Paso del Norte
The day my younger brother, Billy, told me he enlisted, I figured the only rational thing to do was to take one last trip down to Juarez before he shipped out to basic in Georgia. We used to go every few months, back when my wife, Flora, was driving a bus for the city. We didn’t have a lot of money back then. I was unemployed, and I spent most my days watching a lot of television. Billy was working at a gas station just outside of Phoenix. It was a Saturday morning when he called. I was asleep on the couch, and Flora was in the kitchen making coffee.“Well,” he said into the receiver, “I done screwed up, Dill.” I heard the clinking of ice in a glass and the groan of his leather recliner.
The day my younger brother, Billy, told me he enlisted, I figured the only rational thing to do was to take one last trip down to Juarez before he shipped out to basic in Georgia. We used to go every few months, back when my wife, Flora, was driving a bus for the city. We didn’t have a lot of money back then. I was unemployed, and I spent most my days watching a lot of television. Billy was working at a gas station just outside of Phoenix. It was a Saturday morning when he called. I was asleep on the couch, and Flora was in the kitchen making coffee.“Well,” he said into the receiver, “I done screwed up, Dill.” I heard the clinking of ice in a glass and the groan of his leather recliner.
| “What’s that?” “I done screwed up. I was walking around the shops in Phoenix earlier, trying to kill a bad buzz that I picked up at a party the night before, and I walked past the Army recruiter’s office. They talked me into it. I enlisted.” He didn’t seem scared or angry, just sad. Flora stepped into the room. “Who’s that?” she asked, placing a mug on the coffee table in front of me. I held my finger to my lips. “Oh,” she said, stepping back into the kitchen. “What are you going to do?” “I guess I’ll have to follow through with it,” he said. “You can’t say you’re sick? Say you’re terminal or something.” “This is the army, Dill. You can’t play sick.” “When do you ship out?” “A couple of weeks after I go to MEPS.” Flora was in the kitchen rinsing something in the sink. She was humming a song I remembered from church when I went as a kid. Billy and I used to play soldier on Sunday afternoons, after the service, in the church parking lot. Our parents stood in the foyer and spoke with the other adults while we would gather up crumbling dirt clods and throw them at one another. Flora turned off the sink and opened the door to the back porch. *** “Who was that?” she asked as I stepped out on the back porch with my coffee mug in hand. She sat in a sun-bleached, plastic Adirondack chair. We were too poor to afford the real wooden ones. The sun was covered by wispy clouds that reminded me of cotton fields. An ink-colored crow sat on the power line that hung across our fenced-in backyard, and my old riding mower sat in the corner of the yard, not that we needed a mower. Our lawn was bare and empty. The yard was a disappointment in a long series of disappointments that followed Flora and I around ever since I was fired from work. “You’re never going believe this,” I said. “Billy’s enlisted.” “Are you kidding me?” She sounded angry. She reached out and touched my knee. “Why in God’s name would he do a thing like that? Doesn’t he know that’s a good way to ruin his life? Look at how much time he’ll have to spend. Doesn’t he want to start a family?” She squeezed my leg. “I don’t know,” I said, looking up in the direction of the Camelback Mountain. It stood like an adobe castle out in the flatlands of the desert. “He leaves soon.” “I can tell you’re thinking of something.” Her eyes were red and bags had formed beneath them. The city had been making her work late. “What are you thinking about?” “I was thinking you, me, and Billy should load up and head across the border, down to Juarez. Just for a couple of days.” “Don’t you think it’s sort of silly to spend money on something like that, especially since you’re out of work?” She began tugging at a loose thread that hung from the sleeve of her bath robe. Flora had been worrying about our money situation ever since I had gotten fired from the city’s maintenance crew for stealing tools. It had been accidental at first. I had forgotten to take a power drill out of my work truck. I didn’t want to be bothered with having to explain to my boss the next day, so I took it to a pawn shop and sold it. The city began to get suspicious when they noticed that a lot of their tools were beginning to turn up missing. The cops popped me leaving work with a truck full of aluminum pipe wrenches. I had gotten lucky. Because I was friends with most of the guys on the crew, the city agreed not to press charges so long as I paid for all the tools I stole. Of course, Flora and I had wasted most of the tool money on things like cheap plastic Adirondack chairs, so we had to dip into our savings to pay back the city. We were just getting back on our feet, and once I started working again we would be in the green. “It’ll be fine, Flora. Me, you, and Billy in Juarez again. You know how he loves it down there. It’s the least we can do for him. He’s going off to fight for our freedom for Christ’s sake.” “We’re not fighting anyone right now, at least, I don’t think so.” She laid her mug at her feet and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Look, he’s my kid brother. I want to send him out with a bang. Kid just signed a prison sentence for two years, let’s do this for him.” “Dill, if you and Billy want to go down to Mexico and gallivant around for a few days, that’s fine, but count me out. We can’t afford for me to lose my job, too. At least until you find a job yourself.” She stood and started to step back inside, “I love you, you know, but sometimes I don’t understand you at all. You’re selfish. Sometimes I don’t think you care about us.” |
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