Nothing Happened Here

Everything in the desert lay half buried or half exhumed: red, white, and blue plastic gimcracks and scraps of the most common pyrotechnics: spike ends of burnt sparklers; empty red canisters and multi-colored bits of what had been poppers and parachutes, Jumpin’ Jacks and Roman candles. The remains of the nation’s two-hundredth birthday celebration had been scattered with the aid of the Santa Ana winds, a force of nature that felt no particular way about the human femurs and mandibles and patches of desiccated scalp that were also part of the landscape.

From a bird’s eye view, that mix of plastic and bone formed a pattern, a tableau of shadows that shifted, settling abruptly into something almost human. From the ground, cold headwind blowing, sore feet sinking into razor-sharp ground, the pattern was just a story, the sort of tired, unpleasant fairytale no one ever believes, especially the faithful, consumed as they are in doing good in the world, and having no time for hyperbole. Though, frankly, it was the sort of fairy tale eight-year-old Rafaela might have overheard her parents telling each other.

Poor Rafaela could only run so fast. She and her father had fallen behind and were doing their best to follow the tracks of their fellow border-crossers and coyote. Rafaela did not like the coyote. He was cross-eyed, and whenever he turned his narrow face in profile, he appeared to Rafaela like a rusty hatchet. Rusty Hatchet had no patience with her stumbling little-girl stride and told her father so.

Her father started to carry her for longer intervals. That lasted only a while. At one point, he had to stop and put her down, which was when Rafaela saw the abandoned shoes. She had never known anyone who threw away perfectly good shoes and said so to her father. Then she noticed the tattered pants and shirts strung across the raised, bristling fists of the cacti and wondered why people would want to take off their clothes on a cold desert night. The three life-size marionettes sitting at odd angles against the trunk of a small tree startled her.

Rafaela stood, mesmerized by the puppets glowing in the moonlight. She remembered how her mother made puppets out of corn husks; her mother’s warm, firm hands; the scent of lavender water and sweet corn on her skin.

“Who left the big puppets here?” Rafaela asked her father.

Her father told her not to look, so she did, and saw that these were not puppets. They looked to her like the men in Veracruz when they had too much to drink.

Her father wiped his face on his sleeve and made the sign of the cross. He squatted and took something from the clenched hand of the dead man in the middle.

Rafaela leaned against her father. She could see he was holding a photograph of a little girl wearing a white dress with a broad blue sash. The toddler was balancing gleefully on the lap of a woman with an oval face and dark eyes.

For a moment, Rafaela thought it was a photograph of her mother holding her, thought she could hear her mother’s stern voice warning her away from the fire; the lilting voice that told her stories of people she could not remember or had never known—grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts.

Rafaela put the small dirty index finger of her right hand on the image of the girl with the blue sash.

Her father wiped his face again with his sleeve. He tucked the photograph back between the man’s rigid fingers. He picked Rafaela up and started to run. She clung to him, looking back over his shoulder at the bodies glowing in the moonlight. In the growing distance, the drunken puppets appeared like ghosts on a stage with no edges.

Rafaela heard her father breathing heavily.

“Dejame, dejame,” she told him.

She wanted him to let her go, to put her down so she could run beside him. Rusty Hatchet didn’t matter. Her mother had told her about her father’s heart, which was like a breaking clock that ran too fast, too slow. I love you, her mother said. Take care of him, she said. And Rafaela accepted the obligation, promising that she would guard her father’s heart, secretly believing that she would be the one to heal him, secretly berating herself for never doing enough.

“Rafaela is strong,” her father had said.

“The desert can kill a girl that age,” her mother replied.

“I’m taking her,” her father said.

“I’ll have no one to help me.”

Rafaela’s mother placed her hands on her belly.

“La partera will help you,” he said.

“I need more than a mid-wife. I need my daughter here with me.”

“Veracruz has nothing.”

“We are here,” she told him.

It didn’t matter. Her father had made the decision. He was the man of the house. He knew what needed to be done. La partera would take care of his pregnant wife. He promised to take care of Rafaela. He promised to send money home. He promised that, wherever he and Rafaela ended up, he would call the telephone booth in the village. He knew the number by heart.

Rafaela and her father were barely one-third of the way between Veracruz and Sonora, Mejíco, when her father dialed the village telephone and learned the bad news.

“We have to go back,” he told Rafaela. “They’re both dead.”

Once again in Veracruz, just days after her mother’s death, Rafaela remembered a neighbor telling her inconsolable father how the pregnancy had killed his wife and infant son.

“No,” Rafaela’s father shouted. “Greed killed them. Don’t ever forget.”

He sunk his head into his lap and howled. The neighbors gathered around him, settled calloused palms on aching shoulders, and urged him as best they could out of the incoherence of grief.

In the weeks that followed, her father rode alternating waves of rage and self-pity. He drank to forget, and Rafaela watched over him, shepherded him to his bed where he would fall asleep until late the following morning, when he would begin drinking again.

“Greed killed your mother,” he told her. “Don’t ever forget.”

“I won’t, papi,” Rafaela said.

His pregnant wife had died. His stillborn son had suffocated in a thin, hungry womb.

“What sort of man can’t feed his family?” he asked the neighbors.

No one had an answer. They could not imagine the gears and cogs of global agri-business. There was no one to point to and blame. Like Rafaela and her father, the villagers were simply there, somewhere in the gap between earth and sky, all of them left wondering why God did not want to help them. Why had God let the price of corn drop so low it was pointless to try and sow the remaining seeds? No matter, someone from the company would be there soon to collect the seeds. They belonged to the company.

“We will go north again,” Rafaela’s father announced. “I will die standing.”

The empty bottle he had been holding fell to the ground and shattered. At that moment, it seemed to Rafaela that her mother had reached down from heaven and slapped the bottle away.

“Your father is a dreamer,” Rafaela remembered her mother saying. “The problem is he dreams backward.”

“¡Dejame, dejame!” Rafaela repeated. “I hate Rusty Hatchet.”

Her father set her down on the hot sand, the ancient ground along the Tohono O'odham Reservation in Arizona.

“Are they coming to Florida with us?” Rafaela demanded.

“Who?”

“The three ghosts.”

“No, ghosts like to stay together, in the desert.”

“Even Mexican ghosts like us?”

“All ghosts stay in the desert together.”

He picked her up and started to walk as quickly as he could.

Rafaela wrapped her arms around her father’s neck. She wanted to believe him. The problem was, she could see the ghosts. They were running behind them, mouthing something she could not hear. She started to fret, and then decided the ghosts were singing, though it did not seem a happy song.

When father and daughter finally caught up to Rusty Hatchet and the other travelers, the latter were sitting on the ground, some of them weeping, others as silent as stone, while the coyote paced between a pair of Saguaro. The coyote was berating them all for being lazy, for moving so slowly the truck had come and gone. It was all their fault and now he would walk away and leave them here in the dark to fend for themselves.

“Ungrateful little shit-eaters,” Rusty Hatchet screamed.

He was interrupted by the rumble of a truck engine in the distance. The truck’s headlights were off, and the driver nearly rolled over a few of the travelers.

A second coyote jumped out of the cab.

“Scared ya,” he laughed.

He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the spark of light allowing Rafaela to see the long hair that covered most of his face. He wore a tee-shirt imprinted with a metallic eagle--beak open, talons spread.

Rusty Hatchet smacked the cigarette out of Metallic Eagle’s hand.

“Open the fuckin’ door,” he barked.

Metallic Eagle said something under his breath, walked to the rear of the truck, and unlatched the door. The stench of excrement caused the waiting travelers to step back, which offended the coyotes, who pointed their machetes, cursing them for taking so long, for being so delicate.

Inside, there were too many people, and a large plastic bucket, filled past the rim, that served as a toilet. Rafaela and her fellow travelers climbed in and began the long ride across the continent, from the Tohono O’odham lands into the territories of the Apalachee, the Calusa, and the Seminole. Rafaela sat next to her father, and he wrapped his arms around her and began to whisper a lullaby:

“A la puerta del cielo venden zapatos para los ángelitos que andan descalzos.”

“At heaven’s door, they sell shoes for little angels who go barefoot.”

Rafaela rested her head against his chest and listened to the syncopated rhythm of his heart, drifting on the edge of his tenor voice, rising to the gates of heaven, peeking over cloud banks to watch the little barefoot angels shopping for shoes.

At the next stop, when another dozen people were loaded into the truck, Rafaela’s father spoke up, angry and heedless.

“We can’t breathe in there,” he told Rusty Hatchet.

“Better for me,” Rusty Hatchet sneered.

Her father looked down and said nothing more. There were so many people in the truck now, shoeless angels at the gates of heaven, that Metallic Eagle could not close the doors. They could hear him pressing the weight of his body against the latch as if he were trying to close an overstuffed suitcase. He ignored their cries, turned the heavy bolt at last, locking them inside again.

They were all standing now, squeezed tightly together. After a few hours, their hands and ankles began to swell. Some people started calling out to the Virgin Mother for any mercy that would take them home again; that would forgive them for the terrible mistake they had made.

Rafaela hung in midair--between her father and the truck’s side, her feet unable to reach the floor. She listened to the sound of an infant crying, listened until the cry fused with the rattle and grind of the truck’s engine and became another lullaby, its rhythm broken by the coyotes, who opened the doors and began to shout.

“Get out! ¡Chinga tu madre! Get out!”

Everyone got off the truck. Only a young woman remained, pressed into the far-right corner, curled up in sleep. The coyotes laughed. They cursed and shouted at her. They jumped in, anticipating the pleasure of dragging her out. They were disappointed. She was dead, still holding in her arms the child who had suffocated with her.

“No mires, niña,” Rafaela’s father said.

Rafaela looked and saw the thin silver cross around the young woman’s neck, her long tapered fingers, the chipped nail polish, bright pink, the same color as the yarn along the edge of the child’s blanket.

Someone started to wail at the sight of mother and child. Rafaela’s father asked if anyone knew the young woman’s name. The coyotes drew their machetes.

“Aquí pasó nada,” the Metallic Eagle screeched. “Nothing happened here.”

Blank, dry-eyed, Rafaela looked at the bodies of the young mother and child, at the silver cross and chipped pink polish.

“Aquí pasó nada,” Rusty Hatchet echoed.

He looked at Rafaela as he pressed the tip of his machete into her father’s collarbone.

“Pick up the dead girl,” Metallic Eagle said.

“I won’t,” Rafaela’s father said.

“Pick her up, or stay here,” Metallic Eagle said. “You, your girl. Like them.” He gestured toward the dead mother and child.

Rafaela watched as her father and another man, a traveling companion standing just behind him, did as they were told. They carried the bodies deep into the woods that flanked one side of the road, Rusty Hatchet behind them, cursing, the torrent of profanities like a strange funeral rite.

The Eagle waved his machete over his head. “Shut up!” he screamed.

No one was making a sound.

“Get in the truck!”

Rafaela hung back for as long she could. She peered into the darkness trying to locate the point where her father had disappeared into the woods. The truck doors were about to close.

“Get in!” the Eagle shouted.

Her father’s hands appeared, pulling her away from the coyotes, and lifting her up into the truck.