by Daniel Wetta
cartel was increasing, because in the United States a middle class with young, rebellious people who liked rock-'n-roll music enjoyed social activities and types of partying not occurring in Mexico. Día saw more men arriving with guns daily. He stopped looking for his family in the canyons. He worried about their safety and feared he might lead the cartel members to them. He didn't want his parents to know what he had been doing, and he didn't want his brother to become influenced as he had been.
I run a fever in my spirit, he thought.
And he worried incessantly about Luna. He had to keep his eyes on her to protect her from the chabochi men around, who were removed from their women and who looked with lust at Luna's beautiful body. In addition, he took to heart what she had told him. She was not having babies. She was losing them. Perhaps the running was taking its toll, as she had theorized. Nearly three years had passed since they married, and even more years since they first made love, and they still did not have a family.
The memory of Luna's bleeding in the desert haunted him. The spiritual wretchedness of their lives, totally his fault (he believed), evoked this thought: How could we possibly have a family while living as we do?
One day, when an important leader of the cartel showed up to discuss something with him, Día had the first intuition of a possible escape for him and Luna.
He was covered in grease and working under a truck when the man showed up in the crude, wooden shop off the main road running through Creel. A group of beefy Mexican men arrived with him, and a couple of them with rifles posted themselves by the door.
The man wanted Día to run stolen cars. "You are good with the cars and trucks," he said. He seemed to know a lot about Día. "You can start them quickly, and you drive fast. We have a shop in Texas where we change vehicle numbers and strip or prep the cars we get. We prepare papers for border crossings. We pay some of the border guys to look not so closely at the cars. Some of the trucks can be driven off roads to avoid border crossings. We take orders for vehicles in Mexico. So each car is chosen for a purpose. Some we keep for ourselves. You can have your pick at any time. Sometimes you will bring cash back to us from our sales and services up there. Sometimes weapons. We will teach you how to make hiding places in the vehicles for these things. Your wife…she can run for us still, or she can help you. It looks good at the check points to see a married couple in the cars. She can be with you. Your choice."
The choice to make was obvious.
And they did look handsome in the cars, even if Luna always seemed nervous and unsettled until they arrived at the border, where she managed to produce charming smiles for the border agents. It was a disarming tactic which Día told her would help them get through to Mexico. Luna could do anything that Día asked her to do. He had been the center of her world since she was a child. They would arrive at the check point, Día dressed like a Mexican cowboy, Luna in her beautiful, traditional dresses. Día's clothing was one practical use that they had found for the cash that the chabochi gave them. The Rarámuri women, knowing only poverty, wore their dresses for weeks before cleaning them. Many only had one. Día had Luna acquire more dresses at a roadside trading stand in Creel, so that she would always have something clean for the crossings. He had developed sensitivity for cultural differences in the north of Mexico and in the United States as a function of always needing his wits about him in his work. He worried that, over time, he might feel less Rarámuri and more chabochi. He wondered if Luna sensed that she was changing: At the border, when his Spanish failed him, Luna picked up the conversation with ease. He felt to blame for the dilution of her cultural identity. He felt shame. It was the reason that he liked to see her in the traditional dresses. It made him feel less bad about things.
The stolen vehicle shop was several kilometers north of the border at a small Texas settlement known as Presidio, where several hundred residents lived. Día and Luna often took vehicles from Presidio across the Rio Grande River into Ojinaga, Mexico by pulling a two-vehicle trailer behind a heavy-duty pickup truck. They had false papers identifying them as employees of a wholesale dealer who bought used vehicles in the United States for dealers and customers in Mexico. Several of the agents at the Presidio crossing were receiving money from the cartels not to look closely at the vehicles and not to worry about Día and Luna. The Mexican cartel hombres hungered for the big American cars, especially Chevrolet, Cadillac and Ford. Día sometimes unloaded the vehicles in Ojinaga, and sometimes he took them all the way to the principle city with the same name as the state: Chihuahua.
While Día and Luna lived in Texas, as they heard rumors of Rarámuri lands being seized by the Sinaloa cartel in the Copper Canyon, as they learned about the deaths of Rarámuri people being murdered for resistance to the drug-running or for failures in the eyes of the cartel, Día increasingly considered plans for their escape from the dangerous life into which he and Luna had fallen. He saw the stolen cars as a way out. He dreamed that while he had the trust of the cartel, he and Luna might escape in one of the stolen cars that they were delivering to Mexico. There, he and Luna might find a place to build a secret life somewhere. He knew that the cartel would try to find him, so he and Luna would have to abandon any ideas of returning to their families. He would not lead the cartel to them! So whenever he was on the road to Chihuahua, he kept his eyes peeled for road signs that might give him ideas about where to go. At road stops, he conversed with strangers to learn where they were from and what their home communities were like. He sought a hiding place where he and Luna might begin a family.
But fate put into motion events leading to a different destiny.
One afternoon, Día was with Luna in a small community grocery in Presidio, when Luna grabbed her stomach and doubled over in pain. She fell to her knees on the floor. As Día ran to her, he saw a white woman rush to her aid. The woman was asking what was wrong in English, but Luna was answering in Spanish. Día heard Luna's distressful cry of "Bebe! Bebe!" The woman understood enough Spanish words to get the gist of Luna's responses, and with Día's help, she got Luna to her feet, and they took her to a bathroom in the back of the market.
This was another time when Día did not know that Luna was pregnant. He found out later in the afternoon that Luna had only spotted blood. After a long time in the bathroom, the woman consulted her husband at the door, who had come into the store, and then they decided to find Luna some medical help. The got Día to understand to follow them. They put Luna in the back seat of their car, a cavernous white 1960 Oldsmobile 98 sedan. They stopped at a house outside Presidio, where a general practitioner had his office, and he examined Luna. Finding her to be okay, but stressed, he ordered bed rest for her. The older couple collected Luna and drove to their ranch several kilometers north. Día followed. He smelled the onions and cantaloupes being grown on the farm as they approached the ranch house of the couple. He could smell the fragrances even inside the home as that afternoon and evening wore on.
Despite the scare that Luna had lost another baby, this day became for Día one that claimed a sweet corner in his heart. For years he remembered the gratitude on Luna's face and her bond with the Texas woman, who had come to her aid like a doting mother. Día turned to this memory often later, whenever he was feeling desperate and missing Luna more than he thought he could stand.
The baby did survive in Luna's belly. Día could see the bond developing between Luna and the kind rancher woman even that first night. The woman struggled to communicate with words of Spanish, and Luna, seeing the woman's comfort with English, began to learn and repeat English words that very evening. Luna's facility with languages and her cleverness were things that made Día yearn for her. He had always been in awe of her intelligence and quickness in learning. He often remembered watching Luna with the woman that night and recalling the heat that he had felt for Luna in his body. He had wished that he could be alone with Luna in the ranch house. It made him smile to remember that.
Very quickly, by the next afternoon as Día recalled
, it became settled among him, Luna, the woman and her husband, that Día and Luna would move from the small apartment that they had inside a rooming house in Presidio to a wooden bungalow in the back of the farm that was presently vacant. The ranchers offered that Luna could help the woman with the farm and household duties, and the woman would be able to care for Luna as her pregnancy came to term. The ranchers believed, as Día and Luna had told them, that Día worked on cars and occasionally sold some, which he delivered to Mexico. Hearing that, the woman asserted that it would be much safer for Luna and the baby not to travel with Día, as she had been doing. Luna would assist her as compensation for their new living quarters, she said.
The arrangement produced a brief period of stability, at least for Luna, and the sense that they might have a family after all. As Luna's belly grew in the months that followed, she and the older woman strengthened in their friendship. The baby was born in 1961. They considered Rarámuri names. Luna and the rancher woman exhausted many conversations discussing possibilities. Luna saw that the Rarámuri names were difficult for the rancher woman,