Once in my room, I hung the Motobecane on its hooks on the wall, then went over to my little half-height refrigerator. I took out a pint bottle of vodka, drank, then kicked off my shoes and lay down with my bare feet up on the wall.
I’d lived over Aries for nearly as long as I’d been in San Francisco-not quite a year-and I still didn’t have enough possessions even to make this small room look lived in. There was the bed and a dresser and a mirror. The bathroom was down the hall, and the kitchen was the little refrigerator and a single-coil burner, with my few cooking supplies on a pair of high, plain shelves.
Had I been religious, a cross on the wall or a Buddhist altar would have given the room’s bareness a kind of monastic sense. But I wasn’t. Nor could I bring myself to care about personalizing the place. The things that made me who I was weren’t on display, but under the bed, out of sight: My Wheelock’s Latin, with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside. A scarlet dress, never worn and still in the box. My class ring, set with real West Point granite, and my cadet sword.
Feeling the vodka filtering into my bloodstream, feeling relaxed, I dialed Serena’s number.
“Hailecita,” she said. “It’s been a while, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s life up there?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Kind of dull.”
“I figured,” she said, and the conversation lagged.
I tipped the bottle again, drinking. “This isn’t just a call to catch up, is it?” I said. “You want something.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not a big thing, honest.”
“What?”
“There’s a girl up in your part of California who needs to go back to Mexico, to the village where her mother grew up and her grandmother still lives. The abuela’s sick, and this girl, Nidia, is going to take care of her.”
“Okay,” I said, meaning, Go on.
“This girl needs a, what do you call it, an escort. There’s no one who can take her, and I thought of you.”
“Me?” I said, surprised. “What, on my bicycle? I don’t even have a car. And what do you mean, there’s no one who can take her? I don’t want to be racial here, but don’t Mexicans do everything together? Go places eight to a car, sleep four to a bed?”
Serena laughed, unoffended. “Her family is undocumented, and so are a lot of the people they know. They’re scared to cross the border and try to come back.”
“They can’t put her on a bus?”
“She’s not just crossing the border into Tijuana,” Serena said. “Abuelita lives up in the mountains of Chihuahua state, the northern end of the Sierra Madre. It’s a long way, and off the main roads. And the family doesn’t want this girl to have to travel alone. She’s not a tough Americanized girl who knows what time it is. She’s different.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d that happen?”
“She’s really religious,” Serena said. “She used to want to be a nun, until she was thirteen years old.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Then she discovered boys.”
“She discovered a boy,” Serena said. “Johnny Cedillo, his name was. He was Dominican and part black, and her parents were kinda worked up about that until they saw how serious he was about her. He was talking about marrying her from high school on, gave her a ring, like, what do they call it? Not a real engagement ring, but-”
“A promise ring.” Some of the more sincere kids in my high-school class had done that.
“Yeah, a promise ring. They were real serious about each other. Nobody doubted they were really gonna get married and have beautiful little kids.”
“So what went wrong?” I said. “Where’s Johnny now? Did he go to Vegas, get a little on the side, and Nidia found out about it?”
“No,” she said. “He was totally into her, and since she was making him wait for their wedding night, as far as anyone knows, Johnny Cedillo died a virgin.”
“He’s dead?”
“Johnny didn’t go to Vegas. He went to Iraq.”
“Ah, shit.”
We were quiet a second, then Serena said, “The other problem with her traveling alone is that apparently this girl’s beautiful, a real knockout. In her neighborhood, even after Johnny went away to war, no one bothered her. It got around that she was saving herself for her wedding night with him, and even the vatos respected that. But strange men, on a cross-country trip? They’d hassle this girl no end.”
“Wait, back up,” I interrupted. “You’re talking about this girl like you know her, but you said ‘apparently’ she’s beautiful. What’s up?”
“I don’t know her personally,” she said. “But you remember Teaser?”
“Sure.” Teaser was Serena’s lieutenant, her most trusted among the sucias.
“She’s dead,” Serena said.
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t have to ask how. Another name for Serena’s roll call in tattoo ink.
She went on: “Teaser was her cousin. They didn’t live in my neighborhood, Nidia and Johnny, so I never met either of them,” Serena explained. “But I guess they were pretty well known around their neighborhood. People looked up to Johnny; he was an athlete in high school and never got ganged-up, but he was a stand-up guy with his friends, not a squeaky-clean teacher’s pet type. That whole trip. Teaser would ask me why guys like that don’t go for girls like us, and I’d tell her, Because we’re girls like us, that’s why. She also said that people liked Nidia a little more because of him.”
“Liked her more than what?”
“Well, she’s pretty religious, didn’t go out or party. Not the sort of girl you’d expect people like us to like,” Serena said.
Then she realized she was getting off point. “Anyway, I got a phone call from Teaser’s sister, Lara Cortez, about Nidia needing to get to Mexico and asked if I could help. So I called Nidia’s family to talk about it, and I mentioned you. I told them that you could handle yourself and look out for Nidia.”
“You can handle yourself, too,” I pointed out, “and you’re someone they’d trust, a Mexican. Why not you?”
“I don’t have a passport,” Serena said. “They changed the rules about the border, remember? It takes weeks to get one, and the family doesn’t want to wait that long.” Then, in a lighter tone, she said, “Besides, you know what la vida is like. I gotta TCB”-take care of business, she meant-“here, in my neighborhood.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “those cars won’t steal themselves.”
“I don’t do that small-time shit anymore, you know that,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“And, I should’ve said right up front, you’d get paid. Her family’s sending some money to cover the expenses, but if it’s not enough, I’ll make up the rest. And I’ll match whatever you’d make per day up there.”
“You don’t know what you’re offering,” I said. “A good bike messenger pulls down a lot of money.”
It was a little-known truth about the job: If you were committed to it-steady and reliable in reporting for work but fast and heedless on the street-you could outearn some of the young suits you sped past on the street.
I stood up and walked over to the window, looking down at the traffic. “You’re doing all this for Teaser’s memory?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know it may not seem like there’s much of a connection to you, but la raza can be a small community. And Teaser was one of mine. The sucias are for the sucias. You know how it works.”