Valentine(83)

Pues, the rancher and his wife came home—they’d only been down at the creek washing some bed linens—and discovered their baby. The poor thing was so thoroughly shot through with arrows that they had to bury her basket and all. A regiment of Texas Rangers heard about this. Half the regiment was old Confederates and the other half was old Blues, but they were one hundred percent in agreement that there was a score to settle, so they rode around the Panhandle until they found an Arapahoe woman with her baby. They figured they’d riddle the child with bullets and call it even. But some of the men didn’t feel right about this. Filling a baby with bullets was barbaric, they decided, and these men were not barbarians. Instead, they decided, they would deliver a single shot to the baby’s forehead. But they didn’t account for how large the cartridge, or how small the baby, and they were shocked when the baby’s head split like a melon—again Victor pauses—that too was your abuela’s phrase, not mine.

Now the two groups of men were even, but the whole affair had been much uglier and messier than anybody expected and no one was really surprised when both babies began to haunt the men. Every town they rode into, every camp they set up—there were the babies. The men would spend their days killing each other and dragging their wounded off the field, and there would be the babies hovering at the edge of things, watching them. When night fell, the babies would begin to cry—an ungodly, agonizing wail that didn’t stop until the sun came up the next morning.

And the mothers must have died not long after their babies, because suddenly there were two young women hanging around the campfire and they weren’t nearly as peaceful as the babies had been. They shrieked and howled, their skirts rustling when they jerked men out of their tents and pulled them by their feet into the campfire. They untied horses and sent them flying across the plains, leaving the men stranded. Some of the men killed themselves, but most of them wandered around out there until they died from thirst or choked to death in one of the dust storms the mothers had wrought. When the women hurled lightning at the men, prairie fires spread so quickly they couldn’t outrun them. When rain and ice came down on the men’s heads, they drowned in flash floods or froze to death. Within five years, every man on either side was dead, and the mothers, having settled the score, took their babies and returned to the grave.

And this is where your abuela would lean forward and shake her finger at your mother and me and say, No matarás. Glory, you better start cracking those Spanish books if you’re going to live in Mexico. Victor leans forward and peers at a small group of lights ahead. Laredo, he says. You want to stop for a bite to eat?

But Glory doesn’t answer. What kind of woman, she wonders, would tell such a story to little kids? The kind Glory wishes she had known.

The lights of Laredo rise up and grow brighter. They drive quietly and after a while, Glory scrounges around in her backpack for her cassette player and a tape. She slides the tape into the player and hits play. Lydia Mendoza, the Lark of the Border, Victor cries out, and she is surprised to hear a tremor in his voice. Una vez nada más en mi huerto brilló la esperanza . . .

Glory rolls down her window and chews her lip. The recording is grainy and the words are hard to make out, but she understands a few words, nada más and esperanza—there was always at least one Esperanza in every classroom at Gonzalez Elementary—and now Glory is holding her arm out the window, spreading her fingers apart so the wind streams through them. She is glad she’s not dead, but she would give a lot to be able to haunt Strickland for the rest of his life. Hope shines, she thinks the singer may have said, but Glory can’t be sure and she doesn’t want to ask her uncle, whose eyes have begun to glisten in the dark, and maybe it doesn’t matter on this starry night. Maybe the woman’s voice, and the gentle scratching of her fingers on the guitar strings, is enough.

They arrive in Laredo after midnight, where they grab a bite at the truck stop and take turns napping in the parking lot. But only for an hour, Victor says. He wants to be at the crossing before sunrise, and they are still nearly two hundred miles away.

Once they leave town, they drive so close to the border they are not always sure whether they are in Texas or Mexico. The sky is black as hematite, and the names on the road signs are no help—San Ygnacio, Zapata, and Ciudad Miguel Aleman—each marking a wide spot in the road named for stolen rivers or local war heroes or ranchers who died young.

Are we still in Texas? Glory asks every few minutes.

Yes, he tells her.

How about now?

Pues, who knows? Texas, Mexico, it’s all the same dirt.

She tells him about the rattlesnake, how large it was, how it moved like a river. She does not tell him that she had only been that afraid on one other occasion in her life. That snake must have been six feet long, she says, and as thick as my leg.

No shit? Victor says. You’re going to be a legend. Glory Ramírez, the girl who stared down a fifteen-foot rattlesnake.

It wasn’t fifteen feet long, she says. There’s no such thing as a snake that big.

Who cares? That’s how a tall tale works, mi vida.

Most of the stars are gone when they turn off the highway and drive past half a dozen little wooden houses in the still sleeping village of Los Ebanos. At the ferry, five men sit on folding chairs outside a small, festive shack adorned with beer signs and Christmas lights. Another man leans against a two-hundred-year-old ebony tree, the red cherry of his cigarette beating back the dark. A steel cable thick as a man’s fist is wrapped around the tree. It stretches across the Río Bravo and encircles its twin on the other side, where a dozen men and women are already standing on the ferry. It is a border crossing that has been unmanned for as long as anyone can remember. In dry years, in the places where the river becomes barely more than a stream, cattle wander back and forth in search of the sweet blue grama grass. Men and women work on one side and live on the other, and kids sometimes reach their tenth birthdays before they figure out which side of the river they belong to.