Valentine(80)
He picks up an empty suitcase and sets it on the bed. Phoebe, he says again, that son of a bitch is going to pay for this every day until he’s dead. Believe it.
And maybe he will pay, one way or another, Victor thinks, but that’s got nothing to do with him, or Glory. The cops and lawyers and teachers and churches, the judge and jury, the people who raised that boy and then sent him out into the world, to this town—every one of them is guilty.
They load their suitcases and boxes into the back of El Tiburón, covering everything with a tarp weighed down by red bricks. It is just after four o’clock when they walk over to the motel office, and the desk clerk is counting his drawer when they hand over the keys to their rooms, first the young man, then the girl who comes downstairs every day around noon wearing the same Led Zeppelin T-shirt, towel in one hand, bottle of Dr Pepper in the other, and lately, a portable cassette player slung over one shoulder. In a few hours, the boy will wish he’d stopped what he was doing for a minute and thanked them for always paying their bill on time, wished them good luck wherever they were headed next.
*
The road map, when Victor lays it across the steering wheel, is two feet wide and three feet long. He folds it in half, then quarters, and then again until it fits easily in Glory’s hands. He points to the bottom edge of the fold, his index finger lightly tracing the border, a pale blue line that wanders between the two countries, its gentle bends and turns becoming sharper and more complicated as it meanders toward the gulf. It is a line that grows thinner each time the map is revised, Victor has noticed, the river diminished by dredging and fences and dams. It’s been at least a hundred years since old ladies sat on their porches just a few feet from the river’s edge and watched steamboats carry passengers to and from the Gulf while live jazz or country or Tejano drifted across the water, the music lingering long after the boats had passed by.
Two hours south of Laredo, there’s a ferry at Los Ebanos, Victor tells his niece. It can carry a dozen people and two cars on each trip across the river. Victor runs his index finger along a series of state highways and back roads marked by black lines wending their way across the desert and through the Chisos Mountains, stopping at Lake Amistad and picking up again on the other side only to spend another six hundred miles wandering back and forth across the border. Victor fetches the map from his niece’s hand, flips it over, and points at the jagged edge of land hugging the sea. And then we drive down to Oaxaca and Puerto ángel, he says, fifteen hundred miles and roads so bumpy your nalgas will hurt for a week. He glances at his watch and looks toward the western sky. He does not want to be driving through this part of West Texas at night with Glory in the car, if he can help it. If we hurry, he says, we can be in Del Rio before dark.
*
On a two-lane highway somewhere between Ozona and Comstock, along a stretch of road so remote that they haven’t seen another car for nearly an hour, the El Camino starts hesitating on accelerations. When Victor swears and pumps the gas, the engine coughs and sputters like an old man, but they press on for another fifty miles. The sun is hovering just above the horizon when he mutters something about a clogged fuel filter and starts looking for a wide spot where he can ease the car off the road. Glory is half-dozing in the passenger seat with her cheek pressed against the warm window, trying to imagine what her mother’s hometown might look like, whether it will be much different from the old photos Alma keeps in a cigar box. Her hair has grown out enough to look like she means for it to be that way, and there is a fine sheen of sweat on her neck, even as the coming night threatens to send temperatures plummeting.
While her uncle curses and fiddles under the hood of El Tiburón, Glory steps outside and stands on her toes until she loses her balance. She’d love a cigarette, but Victor says a girl her age has no business smoking. Instead, she walks to the back of the truck and lowers the tailgate. She pulls a pack of gum out of her pocket and stuffs three pieces in her mouth. When she sits down, the metal is warm against the backs of her legs. Sweat gathers along her bra line and waistband, and she rubs hard at her eyes. ?Pedazo de mierda! Victor tells the car. You’ll never be a classic.
A dead armadillo lies on the gravel shoulder a few feet away. Above the animal’s crushed armor, two buzzards circle lazily overhead. When the wind picks up just enough to gently lift the hair on the back of her neck and Glory notices that the wind is blowing the animal’s smell away from her, she lifts her face to the empty blue sky and breathes deeply.
Díos mío, Victor mutters, a flathead screwdriver tucked behind his ear. He tries to clamp a hose with a pair of pliers, but when he shuts the fuel line off and gasoline vapors rush to fill his nose, he staggers away from the engine, choking and spitting. Sit tight, Glory, he gasps, we’ll get her fixed up. He tinkers for a few more minutes and then pokes his head out the side of the car’s hood. Go fetch me a stick about four feet long and this wide—he holds up his pinkie finger to show her the width—so I can run it down the fuel line and clear the blockage.
Glory climbs onto the bed of the El Camino and stands up to face the big bunch of nothing that surrounds them on all sides. They haven’t seen a pumpjack since Ozona, and there are no buildings out here, not even a little farmhouse in the distance. The only signs that people have ever been here is the barbed-wire fence that runs along the highway for as far as she can see, and an open gate about fifty yards away. This is different, she tells herself when her heart starts hammering against her sternum. Out there in the oil patch, the earth was an empty table. Here the land is rocky and uneven in some places, flat and bald and red-faced in others. In the loosely scattered cactus patches, tiny blooms cover Texas barrels and fishhook and lace-spine. On the highway’s shoulder, a purple tansy no more than an inch tall or wide has shoved its way through a narrow crack in the caliche, a joyful noise in the midst of all that brown, and as Victor promised, there is a patch of buffalo bur with its bright yellow flowers and tough dark green leaves. When the plant dries out in a few months and its shallow roots begin to wither, the wind will tear it from the earth and send it rolling and tumbling across the land, a dead and dying conflagration of sticks and leaves set rootless upon the world—a tumbleweed. This is not the same place, Glory says out loud when the thin black hairs on her arms begin to prickle and stand up. He is locked up in Fort Worth.