The Guardians (3 page)

In the meantime I discovered where he buried the hawk. It was right near the fallen yucca. La one-eyed Winnie, or Tuerta, as I am calling her now, dug it up. My Mescalero Apache friend, Uriel, told me over the phone that Gabo's finding the hawk was very good luck for him. She said the hawk is good protection medicine. I wonder if finding where it was buried and digging it up was good luck for la Tuerta. Poor little hawk— with so many now trying to benefit from its death. I reburied it this time between two huge chollas, where I don't think the dog will go, seeing that she's cautious now about getting too near anything with thorns.

I'd rather be pricked by a thousand thorns than have to think about what my little brother may have endured. The fact is, however, that I don't know what exactly he had to endure. Sometimes I like to think he is back in Chihuahua with a pregnant wife and that we just never heard from him because he became too selfish and didn't care about Gabo no more or his past life with Ximena.

Another week went by when a foco went on in my head and I realized
that the phone number of that nasty coyote woman that called me might be on the caller-ID box. We don't get many calls. All the numbers of anyone who has ever called since I put in the caller ID right around the time Rafa left my nephew here were still on there. We never erased them. Most of the time we didn't even pay attention to it. Without saying nothing to Gabo, I checked and, sure enough, there was a call from El Paso the very same day la coyota had called me.

“Bueno,” she answered when I tried it. I knew it was her. It was a voice full of intriga and bad tidings.

I went on to tell her who I was and that we were still waiting for Rafa. “I don't know what you are talking about,” she said and hung up on me, proving all the more that she very well did.

My heart started breaking with the sound of the dial tone on the other end and I knew that my brother had been done some awful wrong. Still, without mentioning my concern to my nephew, the next day I took someone into my confidence at the school. I consider most of the teachers much more intelligent than me, with their college education and all. One of them could give me some advice, I thought, but it would have to be someone I could trust, since my brother trying to cross without papers was obviously against the law. Most of the teachers at the school are Mexican or at least of Mexican heritage although half of them call themselves “Hispanic,” which means they don't want to be considered Mexican. Or at least that is how Rafa and I feel about the word. It is one of the few political points we agree on.

Mr. Betancourt, the history teacher, calls himself “Chicano.” He wears a long ponytail and while he obliges the system with a nice shirt and tie, he always has on jeans. All this about Betancourt told me I could trust him with my fears about Rafa, so I pulled him aside the very next day and told him what I thought.

“We might be able to find an address for that phone number,” Betancourt told me. He said there was a phone number that you could call where, if the number you had was listed, you'd get a name and maybe an address. I thought I would try it when I got home, but he took out a cell phone from inside his jean jacket and, to my surprise, within ten minutes had obtained the woman's information for me.

“Will you go to her house?” he asked me.

Betancourt is about thirty-five but most of his hair has gone white. He looks old and young at the same time. I remember when I was in my thirties, I felt like that—old and young at the same time. Now I'm
middle-aged and I feel old and really old at the same time. Yes, I told him that I would, that I would have gotten in my truck and gone right then and there but that my nephew would need it for work in an hour. Betancourt nodded. He looked at his watch and then he said, “Let me move some things around. I can meet you somewhere in an hour or I can go pick you up at your house. I'll take you. It's probably not wise for you to go there alone.”

Miguel. That's his name. He told me to call him Miguel or Mike but to please not call him Mr. Betancourt no more. I never called him just plain Betancourt to his face but that's how the teachers called him in the lounge. Especially a couple of the young women teachers said it like they meant something more by it. Sometimes a single man is as likely to be the object of a lot of unprofessional interest as a single woman, in particular the attractive ones, of which, at the school, I can count only four. I look around, too. I may not say nothing, being a fifty-plus-year-old widow, but I still look.

Miguel was handsome in his own way but more important, for the purposes of our errand, tall and very strong-looking. When he showed up at my house he was still wearing his tie. He decided to keep it on, he said, because it made him look like he might be someone of authority. “I mean, I'm not gonna say I'm with La Migra or anything but it wouldn't hurt if they think we have some pull.”

The woman's house was very close to the customs bridge going into Juárez. It was a little house like others on that block, nothing special about it, and if my brother was in there, if they were holding him for ransom, never in a million years would I have guessed it would have been in such an ordinary place and right there in the middle of everything. The woman herself opened the door. She looked us up and down, especially Miguel, who did start to look like some kind of agent all of a sudden, with his Serpico long hair and bigotes.

At first she denied knowing anything, even the fact that she was the one who had called. Then Miguel took me by surprise. He pushed her, and next thing I knew, we were all in the house, in a dark, tiny, crowded living room with a dirty beige couch and two little kids, one in Pampers, in a playpen. “Listen,” he said right in her face, “you are going to tell us what happened to this woman's brother or you are going right to jail— today. Do you understand? Do you understand?” He pushed her again so that she went reeling back until she hit a wall. She started crying. She might've been around thirty or so, with a bulging midriff from babies,
and her breasts already sagging. The house smelled of stale cigarette smoke. The TV was blaring a Spanish channel. I felt sorry for the babies who looked startled but hadn't started to cry. It was funny that they didn't cry when the mother was crying. Then she got hold of herself and looked me up and down. “What would I know about your brother?” she said to me with that same sneer I imagined that time she had called me. “Have you tried calling your family back in México? He's probably there.”

Before I could even say nothing, Miguel took her by the shoulders and shook her so hard her head went back and forth like it was on a spring. “I'm only going to ask you one more time,” he said. And before he asked again, she looked at me and with spittle coming out of the corners of her mouth and with more hate than I have ever felt from a human being, she seemed even glad to tell me, “Your brother must be dead, stupid. Why else do you think you never heard anything again? Do you think they come and tell
me
what goes on out there? I only know about the ones who make it. They come here until their people pay what they owe. Your brother? What do I know of him? They most likely left him to rot out in the desert because he was a tonto or maybe for being a pendejo he got himself killed. What do I know? Now get out of here before I tell my husband you were here and you'll both be sorry you came.”

It was like a movie. In movies about drug traficantes they have women like that, in their nightgowns in daytime in gloomy rooms and living an obscure existence. And they have guys like the one who drove up just as we were leaving, wearing a big anchor on a chain around his neck and a diamond earring in one ear. They—everything, even their frightened little kids who wouldn't cry—looked like they were right out of a bad drug video.

El coyote looked at Miguel as we left as if he was memorizing him, taking a mental photograph in case he ever saw him again. But neither said a word to the other.

I turned around and took a last glance at the woman, who stayed inside in the shadows. She knew something about my brother's fate. I felt it in my heart. She could have given me some piece of information, however small, a gold nugget to take back to Gabo so that the poor boy would somehow, someday, find closure.

I wanted to go back in and shake her myself. Shake her until her stupid head fell off. Until her neck snapped and we'd carry her lifeless body to Gabo so that he could pray over it for seven days. Then he'd find a
place to bury it even though his father had gotten no such consideration. And when la Tuerta Winnie sniffed up the corpse and started digging, fine; she could dig all she wanted. I'd let her dig up that estúpida's body so that all the coyotes that wanted to come on my little bit of land that I protected so well could feed off of her stupid flesh and lick her stupid bones clean. And then we'd all, me and Winnie and Gabo and Miguel, too, if he wanted, and even the coyotes with four feet, could go out to the BLM land and scatter the bones out there to dry in the sun, for sands and wind to wash over. And Rafa, wherever they had left him, would no longer be alone out there.

Then I felt Miguel take my hand. He had to pull me with him. “Come on,” he muttered close to my ear. “We'd better get the hell out of here while we can.”

GABO

Su Reverencia, el Santo Franciscano, Padre Pío:

Venerado Santo, gracias for permitting me this great honor to write to you in heaven. If there is one reason alone why your most humblest of servants is given the privilege of not being un analfabeto and not knowing how to read or write like my mamá or mis abuelos, I believe it was for this purpose. Because you are at God's feet perhaps He bothers Himself to converse with you about what is going on when you don't hear from me. If not, I will relate what has happened now, as best as I am able to express myself como siempre, Santito.

On that day walking up the dirt road after school, I saw my tía Regina coming down in a car with a man I did not know. I knew it had to do with mi papá. She smiled and gave that little wave that people give out here when they pass each other on the road. My tía Regina's wave is like that of the Queen of England. She waved and smiled that very sad smile of hers, her fading red hair flying in the wind of the hombre's old Mustang convertible. We did not know anyone like that, my tía and I. Most of the people on the mesa and out around these parts drive trucks. Old ones, mostly. One neighbor rides a Harley but only on weekends, with his bikers’ club.

Tía Regina smiled with her little squinting eyes that make her look like a china poblana and then they passed me. I stayed on the side of the road watching them. As the Mustang turned the corner, a flock of blackbirds with long patas, feeding on a rich wet patch of worms, all together lifted their wings. For a moment all the birds hung in the air,
shiny wings out. As soon as the car passed, all together they gently went back down to feed, not one losing sight of the feast below.

I watched until the car was no more than a small, fast-moving object surrounded by fields of green alfalfa, swaying right, then down, until it became a red speck and there was nothing left to think about anymore. I swung around and kept going up the sandy hill lined with cholla y sprawling nopales. Dogs barked aquí y allá, letting my Winnie know that I was coming.

At my tía Regina's I got ready to go to work. “El Estockboy” is what my manager calls me. I pack groceries and keep the shelves stocked with inventory. I know that God gives us drudgery to keep us from being idle, Padrecito. As I unpack cans of string beans y garbanzos to line the shelves, it is a meditation of our Lord. Sweeping is my favorite quehacer, Santito, because then I am free to contemplate God's eternal love. Sometimes the manager sends me out to wash the windows. He says I am the best estockboy he's ever had and whenever I want, I can work for him full-time.

The money I earn I put away. My tía has refused it. When mi papá comes, I will give it to him. He would never ask it of me. He will make good use of it to help my abuelos or toward building the house there. As for me, I have no need of dinero or material comforts. (But, on this subject, Your Reverence, I must ask you to help me, especially when my blanket feels so rico over my body, tan cansado. I find it difficult to get up in the mornings.)