Vampires of El Norte

by Isabel Cañas

or turned her face to the twilight-bruised sky.

He was the only other speaker of their shared, silent language, the only person on the rancho who listened to more than her voice: he read her shifts in energy, her expression, the way she held her weight. She loved him fiercely for it.

It was as if even the crickets fell silent in anticipation, or fear; as if the breeze caught its voice in its throat, apprehensive of the way the night thickened.

Fear was sour in her sweat, in her breath, in the pale, wordless ringing in her ears as teeth as sharp as knives sank into her neck.

Let your gut guide you, Casimiro always said. When you’re bringing down a bull, your gut knows you could die. Your gut wants to live. Shut up and listen to it.

But her neck . . . There was a place between her shoulder and neck where he used to rest his head during long summer siestas watching the sheep. There, strands of her hair and the neckline of her dress tickled his cheek as he rose and fell with her steady breath. There, he would smell her: soap and a tickle of kitchen smoke. Dried herbs. Sunshine. The impossibly sweet, impossibly soft scent of her skin, the one smell on earth he would drown in if he could. That place was now a wound.

He had never seen them act with so little composure; their fear threw oil on the fire of his.

And yet. How strange it was how the gravity of attention in a crowd so large could shift so nimbly. It gathered and spilled toward the entrance like water, toward the Duartes. Toward Néstor. Strange, how conversation could carry on uproariously and an uncanny quiet could fall at the same time, like the dropping of a thin sheet over a bed. For the length of a breath, Néstor could hear nothing but his own heartbeat. The silence settled. Shifted; lifted. Conversation collected itself and reeled on, underscored by whispers spinning like a top from one corner of the courtyard to the next.

It was intoxicating, how much he wanted her to trust him. To relax around him. To smile as she used to, when they were children. Broad and unguarded and sweetly dimpled, her teeth flashing like a loaded pistol in the sun. He would happily be shot dead by it any day of the week.

Noon dripped over her silhouette; the harsh glitter of sun on the river beyond surrounded her like the halo of a saint.

Nena waited. After nine years apart, she still knew the rhythm of his speaking. She knew he had more to say, that he was searching for words or untangling a difficult thought. He was one of the few men she knew who spent time with his thoughts before speaking, even in the midst of an argument or excitement. It was one of the reasons she loved him.

A beast could not change its nature. Coyotes were born to scavenge. Pumas would stalk and kill the youngest and weakest of a herd, for they had to eat. Vultures would always circle, not caring if they fed on man or beast. This creature, whether it was made by God’s hand or the Devil’s, whether it was born of its own foul will in the shadows of the chaparral, would feed as it had been born to feed. That alone did not make it evil.

I think this is because I wrote this book for my family. For every time one of us has been asked variations of the question when did your family come to this country? As a young person, I struggled to answer. My grandfather came to Texas in the 1940s, and my grandmother’s mother during the Mexican Revolution, but the rest of my grandmother’s family? The Rio Grande Valley is a pocket of the world where the border has moved more often than the people living there. I have realized that the answer is, in fact, a question itself. A question that became the heart of this book. When did this country come to us?