Amigoland Part 14

"I bought two tickets," the pa.s.senger stammered in his broken Spanish. "Two tickets," he repeated, pointing to the guitar case in the next seat and then holding up two fingers.

The soldier shook his head. "Identification," he said. "Visa."

He stood there, waiting for the man to produce the doc.u.ments. After searching through his front and back pockets, the traveler located the papers in the side pocket of his cargo pants.

"Citizens?"

Don Celestino and Don Fidencio turned to see the other soldier standing in the aisle between their seats. Socorro nodded first, and then the two men.

"Identification?"

She handed him the ID card she had been holding since the bus pulled over. The soldier glanced at it, then handed it back. He held his position as Don Celestino searched his pockets for the missing card. Don Fidencio was rummaging through the plastic bag with the medicines.

"We just got married," Socorro announced, as she placed her hand on Celestino's leg.

"Married?" The soldier took a closer look at the groom.

Don Celestino looked up at her for a second and then turned to smile at the soldier. "Yes, but with all the celebrating I think I forgot my wallet."

"And when was it that you said you were married?" he asked Socorro.

"A few hours ago, just this morning," she answered.

"A morning wedding then?"

"Yes, so everyone could still get to their work."

The soldier tilted back his helmet and regarded the one ring that she owned and that only a minute earlier she had switched over from the other hand. The soldier looked over the seat at the old man traveling with them, then turned when his partner walked up.

"These two say they were married today."

"Married?" The second soldier leaned back to look at the newlyweds.

"That's what she said, 'married,' " the first soldier confirmed. Then, turning back to the bride, he asked, "Where was this that you say you got married to this man?"

"Matamoros. It was a simple ceremony. Only my father and aunt. My brothers couldn't come."

"I thought you said there was a lot of celebrating," the soldier said, then checked to see if the old man behind them had anything to add.

"For the family, yes," Don Celestino clarified. "They were all very excited to see us get married."

"So this was a few hours ago that you say the two of you were married?" the second one asked, also taking time to glance over the seat at the other pa.s.senger.

"Already I know what you must be thinking," Don Fidencio interrupted, leaning forward. "Now imagine my reaction when I heard my only daughter wanted to marry a man almost the same age as her father."

"n.o.body's talking to you," Don Celestino snapped into the tiny s.p.a.ce between the seats.

"Listen to how my new son-in-law speaks to me. Listen, listen to him and tell me what I can expect later on, if today is only the first day."

"This man is your father?" the first soldier asked.

She looked over the seat back at Don Fidencio, then smiled and nodded.

"Only because she had no place to leave me, for that reason she brought me on this trip. 'To celebrate, to celebrate, we have to celebrate!' 'To celebrate, to celebrate, we have to celebrate!' Who knows where they'll put me to sleep tonight and what will go on between them - in what ways they will be celebrating! Can you imagine? I thank G.o.d that He took her mother and she's not here to experience such things." Who knows where they'll put me to sleep tonight and what will go on between them - in what ways they will be celebrating! Can you imagine? I thank G.o.d that He took her mother and she's not here to experience such things."

The second soldier looked at the first one and motioned to him that they had wasted enough time. Another bus was pulling into the checkpoint.

Don Celestino waited until they were off the bus before he turned around in his seat. "No more from you."

"You should be thanking me," his brother said.

"For insulting and embarra.s.sing me?"

"He saved us," Socorro said. "What does it matter what he said?"

They quieted after this, but the incident kept stirring inside her, especially Don Celestino's reaction when she first told the soldier about the wedding. It was the same face he had made that time she'd added too much salt to the rice.

30.

The lush mountains of the Sierra Madre Oriental, their tops covered in the dark and stirring clouds, formed a striking backdrop to the rather plain northern city of Ciudad Victoria. Though it was still late afternoon, the streetlights had turned on early due to the overcast sky. The station served as a stopping point for those traveling south into the interior - San Luis Potosi, Aguascalientes, Queretaro - and those continuing north toward the border. It was the other road, the one headed northwest, that led to Linares.

The old man sat in the cafe and sipped his coffee as he watched the flow of travelers move from the entrance to the terminal, and a few minutes later watched a new flow of travelers go in the opposite direction. Most of the people moved too quickly, particularly the porters with their hand trucks, for him to take any real notice of them. Closer, though, a gringo with short, spiky hair leaned his bicycle against one of the stone benches. He wore tight black shorts and a bright-yellow shirt that clung to his body. His tennies had cleats that clicked each time he walked around the bicycle. The old man noticed that the gringo's legs were smooth-smooth-smooth, like a woman's shaved legs. Personally, he had never cared if his women shaved their legs or not, though he wasn't about to complain if they were already in bed when he made this discovery. One of them, he thought it might have been a woman who worked in a fabric shop downtown, used to shave them and then ask him to feel them. So he felt them. Yes, they were smooth. Did she want a prize for this? Okay then... first prize for the smoothest legs at the Rio Motel, room sixteen, or whatever it was that afternoon. What he didn't like was one afternoon for her legs to be smooth and the next to be rough like he was rubbing up against a shrimper's face. If they were going to be smooth one day, then they needed to stay nice and smooth the next time. A man should be able to expect certain things.

Before he knew it, the gringo was standing before him, leaning over the cord that separated the cafe from the rest of the lobby. He spoke in broken Spanish, stopping to look through a tattered phrase book, but none of it was making any sense to the old man until he said the word boleto and pointed at the ticket counter. He considered telling the poor gringo that he spoke English, if only to stop him from further mangling the language. Yes, yes, the old man finally nodded; he would watch his bicycle while he went to buy a ticket. It was then that he realized he had somehow become the watchman for people with better things to do than sit around and make sure no one stole their belongings. After his brother and the girl had helped him off the bus and into the terminal, they had gone off to buy the tickets for the final leg of the trip; the leather pouch and the plastic bag with their water and snacks lay on the table before him. His own plastic bag with the pill dispenser sat on his lap so he wouldn't forget it. As if they would ever let this happen.

He opened a newspaper someone had left behind on the next chair. In the photos on the second page, a dead teenage girl, her torso draped in what looked like a black plastic trash bag, lay on a small dune. Another photo showed her wearing a formal dress and tiara. He began to read about the tragedy, a strangulation, and about the young girl's distraught mother, then about the possible suspects. But after the first few lines, he remembered how reading long pa.s.sages in Spanish, or English for that matter, had become a ch.o.r.e to him. He had to read one sentence, then the next, then start over at the beginning, this time hoping to keep the information straight in his head by the time he reached the end of the paragraph. With the morning obituaries, he cared about only three things: name, age, place of death. The name was easy enough to spot. The age was usually the only number in the paragraph, unless instead of the actual age they put the deceased's date of birth, which meant he had to do the math, and this, too, was work for him. If there was somewhere that he could jot down the dates, he might go ahead and subtract the numbers, but if he was on the pot, then forget it - they died when they died. And the place of death concerned him only in that he wanted to know if it was somebody down the hall from him, one of The Turtles or some other somebody. This, he had learned, was the only way to find out, because the girls who worked there weren't going to say anything. By his way of thinking, they should have posted the news up on the bulletin board, not some other useless information like the schedule for the next sing-along with The Jesus Christ Loves Everybody Women. And who really cared to read the forecast by looking to see if the aides had posted the smiley sun made with bright-yellow construction paper or the dark rain clouds made with cotton b.a.l.l.s on black construction paper? They hardly went outside to begin with.

Another group of pa.s.sengers arrived in the terminal lobby. Two teenage boys with bright-blue soccer jerseys were the first to make it through with their backpacks. Next came a man dragging an oversize suitcase, while his wife carried the baby and pulled along another boy. But then an elderly couple, each using a wooden cane and holding on to each other, held back the flow of pa.s.sengers, forcing them to pause while the seniors found their way through the lobby. A young man who appeared to be their grandson carried a valise and a nylon woven bag. The old man and woman turned in the direction of the cafe, until the grandson redirected them toward the exit.

"Buy my Chiclets."

Don Fidencio turned to look at the little boy, making sure he wasn't the same one from before. This one seemed to have longer hair, but it was matted and crusty, with a greenish stain just below his left ear. His T-shirt was tattered along the collar and it looked as though he had dripped mustard across the front. He was standing on his left foot while his right leg formed a triangle against his other leg.

"Buy my Chiclets."

"No, go away."

"But why?"

"Go ask your brother."

"I only have sisters." He held up his grubby fingers. "Five of them, all of them bigger."

"Doesn't matter, I still don't want your candies."

"But Chiclets are gum, not candy." He held out the small carton, balanced on the palm of his hand, as evidence of what he said.

"I don't like gum."

"Buy some Chiclets and you can give them to your friends."

"Friends?" He laughed. "I have no friends anymore."

"But why?"

"Your friends go away when you get old, that's why."

"To where do they go?"

"On vacation."

"On a bus, like you?"

"Yes, but the bus only goes one way."

The little boy thought about this before he gave a little shrug.

"Then buy my Chiclets and that way you make new friends."

"Ya, leave me alone."

"Don't be mean, sir. Buy my Chiclets." He turned his face to one side and blinked his big doe eyes at him. The old man knew this must have been something they trained all of them to do before sending them out with their first box of Chiclets.

"I have no money."

"And that?" The boy pointed toward some coins the girl had left behind after she bought the coffee. His brother had also given him a couple of small bills, but those he was smart enough to stuff in his pocket.

"That's not my money. It belongs to a friend."

"You said you had no friends."

The old man glanced around to see where the h.e.l.l the girl and his brother might be. When he turned back, the security guard had the little boy by the arm, forcing him to stand on both legs and drop a purple packet from his carton.

"He was going to buy my Chiclets," the boy said. "Right, sir?"

"Was he bothering you?" the guard asked. "Already I had told him to not be bothering the pa.s.sengers. But they keep coming, like the flies. You chase them out one door and they come in through the other one. They don't understand anything about rules, no matter how many times you explain the way things work around here."

"He said he was going to buy lots of them, but he couldn't decide which ones he liked more - right, sir?" The boy reached for the old man's arm, but the guard pulled him back. "I told him, 'Pick the green ones, my favorites' - right, sir? Right, you said you wanted to buy?"

Don Fidencio looked at the boy and then up at the guard.

"Come on," the guard said, yanking on the boy's arm. "You come here only to tell me more lies, so you can do what you want. Maybe someday you can learn the rules and how to respect other people."

"But he said he wanted to, I heard him." The little boy was dragging his feet, making his body go limp.

"Yes, like the man and woman you were bothering earlier." The guard pulled harder now. "Everybody, everybody wants to buy your gum."

"Wait," the old man called out.

"What is it?" The guard had the boy halfway out of the cafe.

"I told you he wanted to buy, I told you," the young one responded.

"How much did you say they were, the green ones?" He gestured for the boy to come closer.

"Only one peso, sir, that way you buy lots of them and give them to all your new friends. You will see how many friends you can make with the Chiclets."

Don Fidencio gazed at the coins on the table, unsure what denominations they might be. There was a larger goldish-looking coin with an eagle on it, then a copper coin with the image of a man, an indio, it looked like, and finally several smaller coins with what looked like wreaths of some sort. "This," the old man said, "whatever this will buy." He slid the coins across the table as though he had more important things to do than to be counting dirty coins in a bus station.

"All of it?" The boy was back to standing on one leg.

"Some for now, and the others I can save." He waited for him to take the coins.

"Yes or no?" the guard demanded. "We're not going to stand here all day, selling your Chiclets."

After the boy added up all the money, he looked back at his carton and started counting the packets, but then stopped suddenly and placed the whole carton on the table. "You see?" he said to the guard. "He wanted to buy all of them."

"Now at least say 'thank you' to the man."

"Thank you, sir," the boy said, and scurried off from the table and the guard.

The old man bent over to recover the packet that had fallen earlier. He was returning it to the carton when his brother and the girl walked up.

"I thought you didn't like Chiclets," she said.

"I bought them just to pa.s.s the time."

"Well, now you have more time," his brother said. "The next bus leaves in an hour but doesn't get to Linares until after dark. We should just find a hotel so we can rest, then leave early in the morning."

31.

After staring at the grimy keypad for a couple of minutes, Socorro finally took out a pen and, on the palm of her hand, jotted down her mother's number. She was standing on the corner outside their hotel, which had fifty channels on the television but no phone in the room. The noise from the traffic and the nearby torta stand was loud enough that she wondered if she shouldn't have walked an extra block to the plaza and found another pay phone. Before this, she had gone to the pharmacy so she could buy the calling card she was now inserting into the card reader. The number on her palm still looked strange to her, like she was off a digit, but she couldn't say which. She blamed her forgetfulness on all the traveling they had done that day. Who wouldn't be a little disoriented so far from home?

As the phone rang, she imagined, as she had most of the day, how exactly she would go about telling them where she was. It was still too early for her mother or her aunt to be missing her. She had thought she would ask her mother about her day, how she was feeling, if the swelling in her feet had gone away, if she had taken her afternoon nap and remembered to keep her feet elevated. There was no need to rush into the news about the trip. It would be like peeling an onion, layer by layer, and slowly revealing what had occurred and how, so her mother could see that the sudden trip actually wasn't so sudden. There was the news of Celestino's brother, the poor man living in a home filled with the elderly and infirm. There was the news of their grandfather and how he was kidnapped as a child by the Indians and taken from his ranchito in Mexico to the United States. There was the news of the terrible things that had happened to the other people in their family. There was the news of Don Fidencio's promise to his grandfather to someday return to the ranchito in his place. There was the news of his need to fulfill this promise but also the unfortunate condition of his health (something her mother would surely be able to understand), and how if the poor old man were going to make the trip, he would need help. There was more, but with these details she thought her mother would accept the rest of what she needed to tell her. And perhaps her plan would have worked if she hadn't blurted the whole thing out as soon as her mother answered the phone.

"And then, what do you want from me?" her mother said, only after what seemed like an interminable pause. "What did you call here for? Not to ask for my advice, not to see if this was a good idea."