The children have taught me to count to one hundred in Spanish, I said.
He smiled.
I do not want to miss you, he said.
Look, I want to thank—I began, but he interrupted.
Listen, please. I know who you are. You are American. Not safe anymore for here. We take to you somewhere else. The border. There you are safe. They are good men, but not everyone keeps, uh, keeps quiet when he is. Tell no one about where you are from, say that you are in trouble over girl if you say anything.
It seemed a bit hokey, but he was serious and his face was grave. I looked at him; his eyes were old and very blue.
All of you, and you in particular, you saved my life. I don’t know your name.
He offered his hand and I shook it.
Príncipe, he said. You know that there is no choice, we know we cannot take you to hospital, you are famous gringo escape. Murderer. Famous.
They said I was a murderer?
Rapist, murderer, such things we hear.
It’s lies.
Príncipe shook his head, as if I didn’t even need to say it. The cops wanted me and that was good enough for them. For all of them.
Thank you, Príncipe, I said.
You are welcome. Thank also la Virgen nuestra, nuestra madre, que se echa la culpa de nuestros pecados. Now, my friend, you will go.
Ok.
He helped me into the car. I wound the window down and thanked Pedro, María, and the mother. I got in the VW and we headed off. I turned to wave, and they were all waving back. I was crying. I wiped away the tears and looked out after them for a long time.
The driver of the VW didn’t speak to me but was friendly enough and offered me cigarettes. We smoked and listened to godawful mariachi and Mexican rock music on the radio. The little Beetle was not in as great shape as I had thought and the exhaust seeped into the car from the backseat. The engine was loud and throaty and it seemed impossible that so great a rupture of sound could be coming from so wee a vehicle. The road was good for a long time, but then he turned off it and the new road was immediately terrible, and the car shook and made dreadful crashing noises over every pothole. I was feeling extremely sick from the fumes, and we had to stop every half hour or so for me to get a breath. When we got going again, I tried to focus on the horizon. I stared at the fields and occasional plantations, but my attention always wandered down to my left ankle. The horror of it got me every time. Jesus Christ. María had given me roots to chew on for the pain, and they’d dug up some white pills from somewhere. The root really helped, but whether through placebo or some natural emollient, I don’t know.
When it was getting dark and we had climbed a little and it was colder, we stopped at a village and the driver helped me out. He led me to a hut and told me to use the roll mat on the ground. I lay down and he went back to the car and drove off. I couldn’t sleep at all that night, and it wasn’t from the vermin everywhere. My heart was pounding again in my ears, not from fever this time, but from something else. Nerves, panic. Was this the start of it? My breakdown? I calmed myself very deliberately and lay awake until just before dawn, when men came for me in a jeep. They laughed and slapped my back and said things in Spanish. We drove through a town called Tenosique de Pino Suárez, and then up into mountains. When it got cold, one of the men gave me a parka and I wrapped myself in it.
We came to the camp in the evening. For camp it was. Tents and outdoor fires in a clearing by a river. About twenty men standing about, and at first I assumed they were miners or prospectors or something; but it soon became clear that they were fugitives and absconders and the like. They weren’t bandits, they didn’t raid anyone, they just lived up here, gathered for mutual protection. A tall, thin man with a preposterous Zapata mustache came up to me grinning with a mouth of yellow teeth and said something in Spanish. He shook my hand and gave me tobacco to chew and introduced me to a couple of other men. He was the boss, and I said I was happy to meet him.
I suppose that he explained the situation up here and who everyone was.
Ok, mate, but I haven’t understood a fucking word, I said, and smiled, and hobbled to a place near the fire.
The men were kind and saw me under a canvas overhang next to a rocky little patch which was to be my spot. There were blankets, and you could stuff saw grass into sacking if you wanted a pillow. They helped me clear away the stones and, when the ground was flat, I laid a blanket down and slept.
In the morning we ate beans and in the evening we ate rice and beans, sometimes with a tortilla. Where the food came from was a mystery; indeed, how the men supported themselves at all was a mystery, for it seemed that they did nothing at all. A few of them spoke to me in broken English, but it was so bad and their accents so heavy I could understand very little.
Príncipe must have spun them some yarn, because they were good to me. We were all in the shit together and that was what mattered. Someone was bankrolling us, though, and later when I looked at a map and saw that I must have been in Chiapas, I came up with a few ideas. It was 1992 and within a year the American papers were filled with stories about that most southerly, poorest, and heavily Indian of Mexican states.
In the evenings two of the old guys pulled out guitars and sang long, mournful songs about sweethearts. I didn’t recognize them, but I picked them up, and when I tried a few later on Spanish-speaking friends, they knew them. One night one of the guys strummed “There’s Only One Northern Ireland,” the old football anthem from the Kop at Windsor Park, but it turned out that this was a very well-known song called “Guantanamera,” which everyone on earth had heard of except me. Seeing I was excited by it, they sang it over and over and, in what seemed like no time at all, I had learned all seven verses. The days were all the same. The sky was blue, save for a few breaths of cloud. It was cold until noon and then hot for a few hours, then cold again at night. The landscape was high desert, cacti, a few scrubby trees, boulders. Once when I went for a walk, I saw a fox.
I had been there about a week when I started to get itchy feet (itchy foot, if you want to be literal). The guys sang songs and played checkers and eked out their scant tobacco in the evenings and slept most of the day. Like I say, they did bugger-all and there was no one for me to talk to. I ate their supplies and contributed nothing, not even a decent story or two to the conversation. Things had probably cooled down sufficiently, and it was ok to move on. And I wanted to go. I had to get north, I had to get back to New York.
On a Sunday morning (half a dozen of the men had rigged up church), I rolled up my clothes and got my stick and tried to make myself understood about heading north. The headman got the picture and told me to wait till tomorrow, since a car was coming and could take me to a road—this explained in bad English and more helpfully by drawings on the dirt.
I did wait and a car did come, a green Toyota Camry with a door missing. The driver left off a sack of rice and a tiny bag of coffee. The boss explained a few things and the driver nodded. I got in and the driver didn’t ask me anything at all. He drove me down into the plains. At a road junction he stopped the car and gave me some Mexican banknotes, which I refused but he insisted upon, and told me which way to hitch.
Guatemala, he said, pointing in one direction.
United States? I asked.
El norte, he said, and pointed along a line of blue mountains. He started the car and asked with gestures if I was sure I didn’t want to head back east with him. I shook my head. He shook his and off he drove.
I stood for a while, and then I sat. Just before nightfall a dust storm in the distance showed that there was a vehicle, the only one going in any direction that day. I hobbled up on my crutch and stuck my thumb out. It was a truck with an open back and no cargo. The driver saw me from a long way off and slowed down and stopped. He opened the cab door and said something in Spanish.
Can I come up? I asked.
He nodded, and I got up beside him.
¿Habla español? he asked.
Bueno, he said, and started her up.
He drove the whole of the night and shook me awake in the late morning as we arrived at a small town. I could see it was the end of the line. I asked him where north was and he showed me. I got out and thanked him, and he seemed to say that it was nothing.
The town was so full, it must have been a market day. I bought water, dates, oranges, and tortillas with one of the banknotes and got a lot of change back. I sat in the market square in the shade of a church and ate everything I had. I asked around with sign language and found a standpipe at the back of the church where it was permissible to wash. I stripped down to my boxers and cleaned myself off, much to the amusement of some small children playing nearby with a ball. If the kids hadn’t been around, I would have given my bollocks a good washing too. I air-dried and pulled on my mended jeans and a cotton smock that I’d been given in the village. I had a sandal on my good foot and a now filthy bandage on my stump. I safety-pinned the jeans back over and it was ok. I went back to the village square and found a bus stand and with much confusion explained that I was heading for the United States. This was tricky, I was told. I apparently could not get a bus straight there and should either go to Mexico City or take a bus up the coast, which would get me close but take much longer. In case of the peelers I chose not to go to Mexico City.
I got on the local bus, and we waited about three hours until it filled with passengers. It headed off, and a large woman in the seat next to me opened a black bin liner full of all her stuff and offered me a kind of sherbet to drink. She had one herself and then she produced a Madeira cake and a pot of jam. She cut me off a piece of cake and spread the jam for me too. She offered everyone on the bus a piece of her cake, and there was barely enough left for herself at the end. She told me stuff about her life and her kids and didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t follow any of it.
The bus ride was very pleasant (especially since I wasn’t on the sun side), and we went through a scrubby desert and a few towns and, once, a pine forest. I didn’t see any coast at all and wondered if I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick somehow. In any case, we traveled for about seven or eight hours, almost everyone, including my neighbor, getting off at intervening places. We eventually stopped for good at another place similar to the one we’d left. It was a small coastal town called Puerto Arrajo on a large, curved natural harbor.
I must have screwed up, because it was the end of the line as far as the bus routes north were concerned. Exasperated, I explained to the bus station attendant that I was trying to go north and, equally exasperated, he explained that I had to go back south to Veracruz and get off and then go north from there. The bus south didn’t leave until the next day. It was evening, so I got dinner in a filthy little restaurant which served a greasy pork stew with tortillas and which became the greatest meal I had ever tasted in my life. That night I slept on the second floor of a half-built house. I woke early and got scrambled eggs for breakfast at a sort of tavern. The bus station didn’t open till eleven, so I walked around all morning (I was getting pretty handy with the crutch), took a shit in the public squat shithouse, and strolled down to the shore. I tried to take a swim but the salt water was bloody murder on my stump, so I got out and dried off.
At eleven I hit the bus station. More confusion. Apparently I had misunderstood the man yesterday, for the bus back was not coming today but tomorrow.
I began to fly into a rage, and then I stopped myself. It wouldn’t help. I wandered to the outskirts of town and stuck out my thumb again.
A truck came, and the driver picked me up. I didn’t even ask where we were going. He talked all day and into the night, and I was a good listener.
I thought the sun was coming up, but it was the wrong direction, west, and the man explained that we were in the outskirts of Mexico City. When the dawn did come, I wanted the night back. Soot, diesel fumes, a locust-colored sky. We were up high, and through the smog you could make out slums and shanties and housing estates that were conceived in the design institutes of hell.
When you read Bernal Díaz’s book about the conquest, you get the impression that Mexico City is built upon a lake, with little barges plying between temples and wooden houses; it sounds beautiful, like Venice. I don’t know what happened to the lake, but when I was there, it was a nightmare of roads and concrete, insane traffic, poisoned air,
The driver was only passing through, but it took hours. At one point, in a nicer part I saw Americans at a café near a big church.
A man and a woman in shorts reading the International Herald Tribune. Americans, English words in a newspaper. I wanted to wind the window down and say something. Connect. But I did not. The light changed and we went on.
At a place called El Oro, the trucker stopped at a clothing factory. He asked around and we found a driver heading north.
Tall guy, chain-smoker, spoke a little English, wanted company. Said his name was Gabriel.
I told him mine was Michael, and he said that we were two of the archangels and that was good luck.
I shared his food and his little back sleeping cabin for two days. We talked fútbol and women and ate stale bread, and he told me long and complicated jokes that I couldn’t get but cracked him up.
María’s medicine was gone and the pain in my stump had become incredible. To help, Gabriel let me have some of his homemade moonshine, evil stuff that would have put hairs on the chest of the Lancôme girl.
In Chihuahua City, Gabriel said that we were at the parting of the ways. He was delivering shirts to California and had to turn west. I was going to New York City, and from here the Texas border was only about two hundred kilometers. Texas to New York was a much shorter journey than California to New York.
I could see what he was saying, but I wasn’t quite ready to leave him. It was safe here in this cab, with grain whiskey and old bread and my chatty fellow seraph. I wanted to get back, I had to get back. There was a scene to be played out, the handgun flaring, a knee jerking, the pain to be extracted, the terror to be inflicted, but not yet, not yet.
I’ll go with you all the way to the California border, I said.
He didn’t mind at all, and we drove west to Tijuana.
Tijuana, as most everyone knows, is a miserable place, and it was worse back then, but you only have to go to the nearest bar and be a little discreet before you can get hooked up with someone who can help you cross.
I was discreet, but I had no cash and I had to sponge off two American college guys in a VW bus. They’d been exploring Baja and surfing the Pacific side and had a lot of questions, and they bought me a beer, and I invented a story about myself that I’d been hitching around the Americas for the last few years, working and drifting and seeing things. They thought this very cool for a disabled guy and bought the whole shebang. My invention ran away with me a little, and I mentioned Colombia and Ecuador and the heights of Machu Picchu.
I explained to them I was going to have to cross illegally into the U.S. because I’d lost my passport months ago. They thought this was cool too, and offered to hide me in the bus, but I declined and said that that wasn’t the way things were done, and what I really needed was money.
They gave me fifty bucks and I thanked them and watched them drive off towards the massive customs station that led back into the United States.
With dough in hand and a grilling in a back kitchen that convinced two teenagers that I was not in the employ of the U.S. government, I was told that we were going that night.
A dozen of us met outside a bar off the strip and away from prying eyes. We waited for a long time and I thought I’d been ripped off, but eventually a van pulled up and we drove off into the desert for a while.
I had to climb a barbed-wire fence, which was tricky in my condition, but not impossible, and then there was a solid metal fence, which was a piece of cake and had handy grooves, as if designed for aiding wetbacks with dodgy legs.
I cross
ed somewhere east and south of San Diego with a score of other guys of all ages. We walked into no-man’s-land for some time and then a flashlight beam appeared which was either the agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service or the boy we were supposed to meet.
Our boy. Young, short, black jeans, black denim jacket, and a black Stetson. He yelled at us as if we didn’t see him and we went over, me muttering that half the bloody state of California must have heard the eejit. A van idled nearby and everyone gave the driver money. I didn’t have any cash left now but they let me come along. They were good guys, and most of them were agricultural laborers who did this thing every year. Fruit-picking season was over, but in Las Vegas, building season was just beginning. We drove all night and into the next day and the final stop was an industrial complex just south of Las Vegas itself. Everyone was there to demolish and build hotels and with my experience I knew I could have been on to a good thing, and but for my leg I might have made a fortune. But as it was, no one was ever going to hire me, save to make the coffee, so I thanked the guys for the ride and started hitching again east.
I was on the road an hour and a half when a sheriff’s officer picked me up and told me that hitching here was against the law. I said I wasn’t aware of that and he recognized the accent and asked me what part of Ireland I was from. I said Belfast and Deputy Flinn said that his grandmother on his father’s side was from Belfast. I’m not the biggest fan of peelers or other agents of the law, but Flinn was a big, gingerbapped, pale-skinned, nice bloke who almost wept over my story, which was that I’d come to Vegas to work as a builder but a hoddropping accident had cost me my foot and since I was an illegal I couldn’t very well go to the authorities to get work comp. I was hitching my way back to New York, where I had an address of a distant relative in Brooklyn who might sport me the cash to carry me back broken and dispirited to the Old Country.
Well, Seamus, Flinn began (for I was called Seamus McBride in this little universe), that’s about the worst thing I ever heard, and I want to lend you some cash to get the Greyhound. No, don’t object. I know you guys are full of pride but I absolutely insist.
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