time she’s blinking in bright light. She imagines her son beating his fists against the sides of her womb.
Not yet, she thinks, not yet, my son. Just a little longer.
She’s now nearing the end of her tenth month. Her belly is strained to the breaking point, her back aches, her knees buckle. But she’s more determined than ever. And her son seems to be as stubborn as she is.
“Now it looks like quadruplets,” Hopper says.
“He’s going to be an American baby,” she says, through gritted teeth. “Babies are bigger there. A nice big healthy American baby.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“He’s not going to come out until we get there,” she says.
“I’ll do what I can,” he says. “No guarantees.”
She’s been told there are places where you can climb over the fence. There are places where there is no fence, only guards in towers who sometimes look the other way. She’s going to take her chances on her own. Enough of his gambles.
“I wish you the best,” he says, tipping his fishing hat.
She can barely walk; she stumbles, lurching and weaving. Other people look at her and say, “There’s no way. It’s impossible.” She ignores them.
She walks, through scrub brush and rocks and burning sand and stagnant, stinking water. She walks and walks, thinking: American baby. Nice big American baby.
She hears a sound echoing from far away: dogs yelping, frenzied. She can almost hear them calling to one another: There she is, there she is, get her.
They burst over a rise and she can see them, a mob of dark insects growing rapidly bigger, a man with a gun trailing far behind. Has she crossed the border already? It’s impossible to tell.
The first dog runs straight at her. She stands still and waits. It seems nearly as big as she is, a small horse. At the last minute it veers away and circles. All the dogs swarm around her. But they do not touch her. They keep their heads lowered abjectly to the ground. They seem in awe of her big belly.
The fat sweating guard who comes puffing up behind them is not impressed. Soon she’s sitting in a familiar van, heading back.
She’s been carrying her son for over a year now, with no intention of letting him go.
“Now, that can’t possibly be good for him, little mama,” Hopper says. “You should let the little feller out.”
“He’s going to be an American baby,” she says, slowly, as if talking to a child.
“Let me help you,” he says. “I know a man—”
“No,” she says.
“We’ll try another way. I can get you a fake passport.”
“No,” she says. She hobbles back to the border, is stopped by a fence, and begins tunneling under it, clawing the dirt with her fingernails. She’s crawling through, nearly breaking the surface on the other side, when her son shifts, or perhaps instantaneously grows a fraction of an inch, and suddenly she’s stuck. Border guards come and drag her out by her heels. They don’t seem surprised, they seem as if they’ve been expecting her. They look bored, almost disappointed, as if they’d expected her to have a little more originality.
“Why won’t you let me help you?” Hopper says.
She doesn’t answer.
“Free of charge.”
“Why are you being so generous?”
“I don’t know. Out of the goodness of my heart?”
Today he’s wearing a bolo tie, a snakeskin vest. He is wearing rings on every finger, like a king, like a pirate. Like a pirate king.
“Please,” he says. “I want to. I insist.”
She realizes something she should have seen months ago. He’s been tipping off the border guards. He takes money from people for helping them cross; then he takes money from the guards for telling them when and where to expect visitors. She’s been making money for him with each of her trips.
“You are a bad man,” she says.
“Oh, come now,” he says. “You can’t blame me. It’s a game of chance.”
“An evil man. When my son gets big he’ll come back and kill you.”
“Your son’s already big,” he says. “And I don’t see him doing anything.”
She is determined. She flings herself at the border again and again. She travels in cars, trucks, buses. She walks on blistered feet. She travels in a fishing boat, an inflatable raft. She wears disguises, buys false papers. Each time the border repulses her, spits her back.
Big American baby, she tells herself. She sees his size as proof of his American-ness. Only American babies could be so big, so healthy. She has convinced herself that he has always been American, that she is merely a vehicle, a shell, a seed casing meant to protect him until he can be planted in his rightful home.
She carries him for two years. She constructs a sort of sling for herself, with shoulder straps and a strip of webbing, to balance the weight. She uses a cane. She looks like a spider, round fat body, limbs like sticks.
Her son is alive; she can feel the pulse of his heartbeat, feel the pressure as he strains to stretch a finger, an eyelid.
She thinks she can see a dark shadow through the taut translucent skin of her belly. She can see his hair growing long and black.
Her body is adaptable. Her skin stretches, her bones shift, her blood feeds him. When people see her they are amazed, but she is not; she has seen it before, the lengths the body will go to to preserve itself, to cling to life.
Big American baby, she thinks. Nice big American baby. It is her mantra.
She carries him for three years. Three and a half. She becomes a legend, then a joke, with the border guards. They wave to her as she creeps past, cheer her on, drag her back at the last minute.
Don’t you think he wants to come out by now? people at home say to her.
He’s safer living in my belly than in this wretched country, she says, though she has been so single-mindedly set on her mission that she has taken no notice of external events. War, famine, peace, prosperity: it is all the same to her. America is the only option, the only ray of hope.
She carries him for four years.
Big American baby. Nice big American baby.
She has in her mind pictures of hot-air balloons attached to bicycles, fanciful flying machines. Some days she imagines she will simply lift off the ground and float over, suspended by the power of her will alone. Hers and her son’s. Or she imagines that she is invisible, intangible; she breezes across the border.
