Nightfire! (The Corvette Nightfire Prequel) (2 page)

"You run like a demon," one said. His
language had improved. "Come back in twenty days. We will show you
more of the world. You like it a lot. We will have another run for
you, and you can drive the truck. Do you have brothers and
sisters?"

Día felt an instinctive leeriness in his
heart. He heard faint echos of his mother's warning about the
chobochi. He didn't want them to know about his brother or Luna,
whom he loved so deeply. So he answered them, "I only have a young
brother, who is just a kid. Besides, I am the best runner of the
Rarámuri. I can run for you. You don't need others." And they
laughed again.

He ran for them sporadically the next couple
years. They showed him things: guns, which he did not like, and
"dinero," currency and coins, which held little interest for him.
Those were the obsessions of the chibochi. His obsession became
speed: the running through flat desert, and the acceleration of
trucks and cars that made his blood race. He met many chibochi, and
most seemed mean and threatening to him. He kept them away from his
people, and he told his people little of his absences, except that
he explained to Luna about the speed of the vehicles and the vast
expanses of the roads.

"I am caught up in it," he admitted to Luna
one night. "My spirit soars to the heavens when the earth falls so
fast behind me. My body feels like when we make love and I shout my
joy!"

"You make love to danger," Luna told him. "I
am a jealous woman. You will not leave me behind. Soon I will come
with you."

"No!" Día protested. "That can never
happen!"

"Yes," she answered him. "Or I will marry
your brother. He is my age. You see his eyes for me. If I would
lose you to the chibochi world, then I would at least have
him."

Día was shocked. He realized that during his
absences, his handsome young brother could be with Luna if she
wanted. He did not let this worry stir long in his heart. He
married Luna when he was nineteen and she was seventeen. It was
1957. From that time forward, he kept Luna by his side everywhere.
She was beautiful and desirable, and he read the eyes of the
chibochi who saw her. He began to carry a pistol. He might need to
protect her from the people who more and more revealed their
treachery in a world colder than he had believed could exist.

Luna began to run with Día across the border.
She ran like all the Rarámuri women: in the long colorful
traditional dresses of her people. She was a superb athlete who
could manage a pack on her back more than half the weight of Día's.
They learned more routes. They spent more and more time in the
Mexican towns. Día learned the mechanics of the trucks and cars
that were provided him. They were old, and they broke down often.
He sometimes had to replace parts with some that he understood had
been stolen. Then vehicles began to arrive for him on flatbed
trucks. These had no keys. Día learned to start them by touching
the starter wire to the ignition and battery wires he had joined
together. He installed new ignition key mechanisms. The Mexicans
made him work on these in a hurry, and then they raced them away,
leaving a cloud of dust. His reward for his work was what he
desired most: fast cars and trucks that he could keep for a while
until something better came along for him.

Luna sat close by when he worked. She did not
trust the conversation of the chobochi women in the bars and places
where the women of the men remained. In her heart she wanted to
return with Día to her old life.

He found out in this manner: One cold night,
during one of their runs, Luna collapsed and Día rushed to her. She
was bleeding profusely from her vagina. She had lost a baby very
early in pregnancy. He had known nothing of her pregnancy. Día held
her tightly, and they both cried as she made a confession:

"We make love all the time because I have
wanted to have a baby so badly! I thought that this would make you
come back to our home with me and stay. I have lost two others,
Día! You didn't even know. I think this running is not permitting
me to develop babies." Then she sobbed a long time while Día's
heart broke from the awakening to his selfishness. That night he
vowed to himself that they would return to their people. He
realized that he had not once thought about bringing chibochi
wonders to help the Rarámuri, as he had once intended, nor had he
made any impact on the chibochi to respect his people.

They were, of course, late delivering the
packs that night. It was almost dawn before they met up with the
men who awaited the bags. One rushed behind Día and grabbed him
from behind, immobilizing his arms. The other siezed his pistol and
pointed it at him while Luna screamed. He then pointed it in the
air and fired all the bullets. The man holding him released him.
Then, in a very ugly and threatening manner, the men told him that
they had killed Rarámuri runners who had failed them. Día felt
terror, not by the threat of death, but by the way they cast
pig-eyes on Luna.

But in the end, the men walked them a
distance to a road just as it was getting light. They put Día and
Luna in the front seat of a car and handed some papers to Día.

"You will take this car into Mexico," one of
the men said, speaking to him in a combination of Spanish and the
language of the Rarámuri. "In a short time, you will come to the
border where they will stop you and ask for papers. You won't
understand them. Just show the man these papers, and they will let
you through. Don't speak. Keep driving until a couple of trucks
come and signal you to pull over."

In the months that followed, Día witnessed
more and more Mexican men from the cartel arriving in Creel and
disbursing to plots of land in the mountains where they were
growing marijuana and poppy. He and Luna began to learn Spanish,
especially Luna, who had an aptitude for the language. She was good
at putting words together, Día thought. They learned that demand
for the products of the cartel was increasing, because in the
United States a middle class with young, rebellious people who
liked rock-'n-roll music enjoyed social activities and types of
partying not occurring in Mexico. Día saw more guns and more
menacing-looking people daily. He stopped finding his family in the
canyons. He began to worry about their safety and feared he might
lead the cartel members to them. He didn't want his parents to know
what he was doing, and he didn't want his brother to become
influenced as he had been.

I run a fever in my spirit,
he
thought.

And he worried incessantly about Luna. He had
to keep his eyes on her to protect her from the growing numbers of
men around who were removed from their women and who looked in ugly
ways upon Luna's beautiful body. In addition, he took to heart what
she had told him. She was not having babies. She was losing them.
Perhaps the running was taking its toll, as she had theorized.
Nearly three years had passed since they married, and even more
years since they first made love, and they did not have a
family.

The memory of Luna's bleeding in the desert
haunted him. The spiritual wretchedness of their lives, totally his
fault (he believed), evoked this thought:
How could we possibly
have a family while living as we do?

So one day, when an important leader of the
cartel showed up to discuss something with him, Día had the first
intuition of a possible escape for him and Luna.

He was covered in grease and working under a
truck when the man showed up in the crude, wooden shop off the main
road running through Creel. A group of beefy Mexican men stood
around him, while a couple others with rifles in arms posted
themselves by the door.

He wanted Día to run stolen cars. "You are
good with the cars and trucks," the man said. He seemed to know a
lot about Día. "You can start them quickly, and you drive fast. We
have a shop in Texas where we change vehicle numbers and do prep
work on the cars. We prepare papers for border crossings. We pay
some of the border guys to look not so closely at the cars. Some of
the trucks can be driven off roads and avoid border crossings. We
take orders for vehicles. Each one is chosen for a purpose. Some of
them go to us. You can have your pick at any time. Sometimes you
will bring cash back to us in the cars from our sales up there.
Sometimes weapons. We will teach you how to make hiding places in
the vehicles. Your wife…she can run for us still, or she can help
you. It looks good at the border to see a married couple in the
cars. She can be with you. Your choice."

The choice to make was obvious.

And they did look handsome in the cars, even
if Luna always seemed nervous and unsettled until they arrived at
the border, where she managed to produce charming smiles for the
border agents. It was a disarming tactic which Día told her would
help them get through to Mexico. Luna could do anything that Día
asked her to do. He had been the center of her world since she was
a child. They would arrive at the border, Día dressed like a
Mexican cowboy, Luna in her beautiful, traditional dresses. Día's
clothing was the only practical use that they had found for the
cash that the chobochi gave them. The Rarámuri women, knowing only
poverty, wore their dresses for weeks before cleaning them. Many
only had one. Día had Luna acquire more dresses at a roadside
trading stand in Creel so that she would always have something
clean for the crossings. He had developed sensitivity for cultural
differences in the north of Mexico and in the United States as a
function of always having to have his wits about him in his work.
He worried that, over time, he might feel less Rarámuri and more
chobochi. He wondered if Luna sensed that she was changing: At the
border, when his Spanish failed him, Luna picked up the
conversation with ease. He felt to blame for the dilution of her
cultural identity. He felt shame. It was the reason that he liked
to see her in the traditional dresses. It made him feel less bad
about things.

The stolen vehicle shop was several
kilometers north of the border at a small Texas settlement known as
Presidio, where several hundred residents lived. Día and Luna often
took vehicles over the Presidio border into Ojinaga, Mexico by
pulling a two-vehicle trailer behind a heavy-duty pickup truck.
They had false papers identifying them as employees of a wholesale
dealer who bought used vehicles in the United States for dealers
and customers in Mexico. Most of the agents at the small border
crossing were receiving money from the cartels not to look closely
at the vehicles and not to worry about Día and Luna. The Mexican
cartel hombres hungered for the big American cars, especially
Chevrolet, Cadillac and Ford. Día sometimes unloaded the vehicles
in Ojinaga, and sometimes he took them all the way to the principle
city with the same name as the state: Chihuahua.

While Día and Luna lived in Texas, as they
heard rumors of Rarámuri lands being seized by the Sinaloa cartel
in the Copper Canyon, as they learned about the deaths of Rarámuri
people being murdered for resistance to the drug-running or for
failures in the eyes of the cartel, Día increasingly considered
plans for their escape from the dangerous life into which he and
Luna had fallen. He saw the stolen cars as a way out. He dreamed
that while he had the trust of the cartel, he and Luna might escape
in one of the stolen cars that they were delivering to Mexico.
There, he and Luna might find a place to build a new, secret life
somewhere. He knew that the cartel would try to find him, so he and
Luna would have to abandon any ideas of returning to their
families. He would not lead the cartel to them! So whenever he was
on the road to Chihuahua, he kept his eyes peeled for road signs
that might give him ideas about where to go. At road stops, he
conversed with strangers to learn where they were from and what
their home communities were like. He sought a hiding place where he
and Luna might begin a family.

But fate put into motion events leading to a
different destiny.

One afternoon, Día was with Luna in a small
community grocery in Presidio, when Luna grabbed her stomach and
doubled over in pain. She fell to her knees on the floor. As Día
ran to her, he saw a white woman rush to her aid. The woman was
asking what was wrong in English, but Luna was answering in
Spanish. Día heard Luna's distressful cry of "Bebe! Bebe!" The
woman understood enough Spanish words to get the gist of Luna's
responses, and with Día's help, she got Luna to her feet, and they
took her to a bathroom in the back of the market.

This was another time when Día did not know
that Luna was pregnant. He found out later in the afternoon that
Luna had only spotted blood. After a long time in the bathroom, the
woman consulted her husband at the door, who had come into the
store, and then they decided to find Luna some medical help. The
got Día to understand to follow them. They put Luna in the back
seat of their car, a cavernous white 1960 Oldsmobile 98 sedan. They
stopped at a house outside Presidio, where a general practitioner
had his office, and he examined Luna. Finding her to be okay, but
stressed, he ordered bedrest for her. The older couple collected
Luna and drove to their ranch several kilometers north. Día
followed. He smelled the onions and cantalopes being grown on the
farm as they approached the ranch house of the couple. He could
smell the fragrances even inside the home as that afternoon and
evening wore on.

Despite the scare that Luna had lost another
baby, this day became for Día one that claimed a sweet corner in
his heart. For years he remembered the gratitude on Luna's face and
her bond with the Texas woman, who had come to her aid like a
doting mother. Día turned to this memory often later, whenever he
was feeling desperate and missing Luna more than he thought he
could stand.