by Jon Scieszka
“So, this thing that happened in Fizzledorf, will you never tell me?” asked the bandit deputy.
“I did tell you, Vero,” Deeb replied with his mouth full. “Nothing happened in Fizzledirt. There was no monster, no danger, nothing to outdo the princes on. It’s a dead dump of a town. BORing.”
“But am I not to think it peculiar that when you come home from Fizzledorf, you suddenly decide to free the leprechaun?” Vero asked, using the tip of his sword to pluck a creampuff from a silver platter.
“You looking to move into his cell?” Deeb replied.
“And that new bard song,” Vero continued undaunted. “‘The Tale of the Red Riding Hood,’ it takes place in Fizzledorf, yes? Around the same time you were there? You did not see this Bad Big Wolf? Or this nameless ‘Woodsman’ who helped save the day?”
“Ha! Woodsman. If the guy even exists, I’m sure he’s just some lame do-gooder like those goobers in the League of Princes.” Deeb leaned forward and narrowed his eyes at Vero. “Look, Fizzledorf is over. I want nothing to do with that rathole ever again.”
Vero reached into his belt and pulled out a folded parchment. “Why, then, did the potato-faced man return here today with a wedding invitation? Which he says is for you, but which is made out to someone with the name of Woodsy? And which is signed by a Hoodsy?”
Deeb leaped forward and grabbed the paper from Vero. He crumpled it without looking at it and tossed it into a barrel full of used cupcake wrappers. “I am the Bandit King,” he said, dusting off his suit and puffing out his chest. He paused to dramatically twirl a nonexistent mustache. “It’s about time I reminded people of that. Go round up all my men. I’m about to plan the biggest heist the Thirteen Kingdoms has ever seen. I’ll get those bards talking about me again if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Yes, sir,” Vero said with a grin. “I may never find out what happened to you in this Fizzledorf place, but I believe it was a good thing you went, no? I believe that the old you is, as they say in my country, back.”
“I hate your country,” said Deeb.
Vero bowed and walked off to gather the rest of the bandit army.
And in the solitude of the vast, echoing treasure chamber—stuffed to its rafters with gold, jewels, and frosted pastries—the Bandit King’s hand shot deep into a nearby barrel and began rooting through the trash.
FIRST CROSSING
BY PAM MUÑOZ RYAN
Papa pointed to a bench in front of a liquor store, and Marco gratefully dropped onto it.
He looked up and down the street in downtown Tijuana as it swarmed with American tourists. The neighborhood, grimy and flagged with graffiti, was infused with an undeniable sense of mystery and danger, as if something illegal was about to happen. Marco already felt guilty for what he and Papa planned, even though he hadn’t yet stepped across la Linea. Sure, it was the border to the United States, but no one called it that. It was the Line between success and failure.
Shop owners stood in front of their stalls calling out, “I make you good deal! Come in! I make you good price!” Children ran up to la turistas, determined to sell gum. “Come on, lady, you like gum? Chiclets? Everybody like gum.” Vendors carried giant bouquets of paper flowers and hurried toward cars on the street, trying to make sales through open windows. It seemed that no one accepted no for an answer. The Mexicans simply begged until the tourists pulled out their wallets.
Marco added up the hours he had been on a bus from his home in Jocotepec, Jalisco, in order to reach Tijuana. Eighteen hours? Twenty-three hours? It was all a blur of sleeping and sitting in stations and huddling as close to his father as possible so he would not have to smell the sweat of strangers. Now they were finally in the border town, but their journey still was not over.
“Papa, I’m scared,” he whispered.
“No te apuras. Do not worry,” said Papa, reaching into a brown bag of peanuts. He calmly cracked one, peeled it, and let the shells drop onto the sidewalk.
Marco looked at him. Papa had the profile of an eagle: a brown bald head with a bird-of-prey profile. Once, when he was a little boy, Marco had seen a majestic carved wooden Indian in front of a cigar store in Guadalajara and had said, “Papa, that is you!” Papa had laughed but had to agree that the statue looked familiar. Marco looked just like Papa but with a mop of straight black hair. They had the same walnut-colored skin and hooked noses, but Papa’s body was muscular and firm. Marco was skinny and angular, all knees and elbows.
“How do we find el coyote?” asked Marco.
“Do not worry,” said Papa. “El coyote will find us. Like a real animal stalking its next meal, el coyote will sniff us out.”
Marco took off his baseball cap, ran his fingers through his thick hair. He repositioned the hat and took a deep breath. “Papa, what happens if we get caught?”
“We hope it won’t happen. But if it does”—Papa cracked a peanut—“we will have to spend a few hours at the border office. We stand in line. They ask us questions. We give them the names we discussed. They take our fingerprints. Then we make our way back here to Tijuana. El coyote will try to move us across again, tomorrow or the next day or even the next. It could take two attempts or a dozen. It is all part of the fee.”
“How much?” asked Marco.
“Too much,” said Papa. “It is how it is. Coyotes are a necessary evil.”
“Are they bad?”
Papa sighed. “They are greedy. And money sometimes turns people into monsters.”
Marco had heard stories about coyotes, the people who moved Mexicans across the border. Sometimes they took the money from poor peasants, disappeared, and left them stranded in Nogales or Tecate with no way home. Coyotes had been known to lead a group without enough water into the desert in the summer, where they were later found dead or almost dead, and riddled with cactus thorns. There were the stories about scorpion stings and rattlesnake bites after following a coyote into a dry riverbed. Just last week, Marco overheard a friend of Papa’s tell about a group of people who hid in a truck under a camper shell, bodies piled upon bodies. The border patrol tried to stop the truck, but the coyote was drunk and tried to speed away. The truck overturned and seventeen Mexicans were killed. Since then, Marco’s thoughts filled with his worst imaginings.
Papa saw the wrinkle in Marco’s forehead and said, “I have always made it across. I would not keep doing this if it was not worth it. I would not do this if it was not the best thing for our family.”
Marco nodded. It was the truth. Everything had been better for the family since Papa started crossing. He had not always worked in the United States. When Marco was younger, Papa had gone to work at a large construction site in Guadalajara, thirty miles away from their village of Jocotepec. Six days a week, Papa had carried fifty-pound bags of rock and dirt from the bottom of a crater to the top of a hill. All day long, up and down the hill.
Marco had asked him once, “Do you count the times up and down the hill?”
“I do not count,” he had answered. “I do not think. I just do it.”
Papa’s frustration had grown as the years went by. He was nothing more than un burro, a beast of burden. When the hole in the ground was dug and the big building finished, he had been sent to excavate another hole. And for what? A pitiful five dollars for his nine hours? The day that one of los jefes, the bosses, spat on his father, Papa set the fifty-pound bag down and began to walk away.
The boss laughed. “Where are you going? You need work? You better stay!”
Papa turned around and picked up the heavy bag. He stayed for the rest of the day so that he could collect his pay and get a ride home, but he never went back.
He told Mama, “My future and the future of my children are marked in stone here. Why not go to the other side? There, I will make fifty dollars a day, maybe more.”
So it had been decided.
For the past three years, Marco and his family had seen Papa only twice a year. He and his mother and younger sisters
moved into a rhythm of existence without Papa. Marco woke with the roosters, went to school in the mornings, and helped Mama with Maria, Lilia, and Irma in the afternoon. During harvest he worked in the corn or chayote fields and counted the days until Papa would come home.
The money orders always preceded Papa. The income made Mama happy, and Papa became godlike in her eyes. They still did not own a house, but now they were able to pay the rent on time with plenty left over for things like a television and the clothes and games his sisters always wanted. They had money for the market and food, especially for the occasions when Papa came home and Mama cooked meat and sweets every day. The first few nights of his homecoming were always the same. Mama made birria, goat stew, and capirotada, bread pudding. Then Papa went out with his compadres to drink and to tell of his work in los Estados, the States. The family would have his company for a month, and then he would go back to that unknown place, disappearing on a bus, somewhere beyond the horizon.
“What is it like, Papa?” Marco always asked.
“I live in an apartment above a garage with eight messy men. We get up early, when it is still dark, to start our work in the flower fields. In the afternoon we go back to the apartment. We take turns going to the store to buy tortillas, a little meat, some fruit. There is a television, so we watch the Spanish stations. We talk about sports and Mexico and our families. There is room on the floor to sleep. On weekends we sometimes play fútbol at the school and drink a few cervezas. Sometimes we have regular work, but other times we go and stand on the corner in front of the lumberyard with the hope we will be picked up by the contractors who need someone to dig a ditch or some other job a gringo will not do. It goes on like this until it is time to come back to Mexico.”
For several years Marco had begged to go with Papa. His parents finally decided now that he was twelve, he was old enough to help support the family. With both Marco and Papa working, his sisters might go to the Catholic school.
Mama had cried for three days before they left. When it was time to board the bus to Guadalajara, Marco hugged each of his sisters and finally, his mother. “Mama, I will be back.”
“Some come back and some do not,” she said, choking back her tears. “You and Papa . . . you are the family’s héroes.”
Marco knew he would return. He already looked forward to his first homecoming, when he would be celebrated like Papa. As the bus pulled away from Jocotepec, Marco waved from the small window to the women in his family and, for the first time in his life, felt like a man.
Marco leaned back on the hard bench on the Tijuana street and closed his eyes. He already missed Jocotepec and his sisters playing in the cornfields behind the house. He even missed the annoying barking of the neighbor’s dog and Mama’s voice waking him too early for church on Sunday morning when he wanted to sleep.
Papa nudged him. “Stay close to me,” he said, grabbing Marco’s shirtsleeve.
Marco sat up and looked around. There was nothing unusual happening on the street. What had Papa seen?
A squat, full woman wrapped in a red shawl came down the sidewalk with a determined walk. Marco thought her shape resembled a small Volkswagen. Her blue-black hair was pulled back into a tight doughnut on the top of her head. Heavy makeup hid her face like a painted mask, and her red mouth was set in a straight line. As she passed she glanced at Papa and gave a quick nod.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“That is the coyote?” said Marco. “But it is a woman.”
“Shhh,” said Papa. “Follow me.”
Marco wove between the tourists on the street, keeping Papa and the marching woman in his sight. She pulled out a cell phone and pressed it to her ear, talking into it as she turned off the main avenue and headed deeper into the town’s neighborhood. Along the way others seemed to fall in with Papa and Marco until they were a group of eight, five men and three women. Up ahead, the coyote woman waited at a wooden gate built into the middle of a block of apartments. She opened it and signaled for the parade to follow her. They continued through a dirty callejón between two buildings, picking their way around garbage cans until they reached a door in the alley’s wall.
“In there,” she ordered.
Marco followed Papa inside. It seemed to be a small basement, with plaster walls and a cement floor. Narrow wooden stairs escalated one wall to someplace above. A lightbulb with a dangling chain hung in the middle of the room, and in the corner, a combination television and video player with stacks of children’s videotapes was on the floor.
The woman shut the door. “Twelve hundred for each. American dollars.”
Marco almost choked. He looked around at the others, who appeared to be peasants like him and Papa. Where would they get that kind of money? And how would Papa pay twenty-four hundred dollars for the two of them to cross the border?
The transients reached into their pockets for wallets, rolled up pant legs to get to small leather bags strapped around their legs, unzipped inside pouches of jackets, and were soon counting bills. Stacks of money appeared. The coyote walked to each person, wrote their names in a notebook, and collected the fees.
In his entire life Marco had never seen so much money in one room.
“Escucha. Listen. It is an election year, and la Linea is a big topic with the politicians. Border patrol is on alert. I have had trouble trying to get people across with false documents,” she said, “so we will cross in the desert. I have vans and drivers to help. We will leave in the middle of the night. If you need to relieve yourself, there is a bathroom off the alley. You may leave one at a time to buy food at the corner market. The television does not work, only the video.” Her cell phone beeped again. She put it to her ear and listened as she walked up the stairs that groaned and creaked under her weight. Marco heard a door close and a bolt latch.
It was almost dark. Marco and Papa found a spot on the concrete floor near the video player. Marco put his backpack behind him and leaned against it, protecting himself from the soiled wall, where hundreds of heads had rested.
One of the women, who was about Mama’s age, smiled at Marco. The others, tired from their travels, settled on the floor and tried to maneuver their bags for support. No one said much.
A man next to Papa spoke quietly to him. His name was Javier, and he’d been crossing for twelve years. He had two lives, he said. One in the United States, and one in his village in Mexico. The first few years of work, he dreamed of the days he would go home to Mexico and his family, but now he admitted that he sometimes dreaded his trips back. He wanted to bring his wife and children with him to work and live in the United States, but they wouldn’t come. Now he only went home once a year. What worried him was that he was starting to prefer his life in los Estados to his life in Mexico.
Papa nodded, as if he understood Javier.
Marco said nothing because he knew that Papa was just being polite. He would never prefer the United States to Mexico.
Marco was too nervous to sleep. He reached over and took several videotapes from the pile. They were all animated movies. He put one in the machine, The Lion King, and turned the volume down low. Trancelike, he watched the lion Simba lose his father.
“Hakuna matata,” sang the character on the video. “No worries.”
A series of thoughts paraded through Marco’s mind: the desert, snakes, the possibility of being separated from Papa, the coyote, scorpions. He closed his eyes, and the music in the video became the soundtrack of his nightmare.
Hours later, Papa woke Marco. “Now, mijo. Let us go.”
Marco let Papa pull him up. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on the others who were heading out the door.
A man with a flashlight waited until they all gathered in a huddle. Flashlight Man wore all black, including his cap, the brim pulled down so far that all that could be seen were his black mustache and small narrow chin.
They picked their way through the alley again, following the direction of the man’s light. On the street a
paneled van waited, the motor running. The door slid open, and Marco could see that the seats had been removed to create a cavern. It was already filled with people, all standing up. Men and women held small suitcases and plastic garbage bags filled with their belongings next to them.
There didn’t seem to be an inch of additional space until the Flashlight Man yelled, “Mueva!” Move!
The people in the van crammed closer together as each in the group of eight climbed inside.
“Más!” said Flashlight Man. The people tried to squash together. Papa jumped inside and grabbed Marco’s hand, pulling him in, too, but Marco was still half out. The man shoved Marco like he was packing an already-stuffed suitcase. The others groaned and complained. The doors slid shut behind Marco. When the van surged forward, no one fell because there was no room to fall. Their bodies nested together, faces pressed against faces, like tightly bundled stalks of celery. Marco turned his head to avoid his neighbor’s breath and found his nose pressed against another’s ear.
The van headed east for a half hour. Then it stopped, the door slid open, and Flashlight Man directed them into the night. His cell phone rang to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and he quickly answered it.
“One hour. We will be there,” he said into the phone. Then he turned to the small army of people and said, “Let your eyes adjust to the darkness. Then follow me.”
Marco and Papa held back. They were the last in the group forming the line of obedient lambs walking over a hill and down into a dry arroyo of rocks, dirt, and prickly grasses. Visions of snakes and lizards crowded Marco’s mind. He was relieved when they climbed back up and continued to walk over the mostly barren ground. They crossed through a chain-link fence where an opening had been cut.
“Was that la Linea? Are we in the United States?” said Marco.
“Yes,” said Papa. “Keep walking.”
They walked along a dirt road for another half hour. In the distance, headlights blinked. Flashlight Man punched a number into his cell phone. The headlights came on again.