The Guardians (5 page)

“Hey, Regina,” Miguel Mike called out to me in the teachers’ parking lot the next morning.

At least I don't call him Mr. Betancourt no more. Not when we're one-on-one. “One-on-one” is how the seminar leader talks who comes from the university in Las Cruces every few months to catch us up on how education is progressing in the world. “Why don't you go back and get your degree, Miss Regina?” she always says to me. “You'd make a great teacher.” I hear things like that and I think, Who knows—maybe one day I will.

Miguel Mike came over to my truck and helped carry the pies without my asking. I noticed from the other day when we went to El Paso that he was a gentleman, with old-fashioned caballero manners. Except for the part about pushing that coyota around. But what can I say about that? I don't like the idea of any man laying a finger on a woman. There is a very
high domestic-violence rate in this area, uf, not to mention Cabuche alone, from what I hear at the PTA, on the news, on the street, and on my shortwave ham radio. (That's what I used to do for entertainment before I got cable—listen to police calls.) How Miguel Mike handled the coyota, however, I don't think falls into that category. My opinion is when you buy into a life of crime you can only expect to get hurt, and that's what happened with her. That's as far as my moralizing went, because the truth was I was in a world of pain over my fears of losing Rafa.

“Call me just Miguel, okay?” he said. “Or Mike. Whichever one.”

I decided on Miguel because it reminds me of my favorite archangel. I call upon el arcángel Miguel whenever I need serious help, with this side and the other side. By that I mean here and across the border in México and I mean this life and whatever's on the Other Side. I was telling him all this when I saw by the smile that he was trying to hide that maybe I was just amusing him, which was not my intention. There's no end to how people think that everything about old women is ridiculous. Of course, I know I am not that old, but to a guy with a fast red car, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm old. Also, what I might be revealing and what made me shut up right away was how lonely I could get sometimes that made me just go on and on about things. Then Miguel said, “I was named after the archangel.”

“No way,” I said, figuring he was pulling my leg.

“No, really,” he said. “My mom had a difficult pregnancy.” Then he stopped and said, “What I wanted to talk to you about, Regina, is your nephew. I know how much you worry about him. But maybe now, you know, you could adopt him legally. This way he could get his papers in order and he could stay in the States and study later on. You said he's a good student, right? We could get him a scholarship …”

I was looking down at Miguel's white tenis and thinking how I'd like to be able to afford a pair of those for Gabo for his birthday because I know he likes to play basketball, while I listened to all that Miguel was saying, words that he meant to sound all happy, like that silver lining around a dark cloud but that just plain did not. I knew that as Gabo's guardian, I could probably try to adopt him and if I did, he wouldn't have to go back to México. But what Miguel was leaving out was the fact that we didn't know whether or not mi hermano was coming back for him. Who said my brother was dead? La Coyota? Like she was a reliable source.

“Gimme the pies,” I said, suddenly upset with Miguel because he had
already written off my last living known relative, besides Gabo. It wasn't his fault if my kid brother was dead. But why should I have to accept it with no proof yet?

Then in our struggle, we dropped one of the pies. “Ay!” I said.

“I'll pay you for it, Regina,” Miguel said, looking like he genuinely felt bad.

The sky was full of rain clouds again. Though everywhere there were long slits between them where brilliant light came through.

Sometimes I dream that I live on the other side of the clouds. There I've seen my mamá again. I've seen my father. I've seen my grandfather Metatron. I can't believe he made it to heaven, but I'd know that bellowing voice anywhere. Even in heaven he's yelling at everybody. My mother and he, of course, did not get along.

Mamá went to my abuelo Metatron's rancho when she was only fifteen to work as a cook. That's who I learned to cook from and to know all about plants and everything about vegetables, my mother. My father fell in love with her. It's an old story, I know, the son of the patrón in love with the beautiful india servant. But it was their story for real. We lived on the rancho until I was twelve, when my father and my older brother, Gabriel, who was the most perfect brother and son anyone could have ever imagined, were killed together. A bull turned on them and gored them both in almost one motion. It was one of those bulls you could never trust. I know how funny that sounds. But this was truly a mean animal. It was not all that young, neither, but it was still fierce. It came out of nowhere, a ranch hand said, when they were branding the calves. Who let it out, no one knew or would ever admit.

Hell broke loose on my grandfather's rancho that day. He fired everyone. Then he threw us out—Mamá, Rafa, and me. Rafa was barely six. “I've had enough, enough of this life!” My abuelo said things like that in his grief over losing his beloved son and his perfect grandson. In heaven they're all having it out, I guess.

Mamá took us, with our few belongings, to live with one of her uncles for a few days. She came from very poor people. Then we started crossing over to the States to work the harvests. I had met my future husband not in la pisca but on my abuelo's rancho in Chihuahua. Junior used to come out there every summer with his familia to visit his own grandparents. His grandfather was my grandfather's rancho foreman. What did we know about who gave orders to who until my abuelo lost it that day and ran everybody off his land?

We used to play together out there in our carefree days as children. We took care of my pets. I bottle-fed a pet calf one summer. Throughout my childood I had a pet burrito, cabritos to watch, two pet box turtles for a long time, and I always got to take care of the baby bunnies we kept in cages. When I was about three or four, when my first pet rabbit was taken from me for an Easter dinner, I learned to let go once they were grown. Junior was a gentle boy, so he preferred my company to that of my brothers. One time, when I was twelve, Junior tried to kiss me. We were collecting eggs in the henhouse when he leaned over. I think he had been calculating for a long time how and when he would make his move. When I saw his puckered lips headed in my direction I stepped back so fast, I fell and dropped all the eggs we had been collecting. My mother gave it to me good that day. Junior didn't try to kiss me again until we grew up. But that's how I knew he was the one for me, that summer day when I was twelve.

My brothers and I had had a private teacher who stayed the whole week with us and went home on weekends. The school was too far away and my abuelo thought it was for common folks anyway. Rafa was showing himself to be one of those math-wizard kids. Our big brother was going to go to study medicine in México City and then my grandfather said he would send him to finish up in Paris. I'm not saying that I'm better than other people who crossed over to this side, risking their lives in the river or through the desert, just because I started learning Latin when I was a girl. But life would have been much different for us if it hadn't been for that bull.

That's where a lot of the “what-ifs” start for me.

“What if I had insisted that Ximena stay with me?” Rafa said one time when he got real down on himself about Ximena's tragic death.

“What if Junior had never gone off to war?” I said right back to him.

Well, then, you just have to keep taking those what-ifs to infinity. What if there had been no war and what if no money could be made on killing undocumented people for their organs? What if this country accepted outright that it needed the cheap labor from the south and opened up the border? And people didn't like drugs so that trying to sell them would be pointless? What if being a brown woman, even one with red hair, didn't set off the antennas of all the authorities around here, signaling that you were born poor and ignorant and would probably die poor and ignorant? That you were as ordinary as a rock, so who cared what you thought or what you felt?

I was huddled down staring at that splattered pie on the asphalt, just staring, and I could hear Miguel's voice far off, saying, “Leave it, Regina. The birds will eat it up.” When I looked up at Miguel he looked so tall, like a poplar tree, so healthy and full of life and vigor and a future and, like some kind of fortune-teller, I felt it would be a glorious future at that, with babies and a house and his pretty wife smiling, so proud to see him when he came home from teaching at the school.

All these visions over a spilled pie and hopes for everyone but yourself. Then Miguel said, helping me up, on my stiff knee joints, “Okay, okay. I get it, Regina. We'll look for your brother.”

Since then, I am wondering what Miguel's mother knew about the baby she had just had to give him such a suitable name.

MIGUEL

If I ever write a memoir I'll probably call it
The Too-Late Guy.

It started when I was born—
1969
.

At least if I had been born in
1968
—
the year that rocked the world
— I could have felt a part of it. Sometimes I lie and say it anyway That's why I was a history major in college, to be part of something big.

But in
1968
, it was rocking all over—from My Lai to Malcolm, from the Democratic convention in Chicago to Jim Morrison. The civil rights movement. Free Leonard Pelletier, qué viva Anna Mae Aquash and Pine Ridge. Trinidad Sánchez, Jr.—“Why Am I So Brown?” Los Flor y Cantos festivals, poetry and public art. The San Francisco Mime Troop at Dolores Park. I was only ten when my mom and I happened to see them when we were on vacation. They weren't mimes and I heard the message loud and clear. We sat on the grass of San Pancho's rolling hills watching the performance, me a squirt and yet thinking, “I know the CIA's lurking around here someplace.”

That was back when the CIA was considered the people's enemy.

It was the age of hippies, yippies, and LSD. The Beatles were still together imagining an ashram utopia. Santana came down from the sky like Horus blasting “Black Magic Woman.”

Communism was the government's number-one enemy and students, Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and anyone else who spoke up, close seconds.

That would've been me, man. Public Enemy Number One of Nixon's administration. I'd been on it, too, writing about this country's “incredible
whiteness
of being.”

Still, I got plenty to rant about right here in the present.

My book's gonna be called
The Dirty Wars of Latin America: Building Drug Empires.
Or something like that. The research goes back to when I thought I'd get a Ph.D. My thesis was gonna be on the School of the Americas. It was a U.S. Army center located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, that trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since
1946
. Its graduates became experts in torture, murder, and political repression. Since the word got out on what the School of the Americas was really up to, in
2001
the school officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. After
9
/
11
the government felt it could justifiably come out of its covert-training closet.

The School of the Americas and I go way back.

My father used to run the language program. Colonel John Mason III made the army his career. He did two tours of Vietnam. He learned Spanish, Russian, and Czech and taught all three. He was an astute investor and a shrewd spender. Colonel Mason was so proud of himself. “Not bad for a kid from Sunset Heights,” he used to say.

When I was in my third year of high school, captain of the football team, and doing everything I could to get my father's attention (and not necessarily his approval, since I got thrown off the team for smoking pot), he died of a brain aneurysm.

We flew to Georgia and brought his body back to El Paso. He got a military burial at Fort Bliss. I cried no tears over Colonel Mason. “Maybe a KGB agent ejected some poison from a fake pen into his highball and that's what made his brain implode,” I told my mother.

“Don't disrespect your father,” my mom said, although she had not moved us down to Georgia when he took the post.

After high school I passed on UCLA, which would have been the colonel's choice, and decided to stay in El Paso to go to college. I took my mother's last name. My father left me a trust fund and my mother his pension. Maybe by then she figured her duties as wife and mother were done. She packed up and moved to San Antonio to start a new life. We always keep tabs on each other but she never mixes up in my business and I don't mix up in hers.

I never got to put my findings down on the dirty wars fueled by the School of the Americas alumni. Family life took over. Crucita and I were
expecting our daughter, Xochitl, before we finished college. Soon after Xochi, our son, Little Michael, came along.