“You know my husband was a Congregationalist,” Mercedes said to the spring afternoon outside the window. “He took me to his church. Old brick place, maybe a couple cities over. I wasn’t a good Catholic after my mother died, but I did love him. Oh, how I loved him. And every Christmas Eve, they would do this cantata, the choir with their long, flowing robes, the lightbulbs switched out for actual candles, the whole thing. But the thing everyone came for was this rendition of ‘O Holy Night’ that one of the baritones did. He stood in front of the altar where the pastor was gonna preach after. Ooh, mija, as soon as you saw him step up there, you could feel it. The whole place is so silent you could hold it in your hands, you know? Everybody’s holding their breath. People are whispering to the person they brought with them. Like this is what they were talking about. ¡Dios mío, and then he starts singing.” Mercedes closed her eyes to the memory. “And I swear, his voice singing that song is what mercy sounds like.” She opened her eyes and saw that Sydney was staring straight at her, cheeks shiny with tearstain. “You know, that…” Mercedes searched for the word, the phrase, the thing she’d felt whenever she’d set foot in that sanctuary. “That ‘and yet…,’ you know? Like there’s more going on than what you deserve or I deserve or don’t deserve. There’s this thing too.”
They stared at each other for a long, silent moment before Mercedes sniffed loudly, wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and saw that her cigarette was down to the filter. She stubbed it out against the windowsill, tossed it, and pulled out her pack to light up another. She looked up, saw Sydney’s face, then put the pack away.
THE afternoon saw Sydney on the porch of their trailer wearing at the skin on her knuckles when she saw one of the Chihuahuan smugglers haul a large board of wood from out the back of his truck. He tossed it down onto the scrubland, and it raised a puff of blooddirt with a slap. Bambi had her fists on her hips—she was getting bigger too fast—and Sydney paused at itching the skin of her knuckles to see what was gonna happen.
One of the Chihuahuans, belly spilling over his horned belt buckle, tightened his bootlaces, even though he made a show of grimacing when he handled the left boot. When he stood, it was with new determination. These were special boots. Dance boots, and his compadres leaned on the truck or sat on a stool with a bottle of Sotol and two glasses between them or lay back on the flatbed of the vehicle and slept with their hats covering their faces. The big-belly Chihuahuan straightened, walked up to the board and tapped it with the toe of one boot, then stepped on it with both feet and, as Sydney watched, his feet disappeared in a blur of clip-clop-clippety-clippety-clip-clop-clop-clip-clop before stilling and Bambi fell in the dust laughing, then jumped up, excited for her turn.
The boots were too big for her. She insisted on wearing them anyway, and when she finally got them both on, she duck-walked to Sydney for help while everyone shot good-natured laughter into the air.
“Careful, Bambi,” Sydney whispered as her sister fell into her arms. “We gotta stuff your dance boots.” So she went inside and, under the sink, found some of the insulation that went into the boxes of cacti she delivered to the smugglers every two weeks, and she came back out and made Bambi stand still while she filled in the space around her little sister’s toes and heels with the pink stuff.
Then, with a pat on the butt, she sent Bambi to the board.
Bambi spent a long time staring at it, then tried her first tentative steps, almost falling over her own legs. But the big-bellied Chihuahuan laughed and righted her, then, next to her, danced a quick clippety-clip-clop once, then twice, then this time with Bambi.
Bambi tried it again with the Chihuahuan, clippety-clip-clop, then again as the Chihuahuan let go of her and moved away and each successful sequence bred more speed, more confidence until Bambi’s own feet were blurring against the wooden board in smooth and staccato rhythms. Clippety-clippety-clip-clip-clop-clop-clippety-clop-clop-clippety-clop-clop-clippety-clippety-clip.
“She’s fast,” the Chihuahuan said, fanning himself with his hat and grinning a gold-toothed grin at Sydney, who shaded her eyes with a hand and just squinted.
“Syd!” Bambi shouted as she switched her rhythm and banged anew with her heels and toes on that poor wooden board. “Syd, dance with me!”
Syd coughed and spat red into the dirt. “I ain’t up for that shit, Bambi.”
The little girl stopped and put her fists on her hips and faced her like a general, at which point the Chihuahuans barked and wheezed their laughter at the cloudless blue-red sky.
“Como el jefa,” said one of the Chihuahuans on a stool and the others laughed. “¡Qué rabia!” laughed another one. But Bambi held the pose.
“C’mon, Bambi, I’ll be sleepin’ on the floor for a month ’fore you’re done with me. You know I got a bad back.”
“I’ll give you my blankets!”
And that was when Sydney knew any further argument was futile. So she raised herself from the porch and took herself to the board, then stretched her muscles in exaggerated movements, at which Bambi frowned but at which some of the Chihuahuans whistled. Sydney bent double, grasped her calves, straightened, touched her toes, then swiveled her torso. To the left, to the right. Then, for good measure, she hopped up and down a few times.
“You want my boots?” Bambi asked, quietly, like she was trying to give Sydney a secret advantage in a game they were playing against the others.
“You sure you want this?” Syd asked her, challenge thick on her tongue.
“Dance!” Bambi screamed back, joyful, challenge accepted.
So Sydney shook her head wryly and settled her hat onto her head, then stepped on with both feet. And she danced a jig she remembered from before Bambi was born and she’d watched this whole big family that musta been hers all crowded around a table and laughing and eating and there was a Christmas wreath hung on the door and lights strung up along the walls, little stars fixed in place by magnetic charge, changing colors and, when the main lights got turned off, swimming into the constellations Dad used to point out to her, a jig from before when Dad’s beard was closer to his cheeks and he was wearing the same sort of shirt and tie as the other men around the table and the women wore sparkly dresses and Sydney would sometimes climb up to the rafters over the dance hall’s glass-covered swimming pool and watch the couples all dance and shake and some of the women with big skirts would take the skirts in their hands and ruffle them and shake them back and forth and the men would shake their heads, crazy with what she didn’t know to call desire and there was hopping and shuffling and legs hooking around waists and bodies pressed against bodies and then someone in the shadows pushing a button so that slowly the dancers started levitating off the ground and Sydney in the rafters had to hold on as her feet went up in the air behind her and some of the dancers started to go horizontal and fear flashed over some of their faces but not Dad’s and not the woman’s across from him and their feet moved but to stay close, they hooked arms together, then with their free arms, they threaded their fingers around the other’s and drew even closer as they twirled and spun through the air, a beautiful tangle of limbs as more and more bodies floated in the zero gravity to make constellations like the stars over the dinner table and Sydney had the biggest smile on her face watching her neighbors and her family and seeing Dad with his family, his brothers and sisters and cousins and lover and her family, a jig before they all went to space and Dad didn’t, and that thought threw Sydney back into the present so that her toe missed a beat and the whole rhythm of it all unraveled. Spent, she bent over, chest heaving, sweat dripping down the back of her neck, soaking the collar of her shirt. Her hat had fallen off.
Bambi and the Chihuahuans didn’t say anything. Not even the insects spoke. The only sound was Sydney’s heavy breathing before Bambi squealed with delight and ran to her older sister and Sydney, after a beat to regain her strength, caught her up in her arms and didn’t care that it hurt her back to do so.
And as she held her close, she noticed the beginnings of gray at the roots where her hair sprang from her scalp and her heart hurt. She turned a grin the way of her audience, but it slipped off her face when they all heard hooves clopping against the desert floor.
It wasn’t the thunder announcing a posse, no dust cloud either. But the Chihuahuans all reached for the guns at their hips, and the guy who’d been sleeping in the truckbed pulled a pump-action shotgun to his side and hopped down.
Sydney bounced Bambi in her arms as the little girl, sensing the change in the air, grew quiet and buried her face in the sweat-stinky crook of Sydney’s neck.
“If it’s the law,” Sydney said to the big-belly Chihuahuan, “you should prolly head home. They can’t catch you ’cross the border.”
The man put a hand to Sydney’s shoulder. “Now, how do I look leavin’ mi muñecas lindas like this?”
Sydney smirked at the man. “You got a quarter million dollars’ worth of cactuses in your truck right now. Shipment gets stopped, we’re all in trouble.” After a beat, “We’ll be fine.”
He squeezed her shoulder, then whistled, and everyone hopped in their trucks and were off.
Sydney was still holding Bambi when the lawman came to a stop before her. If Sydney were younger, the lawman atop his horse woulda looked like a giant, one of them irradiated monsters that haunted the desert. But she’d seen enough to know that it was just a human on a horse. No matter how impressive they looked, one arm skinless and steel, hat castin’ cooling shadow over their faces, atop a steed whose silver head and body made it glow in the sun.
“You metálico.”
“And you the girl whose daddy blew hisself up a few months ago.”
“We ain’t got nothin’ illegal here. Just me and my sister.”
The man with the white face and the metal arm was silent for a long time on his horse.
“You gon’ arrest us or what?”
The man took his hat off his head and held it at his side. Probably to tell Sydney that with his hands full he had no intention of drawing down on her. “I ain’t lookin’ to arrest you. I’m on loan from a couple counties over.” A laminated sheet of paper ejected itself from a slot in the horse’s flank. The lawman took it and handed it to Sydney, who took it with her free hand. “We’re lettin’ everyone who live here know the water’s all tapped out. Last purification plant’s gone down. Relocated or shut down or whatever, ain’t my business to parse the language. Anyway, the aquifers are out. ’Sides, slavers are runnin’ loose pickin’ up every little thing. So if you’re mindin’ the little one there, you need to get.” Sydney didn’t move. After a beat, the man turned to leave.
“Why don’t you do somethin’ ’bout the slavers, then?”
“Little girl, I can’t change the weather.”
“These walking papers?” she asked, lazily flapping the already melting laminated notice.
The lawman turned back around. The sun glinted off his arm. “Chance it across the border with yer friends.” He softened. “Caravan’s gathering at Marfa to head east. You make it there, they’ll get you fitted with a relocation packet. Send you somewhere with good water. You get to Ohio, head to Lorain County. Ask for a woman called Cayenne.”
