Dummy to casita in english

The Guardians By Ana Castillo Essay (Editing Or Rewriting)

ALSO BY ANA CASTILLO

Watercolor Women Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse.

Psst … I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: Two Plays.

I Ask the Impossible: Poems.

Peel My Love Like an Onion.

Loverboys.

Sapogonia.

So Far from God.

Goddess of the Americas.

The Mixquiahuala Letters.

Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma.

My Father Was a Toltec: Poems

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To all working for a world without borders and to all who dare to cross them

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I can fly But I want his wings

I can shine even in the darkness But I crave the light that he brings

… I can love

But I need his heart …

My Angel Gabriel

—“GABRIEL,” A. Barlow and L. Rhodes

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REGINA

It was raining all night hard and heavy, making the land shiver—all the bare ocotillo and all the prickly pear. In the morning we found a tall yucca collapsed in the front yard. Everything is wet and gray so the day has not made itself known yet. It is something in between. As usual, I'm anxious. Behind the fog are los Franklins. Behind those mountains is my brother. Waiting. On this side we're waiting, too, my fifteen-year-old nephew, Gabo, and his dog, la Winnie. Winnie has one eye now. She got it stuck by a staghorn cactus that

pulled it right out. Blood everywhere that day. By the time Gabo got home from his after-school bagger's job at el Shur Sav, I was back from the vet's with Winnie, rocking her like a baby. You couldn't blame the dog for being upset, losing her eye and all. I kept Gabo this time around because I want him to finish high school.

I don't care what the authorities say about his legal status. We'll work it out, I say to Gabo, who, when he was barely walking I changed his diapers, which I also tell him. He's still embarrassed to be seen in his boxers. That's okay. I'm embarrassed to be seen in mine, too. Thirty years of being widowed, you better believe I dress for comfort. “Stop all this mourning,” my mamá used to say. “You were only

married six months. The guy was a drug addict, por Dios!” She actually would say that and repeat it even though Junior died fighting for his country. That's why we got married. He was being shipped off to Vietnam. If the coroner suggested he had needle tracks, well, I don't know about that. Mamá always had a way of turning things around for me, to see them

in the worst light possible. It's probably not a nice thing to say you are glad your mother's dead. But I am glad she's not around. Can I say that

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and not worry about a stretch in purgatory? Then I'll say that. We've been waiting a week, me and Gabo—for his dad to come back. He's been back and forth across that desert, dodging the Border Patrol so many times, you'd think he wouldn't even need a coyote no more. The problem is the coyotes and narcos own the desert now. You look out there, you see thorny cactus, tumbleweed, and sand soil forever and you think, No, there's nothing out there. But you know what? They're out there—los mero-mero cabrones. The drug traffickers and body traffickers. Which are worse? I can't say. So the problem is Rafa, my brother, can't just come across without paying somebody. Eight days ago we got a call. It was a woman's voice. She said in Spanish that Rafa was all right and that he was coming in a few days so we had better have the balance of the money ready. Who did those people think they were, I asked myself. That woman on the phone acted so damn cocky. I swear, if I knew who she was, I'd report her to the authorities, lock her up for five years. How dare she treat people like that? Take advantage of their poverty and laws that force people to crawl on their bellies for a chance to make it. Truth is Rafa should have just stayed here last time he came to work the pecans. That's when he finally let me keep his son. Someone in the family's got to finish high school, I said to him. Poor Rafa, all alone like that now, going back and forth, even though I think he has a new wife down in Chihuahua. He won't say nothing out of respect for Gabo's dead mother. Just the mention of Ximena and the boy falls apart. It's been almost seven years now but Gabo was just a child. His mind sort of got stuck in that time when his mother didn't make it. He was here with me that winter, too. When Rafa and Ximena were returning they got separated. The coyotes said no, the women had to go in another truck. Three days later the bodies of four women were found out there in that heat by the Border Patrol. All four had been mutilated for their organs. One of them was Ximena. It was in all the news. I've been fighting to keep my sobrino since then but my brother gets terco about it and keeps insisting on taking him back to the other side. What for? I tell him. Because he's Mexican, Rafa says. As if I'm not, because I choose to live on this side. He's got to know his grandparents— meaning Ximena's folks. He's not gonna become a gringo and forget who

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he is, my brother says of his only son, as if getting an education would erase the picture the boy keeps in his head of how his mother died. I stayed and worked here in Cabuche, first in the pecans and cotton. Because of marrying Junior, I got his army benefits. I could stay and not hide in the shadows no more. This meant no more picking, no more peeling chiles, and no more canning. Instead, I got up my courage one year and signed up for night classes at the community college. I did pretty good in my classes. I really liked being in a classroom. I liked the desks, the smell of the chalk and erasers, the bulletin boards with messages about holidays like Valentine's Day and Martin Luther King Day. So later I got more courage and applied for a job as a teacher's aide in the middle school. That's how I bought my casita, here on the mesa, where I can't see los Franklins this morning. But I know they are out there, playing with me. Like giants, they take the sun and play with people's eyes, changing colors. Like shape-shifters, they change the way they look, too. They let the devoted climb up along their spines to crown them with white crosses and flowers and mementos. They give themselves that way, those guardians between the two countries. I do not know what Rafa is talking about his son becoming a gringo. These lands, this unmerciful desert—it belonged to us first, the Mexicans. Before that it belonged to los Apaches. Los Apaches were mean, too. They knew how to defend themselves. And they're still not too happy about losing everything, despite the casinos up by their land. “Keep right on going,” they'll tell tourists when they try to pull over on the highway that cuts across it during dry season. Ha. I wish I could say that out here whenever some stupid hunter wanders near my property. It's just me and the barbed-wire fence between the hunter and government land where he can do what he pleases, all dressed up like if he was in the National Guard. One day we heard some shots. It wasn't even dawn yet, that Sunday. Winnie went nuts—the way heelers do at the sign of something amiss. Gabo got up—pulling up his jeans, tripping on the hems of them, barefoot. “What was that, Tía?” he said, all apurado and the dog, meanwhile, barking, barking. This was before the accident, when she could practically see in the dark. I let her go out, and la Winnie ran toward the fence that divides my property and BLM land. “HEY, HEY!”was

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all my poor nephew called out. He always freezes up. I think he remembers his mother. Over in El Paso people have asked me if I'm not afraid of the coyotes

and rattlers living right next to the wide-open spaces kept by the Bureau of Land Management. The worse snakes and coyotes, I always say, are the ones on two legs. People think that's funny. “Hey-Hey,” Gabo called out again in the dark of the new day out

there, with a little less conviction the second time. But la Winnie kept right on barking-barking. I went in the house and got my rifle. When I came out I went up to the fence and pointed the rifle somewhere I couldn't see. What were they shooting anyway? We don't got any deer around here. “YOU ARE WAY TOO CLOSE TO MY LAND!”I yelled like I was Barbara Stanwyck or Doña Bárbara or somebody and I took a shot that rang out like a 30-30. It must've woken up la gente all the way in town. A little while after that I heard Jeeps taking off. We couldn't go back to sleep after that so I made us some atole and

put on the TV. I needed to fold up the laundry I'd left in the dryer anyway. Winnie didn't come in like she would have normally, ready to be fed. She stayed outside roaming the grounds. “Your father will come back,” I said to Gabo that morning at the table

about my kid brother who you'd think was way older than me, his mind full of the beliefs of another time, another era, belonging to the Communist Party and all that. He's so proud of it, too. Gabo's older sister ran off a long time ago with a guy over there in

Chihuahua and no one's heard from her since then. So all Gabo has to count on is his father. And me, of course, his tía Regina. But he's lost way too much already in his short life to know that for

sure. So that's what I'm doing right now, trying to do something good— for my brother and Gabo but for me, too—to see that my sobrinito gets a chance. One day I'm gonna take him to Washington, D.C “What the hell for?” Rafa asked me when I mentioned it. “To see where the Devil makes his deals,” I said. One day I'm gonna take my nephew to New York, too, where I've

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never been but it's on my list—my very long list—of places to see in this life. I may even take him to Florence, Italy, to see the David. Well, actually I'm the one that wants to see the statue of David but it won't hurt for Gabo to know a little something about great art. What? Why not? All our lives we have to be stuck to the ground like desert centipedes? My nephew doesn't show any signs of interest in the arts. He don't talk about girls. He goes to Mass every Sunday down in Cabuche. If I don't drive him or let him take my truck, he walks. He observes all the holy days of obligation. My biggest fear is he's gonna become a priest. Wait 'til Rafa hears about it. He'll be so disappointed.

The truth is when I fired that weapon I was trying to show my sobrino not to be afraid. I wanted to show him that if a middle-aged woman like me could confront things that went bump in the night, he could do it, too, that he could face anything. Actually, I had used my .22-caliber rifle only once before in the ten years I owned it. It was when a coyote was getting at my chickens. For a while I had it in my mind that I was gonna get rich selling fresh eggs. Everyone started asking me for eggs, all the neighbors, the teachers at the school, but no one really wanted to pay for them. Then I started feeling for the poor familias I worked with at the school and I gave them free eggs. The coyote ate three of my hens before I caught up with it. After that, I said, What do I need all this for? And I sold the rooster and the hens I had left. I've never been very good at get-rich-quick schemes anyway. But it don't stop me from trying. The only thing I will not do is gamble, go down to Sunland Park or up to Ruidoso and throw my money away in the casinos the way some of the ladies in town do. Oh sure, now and then they win a couple of hundred bucks. They get all excited. They forget how much they lost to begin with. They forget the dinner or the motel and gas money they put out to be there. And I surely will not play the lottery. Millions and millions in the pot some weeks. So I figure, what are the chances? Instead I take that dollar and buy two avocados if they're on sale. Avocados, the food of the gods, are the only things I can't grow on my

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land— too arid; avocado trees don't grow in sand. Another thing I've done with one dollar is send a fax to the White House on that number they give out to people in case you got a complaint about how things are being run up there. I tried to send the fax out of the school office but Mrs. Martínez, the head secretary, said no, nothing doing. Plus, she voted for the president. So I took my letter of complaint to the place on the corner of Main Street and Washington in Cabuche where you can send out faxes, buy phone cards, or have your taxes done. It took five minutes and one dollar and I felt much better afterward. I know I am nobody; no one has to tell me that. But I still vote like everyone else. So if I feel like sending a fax and complaining about the president's latest pick for a Supreme Court judge, that's my prerogative. That's a word I use with the students all the time: prerogative, as in,

“It's a lady's prerogative to change her mind.” The boys say they know all about that—about girls changing their minds. You cannot get a gallon of gas for a dollar these days. You might still get yourself something you don't need, like a thirty-two-ounce can of beer at the package liquors across the street from the “business” tienda where I send out my official faxes. Sometimes I have actually sat and thought out what you can and cannot buy with a dollar no more and it's very interesting—because you think you can't buy much, but in reality, if you think about it, it all depends on your priorities. That's another good word I've given the students and my nephew.

“What are your priorities in life, anyway? Go to jail or go to college? Get drunk with your friends or get a job and make a little money to get ahead?” Things like that. You would be very surprised at how little thought any of them have given those choices until I start telling them about priorities. Gabo's priorities are very clear and I am very proud of him for it. He says he is going to college. That is, if the government lets him. If

he can't get residency he won't be going nowhere but back to México. They don't give scholarships to migrant kids without papers. We do the dollar game sometimes. I used to do it by myself, but now

that my Gabo is with me we do it together. He's come home with a big bottle of shampoo for one dollar. Of course, you can get a whole lot of stuff at the Dollar General for a dollar or what shouldn't cost more than

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a dollar; it's so cheap and falls apart so quick. But this was the champú bueno that Gabo bought at el Shur Sav with his employee's discount. Shampoo is just a small example of how our dollar game works. We've gotten all kinds of things for a dollar. What we won't get and what we'd never do with our dollars, we have

agreed, because we got our priorities straight, I tell him, is nothing that would be harmful to our bodies or our souls. That's why I made him take back the pound of chorizo he bought for us one time. He felt so bad and I felt so bad because the truth was that we both love our chorizo with eggs for breakfast. But we know that spicy, greasy sausage is no good for your health, and what's bad for your arteries cannot be good for your mental well-being neither. Gabo and I are figuring these things out—he, with his suspicious signs

of priest potential and me, a woman who has been living alone so long I may as well become beatified. Santa Lucia, who cares for blind dogs. Santa Barbara, whose father locked her in a tower because he desired her so much. When I've thought of the martyrs and saints, I told Padre Juan Bosco down at the church one time when he reprimanded me for hardly going to Mass no more, it seems it would be very, very hard to become one these days. It isn't because we don't have diehard virgins, but because these days the pope is not about to proclaim every girl who fights a rapist a saint. As for the martyrs—you don't get thrown in the den of lions for refusing to renounce your faith as in early Christian times. I wonder why I always think of things like that—imagining myself tied to a stake, scalped, Roman soldiers demanding I give up on God. Mamá used to come and slap me on the head when she'd catch me daydreaming. “Maybe you used to be a martyr or a saint in another life,” Gabo said

when I talked out loud about these ponderings. “According to the Church, there is only one life and this is it,” I told

him. My sobrino looked very disturbed by this reminder. The rest of that

day he kept to himself, listening to his John Denver cassette in his room. He got it for a dollar at the flea market.

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Gabo found a hawk. It was young, you could tell. It was the most beautiful thing you ever saw, brown and near-white with dashes of black on the wings. Nature is so geometrically precise. If you look real close at birds and fish, too, you see how everything—every feather, fin, wing, gill, is colored just so. Somewhere I heard that baby hawks have a high mortality rate. This one didn't make it. It must've been trying to take flight when it got hit on the road. Its neck was broken but otherwise it looked like it was sleeping, as they say about people when they're in their coffins. (Except for Mamá. The mortician had painted on such bright orange lipstick and powder too light for her complexion she looked dead for sure.) “What are you going to do with it?” I asked my nephew. He looked so sad. You'd think he had killed the hawk himself. He'd found it on the road. He was driving my truck back from work. I let him take the truck since he comes home after dark. When he saw it, he pulled over and put it on the passenger seat. “I'm going to bury it, Tía,” Gabo replied solemnly, the way he speaks most of the time, “with your permission.” My nephew is so polite to the point of being antiquated. True, humble Mexican kids have better manners than American Mexican kids, but Gabo sounds like a page out of Lope de Vega. Lope de Vega, the prince of Spain's Golden Age. I haven't read anything of his; I heard the Spanish teacher at the school talking to the students about him. But Spain's Golden Age of literature is on my list of things to read—my very long list. I've done some reading on my own, García Márquez, for example. One Hundred Years of Solitude was assigned in one of the classes I took at the community college and then I looked for other books of his, like the story of Eréndira and her wicked grandmother, that, in some ways, reminded me of my own life with Mamá in the desert. I read the newspaper every day. But now with Gabo here I have become more conscious of the importance of broadening the mind through reading. The next book fair the school has I'm going to buy us everything we see that we think we'll like. We'll treat it like a candy store. I'll have to assure my considerate nephew, who behaves as if he may be overstaying his visit—the way he tiptoes around and hardly eats, although I'm not sure why; it's not because of anything I've said or done, I hope—that I have saved up for such a splurge. Otherwise, he'll hesitate to get

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anything, even if he sees something he really wants. The hawk was on Gabo's dresser. He brought home a white veladora. He got it for a dollar with his discount at work. It took exactly seven days to burn through. When the candle was done, Gabo said he would bury the hawk. Every night he prayed over it. “You look like some kind of shaman,” I told him when I peeked in to say good night and there he was, standing in the glow of the flame, head bowed, hands suspended just above the dead bird. It looked as if he were trying to resurrect it, although I'm sure that's not what he was trying to do. When the candle had burned out I found it in the trash. Where was the bird, I asked Gabo. Had he buried it already? Where? When? I thought we were going to hold a funeral for it. I felt a little left out of his ceremonies. “Yes,” he said. Later that day, I saw a hawk perched on the fence post by the gate. The front gate is about an eighth of a mile from the front door. It was brown with near-white feathers, black dashes on the wings. It looked a lot like our dead hawk. Maybe it was its mother or some other relation. “Where did you say you buried that bird?” I asked Gabo when he came to the kitchen to make a sandwich for his school lunch. He refuses the money I offer so that he can eat in the cafeteria or go out with some of the kids. He saves his work money, spends only on what he needs. He offered his whole check to me at the beginning, but I looked at him as if he were crazy and told him to use it on himself. His sandwiches are very frugal, too—one slice of meat between two slices of ninety-nine-cent whole wheat bread. “I didn't,” Gabo replied. “You didn't what?” I asked. “You didn't say or you didn't bury it?” “No,” was all he said. “Maybe that bird was carrying that virus, Gabo,” I said. “How much did you handle it anyway?” “Do not worry yourself so much, Tía,” he said. As far as teenagers go, from what I hear at the school and from the students’ parents, Gabo could get a lot worse on my nerves.

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This is not why I am so anxious all the time—having a teenager to look out for now. It was not even part of the Change, like the doctor down in Juárez told me last year. The anxiety is just part of me. On any given day, a person can find several reasons to be anxious. If you don't find it in your own life at that moment, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper and read the headlines. Being a fifty-plus-year-old woman alone for so long, widowed thirty years, that could be cause enough. Every paycheck covers the bills to the penny—when I'm lucky. Every three months or so I come up with another get-rich-quick idea

that ends up not making me much money and sometimes ends up costing me some. I've delivered groceries for people out here in the boonies who can't or don't want to drive into town every week. I've taken orders for curtains and sewed quite a few up. Over the years, I've dog-sat, old people–sat, house-sat. I sold Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay products, even though I am allergic to most anything with a chemical scent. I had Tupperware parties. I sold red candy apples and pecan bread in the parking lot of el Shur Sav. For a time, I had a little business out of my troca selling pizzas. I'd buy them wholesale down the road at a place across from the police station. Then I'd drive them to an empty lot on Main Street and put out my sign. People didn't really want to bother ordering a pizza ahead of time. Just drive up and I hand them one into their car or troca or maybe they were on foot. On weekends I'd make a killing. Then a guy started doing it, right next to me, out of his car. He gave away free Cokes, so he ran me out of business. A long time ago I went door to door selling bibles, the King James version. Then my mother found out and told Padre Juan Bosco and he had one of his talks with me, so I felt morally inclined to quit. All these jobs I had in addition to whatever other full-time work I was putting in somewhere. And all of it caused me anxiety. I keep almost nothing from my nephew now, except what I might look

like in a swimsuit, but why he would care to see his fat old aunt half naked I wouldn't know, but nearly everything in my heart or that crosses my mind I share with him. He's been God-sent that way, I think. I had no idea how lonely I was until one day I found myself at my Singer stitching up his jeans, talking my head off, and he, so patiently, sitting nearby listening to it all. Or at least he looked like he was listening.

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One thing I won't tell Gabo about is my money worries. He'd run off so as not to be another burden on me. The other topic I cannot bring myself to approach is the fact that we haven't heard from his papá yet. It isn't as if Gabo himself hasn't noticed. I heard him crying into his pillow one night. He probably envisions his father being killed by a coyote and left in the desert like what happened to his mother. It isn't like Rafa not to get word to me somehow, but then again, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if he changed his mind about coming. That coyote woman on the phone was horrid—he may not have wanted to pay them all that they wanted. The fact is, all Gabo and I can do is wait. In the meantime I discovered where he buried the hawk. It was right

near the fallen yucca. La one-eyed Winnie, or Tuerta, as I am calling her now, dug it up. My Mescalero Apache friend, Uriel, told me over the phone that Gabo's finding the hawk was very good luck for him. She said the hawk is good protection medicine. I wonder if finding where it was buried and digging it up was good luck for la Tuerta. Poor little hawk— with so many now trying to benefit from its death. I reburied it this time between two huge chollas, where I don't think the dog will go, seeing that she's cautious now about getting too near anything with thorns.

I'd rather be pricked by a thousand thorns than have to think about what my little brother may have endured. The fact is, however, that I don't know what exactly he had to endure. Sometimes I like to think he is back in Chihuahua with a pregnant wife and that we just never heard from him because he became too selfish and didn't care about Gabo no more or his past life with Ximena. Another week went by when a foco went on in my head and I realized

that the phone number of that nasty coyote woman that called me might be on the caller-ID box. We don't get many calls. All the numbers of anyone who has ever called since I put in the caller ID right around the time Rafa left my nephew here were still on there. We never erased them. Most of the time we didn't even pay attention to it. Without saying nothing to Gabo, I checked and, sure enough, there was a call from El Paso the very same day la coyota had called me. “Bueno,” she answered when I tried it. I knew it was her. It was a

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voice full of intriga and bad tidings. I went on to tell her who I was and that we were still waiting for Rafa.

“I don't know what you are talking about,” she said and hung up on me, proving all the more that she very well did. My heart started breaking with the sound of the dial tone on the other

end and I knew that my brother had been done some awful wrong. Still, without mentioning my concern to my nephew, the next day I took someone into my confidence at the school. I consider most of the teachers much more intelligent than me, with their college education and all. One of them could give me some advice, I thought, but it would have to be someone I could trust, since my brother trying to cross without papers was obviously against the law. Most of the teachers at the school are Mexican or at least of Mexican heritage although half of them call themselves “Hispanic,” which means they don't want to be considered Mexican. Or at least that is how Rafa and I feel about the word. It is one of the few political points we agree on. Mr. Betancourt, the history teacher, calls himself “Chicano.” He wears

a long ponytail and while he obliges the system with a nice shirt and tie, he always has on jeans. All this about Betancourt told me I could trust him with my fears about Rafa, so I pulled him aside the very next day and told him what I thought. “We might be able to find an address for that phone number,”

Betancourt told me. He said there was a phone number that you could call where, if the number you had was listed, you'd get a name and maybe an address. I thought I would try it when I got home, but he took out a cell phone from inside his jean jacket and, to my surprise, within ten minutes had obtained the woman's information for me. “Will you go to her house?” he asked me. Betancourt is about thirty-five but most of his hair has gone white. He

looks old and young at the same time. I remember when I was in my thirties, I felt like that—old and young at the same time. Now I'm middle-aged and I feel old and really old at the same time. Yes, I told him that I would, that I would have gotten in my truck and gone right then and there but that my nephew would need it for work in an hour. Betancourt nodded. He looked at his watch and then he said, “Let me

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move some things around. I can meet you somewhere in an hour or I can go pick you up at your house. I'll take you. It's probably not wise for you to go there alone.” Miguel. That's his name. He told me to call him Miguel or Mike but to

please not call him Mr. Betancourt no more. I never called him just plain Betancourt to his face but that's how the teachers called him in the lounge. Especially a couple of the young women teachers said it like they meant something more by it. Sometimes a single man is as likely to be the object of a lot of unprofessional interest as a single woman, in particular the attractive ones, of which, at the school, I can count only four. I look around, too. I may not say nothing, being a fifty-plus-year- old widow, but I still look. Miguel was handsome in his own way but more important, for the

purposes of our errand, tall and very strong-looking. When he showed up at my house he was still wearing his tie. He decided to keep it on, he said, because it made him look like he might be someone of authority. “I mean, I'm not gonna say I'm with La Migra or anything but it wouldn't hurt if they think we have some pull.” The woman's house was very close to the customs bridge going into

Juárez. It was a little house like others on that block, nothing special about it, and if my brother was in there, if they were holding him for ransom, never in a million years would I have guessed it would have been in such an ordinary place and right there in the middle of everything. The woman herself opened the door. She looked us up and down, especially Miguel, who did start to look like some kind of agent all of a sudden, with his Serpico long hair and bigotes. At first she denied knowing anything, even the fact that she was the

one who had called. Then Miguel took me by surprise. He pushed her, and next thing I knew, we were all in the house, in a dark, tiny, crowded living room with a dirty beige couch and two little kids, one in Pampers, in a playpen. “Listen,” he said right in her face, “you are going to tell us what happened to this woman's brother or you are going right to jail— today. Do you understand? Do you understand?” He pushed her again so that she went reeling back until she hit a wall. She started crying. She might've been around thirty or so, with a bulging midriff from babies, and her breasts already sagging. The house smelled of stale cigarette

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smoke. The TV was blaring a Spanish channel. I felt sorry for the babies who looked startled but hadn't started to cry. It was funny that they didn't cry when the mother was crying. Then she got hold of herself and looked me up and down. “What would I know about your brother?” she said to me with that same sneer I imagined that time she had called me. “Have you tried calling your family back in México? He's probably there.” Before I could even say nothing, Miguel took her by the shoulders and

shook her so hard her head went back and forth like it was on a spring. “I'm only going to ask you one more time,” he said. And before he asked again, she looked at me and with spittle coming out of the corners of her mouth and with more hate than I have ever felt from a human being, she seemed even glad to tell me, “Your brother must be dead, stupid. Why else do you think you never heard anything again? Do you think they come and tell me what goes on out there? I only know about the ones who make it. They come here until their people pay what they owe. Your brother? What do I know of him? They most likely left him to rot out in the desert because he was a tonto or maybe for being a pendejo he got himself killed. What do I know? Now get out of here before I tell my husband you were here and you'll both be sorry you came.” It was like a movie. In movies about drug traficantes they have women

like that, in their nightgowns in daytime in gloomy rooms and living an obscure existence. And they have guys like the one who drove up just as we were leaving, wearing a big anchor on a chain around his neck and a diamond earring in one ear. They—everything, even their frightened little kids who wouldn't cry—looked like they were right out of a bad drug video. El coyote looked at Miguel as we left as if he was memorizing him,

taking a mental photograph in case he ever saw him again. But neither said a word to the other. I turned around and took a last glance at the woman, who stayed

inside in the shadows. She knew something about my brother's fate. I felt it in my heart. She could have given me some piece of information, however small, a gold nugget to take back to Gabo so that the poor boy would somehow, someday, find closure.

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I wanted to go back in and shake her myself. Shake her until her stupid head fell off. Until her neck snapped and we'd carry her lifeless body to Gabo so that he could pray over it for seven days. Then he'd find a place to bury it even though his father had gotten no such consideration. And when la Tuerta Winnie sniffed up the corpse and started digging, fine; she could dig all she wanted. I'd let her dig up that estúpida's body so that all the coyotes that wanted to come on my little bit of land that I protected so well could feed off of her stupid flesh and lick her stupid bones clean. And then we'd all, me and Winnie and Gabo and Miguel, too, if he wanted, and even the coyotes with four feet, could go out to the BLM land and scatter the bones out there to dry in the sun, for sands and wind to wash over. And Rafa, wherever they had left him, would no longer be alone out there. Then I felt Miguel take my hand. He had to pull me with him. “Come on,” he muttered close to my ear. “We'd better get the hell out of here while we can.”

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GABO

Su Reverencia, el Santo Franciscano, Padre Pío:

Venerado Santo, gracias for permitting me this great honor to write to you in heaven. If there is one reason alone why your most humblest of servants is given the privilege of not being un analfabeto and not knowing how to read or write like my mamá or mis abuelos, I believe it was for this purpose. Because you are at God's feet perhaps He bothers Himself to converse with you about what is going on when you don't hear from me. If not, I will relate what has happened now, as best as I am able to express myself como siempre, Santito. On that day walking up the dirt road after school, I saw my tía Regina

coming down in a car with a man I did not know. I knew it had to do with mi papá. She smiled and gave that little wave that people give out here when they pass each other on the road. My tía Regina's wave is like that of the Queen of England. She waved and smiled that very sad smile of hers, her fading red hair flying in the wind of the hombre's old Mustang convertible. We did not know anyone like that, my tía and I. Most of the people on the mesa and out around these parts drive trucks. Old ones, mostly. One neighbor rides a Harley but only on weekends, with his bikers’ club. Tía Regina smiled with her little squinting eyes that make her look

like a china poblana and then they passed me. I stayed on the side of the road watching them. As the Mustang turned the corner, a flock of blackbirds with long patas, feeding on a rich wet patch of worms, all together lifted their wings. For a moment all the birds hung in the air, shiny wings out. As soon as the car passed, all together they gently went back down to feed, not one losing sight of the feast below.

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I watched until the car was no more than a small, fast-moving object surrounded by fields of green alfalfa, swaying right, then down, until it became a red speck and there was nothing left to think about anymore. I swung around and kept going up the sandy hill lined with cholla y sprawling nopales. Dogs barked aquí y allá, letting my Winnie know that I was coming. At my tía Regina's I got ready to go to work. “El Estockboy” is what my manager calls me. I pack groceries and keep the shelves stocked with inventory. I know that God gives us drudgery to keep us from being idle, Padrecito. As I unpack cans of string beans y garbanzos to line the shelves, it is a meditation of our Lord. Sweeping is my favorite quehacer, Santito, because then I am free to contemplate God's eternal love. Sometimes the manager sends me out to wash the windows. He says I am the best estockboy he's ever had and whenever I want, I can work for him full-time. The money I earn I put away. My tía has refused it. When mi papá comes, I will give it to him. He would never ask it of me. He will make good use of it to help my abuelos or toward building the house there. As for me, I have no need of dinero or material comforts. (But, on this subject, Your Reverence, I must ask you to help me, especially when my blanket feels so rico over my body, tan cansado. I find it difficult to get up in the mornings.) When I return from work, after my shower, I do my homework in my cuarto, so my tía's sleep is not disturbed. I go to school. I go to work. I go to church. Meanwhile we wait for my father. He will decide if I stay or not but for now I want to stay. My aunt had left the truck keys on the kitchen table. Truck keys and one aguacate. My aunt is good at rationing even while she knows we are not starving; although we have our share of arroz y papas all week. And of course, every day, beans, every which way you want to have them— first in the pot like soup; that's the best. You sprinkle a little diced onions and with a rolled-up corn tortilla—a man could not ask for much more in life. We can't add chorizo to them anymore because my tía says one day it will give her a heart attack. Avocados are just about the only thing my tía doesn't grow in the

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garden that we can't live without. She has one of those green thumbs. We get all kinds of chiles, tomatoes, yellow, red, and green for salsa, three varieties of squash, a patch of watermelon, and corn. Mis padres thought my tía Regina had won the lottery with this property All summer, from harvest to harvest, Mami kept badgering my father, “Why don't we settle down like your sister? Why can't you get us something like that? Por favor, Rafael—your sister did it by herself Why can't we?” My poor mother; she was never happy Who could have been, working in la pisca like we did, pulling up tomatoes, artichokes, cotton, grapes … pues, todo, pues, Santo querido. That day in my tía Regina's kitchen, which is dark even in the daytime but from the window over the sink you can see the mountains, I decided to eat only the avocado. I picked out two corn tortillas, the hardest ones. Little sacrificios prepare me daily for the course I have chosen. I added a hot salsa of chile árbol that my tía makes so delicious, but that was all. (I tried not to enjoy it too much.) I ate the whole avocado because no matter what I try, once you cut one open, the leftover portion will turn black and go to waste. I've heard all kinds of trucos as to how to prevent that—cellophane, aluminum foil, cut the pit out, leave it in, Tupperware. My tío Osvaldo in California swore that the only sure way to keep an open avocado from spoiling was to place the open part flat down on a piece of cardboard. My mother's brother, he had picked avocados in California all his life so I accepted his word. Until I tried it. It did not work. But back then, when Tío Osvaldo was still alive, I was just a little boy. What did I know of life then? One day my mother got word that Tío Osvaldo was dying of pneumonia. He had been working for a flower rancher near Fresno, allá in California. We were working the garlic pisca near Watsonville when the message came. Mami took me with her to see him. Tío Osvaldo was laying there in un jacalito. It was typical of the ones we migrantes were assigned in the labor camps. Since my earliest memory such a shack would be called home. There wasn't electricity in that one. How does someone die of pneumonia picking flowers, Santo? You could die of heat exhaustion and overall fatigue. This everyone knew. My uncle was only twenty-nine years old. He was very strong and had

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never been sick. When we found him, he was trembling to death under a blanket another migrant had lent him. It was one of those soft colchas depicting whole scenes—an adobe house in front of a big yellow moon, a tiger looking at you, the Seven Dwarves dancing. This one had la Virgen de Guadalupe with a white face. The owner of the blanket did not want it anymore with the smell of death on it, so my mother let me keep it. Before we left, a woman told my mother that my uncle died because

the men were forced to stand all night in a shallow lake on the property. The rancher did not want them running away. The story sounded almost unbelievable but Mami said almost was not good enough. She wept real hard over her brother but she said she was also weeping over the things in life that we had to put up with. That night of the red car y el hombre with the ponytail, after el Shur

Sav closed and I went directly home, all the luces were off, even el portal light. La Winnie Tuerta, as my tía was now calling her, was lying quietly outside the door. The winds were blowing dust, knocking cans and chairs down and tools around. Inside, there were no potatoes and eggs on the stove kept warm for me. There was the owl I'd been hearing for the last week. I knocked on my tía's bedroom door. She was in bed, covers to her

chin, la eerie luz of the portable TV next to her bed illuminating her face and the volume turned down. She tried to smile. “I was thinking we might want to go to the city tonight and have dinner out,” she said. “Go out?” I couldn't imagine doing something like that without it

being an occasion. “Yes, like a celebration,” she said. “What are we celebrating?” I asked. (I do try to avoid such

extravagances, Su Reverencia.) “Your birthday, of course, mi'jo,” my tía said. My birthday was not

until March—a month and a half away. It was the first time she called me “her son.” It should not have been a

big deal so that I noticed—even teachers at school called me “mi'jo”— but suddenly I felt hypersensitive. I looked around my tía's room. There was a draft. Algo. I reminded her that my birthday was a ways off. “Your good grades, then,” she said next. Exams were not for another week.

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“We could go to Applebee's or Chili's, if you like,” she said, “or to the Taco Tote. You like that place, don't you, hijo? We're celebrating the trip we're going to take to the capital as soon as you graduate—how about that?” My hands had turned cold and then my ears. If only she would have gotten on with it, just said what she knew. I had never been all the way in my tía Regina's bedroom before. It was smaller than my own. There was the dresser that had belonged to my grandmother, back from her days. It looked antique. The headboard matched. Over the headboard was a small plaque of la Virgen de Guadalupe. There was a color picture of a young soldier on the nightstand. The nightstand did not match; it was modern, of unfinished pine. I was looking around, feeling my body grow cold, first my arms, then down my legs, remembering again for the second time that day how my tío Osvaldo had died. I fought the hunger so familiar en mis entrañas and waited to hear what my tía had to say whenever she got the courage to say it. I started staring at a mancha in the corner on the ceiling. “Does the roof need repairing there?” I asked. She did not answer. My palms hurt. Sometimes I wake at night and they throb as if they have been punctured. I look but there is nothing unusual about them. (You know how long I have prayed for that grace.) I brought my right palm up and scrutinized it. “What's wrong with your hand?” Tía Regina asked. “Did you hurt it at work?” I shook my head and put the hand behind my back. (I do not doubt, Padre Pío, that she knows about my affinities with my Savior.) El Cura Juan Bosco said I had to wait until I finished high school. The days do not pass fast enough. I have already chosen los Hermanos Franciscanos. My dad and my tía are a lot alike when it comes to not trusting the Church. “Millions,” they each say, like they had been saying it all their lives, “millions of mexicanos among the faithful, living in poverty. And the Church—so rich.” “Religion is the opium of the masses.” Mi papá liked to quote Marx. At my age, he joined guerrilleros to fight the government. My tía is a good woman, Su Reverencia. She does not know that I know, but she was a virgin widow. I heard my mamá tell my father about it when I was a child. They both laughed. Maybe they had no use

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for aires of purity. But nothing about the room I found myself in that night or the news we were both preparing for—one to pronounce and the other to accept—was more than what it was. It was just our lives. My father was gone forever. Like crumbs of bread, bits of his soul had been leaving traces for days. A bit had landed on la Winnie la Tuerta's eye and taken it. Another had hummed the young hawk to sleep on the road. Still another piece was now in the owl's throat outside the door at that very moment. And my father's soul was causing la Winnie to howl like she had never howled before. The howling of a dog is an announcement of death. We could not possibly go to a restaurant pretending cheerfulness to ease the ache that my father's soul had dispersed all around us like motes in a ray of light. Tía Regina, she is so simple. (Am I simple, too, Padre Pío?) Slowly I made my way to her bed that night, crawling like a little cat

to one side and put my head on the pillow next to hers that smelled of lilacs or jasmine. The scent of flowers in the desert, even from potpourri, was always disorienting. I was dizzy and closed my eyes. I felt Tía Regina breathing hard until her sobbing began. And while I cried like that later, in my room, many times, that night I went to sleep to the sound of her copious weeping. Copious. It is one of the many beautiful words I learned from reading your most

venerated teachings. Yes, I know what it means. Copious as in “And yet there will be more.”

As always, your devotee tan desmerecido

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REGINA

Today I ate three tunas, one after the other, while I looked out at the snow covering the tops of los Franklins, gleaming like white frosting. I gave a little piece of the cactus fruit to la Tuerta, who was sitting there staring with her one eye. She ate it right up. Sometimes the dog forgets she's a carnivore by nature. Although it's midwinter and all the prickly pear cactus is dormant, I had a stash of peeled tunas in the freezer in a plastic zipper bag for a day like today, when my spirit needed a boost. I came up with a new idea of how to earn a little extra money. I have

a boy to send to college now and that's something to think about. The idea came to me when I started making use of the costal of pecans I collected from under my trees one weekend. First I baked two pies, then three, then the rest of the night I was baking pies. It gave me something to do when I couldn't sleep. I wrapped a pie and took it to school as my way of thanks for Miguel

Mike Mr. Betancourt. I'm not sure what to call him. Everything about my pie was homemade. It had a golden crisp crust y todo. All I know how to bake that always come out right are pies. I entered my pies one year in the county fair. I didn't even get honorable mention. Still, they're pretty good. “Wow,” the teachers in the lounge said, one after the next. I had to let

them know it wasn't for them to share but for Betancourt. “Uh-huh,” said Cindy López. She gave a look to Michelle Montoya. They're this year's student teachers. They think no one knows that Michelle dated Betancourt at the beginning of the year. The first week of school those two got together. Before September was over, so were they. What's this vieja fea think she's up to? they must've been saying to each other with their eyes.

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I found Miguel out in the teachers’ parking lot on his cell phone. He seemed real happy about the pecan pie and stuck a couple of fingers in to taste it right away. “I'm gonna leave it in my car,” he said, smiling, meaning he didn't want to share it with no one. It's winter, which for us means not cold but not hot, so the pie would survive there. “I got more at home,” I said. All the pies were lined up as if on display on kitchen win-dowsills and counters. No one was gonna eat them. I don't have the appetite with all my anxieties these days. That's when I got the idea to go into the pie-baking business. When I had a break, instead of having lunch, I went home, got one of the pies, and took it to the school and set it out in the teachers’ lounge. “Wow,” the teachers said again. “Who's this pie for?” someone asked, trying with all his might not to help himself to a piece. “It's for auction,” I said. “Bidding starts at two dollars, no tax. Hecho en casa y con aceo.” “That means one hundred percent homemade good. I'll bid two dollars,” said Miguel, who had just come in the door so I hadn't seen him. “Regina's pies are to die for!” That's how the whole enterprise got started. The pie ended up going for five bucks and, since that was set as its market value—as the math teacher explained it—the others would be that price. Pie-baking will keep me from getting too depressed.

“Hey, Regina,” Miguel Mike called out to me in the teachers’ parking lot the next morning. At least I don't call him Mr. Betancourt no more. Not when we're one- on-one. “One-on-one” is how the seminar leader talks who comes from the university in Las Cruces every few months to catch us up on how education is progressing in the world. “Why don't you go back and get your degree, Miss Regina?” she always says to me. “You'd make a great teacher.” I hear things like that and I think, Who knows—maybe one day I will. Miguel Mike came over to my truck and helped carry the pies without my asking. I noticed from the other day when we went to El Paso that he was a gentleman, with old-fashioned caballero manners. Except for the part about pushing that coyota around. But what can I say about that? I

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don't like the idea of any man laying a finger on a woman. There is a very high domestic-violence rate in this area, uf, not to mention Cabuche alone, from what I hear at the PTA, on the news, on the street, and on my shortwave ham radio. (That's what I used to do for entertainment before I got cable—listen to police calls.) How Miguel Mike handled the coyota, however, I don't think falls into that category. My opinion is when you buy into a life of crime you can only expect to get hurt, and that's what happened with her. That's as far as my moralizing went, because the truth was I was in a world of pain over my fears of losing Rafa. “Call me just Miguel, okay?” he said. “Or Mike. Whichever one.” I decided on Miguel because it reminds me of my favorite archangel. I call upon el arcángel Miguel whenever I need serious help, with this side and the other side. By that I mean here and across the border in México and I mean this life and whatever's on the Other Side. I was telling him all this when I saw by the smile that he was trying to hide that maybe I was just amusing him, which was not my intention. There's no end to how people think that everything about old women is ridiculous. Of course, I know I am not that old, but to a guy with a fast red car, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm old. Also, what I might be revealing and what made me shut up right away was how lonely I could get sometimes that made me just go on and on about things. Then Miguel said, “I was named after the archangel.” “No way,” I said, figuring he was pulling my leg. “No, really,” he said. “My mom had a difficult pregnancy.” Then he stopped and said, “What I wanted to talk to you about, Regina, is your nephew. I know how much you worry about him. But maybe now, you know, you could adopt him legally. This way he could get his papers in order and he could stay in the States and study later on. You said he's a good student, right? We could get him a scholarship …” I was looking down at Miguel's white tenis and thinking how I'd like to be able to afford a pair of those for Gabo for his birthday because I know he likes to play basketball, while I listened to all that Miguel was saying, words that he meant to sound all happy, like that silver lining around a dark cloud but that just plain did not. I knew that as Gabo's guardian, I

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could probably try to adopt him and if I did, he wouldn't have to go back to México. But what Miguel was leaving out was the fact that we didn't know whether or not mi hermano was coming back for him. Who said my brother was dead? La Coyota? Like she was a reliable source. “Gimme the pies,” I said, suddenly upset with Miguel because he had

already written off my last living known relative, besides Gabo. It wasn't his fault if my kid brother was dead. But why should I have to accept it with no proof yet? Then in our struggle, we dropped one of the pies. “Ay!” I said. “I'll pay you for it, Regina,” Miguel said, looking like he genuinely felt

bad. The sky was full of rain clouds again. Though everywhere there were

long slits between them where brilliant light came through. Sometimes I dream that I live on the other side of the clouds. There

I've seen my mamá again. I've seen my father. I've seen my grandfather Metatron. I can't believe he made it to heaven, but I'd know that bellowing voice anywhere. Even in heaven he's yelling at everybody. My mother and he, of course, did not get along. Mamá went to my abuelo Metatron's rancho when she was only fifteen

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

everyone. Then he threw us out—Mamá, Rafa, and me. Rafa was barely six. “I've had enough, enough of this life!” My abuelo said things like that in his grief over losing his beloved son and his perfect grandson. In

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heaven they're all having it out, I guess. Mamá took us, with our few belongings, to live with one of her uncles for a few days. She came from very poor people. Then we started crossing over to the States to work the harvests. I had met my future husband not in la pisca but on my abuelo's rancho in Chihuahua. Junior used to come out there every summer with his familia to visit his own grandparents. His grandfather was my grandfather's rancho foreman. What did we know about who gave orders to who until my abuelo lost it that day and ran everybody off his land? We used to play together out there in our carefree days as children. We took care of my pets. I bottle-fed a pet calf one summer. Throughout my childood I had a pet burrito, cabritos to watch, two pet box turtles for a long time, and I always got to take care of the baby bunnies we kept in cages. When I was about three or four, when my first pet rabbit was taken from me for an Easter dinner, I learned to let go once they were grown. Junior was a gentle boy, so he preferred my company to that of my brothers. One time, when I was twelve, Junior tried to kiss me. We were collecting eggs in the henhouse when he leaned over. I think he had been calculating for a long time how and when he would make his move. When I saw his puckered lips headed in my direction I stepped back so fast, I fell and dropped all the eggs we had been collecting. My mother gave it to me good that day. Junior didn't try to kiss me again until we grew up. But that's how I knew he was the one for me, that summer day when I was twelve. My brothers and I had had a private teacher who stayed the whole week with us and went home on weekends. The school was too far away and my abuelo thought it was for common folks anyway. Rafa was showing himself to be one of those math-wizard kids. Our big brother was going to go to study medicine in México City and then my grandfather said he would send him to finish up in Paris. I'm not saying that I'm better than other people who crossed over to this side, risking their lives in the river or through the desert, just because I started learning Latin when I was a girl. But life would have been much different for us if it hadn't been for that bull. That's where a lot of the “what-ifs” start for me.

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“What if I had insisted that Ximena stay with me?” Rafa said one time when he got real down on himself about Ximena's tragic death. “What if Junior had never gone off to war?” I said right back to him. Well, then, you just have to keep taking those what-ifs to infinity.

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

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

yourself. Then Miguel said, helping me up, on my stiff knee joints, “Okay, okay. I get it, Regina. We'll look for your brother.” Since then, I am wondering what Miguel's mother knew about the

baby she had just had to give him such a suitable name.

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MIGUEL

If I ever write a memoir I'll probably call it The Too-Late Guy. It started when I was born—1969. At least if I had been born in 1968—the year that rocked the world— I

could have felt a part of it. Sometimes I lie and say it anyway That's why I was a history major in college, to be part of something big. But in 1968, it was rocking all over—from My Lai to Malcolm, from the

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

together imagining an ashram utopia. Santana came down from the sky like Horus blasting “Black Magic Woman.” Communism was the government's number-one enemy and students,

Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and anyone else who spoke up, close seconds. That would've been me, man. Public Enemy Number One of Nixon's

administration. I'd been on it, too, writing about this country's “incredible whiteness of being.” Still, I got plenty to rant about right here in the present.

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My book's gonna be called The Dirty Wars of Latin America: Building Drug Empires. Or something like that. The research goes back to when I thought I'd get a Ph.D. My thesis was gonna be on the School of the Americas. It was a U.S. Army center located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, that trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat- related skills since 1946. Its graduates became experts in torture, murder, and political repression. Since the word got out on what the School of the Americas was really up to, in 2001the school officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. After 9/11the government felt it could justifiably come out of its covert- training closet. The School of the Americas and I go way back. My father used to run the language program. Colonel John Mason III made the army his career. He did two tours of Vietnam. He learned Spanish, Russian, and Czech and taught all three. He was an astute investor and a shrewd spender. Colonel Mason was so proud of himself. “Not bad for a kid from Sunset Heights,” he used to say. When I was in my third year of high school, captain of the football team, and doing everything I could to get my father's attention (and not necessarily his approval, since I got thrown off the team for smoking pot), he died of a brain aneurysm. We flew to Georgia and brought his body back to El Paso. He got a military burial at Fort Bliss. I cried no tears over Colonel Mason. “Maybe a KGB agent ejected some poison from a fake pen into his highball and that's what made his brain implode,” I told my mother. “Don't disrespect your father,” my mom said, although she had not moved us down to Georgia when he took the post. After high school I passed on UCLA, which would have been the colonel's choice, and decided to stay in El Paso to go to college. I took my mother's last name. My father left me a trust fund and my mother his pension. Maybe by then she figured her duties as wife and mother were done. She packed up and moved to San Antonio to start a new life. We always keep tabs on each other but she never mixes up in my business and I don't mix up in hers.

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I never got to put my findings down on the dirty wars fueled by the School of the Americas alumni. Family life took over. Crucita and I were expecting our daughter, Xochitl, before we finished college. Soon after Xochi, our son, Little Michael, came along. But I held on to my dream of getting into a doctoral program, so the research kept piling up. As time went by the thesis morphed into something different. Now it'll be a full-fledged book. I got notes, clippings, magazines, stacks of articles I've been collecting for years. My trailer looks like the forgotten archives of every record on Latin America disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act—from the Reagan administration's intervention in Central America to what some of the School of the Americas's graduates who found themselves unemployed were doing with the highly specialized skills that the narco cartels found so valuable. Now that I'm divorced and all, maybe I'll be able to get it done. Crucita and me split up last year—that's when I moved into the trailer. Our kids stay with her. But I'm right across the street from my old house, where they still live. No, I'm not stalking my ex-wife. She and I get along better now than when we were married. Besides that, she's found religion. Jesus is in her life. Jesus and the evangelical minister she got involved with when we were still together. To be fair, Crucita and I still share some of the ideals around social injustice that we cared about in college. She doesn't only look for potential converts to her church, she volunteers to help women in crisis on both sides of the border. She kind of freelances on that count and goes from one grassroots organization to another, as time allows. Crucita came from a family where the father was one of those cabrón types so it irks her to no end to hear of women being abused in their homes. Lucky for me that I respect women. Otherwise, after my ex took a class in self- defense a few years back, I'd have ended up in the hospital. Anyway, we—Crucita and I—still try to do things with our kids. “It's all about maintaining family values,” she says. “Whatever you say, hon,” I'll respond, to avoid the obvious contradiction in statements like that. So keeping up appearances was behind our going up to Cabuche last August to the kermis at the church.

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And that was when I was struck by the thunderbolt, blindsided, dumbstruck. I'm talking about Regina. I took a teaching job a couple of years ago up there. It's a colonia that

needs good teachers and if nothing else, I'm a good teacher. I dig that sleepy town, although rumors that an Indian-owned casino is being set up there prevail. Other changes are coming, too. What with Las Cruces, New Mexico, expanding south and El Paso, Texas, growing north, the surrounding farmland is getting bought up by developers faster than you can say, “Poor people, get out.” Crucita was set on turning everyone she could into a born-again, so a

bazaar sponsored by the Catholic Church seemed like an ideal place to find converts. At the kermis, which they held in the church parking lot on one of the hottest days that summer, my ex walked around with Little Michael. She's always favored our son, mostly because he's so sickly Xochi had just turned thirteen and Crucita was her new archenemy. My daughter didn't even want to be there but, since I was the lesser of the two evils in her life, she deigned to walk around with me. There weren't that many people about, being as hot as it was and all.

“This is pitiful,” Xochi said, typically bored. Everything was boring to her, except hanging out with her friends. But the bazaar actually was kind of pitiful. The booths were the usual church-fair variety—a cakewalk, darts, and shooting balloons with a popgun. The prizes, mostly kids’ toys, were used donations. There was no cotton candy or funnel cake but there was a deep-fried-gorditas-and-beer stand. Yeah, the church was selling beer. I went over and got a beer for myself and a snow cone for Xochi. I

looked around for Crucita and my son. They were already busy trying to make converts, or at least she was. That's when I spied the redhead from the middle school. She had a chamba. She was managing the ring toss booth. Mi'ja and I went and bought a roll of tickets to try our luck. Or try my luck, since my daughter said she'd have no part of such embarrassing displays. The teens had set up a stage and were dancing to music spun by a DJ.

“I'm gonna check out the music, Dad,” Xochi said and strolled over to watch. All kinds of old-school music came on—from “I'm Your Puppet”

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to “Achy Breaky Heart” and everything by Elvis. The most recent song I heard was “Macarena.” When it played, all the kids and their moms jumped on the stage to do it. Even for an old guy like me, Cabuche was retro. Back at the booth, the sun drilling down on my head, I had no competitors. The object of the game was to get at least two out of three knitting rings around the necks of any of the two-quart plastic soda bottles set up on the ground. The prize was the bottle you snagged— grape, orange, strawberry, root beer, cream soda, or cola—all generic brands. The roll of tickets I bought actually paid for the sodas I ended up winning. With scarcely a smile, the redhead would reach out and hand me the rings while staying in the shade in the corner of the booth. Every now and then Redhead would take out a hankie that was tucked inside the front of her white peasant blouse and pat her freckled chest and flushed cheeks. “This heat's insufferable,” I said, trying to start up a conversation to no avail, while I won bottle after bottle. The game was really set up for kids—with short arms. I scored ten bottles before I finally had the nerve to ask her if she remembered me from school. “I think so,” was all she said. Then she looked away. I'd never had much luck with gorgeous women. Cute ones—like my ex, sure. But not women who not only looked good but who probably rustled steer in their free time. You knew right away you'd better not mess with them. Well, I had really remembered her, all right. And that's why I made a fool of myself trying to get her attention. “Come on, Dad,” called Xochitl, who is her dad's flower princess and has already made me promise to give her the biggest quinceañera Sun- land Park has ever seen. That wouldn't be hard, I figured, considering how small our town is. Still, Xochi and her mom are already making plans that could do a man's wallet a lot of damage. Mi'ja, up on the stage, wanted me to go and join the group doing the chicken dance. I knew the chicken dance. She and her brother had taught me at home. At home was one thing but in public was another. “Hey, Dad!” Michael called. He'd seen his sister up there and ran up, too.

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I looked at Redhead. I thought I saw her smile. That was all the encouragement I needed. I ran over to the stage and jumped on. I was the tallest chicken shaking his butt up there. She was looking, all right. And she was laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. Shy and gorgeous, man, I thought. What a sexy combination. I kept shaking my butt, moving with the crowd and smiling over at her. And she just kept laughing. By then, I couldn't be stopped. Next, we started doing the electric slide. This time, I saw that Redhead wasn't laughing anymore. In fact, she looked a little disturbed. That's when I knew I wasn't exactly impressing her. Afterward, to hold on to the little pride I had left, I didn't bother

collecting my sodas. But Redhead and I were destined, as they say. Five months later,

something happened. Something terrible on the one hand. On the other, it turned out to be what changed the life of a guy whose heart needed some serious mending. She was wearing one of her homemade dresses, made of seersucker or something Mrs. Cleaver–ish. But she could make anything look good. Ms. Redhead came up to me just as I was leaving, to ask for help in a “highly urgent and personal matter.” She took me totally off guard. And before she even explained what it

was all about, I blurted out, “Don't worry, camarada,” like I was in the Partido Liberal Mexicano. The party had made its headquarters right in my hometown over a hundred years ago, just before La Revolución. Those guys were among my role models. “You can count on me,” I blurted out and all but saluted my new generala. Whenever I talked like that, all Chicanoed out, using old-school, The

Revolution Will Not Be Televised jive, my ex used to say, “You want to be a revolutionary, Mike? Start with me. A social movement begins with one woman and one man at a time.” It was too late for that woman to be Crucita. Standing in front of

Redhead so close I could almost count the freckles across her nose and those that splashed down her biceps, I thought, Maybe it isn't too late for the too-late guy.

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GABO

Santo and friend of God, thank you for listening to me,

My saludos to you and to the Lord, my Father in Heaven. Please ask Him to look down kindly on me—I am trying to be good. Padre Pío, I know you do not measure faith by how much a person

dedicates himself to reading scriptures but I want you to know I read not only the Bible but everything. It was no one's recommendation or insistence. Reading just came to me. That was how I learned English. I read it before I could pronounce it. When I first went to school en Los Estados, my tía Regina made them put me in the right year for my age. Because I was un chavito migrante they were ready to stick me in the first grade. I was eight years old. I was so quiet they figured I did not know anything. Two weeks later, they moved me up to the fourth. By then I had read my papá's old copy of The Communist Manifesto. He

used to carry it everywhere with him. I was only six years old when I first tried to read it. My father saw how hard I was struggling, so he started helping me. My tía Regina taught me a little Latin. My bisabuelo Metatron

believed in a classical education. Regina first learned to read with a teacher who stayed on the hacienda. She always says, “rancho,” but they raised cattle, so I imagine it was more than that. Father Juan Bosco has promised to teach me Latin but so far nusquam. I remember my papá would stay up with me, no matter how tired we were, and my mother calling, “Get to bed.” He would light una velita if we did not have electricity and when the candle burned out, then it was time to sleep. By sunup we were all out there working in the fields.

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My mother never learned to read and did not care about books. My older sister, Karla, was a lot like our mother. She was a hard worker, too, but unlike our mother, she never complained about anything. If my hermana had an extra piece of fruit or gum, she would share it with me. When I was little she was the one who would give me a bath, outside in a tina. Karla never had any toys, so I was her doll. Then she started getting a bosom. My sister was still a child, twelve or thirteen years old. She would get so embarrassed. She was upset all the time. She did not want to go to school anymore. The other labor-camp niños teased her. I have not seen my hermana in about four years, Santito. Please pray for her. Mr. Vigil, my English teacher, said a serious young man like me who never smiles would probably appreciate the Russians. So he started me with Dostoyevsky's novels. I read The Idiot and el Gambler. Crime and Punishmentwas my favorite. “Do you think that by Raskolnikov turning himself in, God forgave him?” I asked Mr. Vigil. My English teacher thought for a moment, then he said in that very slow way of talking that he has, like he is thinking of not just one book but all the books he has ever read, “I don't know, Gabriel.” He is getting ready to retire soon. I hope our next teacher brings us up to the twentieth century. This is no reflection on the Russians, just on Mr. Vigil, who only likes very long books with a lot of details. I stopped in the middle of los Brothers Karamazov because of my papá's disappearance. It is hard for me to concentrate on anything anymore besides that. In el Padre Juan Bosco's library in his casita all he has are religious books. He said I could help myself to read anything I found interesting. He has a collection of Bibles. One is so old if you try to turn the pages the paper almost disintegrates, like dead moths’ wings between your fingers. He keeps it open to the Book of Psalms on a wooden bookstand on his desk. I had never been in a house where people owned their own books. I mean, so many. My tía Regina has a few. They are on the bookshelf next to the fireplace. I have read them all. I can stay up and read un libro entero in one night or at least by daybreak. If they are thick like Dostoyevsky's, then it takes me perhaps three nights. Afterward I must sleep. I sleep and sleep and then I start another book.

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After The Communist Manifesto I went on to the teachings of Mao Ze- dong. My father also had Das Kapital and some writings by Lenin and Engels. Everywhere we went to work, following the harvest, the books came with us. El Subcomandante Marcos was a hero of mi papá for so bravely pointing out to the world that the NAFTA agreement was not going to make things better for the Mayan people but worse. If it were not for my mother who said, “No, señor,” he would have gone down to Chiapas to join los Zapatistas in their battle against the government. I was only about five years old, but I remember them arguing about it. “My mother was an indígena,” he'd say. “My own grandfather, who thought he was the last of the great hacendados, threw us off his land because he didn't want us to inherit it.” I remember tanto, San Pío; even if I am not sixteen years old yet, sometimes I feel like I have lived many lifetimes, not just one. And not just my own. I remember my papá's stories. I remember, too, when I was left with my tía Regina when I was very little. I was so upset, being left behind. I was too small to understand how mis padrecitos were trying to spare me from working in los files. I did not think of it in terms of them having so little food or not enough wood for the stove or things like that once they got back to Chihuahua. I got into reading even more because then I would not have to think about when they were coming back for me. My tía Regina was always so good. It wasn't that. I just missed my mamá. I missed my papá, too. Like I missed how he would pick me up and carry me on his back, especially when I would get tired of working out in the pisca. I would cry like el chavalito that I was. My mother complained about everything. So she would say to me, “This is why you have to go to school, mi'jito. So you don't end up living the life of a burra, like your mamá.” That made me cry. It hurt to think of my mother as a mule. I cried a lot when my father told me she was not coming back for me. I cannot remember a time when I wasn't crying over something gone forever. But I am a man now almost, and I know that tears are useless. Mañana I promise, Santo apreciado, no reading, only meditating on virtues of penance.

Your most undeserving discípulo

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MIGUEL

We outgrew each other. That's what happened in my marriage. People talk about how a couple is supposed to grow to keep the relationship strong. Well, Crucita grew in her direction and I in mine. I got more involved in grassroots organizing and spent less time at home. She found comfort with a bubba preacher named Prescott from Silver City. All I gotta say is I hope he does not move into my house. “It's not your house anymore,” my ex says. I may have moved out, but

I still think I have something to say about it. “That's always been your problem, Mike,” she says. “You always got

something to say about everything.” I shared the rather shameful news of my wife's infidelity with Regina,

who somehow has managed to take over most of my life. Actually, she's not that kind of woman. I don't know what kind of woman she is but she's not the clinging type—that's clear. But that's how women do it. They sneak up on you. Before you know it, you're acting like a big tonto over them. Then, they got you hitched. Next thing you know, you're paying taxes on a house you don't even get to live in anymore. As for finding Redhead's brother, I said I'd help. He sounded like a righteous man, so I am sorry to even think it, but for my money, he's been long dead. My therapist thinks I'm afflicted with a “narcissist personality

disorder”—possibly. He didn't actually come out and say it. I snuck a glance at his notes one day during a session. He was getting over a bad cold and ran out of the room in the middle of a coughing fit. I kind of peeked into my file that he left on his chair. Great. So, that's the verdict, I thought, not as sure of myself at that point, as he thought I might be, and no longer having all that much confidence in my therapist, either.

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It was Crucita's idea that I get counseling. Maybe I am self-absorbed or maybe my affliction is paranoia but I felt I got no pity from Regina regarding my cheating wife. When a man comes out looking duped, women tend to feel sorry for him. They view him as a potentially good guy. Instead, she looked at me with those deep-set eyes of hers, which she seems to not even be conscious of what they could do to a man, and said, “Come on, Miguel, you know that everyone at the school thinks you're a Casanova. You've gone out with every single woman who's worked there.” Every single woman but her, that was. Now that I'm a divorced man I feel free to date whomever I please. But a Casanova? Ouch. Every time I start going out with a nice girl, she gets serious on me right away. Crucita was a nice girl. A nice girl who sprung on me she was pregnant just as I was about to apply for grad school. When I was in college I used to write poems about Zapata, Pancho Villa, Che Guevara—all my revolutionary heroes. “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” That's not a quote of mine but of Emiliano Zapata's. My own poetry stunk. Crucita followed me around everywhere. Girls love poets. You say, “I'm a poet,” and they say right away, “Write a poem for me,” or worse, “Write a poem about me.” Secretly, Crucita wanted me to give up all that “nonsense”—not just calling myself a poet but also my “radicalism.” She said I should buy us a big house and join the country club—spend my time golfing, her doing charity work. When I refused to live like that, she settled with living in Sunland Park next door to her folks. Her family convinced her that my teaching was a “noble profession” and even my involvement in community issues was nothing to snub her nose at. Maybe the kids gave her some satisfaction but I sure didn't. Then she became a born-again and gave her life meaning. That and her part-time crusade to end domestic violence everywhere. My own activism keeps me going, especially on those days when you question every decision for yourself that you've ever made. I'm one of the few people around here who still calls himself Chicano. A lot of people don't like that word. They don't get it. They think it means gangbanging. It's like one of those outdated labels that most people

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never understood and now everybody hates and has no use for. Like feminist. Half the women I know don't like that word, either, but when you ask them what it means, they say they don't really know. Things just keep closing in by the minute. One day the two-party system is gonna sound obsolete and even a bad idea. Mark my words.

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GABO

Mi Más Querido Santo,

One of the greatest favors for which I feel so indebted to our Lord is that His Majesty permits me to unburden myself to his servant in heaven. But today, Padre Pío, allow me to tell you about un regalo that He has brought us around here. Father Juan Bosco told me that los Hermanos Franciscanos encourage friendship. For this reason, I am most grateful that we now have others to share our humble vidas with. By we, I mean mi tía and myself. Sometimes I feel my aunt's loneliness like un león feroz slowly coming

toward us from far away. One day I'll have to leave her and then who will she have? Everyone needs familia. And when your familia goes away or when they die on you, then a good friend around helps. She always mentions la Señora Uriel, but they never see each other. “Too busy with work and life,” is what my tía has said about never seeing her only amiga. But my tía Regina has finally made herself a new friend in el Chongo Man. We know little about the schoolteacher but I sense in my heart he is well-meaning, even if he goes about it clumsily. My best friend is Jesse Arellano. (He is not well-meaning, Su Reverencia. Pero that is why I consider

him such a great gift from Our Lord. He stands in need of God's consolation. Please keep him in your prayers, Santito.) “Jesse Arellano as in the Arellanos, ese,” he said to me when we first

met on the basketball court at the Catholic high school in Santa Teresa. Being a private school, it has a very decent basketball court. Santa Teresa is the town between Cabuche and El Paso. It also shares la

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frontera with México. The Santa Teresa border isn't used for a lot except the business of the narcotraficantes. The sheriff's deputies drive around and harass us sometimes because we are out there playing on what they say is private property But usually they leave us alone when they see we are only trying to throw a few hoops. I looked at Jesse like he was talking to me in Greek. “What up?” he said. “You not from around here or somethin’? My older brother is El Toro Arellano… . You know, the guy who helped start los Palominos back in the day? He's doing time over there in La Tuna now… . Are you really that out of it, man, ¿o qué, ese?” My new friend was not exactly claiming he was one of the notorious Arellanos from Nuevo Laredo. Everyone along the borderlands has heard about esos narcos. He just left it open so that you might come to that conclusion yourself. Obviously, los Palominos counted on people being stupid. But one thing seemed obvious, Padre Pío. The Palominos were penny-ante gangbangers compared to los carteles grandes that reign over the borderlands. (Penny ante. I read that in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It is one of the libros Mr. Vigil passed on to me. But penny ante does not mean the Palominos are not locos.) Jesse forgave my ignorance regarding his status, he said, because I was so good at basketball. (I almost always win.) We have started meeting there now and then when I have time between my job and school and Jesse has time between his penny-ante activities. He has put aside the fact that I have plans on becoming un hermano of the Church. To him, that makes me a “nerd” or I have a lot of nerve. (He laughed after saying that because he thought it was funny that it rhymed.) One day, maybe to test out which it was, Jesse slammed the ball right at my face. Blood gushed out of my nose. “It was an acci—” he started to say, sniggering like it was not. Next thing I knew, Santito, he was pleading for me to let go when I had his neck locked between my thighs. (I learned that movida at school, trying to get on the wrestling team.) After that, there were no more accidental slam balls from my new best friend. Another time he said, “More than anything, I'm in awe of a guy who is

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voluntarily gonna be without a woman his whole life. Never. Not even once. Do you have to be a virgin before you go in?” he asked, tossing the ball from one of his boxy hands to the other. “ 'Cause if you don't, you better get you some before you do.” When my face went red Jesse really cracked up. I am not sure what the big deal is about sex, Padre Pío. I know I might be saying that because I do not have experience, but that is not the point. When you give yourself to Our Lord, desires of the flesh must be sacrificed. (… And be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. Corinthians Two, Chapter Six, Verse Seventeen.) “Not just sex,” I told mi amigo, “but you must keep away from alcohol, drugs, parties, all kinds of loud music, and cars with fancy hydraulics like yours and which you are so proud of. And while I am at it, you will not have use for sinful pride, either. You will have God to fulfill you.” I tried to explain it like that to Jesse with all the conviction I carry in my heart, Santo. Afterward, he just stared at me, like he does a lot. One of his eyes wanders, so it is not easy to tell if he is giving you a hard look or someone else. Then he spits out a big wad of phlegm and you move back anyway. “Man,” he said finally, “you are really weird.” As long as he does not try to get me in the gang. All we do is shoot hoops. And talk or “chill,” as he calls it. He tells me all about his “cool” world. “Sex and drugs, man. That's what counts, vato,” he says; and then he spits. Jesse himself knew a girl, in the biblical sense, when he was only eleven and was brought into los Palominos. He said his brother, El Toro, had been his sponsor. “You need someone to vouch for you,” he said. Not just anyone could join the gang. “You gotta have what it takes,” he says all the time. What it takes, from what he has told me, Padre Pío, is a wish for a life in prison or worse. When a chava gets brought into the gang it is truly a tragic fate cast upon a female. Except in the Old Testament I had never heard of such barbarism, Su Reverencia. He did not say rape. But that is what it is. What he said was that a girl throws a pair of dice and whatever number comes up, that is the number of guys who will have sex with her that

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night. Some of the girls are barely thirteen years old when they join. They also have to get “jumped in,” which meant that their future “sisters” all beat la chavita up together. I walked away from the ball court and leaned against the fence. I wanted to vomit. What kind of mother and father are at home, I kept thinking all that

night, who wouldn't ask what happened to their hija when she returned home half the chava she was when she left? Beaten up and raped by kids who told you that they were going to be your “familia” from now on. What kind of family does that? In my English class there is una chava who is in los Palominos. She

can hardly read. (They pass failing students at my school just to get rid of them, Padre Pío.) Everything comes hard to her, all the subjects, I mean. Tiny Tears already has a baby. I asked her one day if she was planning on getting married once she finished high school. She stared at me with almost a scowl, as if she resented my question. I wanted to ask if she even knew who the father was but I decided to leave her alone. Tiny Tears hardly ever speaks. But behind all the makeup I fear is a very scary girl. Su Reverencia, at night, as usted already knows, I devote prayers to

Jesse and his brother in prison and to all of los Palominos, for God's light to enter their demented souls. Even if they do not have mothers and fathers who care, I beseech God y todos los santos that they find a way to forgive themselves. Jesse likes to tell me he forgives me for being such a nerd. He says he hopes he never hears of me on the news that I only joined the Church to molest altarboys. Then he laughs that loud cackling laugh that reminds me of a hyena's. I used to hear hyenas when we crossed over through el desierto

toward California when I was un chavito. They frightened me for sure— laughing all together, somewhere in the dark, getting closer. They travel only in packs. That's how they can be so vicious—the fact that there are many of them, they can get hold of a man and just tear him to pieces. They could eat a man vivo and afterward, laugh, todos juntos. San Pío, thank el Señor for me, por favor, for all His blessings and

considerations of His imperfect servant, but most especially for sending me this boy who is a mirror to my own spiritual shortcomings.

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Su servidor, undeserving as I am

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REGINA

I was tilling the soil for this year's garden when Gabo showed up with someone I never saw before to lend us a hand. His name is Jesse Arellano. He is a thin young man with a shaved

head and growing a goatee like Gabo's, except that it looks drawn on with charcoal. His first facial hair, and apparently, it was also his first time working on a garden. When he started to rake I noticed on his right hand between the thumb and index finger a blue tattoo of a cross. It was crudely drawn with dots in between the lines of the cross. I've seen that cross around a long time. It means you belong to a gang. That also means I wish he wasn't the only friend my sobrino has ever brought home. But Jesse did his best to help rake up the dead leaves, pine needles, and dried mesquite that had blown in and collected in the garden during winter, so I kept silent. Gabo was fixing the gate to our garden just like his father would have

done. Just before spring we mend it and every following winter the winds yank it every which way. We needed to reinforce the fence with new chicken wire, too, to keep the cottontails out. I've been preparing my own mulch since I first took over this place. I

use compost from food scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, and bring over cow or horse manure from nearby ranchos and mix it all up as top dressing. We loaded wheelbarrows and dumped it in the garden to fertilize the sand. That's all the soil we have here up in the mesa, where what grows normally is a whole lot of cactus and creosote with no help at all. If you are serious about your garden you start getting ready about a

month before spring. That's when it begins to look like winter's gone but isn't yet, because on any night you might get a frost that will kill

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everything you just put into the ground with such loving care. Loving care is what I try to bring to whatever I do—otherwise why bother? “This year I'm planting three different types of tomatoes,” I told Jesse, “because Gabo loves his tomatoes. He eats them like fruit.” Jesse stopped raking and gave me a peculiar look as if up until then he had thought tomatoes came from cans. “Well, that is because they are fruta,” said Gabo, who I have noticed is becoming kind of a know-it-all as his sixteenth birthday approaches. I gave him one of my looks and he went back to his nailing. Seeing him hunched over I remembered exactly the time when Rafa taught him how to hold a hammer. Gabo was about eight years old. “It's heavy,” I said to my brother. “He's too chiquito to hold up such a heavy tool. I'll do it.” I rushed to help. My brother put his palm up, while insisting that the child draw back the hammer with two tiny hands. Concentrating, Gabo's boquita was all puckered like an old man's. And then, bam, he got the nail square on the head. “¡Eso!” Rafa shouted, lifting up his son in the air and swinging him around. Gabo never let go of the hammer. All summer crop dusters will fly low, spraying pesticides on the nearby farmlands, not to mention on the workers. A neighbor here on the mesa whose house is hidden by big pines sunbathes in the nude. The crop dusters, she says, circle over her property when she's out there. I don't care what they see as long as they don't accidentally spray any poison on me, or my plants. This year I'm thinking of joining a farmers’ market and taking my pesticide-free vegetables to sell. Miguel told me about a cooperative of indio coffee-bean growers in Oaxaca that ended up making a prosperous international business just because they couldn't afford pesticides and produced organic coffee. I hadn't thought of myself as an organic farmer until Miguel put it that way. One day me and him drove down to El Paso again. We drove up and down the street of los coyotes. We never saw nothing. What were we going to see? The window blinds were down on the house. Doors shut. No sign or nothing to give us any clues about what to do about mi her- mano. While we cruised around I did get to hear all of Miguel's life without

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asking. He just went from one subject to another on his own. It didn't even seem to matter that I was there. Miguel just likes to hear himself talk. From organic farmers and his concerns about the environment to what he thinks about the immigration issue. He talked like he was in front of his classroom. Me, with my hands folded on my lap, I looked like the pupil. When people talk that much around me I tend to get inhibited. And irritated. It comes from living with Mamá all my life. Who put the nickel in the nickelodeon? I used to say to myself about her. “What's wrong?” Miguel asked. “That cat got my tongue.” “What cat?” He smiled. My friend was teasing me but I didn't know it. Not knowing when you're being teased also comes from being alone for inordinate amounts of time. “You know? The cat,” I said. “I'm not a teacher like you, with always something clever to say on the top of your tongue.” Miguel corrected me. “On the tip of your tongue.” “See what I mean?” I said and then I shut up for a long while. So Miguel kept talking, telling me all about his comunidad and all that they do to clean up the environment. And maybe in an attempt to make no big deal out of it, he slipped in the fact that he was a divorced man. “Yeah, my ex-wife and kids live across the street from me,” he said. “Oh,” I said. If I were the bold type I would have said, “Oh?” to get more information. He looked at me for a second as if he expected I might have a question. I didn't. I had a million. A million questions I didn't ask. Then he went back to talking about his community activism.