New Border Voices: An Anthology

Coyotes

Coyotes COOPER RENNER That summer they finished the fence, from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to California . Sections of it had been there as far back as Jorge could remember: riding with his grandfather to the old man’s four acres of citrus. The little grove began only eighty feet south of the house but was a six-mile drive each way because of the fence: three miles east to the official pass-through gate, manned by INS, three miles back west, to the acreage overlooking the river. Jorge scrambled up the low limbs of the trees, dodging the thorns, reaching the high fruit the old man was no longer nimble enough for. He would point through the leaves to his mother, sitting on the porch near enough to call to, but in that other world, on the “safe” side, where the mojados weren’t supposed to come. Granddad—only Jorge’s older sisters called him abuelito—spent their whole time in the cool shadows of the trees cursing in both languages under his breath—the damned fence, el pinche gobierno—words and phrases the boy cached away for use at school, far from Mama’s Pentecostal ears and slim grapefruit switch. When they worked the trees nearer the river, Jorge would look down and across into Mexico, to the men and boys swimming casually in the murky water, giving no indication they wanted to be anywhere but there; to the weathered shops and houses with tin roofs up the bank above the water; to the women hanging laundry in the thick blustery wind. They look just like me, he always thought. But no one wants them over here, do they? Sometimes he and Granddad found a clutter of orange and grapefruit peels on the bank, and maybe a discarded T-shirt. They came over, welcome or not, didn’t they? They swam or paddled into the US, but the fence sent them back, or turned them farther west where, in those years, it wasn’t finished yet. But now it was done, and Jorge was twelve. He walked in the evenings, in the long falling twilight, on this good side of the fence, the side where boys jangled dollar coins in their pockets instead of pesos and plastic cigarette lighters. He sometimes thought he smelled the smoke of those cigarettes, blowing on the wind from that foreign country, and he curled his fingers into the chain links and stared off past the gourd vines and honeysuckle that twined into and up the fence, and he wondered how his chest would swell, taking in that smoke. He wasn’t just a boy anymore. A burst of music from the other side broke his reverie, and he looked at the ♦ ♦ ♦ 50 ♦ Cooper Renner enormous old Cadillac—a ’76 Eldorado, no?—shuddering as it drove along the Mexican street, booming Vicente Fernández canciones to the whole vecindad. He sat down in the shade of a mesquite, stretching his legs out in front of him and watching the always more boisterous life across the river. The helado salesman wheeling his bike with the freezer box, full of blow pops and ice cream sandwiches , mounted above the front wheel; the aimless collarless dogs; the thinlegged boys playing fútbol between the road and the embankment ten feet higher than the river. Where did all his friends vanish in the summer? Why couldn’t he be a mojado, a reverse mojado swimming into Mexico and joining that game? It was then he heard the conversation. “Es sólo muchacho,” the first said, a voice high and timbre-less, as though it came to him over a tin can phone. He looked to the right, but saw nothing. “No, no,” a deeper voice responded. “No es muchacho. Mira los pelos.” Automatically Jorge drew his knees up, and his fingers curled loosely around his shins. Yes, he thought. Look at the hair. The fuzz that had started going black and wiry—and not just on his legs—during Navidad. That was when his mother started getting flaky, ordering him back to his room when he wandered sleepily to the breakfast table in his underwear, just as he had done all his life. Hell, they were his sisters, weren’t they? Who cared what they saw? “Nada más muchacho,” the first voice insisted. Ha, Jorge thought. You wouldn’t think I was just a boy if you saw me in the locker room, marr...