The breeze blew in Lilia’s face, and she waved at a passing boat. At that moment all seemed just right in Puerto Isadore, and Lilia could not imagine living elsewhere.
LILIA WALKED home alone by the light of the moon. Perhaps Héctor was awake, somewhere safe, pondering the moon, too. As she rounded a bend, she encountered an old man leading a burro so pale it glowed ghost-like in the moonlight. She nodded, and the man returned her greeting with a toothless grin. Neither he nor his feeble burro, a sack of cabbages on its back, made a sound as they traveled the dusty path. The man wore thin sandals, a dingy t-shirt, and baggy trousers. The donkey’s eyes were closed, and Lilia wondered if he had eyes at all, and where the two could be heading at this hour. After they had passed, she turned to be sure she had seen them, that they were not spirits. The burro’s wiry tail did not twitch, but lay against his white hind-quarters perfectly still, as if all the animal’s energy were necessary for walking. Lilia watched them disappear around the curve in the road and wondered if burros experienced emotions. If so, she imagined he felt like a weak soul being led nowhere.
As Lilia neared the courtyard, the sound of Alejandra’s crying startled her. Crucita never let the baby get so worked up, and the wailing disturbed Lilia. “Crucita?” Lilia called, scooping up the child from her basket beneath the tree in the courtyard and whispering, “There, there” and clicking her tongue in the way she did to soothe her.
Stew, bubbling unattended, boiled over and caked on the pot, and Lilia’s foreboding turned to panic. Clutching Alejandra, she dashed to pull the pot from the coals, and in the midst of shouting her grandmother’s name, tripped over a crumpled Crucita. Dizzy and horrified, Lilia nearly dropped Alejandra as she knelt by her grandmother.
“Crucita. Crucita. Crucita!” She was screaming it now, as if the old woman were asleep and deaf and only the loudest shouts would rouse her. Alejandra began to cry, but Lilia ignored her, placing the child on the floor beside her. Lilia took Crucita’s face in her hands, gently at first then with more force, squeezing her cheeks. Her skin was cool and her apron and dress seemed too big, as if they were the oversized costume of a child pretending to be a grandmother. How thin Crucita looked. She did not move. Tears streaked Lilia’s cheeks, blurring her sight so that all seemed distorted. She continued to caress Crucita’s face, her brow, her arms, her hands, repeating her name countless times.
The awkward twist to her limbs, the angle at which her neck bent, all told Lilia her grandmother was in no pain. She knelt, stroking Crucita. She raised her into a sitting position, held Crucita close, rubbing her back gently as Crucita had done to Lilia since birth, to make things better.
The moon passed across the kitchen window, and, still, Lilia sat on the floor, the pot of burnt stew long cold. Crucita’s head fell awkwardly onto Lilia’s shoulder, not as Alejandra’s often did, as if seeking solace, but like something spilled, wayward.
When had Crucita’s weary head last sought a shoulder? With her fingers, Lilia combed her grandmother’s disheveled hair, then slowly unraveled the familiar, gray braid, now loose and damp from Lilia’s tears. She reworked the long strands like ribbons into a tight, beautiful braid, fingering the now-respectable plait until her thumb grew numb, and her tears ceased. Alejandra had long since fallen asleep, but when she began to stir, Lilia held her, too. Clutching her dead grandmother to her side and her infant daughter in her lap, Lilia felt a stranger to herself. She knew her life would forever more consist of three periods: time with Crucita, this day of Crucita’s passing, and the future without her.
3
HÉCTOR TRIED to imagine the words he would use to describe this to Lilia. His chest could explode any moment from the hot air in the cramped compartment, the smell of other men’s sweat, from both oppressive heat and palpable nervousness. When the last couple of men crawled in, Héctor’s chest tightened with panic. The space simply could hold no more. The boots of the men on either side of him brushed against his ears. He tried to remain motionless out of courtesy, to avoid scraping the ears of the heads on either side of his feet. The already dark box in which they lay became seamless as the coyote closed the hole. The unmistakable sound of welding torch hissed beneath them, Héctor’s fate now literally sealed.
At each stage of his journey, Héctor had felt more committed, like he could not turn back, but now, his emotions were different. He imagined screaming, pleading his change of mind. Likely his screams would be ignored if they were even heard at all. And what if, somehow, the coyote were to hear him and open the sealed underbelly, then what? He would undoubtedly take Héctor out back, shoot him, and dump him in the day’s trash. Each man must surely have been thinking the situation through as Héctor did.
The roar deafened Héctor when the idling truck engine shifted into gear. The truck shook and rumbled and began moving, and Héctor was surprised that he could not tell, could not remember, if the front of the truck were to his right or to his left. He tried to breathe deeply, to slow his heartbeat, to relax. Mere centimeters separated the tip of his nose from the ceiling of this compartment, and he wondered what happened if a fat man were to seek a coyote. A fat man could never fit here, but a man of great girth would have no reason to leave Mexico. The poor, lean, hard-working men, however, had reason to head north. Héctor wondered, had he been fat, if the coyote would have accepted him.
Héctor had no way to mark the passing of time, no radio, no sights, nothing save the occasional turn left or right, deceleration or acceleration, the feel of a dirt road compared to pavement compared to gravel. These variations were the only changes in the infinitely black undercarriage of the truck.
No one spoke. Héctor had heard tales of men, wrongly presumed dead, buried alive. He understood how such a man felt. He could scratch at the floor or the ceiling until his nails were gone, his fingers bloody nubs, his voice hoarse, his throat raw, but nothing would help him. His situation would be unchanged from the effort. But I have hope, I have hope, he said over and over to himself. The words became his mantra, his silent lips forming the word hope, hope, hope, for what could have been hours, or minutes: all sense of place and time and reality had been sealed off with the final flames of the welding torch.
Héctor had no way of knowing whose head was just beyond the feet brushing his right ear, but after a while—he could not know how long—he discerned words rising above the rumbling of the truck, prayers uttered in the darkness. The anonymous voice floated soulful, desperate and crying. Soon others joined in until the incessant rumblings of the truck’s engine mixed with the desperate prayers of ten strangers in unison. Men cried, but the rhythm was soothing, somehow, with the repetition of the Hail Marys along with the vibrations of the truck. Maybe the comfort sprung from the act of ten strangers reaching out to their god in the most sincere and desperate way.
Héctor felt trapped somewhere between life and death, suspended among the souls of others, suffering similar fates. Ave Maria. Hail Mary, full of grace, Hail Mary full of grace. Hail Mary full of grace.
Would they be here days or merely hours? Héctor’s thoughts shifted between surreal images of purgatory and the very earthly thoughts of relieving himself. The acrid scent of urine permeated the musty air, mingled with sweat. The first of the men had pissed, maybe from fear. Héctor had heard of men doing so, or maybe he simply had to go and could wait no longer. Why wait? If he were going to be here for a day or more he’d have to go at some point. The smell of the men sickened him, their shared air hot, stagnant. Soon the odor changed to vomit, an unbearable stench, except what choice remained but to bear it? Go some place? Escape? Curse the men who pissed, who vomited? He breathed the smell of desperation. Héctor closed his eyes out of habit, to seal himself off from this place, these smells, the sounds, but doing so changed nothing. His dark surroundings remained the same whether his eyes were open or shut. He hoped he could go a long while before he wet himself. He wondered how long that would be, and he considered that this was a place where a man could die.
The truck slowed, then stopped, but this time was different. The engine cut, and the silence now frightened Héctor as much as had the deafening roar. Instinctively