BAE BOY

2-31

All I could think, when I looked down into the hole they were at the bottom of, was "How the hell did they do this?"

The hole was really, really narrow and not like the shafts I'd seen before. There'd been shafts out in the middle of nowhere in Dogpatch where my mom's family lived, left over from all kinds of different mining and well digging stuff. A lot of it illegal, so nobody knew they were there.

Which meant us kids were always being yelled at to "watch what the hell you're doin'" if we went out there with the uncles to shoot or something. There were family stories about kids falling down the wells and shafts and getting all broken up.

Animals, too, had died like that. And at least one car, as I recall, had driven into something or other and got stuck there. Driver and passengers had to be cut out of the thing, the way they told it.

It's that thing that we both love and hate about AZ. People just do what they damned well please, and the consequences come down on other people, later. There's fences and things around some of the holes, but not all. And if you're unlucky enough to walk up on one of the open ones...down you go.

But they couldn't have fallen into this one. I mean, deep as it seemed to be, they'd be dead if they'd tumbled down there by accident.

But they were bawling up a storm now that they heard us up top. I couldn't tell by the crying if they were hurt bad or anything because it was actually kind of hard to hear them. That's how deep it was.

And you could definitely tell that they were terrified. High pitched screams and this real mournful sounding "Mamá! Mamá! Mamá," over and over again--that, I could hear. Broke my heart.

The mother they were screaming to was named Abril, which just means "April," and the grandmother was Xōchitl ("SO chee,") which means flower, in Aztec. Popular baby name around my way, so don't trip that I know that.

I asked Abril to tell them that we were going to help them. So she yelled that to them a few times, in a few different ways, while I sort of shoved myself into the hole as far as I could, trying to see something.

I couldn't even wedge my shoulders in. Even when I squirmed to see if sort of contorting myself in some way would work, it was no good. And both women were kind of plump, or rather, just sort of stocky, not actually fat. So neither of them were going to fit, either.

I sat back up and just tried to gather my thoughts. And I was glad to see a big pick up full of men heading our way.

It was Pablo, one of the head men who I'd met before, and some young guys I might've seen back when we first came and ate all those Christmas tamales and whatnot. I remembered the flirty girls better than the boys, but there'd been a lot of boys there, too.

And Charlie was there, too, bringing up the rear, in a truck that looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath.

He got out and came right over to me and said, "Indian wells," with a deep frown on his face.

And then he looked at Pablo and said, "You can't go down in there this way. Gotta find where they squeezed in there'n' then see if you can figure out which way they went."

Pablo shook his head and said, "That'll take all day. There's all kinda holes over there. Tunnels goin' every which way."

And Charlie said, "Well, they're in one. So we got to find how they got there."