El Míster

Señora Pérez’s house was too small for the four of us to go inside. El Míster and my abuela waited out front. My mom and me sat at the round table in the corner of the kitchen, my mom stabbing the rotary dial with her index finger. Sra. Pérez sat on her sofa watching a telenovela while her two boys made engine sounds, running their Hot Wheels along the concrete floor and over their mother’s knee. I had spent lots of time at this table—at this phone—with my mom. I knew my father mainly by his voice, tinny and crackly through the receiver.

He left for the States when I was three, and I’d only seen him twice since then. The summer after I turned seven, police raided a construction site in South Houston and sent him back to us on a bus. He’d been wanting to come visit anyway, he said. I spent that summer walking the dirt roads to the nearby rancherías with him, helping other men with their harvests. They paid us in bushels of corn, which we ate from and which my dad tried to sell. We ended up with a mound of rotten cobs on the side of the house and a swarm of flies that trickled in through the gaps in the walls and buzzed our ears while we slept. In the late summer he left again. And it was four years of trembling countryside and a quake that sunk part of the town into the old sulfur mine before I saw him again.

Construction stalled around the holidays, he said, so he hopped on a bus from Houston to check up on us. I’d never gotten a Christmas gift before that visit. He brought me a remote-control truck with off-road wheels. When I asked him if the gift was from Santa Claus, he laughed. “¿Are you kidding?” he said. “¿Some fat white guy gets the credit? Nah. Ah.” He wagged his finger. “I worked to make money, and then I went to the store and paid for it, because you’re my son and I want you to have it. Santa Claus doesn’t exist.” I managed to race the car into the collapsed mine a week later by accident, and it was gone. I thought he would be mad, but he just said, “Ni modo,” and that he’d get me a new one.

That visit, my mom tried to make him promise he would send for us soon, showing him that Doña Martina’s old house was halfway inside the cavern spreading from the burnt-down mine, and reminding him that everyone else was looking for a way out. But like most Mexican men who could remember better times at home, he had dreams of coming back and living his old life again: working the fields and raising his chickens. And he got mad, saying that he almost had enough money to come back for good. To prove his commitment to our home, he spent most of his days making repairs around the house: spreading tar over the holes in the tin roof with a metal spatula, mixing concrete into a gash in the kitchen floor that had opened up during the tremor. He even pulled a door off an abandoned house and put it on ours. The door was solid oak with a stained-glass cross encrusted in the upper half—a crack from end to end—and when the sun shone in through the front door, it cast a red shadow into the kitchen. Then after a few weeks, he left to meet a coyote in Nuevo Laredo.

Afterward, my mom got sick—vomiting her huevo perdido in the shrubs outside the window, stomping out of the room when my abuelita lit incense before her prayers, yelling at me for being too loud, for lying so close and being too warm, for scraping my knees playing with my friends in the abandoned mine cars on the tracks. When she called him long-distance on Sra. Pérez’s telephone to say she was pregnant, there was lots of shouting. She called him often after that. Two or three times a week, for weeks, I would hear her hollering from all the way down the street. And when Sra. Pérez gave her the phone bill at the end of the month, she cried. But she got what she was fighting for, cause three months later, she told me to start saying goodbye to my friends at school, and two months after that, el Míster showed up, and here we were.

After a few rings, somebody answered. My mom said in the few lines of English she had, “Juan, please. This Valeria.” The secretary at the lumberyard knew the drill, so my mom hung up.

“We’ll call back in fifteen minutes,” she told me.

She took a seat on the sofa next to Sra. Pérez, watching the clock above the TV more than the telenovela. The little boys were now throwing their miniature cars against the ground, mimicking the sound of explosions. My abuelita sat on a cinder block just outside the house under the patchy shade of a bald cypress. El Míster stood to the side, his hand in his blue-jean pocket. He didn’t look like anybody I’d ever met. He wore a half-open polyester shirt exposing a thick patch of hair, a stand-alone mustache that crept into his mouth when he talked, curly hair down to his shoulders, sideburns, and large sunglasses with dark mirrored lenses like gasoline rainbows.

“It should be fine,” he said. “The lumberyard is closed tomorrow. Better that we get there on his day off.”

“Ay, joven. I hope you’re right,” my grandma said. “My yerno has taken good care of us. But he’s got a hard head.”

“Nah,” said el Míster. “I’ll tell him it’s a good idea.”

“Okay,” my abuela said, shaking her head.

He wiped the sweat pooling around his eyes. “Damn, it’s hot,” he said, fanning himself with his right hand. “¿Is there anywhere to get a refresco?”

“There’s a little store that way.” I pointed north. “It’s not far.”

“¿Cómo se llama?”

“Chong,” I said.

“¿Chong?”

“The old man is Chinese.”

“I didn’t know they owned all the stores out here too.” He laughed.

“¿Are you gonna walk?” I asked.

“¿Why, when I got wheels?” He smiled as he got up and walked back toward his little car.

Abuelita and I were silent. The telenovela’s dramatic score leaked out the front door. A couple was arguing on-screen.

“Amá,” I said to my abuelita. “¿What do you mean that Papi has a hard head?”

“Ay, mijo. It doesn’t mean anything except that he likes to do things his way.”

“¿Is that bad?” I asked.

“No. But it’s not always good.”

I went back to the kitchen table and sat by the phone, following the hands on the clock.

“Call,” my mom told me, getting up slowly from the couch.

“Hello,” my dad answered in English.

“Bueno,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say to him.

“¿Juanito?” His voice was tired and hushed. “¿Cómo estas, hijo?”

“Bien,” I said.

“I can’t wait to see you.” “Me too,” I said.

“¿Are you excited for your new home?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I know you’re sad about leaving your friends, but family should be together, ¿you understand?”

“¿What about Abuelita?” I asked.

“We’ll work on that. For now, it’s important that the four of us be together.”

“Three,” I said. “There are three of us.”

“Four with your sister,” he said.

“Here’s Mom,” I told him.

Sitting beside my mother, I could hear my dad’s voice change, but I couldn’t make out his words.

“Juan,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know you’re working.” And then, “We haven’t left yet. He says it’s too late and we should wait for morning. No. I’m on the phone at Mari’s house.” She furrowed her eyebrows and through tight lips said, “We’re ready. He’s the one who got here late.” She sighed. “We’re leaving early tomorrow.” She leaned back in the chair, and my father’s voice came through the receiver in quick bursts. She tried to laugh. “¿Well, why didn’t you send some pinche viejito then, or a woman? ¿If you don’t trust him, how am I supposed to trust him?” She bit the nail of her index finger. “¿If he’s your friend, then what’s the problem? I don’t know who. I don’t live there. I don’t know anybody there.” She tilted her head back and nodded. “There it is. Of course I didn’t invite him to stay in our house. ¿What do you think of me?” She listened silently for a moment, then said, “He’s just a kid. He doesn’t even have a real name.”

Just then, el Míster came through the door drinking a pineapple Jarritos and holding a box full of glass-bottle sodas. “Man, that chino speaks Spanish better than me. Grab whatever you want,” he said. Sra. Pérez’s boys looked into the box and then hid behind her legs.

“Don’t be so timid,” she told them. “Here,” she said, holding out an apple soda for the two of them. “¿What do we owe you?” she asked.

“Nada, nada. Just enjoy,” he said, waving her off with a laugh. But she insisted, digging into her purse, putting two five-peso coins in his hand.

“¿Is that Juan on the phone?” he said. “Let me talk to that cabrón.”

He held the phone up to his ear and laughed immediately—a loud throaty sound that startled my mother. ¿Did my dad make a joke?

My mom scoffed and walked away from the table.

“Everything’s good here,” el Míster said. “The drive was fine. Longer than I expected. I got lost two, maybe three times. You know how it is. Everyone gives bad directions. Todos me dicen, ‘If you see a black cow in the pasture, you went too far.’” He laughed again. “Yeah, we’re gonna catch the daylight tomorrow. We’ll try to cross the bridge before dark. Nah, I’m staying anca mi tío Picho tonight.” While my father talked, el Míster looked over at me, smiling, rolling his eyes, and flapping his hand open and shut in the imitation of a parrot. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll get there when we get there. Everything’s gonna be fine. No. Nel. Sí. Sí. Uh-huh. Orale, güey. Ahí te watcho.” And he hung up. “Done deal,” he said, taking a chug of his bright yellow soda, his big teeth sticking out as he drank.

“¿What did he say?” my mother asked.

“Everything’s fine. We’ll give him a call when we get to Victoria.” He combed his mustache to the side with his fingers.

“¿Everything’s fine?” she said. “¿Just like that?”

El Míster shrugged his shoulders and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I almost forgot,” he said. “I need you to look at something.”

He went to his car, pulled some papers out of the glove box, and handed my mom a State of Texas birth certificate. “When we get to the border, probably nobody is gonna ask you anything. If you let me do the talking, we’ll be fine. But just in case, you should know the papers we’re using. ¿Can you say that name?” he asked.

“Griselda Pacheco,” my mother read. “Ay, Dios, what an ugly name,” she said.

“That’s my sister,” el Míster said.

My mother flushed. “Perdón.”

“No problem,” he laughed. “So, tomorrow, you’re a Tejana. And you’re my sister if anybody asks you anything, ¿okay?” Looking at me, he continued, “You’re her son. My nephew. ¿Can you read that?”

“Roberto Pacheco,” I said.

“¿What year were you born?”

“1988.”

“¿And how old are you?”

I did the math. “Eleven.” But, really, I was already thirteen.

“Good. I’m Lindolfo Pacheco. You might need to know.”

“¿Lindolfo?” I said. “¿Por qué te dicen el Míster?”

“Cause I never liked Lindolfo,” he said, lowering his sunglasses back over his face. “And some kid a long time ago told everyone I looked like a horse when I smiled. So they called me Mister Ed.”

“¿Míster Ed?” I asked.

“An old black-and-white with a talking horse,” he said. “But we’ll talk more tomorrow. We got a long road ahead.” As he walked to his car, he pulled the ten pesos Sra. Pérez had given him out of his shirt pocket. “Oye, Juanito. Aquí tienes,” he said, handing me the coins while my mother was busy inside the house.

Nobody had ever given me money. “¿Don’t you need it?” I asked.

He laughed a little. “Nah, it’s just some coins,” he said.

That evening, me and my friends messed around on the abandoned tracks like they were some bootleg roller coaster, wheeling each other down the line in the old transport cars as fast as we could. When we got tired, we dangled our legs over the rim of the canyon, hollering into it—the echo of our voices bouncing off the jagged rocks and the twisted metal roofs and flying back at us from multiple directions like hungry blackbirds. The ground around us was littered with the glass shards of broken vases and spent veladoras—offerings to all the men buried deep inside the collapsed mine. My uncle and both my abuelos were among them.

Panchita, who was a year older than me and Luis, ate spicy corn churritos out of a plastic bag, crunching one in her mouth. “One for me,” she said and—tossing another below—“Y uno pa’ mis muertos.”

Luis’s dad and older brother had crossed years ago, and he knew a lot about up north. He wore a Space Jam shirt with Bugs Bunny on it that his dad had sent him. He gathered his hands around his mouth and, in his stringy voice, shouted, “Lucas, I am your father” into the mine. The words came back to us with a chorus effect that sounded like a wimpy Darth Vader, and we hit the ground cackling.

“Suck it,” bellowed Panchita, and she licked chile dust off her fingers as her voice echoed at her soft, round face. Then she whistled as loud as she could to the tune of the words “¡Chinga tu madre!” The sound bounced against the far wall, and the mine spit the five-note refrain back, telling us all to go fuck our mothers.

“Oye, Juanito. You say something,” Luis said to me.

“¿What should I say?” I asked.

“You think of it. I won’t be around to tell you what do to when you’re gone.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth and made a start, but I was too embarrassed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say whatever chingadera pops into your head,” Panchita said, wiping chile dust on the front of her overalls. “Nobody cares.”

It took me a second, but finally I said, “Adiós.” The wind carried my voice away before it could hit the walls of the mine, and it was quiet.

Luis came closer and put his arm around me. “Dammit, Juanito. Now it’s sad.”

“La tuviste que cagar,” said Panchita.

We sat awhile, kicking our feet over the threshold.

“¿Are you actually leaving tomorrow?” Luis asked. “Cause yesterday you said you were leaving today.”

“Yeah, we’re leaving,” I said.

“My dad says he’s gonna send for us too, you know,” Luis said. “We can visit each other.”

“Yeah. My dad says you can take a bus anywhere over there.”

“Pinches pendejos,” Panchita said. “You can’t drive from Houston to Chicago just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “¿You ever seen a map?”

“No chinges, Panchita,” Luis said. “We’ll take a plane.”

“¿Con que dinero, estúpido?”

“Carlos told me he rode the train to the theater with his friends the other day. Even kids have money there.”

Caught up in Luis’s excitement, I ignored Panchita. “My dad says I’m going to have my own room in the new house. And that we’ll have a big TV. Two of ’em. He says anybody can have two TVs like it’s nothing.”

“¿You think you’re better, cause you’re leaving?” Panchita said, scowling. “¿If things are so great, how come your dad didn’t want you there? Not till the whole town heard your mom kick his ass over the phone. Juanito, don’t be stupid like your stupid friend here. My mom says that people leave when they’re too chicken to stay.” She stood up and spat on the dirt around her feet.

Luis’s eyes narrowed. “Just cause your dad hasn’t sent you a single peso in two years. ¿How would he? He’s a dumb drunk who can’t sign his own name. No wonder he’s gone.”

It didn’t take much to recall the image of Don Pancho waking up in the road, a bottle of mezcal gripped in his palm, holding up the angry bus driver coming in from Lomitas. I imagined him dead in the desert now—we all did—left behind or shot by his own coyote (a neighbor had said), one arm draped over his eyes, shielding his face from the dirt. “Ya para de joder, Luis,” I told him. “He doesn’t mean it,” I said to Panchita.

He looked over and relaxed his gaze at the sight of her head hanging between her shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said, smacking his lips, stopping himself. “I don’t know.”

“You can say it,” she said, standing at the very edge of the hole, looking hard at her feet. “He’s dead.”

“Don’t say that,” I told her. I tried to offer an alternative, but I couldn’t picture anything except the desert.

“Pues, es una cosa o es otra cosa,” she said. “He’s dead, or he left us. ¿Which is worse?”

I put my hand on her shoulder and pulled her away from the rim, the worn denim of her overalls soft against my palm. The bone of her shoulder sharp. She hugged me. She wrapped her arms around me and pushed her face into my chest, her tears dampening the front of my shirt. And then she pressed her mouth to mine and kissed me. Her thin black bangs tickled my forehead. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, but in that moment I wished I could’ve had time to figure it out. The graze of her lips was rough, and it left the tingling flavor of dirt in my mouth and the sweet spicy heat of her corn churritos. I just patted her back as a parent would to comfort a child. “No pasa nada,” I said. Luis stood behind her, looking down at his feet.

She laughed hard between heaving sobs. “Chinga tu madre, Juanito,” she said, loosening her grip around me and extending an arm toward Luis. She pulled him into our hug, and we stood just like that, warm against each other even as the sun slipped below the mountaintops and the cold wind charged with dust from the hillside swept over us.

That night I thought about Panchita and Luis and my abuela. ¿What would be waiting for me on the other side? We all knew people who came back to visit—driving their new trucks, dressed in their pressed clothes and shiny buckles, throwing their parties in the square and then going back when they ran out of money. ¿Is that a life that I would grow into? I imagined myself sitting tall inside a pickup with my dad, ¿but where were we driving? Watching cartoons on a TV that took up half a wall. ¿But who would be there with me? Magda would be born soon. She’d be a citizen—it was something my mom and abuelita talked about a lot. She would grow up speaking English. ¿Who would I talk to? I barely spoke any English at all. Though Luis had assured me that everybody spoke Spanish over there anyway. I took the birth certificate out of my mom’s purse, holding it to the candlelight on my grandmother’s altar. Maybe Roberto could be my friend. I read the name and dates over and over, trying the sounds out loud until I got tired and fell asleep on the floor by my abuela’s sofa.

It was still dark out when my mom woke me up. She cooked an early breakfast of eggs and beans with leftover salsa from the day before. She made tacos for the road and wrapped them in tinfoil. There were two open suitcases on the floor. My dad had told us not to bother bringing too much—that we’d just get new things once we were on the other side. My mom had packed most of the clothes we had. Plus our birth certificates, old photographs, the baptismal robe my abuela had hand-knitted for me, and my mom’s yellow apron printed with a fat tabby cat.

After breakfast, my grandmother prayed silently at her altar.

“¿Abuelita?” I asked, fitting my arms through the sleeves of my shirt. “¿What are you going to do with us gone?”

She stood to face me. “¿What do you think? I’m going to polka,” she said, laughing.

“En serio,” I said.

“I’m not too old to take care of myself, Juanito. I’ll find things to get into as long as the bus fare doesn’t go too high.”

“¿What about us?” I asked. “¿What are we gonna do without you?”

“Ay, hijo,” she said. “You’re going to go to school, and you’re going to have friends, and soon you’ll have a new sister who’s gonna keep you busy. And I’ll come visit you as soon as you’re settled.”

I put my hands on her shoulders and pulled her into a hug, shoving my face into her collar, the coarseness of her salt-and-pepper curls itching against my forehead, and I cried.

She put her arms around me. She chuckled and cradled the back of my head in her palm and pressed a callused thumb into my forehead, etching the shape of a cross from my hairline to my eyebrows. “I’m going to be fine and so are you,” she said—blessing me, kissing the top of my ear, slipping her finger through one of my curls.

While we waited for el Míster, my mom walked me down to the pit, her tiny thumb and forefinger—nails painted red—not long enough to wrap fully around my wrist, and we sat a couple meters from the rim, the sun rising at our backs.

My mom closed her eyes, one hand on her belly and the other firmly pressed against my arm. When she prayed, her lips moved, but she didn’t make a sound. After a while, she stood. Two blackbirds perched on a rock below. “¿Did you know that I sometimes talk to your abuelo and your tío Joaquin?” she asked.

“¿How?”

“You just talk, and they talk back,” she said. “Hello,” she shouted, and the mine spoke back to us, her greeting returned in double. “That’s them.”

“¿What do you talk to them about?”

“Different things. Mostly I just say that I miss them and tell them about what’s new.”

“¿What do they say to you?”

“The way they talk back, Juanito, is like a message inside your head. You know what they want you to know. And it’s not words. But more a feeling.”

“¿Have you told them that we’re leaving?”

“No,” she said. “But they know.”

“¿How do you know they know?”

“I can feel they’re sad.”

The puttering of el Míster’s car reached us across the distance.

“It’s time to say goodbye,” she sighed. “Go on.” She nudged me with her elbow.

“Adiós,” I shouted, just like the night before. But this time, the word came back at me twisted. The chorus of echoes reflecting off the sharp rocks sent it back to me like a question—“¿Adiós?” “¿Adiós?”

It was good we hadn’t packed much, cause el Míster didn’t have the space. He put our bags in the trunk next to a spare tire and a tumble-weed of jumper cables. His car was a burgundy Dodge Spirit with a sharp metal spring sticking out of the torn cushion on the passenger seat, and a personalized license plate that read TU Y YO.

Me and my mom sat close in the back seat. My abuela stood next to the car, none of us saying anything, and when el Míster started the engine, my mom cried. But my abuela just reached in through the window, kissed my mom on her forehead, and gave her a blessing. “Los quiero mucho,” she said. “We’ll see each other soon.”

When we pulled away, she put her face in her hands. But we kept driving, my grandma getting smaller behind us until she was just a smudge in the window. Then she was gone. And so was Luis. And so was Panchita.

On the road El Míster tried talking to my mom to pass the time, but she hardly responded. “The air is nicer up here,” he said.

“Yes,” my mom said.

“¿How long have you lived in Villaseca?” he asked.

“Always.”

And then: “Your mom is bien buena onda.”

“Yes,” she said. “¿How much is Juan paying you?”

He laughed. “Just enough to put a down payment on a better car. This carcacha will get us home, but who knows after that.”

The sun was coming up over the hills. Its orange glow bled into the purple sky. The car rattled over the dirt path. El Míster kept his arm out the window, waving his fingers over the cool desert breeze, sticking his palm straight up and letting the wind bend his hand back at the wrist.

I woke up as we were pulling into a Pemex past Matehuala. El Míster got out for a cup of coffee while the attendant fueled up the car.

My mom peeled the foil off a pair of tacos and handed one to me.

I bit into it. The taco tasted fine, but the corn tortilla was soggy, and some of the salsa dripped onto my shirt. She dabbed the stain with her handkerchief.

I finished it and asked for another.

“Juanito, we need to be careful.”

“You can’t even see the stain anymore,” I said, biting into my second helping.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “You know what men sometimes do to people who are crossing.”

El Míster came out of the Pemex chugging his coffee, tossed the paper cup into the trash can, and got back in the car.

My mom thought it was smart to not show any interest in him. But I thought I should be his friend. “¿How did you drink the coffee so fast?” I asked. “¿Wasn’t it hot?”

“Yeah, but it smelled burnt. And I hate when it’s burnt, so I had to drink it fast. Gotta stay sharp on the road.”

When the engine turned over, the muffler blew out a cloud of smoke, which came in through the window. El Míster coughed and stomped on the gas. Now caffeinated, he drove faster and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of whatever song was playing in his head. “Oye, seño’,” he said.

I knew this would irritate her, because that’s what people called my grandma.

“¿Do you put oregano in your salsa?”

“¿Huh?” my mom asked.

“My mom doesn’t use oregano. ¿Do you use oregano?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she said.

“¿How did you know?” I asked.

“I can smell it.”

“I can barely smell it,” I said, “and I’m holding it up to my face.”

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said, lowering the tone of his voice. “When I was little, my abuelito died in his sleep in the room across from me and my parents. And I could smell him. I woke my mom up and told her there was an odor coming from his room. She went to check on him. My dad called the ambulance, and they took him away. My parents didn’t smell a thing. They thought I had something wrong with me. First she took me to the gringo clinic, and he took my temperature and gave me aspirin. Then she took me to a curandero in Northside, and he did an experiment. He put a menthol cigarette in his pocket. A thing of garlic under a rosebush. A dirty towel in a basket full with clean laundry. I tracked them down like those police dogs on the TV. After all that, he said my nose was a gift from God, but that it would sometimes feel like a curse.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“Nah. It’s true.”

“¿What did your abuelito smell like?”

“He usually smelled like mothballs. But that night, it was paint thinner and sugar.”

“¿What does paint thinner smell like?”

He tapped his index finger on the steering wheel, thinking. “Like gasoline,” he said.

I leaned forward and rested my chin on the passenger-seat headrest. “I don’t believe you.”

“Juanito,” my mom said, annoyed, pulling me back into my seat by my shirt collar. “Don’t talk back like that. Y para de molestarlo. He’s busy driving.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” he said. “I like to talk.”

I felt my mother roll her eyes, and I hoped he didn’t see her through the mirror. I figured he would be nice to us if we were nice to him.

“¿You don’t believe me, huh?” he said. “Well, hey, that’s even how I met your daddy. I smelled him.”

“No lo estés cuenteando,” my mom told him. “He already believes toda la porquería they play on the TV. He doesn’t need more.”

El Míster laughed that same throaty laugh from when he was on the phone with my dad. He didn’t know my mom well enough to know she was serious. “I met your dad when I was working at the pescado frito place,” he said. “¿You ever had fried fish?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Ma, ¿have we eaten pescado frito?”

She smacked her lips, annoyed, her forehead bunching together at her eyebrows. My mom knew how to scowl. “If you insist on talking tonterías, okay. But I haven’t slept in two days, so leave me out of it.”

We both quieted, chastened. But when her breathing turned into animal snores, el Míster talked in his hushed voice. “Todo el barrio stops eating meat forty days for Cuaresma, so they always show up at the fish place. Lines out the door all the way to the car wash on the corner. I was working there a year before bald-headed Rodney—el jefe—tells me que I gotta wear a hairnet.

“‘¿And mess up all my curls?’ I said. ‘Nah. Take me off the deep fryer,’ I told him. ‘I’ll take orders at the front or in the drive-through. But I ain’t hiding this hair under no net. Pero se puso sus moños and told me again. So I said, ‘¿Why don’t you put on the net?’ and pointed to his shiny head. That got everybody laughing in the kitchen. He got all colorado, scratching his red nose with his fingernails, saying if I was gonna act that way, I should ‘resign.’ But my papi taught me never to quit anything, so I say, ‘I ain’t quitting. If you want me gone, you better fire me, or Im’ma keep working.’

“I was a good cook too. And hot food usually covers up bad smells, so I didn’t wanna leave. But when even the customers laughed at him, he told me I was fired. So I scooped four fish and a handful of shrimp into a box and left. ‘My severance pay,’ I told him with a shrimp tail sticking out my mouth.”

“¿What does that have to do with my papi?” I asked.

“Patience, niño. After I got fired, this older gringa who worked in the drive-through—Tracy with the red hair—would give me free shrimp and cocktail sauce outside by the dumpster when she was on her break. She was fine, but she smoked cherry cigarillos, and I have to trick myself, you see. The dumpster smells bad, but that’s expected cause it’s a dumpster. Better for me and Tracy if her smell gets mixed up with the trash, and I can pretend the bad smell isn’t her. Anyway, your dad walked around the back of the restaurant while I was sitting with her. He had dirt on his boots and on his clothes and on his face. He came up to us and said he was hungry and if we could help him. At first I thought he’d gotten into a fight cause he had some scratches and a little blood on his arms. But then I realized it was something else.”

“¿What was it?” I asked, leaning forward.

“Well, I could smell dried blood under his shirt and the sweat of other men on his clothes and the sand on his skin. And it wasn’t no wet, fishy beach sand. It was fiery desert sand. In our neighborhood”—he pulled his sunglasses off and looked back through the rearview mirror—“that means he probably had a tough time getting there.”

Panchita’s father came to mind—buried under a layer of sand. I closed my eyes as though it would shut the image out of my mind, but it only became clearer: the lines of sand like wrinkles on the man’s face. It was like a punch to the stomach, the thought that my dad could’ve ended up dead in the desert. “¿What did you do?” I asked el Míster.

“Tracy told him, ‘¡Get lost!’ But when I gave her a look, she went inside and came back with a basket of fish and some french fries. He went and ate under a tree by the train tracks. But,” he said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, “Tracy didn’t let me off the hook for your daddy’s fish. I ended up going to dinner with her at Subway—some sandwich place—and when I got home, I spent an hour scrubbing her cherry lip gloss off my mustache. When you get to that age, you’ll figure out how a kiss is supposed to taste. But for now, I’ll tell you it shouldn’t be petroleum jelly and cherry cigarettes.”

I remembered the soft abrasion of Panchita’s mouth. The sweet heat of spiced corn lingering on the edge of my lips. ¿Was that how it was supposed to taste?

El Míster laughed. “All that trouble for some mojado I probably would never see again. ¿But you know what? A month later, my dad set me up with a job at a lumberyard in Northside, and your jefito was already working there. He had seniority, the boss told me. ¿Can you believe that? Now he’s real macho trying to tell me what to do.” He laughed again.

When my mom woke up, we were in Nuevo León, the yellow landscape behind us. The passing countryside was now nopales bursting with big purple prickly pears; wiry mesquites; cornstalks; short palms with thorns thick as knives; and wooden crosses like mile markers all along the road, adorned with plastic floral garlands and photos of people killed on the road. She put her arm around my shoulder, pulling me close as she stared through the open window, and I felt the baby kick through her belly. “We’re getting close,” she said.

“I wonder what Abuelita’s doing.”

“Sleeping late. Probably took the bed back,” she said and then, changing the subject, “which reminds me—¿are you ready for your new house?”

I nodded.

“Just a little while longer to the bridge, seño’,” el Míster said.

She didn’t respond.

“¿So, what’re you gonna name the baby?” he asked, looking into the mirror—waiting.

She kept her eyes on the scenery and didn’t speak.

“Magda,” I said to him finally. “Magdalena.”

“That’s a nice name,” he said.

El Míster gave up making conversation with my mom and turned the stereo on. He drove with his left arm out the window, his gilded watch gleaming in the sun, and his black curls blowing in the hot wind. I caught his gold-rimmed aviators in the mirror, and I knew he was looking back at me, cause he smiled his big-tooth grin, turned the volume up on his Freddy Fender tape, and nodded his head to the beat of the music.

Traffic slowed in Monterrey. The sun reflected off the cars crowded on the highway, and we sweated in the back seat, my ear sticking to my mom’s arm. With the windows open, we breathed in the black exhaust of the cement trucks whose barrels rotated as we idled. The rumble of motorcycle engines filled the cabin as they wove between slow-moving vehicles. In the distance was el Cerro de la Silla—the twin peaks closing in on each other in the shape of a saddle. El Míster saw me looking. “If God rode a horse,” he said, “that’s how big the saddle would be.”

The sun was still bright and hot by the time we got to the bridge. The lines of cars going into Texas inched forward like snails. On our side, men sold bamboo flutes and tiny hand drums with the eagle-and-serpent insignia. Old women holding babies in their arms knocked on car windows and asked for money.

“The line is so long,” my mom said.

“That’s good,” el Míster said. “The longer we wait, the darker it’ll be and the faster they try to speed the line along. ¿Did you look over the papers?”

“Yes,” she said.

“We might as well practice. ¿What are your names?”

“Roberto Pacheco,” I said.

“And how old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“¿And you, seño’?” he asked, looking at my mom, who wiped sweat off her face with her handkerchief.

“Griselda Pacheco.”

“¿How old?”

“Thirty,” she said.

“¿Where do you live?”

“Houston,” we both said.

“Good. Don’t talk if they don’t talk to you. We’ll be fine.”

My mom grabbed my hand. I could feel her trembling.

“¿What’s Houston like?” I asked.

“You never seen a place so big in your life. So many lights, you won’t believe it. It’s the best city in the world.” He chuckled.

Farther down the line, a woman tapped at my window and held up a cardboard tray with candied pumpkin and burnt-milk toffees.

“Dulces.” She smiled, her parted lips revealing her rotting teeth.

“Look straight ahead and do like you can’t see her,” my mom told me.

The woman rapped on el Míster’s window with her knuckles. He looked at her and shrugged his shoulders. I expected her to move on to another car, but she walked around to my mother’s door, raised the different candies to the window, and rattled off the prices.

My mother continued to ignore her, staring straight ahead, drilling a hole into the headrest with her eyes. The woman set the tray of sweets on the ground and put her hands together as if in prayer. “My grandbaby is sick,” she pleaded.

I reached into my shirt pocket for the coins el Míster had slipped me the day before.

“¿Where did you get that?” my mother asked me.

“It’s mine,” I said, not wanting to get el Míster in trouble. “She needs money.”

“Probably,” she said. “But she’s not going to get it from you.”

“But she saw me reach for it. She saw the coins.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. I bet she sees a lot of things on this bridge.”

“But I wanna give it to her.”

“Juanito,” she said, through tight lips. “Put that money back in your pocket.”

“It’s just a couple coins,” I said.

She laughed. “¿Just coins, huh? Forget it. ¿Where do you think money comes from? ¿It just shows up at the post office like magic? Someone else on this bridge will give her money.”

“¿How do you know?” I asked.

“If she needs money so bad, she could be working for it like these other women.” She pointed to the pedestrian walkway alongside the automobile lanes—older ladies in cleaning uniforms.

When she saw that my mother would not budge, the woman peeled herself away from the window, picked up her box of candies, and walked over to another car.

“She looked like she needed it,” I said.

“Juanito,” she said, “mírame.” She palmed my cheek and moved my head so I was looking straight into her eyes. “¿Why do you think we’re leaving Villaseca?”

“¿What?” I said, though I had heard her question.

“¿Why do you think we’re leaving home? ¿Your friends? ¿Your abuelita?”

“We’re going to live with Papi,” I said.

“Yes. ¿But why do you think Papi left Villaseca?”

“To work.”

“¿And why do people work?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“No te hagas menso, Juanito. ¿Why do people work?”

“To make money.”

“¿And do you think we have money like that? ¿To give away to whatever strangers you see on the street? ¿Do you think she needs that money more than we need that money? ¿Huh?”

“No se.”

“Contéstame, Juanito.”

“I don’t know.”

“Pues ahora sí lo sabes, and make sure you don’t forget. If you wanna be giving your money away, you give it away to me first, ¿you understand?”

I kept my eyes closed most of our time on the bridge, resting my head on my mom’s stomach while she ran her fingers through my hair. Closer to the checkpoint, I could hear soldiers talking. They inspected families in minivans, crowds of people on passenger buses, and long-haul drivers in eighteen-wheelers. There were armored jeeps and police dogs and sweaty men with short spiky hair wearing machine guns around their shoulders and sunglasses over their faces. By the time we made it to the agent in the booth, it was dark, and I pretended to sleep, opening my eyes occasionally to get a glimpse of the man. He was short and had brown skin with black hair that he wore slicked back—like my dad on the days he went to church.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, his voice twangy like el Míster’s.

My mom’s heart sped up. I could feel it beating through her stomach, and the baby started to stretch her limbs against the walls of my mom’s belly.

“Houston,” said el Míster. “What’s in Houston?”

“Home. Work.”

“Are y’all family?”

El Míster nodded. “My older sister and nephew. We were visiting family in San Luis.”

“American?”

“Yup.”

“Can I see some papers?”

“Los papeles,” el Míster said to my mom.

She pulled the two birth certificates out of her purse and handed them to the officer through her window.

“What’s your name?” he asked her. She ran a hand over my head in a steady motion, and I could feel the blood pulsing in her fingertips.

“What?” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Griselda.”

“What about him?”

“This Roberto.”

“Do you speak English?” “Little.”

He switched to a broken Spanish.

“¿How many months?”

“Six,” she said.

“Wake him up.”

“Roberto,” she called. “Roberto, despierta.”

I stretched my arms and rubbed my eyes as though I were waking up from a deep sleep. I kept close to her. I could smell the tacos in her purse, and I could feel the heat from the baby against my body.

“What’s your name?” he asked in English.

“Uh, Roberto,” I said.

“How old are you?”

“Eleven,” I answered in English.

“Birthday?”

El Míster looked at me through the mirror. His eyes damp, and his lip trembling.

“May,” I said.

“The day,” he said. “¿El día?”

“Monday.”

The man laughed. “Can I ask you a question, sir?” he said to el Míster. “How come you know English, but they don’t?”

El Míster laughed. “Well,” he said, tapping his fingers on his knee, thinking quickly. “She’s the oldest girl, so my parents never sent her to school. The kid’s in special ed. Daddy’s some mojado ran out on them. You know how that is.”

The man was quiet. He looked at my mom, who’d fixed her gaze down at her belly. Then he looked at me, and I looked at him. “Welcome back,” he said. He tapped a button inside his booth, and the red traffic light in front of the car turned green.

“Thank you,” said el Míster.

And we drove into the United States.

Texas wasn’t much different from San Luis or Nuevo León. The roads were empty. There were miles of corn growing in perfect rows along the roadside. There were prickly-pear cactus patches and mesquite trees. There was a smashed armadillo lying in the road, its bloodstained armor shining purple in el Míster’s headlights. About an hour past the border, we came to another checkpoint. It was smaller than the one on the bridge, but there were six men standing guard with rifles and two others with police dogs.

“This is the last one,” said el Míster. “We’re going to be fine.”

My mom pulled me close to her and put her quivering arm around my shoulder. She clutched my hand in hers. When she started to pray the rosary under her breath, my fingers began to quake.

Ahead of us, they had pulled an eighteen-wheeler off to the side. The dogs and their handlers flanked the truck and walked past until one of the dogs sat and raised his paw to the back of the vehicle. A guard shouted. The driver stepped down from the truck, and they put his hands behind his back and sat him on the ground.

Another guard came up to our window. “Wait,” he said.

The car rumbled. A heavy wind picked up small clouds of dust and blew through our open windows.

“¿Can you smell what the dog smells?” I asked el Míster.

“Yeah,” he said, sighing.

“¿What is it?”

“It’s better if I don’t say.”

“Come on,” I said. “¿Or were you just making all that up?”

He covered his eyes with one hand. “Like sweat,” he said.

“¿That’s it?” I asked.

“No. But I won’t say the rest.”

I saw his face in the rearview mirror. His moistened eyes glistened in the checkpoint’s artificial light.

“Lindolfo,” my mom whispered.

“¿Huh?” el Míster said.

“Míster.” Her voice shook.

“Mande.”

“Go.”

“¿What?”

“Drive,” she said, waving her hand forward.

“No way.”

“They’re going to catch us. Go.”

“Police drive up and down this road all night. They’ll catch us for sure if we try to drive away. Cálmate, and we’ll be fine.”

Her eyes welled with tears, and she dug her fingernails into my palm. I clenched my teeth to keep from wincing. There was a long line of cars behind us, their low-beams spotlighting us through the back window.

“Keep calm,” el Míster said. “No pasa nada.”

The guards were talking to the truck driver as they stood him up and walked him to the cargo door.

One of the men was suddenly at our car again, looking through the back window at my mom and me. “Why’s she in the back?” he asked el Míster.

“Safer for the baby,” he said. “Plus—” he pointed to the metal spring poking out of the passenger seat.

The guard stuck his head through the window to see. He sucked his teeth. “Step out of the vehicle,” he said, looking at my mom.

Understanding his gesture, she took a deep breath, squeezed my hand with the strength of her whole body, and stepped out.

The man towered over her, his rifle slung around his shoulder.

She kept one arm at her side and the other on her lower back. I could feel her heart beating inside my own chest.

“Everything okay?” he asked, pausing, looking hard at her face.

“Yes,” she said. “Okay.”

He stared. “Speak up if you need to. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Who is this man?” he asked, pointing to el Míster.

“I’m her bro—” he started to say.

“I asked the lady. Not you, sir.”

“My brother,” she said.

“And the boy?” He nodded in my direction.

“My son, Roberto.”

He held her door open, and she climbed back into the car next to me.

“American citizens?”

“Yes,” me and my mom said.

“American citizens,” el Míster said, pulling the birth certificates out of the glove box.

On the side of the road, the police had opened the eighteen-wheeler’s cargo door. There were shouts, the sound of a baby wailing, and a pregnant woman stepping out of the hold.

“Gimme a second,” our officer shouted at the other agents.

“I don’t need your papers,” he said. “Go on.” And he ran toward the truck. And we drove past the checkpoint.

“¿Is that it?” my mom asked.

“Ya la hicimos,” he said.

Her body shook with laughter. She pulled me into her. And her laughter gave way to trembling sobs.

El Míster was right about the city. I woke up to the warm glow of light on my face. My mother slept next to me. I sat up straight in my seat, and I saw Houston for the first time. I rubbed the sleep away from my eyes as we passed the twin minarets glowing in the medical center and as we scraped against the downtown skyline where, next to me and in front of me and all around me, the glossy buildings and their thousands of tiny, flickering lights stretched into the night sky, and the only thing I could compare them to were the dancing yellow lights on Sra. Pérez’s stereo equalizer.

“¿Is this it?” I asked el Míster.

“Yup. We’re home,” he said.

“¿This is where we’re gonna live?”

“Not exactly. But not far away.”

He pulled off the highway onto the South Wayside exit. Passing a Holiday Inn with graffitied plywood over the glass doors, el Míster rolled down his window, and waves of damp, hot wind plowed into my face. The orange light of the streetlamps gave a sickly glow to the line of women near the bus stop waving at cars and to the men sleeping in the gravel lots. I saw white and brown and black faces. An old woman pushed a shopping cart across the street, and as she limped in front of the car, there was a stirring in the fat lump of fabric inside the cart—a dog. Its eyes reflected the neon glow of the Fiestamart’s lime-green parrot perched atop the store.

We passed a fish market. We passed a Whataburger. We passed a white man fighting a black man in the parking lot of an AutoZone, and a woman sleeping under the cover of the Metro stop on the corner.

El Míster stopped in front of a white wooden house reflecting the orange hue of the nearby streetlamp. There was a child’s tricycle in the middle of the street. There were shredded tires in the front yard half-buried under mud and empty beer cans.

My dad was leaning back in a wicker chair. Under the porch light, his greased hair and pointed dress shoes shone black. He was asleep. He didn’t notice we were there until el Míster honked the horn. He woke up startled, looked around, and reflexively took his comb out of his back pocket and slicked back his hair. When he saw us, he laughed. It was a loud and happy sound. He walked to my mother, who was slowly getting out the car. “Cómo te he extrañado,” he said. They hugged, and he slid to his knees, pressing his ear against her stomach, listening. He set both of his hands on her belly, pulled his face away, and looked straight at the bump as though he could see through her skin and was staring the baby right in her face. He kissed her stomach and got to his feet. “Juanito,” he said, walking over to me. “¿Cómo estás, mi hijo?” He crouched and hugged me close to him. “Oye, Míster,” he said, approaching the car, talking to him through the window.

“¿Quiúbole?”

“You’re a good friend. Thank you.”

“No hay de que, amigo. It was fun. I’ll see you at work, jefe,” he said, saluting my father, and he drove away.

When my dad switched the lights on in the house, a line of cockroaches fled into a crack in the wall. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and the ceiling fans, which swirled the warm outside air, were bordered black with an accumulation of dirt.

“¿Which one is my room?” I asked, wanting to lie in my own bed for the first time.

My father pointed to a door near the back of the house. On the lime-green carpet was a mattress with Speed Racer sheets bundled on top.

“Ay, Juan,” my mom exhaled.

“I’m still getting moved in,” he said. “I work six days a week, sometimes seven.”

“I know.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “We’ll make it nice.”

“Juanito, you sleep with us tonight,” he said.

We settled into the bed in the front room, me between my parents. My dad hugged me close, and I put my hand over his, touching the coarse hair of his knuckles with my fingertips. I wriggled from his grasp when the heat became too much and the sheets became damp with our sweat and the moisture from the outside air.

The next morning we went for a walk. The alley road along the rails was a mix of gravel and dirt, and tall patches of crabgrass broke through weak spots in the street. The downtown buildings, whose lights were so soft the night before, loomed large in the nearby distance, their concrete, steel, and mirrored glass spitting the summer sun back east—right in our faces. Two little kids with rubber floaties around their wrists laughed, splashing in a water-filled deep freezer behind their house.

My dad took my hand as we walked along the tracks, his callused palm scratching against mine when he swung our hands. “¿Remember that time?” my dad said. “When you were real little, that I walked you over to the rails, and you and your mom got in one of those old cars, and I pushed you all along the track.”

My mom smiled.

“No,” I said.

“Your mom held you up so you could look out. You were scared, crying at first, but when we picked up speed and you felt the wind on your face, you started laughing real hard. ¿You remember?”

I pulled my hand away from his. There were two saggy dogs sleeping off their hunger in the grass. A little boy urinating on the wheel of a parked truck. “¿Are things really going to be better here?”

“I know that you’re going to miss home. I miss it too. But we have a new home now. And we’ll make new memories here too. Good ones. I promise.”

“Yes, we will,” my mom said.

As my dad reached for me, putting his hand on my shoulder, a voice called from the corner house at the end of the block. “Oye, mijo. Come here a minute.” It was a man slouched in his backyard on a rusted weight bench pushed against the cyclone fence, the caguama in his hand sweating through its brown paper bag, a layer of crushed cans around his feet.

“Ignore him,” my dad said. “Let’s go pass by your new school.”

“Ven,” the man insisted, waving us over with one hand and taking

a drink with the other. “Niño, you look like somebody.” When we got closer, I stopped and gazed at him.

“A ver. ¿Who are you?” he slurred. His eyes small, focusing.

His furry brows pushed against the brim of his hat. His mustache grew well below his upper lip like a fuzzy caterpillar, beer foaming white at the edge of the bristles. His body was thin, but his face soft and round and pocked with acne scars, the indentations dark like a ripening cantaloupe. His black T-shirt was tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans, a chalky-white salt line across his chest from his sweat. I was sweating too. He pulled off his hat. His hair was smooth and straight and fell black over his forehead like a young girl’s bangs. “Let me get a look,” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun, pulling his arm over his forehead. “Nah,” he said, “I thought I knew you.” He shut his eyes. “Pero you’re nobody.”

“Juanito, vámonos,” my dad said.

But I knew the man. Even clearer when he leaned back on the weight bench, his body weighing a bowl into the wire fence, his arm draped over his eyes like a napping cat. “Don Pancho,” I said.

“¿Eh?” he muttered.

My mother walked up to me, leaning into my shoulder. “¿Don Pancho?” She saw it too.

“Valeria, let’s go,” my dad said.

The man let his empty beer can drop to his feet. “Están equivocados. I don’t know no Pancho. Yo me llamo Claudio.” He got onto his knees and lay down on the ground and stayed there, one arm shielding his eyes from the sun. “Yo me llamo Claudio Reyna.”

“Juan.” My mom looked at my dad, her eyes wide, her mouth agape. “¿Did you know?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, impatient. “Let’s go.”

“¿Did you know, Juan?”

“¿Know what?” He crossed his arms in front of his chest.

We stared at him.

He smacked his lips. “Valeria, don’t start. It’s our first day together, y ya vas a empezar. You don’t know what things are like here. Everyone for himself. That’s how it is.”

My mom was quiet.

“I didn’t take care of you and Juanito and your mom all these years all by myself by worrying about other people.” He flung his hands into the air. “My family is the family I care about. It’s not my business what another man does or doesn’t do for his.”

I couldn’t look at him. I could only look at Don Pancho, lying on the ground. I thought of Panchita and her mother and her brothers back home wondering about him, crying over him.

“You didn’t say anything,” my mom said. “His family thinks he’s dead, the whole town. We prayed a novena. But you knew. And you didn’t say anything. ¿What else are you hiding, Juan?”

Somewhere in the man’s bloated face, I saw his daughter’s. There was no mistaking it. The softness of her brown cheeks molded after his. The lazy hair falling toward the front of her face. Her broad, sharp shoulders. The curve of her lips as they opened toward my mouth, the way his opened against another can. “No pasa nada,” I had told her. But it was a lie, because, of course, everything was different now. And how I wished I might have said something other than that. I shut my eyes and felt her body against mine again. Her arms warm in the cold wind. A tinge of sulfur in the air. Her hands freckled with dirt. Her lips rough with the grit blown against us from the hillside. Her kiss like corn and chile and lime and sand. That’s how it was supposed to taste. Her kiss like home.

Read more from Issue 19.1.