Dr. Brinkley's Tower (9 page)

Francisco looked in every direction. As he did, he forced himself to breathe slowly and take stock of his situation. He
had nothing at his disposal but a little water and a sack half-filled with tortillas, and he had no idea how long he'd have to ration these items. To deal with this decision, he forced himself to pretend he had nothing. He cleared his mind and thought of Violeta and the village, and as the midday sun began its daily scorching of the earth, he swore he could hear the voices of those familiar to him — male and female, young and old — echoing in the sky's infinite white.

Francisco waited, the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes. He had heard of cases in which people trapped in the desert had temporarily gone blind in the harsh, relentless glare, only to be found crawling towards some imagined source of water, a hand waving ahead of them like a beetle's antenna. Others, he knew, succumbed to madness, only to be found ecstatically muttering psalms through cracked, bleeding lips. As he sat, Francisco fought to banish such fearful thoughts, only to find that it was difficult; in times of crisis, he was discovering, the mind darkens, becoming more of an enemy than the situation itself. He breathed slowly and deeply. The voices in his head drifted into silence, replaced by a mounting thirst. In response he took only the tiniest sips of water, sips that barely served to dampen his tongue and cool the flameless blaze at the back of his throat.

He heard a distant, indistinct noise, a sort of soft clicking. He turned his head and saw something that, in the blistering heat, looked watery and black, not unlike ink marks on cotton parchment. Francisco watched it shimmer, hoping upon hope that it wasn't some sort of hopeful mirage. After a minute or so he concluded that it
was
coming closer, and
that the quavering vision was an old buggy drawn by a pair of mules. It took forever to reach him. The skin on his face and hands felt scorched.

The rear of the wagon was covered by a heavy woven tarpaulin. In the front seat were two men, both of whom wore cowboy hats and chambray shirts and Villa-style moustaches. As the cart pulled up, Francisco noticed the hands of the driver, which were covered with scars and small nicks and streaks of oil.

— Qué onda? asked the passenger.

The man was grinning, and Francisco noticed he was missing a pair of teeth, leaving an indecorous part in the middle of his smile.

— No mucho.

The two men looked appraisingly at Francisco. The driver spoke. — Looks like you've had a bad day, primo.

— Sí.

— That your saddle? asked the passenger.

— I'm just using it.

— It's a nice saddle.

— It's old.

— I wouldn't mind having me a saddle like that, said the driver. — And the stirrups, I think they're silver. And look at the stitching. It's like a rodeo star would have. You a rodeo star?

— No.

— Then why you got a rodeo saddle?

— It's borrowed.

— The horse too?

— Sí.

Both men started laughing. The driver slapped the top of his right leg. — Whoever you borrowed it from ain't gonna be happy when he sees what you did to his horse!

Francisco looked up and down the desolate, baking roadway. He returned his gaze to the two and asked: — Where are you going, señores?

— Uhhh … Rosita, said the driver.

A few seconds transpired. The two men looked at each other, and then the driver stepped down and said: — So. You need a ride or not?

Francisco narrowed his eyes; he knew that the men were contrabandistas, shuttling liquor into the United States. His choice was clear. He could either accept a ride from these suspicious characters or he could face the prospect of spending a night in the desert, where, in addition to a ravaging thirst, he'd fall prey to hunger and falling temperatures and every manner of scorpion and stinging spider.

He rode between the two men, both of whom smelled of sweat and liquor and stale, settled-in smoke. The saddle was between his feet. Behind him, beneath the tarpaulin, he could hear bottles rattling. When the driver turned off the roadway onto a tiny dirt track that headed in the general direction of the river, Francisco realized that they were no longer heading to Rosita, if in fact they ever had been.

— Stop the cart, he said.

— What for? asked the driver.

—Just stop the damn thing and let me walk.

This prompted both men to chuckle and the driver to say: — You ain't goin' nowhere.

A few seconds later, as the wagon slowed to manoeuvre
around a boulder, Francisco put his right fist into his left hand and drove his right elbow into the face of the bandido on the passenger side. The man fell into brambles, holding his spurting nose. Abandoning the saddle, Francisco leapt from the cart and began to run towards the roadway. When he heard the cock of a pistol and the driver saying
Hold up, pendejo, or I'll shoot you in the back
, Francisco instinctively stopped and slowly turned. The driver came around the cart with his pistol pointed at Francisco's head; when he reached a point where a blind man wouldn't have missed, he squeezed the trigger.

— Hijo de puta!

— What happened? said the passenger as he picked himself off the dirt.

— The gun jammed, cheap piece of shit.

— Try it again.

He spun the chamber and again aimed the gun at Francisco's forehead. Again it refused to shoot.

— It won't work. Let's go.

— Try again, pendejo. I think he broke my goddamned nose.

— I said forget it, let's go.

A minute later Francisco was alone in the middle of an endless Coahuilan scrub. He stood motionless, the emotions within him so intense that his body refused to accept them as his own. This state of grace did not last long: he began to shake so violently that he fell to his knees and vomited a translucent slime, after which he rolled over and closed his eyes against the white sun, panting so fiercely his ribs hurt.

When he caught his breath he turned over and, for no good reason, began pawing at the earth like an enraged dog, till his fingertips were ragged and his nose ran and his lungs
felt heavy with dust. He stayed there, on hands and knees, panting. When he finally regained his breath, he rose because he had to, and rummaged through his knapsack. He drank the small amount of water left in his bottle, which somehow only magnified his thirst. Commanding himself to think, he looked down the twisting, bleached track that had led his would-be killers to this spot: it was little more than a pair of ruts in the sun-baked earth. One option was to walk back along the path towards the roadway and hope that the cool temperatures of night might bring out a few travellers. He turned, squinted his eyes in the opposite direction, and spotted what looked like a thin, mud-red interruption in the relentless desert. This, he concluded, was the Río Grande. He devised a new plan, this one motivated primarily by thirst. He would find the river, and there he would drink muddy water, refill his water bottle, and return in the direction from which he'd come, hopefully flagging a ride with some travellers who might, if all went well, refrain from murdering him. If it turned out that he had to spend a night curled up in the desert, he'd find himself a sandy lee and do just that.

He put his head down and trudged. With only the barest hint of a path, he had to veer around every manner of agave and yucca and low, spiny cactus. He kept thinking of Violeta — of her green eyes and wavy black hair and her soft, graceful manner. After a half-hour of delirious marching, the sound of the river grew into an actual stirring, the thin, mud-red line a slowly moving banner. He pressed on, his gaze focused just ahead of his tired feet. With time, his thoughts deadened and his actions became robotic. His tongue swelled, and he could think of nothing but the baking, tuberous presence in his
mouth. His thoughts of Violeta dwindled, and the sounds of the desert no longer came to his tired, sunburned ears. Even the fear for his own survival — a fear that had propelled him in this direction in the first place — disappeared, and when Francisco finally stumbled upon the gently sloped banks of the river, his first reaction was to stop and peer curiously at the rush of grey water, as if he had no idea what it was or how he had found himself here.

It all came back: the river, the desert, the horse, and the saddle with the nice embroidery and how he had nearly got himself killed over it. Then he was running towards the river while simultaneously pulling off his clothing and making weak, strangulated yelps. He jumped in and splashed madly and tasted metal in the cool, delicious water. When he finally crawled out, he reached his hands towards the sky and, eyes clamped, let his naked body dry in the sun.

Eventually he opened his eyes and dressed and, shortly after, noticed he was not the first person to have graced this spot. A few metres away were the blackened remains of a firepit, along with a jumble of paper bags, half-eaten tortillas, torn bedrolls, cooking utensils, and old clothes. In the middle of the firepit was a rusted old coffeepot that bore a large dent on one side. A bit farther on, someone had nailed two mesquite branches into the shape of a cross and pushed it into the beach. Francisco was considering his next move when he heard rustling. Before he could react, he looked up at the top of the bank and watched as a lone hombre emerged.

The man was dark and had a compressed mestizo nose. He was shorter than Francisco, though just as stocky. He was maybe twenty-five years of age.

— You are crossing? asked the man in a thick southern accent.

— No, señor.

— Then why are you here?

— A pair of criminals left me here.

— Criminals? Really?

— Contrabandistas, actually. They stole my saddle and would have shot me had their gun not jammed. Then they left me out here.

— Dios mío.

Seconds passed. Francisco asked: — Where are you from?

— Chiapas.

— You're a long way from home.

— I have relatives in Texas. What about you?

— I'm going to try to walk back to the main road and get a lift to Piedras.

— Ay, that road. I was out there for hours before I got a lift. And even then it was in a donkey cart. I've been travelling all day just to get here from Sabinas. It's the heat. By the way, was that your dead horse I passed? There were so many flies I had to put my hand over my mouth.

— Sí.

—Jesús, hombre. Talk about luck. You want to eat?

The man opened his backpack and took out a bundle wrapped in brown paper. They both sat on a fallen mesquite branch and shared tortillas and jerky and water.
Gracias
, Francisco kept saying, between bites.
Muchas gracias, señor.
As the sun began to dip and turn a deep, spectral orange, the man started a fire with the half-burnt wood left in the pit.

— Looks like we're here tonight.

Francisco tightened his collar over his throat and prepared for the cold of the desert. Meanwhile the man stared into the flames, his face flickering with tones of red and yellow and blue. He fetched two potatoes out of his knapsack and edged them into the ash. After a few minutes of pushing them around with a stick, he stopped and looked at Francisco.

— You know what you should do? Swim with me in the morning. There's a good, newly paved road on the gringo side, and you'll catch a ride into Eagle's Pass in no time. They have actual cars over there, not just wagons pulled by burros. There you can cross back over into Piedras.

— I'd get caught.

— Even better. Let immigration drive you there themselves.

— Won't they beat the mierda out of me?

— If they took the time to beat up every wetback they found they'd never get any work done. Sometimes they even give you a sandwich.

Francisco thought about this. — You want me to swim to los Estados and let the immigration people take me back to Piedras?

The man shrugged. — It's what I'd do.

He slept curled like a baby, his right side resting on scrub and his head on his knapsack. It was cold that night, his sleep thin and shivering. Well before daylight, he felt a cold hand touch his shoulder. Francisco stretched and rubbed his eyes as the Chiapan collected his things in the moon's low shimmer. Once his possessions were packed, the stranger put his
backpack over his shoulder, walked to the water, and said
I'll see you on the other side
before slipping quietly into the river. Francisco rushed to the edge and watched him swim towards the far bank.

Francisco crossed himself and then slipped into the water. As he struggled towards the far bank he thanked God that the current happened to be running in his favour — like most Coahuilans he was a perfunctory swimmer at best. He emerged at a spot on the bank about thirty metres west of where his travel companion had climbed out and gone on without him. As Francisco walked towards the roadway running along the gringo side of the border, the first scarlet rays of morning fell from the east. He reached a wire fence denoting the existence of a ranch. When Francisco began to climb it, his foot slipped and he tore his shirt. Upon inspecting the damage, he shouted curse words that faded slowly in the chilly, vaporous air.

He walked a little bit farther, reaching the two-lane border highway just as the sun cleared the horizon. It was still cool, and in his dripping-wet clothes he had to shuffle on the spot to stay warm. Fittingly, a black and white sedan was the first car to pull over.

One of the policemen had latino features. He, naturally, did the speaking.

— Buenas días, joven.

— Buenas, señor.

— Did you swim across the Río Grande this morning?

— Sí.

— I take it you are not a resident of los Estados Unidos?

— No, señor. I'm sorry.

— Well, in that case, I think we're all going to take a little ride.

An hour later, Francisco found himself in a locked room with about two dozen other illegal immigrants, all of whom had wet clothes and frightened expressions and an air of inextinguishable fatigue. Around nine o'clock they were given fried-egg sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. At ten o'clock they were packed into a small bus with doors that locked only from the outside; as it wound its way through Eagle's Pass, Francisco peered at real yankee barbershops and real yankee saloons and real yankee grocery stores and he marvelled at how healthy everybody looked and how clean and new their hats were. In the bus there were not just Mexicanos but Guatemaltecos and Salvadoreños as well. They were all dropped off at the border. As they were under the authority of the police, they were saved the indignity of having to pay a small bribe to enter their own country. This irony caused Francisco to grin for the first time since he'd left Corazón.