Runner Up: The Kids
There was a river with many stones in it. Grey stones. And almost as many people as there were stones. We were all crossing the river. It was not deep, and a woman carried me across in her arms.
There was a river with many stones in it. Grey stones. And almost as many people as there were stones. We were all crossing the river. It was not deep, and a woman carried me across in her arms.
I looked down. I was afraid she might stumble but she balanced on the slippery rocks, stepping from one to the other. I could see her legs, her dark jeans, and the water white and eddied around her knees. When we reached the other side, tall, thin grass grew like fingers along the shore. There was a sound as if a branch was snapping in half, and the woman who held me slipped in the tangle of undergrowth and fell down. “Go on,” she said. I waited. She reached up and put something in my pants pocket. After that, she did not move. She looked up at me. She was holding her side, and she had blood on her hands. She had slipped and fallen on something in the embankment and repeated the words “Go on.” I parted the tall grass with the others. Some had trampled it down for me as they climbed. When we reached the top of the embankment there was a road with white lines painted on it and men with short haircuts and dark blue uniforms who were pointing handguns at everyone who had crossed the river. They ordered the men toward one truck and the women toward another. When the women reached the truck, they still had their children in their arms or by the hands. Some of the older children followed along behind them. A woman in a blue uniform with her hair tied back behind her head and rubber gloves on her hands pushed the children away from their mothers. They took the children from the arms of their mothers. The women screamed. I turned and looked for the woman who had carried me on the long journey and she was not there among the others on the road. I never saw her again. The children bawled. Some fought back with powerless fists or kicked wildly. We were loaded into a white truck. The windows were blacked out, and we drove away. The motion of the truck rocked me to sleep. I do not remember where we went, but more people in dark blue uniforms woke me when we arrived at a place beneath tall, bright lights, a place surrounded by barbed wire and a steel fence. We were ordered to remove our clothes and the people in blue uniform sprayed us with cold water. Before I took off my pants, I found what the woman had put in my pocket just after we crossed the river. It was a gold-coloured coin, not real gold, but it had a face on it. I put the coin in my mouth so no one would see I had it. Then, after the people in blue uniforms had shaken our pants and shirts and slapped our shoes against a wall, we put our clothes back on. The other children were still crying. One girl had cried so hard she threw up on one of the women in a dark blue uniform, and the woman slapped her and swore at her and pushed her back, clothed, into the area where they had hosed us down. We were taken to a large room and told to lie on black mats. A man handed us silver blankets. We were told to lie down and sleep. What did I dream that night? I remember low houses painted in bright colours. The sidewalks around them were narrow. The plaster on the front of the houses was cracked and crumbling. Stray dogs watched us in the street as we boarded a bus. “Pero! Pero!” someone shouted. The dogs moved further away but they still watched us. The place where me and the other children slept that night, and for nights afterward, was a prison that had once been a large store. The men in dark blue walked up and down, staring at us through the fence. “Pero! Pero!” I shouted at them to make them go away. But they didn’t. I pulled the silver blanket around my shoulders. I tried to remember the woman who carried me across the river. Was she a friend? An aunt? Was she my sister or my mother? The older children, the boys, would grab the smallest children when they went to the washroom. I would try to tell the men in dark blue that the boys had taken someone smaller than me into the room where the walls echoed with the small child’s cries. The men would not listen. They would stare at me and say, “Go away, Pero.” That is how I got my name. It means stray dog.Most of us in the pen were crucified. I lived in a different kind of crib.I was only four when they put me in the cage with the other children. The men in uniforms called it “a crib.” Since then, when I have stood in front of churches during the Christmas season, I have been told a crib is a box of hay with the baby Jesus in it. Those Jesuses are always smiling. They have haloes. They look up to heaven with their arms spread as if they are receiving the blessing of a higher power or are spreading their arms to say, “I am ready to be crucified.” Most of us in the pen were crucified. I lived in a different kind of crib. The crib, as I learned later, was an abandoned Walmart on the outskirts of an abandoned town. It had once been a good town, people told me. I spent four years of my childhood there. Some children prayed as they lay on their black mats. Some bit their wrists and did not wake in the morning. Everything I remember about that place was death, and everything I wanted to remember while I was there was a dream of life I slept through. One of the women in a blue uniform made us go to a room where she taught us words. We repeated them. If we did not repeat them the way she wanted, she would slap us across the backs of our heads. She told us we were criminals. We didn’t belong in her country. One girl, a little taller than me, spoke up. She knew how to speak to the woman. “Send us home,” she said. The girl was pulled by her hair and taken to a room where I heard her shrieking. Then the woman in dark blue returned, and at the end of the day the girl sat on her black mat, staring straight ahead, one eye swollen and turning black, and the other looking for something or someone in the distance. A man who said he was the Superintendent appeared and ordered us to be quiet as we sat on our black mats. “There has been a change in the government,” he said. “You are going to be reunited with your parents.” Some of the children, sensing they were hearing good news, cheered. Others who didn’t understand sat there, their backs hunched, their hands folded in their laps as they had been taught to do when someone came to speak to us. The woman who taught us words, who had held up a picture of a man with an orange face and ordered us to say, “God bless the President,” called me into her special room. I thought I was going to be beaten up. “We don’t know who your parents are,” she said. “We have misplaced your records. Do you know where you are from?”
I told her it was a town where the women were tired every day because they sat up all night, afraid the door would open, afraid of gunfire, afraid of the men, the dark peros who came in the night.I told her that I had dreamed of the street with the colourful houses, the cracked plaster walls, the stray dogs, the peros, watching us from a distance. I told her it was a town where the women were tired every day because they sat up all night, afraid the door would open, afraid of gunfire, afraid of the men, the dark peros who came in the night. I thought she was going to beat me the way she had beaten the other children if they said anything, so I sat there and shook my head, shrugged my shoulders. I let her know that I did not know. She slid a file across her desk. “Is this you?” In the file there were sheets of paper, some with an American eagle in a circle at the top and some with a strange sun-face designed rounded by a border of squares. Clipped to the upper left-hand corner of the pages was a picture of a boy. His face was blank. His eyes were staring at the floor. He did not look happy. I wanted more than anything to be a boy who smiled, so I shook my head and said, “No.” “His name is Dominicano Juarez. Are you sure you are not this boy?” I did not know what I looked like. There were no mirrors in the bathrooms of the cribs. I had not seen my reflection since the day we crossed the river. I had stared over the bank at a frog just before we began our crossing, and I saw a boy in the water whose face moved when my face moved, whose mouth opened and closed with mine, and whose hands reached toward me when I reached into the river. He could have been me, but I had forgotten who I was. “I am Pero,” I said. She closed the file. The day I was moved from the crib at Walmart was the day I discovered the world outside the barbed-wire fence had changed. As we drove along a highway in a bus with windows that had not been blacked out, I could see ruined neighbourhoods, houses burned to shells, abandoned storefronts, and charred cars resting on their wheel rims. I disobeyed my orders. There was a young man in a dark blue uniform who sat at the front of the bus. We had been told to stay in our seats. We had been told not to talk to the driver. But I wanted to know what had happened to the towns we passed, so I walked up front and asked the young man. His face was covered in pimples. He looked as if he had not started to shave, but he had a gun in a holster on his hip. “What happened to these towns?” I asked. He looked at me as if I was stupid. I thought, for a moment, he was going to shoot me. Then he said, quietly, “They overthrew the President and all hell broke loose. Probably why you spent so long in the tank. People had other things to do. Up north about twenty miles in Austin, a gang of patriots got into one of the compounds and gunned down everyone they took for an alien. You and your pals here were lucky. You were guarded by the dissenters. It came down to the red states versus the blue states, and the red states won.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yep,” he said. “The red states won the day. I’d grown up in a blue home, but then I went off to a state university, not one of those Christian places, and I couldn’t live with what was happening, so I joined the red guys. New York and Hollywood types learned how to use guns and good Christian folk like some of my aunts and uncles got the worse of it all. But it’s for the best, I guess. No more guns. No more walls. Things went nuts for a while. Really nuts,” he said as he turned and looked out the window. “Get back to your seat, you little bugger. Go on. Git,” he whispered as he put his hand on the horn of his revolver. We spent a day and a night on the bus. There was no washroom, and nothing to eat. All of the kids peed themselves. There was nowhere to go. A couple squatted beneath the seats and crapped on the floor. The bus stank. We stank. When the bus stopped, a woman in jeans came on board. She was carrying a clipboard. The door opened. She paused on the steps and looked like she was going to puke. “Welcome to Illinois,” she said. “I want everyone to line up, single file, beside the bus.” We waited in the shadow of the yellow bus. The driver and guard stood talking as they leaned against the front bumper. The young guard called over to us, “So long, little buggers.” A van came, picked the two men up, and drove away. Cars pulled up beside the bus and men and women got out. The woman in jeans with the clipboard told them to wait behind a white line that had been painted on the pavement. The woman with the clipboard separated the girls from the boys. One girl had a little brother. As the woman pulled them apart, they screamed and reached for each other. I had to turn my back. I could not stand to watch them sob though I heard their pain. We were each given a piece of paper with a number on it. I was number 647. “When I call your number,” the woman in jeans said, “you will proceed to the people you are here to meet. These people are now your families. You are ordered to treat them with respect. There will be no talking, no crying.”
Borders are lines. There are lines everywhere. Those who draw them have no sense of what those who need to cross them endure.My number was called, and I walked toward the painted line. My life, for the past several years had been about standing behind lines, waiting to be called to cross a line, being called a criminal because someone I cannot remember stepped out of line. Borders are lines. There are lines everywhere. Those who draw them have no sense of what those who need to cross them endure. I stood there, and a man and a woman approached me. They left their other children, a boy, and a girl, behind the line. The woman approached but she immediately stepped back and waved her hand in front of her face. The man said, “You smell like shit.” I couldn’t say anything. I had been ordered not to speak. I wanted to tell them about the bus ride, but it would have meant talking. They headed toward a van. The boy who was with them looked and me and said, “You stink. And you’re not like us.” The woman said to me, “Your new name is Jeremy Ward because we’re told you don’t really have a name. You are only known as Pero.” The little girl, who was younger than me, bent over and barfed. Another long ride. The van was air conditioned, but because I smelled of shit, the family had to roll down the windows. I had to sit in the back. The boy turned around in his seat. “We’re watching Frozen, but you’re not allowed to look. The headphones are mine. Shit people don’t get headphones. You’re shit-coloured too.” Bobby Ward, I was told, was my new stepbrother. He didn’t want a stepbrother. Neither did Angela, the girl. I’m not sure why their parents wanted me, either. I heard them talking late that night. The father insisted it was his duty as a human being. The woman said it was all wrong. She said I shouldn’t be there. The father said they’d have to make the best of it, they’d have to adjust. I looked out the window of my bedroom. The father was burning my clothes in a trash can. My coin was in the pocket. I waited until early the next morning. When everyone was asleep, I went to the yard and put my hand inside the can. At the bottom, I found the coin. It had turned black. My father, Mr. Ward, yelled at me out the back door. “Get out of there, you idiot. Now your hands are black.” He made me stand with my hands under the garden hose until the ashes washed away. He turned off the hose and made me turn my hands over and over. “They’re still black,” he said. “They will probably remain that way.” Everything in my life turned black. My memories, over the next several years were black. I blacked out my time at school. My English was not good. We had spoken Spanish to each other in the crib. The English schoolteachers told me I was stupid. I didn’t care. It was all part of the blackness. I was the only kid in the school who was one of the “salvaged.” The salvaged, I learned, where the kids who had been taken from their parents when they crossed the Rio Grande. In the process of being taken away from their mothers and fathers the government people lost the kids’ identities. Those who were as young as me when we were taken had no memory of who we were. We were just “the kids.” Bobby and I never got along. He played baseball. I said I wanted to join the team, but at the try-out the coach had a word with Father Mr. Ward and I wasn’t permitted to play until I got older. The coach told me I needed to learn to catch. The ball hurt my hand when it came to me, and I dropped it. Bobby said to me on the way home, “You’re a shithead.” I didn’t say anything. He punched me in the shoulder. “I said, you’re a shithead. Say something.” Father Mr. Ward told us to cut it out or we wouldn’t stop at McDonald’s on the way home. Angela was in Grade Five. She avoided me. We didn’t speak. If she saw me going to the bathroom, she would lock herself in her room. I heard her whispering to Mother Mrs. Ward that I was dirty, and she didn’t want to touch anything I touched. I wasn’t allowed to walk around Angela’s side of the kitchen table. Mother Mrs. Ward said I was a member of the family and Angela had to take me as I came. Then Angela said her kindergarten teacher had told them that criminals like me were killing America and that they didn’t deserve to live. Then she told her mother how much she hated her. Mother Mrs. Ward collapsed on the kitchen floor and cried into her hands. Angela slammed the door of her room behind her and locked it. I didn’t say anything. I kept my silence as long as I could. I didn’t say anything at home and I didn’t say anything at school. I sort of made a friend. He was Korean, he said. He said his name was Ho. Ho said, “Let me teach you how to catch and throw.” No one in the school liked me or Ho. At recess we had the area in the back corner of the schoolyard to ourselves. That is when I learned to catch and throw. The next year, I tried out for a baseball team at school. Bobby didn’t get picked. I did. I was a pitcher. The teacher who coached us said I threw harder than any kid my age. “Where do you get that stuff?” the coach asked. “Is all that bottled up inside you somewhere?” One day Father Mr. Ward was sitting alone in the backyard. It was a weekend and it was summer. I was twelve by then. He was having a beer. “This isn’t for you,” he said. “You might get to like it, and it is not to be liked too much.” Then he asked me what I remembered about coming to the States. I shrugged. “We crossed a river,” I said. “I was in the arms of a woman, but she slipped and fell on the bank as we climbed into the country. I’m not sure. Maybe she was shot, maybe she fell on something. She never made it to the road. The rest is, well, I don’t remember.” “Or want to remember?” he asked. “I don’t care.” He said, “You should. Maybe you have family somewhere. Maybe they are wondering what became of you.” I shrugged again. Then, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the coin. I held it in my hand and stared at it. “This was what I wanted from the ashes of my clothes. The clothes smelled like shit. The coin didn’t.” He reached over, and I let him hold it in his hand. He squinted, rubbing it with his fingers to see if the blackness would disappear like someone who was waking up and rubbing the night from their eyes. “Honduras,” he said. “This is a 100 lempira. You’re from Honduras?” I shook my head yes, then no, then yes again. “Not certain, are you,” he said. “I should see if anyone in Honduras is looking for you.” “They haven’t looked for me,” I said. “Maybe you don’t know they are. You haven’t exactly been easy to find. I mean, you got here. They told us you went by Pero, the name for a wild dog. That could be anyone’s name, anyone’s word. Then we called you Jeremy. I’d say you’re hiding in plain sight, but no one can see you. You’ve become invisible.” It must have been two weeks later. It was late at night. I had come home from baseball practice and Father Mr. Ward and Mother Mrs. Ward were sitting at the kitchen table and said, “Jeremy, come here. We’ve got something for you.” They were holding a letter from the International Red Cross. Someone had paper clipped a xeroxed photo to the corner of it. The photo was of a little boy. He was not smiling. He stared into the camera. He was not looking at the world. He was looking beyond it. “Jeremy,” said Father Mr. Ward, “do you ever remember anyone ever calling you Dominicano Juarez?” I didn’t know. Mother Mrs. Ward held up the letter. “We think that’s who you are. We think that’s why you called yourself Pero. Dominicano means ‘dog of God,’ like the Dominican monks. That may be how you got your nickname ‘wild dog,’ Pero. It says in the letter you have a grandmother in the town of Cedros which is just north of the capital. She met an aid worker and gave them your name and this picture.”
My life has been a long sleep. Everything in that sleep has been a dream. I have been called everything and nothing at the same time.“I’m not sure if I am that boy or not,” I said. “My life has been a long sleep. Everything in that sleep has been a dream. I have been called everything and nothing at the same time. I am no one, except Jeremy Ward, Pero, shithead, stink face, criminal. Now you tell me I have another name, a real name, and a real family somewhere. I don’t know what to believe.” “We’ve been in touch with your grandmother,” Father Mr. Ward said. “I am not sure if you want to hear the story or not.” I shrugged. All my life I survived because my shoulders never got tired of trying to touch me ears, and all my life they never managed. That’s why I shrug. I need to hear what I need to hear, but my shoulders never block out the sound even though I wish they would. “Your father and mother,” Father Mr. Ward said, “were murdered by a death squad. They had saved enough to buy a small piece of land to work, and the big landowners didn’t want anyone moving in on them. Your grandmother, who moved into town with your uncle, was threatened as well, but she refused to leave. It was your aunt, Marita, who decided you would not have a life unless she fled with you. The last anyone heard from you or Marita was in a town near the Mexican border. She told your grandmother that she had paid all her money to get across the river, and they would be crossing the next day in the afternoon. No one heard from you or Marita again.” I sat silently. I did not know what to say. If it was true for me, could it be true for the others? There were thousands of us. We were not misplaced. We had our names, our lives, our families, purposely stolen from us. It was part of some great plan to make America into something it never was, something that betrayed the ideas America was supposed to represent. Someone had to stand in the way. Someone had to be blamed. So, they blamed us. They blamed the kids. Some people called us dreamers. But do they know what we were dreaming? We weren’t dreaming of who we wanted to be, but just of who we might have been. I do not remember much of my Spanish. That language has died in me, but I am trying to learn it and take it back because it is in me and it is mine. I have spoken to the old woman on the other end of the phone. She weeps. She says my name over and over. I tell her I am not God’s dog. I am Pero. I am Pero. I try to remember a dream I had in the crib of the detention center. It is a dream of an old woman who smells of blossoms. Her flesh rolls over her elbows and is warm to the touch when she holds me in her arms and says the names for things she has laid out on a table where she prepares a meal. She sets me down on the floor as she stands at the table and pats round dough between her hands then rolls it with a dowel. I look up at her, and with flour on her palms she rubs my head so my hair turns white like an old man’s. I kneel and cling to her leg. I am the dog who refuses to leave her side.
