Red Glass (16 page)

“
Gracias
, Ñola,” I said. I walked outside into the cool night air, to the roadside. The scent of Queen of the Night was so strong it felt like a tangible presence. I shivered under my thin sweatshirt and waited for the truck. Supposedly it passed by every four hours, starting around five a.m. I had my passport in my pocket and an extra hundred dollars—the emergency cash Juan had given me—tucked in my bra. A few sleepy-eyed people carrying bundles on their backs walked over to wait for the truck. They looked too groggy to ask what I was up to.

Soon the pickup truck bounced up the road, and once it stopped, we climbed into the back. By the time we reached Huajuapan two hours later, it had grown light. The driver dropped me off in the bus station parking lot, a black stretch of oil-stained asphalt.
“¡Feliz viaje!”
he called after me. Happy travels.

When I got to the front of the line, I smiled bravely, trying to look as if I traveled around Central America on my own all the time. The ticket seller was a middle-aged man wearing an intimidating starched shirt and a blazing blue tie. He seemed in a hurry. “Yes,
señorita
?”

“I’d like a ticket to Tapachula. The evening bus, please.”

He clicked on the keyboard with manicured nails and shook his head. “Sorry,
señorita
, but it’s full.”

My mouth dropped open. “Full?”

He nodded. “That overnight bus is popular.”

After a moment of shock, I started forming plan B. Go all the way back to Pablo’s village? Or buy a ticket for tomorrow night and stay in a cheap hotel?

The man clicked a few more keys. “You’re in luck,
señorita.
There’s a bus that leaves in twenty minutes. It’s only second class, but there’s plenty of space on that.”

I tried to think fast. People were waiting behind me, looking restless and rushed. “Um, what time does that bus get to the border?” I asked.

He glanced at the plastic map on the wall. “Oh, I’d say about six o’clock tonight. But second-class buses make more stops, so you never know for sure.”

I chewed on my cuticle. “So, um, before dark?”

“I’d say so.” He looked impatiently at the growing line of people. “Would you like to pick your seat?” He rotated the screen toward me, motioning to the available seats glowing green against the black background. The bus was mostly empty.

I swallowed hard. “Well, are you sure I’d get there before dark?”

“Nothing is sure,
señorita.
”

“But is it safe?”

He motioned to the TV, where the news blared. “Listen to the news,
señorita.
You only hear the bad things. If you worried about everything you heard, you’d never leave the house, would you?”

My teeth tore at my thumb’s cuticle. “Well, I mean—”

“Look,
señorita
, we have many people waiting here.” He smoothed his tie and looked at the next customer. “Please step aside.”

“Okay, give me this seat, please.” I pointed to a seat by a window.

Once I paid him and got the ticket, I realized there was no time to walk down the street to buy snacks. I’d have to get food at one of the stops. I took out my bottle of water from my backpack and waited on a hard, plastic seat, sipping self-conciously. The waiting area smelled like a mix of disinfectant, exhaust, and cheap cologne. On TV, a woman with bleached-blond hair gave the news—floods and murders and hijackings. I unfolded my map and saw that Ángel’s town was not even a half inch from the border town, less than thirty miles as the crow flies. This reassured me. Even if the bus arrived a little late, I’d still have time to make it to Ángel’s town before dark.

Soon I became aware of people staring, whispering, wondering what the foreign girl was doing alone at a bus station. A guy about my age was staring especially hard. He had a chubby face, kind of friendly-looking, kind of slimy. His hair was stiff and spiky, and its shadow on the wall looked like little sawteeth.

I touched the Virgin necklace that Ñola had given me. My eyes flicked to the clock, the white tiled floor, the buses idling outside the window, and back to the clock. Where had they cut Ángel? I pictured his face crisscrossed with gashes. I thought of Mr. Lorenzo’s scars. The ones I had seen as a reflection in Dika’s and Ángel’s eyes.

The slimy-friendly guy moved next to me. Up close, I realized he was the source of the cheap cologne smell. “Excuse me,
señorita
, where are you going?”

“Guatemala.”

“¿Solita?”

I nodded. “Yes, alone.”

“You’re brave!” He waited for me to ask about him, and when I didn’t say anything, he just kept talking. “I’m going there, too. I study in the university here in Huajuapan, but I’ll be visiting my aunt in Guatemala for a week.”

I forced a smile. It was a good idea to know someone on this trip. That way, criminals might think we were together and not mess with me. This guy seemed pretty harmless. He could watch my back.

Once the bus arrived, he insisted on carrying my bag outside. “Excuse the bother,
señorita
,” he said. “But would it be possible for me to sit beside you?”

“Okay.”

He sat down. “Do you have a boyfriend,
señorita
?”

I hesitated. He was looking right into my eyes, as the cop had done. I wasn’t used to being flattered, and it made me feel cautious. “Yes,” I said finally.

“Too bad,” he said. “But we can be friends.” He winked. “I’m Rodrigo.”

“Sophie,” I mumbled. “Nice to meet you.”

Then he drilled me with questions—
Where are you from? What are you doing here? How old are you?
—until finally, I said I was tired, and closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

To my surprise, I actually drifted off, and it did feel like drifting, floating through the air, as though gravity had been a figment of my imagination all along. Really, it was very easy to fly, if you could only hold on to that lightness. The feeling you got as a kid, running with joyful abandon, like Pablo flying down the hill, his arms outstretched like wings.

When I woke up, Rodrigo was staring at me. He must have been watching me sleep, waiting for my eyes to open. “Excuse me,
señorita.
Did you have a pleasant nap?”

I nodded and sipped water from my bottle and thought, A whole day next to this guy. The sun was shining through a filmy haze. Outside the window, flat fields stretched as far as I could see. Clusters of banana trees with giant green leaves spotted the roadside. I wished I could pluck a few bananas. My stomach was growling so loudly the whole bus could probably hear it.

“Can I offer you a cookie,
señorita
?” He held out a packet of cookies filled with red jam.

I took one.
“Gracias.”

“Excuse me,
señorita.
Your boyfriend, is he North American like you?”

“No. He’s Guatemalan.”

“He is? Well, he must be light-skinned then, because you white girls don’t find us
morenos
attractive, do you?”

At first I looked out the window, chewing my cookie and ignoring what he’d said. But then I said, “Not that it matters, but his skin is darker than yours. His mother was Mayan. Is Mayan.”

“Oh. And you’re going to his town?”

I nodded. “To bring him something. In a town near Tecún Umán.”

“
¡Señorita!
Are you crazy? Why don’t you meet him in a tourist place like Antigua? There are many beautiful places in Guatemala. Ancient temple ruins, golden artifacts, handicraft markets, elegant hotels, colonial churches. You shouldn’t travel around Tecún Umán. I have a cousin who lives near there, and she won’t leave the house at night. There are bullet holes through her walls.”

“Well, I’m not staying. Just going, giving my boyfriend something, and coming back here with his dad. And maybe him, too.” My fingers wrapped around the old, worn leather of Ñola’s Virgin.

“Aren’t you scared,
señorita
?”

“I’m used to being scared,” I said. It was true. I’d had plenty of practice. I could very easily imagine all the ways in which I might die on this trip—gunshot, knife wound, strangling—I used to envision these kinds of scenarios every time I walked down an alley in Tucson. But what was happening now felt different. This trip was something truly risky. The pure rationality of my fear felt good in a weird way. Maybe the way to let go of all my pointless, ridiculous worries was to delve into the real thing.

I dozed on and off, while on the bus’s TVs, two cop movies exploded with screams and gunfire and ripped into my dreams. Twice we stopped in huge parking lots with gas stations and fast-food restaurants displaying piles of fly-covered empanadas on the counters. The bathrooms didn’t have toilets, just open drains that you had to squat over. Those were covered in flies too. On the first stop, I took one look at all the flies and ran back to the bus as though they were chasing me. On the second stop, I had to go so badly I just held my breath, zoomed inside, closed my eyes, and peed for so long I had to take another breath. Afterward I wolfed down two empanadas before I could fret too much about whether the flies had first made a visit to the bathroom.

Around six in the evening, I was flipping through
The Little Prince
when the bus pulled into a parking lot. I shut the book and turned to Rodrigo. “We’re here?”

“Oh, no. Two hours left. The bus usually gets there around sunset.”

“But the ticket man told me six,” I said.

“Those guys don’t know what they’re talking about.”

I took a long breath. Okay, a minor setback. No big deal. At the border I’d just splurge on a taxi to take me right to Ángel’s town. It was less than thirty miles. No problem.

Then, through the front windshield, I noticed the hood propped up. I scrambled off the bus, and Rodrigo followed. The driver and his assistant were staring at the engine, looking puzzled, with a grease-stained toolbox open at their feet.

“What’s the problem?” Rodrigo asked.

“Nothing major,” the driver said quickly. “Just a ten-minute repair.”

“This happens sometimes,” Rodrigo assured me. “We’ll be on the road again soon.”

We stood under a tree at the edge of the parking lot, watching the men tinker around. The air pressed on me, steamy and thick, and soon sweat started trickling down my face. The ten minutes turned into forty minutes, which turned into two hours, and by then the sun was already dropping below the edges of the sugarcane fields beyond the parking lot.

Back on the bus again, I counted only seven other passengers, all of us sweaty, our clothes glued to our skin. We still had two hours left to drive, which meant we’d get to the border at ten at night. Trying to stay calm, I thought of my options: taking a bus back to Huajuapan? That would mean a wasted trip, but at least I’d be safe. In the rearview, I watched the driver mumble a prayer and rev the engine.

As he was turning out of the parking lot, I suddenly grabbed my bag and stumbled to the front. “Excuse me,
señor
, I—I need to get off. I need to catch a bus back to Huajuapan.”

He shook his head. “No buses until tomorrow.” And then he turned onto the road, nearly empty of cars. “Too late to turn back,
güera.
”

We reached the border town at 10:10 p.m. Even this late, the air was hot and dense. When I stepped out of the air-conditioned bus, my skin grew sticky, instantly coated with sweat. Outside, streetlights in the parking lot cast an eerie green glow in the mist. Stretched before us was a wide bridge with a low building at the entrance where three guards in uniforms paced, loaded down with machine guns and rounds of bullets strapped across their chests. It looked like the set of a cop movie.

“What now?” I asked Rodrigo. My mouth felt pasty.

“This is the bridge that takes you from Mexico to Guatemala,
señorita.
”

Four people from the bus were already crossing over the bridge. The others had mysteriously disappeared into the night. I headed toward the bridge with my backpack slung over my shoulder and my passport growing damp in my sweaty hand.

Rodrigo gestured to the building lined with clouded windows, dingy and nearly empty inside. “Go in here. I already have an ID to cross the border, but you’ll have to show them your papers.”

Papers? I needed papers?

Rodrigo saw my confusion.
“Señorita,”
he said hesitantly. “Your boyfriend will be waiting for you on the other side, right?”

For some reason, I didn’t want Rodrigo to know quite how clueless I was. Pride, maybe, or maybe I was scared to admit it to myself. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be all right.” I would just stick to my plan of finding a taxi. It wouldn’t be ideal traveling at night, but it was a short distance. I could handle this.

“Well, good luck,
señorita.
”

“Thanks.” I watched him go. He flashed an ID to a guard who waved him through. The other people from the bus had IDs too, and walked quickly across the bridge, where cars waited for them. I was the lone tourist.

I took a deep breath, tried to smile, and walked into the room. It was mostly bare except for two metal folding chairs, an ancient computer, and some dented filing cabinets. Two men in uniform stood behind a counter, one barely older than me, the other middle-aged, his gut hanging over his belt. Looking amused, they watched me walk inside. The heavy man asked, “What’s a
gringuita
like you doing out alone at night?”