The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (25 page)

“Just a place I know. It’s really cool. Especially in the snow.”

“Is it okay?” she asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. Was she asking if it was okay for her to leave school? Probably not. It wasn’t really okay for me, either, but I didn’t want to think about it.

“Everything’s okay,” I said.

We drove for at least a mile without speaking. Which was fine with me. I felt electric just at seeing her again, at sharing the air with her, at anything and everything.

On the way out of the school parking lot, the car had lurched
and sputtered as I got it up to speed, but once we were in fourth gear, I just squeezed my hands around the steering wheel and stayed in the same lane, cruising along down Route 7, toward Route 1. The snow was still falling, dissolving against the windshield, leaving wet asterisks on the glass. The sky was as pale as salt. Maribel kept her face against the window, rapt and in awe. I glanced at her a few times, but mostly I fixed my eyes on the road. We sped by Chili’s and Borders and Christiana Mall, and eventually, the snow started falling harder, white dashes shooting at the car and past the windows like light trailing from a thousand stars. A few miles later, I got confident enough that I turned on the radio, but after bouncing around through about twenty different stations, I clicked it back off again.

“I think I should start a radio station,” Maribel said suddenly.

“What kind of radio station?”

“I like music.”

“Are you talking about a radio station at your school? Do they have that?”

“I could do it.”

“Sure, why not?”

“I could.”

“I believe you.”

I felt her staring at me.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re the only one who thinks I can do anything,” she said.

We drove for the next hour and a half and the snow kept falling, even though it wasn’t sticking to the pavement, only the grass. I stayed in the right lane, letting people pass me, and focused on keeping the car steady even though I was practically shaking with the thrill of being out on the road like we were.
My cell phone rang at one point, not long after I should’ve been home from school. I fished it out of my pocket and looked at the screen: home. I turned it off. I knew I was in for a mountain of shit when I got home—for seeing Maribel, for taking my dad’s car, for driving with nothing but my permit folded up in my wallet—but I didn’t care. Maribel and I deserved to be together and she deserved to see the snow if she wanted to and nobody was going to hold us back. I was her one chance. I wanted to give her the thing that it seemed like everyone else wanted to keep from her: freedom. Besides, by now the damage was done. If I’d turned around that very second and taken her home and parked my dad’s car in the lot and walked back into the apartment, the mountain of shit wouldn’t have been any smaller.

“I’m hungry,” Maribel said after a while.

“I have some Starbursts in my backpack,” I said. “You can have them.”

“What are they?”

“You’ve never had Starbursts? They’re fruity. Like candy. But chewy.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You don’t want them?”

“Do you have French fries?”

I laughed. “I didn’t even know you liked French fries.”

“I have them at school sometimes.”

“Cafeteria fries? Are you kidding me? That’s like eating ear-wax or something. Listen, I’m going to do you a favor and introduce you to real fries. You won’t know what hit you.”

I pulled off at the next exit. Straight ahead, the golden arches hovered high above a McDonald’s, its roof covered with splotches of snow. The car skidded as I turned and the rosary my mom had
hung on the rearview mirror knocked against the glass. I tried to downshift, and the car made this horrible grinding sound, but somehow I recovered and before long we were coasting into the drive-thru lane. I pulled up to the speaker box, thinking I could just shout my order and circle around without stopping the car, but of course it didn’t work out that way. The car clunked and stalled, and Maribel and I were just sitting there, waiting for a voice to come through the speaker. When it did, I yelled out that we needed an order of large fries, and then I depressed the clutch and turned the car on again. We drove around to the first window slowly—I was concentrating on staying in the drive-thru lane without bumping up onto the curb—and I handed over a five-dollar bill, all the money I had with me. This time I just kept the clutch down until I got my change, then let it go again and rolled up to the second window, where I grabbed the bag of fries from a guy who was standing there dangling them out the window.

By the time we left, I was feeling pretty good. If I didn’t say so myself, I was getting the hang of driving stick.

Maribel held the warm paper bag on her lap until we got back on the highway. Then she said, “Can I have one now?”

“Sure,” I said. “They’re probably still really hot, so be careful.”

Maribel pulled out a fry and bit into it.

“So?” I asked, when she didn’t say anything.

“Cafeteria fries suck,” she said, and I busted out laughing while she finished that one and reached for another. Then another. Then another. She was going through them so fast I had to tell her to save some for me.

It was close to five o’clock by the time we got to Cape Henlopen. I parked on the street, near the outdoor showers where
people washed the sand off their feet before walking to their cars during the summer.

“You ready to get out?” I asked her.

“Where are we?”

“You’ll see. Come on.”

I wriggled out of my coat and handed it to her even though it was about three sizes too big for her. The sleeves covered her hands and the body of it reached almost to her knees. It reminded me of that day I first met her in the Dollar Tree. She’d been wearing that yellow sweater. She’d been swimming in it. Lost in it. Now she was lost in me. I shook my head and smiled. She made me think the craziest stuff, but I didn’t even care.

Maribel and I ducked under the lowered parking gates and walked across the empty lot, our sneakers making prints in the snow, our breath heavy in the air.

The sand, when we came to it, was covered by a dusting of snow. The barreling ocean waves were a silvery blue. We stood side by side and looked out at the vastness, the possibility of everything out there. Within the universe, I felt like a speck, but within myself I felt gigantic, the salt air filling my lungs, the roaring of the waves rushing in my ears.

“It’s so beautiful,” Maribel murmured.

I kept my hands balled in the pockets of my jeans while the cold air knifed at my lungs.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“This.” She held her arm up, the end of the coat sleeve flopping.

“Yeah,” I said, like it was no problem, which in a way it wasn’t. Forget about the trouble we were in, or who might be looking
for us, or how, after this, it would probably be even harder to see her again. Forget all of that. I would have done anything for her.

I shifted my weight from side to side and clapped the edges of my sneakers together, knocking the wet sand off. I was freezing without my coat, but there was no way I was going to admit it. Goose bumps pricked up on my skin under my shirt, and a shiver spread across my back.

Maribel crouched down and ran her hand along the sand, barely skimming the surface. “So beautiful,” she said again.

I put my hand on her head, on her damp hair, and when I squatted beside her, she looked at me with her golden brown eyes and her long black eyelashes. I reached under her hair and put my hands behind her neck and kissed her. Her face was moist from the falling snow. Maybe I should have stopped, I don’t know. I should’ve given her a chance to come up for air or to protest or whatever. But when she put her hands on my shoulders, pressing her mouth to mine, I knew she wanted to be there as much as I did. I kissed her again and again and again, greedily, like I was making up for the time I’d lost, like I was making up for all the times I might not get to kiss her again once our parents found out what we’d done, like I was making up for my whole life when I hadn’t known her, which seemed unbelievable and like a crime. And by the time I finally pulled away, I wanted to devour her. I wanted to tackle her to the ground. I wanted to put my hands along every inch of her. I felt crazy—spinning lights, blurry vision, pounding ears—with want. Her face was flushed, and I was breathing fast. We were kneeling in front of each other. I slid my arms up under her shirt and felt her ribs and her hot skin under my hands. My fingertips brushed along her bra and I reached around to fumble with the hook
until I gave up and lifted the whole band up over her breasts. I laid my hands on them, the softest things I’d ever felt, and she took a sharp breath. “Are you okay?” I asked, and she nodded. Under my pants, I could feel myself getting hard. I didn’t want it to happen again, though, the way it had that day in the car. I didn’t want Maribel to think I had a problem or something. So I dropped my hands to her waist and tried to take a breath, to calm down and just look at her. Maribel blinked. “You have snow in your hair,” she said. I smiled. “So do you.” I reached out and lifted a few strands of her hair, drawing them across my tongue, through my teeth, tasting her shampoo and the icy flavor of snow. I was shaking and my skin tingled. Maribel unzipped my coat and spread it open like wings, folding it around me as far as it would reach. I inched closer to her on my knees through the sand, and the two of us crouched together, huddled in my coat, listening to the crashing waves, our breath pulsing into the salty air, watching as the snow landed on the water and melted away. And then Maribel fell backwards, right onto her ass. She started laughing. “I knew it wouldn’t last,” she said. I knew it, too. But I wished like hell it would.

I came from México, but there’s a lot of people here who, when they hear that, they think I crawled out of hell. They hear “México,” and they think: bad, devil, I don’t know. They got some crazy ideas. Any of them ever been to México? And if they say, yeah, I went to Acapulco back in the day or I been to Cancún, papi, then that shit don’t count. You went to a resort? Congratulations. But you didn’t go to México. And that’s the problem, you know? These people are listening to the media, and the media, let me tell you, has some fucked-up ideas about us. About all the brown-skinned people, but especially about the Mexicans. You listen to the media, you’ll learn that we’re all gangbangers, we’re all drug dealers, we’re tossing bodies in vats of acid, we want to destroy America, we still think Texas belongs to us, we all have swine flu, we carry machine guns under our coats, we don’t pay any taxes, we’re lazy, we’re stupid, we’re all wetbacks who crossed the border illegally. I swear to God, I’m so tired of being called a spic, a nethead, a cholo, all this stuff. Happens to me all the time. I walk into a store and the employees either ignore me or they’re hovering over every move I make because they think I’m going to steal something. I understand I might not look like much. I work as a photographer, so I’m not in a business suit or nothing, but I have enough money to be in any store and even if I didn’t, I have the right to be in any store. I feel like telling them sometimes, You don’t know me, man. I’m a citizen here!
But I shouldn’t have to tell anyone that. I want to be given the benefit of the doubt. When I walk down the street, I don’t want people to look at me and see a criminal or someone that they can spit on or beat up. I want them to see a guy who has just as much right to be here as they do, or a guy who works hard, or a guy who loves his family, or a guy who’s just trying to do the right things. I wish just one of those people, just one, would actually talk to me, talk to my friends, man. And yes, you can talk to us in English. I know English better than you, I bet. But none of them even want to try. We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?

It’s fucked up. The whole thing is very, very complicated. I mean, does anyone ever talk about
why
people are crossing? I can promise you it’s not with some grand ambition to come here and ruin everything for the gringo chingaos. People are desperate, man. We’re talking about people who can’t even get a toilet that works, and the government is so corrupt that when they have money, instead of sharing it, instead of using it in ways that would help their own citizens, they hold on to it and encourage people to go north instead. What choice do people have in the face of that? Like they really want to be tied to the underside of a car or stuffed into a trunk like a rug or walking in nothing but some sorry-ass sandals through the burning sand for days, a bottle of hot water in their hands? Half of them ending up dead, or burned up so bad that when someone finds them, their skin is black and their lips are cracked open? Another half of them
drowning in rivers. And half after that picked up by la migra and sent back to where they came from, or beaten, or arrested. The women raped in the ass. And for what? To come here and make beds in a hotel along the highway? To be separated from their families?

And then there are a lot of people who come here because they actually want to try to do something good in this country. In my case, I was working at a newspaper in Sinaloa for years, trying to report on the drug war, trying to make people there aware of what was happening in their own backyard, but my bosses only had an appetite for the macabre. They kept sending me out to take photos of crime scenes that they’d plaster on the front pages. I did it at first because I thought, you know, that’s what people needed to see. Maybe people would be shocked into action. But after a while I realized that it was all just spectacle. Photos of decapitated bodies weren’t helping anyone. So I wanted to come to the other side, across the border. No one here wants to admit it, but the United States is part of México’s problem. The United States is feeding the beast, man. I thought maybe if I came here, I could make a difference.