As in Serafina’s village, on The Beast, everywhere, I am El Chavo Viejo. My hair is not salt and pepper. Just pure and solamente sal. El Chavo Viejo. I have earned it. This name is good with me.
The moon is high this night. Moonlight pours down upon train and riders alike, a great spill of moon. I look far down the train. Moon. Moon. Moon. All riders are silvered with light. Glowing. I look down at myself. I am glowing too. I, now silver-hair, Manuel Flores.
A child near me holds on to his mother and tugs on my shirt. “I am hungry.” He pleads. Maybe it is the moon glow, for in this moment I remember these same words coming from my own mouth. Before I met Señor Santos.
“Take this,” I say, breaking in half a torta I have bought from a vendor.
“Gracias,” he says, hungrily taking a bite.
This train is not a crowded one. So carefully I arise and move to a place where I can nearly be alone. I look up at the olden face, luminous and holy. I feel a sound lift in my throat. Like a wolf I howl at the moon. Then—somebody is howling howling beside me. Night pouring down, light pouring down, we howl, we howl.
For a time then, all is silence. Who would speak in this silvery presence?
The other wolf, he is a boy, younger than me. He wears a worn-out cap—who knows what color?—silver now. Beneath the bill his eyes spark like obsidian chips. Cejas, eyebrows, go swooping across his small brow. Silver ones.
When the moon retreats he speaks.
“Hola, lobo,” says this guy, splunking down beside me. Hello, wolf.
“Hola.” From all that silver I am still nearly speechless.
“Who are you?”
“Manuel Flores, El Chavo Viejo. Who are you?”
This small wolf with the cap, he pulls it off, and hair hair billows from beneath. A silver riverspill.
“I am Inés.”
“Do not trust anybody,” I say with urgency. Like I am an old hand at this. “Put back your cap.” Girls especially are in danger on The Beast.
“I have been watching you, Chavo Viejo,” says Inés, stuffing her hair beneath the cap again, “From over there I have seen you share half of nearly nothing. Besides, you are part wolf. You I can trust.”
For a moment I just gape at her face.
“Here then,” I say smiling, holding out to her the rest of my torta, “Take half of nearly nothing.”
Inés, she is all cejas. Something from my school days comes back to me. This one, she resembles a lot the one called Frida, who painted in a very weird way. On our classroom wall, my teacher hung a calendar with Frida’s odd paintings. And a photograph of her and her fantastic eyebrows. I call Inés, Cejas.
Cejas is not beautiful. But she is. With a good smile. She brings life wherever she goes. She is like a sparrow, a small brown bird with sparking eyes always hopping hopping seeking crumbs. A plucky little bird of complete mischief that steals your tortilla from your very hand if you are not watchful. A little mischief bird that for its boldness makes you smile. Like a sparrow, Cejas is small and busy and bold.
Cejas sees things I cannot see. Feels things I cannot feel. Dreams dreams beyond my dreams. She stretches me in a magical way to open my mind, my soul.
Cejas and I, two young lone ones on a train, trying to stay alive. Instantly we become comrades. A friendship of relámpago, lightning. Right off Cejas calls us Los Intensos because we feel fierce about things. A miracle! I tell myself in wonder, I have a friend.
My dream is to find my brother. Cejas’s dream is to find her mother, in a place called Virginia of the West. There Cejas will get a job. Her first money will go to her family, she declares in her spirited way, her sparrowness.
Cejas likes photographs. She has seen one in a store window. A picture of tortillas in a basket. Tortillas of all things. But she loves it.
“One day I will take photographs also,” she says, her dark eyes alight with the shine of her dream. For safety against bad ones, her hair is now always hidden.
Comes now her long braid of words. “Plain things—jars, petates, cactus, old fountains, old walls, old faces. Whatever I like I will snap. Maybe even sell,” she adds.
At these times Cejas speaks with such grit, such fervor, such fire, I believe she might just do this.
The Beast rushes on. Cejas becomes bored.
“Now I will take photos,” she says in a voice of secrets and hops up, balancing against me to not fall off.
“You are loca,” I say, “and completamente reckless.”
“Where is the harm in being a little reckless?”
In my mind I see death, but I do not say so.
“Come on.” She beckons with her little hand. And of course, under her spell, I cannot say no.
Suddenly Cejas kneels down. Beside a mother and child, wrapped in the same torn shawl. Like us, they are tired—exhausted really—from being vigilant against assaults, from trying to stay on The Beast. They are ragged and dirty, but these things do not hide their love. “Click.” Cejas works her pretend camera. “See?” she says, turning to me. Perched here on top of this raging beast, she captures who Beast Riders are.
Cejas clicks her camera again and again. Maybe the subject is a ladder of the train that Beast Riders grasp for their lives. Or a broken shoe abandoned—though not for long. One time she finds a huddled guy, completely filthy, gripping a filthy doll. She clicks him. Enraged, the man leaps up, yelling “¡Ladrona!” Thief! Cejas darts away from him, jumping jumping with care from car to car, crouching against the wind, shouting to me all the time, “Do not look down! Do not look down!”
At last we escape the furious man.
“Photography is dangerous,” she says, not smiling.
I look at her, panting.