Estevan and I talked about everything you can think of. He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people’s shirts, just above the heart.

“Not that I know of,” I told him. It occurred to me, though, that it might be kind of appropriate.

He told me that the national symbol of the Indian people in Guatemala was the quetzal, a beautiful green bird with a long, long tail. I told him I had seen military macaws at the zoo, and wondered if the quetzal was anything like those. He said no. If you tried to keep this bird in a cage, it died.

Shortly after sunset we left the interstate to take a two-lane road that cut through the mountains and would take about two hundred miles of New Mexico off our trip. I wished we could keep New Mexico in and cut out two hundred miles of Oklahoma instead, but of course Oklahoma was where we were going. I had to keep reminding myself of that. For some reason I had in the back of my mind that we were headed for Kentucky. I kept picturing Mama’s face when we all pulled up in the driveway.

I squinted and flashed my lights at a car coming toward us with its brights on. They dimmed.

“Do you miss your home a lot?” I asked Estevan. “I know that’s a stupid question. But does it make you tired, being so far away from what you know? That’s how I feel sometimes, that I would just like to crawl in a hole somewhere and rest. Go dormant, like those toad frogs Mattie told us about. And for you it’s just that much worse; you’re not even speaking your own language.”

He let out a long breath. “I don’t even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. In Guatemala City I missed the mountains. My own language is not Spanish, did you know that?”

I told him no, that I didn’t.

“We are Mayan people; we speak twenty-two different Mayan languages. Esperanza and I speak to each other in Spanish because we come from different parts of the highlands.”

“What’s Mayan, exactly?”

“Mayans lived here in the so-called New World before the Europeans discovered it. We’re very old people. In those days we had astronomical observatories, and performed brain surgery.”

I thought of the color pictures in my grade-school history books: Columbus striding up the beach in his leotards and feathered hat, a gang of wild-haired red men in loin cloths scattering in front of him like rabbits. What a joke.

“Our true first names are Indian names,” Estevan said. “You couldn’t even pronounce them. We chose Spanish names when we moved to the city.”

I was amazed. “So Esperanza is bilingual. You’re, what do you call it? Trilingual.”

I knew that Esperanza spoke some English too, but it was hard to say how much since she spoke it so rarely. One time I had admired a little gold medallion she always wore around her neck and she said, with an accent, but plainly enough: “That is St. Christopher, guardian saint of refugees.” I would have been no more surprised if St. Christopher himself had spoken.

Christopher was a sweet-faced saint. He looked a lot like Stephen Foster, who I suppose you could say was the guardian saint of Kentucky. At least he wrote the state song.

“I chose a new name for myself too, when I left home,” I said to Estevan. “We all have that in common.”

“You did? What was it before?”

I made a face. “Marietta.”

He laughed. “It’s not so bad.”

“It’s a town in Georgia where Mama’s and my father’s car broke down once, I guess, when they were on their way to Florida. They never made it. They stayed in a motel and made me instead.”

“What a romantic story.”

“Not really. I was a mistake. Well, not really a mistake, according to Mama, but an accident. A mistake I guess is when you regret it later.”

“And they didn’t?”

“Mama didn’t. That’s all that counts, in my case.”

“So Papa went on to Florida?”

“Or wherever.”

“Esperanza also grew up without her father. The circumstances were different, of course.”

In the back seat Esperanza was stroking Turtle’s hair and singing to her quietly in a high, unearthly voice. I had heard enough Spanish to understand that the way her voice was dipping and gliding through the words was more foreign than that. I remembered Estevan’s yodely songs the day of our first picnic. They had to have been Mayan songs, not Spanish. Songs older than Christopher Columbus, maybe even older than Christopher the saint. I wondered if, when they still had Ismene, they had sung to her in both their own languages. To think how languages could accumulate in a family, in a country like that. When I thought of Guatemala I imagined a storybook place: jungles full of long-tailed birds, women wearing rainbow-threaded dresses.

But of course there was more to the picture. Police everywhere, always. Whole villages of Indians forced to move again and again. As soon as they planted their crops, Estevan said, the police would come and set their houses and fields on fire and make them move again. The strategy was to wear them down so they’d be too tired or too hungry to fight back.

Turtle had fallen asleep with her head in Esperanza’s lap.

“What’s with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians?” I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

After a while Estevan said, “What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.”

I thought of my Cherokee great-grandfather, his people who believed God lived in trees, and that empty Oklahoma plain they were driven to like livestock. But then, even the Cherokee Nation was someplace.

“You know what really gets me?” I asked him. “How people call you ‘illegals.’ That just pisses me off, I don’t know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“You just can’t,” I said. “That’s all there is to it.”

On the second day we got into flatlands. The Texas panhandle, and then western Oklahoma, stretched out all around us like a colossal pancake. There was no way of judging where you were against where you were going, and as a consequence you tended to start feeling you were stuck out there, rolling your wheels on some trick prairie treadmill.

Estevan, who had apparently spent some time on a ship, said it reminded him of the ocean. He knew a Spanish word for the kind of mental illness you get from seeing too much horizon. Esperanza seemed stunned at first, then a little scared. She asked Estevan, who translated for me, whether or not we were near Washington. I assured her we weren’t, and asked what made her think so. She said she thought they might build the President’s palace in a place like this, so that if anyone came after him his guards could spot them a long way off.

To keep ourselves from going crazy with boredom we tried to think of word games. I told about the secretary named Jewel with the son who sees things backwards, and we tried to think of words he would like. Esperanza thought of ala, which means wing. Estevan knew whole sentences, some in Spanish and some in English. The English ones were “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!” (which he said was a typical gringo way of looking at that endeavor), and “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” which was what Napoleon supposedly said when he was sent into exile. I hadn’t known, before then, where or what Elba was. I’d had a vague idea that it was a kind of toast.

Turtle was the only one of us who didn’t seem perturbed by the landscape. She told Esperanza a kind of ongoing story, which lasted for hundreds of miles and sounded like a vegetarian version of Aesop’s Fables, and when she ran out of story she played with her baby doll. The doll was a hand-me-down from Mattie’s. It came with a pair of red-checked pajamas, complete with regular-sized shirt buttons, that someone had apparently sewn by hand. Turtle adored the doll and had named it, with no help from anyone, Shirley Poppy.