Amigoland

by Oscar Casares

  “I thought you said he had never been on a real horse,” Don Celestino said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t stay quiet forever.” The old man used the interruption as an opportunity to take another drink. “Papá Grande knew they were good because he was there, on the horse, and saw how they controlled the horses, how they rode them.”

  “Yes, but how could he know they were better than most men if he had never climbed onto a horse?”

  “I thought you were sleepy?”

  “Until you kept me up with your story.”

  “The way I remember it, they rode through the night,” Don Fidencio replied, surprised his brother didn’t object. “The Indians stopped only two times to water the horses, but they wouldn’t let the children get down, maybe because they were afraid one of them might escape.”

  “Those poor children, all that time without eating or sleeping?” Socorro turned toward Don Celestino, but he was staring out the window as if they were still on the bus.

  “The worst of it was that, after a while, he felt like he had to make water, but there was no way for him to tell this to the Indian, not that he would have stopped anyway.” The old man shook his head. “The whole night that way. Not until they crossed the river did they let him go free.”

  “Only him?”

  “The way Papá Grande told me, only him. The rest of the children, they took with them to the north. Maybe they thought leaving one little boy would force the soldiers to stop or that they would be satisfied with only that one child. But who knows, why him and not the others?”

  “He was lucky, no?” Socorro said.

  “Lucky that they freed him, but not so lucky with what had happened earlier.” He took the last sip of his beer.

  The waiter, who had been standing off to the side and halfway listening, stepped up now. “Another cold beer for the gentleman?”

  “No, just the bill,” Don Celestino said before his brother had a chance to answer.

  After paying, they walked out of the restaurant and through the lobby. Don Fidencio kept testing his new cane by stabbing it into various splotches and cigarette burns on the carpet. Don Celestino had rented two rooms, his brother’s located on the ground floor, and a bigger room upstairs for him and Socorro. They agreed to meet for coffee and a quick breakfast at seven and try to be in the taxi by seven thirty. If they were still hungry, they could buy a snack at one of the stores inside the terminal or wait until they arrived at their destination. It was only a two-hour bus ride to Linares.

  33

  The same waiter unlocked the doors early the next morning. His shirt was still untucked and he held the tail ends together as if they were part of his bathrobe. Don Celestino pulled a chair out for Socorro. As it had been the evening before, they were the only customers in the restaurant.

  A few minutes later the waiter brought out some coffee for Don Celestino and an orange juice for Socorro. He placed a basket of fresh bolillos on the table, turning back one corner of the checkered cloth they were wrapped in.

  “I knew this would happen,” Don Celestino said. It was now quarter after seven.

  “It must take him longer to get dressed,” she said.

  “Then he should get up earlier.”

  A man not quite as old but using a cane walked into the restaurant. He wore a black guayabera and a pair of gray pants with sharp creases. He surveyed the surroundings until he saw the waiter motioning that his table was ready. When he arrived at the table, he hooked his cane on the backrest of one of the chairs and then tugged on it to make sure it was secure.

  “Maybe he couldn’t sleep,” Socorro said.

  “He can sleep more on the bus if that’s the problem.” Don Celestino glanced at his watch again.

  “What if something happened? Maybe we did wrong in leaving him alone in his own room, not even on the same floor.”

  “Where else did you want him?” he asked. “Sleeping between us there in the bed?”

  “If you want, I can go check on him.”

  “No, you wait for us here.” He pushed away from the table and stood up.

  “Remember his age, Celestino.”

  “You think I might forget?”

  A cleaning girl in bleached jeans and T-shirt was emptying an ashtray container down the hall from the room. She didn’t seem to notice or care when Don Celestino pressed up against the door. The room was silent as far as he could tell. No television. No shower. As he had suspected, the old man was probably still asleep or barely getting ready, maybe sitting on the toilet.

  He stayed listening for a few seconds before he knocked.

  “Fidencio?”

  He knocked harder the second time and then tried the doorknob.

  “Fidencio, are you asleep?”

  The third knock was loud enough to hear in the bathroom, if that’s where he was. Don Celestino told himself there were plenty of reasons why he might not be opening the door, though he couldn’t see why he wouldn’t at least answer, let him know that he had heard him knocking.

  When it was clear that his brother wasn’t going to open the door, Don Celestino asked the cleaning girl for help. She walked over, dragging a plastic trash bag as if someone might take off with it when she had her back turned. Her dark hair, still wet from her shower that morning, was pulled back into a high ponytail.

  “And your key?” she asked.

  “I have my key.” He dangled it from the wooden slat with his upstairs room number written on it. “But my brother’s not answering his door.”

  “Maybe because he doesn’t want to come out or wants you to leave him alone.” Her slew of keys hung off a large metal ring like a jailer might carry.

  “Yes, but he’s an older man.”

  The girl stared at him for a moment, as if she were attempting to do the math in her head. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said as she inserted the key. “The manager is the one you should go tell.”

  She knocked as she was turning the knob, and then into the door frame called out, “Hello? Cleaning!”

  She pushed open the door less than an inch before the security chain pulled taut and then someone pushed back from the other side. “I knew this was a mistake,” she said, and moved over.

  “Fidencio,” his brother said into the tiny crack between the door and the door frame. “Open the door already.”

  “Go away!” the old man shouted from somewhere inside the room.

  “What happened to breakfast, like we said?”

  “Nothing, leave me alone.”

  “What do you mean, leave you alone?” Don Celestino was now talking down at the doorknob as if it were some type of transmitter. “We need to catch a bus, remember, to Linares?”

  “Go yourself!”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Ya, I told you to leave me alone!”

  The door to the next room opened and a bare-chested man peered down the hall. He cocked back his head as if to ask what exactly the problem was at 7:23 in the morning. The cleaning girl waved hello to him.

  “Now let’s see if he doesn’t call the manager and they run me off,” she muttered after the man had gone back inside.

  Socorro walked up as Don Celestino was pressing his shoulder against the door. It took some convincing that he was going to hurt himself before he backed away and finally agreed to go wait in the restaurant. Maybe she could get the old man to open the door. The cleaning girl returned to her work down the hall but kept looking back every so often.

  Socorro leaned into the closed door. “But you don’t feel sick, right?”

  “No, you can go and leave me, there’s nothing wrong.”

  “And you took your medicines again today?”

  “Yes, all of them,” Don Fidencio said, tired of all the questions. “Just like yesterday.”

  “You slept good?”

  “All night, like a baby.”

  “Then?”

  “Please, just leave me.”

  “Take as long as you want,
but I’m not going anywhere.”

  “And then what, you think you’re just going to be there, standing in the hall?”

  “I can sit if I get tired,” she said.

  “How will that look, a young lady sitting on the floor outside a hotel room?”

  “If you can stay in there, I can stay where I am.”

  Don Fidencio considered what she was saying. He was sitting in a plastic chair against the far wall, as he had been doing since four that morning, when he woke up in bed with his clothes still on. It was now close to eight. When he ducked his head, he could see the very edges of her sandals under the door.

  “And my brother?”

  “He went back to the restaurant, but I know he’s worried.”

  After a while he leaned on his cane until he could push himself up. He was wearing an undershirt and a bath towel, which he was doing his best to keep knotted. A trace of light from under the door helped guide him. He shuffled in her direction, using the cane to clear a path, first pushing his shoes to one side and then the pile of clothes to the other.

  “Wait until I tell you when,” he said, then unchained the door and shuffled back to the plastic chair. “Ya.”

  Socorro edged open the door as if he might have suddenly fallen back to sleep and she didn’t want to wake him. The bathroom light was on and added to the sliver of daylight pouring in from between the curtains. The old man was sitting with an extra towel on his lap, where he kept the plastic bag with his medicines. Once she shut the door, he leaned back so he could adjust the position of the bag. Then the curtains blew open and the air in the room seemed to change.

  “I better close the window,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Something smells bad.”

  “But not from outside.”

  She noticed then that the bed was stripped bare and the sheets were lying near the entrance to the bathroom. A dark stain spread out from the center of the mattress, fading as it made its way toward the edges. She held her place as she glanced around the dim space, trying to avoid the mattress and then understanding that the only other direction for her to look was toward the old man.

  “Don’t go telling him,” he said.

  “He worries about you.”

  “Say whatever you want, just not this.”

  “You want me to lie to your brother?”

  “It matters more to me than it does to him,” he said. “He only cares that I’m still alive.”

  When she finally nodded, Don Fidencio thought about making her swear to this, but he let it pass when she pulled up a chair and sat next to him.

  “You should have called us.”

  “For what, if it was too late?”

  “It was an accident,” she said. “People have accidents.”

  “But how many times?” he opened his hands to ask. “Old people who are supposed to be in nursing homes, those are the ones who have the accidents.” He paused as he glanced at the bed. “He never should have taken me out of that place. He should have left me to die there with the rest of them.”

  “Please, stop saying those things.” She tried to reach out to him, but he pulled away.

  “And why not, if this is only the truth — my body is useless, the same as I am. So young, what do you know about these things, about your body not doing what you wanted it to do, what it was supposed to do?”

  Socorro looked the other way, then down at her lap. She wanted to say something to him, offer some words of hope or a way to restore his faith that things would get better, but instead they stayed like this, each of them realizing there was nothing left to say.

  “Let me help you,” she said, kneeling beside him.

  He raised the sleeve of the undershirt to wipe at his nose. “I want to stay alone, without any help.”

  “We can’t leave you here,” she said.

  “So that he can take me back there, leave me like they did already once, this time for good?”

  “Nobody’s going to take you back,” she said, now standing next to him. “Your brother promised to take you to Linares.”

  “How, then?” he said, and with his chin he motioned toward the pile of clothes.

  “Leave it,” she said. “Just clean yourself, and I can go buy you new pants and a shirt to wear, like if it was another trip.”

  “And if it happens to me again?”

  “It won’t,” she said.

  “And still, if it happens?”

  “It won’t, I told you.”

  “Now you sound like me when I was trying to convince Amalia and her husband.”

  “Maybe I do.” She helped him stand up. “Maybe you were right to call him that ugly name you like to call him.”

  “The Son Of A Bitch?”

  “That one.”

  They ended up staying an extra day in Ciudad Victoria. Socorro explained to Don Celestino how his brother had been sick during the night, probably from something he ate at the bus station, and was in no condition to be traveling. He hadn’t opened the door because he’d been embarrassed for anyone to see him that way.

  She spent the rest of the morning shopping for the clothes the old man would need for the next couple of days. By the time she returned to the hotel, she found that Don Fidencio had used one of the plastic chairs to sit in the shower while he cleaned himself. And meanwhile, Don Celestino had gone out for a walk and, as she discovered later that afternoon, located a pharmacy that sold those little blue vitamins he was so fond of.

  34

  Two men, both short and dark, stood alongside the lonely highway. They wore straw cowboy hats, the bands soiled a dark hue as evidence of their labor. Earlier it had drizzled, and their bright long-sleeve shirts, one yellow and the other red, were still dripping from the cuffs. Next to them stood a nylon sack thick with bristling ears of corn. Empty soda bottles of various colors, potato-chip wrappers, and cigarette butts littered the gravel patch where they had come to wait for their ride.

  Don Fidencio leaned back against the headrest as the driver edged the bus onto the shoulder. This would be no less than the tenth stop he’d made in the last two hours since leaving the station. They had missed the first-class bus earlier that morning and, in order to not waste any more time, his brother insisted they take the next direct bus, which, as it turned out, was direct but not nonstop.

  Behind the two men, the shoulder dipped and then farther on extended toward what appeared to be a grove of some sort. One of the men turned and called to someone behind them. A moment later, as the dust and empty wrappers were still settling back to the ground, two young women emerged from where the earth dropped off. The same man held out his hand to a woman carrying a baby swaddled in a pink blanket; the second woman carried a wet tarp and a pair of plastic shopping bags filled with groceries. The four adults boarded the bus with the sleeping baby and the nylon sack. Once the bus pulled back onto the road, the old man yawned and turned toward the window again. The bus slowed for a curve in the road and then accelerated again on the straightaway. A wet goat stood tethered to a metal stake near the shoulder. Across the dense countryside there was no sign of a house or a farm or so much as a dirt path leading to the metal stake. Just a goat getting sprayed with the rainwater still on the highway.

  They crossed a truss bridge with only two lanes and a while later passed a sign that read, BIENVENIDO A NUEVO LEóN. At least they were getting closer; the next sign indicated that it was thirty kilometers to Linares. The clouds from earlier had lifted, and what remained of them was covering the very tops of the mountains to the west. The blossoming huisache roused the countryside with alternating splotches of green and a yellowish-orange. Less frequent were the yuccas’ lush white flowers blossoming high above the rest of the scrubland. Even an old man with poor eyesight could tell the land had changed the farther from the border they ventured. He wondered if his grandfather had ridden past these same thickets when he was taken from his home. This thought sat with him for several kilometers until he tried to rec
all the last thing he had seen of his own house, but he moved on when he realized that all he could recall was the dank hotel room he had been in the last two nights, which he was trying his best to forget. They hadn’t arrived yet and he was asking himself what the point of it was. All this way to wake up dirty in his own bed? It didn’t matter how far they traveled because this wasn’t going to change his condition. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or the day after, the same thing might happen again, and if not that, then something worse. How far could he be from another stroke or from having to be fed and refed because he couldn’t so much as remember to swallow? And more unbearable things, those that he had heard happening down the hall — he could only imagine what the shouts and gurgles and sobbing were all about. If anything, the worst of it was probably more likely to happen than not happen. And so the shame he felt that early morning in the hotel had since been replaced with the simple and irrefutable truth that this was where his life was headed now; he had escaped one prison only to discover that there was no way of escaping his own failing body.

  The old man had fallen asleep by the time the baby started crying. Only with the hum of the tires on the road and the soundtrack to the most recent romantic comedy did he manage to sleep through the wails.