The room was dark and she went to the sink and turned on the light. In the mirror she saw herself. It seemed like she had aged since the morning. Her bloodshot eyes could produce no more tears. They would in time, but now she was numb.
Camilla washed her face, dried off with a towel, and turned out the light. She made her way to the bed and lay down on the bedspread. The stillness of the room was suffocating. Somewhere a few miles south, her son was running, hiding, fighting. Who knew what he was doing? The uncertainty gripped her stomach, her womb aching to know that the child who had resided there so many years ago was safe and sound somewhere across the border.
Her pain and anxiety ebbed and flowed through the night, and just as sleep was attempting to overtake her exhausted mind, there was a knock on the door. She lay silent, her heart beating fast, her mind racing to think of who it could possibly be.
Roberto, it had to be Roberto. He had crossed over and seen her car in the parking lot. It had to be him.
Another knock on the door.
She rose from the bed and went to the door, opening it without reservation.
But it wasn’t her son.
“Hello, Mrs. Ibanez, strange to see you here,” Agent Lomas said as he pushed himself into the room and slammed the door behind him.
63
Camilla was told to sit in the chair that Lomas pulled out from the dilapidated desk in the room. She did so without argument as she kept her eyes on the agent. He searched the room, under the bed, in the bathroom. There was no one else here. He walked over and locked the door, then turned to her. She could feel her heart beating in her throat, not knowing what this man was going to do.
“Where is he?”
“Who?” she said.
“Don’t make this hard on yourself.”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“So,” Lomas said, “are you and Kazmierski living together now?”
“What? No.”
“Then why are you in his room?”
“I was too tired to drive home,” she lied. “I knew he had this room and he was not using it.”
“And how did you know he wasn’t using it?”
Camilla didn’t answer. Already Lomas had made her doubt her ability to cover her actions.
“Where did you leave him yesterday?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. You drove him over to a hostel and dropped him off. Who told you to do that?”
Again, Camilla held her tongue. She was not good at lying, even less so when her pulse was pounding in her ears as she wondered if she would ever make it out of this room.
Lomas took off his coat, threw it on the bed, and rolled up his sleeves. She could see that he was sweating, even though the air that night was unseasonably cool. He was nervous, but not of her. Something else was on his mind.
“This can go several different ways,” Lomas said. “I can take you in for obstruction, but that would just be the start. Aiding and abetting. Conspiracy. You’d spend a long time in a cell somewhere where nobody will know where to look for you. It really isn’t that hard. Trust me.
“Or, I can take you across the line and drop you in the plaza. Roberto has been busy today. You’d be a welcome token for Salazar to use to get him to show himself.”
“What do you mean?” she said. She didn’t want to know, but the words came out of her mouth before she could stop herself.
“Roberto has killed several Cartel sicarios, all in one day.”
Camilla shook her head, not wanting to believe what Lomas was saying.
“Yes,” he said. “There is a bounty on his head so large that all of Nuevo Negaldo will be looking for him. He’s gone to ground somewhere, but I’m sure knowing that you were in the hands of Salazar would make him show himself.”
“Is that why they killed Felipe?” she shouted. “Is that why they killed my brother?”
“See, you do know what’s going on, don’t you.”
The tears started welling up in the corners of her eyes again, her world crashing in around her. Lomas walked over to the sink, filled a glass with water, and brought it over to her. He changed his tone.
“I don’t care about Roberto. He can stay hiding until the end of time. I’m sorry for your brother . . . this . . . priest. We are dealing with savages. I’ll even go so far as saying that your son was justified in taking revenge for his uncle. It wasn’t smart, but I can understand. But now, for you, just tell me what I need to know and you can rest assured that your part in this is over. Okay?”
Camilla sipped the water, wiped her eyes, and gave a subtle nod.
“Now, Ed Kazmierski came down here, met with you, and you told him to go to Nuevo Negaldo. Why?”
“To meet with Felipe.”
“The priest?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tell him to do that?”
Camilla breathed in and out. She felt like she was betraying her son, betraying Felipe. She didn’t know what the right thing was to do.
“Roberto told me to,” she said.
“And why would Roberto tell you to do that?”
“Because Felipe had something.”
“Had what?”
Camilla’s lip quivered. The answer was the last thing she had left. While she retained it, she had leverage. Once spoken, she was at the mercy of Lomas, and she had no idea what level of mercy he might offer. She knew the stories, had read the papers, the news. The bodies found in the desert, in the streets, in burning barrels on the ridges overlooking the city. The guilty, dead and disposed of, all while the citizens ignored the smoking pyres. She would become one of the shunned and her heart ached. She wanted Roberto to be here with her, to hold on to him, to have him protect her through this fear.
“What did Felipe have?”
What did she owe to this American? Who was he to her? Why should she trade her life to protect him from Agent Lomas, the Cartel, the men that butchered Felipe? He was the cause of this. If not him, his son. Tyler Kazmierski.
“You will not harm Roberto?” she asked faintly.
“I have no control over that. Roberto is in Mexico, and I am here. But I promise you that I will not harm you.”
She swallowed hard.
“Felipe had . . . Edward’s son. Tyler,” she said.
Lomas’s eyes widened.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
She nodded again.
“And Roberto set it up?”
“Yes.”
Lomas paced around the room and put the pieces of what he knew together. Ed went to the church to meet up with Tyler. But they didn’t cross over the border. So they were either still at the church or . . .
But if they were at the church, Salazar’s men would have found them when they killed the priest. No, they had gotten out somehow. They were going to cross over some other way. Roberto was in two gunfights that day, one outside his mother’s house in Nuevo Negaldo. Odds were that they would not have stayed in the city. The first fight, however, was at a migrant camp. It was empty by the time more men had arrived and reported back the carnage. There were no dead gringos in the place.
They were hoofing it through the desert.
He pulled out his phone, opened Google maps, and looked at the area.
“So,” he said to himself, “they are taking the long way home.”
By now, they would be on his side of the wire. Both of them. And one of them had in his possession the knowledge of where the missing load was. It was served up for him better than he could have imagined. It was time to make his score.
Lomas walked over and grabbed Camilla by the arm and forced her to her feet.
“Get up,” he said, “we’re going for a ride.”
64
The water was running low and what was left was hoarded like gold.
The group was still together. No one had fallen off.
It was the small hours
of the night and the men were walking north under the stars like the Magi. Ed brought up the rear of the moving column, his eyes fixed on Tyler’s back, his on the man before him, and so on, with Julio leading the procession. They walked a trail that had been beaten out of the landscape by thousands of feet before them, their own steps adding to the compacting effort of migration. The path curved down a dry arroyo and followed a ridgeline for a mile, weaving snakelike through the country. The men crested the ridge and plodded on.
The darkness was overpowering and the nocturnal sounds of the desert expanse called out to them with each step. Ed’s legs were burning, his quads tightening, the first indication of a blister was forming on the arch of his foot. He wondered as to the foolishness of this journey. He was in no shape to be hiking through the night. His body had gotten old without his notice, had aged and atrophied.
Tyler was struggling too. Even in the dark his pallor stood out, his gait was slouched.
“You alright?” Ed whispered.
Tyler grunted. He hadn’t said more than a few words since they had talked with the Guatemalans.
“Do you know where we are?” Ed said.
“No.”
“Okay.”
Ed looked up. There was nothing out here. No signs, no lights, nothing to tell them where Mexico ended and America started. Before him, endless, uninterrupted nature.
They walked on, the rocks beneath his feet crunching with each footfall.
He adjusted the packs, the one on his back, the other slung on his chest. He was sweating more than he had in a long time. To keep his mind off his own pain, he tried to concentrate on the swaying cadence of Tyler’s motion before him.
Like a gaunt, skeletal metronome.
His mind cleared with a slow epiphany.
For too long he had viewed Tyler’s place in his life as if it were a celestial body moving in orbit around its host star. He being fixed in place, his son moved by the natural order, brought into being by his parents. To Ed, Tyler was simply navigating a path set down before the dawn of time, an adornment to Ed’s life. But Tyler was more than that, had always been more than that. Ed was too ignorant to see that his son was, in fact, a world unto his own.
What kind of father was he?
Two steps in front of him was a grown man. His shoulders weakened by the patched gunshot wound and the loss of blood and energy. His body lean from years of self-abuse. But all the while his midnight ambulation through that desolate patch of country showed that he was built for this new world. He was a man who had passed through fire. And though his route in life had been marked by bad decisions, Ed watched Tyler guide his walk with purpose and a deftness of skill.
What had his son seen?
What had he experienced in life that was so far removed from Ed’s own story? His son looked on the world through a glass tinted with the roughest abrasions, and Ed, for the first time he could remember, wanted to know what that view looked like.
He wanted to know his son.
He wanted to know why he did the things he had done. Why he wandered. Why he lusted after the drugs he put in his veins, why he would put himself in such straits as these. What went through his son’s mind when he thought of the future? Did he think of such things?
And then Ed considered the most jarring notion. Did he love Tyler? Had he ever really loved him?
A rock caught his foot and he stumbled. The ground came up fast and his face smashed against the hardpan. The pack on his front side smashed against his ribs and took the breath out of him. Tyler turned and helped him back to his feet without saying a word.
They walked on.
His mind went back to his thoughts.
When his wife had left, he shut down. There was no getting around that fact. He didn’t really know how to take care of his boy. He knew how to pay the bills, how to make sure that Tyler had a place to sleep and that the chores were done, but that was about it. Their relationship was mechanical. It was simply mathematics with no art. And so when Tyler started getting into trouble, the equation became unbalanced and Ed found himself no longer interested in trying to solve it.
He told himself at the time that he was giving tough love, teaching resiliency, teaching the boy that when it came to correcting mistakes, it was up to him and him alone to fix them.
But in reality he had taught Tyler that he wasn’t worth the effort.
Was that true? Was Tyler really that much of a burden after his wife left, or had the abandonment and resentment just overtaken him so much that all he could do was make sure that nothing else ever touched his heart again, even to the point of pushing away his own boy?
A child is so much more than a derivative of a parent’s baser traits, more than a collection of faults passed down that a father is afraid will expose parts of himself to the world. Every mistake that Tyler had made was an affront to Ed’s sense of pride, as if each act of the son deducted from the character of the father. But now, on this trail, Ed saw, as with new eyes, the man before him.
Not an extension of himself that caused pain to the whole, but an independent being as he himself knew he was.
His son.
Ed thought of his own father, how it was easy to believe that his old man had come into existence at the moment of his first memory, that his father had not lived before Ed was in the world to observe it. How little he had cared for his own father’s instruction. The same way that Tyler had disregarded his advice.
They were alike, father and son, but not the same, and this separation of identity in Ed’s thoughts could not have happened anywhere else but on this journey through the desert.
Tyler turned around again to make sure his father was still on his feet.
They all walked on.
65
Crossing into the States was less dramatic than what Ed had expected. Julio held down two lines of barbed wire while the men stepped over one by one. They were home. Unlike their traveling companions, the anxiety for Ed and Tyler diminished with each additional step.
The group came to a stop and the men took the opportunity to sit down. Julio walked ahead and pulled something out of his pocket.
“What’s he doing?” Edward asked.
“Burner phone,” Tyler said.
“What’s that?”
Tyler still wasn’t that interested in talking, but he relented. “There are lookouts on these hills watching for Border Patrol. They’re letting him know where to go.”
“Lookouts?”
“Yeah. Guys camped out on the peaks. They’ll stay up there for days directing traffic.”
Edward kept his eyes on the coyote. Julio pocketed the phone, walked back to the group, and everyone got back on their feet. They then set off again. Julio led them to a declivity that fell away into a steep valley, then turned north, and navigated along a dry wash before coming out the other side. They were making their way to a mountain spire isolated on the plain, its huge bulk silhouetted in the twilight sky. They soon found themselves ascending a narrow path to an opening framed by old timbers barely the height of the shortest in the group.
“An old silver mine,” Tyler said before his father could ask.
They ventured in single file and followed the course of the mine several hundred feet, then one by one each of them descended a ladder in the dark. Edward followed his son down, Luis and Juan bringing up the rear. The smell of all the men soon turned the tunnel rancid.
Once down the ladder, they all journeyed on into the mountain, hunched over like trolls. Every muscle of Ed’s body was burning, and he was convinced his back was about to seize and paralyze him. But before he lay down and quit, he could feel fresh air blowing down the tunnel. They emerged on the other side of the rock and stood, each stretching and breathing in clean oxygen.
Julio had been the first through the cave, and when Ed emerged, he saw that the coyote was on the phone again.
“What now?” Ed asked.
“The highway. You can barely make it out over ther
e. We have to wait here until the pickup time.”
“Do you think he’s telling someone about us?”
“Absolutely,” Tyler said calmly.
“And . . .”
“We’re on the US side, so we have that going for us. We’ll make a break for it at some point.”
“What if who he is talking to comes for us first?”
“Too risky. I figure either Julio tries to take us here on his own and march us back to Mexico, or he’ll wait until we hit the highway where he’ll have backup. I bet he doesn’t have the guts to try to make a move out here on his own.”
“And if he does?”
“Like I said, I’ll take care of it.”
Ed nodded. It wasn’t just youthful or thuggish bravado coming from Tyler. It was reserved confidence.
Julio looked back at him, the phone still on his ear, the same impish smirk on his face.
They waited.
An hour or more had passed when Julio looked at his watch and then forced everyone up. The group made its way down the mountain and double-timed it toward the highway. Their bodies burning, their muscles exhausted, each man running toward his destiny.
On and on through the endless desert.
The lights of the road running perpendicular to their course came into view, the headlights of sporadic vehicles crisscrossing the landscape. The troop kept moving, relief and smiles on the Guatemalans’ faces as they looked back at Edward and were surprised that he didn’t seem to share their enthusiasm. Ed looked to Tyler to see what they were going to do.
The group stopped twenty yards from the road and waited behind a berm topped with brush.
“What now?” Ed whispered.
Tyler shook his head.
They all sat.
Soon, a van pulled up from the west and stopped abruptly. With a grunt, Julio directed the migrants toward it. Each man ran for the vehicle as if afraid there wouldn’t be enough room for them all. They filed in, but when Tyler and Ed arrived, Julio pulled out a handgun from the passenger window and stepped between them.
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