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  “What’s your real name, son?”

  Jesús María José González Reyes. But he would never tell them that, not ever.

  “Jesús González Riele.”

  That’s a good name. He also went by Reyle, Reyles.

  They told him he was lucky, he was just a kid. “But don’t be stupid and go trying it again, boy. Better not push your luck.”

  One of the agents wrote in his incident report: “Arrested teenager illegally hopping freight train in the US. Deported him to Mexico through Brownsville.”

  The experience didn’t intimidate him at all; by the time he was back in Juárez, all Jesús could think about was going back. Now he knew there was very little risk of being sent to prison, even if they arrested him again. The worse thing that could happen was that he’d be escorted to the border and deported. But they’d feed him and give him a place to sleep. Not so bad.

  It wasn’t long before the police caught him again, riding a freight train in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Three drunks had jumped the boxcar he was traveling in, and they drew attention. Jesús gave them another false name: José Reisel González: since there was no register for that name, the police sent him to McAllen. The Migra in McAllen deported him to Mexico a few weeks later.

  Jesús was enthusiastic about both encounters because it allowed him to speak to the police in English. He had a long conversation about Jerry Rice with one of the agents. The agent was surprised: “I thought all you dudes like is soccer down there.” “Soccer is for sissies,” Jesús responded, and the agent laughed and patted him on the back.

  By now he was beginning to understand a little better how the country worked inside the border. It was like a huge, clumsy giant. And like all giants, it had certain vulnerabilities that weren’t immediately obvious. But when you uncovered one, it was easy to take advantage of it. When a policeman saw in him the eyes of a frightened child, they could be moved to sympathy. The old ladies, the young couples, they practically left their doors open so that Jesús could do his business. The pawnshops never asked him for documents. The government claimed that they had tightened measures against immigrants, the country wouldn’t stand for an invasion of illegals, but he never felt any restrictions. Despite how much they complained, the country needed people like him. They preferred to look away instead of arresting him.

  He still suffered bouts of dread, but at least the apocalyptic visions of fires and floods that had beleaguered him for such a long time no longer tormented him. He might even find it in himself to reconcile with María Luisa. What might she be up to now?

  In Juárez, Jesús went out most of the time: the round of taverns, the Plaza Monumental bullring, or the dog races. He watched wrestling on television and went wild when he saw how Mil Máscaras cut the ponytail off some idiota who had tried to provoke him.

  One day Miguel, a coworker from Braulio’s auto body shop, told him he didn’t like wrestling.

  “It’s all fake, hermano, just playacting. I mean, you can’t possibly believe all those chokeholds, cross-bodies, and flying kicks are real and not staged ahead of time. It’s a good show a veces, but nothing more than that, güey. The Arena Mexico capitalists meet the wrestling dudes before the show and they all decide who’s going to win, what moves they’ll do, and when. Get it?”

  Jesús pushed Miguel to the ground and started kicking him. The other mechanics had to jump in and separate them.

  The next day, Braulio chewed him out and told him he didn’t want problems between his employees. He forced him to apologize.

  Eventually, though, Jesús realized Miguel was right, and it ruined everything. Now he watched the same wrestlers on television and tried to enjoy the show, but it wasn’t the same anymore. Mil Máscaras circling the ring, his aerial technique, the signature throw, that special hold . . . Now he felt cheated. He’d been such a devoted fan for so many years, only to find that in the end it was nothing but a big sham. Like movie stars. Better to cheer on Jackie Chan.

  He took his masks from the closet, stacked them one on top of the other, doused them with kerosene, threw a match, and felt better watching them burn.

  He starting running with a group of chavos called Los Satánicos, who squatted in an abandoned house in Colonia Bellavista. They had pool tables, foosball, and a jukebox on the first floor; Jesús sniffed glue, listened to heavy metal turned up full blast, and frequented the whorehouses on Mariscal and Acacia Streets. He also went to cantinas looking for chamacas from the maquiladora who were living on their own. There were a few rapes. He said it was their fault for flirting with him and then trying to act all prissy.

  He got liquored up, smoked weed.

  He sold the hot jewelry in Revolution Mall and hid the money in a locker at the main bus station; he kept some clothes there too, and a pistol he had nicked in Detroit.

  He spent three weeks a month across the border in the summer. He stole a new car every two weeks; the rest of the time he traveled around in freight cars, robbing bigger and bigger houses. That’s how he came across the pistols. He bought drugs with some of the money. He quit smoking weed and cultivated a cocaine habit. His face swelled, and his cheeks got red and blotchy. He sweated a lot at night and started having visions of fire and rain, gaping abysses that opened on the earth’s surface.

  One time he cut a finger while breaking a window to burgle a house. He stared, hypnotized, at the oozing blood, letting the coppery odor carry him away; he put his finger in his mouth and it tasted like metal. He improvised a bandage to stop the bleeding by tearing the pocket off his shirt, but all it did was make him realize how much he craved new blood. He threw the strip of cloth away and decided not to enter the house.

  Jesús was making an effort to keep his darker, more violent impulses under control. He’d been choosing empty homes deliberately. He noticed how much harder it was to restrain himself now. Robbing cars and homes was too easy, it didn’t give him the same buzz, that cold euphoria of having a knife in hand, about to end some useless person’s life. Deadwood.

  Someone had given him a mission; he was doing what he was meant to do.

  One summer he jumped a freight train to Florida. It ran slower than usual, which allowed him to jump off a number of times, raid houses, and jump back onto the same train on its way out of town.

  The train had stops in St. Petersburg, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach.

  He rented a locker in the West Palm Beach station to stash some necklaces and other trinkets along with the stolen cash, and jumped the train to Miami.

  Jesús finally hopped off again at around six p.m., as it was riding through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. It didn’t take him long to find an empty home. It was a wooden two-story residence painted sage green with a fussy manicured lawn.

  The automatic garage door had been left open, which gave Jesús an easy way in. There was a dented red Toyota in the garage and space for another car; maybe they’d gone shopping or out for dinner? There was a lawnmower on one side, and two yellow bicycles, carpentry tools piled high on an aluminum shelf. The trashcan was full, there were random things lying around, tote bags from a shopping mall, a drawer full of last year’s Christmas decorations.

  He scanned the photographs in fancy metal frames hanging on the first-floor wall. She was brown-skinned with jet-black hair, a little on the plump side. Her eyes were the exact shape of almonds. He was a freckly blond, tall and athletic (he was playing tennis in a number of the photos).

  The living room was equipped with a stereo system and television. They had a whole collection of horror movies on DVD with a particularly robust selection of Dracula and Wolfman films. There were CDs of Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, Luis Miguel, and Stevie Wonder.

  In the second-floor office he read their credentials hanging on the wall: she was a dentist, he an ophthalmologist. Their computer screensaver showed a photo of the two of them sitting in a boat, beholding a violet-tinged sunset.

  Jesús walked in
to the master bedroom.

  He had only taken a few steps when suddenly a figure jumped up from the bed and ran to a door on his right and slammed it shut. It was a woman. He immediately shot after her and grabbed the handle of the bathroom door before she could lock it. He charged her, tried to knock her to the floor, but she slipped away and ran back into the bedroom. Jesús turned around and followed her.

  He felt something crack his head. The impact sent him reeling and he collapsed, dazed. He tried to stand up but couldn’t: the woman pounced on him, biting and yanking his hair. Jesús had to fight hard to get free of her. He was smaller than she was, but stronger. He shoved her as hard as he could and managed to escape. He got to his feet, panting. She ran for the stairs, screaming hysterically, and grabbed a bat; he took off after her.

  Then he lost her. Could she have run to a neighbor’s home?

  Jesús grabbed the car keys that were on the dresser by the phone. He ran to the garage and opened the Toyota’s door. He jostled the key in the ignition and the motor turned with a cough of shocked gears. He backed out of the garage hesitantly. Where was he going to go?

  Just out of the driveway, he turned right and drove for three blocks until coming to an intersection with a main road, where he took a left. The signs and traffic lights aggravated him; they were all around him, pointing in every direction. Nothing compared to the easy riding of a freight train, where everything else moved while he lay stationary on the ground watching the parade of landscapes blinking through the slits in the door. Usually Jesús drove only in familiar territory, a few streets in cities he knew intimately, and the freedom of the highway.

  The police stopped him a few hours later on the outskirts of Miami. He had driven ninety miles.

  Two months later, a Florida state court found Jesús guilty of aggravated assault, breaking and entering, and grand theft auto. He was lucky: they didn’t connect him to his prior crimes in Texas.

  He was sentenced to twenty years, his exact age at the time.

  6

  Landslide, 2008

  I was working on a new version of “Luvina” with zombies when my cell phone rang. It was Fabián. “Am I interrupting you? If so, I can call back later.”

  “You won’t call back later. What’s up?”

  “Just reminiscing. Want to come over?”

  It was midnight; I had already dressed for bed, in shorts and a T-shirt, and the lights were out except for my desk lamp. The day in Taco Hut had been exhausting; after a restorative nap I had just gone back to work.

  I asked if he was OK.

  “It depends. I had a few gin-tonics and they went straight to my head.”

  “Oh, that’s it.”

  “That’s not only it.”

  He could have tried harder to justify the phone call.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  I hung up.

  The front door was slightly ajar when I arrived. It was raining: the leaves of the plants in the yard were slick and shiny. I got off my bike and stepped in a few puddles along the gravel path that led to the porch and got my boots muddy—being back in this territory that had once been mine gave me the jitters.

  The house was over a century old. It had been restored a decade ago, but even so the wood floor and the walls never stopped creaking. Woodstock, Fabián’s ash-colored cat, looked at me apathetically from its perch on the front porch. I took my boots off and left them on the mat; Fabián’s black bicycle was in the stairway entry, and I leaned my bike against the wall. The kitchen light was on, but nobody was on the ground floor, which wasn’t unusual since Fabián only came down when he wanted to cook something. I nearly bounded up the stairs. I could hear Billie Holiday’s wistful voice coming from the room at the end of the hall, crooning a song of unrequited, flawed love, the kind of song that Fabián knew by heart.

  He was sitting on the bed staring at a pile of books on the coffee table. He looked up and saw me, though I’m not sure he actually registered my presence. His eyes went back to the coffee table. I slowly looked around the room, checking to see if everything was still in place, whether my absence had changed anything. There were the blurred telescope shots of a lunar eclipse and comet. The Saturday Evening Post cover from 1932, with the Norman Rockwell illustration of a little girl who is drawing. Fabián collected examples of “meta” in diverse art forms: drawings of drawing, texts that referred to another.

  There were two table clocks on the nightstand, the one from his bedroom and the other from the living room, both of which were smashed to bits. “What’s up with that?” I asked, pointing at them.

  “The incessant ticking was driving me nuts, so I clutched a hammer. Then I realized how idiotic it was. Time still goes on. The underlying message was that perhaps I shouldn’t sleep. Seriously, never, ever sleep. Three, four hours a day and that’s it. Things may be tough when I’m awake, but when I close my eyes it’s worse. So between one bad thing and the other, maybe the best thing would be to keep my eyes open. But don’t be concerned; I’ll do my best to let you sleep.”

  His eyes held the tired promise of someone who is trying to be charming but knows deep down that he’s no longer able to engage in these games, who doesn’t believe his own words or gestures because they’re no more than the exercise of habit, activated by the body’s memory. There had been nights when his flirting brought results. But I didn’t want to open myself to melancholy, so I erased the images from my mind.

  Fabián twitched his nose as if he were rearranging his nostrils and lay back on the bed. I walked over to a chair that had a stack of books on it, moved them to the floor, and sat down.

  “You have an awful lot of books for someone who thinks they’re a bunch of crap. You could use a Kindle.”

  “Habit is the hardest thing to break. Once I finish my manuscript, I’ll never crack another book in my life.”

  “No reason to be so categorical.”

  “Why not? It’s the only way to get somewhere in life.”

  “My, aren’t we being earnest tonight.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, peanut,” he said and pulled a baggie full of white powder from under his pillow. “I thought it would take you longer to get here. Here,” he said patting the bed. “Lie down next to me. There’s space, even if there isn’t space.”

  “So we can both look up at the ceiling?”

  The storm shook the walls. A bolt of lightning lit up the night sky, and through the window I saw a flash of the trees in the neighbors’ yard, their branches thrashing about like dueling swordsmen.

  I needed Fabián to show some sort of deep feeling toward me, even if that feeling was negative. But I knew he was toying with me, that what moved him was indifference at best, disguised as cordiality. Any passion in him had gone into deep freeze a long time ago. I had to figure out how to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to me, how not to allow my feelings for Fabián—a mixture of desire and rage—to turn into some personal myth that overwhelmed the other areas of my life.

  He handed me the baggie. “Want some?” I didn’t want any, no, but why is it always so hard for me to say no to him? I dropped the baggie on the table, cut a few lines on a magazine, and snorted them.

  “Oh dear, dear little Michelle. She who still believes in literature. In the novel. In poetry! I had that kind of faith once. Do you remember that poem by Martí? The poet worked at night, by candlelight. And Cuba passed before his eyes like a black widow. He asks whether he’ll have to choose between Cuba or the poem. Or are they one and the same thing? I thought they were the same. I once believed they were the same.”

  “They aren’t.”

  “But Martí realized that words were insufficient. And for that reason he turned his back on literature and went in search of freedom for his people, and death, on horseback. And that’s how he found what he was looking for.”

  My nose burned.

  “I don’t get what you want to achieve. For nearly a decade you’ve been reading all the book
s you can get your hands on, in order to concoct a complete theory. That tells me that you haven’t lost faith yet. So you don’t like the novel as a form, so what? García Canclini, Sarlo, Ludmer, González Echevarría, Molloy, they’re the stuff of literature too. Their theories are pure fiction. And when it comes down to it, what does it really matter anyway?”

  He sighed. “You know something? I’ve always considered myself paranoid, yet I never went so far as to think there was a reason that certain things were happening to me here. But now I do. The deans are against me and they’ve decided to make my life miserable.”

  “Oh, so they’re crazy?”

  Fabián had trouble getting up. I followed him into the living room. This was the same room where he tried to teach me how to tango a while ago, and we couldn’t stop laughing at how clumsy we both were. We used to watch DVDs here and give tireless play-by-plays (he introduced me to the work of Lucrecia Martel and Philippe Garrel, and I pestered him into watching everything by Miyazaki and the new Battlestar Galactica). I shouldn’t let myself get carried away by such memories. The past is not a good map for the present, I tried to remind myself, and yet . . .

  “Oh, they have cause, yes. But not enough to put a tap on my phone.”

  “What are you looking for? Can I help you with something?”

  “I have to go out, will you wait here for me?”

  “You’re crazy, where could you possibly be going at this time of night, and in this weather? And why would the deans want to do something like that?”

  “I have to see a friend. The deans take my trash in the mornings to analyze what I’ve eaten, written, and bought.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not going to let you go out there. What do you mean, your trash? Why would they do something like that?”