4.
If Soli found a phone and called the cantina, Papi would find her here and take her home, away from Manuel and his tunnel. They would ride a dusty bus, side by side, for hours.
But she did not want to go home. She did not want to go back to that life. She wanted California, and she wanted it badly enough that anyone who threatened to take it away, even someone she loved very much, would have to be ignored.
She spent that night lying on a plastic mat, courtesy of Grupo Beta. She didn’t sleep, of course. Her backpack, bulky with bottles that she’d stolen from Manuel, lay next to her. She cradled it like a boyfriend. Exhaustion was everywhere. The others were too tired to care about the hard ground or the heat. She watched the stars and thought about Popocalco. When summer days baked their house and made sleep impossible, they’d lie outside and let the mountain breezes cool them to a stupor. There, like here, she could see the languid moon. But here, she couldn’t hear the whisper of the valley or the shlack-shlack of corn stalks in the wind. Here, the air was dense. Into its silence seeped the whine of power lines above, the snores of coyotes, the anonymous trumpets of gas and passing motorcars. An airplane droned overhead. She heard an animal howl, loud and close. She sat up. What a feast they would make for a hungry beast, she and these weary pilgrims.
And then she saw someone else sit up but couldn’t see his face, just the lean arch of his torso. He had hair that rose in a mad crown around his head, and across that rustling meadow of bodies, they watched each other.
He lay down again, and so did she.
• • •
WITH THE MORNING, the sun sliced through her, blinding at first. She had to squint until the glare softened. It was this light that brought her Checo, wild-haired and warm, as certain as a ray of sun.
An orange truck pulled into the camp. Already a line of people waited for the men to set up tables. At a separate table, they had set up a medical station, bandaging feet and checking for head lice. Why Grupo Beta bothered helping them, a bunch of hopefuls heading for the exits, she could only imagine.
She spotted Manuel in the distance, leaning on his car and talking on his phone. He plucked at his chin with his fingernails.
When she reached the front of the food line, the Beta man dripped a half-ladle of beans onto her plate, where they sat in a sheepish pool. The men before her had been given full servings. Soli knew this food was free, that she should have shut up and taken what she was given. But the thing is, she was hungry, and she wanted as much as everyone else.
“I want more,” she said.
“That’s enough for you.”
“The men before me got more.”
“Move down the line, please.”
She stayed put.
“You’re small. That’s all you need. Now move down.”
The men behind her began to make noise. Move on, señorita! Keep it moving, chica.
There was much grumbling and shouting. Soli didn’t budge. Behind her, she felt the rising cloud of irritation. Whistles and more shouts. Someone yelled, “We’re all hungry, so move your pretty pompas!”
And then, from the swelling hubbub of the food line, a single voice: “Give her mine,” it said. It flared again: “Give her mine!” A voice of wood and air, it blew like a mountain flute.
The Beta man looked down the line, locked eyes with the voice, and cursed. He slopped more food on her plate.
Soli made a decision. This was the voice for her. She would stick with this voice.
It belonged to a young man, thin and capable. From his head rose a hurricane of hair, pushed back with a headband. She’d never seen anyone like him. He couldn’t have been much older than her. Twenty, maybe. He sat in a cluster of men and boys. He squinted into the sun, shook his head, threw his hands in the air as he spoke. Thin ropes circled his wrists. His name was Checo.
She could tell this much from where she sat: Checo wasn’t scared. And she was. He seemed to know what he was doing. And she hadn’t a clue. She looked back at Manuel, who was scanning the crowd now, looking for her. For all her ignorance, she knew she’d have to make her own move. The key, she sensed, was to pretend she didn’t care. Take him or leave him, whoever he was, this man who radiated promise. He stood at the edge of the camp now, staring down the train tracks, when she walked to his side.
He saw her. Nodded. “Get enough to eat?”
“Sure.” She peered down the tracks herself and saw nothing but quavers of heat. “You headed to the States?” she asked, at last.
He smirked. “I sure am, señorita. And you? Japan?”
She had no reply to this, so she mustered her courage and said, “I think I’ll come along with you.”
This earned an outright yelp of glee. The man doubled over, hands on knees, laughing. Soli stared. She’d never made a person laugh like this before. Other travelers turned to watch them. A few of his friends gathered round, looking from Soli to the man and back. Soli turned to leave.
“Wait!” He held up a hand, waved a finger at her. “Don’t go,” he said. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“If that’s what you want? You can come with us.” He smiled for real then.
A small boy stepped forward from his group of friends, looked Soli up and down. “Can you ride trains?” He whacked her on the arm. “You ever ride a train before?”
Soli gazed at the boy, rubbed her arm.
“I can ride a train,” she said. Anyone could ride a train, she thought.
Soli found Manuel by the latrines.
“Keep your tunnel,” she told him. “And keep my Papi’s money. I’m going on my own from here.”
He peered at her, shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re saying, fresa. There’s no thank-you-and-goodbye for us. You’re part of this now. You know that, right?”
Soli’s heart pounded through her temples. She fought the urge to cry out. If she ran, Manuel would surely catch her.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, Manuel. I’m going to the bathroom now, okay? Wait here.”
He shrugged, grinned. “I can wait all day.”
The bathroom was packed with women: women washing their faces, women hunched over sinks and splashing water under their arms, women waiting for the three toilets. Where had they all come from? She grabbed one. “Trade clothes with me,” she said. “Please!”
The woman scoffed at Soli, looked her up and down. “I don’t think so.”
She tried another and another, until finally one shrugged and said, “Okay.”
“Thank you,” Soli said.
“What’s wrong with your clothes?”
“Nothing! They’re fine.”
And with that, she traded her pink T-shirt and blue jeans for a pair of old brown trousers that cut off at her knees, and a T-shirt that read Soccer Players Do It for 90 Minutes. When she took out Manuel’s knife and stood at the sink, hacking at her hair, no one seemed to notice. Desperation was strength, and Soli’s enabled her to saw through her ponytail and shred away the locks that hung loose around her forehead, until she looked like a bona fide, wholly unnoticeable fourteen-year-old boy. Luckily, her breasts were negligible. She ambled from the bathroom with a masculine limp, spat on the ground, and marched past Manuel, still stationed by the bathroom entrance, who barely turned her way.
“Idiota,” she muttered, as her heart petered down to a workable beat.
• • •
LATER, CHECO LAUGHED AT HER. “You’re becoming an American already,” he said. “Give me my food! It’s mine, it’s mine!”
“I wasn’t being American. I was hungry. And if this were the States, they would have called the police.”
Checo hadn’t gone hungry, either. “I knew they were bullshitting,” he said. “They had enough for everyone. They just like to be in charge.” He paused. “You look like a boy now. Wha
t happened?”
He had no sense, that first morning, of what would grow between them, those days on the trains. But Soli knew, from the second he shouted down the food line, that Checo was right all over. With his hands, his hair, his heat, he was the wind that would carry her North.
When the small boy had punched her and asked if she could ride a train, Soli had envisioned boarding a passenger train. She’d worried that they’d be boarding without tickets, without money, that they’d have to hide when the collector showed up. She was more wrong than she could have imagined. Later that morning, a freight train pulled onto the tracks near the camp. It hissed its arrival, a great metal snake. There it stopped, waiting to be loaded and unloaded.
The Beta man was firm: “No one is to ride this train,” he said. “It is illegal to ride on top of a freight train. It is against the law. You will be arrested,” he said, “and sent back home.” Then he paused. “Please watch out for tunnels. If you see a tunnel coming, lie down flat. Hitting the top of a tunnel will kill you.”
Here’s the thing: The police weren’t going to stop them. There were too many travelers to arrest them all, and no one, not even the police, had any interest in stopping a horde of penniless kids from getting out of Mexico.
Soli began to understand that getting on a freight train when you haven’t been invited wasn’t a wise thing to do. Checo explained it to her beforehand. “You wait for the train to start moving, you run like hell and you climb on,” he said. “If you fall, you’re carne molida.”
“Why can’t you get on before it starts?”
“You’ll get caught,” he said. “Now, listen. You run alongside it and catch up to one of those ladders on the side. See those? You run, you climb, and you get onto the train. You go first, and I’ll come up behind you.”
“Okay.”
“I won’t be able to pull you up,” he said. “You’ll have to do that yourself. You got strong arms?”
“I don’t.”
He clasped her arm where the muscle should have been.
“Well. You’re light. You’ll be fine. Give me your backpack,” he said. “I’ll carry it.”
She hugged the bag more tightly.
“There you go again. I’m not going to take it. I’m going to carry it so you can run.”
She took it off and gave it to him. He had to loosen the straps to get it on. “What’s in here?” he asked.
“Water.”
He took the pack off, opened it, and cursed quietly. “You brought these all the way from Oaxaca?”
“I took them from that man. And there’s a knife in there, too. And a Prince tape.”
He shook his head. He was wondering about her, she could tell. What passed across his face was a cool, fast cloud of doubt. She wanted to tell Checo that on a journey like this, you kept the things you owned, because you never knew what might be stolen by rough hands or sorry circumstance. But because she was a girl with hummingbirds in her heart, she kept this wisdom to herself. She let Checo do the knowing.
And then he put the backpack down and looked straight into Soli’s eyes. “You’ll have to keep up, okay?” He cupped her elbow. “Don’t get left behind.”
Running for a train was easy enough because she had a goal in mind, and that goal made her forget the raw skin between her thighs, the pounding in her feet and knees. It was a race she had a chance of winning. Pulling herself onto a moving train was something else. It was then that she began to doubt herself, when she realized just how weak her arms were, how fickle the elbows. The train gnashed its wheels at her, sent the sound of metal on metal right up through her bones and into the marrow.
Soli’s hand grasped a railing. She faltered. Her elbow flailed and the momentum of the train was harder and stronger than she was. She felt her grip slipping. She felt the ravenous suck of the tracks below.
And then she felt Checo, his arm around her waist, pushing her up and shouting as the train picked up speed. “Hold on to it!” he yelled. “Pull yourself up. Pull! Grab on!”
She pulled up, she grabbed. Her foot found a rung and she was on. Checo was behind her, his chest pressed to her back. “Climb up,” he breathed. She climbed, crying without shame, her arms shaking uncontrollably at each rung. When she reached the top, he hoisted both of them to the roof of the train. They lay there for a long while, catching their breath.
“Thank you,” she said at last. “You saved me.”
“You fall, I fall.” Either he was making a promise or stating a fact. He unzipped her backpack and opened a bottle.
“Salud,” he said, took a sip, and passed the water to her. “We’ll get stronger stuff than this tonight.” Soli turned and watched the shrinking past, the faraway camp, and let her nose, her throat, her mind fill with the pleasures of a promising wind.
As they rode that day, she began to understand the boy-man who’d opened an escape route from Manuel. Checo’s barbaric crown of hair was born of the ceaseless wind. His voice, loudest in the day and with no apparent volume control, came shouting over the rumbling tracks. Everything he said was certain, a pronouncement, because on this train, running beside it, lying flat atop it, you needed to know exactly what you were doing. And if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing, you acted like you did and hoped for the best.
Soli searched for something to look at. The world rushed past, and her eyes yearned to focus. “Just don’t look so much,” Checo said. “Stop looking. Soften your eyes and try not to see.”
Clustered around Checo at all times were the collection of young men and boys who had found one another on this journey. They were Mario and Flaco, both fourteen. There was Pepe, whose face still carried a soft, fatty cushion of infancy. “How old are you?” Soli asked. The boy raised his fist and up sprang his middle finger.
“We’re pretty sure he’s eight,” Checo answered.
There was one they called Nutsack. Nutsack was older than the rest and spoke good English. He’d made the mistake of translating the word for them, and the name had stuck for good.
In the afternoon, the group grew quiet. They couldn’t sleep, because sleeping meant falling. But the late afternoon was a time to pretend they were somewhere else, to think of home and slip feathers into the cushions of their futures. When Soli started to doze off, she felt a pinch. “How are you?” Checo asked. She opened her eyes and found herself unable to speak with his face just inches from hers. He cleared a strand of hair from her mouth. If they had been alone, he would have kissed her.
• • •
AS DUSK SHOOED AWAY THE DAY, the train came to a stop. In the distance, not far from the tracks, they spotted the hanging lanterns of restaurants, people out for the evening, music. After the endless rush of wind in their ears, the music was like dew on a leaf.
“Come with me,” Checo said. They headed into the busy part of whatever town it was. “Tomorrow we ride La Bestia,” he said. “Tonight, we celebrate. What’re you wearing under that coat?”
“Why, we’re going dancing?”
He took her hand and led her into a store. “Wait,” he said, and slipped a slick hand—she gasped—around Soli’s neck. Then he unzipped her backpack and pulled out her rosary.
“Put this on,” he ordered.
“What? Why?”
“Just put it on.” He strung the beads around her neck, straightened the cross and set it on her chest, on full display.
“Better. Let’s go.”
Because Checo told her to, and Checo hadn’t been wrong yet, Soli walked in, pretending to peruse the back wall of the store. Those boys, they always had plans.
The only store in Popocalco stocked its liquor at the front so hoodlums like them couldn’t steal it. Checo picked up a jug of wine—not a bottle, but a jug, the kind with a handle.
“That won’t fit in my bag,” she said.
“It’s not going
in your bag.” He stepped close and hugged her, and as he held her, he pulled up the hem of her T-shirt and shoved the jug inside.
“Ai!” she cried. The glass was cold on the skin of her belly.
“Va dar a luz!” he shouted across the store. “My wife is in labor!” She watched him button her jacket up. He frowned at her.
“Ai!” she gasped. “Ayudame!” She pressed her palm to her back the way pregnant women did and shuffled down the aisle, bending her knees as if the weight of childbirth were driving her into the ground. She wheezed, she whimpered. She made the suffering sounds that she’d seen and heard from others. “Ai, Dios mio!”
Checo dragged her out the door, leaving the clerk wide-eyed. “We’re having a baby, señor,” Checo shouted as she shuffled out. “Congratulate me!”
They ran down the road holding hands, her arm supporting her belly. They ran through busy streets and into the dark. Back at the train, the other boys shouted their welcome.
Pepe’s eyes went wide. “How’d you get that?” he asked her. “You got money or something?”
“No, Pepe,” Checo said. “She’s got something else you’ll never have.”
The boys clapped Soli on the back, congratulated her. “You’re one of us now,” Nutsack said.
“Fuck off. She’s not like you.” Checo screwed the cap off the wine. When Pepe reached for it, he pulled the jug away. “No, no, no, Pepito.” He pointed to the restaurants. “You know what you’ve got to do. Get my wife a bite to eat. She’s just given birth, right?”
Pepe came back with a bagful of food—a packet of french fries, half a sandwich, two apples, and a tin of biscuits.
“Where’d you get all this?” Soli asked. “Did you steal it?” She turned to Checo. “Did he steal it?” There was something wrong with making a little boy steal.
“You think we’d send him? He couldn’t steal daylight from a blind man.”
It was later that she realized that Pepe had begged. For a little boy with watery eyes, it was easy.
With the wine that night, they turned their throats to sandpaper, their teeth to gray pebbles. There was no shelter for them there, no red Beta truck or mats to sleep on. Checo made sure Pepe found a decent place to lie. He was short and thin enough to stretch out on a roadside bench. “Yell if anyone bugs you,” he said to Pepe. “You got your knife?” Pepe nodded.
Lucky Boy Page 4