Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Still, he said nothing. I was staring at him when we heard the clippitty-cloppity of donkey hoofs and the tinkling of little harness bells. Looking up, I saw an old man coming along the road toward us, leading a burro. He was smiling, his eyes twinkling beneath the shade of his straw sombrero; his silver handlebar moustache was quaintly long, the skin of his face and hands dark brown. I resented him mightily. He was the embodiment of mañana. He had no worries, no responsibilities. He had a four-legged vehicle of his own, and such vehicles perpetuate themselves. Cars did not give birth to little cars. Even the poorest of the poor were better off than me!

  The old fellow came to a halt beside the car and shook his head over it.

  “Ay, ay, pobrecito, estás tan triste”, he said in a sing-song. “No te pongas triste, no estés triste. Todo va a estar bien.” (Oh, oh, poor little one, you’re so sad. Don’t be sad. Everything will be okay.) Whether he was addressing us or the car, I do not know.

  My father slowly rose to his feet and went over to him. The stranger gave him an encouraging smile, and then without another word, he peered under the hatches on the roof. He reached inside like a blind surgeon and felt all around with his very ancient fingers.

  “It is the blood vessel of the automóvil, no?” he said in the high voice sometimes used by very aged Mexicans. “Señor, the hose is crack and pull from the heart. You make the wire around it, el coche pobres is fix, sí.”

  My father tinkered as directed. The old man watched, humming to himself. My father got into the car and turned the ignition, the motor rumbled, and our chariot sat there in front of us, vibrating nicely and ready to go.

  “The pressure hose”, my father said. “That’s all it was.”

  He got out of the car, rummaging in his pockets for some money to give the old man, but this was only a courtesy gesture, because there was nothing in the pockets.

  “Nada, nada”, the old man waved it away. Then he turned and led the burro off the road and into the desert. He passed beyond a thicket of mesquite, and we saw him no more.

  My father got in behind the steering wheel, I jumped into the passenger seat, and we continued our journey.

  I don’t think we said a word for about forty miles or so.

  Somewhere east of Albuquerque, he handed me back my card, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “I am sorry, Papacito”, I murmured shamefacedly.

  “Benigno”, he replied and said no more.

  More time passed.

  There came a moment when he cleared his throat. “You ask me why we are sad all the time. Does it seem to you we are always sad?”

  “No, Papa, you are not.”

  “Your mother cries one time a year, I know.”

  “Yes. It worries me. She will not tell me why. Never has she explained it to me. I can see no cause for it. Why does she cry at the end of July every year? For three days she cries. Every year. It is very strange.”

  “There are reasons.”

  “Can you tell me the reasons?”

  I watched his face closely. A wave of sorrow washed across it.

  “You are a man now”, he said. “Perhaps the time has come for me to tell you. For a long time, you have known that the world is a hard place. You can see with your eyes that we have guarded you from the evil all around us, and I think you have discovered that we guarded your thoughts as well.”

  Still, Benigno, the world is a dangerous place, my mother had called after me when I strode confidently out into the desert, the day a rattler struck me down.

  I said nothing. I did not want him to speak negatively about the world. I knew that the world had problems, even serious ones. But my life was beginning. There was promise in it. Maybe I would become a genius. I had a scholarship. I did not want him to tell me, as he had done so often before, that there was much wrong in the way people thought and the way they lived.

  “Why does my mother cry?” I asked, hoping to steer him away from general criticisms of the world.

  “Your mother cries because there is a great suffering in her heart. Long ago it happened. We have wanted to tell you, but. . .”

  “What did you not tell me?”

  “Neil”, he said. He always called me Neil when he was about to speak of the gravest matters. “You once had a brother and a sister.”

  “What?” Stunned, unable to absorb what he had just said, let alone understand it, I stared at him with my mouth open.

  “When you were a year old, we conceived a child, Mama and me. There were two children in her womb, twins, though we did not know this at first. Later, when she became bigger, Fray Ramon brought a doctor to us. He was a good man who did work for free. He brought an instrument and put it on her belly, and we watched the niños swimming around inside. We could see it was a boy and a girl. Very pretty, very strong they were.”

  As I listened to him tell the story, my throat choked up, and I stared straight ahead through the windshield. I did not know what to feel. I felt only that I did not want to hear this.

  “We hid her pregnancy. She never left the village after her belly could no longer be hidden. Your grandmother lived with us then. Do you remember her?”

  “No”, I said. Looking back, my memory produced only vague impressions of several old women with gray hair, the ladies of the village who were like grandmothers to any and all children.

  “The people were accustomed to guarding such secrets”, my father continued. “They did not report us to the police. There were other illegals among us. Do you remember the red blossom children?”

  “Yes. They always ran into the desert when the police came.”

  In our village, mothers or grandmothers often painted little flowers on the hands of certain niños among us—not all of the children, just some, the illegals. They made a game of it, because they did not want to frighten the little illegal ones. Whenever the bell rang, the red blossom children knew that they must hide. In the chaparral and sage bushes, they could not be found. If they remained hidden until they were called home by their mothers, they received sweets.

  “The police always come fast. They give no warning”, I said. “Yes, and that is why we made the trailers into a maze.”

  “We are a town of crazy streets. I thought it was because people are stupid.”

  “It is because people are smart and because they love their children. Later, the police and the social workers used the heli-floaters and heat scanners, so it was not so easy to hide. The fathers of the village dug holes in the earth beyond the edge of the village and covered them with plywood and sand. Little caves. They were dangerous because of snakes and scorpions.”

  “I used to play in them.”

  My father took his eyes from the road and gave me a severe look. “That was foolish, Neil.”

  “We thought it was part of the game. The older ones helped the little ones. Mama used to ring the bell.”

  “Yes, the mothers took turns watching. If a strange car came along the road or a hovercraft appeared in the sky, they rang the old brass bells—the same as the one your Mamá uses for the piñata feasts. There are many bells like it in the village. The children stopped playing and hid themselves.”

  He grew silent again.

  “Where are my brother and sister?” I asked.

  “I do not know who betrayed us”, he said in a shaken voice. “Maybe no one betrayed us. It is possible the police just came that day in the hope of finding something. They checked every trailer. I was away at work. Your mother was napping in our home at the time. Your grandmother had taken you for a walk, wrapped up in her tilma. When Mamá heard the bell ringing, she got out of bed and tried to go quickly into the desert. But she was eight months along, very big with two babies inside, and she could not walk well. She did not get far before they spotted her.”

  Now I was frozen inside. It was the strangest sensation in the world, to feel nothing emotionally, with the hair lifting on the back of my neck, my fists tightly clenching, my heart pounding, my throat c
losing, my lungs struggling to breathe.

  “They took her away to a hospital. They cut the children from her womb. They killed them, Neil. They killed them. And then a doctor did something so that she could never again have children.”

  “What did you do?” I asked in a choked voice.

  “I could do nothing—nothing! I searched for her. I went to Las Cruces and banged on many doors. The police would not tell me where they had taken her. The department in charge of these things would not tell me. I hit one of their men. I spent six months in jail because I hit him.”

  “And my mother?” I gasped.

  “Three days after they took her, they returned her to the village, to our home.”

  As he drove onward, I observed my father’s face. Never had I seen him look like this. Never. Until the day I die, I do not want to see another look like that on anyone’s face. I saw a grief so deep it was fathomless, beyond my comprehension, then and now. There was an old anger in it too, an utterly helpless kind of anger. All these years later, I wonder if there was also despair. I don’t doubt that he had feelings of despair. Yet I think there was no absolute and final despair, because of what happened later that night.

  I can’t write any more today. I feel sick. I feel helpless. Why has all this come back to me now? I want to kill the people who killed my brother and sister. Sixty years have passed, and I still want to kill them. I am watching myself kill them in my mind. Why does this pain not stop?

  Day 225:

  Look at it, Neil. Look at everything and see it. Why have you tried to bury this? Why have you turned away from it throughout all these many years? Was the pain too great for you? Is a man a man if he does not face the worst with courage?

  But where would courage have taken me? What would I have done? What could I have done? Learning the truth of my family’s history left me in a state of rage and dread, and for neither of these was there any outlet.

  As our car approached the outskirts of Santa Fe, the sunset was a violent red over the city.

  “Take me back to Las Cruces”, I said to my father.

  “You must not miss the registration”, he replied, shaking his head. “There are only a few hours until it closes.”

  “Take me back to my mother!” I demanded.

  “Neil, you cannot go back.”

  “Take me back now!” I yelled and burst into tears. He pulled over to the side of the road and idled the engine. He sat with both hands on the steering wheel as I sobbed. “You must go forward”, he said quietly.

  “To what! To what!”

  “You must go forward into your life.”

  “No, I will go back. I will go back, and I will find the killers. I will destroy them!”

  “If you kill the killers, you too will become a killer.”

  “No! I will bring justice.”

  “Justice? What do you think is justice?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. But I will make them pay for what they did. ”

  “Only you will pay—it would destroy you, not them.”

  “I hate them. Truly, Papa, I hate them. I will hate them all my life.”

  “Do not hate them. They do not know they are evil. They are blind. If you hate them, if you kill them in your heart, they will not die. They will rise up again and again within you, and they will kill your heart.”

  “I will make them suffer!”

  “You will suffer. And your mother and me will suffer too.”

  “There is no other way!”

  “There is another way, Benigno. I will show it to you.” What did he show me? He showed me a ruin. A ruin within ruins within ruins.

  We drove on into the brightly lit city, which was filled with speeding cars and happy laughing people on the sidewalks, the noise of bars and dancing halls, and billboards with 3D advertisements for beautiful people living beautiful lives. I hated it all. I hated every passing face. As we navigated slowly along a street called Alameda, young men and women in expensive cars sneered at us as they roared past at high speeds, and some of them made rude gestures. All around us towered new office buildings and hotels. We turned off this main thoroughfare onto a side street and went north. The whole block looked like a junkyard of rubble and machinery for demolishing buildings, with a few standing structures that looked very old.

  My father turned left into an alleyway and parked the car. We got out, and he led me across the street into the maze of ruins.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “The cathedral once stood here, San Francisco de Asís, where for centuries men worshipped God. They have torn it down to make a grand hotel.”

  I had never entered a church before. I knew what they were because from childhood onward I had read about them, heard stories about them, and seen their ghostly forms from a distance. I had been baptized by Fray Ramon in the plaza of our village, and had worshipped all my life at the tail gate of his pickup truck. When I was a little boy, my father had sometimes taken me to remote adobe missions in the hills, but these ancient buildings did not have priests in residence and were boarded up, locked with police seals, or enclosed behind barriers erected by historical preservation agencies. Whenever we visited one, we would kneel in the dust and pray, then quickly leave before we were seen.

  “We are trespassing in our own home”, my father now said to me, in a voice just above a whisper.

  His solar flashlight lit the way ahead of us a few steps at a time. We climbed over piles of concrete, crawled under barriers, squeezed through fence slats, and came to a shadowed building of large yellow blocks. The beam of light played over the doorway, the padlocks, the police notice, the other signs warning us away. Undeterred, my father led me around the building and into what looked like a yard full of wheelbarrows and stacked stones. Beyond these, we came to a wooden shack leaning against a high chain-link fence.

  “We will speak to the watchman”, he said.

  He knocked on the lintel of the low doorway, for only a blanket covered the opening.

  “Mi amigo”, he called in a low voice.

  An unseen hand pushed aside the blanket, and the light of an oil lamp flowed out to greet us. Then a man stepped out into the dark. I could not see his face, but I could tell by the way he embraced my father that they knew each other well. As they whispered together, I could not hear their words.

  The man took us through a canyon of construction materials, and led us deeper into the shadows behind the building we had first examined. There my father pointed his flashlight at a spot on the wall close to the ground, and I saw a wooden trap door, white with cement dust. The watchman lifted it, crouched down, and went inside, with my father and me following on his heels. I could see next to nothing as I climbed a few rickety wooden steps behind the men. At the top, the watchman opened a door with the sound of squealing hinges and scraping wood, and I found myself standing inside a low-ceilinged room that contained only a countertop along one wall and cupboards with open shelves. The smell of mice was strong. I heard the hooting of an owl somewhere above my head. Broken glass crunched beneath my shoes, and I dragged my bad leg through it carefully, fearing that I would fall and cut myself.

  Next we passed through an open doorway into a larger space.

  “I will make a light”, said the watchman. He took two candles from his pocket and set them on a table at the near end of the room. When they were lit, their glow illuminated the immediate area, and I saw that the table was a slab of flat stone upon two stone uprights. It was cracked in several places, with pieces broken off, and covered with spray-painted graffiti. The surrounding walls had been defaced in the same way.

  “The light might be seen”, my father said.

  “No, we are safe. After vandals broke the glass, the windows were covered with plywood until a decision is made.”

  “So there is still hope?”

  “Un poco, a little. The government wants it razed to the foundation. The historical agency wants it restored. A museum, they say. Per
haps they will save only the work of San Jose.”

  “If they try to save it by taking it elsewhere, will it not be destroyed?”

  “Sí, this is a danger. It is very old, and no one can explain why it stands. No one has ever been able to explain it. Yet it is not indestructible.”

  Turning to me, my father said, “This is my son. His name is Neil Benigno Ruiz de Hoyos. Neil, this is my friend. I cannot tell you his name.”

  The nameless man extended his hand to me with a smile. I shook the hand and dropped it. Now I could see that he was in his fifties, with a toil-worn face haunted by a lifetime of troubles. In the flickering shadows of candlelight, he seemed furtive to me, repugnant. Yet there was kindness and intelligence in his eyes, and I wondered why I was not permitted to know his name.

  “So you have brought him here to see the gift?” said the man.

  “He has need of it now”, said my father. “Will you show him?”

  “Of course.”

  The man took the candles from the table and carried them into the darkness. We stepped off the low platform onto a brick floor and followed him. I halted abruptly and gave a yelp of fright when out of the shadows came a huge red shape like a monster opening its jaws to devour me. My father took my arm, drawing me closer.

  He played his flashlight over the great beast.

  “It is a fire engine”, he said. “Once this was a station where men defended the city from fires. In the old days, houses were made of wood, and sometimes they burned down and people died. No one has driven this machine for many years.”

  Now we stood before the front of the vehicle. It was like a truck with a huge head and long body. It sat upon concrete blocks, its tires missing. It was something like a modern car with two glass eyes, but its front was not flat like our cars. It bulged forward with an open mouth and broken metal teeth. Above the teeth was an iron motor with wires sticking out of it, and a completely shattered windshield. There were seats inside with torn fabric and coiled springs.