Hot Sur (59 page)

“It can’t be, thanks, but no,” María Paz said flatly. “I can’t leave my sister behind, because Sleepy Joe will hurt her.”

So then they went back into their endless and wary conversation about Sleepy Joe, who he really was and how much harm he could do to Violeta.

“You’re the one who told me he was harmless,” Rose pressed.

“I never said he was harmless. I said he was no murderer; it’s different. But he is pissed because he thinks I stole his money. Why is that so hard for you to understand, Mr. Rose? Sleepy Joe is frantic, and he’s going to get even more nuts when he finds out I took off, according to him, with his money. If he can’t get to me, he’ll get even by hurting Violeta. You can bet the house on that. Today, I knew as soon as I saw her that things weren’t going to work as planned. I realized right away that I could not count on Violeta. She has to make a scene about everything. Do you know what I mean? Always. A fucking scene, that’s what she does, throws tantrums whenever she doesn’t get what she wants or if she feels as if she is being forced to do something. Not so bad this time, actually, she remained calm. She didn’t whine, didn’t cry, didn’t let loose with a list of maddening questions like she always does, sometimes the same question, over and over and over again, until you think that your head is going to explode. But there was none of that this time because her mind was made up. And like I said, no one in this world is as stubborn as she is. Just gave me the giraffe. The giraffe, her dearest possession, the thing that keeps her sane. Like Linus and the blanket he can’t part with, that’s the giraffe for my sister. Yet she gave it to me, and that means she was serious. She knew exactly what she was doing. A willful act, Violeta condemning herself forever by deciding not to come with me. I get it—all the other stuff—I’m not blind. It’s true what they say in the brochures, Mr. Rose. She is terrified of the unknown, takes refuge in her routines, and I was offering the most uncertain and risky adventure. The worst thing for her. I thought she would be excited just to be with me. I thought the best thing for Violeta was always to be with me, by my side. Until today, that’s what I felt and believed. From the time Violeta was a baby, she was fine if she was with her older sister, Big Sis. Apparently that’s not the case anymore. But I can’t leave her here; you have to understand that, Mr. Rose. I have to take her with me, even if I have to kidnap her.”

Rose tried to suggest that wasn’t the greatest idea, but María Paz’s despair was a solid wall that common sense could not penetrate. At least he was able to convince her to go to a little motel hidden in the woods, where they were able to reserve a couple of rooms without questions about the dogs or having to present IDs.

Despite its plainness, the place had a cosmic name that Rose remembers well: North Star Shine Lodge. He had learned from Pro Bono about the importance of the names of the motels. They had something to eat at the motel cafeteria, drawing the unwanted attention of the few other diners because of the three dogs sprawled under the table, and because María Paz couldn’t stop crying as she clutched the stuffed giraffe. Rose tells me that everybody there was just as suspicious. He was sure they were in the operations center of who knows what types of illegal activities. At the other end of the room sat three Asian men dressed in black, wearing sunglasses and thin, shiny ties. On the table in front of the men, in plain sight, there were stacks of bills wrapped in plastic.

“They must be Yakuza,” María Paz whispered, but she had no head for anything but her own tragedy, the unexpected and insurmountable obstacle casting an ominous cloud on her survival mission.

Fortunately, they were in agreement about one thing, Rose tells me. Violeta would be toast if she were left behind. Sleepy Joe had pounced on Cleve and he would pounce on the girl; that was as clear as daylight. But Rose could think of no solution for the impasse and didn’t have the means to comfort María Paz. It would be best to let her rest so he could calm down and brainstorm. At that point, they were approached by the motel clerk, a fat lonesome figure in a baseball cap, who invited him to a game of miniature golf, the only entertainment in those parts, other than a bar with a pool table in a neighboring town.

“No, thanks,” said Rose after María Paz went to her room, “I’m going to take the dogs outside, set them up for the night.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the man said. “They’ll freeze their asses off, won’t last ten minutes, noses turned to ice and throats freezing inside. Come on, a little miniature golf, my friend, it’s indoors. Have you ever played it? Much more fun than it sounds. You’ll go nuts in these parts just staying in your room.”

“He insisted so much that I finally said yes,” Rose tells me. “Better than being locked in my room staring at the TV. So I stumbled down a long hallway behind the fat man, brandishing my toy putter. This was no mini golf course, though, maybe mini-mini golf. The fat man said we could do half a course, nine holes.

“There’s only three,” Rose said.

“We do it three times,” the fat man responded.

The guy was very chatty, so after a while Rose asked him about the three Asian men in the cafeteria.

“What about them?” said the fat man, removing his cap to wipe the sweat from his head and face.

“Are they Yakuza?” Rose asked.

“Why don’t you ask them? And keep an eye on that pretty girl you got with you. I play the fool: see no evil, hear no evil, but you can tell she’s illegal from a mile away. Careful the Yazuka don’t snag her.”

“A lot of weird business around here?”

From hole to hole, one, two, three, and around again, the motel keeper explained to Rose that trafficking of migrants was one of the most lucrative types of global businesses. He told Rose about the Onondaga and the Iroquois League, as well as about other important figures who were capable of moving anything illegally across the border, even a herd of elephants if they had to. The Onondaga went through the Saint Lawrence River by boat—during the wee hours in the dead of winter. That’s when it was best to leave, because the weather was usually the most clear. They were strong rowers, so the Onondaga avoided the noise of motorized boats, but that did not mean that they were not technically advanced, equipped with night-vision binoculars and every other kind of useful gadget. In the bottom of the boat, they crammed illegal Chinese, Pakistanis, and even Muslims who kissed the ground when they arrived. People came from everywhere to cross the border, and there were the Onondaga, waiting, their lands overlapping the frontier, thirty acres of islands and coves hidden in the woods. They were capos of the leather trade in previous generations, then cigarette smuggling, and now they used the same routes for human trafficking.

“Just watch closely and you’ll see,” the motel keeper said to Rose. “Two thousand US dollars per head, and they can get six heads across in a single trip. One of them always stopped by the North Star for drinks. His name was, or he called himself, Elijah, and he was so ingenious that he had built a false bottom on his aunt’s Buick LeSabre with enough room to accommodate up to six humans.”

“You can’t fit six humans in the false bottom of a Buick LeSabre or any car,” Rose said.

“You can if they are Asian.”

“And how does the Buick handle the roads, with all the snow?”

“If there is a lot of snow, they use a snowmobile. That’s a big part of the problem, the cold. Most of the clients come from warm climates, cotton dresses. Elijah wraps them in blankets, so they don’t die on him. Once they’re on the US side of the border, he literally leaves them out in the cold to fend for his own. He is a hell of a snakehead.”

“Snakehead?”

“Those on this side are called coyotes; the other side, snakeheads.”

“Cyber-snakeheads,” Rose said.

“If you could see all the little people that sneak into this country. They pass under the McDonald’s arches and touch the sky with their hands.”

Rose soon grew weary, as bored with miniature golf as he was with tales about the Onondaga, and there were still a few holes to go to complete the nine. Rose didn’t know how to get out of his commitment with the sweaty, fat man, who sweated so much in winter that he must have caused floods in the summer. Add to it his mouth: now there was someone who could talk up a storm. It was at that point that María Paz came running, waving the stuffed giraffe.

“Come, Mr. Rose! Come see!” she shouted.

“Shhhh!” Rose tried to signal her to be a little more discreet, but she was too worked up to notice, in a frenzy almost. “Come on, Mr. Rose! To the room, come, come, quickly, sir, don’t drag your feet!”

A few hours earlier, María Paz, disconsolate, had gone to bed still dressed, hugging the stuffed giraffe her sister had given her in the front of the school. Her life had suddenly become impossible, the crossroads not crossable. So much waiting, holding on, pedaling in place, just to get to this. If she didn’t get out of the country very soon, they would catch her. If she left, she would be leaving her sister at the mercy of Sleepy Joe. Neither option was acceptable, and no other choices seemed possible. María Paz couldn’t even cry. She didn’t even have that consolation, because crying comes from a broken heart, but here there was nothing, not even that, just a dry heart, lack of responses and hopelessness. In the dark, because she didn’t even have the energy to turn the light on, she curled up like a snail in the motel bed, the bed that so many had passed through, at once such a beautiful and sad thought, that transitory bed. She pressed her chest against the giraffe, which, by the way, smelled horrible, like it had soaked in piss, making it clear that Violeta was still peeing anywhere she chose and using the giraffe as a sponge. María Paz hated that her life had just been going around in circles, that she was chasing her own tail, sticking it in front of her face every time she was ready to take a new course so that it just kept her going round and round. Once again, she was clutching the giraffe, just as she had years before on the flight to America, when she had snatched it from Violeta because the girl had just peed on it. Only the giraffe wasn’t that cute, faded toy anymore, but a filthy and disgusting lump, amorphous, eyeless, earless, looking more like some prehistoric bug, half the stitching undone, missing a leg, but just as smelly as before.

It was an amazing coincidence, or rather terrifying: the stuffed animal that marked that long-ago trip they took together, the arrival, loomed again now, on the eve of another journey, the farewell one. A sudden fear of that object that somehow had appeared and reappeared at these critical moments struck María Paz: Was it just a simple fetish or something more like magic? María Paz thought all this had to mean something. But what? There was some message from destiny, but she couldn’t figure it out. It could not be that she would trip up right before the finish line, all the escape planning, the heartache, just to fuck it all up a few steps from Canada. And there was nothing she could do because she had tripped up almost within reach of her goal, and there was no going forward or backward, no going alone or accompanied, no going north nor south, so it was best just to be there, quiet and in the dark, hugging the stinking giraffe.

And to think that Violeta had given her the thing she most treasured, which she had lugged around with her since she was a baby, her strongest emotional anchor, so much so that she would become nauseated whenever someone took it from her, as happened to Linus when his sister Lucy wrestled his blanket away. But despite all this, Violeta had willfully handed the giraffe over. It was a selfless gesture of love that María Paz had never before experienced from her sister. Then had come their parting without hugs, because Violeta did not tolerate any kind of physical contact, and the way she said good-bye sounded so final and definitive that she may as well have said good riddance.

Outside it was completely dark, and the room was still dark, when María Paz, unable to withstand the smell of the giraffe anymore, got up to go to the bathroom, thinking that she would give it a good wash and scrub. If this whole episode was indeed proving to be some kind of ritual, if Violeta had wanted to suggest that their lives were indeed circular, and if she did say through this gift what she couldn’t express in words, if all that was so, then María Paz was going to make an effort to show respect to the love she had been shown. The North Star was a shoddy motel that offered no amenities such as shampoo, and the bathroom was equipped instead with a previously used chunk of pink soap that was stingy about creating foam. But there was warm water from the tap and María Paz filled the sink to dunk the giraffe and give it a good scrubbing.

“I abandoned the fat man in the middle of our game and ran after María Paz, expecting the worst,” Rose tells me. “Now I’m going to try to describe my shock, there in the room of that fourth-rate motel, during one of the harshest nights of the coldest winter of the last five years, well beyond a hundred miles from Montreal and more than three hundred miles from New York City. It was dark inside, except for the glow of one bulb coming from the bathroom. I mean, the light was off in the room itself when María Paz led me in, and when I tried to turn it on, she stopped me. It was the first thing that occurred to me: turn on the light—what anyone would do upon entering a dark room. But she wouldn’t let me. And there was something inside that room that glowed like a will-o’-the-wisp; it emitted the kind of halo of brilliance that have shone from other treasures—the Amber Room of Catherine the Great, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cave of Ali Baba. What I saw there with my own eyes on María Paz’s bed had a mythical luminance. It sparkled, I’m telling you, like a nest of salamanders or a stack of gold coins. At least that’s how I remember it.”

“How much is there?” María Paz asked Rose, ensuring that the blinds of the room were completely drawn and that she locked the door. “How much?”

It was impossible to calculate, Rose tells me. How could he add all those hundred-dollar bills strewn on the bed, some wrinkled, others bound into stacks, others tied into larger bricks? All wet, though. Rose could not say a word, not even a murmur. The shock had left him speechless. But María Paz responded to her own question.