I reach for the envelope. Inside is a letter wrapped around three crisp hundred-dollar bills. I read the note aloud.
I’m sorry it has to be this way, but I think it’s for the best. For what it’s worth, I think your dads would be proud of both of you.
This should be enough for two bus tickets to Denver. Please use it. We all need a little help sometimes.
Your friend,
Marcos
I set it back down on the table. Arbo and I stare at it for a while.
I don’t speak. I know we’ll take the money—we need it too much not to. But I can’t be the one to grab it. I need for that decision to be his.
• • •
The money sits there.
We shower.
We gather the few things we have.
We avoid each other’s eyes.
We open the door to leave. We both stare at the table.
At last, Arbo grabs it.
We walk to the bus station.
• • •
I flip through a rack of postcards. We have a brief wait before our bus leaves, and I want to make sure we send this from Phoenix. I find one with a golden bird rising out of the desert toward the sky. I fill in Sr. Ortíz’s address and write three words.
We made it.
It’s a half truth, but it’s the half I want him to have.
• • •
I scan around me while we wait, hoping to see Marcos. In my heart, I know he won’t come, but still, I hope. I wonder where he’ll go. I wonder what he’ll do. I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.
I wish the best for him. Really, I do.
• • •
The bus pulls onto the highway, and we settle in for a twenty-two hour ride. I pull out Huck, ready to get lost again in his adventures and forget about mine for a while.
Thumbing through the pages to find my place, I stumble across an image. In the blank space below a chapter’s end, there is a sketched drawing of a superhero-like figure. He’s wearing a wrestling mask with a peace sign and has a stethoscope wrapped around his neck. Below him, his name reads: El Revolucionario, the peaceful wrestling doctor.
I show Arbo.
“When did she do it?”
“I don’t know. I just found it.”
“I love it,” he says.
I stare at the picture, and with it comes a wave of memories.
“I keep thinking about a conversation we had back in the desert,” Arbo says. “You and Marcos were arguing—about her. And instead of focusing on that, she tried to help me. She started telling me about all these amazing things she remembered my dad doing. One after another. He built her a rocking horse when she was a kid. And for her fifteenth birthday, even though she didn’t have a quince, he gave her a gift…an artist’s easel that he made.” He pauses. “I didn’t want to listen. But now, it’s all I can think about. It’s like I had forgotten how much he liked to build things and then give them away. She helped me remember who he really was.”
“I’m sure she loved the easel.”
“She did. My dad was a good man.”
“Yeah. He was,” I say.
“So was your dad.”
“They both were.”
Arbo looks down at the picture again.
“It’s perfect.”
If you ask me, that sums up everything about her. I break. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”
“I’m here for you. Like you were for me.”
He puts his arm around me.
“I know. I couldn’t do it without you.”
“You could, but you don’t have to,” he says.
I look out the window. As we leave the city, the desert landscape zips by at speeds that feel absurd.
I promise to never take this for granted. To always remember what that walk was like, and what it cost us to get here.
I don’t know what we’ll do in Denver, or wherever we end up. Truth is, I don’t know how I’ll face tomorrow. Each breath is still hard. But I’ve been through enough to know that we have an opportunity. And we owe it to ourselves and to all the others to make the most of it.
Author’s Note
February 16, 2017
Several years ago, a good friend of mine lost a family member in northern Mexico. He was kidnapped. Ransom calls followed, but then they suddenly stopped. No one knows what happened or why, and attempts to discover the truth only resulted in threats against the family. I couldn’t stop thinking about this tragedy, and I found myself asking: What would I do if I lived there and something like this happened to my family? This question sparked my initial idea for The Border.
While the opening scene in this novel is more extreme, it is no less real. The drug war and lawlessness along the U.S.–Mexico border has produced a violent, inhospitable climate. From 2007 to 2014, it’s estimated that anywhere from fifty-five to ninety thousand people were killed in Mexico’s drug war.1 Many were innocent victims caught in the cross fire, including one thousand children and sixty-seven reporters.2 There is conflicting evidence as to whether this level of violence is currently decreasing or persisting. Time will tell, but for now, it creates a compelling reason for people to search for something better. Desperate situations provoke desperate measures.
The long trek through the Sonoran Desert is a passage so brutal that it has earned the nickname the Devil’s Highway. It is littered with real-life tales of tragedy. Thousands have died. Many go unnamed. In January 2013, the state of Arizona held almost eight hundred unidentified bodies of would-be immigrants who tried to cross but failed.3 Those who undertake this journey truly gamble with their lives. At the time of writing this, there’s talk of building a wall. Who knows what may happen, but in my opinion, Mother Nature has constructed a far more formidable obstacle in the Sonoran Desert.
I have always been interested in stories of immigrants coming to the United States, but this specific journey fascinates me. For me, it’s impossible to hear about someone’s experience making this passage and not admire their determination and perseverance.
I grew up in Texas and am an adventurous traveler. I speak Spanish and have lived, worked, volunteered, and traveled throughout most of Latin America, including northern Mexico. I’ve faced some dicey circumstances. I have been lost and alone at night in the backwoods of Paraguay, and I have been stranded in the highlands of Bolivia. I have never, however, made this harrowing trip through the Sonoran Desert, nor have I had an experience that comes even remotely close to it. My travel has been that of privilege, not necessity.
While I’ve gained a deep cultural appreciation and perspective from my experiences, I needed much more than that to write The Border. Crafting an authentic story, characterization, and setting required an education from a plethora of sources, from the Internet to books to anecdotal accounts from conversations I’ve had.
Two incredibly valuable resources were The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea and Clandestine Crossings: The Stories (published online) by David Spener. Urrea, in particular, deserves an enormous thank-you. His graphic depiction of twenty-six immigrants’ ill-fated passage in 2001 was instrumental in helping me to accurately understand the terrain, the voyage, and the social structure involved in crossing.
Although this story is fictional, I wanted to make the journey as factual as possible. Sonoyta exists, as does Ajo, and I have tried, to the best of my abilities, to capture the exact route Pato, Arbo, Marcos, and Gladys might have taken. To do so, I blended some real-life accounts with conjecture. Here is a copy of the map and notes I originally used to plot their trip.4
One irony I’ve always struggled to reconcile is the presence of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 517 square miles of national park that lie in the middle of the madness in the map above. Although violence in the region has reduced park attendance, tourists still
visit. How many? According to the U.S. National Park Service, in 2016, more than two hundred thousand desert-lovers savored the majesty of this terrain.5 The contrast between the experiences of the immigrants and the tourists who essentially coexist in this same area astounds me. The encounter between the mountain bikers and the teens at the end of The Border is my attempt to push these two competing forces to come to terms with each other. It also represents one of my principal motivations for writing this novel, which feels more relevant with each passing day.
We’ve recently entered a period of heightened debate about immigration, especially about illegal passage along the U.S.–Mexico border. This political discourse often loses sight of the individuals at the heart of the issue. To generalize, they are people in need—in Sonora, and elsewhere. Survival at home is grueling; bettering their own lives there is unlikely. They leave desperate situations to find an opportunity for a better life. And they risk everything along the way.
My hope for anybody who reads this novel is that it inspires you to take a moment and imagine what drives someone to come to this country and what that journey is like, whether legal or illegal. Empathy begins with the recognition that everyone has a story.
1. Jason M. Breslow. “The Staggering Death Toll of Mexico’s Drug War,” PBS.org (July 27, 2015), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-staggering-death-toll-of-mexicos-drug-war/.
2. Anne-Marie O’Connor and William Booth. “Mexican Drug Cartels Targeting and Killing Children,” Washington Post (April 9, 2011), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexican-drug-cartels-targeting-and-killing-children/2011/04/07/AFwkFb9C_story.html?utm_term=.a83c52d3d2b5; “The Violence of Mexican Drug Cartels,” IShotHim.com (January 6, 2013), http://visual.ly/violence-mexican-drug-cartels.
3. Robin Reineke, “Arizona: Naming the Dead from the Desert,” BBC.com (January 17, 2013), http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21029783.
4. Satellite imagery © Google 2017.
5. “Annual Visitation Report by Years: 2006 to 2016,” accessed March 2, 2017, https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/National%20Reports/Annual%20Visitation%20By%20Park%20(1979%20-%20Last%20Calendar%20Year).
Acknowledgments
While I’m very proud of this novel, the amount of guidance and support I needed to arrive at the final product was more than enough to keep me modest. I’m forever indebted to all of the amazing people who provided this help.
Any list must begin somewhere, and it’s right to begin this one with Chris Gardner. He is the busiest person I know and incredibly generous with the time he doesn’t have. He’s my Yoda, strong with the literary force and there when I need him most. As if this alone weren’t enough, he also recruited his high school English students to review early versions of The Border. Their combined feedback had a significant impact on the shape of this story. In no particular order, thank you to: Natali Morriss, Aliya Fantauzzi, Josh Gonzales, Hanna Malott, Megan Reyna (plus her grandmother, Susan Baker), Claudia Norman, Kylie Newsome, Christian Aguirre, Liliana Palacios Herrera, Sabrina Spracklen, Greg Meinhold, Alex Moore, Samantha Garcia, Michaela McClanahan, William Guthrie, and Karina Bustos.
Along with Chris Gardner, I had two family members on my core feedback team—my creative and articulate brother, Billy, and my thoughtful and understanding wife, Lisa. They deserve many rounds of applause for enduring endless revisions and my accompanying neuroses.
I’d like to profusely thank Adrienne Rosado, my spectacular and persistent literary agent, who has tirelessly critiqued and pitched my work for way too long without receiving anything in return. Her support and dedication to helping me has been a constant force in my growth as a writer. Adrienne also introduced me to Dani Young, who deserves significant credit here as well. Her early editing and suggestions took this story to another level. Without Dani’s insightful recommendations, I can confidently state that this book would not have been acquired by Sourcebooks.
And on that note, I can’t say enough positive things about my experience with the entire team at Sourcebooks. Huge thanks to my phenomenal editor, Annette Pollert-Morgan, who shepherded this rookie through the publication process, made me a part of her team, and showed me “just” how much better this story and my writing could be. Further credit and appreciation goes to Michelle Lecuyer and Claudia Guadalupe Martinez, who each brought a thoughtful and invaluable perspective to the novel. And I’d also like to thank Cassie Gutman, Sarah Kasman, and Lynne Hartzer, and all the others behind the scenes who believed in this novel and helped bring it to market.
Others who reviewed portions or entire versions of this novel and provided valuable feedback include Chris Cassell, Mark Trahan, Mark Berry, Abby Ford, and Kelsey Ortinau. Thanks to all of you.
I owe Mark Wachlin much gratitude for several clutch suggestions when this novel was only a one-line idea. Top among these, I had originally conceived of four boys traveling. Mark suggested making one of them a girl. It’s hard for me to imagine this novel without Gladys.
Last, but far from least, I’d like to thank my parents for giving me remarkable opportunities to explore different cultures. Without these experiences and the perspectives gained from them, this novel wouldn’t exist. An additional thank you and giant hug to my mother who has reviewed nearly everything I’ve ever written and—despite this—has an unwavering belief in my scribblings. I can write no stuff written badly in her eyes, even this sentence. In the marathon of writing a novel, she is a carton of energy bars. And I needed every one.
About the Author
Steve Schafer is an avid cultural explorer, animal lover, bucket-list filler, and fan of the great outdoors. He has a master’s degree in international studies from the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two children. The Border is his first novel.
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