My Aunt Concha welcomed us into her tiny apartment under the elm trees lining Calle Pípila in Cd. Juárez. The door of the apartment faced the sidewalk. There was no yard, but the elms rose out of boxes to shade pedestrians as well as the fronts of the presidios, one story apartments plastered with stucco on the inside and outside. A red-handled mop stood beside the door, drying, drying. Its grey hair, its grey curls, scented with lemon. Her place sparkled. The floors smelled of soap and pine oil. We had chicken soup for lunch in her rather outdated kitchen, and for dessert she let us pick out a candy from a pink tin box covered in plastic daisies that had probably once held Marías or some kind of shortbread.

“One. No more,” my Aunt Concha said in Spanish. She always said the same thing.

My Tía Concha. When my mother was a child, Concha was a party girl. Now she dressed in black and wore a black lace veil and was very thin, with a stern, withered face that had once belonged to a girl who could dance all night at the local casino. She was an old lady, and we were children. Aunt Concha was actually my great-aunt, a sister of my mother’s father, who had passed away when my mother was a child. Since Concha never had children herself, she always grew tired of us after a very short time. My brother and I were sent to play in the park just down the street so that she and my mother could drink coffee and talk about politics, about the family spread out on both sides of the border, and about the old days, when everybody lived in Guadalajara and northern Jalisco.

The sunlit park, shaded in places by tall Chinese elms and light green ash trees, was a world of wonder. Yellow and black butterflies soared on the breeze like flecks of light. Whiptail lizards, furtive as fish, rustled in the grass. Regal mockingbirds whistled and tittered as they looked for mates or defended territories. An escaped pet parakeet sat on the head of Vicente Guerrero’s bronze bust (the park was named for him) and ate a discarded peanut.

On a little pedestrian bridge at the edge of the park, which extended across a steep, dry gully, Don Freddie and his daughter stood like sentries. Alfredo Marquez was nicknamed Freddie, even though he was Mexican. His daughter was Marisol. Freddie was slight and ascetic in appearance, with a long black beard and small, childish hands. His daughter was also rather small for her age. She was eleven. Freddie was a librarian at the local university, but he was also a kind of living astronomical clock. The heavens had outsize influence on his daily behavior: when Orion sat in the sky, he was brave as a tiger, but when Leo raised his brilliant mane, he would run and hide; when Venus, queen of the stars, arose, he was amorous with all the women of the neighborhood, including my elderly aunt, though the presence of Aldebaran in winter would sometimes put a temporary check on his adolescent behavior. When the moon was full, he could only eat bread and tortillas, but when Mars burned red among the constellations, he ate carne asada and barbacoa. The ardent morning sun made him happy and optimistic, but a fading sunset always brought him profound melancholy. On that Saturday afternoon in the park, with the sun sitting high in the sky, Freddie was sober and alert as he stood with his daughter on bridge sentry duty.

“Buenas tardes,” he said to my brother Tomás and me.

Marisol just nodded to us from under a blue baseball cap. She was a year older than me, and I liked her a lot.

“What’s the password?” Freddie asked us in English.

“Chupa chorro,” my brother said.

Marisol gave him a gentle whack but let us onto the bridge.

The air surrounding that old stone bridge was cool and fresh—a celebration of pleasant caresses and murmured music. The scents of melon and lemons and freshly cut grass enveloped us in rare perfume. We played all afternoon on the bridge, pretending it was a ship. Marisol was the captain, as she was the eldest of the kids. Her father was the boson, and I was the navigator. My brother was the chief steward. At one point, Señor Freddie sent him to a nearby beverage stand to buy lemonade for us.

Marisol found a stout wooden beam under the bridge (below deck) that had been discarded long ago, along with empty tin cans and a rather gruesome cat skeleton. After dragging it onto the bridge with her father’s help, she kept an eye out for minor peccadilloes on the part of her crew that would give her an excuse to make us “walk the plank.” Cursing was forbidden. Everyone had to be addressed by their titles. Shirttails were to be tucked. Gig lines straight. Marisol was clever, but also a little bossy.

“Disciplina, marineros,” she would insist.

Even her father seemed overwhelmed by her, and our antics on the bridge eventually wore him out. He retired to a nearby bench, leaving us alone. That’s how Juárez was in those days. Children could play by themselves in a public park without the least thought of harm. Don Freddie read a newspaper bought from a roving vendor for a few minutes before promptly falling asleep, the newspaper over his face. The three of us kids ran up and down the pink tezontle bridge and even climbed over the side with a ladder made of fallen tree branches, down into the deep, dry gully, which was filled from end to end with weeds and trash.

Marisol would call us back to the ship, careful not to raise her voice in a way that would wake her father.

I stared at her pretty green eyes as she tied an old bicycle wheel to the side of the bridge with bits of copper wire. Green or blue eyes are called “colored eyes” around here. Marisol was completely engrossed in her effort to provide the ship with a steering wheel—but it wasn’t long before she was back to giving commands.

“Navigator, tell me how far it is to Palm Island.”

“I’d use my sextant to study the mar y sol, captain, but unfortunately, my hands are full, because she’s making me hold her shoes and her cup of lemonade.”

“General Order Seventeen. All jokers and complainers will be sentenced to walk the plank.”

“Besides,” my brother Tom chimed in, “you’ve already done plenty of studying.”

I whacked him on the shoulder.

“Cut it out, asshole,” he said to me in English.

“One more time and you’ll walk the plank, steward,” Marisol warned him. She knew all the American curse words.

To show us how serious she was, she wedged her salvaged plank into one of the rectangular embrasures on the parapet lining the bridge. It extended far over the gully. She sat down next to it with a pensive look on her face.

I approached her carefully. She was using a lip balm stick she had taken from her little tooled-leather purse.

“Why don’t you have a mother, captain?” I asked her.

“Because she’s dead, navigator,” she said matter-of-factly.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Why doesn’t La Señora Concha have a husband, navigator? Is he dead?”

“I don’t think she ever had a husband, captain. Who’d want to marry her?”

“Who’d want to marry you?” Marisol said with mischief in her eyes.

“How about you?”

“I’d rather walk the plank.”

“Come on,” I said. “I’m not so bad.”

I pulled a pizza-parlor arcade token out of my pocket and gave it to her.

“Pirate’s gold, captain,” I said.

She took two twenty centavos coins out of her purse and put them into my hand.

“Ship’s wages, navigator.”

“Pieces of eight.”

“Time to explore Palm Island, sailors,” she said as she lowered herself over the bridge and onto our makeshift ladder.

When we arrived back on board, our lemonade cups were attracting ants. Marisol ordered my brother Tom to throw them overboard.

“What did your mother die of?” I asked Marisol quietly.

“She died when I was born. That’s why my father’s crazy. Let’s set sail for Shark Island, sailors.”

I brushed an ant off her shoulder.

“Crazy. Just like my aunt.”

Freddie was calling, “Marisol, Marisol.” He had woken from his nap. His voice sounded melancholy and forlorn, but we knew it was just because of the falling dusk.

Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries. His work has appeared in over fifty journals including Chicago Quarterly Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Folio, and Stonecoast Review.