It’s always the same when I board the bus—it’s already half-full, mostly women from Fresno and the little towns just south of it, like Fowler and Selma. I get a seat alone and the bus moves on to Goshen, then Tulare and Delano, each woman who boards more weary than the last. They’re all like me. Or at least, they look like me. I don’t know their histories. I don’t know if they came from south Texas like I did, were taken from school in the third grade to work in the fields like me. I was resentful of my parents for giving me the life of a dumb mule and I left them almost to the minute of my eighteenth birthday, with only a scrap of paper with their address and phone number that I never ended up using. I walk around with a lot of pride because I did that, because I proved that I could support myself in a hard world. I did all right for myself for a while. Then I fell in love.
When we get to Bakersfield, the bus is packed, and a young woman boards with a big sigh and looks at the seat beside me.
Con permiso, she says, before she moves to sit down.
I know just from looking at her that this is her first trip. She carries a cheap white purse in one hand and a bulky shopping bag in the other. She reminds me of all the women in town who everybody knows have just recently arrived from Mexico, because they go to the grocery store in high heels and tight dresses, doing their best to be like the American women they see on television.
She’s wearing a purple dress and white high heels, and just by that I know she spends too much time watching the afternoon soap operas, not understanding that the women on those shows only scheme because they have no jobs to go to. It will take a while for her to someday let the TV station rest on the evening news with Jessica Savitch—the kind of person I wish I was smart enough to sound like—when the need to listen to English for practice turns into a wish to look like an intelligent and confident woman.
She sits down quickly as the bus begins to pull out of the station, and when she adjusts the shopping bag under her legs, I look at her hands, but there isn’t a ring to be found.
The bus is back on the road and, soon enough, I can feel the rise into the mountains, the ascent into Los Angeles. My stomach flutters like the times when Timoteo and I boarded the cheap traveling carnival rides that sometimes set up in the town park, and I place my hand on my ribs, remembering.
Are you hungry? the young girl says to me in Spanish.
I didn’t know she had been looking at me, and before I can answer, she reaches into the shopping bag and brings out something wrapped in foil. When I don’t take it immediately, she begins to unwrap it—a taco of corn tortilla and something orange—and tears off a piece for herself.
Take it, she says, handing me the part still in the foil. It’s cold, but delicious: chorizo and potato. I nod my thanks. Where are you headed? she asks.
Los Angeles, I answer. I think to ask where she might be headed but I already know.
She says nothing for a moment, and just when I feel bad that I haven’t asked her a question, she finishes her food and carefully pulls a tissue from her bra to wipe her fingers. Do you know Los Angeles very well? she asks.
What do you mean?
Do you know the city? Do you know your way around?
I know some places. Around the bus station, I mean.
She dabs at her lips with the tissue before balling it into her fist. Would you help me when we get there?
Help you how?
She reaches for her cheap white purse and pulls out a folded piece of paper.
The bus has darkened with the coming of sundown and the road’s curve into the high walls of the mountains. She shows me the paper—a map—in the bare light.
He told me to look for the park, she says.
I know the park and I know the agreed routine: Pershing Square, where I know to wait overnight to see if Timoteo might show up from Tijuana, spending a night at a motel near Seventh Street where the door opens out to the city’s loud darkness.•
Excerpted from The Consequences, by Manuel Muñoz. Published by Graywolf Press. © 2022 Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists. All rights reserved.
Join us on February 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
