Free Across the Wire by Luis Urrea Page B

and feelings were almost always a mystery.
    Sometimes, when her mother had bad spells, Laura wrote to ask me for help in getting her to the hospital. One day, I got a letter telling me that she had to begin kidney dialysis; Laura was terrified. She asked me to get everyone to pray so she wouldn’t die. Then she told me that the next time I saw her it would be her twelfth birthday. Her mother was going to give her a little party, and she wanted me to be the guest of honor.
    A friend of mine gave me five dollars to give to Laura. I put it in her birthday card, along with twenty dollars from me.
    Another Chicano friend of mine named Rico had been going down on the run with me. Rico was in the MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) organization at the college where I was working, and he had helped get some clothes collected for Tijuana. He had become somewhat of a cause célèbre with the Mexico Crew—he drove a chopped and severely modified low-rider VW bug. It had roses etched in its tiny windows, and “suicide doors”—they opened in the opposite direction from regular car doors. It also had a Porsche engine that made a violent racket. His license plates said QUE MALO. (How Bad.)
    Rico was endearingly obscene. He’d be in the midst of a pack of Baptist Bible students, and when something startled him, he’d cry, “Jesus Christ!” or “Holy shit!”
    Incredibly, his great charm seemed to make them deaf to his sins. The church folk swarmed to him. I often wondered if the Baptist sisters didn’t dream they could tame the beast, make of him an upright Bible-believing missionary.
    Rico’s cry could always be heard in the distance: “Holy fuckin’ shit!”
    ———
    Rico piled into a van with me. When we got to San Antonio, it was drizzling. Laura was standing out in the dirt road, watching for us, alone. When she saw us coming, she ran inside.
    There were actually two orphanages near Laura’s house. The crew would pull into the first and begin the bathing. A small group moved on to the second, to begin preparing the food bags and washing heads. Rico, a woman named Diana, and I left the first crew and walked through San Antonio. When we got to Laura’s house, she ran outside and took my hand. I slipped her the card and told her I was hoping she would buy her own gift, since I didn’t know what to get her.
    Von had given me a digital wristwatch for her, too, but I wanted to spring that on her later.
    “You’ve got to come to the party!” she insisted.
    “I will,” I said.
    “Bring your friends.”
    “All right,” I said. I told her we were walking to the orphanage.
    She walked along beside me, as quiet as always.
    Between the village and the second orphanage, the stream had erased the road that once cut through its bed, so the government erected a stone bridge over it. This bridge took an age to build, and they didn’t grade the ramps leading up to it. Within a couple of years, the soil had washed away from either end, leaving a nice stone sculpture of a bridge in the air.
    We started across, looking down as we walked. The stream was still running with water from the rains, and we all paused on the stone bridge above it. The whole thing was clotted with tadpoles. The shallows were black with them, and theysquirmed furiously in the water. I picked up a dirt clod. I wanted to drop it in one pool and separate the tadpoles to get an idea of how many there were. When the clod hit, the splash threw fistfuls of them onto the shore, where they thrashed.
    “Oh shit!” Rico yelled. “You’re killin’ ’em!”
    We barreled down the slope to the water’s edge, on a tadpole rescue mission. Diana and Laura stood above us, laughing.
    “Well,” I said, “I can’t let ’em die just because I did something stupid!”
    “Right!” cried Rico. “Stupid!”
    It took us about ten minutes to collect them all and get them back in the water.
    We washed the heads of eighty kids that day.
    When Diana, Rico,