by J P S Brown
After a chat, Maggie asked if they had seen Paul and Buster. They looked away stuttered, said "no" in too many ways, excused themselves, and left for their rooms.
Maggie said, "Come on, Mikey. I know where the sonsaguns are."
When Maggie headed for a fight in a hurry and Mikey was with her, she always grabbed him by the hand so she could make headway at her own pace without leaving him behind. He figured she also wanted to keep him close so he could be her witness later in the family fight at home. They covered the hundred yards from the Montezuma to the Cavern in about one minute, and that included negotiations at Mexican Customs and Immigration. The Cavern had formerly been used as a dank, slimy dungeon where black scorpions and giant centipedes nested and feasted on convicts shackled to the walls. After it was vacated of its prisoners, the Kuriakis brothers bought it and turned it into a first-class restaurant. The scorpions and centipedes stayed to entertain the diners.
Every day at 11 AM the waiters and waitresses in black tuxedo uniforms began serving dinner in heavy chinaware on white tablecloths, with silver so soft a diner could leave his teeth marks on it. The mariachis strolled from table to table and played on request from opening until closing time. Other mariachis did the same in the Cavern's separate bar that never closed. The best foreign wines and cognacs were served there, as was the commonest Mexican beer and tequila. In the main cavern where everyone dined, the only light came from small lamps against rock walls that had been blasted by dynamite and hewn by iron tools, then polished smooth by squirming convicts.
Now, people arrived at the Cavern in the evenings dressed in their best with their pockets full of money, and left fed to the ears with good food and wine. A blind man could tell when he was within a block of the Cavern by the smell of cahuama turtle soup that cooked in big pots in the kitchen. The smell seemed to hang in a nutritious, steamy haze over the narrow Calle Elias in front of the place.
Maggie barged into the bar off the street. Paul and Buster, their hats on the backs of their heads, happy smiles on their faces, tequila shots in their fists, leaned against the bar. Girls leaned against their sides and smiled into their faces. The sight of Maggie with her kid in tow, so full of meanness that it showed like sparks coming out of her ears, put an end to that. The girls became fish that sounded for the depths of the sea. Paul and Buster's smiles disappeared.
The scene for which Mikey stayed was short. When she saw that Paul and Buster had crystallized in their tracks, Maggie turned Mikey loose, sailed in, slapped the hats off their heads and the drinks out of their hands, and stomped their toes with the high heels on her pumps.
Buster touched his toes in pain.
Paul said, "Honey, am I late already?"
Maggie could have pulled up and herded them home right then, but she wanted to castigate them. She needed to show how decent women deal with husbands and brothers who spend their time away from home with bartenders, mariachis, and whores. When Paul did not bend over his foot to show that it had been damaged, Maggie spiked it again and then spiked the other foot. Paul grabbed her roughly by the shoulders to stop her from doing it again. She tried to kick him in the groin with both feet. She missed his most vital spot, but he read her vicious intent. He shoved her into a booth full of drunken students.
Ordinarily, this might have been fun for everyone, especially the young men in the booth upon whom Maggie landed, but Mikey, Paul, and Buster were afraid she would hurt her belly. Mikey had been warned many times by almost everybody in his family to be careful not to disturb the peace of Maggie's belly. Paul started toward her, so Mikey wrapped himself around a leg and hung on. He did not think his parents would kill each other if he could stay attached to his father's leg.
Paul only wanted to make sure that Maggie was not hurt. She was to blame for Mikey's fear that Paul would harm her. She had convinced Mikey that his father would probably beat her to death someday when he was too drunk to know what he did.
Paul hauled Mikey along on his leg while Maggie separated herself from the young Mexicans in the booth. Paul tried to shake Mikey off and said, "Madam, look what you made me step in."
They both began to laugh and try to pry Mikey loose. They could not pry away even one of his fingers, so Maggie spoke angrily to him. That did not work, so she began to plead. Mikey did not turn loose until Uncle Buster tickled him, put his arm over his shoulders, and whispered, "Come on, Black Man, they're not mad anymore."'
Maggie quit smiling, stalked away to the bar, and ordered a tequila doble. The bartender was quick to serve it. Maggie arched an eyebrow, turned to face Paul, and began insulting him. Paul did not know much about how to insult anybody. He only began to brag on the way the bar girls and whores had treated him. Mikey backed away from them until he found himself out in the street, bawling. He walked miserably away from them. He did not realize how far he had wandered until he stumbled down the bank of the Nogales Arroyo, the same arroyo that ran in front of his house. He sat for a while in the sand in the bottom.
In those days the arroyo was a lot more crooked than it became after its path was engineered, directed, contained, and straightened by cement banks. Mikey started walking home but realized after a few moments that he was headed upstream, the wrong way. The arroyo ran downstream from Nogales to his house. He climbed out and found himself on Canal Street.
Mikey had been led off the main arroyo and up another dry wash by the music he heard from bars, nightclubs, and dancehalls. This was the Zone of Tolerance, the street set aside by the municipal government of Nogales, Sonora, for its bordellos. Mikey was only five and did not yet know bordellos.
He did know a familiar voice when he heard it. He could hear Queta singing. He went into a saloon and found her spotlighted on a stage singing "Quatro Vidas," "Four Lives," his favorite song. Nobody cared who came into that place at that hour. Mikey was so little nobody saw him at the door. The place was full of empty tables.
The spotlight was the only light in the place. The person who sang and accompanied herself on a guitar sounded like Queta but did not look like her. She was dressed in a colorfully brocaded and sequined China Poblana costume. Mikey knew how much work and good material went into a China Poblana. He had watched Mimita, his Nina's mother, sew, measure, and trim good cloth and bright thread for months to make a dress like that. Queta's China Poblana with its brocaded roses was just right for someone as classy as she, but if the voice had not been unmistakable, Mikey would never have known the singer was Queta. Her lips and cheeks were painted with thick swipes of red paste, and her eyebrow lines were thin, long, and drawn flat over her brows. The rest of her face, her neck, her bare shoulders, and her bosom were layered with white powder. Mikey knew only the eyes that peered wetly out of the powder and paint. Queta was only a specter inside it all.
Three women who were as heavily painted and powdered as Queta sat together at a table, not looking or talking to each other. They were overdressed in stiff, bright, homemade dresses. A man sat alone at a table near the front door. Another man sat with his back to Mikey at a table on the edge of the stage. Mikey climbed into a booth and fell asleep.
Someone screamed over Mikey's head. He looked up as a man and a woman wrestled against the booth. The man jerked the woman up onto her tiptoes in a bear hug, and then held her arms around his own head. She screamed in his face. The man's rumpled hair hung in his eyes. The woman was the one Mikey had thought was Queta, but now he could not see anything familiar about her. The man growled and twisted her arms behind her, bent her backward, and bit her on the mouth. She kicked at him and yipped angrily with the effort. He raised his fist overhead and struck her in the face. She slumped and he dropped her. Her face bounced on the floor. He kicked her in the side and stepped away. He went back to his table, pocketed his coins, and combed his hair.
Queta cried with her first breath as she regained consciousness. She lay with her face on the floor. Her arms were still behind her. One of the heels of her new red pumps was broken. The man looke
d at her. Then he turned away and Mikey recognized him as the Anglo man.
As soon as the Anglo left the saloon, the man who had been sitting by the door knelt beside Queta and called to the three women. Two of them were already on their way toward Queta and one in a blue dress hurried out of the room.
Queta whimpered and tried to raise her head. Her arms lay dead behind her. The toes of her pumps scratched feebly against the floor. The two women relaxed her arms by her sides and sat her up. Her head lolled on her chest. The women spoke kindly to her and called her name. The woman in blue came back with a bucket of ice water and a towel. She soaked the towel in the water, draped it around Queta's neck, and wiped her face, shoulders, and bosom with the ends and cleaned away some of the powder and paint.
The woman in blue looked at Mikey. "¿Quién eres tú? Who are you? Are you Forbes?" She pronounced it "Forrrvehs."
Mikey had no idea who Forrrvehs was. "No," he said.
All three women stared at him. "¿Entonces, quién eres? ¿Cómo te Ilamas? ¿Qué estds haciendo aqui? Who are you, then? What are you called? What are you doing here?"
"Me llumo Miguel Pablo Veranos Sorreles," Mikey said.
The woman in blue narrowed her eyes to examine him and said, "¿Quienes son tus pudres? Who are your parents?"
"Pablo y Margarita Veranos. Paul and Marguerite Summers."
"¿Eres hijo de Pol Somairs? Are you Paul Summers's son?"
"Si."
"¿Y, tus padres? And your parents? Where are they?"
"¿Allá están?'
"¿Adónde? Where?"
"En la Caverna. In the Cavern."
"How did you get here?"
"I got lost walking."
"And now you find yourself here."
"Yes."
"Boy, I am not surprised. All your people find this place sooner or later. How old are you?"
"Five."
She looked at Mikey for a long moment. Then she said, "Five. That's a record, even for the men in your family. I am Maria Ester, a friend of your uncles. You stay right where you are. I'm going down the street to call the Cavern."
The iced towel helped Queta recover and the women walked her to the booth. Mikey stood back and watched. She did not look at him. She propped her face in her hands and gazed down at the table. Mikey could not see what the coward had done to her face. He thought Queta's, Nina's, Maggie's, and Granny's were the prettiest faces anyone had ever seen.
"Are you meditating, Queta?" Mikey asked.
She glanced at him, and then turned for a better look. "Is it you?"
"Yes."
"I am so atarantada, dizzy. You? I might have known you would come and save me."
"I got lost."
"What?" She was still confused.
"I got lost."
"I don't believe you. You came to save me like the other time at your car. That's why you're here, isn't it?" She laid a lovely, amused eye on him and a short gasp of pleasure escaped her. She cut it short because it hurt. Her lips were bloody.
"Vente. Come with me," she said.
She took Mikey's hand and led him to a private sala, a comfortably furnished living room lit by one kerosene lamp. She sat him on a couch, pulled off his shoes, and placed them side by side on the floor.
Mikey stared. This person of the powder, paint, and bloody lips exemplified the grotesque turn his life had taken the moment Maggie charged out of the Montezuma. He was not surprised to find himself in the private refuge of beaten, painted women in the middle of the night. He had always known something like this would happen if his parents did not stop fighting. Worse would happen. He would be this much separated from his folks forever. He always worried about that. This time he was truly lost from them and it was no dream.
Queta pushed him gently down, put a cushion under his head, dimmed the lamp, and sat nearby to rest. She dabbed at her face with the ends of the wet towel. He pretended to be asleep but watched her. That was no way to stay awake. He fell into the innocent sleep of a five-year-old and did not wake up until he found himself in his own bed the next morning.
FOUR
Sierra DE SAN JUAN
The Mexican horsernan says, "Andando en el campo llano, como lo quiera el Cristiano; pero en subiendo la cuesta, como lo quiera la bestia. Ride at your pace on the plain. Ride at your horse's pace on the mountain."
Paul loaded Cabezon's ranch truck with Mikey's bed and saddle, cases of canned food, spare truck wheels, and barrels of gasoline. He sat Mikey in the front seat beside him and left Nogales on a clear morning in October. They were headed for Cabezon Woodell's headquarters at El Carrizal, on the west side of the Magdalena Mountains in Sonora. Paul crossed the line at the port of entry of Sasabe in the Altar Valley. Sasabe was a pueblo southwest of Tucson at the end of seventy miles of dirt road.
Paul arrived at the line at noon. The garitas stood new and clean on a hill. The pueblo on the Mexican side lay in the dirt among the rocks of a canyon a quarter mile south of the line.
Customs and immigration officials on both sides of the line were on the alert. Two murderers were expected to try to cross somewhere along the border to escape the law. One had murdered his family in Mexico. The other had murdered while robbing a bank in Douglas, Arizona. The Mexican was expected to head into Arizona. The American was expected to try to hide in Sonora. The American officials on the Arizona side were fresh, clean-cut young men. Paul wanted to ask them if they knew anything of the killers when he stopped for their inspection, but they only smiled and waved him on through the gate.
Paul and Mikey went inside the garita on the Mexican side for their truck permit from Mexican Customs. The customs official in the garita was an old, gray fellow who doubled as immigration officer. He sat at a typewriter in the front office. He wore Levi's with the cuffs turned up over the insteps of his boots, a short-sleeved civilian shirt, and his official cap cocked over one ear. He processed the visas for a man and a woman. He was a good typist using two fingers. His index fingers landed heavily and surely on the keys without his having to wonder where they struck. The doors and windows of his office were wide open. The office was spare and neat. Only a stack of blank visas, the typewriter, and an American fifty-cent piece were on the desk. When Paul and Mikey walked in, the American couple walked out and the officer pulled open a drawer and brushed the coin, like a big crumb, off the table into the drawer without looking at it.
Paul already had his visa for immigration and Mikey did not need one, so the officer took them into a separate office to issue the customs truck permit. Sasabe, Sonora, was in the region called La Pimería Alta. Almost everybody who passed there knew or were related to the few ranching families that lived inside that region, which covered several hundred square miles on both sides of the line. Everybody who stopped to be processed was headed for a place to sleep in Sonora that night.
"I must be getting old, Pol," the customs inspector said. "I did not know when you left Sonora last."
"I went out at Nogales, Cabo."
"And this boy with you, on which side does he belong?"
"He is my son and belongs to me."
"Ah, a little Pol."
"Shake hands with El Cabo, the corporal commander of this post, son."
Mikey shook his hand.
"This isn't a Yaqui you're trying to bring back to Mexico, is it, Pol?" the Cabo joked.
"No. He is prietito, but he's mine."
When the permit was complete, the inspector handed it to Paul, followed him out to the truck, and stood by for a moment to talk. "You know, the judicial police stand vigilant even up here in the north for that Nolasco who killed his wife and four children in Chiapas," he said.
"That's what we heard. And the Americans search for a gangster"
"Did the gangster kill his family, too?"
"No, he is only a bank robber."
"Ah, then, your criminal is a romantic bandit like El Chamaco Nelson, Baby Face Nelson, then?"
"Yes, only I think this one's
name is Kelly."
"In these times, who would not think of becoming a bandit if he could be rich and famous like El Chamaco Nelson, no?"
"Tienes mucha razón, that's a very reasonable observation, Cabo."
"I started to tell you. The government mounted a nationwide manhunt for that Nolasco with much publicity. He is an insane Indian who probably ran straight into the jungle after he killed his family. He did not have to go more than three meters to hide. Do you think the judicial police should stage a search on the Pimeria Alta of Sonora and Arizona for a guacho who does not know his way out of a jungle thousands of leagues to the south?"
"It doesn't seem right, does it, Cabo?"
"Of course not, but last week, an army unit of our very same government slaughtered a family of Christians at Los Molinos with as much dispatch and facility as they would have cornered and killed a herd of javalina. This they did only ten leagues from here, with no fanfare, no newspaper account, and no radio announcement. The commander of the unit probably did not even consider those murders worthy of an entry in his log book."
"Who did they murder this time?" Paul said. "Did I know them?"
"I don't think so. They were Yaquis who had fled the reservation at Bacum. Someday this government for which I work will have to make an accounting to God for another dead father and another dead mother and three dead little children."
"Que chingado," Paul said.
El Cabo looked at Mikey, then at Paul. "Does the little Pol speak Spanish?"
"Better than me and as well as you," Paul said.
"Then let's talk about fiestas or something, not murder in President Calles's glorious revolution against Indians and Christians."