Did they spot us? Who are they?
My own quickening pulse fills my ears, blocking out their murmurs.
We lie low for an anxious stretch of minutes. Then one clear voice rises from the group.
“To the right. A la derecha.”
The footsteps resume—and become louder. We press our bodies low to the ground.
They pass within five meters and continue onward, oblivious to us. They march toward the mountains.
“Who are they?” Arbo asks as soon as the last of their group goes by.
“I don’t know, but they seem to know where they’re going,” Marcos says. He starts gathering things.
“Do we follow them?” Gladys asks.
“It’s that or lie here and die,” Marcos answers.
I turn to Arbo for his reaction. He slowly pushes himself to his feet. The rest of us do the same, as quietly as possible.
“Who do you think they are?” Gladys whispers to me.
“Un guía con pollos,” I answer.
“What?”
“People like us, but they have someone showing them the way.”
Following them is not as easy as we might have thought. We need to stay back far enough that we are neither seen nor heard, but close enough that we don’t lose them in the darkness. And we can’t use any light to guide us, not even Arbo’s watch. We’re back to Marcos waving a stick out in front of him, stopping and turning suddenly each time he strikes a target.
It’s a sluggish pace, but fortunately the group is moving slowly as well.
My body still feels shriveled and empty, but the belief that we’re now moving in the right direction lifts my spirits enough to lighten my feet. We don’t talk, but I can sense that the rest of the group is feeling the same.
Soon the mountain begins its steep slope, and we all slow to a crawl.
“Vámonos. Un poco más. Then we’ll go back down.” The occasional voice echoes off the rocks, giving us clues as to what lies ahead.
Eventually.
Un poco más is like mañana. It’s an intention, not a reality. An hour later, we’re still climbing.
• • •
Dawn breaks, and with it, we lose our cover. We watch the group ascend in the distance until the guía finally delivers on his promise. The group drops over a ridge and out of sight.
We hustle up the steepening rise, winded but propelled forward by the fear of losing them. As we approach the ridge, each cautious step reveals a little more of what lies ahead. It’s not what I expected. We are at the top of a hill, with more mountains beyond.
On the other side of our hill, we see the group snaking down toward an empty riverbed that forges a winding trail through the peaks ahead. I stare at the bed, wondering when, if ever, it brings water.
We rest until the group reaches the riverbed, turns around a bend, and moves out of view. Again, we follow their path.
All around us is evidence that we are going the right way—trash. It’s clear that the group in front of us is not the first to pass along this ravine. Plastic and foil dot the landscape just as the prickly plants do. Empty soda cans taunt us. Shreds of other debris peek out of the sand in tattered strands. All of it looks dull and bleached, as if it were left here a hundred years ago. It’s a cruel reminder of how quickly the desert destroys everything.
• • •
Walking in the riverbed feels both freeing and vulnerable. For the first time since we started our trip, we can move forward without fear of being jabbed or scratched, and we can take more than ten steps in one direction without having to turn. If we had any water left and weren’t quickly withering away, I might even call the hiking easy. But it comes at a price. We are openly exposed to anyone in the area above, and to the group ahead of us if we’re not careful. Even more than being spotted, we fear that the group will turn away from the riverbed and quickly disappear in the mountains. It’s unlikely, but so was our finding them. Probability doesn’t mean anything out here. You get one chance and you hope you get lucky. This is our opportunity to be led out of this death trap.
• • •
The fire returns as it does every day, with an explosion of light and heat as the cloudless sky slings the sun over the mountains. The group stops, and we do the same. We’re three or four hundred meters away from them, peering around the thick cacti and sprawling shrubs that line the edge of the riverbed. I try to count them. I think there are seventeen people total.
The cleverness I felt when I created our tree shelter disappears as we watch them unfold several small, tan tarps and drape them across a pair of cholla cacti, a towering mass of sprawling thorns that looks like what might happen if a cactus and a tree were to have a baby. They use its thick spines to anchor the tarps in place, giving them a broad swath of shade. Then, as we did, they huddle beneath it, too close for comfort, too hot to care. They pass jugs of water around and take long pulls on them. It’s tormenting.
We backtrack until they’re out of view and set up our own shelter.
“We need to make sure they don’t leave without us,” Marcos says.
“I don’t think that’s our biggest problem,” I say.
He doesn’t respond. Nor does anyone else. They don’t need to. I look at Arbo. He’s collapsed on his side, resting for now.
For now.
Gladys does the same. I feel the tickle of a headache in the back of my skull.
We won’t last the rest of the day.
“We need water,” I say.
“Okay. You have any ideas?” Marcos asks.
I turn and nod my head in the direction of the group.
“You think they’re just going to give it to us.”
“I don’t know what other option we have.”
Silence.
“We could steal it,” Marcos says.
“There are seventeen of them,” I say.
“They need to sleep. We could go in a couple of hours.”
“They won’t all be sleeping.”
“They’ll be trying to. Just one of us will go. I’ll do it.”
“Güey, they’ll catch you, and then we’re really in trouble,” I answer.
“At least my way, they might not catch us.”
“We can’t steal their water. What would you do if someone stole our water?”
“And what would you do if someone walked up to us and asked for it?”
“I’d say I’d be glad they didn’t steal it.”
I don’t say this. A coarse voice that comes from beyond our group does. We all sit up straight as two men emerge from behind a pair of thick shrubs that shield us.
“Settle down, and don’t move,” one of them says. He wears a sleeveless flannel shirt that’s partially tucked into his pants, revealing the upper half of a pistol.
“Anybody got any water we can have?” the other one asks, smiling through crooked teeth. He has a tattoo of three parallel bars that run up the side of his neck.
None of us speak.
“So, I’ll take that as a no, huh? You want to tell us why you’ve been following us?” Flannel Shirt asks.
“We’re lost,” Marcos says. “We followed you because you look like you know the way out.”
“We do. That’s why you pay a guía to take you across. Anybody here a guía?”
We shake our heads.
“Every pollo pays the price… It’s just a question of when and how much it costs you.”
“I have money,” Marcos says.
“Then why didn’t you get someone from the start?”
“I don’t have that much money.”
“So, you don’t cross. You wait until you do. There’s a system, güey. You cross, you go through us. We’re the ticket to the other side.”
“Like I said, I have some money. Do you want to talk?” Marcos asks.<
br />
“Okay, güey. Let’s deal. What do you have?”
Marcos stretches for his bag. Both men reach for their waistlines.
“Give me the bag. I’ll open it.”
“It’s my bag.”
“If we wanted to steal your bag, you’d be dead by now.”
Marcos tosses his bag to them, a touch firmer than is necessary.
“It’s in the pocket on the inside,” Marcos says.
Flannel Shirt fishes out a small roll of money, counts it, then starts to laugh and shows it to Neck Tattoo.
“You want to cross for this? We can take you to the other side of the riverbed,” he says, pointing about fifty meters away. More laughter.
“That’s all we have,” Gladys says.
“Do you see all those people over there?” Flannel Shirt asks.
They are blocked from view, but that’s not the point. We nod.
“Each of them paid a thousand dollars. That’s more than twenty thousand pesos.”
“Can we just buy water?” I ask.
“And what happens when you try to follow us. All sloppy-like, and la migra finds you…then us. What happens then?”
“We won’t follow you.”
“There’s only one way to go from here, güey.”
I don’t know whether it would help us, but I’ll admit to wishing we had Marcos’s mota right now. I wonder if Arbo feels the same.
They back away and talk quietly to each other.
“Stay here,” Flannel Shirt says. He walks back to the group. Neck Tattoo stays with us. He squats in the thin shade of a low bush a few paces away.
“How old are you guys?” he asks.
“Nineteen,” Marcos says.
“All of you?”
We nod.
“You don’t look nineteen. You look younger,” he says.
“So do you,” Marcos says.
He doesn’t look much older than us, but the bars on his neck add a few years. Maybe that’s the idea. I wonder what they mean, if anything.
“You. What happened to your eye?” he asks Arbo.
“He punched me,” Arbo says, pointing to Marcos.
“Mr. Tough Guy, huh?”
“You want to find out?” Marcos asks.
He shoots Marcos an annoyed expression and quits asking questions. Several minutes pass in silence, then we hear footsteps. A different man appears. I recognize him from tracking the group—he’s the one I thought was in charge.
He’s probably twenty-five. He’s wearing a beige T-shirt with some faded words in English. The stretched neckline of his shirt reveals a thin gold chain with a cross flopped over his neck. He looks us over from underneath a baseball hat pulled down nearly to his eyebrows.
“How old are you guys?”
“Nineteen,” Neck Tattoo says.
“I didn’t ask you,” he says. He turns back to us.
“Nineteen,” Marcos says.
Again, he looks us over.
“Why didn’t you hire someone to take you across?”
“We didn’t have any money.”
“Lots of people don’t. That’s not how it works. You think those people over there have thousands of pesos lying around?” His tone is rhetorical. “They pick beans. They sell tortillas. They borrow the money.”
“So, can we borrow it?” Marcos asks.
He chuckles.
“No tienes ni idea, güey. Did you just ride your bikes to the border and start walking?”
“No.”
“Where are you trying to go?”
“Ajo,” I say.
“Ajo. Ajo. So you do know something,” he says. “Who told you to go to Ajo?”
“We read about it in a letter from a friend who crossed.”
“Did your friend go through a coyote?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why didn’t you, güey?”
“Like he said, we didn’t have the money,” I say.
“But you did have some money, right?” He holds up Marcos’s small roll of bills. “Which one of you had it?”
“I did,” Marcos said.
“Can I talk with you for a moment, in private?”
Even Marcos looks concerned at this request.
“I’m not going to do anything. I swear. One minute and then we come back over here to your friends.”
“What do you want to ask?”
“You’re the money man. I have a couple of questions.”
Marcos stands and they walk aside together. They never leave our sight, but they go far enough away that we can’t hear them.
True to his word, they are back in under a minute. Marcos takes a seat with the rest of us.
“Okay. Let me explain how this works, since you apparently have no idea,” he says. “There are two ways you can get a guía. If you have the money, you pay, and it’s all good. But if you don’t have the money, you ask Sr. Coyote to loan it to you. And he does, because he knows you’re going to repay it. Do you know how he knows? Because he does his homework, and he knows where your family lives. That’s trust.”
He makes a point to look at each of us in turn.
“Can I trust you?”
We all nod.
“I’m tempted to. You look very nice. But to be sure, why don’t we play a game called Confianza. It’s an easy game. It’s one question. Here’s how it works. Everybody, point to your friend, the money man.”
We all raise unsure fingers.
“Now, on three, everybody say his name.”
Crap.
Marcos looks down. I know him well enough to recognize that look. He’s been had. And so have we. At this point, we don’t have much choice. Either we make up three names which won’t match, or we all give the same name and hope that three out of four is a good enough answer. I hope Arbo and Gladys are thinking the same.
“One, two…”
“Marcos,” Arbo and I say. Gladys says nothing.
He looks at Gladys with a stern eye.
“Marcos,” she says in a low voice.
“Ah, Marcos. Everybody says Marcos…except for Luis.”
“It’s not Luis. It’s Marcos,” Marcos says.
“Why would you lie to me?”
“I don’t know you.”
“And yet, you ask me to help you.”
Marcos gives a pride-swallowing nod.
“Let’s play the game again,” he says. “Now everybody point to him.” He points to Arbo and we have no choice but to say his name.
Soon, we’re all named.
“And on three, where are you from?”
This could get very ugly, very fast.
“Now, let’s point again and tell me how old you are…”
Very, very fast.
“And where are your parents? On three…one, two…”
None of us answer this one.
“I said, ‘Where—’”
“They don’t know we came,” I interrupt.
He stares at me and I stare back at him. As I do, Flannel Shirt returns. He’s carrying a jug of brownish water.
“That’s enough trust for now. You need water.”
“Why is it brown?” Arbo asks.
“We hit an old well yesterday. It’s not the best, but be thankful it had water. If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t be getting anything.”
“So, you’ll guide us out?” Marcos asks.
He nods back to us.
“How much?”
“We’ve got a couple of days. We’ll figure it out,” he says.
He turns and walks away. As he does, he says, “Come on over. There’s a tree you can put your stuff on. But be quiet, our other pollitos are sleeping.”
A Familiar Face
“I thi
nk he knows,” Marcos says in a hushed voice.
Neck Tattoo lingers out of earshot while watching us gather our stuff.
“He might,” I say. “He asked a lot of questions.”
“But he could have been asking to make sure he’ll be able to get his money,” Arbo says.
“Yeah, but I don’t like the way he ended it. He let it go too easily,” Marcos says.
“What do we do about it?” Gladys asks.
“We can’t do anything about it,” I answer. “They have water. That’s the only thing that’s keeping us alive.”
“That disgusting brown crap? You’re calling that water?” Arbo asks.
“It’s still water,” I say. “And they know how to get out of here. We follow them. That’s what we do.”
“He’s right,” Marcos says. “We’ll just need to figure out how to slip away once we get there.”
“What if he doesn’t know about us and he’s really helping us?” Gladys asks.
“That’s a risk I don’t think we can take,” Marcos says. “We already gave him all the money we have. That’s enough,” Marcos says.
None of us respond. Our silence is our agreement.
We walk the short distance to their camp where we find our tree. We make a plot of shade and sit, separated from the other people by about thirty meters of sizzling sand.
They look like us—everyday people, weakened from the trip, dazed from the heat. They’re older, but not by much. Some sleep, some stare with blank eyes into the mountains. Most are men. I count only two women, and one of them has a baby. She’s trying to nurse it under her shirt. I think about the strain my body is under and can’t imagine what it must be like to be her.
I look at each one of them and wonder what drove them to make this trip. What did they have to let go of in order to come, and what, if anything, do they have waiting for them on the other side?
As I scan the group, I meet a pair of eyes. They are beneath a wide-brimmed canvas hat, folded down at the ears, buried deep in a tunnel of shade. They stare back at me and a lone finger rises to the lips beneath them, as if to say, Shh.
Then I recognize him. I don’t know whether this is good or bad. It’s the man from the motel porch. He continues to look right at me. It’s not an aggressive stare, but more like he’s trying to communicate. What I think he’s telling me is, It’s okay, but don’t act like you know me.
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