The Guardians (28 page)

After she left her new iglesia-in-progress, she disappears.

I say it in the present tense because it's like an hour—between i and
2 P.M.
—that I have frozen in my head. She slipped through another dimension, and she's still there somewhere, like Alice in the looking-glass.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

One of my all-time favorite books in college was
Things Fall Apart
by Achebe. It was about how one man of the Ibo tribe experiences the breakdown of his world. Things thereafter would never be the same. The title of his novel came from the Yeats poem “The Second Coming.”

Like my abuelo might say, we need a second coming around here all right.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

It wasn't the Magonistas who brought anarchy to the border. There is no cohesive center where a line divides. Anarchy is its natural result.

Crucita used to always tell me I needed to get in touch with my feelings. “You're like so many men,” she'd say—she was a psych minor. “You guys don't let yourselves feel your emotions.”

She was right, but I didn't know it then.

I was out of touch with my feelings.

I mean, I knew I loved her and the kids. I knew I wanted to look out for them as best I could. I just didn't know how to show how I felt.

Three weeks have gone by and Crucita is still lost in the looking-glass.

My ex-wife's vehicle was found in a garbage dump on the other side, in Lote Bravo.

The car had been stripped and torched.

There was no way to get any kind of evidence from it.

How did the police there even figure out that the vehicle they found was, in fact, Crucita's?

Like I say, I suspect everybody. Even if I don't suspect some officials for being the culprits, I suspect their incompetence.

I moved back into my old house, empty as it is, and left all my papers in the trailer.

I sent the kids to stay with their uncle Fernie. They call home every day, if I don't call them first. Xochi says, “Dad, do you think we'll ever find Mom?” She asks me the very same question every day the very same way.
Dad … do … you … think … we'll … ever … find … Mom?
What I can't stand is that implicit in the question is that my child is asking me to give her something I feel I don't have the ability to do—return her mother to her.
Will you ever find my mother?
is what I hear. And I, a man with the best intentions, who obviously could not love enough or
the way my wife had wanted me to express myself, have failed my whole family miserably I could not even keep Crucita from harm's way.

The worse part is the not knowing. Aside from the ransom note left in my Mustang we never heard anything about her again. Is she still alive? We don't even know that much. “That piece of crap Toro and his little Palominos have no souls. They're wicked to the core. They would just as soon kill someone for the fun of it than try to extort money” I told Gabe one day when he came over to see how I was doing. I took a leave of absence from school. At first I was all over the place, on the news, crossing over to the other side, driving all over the place trying to track those little pendejos down on my own … organizing posses. Then little by little, with no sign and no word, people started losing interest in finding Crucita. Some days I can't get up from bed. Or better put, the couch. I can't go to the bed my ex and I used to sleep in together.

“Don't blame yourself, Mr. Betancourt,” Gabe said. He was with the priest that had come to his barbecue party. Juan Bosco, or J.B., as I like to call him, and Gabe offered their help. But the kid knows better than anyone there is nothing they can do.

Regina didn't come with him. We haven't spoken since that day she came running out of the school after me. I've picked up the phone ten times to call her. Ten times I've stopped myself. I want to apologize. I want to tell her how afraid I am to get together with someone and fail again. Fail is an understatement. I've been carrying so much anger inside me so long I don't know who I'm mad at anymore. Even if the note I got came from the Palominos gang, I knew Gabe didn't have anything to do with Crucita's disappearance. And if he didn't, Regina sure didn't.

So, for now, we're a pair of U.S. Mexicans living in parallel universes.

People we care about go AWOL.

“Unless you can be inside a man's brain and replace memory, a sense of family duty, cultural norms, and everything else he grew up being told what it is to be a man, this ain't working for me,” I told the therapist when I decided to quit.

Before I got divorced I joined a men's circle up in Taos. There were about eight or even as many as a dozen of us sorry asses at any given meeting. We weren't exactly “Iron Johns” searching for our feminine souls. But we were aware of our reliance on our macho selves. We built a sweat lodge in the back of one of the guys’ houses. We stayed out all night praying, chanting, talking, and trying to be honest with ourselves, some for the first time in our lives. A couple of the guys there admitted having
been physically abusive. Some had drinking or even drug problems. Eventually, I stopped going.

Not because I couldn't relate. In some ways I had related too much. I just felt, like Crucita always said, I was a man who couldn't let himself feel.

Now all my feelings are beating in my head like a water drum.

EL ABUELO MILTON

“Here's what we are going to do,” I said to el Mikey when I went to check him out at his house one night. He wasn't answering the phone no more. He didn't return my messages. ¿Qué diablos pasa? I asked Oso. Maybe my grandson had gone and done something stupid to himself. So me and Oso drove up to Sunland Park to check it out.

I found el Mikey alive. He only grunted when he saw me at the door and went back to lay on the couch. “Chingaos, hombre,” I said. My nieto looked like ese Rasputin con una long beard. Y más pa’ ya que pa’ 'ca. He was in some scruffy sweats, like he hadn't changed in a month. 'Cause he hadn't. That was obvious. It wasn't a month but he sure stank like it.

When Crucita first disappeared, Miguel had been on the TV news appealing to the kidnappers. He would drive all over the place with fliers— the airport, hospital, and bus terminals. His gente in Sunland Park, they'd been helping to look, too.

Then my grandson shut down. That's what happened. I wasn't having none of that, not from a Betancourt. “Ya ni la muelas, hombre. Where's all your fight gone, son?” I asked, showing as much disgust as I could muster. “Listen,” I said, “I've been thinking about this whole situation. The chota in El Paso can't cross the state line to look for those lil pachucos. And the New Mexico police ain't had no success in finding them, neither. Looks to me like the job's been left to us.”

The other night, I heard on the news that the bodies of two mujeres were found by the Santa Teresa border, naked, tied up, stabbed. No, I ain't saying that's what happened to la Crucita. I mean, all the missing and murdered mujeres in the last years. But they mentioned it once and
that's it. You never get to even find out their names. It's like it don't matter. I do not think they could come up with a horror movie worse than the situation we got going en la frontera. In fact, we heard that the very consultant for that movie
The Silence of the Lambs
was brought in to give his opinion of what he thought was going on after the first three hundred missing girls and women turned up dead in Juárez—all having obviously met their end in the most vile ways. “Yup, it's a serial killer, all right,” was his grand conclusion supposedly. “Maybe even two. He might not even be Mexican.” Then he went back to Hollywood.

Esa Tiny Tears—my number one hunch as to who knew what happened to Crucita—had up and dropped out of sight, too. Maybe by her own doing. Maybe not. María Dolores, that's her real name. The diputada told me. Sofia said la ruquita left her sick baby with her mother up in Mesquite and took off. La baby was born an addict. Tiny Tears's mother didn't seem all that upset that her hija was gone. She told the authorities she didn't bother to report it because it wasn't the first time her hija had run away. “The last time she took off, she came back with this,” the mother supposedly said to them, referring to the criatura in her arms.

“What d'you think, hombre?” I asked my grandson. At first el Mikey just stared at me, looking up from the couch. There were about twenty empty cups of take-out coffee all around, that yuppie expensive kind. “Ain't you got nothing better to do with your money?” I said, picking up the trash. “Learn to make yourself a pot of coffee, will you?” On the dining room table, all over the floor in the living room, everything was covered with papers and newspapers. By el teléfono, all kind of notes. “What's the matter with you, Mikey?” I asked him. “You on the phone all the time but you can't call your abuelo back? Who do you talk to, anyway?”

For the first time, Mikey spoke up, with a voice that sounded like someone was strangling him. “My kids,” he said.

“Well, I've spoken to your kids, también,” I said. “Frankly, they ain't doing too good, neither. So what me and you's gotta do, Mikey, is get out there and do our own tracking down of those Palomino pachuquito outlaws. That Toro-Vaca-Rata's back on the street hurting kids. Chamacos just likes yours.”

“My kids,” he said again, like his brain was on “repeat.”

“Son,” I said, reaching down and lifting up that big bulto of a grandson I had by the front of his sweatshirt, “get off your trasero and let's do something for those kids’ sakes.” Once I got him on his feet I said, “How 'bout we start with you taking a shower?”

REGINA

It was November, and a windstorm was howling all around outside one night when we were woken up by a
tun, tun, tun. Tun, tun, tun.
Válgame Dios, I thought, quickly putting on Mamá's chenille bata. (That's what I use, Mamá's old bathrobe.) I got my rifle out of the ropero. Then
tun, tun, tun
again.

“Who is it, Tía?” Gabo whispered. He peeked out of his room, more asleep than awake, like me. For once, he had been sleeping soundly in his bed. I shrugged my shoulders, tiptoeing with the rifle in my hand to the front window to take a look. It was the sheriff's vehicle, headlights glaring at the house.

When I opened the door the sheriff and a deputy stepped in. They removed their hats and apologized for disturbing us. “I just wanted to come up and make sure things were all right up here,” el sheriff said. Why shouldn't they have been? Although my place is a ways from town, I never worried about break-ins or nothing. But the sheriff had never come around checking on me before, neither. “What happened?” I asked.

“Do you mind putting down your weapon, ma'am?” The deputy asked. I still had the rifle in my hand. I leaned it against the wall and crossed my arms. One minute you were in your warm camita dreaming about what you were going to cook on Thanksgiving. The next, you had law enforcement in your home acting like you were a potential criminal. The sheriff smiled at his deputy. “I think she's right to try to protect herself, living out here and all.”