B0061QB04W EBOK (19 page)

A
WEEK AFTER
the new school year started, Mago’s dream came true. She was chosen to be a flag bearer, an honor given to the sixth graders with the best cumulative grades. The only problem was that she would need a special uniform. We hardly had any money to eat, let alone to buy fabric and pay a seamstress to make a uniform.

“We have a few weeks yet,” Abuelita Chinta quickly said at seeing Mago’s crestfallen face. “We’ll come up with the money, somehow.”

Back then, Mago had loved school more than anyone I knew. Even more than I did. Sometimes at night, when everyone else was sleeping, she would tell me about her dreams of going to technical school
and being a secretary one day. Being a secretary had also been my mother’s dream. Mago put her fingers in the air and pretended to type on an invisible typewriter. I closed my eyes and I pictured her dressed in a pretty silk blouse and black skirt with a slit in the back, the kind secretaries in soap operas wear. I imagined her boss, a handsome lawyer, telling her she was the best secretary he’d ever had. Then they would fall in love. “Where will I get the money to pay for technical school,” Mago wondered, “when we don’t even have money for my flag-bearer uniform?”

Mago envied Doña Caro and Don Lino’s children. Don Lino made good money as a welder, and his kids didn’t have to worry about paying for school. Their oldest daughter was a kindergarten teacher. Lemo, who was fifteen, was learning to be a welder, like his father. Alba, who, at thirteen, was a year older than Mago, was already talking about going to nursing school in a few years. And little Jimmy, who was eight years old like me, didn’t know what he wanted to be yet, but when Doña Caro said her little boy was going to be the mayor of Iguala, no one laughed. If Abuelita Chinta had said the same thing about Carlos, I know the whole neighborhood would have bent over with laughter. “Him? The little orphan?” they would have said.

Abuelita Chinta did her best to look after us, but she didn’t earn much as a healer. It was hard for her to feed four children and herself. What little food she bought she distributed evenly among us. Sometimes she went without food and made sure that we were fed first. Money wasn’t the reason she tended to the sick of body and mind. But because she was a respected healer, people would sometimes bring her fruit from their trees, guavas, oranges, plums, and she would give them to us. If someone gave her a tablecloth as a gift, she would use that cloth to make dresses for us, saying that her table had no use for such things.

“She’s too old for this,” Mago said as we watched Abuelita Chinta make her way down the dirt road to do a cleansing. Mago shut her textbook.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“What’s the point?” Mago said. “Why study so much when we all
know I won’t finish school. I should just quit now and get a job. Put some food on the table.”

“Don’t say that!” I said. “You have to finish school. One day, you’ll be a secretary. You’ll have a good job. You’ll make us all proud.”

Mago was almost a señorita—almost because she was twelve and her body had not yet begun to bleed, but she kept praying it soon would. She was turning into a pretty girl. Her breasts were starting to grow and the boys were noticing. But Mago was very self-conscious about the way she looked, especially about her scars.

“I’m ugly,” she would say while looking at herself in the mirror.

La Quinta Castrejón had a big grove of mangoes at the rear of the lot, behind the beautiful hall for parties and the swimming pools. The owner of La Quinta was called El Cuervo, the crow, because he dyed his hair black, always dressed in black, and owned a black car.

Carlos and some of his friends decided to take a trip to the grove to help themselves to some of those mangoes. Their first attempt was successful, and Carlos came back with a bucketful of small mangoes. We gobbled them up with chili powder. “Next time,” Carlos said, “I’ll bring more mangoes. You can sell them at the train station, Mago. Maybe then you’ll have enough money for your uniform.”

The next time Mago and I went with Carlos and his friends. One of the boys was put in charge of looking out for El Cuervo while the rest of us climbed up the trees. I didn’t go up too high because I was afraid of heights. But the mangoes within my reach were tiny. Higher up, mangoes the size of a man’s fist hung like giant Christmas decorations. Carlos kept going higher and higher up the branches. Mago told him not to go too high, but Carlos didn’t listen. The bigger the mangoes, the more we could get for them at the train station, he told her.

“¡Ahí viene el Cuervo! Quick, get out. The Crow is coming!” At hearing this, we jumped down from the trees. Mago grabbed my hand and together we rushed to the hole in the fence. We turned to look behind us and gasped at seeing that Carlos was still up in the tree. Because he had climbed too high, he was now struggling to get down. We heard El Cuervo’s car crunching the gravel on the dirt path as he drove into his property.

“¡Apúrate!” Mago hissed at Carlos. He jumped down from the last branch and his bag broke. All the mangoes rolled in different directions. By then the kids we came with were running toward the train tracks, rushing home. But Carlos was busy picking up his mangoes and there was El Cuervo, unlocking the gates, ready to come in.

“¡Déjalos!” Mago yelled. But Carlos wouldn’t leave the mangoes. He scrambled to pick them up and used his shirt to hold them.

“Hey, get off my property!” El Cuervo yelled. A gunshot rang out. We pulled Carlos out of the hole in the fence and ran as fast as we could back to Abuelita’s house.

“Don’t ever go back there again, you hear?” Mago said. “It was a bad idea. I should never have let you come!”

“I’ll be more careful next time,” Carlos said.

“I said no!” Mago hit Carlos on the arm and took off running.

“But your uniform …” Carlos said, but Mago was already long gone.

We came home to find Abuelita Chinta and Mago sitting around Betty on Abuelita’s bed. Abuelita Chinta was making a paste with the sap and pulp of aloe vera leaves. Mago was putting a wet cloth on Betty’s face, who was crying uncontrollably.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“I was boiling water,” Abuelita Chinta said between sobs. “For her bath.”

Every few days, Abuelita Chinta would send Carlos, Mago, and me to bathe in the canal. The water was the color of coffee, and once in a while a piece of horse dung would float by, but it was fun to play in the water. Betty, as the youngest, bathed at home. That day, as Abuelita Chinta was carrying a pot of boiling water outside to mix the hot water with the cold water in the bucket, she lost her grip on the pot, and the boiling water splashed down on Betty’s face.

Betty’s cries were deafening. Mago took off the wet cloth so that Abuelita Chinta could apply the aloe vera paste, and I gasped at seeing Betty’s red face. Her skin looked as if it were melting.

“Let’s take her to the doctor, Abuelita,” Mago said.

“We have no money,” Abuelita Chinta said. “And I don’t know when your mother is going to call. But you’re right, Mago, your sister
needs a doctor. She’s in too much pain, and I don’t think my remedies will be enough.”

“But you’re a great healer,” I told Abuelita Chinta. “You can heal anything, can’t you?”

Abuelita Chinta put her hand on my arm and said, “No, mija. There are many things I cannot cure. I couldn’t heal my son. I couldn’t heal your mother’s broken heart. And now, I can’t even help your little sister.”

Mago stood up. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and then left.

Mago came back with money she had borrowed from Doña Caro. She picked up Betty and carried her out of the house. We followed behind her. Abuelita Chinta hailed a cab, and we squeezed in. It was a long, painful ride. I put my hands over my ears to block out Betty’s cries. By the time we got to the emergency room, huge blisters had popped all over Betty’s face, some oozing a pinkish liquid that mixed in with her tears. We were at the hospital for many hours. The doctor put a yellow ointment on Betty’s face and wrapped her head with gauze. He did the same to the areas on her arms and chest that had gotten burned.

Mago barely had enough money left over to buy the medicine the doctor had said to buy. “We’re going to need more money,” she told Abuelita Chinta as we walked out of the pharmacy. “This medicine won’t be enough. And we need to do things right. I don’t want my little sister getting any scars on her face.”

In the morning, Mago left early and didn’t tell us where she was going. She came back with news that she’d gotten a job at the train station, selling quesadillas at one of the food stands. “I’m starting there tomorrow,” she said.

“But what about school?” Abuelita Chinta asked.

“I’m still going to go. I’ll go to my job after school. Maybe it will be enough to pay for my uniform and buy Betty’s medication.”

Abuelita Chinta looked down at the floor and shook her head. “I’m sorry, my granddaughter.”

“Don’t be,” Mago said.

The next day Carlos didn’t come home with us after school. He claimed he had something to do and took off without another word. Mago and I hurried home because she only had about half an hour to do her homework. It was Mago’s first day of work. Her job was to help out at Doña Rosa’s food stand. As part of her wages, Doña Rosa promised to give her any leftover quesadillas.