He had brought up the wild donkeys in conversation and Marlene didn’t believe him.
There are no wild donkeys in Southern California, tío, she said to him.
Why would I lie about that? Tío Reynaldo rolled his eyes.
I don’t know why. You just lie sometimes. It runs in our family.
Ay Marlene. Come on. I’ll prove it.
So they jumped in his old red-and-white Ford truck and went in search of wild donkeys.
The sun was setting and the hills on both sides of the road that twisted itself from Colton to Moreno Valley began the shift from dry desert landscape to being awash in the gold disappearing from the rays of sun that made the dangerously dry shrubs and brush seem magical before darkness completely overtook everything.
Marlene almost missed the little donkey standing by a fence post. Tío Reynaldo pointed it out with a whistle.
Ay, mira. There’s one.
Sure enough, Marlene looked up and sees the little brown donkey. When she looked a little to the right, she spotted about ten more donkeys, just chilling. That evening she and Tío Reynaldo spent a few hours driving through Reche Canyon and San Timoteo Canyon Road. This was a favorite pastime of theirs; wandering to just wander. No aim, no specific X.
They were quite the pair. Tío Reynaldo in his fifties, brown hair thinning, thick-rimmed glasses, stylish clothes that didn’t reveal that he spent most of his days changing oil or cooking kale and sweet potato mash or whatever the ever-changing and ever-hungrier American palate asked for. Then there was Marlene in her teens. T-shirt and jeans, flannel and jeans, blouse and jeans. It would be a sweet story to say that they enjoyed each other’s company from the first time they met, but that would be a lie. While she didn’t dislike Reynaldo, Marlene was indifferent during his visits.
She found him mostly tolerable and a little annoying because he was one of those adults who always made cheesy jokes and tried to be pals with the kids. It wasn’t until Marlene saw Tío Reynaldo playing the accordion and singing Ramon Ayala that he became more than an annoying uncle.
During a cold autumn night that smelled of birria and leña, years ago when she was a child, at a birthday party for a cousin visiting from Mexico, Tío Reynaldo transformed from tolerable and annoying, to someone fascinating and worth knowing. Marlene had already been sent to bed but someone’s aunt’s sister had brought out a guitar and was belting out Chavela Vargas with such sentimiento that Marlene knew, having never even been in love yet, what heartache felt like. What that particular sadness was. By the end of the song women were openly crying, and men were drying their eyes. Marlene sat in awe of what music could do to a person.
But when Tío Reynaldo picked up the accordion and started playing what could almost be called “the other” Mexican national anthem, “Tragos de amargo licor,” that was it. She learned that there was something more sincere in that man than she had believed.
Marlene thought of that moment whenever she hung around Tío Reynaldo and any time she’d go see him perform in bars or lounges she probably shouldn’t have been at. She thought about that moment now as the familiar tune poured from the radio and she turned the volume up without thinking. The song was midway through and Ramon was singing about how much like a coward he felt for drinking his feelings away. Tío Reynaldo and Marlene joined voices as San Timoteo Canyon got darker and the high beams were turned on.
But they stopped singing as they came up to some of the citrus groves that still dot Redlands. What the high beams highlighted was almost unbelievable to Marlene—a herd of donkeys amongst orange or lemon trees, though it was hard to tell which was which in the dark. There they were, cute and dumb looking, caught infragante and mid-chomp, oranges in their mouths, their eyes full of surprise as the high beams shined on them.
This is why Marlene loves Tío Reynaldo: because he’s always shining a light on dark places, always teaching her that the unknown isn’t always frightening. That the unknown is simply that, unknown, and that if we are not cowed by not knowing, or by money, that if the fear doesn’t keep us safe and sound at home but instead drives us to know, leads us directly into temptation, well then, we are constantly changed and can create change. We are never done growing and, therefore, he adds, we never stop being young.
That’s how I keep my youthful glow, Tío Reynaldo joked.
No pos wow, Marlene responded. I just thought it was the not having kids and being single.
That too, he added. But mostly it’s the curiosity.
Haven’t you ever been curious about that?
About what?
Being married and having kids?
Ay, Marlene, let’s not talk about sad things, he said and quickly went back to the wild donkeys.
THE PART WHERE YOU LEARN ABOUT MEMO’S
AND MARLENE’S FAMILIES.
There are people who are born to sit. To stay in one place. Whose eyes do not wander, much less their minds. Who live in fear of the unknown and who haven’t been curious since the first time they fell off a tree and never attempted to climb again. People who when there are no real, physical, fences or barriers, will quickly erect imaginary ones so as to reassure themselves that they are safe. However, that assurance is also imaginary because there is no such thing as real safety. That is an illusion.
Memo and Marlene have parents who are both from this country and from another country. They do not come from families of sitters or stay-putters. They come from a family of fence hoppers and explorers. Some, like Reynaldo and Marlene, are patas de perro and were born to wander. Others left out of necessity. In either case, their families are a mix of people who can come and go as they please to the country of their birth and ancestors, and of people who are trapped by an inefficiently run and racist system. A system that has enacted laws and physical structures that get people killed for simply trying to leave poverty and reunite with family. Marlene had an uncle die in the desert and Memo had a cousin drown in a river, crossing to El Gabacho. Marlene’s father was born on a rancho in the middle of Sinaloa and her grandmother finally left her husband, Marlene’s grandfather, for good when Doroteo was four years old. His brothers, much older than him, were already in Gilroy with Reynaldo, working in restaurants and a tire shop. Trying to find their place in their new country. Marlene had visited the left-behind grandfather a few times in her childhood. The once big man lived small in a haunted apartment in Celaya, Guanajuato. He was old and lonely, and rarely left his couch, where he watched courtroom dramas and telenovelas with his cat, Petra.
To have families in two countries is to have part of yourself missing. Perhaps this is not the case with people who, if they have the money, can jump on a plane and cross borders without fear. But for much of Memo’s family, and some of Marlene’s, leaving is never easy. Marlene thinks about how her tía in Sinaloa will never see the house her brother built or come over for Sunday carne asada. How she has cousins she will never be close to, because their parents decided to have sex in a different country and this country is a closed border for most Brown and Black people—and Brown and Black people is exactly what their families are made of.