by Noe Alvarez
24
Deer Runners
Obregón, Sonora.
The van Trigger drives runs out of gas on the highway.
“Run the rest of the way, Noé,” Trigger commands.
Trigger and I get into a heated argument about what it means to be a runner with PDJ and his rationing of water.
“I don’t run for you, Trigger,” I tell him.
“Like hell you don’t . . .” He gets out of the van and opens the side door. He stands, waiting for me to jump out.
Quiet Kara, his love, sits silently in the passenger seat. Trigger threatens to throw me out of the van when I tell him I won’t run any more miles for him, not until he gives me a water bottle.
After Kara sneaks me a water bottle, I rewrap my knees and take off on my run. Here in the state of Sonora, we are accompanied by police cars—the governor has ordered this, for our safety. So a police car follows behind me as I run. After a while, it pulls up beside me when I’m alone on the highway in the deep desert haze.
“You’re hurt,” a voice comes from within the car.
I duck and peer through the window. A strikingly beautiful policewoman.
“Why do you run?” she asks me. She must have noticed the irregularity of my jog. Like someone with a nail stuck to his foot.
“I have to,” I say. I’m not good at anything else in life.
“Eres Mexicano?” she asks.
I hesitate, feeling I don’t deserve the honor of such a label. “My parents are.”
Her name is Victoria. She tells me that she’s not like many others here in northern Mexico, who desire a life in the U.S. “I don’t believe in the U.S.—that it could offer me anything better,” she says. “My people and responsibilities are here.”
Meanwhile, PDJ in many ways is disintegrating. Our relationship with local communities is becoming more strained every day. Here, the people’s distrust of us demands that we work harder to be better guests. It’s difficult to model behaviors of peace and dignity on an empty stomach, battered knees and soul, and beaten pride.
Later in the day, a local cowboy in flashy clothes who has been following us from Pótam approaches me in private to inquire about PDJ’s purpose in Mexico. He asks why Mexican police are escorting us and he cautions us: “The community is watching.” He does not believe we are running for peace, or anything good, for that matter. He thinks we are plotting political upheaval.
But there is good, too. Three Mexican soldiers have joined our run. They put their guns aside and pick up staffs to run alongside us. They fight the stereotype that all people in their line of work are corrupt. Today they surrender what symbolizes power—the gun—and they sweat for their people. Today will be a day without violence, though the threat of it is never far—after one of our women runners survives an abduction attempt, Pacquiao announces that women will run in pairs.
Victoria and I become more acquainted. In her acceptance of me, I begin to understand what it might mean to be Mexican, how my life might have been had my parents never left.
On our last day in Sonora, Victoria gifts me a cowboy hat for sun protection.
“Ahora sí eres muy Mexicano.” Now you are very Mexican. She smiles, and gives me a peck on the cheek before driving away.
25
Chihuahua
In Chihuahua, some of the inland runners have settled onto a plateau overlooking the desert in circle formation around a fire. They have popped peyote buttons under the direction of a wandering medicine man, permitting their minds to become spindled with magic—minds laced with the intricate webs of hallucination. All night they sing, dance, laugh, and Crow and Tlaloc become closer. They dance until the stars close in on them, eliminating the space between the here and there. The fire and dances dwindle. Laughter becomes fainter as people withdraw into the pulpy atmosphere of peyote. Crow and Tlaloc sit under the stars when it darkens, forgetting to tend the fire pit. The peyote strengthens, and they connect over things of two people madly in love.
The morning finally comes and with it two horses. “C’mon. Get on,” Tlaloc says from behind the reins of one of the horses, bareback riding.
“No. I’m too scared,” Crow replies but eventually gives in, mounting the other horse on bareback, clutching it with dear life when it dashes after the other horse, on Tlaloc’s tail, into a valley of brush along a creek. “I’m going to die,” she shouts.
“The horses know the path by heart. You’ll be okay,” and they slow along precipices and ridges. Old trails carved out by animals. The walls of the canyon nudge them toward the center, into tighter spots. They come to a stop along the water, dismount, and skinny-dip into the water together.
When I wake one morning, I am sleeping on my stomach on a floor. Something has awoken me, and then I know it: a burning sensation rips through my back. I ask Chula Pepper to look me over.
“Oh my God,” she says, backing up. “Here, you need to see for yourself,” she continues, and brings me a mirror. I see blisters all over my back.
The locals help me determine that it was cricket urine, bugs that nested on my back all night.
26
Touch of Treasure
I lean over my dog over a pool of my blood. My shoulder is red with the blood dripping from my lip where my dog bit me.
We used to have a dog, my little brother Tito and I, in Yakima. A German shepherd named Tesoro, Spanish for “treasure.” He was a beautiful black dog with tan socks, and Tito and I shared in the responsibilities of caring for him, after begging our father to let us keep him. Tito fed him and I shoveled his shit. Nothing could separate us.
But our neighbors complained and threatened police intervention. Our father took Tesoro away to stay with an uncle who lived on a ranch, where he would be happy on the farm, my father promised. He would be free to roam the ranch and the surrounding apple orchards. But, at the farm, they imprisoned him, kept him on a leash, tortured him into becoming a worthy guard dog. Until one day Tesoro attacked one of the farm goats and acquired another taste for blood.
Farm life changed him as it did me.
When I saw Tesoro on the farm, I reached for my beloved dog’s head, despite his barking. Maybe, just maybe, if I touched him again, he’d remember the good times. He’d remember me. His ribs protruded. This dog who bit into my lip was not the dog I knew for years, the dog who protected me from bullies, and raced to embrace Tito and me. Either he mistook me for someone else—another torturer who would poke him with a stick until he turned mean—or he knew exactly who I was, and took this opportunity to lash out in anger at me, for abandoning him to this harsh life where no one loved him or fed him properly.
When Tesoro went after another goat, he was shot and buried there on the ranch, where like all other slaughtered life his blood seeped into the soil that enrich our orchards and vineyards.
I think about Tesoro’s affection on the run, which allows me to explore what physical touch means to me. In the jungles, for instance, I experience the touch of rain—a rain unlike what I experienced at home. A kind of rain that almost brings on a fever. I had lost touch with the world around me, and it would be through my touch of animals, people, and the land that I would move toward recovery.
27
The Rebirth of Story
August 12. Mazatlán, Sinaloa. Roughly 4,100 tangled miles.
It’s another hot day and we’re on a sweaty run through the congested streets near the beach town of Mazatlán. There’s a fire within me from forcing down jalapeños to ease my worry of stomach infection. Cheeto and I slip through the chaos like professional athletes. Passersby turn their heads toward us in silence.
“Why don’t people say hello to us?” Cheeto asks me between breaths.
“Maybe because we look like we’re in a hurry?” I tell him. “And because we smell.”
Something catches his eye. “Ever had La Michoacana?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
He gives me a look of shock. “Come with me!”
He veers off course.
I follow him into a shop selling ice cream. In line, we talk.
Cheeto was brought into the U.S. from Mexico when he was two or three years old, to join his father who was already working in the U.S. “At the border, it hit me,” Cheeto says. “I was coming back to another nation that I knew.” Cheeto places coins on the counter, asks me what flavor, and receives two helados. We peel the wrappers, uncovering coconut and strawberry, and run out of the store—staffs in one hand, helado in another.
We take a day of rest in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, in a vacant lobby of a hotel rumored to belong to drug cartels. It is said that laundered money is what built these cities. We clean out the vans, bringing order to our corner of an orderless world. We are engaged in familiar tasks—tending to our battered legs, breathing in the salty ions of the coast, playing music—when Pacquiao calls a meeting.
“Everyone please gather around,” Pacquiao says. His face is stern. “Today I received an email from someone in Washington State.” He looks around, into the eyes of every runner. I know it’s about me. “The email states that we could face legal action on the grounds that we are denying runners water.”
My heart stops. Earlier on the run, I stopped in an Internet café and emailed a professor of mine about Trigger’s withholding water from us.
“Whoever sent this email, please come forward,” Pacquiao says.
No one does. For a long while there’s silence. Pacquiao gives me the chance to come forward, but I don’t. This is not the time to confront Trigger, I think to myself.
“Well, I expect that whoever sent this information out will fix it,” Pacquiao says. “And I mean soon.”
At the earliest opportunity, I send an email informing my professor that things are now much better, when, in fact, they are not. My days and nights are spent around Trigger. Pacquiao can guarantee me no safety.
28
Nayarit
The rains hit heavily for several days, slapping against us as we push forward through the green hills around us. The towns we pass through blur into each other. Many of us are now running with one hand on a feathered staff and the other against a riotous stomach. Infections are common, but I am not afflicted, not yet. The jalapeños at work, maybe. Still, darting into the bushes has become common practice, with dehydration and nutrient loss ever-present risks. But we run it out, feeling that the harder we run, the quicker we’ll cleanse our systems of sickness.
“We’re becoming like animals,” Mazat says admiringly, while we run together. “Almost capable of distinguishing the different kinds of rain like animals do.” The manner in which the rain strikes, strums, and plucks at our skins, as if our bodies were like the chords of an instrument.
For closing Circle, while Tlaloc and Trigger prepare their musical instruments, Zyanya Lonewolf asks me to do something: “Stand up.” I do.
“Now reach your hands as high as possible,” like touching a ceiling, Zyanya Lonewolf explains. “That there is the spirit world. That’s how close it is.” Tlaloc and Trigger sing in the Nahuatl Indigenous language a song dedicated to Tonantzin. Zyanya Lonewolf, who has been learning songs with Trigger, tells me that the song is dedicated to an “Aztec goddess.”
“What do you think they are singing about?” I ask Zyanya Lonewolf for more detail.
“Something about how we’re pitiful humans on earth just trying to find our place on the land.” The special place that’s located between earth and sky and that can be touched by reaching your hands high, she says.
After the conch had passed through many hands in Circle, Mazat had expressed frustrations with the northern Chicanx runners—us, people who came into Mexico with an attitude, energy, air of prestige that clashed with the local runners of Mexico.
“Here in the south, traditions and ceremony are very land-specific and those laws must be respected,” he says. In his view, PDJ imposed ceremonial protocols different from those of locals, widening the cultural divide between the northern runners of the U.S. and Canada, and people in Mexico. “I don’t know about you guys, but down here in Mexico, we are always in ceremony. All of our lives we’ve been in ceremony.”
This discussion comes about after lightning had struck and a local runner interpreted it with foreboding—claiming it was a sign that the runners were running incorrectly and that we were mishandling the feathered staffs. Mazat made demands, but Pacquiao wouldn’t have any of it. “We run in all weather. The running doesn’t stop,” he said. Mazat—a man proud of his people’s ways and heritage—felt responsible for his people and the few Sonoran runners permitted to join the vans in Mexico. It became yet another bitter dispute lasting into the late hours.
“The Mexican vision seems to be different from the Chicano version,” Mazat remarked in Spanish about the organization of the run, while Cheeto interpreted in English for the others. “Running and imposing our ways on communities does not comply with the mandates of the run,” he continues, drawing smoke from his pipe. The hours are long, runners fidget, and I massage the pain stabbing my knees. “There are people with a superior mentality here, who don’t run, even pretend to be sick,” he says. He tells about how runners don’t properly share things with one another—basic items donated by the communities, food, musical instruments. About feeling rejected sometimes by the “English speakers of the north,” he says. Around the camp are people’s wet clothes, wrung socks. “We make promises to the communities. The run should not be led with arrogance.”
Chula Pepper voices another pressing concern. Sexism on the run.
She reminds us of the “Woman Warrior” song. How as the song went through the U.S., it changed, taking on the spirit of the different places, absorbing the words and strength of women who wanted change. But she was upset, she said. “It’s frustrating to be told that you can’t walk in front of the drum because you’ll curse the drummer,” she said. There was a lot of superstition around women on their period. “I’m upset at certain rules around the drums. That if we’re on our moon or wear certain clothing, that it’s disrespectful in a lot communities.” The implied assumption is that if you are uncovered in any way, you’re distracting men and taking their strength from running. Chula Pepper had the support of most runners.
“The ‘Woman Warrior’ song is our song,” she asserts. “We’re the strong ones. It’s our song to teach and empower other women with.”
For a time the meeting improves relationships between runners. We give it our best to be civil. But exhaustion and short fuses pull us back apart, back into old patterns of mere survival. Running when we barely walk. Staying awake when we barely can sleep.
29
Mangoes
Several miles southwest of Nayarit, Mexico, a desert village wakens to cool air. The blooming sun exposes me squatted behind a rock on the edge of camp, beside the shade of a large shrub, swatting away at flies materializing out of my ass. I wipe then sit on a rock to contemplate the contours of Nayarit—an arid land in southwest Mexico situated along the Pacific coast. My stomach grumbles. I soak in a new day.
A collective silhouette of village kids comes over the hills. Baskets of laundry rest on their heads. Buckets swing from their hands. They dip into the black hills to collect water and wash clothes. One of the boys walks toward me. After a moment, he points to the bag of dried fruit beside me and gestures with his hand to his mouth. I hand it to him, he kisses me on the shoulder, and walks away.
The run is increasingly sluggish, food supply is low, and some of us have gaunt looks to our faces. We are getting desperate. The salmon jerky from Alaska has long run out. Canned foods are low. Villagers offer what little they can to us. The run is purging us on many levels, but without the proper nourishment, I know I cannot sustain running for much longer. My knees continue to throb, and I continue to ignore them.
Later, when the van drives by a mango grove, Andrec brakes. Struck by the same idea, Cheeto, Andrec, and I devise a way to collect mangos. Rather than deplete local familie
s of their food, Cheeto, Andrec, and I take to a single tree. We pick unripe mangoes, quickly tossing them down to Cheeto, and into the van.
We eat unripe mangoes for nearly a week, it seems, snapping crunchy fruit into our mouths like apples. We pay the consequences: diarrheal detours.
Still, the run goes on and the mangoes sustain us. We are only small pieces of personality pushing forward toward better versions of ourselves as best as we can. We are dirty, smelly, and we often frustrate one another. Complaints range from minor ones, like me discovering that Trigger is giving me more miles to cover, to serious ones relating to safety.
The roads are not roads at all in this part of Mexico. Only wrinkles and gashes in the earth hacked out by a fury of weather and the migration of animals and villagers. Our van trembles onward until we stop and set up camp. I duck into the shrubbery and set up my tent. The hard, dry soil crunches beneath my feet. Short outgrowths of grass scruff my knees. Thorny branches prod my sleeves. A grasshopper is awash in a river of ants. A kestrel kneads its talons into a rodent. My mind bites greedily into Mexico, tracking my moves forward, and forcing me to see things in a new way. A spider repairs its web. Near it, bent grass. Fur is snagged to small twigs. Signs of a disturbance. A hoof that has cut through the orb of a web. I squat and see fresh scat. The light shifts and for a moment everything makes sense to me. My ears ring with adrenaline.
I sit down beside my tent. Suddenly, a cool shiver fills me. Death, I realize, takes a thousand forms. I close my eyes until it all goes away.