Across the Wire (6 page)

I waved at him, but he just looked at me as the truck went by, no emotion at all on his face.

As we were unloading the vans, one of Pacha’s girls came to me and put her hand on my arm. “Luis,” she said, quietly. “Mama’s baby died.”

I stared at her.

“Don José just took him away in the truck. His head was too big. He was all black.”

I asked her if it had been born here.

She shook her head. “Free clinic,” she said.

She stood calmly, watching me. “Mama needs you,” she said.

I didn’t want to go up there.

It was a terrible charade: Pacha was blushing and overly polite, as though caught in an embarrassment. I was pleasant, as though we were having tea and crumpets at the Ritz. Everything felt brittle, ready to shatter. She wore baggy green stretch pants and stood holding a salvaged aluminum kitchen chair.

“Poor José,” she said, looking off. It was very dark in the house, and it smelled of smoke. “Poor José. It hurt him so much.”

That look as he drove past, drunk: where was Jesus now?

“The baby wouldn’t come out,” she said. She looked at her feet. “The doctor got up under my
chi-chis
and pushed on him after I tried for a few hours.”

“He sat on your abdomen?”

She nodded. “Sí. They got up on my chest and shoved on me. And then the doctor had to get down there and pull me open because the baby was black and we were both dying.” She
swayed. I jumped up and took her arm, trying to get her into the chair. “It hurts,” she said. She smiled. “It’s hard to sit.” I got her down. “They stuck iron inside me. They pulled him out with tools, and I’m scared because I’m fat down there. I’m still all fat.” She couldn’t look at me; she bowed her head. “It’s hard and swollen and I can’t touch it.”

I told her not to move and ran down the hill to get Dave, a medical student who was working with us. He grabbed a flashlight and followed me up.

Pacha repeated her story; I translated.

He said, “Tell her to pull the pants tight against her crotch so I can see the swelling.”

She did it. He bent close. It looked like she had grown a set of testicles. He whistled.

“Think it’s a hernia?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Could be.” Many of the women in the dump get hernias that are never treated—I knew one woman who had one for fifteen years until she asked one of us to look at it.

Dave said, “Tell her I have to feel it.”

I told Pacha. She just looked at me. Brown eyes flecked with gold. “Anything you say.” She nodded.

“Is she all right?” Dave asked.

“Yeah.”

He handled her very tenderly; she winced, sucked air. “Feels bad,” he said.

She kept her eyes on my face.

“We have to get her pants off, buddy.”

“Wonderful, Dave.”

“Culturally?” he asked.

“A disaster.”

One of my aunts, when she was pregnant, was attended to
by a male obstetrician. My uncle ordered him to stand outside a closed door—his nurse looked at my aunt and called out the details to him. My uncle hovered nearby to make sure there would be no outrage against her womanhood.

Dave stood there for a moment. “Too bad. We have to look.”

“Pacha,” I said. “The, ah, doctor needs to see it.”

She nodded. She took her children outside and told them not to come back for a while. I held her hand and helped her into the bed.

José had designed a little paper alcove for the bed. Pictures of musicians, movie stars, and saints were pasted to the walls. A ragged curtain hung beside the bed for privacy.

“He was too big,” she said, stretching out. “Too fat.”

She worked the pants down around her hips. A strip of dirty elastic—perhaps torn out of an old girdle—was wrapped around her fallen belly to hold it up. She unwrapped herself. Her navel hung out like a fat thumb.

She undid some safety pins that held her underpants together. They were blue, lightly stained. A smell rose of warm bread and vinegar. Dave sat beside her. She stared into my eyes.

I looked away. I was embarrassed and nervous.

Dave handed me the flashlight and said, “Here. Illuminate it for me.”

Her right side was thick and grotesque. The right labium was red. Bits of lint stuck to her. Every time he touched her, Pacha gasped.

“Blood,” he said. “Tell her it’s blood. No hernia.” He smiled at her.

I translated.

She smiled a little bit, more with her eyes than her lips.

We put her to bed for several days—no more trash-picking. She needed to let the blood reabsorb. Dave gave her a battery of vitamins, some aspirin, put her on lots of fluids.

“Ay, Luis
,” she said.

I stepped out of her home. The sky was black and brown—they were burning dogs at the end of the dump. It smelled like Hell. I took a deep breath and walked away.

I
t was finally time to go down and see Jesusita.

We climbed into the four-wheel-drive Blazer and drove down the slippery hill. The dirt road was already so deep in mud that the truck couldn’t make it. We had to abandon it and slog down. In places, the mud went higher than my knees.

Jesusita and some of her brood waited for us at the bottom of the hill. They led us to what seemed to be—for the dump, anyway—an especially luxurious house. It was a small American-style place with stucco walls and what appeared to be a real roof. It even had a porch. We were a little suspicious at first. The Cheese Lady had made such a fuss about this? Our opinions changed when we got inside. Half of the interior walls had fallen in, with the back walls sagging and open to the wind. The floor was raw, uncovered cement, and the whole house was awash in one or two inches of water. Only two areas remained recognizable as rooms. In what had clearly been a living room, on a sheet of plastic, were piled all of Jesusita’s possessions—clothes, bundles—forming a small dry island. The family slept on this pile. The other room was a kitchen.

They had dragged the empty shell of a stove from the dump. A linoleum-and-aluminum table stood in the kitchen, too, with
four unmatched chairs. On the counter, a few coffee cups, a pan, and the meager food supplies we had given Jesusita. Her husband arrived, took off his straw
vaquero
hat, shook our hands, and very formally and graciously invited us to sit and have a cup of coffee with him. He was an iron-backed man, not tall, but erect and strong; his hands were thick and solid as oak burls. He wore old cowboy boots and faded jeans and a white pearl-snap shirt. We learned that he was a horse-breaker from the interior of Mexico, a real cowboy who took pride in his talents.

Jesusita said, “He is the best horse-tamer in our region.”

He shushed her—he never liked too much talk of home. His tightly curled hair was tinged gray and white. A small peppery mustache sketched itself across his upper lip. He referred to each of us as “
usted
,” the formal “you,” and it was clear that he expected the same respect. The most lasting impression we took with us was one of dignity and pride.

Their children were remarkably attractive—several girls and two little boys. One of the girls, perhaps fifteen, had a baby. All their hair was shiny and black, and the girls wore it pulled back in loose ponytails.

Jesusita put wads of newspaper in the hollow stove and lit them. She heated water in the battered pan, and she made Nescafé instant coffee with it. It was clearly the last of their coffee, and she served it in four cups. We men sat at the table. Jesusita and the kids stood around us, watching us drink.

It was a lovely moment. The weak coffee, the formal and serious cowboy, the children, and Jesusita, hovering over us. She broke a small loaf of sweet bread into pieces and made us eat.

It was also a fearsome moment—the water was surely polluted,
runoff from the miasma above. A great deal of disease infested the area from the constant flooding and the scattered bodies of dead animals. To refuse their hospitality would have been the ultimate insult, yet to eat and drink put us at risk. Von had the grim set in his lips that said,
Here we go again
, and with a glance at us, he took a sip. We drank.
“¡Ah!”
we exulted.
“¡Delicioso!”
Jesusita beamed. The cowboy nodded gravely, dipped his bit of sweet bread in his cup, and toasted us with it. Outside, the cold rain hammered down. Inside, we all shivered. We could find no way to get warm.

I
first met the Serrano family on a Thursday. Halloween was coming. Several women told me there was a very dirty new family living out at the far end of the pig village. The children were sick, they said, and the mother—who was about to have a baby—was dying.

I walked out there, to where the Serranos had thrown together a small compound of stray boards and bedsprings. The roof was low—about three feet high—and I had to bend over to get inside. The only room of the house was a combination bedroom and kitchen. Its floor was dirt, and the room was dark and smoky. The smoke came from a little cook fire in the far corner, dangerously near the wooden wall. Some papers and a couple of pots rested on a cardboard mat in the dirt next to the fire. In the other three corners, pallets of rag and paper lay in the dirt: the beds.

Two boys and a little girl squatted in the dark. When they saw me, they started laughing. I said, “Come out here.”

The little girl had an unusual name—Cervella (Ser-VEY-yah).

“Where’s your father?” I asked.

The eldest boy shrugged.

They all giggled.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Cagando.”
(Shitting.) “She does it all the time.”

They all nodded.

“All day,” Cervella said.

Her face was covered in smudges, but under the dirt I could see dense scabs, dark as steak. I couldn’t figure out what they were; they looked like a combination of scabies and impetigo.

“What is this?” I asked, putting my finger on her cheek. She shrugged. I took her arm, turned the elbow out; there they were again. When I touched the edge of a scab, pale orange blood leaked out. “Does it hurt?”

Shrug. “Itches.” Giggle.

They all looked past me. I turned around. Mrs. Serrano had appeared in a patch of tall weeds. She scared me to death.

She was a zombie, right out of an old Boris Karloff movie. Her skin was sallow and had the texture of hide, all crisscrossed with tiny X’s in the thick flesh. Her eyes were black, but overlaid with a dullness that looked like a layer of dust—I wanted to wipe them off with my fingertips. Her mood was so flattened that it seemed agreeable and mindless; on her mouth, a loose-lipped grin and a constant exhalation of dank air. When she stood next to me, I could feel her fever radiating.

She was very pregnant.

“Are you Mrs. Serrano?” I asked.

“Serrano?” she said.

Pause.

“Where is your husband, Mrs. Serrano?”

Pause.

She moved a hand in the direction of the dump.

“What’s wrong with your daughter?”

She smiled slowly, looking at the ground. “My daughter? There is something wrong with her.” She laughed in slow motion.

I was baffled.

I put my hand on her forehead; it was dry as a skull, burning.

“I have dysentery,” she said.

Someone coughed behind me. Mr. Serrano had arrived to see who was bothering his family. He was a hearty man with a hat and a drooping mustache. He gripped my hand and pumped it.

“Good to meet you!”

I told him his wife was seriously ill.

“I know it,” he said. “Watch this.” He grabbed her arm and pinched up a section of her skin. When he let it go, it stayed elevated, like clay, or a pinch of Silly Putty. A sign of severe dehydration. They call it “tenting.”

“Está toda seca,”
he said. (She’s all dry.)

“The baby?” I asked.

She laughed.

“Touch it,” Mr. Serrano said.

I put my hand on her stomach. It was hard.

I brought them supplies from the vans: water, a quart of vitamin D milk, a pound of rice, a pound of beans, a large can of tuna, a large can of peaches, a large can of fruit cocktail, one dozen flour tortillas, corn, a can of Veg-All mixed vegetables,
bread, a fresh chicken, and doughnuts for the kids. I told Mr. Serrano to keep her in bed and to pour fluids down her, and I’d be back the next day with Dave and a
gringo
doctor.

They both laughed. He kept rubbing his hand over his face, up to the hat, down over the chin.

The next day, when Dave and I returned with the doctor, Mrs. Serrano was sitting in the sun on a broken kitchen chair.

“I’m back,” I said. “Remember I told you I’d come back?”

She didn’t respond.

The doctor crouched before her and felt her stomach. He pulled up her lids, felt her brow, and took her pulse. He shook out his thermometer and put it in her mouth. She submitted to everything.

“Tell her I need a stool sample. Tell her I need to see some stool.”

I told her. She got up and motioned for us to follow her. She led us to the south wall of the shack—the outside of the kitchen wall. The single sheet of plywood was also the wall of the pigpen. And she had been leaning against it to go; bloody ropes and spatters of feces were all over the wall. We were standing in it. Dave cracked, “There’s nothing like really getting into your work!” Our can of tuna simmered about six inches away from this mess.

“Doesn’t she know anything about hygiene?” the doctor asked.

I translated.

“What is it?” she asked.

The doctor handed me a paper cup.

“Sample,” he said.

———

He gave her Lomotil to stop the diarrhea. We gave her several jugs of Gatorade, more jugs of water, and some clothes.

Mr. Serrano, who had stood in the background during all this, came up to me and said, “Don’t leave us a prescription.”

I told him not to worry—we’d pay for it.

“No,” he said. “We can’t read. We won’t know what we’re getting.” The doctor had given him a bottle of antibiotics, and Mr. Serrano held it up to me and said, “And you’d better tell me what this says, too, eh?”

Whatever Mrs. Serrano had, it was cured within a week or two because of one donated hour and some pale capsules the doctor prescribed. Within days, her eyes brightened, her skin turned tender, and her fever vanished. They moved the pigs away from the wall and went out into the weeds beside the dump to relieve themselves. In time, she had a healthy baby.