Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  The train slowed down a little just about forty-five minutes on, as it passed through the next town. What if he jumped off here? His stomach was growling.

  He’d have to wait twelve more hours for the next freight train to come through. Which means he’d show up a little late, but Jesús knew that Braulio’s contacts wouldn’t go anywhere until he got there. They might call his boss, ask what happened, but that’s all. Braulio would tell them to just hold on. Jesús was dependable, he’d never fucked up before, must’ve been a hitch.

  There were rows of prefabricated houses along the tracks, with yellow light streaming through rectangular windows. Shadows conspired with each other along the rooftops. It all seemed so peaceful, so quiet, so worth a visit.

  He jumped from the train without somersaulting but jolted his knee hard enough that it made him limp slightly.

  One of the houses had a window still ajar. The lights on the first floor were off, but there were signs of life on the second floor, judging from the lively reflection of a television’s lights in one of the upstairs windows.

  Jesús jumped the fence with ease, crossed the yard, and approached the window. He opened it wider and found himself in a living room with old easy chairs and a piano covered in a plastic sheath. He thumbed through the magazines on the coffee table near the sofa—People, AARP—and for a second he could imagine what it would be like to live in this country that wasn’t his: cut the lawn on Saturday mornings, watch television with his wife and children on Sunday evenings, a dog or a cat asleep on his lap.

  The fantasy of that life nauseated him.

  Jesús switched the light on in the kitchen and opened the fridge. There were turkey slices in a plastic bag. He ate all of them. Then he polished off an apple and some cheese. He poured himself a glass of milk, grabbed a box of cookies from the cupboard. There was a calendar stuck to the upper part of the fridge with a Ronald Reagan magnet, and another of the Taco Bell chihuahua, photographs of a white-haired older lady next to three women—her daughters? They looked happy. Where was the old man? Was he dead already?

  He could leave the house now, just wander around the town until the next train came by. But instead he stayed and continued rummaging through the cupboards. What was he looking for?

  His movements were growing brusquer, he felt his heart accelerating, pounding, beginning to race.

  He slammed one of the cupboard doors shut. He heard footsteps on the second floor, a voice called down from the top of the stairs.

  “Is that you, Joyce?”

  He knew what he was craving.

  “Honey, would you please say something? You’re scaring me.”

  He rifled through a few drawers, found a knife.

  Would he wait for her to come down? Or go find her himself?

  4

  Smithsville, 1985

  Ranger Rafael Fernandez walked into the house, which had been cordoned off with yellow tape. The front door was ajar, and police were coming and going. As he entered he greeted Captain Smits, who was communicating with one of his subordinates by walkie-talkie. Smits pointed at the stairway and continued talking. There were chalk marks on the floor and on the last few stairs, marking where they had discovered the elderly woman’s lifeless body. The corpse had already been taken to the morgue.

  The captain finished his conversation and approached Fernandez. He put his hand on one of Fernandez’s shoulders in his typical easygoing, chummy way. The Ranger stepped back. He didn’t like it when people got too close to him.

  “Anything new?”

  “Olivia Havisham, seventy-five years old, widow, retired schoolteacher.”

  The captain handed him a folder with Polaroid pictures of the crime scene, together with reports by the coroner and forensic pathologist. The photos upset him: the murderer had been particularly vicious.

  “He cut her throat with a knife, then stabbed her in the chest with it,” the Captain explained. “According to the coroner’s report, death was not instantaneous. Poor lady had time to realize what was going on.”

  “What’s not going on anymore, you mean.”

  “Yup. Motive appears to be robbery. He sorted through the drawers where she kept her jewelry. A daughter says there are some earrings missing, a few bracelets and chains. That’s Joyce over there, the only one who lives in the vicinity; the other two have been notified and should be getting in this afternoon.”

  Fernandez remembered something an FBI agent once said, a specialist in criminal profiles: the killer always leaves something behind and always takes something away from the scene of the crime.

  “We know what he took,” he said, giving him back the folder. “But what did he leave behind?”

  “Fingerprints, all over the goddamned place. Wasn’t premeditated. Didn’t seem to worry at all about getting caught.”

  Fernandez asked permission to go upstairs. “Fine, long as you don’t touch anything,” Smits said. “Coroner says we aren’t supposed to be walking around in here. We mess up his crime scene, ain’t that a hoot? Leave footprints everywhere. Hooey. You’ll find the daughter in her mother’s bedroom. She doesn’t want to move, she’s still in shock.”

  “I can imagine.”

  But the truth was he couldn’t imagine it. His own mother was in a hospice in Abilene, down to skin and bones and no longer able to recognize him when he visited. She was mostly bedridden, and whenever she wasn’t sleeping she was watching television. She’d had a stroke and lost her ability to speak; every once in a while she opened her mouth enough for him to see where half of her tongue had been burned off, as if struck by a bolt of lightning. Which is more or less what had happened: the stroke had decimated her brain cells, and along with them the ability to communicate, to articulate words.

  In all, he preferred having his vieja in that condition rather than lying on a steel autopsy table in the morgue.

  “Any suspects?”

  “The window had been left open. I don’t think the killer knew her. He saw the open window, came in to rob, found the lady there and killed her. All very clean.”

  “Opportunity makes the thief.”

  “Maybe the thief was already made. A damn clumsy one at that. We’ll know in a little while if he has a record.”

  Fernandez cleared his throat as he scrutinized framed pictures of the woman and her daughters. Here they stood at the door of a restaurant. Here on a ski slope. There was one of them in a town square that could have been in Mexico. Now just another broken family. Though death seemed to have been the final blow to what had already been broken: the father was nowhere to be seen. Death merely accelerated the slow process of decay we’re all subject to from the moment we’re born. Fernandez considered his own family. It shocked him to think how much he hated Cherise, someone he had truly loved once. He’d spent so much time with his children when they were young, but now, as adolescents, they looked at him as if he were a complete stranger, just some spic who spoke English with a heavy accent (they constantly corrected his pronunciation of “comfortable” and “vegetable,” saying “it’s evakiueizion and not evacueizion,” or “the ‘l’ in ‘salmon’ is mute,” they scolded him for using articles or pronouns wrong, “pass me the Tabasco, please” or “I like the ice cream”). He didn’t know how to listen to them and couldn’t offer the advice they needed.

  He climbed the stairs to the second floor with Smits. It had been a quiet day, and he was off the clock, but the boss called on volunteers to check in and report on what had happened. He’d left what he was doing the second he received news of the murder. The town was less than an hour from Landslide.

  Before entering the elderly woman’s bedroom, Fernandez inspected the window in the hallway, just between the stairs and the bedroom. The curtains were open and tiny specks of dust were floating in the sunlight. From this vantage point he could discern how the house just opened itself up like a big fat temptation to anyone walking along the train tracks. The home of a single elderly woman, just begging to be rob
bed or even raped and killed. There were savages in all parts, but it seemed as though people had gone a little bonkers these days. As if something in the air was making folks act more bizarre than ever. Even those of sound mind can feel the allure of the switchblade to finish a conversation gone awry, or a pistol to shoot dead that asshole who just dared raise his voice a little too loud.

  Joyce, the woman’s daughter, was slumped across a rattan chair in a corner of the room; a policewoman or nurse, or both, was kneeling beside her, taking her pulse. Fernandez approached and murmured a soft “My sympathies.” He nodded and walked away without expecting a response. He felt uncomfortable encroaching on the private space of the bereaved. His job required it from time to time, part of the profession that he least liked. The dead were dead; but the living were the ones who had to bear the pain, deal with the problems, the debts, the specifics, the half-truths, not knowing how to fill the immense—or maybe not so immense—void left by their loss, the result of some thief’s whim or an accident, there were so many ways to leave this world, it was so easy.

  He walked over to examine the walls, look closer at a collection of wooden landscape paintings, obviously souvenirs from a trip to Guatemala. They narrated creation myths. The nurse stood up and left.

  The victim had lain down on her bed to watch television, covering herself with a coffee-colored blanket decorated with southwestern motifs. Now it lay thrown over the pillow. There was a pile of books and magazines on the night table. Fernandez bent over to thumb through the books. He didn’t feel curiosity for the lives of his coworkers or his neighbors in life, but when death came calling, even the slightest details took on enormous significance. What did they read, what cereal did they eat for breakfast, what time did they go to the gym, what were their favorite television shows? These details allow the dead, rendered speechless, to still have a say. People are generally nosy, they like to pry into the lives of other people who share the same space as they do; but somebody has to concern themselves with those who are no longer among us.

  So what did the books tell him? That Mrs. Havisham was worried about her savings. She dreamed of taking a trip to the Mayan Riviera. She read detective novels that she checked out of the municipal library: Elmore Leonard, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

  Wouldn’t that have been interesting: the elderly woman was reading a detective novel about a murderer of elderly women who broke into his victims’ homes through the window, when a murderer of elderly women broke into her home through an open window and killed her.

  But no, it wasn’t the case. She had been watching television. He would ask what channel she had tuned in to. Did the program she was watching tell him anything about her death? Doubtful. Yet these were the types of minor details, the specifics that mattered to Fernandez.

  He stepped over to where the daughter was seated. She started talking before he even opened his mouth.

  “It’s all my fault,” she said. “Mom complained about being alone, she wanted to go to an assisted living facility. I couldn’t bear the idea, said it wasn’t necessary, and promised to visit more often. But everything always seemed more important than coming to see her. I abandoned her.”

  “Right now you need to try to keep calm,” Fernandez told her in a hurry: he didn’t want to see her cry.

  He would have told her the same thing he told one of his relatives in a similar situation: “When it comes down to it, we’re all alone.” But he had learned the lesson, these words didn’t offer consolation, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “If what you’re asking is whether anything of particular value is missing, the answer is no. There are a few pieces of jewelry gone, but whoever took them wasn’t being picky about it. He grabbed whatever he could stick in his pocket. There are a few library books missing, but I suppose that doesn’t count. She was absent-minded, tended to leave them all over the place; you can’t imagine the late fees. I don’t know if absent-minded is the right word, she was forgetful.”

  Joyce had a noble, dignified face, despite the contrast between the taut skin of her cheeks and the crow’s feet fanning around her eyes. She was a young-looking not-so-young woman.

  Her mother hadn’t been very cautious. She left her necklaces and rings in plain sight; nothing was kept under lock and key.

  “You bet, that was her all right. We begged her to have her jewelry appraised and then store it in a safe deposit box. The housecleaners stole things from her. And I would say, ‘Mom, when are you going to learn?’ And she would say, ‘What do you expect, they’re poor, we should be helping them out.’ As if her calling in life was to be there for them to rob her.”

  Rafael Fernandez thought briefly about the period of his life when he had gotten into petty theft. He was only twelve years old and was trying to help his parents, who were undocumented workers in a maquiladora in Calexico, California. His shoplifting career hadn’t lasted long, though. In fact, as a boy in Mexicali he had dreamed of becoming a police officer. Rafael was crestfallen when he found out that these agents of the public good were the same racketeers who visited his father’s liquor store every last Friday of the month and threatened to close him down if he didn’t pay extortion money. The situation eventually spiraled out of control and an “accidental” fire stripped his parents of everything they owned. That was why they had decided to cross the border. A few months later, in the United States, Rafael knew there was no going back for him, this was his new and his only country.

  Before leaving the room, Fernandez asked Joyce if she’d seen anyone suspicious lurking around her mother’s house: a gardener, a housekeeper, someone capable of murder?

  Joyce looked up at him reluctantly, as if all she wanted from him was the promise that he’d find his mother’s killer. But she seemed to think twice and realized it wasn’t worth making such an obvious request.

  “Please let me know if you think of anything else,” Fernandez said.

  Smits was waiting for him on the landing of the stairs.

  “The press is outside,” he said. “We have to give a statement. They need some sort of feed.”

  Fernandez thought it might be best if the case were assigned to someone else. He’d have one less reason to feel guilty if he didn’t find the killer. He was haunted by the ghosts of so many people whose murders were left unresolved. The architect who was stabbed to death by one of his partners, who ended up walking for lack of evidence to prove the crime; the young Norwegian girl whose cadaver was found near the train tracks in Landslide. They didn’t even have a suspect!

  “Tell them the investigation is ongoing, there are a number of leads, same old thing.”

  “I can do better,” Smits said. “How about we tell them the truth. No suspects. The killer disappeared as if the goddamn earth had swallowed him whole. He’s invisible.”

  “That would only pique their morbid curiosity.”

  “Well ain’t that the idea?”

  Maybe the captain was right. It wasn’t the police’s mission to calm the frenzied populace, assure them that order would be restored. These were troubled times, and to keep ahead of the game, the police needed to put pressure on public opinion, make people feel unsafe, encourage them to report prowlers in their neighborhood, awaken the fervor of the mob that would lynch a stranger for being an outsider.

  He said goodbye to Smits, told him he’d check in at the morgue before going back to Landslide, and asked to be kept informed.

  5

  Ciudad Juárez; various US cities, 1985–1988

  Jesús kept taking jobs on the other side of the border. At first they waited for him to cross and had the cars ready for him to drive back over. Eventually he was expected to steal them himself. Braulio trusted his ability, he’d seen him work in the body shop taking cars apart, opening the doors, and starting them up without needing keys.

  Before long he became the consummate thief. Pickups and SUVs were trickier for him at first, but after a while they were a piece of cake too.

  Jesús took
advantage of his work to explore the country. He roamed around jumping freight trains, a blue canvas bag in tow, the kind tennis players use to carry their rackets, wearing his lucky gray blazer, no matter how soiled.

  One of his favorite routes went to central California. Often he’d pass through Dening, Tucson, Yuma, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles before heading north by Bakersfield through Stockton. Other times he’d go from Bakersfield to Albuquerque and on to Gallup, Flagstaff, and Barstow. He also liked to travel toward the Great Lakes. To do that, he first went to Landslide and continued north to Dallas, Texarkana, and Little Rock to St. Louis, a sort of home base from where he would head over to Chicago and Detroit. At first he wasn’t very interested in the names of the places he visited, but he started memorizing the itineraries because everything was easier when he knew where he wanted to go and the times the trains came and went.

  If he got to a town or a city by night, he would jump off the train and look for empty homes to burgle, pinching jewelry and objects that he could carry easily in his pockets. He sold them in pawnshops and kept a few things that he particularly liked for himself.

  At times he was tempted to break in when he noticed students at home, or an old lady by herself. He’d break in to burgle, but the robbery was a mere excuse for what really attracted him: the women who ignored him when they saw him loitering in a train station or a supermarket. Gringas who couldn’t stand the fact that he was alive. How easy it would be to get rid of them. It was a powerful temptation, but he kept it in check. He didn’t want to get into any trouble.

  He looked for places to eat for free, churches, soup kitchens, and Salvation Army stores. He practiced his rudimentary English with the priests and volunteers who aided him or with the hobos and beggars who sat with him at the table. He followed as much of the 49ers season as he could.

  Migra agents arrested him one time when his train stopped in Brownsville. They opened the boxcar doors and pointed their guns at him; Jesús was asleep on the floor and woke up startled and shaken. They cuffed him and dragged him into the office. They asked his name, entered the false information he gave them into a computer, and announced that they were deporting him back to Mexico.