, thinking deeply. “Maria would probably help, but then Aunty Nita would find out. Let’s just wait. We have to be smart. We’ll wait until we can think of a way to do it.”

  Juan reluctantly agreed and then changed the subject as his stomach growled. “Can we at least go back and find some food, then?”

  Julio wasn’t sure if he wanted to forage under the eyes of Aunty Nita, but decided there was little harm in it. They’d already told her they didn’t know anything, and if she tried to talk to them again they’d just leave. “Yeah, I’m hungry, too.”

  They walked down the streets, the sun cooking the brick of the buildings and beating down on the boys. No sooner had they entered the market and began looking through the garbage than Aunty Nita saw them and told Maria to watch the stand while she walked to the caseta and made a phone call.

  The boys had found little food today and were just about to leave to go look behind some of the restaurants that would be throwing their lunch trash away when a police car pulled up. A man dressed in a suit got out and was greeted by Aunty Nita. She pointed to the boys and Julio was suddenly filled with fear. Juan watched with curiosity as the man began walking towards them. Julio began walking away quickly and Juan turned to him, “Where are you going?”

  “We should run, Juan,” he told him.

  “But why?”

  “She must have told the police we were asking questions,” said Julio. He paused and beckoned for Juan, “Come on.”

  Juan turned and the man was now briskly headed for them. “Hola, ninos!” he called for them. “I just want to talk for a moment.”

  “Come on, Juan,” Julio said sternly.

  Juan looked at the man and thought about the reward. This was their chance. This was his chance, maybe. For once, he thought Julio was wrong. The police wouldn’t care they weren’t old. All they wanted was to find the American. He was convinced they’d give them the reward. If Julio wasn’t willing to talk to them, then he would, and he’d bring back the reward and Julio would be embarrassed about his paranoia. For once, Julio would have to admit that it was he, Juan, who had known best. “No,” he told Julio. “I want the reward.”

  The man in the suit was nearly on them, “Come on, Juan!” Julio scolded again.

  But Juan stood his ground, “No!”

  The man in the suit had reached Juan now and was telling him, “Hello, Hello.” He looked at Julio who had backed away some fifteen feet. He smiled friendly and held out his hand, “Where are you going? Come back, come back,” said the man, waving him to return. “I only want to talk to you.” Julio stood firm, looking from Juan to the man, and awkward stand off of tension. “It’s so hot out here,” said the man kindly, “Don’t make an old man walk anymore, please. Come, I’ll buy you both a lemonade and we’ll just talk for a bit.”

  Juan smiled at Julio and now he also waved his hand, motioning that Julio should come back. “It’s okay,” he told Julio.

  But something told Julio to run. He didn’t trust the police. He knew Aunty Nita was after the reward and he didn’t trust her, either. Why hadn’t Juan listened? The police would lock them up and make them tell them what they saw, but there wouldn’t be any money. They’d drop them back in the streets and the drug dealers would come looking for him. Julio was furious with his fri
end. He wanted to run and grab him, but it was too late.