Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  “If you are strong, I will buy you that on the other side,” Manuela said, pointing across the plaza. A little kid was playing with a remote-controlled car. It zipped across the plaza and spun in circles. It was the first time Oscar had seen anything like it. He couldn’t figure out how it drove by itself and how the boy controlled it without wires. It seemed like magic and he decided that maybe it might be worth all the trouble of crossing over if that was waiting for him on the other side.

  Ramiro’s friends had a car, but they didn’t want to risk smuggling anybody. Instead, they started driving around town, looking for help. They stopped at a blur of places—an auto-body repair shop, a tire store—and eventually found two guys willing to assist. They claimed to be coyotes—smugglers capable of walking immigrants through the desert and across the border—but they looked more like addicts. One was skinny and had bloodshot eyes. The other was so fat, he looked incapable of walking a long distance. They agreed to guide the mother and child to the United States, but only for an up-front payment.

  Ramiro’s friends dropped the four off at a spot outside Agua Prieta where the border fence transitioned from an ominous twenty-foot-tall wall of iron to a not-so-intimidating chain-link fence. At the intersection of the two fences, the chain link was busted open to create a six-foot hole. Ramiro’s friends pulled away and the coyotes explained the rules: keep up, hide when you see the migra trucks, and, no matter what, don’t identify them as coyotes if caught by immigration.

  The fat guy stared lasciviously at Manuela. Oscar felt a spike of panic. It was open desert and they were out there on their own, just him, his mother, and two questionable guys they’d met an hour ago. Oscar knew he wouldn’t be able to fight the men if they attacked his mother, but he could throw a rock hard and his aim was good. As they set off for the edge of the fence, he scanned the ground for suitable rocks. He stayed tense, ready to attack at any moment.

  They clambered through the hole in the chain link and trudged north. The sun was about to set and the skinny coyote started jogging. Manuela was wearing shoes with short heels, which made it difficult to walk on the uneven ground. The fat coyote, panting with exertion, stayed close to her. Oscar stuck by his mother’s side. He was afraid of getting caught and going to jail. Or worse: his mother could get caught and he’d be left by himself with no idea what to do. He didn’t even know where the coyotes were taking them. What if they were getting them lost on purpose, leading them deeper into the desert where no one could help them?

  It was dark now and they could barely see the ground. There was a crescent moon and thin clouds. Oscar worried about stepping on a snake or a scorpion. The cold also started to get to him. It had been in the low sixties during the day, but now, with the sun down, the temperature plummeted. He had never been so scared in his life.

  After what felt like hours of walking, they arrived at a creek bed. A hundred feet away, an immigration camera rotated on a post, but they moved carefully past it, staying on its blind side until they came up the opposite bank and into an open field with knee-high grass. A dusty road ran through the middle of the field. The skinny coyote pointed to some large brown buildings in the distance. That was their destination, he said. He wanted to pick up the pace, but his chubby friend couldn’t catch his breath and begged to go slower.

  They were about sixty feet from the road when the skinny coyote hissed for them to get down. A Border Patrol truck was driving up the dirt track right toward them. It had an enclosed cell on the back for captured migrants, but the fat coyote was too exhausted to do anything other than kneel down on one knee. His head popped up above the yellow grass like a jack-in-the-box and he refused to lie down, no matter what anyone said. As the truck went past, they could clearly see the agent looking at them, but the man didn’t stop.

  “He must have been full,” the skinny coyote said. “But he probably called for backup.” If they wanted to make it, they needed to run the final distance to the big buildings.

  They took off, leaving the fat coyote behind. After what seemed to Oscar like an endless run, they reached the back of one of the buildings. The skinny coyote told them that his job was done. He instructed them to the walk around to the front and go inside. They would be picked up there. Then he disappeared into the darkness.

  Manuela and Oscar cautiously moved around the building and stepped into the bright lights shining on the sidewalk. They saw lots of gray and blue shopping carts, and a large, illuminated sign above the entrance said WALMART. Oscar had no idea what it was.

  They ventured into the store and waited in the garden department. Amid the relative safety of the rakes, shovels, and potted plants, Oscar felt slightly less exposed. He found the moist smell of the potting soil comforting and realized that he was exhausted. “We must have run for hours,” he told his mother.

  Manuela laughed. “What are you talking about? It’s only been twenty minutes since we left Mexico.”

  Oscar couldn’t believe it. “But—”

  Manuela shushed him. She was worried that if someone heard them speaking Spanish, it would draw unwanted attention. Oscar was too surprised to say much more anyway. The night seemed endless. Within an hour, Ramiro’s friends arrived in the garden department—it was the predesignated pick-up spot. Oscar followed them outside to a brand-new Lincoln that smelled of leather and plastic. Overwhelmed, he fell asleep as soon as he got inside.

  He awoke briefly to the smell of hamburgers. Bags of food came through a window of the Lincoln—they were at a drive-through at a Jack in the Box. There was an orange soda and fries. Oscar hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours—all the emotion and travel had made him nauseous. He desperately wanted one of the burgers but wasn’t sure he could keep it down. His mother told him to keep resting; she’d keep his burger safe.

  They arrived at a house with a big front yard covered in grass. Oscar was surprised. This wasn’t like the dump they’d stayed in before. This place looked like the home he’d seen on his first trip—the one he dreamed they’d live in one day.

  A family of five owned the home. The Vazquezes would share it, and Oscar remembers a blur of adult and kid faces as his mother led him into a bedroom to sleep. When he woke, he was ravenously hungry and ventured out of the room to look for his hamburger. All he found were empty wrappers. His mother had fallen asleep, and the kids who lived there had devoured his portion. From then on, Oscar was infatuated with Jack in the Box. He calls it “the first restaurant I never ate at.”

  * * *

  Oscar returned to Isaac Middle School a year after he’d left it. This time, he started to pick up the English language, but it didn’t help him make friends. To many kids, he was an unreliable presence who might just disappear again. So when teachers asked if anybody wanted to participate in a science fair, he decided to raise his hand. If nobody was going to talk to him, he figured he’d entertain himself.

  Since he’d grown up in a bean-growing region in Mexico, he chose to study how light and humidity affected the germination of beans. He used a small closet at home to conduct the experiment and meticulously tracked all the variables in a notebook. His teachers were surprised. Just a year earlier, he couldn’t speak the language. Now Oscar turned in an in-depth, exhaustively documented report on bean sprouts in English. His report won a two-hundred-dollar prize at the county science fair.

  In eighth grade, Oscar was selected to go on a field trip to Arizona State University with a small group of other students. They were shown the sports facilities and science labs. They saw college kids zipping around on bicycles. Everything looked new, big, and magical to Oscar. He didn’t say anything, but he started to dream about going to college. He didn’t say anything because it seemed like an impossibility. He had no idea what he had to do to get there.

  For his parents, Oscar’s middle school graduation was a triumph. It signaled that their son was destined to accomplish great things. Oscar was assigned to Carl Hayden and showed up as a freshman with no place in the social pec
king order. He didn’t want to feel so lost, so he tried out for the football team. It seemed like the thing to do. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to play the game and was summarily cut. He tried playing soccer, but the coach repeatedly benched him for playing rough. Apparently, the style of play he was used to in Mexico wouldn’t fly in the United States. It seemed as if nobody wanted him.

  During football tryouts, he saw a group of students jogging around the field in desert-camo T-shirts. They moved in perfect formation, as if they were one entity. While the football players ran the bleachers five or six times and collapsed into a heap at the bottom, the camo-clad students ran up and down dozens of times and never seemed to tire. When they got to the bottom, they burst into round after round of push-ups. It was as if they were mocking the oversize, heavily padded ballplayers.

  Oscar asked around and found out that those kids belonged to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. ROTC cadets learned to shoot guns, navigate through the wilderness, and rappel down cliffs. They were issued uniforms and had ranks. To Oscar’s thirteen-year-old-eyes, they seemed like action heroes.

  He signed up early in his freshman year and was issued his own green uniform. Cadets were required to wear the outfit on Thursdays, and the footballers liked to call them “pickles.” Maj. Glenn Goins, the group’s instructor, taught his charges to take the abuse stoically and reminded them that the best defense was to make sure they could outrun, outclimb, outshoot, and outthink any aggressor.

  Goins and the other cadets welcomed Oscar into the group. The mission of the program was to “inspire young people to become better American citizens,” and though most of the cadets were probably not citizens, Goins took an open-minded view. For him, Emma Lazarus’s poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty summarized one of the things that made America great:

  “GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR,

  YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE,

  THE WRETCHED REFUSE OF YOUR TEEMING SHORE.

  SEND THESE, THE HOMELESS, TEMPEST-TOST TO ME,

  I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR!”

  So Goins wasn’t about to turn anyone away. The kids were here; he figured the best he could do was teach them about America. No other group had ever welcomed Oscar, so when he put on his green “service uniform,” he felt a pride he was unaccustomed to. It was nice to belong somewhere.

  His freshman year, ROTC transformed Oscar from a skinny 115-pound kid to a 140-pound dynamo. At the outset, he could barely manage a handful of push-ups, and his pull-ups were laughable. By his junior year, he could fire off seventy-six push-ups in a minute and do set after set of pull-ups. He became the commander of the Adventure Training Team, the most gung ho cadre of cadets. They competed in wilderness races in which they had to haul forty pounds of water up mountains and run with backpacks filled with sand. With Oscar rallying the team, they began to beat ROTC programs from much larger schools.

  Unlike other schoolwork, which often felt disconnected from life, ROTC felt real. When Goins explained how to apply a tourniquet, he told the story of a friend who got shot in the leg and was able to keep flying his helicopter because of a self-administered tourniquet. Goins had been an attack helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and infused his program with a deep sense of morality. At a time when immigrants such as Oscar were referred to as “illegal aliens,” Goins taught his students that the Declaration of Independence enshrined all people—not just American citizens—with “unalienable Rights.”

  “It was the most awesome, coolest thing ever,” Oscar says.

  Goins felt that everybody should be called to serve the community in some way. That’s why he had joined the military, and that’s why he continued to teach at Carl Hayden after he had retired from the Army. But he knew that many of his charges couldn’t enter the military. Since the Vietnam War, immigrants with green cards had been permitted to enlist. But students who crossed the border illegally were still citizens of their native country and couldn’t join.

  Oscar didn’t know that. He believed he was dutybound to give back to the United States. He was receiving a free education, and his family was able to afford a home that didn’t leak. The United States had been good to him and he wanted to show his appreciation. He had only been in the United States for about two years, but he viewed himself as an American now. Particularly after September 11, 2001, he felt that it was his obligation to defend and possibly even die for the country that was his new home.

  Soon after 9/11, Oscar sought out Major Goins. “I want to enlist, sir,” Oscar said, even though he was only fourteen years old.

  Goins hated this part of his job. He figured that about 85 percent of his charges had crossed the U.S. border illegally or overstayed their visas, and while he explicitly told his students that he wasn’t recruiting them for the military, many inevitably wanted to join.

  “Do you have a green card, son?” Goins asked.

  “No, sir,” Oscar responded, still bright eyed and innocent.

  Goins looked at Oscar with regret. In his nineteen years as an ROTC commander, Goins had never met a finer student than Oscar. He embodied everything the military was looking for: leadership, intelligence, dependability, integrity, tact, selflessness, and perseverance. He was the consummate cadet in all regards except that he wasn’t eligible to serve. “Oscar had it all,” Goins remembers. “His only drawback was that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.”

  “You know, there was a time when that was okay,” Goins said, thinking back to World War Two and the Vietnam War, when Canadians were allowed to join the U.S. military. “But it’s not gonna work anymore. You gotta be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident.”

  Oscar felt as if the air had been sucked out of him. He didn’t know what to say. He looked at Goins for a moment, but then snapped to attention. This was just an obstacle, nothing more, and it was the mission of a cadet to overcome all obstacles. The bigger the obstacle, the better the opportunity to prove the cadet’s mettle.

  “Thank you, sir,” Oscar said, now recovered from the flash of disappointment. As he walked away, he decided there was only one solution: to become the best cadet the program had ever seen. “Maybe if I’m good enough, something will change,” he thought.

  When Oscar was a junior, the battalion went to Fort Huachucha, a 110-acre Army base near the Mexican border. Active-duty soldiers ran the teenagers through the camp’s obstacle course and gave them puzzles to solve. Oscar gave it everything he had and expected his teammates to follow his example. Running the obstacle course, Oscar hauled people over the walls and picked up their loads if they couldn’t carry them. He seemed to be everywhere at once, exhorting his teammates, zipping up ropes and racing under low-slung barbed wire.

  He made an impression. Goins promoted Oscar to cadet major, thereby making him the battalion’s executive officer. He was now responsible for planning events, coordinating students, and teaching the younger cadets the basics. He also commanded the Adventure Training Team, and under his leadership they became an elite unit within the battalion. It wasn’t enough to simply pass the team’s physical challenges. Oscar rallied his squad to do training exercises after school and on weekends. Long after the football team had gone home, they jogged around West Phoenix. On Saturdays and Sundays, the team ranged across the mountains surrounding Phoenix, scaling cliffs and fording rivers. When they reached a summit, Oscar led a round of push-ups.

  Goins taught a civics class and required his students to study the Preamble to the Constitution. While others simply read it, Oscar memorized it and would recite it to anyone who asked. For him, there was no irony when he said, “We, the People of the United States.” It was his reality. He was coming of age in Arizona, and his schooling was preparing him to be a productive member of American society.

  At the end of Oscar’s junior year, Goins awarded Oscar the JROTC Officer of the Year trophy. Oscar wore his green Army uniform to the ceremony. It bore row after row of ribbons signifying all the medals he had been aw
arded. The executive officer’s whistle and the black Adventure Training cord were slung over his left shoulder. A nameplate over his right pocket read VAZQUEZ. The trophy featured a golden cadet standing at attention, and Oscar held it, beaming, in a photo with Major Goins. It was one of Oscar’s proudest moments.

  But it wasn’t enough. Two other cadets had green cards and enlisted at the end of junior year. Oscar watched as they shipped out for basic training that summer while he stayed home in Phoenix, working at a mattress factory with his father. It was a stark reminder that nothing would change the fact that his mother had taken him across the border at night without a visa.

  By the start of his senior year, he realized that he needed to find something else to do with himself. He hadn’t worked this hard to end up at a mattress factory like his dad. Ramiro and Manuela had brought the family to Arizona to give Oscar a chance to accomplish more than they had been able to. The problem was, Oscar didn’t know what to do now. So when he walked into Fredi Lajvardi’s marine science classroom in October 2003, he was ready for new ideas.

  FREDI LAJVARDI KNEW how Oscar felt. Like many of his students at Carl Hayden, Fredi arrived in the United States when he was a small child. He was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1965, the son of a successful ophthalmologist and a pediatrician who wanted better career opportunities for their children and themselves. His parents—Reza and Tooran—needed to redo their internships to practice medicine in the United States, so they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1966 when Fredi was just a year old. His brother, Alladin, was born in Cleveland and therefore had automatic U.S. citizenship, something that Fredi wouldn’t receive until 1984, when he was nineteen years old.

  Reza and Tooran followed jobs to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix in 1969. The family moved into an apartment near the hospital, just north of downtown, and Fredi started elementary school at Candy Cane Elementary. Though his parents spoke Farsi with each other, they spoke English with their children. The emphasis was on assimilating.