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five miles from my grandmother’s house in the hills above Tijuana.
    She had light hair and blue eyes like mine—she could have been my cousin. When she realized I spoke Spanish, she clutched my fingers and chattered for an hour without a break. She hung on harder when Von announced it was time to go. She begged me not to leave. América resorted to a tactic many orphanage children master to keep visitors from leaving—she wrapped her legs around my calf and sat on my foot. As I peeled her off, I promised to return on Von’s next trip.
    He was waiting for me in the alley behind the orphanage.
    “What did you say to that girl?” he asked.
    “I told her I’d come back next week.”
    He glared at me. “Don’t
ever
tell one of my kids you’re coming back,” he snapped. “Don’t you know she’ll wait all week for you? Then she’ll wait for months. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
    “I mean it!” I said.
    I went back the next time to see her. Then again. And, of course, there were other places to go before we got to América’s orphanage, and there were other people to talk to after we left. Each location had people waiting with messages and questions to translate. It didn’t take long for Von to approach me with a proposition. It seemed he had managed the impressive feat of spending a lifetime in Mexico without picking up any Spanish at all. Within two months, I was Von’s personal translator.
    It is important to note that translation is often more delicate an art than people assume. For example, Mexicans are regularly amused to read
TV Guide
listings for Spanish-language TV stations. If one were to leave the tilde (~) off the word
años
, or “years,” the word becomes the plural for “anus.” Many cheap laughs are had when “The Lost Years” becomes “The Lost Butt Holes.”
    It was clear that Von needed reliable translating. Once, when he had arranged a summer camping trip for
barrio
children, he’d written a list of items the children needed to take. A well-meaning woman on the team translated the list for Von, and they Xeroxed fifty or sixty copies.
    The word for “comb” in Spanish is
peine
, but leave out a letter, and the word takes on a whole new meaning. Von’s note, distributed to every child and all their families, read:
    You must bring CLEAN CLOTHES
TOOTH PASTE
SOAP
TOOTHBRUSH
SLEEPING BAG
and BOYS—You Must Remember
to BRING YOUR PENIS!
    Von estimates that in a ten-year period his crew drove several
million
miles in Mexico without serious incident. Over five hundred people came and went as crew members. They transported more than sixty thousand visitors across the border.
    In my time with him, I saw floods and three hundred-mile-wide prairie fires, car wrecks and gang fights, monkeys and blood and shit. I saw human intestines and burned flesh. I sawhuman fat through deep red cuts. I saw people copulating. I saw animals tortured. I saw birthday parties in the saddest sagging shacks. I looked down throats and up wombs with flashlights. I saw lice, rats, dying dogs, rivers black with pollywogs, and a mound of maggots three feet wide and two feet high. One little boy in the back country cooked himself with an overturned pot of boiling
frijoles;
when I asked him if it hurt, he sneered like Pancho Villa and said, “Nah.” A maddened Pentecostal tried to heal our broken-down van by laying hands on the engine block. One girl who lived in a brickyard accidentally soaked her dress in diesel fuel and lit herself on fire. When I went in the shed, she was standing there, naked, her entire front burned dark brown and red. The only part of her not burned was her vulva; it was a startling cleft, a triangular island of white in a sea of burns.
    I saw miracles, too. A boy named Chispi, deep in a coma induced by spinal meningitis, suffered a complete shutdown of one lobe of his brain. The doctors in the intensive care unit, looking down at his naked little body hard-wired to banks of machinery