Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  Maybe if I was a citizen I would have exclaimed and said something. I felt like I was owed at least an explanation as to why it was taking so long. But having only a green card was precarious. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

  *

  The waiting became unbearable, and I was sure something had gone wrong. I started making plans in my head. People kept shuffling through the doors, but none of them were Apá. After what seemed like an eternity, I saw him emerge through the doors.

  I tried to hurry up to him but was held back by a series of stanchions keeping the people in order and had to watch him agonizingly wind around them as he approached me, as if he was about to board a plane. I looked at his face. I was preparing myself for that moment. I almost didn’t want to look at him because I still wanted to remain in the realm of possibility, of obscurity. Anything was still possible. But I could do nothing to change what it was my father already knew.

  He had a slight smile on his face, and for a moment, as I held Rubi’s hand tight, my heart leaped. But as he got closer, I saw that his eyes were red.

  It was one of those rare moments when I allowed myself to look at him carefully again, to study his face. I stopped trying to look for something—change, regret, sadness, joy. All I saw was an old man who was tired of chasing a carrot dangling just out of reach.

  *

  “Apá, what did they say? What happened?” I asked him, as if it was mandatory to ask, even though I already surmised the answer.

  “Let’s just go back to the hotel,” he said. We’d left our bags there with the concierge.

  He didn’t want to talk about it there, in front of the crowd. He was too proud to let his failure be seen in public. I knew they were all staring but didn’t care. I suddenly understood the people who exited the doors before me. I went from being the voyeur to the observed without skipping a beat. I was now the spectacle, and I could feel everyone’s gaze on us, trying to decipher our news—wondering if their fate would be like ours. How desperate they looked from that perspective; how thirsty for any kind of relief. Apá didn’t stop to talk to me; he just kept walking in the direction of the hotel, not fast but not slow either, just steady.

  We left the crowd behind to tend the limelight.

  “What did they say, Apá?” I said, this time more demanding as I tried to catch up, now that he picked up his pace.

  “It just didn’t happen. Let’s talk about it in the hotel.”

  I didn’t have time to understand because he kept walking away. I didn’t know what to say to him, or to Rubi, or to myself, so I just stayed quiet, and we walked in silence to the hotel.

  There wasn’t much I could say or do, there weren’t many decisions for me to make. The decisions had already been made for us. The gears had been set in motion. It felt like we were at the beginning of a new era, as if from that day forward, our lives would be different. Anything that could have been would never be. Everything that was, would be forever.

  21.

  Apá said it was a young woman who had interviewed him.

  “She was nice, and she was sincere. She spoke Spanish and was kind when she talked to me. She kept saying ‘I’m so sorry, there’s nothing else I can do, I’m so sorry, I wish I could help you.’ And I think she was telling the truth,” he said, looking away from me.

  Perhaps the woman indeed was sorry. Perhaps she didn’t really want to be there, having to deny people all day, changing the courses of entire families’ lives with a swipe of a pen or a click of a button. Maybe she thought that the job would be different, that she was going to make the world better. Isn’t that what we all think when we start a new job? Maybe she was just assigned to be at the border as part of her training to go elsewhere. “Just two years of this and I’ll be in DC, doing other things,” I could see her thinking. We were what she had to put up with to go on to better things, a story that led to a better story, a jumping point that led away from grief. I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry.

  Couldn’t she have helped?

  Apá waited ten years (plus two) for them to simply remind him of his previous deportations, to point to them as additional reason for his rejection. Couldn’t they have just told him that in 2003, and we could have moved on with our lives instead of living with a small iota of hope? If we had let go then, if we had moved on with our lives without Apá, what would have become of us?

  For so long we lived with the hope that he was paying back his debt to society in return for forgiveness. We thought there was something at the end of this for us. If we had known that nothing could make his mistakes in the past go away, we would have told him to come back, we would have brought him however we could, however much it would have cost. Or we would have told him to never come back, and simply cut ties altogether. Either option was better than spending my entire adolescence and early adulthood in uncertainty about him.

  *

  How different, I thought, from mine and Rubi’s interview. Rubi stayed close to me because she knew about Apá’s short fuse, and though he had controlled himself the entire time we were in Juárez, we were both uncertain how he would react. She held my hand as we made our way to the hotel and waited in the lobby chairs for a cab. I knew it was a mistake to try to begin to know him too well, and I could tell that Rubi was backpedaling her mistake of trying to know him as well. Neither of us wanted to know what he carried in his bag, or how he shaved his beard at night, and the little that we did pick up, we were beginning to put back down.

  “Rubi, Rubi . . . Rubi,” I said as she stared at her phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s make sure we have everything ready for the checkpoint, yeah?”

  We were both polar opposites in moments of distress. My adrenaline kicked in, and I was always on top of things, making sure nothing went awry. And depending on the severity of the distress, it wouldn’t be until weeks, months, or even years later that I would crash emotionally and reckon with the weight of that moment. Rubi, on the other hand, was the opposite. She retreated into herself at the moment of intensity and was strongest afterward. We complemented each other nicely. So while I was frantically looking for our passports, calling Apá’s cab, making sure we still had pesos at hand to pay the cab, and figuring out logistics, Rubi had her earphones on and had checked out. I was okay with that because I knew I would need her in the future, when I would not be able to find any excuse to get out of bed, when I would need a half fifth of vodka just to make it through the day.

  Our cab would take us across the border to the El Paso airport, and Apá’s would take him to the bus terminal in Juárez. Our cab came first. I looked at Apá for any sign. What would come next? What was there left to do anyway? We put our luggage in the trunk, and I gave Apá a hug. I squeezed him tighter and tighter, as if I could squeeze him enough to fold him up and put him in my pocket.

  “Okay, Apá, we have to go now,” I said.

  Rubi hugged him and held his hand again for a brief moment. She had her small purse wrapped around her shoulder, and it swung around as she turned to get into the cab. I gave Apá the rest of the cash I had, only keeping exactly enough for the cab ride. The small Nissan headed north toward home. We didn’t need to say anything, I stretched out my hand, and he stretched out his to receive it. Giving him money would from then on be the best way we could talk to each other.

  22.

  The ride to the border checkpoint was quiet. The driver, too, must have known what had transpired, given where he picked us up from and where he was taking us to, and the silence between us. At the bare minimum, he knew we’d had to leave someone behind. He kept his eyes locked on the road.

  Even though it was December, it still felt hot in the middle of the day, so I cracked open the window. Traffic was backed up for about half a mile at the checkpoint. We inched forward, unbearably slow. Either Juárez was tugging us back, not wanting us to leave, or El Paso was pushing against us, not wanting us to enter.

  Walking down the lanes were street vendors
with their merchandise hanging from hooks on large boards. Others carried large sticks with plastic balloon animals, cotton candy, popcorn, newspapers, and toys, so many toys. Their bright colors against the hazy sky made me want them as if I was ten years old again but knew better than to ask for a toy when there wasn’t any money.

  One of the vendors approached the window and asked if I wanted to buy a rosary.

  “Here, el Cristito, so you can cross safely,” the man said as he reached his hand through the cracked window. It was colorful and refracted the light inside the cab like a spiraling disco ball, tossing small triangles of God’s supposed holiness onto the stained upholstery. I knew I could cross on my own, I knew I didn’t need God anymore.

  I entered Mexico much the same way as the light entered the rosary, and when we departed the corridors of its prisms, we did so no longer wholly intact either, a little broken.

  *

  I wanted something to remember the trip, to hold something that could stand for our time there, and burn it later, perhaps mail it to a friend and have them burn it and describe it burning to me over the phone. Unfortunately I didn’t have any money, either pesos or dollars, since I gave it all to Apá.

  “Rubi, do you have any cash left over?” I said.

  “No, I don’t. I gave it all to you,” she said, still searching through her purse.

  I handed the rosary back to the man, and the light scissoring through the cab faded away, leaving only the stains behind.

  “Ándale, I’ll give it to you cheap, here,” he said as he pushed it back to me, insisting that I buy it.

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have anything left,” I said, and took out my wallet to show that it was empty as I gently pushed it back into his palm.

  “Ándale pues,” he finally said, and took the rosary back, along with all its holiness. It would help us cross, he had said, but it was too late for that; we weren’t the ones who needed help. If only we had met him hours before to wrap the rosary around Apá’s neck, bursting open like sharp flowers.

  *

  The drivers in the other lanes looked bored. Some of them played their radios loud, and others looked as I imagine we looked—defeated. In the air, through the lanes, I heard the soft beat of a cumbia song. More vendors reached into the cab to hand me things I could not buy as they walked down the lanes. I wanted to get out of the cab and run, I wanted nothing to do with Juárez anymore. Not the vendors, not the embassy, not the miles and miles of open land, not the city with its incessant motion—none of it.

  “You’re going to have to get out and walk through the checkpoint on foot,” the driver said. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”

  “Why, is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, everything is fine—it’s just company policy that you have to cross over by yourself, and I’ll meet you over there by the sidewalk.” We grabbed our suitcases and walked.

  The building was small, and there was hardly anyone inside. Ahead of us was a man in torn clothes with no shoes and disheveled hair. He chatted with the officers for a minute before handing them his card. They were friendly toward him, as if they saw him every day and knew him by name already. Their voices had an air of worry and care, and they kept nodding their heads at the tattered man as if saying “Take it easy, you’re going to break your mother’s heart.” They gave him back his card and waved him on, a worried smile on their faces, as if he were a high school friend who had seen better days.

  I held my passport and my mica, my green card, in my hand as we stepped forward. I could feel the ridges on the card, and I thumbed them gently. That’s all that they needed to see—a piece of plastic with my name on it. I thought the card and the passport should at least weigh more, that they shouldn’t be as light as they were. They were too important to be that light.

  I handed my card to the officer, who was talking about a football game and looking over to the other officer; he hardly noticed that I was there. He only looked at me when he held the card up against my face to compare the two and waved me forward.

  “I’m telling you, that catch would have won the game,” he said, returning to where he’d left off in his conversation, looking over to his friend again, who in turn was looking at the scanning machine as my bags passed through the conveyor belt. We were an aside in a football commentary, a mere interruption.

  “No, it wouldn’t have, they would have needed a two-point conversion,” said the other agent, avoiding me altogether.

  They handed me back my card, and I walked through the metal detector as they continued their conversation. It couldn’t have taken more than three minutes from the time I gave him my card to when I picked up my luggage on the other side of the machine. Rubi went even faster because she handed them her U.S. passport, and they were less cautious about citizens. Just like that, we were done. We did in three minutes what my father had waited ten years to do but couldn’t.

  *

  El Paso looked different in the daytime. It looked like every other American city I had ever been to. It had seemed like a different city at night, when we first arrived—it was mysterious then, illuminated, charged with possibility. But now it looked like a bar at midday, when the lights are turned on or when someone opens a window.

  It was a small airport. A border patrol agent stood near the TSA gate, randomly checking people as they entered. I approached TSA, where I was asked to see my green card on top of my driver’s license, but I refused. I didn’t want them to see my green card. Why should they? We were already in the U.S., weren’t we? Never in any other airport had I ever needed to show my green card, so why should I now? The TSA official waved over the border patrol agent, who was tall, white, and clean-shaven in his green fatigues. I didn’t feel like talking, and I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. The agent signaled me forward and said in broken Spanish, “Documentos por favor.” I handed him only my ID with my ticket. He looked at it and asked me to step aside.

  All I wanted was to feel like there was nothing in front of me. Why couldn’t they just let me go on with my day?

  “Can I see your green card or visa?” he asked me again, this time more forcefully.

  I wanted to throw it in his face. Or, better yet, I wanted to throw it on the floor and make him pick it up—to lean down and have to look for it. Nothing said that was against the law, nowhere did it say I needed to be courteous, but I knew I had no choice. I wasn’t yet a citizen, so I didn’t want to risk anything. I took out my green card and handed it to him.

  He handed my green card back and motioned for me to move along. He was done with me. There would be nothing further to discuss. I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or relieved that nothing became of our interaction. Maybe he wanted a little excitement in his day. Maybe he was hoping to score some points with his boss.

  Rubi was already waiting for me by the arrival/departure monitors, and she looked annoyed that I was being so stubborn. All around me, I saw people going on with their day as if nothing had happened. They were smiling, telling jokes, looking at their phones, adjusting their belts, stuffing their faces with a burger. The world was still moving. To them, indeed nothing had happened. But it felt like they were rubbing their quotidian liesure in my face. It wasn’t their fault that my father had been denied, and yet it bothered me to hear everyone talking around me.

  We found our gate, and I left my luggage with Rubi. “I’ll be right back,” I told her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t be here right now, I need to go somewhere,” I said in a frantic voice.

  I went into the bathroom and locked myself inside a stall. It was the first time I’d cried for my father and not because of him. I could hear people outside, but no one seemed to mind, or no one dared intervene. They figured it was best to let me dice it out by myself.

  It felt like a mathematical equation. Everything on one side needed to equal everything on the other. So, then, what was the equivalent of my father? What was the equivalent of
me?

  I sat on the toilet for a long time and let my phone ring on and on as Rubi tried to reach me. Then Amá tried to reach me because Rubi had called Amá. I turned off my phone and pinched myself, and slapped myself, and pulled my hair. It felt like it was my fault, like it was all my fault.

  On the plane, I tried reading a book, but it didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t read the words. They didn’t feel like words. Instead, they felt like they were stones, like they were heavy and difficult to pick up. It was a long flight back to Detroit. I took a few sleeping pills because the drinks were too expensive on the flight, fell asleep on Rubi’s shoulder and never bothered looking out the window to see the landscape below.

  [Third Movement as Migration and High Baroque]

  We crossed the border on a Thursday. The grass was wet. Maybe it wasn’t grass. Maybe it wasn’t even dirt. Whatever was below us was moving—snakes? I counted to three and stopped. One, two, three, stop. One, two, three, stop. Everything we did was a kind of running. Even when we were just lying there, it still felt like we were running.

  In the distance, it looked like the rings of light around a distant planet. I wanted honey, something sweet. But most of all, I wanted to stop and sleep, right there in that field of cucumbers. I wanted my dreams to be of honey, the dark kind that comes from the brightest flowers, from the most bitter of plants, plants that not even beetles touch, plants that at least are good for shade.

  What good was shade anyway? What good were our feet, if they could only run so fast?

  We probably would have stepped on the snakes if it weren’t for the music and our graceful dancing. There was music? Yes. It started slow, but then picked up, and then slowed back down again. It was a waltz, it was a polka, it was the boogie-woogie jump swing, bebop. We were in a grand ballroom. Amá was in a gown. She was in a gown? Yes. Amá turned and turned as the hems of her dress blossomed toward the edges of the room. We all blossomed like bitter fruit.