“Thank you.”
Then we all stood watching Hector take a third book out of the bag and pull out the perforated boarding pass I’d been using to hold another page. “A good flight?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“And this is your address?” Miguel showed me the license then gave it to Hector to record all the information on it.
I asked, “What are y’all doing?”
Ramiro spread his arms and started to sing, “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you, getting to like you …”
He was a loud baritone, and I had to strain to hear Miguel saying, “I will give to you something very important. I want to know …” he gestured to Ramiro.
“… all about you.”
Miguel held up two credit cards from my wallet. “Why is the name Laura Jackson?”
“She’s my best friend. She let me use her cards for this trip.”
“Why is she not here?”
“She had to work.”
“Why you come alone? Why not wait?”
I looked away and grimaced, “It was a bad breakup. I needed to get away.”
“With Laura?”
“No, another girl.”
Miguel considered it before shaking his head and accepting, “Okay.”
Pen in hand, ready to write, Hector asked, “Laura’s address and phone number?”
“No,” I was firm. “You don’t get that.”
“Is okay, guapa,” Ramiro smiled two shades of wrong. “We no talk with Laura.”
I hadn’t pulled Laura out of the air with a forged birth certificate. She was real and living in Tennessee, unaware of what I was doing to her credit. That was going to be surprise enough. I didn’t think she needed three angry Mexicans showing up at her door as well.
I said, “Maybe this is a bad idea.”
“No, is okay. Laura is your …” Ramiro searched for the word.
“She is our guarantee,” Miguel corrected.
There were four Laura Jacksons in Tennessee at the time. One of them lived in Fayetteville, so I’d purposefully gone there to rent a house and connect a phone in a second Laura’s name. I was trying to think out the ramifications of giving away my Laura’s location while the Mexicans watched me, but I couldn’t concentrate with them staring, so my reasoning went awry. I thought the double names in one city would confound them, like it had been confusing the creditors. I said, “Alright,” and gave them the address of the rented house and the phone number with me on the answering machine saying, “This is Laura.”
~~~~~~
The cocaine-filled statue of the Virgin Mary wasn’t as I expected. It was ceramic, but that’s where the similarity stopped. What was disconcerting was it was obviously empty. It was just a great big round clay pot with eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Both ugly and boring.
It was sitting on the coffee table and I was turning my head, studying it, hoping to make sense of it. “It’s a …?”
“A monkey,” Hector said.
“Oh.” It was not obvious.
Four of us were staring at it and nobody looked impressed.
I was honest, “I really thought y’all were going to have me smuggle cocaine. I don’t understand this.”
Ramiro sighed. “Tampoco lo entiendo.
“We don’t understand either,” Miguel translated.
Ramiro might have been a better liar, but I believed him. I did not believe Miguel.
But I said, “Okay,” and I meant it. I’d take this monkey through customs. “Where is it going?”
“My friend is called Tony. His address is Peachtree Street in Atlanta. I will tell you where and you will remember. You will not write it.”
“Okay.”
“Also, you will remember my phone number. You will call me when you give this to Tony.”
“Okay.”
Miguel and I looked at each other for several long moments until he finally asked, “You want money for this?”
I didn’t mean to laugh, but I thought my lack of concern was rather transparent. “I suppose that would make it proper,” then looking at the pot, “but I imagine you’ve already guessed, I’m not doing this for the money.”
Give it a Name
I had three days before my flight returned home and I was spending them at the stucco house. The start of the first day, I ran my hand down the back of my thigh and felt a small circle of skin slide away. Tennessee is crawling with brown recluse spiders and one of the little rot-mouths had bitten me. The flesh was already decaying and it had the potential to get much worse, so I went to the doctor’s and then to the pharmacy with a prescription for three antibiotics.
The pharmacist wanted to know what the cocktail was for because he didn’t think he could fill it, so I explained about the spider and he came out to look at my leg. As he did, the teenage assistant behind the counter looked to see also and grimaced with disgust, then feigned a gag in his mouth. Moaning a warning, he tried to wave the pharmacist away.
The pharmacist said a few rough words to him and then apologized to me, saying, “He is a child, forgive him.” He went on to explain, “I understand this spider venom. I will make for you the same medicine as for leprosy,” and then left to prepare it.
Alright, sure, I wasn’t going to argue because I didn’t know a thing about it.
But the little shit behind the counter had a few opinions. He tutted, “Leprosy. Bad disease. I don’t think you will have much luck at the clubs with leprosy.” He sadly shook his head to emphasize my misfortune. Then he brightened to declare, “Would be better to have herpes.”
Well, that was an opening I had never heard before. I was staring at him somewhat dumbfounded when he continued, “You Americans are waa,” he cried, “about herpes, but is no big problem. I would have herpes to leprosy.”
“Interesting choice,” I couldn’t quite bring myself to smile. “Given an option, I might have gone for something a little more exotic like rabies, or perhaps tetanus.”
“No,” he frowned at my selection. “Herpes is better. Better than AIDs. Much better than leprosy. Maybe you have herpes on your leg?”
“Maybe I do,” I was starting to get the hang of this conversation. “Maybe you’re right. I might prefer a couple of blisters to rotting flesh. In fact, I think I would.”
“Yes, herpes is better than leprosy.”
The discussion continued until I didn’t know what I had on my leg but well understood Americans were entirely too uptight about herpes and he’d been spurned because of it. I apologized for the entire nation: “We are a bunch of assholes.”
I walked out of the pharmacy shaking my head, thinking that was a conversation I would never revisit. I meant to file it somewhere under forget and then carry on with my spider bite as though it had never happened, but in a few days, it was going to unexpectedly find its way back into the in-box.
It wasn’t anything I was going to share with Katia though. I was too much of an American to think you could say the word herpes around a lover and not lose them. And while I was keeping my mouth shut, I didn’t mention leprosy or anything about a clay monkey pot either.
She had no idea why Miguel was sending us to the sprawling market to buy souvenirs, but he wanted my luggage to be packed with multiple crafts, especially Mayan trinkets, and anything antique, or clearly handmade.
Katia haggled, laughed, and occasionally cursed or stalked off knowing she’d be called back, and I stood aghast like a tourist, embarrassed she was arguing the price.
Back at the house, Ramiro was waiting to stuff the pot with trinkets encased in bubble wrap and then he swaddled the pot in more. It went into a transparent mesh bag like a ball, and Miguel said, “You will keep this …” he didn’t know the word, so sat down to cradle it against his stomach. “Always here.”
“In my lap, okay.”
“Like a baby.”
“Okay.”
“Not up there,” pointing overhead.
“Not in the compartme
nt. I understand. In my lap. Like a baby.” I was smiling indulgence.
Then with a little hug, Miguel repeated, “This is a baby.”
~~~~~~
Late on the second day, Miguel knocked on Katia’s door to say, “We must talk.”
While getting dressed to go downstairs, I rearranged my features to ensure I had the face of an innocent angel because I’d heard it in Miguel’s voice, something was very wrong.
Hector was on one couch and Ramiro had flipped a dining room chair to straddle its back. It was already tense but Miguel made it worse by pacing. They appeared mostly confused, and I could see they wanted to be convinced all was good, but they were on the edge of anger and about to tip.
I said from behind the empty couch, “Tell me why you’re upset.”
Katia had arrived at the bottom of the stairs and Miguel pointed her into a chair against the wall saying, “Sit.”
Then to me, “What is your name?”
Oh, wow, that was like getting slapped back to Dallas. Considering the question opens nearly every beginner’s language course, it’s surprising how rarely that exact sentence is actually spoken. I was pretty certain I hadn’t heard it in eight years, but it was less the words than the tone that hurt me. It should have been expected considering the games I played, but it took me a moment to recover, and I hoped in the evening light, no one had seen my face flush.
I said, “You know my name, so tell me what is happening.”
Miguel held up the license with Willow’s name for me to see. “You said this is your home.”
“Well,” I conceded without showing guilt, “it is the old family home.” It was the dilapidated ruin on the way to campus that I had first sent to Passport Services. I had used it again with Willow because I wanted to give her address meaning. I wanted to tie her name to the past, to the first laser printer and Mittwede and our races through the curves. But I was so familiar with the route, I’d stopped seeing it years before. If the house had been bulldozed, I might not have noticed.
“Do you live here?”
“I don’t sleep there.”
“You said to me you live here.”
“It is my home. My permanent address. All my mail goes there. For simplicity, I tell people I live there.” I was smiling, “Shall I assume you’ve sent someone around to knock on the door?”
Looking at the floor, Hector said three emotionless words in Spanish.
I could imagine what they were when Miguel accused, “There is no door.”
I snapped, “Of course there’s a door,” but there probably wasn’t. I had propped it up seven years before and suspected it had fallen back down. I should have known Miguel would not trust his baby to just a name on a license. Someone they knew in the States had obviously traveled to see the place, but it wasn’t anyone in this room, and a house with no door it not the sort of thing to admit. “There has been no deception on my part. I told you I had just broken up with my girlfriend. You wanted to know my home address and you have it. You are holding it in your hand. The State would not have issued that license if that was not my home.”
But Hector was talking to the floor again, flatly stating multiple facts unknown to me, and Miguel was trying to listen to us both.
When we were silent, he said, “Laura’s house is also empty.”
Well, hell. It was empty save for an answering machine. I hadn’t even bothered to hang curtains, so it was a simple matter for anyone to see straight through the place.
Deny and concede had always been my most successful tactic. I said, “It’s in a state of upheaval, but it’s not empty. Laura and I are in the process of moving into an apartment together.”
Miguel and Hector spoke together and in their words was a great deal of doubt.
Miguel held up Willow’s license and said, “I think maybe this is not you.”
“Seriously?” I laughed. “The picture isn’t that bad. That is obviously me.”
“This is nothing. I could have this made tonight.”
“Dude, I have to go through US Immigration with that. Do you not think they can spot a fake? And if they have any misgivings, it’s a simple phone call to Tennessee to confirm it’s legitimate.” Hands out to stop it going further, “Tell me what you need from me to make this right.”
Miguel’s emotions were running up and down the scale of trust and tripped on something close to hope, “Your address.”
I made the fatalistically amused expression of You’re not going to like this, and said, “It’s in your hand,” then pacifying, “I know, I know, but that really is the address that will always lead to me, and I knew you’d have issues if I told you I was moving into an apartment but don’t know the address. It’s in Lewisburg, which is Laura’s hometown, and I’m not yet familiar with the city. Let me call her and I’ll get the address.”
I called the answering machine that had my voice saying “This is Laura,” and had a “Please pick up” conversation with myself that went nowhere.
“Laura’s house is empty,” I was reminded.
First deny, “No, it’s not,” and then concede, “It may be in boxes, but she will be back tonight. I will call again later.”
~~~~~~
By midnight I was dragging tired and Laura still hadn’t come home. The three guys had been doing lines of cocaine off the dining room table while I rested against the arm of the couch reading different books from my bag. The mood in the house had shot past paranoid hours before, but I was pretending not to notice the aggression. My flight was in twelve hours and Hector was angry they had run out of coke.
Miguel used the phone and then they started arguing amongst themselves.
They had told Katia to leave shortly after my first failed call and she’d wordlessly obeyed. Repeatedly I had wanted to offer that we all shake hands and walk away, but every time I was about to say it, my head would explode with sirens, warning me it would be disastrous. It would look like I was backing away, defensive, in the wrong, and showing fear, but worse, it would force the issue of what they planned to do with me. Because they had to do something. And it was obvious from the start they weren’t going to let me follow Katia out the door, so instead of bringing the situation into premature bargaining, I was waiting. I didn’t know for what, not exactly, but I was looking for some sort of opening, an opportunity to turn it around or gracefully escape, but it was becoming apparent I had made a terrible mistake. Time had stretched things from bad into violent.
Hector threw a glass ashtray over my head into the stairs.
I didn’t look up, just turned the page.
The volume of their fight escalated until Ramiro slammed Miguel against the wall while Hector shouted in his face.
I kept reading even though I was too alarmed to see the type.
Miguel shrugged Ramiro off and they all stood in angry conference, occasionally throwing an arm out in my direction.
The book became far more fascinating. Absolutely nothing was going to tear my attention from it.
Minutes passed before Miguel, then Hector, and finally Ramiro swiveled a chair away from the table to sit in a row and stare at me like a terrible problem they needed to solve.
I’d been on the same page for far too long but I didn’t want to move, afraid the slightest action would trigger something awful.
Their dialogue was sporadic and irritated. They weren’t comfortable in the straight backed chairs. One or the other would constantly be shifting, adjusting, huffing out aggravation, or falling forward to hang their arms between their knees and then back to flex their shoulders.
I knew the scene was about to break and I was dreading the change. Ramiro took a bottle from his shirt pocket and ate a pill. Miguel slapped his leg and Ramiro gave the bottle to him, and then Miguel handed the bottle to Hector.
All three had swallowed a pill and it gave Ramiro an idea. He gestured to me and Miguel agreed.
I was barely breathing, thinking, Oh god, here we go.
Miguel c
ame to stand before me with his hand out and four blue pills in his palm. I looked up into his face when he said, “Have these,” then over to Hector who was bringing a glass of rum and coke that had melted into two colors.
I sat up and asked, “Valium?”
Miguel nodded.
I gave a quiet laugh as though the idea were insane. “I can’t take four. It’s too much. I’ll be asleep for twenty-four hours. No,” I was shaking my head, “I’ll miss my flight.”
“I will wake you.”
I didn’t have to feign an expression of worry. I was certain they planned to kill me, thinking I would be too drugged to fight. And I didn’t want them to suspect one, four, or twelve was all the same to me. I said, “One is plenty.”
Miguel pushed the lot on me saying, “Four.”
“How about just two?”
“Four,” he insisted.
I said, “I swear, you really do have my address.”
“Is okay, guapa,” Ramiro was still at the table. “You sleep. Fly home tomorrow.”
I pulled at Miguel’s wrist, saying, “Please sit,” until he was on the edge of the coffee table. “This is truly not necessary. We are both aware the plan is not going forward. It is fine. I am no more trouble for you than before we met. I will leave …”
“You will stay.”
“Or stay. Okay. But this,” I was trying to close his hand on the pills, “is really not required.”
Hector said, “I promise, no bad thing will happen.”
I shook my head to refuse and Miguel leaned closer to warn, “I will make you.”
That was a humiliation I did not want to experience. I could clearly imagine the struggle, and after a brawl like that, none of us would be able to pretend anything was going to get better. I accepted the pills saying, “I suppose I won’t be too concerned about it in a moment anyway.”
~~~~~~
The last time I had taken anywhere near 40 mgs of diazepam I had taken 50 with Mittwede. He had wanted to prove he could get me wasted. I was trying to remember how he had acted on a similar dose. I couldn’t recall anything except he had done it again without me and slept right through the fire that killed him.