The Smugglers

This was 1938, a time when little girls did not yet wear jeans, and the Great Depression was in charge of families’ finances. My sister and I were lucky enough to have a Sunday dress, two school dresses, and a leftover dress from last year for playing outside. If I had outgrown last year’s playdress, mother’s circle of friends traded hand-me-downs, and those did fine for Saturdays.

Grandpa was a handsome dude, blue-eyed and blond, when he got to Laredo in the 1890’s, long before U.S. Customs did. If he wanted to buy some tequila or French wine or party with other twenty-somethings, he walked across the bridge to the other side of the river. The Rio Grande, that is, and the other side being Mexico, if you got technical. Which nobody did very much, until the U.S. government came along years later and built a bigger bridge, and then Texas, after Prohibition ended, started to collect import duties on things. Things like liquor. “Ridiculous!” Grandpa, now silver-haired and portly, still fumed about it. He would say things like, “Less than a mile, round trip, for a bottle of tequila and some Leon d’Or wine, and they want to charge us!”

And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture had rules, too, such as you can’t bring back an avocado with the seed still in it.

“WHAAT?,” Grandpa would say. “Any fool knows that if you take the pit out, the avocado will be all black inside by the time you get home. Stupid!”

So the locals mostly ignored the rules, figuring they were really intended for tourists. And the Customs guys mostly ignored the locals, because they had to live in that little town — and anyway, some of the rule breakers were kinfolks.

None of this affected me until my sister Patty and cousin Mary Ellen and I got roped into smuggling. I mean, we didn’t know we were destined to be criminals that Saturday when Grandpa asked us if we wanted to go across the river with him to shop for the family’s regular Sunday noon gathering at his house. I was eight, after all, and the other two were six.

We were just excited to go to El Mercado. It was nothing like the Jitney Jungle where we went with Mama in Laredo, with its turnstiles and small grocery carts and two checkout lanes. El Mercado was a whole city block under a roof. It had no walls, so the small individual stalls could face the sidewalk all around the outside edge. It had some vendor stands inside, too, but the biggest section in the interior was devoted to the meat market. Whole carcasses hung on hooks from the ceiling — beef, pork, cabrito. Flies buzzed around, lured inside by the smell of raw meat, and butchers would swat them away with a towel if they weren’t busy. After giving the day’s offerings a thorough inspection, Grandpa decided what he wanted for tomorrow’s dinner, and a butcher cut his selection from one of the beef carcasses and wrapped it in butcher paper.

Then it was on to the fruit and vegetable stands, laden with local vegetables as well as mangoes and pineapples and chilies of every kind. Last of all, Grandpa stopped at our favorite —the homemade candy stand, where he treated us to sweet potato candy, leche quemada in tiny boxes, and a lemonade.

When we three girls were sitting in the back seat of the car again, he said, “Here’s an avocado for each of you. Hide it under your skirt so the guy at the bridge on the American side won’t see it.”

Now at St. Peter’s School, they taught us we should always obey the law. The nuns also said it was a sin to disobey your parents. Suddenly my brain was full of anxious bees. I couldn’t obey both rules. Which one was more important? Grandpa wasn’t exactly a parent, but he was certainly Daddy’s father. And anyway, he was driving the car.

Grandpa won the vote.

What would happen to us three girls if we got caught? And if we didn’t get caught, would I still need to confess this to the priest next Friday? Would he think it was a mortal sin or a venial sin? Suddenly, the avocado began to feel like a hot coal between my legs. I just knew it must be glowing red, visible to any customs official on the alert for smugglers.

What’s the best way to look innocent? Smile at the officer? Gaze out the window? Pretend to be asleep? The internal moral war was still raging when we got to the north end of the bridge and stopped at a waiting inspector’s kiosk.

“Hi, Mr. Puig,” the agent said. “Everybody U.S.citizens? Are you bringing anything back today?”

“We’re all citizens,” Grandpa said.

“Well, at least that’s true,” I thought. I sat real still and stared straight ahead.

“And I bought some tomatoes and candy and a couple of kilos of meat.” He showed the paper bag to the agent.

“OK,” said the officer, and he waved us on through.

A right turn from the Customs House onto Zaragoza Street, two more blocks, and, safe in Grandpa’s driveway, I could exhale. Quickly, we three girls turned over the avocados, their pits still where Mother Nature put them.

I walked to the back yard and gazed across the tranquil river at the church tower on the other side. And I prayed that Sunday’s guacamole would be good enough to wash away my Saturday sin.