Amigoland (20 page)

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his early in the morning there was hardly any traffic on the bridge going to the other side. The driver paid the toll, and
less than a minute later they had crossed over. On the other bridge, headed in the opposite direction, two rows of cars and
trucks inched along toward the U.S. checkpoint. The pedestrian line that Socorro had used to cross over only a few minutes
earlier now extended the full length of the bridge.

Up ahead, the taxi driver slowed down for the speed bumps leading to the mini–traffic light in front of the customs building.
Red meant you had to pull over for one of the inspectors to look in your trunk before permitting you to drive on; green meant
you were free to move forward.

“But these men need their papers to travel,” Socorro said, as the driver continued on.

“That, they can do at the bus station, and much faster, with no lines.”

Don Celestino patted her hand. “The man knows — he takes people to the bus station all the time, right?”

“Only for the last seventeen years,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

Away from the bridge the city buses swelled with people’s arms and faces in the open windows. The more hopeful of the street
vendors were setting up for that occasional tourist who might wander over this early in the day. The homemade-candy vendors
stood guard over their glass stands, shooing away the incessant flies and bees. A young man with tire shanks for knees crawled
between the cars, hustling along the pavement to catch up to an arm reaching out with a few pesos. A barefoot boy, hunched
over as he carried a three-foot-high crucifix on his back, searched for his next customer among the idling traffic. On this
side of the street, a city worker in green cover-alls was raising a small dust storm with her thatched broom. Next to a taxi
stand, a driver in a yellow muscle shirt was haggling with a sunburned tourist, while his equally sunburned wife and kids
waited on the sidewalk, trying not to touch anything. A skinny woman, holding two nylon-woven bags teeming with groceries,
berated her three kids as she crammed them into a packed Maxi-Taxi van. Farther down a campesino rode atop his wooden cart
as his burro clomped along, both of them scornful of the honking cars and trucks behind them.

After the second block they were able to get beyond some of the congestion and speed the rest of the way down Calle Obregón,
passing the restaurants, the bars, the discos, the curio shops, the occasional boutique or doctor’s office or dentist’s office,
and several pharmacies other than the one they were looking for. The driver, a slight man with reddish-brown skin and a smallish
head, had to keep pushing his oversize aviator glasses back up his thin nose. Once he was closer to the center of town he
turned on his radio so everyone on the street could hear the cumbia playing over the sound of his muffler. He especially wanted
to impress the young mother pushing the stroller near Plaza Hidalgo, but the girl paid as much attention to him as she did
to the babbling coming from her baby.

Don Fidencio rolled down his window to get some air. Later it would rain; he didn’t need a weatherman to tell him this, he
felt it in his knees, especially the weaker of the two. Across the street he could make out the cathedral’s conical spires
rising higher and higher into the grayish sky like a pair of matching dunce caps. If they weren’t in such a rush, he would
tell the driver to pull over so he could get his shoes shined at one of the stands in the plaza. These black-rubber-soled
shoes weren’t the kind one would normally think to shine, but at the same time it was a good idea to make sure they were presentable
before arriving in Linares. Not that anybody would’ve paid attention to what an old man had to say. If they hadn’t listened
to him about the pills, what chance was there that they would stop now? Pills for his heart. Pills for his blood pressure.
Pills for his cholesterol. Pills for his kidneys. Pills for his heartburn. Pills for the pain in his legs. Pills for him to
make cacas. Pills for him to sleep. Pills for this pill or that other pill not to make him sick. Everybody wanted to give
him a pill, whether he wanted it or not. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, they always had a pill for him. Like he might die if they
didn’t force another pill down his throat before he finished his meal. The One With The White Pants used to push his cart
through the mess hall like it was a hot summer day and he was selling paletas to all the kids who had been only waiting for
him to ring his bell and now they were going to chase him down the street with money in their hands.
Please, sir, give me just one more for my heartburn — I can feel the meat loaf coming up already. No, me first, me first.
I need one for the terrible pain in my big toe. I want one for my arthritis. Me first, sir, me first. Me, me, me!!! Give me
one of those big pills you would not feed to a horse! Please, sir, me first!

C
hayo raised her glasses, holding them up close to her face, then removed them altogether since they were really only reading
glasses and at the moment she didn’t have anything in front of her to read, not a prescription, not a label off an old vial,
not the name of a medicine scribbled in English on a piece of paper that she could then look up in her big red book with all
the proper medications listed in Spanish. The glasses were attached to a silver-beaded necklace that she was knotting up between
her fingers until she finally let it rest against the front of her blue smock. Then she and Socorro moved to one end of the
counter while the two men lingered at the other end: Don Fidencio, near a small rack of sunglasses, trying on the various
styles; Don Celestino, next to a plastic display, where he was sniffing an open tube of brilliantine.

“You can pretend the medicines are for my mother,” Socorro said, reaching out for her hand.

“Your mother, I have known for many years,” Chayo replied.

“But remember that first time, how I came here and you hadn’t met her?”

“That was different. By then your mother had been to many doctors. You showed me what they had given her.”

“Don Fidencio has been to the doctor many times.”

“Yes, but who can say what they prescribed for him?” She let go of Socorro’s hand. “Here you have me in the dark. All you
can tell me is that he needs medicines for his blood pressure and cholesterol, so he will not urinate so frequently, and because
he had a stroke not that long ago, and the rest only God knows. Like that, you want me to guess, like I was his doctor.”

“Only enough for a little while, for a few days, until we get back from the trip.”

“At a great risk, and not just for him — for you, for me,” Chayo said. “Tell me what you are going to do if he gets sick anyway
or if I give him the wrong medicines and they do him harm. Then what?”

They both turned when the door chimed. The security guard smiled briefly as he held open the door for a young pregnant woman
with two young children, then he went back to crossing his arms over his flak jacket. Chayo excused herself to attend to some
of the other customers that had entered the small pharmacy. She left Socorro waiting at the end of the counter near the display
of mentholated lozenges and the long glass case containing various brands of condoms and contact solutions. A string of Telmex
phone cards, each wrapped in plastic, dangled from the register inside a Plexiglas booth. The cashier girl counted off the
colorful bills in front of her, arranging them into disheveled stacks. At one point she looked up at Socorro and gave her
the passive smile of someone who isn’t paid enough to be genuinely pleasant. Then she entered an amount into an office calculator
and waited for the machine to produce a receipt before sticking it and two of the stacks of bills into a metal box beneath
the register. The pregnant woman was now lingering near the booth, holding one child in the cradle of her right arm and carrying
another in a stroller. She wanted to know what size diapers she should buy if she needed one that fit both a seven-month-old
and an eighteen-month-old. Chayo told her that, unfortunately, she would have to buy different sizes, but today she would
make her a special price on the Pampers.

Once she had taken care of her customer, she and Socorro walked to the counter where she kept the pharmaceutical book.

“Just tell me how you want me to feel doing something like this?”

“If we have to, we can find a doctor,” Socorro said.

“The doctor you should have found before you brought him here. Before, not later. That’s how it is supposed to happen. These
medicines are not for taking chances.”

“And if he goes with no medicines?”

Chayo turned toward the center of the store as the old man was trying on a pair of dark sunglasses and crouching to see himself
in the tiny mirror. The squared frames were the kind his doctor had given him years ago after removing his cataracts. He held
them against his brow, then stared up at the fluorescent lights as if he were staring into the sun. When he looked back down,
he lost his balance and staggered forward, in the direction of the sunglass rack, but at the last second grabbed hold of the
walker to correct himself.

“Only so you can go for a few days,” Chayo said, shaking her head, “and nothing too strong. After that you have to promise
to take him to a doctor, with someone who can prescribe some real medicine. A man his age and in that condition needs special
care.”

She reached for the beaded necklace that held her glasses, sliding her fingers down it as if she were counting off each bead
on a rosary. Then she walked around to the other side of the counter and opened the big red book.

The old man clung to his brother’s arms as he made his way down the three steps from the pharmacy. The security guard was
kind enough to carry the walker and open it again on the sidewalk.

They were about to walk back to the taxi when Don Fidencio noticed an old india sitting in the shade near the bottom step,
her cupped and pleading hand stretched out in their direction. The frayed rebozo draped the edges of her withered face and
then stretched out to cover what at first appeared to be a child but was only the swollen curve of her back. He reached into
his pocket for some change, but all he found was his lighter.

“Here,” Don Celestino said, and handed him the change from the medicines.

The old man dropped a few pesos into the india’s hand and she hid the coins somewhere under her rebozo. Then she nodded and,
raising the same hand, said, “May God bless you with a long life.”

The old man stared at her, wondering if he shouldn’t take his money back or at least ask for a more useful blessing. He was
about to say something to her, but he could feel his brother tugging at his arm.

N
ow he sat in a plastic chair with a Carta Blanca beer logo against the backrest. His brother and the girl had helped him get
to the little café and bought him a bottle of water so he could take his medicines while they went to buy the tickets. Don
Fidencio’s job was to keep an eye on his plastic bag with the medicines and his brother’s leather pouch that had his insulin,
making sure nobody ran off with them.

Dust swirled through the open doors at either end of the central station. Down the middle of the lobby, a young man, maybe
only as tall as his dust broom, plowed the never-ending trash, which included receipts, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers
that people preferred to toss on the floor rather than into one of the nearby trash cans. Where the old man sat, the space
was lined with a tiny convenience store that appeared to sell only frozen treats and sex magazines, a pharmacy offering minor
travel remedies along with an assortment of salty snacks, an open-sided café serving quick meals already under the heat lamps,
and, just beyond the front doors, a counter where a porter would store luggage for a small hourly fee. On the opposite side,
the eight bus counters, each with its own set of uniformed attendants, stretched the length of the lobby. So far his brother
and the girl had stopped at three of the counters.

When he turned back, a barefoot little boy was standing next to the table. Several dime-size patches blotted his thick crew
cut. A smear of yellowed mocos had dried under his nose.

“Buy my Chiclets, sir,” the boy said, extending a grubby hand with several packets of fluorescent-colored gum.

“No,” the old man answered.

“Buy my Chiclets, please, sir.” He tilted his head to one side.

Don Fidencio lifted a finger and wagged it at the boy.

“Come on, sir, buy my Chiclets.”

“I don’t want any Chiclets.”

Don Fidencio looked back across the lobby. His brother and the girl were talking to an attendant behind one of the counters.

“Buy my Chiclets, sir.”

“Are you one of those little deaf boys? I told you, ‘No Chiclets.’ ”

The little boy stared back for a second. “Are you blind?” “Do I look blind to you?”

“You wear those dark glasses,” the little boy replied. “The same as Macario The Blind Man wears.”

“I’m not blind. Now go, leave me alone.”

“People say Macario is not blind, but they still call him Macario The Blind Man, and the other people who don’t know give
him money.”

“These are called sunglasses,” Don Fidencio said.

“But we’re inside, where the sun never comes out.” “Leave me alone already.”

“Buy my Chiclets.”

“I have no money.”

“But, sir, the Chiclets cost nothing, only four pesos.”

“Go away.”

“Then I will give them to you for two pesos.”

“Already I said no.”

“But why?”

“Finally,” Don Celestino said, walking up to the table. “None of them have direct service to Linares. We had to buy tickets to Ciudad Victoria, and from there we can make the connection.”

Don Fidencio spread his legs so he could begin to stand up. “I was thinking I was going to spend the day here, sleeping in
this bus station.”

“You made a friend?” Socorro said.