The Jaguar's Children (9 page)

The pueblo where I was born is built on a ridge and you get to it by a dirt road off the highway. On a clear day you can see off both sides into different river valleys with the green mountains all around. When I was young and my father was away, I would go with my abuelo into the milpa after he burned off the old crop of corn and beans and we would plant the new crop together. Abuelo went first with his machete, stabbing it into the ground to make the hole, and I would follow, taking the seeds from the little sack my abuela made for me, dropping them in there and mounding the dirt over. It was a good job for small hands and we made a steady rhythm together, back and forth along the rows from the bottom of the milpa all the way to the top—and ours were steep up there, almost too steep for a plow.

In the heat of the day we would sit under the palapa with the soup and tortillas, and all around us the smell of smoke and chicken and burned earth. If we were lucky maybe we would see a rainbow or an eagle down below. On such a day I asked my abuelo how can something so small as a kernel of corn grow so big and feed so many, and he said to me, “It is the god inside doing this—
Pitao
. Some say that long ago,
Pitao
made us from the corn. I don't know if that is so, but what I do know is this—without it we would not exist, and without us there would be no corn. And if we become separated? We will turn into different things. We will lose our strength, our understanding of what and who we are.”

Abuelo liked the nighttime and even after a long day of work he would stay up after everyone else went to sleep. He liked to smoke a little yerba, listen to the night sounds and watch the stars—I think there were more of them back then. He could talk like a gecko and he tried to teach me—put the side of your tongue against your teeth, left side, and suck in hard. You hear that hollow clicking sound? But I could never get it right. I'd try and Abuelo would say, “Oh no, now you're insulting him! It's like this.” And they'd call right back. He always liked the darkness best.

Once my mother brought him a kilo of oranges from el centro. Oranges don't grow in the mountains where we live and he ate them all with the skin and everything. This is not because he was ignorant. It is because he grew up in the time of la Revolución with no father and he never forgot what it was to be hungry.

At least once a week my abuelo would take his burro into the mountains to cut the wood for cooking. That burro is still alive and she's older than me. When you live close with such animals for a long time they become your family. You learn all the little ways they have, and they learn yours too because in the campo there is a lot of time for watching. One of Isabel's little tricks is to bite your ass when you aren't looking. It is a game with her, but it hurts like hell. My abuelo was smart about this and she almost never got him, but one time she did—and bad, so he grabbed her by the lower lip, twisted it up and very close to her he said, “What, you bad burro! You think you are a wolf now? Well, look out then. I am a jaguar.” And his eyes were sparkling. She always worked hard for him and he never made her carry him on the steep trails as many others do.

One Sunday, long before I was born, the priest called on my abuelo for a tithe. Abuelo refused to give him the money and said right there in the church that the gods he serves are not asking him for pesos. Many disapproved of this and the mayordomo's wife accused him of being a witch. There is a brujo in our pueblo, but it is not my abuelo. It didn't matter. Since that time, when the village council was deciding who gets to cut wood, or who is getting the water for the milpa, Abuelo was at the end of the line, and it was the same for my father. In the pueblo, you carry the sins of your family before you, and my father's burden was heavier than most.

If you go to visit my pueblo today and ask someone what time it is, they might hold their hand to the sky and point to the angle of the sun. If you tell them they have the wrong time they might say to you, “We follow the hours of God, not the hours of the devil.” Maybe they smile when they say this and maybe they don't. When I was young and living there we didn't see gringos very much, and when we did it was only hallelujahs—evangelistas. Like we needed more gods. The hallelujahs were enormous and white with dog-color hair and glass eyes and my sister and me would watch them only from a distance. Sometimes they would bring us bags of old clothes and shoes. One of the T-shirts Mamá got said “Jesus Hates the Yankees.” Whenever we were bad or didn't listen she would say, “Look out, or the gringos will come in the night and take you away!” And you know, AnniMac, mi madre was right. Look how many Mexicanos you got up there now.

But not my abuelo and abuela. They stayed in the Sierra all the way to the end. Always my abuelo worked with the burro, he never had a truck, and you know a burro is not like a horse—a burro is one uncomfortable ride. The packsaddle is wood and hard, but without it the backbone will break you in two. Riding on one for a long time, your kidneys hurt after, your tailbone—other things too. And at the end of the day when they came back to the pueblo, him and that burro were both so heavy with the firewood that from behind you could not tell who was the animal and who was the man. That's how it is in the pueblos—a lot of times it's hard to tell.

And that is why, when I was five years old, Papá took me to el Norte.

We crossed at Presidio in Texas. Back then, there was just the small bridge and around a bend in the river a boat waiting in the tall grass, but Papá did not have enough money for a coyote so we had to swim. My tío in L.A. did this also and he told Papá where to go and how to do it. In a market on the border, Papá bought a box of plastic garbage bags. Then we walked out of town for a long time to a quiet place where there were no people. There, under a tree, we took off all our clothes and put them in one of the garbage bags. Papá blew up the bag then like a balloon and tied it up. After this he put it inside another bag, and more after that, and each time he tied the bag again. Then we walked to the water with only our chones. The Río Bravo was bigger and slower than the rivers I knew at home and it was the color of sand, even ankle-deep you couldn't see your feet. Papá held the bag in his arms like a sack of corn and walked into the water. He crouched down there and said, “Get on my back and hold on.”

But it was December, the sun was going down and the water was cold. I was afraid and I remember saying, “I want to go home.”

“That's where we're going,” said Papá, “to a new home. Hold tight to me now and the river will take us where we need to go.”

I did as he said and I gasped when we went under. The bag was big, but it was already full of our clothes and it sank. When we came up only my father's head was above the water. My arms were wrapped around his neck like vines and I could hear him choking as we were pulled into the current. “Easy,” he whispered. “We're just going for a little swim.”

I climbed up higher, tucking my nose in behind his ear, and the smell of his hair calmed me. I loosened my grip then, but only a little. I could feel him kicking under us—not hard but steady—and like this we left Mexico behind. Drifting down and slowly across, we made our way toward a line of willows on the far bank. By the time my feet touched the bottom I could smell the mud of el Norte. Between my toes it was as soft and slippery as the inside of my mouth.

Papá took my hand and we ran into the trees. We sat down in the leaves and he tore open the bags. “Bienvenidos al Norte,” he said, pulling off my wet chones and rubbing me down with his T-shirt. “Maybe one day you will be a real Americano.”

Papá threw the garbage bags and our wet chones into the bushes and gave me a tortilla to eat. When I asked him why he wasn't eating, he said he ate already. For a while we sat there with the wind blowing us dry, watching the sun drop through the branches. Out on the riverbank, standing in the sand as tall as my father, was a rusty metal cage. I remember this cage was so orange in the low sun it was like fire, like that cage was burning, and I asked my father if this was some special kind from the circus. “No,” he said. “Es para criminales y migrantes.”

“¿Qué es un migrante?”

“It is a good man trying to do better.”

“Why is there a cage for him?”

“There are many cages, m'hijo, all shapes and sizes. Come now, we will go and find Tío Martín.”

 

Tío Martín was four thousand kilometers away. He is my father's older cousin and he was always lucky. For many years he worked in a hotel in Massachusetts out in the country and he told my father to come—again and again he told him this. There is work, he said—in the kitchen, cutting the grass—many things to do. It is safe and quiet there, he said, and far from the city so la Migra will not find you. For us it was almost true.

After we crossed, we walked for a long time in the dark, down a dirt road where the trees were low and made a tunnel. It was cold and damp in there like winter in the Sierra. You could smell the river—muddy and full of rotting things and you knew even without seeing that it was big. I think my father carried me for most of the night. He is almost as big as a gringo and strong like a machine. He can lift a twenty-liter bucket full of cement with one hand, put it on his shoulder, then do the same with another bucket and walk as far as he needs to walk. Since he was young he was called el Biche for his green eyes. His mother, my Abuela Zeferina, called him Ezequiel because Ezequiel saw the future and was not afraid. Also because God told him in the Bible, “Son of Man, I will send you to a fighting nation that is fighting me. They and their fathers are going against me, even now.”

Always I think Abuela believed her son would go to el Norte.

I remember sleeping in the woods with Papá, wrapped in his jacket, and I remember the tortillas. At home we ate only corn tortillas and these white ones were like eating the side of a box. I did it only because I was so hungry. We traveled this way for maybe three days until we got to a town with cement on the streets. It was just morning and Papá said to look for a white dog running. Every corner we turned I remember leaning around, hanging off his hand and I was proud because I saw it first. “¡El perro blanco!” I shouted. “¡El perro blanco!” He was there running up the side of a low building and he looked so thin and fast. My father took a deep breath then, like you do when you're stepping into a cold river. I couldn't understand why that dog was so important, but now of course I do. That dog took us all the way to Tío Martín.

 

In the bus station nobody was glad to see us. Some fanned their faces when we passed by. My father cannot read so well—all his life there is something between his eyes and the words—so he went to the wrong window and I am glad now that we didn't understand what the man there told us to do. He looked down at us like we were bringing him a plate of shit. His lip twisted as he talked and then he waved us away, sliding shut his little door. Through the thick glass I watched him turn his back and light a cigarette. After that, my father and me stood over by the pay phones, watching. There was another window on another wall and people were coming and going from there. I watched closely this one man who came away with a ticket in his hand. He was old in a jean jacket and he was dark like me, but his hair was white and woolly as a sheep. I had never seen a negrito before and I stared at his nose and lips until my father growled, “Basta,” and pushed my head away.

We went to the window where the negrito came from and my father said, “Espreenfill.” Then he held up two fingers. The lady in the window looked down at us, her eyes squeezed together like the sun was too bright. Her eyelids were silvery blue and sparkling the same as some butterflies you see around our pueblo. The hair above her forehead was yellow. It stood up by itself and I wondered how.

“
Espreen
feel,” my father says again, a little louder. “Mossa-
shoo
sis.”

“
Sprang
fail?” she says back. “Massa
tooch
its?”

My father bit his lip and nodded, hoping they were talking about the same thing. The lady looked at a list she had and said some things my father couldn't understand.

“¿Cuánto cuesta?” he said, but the lady only looked at him. He made a writing motion and she wrote something down. He looked at it and nodded. “Ven,” he said to me, and we left the window. The lady said something else and my father waved and then he took my hand and led me into the toilet. He took me into a stall with him and pulled his pants down. There, sewn on the inside of his pants leg, was one of my baby sister's socks and inside it was the money—dólares. He counted some out, put these in his pocket, put the rest—not much—back into my sister's sock and tied up his pants. Then he put the seat of the toilet down and told me to go. He left me there and went out and I could hear him washing at the sink. I had never sat on a toilet seat. The walls were stone and everything echoed and smelled of chemicals and pine trees. It was a palace in there, but when someone in the next stall flushed the toilet I ran out so fast I tripped on my pants.

We left the bathroom and went back to the ticket window. My father pushed the money through and said, “
Espran
fail.”

The lady looked at the dirty, wrinkled bills, shook her head and blew air out through her lips so they flapped. This made her cheeks puff out and with her sparkling eyes and tall yellow hair she looked like a puppet I saw once at a fiesta in Tlacolula. My father was getting nervous, his eyes going fast from her hands to her face and back to her hands. The lady said something to someone we couldn't see, shook her head again, and counted the money, holding the bills only by the corner. She didn't put them in the drawer but set them to the side. She pushed a single bill and some coins back through the window along with the tickets. Then she held up a little map with the white dog on it and started talking slow and loud and we had no idea what she was saying. She pointed to a red dot on the map, then to my father and then to the inside of the bus station. Then she made a line to a bigger red dot and said “Dallas!” about five times like it was something very important. Then she made a long line past many other red dots and said “New York.”