Excerpt from the forth coming novella: Mexican Honeymoon
Moments earlier she had been seated inside the Airstream enjoying a quiet breakfast when suddenly the morning was shattered by a barrage of bullets strafing the rounded top-side of the Airstream. The machine guns roared as hundreds of bullets passed through the airstream and out the other side. Jerry yelled, “Get down!” He simultaneously reached out and pushed her and the child to the floor, upending the table with its glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice, plates of crisp bacon, and a platter of fried eggs basted with bacon grease and seasoned to perfection with salt and pepper. Before she could comprehend what was happening or shake the breakfast off her pink whale-boned halter top and starched white shorts, the door flew open. A gold-toothed Mexican with a machine gun appeared in the doorway yelling something, which to her, was just a bunch of unintelligible gibberish. He looked the stereotype of the Cisco Kid’s fat sidekick “Pancho”, yet was as menacing as Gold Hat in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Jerry told them to get up slowly and exit “The Silver Bullet”, the name he had proudly christened it the week before when he purchased it. The child was, as usual, biting her fingernails. She stopped nibbling, and copying the grownups, raised her thin arms in the air as they descended the metal step to the rocky ground. “Pancho” who seemed to be in charge had large sweat stains under both arms, a bandoleer worn diagonally over one shoulder and across his broad chest, a hand gun holstered at his hip, and a ridiculous sombrero with a rattlesnake hat band complete with fanged head and rattle. He motioned for her and the child to go stand against the trailer. One of the other men poked her ample rear end, with the muzzle of his gun, and roughly turned them around to face the aluminum side of the trailer, then stood guard while “el jefe” demanded of her husband, “Sus papeles, Señor.” Jerry looked at the man puzzled. “Sus documentos…papeles.” The night before, they had pulled off the main highway, which was no more than a deeply rutted, one lane road, more like a cow path than a highway. They were hot and tired and irritable from the long drive. While Jerry was preparing dinner, she and the child swam in an irrigation ditch, the child annoyingly bobbing up and down like a tea bag because she didn’t even know how to swim. Petie imagined taking her to the country club and having her perform this Lipton’s Tea-bag act in front of all her fashionable friends and shuddered at the thought of how embarrassing that would be. She’d have to enroll her at the YWCA for swimming lessons as soon as they returned to the states from their Mexican honeymoon She hadn’t wanted the child to come with them in the first place. It never occurred to her when she broke up Jerry’s marriage to the girl’s mother that he’d fight for custody of her. Nor did it cross her mind that in this day and age the courts would award custody to a single man. But they did and now she was stuck with her. As she looked at the fat, squat, distorted reflection of the men in the shiny aluminum side of the Airstream, she wondered if they would want to rape her and if they did, hoped, they would at least take her inside the Airstream and not do it in front of the child or her husband. Then she thought maybe they would take the child, and in her heart of hearts she wished they would. Now “el jefe” was yelling at Jerry, “Andale!” In his nervousness, Jerry grabbed every piece of paper in the glove box and thrust the entire bundle into the man’s pudgy hands. It was unclear if they were federales or bandoleros, but since they had the guns, Jerry didn’t bother to ask. The man stepped away backwards, turned mechanically and went back to where some of the other men were standing idly about or leaning against a filthy Land Rover, smoking cigarettes. He began to sort through the stack of papers which he had laid out on the hood of his vehicle. Looking first at their birth certificates, hers from Connecticut, Jerry’s from Michigan, then the child’s tribal ID card, the car registration, and whatever else Jerry, in his haste, had given the man. After a few moments he gasped and in the exhale breathed the words, “Madre de Dios!” Mother of God! Crossing back to where Jerry was still standing with his hands in the air next to the convertible, the man said, “Señor, lo siento! I am so sorry I did not know. Please forgive us. Where is you destination?” Jerry told the man he was on his honeymoon and they were just driving south until the road ended. The man looked at the woman with her hair up in pin-curls, the cheeks of her large butt peeking out under the cuffs of her shorts, then at the child, perhaps wondering why anyone would take a child on his honeymoon. Then he looked back at Jerry and announced, “Please, Señor, we will give you safe escort to the next border.” Petie and the child turned their heads to see what was going on. The man was almost bowing to Jerry and scraping the ground before his feet as he profusely apologised. Jerry motioned for her and the child to get into the car. PRONTO! The men piled into the Land Rover and together with the Rover in the lead, they drove the hot dusty miles to the next roadblock, the oversized tires on the jeep spewing rocks and grit into the dust laden air. Once they were on the open road, Petie adjusted the rearview mirror in order to remove the metal, spring-hinged clips from the pin-curls they held in place, on her headful of bobbed, bleached-blonde hair. She looked into the corner of the mirror to see what the child was doing. She was sucking on her index finger and tugging at her hair as if she was willing it to grow. A few months ago, when the child first arrived from the foster home where the courts had placed her, gripping in front of her knees with both small hands, the handle of a beige Samsonite suitcase, her grandmother’s monogram JMR for Josephine Morong Runnels imprinted in gold letters just below the broken lock, Petie had taken one look at her tangled hair and wagged her head from side to side. She, who kept her own hair short and easily manageable, had no intention of combing or brushing someone else’s unruly hair. The next day Petie marched the child, against her will, down to Howard, the local hairdresser. The child had looked so tiny sitting there in the big barber chair, draped in a smock intended for a grown up. Tears spilled down her face while Howard lopped off her long braids. Gads, you’d have thought he was cutting off her arm or something! Petie thought she looked much better with her Buster Brown hairstyle. The child refused to look in the hand-held mirror Howard offered her when he was through. She just closed her eyes, shook her head, and went to wait by the door as Petie paid him for disfiguring her. Her braids, two black snakes, mocked her from the floor beneath the chair. She wished they would coil up and strike Petie and Howard on their calves and ankles. Two months later the child’s mother managed to save enough change out of her per capita payment to make a phone call. One by one she dropped the buffalo head nickels into the coin slot of a pay phone on the Rosebud reservation to make the call to her daughter in Los Angeles. In her native San Poil, the child sobbed into the telephone. “They took my hair–I thought you died” At 5 the child already knew the only time you cut your hair is when a parent or grandparent dies, or for a slight trim on the full moon of August, to make it grow longer, stronger, thicker. Her mother’s whiskey-soaked, tear-laden voice echoed down the line, “Don’t cry my little sweetheart. It will grow back.” They spoke for a brief moment and then her mother’s tender, gentle voice disappeared over a havoc of telephone wires somewhere in the mid-west over dust bowls and prairies that separated them from each other. It became a whisper in the wind somewhere out over the Rockies, then was gone forever. Petie took the crackling, heavy black receiver from the child’s trembling hand with the fingernails bitten down to the quick. “What was that all about? You’re such a crybaby!” Now they and their escort arrived at a roadblock. Petie ran her fingers through her curls, and wiped a smear of lipstick from the corner of her mouth before putting the mirror back into position. “Pancho” got out of the jeep, and strode to the front of the vehicle to talk to the men guarding the road. They spoke in Spanish and Jerry was only able to make out the words “Amigo de El Presidente…Friend of the President…” Adolfo Ruiz Cortines had recently ousted Miguel Aleman Valdez as President of Mexico. Harry S. Truman had in January handed over the reins of the United States presidency to President-elect General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jerry who had never met either of the Mexican Presidents nor any U.S. president, decided not to say anything and cautioned Petie to do the same. He couldn’t imagine for whom they had mistaken him. The Cisco Kid’s fat, sweating sidekick came back to the convertible. “Señor, you are in good hands. You will now have new escort”. He then, with an almost comical flourish of his oversized taxidermic sombrero, his mustache fluttering in the warm breeze bowed and took his leave. They drove south through the towns of Hermosillo, Guaymas, Mazatlan, Guadalajara, where at each town or village “border” crossing, the patrol guards performed the same charade. Each time their present escort was replaced by a new one and their “documentos” were handed to the new man in charge. Each time Jerry heard the men say “Amigo de El Presidente” as they looked at the papers and motioned toward him. A few miles outside of Mexico City the last of their escort handed him back his papers. “Señor, you and your family will be safe now. It is an honour to meet the friend of The President. Vaya con Dios” Jerry and Petie and the child went back into the trailer. Petie began to pick up the broken dishes and mop up the orange juice. Jerry put the table back on its legs, spread their birth certificates and other documents out on the table to try to figure out what the man had read that made him decide to spare their lives. He looked at Petie’s birth certificate and discovered she had lied to him about her age by a good dozen years. He turned his daughter’s tribal registration card over and over in his hands, but found no clues there. At last he came to the warranty for the Airstream, off to the left of the page there was a drawing of a man on a bicycle pulling an airstream trailer with the name Wally Byam beneath. Across the middle in bold block letters, the words: AIRSTREAM TRAILERS, INC. Jerry began to scan the certificate. Lifetime Warranty Airstream Trailers. Inc. warrant each new vehicle manufactured by it to be free from defects in material and workmanship under normal use and service; its obligation under this Warranty being limited to making good at any of its factories any part, or parts, thereof which shall be returned to it by the registered warranty holder with transportation charges prepaid, and which, in its examination, shall disclose to its satisfaction to have been defective; this Warranty expressly in lieu of all other warranties expressed or implied and other obligations or liabilities on its part, and it neither assumes nor authorizes any person to assume for it any other liabilities in connection with the sale of its vehicle. This Warranty shall be in full force and effect and valid in the hands of the registered holder during his lifetime. This Warranty shall cover and include all labor charges for replacement or repair of defective parts. This Warranty does not apply to any vehicle which shall have been repaired or altered outside of its factories in any-way so as, in the judgement of the warrantor to affect its stability; or which shall have been subject to misuse, negligence or accident; or which shall have been loaded beyond the factory rated load capacity. It makes no warranty whatsoever in respect to tires, tubes, rims, signaling devices, axle and wheel assemblies, brake assemblies, refrigerator, heating, stoves,ranges, electrical fixtures, water heaters, or other trade accessories in as much as they are generally warranted separately by their respective manufacturers. And then, there it was: AIRSTREAM TRAILERS, INC. By Arnold R. Costello President Pancho and his cohorts, who had limited knowledge of written English had mistaken the signature of Arnold R. Costello, the president of Wally Byam’s Airstreams Inc., for the President of the United States of America. When they had finally finished laughing, Petie looked at Jerry and said, “I guess it doesn’t cover the bullet holes. Huh” The child looked out the window at the barren landscape and sighed.
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