Where We Come From Page 5

  “Nobody knows, nobody’s going to find out.”

  “And then?”

  “Nomás.”

  “We barely have two weeks using the house.”

  “Pero ya, you have to leave. You can have back all the money. I only spent to buy the food.”

  “That’s not how it works. You don’t tell me, I tell you.” He rubbed the bat against the side of his jeans, twisting it one way and then the other as if it were important to keep all sides of it clean.

  “But in my house.”

  “I give you money for the place, for this other house, and for you to make the sandwiches. The deal was we could use the property for the payment, made in full before we came to occupy the space. Both parties agreed to this. You do whatever you want in the other house, me vale. If you wanted things your way then you should have said no. I told my bosses that it was all good, that I paid you, y no iba haber ninguna chingadera. And now you want me to go say que no, she changed her mind, nomás porque you didn’t want to anymore? When already I got a load waiting to come later tonight? That shit don’t fly with me.”

  “How much longer, then?”

  “Pues, how long did we say?”

  “A month to start with and then we would see.”

  “Then we’ll be in there for the whole month.” He struck the bat against the heel of his boot as if he had issued his verdict. “Unless it turns out to be more.”

  * * *

  —

  If anything, there were more people the following week. If at first there had been eleven or twelve in the loads, this time it was at least fifteen or sixteen of them. Maybe because it was getting harder and harder to cross them into the country and transport them north, but this group stayed longer and before she knew it three days had passed. She wondered how many sandwiches these people could eat. Rigo would bring food from outside for him and El Kobe, but the others were left to eat the baloney sandwiches, which she was now alternating with ham and cheese, and tuna and potted meat. The van came back the fourth night and dropped off another seven crossers, which brought the count to over twenty not counting El Kobe and Rigo. What she witnessed, she witnessed from inside her mother’s house, peering out the crinkled venetian blinds as the single file of men and women, and even a young boy, snaked from the carport through the backyard. Then one after another after another they stepped into the small house her mother had never rented to more than a family of five.

  It worried her that she hadn’t spoken to El Kobe in almost a week, since their talk outside the pink house. She had no idea if he was still mad or had let it pass, but she knew they weren’t leaving on their own. She thought if things were better between them then maybe she could convince him to leave before the end of the month, when Orly would be showing up. For them to leave a few days early wasn’t that much to ask. It was almost all of what they had agreed to, what El Kobe had paid her for. If she did something nice for him, maybe he would do something nice in return. She wanted to believe this.

  Just after she had run her errands and Rumalda left for the day, she knocked on the pink door. She waited a full minute with no answer and then knocked again.

  “¿Qué fue?” he said without opening the door.

  “La comida.”

  “La comida?”

  “The food,” Nina said. “To eat.”

  “The food.” He said it as if “food” meant something other than food.

  “I didn’t want to leave it outside.”

  “And for that reason you knock, para dejar unos pinches sándwiches?”

  If she hadn’t been trying to smooth things over, she might have left right then with the food. Talking to her that way. El Kobe cracked open the door, bracing it with his left foot, and glared out like she might be a bill collector. Then he glanced over her shoulder, toward the back gate that led to the carport and the street. His eyes were puffy with sleep or lack of.

  “Something else this time.” She lifted the bag of Church’s and the deep-fried aroma wafted between them.

  “That wasn’t part of the agreement. We pay for the house and the food you make, not for anything from outside.”

  “Did I ask you to give me more?”

  He looked her in the face.

  “Nobody saw you coming with so much food?”

  “I went in the car, not walking in the middle of the street.”

  “And the one cleaning the other house?”

  “She left on foot, but without seeing the bag I had in the car.”

  Another glance over her shoulder and El Kobe pulled open the door.

  Six, maybe seven, men sat huddled on the floor with their backs against the opposite wall, arms crossed over knees and heads hanging low between them, as if riding in a boxcar and only waiting for the train to reach its destination so they could hop out and find their next ride. The two women were on the sofa, one sitting, the other lying down. An older man sat on the floor next to the sofa, near the feet of the woman who was upright. Another five men were sitting against the wall nearest the bathroom. Four more were playing a card game in the bedroom, the rest were watching or not watching along the walls. The boy, his blue cap pulled low over his brow, sat alone next to the air conditioner they wouldn’t be turning on for another four hours. Like the other men, he kept a hand on the water jug on the floor between his legs.

  Other than El Kobe motioning for her to come in, no one greeted her or so much as raised a head to acknowledge her presence. With the door shut, the front room was dim except for the razor lines of dust filtering in from the top of the foiled windows and a small lamp clipped onto the edge of the kitchen counter. A thick workbook lay spread open, facedown, on the counter next to a legal pad covered with notes.

  The only mattress in the house was bare and flopped over on itself, one corner keeping the bedroom door open. The pillows and the sheets were tangled in a tight ball. The toilet flushed and a few seconds later Rigo came out of the bathroom, a San Judas pendant on a gold necklace jigging across his V-neck undershirt as he shook his hands dry. He had a handgun shoved into the waistband of his jeans, the black grip clear to see even in the dim room. El Kobe probably had one under his untucked shirt, along with the bat down by his side.

  “Pollo for the pollos,” Rigo said when he saw the three family packs of chicken. He repeated it a little louder in case no one had heard his joke, which apparently they didn’t the second time either.

  Nina placed the plastic bag on the kitchen table and removed the wad of paper napkins she’d grabbed from the dispenser. The paper plates she brought from the other house. Rigo set aside one of the three boxes for himself and El Kobe, then called the men and women to come grab a plate. The smell of the chicken had been lost in the rankness of so many bodies that had been holed up for almost a week. She turned away when the older man, wearing only dingy red briefs, the elastic loose around his scrawny thighs, rushed forward to grab a plate and then held the line so the two women could serve themselves before the men. At first she thought the man had been changing his clothes and didn’t want to miss out on the food, but everywhere she looked half-dressed people were walking toward her.

  “Maybe you heard the barking last night,” El Kobe said.

  She might have, but then again the dog barked every night.

  “One of them tried to take off without paying the new price, but Rigo caught her before she got to the gate. So it doesn’t happen again we had to take some of their clothes, like for a deposit.”

  “Now the pollos have no feathers,” Rigo said and laughed.

  “Ya güey, con tus pinches pollo jokes,” El Kobe snapped. “Just give them the food.”

  Only one of the women on the sofa had walked over, an arm crossed over her small chest and green-colored bra, but still wearing faded jeans. The other one stayed curled up on the sofa, her legs crossed at the ank
les, her face buried in the seatback as if she had lost something valuable and irreplaceable between the cushions.

  After the woman and the old man had served themselves, the rest of the men jockeyed for their place in line and the boy with the blue cap managed to sneak to the front. El Kobe slammed the barrel of the bat against the counter, making them rear back. He stabbed the dented tip of the bat into the boy’s chest, shoving him back a few steps to show exactly how far he wanted him. If they fought, nobody would eat. Two pieces of chicken and a piece of bread, nothing more.

  The boy slunk into the middle of the line before the men in the back room could come around. By the time the rest had served themselves, the old man in the red underwear had already polished off his first drumstick and the cartilage and started working on the marrow.

  * * *

  —

  El Kobe, whose real name was Omar, had been given the nickname El Kobe by Parra, who was the one in charge and gave out the names, but only to the ones he liked. Rigo, for instance, who was Parra’s nephew and had worked for him longer, was only Rigo. Sometimes El Kobe thought Parra wanted him there not to watch over the load, make sure they didn’t run off, but just to keep an eye on Rigo. Six months earlier, at a different house, out near the port, El Kobe stepped outside to get his phone from the truck y el puto de Rigo had pushed one of the girls, maybe thirteen at the most, into the bathroom and tried to lock the door behind him. The girl was screaming but not as loud as her mother, who was straddling the doorframe, refusing to let him close and lock the door. El Kobe had to pull her and the girl out. From then on, anytime they took over a new drop house, El Kobe showed up first to remove all the doorknobs before Rigo came around with the load. He didn’t need las pendejadas de Rigo. It was bad enough the shit Parra did to the crossers when they couldn’t pay the extra money for the rest of the trip, what he told them they had to do to earn it, especially the women and girls. El Kobe tried to stay out of it, let Rigo handle his tío’s orders. After this load he figured it was maybe two more and he was out, done. He already had his first hundred hours of the class time he needed to get his real estate license. He had a primo named César who was a broker on the island, selling and leasing condos to all the rich Mexicans coming in from Monterrey. César, who worked only four or five days a week and drove a black Hummer, loaded with leather seats and a badass sound system, told him he could hook him up at his leasing office. He just needed to take care of getting the license and he’d have it made. You show the properties, get the maintenance guys and cleaning women to prep the home, make sure you have your numbers right, and close the deal. Easy work. A lot easier than sitting in a little pink house with twenty-three crossers and Rigo.

  * * *

  —

  Nina was halfway across the yard when she looked back at the pink house. She had done her part, done something nice for them, something she hadn’t been asked to do and wouldn’t be repaid for, same as with the doorknobs, which she hadn’t bothered to bring up. Without exactly reminding him of her gesture, she had thought she might ask El Kobe about possibly leaving a couple of days early, but after seeing how they treated these poor people, especially the women and the boy, she realized Rigo and El Kobe weren’t the type you did nice things for and expected anything in return.

  4

  Beto liked to surprise her, like not returning her phone calls and then one day just showing up like they had planned it all along. This surprise happened on a Sunday afternoon. Him and his twin boys, all three of them dressed in Astros T-shirts and blue-jean shorts with elastic waistbands. He only brought the boys around when they didn’t have tee-ball or whatever else might seem more important to him at the time.

  “For Mother’s Day!” he said, all proud because he had given his wife, Melba, the day off from watching the boys and dressed them himself. “You act like I need to call you first or something, make an appointment to see my own mom for Mother’s Day.” The front door was open, but they were speaking through the grating of the security door.

  “She’s resting in bed. She had trouble sleeping last night. And anyway, Mother’s Day was last weekend.”

  “We got busy,” he said and left it at that. His sister was always trying to put the guilt on him for not coming more often, as if he didn’t have his own family and a business to run. He cocked his chin at the yawning trash can next to the ramp. “Looks like you had a get-together. It didn’t get that full when we all lived in the house.”

  “I forgot to put the can out on the street for them to take it.”

  “A family pack, just for the two of you?”

  “They had a special the other day. What we didn’t eat I saved in the freezer.”

  “Still, it looks like you had a party or something.”

  “Yes, that’s all we have around here, every night one pachanga after another. That’s why she’s so tired.” For the last two weeks she had managed to keep him away from the house. She blamed herself for not being more careful with the trash.

  “And then what, are you going to open the door or not?”

  She jiggled the lock like it was stuck. “You couldn’t even stop by for a few minutes last week, on the real Mother’s Day. She was asking for you.”

  “Melba wanted to go to the cemetery to see her mom. She’s all the way up in McAllen and we had to leave early because after we saw her mother Melba wanted to try the Olive Garden over there.”

  Earlier, Mamá Meche had been sitting outside, getting air; her wheelchair was still parked between the front door and the ramp, but now the two boys were playing with the locking mechanism on her chair, trying to figure out how to release the brake. “Ya, open up,” Beto said, yanking on the door. He could feel the sweat rolling down his back and the Astros shirt clinging to the underside of his belly. “It’s hot out here and we can’t stay all afternoon. I have to take the boys to get ice creams.”

  She pushed open the security door. He was walking into the house when one of the boys—either Roberto Jr. or Rudy, she could never tell them apart, always dressed the same and with their crew cuts showing their dark scalps—climbed into her mother’s wheelchair and the other one pushed the chair down the ramp, making his brother collide with the railing at every sharp turn. When they reached the driveway, the one pushing turned the chair toward the carport and then disappeared around the side of the house.

  “Tell them to bring it back,” she said.

  “Leave them, they’re just playing around. Why you have to ruin their fun?”

  “Yes, but that’s not a toy for them to play around with.”

  “Roberto,” his mother called out from her bedroom. “¿Eres tú? I wish this woman would tell me you were coming. And with my little boys this time, I hope. I could have gotten dressed nice, and not the way she has me here, just thrown in the bed.”

  She was about to tell her mother that “this woman” has a name, but right then she heard the gate squeak open and the twins push the wheelchair into the backyard. Before she could reach the kitchen to get outside, La Bronca had risen from the dirt like some mythical creature drawn to life from the center of the earth. The little boys, not having been in the back since the animal was moved there from the front yard, where they knew not to go near the meanie dog, were so startled that the seated one tried to jump out before his brother brought the wheelchair to a full stop and the chair toppled over into the grass. All while the dog lunged repeatedly against the chain, a motion that seemed to both strangle and energize her.

  “Bronca,” Nina shouted from the middle of the yard. “Ya, Bronca!” Half a dozen more barks for good measure and the dog eventually retreated into her lair, her back legs again used up and rickety after the sudden exertion.

  Beto scooped up Rudy, the one closer to the back door and still on the ground crying; his brother had run off and was whimpering near the gate. Between the sobs, Beto could feel his boy’s little heart
galloping in his chest. He carried him over to the gate and there knelt down to also hold his brother, soothing them both with promises of later ordering an extra scoop of ice cream for each of them.

  Then he turned to his sister. “And you, why the hell didn’t you say something about that animal?”

  “I told you to not let them be playing all wild. If you had paid attention to what your boys were up to.”

  “What do you need that dog back there scaring people for? You’re lucky it didn’t get loose and bite one of them, give him the rabies.”

  “If you would’ve been watching them like a father.”

  “And if you were watching them like a tía.” He was shaking his head at her. “Good thing you never had any kids.”

  He gathered up his boys, one in each arm, and walked back inside to see his mother.

  “They would’ve been better taken care of than those two,” she stammered, fighting for the words to rise beyond the tremble in her voice. “That I know.” But now she was saying it only to herself.

  * * *

  —

  After the boys calmed down some, the rest of the morning was taken up with their grandmother spoiling them in her own way, letting them pick through most of the Whitman’s Sampler they had brought her for Mother’s Day and then delegating who would hold the remote control and for how long while she visited with their daddy.

  Nina busied herself in the kitchen, washing and drying dishes, sweeping the floor she’d swept earlier, all near the kitchen window. Across the yard the little house was still, but in the middle of all the barking and screaming and crying she could’ve sworn she heard the click of the second dead bolt.

  5

  Early the next morning Beto let himself in through the back gate. No more dealing with his sister trying to control him, saying when he could come inside the house to visit his own mom. He was still upset about the dog scaring his boys half to death. Little Roberto had woken up in the middle of the night screaming that he was being chased by the dog, which startled his brother and made him think the dog was in the room. And because it was both of them crying and because it involved the afternoon they’d spent with their dad, Melba made him get up too and hold one of the boys in his lap until he finally fell asleep half an hour later, after which Beto had to sleep there between the two beds, on the floor, like some refugee. On a work night.