Across the Wire (9 page)

Our job was to bathe kids, wash heads, deliver food, and attend to any minor medical crises we discovered at the orphanage. Laura Patricia lived in a small house behind the corner market and across the creek. When I met her, she was about ten—a pretty girl with copper hair. Neighborhood kids were allowed to go over to bathe and get shampoos after the orphans had finished.

Each child was awarded a treat bag for bathing—he or she got two doughnuts (day-olds donated by Winchell’s), two or three pieces of fruit, and a carton of chocolate milk. We had reservations about the chocolate, but learned that the kids wouldn’t drink plain milk. They’d often give it to the dogs.

Colored poker chips, won in competitions, “bought” sundries at a small “store” set up in the back of one of the vans. Orphanage boys always helped put together the treat bags—for a fee. They were terrors, but the prospect of being paid in chocolate doughnuts for their tireless efforts turned them into little Jimmy Swaggarts. They pontificated from the fruit table, strutting and exhorting the other kids to be as holy as they. We’d stuff over a hundred bags, and they’d eat at least as many chunks of doughnut.

In the background was Laura, watching.

Later, when I’d go out to work on heads and hair, she’d follow me. Finally, one day, I asked her if she’d like to help me wash. She immediately took over the rinse-and-brush brigade. I’d be raising a ruckus with the children: “Brace yourself, I’m going to pour hot soup on your head! Watch out—here comes a cup of hot coffee!” She would shake her head at me like a wife. Whenever I sat in a chair, she’d come into the house and sit near, not looking at me, as though it had been the sheerest happenstance that we were there at the same time. On rare occasions, she would sit on the arm of the chair and put her hand on my back.

Laura did not bathe with the other kids.

Her mother had breast cancer, and we often paid for her bus trips to Los Angeles, where she got her treatments. The chemicals made her bloat until she was unrecognizable, and they ultimately did little good. Her right breast was removed before we met.

Five years after her mother’s first mastectomy, Laura turned eleven. She transformed from a quiet, moody little girl to being a tall, beautiful young woman. Her hair went long and wavy of
its own accord, and her walk became graceful. Her body began to curve and lengthen. She remained quiet, though. Her thoughts and feelings were almost always a mystery.

Sometimes, when her mother had bad spells, Laura wrote to ask me for help in getting her to the hospital. One day, I got a letter telling me that she had to begin kidney dialysis; Laura was terrified. She asked me to get everyone to pray so she wouldn’t die. Then she told me that the next time I saw her it would be her twelfth birthday. Her mother was going to give her a little party, and she wanted me to be the guest of honor.

A friend of mine gave me five dollars to give to Laura. I put it in her birthday card, along with twenty dollars from me.

Another Chicano friend of mine named Rico had been going down on the run with me. Rico was in the MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) organization at the college where I was working, and he had helped get some clothes collected for Tijuana. He had become somewhat of a cause célèbre with the Mexico Crew—he drove a chopped and severely modified low-rider VW bug. It had roses etched in its tiny windows, and “suicide doors”—they opened in the opposite direction from regular car doors. It also had a Porsche engine that made a violent racket. His license plates said
QUE MALO.
(How Bad.)

Rico was endearingly obscene. He’d be in the midst of a pack of Baptist Bible students, and when something startled him, he’d cry, “Jesus Christ!” or “Holy shit!”

Incredibly, his great charm seemed to make them deaf to his sins. The church folk swarmed to him. I often wondered if the Baptist sisters didn’t dream they could tame the beast, make of him an upright Bible-believing missionary.

Rico’s cry could always be heard in the distance: “Holy fuckin’ shit!”

———

Rico piled into a van with me. When we got to San Antonio, it was drizzling. Laura was standing out in the dirt road, watching for us, alone. When she saw us coming, she ran inside.

There were actually two orphanages near Laura’s house. The crew would pull into the first and begin the bathing. A small group moved on to the second, to begin preparing the food bags and washing heads. Rico, a woman named Diana, and I left the first crew and walked through San Antonio. When we got to Laura’s house, she ran outside and took my hand. I slipped her the card and told her I was hoping she would buy her own gift, since I didn’t know what to get her.

Von had given me a digital wristwatch for her, too, but I wanted to spring that on her later.

“You’ve got to come to the party!” she insisted.

“I will,” I said.

“Bring your friends.”

“All right,” I said. I told her we were walking to the orphanage.

She walked along beside me, as quiet as always.

Between the village and the second orphanage, the stream had erased the road that once cut through its bed, so the government erected a stone bridge over it. This bridge took an age to build, and they didn’t grade the ramps leading up to it. Within a couple of years, the soil had washed away from either end, leaving a nice stone sculpture of a bridge in the air.

We started across, looking down as we walked. The stream was still running with water from the rains, and we all paused on the stone bridge above it. The whole thing was clotted with tadpoles. The shallows were black with them, and they
squirmed furiously in the water. I picked up a dirt clod. I wanted to drop it in one pool and separate the tadpoles to get an idea of how many there were. When the clod hit, the splash threw fistfuls of them onto the shore, where they thrashed.

“Oh shit!” Rico yelled. “You’re killin’ ’em!”

We barreled down the slope to the water’s edge, on a tadpole rescue mission. Diana and Laura stood above us, laughing.

“Well,” I said, “I can’t let ’em die just because I did something stupid!”

“Right!” cried Rico. “Stupid!”

It took us about ten minutes to collect them all and get them back in the water.

We washed the heads of eighty kids that day.

When Diana, Rico, and I walked back to Laura’s, it was misty. The air was a pale gray; the hills were invisible behind the gauze of water. Laura’s mother had set a small table on the patio in front of the house. Everyone was waiting for Laura’s uncle to arrive with Jell-O.

We were seated—I got the chair beside Laura’s (she held my hand under the table), and Diana got a chair, too. Rico sat on a broken kerosene heater. I suddenly realized that was it. No one else was sitting with us.

Everybody fretted about that Jell-O.

Her mother brought out little bowls of chicken and potato salad, and she put a small plop of each on our plates. The neighbor kids pressed in around us and watched us eat, fascinated by the party. We ate the family’s only food, and Laura’s mother couldn’t join us, nor could her friends. Laura was radiant. This was her big day.

In the background, I heard her mother mentioning “
tío”
(uncle) and “
el Jell-O.”

We tried to make the chicken last, but it was gone very fast.

Laura’s mother cleared the table. She stalled as long as she could, and had apparently given up on the uncle. She hurried inside to get the cake when—suddenly!—the uncle appeared in a cloud of dust. The gathered kids rippled around us, excited. He leapt out of his car and threw a bowl of red Jell-O on the table.

Laura’s mother brought out the cake. She had baked it there, in a paper-and-wood-burning oven. It was partially collapsed, and the yellow frosting was speckled with tiny black flakes of soot. The kids whispered as we cut the cake that they couldn’t eat. Laura was smiling. I was about to take a bite when I glanced at Rico and Diana. They were silent, staring out at the drizzle. It was billowing, curtainlike, furling. We all sat there looking out. The small vines of the distant orchards clung to their white stakes; the red clay tiles of the tilemaker across the road lay on newspaper, soft in the wet. Dogs hunched together under trees like small herds of cows, trying to stay dry. Children all around us coughed.

Laura’s fingers were cold and silky.

Diana’s eyes slowly brimmed with tears; I watched them roll over the edge of her lower lids and fall. The whole world stilled around us. Rico looked at me. I looked at Laura’s face. The cold had made pink spread across her cheeks. She was wearing perfume. On her face, there was the slightest of smiles. Nobody said a word. It began to rain.

A
boy named Sergio fell down and broke his wrist. He had been playing jump rope with a small group of kids, and they pulled the rope tight beneath him, catching his ankle and throwing him to the ground. His wrist twisted softly near his hand; he was pale gray with shock, and his skin was cold. His mother was not home, and we had to take him to town in one of our vans, looking for a clinic. Since this was Good Friday, most of Tijuana was locked up for the day—and many of the stores and offices would be closed all weekend. The one clinic we knew to be open was right around the corner, but it had a fearsome reputation in the neighborhood. Here, we call it allegations of malpractice. There, the people only had rumors: a boy with a broken arm had been taken in there by his mother. He was taken down the hall and put to sleep. When she was allowed to go back to him, an hour later, she was horrified to find his arm gone. They had amputated it.

We had Sergio lying on blankets in the back of the van; Sharleen, one of the faithful old-timers, held him in her arms. She had an ice pack pressed to his wrist, and she tried to steady him as we banged over the rough streets. Still, whenever we hit a pothole, I could hear Sergio groan. I kept directing the driver around corners, to all the
barrio
clinics and pharmacies I could remember, but they were all closed.

A massive Great Dane with a strangely mottled coat blocked the road. He was guarding the door of a pharmacy. Next door, we were thrilled to see a small clinic. It was open. The lichen-covered dog looked at us balefully as we dragged Sergio in.

The doctor’s name, interestingly enough, was Dr. Virgen.

He looked at Sergio’s wrist and said, “Bad break.” He looked at it, felt it, looked in Sergio’s eyes. All the while, Sergio
whimpered incoherently. “I can do nothing without an X-ray,” Dr. Virgen said. We couldn’t budge him; a break like this could not be played with, and he was right. It was just that the town was shut down, and Sergio was getting worse. The doctor got on the phone and called around town. He found us a hospital in downtown Tijuana—it was open only for another hour. He repacked Sergio’s wrist in ice and rubberized wrappings, and we sped off again.

When we carried Sergio into the hospital, the nurse took one look at him and said, “His wrist is broken!”

Sergio sagged sideways and vomited.

We were the last people out the door of the hospital. We got back to the Virgen Clinic, and the doctor looked at the X-ray, nodding. No matter what language they speak, it seems all doctors favor the same cryptic, stoic hemming and hawing and lip-pursing. They remind me of priests.

“I will set it,” he said.

However, of course, there was a complication. Nobody had found Sergio’s mother. There was no one to give consent to the medical work. “It’s a problem,” said the doctor. “You see, I have to put him under with an injection. If anything happens, you are acting as his guardian. It is conceivable that he could die. You are liable.”

There wasn’t really a choice. I told him to set it.

We took Sergio down the hall to the small operating room. I got him up on the table. “You okay?” I said.

He nodded, smiling weakly. “Look,” he said, glancing past me.

I turned around. On the next table, slowly leaking blood,
was a mass of tissue. We stared at it. It was dense as a small sun, and we held to it with our eyes, afraid to ask what it was, or why it was there.

I sat in the echoing waiting room, waiting. It wasn’t like an American doctor’s office. No music played, for example. No framed prints of trout fishermen or mountain vistas. No magazines, and no cozy table lamps: the lighting was from tubes in the ceiling. There weren’t even any carpets. You find very few carpets in Tijuana offices; most streets outside the center of town are either dirt or around the corner from dirt. There is no way for a carpet to survive. All the floors are linoleum. They have little more personality beyond that of a car wash.

The doctor came out and looked at me for a minute, cryptic to the end. “He’s asleep,” he said. “He’ll be out for a few hours.”

His nurse came out, then, putting on a jacket.

He said, “We’re going out to dinner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m taking my nurse to supper. I’d like you to watch my clinic for me while I’m gone.”

I thought he was kidding.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “nothing could go wrong. We’re closed for the day, and both patients are sleeping peacefully.”