It stops but the driver doesn’t open the door. He points at his watch and mouths the word early.
Sí, amigo, and if I were one of those tall trophy wives on Pearl Street-
Not that they’d ever ride the bus.
A sound behind me. A Mexican laborer carrying sticks. He puts them down, walks a little into the forest, and relieves himself against a fir tree.
“Come on,” I mouth to the driver but he shakes his head.
Oh, America, you’re making it too easy for me.
Seconds go by. The cool sun. The idling bus. The sound of streaming piss.
When it’s exactly five minutes past, the driver pushes a button and a compressor releases its hold on the door.
A hiss of air. The smell of AC, coffee, people.
The laborer catches my eye. An older man. Not his first time over the border. I suddenly see his whole trajectory: a crossing in Juárez, a night journey through west Texas; a lecture in vulgar street Spanish from Esteban or a punk overseer just in from East L.A.; and then work all day until the sun goes down. Sleep in the Wetback Motel or some dive in Denver, up and work again.
A look passes between us.
A look of recognition.
Life is hard.
No fucking kidding.
The man nods. I nod back.
“Gittin’ in, miss?” the driver asks impatiently. I step onto the bus and leave five quarters. Exact change. I don’t wait for the ticket. I walk to the last row and take a seat. Six or seven passengers. I see them but I don’t see them. They don’t see me, either. Who does ride the bus in this town? Kids, DUI repeat offenders, foreigners. The door closes, the clutch slips, we shudder forward.
Ten minutes pass. Houses appearing through gaps in the trees.
I look for numbers on mailboxes. I spot 229 almost immediately and hunt for a way to stop the vehicle. I see a cable that runs along the window. I pull it and a bell rings and the bus comes to a halt at the next stop, a full kilometer up the road.
I stand, walk to the front.
“Thank you,” I say to the driver.
“Uh-huh,” he replies.
I exit. The bus moves away.
Back to 229. A two-story with four or five bedrooms, set off the road. Wooden deck running all the way around it, rusting iron sculptures littering a small garden. The trees big and oppressively close.
The path. The porch. Neat piles of raked golden leaves. A knocker shaped like a border collie’s head. I rap it. Clunk of boots. Door opens. Young man, twenty-five, jeans, black sweater, pale Asiatic features, a suspicious look. Huge. What do they put in the water out here?
“We never contribute to solicitors,” he says.
“I’m from Great Northern Insurance, I’m here to talk to Mrs. Cooper, if I may,” I state quickly.
The man frowns, hesitates, opens the door wider. “Is this about the accident?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“You better come in.”
The house is dark, cool, and smells of vinegar. Mahogany paneling, stone tiled floors, a few more of the ugly metal sculptures. I follow the man into a small cluttered living room. Hummel figurines, crystal animals, Indian tapestries, a beautiful worn rug hanging over the brickwork at the chimney, Chinese-style screen prints on the other walls. An oval ball in the middle of the mantel.
“My mother,” the man whispers, obviously referring to a white-haired woman sitting in front of a very large TV. A quiz show is on, people jumping up and down.
“I’m Jimmy,” he says.
“Inez Martinez,” I say, offering him my hand.
He shakes it firmly and quickly lets go.
“Mom, there’s a lady here to see you about the accident,” the son says. He repeats the statement but the woman is rapt in the show. This happens two more times and finally Jimmy resorts to turning off the set with a remote control.
Mrs. Cooper looks in my direction. She’s a seventy-year-old Chinese woman in a beautiful blue floral dress. Trim, neat, tiny. She has an ethereal quality about her that sometimes you find in the dying or in junkies.
“Mom, there’s a lady here to see you,” Jimmy says.
“I was watching that,” Mrs. Cooper protests.
Jimmy shrugs and rolls his eyes at me.
Over to you, Mercado.
Gentle voice. Fake smile. “Mrs. Cooper, I’m Inez Martinez from Great Northern Insurance,” I say, enunciating the words the way they taught us in English elocution class-our goal seemingly to sound like American actresses from the 1930s.
“Yes?” Mrs. Cooper says, looking at Jimmy as if she’s being sold down the river or carted off to that nursing home her son is always going on about.
“I’m eighty-one and I’ve never had an accident,” Mrs. Cooper says.
“Eighty-one? I thought you were in your early seventies,” I tell her, truthfully. With Americans, I realized, it was very hard to tell.
Mrs. Cooper smiles.
“Would you like anything to drink, Miss Inez?” Jimmy asks.
I can’t resist. “Do you have any orange juice?”
American orange juice is light-years from the ersatz stuff they pedal in Havana.
“We’ve got some fresh-squeezed,” Jimmy says. “Is that ok?”
Fresh-squeezed orange? It’s like breakfast with one of Ricky’s high-powered friends.
“That would be perfect,” I reply.
Jimmy smiles. “I got this new machine for squeezing juice.”
“Very nice.”
“A present. Little bonus we all got. I work for Pixar.”
Obviously Jimmy is trying to impress me, but I don’t know what Pixar is.
“Pixar, very impressive,” I tell him.
“We’re setting up a studio in Denver at the old Gates Plant. Us and Redford. You know, Sundance. I’m not one of the creative ones, but, you know, we all do our thing-”
“What is this all about?” Mrs. Cooper wonders, looking at me sharply.
“Madam, I represent your former insurance company-Great Northern Insurance, I’m a claims investigator. We’re looking into an accident that you had on May twenty-sixth of this year,” I say.
“I’ll get that orange juice,” Jimmy says and slips out.
“What accident?” Mrs. Cooper wonders.
“The accident that occurred on May twenty-sixth, when you were driving your Mercedes,” I say with a mild panic-I couldn’t have screwed up the names, could I?
Mrs. Cooper shakes her head. “I wouldn’t call that an accident,” she says.
“Is there anything wrong?” Jimmy asks, coming back with a glass of orange juice.
“Nothing wrong at all, this is just routine,” I say with a reassuring smile.
“Mother admitted fault and they told us that it wouldn’t be a problem,” Jimmy continues.
“Oh no, it’s nothing to worry about, I’m only here to get the details of the accident, this doesn’t affect the claim in any way. In fact, confidentially, I can tell you that the check has already been cut. But for anything over ten thousand dollars we need to interview the claimant in person, it’s just our policy.”
Jimmy nods. It sounds plausible, and once you tell people that money is on the way that’s generally all they can subsequently think about.
“Mrs. Cooper, if I could bring you back to the afternoon or evening of May twenty-sixth, 2007.”
Mrs. Cooper still isn’t sure, though, and looks at her son for a prompt.
“Go on, Mother, tell her about it,” Jimmy says. “It’s all right.”
“Well, now that I think about it I do remember a little. There was still snow on the ground. It was a terrible winter, did they tell you that? We had a terrible winter up here, seven storms in seven weeks. One of the worst ones I can remember and I’ve been here for fifteen years,” Mrs. Cooper says with a soft and not unpleasant Chinese accent. The Chinese apparatchiks I knew in Cuba all spoke in harsh, clipped, imperative tones.
“Can you understand her, Miss Inez? Mother’s from Shanghai. Dad met her just after the war, he was an airman, the Flying Tigers. English isn’t her first language.”