Installment 2: Re-entry

I don’t remember much about the drive from Hidalgo to the border.  I remember driving too fast, and that made the boys nervous since we were driving without a permit.

I must have been driving fast because I wanted us to make our flight, but mostly it was because I could.  The road was flat and straight, cutting through a wide desert.  Driving fast just seemed like the right thing to do.

I also remember passing the station where we would have returned our permit, had we purchased it in the first place.  “Just stay left Parrish.  Go go go!” the boys spurred me on, and I blew past it.

When we neared Nuevo Laredo, a long line of parked cars appeared ahead of us.  The four of us exchanged a quick “Oh sh*t,” but we also noticed that the right lane was empty.  I continued in it, desperately hoping that the cars I was passing were like the people who stand in the first line at the grocery store, while the last register stands empty.  Unfortunately, that trick doesn’t work with border traffic.  Eventually I came to a police car parked perpendicular to my lane.  The cop waved us through a break in the median with a shake of the head and some terse words about waiting in line with everybody else.

Once we repositioned ourselves, I looked around, mostly searching for somewhere to go to the restroom.  Low houses and everything shops lined the right side of the road; we joked about darting through an alleyway to find a secret spot behind those.  I could also ask one of the shop owners if I could use their restroom; they probably get that a lot.  Or, somewhere along the line there must be someone with a booth and a toilet and a fee and some papel higiénico; I mentally prepped for the adventure in sanitation that this would probably entail.

Then, a bit ahead of us on the opposite side of the highway, I saw a cluster of toothpaste blue: port-o-johns.  Initially my eye skipped off them and landed on the American flag fluttering lightly in the distance.  But that flag was dwarfed by the enormous Mexican bandera billowing in the foreground; I thought it prudent to open the door to one of those port-o-potties and take stock of the situation.  Ryan switched into the driver’s seat; I grabbed some toilet paper and darted across the road.  After opening the door with an apprehensive half-breath, I smiled at the odorless fragrance inside.  I gave a quick shrug to the boys in the car, stepped inside, and closed the door.

Returning to the car, I felt much more present in the situation.  Ryan stayed in the driver’s seat, sunglasses perched on his forehead, ipod resting on his knee, legs stretched out from the reclined seat back.  Voltaire was scrunched down behind him, nearly hidden between a pile of backpacks and the door, cell phone held against his ear.

Johnny sat upright behind me, rocking a pair of aviators and perching his arm on the backpacks wedged between him from Voltaire.

“So Volt’s got service here?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s on the phone with Continental,” Ryan answered.

“Ok so the problem is that we’re still in Mexico,” Voltaire began.  “We’re stuck in line at the border and it’s probably gonna be a while.  We’re just wondering whether there’s a later flight out of Laredo,” he explained politely, “and whether we can get on that flight, and whether there’s any fee for changing our tickets.”

We waited silently, trying to ignore a leather-skinned woman pacing the shoulder and selling miniature altars of Mary Magdalen holding Christ’s body.

“Oookay.  Ok good.  Thanks.”  And Voltaire snapped his phone shut.  “Well she says there’s a $150 change fee if we miss our flight, but she also says that our flight is delayed by an hour.”

I looked at the clock.  It was 3:00 PM, and our flight was at 7.  Maybe we could make it.

“Hey can you put this in?” Johnny asked, and reached between the front seats with his ipod.

“Sure,” Ryan responded, and unplugged Voltaire’s ipod to replace it with Johnny’s.  Music had been a funny theme on this trip.  Before leaving home, I had made a mix cd of upbeat indie favorites of mine, partly as a challenge to myself to find something in my music collection that someone would like.  We listened to my cd a few times at the beginning of the week, before switching to Voltaire’s ipod full of hip hop and top 40 favorites from the ‘70s to now.  I was fine with that, as long as I wasn’t asked to drive the ipod.

But Johnny fell in love with country music on a road trip through Pennsylvania once, and country songs are sticky.  A few minutes into his playlist, I couldn’t hold back a half-grin.  My eyes went out of focus, as I stared through the low buildings lining the road to summer moments in the Alabama foothills.

“So ya know how certain songs are connected to really specific memories?” I said to Ryan, who nodded slightly while continuing to sing softly.  “This song reminds me of really specific moments from the summer camp I grew up going to,” I continued, knowing that what I was saying was going to sound trite, “But I never would have thought I’d be belting ‘Strawberry Wine’ out the car window with three dudes, waiting in line at the Mexican border.”

“Ha!” Ryan replied, chuckling a bit while everybody continued to sing with Deana Carter.

The minutes chipped away at the likelihood of us catching our flight.  Eventually we decided to call the airline again, to find out what our alternatives were for catching another flight home and how much it would cost us. Voltaire got on the phone with Continental.

“Hmm, nothing out of Laredo until Tuesday?  What about anywhere else?  What other cities could we fly out of sometime tonight or tomorrow morning?”

I turned my head towards Ryan and raised my eyebrows slightly; his clear eyes were as wide as mine.

“Hmm, ok, nothing out of Dallas.  What about Houston?”

“Oookay…San Antonio?”

“No.  Uhh…okay, is there anywhere else we could fly out of?” Voltaire’s voice took on the jovial, almost-sarcastic tone that means he’s close as he gets to exasperation.  “El Paso.  Oh yeah, check El Paso.”

“Huh.  Nothing.  Okay.  Thank you.”

“So what’s the situation?” I asked.

“Well every flight to DC out of anywhere in Texas is booked until Tuesday, but we can fly standby and they won’t charge us the change fee” Voltaire replied flatly.  I called Enterprise and found out that it would cost us $150 to drop the car off somewhere else in Texas (but we didn’t like the idea of trying to fly standby and maybe not getting on a flight until Tuesday).  Or $450 to drop the car off in Washington, if worse came to worst.

On and on we waited, creeping towards the border, listening to music, laughing at each other’s memories from growing up.  When we finally pulled into the border patrol booth, Ryan put on his best manners to greet the border agent as he handed him our passports.  I crossed my fingers that he didn’t ask for a driving permit.  He didn’t.

Crossing over the Rio Grande, the clock was dangerously close to betraying us.  Equipped only with some vague directions that the border agent had given us, we felt our way through Laredo to the airport.

We hurried to the rental car counter to check our flight’s status, return the car before Enterprise closed at 8, and check the monitors to see if the plane had left yet.  It had.  We turned towards each other, the sky turning the color of dry shale behind us.  With a blunt energy spurred by inevitability, someone said, “Ok, well I guess we’re driving home.”