The Guardians (18 page)

That bent-over, backbreaking, repetitive reaching down or reaching up was the reason I could not move my wrists some days. My wrists and most everything else. Being out in the glaring sol like that gave me melanoma. (“That's what happens when you go suntanning so much,” the doctor told me.) Rafa couldn't have lasted much longer doing that work, neither. He was already starting to look like an old man. But my little brother had a goal. He was building a casita back home. “Almost done,” he said every time I saw him.

“What has happened is that migrants are having to try more often to get across without being apprehended, and are using different routes to do so, which are more dangerous,” la Señorita Edwina told me the first time I went by the office. Everyone had a theory about what could have happened to mi hermano. None ever sounded like it would have a good outcome. Her first hunch about Rafa's disappearance was that he might have changed his mind about the coyotes and gone in another direction.

“It is hard to come up with true figures,” she said, “but we estimate maybe three thousand immigrants try to cross in a single day. It is impossible to track down so many. They show up all along la frontera packed in cattle trucks, water trucks, and the backs of pickups. The trucks drive up dirt roads and stop, and everyone jumps out and makes for the nearby border.”

“No, señorita, you don't understand,” I said, hoping to make clear who my brother was. He was no stranger to the routes. Rafa knew his way. He was of the Rarámuri, he liked to say, the people with the light feet. The only reason he needed a coyote was that was the law of the land now. If you wanted to cross, you had to pay
somebody.
Plain and simple. “My hermano was not naïve,” I said. “He even spoke English. I am certain he fell victim to the coyotes he got mixed up with.”

La Señorita Edwina was wearing a jacket that had
PROTECCIóN A MI-GRANTES
stamped across the back. It came down to mid-thigh she was so short. “Well, then, señora,” she said, looking up at me with that pitying face people make about such matters, “there really is nothing we can do but keep an eye out for him. Leave his datos and a photograph and if we hear anything we'll let you know.” I'd come prepared with a stack of photocopies with Rafa's picure. In black marker I wrote a description: six-one, black hair, green eyes, a tattoo over his heart of a corazón with his and Ximena's initials. That proof of love had been his wedding gift to her. “Tattoos are for sailors and vulgar people,” Mamá told them. It was after the fact. They didn't care. They were young and in love.

Grupo Beta was now also helping pass out fliers warning migrants about the Minuteman volunteers. They described them as “armed vigilantes” waiting across the border to hurt them. “They have guns,” Edwina told me. “Why would they be carrying guns if they were not planning to use them?”

They didn't have these agents driving around the desert in their orange trucks when I was working the harvests. They supply water and bring people to aid stations. The Mexican government now even puts out a survival handbook. It advises migrants how to cross, with tips on avoiding apprehension by U.S. authorities. Those Grupo Beta agents are not supposed to send you onward but to coax you to go back home. When you try to come over with no papers and vanish, there won't be any dogs or search parties called out. You travel at your own risk. You are at the mercy of everything known to mankind and nature. There is the harsh weather and land, the river and desert. The night is and is not your friend. It provides coolness and darkness to allow you to move. But you can get lost, you can freeze, you can get robbed or kidnapped, you can drown in el río. You can fall into a ravine, get bitten by a snake, a tarantula, a bat, or something else. The brutal sun comes with day and anything can happen to you that happens at night but you can also dehydrate, burn, be more easily detected by patrols and thieves. Bandits could kill you as easily as rob you of not just your life's savings but that of your whole familia. Even of your village, in cases where communities have decided that getting one person out will help them all. If you are a pollo smuggled with others in an enclosed truck you could die of suffocation. Whatever happens to men, in my opinion, is worse for women.

The first time we crossed over I was on my period. I was thirteen. We made it to this side fine. Fine meaning alive. We had the help of Junior's
grandfather. Despite my abuelo Metatron's firing him, Junior's family still had affection for us. When they drove out to the desert, to the designated meeting point and picked us up, my slacks were caked with dried blood. I wanted to die of embarrassment. I cried so much, Mamá kept saying, “Shut up already—don't be such an escandalosa.” We were safe. That was all that mattered. Embarrassment is nothing when you're at the mercy of not just “your” coyote but all coyotes, all traffickers prowling out there for the victims of poverty and laws against nature. That's how I feel about it. From the beginning of time, the human being, just like all nature, has migrated to where it could survive. Trying to stop it means one thing only for the species: death.

Grupo Beta agents were sent out to help what could not be stopped. But like with everywhere else, there were corruption and abuses even within that agency, or so I heard. In Baja California and some other places Grupo Beta had been investigated for drug and human trafficking. La Señorita Edwina told me this when I started looking into what it could and could not do for me in terms of finding Rafa. Overall, she tries to convince me that their intentions are well-meaning.

PARA EL INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE MIGRACI
O
N LO MAS IMPORTANTE ES BRINDAR AYUDA Y PROTECCIóN,
reads another slogan on a poster near the door that has caught my eye each time I leave with no news about Rafa. While Grupo Beto claims to be all about looking out for the welfare of would-be crossers, where would anyone begin protecting people they didn't even know existed?

Maybe it's the stress of Gabo's recent troubles, the steady three-digit temperatures before we got the chubascos, floods everywhere, or maybe my hot flashes, pero I'm dizzy all the time. “I'm just having a power surge,” I say if anyone notices I'm sudando like I was in a steam bath. But in reality, it don't feel like it's a power surge but more like an outage.

Maybe it's my blood pressure. Mamá had high blood pressure. She also had diabetes, a weak heart, varicose veins, bursitis … what didn't she have? All her life Mamá had physical debilities. I remember when she was young my mother was anemic. She used to suffer from fainting spells. When we worked in los files, she fainted every day out in the middle of the field, picking pecans, chiles, tomatoes, apples, whatever. Berries. They were the worst. Imagine what all the thorns do to your fingers.

As I get older I keep thinking I'm going to be sick with everything,
just like mi mamá. Instead, except for the discomforts, throwing the blankets off and putting them back on all night, and the fits I have over nothing that come with the Change, the doctor has told me, “Regina, don't worry. You're going to outlive us all.”

I don't know if I want to outlive everyone I know. I was just telling that to la Tuerta Winnie while she lay at my feet underneath el portal. The heat of the day has begun to go down with the sun. Now the mosquitoes will be out in full force. The dog is not only half blind, but now she's got cancer. And every day our old heeler gets worse. I've been thinking about when she was just a little pup and Gabito was first learning to talk. I got her for the boy when he was only two years old, when Rafa and Ximena left him with me. That was my Christmas present to him. Gabo named her after his favorite bedtime story,
Winnie-the-Pooh.
They say don't give puppies to little kids; they don't know how to take care of them. The first thing Gabito did for the little dog was get her some water in a plastic bowl. It was one of my good Tupperware. He got it from the kitchen. He was trying to do something good so I didn't scold him. You should never scold a child or an animal when it don't know no better. Afterward, now that's different. You don't want them getting mañosos.

I could have the cancer cut out of la Winnie's thigh but the vet said it would cost nearly a thousand dollars. One day I drove the dog to a vet in Juárez. Doctors are cheaper on the other side. He wanted eight hundred dollars. That was still a lot.

I got la Winnie from one of my neighbors, an onion farmer. His dog had just had a litter of sixteen. Sixteen was too many for the mother and she ended up crushing some by accident. The farmer gave away the rest when they were ready. There's no more to tell about la Winnie. She's not Lassie. She don't rescue people out of fires. She has been a good watchdog. Even almost blind, she has gotten me up more than once when there were shots coming from the other side of my barbed-wire fence— where the true desert begins without end.

Gabo's in his room sleeping.

Last night, he was up sleepwalking again. Maybe it's not sleepwalking. I called Uriel. I keep inviting her down. Maybe one day she'll surprise me and show up. My old friend, with her Tarot cards and pendulums, over the phone said, “It's something else.” She couldn't say exactly what, but something.

That's how me and her met, when she read my palms. Up near Cloud-croft, in Mescalero, to be exact, she had set up a table at the market. She read palms, the Tarot, whatever you wanted. She also sold smoked venison. It was good, too. The lines on my hands told her what I already knew. I'd never known money and never would. I'd had a true love but had my heart broken. I'd have three children. She never explained that one. “All I can tell you is what I see,” she always says. I call Uriel when there's something I can't figure out no matter how I look at it. She keeps telling me that she “sees” Rafa alive. Who, what, where, why? “I'm a psychic, not a private eye,” she says.

Ever since Gabo came back home he's been far away. Last night, I found my sobrino out under one of the big pine trees that surround the house. He was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, nearly naked, with a sábana wrapped around him. He looked like he was in a trance, like one of those yogis who meditate all the time. I don't know what got me out of bed, besides the fact that I had to go pee. On my way back to my room, I happened to notice something strange outside the window. By the tree, there was the whiteness of a bedsheet.

I opened the door. “Gabo?” I called out. It looked like it was him but I couldn't make sense of it. It was a full moon so it was easy to make him out. The whole ground was illuminated like there was a huge overhead lamp up in the sky. There was light on the creosote, on the ocote and yucca. A strange light. Light like dew on the leaves, like manna—the food of the angels. I tiptoed in my chanclas toward my even-stranger nephew, who was sitting so still with la Tuerta Winnie lying down next to him. When I got close enough, I thought he wasn't even breathing. It scared me.

He was breathing, as I discovered, but I had to put my ear to his smooth chest to hear his heart. It was beating so slow, I was afraid that any second it would stop. His whole cuerpito, tan delgadito, like no one ever bothered to feed him, as if I didn't make the best frijoles, the tastiest chile colorado, the finest gorditas, the most golden crust pies in all of Doña Ana County—just for him.

“Gabo?” I said, after a minute of staring into those blank eyes looking upward. Then I looked up, too. The sky was full of stars, all the galaxy, the Big Dipper, Little Dipper—what do I know about the stars? “Please, Diosito,” I said out loud, “what should I do?”

La Tuerta, who has a hard time getting around now, managed to get
up and lick my hand. I looked down again and Gabo was back. “Tía,” he said softly, looking all surprised, “what are you doing out here?”

“Me?” I said. He had given me un susto, my heart beating fast enough for the both of us. “What are
you
doing out here, Gabo?” I asked him. And instead of hugging him and telling him how happy I was that he was all right, before he could say a word, I started yelling at him about everything that he had done to upset me lately.