Dr. Brinkley's Tower (5 page)

Francisco said nothing. Señora Cruz rose and walked over to a battered cupboard that stood in the corner. She opened the drawer and removed something. When she turned, Francisco could see it was a photograph. Malfil Cruz crossed the room and, eyes damp, stood beside the chair on which Francisco was sitting.

— My husband was killed in a fight near Chihuahua City, may God rest his soul. My son, however, disappeared.

She leaned over and held the photograph before Francisco.

— You see, Francisco? He looks a little like you.

Francisco looked at the photograph.

— I am a woman, Francisco. I cannot wander off whenever I feel like it, asking questions of anyone I care to. It would not be proper. But
you
 … you are a young man. You are a free man. Take this picture. I want you to try to find out what happened to him. They rode in the direction of Piedras Negras. It was years ago. This is all I know.

Francisco took the photograph. Pablo was standing in the sun, his arm around his mother, a cowboy hat shading his eyes. It was true that he bore some similarity to Francisco, in that he was broad-shouldered and thick-armed and, at the age of sixteen, could pass for fully a grown man.

— If you could find out what happened to him, I would be eternally grateful. The rest would be up to Violeta. Do we understand each other?

Francisco continued staring at the photograph in his hand. It was so crinkled and worn it felt coarse, like the finest grade of sandpaper. Although the young man's eyes were shaded by his hat, Francisco could still see the mischief flaring within them. This contrasted with the solemn, almost exhausted look in Malfil's eyes. Suddenly, Francisco realized something. Pablo had been a handful. Looking at the photo, Francisco wondered if perhaps mother and son had quarrelled before his disappearance. Could it be that Malfil's continuing torment was fuelled as much by guilt as by maternal love?

— Sí, Francisco finally said. — We do, señora. My final exam takes place in the middle of June, and then my days will be mine.

— Gracias, Francisco, Malfil responded. — Trust me when I tell you that I would not grant just anyone this task.

The rest of the meeting was filled with polite conversation, most of it concerning the coming of the tower. On this topic Malfil Cruz was exuberant: the project was filling the entire town with a sense of possibility, and for this reason she had felt a rekindling of her desire — ay no, of her
need
— to discover what had happened to her only son. When the coffee was finished and a respectful amount of time had expired, Francisco Ramirez stood and thanked Malfil Cruz for entertaining him. After bowing slightly to both Malfil and Violeta, he excused himself and walked towards the door. Yet just before leaving, he turned and said something that had the resonance of the prophetic.

— Don't worry, señora. I'll find your son. Or I will die trying.

JUST BEYOND THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF TOWN
was the rickety wood-planked bridge separating México from Los Estados Unidos. At most hours of the day customs guards sat on either end of the little bridge. The American guard had a small cabin in which he kept a radio, a fan, a stack of pulp novels, back issues of the
Saturday Evening Post
, and a small icebox in which he stored his lunch, a roster of snack items, and a variety of soft drinks. His Mexican counterpart had nothing more than a hat to keep the sun off his head and a three-legged kitchen chair he'd salvaged from the municipal dump, an operation that had exposed him to odour and crow attack. While both guards were theoretically in place to control the flow of commerce and immigration between the two countries, they functioned mostly to collect bribes from those powerless enough to feel intimidated by their presence. Most of Corazón's residents, when needing to visit los Estados, simply chose to swim for it.

Exactly two weeks after the Reyes brothers' lucha night,
the dusty stultification that so characterized life in Corazón de la Fuente was fractured by the rumble of three Model T pickup trucks crossing the bridge at precise twenty-metre intervals. All three vehicles turned right at the sandy impression that was Avenida Cinco de Mayo. The drivers then motored west, past the ejido, the remains of Antonio Garcia's once-grand hacienda, the central plaza, and the long, jacal-style lodge that was Madam Félix's House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. With the entire town excitedly watching — noses pressed against windowpanes, mothers calling for their children to come see, men opening celebratory bottles of cerveza — the gringo drivers pulled up at an expanse of flat desert scrub. Here a half-dozen men got out, all dressed in dungarees, workboots, and hard hats. To those townsfolk who were perplexedly looking on, it was as though the men feared a vulture might suddenly expire from a heart attack, plummet through the broiling air, and clunk them on the head.

The men started walking around the area's perimeter. Occasionally they stopped to point, arm-sweep, or gesticulate, actions that were often accompanied by raised voices. One of them kept unrolling construction plans, which he would hold vertically, and then horizontally, and then vertically, before his own flummoxed expression. The gringo trucks came again the next day, and the day after. Then, in the following week, the only visitors to the work site were voles and the occasional deer wandering into town to feed on scraps missed by the town's stray-dog population. A gloomy quiet descended upon the lot, causing some townsfolk to wonder whether the project had fallen through. But then, one morning, Holt tractors equipped with dozing blades could be seen approaching
the river. Ignoring the Mexican border guard, whose chair collapsed from the resultant vibrations, the drivers chugged across the shaking bridge and turned right. Upon reaching town, they rattled walls and cracked windowpanes and shook wooden dentures from the mouths of the town's elderly.

They stopped at the work site. In true gringo fashion the men got right to work, no cigarettes or chit-chat or cups of warm chocolate (fortified, more often than not, with a little fermented agave). They immediately began pushing around mounds of the thin, tan, wormless soil, stopping only to drink Coca-Cola and eat a quick canned-meat sandwich at noon. After lunch they worked for the whole of the afternoon, never once stopping to nap or sip pulque or sneak off for a quick visit with a mistress. All of this was a source of fascination for the people of Corazón de la Fuente, who, having little better to do, gathered and spent the day watching. Some of the more enterprising set up food stands from which they sold organ-meat tacos and warm beer, only to pack up when it became obvious that the gringos were interested only in the bland-looking lunches they'd brought from home. When the sun was low in the sky and starting to turn the colour of marmalade, the tractors chugged back through town, fracturing whatever windows they had failed to crack on their way in that morning.

Within three days, a four-hectare field of bramble, mesquite, and prickly pear had turned into a mound of light brown soil. Suddenly, the coming of the tower seemed more than a vague possibility: all you had to do was close your eyes and you could imagine it, reaching towards the relentless sun, risen magically from the moistureless earth. The following
day, Mayor Orozco went to welcome the project foreman. It was a short greeting: though the mayor's English was rudimentary, it was accomplished in comparison to the foreman's Spanish. They shook hands and grinned at one another.

— Welcome, said Miguel.

— Ain't nothin', said the foreman.

— If joo needing any assistance, please just inform me.

The foreman nodded and resumed hollering instructions at the bulldozer operators. His actions, at least in the eyes of those watching the proceedings, were brusque and lacking in courtesy, and a small minority of townsfolk felt that he should have been rebuked by the town's kindly, if indecisive, mayor. By the end of the day the work team was gone.

The field sat quiet for the next nine days. Just when the townsfolk began to suspect that a serious delay had occurred, the same vehicles came rumbling back through town, though this time they were fitted with grading blades. Throughout the day, the mounds of dead Coahuilan earth were spread out, scooped up, churned, spread out, scooped up … On and on it went until the field was more or less as flat as it had been before the project started. The difference, of course, was the glaring absence of agave, huizache, mesquite, scrub grass, succulent plants, vole mounds, scrap metal, broken bottles, spent artillery shells, and all manner of flowering cacti. The adults of the town looked at the field, struggling to keep rein on their soaring feelings of hope. To the town's children, the field was now as tempting as an actual sports field; the foreman soon posted security guards to keep dirty-faced little ones from playing on the site, their makeshift balls fashioned from inflated goat udders. At the end of the day, the tractors
rumbled towards the American side of the border, again causing damage too petty to complain about, given the notices that were appearing throughout town, posted on walls, fence posts, and palm trees. In a faultless Spanish they read:

Sometime later that week, the strangulating heat that had gripped northern Coahuila for a month finally broke, a cool breeze descending from the north like a susurration of hope. The townsfolk, used to waking early in baking temperatures, now awoke for a more pleasant reason: they were too excited to sleep. Wrapped in woollen ponchos, eyes crusty with sleep, gripping cups of hot coffee or the chocolate beverage known as atole, they drifted out of adobe homes and tin-roofed hovels alike. Clustering in the central plaza, they chatted and smoked cheap punche cigarettes and kept glancing furtively towards the bridge separating nations.

A truck pulled up, the crowd parting to make room. In the cab were three men: the project foreman, a sub-foreman, and
a translator named Geraldo who was obviously not from the north, as he had the distracting habit of addressing everyone as
chango
, a southern expression used in place of
primo
or
compadre.
As Geraldo began advising the crowd to form a single, orderly line, the two gringos set up a table in the middle of the bandstand where the Reyes brothers had put on their wrestling display. Geraldo also tacked a large handwritten sign to one of the square's dying palo verdes. On this sign were the rules: no women, no one under eighteen or over sixty-five, no one without the usual complement of arms and legs, no one with a criminal record. The line soon extended through the plaza, along Avenida Cinco de Mayo and past Antonio Garcia's hacienda, only to peter out somewhere in the smoky, festering depths of the ejido.

As the two gringos began taking down the names of the eligible, another truck showed up. Within minutes, a pair of smiling women from the other side of the river, each with a gingham apron and upper arms as wobbly as gelatin, began giving free cups of lemonade and pieces of tepid southern-fried chicken to those who cared to join a second queue. By the end of the morning, everyone who qualified was informed that he had a job; this included Francisco's delighted father, who had not worked since the middle days of the revolution, when a misdirected government shell had destroyed the tannery where he was employed.

— Okay, changos, Geraldo began to yell, his arms waving in the air. — Time to go home, party's over, the chicken is all gone, when we need you you'll be the first to know …

Again there was a period of maddening inactivity. Days turned to weeks, and an agonizing ennui set in. The boredom, the relentless sun, the gruesome memories of the war, the monotonous diet of rice and beans and cereal — all of it now seemed unbearable when weighed against the promise of employment. As those weeks turned into a full month, the day of the job fair began to seem like something imagined, as though it had existed only in the columns of wavering air that rose from the streets at high noon.

But then, one morning, a convoy of diesel-engine flatbeds, all carrying metal I-beams, began rolling through the narrow, dusty lanes of Corazón de la Fuente. Given their loads, it was difficult to negotiate the turn encountered at the plaza: the eldest palm tree on the square was repeatedly assaulted, and the house with the misfortune of being located at the junction was scraped by the protruding girders. Upon reaching the work site, each driver dumped his bundle of I-beams before returning to the American side and fetching another. This went on for a full day. The damaged palm tree keeled over, taking another one with it, and the façade of the scraped house grew so thin it became permeable to the hot, dense air.