Sunshine sang louder, dancing in swirling circles around the tree as the lights grew brighter. The sound of a car grew near and a police cruiser pulled into their driveway.
The neighbor in the window flung his free hand toward the road as he screamed silently into the receiver of his phone.
Sunshine’s front door flew open and Aunt Sal stepped outside to get a look at who was parked in the yard. Bloodshot eyes swept the footprints in the driveway, the bloodied path beside the road, the small tree in her front yard. Her bloody, smiling niece.
“See! See!” Sunshine squeaked. “Merry, Merry Christmas!”
“Oh, Sunny, what have you done?” Aunt Sal managed to say. She turned her head to release the vomit induced by last night’s cheap pinot and the aromas emitted from the scene in the yard.
Empowered, Sunshine sang louder.
Aunt Sal will tell me how beautiful our tree is after she’s done being sick and finds her some morning coffee. Maybe she will even sing Jingle Bells or Silent Night if I say pretty please…I will just have to wait.
Sunshine beamed.
DIA DE LOS INOCENTES
by Elias Siquerios
How fast could Tito run? And when his legs gave out in this land of splintering stone and crowded cacti, who would he cry out to when they brought him back to the ranch to face that despicable thing?
The night covered him. That was good. He stopped to catch his breath, sitting on the hard ground, feeling the cold December wind on his face and neck. He was heading north, following the road but hidden out of sight. Now and then he could hear voices that came out of the desert. He didn’t think they were real because they vanished as soon as he’d stop to listen. When he forgot about them they would come again.
A vehicle neared along the road. He could hear its wheels on the gravel and crouched. When it passed he stood up and continued his run, knowing he would have to trust someone enough at some point so that he could ask for help. But when could he trust someone? The ranch he had escaped was isolated. He thought that everyone within several miles of the ranch must be affiliated to the men who had kidnapped him and his friends.
He had been on the run all day, the sun stealing life from him. When the sun proved too much he had crawled under an overhanging stone by the side of a small hill and rested until the sun began to set. When the car was gone he continued, closer to the road where the ground was smoother and he could make better time. Tito noticed more cars coming and ducked back into the brush and when he saw that cars were also growing numerous in the opposite direction he could tell there was a town or city near.
He continued on the road when traffic cleared, slowing his pace to a walk. He felt tears well up in his eyes and thought of his mother in El Paso. She had begged Tito not to go to Mexico, had said that it was no longer the same country as it used to be. He thought she was over worrying and said that it was just for the weekend and that he’d bring two friends with him. She argued with him on the phone but it would be impossible for her to talk him out of it, especially as he was six hundred miles away in Austin, TX, twenty-two years old, and as stubborn as his father.
It had all seemed well thought out to Tito. His friend Roger Winslow had a girlfriend from a rich family named Gloria in Monterrey. The parents were away in New York City for two weeks and Roger’s girlfriend had said she’d have the family home all to herself. She spoke of Monterrey’s nightclubs that didn’t close until four in the morning, spoke of her hot girlfriends, of her new Mercedes. Tito and his friends were all from working class families driving beat-up Toyotas and geriatric pickups. They were student aid boys; naturally the pictures she posted on Facebook of herself and her friends would rile them up. They had discussed the dangers. They discussed them for a whole night. They had a simple plan, to cross the border from Del Rio over to Mexico at Ciudad Acuna, thereby bypassing the notorious city of Nuevo Laredo, then proceed with caution, obeying every law, carrying tourist cards, with Tito being the one to deal with any police since he spoke Spanish and was of Mexican descent. The three boys, Tito, Roger, and Michael Hopler, even set aside three hundred dollars for mordida money in case some crooked cops decided to supplement their income at their expense. The mordida money was Gloria’s idea.
They thought they had it all worked out.
Tito saw lights up ahead over a small hill. A glow of homes stretched out several miles in different directions. When he cleared the hill he could see the town itself, not large enough to be a city, but comforting in its size of four to eight hundred people. He tried to think of the maps he had read on the way down here, tried to picture where he was, but no dice. A cattle truck roared by, going toward town. He followed the road into town and hoped for the best. A truck moving toward town approached and he could see a man and a woman sitting within. He flagged them down. They asked him in Spanish what had happened to him. Tito realized how he must look to them in his filthy clothes and raw face. He couldn’t speak. When he tried he almost sobbed. He pointed in the direction from whence he came.
“Do you need to go to the police?” the driver asked.
“No,” Tito managed to say. “No police!”
THE COUPLE DROVE TITO into town and left him at a corner where an auto shop blared norteño music from within. Tito had asked the couple for the time and was surprised that it was barely nine in the evening. He felt as if he had been traveling the darkness of the desert for much longer. He crossed the street toward the storefront of a closed Florist. A man on a motorbike appeared out of nowhere and zipped out of sight, leaving only the smell of burnt petrol in the night air around him.
Most of the businesses were closed. A stray dog sniffed at full garbage cans at the edge of the sidewalk. The trees raised skeletal boughs over the sidewalk and the fallen leaves had long since turned to brown pulp on the ground. Tito turned a corner and saw a bar at the end of the next street. The red heavy door to the bar was propped open and a Rolling Stones song blared from within. There was a painted sign over the door which showed the name of the establishment, Toritos De Oro, written in red lettering over a golden bull.
The bar was empty save for two tables at which several of the locals had gathered. Tito looked toward them, fearing that they might be the men from the ranch but the faces were all unfamiliar. He passed the bartender without looking at him and found a sign directing him to the bathrooms. He entered the bathroom and squinted from the bright overhead light. The room smelled of old urine. The white paint was peeling off of the ceiling in large patches. Tito went to the sink and looked in the mirror.
He looked like shit.
His lip was cut open at the bottom right side and he had a gash under his nose as well. Both lacerations had stopped bleeding but there was a coat of crusted blood in both places. His left eye was swollen and he had several lumps on his head on that side as well. He had a large lump on the back of his neck which felt warm when he touched it. He ran water from the faucet and wasn’t surprised when only the cold water worked. The cold water felt good on his face. He washed the coated blood from his neck as well, ran water over his hair and talked to himself, unaware of what he was saying. He saw that his shirt was drenched in blood along the collar but there was nothing he could do about that now. He looked at the bloodstain, touched the warm bulge on his neck. He had been bitten there. He shook his head as if to forget the memory.