back to Issue 18
by Jack R. Johnson
Daguscahonda, Pennsylvania, or True Water. Named by an elderly Indian chief with a penchant for drinking out of Elk Creek and declaiming on its purity. Like every resident, Pauly knows Daguscahonda is famous for only one thing besides its odd name: a chicken that was born in 1885 with four perfect legs. No one in town thinks much of this anymore, but it’s on Pauly’s mind when he spies a movement along a stalled series of boxcars glittering on the train tracks. “Hey!” Pauly yells. No answer. Pauly unslings his pellet rifle from his left shoulder. Maybe it’s a stray dog he’ll have to shoot? A giant fowl or a large fox? They’re everywhere in the summer. He steps off the path and doubles back through the woods. Uncle Sonny told stories of dangerous hobos and migrants camping in the Wilcox train yard, whispered of Satan worshipers, how they found the ashes of a pentagram in the morning sun. Pauly doesn’t believe any of this. Uncle Sonny is a teller of tall tales. Nevertheless, he keeps his finger by the trigger.
Using the spruce trees as cover, Pauly approaches the train car from the rear, lifts the pellet rifle’s sight to his right eye. The sun breaks through and he sees her standing there, brown eyes peering at Cheat Mountain. Long black hair and sculpted features. Reminds Pauly of Mary-Beth, his older sister, in a loose tan T-shirt and jeans.
“What are you doing out here?” Pauly asks. He wants to sound assertive. As he approaches, he sees that her T-shirt bears the legend Beyoncé. She has built a miniature home in the boxcar. An abandoned bookshelf for a pantry, in the corner pilings for beds. He leans forward, peering into the darkness. Near her, an older man lies, a burlap sack pulled to his chin. The girl says one word. “Sick.”
Pauly nods. “What’s wrong with him?”
She looks concerned, but doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s unable to answer? Pauly leans his rifle against the side of the boxcar, looks around. He spies an old pot filled with dirty water and a dishtowel. A small black circle of cindered twigs and branches smolders at the entrance to the boxcar. Near the old man, an orange 7-Eleven breakfast burrito lies unwrapped, two half-moon bites sculpted out.
“Mi familia.” She points north.
“You have family up here?”
She nods.
“In Daguscahonda?”
“Buffalo,” she says.
Pauly has never been to Buffalo, but he’s heard Uncle Sonny and his father talk about it. “It’s cold there,” he says. The girl furrows her brow. Pauly wraps his arms around his shoulders and shivers to communicate his meaning.
“Tiene frío,” she says, pointing to the old man. Then, “Cold.”
“He doesn’t look good,” Pauly agrees. Old men saddened Pauly. Years ago, Pauly sat with his grandfather in his last days, and he remembered the coughing and gasping for air, the aging around the red eyes, the pallor. All too familiar. “Does he need medicine?”
The girl nods.
“We have a first-aid kit, bandages and stuff,” Pauly says.
The girl smiles, and that’s enough for Pauly. He tears off through the woods toward Uncle Sonny’s pickup.
*
During the week, Uncle Sonny works at a tedious factory job in nearby St. Anna. He firmly believes that every weekend should be devoted to nothing but R&R, which involves drinking too many beers and killing variously sized animals in Cheat Mountain forest. Uncle Sonny is half in the passenger-side door of his Ford 150, digging through their cooler for an Iron City when Pauly tries to reach past him to pop the glove compartment open.
“Where you think you’re going?” Sonny demands. It’s Saturday so Sonny’s unshaved beard is silvering nicely. His nose is red from the cold, and his breath already smells of booze.
“There’s a girl and an old man—maybe granddad—out by the train yard. I think the old guy is sick. Can I get the first-aid kit?”
“What?”
“They’re trying to get to Buffalo.”
“Buffalo?”
“She didn’t speak much English.”
Sonny grows serious, frowns. “Don’t be messing with those people.”
Pauly’s eyes widen. “Well, I told her—”
Sonny shakes his head. “You stay away from them. They might be dangerous.”
Pauly shrugs. “I had my rifle.”
“Come with us. Theo’s going to bag his first deer. You should see how excited he is.” Sonny stands, pops an Iron City and takes two large swallows.
“Can’t we let them use our first-aid kit? There’s an old man who’s hurt.” Pauly doesn’t like to argue with Uncle Sonny, but his mission for the girl feels too important to surrender.
Sonny lowers the Iron City and stares at him. Now Pauly wishes he hadn’t said anything. Uncle Sonny knows everyone in Cheat Mountain, and if he tells Deputy Schroeder there are illegal immigrants in the Wilcox train yard, it won’t be a day before a cop rolls up to make sure they don’t stick around.
“How bad?” asks Sonny.
“He can’t get up, he’s lying in the boxcar. Maybe broke something,” Pauly embellishes. He’s learned from the best.
“Huh,” Sonny grunts. “All right.”
He leans in and opens the glove, pulls out a little white plastic kit with a faded red Swiss Cross, hands the kit to Pauly.
“Hold on,” Sonny says. He sighs. “We have to collect Mark and Theo.”
“You guys don’t have to come along.”
“We’re going with you,” snaps Sonny, and Pauly knows that’s it. Uncle Sonny calls into the belly of Cheat Mountain. “Theo, Mark, come here!”
A faint voice from the surrounding spruces. “What?”
“Come here!”
“We’re tracking a buck. Six-point.” Theo sounds pained.
“Come here for now.” Sonny shouts, strident. “We got to take care of some things.”
Pauly interjects, “Theo and Mark don’t have to come. I’ll be fine.” He knows they’ll blame him for cutting the hunt short.
“We’ll just be sure,” says Uncle Sonny.
*
Juanita could not remember all that happened to her. She was not supposed to be in the train car with the old man who was hurt, but things had gone haywire coming out of El Salvador and she lost Chuy to La Migra.
She met Chuy in San Salvador, after she fled her village because of the soldiers. She was living off the streets—one of the “in-the-street” kids, as they were called—when Chuy showed up, a tall, lanky boy. Juanita knew he didn’t eat enough. He had fuzzy black hairs on his upper lip, a sunken chest, and his tattered ES jersey hung off his shoulders like a loose curtain. But his dark eyes were honest and he stole a ripe mango from a street vendor for her, laughing the whole time. Something joyful, almost mad in his antics. She was so hungry she ate the skin and flesh, then sucked on the large pit with tears in her eyes. Chuy laughed at her.
“You eat the skin? You eat everything?”
Yes, she explained, she would eat everything. She didn’t tell him it had been three days since her last meal. She didn’t tell him that she was homeless now. Didn’t tell him that she had lost everything, but somehow he knew. The “in-the-street kids” were like that; they always knew.
He proceeded to swipe two orange Kolashanpan sodas and a half dozen pupusas over the course of an hour, piling up the abundance in a little home he had made for himself on tattered cardboard behind a taquería. His space smelled of cooking grease and dog shit. He called it his homeland. Chuy’s kingdom. The taquería had a one-eyed dog that howled if anything came too close to the shop. The dog’s demented eyes didn’t appear to put Chuy off. He’s a decent alarm, Chuy explained; they would be safe. Juanita studied the situation. She liked that he had food stashed, and a guard dog. Better than some places Juanita had stayed, and worse than others, she decided. She stayed.
She remained with him for three weeks. When they thought they had enough money, they walked to the railroad tracks in San Salvador, determined to head north. Juanita had a cousin in Buffalo, New York, and Chuy said he had relatives all over New York City. San Salvador was too dangerous. Gangs demanded money just to sleep in the streets. You couldn’t trust the soldiers, either. “No one is legit,” Chuy told Juanita. And she knew this was true.
*
On the train with Chuy heading to El Norte, Juanita discovered glue. They rode on top of La Bestia, the train that roared through Central America all the way to the gringo border, huffing a Gerber’s baby jar of glue, the smudged label half worn off. Turkey and rice. When Juanita twisted the lid and lifted it, she saw that the little jar was filled with a yellowish-gray Resistol, which bore a heavy industrial odor. “Quick!” Chuy thrust it under her nose. “Quick!”
She remembered the first time: the way it seemed the top of her head blew off, floated upward toward the stars. Chuy demonstrated how to draw her T-shirt around her mouth and nose to prevent fumes from escaping. He showed how to inhale swiftly and strongly to effect the high. Afterward, as La Bestia roared through the jungle canopy, she looked up at the bluish, moth-clustered moon with teary eyes and blurred vision. The closest she had ever been to God.
Years before Juanita had sung, but after the soldiers came all that was over, until she inhaled the Resistol. Then she began to sing again, lightly. Chuy loved her voice, and even tried to sing along. His singing was no good, but it helped them stay awake so they didn’t fall off the train’s roof. Once an old man fell asleep. He woke in free fall off the side of La Bestia. They heard his screams for a moment and then nothing but the relentless chug of the engine.
*
“She—they—were in the second boxcar from the end,” says Pauly.
Theo groans.
“This close!” he says, meaning the buck. He holds his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.
“Why didn’t you shoot it, then?” asks Mark.
“I didn’t have a shot.”
“‘This close!’” Mark mocks.
“You guys pipe down,” says Uncle Sonny.
Pauly cups his mouth and calls, “I’ve got some medicine for you.”
He walks toward the second boxcar, feeling his older brother and Uncle Sonny behind him. He sees one of her jean-clad thighs by the side of the boxcar. She’s being careful, watching them, making no movement, her face a sliver against the boxcar frame.
“Hello!” Pauly shouts. “We’ve got medicine.” He lifts up the faded first-aid kit like a white flag.
Juanita waves back, uncertain. Since she has arrived in the states, she finds most advances untrustworthy. A young boy like Pauly appears innocent, but arrives with other strangers carrying guns. After she and Chuy crossed the Rio Grande outside El Paso, a young boy threatened them with a machete, wanting their money. The boy was skinny and short and he looked hungry: sallow cheeks, dark eyes that had lost their way. Dirt smudged his forehead. Chuy emptied his pockets for the boy. One hundred pesos. “Chump change,” the boy declared, but he left them alone because he thought they had nothing else. Ten minutes later, La Migra arrived in two growling black SUVs. As planned, they ran in different directions. Juanita managed to escape by hiding in a culvert where an old man had covered himself in a threadbare Mayan blanket, silent, hardly breathing on the hard-packed dirt. When she lifted the blanket, he peered up at her with petrified black eyes. He smelled of sweat and something spoiled. Blood dribbled out of his left ear. The side of his face was swollen as though someone had slapped him.
He put his finger to his own mouth to indicate silence. She crouched down by him, waited for La Migra to leave. After he heard the engines start and the dark SUV drive off, he whispered, “They are thieves.”
“The ones that hit you?”
“Yes. But La Migra scared them off.” He rolled to his right and stared off at the implacable desert. “Migra took your friend and the coyote,” he said. From the culvert the old man had watched as first Chuy and then the coyote were tackled by the sweaty ICE agents on the rocks and sand. She looked at the old man, doubtful, then gazed across the desolate landscape, a lone cactus like a stick figure in the endless sea of sand and scrub brush.
“Do you know a way?” Juanita asked.
When the old man said he did, she wasn’t reassured. Part of her wanted to believe him, but the other part of her thought he was daft. The old man stared at her. “We’ll need water,” he said.
*
They walked for an hour into the city center, then managed a bus ride out of El Paso. Juanita had very little money and she knew the old man had been robbed—not once, but twice, beaten the first time. But he had twenty Franklins stashed in a money belt the thieves had never touched. A little miracle. At the station, he’d pulled off his belt and began sliding out the bills. “I am not so poor,” he explained, as he counted them out leisurely. A pleasant surprise. He wanted to show her that he could provide. He paid for their bus ride, and they ate expensive enchiladas at the bus station. His name was Mario. Mario enjoyed the pleasure of a cold Modelo while Juanita was content with bottled Dasani.
Next to him on the bus, Juanita noticed the swelling in Mario’s face. She used a wet napkin to wipe the dried blood off his leathery ear. She was beginning to feel a tenderness for the old man. He was sweet in his own way. He had helped her. Perhaps she could help him.
“You trying to make me respectable?”
“Lost cause. I don’t want you to look like walking wounded,” she said, not adding, and I don’t want the gringos to notice.
*
On the bus for three days, they enjoyed the luxury of riding in a vehicle rather than on top of one. When there was a problem with the bus engine just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, they had to stop and transfer. Mario was not feeling well. As he rose from the seat to leave, his face went deathly white and he fainted in the bus aisle. Juanita didn’t know what to do. She yanked on his arm until he righted himself, then half-dragged the old man off the bus to where the others waited. The driver asked if he was all right, and despite his pallor and obvious weakness, Juanita said, “Sí, sí,” and then, remembering where she was, said, “Yes.”
She had Mario sit with his head between his legs on the curbside while they waited. A Pennsylvania state trooper showed up, and she pulled the old man between two dilapidated red brick buildings to an aged train yard that had an empty boxcar. She grabbed him by the money belt and yanked him into the car. He whispered thanks.
They lay back and waited. The police stayed and Juanita and Mario decided against reboarding—too risky.
That night was cooler and Mario began shivering. Juanita found a dirty burlap sack that she used to cover him. Once, when Juanita was six, her sister had a deadly fever and Juanita held her hand and stayed by her side, singing to her about a little girl who braved the cold to be alive for the sun in the morning. She wouldn’t sing that song for Mario, but she saw that he was still shivering and so held him to keep him warm and hummed the song, without the words, so he wouldn’t think she was silly. She lay in the boxcar beside him and tried to sleep. Juanita watched the white moon through the boxcar opening and whispered Papa Moon, which was what her father called it, although this reminded her that he was a ghost now, disappeared: dead or in prison. You never knew. Her mother was disappeared, too, she supposed, and her brother and her little sister. She made the sign of the cross, thinking of that moment when the soldiers came, and then closed her eyes with the glow of the moon on her eyelids.
In the morning, she felt the train beginning to move and looked out as the train headed in the wrong direction, eastward, into mountains covered in clouds.
*
Pauly hands Juanita the first-aid kit. She opens it, examines the contents. Nothing. In truth, she wishes she hadn’t asked, for the kit is useless, and now she and Mario are surrounded by these gringos with guns. She’s certain Mario needs more than a bandage or a splint. Something is wrong inside him, inside his head, maybe. She doesn’t know. Mario isn’t talking the same way and his left eye droops. In the morning, he had woken and muttered incomprehensible things. She understood the words, but not their meaning. Pelican. Aeroflot. Byzantium. Then, out of nowhere, two fully formed sentences, so splendid that hearing them broke her heart.
“The confusion you feel means that you are still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. This, God has explained to me,” Mario said, his eyes mere slits staring at her. Then he closed them again and babbled about mid-drift and petrichor, the odor of the rain.
Juanita, too, began to slip into a kind of delirium as they hid in the train yard. She had begun to dream silly things: that Mario was the soul of her father reincarnated. Or that the mischievousness of her youth had come back to haunt her as the burden of this dying man.
Pauly waits. Juanita hands the kit back, shakes her head.
“Hospital,” she says. Her eyes are dark, serious.
Mario doesn’t want to go, but she knows it is the only thing that can save him. Despite the risk to her, and to him, it’s what has to be done.
*
“I don’t know about all this.” Uncle Sonny’s bottom lip shoves out in disapproval, but he drives them to Mount Cheat Memorial Hospital. He thinks he’ll leave them and then skedaddle. Once they arrive, though, he realizes they have to carry the old man into the waiting room just like they had to carry him into the back of the pickup.
“You can just drop me off with them,” says Pauly. When Sonny stops, Pauly slaps the pickup door open and runs into the hospital, hardly slowing for the sliding glass doors. Sonny stares after Pauly, baffled by his virtuous nature. The kid is a pain. Too much of his mother in him. Pauly returns with an orderly and a wheelchair. Pauly says he’ll stay and they can get back to hunting, but Sonny doesn’t want to make two trips. So they all march into the hospital behind the old man in the wheelchair and the young girl.
“This is stupid,” says Theo.
“Be quiet before I smack you,” Sonny hisses. The morning is already shot. He doesn’t want any more complaints. He thumps the top of Theo’s cami-colored cap, which is Uncle Sonny’s method of discipline. The registration nurse looks bored. One other person waiting in the admissions area leans his head back, a bundle of paper towels pressed against his nose, trying to slow a nosebleed. Pauly explains that they are there to check on the old man because he’s been hurt.
“What’s ailing him?” asks the nurse. Her name tag reads “Gibbons.”
“I think he’s been hit—see the side of his face?”
Nurse Gibbons peers over her reading glasses to give Mario a good once over.
“Hmm,” she says. She glances at Uncle Sonny. “Are you the responsible party?”
Sonny looks alarmed.
“Me? No.” He nods toward Juanita. “If anyone is, it’s her.” He thumbs in her direction.
Nurse Gibbons turns to Juanita. “Name?”
Juanita is frightened, but tells her.
“That’s a pretty name.” Nurse Gibbons nods toward Mario. “And him? What’s his name?”
“Mario Díaz.”
“Where are you from?”
Juanita stares at her blankly.
“Your home,” Nurse Gibbons elaborates.
Juanita studies the situation, blurts, “Buffalo, New York.” She lies so smoothly it surprises her.
“Out of state.” Nurse Gibbons nods perfunctorily, continues typing. Finally, “Do you have insurance? Health insurance?”
Juanita frowns, shakes her head. Fearing that they might refuse to help Mario, Juanita adds, “Money.” She pulls out three wrinkled hundred-dollar bills from her jeans pocket and flattens them carefully on the counter in front of Nurse Gibbons. All the money they have left. Nurse Gibbons raises her right eyebrow and sighs. “Okay, okay. We’ll get to that later.”
But they take the old man in.
*
It’s the whitest room he’s ever seen. And cold. Mario recalls floating leisurely down a wide brown river, watching the banks for movements, anaconda, alligator, the distant boil of flapping egrets, hungry piranha. This white room frightens him more than any jungle threat. A mausoleum quality to it, he decides—like he might already be dead.
In Mario’s homeland, he was known for his poetry. Now he has come to the land of cold words. A palace for dead poetry, he decides, where words drop like icy pebbles, useless as the marbles he played with in the alleyways of Medellín. He tries to lift himself but doesn’t have the strength. Closes his eyes, letting his thoughts drift like water. When the doctor asks about his injuries, Juanita doesn’t know what to tell him. Mario grunts.
“Looks like he got hit,” Pauly says. “Real bad. See his cheek? He needs medicine.”
“We’ll determine what he needs,” Dr. Macintosh snaps. He is a squat, red-faced man, without much humor, Pauly decides. Juanita nods hopefully. She looks at the different medical instruments in the examining room and finds the antiseptic quality of the place reassuring. Controlled, unlike everything else in her life.
Dr. Macintosh peers into Mario’s left eye and then his right eye. “Follow my finger,” he orders. When Mario stares at him without comprehension, Dr. Macintosh turns to Juanita and asks, “Can he understand me?”
Juanita shrugs.
“Habla inglés?” Dr. Macintosh demands.
“Yes,” says Juanita automatically, but it’s evident to everyone she does not speak much English, nor does Mario.
“Look here,” Dr. Macintosh orders Mario and points to his right index finger, which wavers before Mario’s face. Dr. Macintosh draws his finger across Mario’s field of vision, from his far left to his far right. He watches Mario’s eyes intently the entire time.
Dr. Macintosh draws back and looks at the side of his face.
“Has this always sagged?”
He makes a motion with his hand to indicate the drooping.
“Cuándo?”
Juanita shrugs. “Ayer por la mañana.”
“In the morning then, you noticed this?”
Juanita nods. “Ayer por…”
“Ah, yesterday?” Dr. Macintosh sighs, leans back in his examining room chair.
“I believe it’s a stroke,” he says to the room. “We’ll need an MRI.”
*
On the cold hospital gurney, Mario is thrust into the MRI machine with its cracking sounds and whir. He descends like a bird through the sky over the winter landscape and the harsh mountains of El Norte, to the brown rivers where he knew the waters would take him. As ordered, he does not move, lies perfectly still while the horror sounds of machinery chirp and groan, and it will make no difference, he realizes. None at all.
*
“All right, then,” says Sonny to the emergency room nurse. “We’ll let you get to it.” He feels as uncomfortable as Mario in the hospital. They have squandered their morning hours for an old man who won’t recover. He curtly motions for the boys to follow him.
“What do you think will happen to them?” asks Pauly.
“Who knows?” says Mark. “Shouldn’t be in this country anyhow,” he adds. “They don’t even speak English.”
“I think the girl knew a little bit,” says Pauly.
“I’d do her,” says Mark. “I’d give her some American tongue.”
“You wouldn’t want to,” says Theo. “She might have something.”
Pauly ignores the banter from his brothers. He’s heard it all before, mostly crude, bragging, but something nags at him. “The old man had something. What was the matter with him?” Pauly asks.
“It was a stroke, the doctor said,” Mark says.
“What’s that?”
“It’s what you boys are going to give me if you don’t get your ass in gear,” says Sonny, irritably.
As they walked down the tiled hallway, they pass Deputy Schroeder. They are all dressed in camouflage, like a little army trooping along.
Theo whispers, “Aren’t you going to tell him?”
“No. Shut up, Theo,” says Pauly.
“You should tell him there’s a bunch of illegals,” Theo announces loudly.
Pauly grinds his teeth. “Quiet.”
Uncle Sonny keeps walking.
“I’ll tell him,” says Theo.
“Be quiet,” Pauly snaps, outraged. “They didn’t do anything to you!”
“You screwed up my chance for a deer,” Theo whines. “It was my time.” His voice is angry, high-pitched, petulant. “My time to kill a deer.” Theo stares sullenly at his brother and then yells, “Deputy Schroeder!”
*
“It will be all right,” Juanita tells Mario. “It was just a test.”
Mario smiles, and his grip tightens on her arm. He is trying to ease her mind. He is not scared, he wants to tell her, but the words escape him. He is not scared but he knows that she is. He wants to reassure her; he is already on his way to the jungle and night sounds of his youth, the timeless hut by the brown water where he was born. At the door to the MRI room, Juanita sees Deputy Schroeder waiting. She follows the nurse through the doorway, holding her breath. The officer approaches, puts a restraining hand on her forearm. She looks down at the brown cuff of the uniform, the wedding ring. He has a family, she realizes—such a natural, everyday thing. A place to call home.
Jack R. Johnson is a monthly columnist for North of the James magazine in Richmond, Virginia; an editor of The Alliance for Progressive Virginia blog; and a contributor to Style magazine. His published works include award-winning short stories, articles, and the novel An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation.