Wedding

[This story is found in American Gospel, a collection of stories by Robert Paxton.]

Claudia Noraima Neria Montufar, a young Honduran woman who had arrived in the US unceremoniously (and without permission) two years ago, was about to become Claudia Barnes, wife of Jeffrey Barnes.  Those around her that Sunday morning at the tiny, Catholic church in Carlson, Arizona thought that this must be the happiest day of her life.  The Americans present, largely Jeff’s family, smirked inwardly as they thought this and glanced at her swelling abdomen.  The Mexicans and other undocumented individuals present envied her.  Most of them had false papers with varying levels of believability.  Some had none at all and lived every day in fear.  Claudia was going to become legal, join herself officially to the great machine of sustenance that was the United States.

She would have liked to feel good about her wedding.  She would have liked to feel good about anything.  Claudia’s barely kept secret, unknown even to her friends and certainly unknown to her future husband and the father of her child, was that she was insane, and had been so since she crossed the border into the U.S.

This insanity she had managed to submerge in constant activity, any job she could take, any act she could perform.  This had carried over into her sexuality when she met Jeff.  At first, before she got pregnant, before he perceived that his life had been ruined and began to drown slowly in liquor until his death in a car accident a few years later, Jeff had joked with his friends that he’d found a nympho. 

But Claudia, unlike real nymphomaniacs, did not want frequent sex because she confused sex with the love and affection which she starved for.  Claudia liked sex because it felt good and it took her mind off the awful thing she had done that drove her crazy, the terrible deed that haunted her dreams, the gruesome ordeal she remembered every morning when she woke and plunged into madness again, her mind filled with the screams that she had stifled.  She had held them inside as she did it and now she heard those screams all day, every day. “Twenty-four seven,” Jeff had said to her once, about her sexual needs.  She knew all about twenty-four seven.

The church was simply a house with one large room devoted to mass.  The Catholic community in Carlson considered itself small, consisting mostly of retirees, snow birds from the East and the Mid-West come to enjoy the weather as they faded away.  There were many young Catholics in the area, but they were Mexicans or Central Americans and felt unwelcome in the church where no one spoke Spanish and there was an insignificant shrine to the Virgin hidden in a back room, like an old, mad parent.  They only came for baptisms, marriages and deaths.  So they had come in large numbers, standing in the dining room because the pews were full, to see one of their own make it to safety.

Claudia hoped, without really hoping, that God would bless her and erase her memory, take the screams from her head.  She had confessed it all the very next day, two years ago in El Paso, only to learn that it was not a sin.  The young American priest, in slow, awkward Spanish, had said that yes, there were sins involved in her story, but that which truly weighed on her was not a sin.

“You were forced to do it.” The priest said, “Besides, she was already dead.” Then he had told her about the team of South American soccer players who had survived a plane crash in the Andes only by consuming the flesh of those who had died.  That was not a sin, either, he explained.  God understands.

Why couldn’t it be a sin so that she could be forgiven?

So here she was two years later, pregnant, at mass in a strange church in stranger land, with a man she didn’t love and could barely understand beside her, ready to be married.  Yet those two years were a series of blurs, scenes barely noticed as she struggled to distance herself from the horror inside, the other scene, the never-ending scene that played again and again in her memory.  That struggle continued right up to the present.  Even a sane person could not have kept from thinking about it. 

A large crucifix hung on the wall behind the altar table, Christ’s tortured carcass nailed to it for eternity.

During the homily that she couldn’t understand, Claudia got up as discreetly as possible and went through the door to the dining room.  Rosa Maria Rivas, a friend from the hotel where they both worked as housekeepers, lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Voy al bano.” Claudia said as she passed.

“Nervios.” Quipped Rosa Maria, smiling and winking at the other Mexicans standing in the dining room, listening without comprehension to the priest they could not see.

In the bathroom, running cool water into her cupped hands before applying it gently to her face, it was no better.  It had happened in a bathroom.  She looked into the mirror at her dull, terrified face and remembered doing the same thing in a filthy bathroom in El Paso after passing the last condom filled with cocaine and cleaning the feces off them in the sink.  She also remembered the sound of Veronica’s body hitting the floor in the other stall, and the sound of someone gurgling.  These thoughts drove her from the church bathroom, her face still moist from ablution.

But walking back to mass through the dining room Claudia could not fend off images of Veronica’s quivering flesh and the foam dribbling from the corner of her mouth.  Claudia had known right away that it had something to do with the drugs inside them, their tickets across the border.   

When she resumed her seat, everyone was standing.  The priest and the white people sang hosanna and it was time to kneel.  She knelt as she had knelt on that filthy floor in the El Paso bathroom to lift Veronica up onto the empty commode, as if she could will the condoms out of a dead body.  But soon Veronica was still and silent forever, the condoms trapped inside, the angry gringo in the bar outside getting angrier.

As she rose for communion, Claudia recalled the great depth of her fear thinking about that furious white man who only knew enough Spanish to tell them to go to the bathroom and take a shit.  She hadn’t seen any weapons, but she knew that he wouldn’t need one to hurt her or kill her.  When she finally had the courage to walk out of the bathroom, sit next to him in the dark corner and tell him, she nearly fainted when he pulled out a knife.  After he handed it to her she remained confused for a moment.  Using gestures, the gringo explained what he wanted. 

It was the wound in His side that did it, that pushed her past her limit.  Approaching the priest, she tried not to look over his shoulder at the gaping wound in Christ’s abdomen.  It took her right back to the moment she had spent two years trying to erase from her memory, the moment that had haunted her dreams, the moment when she cut into Veronica’s belly and sliced through a length of intestine to search for the condoms.  She had told herself that it was no different than removing an animal’s entrails back home, and used her memories of butchering to guide her hands through Veronica’s guts.

When the priest offered Claudia the body of Christ, the initial scream escaped her lips and her knees buckled. She remembered gently squeezing each length of intestine with trembling hands until she found a lump and pushed it toward the opening she had made.  As Claudia fell prostrate before the priest, hiding herself from Christ’s diffident agony, she remembered the pile of shit and swollen condoms in a pool of blood beside Veronica’s body when she was done, and counting them until there was one less than there should have been because one had broken and killed the Mexican girl.

Her cries were so horrible that Jeff’s family left the church, decanting into the parking lot.  Here and there clusters of people stopped and looked back, apparently considering their return.  Then a new shriek would pierce the calm air of a small town Saturday and they would continue their flight.  A few of them, the older ones, remembered the squeal of hogs being slaughtered on the farms they grew up on.  The rest remembered horror movies.  

Jeff himself did not flee but only retreated to the door way and watched her from there.  The priest had retreated to behind the altar table with his dish full of wafers, one hand held protectively over them.  Claudia screamed until Jeff, ignoring entreaties from his mother to come out into the parking lot, returned to her side, remembering the picture of the ultrasound showing his son.

Claudia rose to her feet with Jeff’s aid, eyes and mouth shut, holding in her breath like a drowning woman, tears darting down her cheeks along routes that would someday turn into wrinkles.  Eventually, the priest came out from behind his shelter and served Eucharist to the man and the woman as the others crept cautiously back into the church. 

The wedding ceremony began shortly afterward.  Claudia was able to open her eyes and breathe raggedly by the time it came for her to take the vows.  There was muted, embarrassed applause as Jeff kissed her briefly on one side of the mouth.

Somewhere in her fragmented thoughts, as Claudia stumbled out the door with her husband into the bright light of an Arizona day, she thought that maybe the worst was over, maybe she would be able to stop thinking about what she had done and enjoy life.

But the truth was that she was just completely broken, for good and forever.

from Sudden Cool Dark

The Fiend Ellsworth

Bereft in deathly bloom

Alone in a darkened room

The count…

Bela Lugosi’s dead!

-Bela Lugosi’s Dead, Bauhaus

After Neil parked the car, he turned off the motor but did not perform his usual energetic exit from the vehicle. Instead, he hung one arm over the steering wheel and stared glumly ahead at the Carlson Cliffs, an establishment whose signage announced it as the town’s premiere long-term care facility. A nursing home.

“This,” my new partner said as he pointed one finger of his suspended hand at the building, “is where we conduct most of our business these days.” He shook his head in a subtle, barely detectable and entirely un-Neil-like way. I understood him to mean that the vampire unit was utilizing nursing homes to sequester vampires.

I had nothing to add, so I got out of the vehicle. Neil did the same, slowly, like a teenager going into his house to tell his Dad that he just wrecked the car. For the first time, I walked frustrated in his wake, eager for him to pick up the pace.

Inside, we met our local contact.

“Len,” Neil said, finally resuming his usual smile, “this is Glenn the RN.” Neil chortled with glee at his little impromptu joke. Glenn was a bearded man in blue scrubs, apparently in his late thirties. “Glenn got a promotion, didn’t you?”

Glenn was the new director of nursing at the facility. Neil had explained to me earlier that policy was to use the usual cover story about national security and special dementia patients with these local contacts. We were not to discuss vampires on site. Glenn did not possess any special clearance and was under the impression that our subjects were just what we told him: men in possession of top-secret security clearances who could no longer be trusted to maintain secrecy due to the progression of their terminal disease.

In the privacy of Glenn’s office, Neil explained how our unit had facilitated Glenn’s ascension. “He helped us out a couple years ago with a subject here in Carlson and we helped him out. Now, we have a very solid facilitator here in town.”

Glenn was all smiles.

In Glenn’s office, I learned some of the routines and key terminology used but mostly it was just a meet and greet. I supposed that it was really an opportunity for Glenn to know my face, just in case I had to come in solo from the field.

The next morning, we went out to see Ellsworth.  The demented old man’s estate was east of town and north into the wooded canyons there.

Neil had spent the remainder of the previous day preparing me for my first encounter with one of our subjects.  That was the term that we were to use to describe vampires were potential vampires, especially when we might be over heard.  Neil was no Van Helsing.  Most of my new training was much like most of my old training.  A lot of paperwork, bureaucracy, fast food and coffee.

Our cover for this encounter was the state attorney’s office. Earlier that year, Ellsworth had gotten in an altercation with one of his employees. There had been a struggle and Ellsworth had hurt the other man significantly. Neil and I were posing as a government legal team there to depose him. Neil was the attorney and I was to be his note-taking paralegal.

I rankled a bit at this, thinking that I was certainly a better choice for the role of lawyer, but I knew that I would have to humor Neil for some time.

Normally this would have been handled in court but Neil had already contacted Ellsworth’s representative and proffered this special opportunity to depose him at home, due to the old man’s declining health.

We took Neil’s car.  After eating again at Jimmy’s, where Neil forked away another mountain of pancakes, we drove east on State Route 88.  The landscape there became dramatic.  To the south and on the right, the land sloped down to the trickling Verde river.  The terrain was barren except for mesquite trees and creosote bushes.  To the north and on the left, the land climbed into forested mountains.  Just across the road, there was already a noticeable difference in the vegetation, as if the road marked a sudden and significant change in climate.

After a few miles, with Neil noting the few habitations along the way and relating the idiosyncrasies of their owners or the otherwise obvious purpose of a business such as the Verde River Smoke Shop (you can get cheap tobacco there, Neil stated), we turned north onto an unpaved road.  Initially, there were no markings to indicate the name or purpose of the road.  Several hundred yards later, the road forked.  A small green sign set between the choices named the destinations.

To the right, down in the canyon, was the town dump.  I could not see it from that vantage point but the smoke from its perpetual fires ascended into the overcast sky.  “They’re always burning brush and other stuff in there,” Neil commented.

We turned left.  The Ellsworth Estate, the sign notified us.  The road climbed along an increasingly wooded cliffside.  It felt like we had traveled much farther away from Carlson than could have been possible in just a few minutes.  The woods became thicker.  I noticed what I thought were patches of snow here and there, in the darkness beneath the tallest trees.

When I look for what remains of this property today, using Google Earth, it appears that it is less than two miles from SR 88.  That morning, it felt much farther away.  Finally arriving at the gate which was the terminus of the road, I felt like I had lost time.  Like I was someone in an alien encounter story who suddenly found himself where he had always planned to go but with no idea how he had gotten there.

The gate itself was not unusually impressive.  It was a standard portal made of black rails, the kind you see barring the way into gated communities around the country.  Neil parked the car and waited. Beyond the gate I could see the road continue, winding its way up and through the woods.

Several minutes passed and that sensation of lost time came and went.  Strangely, Neil added no commentary to our delay.  He just looked out the window, checked the rearview mirror several times and whistled quietly.  I said nothing, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t having an acid flashback.

The next event did not help to dispel my sense of unreality.  A little girl appeared, stepping out of the woods and on to the road perhaps a hundred yards away on the other side of the gate.  She appeared to be on the edge of puberty, wearing a white dress with her black hair in pigtails. She sauntered down to the gate in no hurry, looking down or off to the sides, anywhere but at us.

When she finally arrived, she did not hail us or show any sign that she saw our vehicle. She just reached up to some unseen interface on the other side of the brick posts anchoring the gate on either side of the road. A moment later, the gate began to part. Neil accelerated gently and we resumed our climb. I looked out the window at the girl. She had turned and begun to walk back up the road, ignoring us completely. We were nearly out of sight before I saw her turn back into the woods.

Neil drove a quarter-mile before a large house suddenly appeared amid the trees.  The road made a circle in front of the house.  I thought of the Ouroboros, the ancient serpent that consumes itself.  Neil parked the car off to the right but not directly in front of the house.

The home itself was three stories high.  Originally painted white, it had seen better days.  Paint was peeling noticeably in several areas.  All the windows were shuttered.  Even from so far down below, I could see that the gutters were choked with pine needles and leaves.  There was no one around. 

“Well,” Neil announced, “they must know that we’re here.” And with that he opened his door and got out.  As he lumbered out of the vehicle, I noticed the holster for his service weapon briefly exposed by his movements.  Self-consciously, I touched my own weapon before getting out myself.

We climbed creaking stairs onto the porch and Neil knocked nonchalantly on the front door.  We waited a long time. I noticed a gentle breeze and sniffed the air.  It smelled pleasantly of pine trees and old campfires.

Eventually, there was noise inside the house, footsteps approaching the door.  The door shuddered several times as various clunky locks were undone.  It opened to reveal a tall slender woman dressed in a man’s T-shirt and apparently little else.  Framed by raven black hair, her blue eyes would have been pretty were it not for the bags underneath them. 

“Yeah,” she said.  Like the little girl on the road, she did not look at either of us.  I realized that this was probably her mother.

Neil introduced us and sounded very convincing.  It was the first time I had seen my new partner acting out a role.  I was impressed.  He sounded like a semi-hapless government worker, unsure about his purpose but genuinely sincere and apologetic.

The woman briefly brought one hand to her face.  She pushed one of her long black tresses back behind her ear.  I noticed a tattoo on the inside of her wrist but could not make out what it was.  She looked up and at each of us in turn.  I had seen such faces of devastated surprise on many meth addicts in my career but she bore none of the other normal markers of such habits.  Something entirely different had taken this woman for a wild and unexpected ride.

“What?”

Neil repeated himself and then asked if we could come in, already beginning to move his large frame into the doorway.

The woman said nothing.  She just let us pass and closed the door behind us.

The house smelled like an old house and nothing else. I had been expecting something awful. The dust lay thick on shelves and tables and you could taste it in the air. There was the faint odor of a toilet that had not been flushed after use. Other than that, nothing startled me.

It was dark. Even on a sunny day, the house would have been dark because every window was shuttered. Dull light seeped in at the margins. Otherwise, the house was lit internally by candles. Lamps and overhead lights were available but lit candles on a dining room table provided the only illumination in the entry way and living room.

The furniture was old and heavy-looking. Looking at it, I could tell that it had been hand-crafted some time ago, back when factories were not mass-producing mountains of cheap coffee tables and love seats for the average man.

Paintings of various sorts adorned the walls. Some were portraits, presumably of ancestors. Families gathered in their Sunday best stared back from eternity. Others were still-lifes and landscapes. In one, a river flowed through a desert valley and I presumed that it was a local setting.

I also noted a great empty space on one wall. Only later did I realize that a mirror had most likely occupied that area.

We stood in the dark for a few seconds. I turned to look for the sleepy woman who had let us in but she was inexplicably gone. I looked at Neil. He broke character, smiled like a rascal and winked at me. I said nothing. The silence was oppressive.

After a minute, I heard movement in the dining room, a chair scraping the floor. Then another. I leaned to peek and saw that there were people in there. Neil was already moving in that direction, lugging his hokey briefcase that was filled with a lot of official looking documents.

In the candlelight, I saw Ellsworth in the flesh for the first time. He sat with his hands on the table before him, staring at the lit candles in the centerpiece. As in his most recent photo, his hair was snow white, his skin smooth though still blemished with age spots. He looked like the definition of a hale and hearty old man. In fact, he appeared to be in better condition than everyone else in the house.

Everyone else included the man sitting beside him. Middle-aged and tired-looking, his mussed blond hair stood up and revealed thin spots on his scalp. He wore a T-shirt that advertised Dick’s Sporting Goods. Unlike Ellsworth, he looked directly at us.

“How can we help you gentlemen?” He said, providing us with a goofy smile.

Neil introduced us again. We were here to depose Mr. Ellsworth so that the case could move forward. This would allow the land-owner’s representative to proceed with the plea bargain already proposed. Again, I was stunned by Neil’s pitch perfect performance. I half-believed that we really were here to depose the old man.

While Neil was still speaking, Ellsworth finally looked up. First, he looked at Neil, who ignored him and gave all his attention to the disheveled man sitting across from him. Even then, just enjoying a presence in his peripheral vision, I was entranced by the old man. I could see that his eyes were exceptionally dark and deep. I wanted him to look at me. I barely restrained the desire to move, to raise my hand, to get his attention somehow, like a child begging for adult attention.

Then, as Neil summed up his opening presentation to the tired, bored-looking man sitting next to the object of my devotion, everything changed. Ellsworth turned his head and looked directly into my eyes.

I will not compare it to sex. The sensations, though, are related. When he looked at me it was the same shock, the same hit, that I got the first time a girl took my hand in middle school. It was not a climax of sensation but the first step into a world of pleasures that I had never considered possible before. I had the same desire that I had with that girl decades ago. To wrap her hand more firmly in mine, to get closer to her, to inhale her scent, to dive into the sea where she awaited me.

I began to get up, intending to walk around the table and take a seat at Ellsworth’s side.

Neil bumped into me. He had risen from his chair suddenly, more quickly than I would have thought possible for a man of his size and age.

“I’m very sorry.” He said, his voice now gravelly. “My assistant seems to have become ill. Give us just a moment, will you?”

He had me by both shoulders and manhandled me out of the room. I was looking back over my shoulder. I noticed Ellsworth’s unkempt companion and the amused look on his face before I got one last glimpse of my first vampire, staring into my soul as I was pulled away.

Neil worked the locks on the front door unbelievably fast and had me on the front porch, inhaling that pine scent, that taste of wood smoke in the air. It had grown darker outside, though the day had advanced.

“I think we got everything we need, buddy boy.” Neil said, pushing me toward the car. “Let’s split.”

As Neil drove the car around the circular driveway, the car naturally pulled right in front of the porch. From the passenger seat, I looked out the window. Standing there in his wrinkled T-shirt and a pair of sweat pants, Ellsworth’s human agent leaned on the wooden railing and smiled.

I was speechless until we were within Carlson town limits.

“Your briefcase!” I blurted. In my mind, I had been returning again and again to that scene in the dining room of Ellsworth’s mansion, analyzing a little more every time as I crept back up from whatever depths had claimed me there. Eventually, I had remembered Neil’s briefcase and Neil leaving it on the table.

“Hey, he’s back amongst the living!” Neil laughed. He patted me heartily on the back. “Don’t worry about it, scout. There wasn’t anything in there but those bullshit papers. Nothing that would tie it to us or incriminate us or anything. I was prepared for that little scene. It gave me all the confirmation I needed.”

As we neared the motel, I considered the difficulty of our challenge. If Ellsworth was going to stay on his estate, we would need a swat team to pick him up, given that the Temple may have had hidden resources in the surrounding woods. That did not seem to be within our bailiwick after learning everything that Neil had taught me about the parameters of our work and the scope of our authority. I expressed this concern to Neil.

“You’re right, this is a tough nut to crack.” He responded as he placed the car in the parking spot outside his room. “We’re going to have to settle this one the old-fashioned way and grease the motherfucker.”

In the Corner of God's Eye

This story was first published by WordRiot.org in August 2003. With a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can read it and other stories from my collection American Gospel for free. 

 In August, Peter took me out to Puerto Anapra in the brown Toyota, a battered pickup that looked like something buried in the desert a thousand years ago and only recently excavated. I braced myself in the passenger seat while he drove over the broken, cratered road.  It had been a dry summer and dust clouded the view.  Occasional rains packed it down but it always rose back into the air, choking and blinding.  We had rolled up the windows in preparation and were sweating profusely because the AC didn’t work.

 I first saw Anapra the day I arrived in El Paso.  The previous summer I had come from Arizona in a Greyhound bus that roared along Interstate 10 until it reached the city limits and slowed, allowing me to take in the desolate view.  To the right, West of El Paso, the town of Santa Teresa sat lonely and quiet on the desert floor.  Directly ahead, Juarez, mother of my strange destiny, awaited me.  Ahead and to the left, El Paso del Norte was not sure if it was America, Mexico or Texas.  All around were low, brown barren hills that couldn’t have cared less about which country they resided in.

The I-10 closely parallels the border as it approaches downtown El Paso and turns eastward.  Anapra lays between this multi-million-dollar testament to America’s technological advancement and the naked cliff faces opposite in Mexico.  Cristo Rey, the giant white crucifix that sits atop a hill in El Paso, can be seen from a distance of many miles, and from this promontory a crucified Jesus looks out over creation.

The full name of the area is Puerta Anapra.  It is not a town unto itself but rather a colonia of Juarez.  Ciudad Juarez is divided into colonias the way an American city might be divided into zip codes.  Except Anapra had not been planned by the city fathers; people just built there, raising homes on the desert floor or carving them out of the sides of low hills.  The land occupying this space before the recent settlement must have been as barren and lifeless as the Moon. In the corner of God’s eye, it had become a squatter colony.

I saw the result of this sudden sprawl from my moving vantage point on the bus.  The view lasted only seconds and I was grateful when I was carried out of Anapra’s sight and into the slow-beating heart of El Paso.

A week later Peter took me and a few other volunteers on our first trip to Anapra.  He drove and talked endlessly about the border and the plight of immigrants throughout history, starting with Abraham and Israel. The other new guys and I, for a variety of motives, had decided to come live in shelters on both sides of the border, working for free.  Most had been like me, kids fresh out of college and wanting to do anything besides go back to school or get a job.  Some were religious, some were leftists.  We sat in the back of Peter’s van joking about Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace to take our minds off the poverty and misery we were seeing.  The immense shantytown, built on desert sand and into the sides of barren hills, was a stark, undeniable reminder of our own mortality.  When you grow up surrounded by food, computers, designer clothing, excellent housing and movie screen television, you never know the eternal enemies of the race: hunger, weather, violence, madness.  To see others afflicted by these things suggests a common destiny.  Yes, they will die out here, but you will die someplace else.

We tried to listen to Peter’s lecture while our minds browsed memories of home and middle-class security, wondering if we would stay.  One of the others left the next day without saying a word to anyone.  I was the only one left by the following summer.  For reasons mysterious even to myself, I remained.

I had subsequently been out to Anapra a number of times but not since early July, when I went to the fiesta patronal of the small church that served the area.  Nothing had changed.  It was just as hot, just as disturbingly impoverished, and I still had the diarrhea I’d gotten from eating tacos made with spoiled meat.  A year had gone by but I still got weak and feverish once a month for several days at a time.

Peter had called me an hour before and told me why I had to go with him.  I’d been sitting, sweating, in the office at Casa Maria, one of Peter’s Juarez shelters, going over the schedule for the last week of August, when he called.  He reminded me that the previous summer I had attended a free course about documenting human rights abuses committed by the border patrol.  I remembered, sitting there and feeling as empty as a discarded beer bottle, how fervent I’d been at the time I was trained, only beginning to think that I, too, might someday burn out like so many other volunteers I knew.  I had been positively anxious for the border patrol to kick someone’s ass so that I could write it up.  But I never got a chance.  Either the border patrol wasn’t abusing anyone or the people being abused weren’t talking.

“I need your assistance.” Peter had said, speaking to me from the dingy office of his decrepit house in downtown El Paso where he lived alone. He spoke in a cold, formal voice, as if he didn’t know me very well.  Maybe after seventeen years of being the border saint it was easier not to know any of the transients you met, be they volunteer or refugee.

“That’s what I’m here for.”  I was drawing up the work schedule as we talked, but focusing neither on that nor on the conversation.

“I just got a call from Rita Melendez.” Rita was a woman with four children who inexplicably made a living in Anapra.  The organization had been in touch with her for a few years in order to have a contact in Anapra.

“How’d Rita call you?” I asked, somewhat more attentive now.  I knew that neither Rita nor any of her neighbors had phones. 

“She had to take a bus into town.”

That morning a neighbor had told Rita that a man who tried to cross over into the States the night before had been brutally beaten not far from Anapra.  He had been taken in by someone just a few blocks away.

“But Rita hasn’t seen the man?”

“No, and I’m aware that this could be a wild goose chase, but I want to act on it.  I’d like for you and I to go out there and try to document the event.”

I had forgotten almost everything involved in creating such documentation.  But I couldn’t bear admitting that to Peter so I agreed to go.  A part of me was hoping the poor bastard would die of his injuries before we got there and save me the embarrassment.

As Peter and I entered Anapra proper I recalled the disgust I had felt at my first view.  This was the grimmest, lowest level of poverty I had ever seen. Houses were made out of anything their owners could get their hands on: wooden pallets, styrofoam, cement blocks, plastic bags, plywood.  Most homes were a combination of this garbage.  The floors were usually dirt, packed down by the treading feet of the occupants.  There was no running water.

Some residents used car batteries as a temporary energy source.  If not, electricity was pirated from nearby electrical poles.  Every now and then some poor bastard got electrocuted trying to hook up his house so that his family could listen to the radio, watch TV or run some other rare appliance they might be lucky enough to have.  The dirt roads were girded by the tangled cables that ran from these poles to people’s shacks.

As the Toyota struggled through sand, rocks, and clouds of dust to the top of a hill, I looked out over that human disaster and felt pity and empathy rising up out of the junkyard of my soul.  I felt compassion for the man I was supposed to interview and hated feeling it.  Not for the first time I wondered if I had been wise to volunteer for another year in this slow hell of other people’s suffering.

We stopped at Rita’s ramshackle home.  If I had wanted to find out how Rita eked by I could’ve done so, but I never got around to asking. She was one of those unbelievable examples of human fortitude and mercy.  The year before I arrived in El Paso, with my college smile and my duffel bag, Rita took in an old man, abandoned by his own children, to live in her home.  As if supporting her children on virtually nothing hadn’t been difficult enough, Rita had taken in an old gimp that did nothing but consume and whine.  Volunteers tended to speak of her as the soul of charity, but I thought she was nuts.

Her house was made mostly of cement block, which was nice for the area.  The dwelling had a low ceiling and a back room made from wooden pallets and semi-transparent plastic sheets.  There was a faint smell of wood smoke in the dusty air.  By the time we had stepped out, two of Rita’s three boys had come running out of the shack and were babbling something faster than I could understand.  Peter contorted his face and listened intently.

Rita, short and brown with a pretty face for her thirty-some tough years, came out as the boys rattled on, probably having long past disbursed any important information and now simply repeating or rephrasing it.  Peter was too polite to interrupt.  I looked inquisitively at their mother.  She smiled, showing a rare mouth with only one missing tooth, and explained quickly.

“Don Luis esta mal.  Necesitamos llevarlo al doctor.”

Don Luis, the old boy Rita had taken in, was sick and needed to see a doctor.  Secretly, I felt good for Rita.  If Don Luis died she’d have one less mouth to feed and a slightly better shot at survival.  It sounds heartless, but you haven’t seen how she and her kids lived.  You haven’t watched those barefoot boys play with sticks and rocks while, a few miles away, American children whined if their parents didn’t buy them new shoes or more video games once a month.

We crowded into her home and stood against the walls.  The living room, to the right of the entrance, was small, perhaps ten feet by eight.  There was a small, fold-up card table standing uncertainly in the middle of this space, surrounded by a green, plastic patio chair, an actual wooden chair and two milk crates stacked one atop the other.  Don Luis occupied the patio chair, arms dangling at his sides, head bowed as if in prayer.  On another milk crate sat a battered TV.  It showed little more than static.

Rita chattered and Peter nodded, repeating a few times that he would help her.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked Rita. 

“We found him on the floor when we came back from the store.”  There was a market just a block from her house.  “He was shaking and moaning.”

I had seen things like this before in the shelters; old men and women, trembling uncontrollably, having fits, shouting incoherently.  They might go on like that for weeks, months, or years before dying.  In the States such a case would have been diagnosed and treated, someone would have done something for them.  In Mexico, they just suffered on the margins of society.  Then they died.  Until now Don Luis had been a burden, but he had been lucid and ambulatory.  I was slowly realizing that things really could get worse for Rita and her children, after thinking for so long that it couldn’t be any worse than it was.

Peter, Rita and I lifted him simultaneously. “Aah. Aah. Aah.”  He moaned, exhaling noxious breath.  I held Don Luis’s shoulders. His head lolled against my chest.  With his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open, the old man resembled an infant.  As close as I was, I could smell that he had shit himself a little, just like a baby would do.  But another look at that weather-beaten, wrinkled, slack flesh around his eyes and I saw the death in him.  Don Luis forever became the personification of Death for me, even though he did not die that day.  When my mother was dying of cancer two years later, I sat at her bedside in the hospital and remembered Don Luis.  I imagined the old man coming for her, reeking of shit and moaning “aah, aah, aah” as he stumbled down the hallways, shutting the eyes of the dying with a trembling hand.

We staggered outside like a confused, six-legged juggernaut.  With a quick flash of his hand Peter cracked open the passenger side door and pushed it wide open with his body.  We put Don Luis in the middle of the seat and Rita hopped in to support him.  I got out of there quick, just in case whatever the old man had was catching.  I had known volunteers who got tuberculosis during their stay.  In a year I had managed to avoid that and certainly wasn’t going to risk getting anything worse.

As Peter and Rita tried to decide whether to take him to the clinic or the General Hospital, I couldn’t help but look northward to America.  A few hundred yards from Rita’s house, the only thing separating Mexico and her northern neighbor was a low dirt berm.  One could easily step over it.  I thought of running for it just to see what would happen.  It looked so easy.  Of course, one could easily pick out the border patrol trucks stationed at regular intervals. They were the real border; magnificent, gasoline-powered, steel machines that vigorously pursued anything that tried to penetrate our defenses.  The dirt berm was only a symbol. 

But with the trucks so still it was easy to imagine that they were asleep, that one could bolt across the border and into the promised land and hide before the guardians awoke. I tried to imagine having that temptation all the time.  From his perch above all the misery, Christ also seemed to contemplate this temptation.

Eventually Peter decided to take Don Luis to the General Hospital.  This was a tough decision, since the General Hospital was known for taking off a leg when you needed a kidney removed and vice versa. 

“I’ll go with Don Luis.” Rita announced.  “Veronica will be here in a few minutes.  She can show you the way.” She spoke the last words to me.  Veronica was Rita’s sixteen-year-old daughter.  She visited the house occasionally and I had seen her on most of his trips to Anapra.

Rita left her two boys with me.  The three of us watched the truck kick up dust as it pulled away, then we went inside to escape the Sun. 

Inside was little better.  The enclosed darkness of Rita’s dwelling offered no more than an almost imperceptibly cooler environment and brought her family’s stark poverty far too close.

The kitchen was a small space to the left of the front door.  Over one corner a mesh bag hung from a nail in the ceiling.  The idea was to keep the mice and the bugs out.  An onion weighed the bag down.  I thought of a man with one testicle.  A hot plate sat on the ground below, next to a small tank of propane gas.  A wooden stand, holding a few dishes and cups, and a water basin were in the other corner.  Rita’s family took baths by filling up the basin with cool water and then pouring in a pot of the boiling kind.  That much water was hard to come by so they bathed infrequently and all in the same water, one after the other.

The boys babbled, excited to have one of the gringos in their home.  Soon I understood that they wanted to play soccer, futbol, with me.  I agreed on the condition that I had to leave as soon as Veronica arrived to show me the injured man that I was supposed to interview.

“Hokay!” They shouted before running out the door.  They ran right into their eldest sister, Veronica, who immediately began to scold them in vicious Spanish. 

When I walked out she stopped right in the middle of a particularly foul phrase and smiled. 

“Ay, que verguenza.” She batted her eyes.  “Perdoname.” She was thin and dark-skinned with jet-black hair and blacker eyes. 

“Esta bien.  No hay problema.” I responded.  I told her about what had happened and why they had left me behind, waiting for her.

“Si!” She began, nodding her head vigorously.  “Yo se donde esta!” She reached out to take my wrist and pulled me along.  I made sure our hands parted as we began our trek.

“Vayanse!” She hissed, turning back to the boys who had started to follow.  They scampered back inside the house and let us depart.

“Como esta todo en la casa?” She asked demurely when we came to the end of the street.  How is everything in the house?  She referred to Casa Maria.

“Bien.  Bien.”

She turned left and I followed.  The conversation carried on, touching on benign subject matter like the house and the weather, until it lamely died a minute later when we reached the house we were looking for.

It was not much different from Rita’s house, perhaps in slightly worse condition but the same size.  It had no front door.  Instead, there was a heavy blanket hanging across the single doorway.  Windows were also curtained with blankets.  There was no noise from inside.

“Oye!” Veronica called from a few yards away.  “Oye!”

I stood beside her, listening to the distant sound of cars roaring over the interstate, listening to the more intimate sounds of our feet on the sand, the susurration of our breath.  The other myriad noises of Anapra were filtered out as we stood there, waiting for a dead man to respond.

After a minute, Veronica spoke to me.

“Aqui es donde me dijeron.” Here is where they told me.

I shrugged and asked her if it would be okay to go in, or could we get hurt trying that? Veronica assured me that if she went in front, calling out, we would be okay.

Thus we approached the shack, Veronica in front, announcing the purpose of our visit as we precariously covered the short distance between the gate and the front door.  Soon we stopped again, before the curtained doorway, listening.  Veronica looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and pushed aside the blanket.  Holy of Holies, I thought as I stepped through the doorway, following Veronica into the cool darkness of the dead man’s abode.

Dark it was, but not quiet.  Flies buzzed and hummed in the unlit room.  I was used to flies swarming all over me, taking whatever sustenance they could from my sweat, but these flies paid me no attention.  There was a more attractive dish set for them.  The bloody remnant of a person lay on the dirt floor.

With the curtain slightly open it was possible to make out some of the former man’s features.  He was dark-skinned, moreno as they say in Spanish.  He was small, with black hair.  His eyes were, mercifully, shut, so his eye color was not verifiable but I had a pretty good idea of what they would have looked like.  The man was probably from Guatemala, an indian from the mountains.  I could tell where someone was from just by their appearance. His eyes would have been black.  His voice would have been high-pitched, his Spanish fast and mingled with indian terms that made it nearly unintelligible to me.  He must have recently died because I detected only the faint odor of unwashed skin, rather than the stench of rotting flesh. 

While I was still staring down at the dead man’s face, Veronica turned and threw her arms around me.  She whispered hoarsely, “Llevame de aqui!” Take me away from here.

In the moments the embrace endured, while I inhaled her strange mixture of pleasant girl-scents and repulsive body-odor, I wondered what she meant.  Was she asking me to take her out of the shack, or out of Anapra? 

I pushed her away slowly.  She jutted her face forward and up, into mine, her full lips grappling my own.  I pulled her back and returned the kiss, hands running up and down her body, underneath her shirt, rasping against her back.  She used her arms to force my face against her own.  Our teeth clacked together painfully.  I slipped her shirt up over her breasts.  Her torso, slender and brown, was unbelievably smooth. 

Then I became aware of the smell, an awful reek.  It was sweat, dirt, blood and the stench of her sex all at once.  I remembered the corpse and Don Luis and suddenly wanted to vomit.  I pushed her away, against the concrete wall, and stepped outside into the clear sunlight.

I stood there and listened to the sounds of Anapra and the distant sound of America.  I heard Veronica crying inside the house, just a few feet away; easy to comfort there in the darkness with the dead.

I stepped through the gate and onto the street. 

I waited at Rita’s house and played reluctantly with the boys, kicking around a half-deflated soccer ball that appeared to be older than Peter’s Toyota. 

I thought about something Peter had told me and the other new volunteers the day after we arrived.  He’d said that we needed to understand that that we did not become volunteers to help poor people.  We did it for ourselves.  I can remember thinking it was a bunch of shit and feeling a little insulted.  I had come to help poor people even if he didn’t think so.  After a few months, though, I realized that he was right.  In all the emotional turmoil I experienced in those early days I cried on several occasions.  But I never cried for the miserable, downtrodden people I met.  I cried because I was afraid that the same misery could occur to me someday, that reality was a relentless tide of events that could not be stopped by wishful thinking.  I cried because no one else would cry if I ended up on the street, hungry and cold.  I cried for myself.

Standing there at dusk in Anapra, I played soccer with Rita’s boys and understood that Veronica, too, cried for herself and not for the dead man.  But just as no one could do anything to assuage my sorrows, I could do nothing to alleviate hers.  We were two different worlds and the distance between us was not navigable.   

Veronica had not returned when Peter and Rita came back with Don Luis, who was conscious but weak, just after sunset.  There had been no room at the General Hospital and they had given up waiting there.  In the meantime, Don Luis had recovered somewhat.  Peter promised to come in the morning and take him back to the hospital.

I told Peter that we had not found the victim and that Veronica had stayed out trying to find him.  Peter resigned himself to trying again the next day and I was grateful when we got in the truck and drove away. 

Peter called the next day and informed me that Veronica had found the man dead.  The whole thing was being investigated by the federales and I could forget about documenting it.

“Keep me informed.” I replied dully.

I had two days coming to me.  I planned on going over to El Paso to take a shower.  Then I was going to go to the library and read magazines in the air-conditioned basement before eating a hamburger and drinking some beer in a clean bar.  I was going to be a good American and forget about Rita, about Veronica, about Don Luis and the dead man, about a whole world out there just dying to live.