One Life. David Lida

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      “Sorry to bother you, señora,” I said, offering a pleasant smile. “I’m looking for someone who I believe lives in this town. His name is Juventino Escobar.”

      Although she understood me perfectly well, she was going to take as long as she needed to size me up before answering. Who was I? A slender gringo in need of a haircut, in black jeans and a carelessly ironed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A black backpack over my shoulder. My presence couldn’t possibly mean good news. Did I want to kidnap Juventino? Arrest him? Sell him drugs, or buy some? Could she trust anyone who spoke with an accent like mine? Did I represent the CIA? The FBI? The DEA? Disneyland?

      “Do you know Juventino by any chance?” I asked. I wasn’t going to stand in her doorway all day, particularly in the early September sunshine that baked the earth after the rain. If she thought the existence of her neighbors was a state secret, there was always the next house. And the next one and the next one, each with its own plucky rebar.

      “No,” she said finally. “I don’t know him.”

      “Okay,” I said. “Many thanks, señora. So sorry to bother you.” I turned my back. The taxi was parked across the street.

      “But I know his mother.”

      I stopped in my tracks. “Excellent. Where does she live?”

      “They say he might have come back. From el gabacho. I don’t know.” El gabacho. Also known as los States, Norteamérica, Gringolandia, or el otro lado.

      Waving my hand, I motioned for the taxi driver to come over. Despite all the years I had lived in this country, I never understood when a Mexican gave directions. He would never send you left or right, east or west. It was always “up” or “down.”

      The cabdriver lived more than two hours away in Puroaire. He was slender with short hair and a winning smile. As the woman explained how he would have to go up there, and then down the other way, somewhere over the rainbow, he nodded sagely, as if he understood perfectly. He might have been to Ojeras before, but he didn’t know it very well. He got us lost along the way.

      “Did you get all that?” I asked, once we were back in the cab.

      “Yes, absolutely,” he said. After a pause, he added, “But if I didn’t, we can ask someone else.”

      Sometime before the next millennium, the local bureaucrats might decide that it would be worthwhile to pave more than the two central streets of Ojeras rather than divert public funds into their own pockets. Don’t hold your breath. Driving down the dirt streets, we kicked up a dust storm, passing more short and fat houses with rebar tilting toward the sky.

      The town plaza was so tiny you could fit it in your wallet. It was ringed with trees, which had been pruned into perfect little squares like green marshmallows on sticks. There were iron busts of four men—los hombres ilustres—local poets, professors, politicians. The clock in the church’s skinny spire read ten to three, 24-7.

      Brown-skinned adolescents kicked a soccer ball despite the afternoon heat, wearing their caps sideways and pants that stopped at their knees. Two chattering girls barely out of their teens walked down the street, each pregnant. A lady in a blue apron waved the flies away from quesadillas she had fried in boiling oil for invisible customers, next to a white plastic table covered in a plaid plastic cloth. There were few men around. The absent were mostly in el gabacho.

      The closer we got to the edge of town, the more primitive the houses became. Adobe or clapboard slats for walls, corrugated laminate for the roof. Sheets of torn plastic instead of windows. Bent, crooked doors fastened with a chain and a padlock, or with nothing at all. Finally we got to a huge crater covered in rocks and mud. It was a circle about three city blocks in diameter and fifty feet in depth, and it looked like the surface of an undiscovered planet. On the other side were more shacks.

      “She lives up the hill there,” said the driver. “Sorry, but my car won’t get through that hole.”

      “No problem. I’ll walk.”

      Clambering through the stones and mud was my exercise for the day. I tried to walk around the brackish, soupy puddles, some of which glowed with a rainbow chemical swirl. I had to go back and forth only once. Poor Juventino’s mother had to do it day after day, if her son gave her any money for groceries.

      I had high hopes for Juventino. He had been married to Marta, one of Esperanza’s older sisters. The promising facts were that he was not an actual family member, that he and Marta had split up years earlier, and that he lived in another town. He had nothing to lose, no one to protect, no more diplomatic duty to perform. If I was lucky, he would have axes to grind. A witness like that can spill all kinds of dirt.

      By the time I had traversed the crater, my black sneakers were covered in mud. The huts were so ramshackle they looked like they’d fall over if you leaned against a wall. A dry, hot wind kicked up a whirlpool of dust. If dirt were expensive everyone in Ojeras would be a millionaire.

      Four dogs lay in the middle of the road, in shades of matted gray and beige. Mama was mangy and bloated with milk, and had about nineteen nipples. Her boys were lean. I could see their ribs, the flesh rising and setting with their breath. As I got closer they started to growl. What could they possibly have been protecting? Was anyone actually hiding a stash of something inside one of those broken-down shacks? The wrong questions to ask in a Mexican Podunk.

      They snarled more loudly as I approached. The smallest one, a disheveled silver mutt, got up and yapped at the top of his high-pitched lungs. Why is it that the tiniest dogs always sound as if they’d swallowed a microphone? He scampered to my side. “It’s okay,” I said in a velvety but stern purr. I was perennially hopeful an utterance like that would shut up a barking dog, but it never did. He only bleated more loudly.

      Let him yap. I ignored him and walked on. Dogs liked me—or so I thought until the son of a bitch set his teeth around my ankle and broke skin. I kicked him away. It hurt, but the shock was worse. I just stood there as he yapped, a how could you? expression on my face.

      I bent over and pulled down my sock. I was bleeding. Not heavily. A steady, ladylike trickle. The defense team would get a kick out of this. If they needed any proof of my dedication, there it was written in red. Not only was I willing to crawl through dust and mud, I would suffer dog bites to try to save Esperanza Morales’s life. I scowled at the mutt through narrowed eyes. He just kept yapping. I pulled back my leg as if I was going to kick him, but he didn’t even flinch.

      I realized I had an audience, outside the last house on the right. Another ancient sixty-year-old, her thick legs rooted in the ground like old oaks. Her flesh was a wobbly mass under a striped serape she wore despite the midday heat. Two other women, their middles swollen after multiple pregnancies, in jeans and T-shirts. One sat sifting through a bowl of dried beans, picking out the little stones; the other folded raggedy clothes she picked from a washline. A tiny girl stared. The three adults did not acknowledge the gringo in their midst inspecting his dog bite. I hoped that my victimhood would at least make them sympathetic to my cause.

      I limped in a straight line to the old one. If she wasn’t Juventino’s mom, I was Pancho Villa. “Buenas tardes,” I said. “Señora Escobar? My name is Richard.”

      She just stared at me. Who the hell was I? How did I know her name?

      “Juventino’s mother?” I asked.

      She wouldn’t say СКАЧАТЬ