Cry Me A Rio

Chapter Four

The Mexican Cure

A rooster crows as Lucha, my mother and I walk to the bus station on the other side of San Pedro. We’re joining Lucha on a trip to the doctor. She’d been complaining about her hip. My mother wants to get her own arm looked at and I have that troubling stiffness with my jaw. The knotted muscles make it hard to eat so much as a corn tortilla. I imagine it’s some mal aire, an “evil” wind, trapped in my ear while crossing the bridge into Reynosa. It’s the kind of near superstition I let myself believe here in Mexico.

We leave the house early in the morning. The sky hovers darkly, shrouded by a lingering night smoke. The lampposts offer occasional puddles of light. At the tortillería, the delivery truck starts up its morning run. There’s no one else on the road except for a few kids headed to school with their hair poking in every direction that it has been yanked to get them out of bed.

Lucha gives my mother and me instructions to continue to the bus station. She goes off to round up her comadre Adela, who had been at the barbecue the previous night. I only shook Adela's hand before being pulled toward the men. Despite what felt like my quinceañera, this morning I’m unable to carry off the role of manhood, becoming a mama’s boy all over again when we arrive at the station and see the waiting room packed with men.

The fat dispatcher sits behind a large desk drinking his morning coffee. A band of others sit on stools or stand and smoke and jab each other’s bellies. The sight of them must make my mother nervous too because she insists we both wait outside to keep an eye out for Lucha and Adela. I agree, despite the cold, but when I glance inside, I spot an old woman sitting in one of the far corners of the room. I tell my mother to go inside to keep warm. She stays put until one of the men comes out, followed by most of the others, and he tells her to step inside. “¡Pásale, pásale, señora!”

She follows. I raise the hood of my sweatshirt and remain on the curb. I turn toward the doors to see if my mother will invite me in, but the old woman and my mother are coming outside to join me.

The old woman grunts. “At this late hour we would’ve already been there,” she says, looking across the packed dirt of the station lot. Her mouth remains open, as if she can’t close it, the ceramic stones of teeth wired together, the bad ones tied to the good ones. When she speaks again, her jaw never fully opening, the words issue in an eerie somnambulist voice, like a woman grinding her teeth and talking in her sleep at the same time. From her muttering, I realize that she’s coming to the doctor with us, too. Why hadn’t anyone said anything?

She crosses her arms and shakes her head as she looks at the distant block of houses. She must blame us—my mother and me—a double wrench tossed into the smooth engine of her routine.

The minutes pass before Lucha returns with Adela. Last night, wearing a gray rebozo, she’d looked like a soldadera, an armed woman of the Mexican Revolution. This morning Adela wears a pink skirt and jacket that gives her the look of a frosted cupcake. Against her pitted dark skin, the clothes look extravagant, like what she might wear for her own funeral. The woman with the bad teeth wears the same kind of finery, with lace trim, in beige. A varnished-wood cross hangs from her neck.

The Virgin of the Little Stream

One driver readies his bus, pulling up the snub-nosed hood, shoving a streaming water hose into the radiator until it overflows. He jumps behind the wheel, guns the engine, flicks the lights, tests the accordion doors. He signals to us and we climb aboard.

I figure the early rise to see the doctor will let us have the rest of the day to ourselves. There is nothing more I want to do than to sit on Lucha's backyard patio and listen to her stories about Chocolate.