La Biesta en Arriaga (or) Maternal Instincts (I can't decide yet :) )

La Biesta en Arriaga

(or)

Maternal Instincts

They said we were leaving tonight.

“Pack a jacket and a pair of boots,” mama said, and hands me our backpacks. They were from school, but since they started making us pay, the narcos have been around a lot recently, and I just stay out of their way. “And don’t forget to write when you get there, so that mama can come to her chulitos, and be near them and kiss them again. Okay? And when you make your first pay, send it back to mama, okay? So that mama can come to you? Oh, mi bebe.”

She held my face with her callused hands, and shivered as she kissed my forehead. Dad was outside smoking his tubería, and trying to be as far away from the situation as possible.

I didn’t even run to my room. I walked, feeling the carpeting under my feet, maybe for the last time. I hoped Eddy was nice. That he’d take care of us and feed us good food, and have good water that we wouldn’t have to drink and pour out of bottles. And that his hands weren’t callused, and that they were soft and comforting to hold. I hoped he was kind, and understanding, and would teach me to read better.

Paola jumped on the bed, up and down, and it creaked. With every impact, it let go of air, and breathed once her hair was flying beside her. Her feet pointed in the air, her toe nail polish cracked and chipped. She wore her iconic neon pink tee shirt, and it glowed in the dark room. The only reason I could see the shine of her hair, and the dimples of her smile, was from the light coming in from the open door. Before I came, she was jumping in the dark.

“Mama says we’re leaving tonight,” I said. “Tio is coming to bring us to Eddy.”

“Who is Eddy?” she asked, and jumped into sitting position. Her feet dangled.

“I don’t know. That’s who we’ll stay with.”

Mama and Papa had been telling us about the night we’d have to leave. They said it would be unannounced, until the last minute, and that we’d leave as soon as they found out. Tio runs a tight shift, Mama said, that he could only take a few children a week. I asked Mama why. I knew that it only took a day to get Arriaga, and then another day to get to Train Tracks. Mama said he spends the rest of the week buying gas, and spending his money on women and bars. I asked Mama why he did that. She said because he was a bad man. Then I asked why he was helping us. Because, little one, sometimes bad men are the only people brave enough to do good things.

I told Paola to change her shirt, and put on something dark colored, because that was what Tio told us to wear. I changed into dark green – that was the closest I had to black.

Jorgie was only two. Mama said we would have to give him a pill so he could stay asleep in the car. Mama told me that I was to hold him tight, and let him know that his Mama was near.

“I’m not his Mama,” I whispered. She nodded her head, and wiped at her eye.

“Why are you crying, Mama?” I asked.

“Because I’m so happy,” she whimpered, “that you will get to go to Eddy and be safe, and get an education. Maybe one day you will be rich.”

“When will you come to get us?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she cried. I took her hands, and she looked down at my little hands comforting her. “But I will find you, and kiss you and love you. Just promise me you will send me any money you earn. So that I can buy a ticket to come see you. So that I can find a way to find you.”

“How?” I asked.

In the other room, Jorgie started crying. Mama sighed, wiped her eyes, and ran in to comfort the littlest one.

“Mama!” I heard him shriek.

“Hola, mi dulzura!” I heard her laugh, my sweet. It wasn’t a happy laugh, it was forced, and asserting.

I can hear a car alarm outside, and the sound of it locking. Tio lets himself in.

“Hola,” he shouted. “Es Tío.” He shouted angrily, and hurriedly.

“Hola, Tio,” I whispered. He stared down at me. He didn’t say anything. He looked up, and around.

“Where is tu papi?” he asked, and spit onto the ground. He smelled like tobacco, and grease.

I pointed to the porch, where Papi is fumbling around to get up. He pours Tio a little glass of aguardiente, and he drank it all in one gulp out of a little glass. He shivered, and laughed. Papi handed him a zip locked bag full of money.

Tio nodded, and said, “Gracias.”

Papi looks at me. He wears a blank face. Mi papi was very handsome, dark skinned with light eyes and hair. Jorgie looked just like him. I looked like Mama, very short and thin, with thinner and shorter hair, dark.

Paola sauntered out of the house with her backpack on, and spun around a couple times. Her hair was done in long tight braids that followed her around. She ran over to Papi, swaying side to side, and buried her face into his stomach.

“Adios, Papi,” she said, very casually.

“Adios, Paola,” he said, with the same tone.

Mama ran out with the baby, and a sling. Mama tied the sling to my back, and strapped the baby into it. Mama had just fed him the bottle with the sleep medicine, and he was already groggy. She kissed the top of his head, and I felt his hands make fists, and let go, against my back, his feet pawing at me. He stopped moving. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck steady, hot and light. I shifted him so that he was hanging on my chest, not on my back.

All I could do was blink at Papi. He did the same, I pursed my lips into a thin line, and nodded my head. Blink. Mama brought one calloused hand to her lips, the other resting on her side. Jorgie’s eyelashes tickled against my bare neck.

Tio leaves the house, and starts the car. I ran after him. I hear Mama whisper my name, and I stopped. I turned around. She shook her head, and I stepped backward, turned around, and listened to Paola’s light footsteps running behind me. I kept one hand on the baby, and watched as Paola giggled as she ran.

Tio had light music playing.

“What grade are you in, chica?” he asked. He lit a cigarette, and shook it out the window to blow the fire out. The familiar smell of tobacco filled the car, and comforted me. Paola was already asleep.

“We haven’t been to school in a while,” I said.

“Why the hell not?” he asked. The car speeds off, sixty down a dirt road that might as well have been a highway.

“We can’t go since they made us pay,” I whispered.

“They have the narcos in your school?” he asked casually.

“Mm-hm.”

“Nothing’s changed,” he laughed. “I remember there was an older boy in my school, he told me that if I didn’t deliver cocaine to some guy, he was going to murder my parents. I did, you know, deliver, but, it was nerve-wracking. Trust me, you’re better not going to school anyway, the teacher’s don’t teach shit, and it’s stay at home and become a maid or a farm worker. Or a teacher.”

Tio had a scruffy beard, and tired eyes. His shirt was ripped, he had a bandage on the inside of his elbow, both elbows, actually.

The song was quiet, with guitars and a bass. No drums. I held Jorgie against my chest, and as I kept him warm, he breathed short hot breaths into my chest, keeping me warm. I was asleep before the song was over.

When I woke, we were parked in a bar parking lot, Tio asleep behind the wheel. I rubbed my eyes, and poked the old drunk. He didn’t recoil, he just let his mouth open. I untied the sling, and loosened Jorgie’s grip of my shirt. I laid him down next to Paola, so his head was on her thigh. He immediately grasped the air for something to hold, and wrapped his arms around his sister.

I opened the door to the bar, the low lighting comforting to my awakening eyes.

“Hola amiga,” the bartender said. She was a tiny little woman, with big eyes, and bigger breasts. “Where is your mama?”

“Can I have a glass of water?”

“Where is your papi?” she asked again.

“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked again. I stood still.

“Anything else?” she asked quietly. The bar was empty.

“I don’t have any money.”

“You can have the running water, but the bottled shit is two dollars.”

I was so thirsty.

“I’ll just have tap.”

“Your funeral,” she said, and poured me a glass of water from the tap. I smelled it, and held my nose as I downed it. It didn’t taste awful, but I knew my stomach wouldn’t like it. But it was refreshing, and it soothed my headache, and shivers.

We arrived at Arriaga that night. Jorgie woke up at five o’clock, ready to play and be a baby. We pulled over, and I changed his diaper, and fed him his new bottle. As he was drinking, I placed the pill on his tongue like mama told me I should, and he swallowed it without noticing. He coughed, and I burped him. Paola watched.

“I love you,” Paola said.

“I love you too,” I said back.

“When do you think we’ll see mama again?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Soon?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“I just do,” I laughed. But it wasn’t funny.

Jorgie started drifting back off, and Paola ran over to hug me. I bent down to embrace her, feeling her every feature with my body, her rib cage against mine, her shoulders against my forearms.

“Don’t cry, little one,” I said.

“I’m not going to,” she said.

“Good. Let’s go. Tio is going to take us on a train so we can go to Eddy.”

“Okay,” she mumbled.

Tio took us to the tracks, and pulled the car over. It was just starting to get dark, and the stars were alive and dancing, like Mama said they always would.

“No matter where you are,” she would say, “we will always have the moon and the stars.”

Tio cleared his throat. He started, “I want you all to listen very carefully.”

“Okay,” Paola squeaked.

“When you get on the train, you are to be very brave. You are to keep quiet, and to hold on tightly. The train ride is a very fast one. When you have to get off, move quickly, and hold on to each other. It will be much darker when you get off.”

He walked us up to the train tracks, and stood with us for a few minutes.

“La Biesta will be here any minute.”

“La biesta?” I whispered.

“The train. You have to jump on, it will get you across.”

“I thought you were going with us!” I screamed.

“Shut the fuck up!” he whispered, with a raised tone. “I am not going with you. You are to bring your baby brother and sister to Ixtepec, and take them to the shelter. Then you are to walk the rest of the way across the border, and I will bring you to Eddy.”

“How do you get across?” I asked angrily.

“I can drive over.”

“How?” I cried.

“I was born in the United States, I do this for easy cash.”

“So?”

“So, I have dual citizenship. If you haven’t noticed, I have Texas license plates on this piece of shit.”

“Oh.”

The ground started to rumble, and I held onto my sister.

Tio bent down and whispered, “If anything happens to your siblings, you must keep going. Do you understand?”

“What?” I mumbled.

“The train is coming.” He raises his voice slightly. “When the train comes, you have to jump. There is a stop a mile away, so it is starting to slow now. When you get to the stop, get under the train, or in, depending. I will tell you when to jump, and you have to hold on. Try to land on your back. Okay, here it comes.”

I started shaking.

“Relax yourselves.”

I tensed up.

“All you have to do is jump on to the train, and hold on to the edges. That’s all. It’s a short train, this one, not short length wise, but – okay here it is.”

He lifted Paola up in the air, stricken with fear, and I braced myself.

“Jump!” he screamed, and I jump into the air, feeling around for something to grab onto, and I hit the top of the cargo load. I started to roll, and I hold onto the top with all my power. The baby is under me, protected by my weight, and I can hear Paola’s light cries near me.

The train started to slow, and we got off the train. Hurriedly, I looked around for somewhere to hide, and I realized I could get inside the cargo box. I flipped two switches, and it opened, it’s small and dark, and smelled awful. We climbed in regardless, and I hold onto the top of the box, because I couldn’t close the box back up with the switches. I sat up, and so did Paola. There is a strip of light that was able to get in through a crack in the seal of the box.

I put one finger in front of my lips, and Paola nodded. The train started to move, and I let out a long sigh.

“We can talk now, right?” Paola asked.

“Yes,” I responded.

She said, “I wish Eddy could’ve just come to get us. This is scary.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“Do you think it’s okay for me to fall asleep?” she yawned.

“I’ll wake you when it’s time to get off.”

Within an instant, she was asleep.

I started to cry.

Quietly, I made sure that she couldn’t hear me, so I couldn’t wake her.

I didn’t cry for myself though, I cried for Jorgie, who would grow up without a Mama or a Papi, because I knew Mama was never going to come for us. I’d seen it too many times in our neighborhood, that a couple’s children leave in the night, and the couple stays there and can live easier without having to pay for extra mouths to feed. At that moment, I felt so angry, and so hateful toward my parents. I should’ve killed them, I should’ve had one of the gangs in our neighborhood kill them, so I could’ve run away and lived by myself, and Jorgie and Paola wouldn’t have had to be born into our family. They could’ve been born into a rich white family, and have had blue eyes and could’ve been beautiful.

And it was all my fault. I was so selfish, I wanted a Mama, and a Papi, and I didn’t care that it meant that they would have to suffer in a life like this.

We got off the train in the morning. I woke up, and it was morning. I woke up, it dawned on me that I had fallen asleep, and I shook my brother and sister awake. I pushed the cargo lid off, and jumped out, my brother strapped to my chest, and my sister following.

“Where are we?” she asked.

I looked around. We were surrounded by desert, and loneliness. I took my hermano in my arms, and grabbed hold of my hermana’s hand. Paola didn’t say anything. Jorgie is still sleepy in my arms. I nodded my head, and slowly, we started to walk.

“What about Mama?” Paola whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said, choking on my own words. I felt a rock at the bottom of my throat, and I held it down. It wasn’t even a lump. It was so hard, so painful. But I kept it in, so Paola didn’t have to feel it.

“So there’s no Eddy?” she asked quietly.

As we walked, we kicked up clouds of dust. The rock in my throat started to grow. It grew into my stomach, into my sweaty hands, into my tired feet. A tear rolled off my face, and into the dirt, small enough not for Paola to see, but just enough to lessen the pain. It was soaked up by the dry earth in an instant.

We walked for what felt like hours. I hadn’t drank since the bar, I don’t think my siblings have drank at all. I sweated, and licked the salt off my upper lip, letting my tongue taste the bitterness of exhaustion, that was satisfying for all of a minute.

We pushed on. And on. And on.

I start to wonder if there really is a shelter, or an Eddy. If Tio is just sending us this way so he won’t have to deal with us. And that we’d die out here, where no one would know we were gone, let alone existed in the first place.

Jorgie started to wake. His eyes still closed, he instinctively grabbed at me, and at my flat chest. He snuggled into my shoulder, and fell back asleep. I remembered what Mama told me, and stopped walking.

“Mama is near,” I whispered. I paused. “Mama is here.”