The wind shifts, and suddenly the cowboy smiles. He lets loose a deep belly laugh that transforms his entire demeanor into a genial host greeting long-awaited guests.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Stay below ground,” Kipling tells us from the top of the steel ladder.
The rusty hinges squeal as he lowers the ceiling door and seals us inside an unlit passageway. Immediately I’m thrown back into our own hidden tunnel in Dallas. The memory pierces my heart as the lights abruptly flick on and I see a gloomy concrete path that once led me to my home.
“If the lights start flashin’ red, don’t even breathe. The Guard sniffs ’round here every coupla months.” Kipling’s voice echoes above me, pulling me from the past.
I descend the final four rungs and fall in line behind Ava. Her faraway gaze on the passageway’s smooth walls tells me she sees the phantoms too.
“I think my stinkers throw ’em off,” he says as he reaches the ground and turns from the fixed ladder. He points up to the muted thumping of kangaroos hopping above our underground roof. “My male western ’roos.”
He chuckles amiably and squeezes past me to get to the head of the line. “Sorry about that sour welcome, thought ya’ll mighta been spies. Can’t be too careful nowadays.”
Lucía presses tight against the wall as he moves in front of her, shielding her eyes from him with her ragged scarf. Kipling readjusts his hat, and the clicks of his boots guide our travel-weary train down the narrow tunnel. Lucía has not spoken a word to him, guarding who she is with silence. She holds her rosary firmly by her side, pushing forward bead after bead with quick fingers, counting her prayers with blistering speed.
I peer up at my sister’s face protected beneath her hoodie. I wonder if Kipling knows who we are. Maybe cowboys don’t frequent the Internet or stay current with news from the outside world. If he does know, he’s being coy. He’s given no indication he’s put two and two together and has added up what Ava and I are. Twins. A life sentence in a prison farm.
A few steps ahead, a wall sconce illuminates an oval door painted in the same bright yellow as the safe house in Amarillo. Kipling pulls out a set of identical gold keys from his jeans pocket and expertly selects one. He turns the key inside the lock and shoulders open the heavy door with a forceful shove.
There are shadowy figures everywhere. Huddled around wooden tables eating jerky, resting on metal cots with no mattresses, crowded in every corner dealing cards or swapping hushed stories. The vast room is poorly lit, relying on a single bulb that hangs precariously from the high ceiling, obscuring their faces from me. But I can feel their collective energy as Kipling leads us farther into the room.
Fear and uncertainty smother the very air of this space, making it difficult for me to breathe. But as I stumble on, my eyes adjusting to the blackness of the poorly lit room, I catch a glimpse of the faces packed against the wall. There’s a restrained hopefulness, a quiet determination, set on every feature of every individual we pass. An unmistakable courage that mirrors Lucía’s and tells me as plain as day who these people are.
Gluts. Those from beyond our unwelcoming shores and beyond our unconquerable borders. Maybe even hidden multiples.
At first I hear only faintly accented English and the familiar Spanish, but as we move deeper into the claustrophobic room, I hear fragments of French, Mandarin, Russian or a similar Slavic language, and another guttural dialect I cannot begin to identify. The whole world is in this room. Or as much of the world as I’m ever going to see.
My old self would yearn to find a friendly face, my curiosity barely containable, and ask them to share everything there is to know about their culture and the land they left behind. But as our guide stops near a table beside a row of cabinets, I keep my eyes low to respect their privacy, and lower my hood to respect mine.
My gaze lands on the feet of the table’s occupants beside us. Their shoes are caked with dirt, ripped and tattered, soles worn down so thin they might as well be barefoot. I imagine how far these people must have come. How much they must have overcome.
Kipling’s keys rattle as he twists the lock of a dented steel cabinet. He grabs a generous handful of jerky and hands it to Ava.
“Folks really can’t tell the difference from a cow and a kangaroo. Not with the way I make ’em.”
My mouth waters from the smell of the salt, and my empty stomach clenches with hunger. Ava passes me ten pieces of the dried meat, and I struggle not to immediately shove every crumb into my mouth. I pocket all but one. We must preserve our food. It needs to last us until Denver, a journey that could take weeks in our weakened condition. Kipling offered us water from his own rations before we came underground and offers us more now. Two bottles of water each.
“Thank you, sir,” I say, humbled by such straightforward compassion.
“Sir nothin’,” the cowboy says as he closes the cabinet and turns the lock. “The name’s Kipling.”
He claps Ava amiably on the shoulder. She shrinks from his touch but hides the involuntary reflex with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Get some rest. I’ll come back in the evenin’.” His mouth stretches into a wide, beaming grin, shining into the gloom. “Got somethin’ to show ya’ll.”
With a tip of his hat, he nods farewell. I turn to hand Lucía her water when I realize that she’s gone.
“She’s over there,” Ava says, pointing to the orderly cluster of cots and mattresses near the far wall. I start to follow her, but Ava holds out a hand to stop me. “Wait.”
My temper flares. “No one will see my face. It’s fine,” I whisper hotly, pushing aside her hand.
As I make my way through the room, dropping my head to avoid all the eyes, Lucía approaches a sturdy woman leaning against the wall beside an open cot, her strong arms wrapped protectively around the swell of her belly. I wonder how this woman came to be in this basement. Did she make it over our Big Fence after fleeing an ill-fated land, or is she here to hide an illegal pregnancy with twins or even triplets? I wonder how long she’ll last.
Not long, I suspect. No one ever does.
My focus returns to Lucía as she murmurs something to the woman. The woman shakes her head, and Lucía stumbles forward to a man on the next cot, repeating her two-word appeal. He looks upon Lucía with pity, bowing his head in silence.
“Rocío? Nicolás?” I hear her high-pitched plea as she drags herself from person to person. “Rocío? Nicolás?” she shouts over and over.
For every face she scans and passes, her body seems to bend and sink under the heaviness of her mounting anguish.
“Rocío! Nicolás!”
She meets a steady wave of shaking heads. Her legs buckle. She stoops so low that I fear the weight of her despair will sink her deeper and deeper beneath the ground until her voice grows hoarse and there’s no one left to listen.
She reaches the end of the line and staggers backward, crashing into Kipling. He catches her, and she looks up at the cowboy with a faith that keeps her trembling body vertical.
“Por favor. Busco a mi madre Rocío y a mi hermano Nicolás.” Please. I’m looking for my mother, Rocío, and my brother, Nicolás.