Where We Come From Page 20

  “¿Y la pinche migra?” The other boy takes half a step back, shaking his head.

  “No migra, muy rápido.” He moves his two fingers even faster like they’re on a moving sidewalk.

  But Daniel’s not buying it. Stuck inside for almost four weeks and then to be caught because they went walking down the street in the middle of the afternoon, to buy raspas. Nomás no. He shakes his head again.

  Orly could go for the raspas himself, but it’s hot enough that the ice will start melting and the syrup will run down his arm before he makes it back. It feels like it got hotter just mentioning the raspas, and now any bit of relief depends on their going to the trailer.

  They sit on the back steps. A flock of parrots glides off in the distance, rising higher and higher before veering beyond their view. Two boys should be able to leave the house to get snow cones on a blazing summer afternoon. Even if his godmother found out and got crazy mad, especially at him for coming up with the whole idea, for leaving a second time, for promising her not to but doing it anyway, even then they should be able to go. She just wants to control his life because she’s doing something she’s not supposed to and because of that he can’t do anything. Like it’s his fault, like he started any of it. Isn’t summertime when you’re supposed to do all the things you can’t really do the rest of the year? His dad still traveling with his girlfriend, Alex barely off probation, Carson in Paris, probably drinking more champagne, and he can’t even walk down the street in the middle of the afternoon for a raspa.

  Another group of parrots swoops across the length of the yard before reversing course and veering south, their squawking seeming louder the farther they get. One bird peels off from the rest and dips somewhere beyond the pink house and the back gate. He waits for it to come back into view and when it doesn’t he says, almost in a whisper, “The canal.”

  “¿El canal?”

  “El canal.”

  And now Daniel nods.

  “El pinche canal,” Orly says and smiles, even lets out a little laugh, because all along there it was right in front of them.

  Orly has on his sneakers, but at the last second he flips them off and goes barefoot too. The distance to the raspa trailer turns out to be shorter if you follow the canal, but the trail itself is cut off in places with backyard fences that force the boys to drop down and walk along the edge of the water or wade across so they can follow the trail on the other side. Because it hasn’t rained as much as usual this summer, the water reaches only to their knees. Still, it’s slimy and feels like they’re wading through oil, the goopy mud squishing between their toes, until they climb the bank on the other side. The dirt path is steep and hard to get up, but then they figure out the path is for going down to the water and the concrete embankment for reaching the overpass.

  From the guardrail, it’s another sixty feet to the yellow trailer. The lot is empty except for a truck parked outside the dollar store. Still, Daniel isn’t sure it’s worth the risk and asks Orly to just bring the raspas so they can eat them down here, where no one will see him walking around. But after coming this far, Orly shakes his head.

  “¿Estás seguro?” Daniel asks, still inside the guardrail.

  Orly turns in every direction, even steps onto the bridge, to make sure it’s safe. Then he waves him over and they both make a run for it.

  With the afternoon sun bearing down on the asphalt it feels like they’re scurrying across the comal where Nina makes the tortillas. They rush all the way to the trailer and the narrow strip of shade created by the overhang, near the window where they order.

  Daniel asks for the tamarindo flavor and Orly gets the leche his great-grandmother had last time. They take a taste of each other’s and decide they made the right choices. Daniel’s tongue is a brownish yellow, Orly’s rose-colored, a few shades off from the house behind his godmother’s house.

  They’ve eaten only the top part of their raspas when a white Suburban with a green stripe pulls up to the curb and idles there in the bright sun.

  Daniel notices the agent first and takes a deep breath and holds it. He and Orly look each other in the eyes for a moment, neither uttering a sound, each letting his gaze drift over the other’s shoulder, ready to drop their raspas and take off en chinga when it’s time. They could run in the same direction or split up, so at least one of them has a chance to get away. If Daniel gets caught, it’s over, end of the summer, end of their big afternoon adventure, end of trying to contact his father. If Orly gets caught, they call his Nina for the second time in a week. If he gets caught, they ask why he ran, they ask who the other boy was who ran in the other direction, they ask how he knows him, they ask where he lives.

  But instead of either of them running, Orly half turns and waves hi, same as his dad when they first got to town. This agent isn’t reacting, though, and only keeps staring in this direction. Then Orly nudges Daniel and when he waves the agent finally eases off, which is when the two boys get back to breathing.

  * * *

  —

  The traffic is heavier on the overpass when they head down to the canal. Daniel leads the way this time, crisscrossing the water more than they had earlier. Orly doesn’t know what he’ll tell his godmother when she asks how he spent his afternoon, how much he’ll have to lie or if he can get away with saying he just hung out, reading and playing on his iPad, and let her think he was doing what she hoped he was doing. If not telling her he went for raspas with the boy is the same or worse than her lying about hiding him. When they’re close to the house, Daniel reaches out his sticky hand to help Orly up the slope. Orly is lowering the clasp on the back gate when his tío’s van pulls into the driveway and both boys hit the ground and steal across the grass and then under the edge of the house. They’ve barely crossed into the dark before Daniel gets to the faint shaft of light from above.

  “Aquí está,” he says, and up they go.

  Beto pulls in as far as he can and then grabs the bag of pan dulce sitting next to him on the passenger seat. The sweet bread is still a little warm and he cradles the bag in his forearm as if he were carrying a newborn.

  The boys take turns peeking through the tiny porthole in the foil. On the way back, Orly felt like he had to pee and didn’t know if he could make it all the way to the house. He even considered doing it in the canal, but now he feels like he couldn’t do it if he had to.

  Beto walks around to the back and knocks on the screen door. The dog is barking at him, lurching against the chain, choking on its rage. When he sees the security door is unlocked, he knocks one more time, calls out “Hello,” and lets himself in.

  “La puerta,” Daniel says, as though Orly needs reminding that he should’ve locked it before they left the house. A few minutes pass before his tío walks down the back steps.

  “¿Qué está haciendo?”

  “Nada,” Orly says, because his tío is just gazing in this direction as if he suddenly notices something different about the little house.

  Beto sets the bag on the back steps and walks to his van. One of these days he needs to organize his equipment so the pumps go where the pumps are supposed to go and the toolbox shuts all the way. It’s been over a year since he cleaned up back here, and even then it was only to make sure the pumps and bait stations weren’t anywhere that his boys’ little hands could reach if they happened to open the panel doors. It worries him that they might be messing around with the chemicals inside there and get hurt, and so he hides the van keys when he gets home, sometimes so good that even he can’t find them. He pulls out the spare tire and the jack, and places them on the driveway. Finally, beneath all this, he finds his crowbar and stuffs everything back where it was.

  After he picks up the white bag, the boys can’t see him anymore from the side window and have to move to the front door. Sitting on the floor, their backs against the door, they feel the house shake each time th
e dog rises up and the chain jolts against the foundation block.

  “Ya está bueno, bow-wow,” Beto says to the dog. “Why you have to always be so mad? Mira, I brought you a little present.” He drops the crowbar in the grass and holds the paper bag open just out of reach of the dog but close enough to make it bark louder when it catches a whiff of the pan dulce.

  “Ya ves, I’m your friend, bringing you a little snack. What do you like more, las empanadas o las donas? You look like an empanada doggie to me.” He takes the glazed donut for himself, clutching it between his teeth, and flings the empanada into the grass. The dog half sniffs it before scarfing it down.

  “No que no, doggie. Now you and me, we’re talking the same language.”

  He finishes the last of his donut and La Bronca is whining for more, wagging the knot of matted fur that makes up her tail.

  “How about a concha?” he says, looking into the bag. “Let’s see, I got a chocolate one and another with the yellow flavor.” La Bronca is sitting on her haunches, waiting while he digs into the bag and lifts one piece of the shell-shaped bread and then the other. “Better make it the yellow one. Everybody knows doggies aren’t supposed to be eating chocolate conchas.”

  This one he tosses just behind the animal so she has to turn to get to it and all the yellow flakes that fall into the grass. Then he picks up the steel bar and high-steps it to the door.

  He places the bag of pan dulce to one side but holds on to the crowbar, in case he needs some protection. First he pounds on the door with the plump side of his fist, hard enough that Orly can feel it against the back of his head and through the rest of his body. Daniel inches away, first scooting, then turning around and crab-walking as he keeps his eye on the front door. His arms are shaking so much that he has trouble not tipping over to one side.

  A few seconds pass before Beto pounds on the door several more times and leans in to listen for any movement inside the house. Then again. Still nothing.

  His first whack with the crowbar misses the padlock and leaves a dimple on the doorframe. His second one connects with the base of the lock but only makes it rattle in place. His next try hits the shackle, sending the lock jangling side to side. And then again and again and again and again and again and again, the whole house shuddering now, till he feels the steel bar pulsing through his hands and arms and finally has to sit on the steps to catch his breath.

  The dog starts barking again, and so Beto tosses it a square piece of pink cake, the colored sprinkles popping off the frosting as soon as it tumbles into the dirt. The dog is still sniffing out the crumbs in the grass when Beto slips the forked end of the crowbar into the shackle of the padlock and leans on it with his entire weight until the whole lock busts apart and a second later the hasp splinters from the doorframe, leaving only the dead bolt in place. The noise is so jarring that he doesn’t hear his name. It doesn’t help that the dog has given up on the crumbs and is back to barking.

  “Tío Beto?”

  He turns to find Orly standing at the bottom of the steps, waving to him. His shirt is smeared with dirt; he’s holding a soccer ball under his right arm.

  Beto begins to wave back but stops to switch the crowbar to his other hand.

  “I came to bring you pan dulce.” He motions to the bag with his chin. “I knocked a bunch of times on the other door y nada, couldn’t find you nowhere.”

  “I was in the back.”

  “This is the back, we’re in the backyard now.”

  “Behind the backyard,” he says. “I kicked my ball too hard and it fell into the canal.”

  “In the water?”

  “It started floating away, so I had to run after it. I dried it off, there in the grass.”

  “You weren’t inside because you were chasing a ball, barefoot, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  “Yeah, behind the pink house. I took off my shoes before I got in the water.”

  Beto glances back at the house as if he needs to verify the color, and then turns back to the boy. “Yes, sir.”

  Orly nods. “Yes, sir.”

  Beto shakes his head, wondering who the kid thinks he’s fooling. He’s ready to get it out of him, make him explain himself, but right then the gate opens.

  His sister stands just inside the yard, tilting her head to one side, unsure that she’s seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. It takes her a moment to make her way across the yard. Orly steps aside and the dog’s barking drops down to a menacing growl.

  “And you,” she says to Beto, “what gives you the right?”

  “Ya, it was time.”

  Without taking her eyes off her brother or the busted lock, she sends Orly to wait for her inside the other house. She stays at the base of the steps, staring at her brother, the leather strap of her purse tight around her fist.

  “Time for what, Beto?”

  He looks for someplace to set down the crowbar and instead hooks it on his belt, where it sways against his right leg. “Don’t be playing all pendeja like you don’t know. Mom told me, she said she was hearing the voices again. She even told me the boy had tried to run away.”

  “¿Y le créiste, una viejita ninety-four years old que they have on so many medicines? The one who wakes up in the middle of the night and says she needs to go milk the cows? The first night they had to tie her hands to the bed rails because she kept pulling the wires and tubes from her arms and chest, that one you believed and not your sister?”

  “That’s our mother you’re talking about.”

  “You think I don’t know who she is? I live with her, for the last eight years, or you forgot? I’m the one who feeds her and changes her when she has accidents in the bed. Me, not you, I’m the one that’s been at the hospital almost all day, every day, and even sometimes at night when you leave after you said you were going to stay. I know who she is.”

  “And because of that you think you can hide a bunch of mojados behind her house. Did you think I wasn’t going to keep coming around until I got in?”

  “Ya con tus mojados, I told you no more, that what you saw was the last time I let them stay.”

  He glances back at the locked door. The dog has retreated to her usual spot under the house.

  “If you’re not keeping twenty or thirty of them in there, then unlock the door. Let me in if you really got nothing to hide.”

  “And if I do open it, then what? You’ll leave me alone, let me figure out my problems on my own?”

  “You want me to promise that I’ll let you keep twenty or thirty mojados in here and with my mother in the other house?”

  “If I have what you think I have, then you can do whatever you want, call the police, take Mom to the nursing home. But if not, you leave me alone.”

  “Open it.”

  “Promise me, Beto.”

  “Open it or I’ll just call right now and it’ll be over.” He pulls the phone from the leather pouch on his hip and taps on the screen to show her how fast he can make it happen.

  She doesn’t know what she was thinking, that it wouldn’t end like this or worse. She wants to tell Beto about the young boy and why she’s been trying to help him find his father. If he wasn’t lost and alone and hungry she wouldn’t have let him stay. What’s so hard to understand about that? She wants to believe that ignoring Beto will make him give up, but she realizes, as she should have the first time, that her brother isn’t going anywhere. She can make up a lie, some story to buy herself some time, but in another day or two they’ll be standing in this same spot, and with the boy crouched and terrified on the other side of the door. Maybe it is better if they take him, return him to Mexico, to the mother who from one day to the next lost her child.

  Nina reaches around him and unlocks the dead bolt. “Then see for yourself,” she tells him. “If you’re so worried about what I’ve been hiding.”

/>   Beto uses the hook end of the crowbar to nudge the door open the rest of the way. The sunlight pouring in the front door is the only light in the room. He stumbles around looking for a lamp and finally yanks on the pull chain near the kitchen window. In the sink, a couple of bloated Froot Loops drift in a bowl of watery milk. The rest of the dishes are stacked neatly in the dish rack.

  “Looks like somebody was here,” he says.

  “Maybe they were” is all she offers him in response.

  “Are you saying the maid was staying in here, because it smells like someone was cleaning.”

  He opens the refrigerator and finds the leftovers she brought over the other night. The quart of milk is almost empty, the expiration date still a week away.

  “She doesn’t eat very much, does she?”

  But Nina is distracted, glancing around the house to where the boy could be hiding—in the shower, under the kitchen sink, in the bedroom closet—and wondering how long it’ll take her brother to discover him. She wonders if Beto will run him off or call the police or immigration to come take him.

  “And the doors?” he asks when he notices the knobs are missing.

  “I’m replacing them,” she answers. “That, and now the doorframe.”

  “Only because you forced me to, that’s the only reason. If you could, you would blame everything on me. Make it my fault you had to come back to take care of Mom, my fault you had to sell your little house. Everything my fault, like the family was keeping you from having your own life, like you never had your chance.”

  She lets him go on mumbling to himself; she’s heard it all before. He glances into the bathroom and makes his way to the bedroom, where he finds an old mattress flopped over on itself. The light is brighter here than it was in the living room. Nina follows him into the room only as far as the closet, the one place he hasn’t looked yet. It seems ridiculous to her now, allowing him in the house so he can prove he was right. She almost wants to do it herself, say, Here, right here’s what you’re looking for, and get it over with. But her brother walks past the closet and goes straight for the pile of clothes folded neatly on the floor by the far window.