The Only Road

by Alexandra Diaz

  Ángela’s hand on his shoulder brought him out of his reverie. From the way the light shifted through the stained glass windows, he guessed it must be midday, hours since they had arrived. What a blessing it was, being in a place where it was so easy to forget everything that had happened.

  Across the street from the church, they settled on a bench at Parque Central Miguel Hidalgo, a stone-paved plaza with a fountain, white-painted tree trunks, and manicured hedges instead of the bare, compressed-dirt park back home where Miguel had . . . No, Jaime wasn’t going to think of that park again.

  The midnight feast Abuela had made for them back home seemed ages ago. They peered into the plastic food bags Abuela had sent off with them: tamales wrapped in banana leaves, a hunk of queso fresco, chorizo from relatives in the neighboring village, mangos from the tree behind his house, and a pile of her homemade tortillas.

  Jaime stopped himself from grabbing half the chorizo and cheese. “How long do we have to make this food last?”

  “As long as possible.” Ángela grabbed the smallest tamale and began unwrapping the leaves.

  Three bluish-gray pigeons strutted back and forth in front of them, just far enough away to keep from being kicked.

  “How long do you think this trip is going to take?” Jaime focused on the tamale instead of his cousin. “I forgot to ask Papá.”

  More like he hadn’t wanted to ask. Not then, and not really now. The less he knew, the less responsible he’d have to be. Much better to let the grown-ups make the arrangements, let Ángela make the choices. Then if something went wrong, he wouldn’t be blamed.

  Ángela shook her head. “I don’t know. Tina at school once mentioned her papá made it in four days, but Marisol’s took forever. Several months.”

  “Months?” Jaime choked. How could they possibly survive months? They had left home only twelve hours ago and already he felt lost without his family. What happened when the food was gone, when there was no one to take care of him?

  Ángela looked behind her and around the park. Other than the pigeons, there was no one within earshot. She continued talking. “There’s a lot we’ll need to sort out along the way. Our parents spent more time borrowing money than ironing out the details.”

  Jaime’s hand landed on his waistband. How had his family scraped up so much, so quickly, and without the Alphas finding out? The guilt that had started upon hearing of Miguel’s death twisted and burned in his stomach. It was his fault Miguel had died—Ángela must have thought so too; his fault that he was still alive and that his parents sacrificed so much to make sure he remained that way.

  “Do you know Tomás’s phone number?” Ángela asked.

  Jaime shook his head with another pang of guilt. He had never called his brother. Mamá did that, and only after first punching in all the numbers from the phone card into the village pay phone—using Tío’s cell phone would have cost too much. “Mamá wrote it down for me. It’s in my bag.”

  Ángela pulled a slip of paper from her pocket. Already it was creased and worn around the edges. “We should memorize it. In case something happens to the paper. Or one of us.”

  What? He’d been so worried about what happened to Miguel, he hadn’t given much thought to what might happen to them. To Ángela. He grasped Ángela’s free hand. “I’m not letting anyone, or anything, hurt you.”

  She avoided his gaze. “Still, we should know his number.”

  She was right, of course. It’d be stupid not to. Paper could get wet, torn, and easily lost. But by memorizing the number, he would accept the possibility that she might leave him and join Miguel. He didn’t want to tempt fate.

  Please, Lord, don’t make me responsible for another tragedy, he prayed before studying the paper in Ángela’s hand. He ran the ten digits around his head, repeating them like a poem and putting emphasis and beats after certain numbers to remember them better. 5, 7, he chanted like an intro to a song, 5-5-5-5, he tapped steadily against his leg four times, 21, like a question, 86, like the response. 5,7, 5-5-5-5, 21, 86. He’d have to say it to himself again later.

  “Okay, got it.” He heard the rhythm of the numbers and visualized them in his head. He’d done his part. He didn’t need to know anything else.

  Ángela disagreed. She folded the paper and returned it to her pocket. “We get to Arriaga, and stay the night at a refugee shelter Padre Lorenzo arranged, Iglesia de Santo Domingo. From there we have to contact El Gordo, who’s already been paid to take us on the train north to Ciudad México—”

  “Sí, I heard about El Gordo,” Jaime interrupted. Maybe if Ángela thought he knew what was going on, they could finally change the subject. “Mamá said Hermán Domingo’s cousin used him, but he was expensive.”

  Ángela nodded her head several times. “In the capital a man named Santos got a deposit to get us on the next train—we’ll pay the rest when we meet him, which should get us to Ciudad Juárez.”

  “And then we cross the Río Bravo,” Jaime added, despite his resolution to remain ignorant.

  “And then we cross the Río Bravo,” she agreed. “Which they call the Río Grande in El Norte.”

  Crossing the border of México into los Estados Unidos. Tía’s words of keeping the money safely sewed into their jeans rang in his ears. But even with the money, how would they manage it? What he knew of that crossing already terrified him. News reports showed immigration patrol officers shooting anything that moved; detention centers packed with people; politicians over there who said all immigrants were rapists and criminals. And before that, there was Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican border city notorious for its violence and human trafficking. It didn’t sound like Ángela knew how they would manage either.

  His tamale remained on his lap, untouched. He unwrapped it, pretending it was steamed and served warm with Abuela’s chia salsa.

  Jaime felt as though he already knew too much. Friends at school talked; advertisements on television and on billboards warned of the horrors. In an illegal journey of four thousand kilometers, they were going through places more corrupt than his village, running from gangs more violent than the Alphas, going to a country where no one, except Tomás, wanted them there. Everywhere they’d go on this journey, they’d be unwelcome.

  5,7, 5-5-5-5, 21, 86.

  The banana-leaf wrapper from his lap fluttered against a light post, where two pigeons pecked it to death. He and Ángela had to talk about something else.

  • • •

  After a tamale and a mango apiece, they weren’t full, but the food, filled with Abuela’s love comforted them. They walked around the park some more and settled on a different bench, this time near the statue of Benito Juárez, a Zapotec Indian revolutionary hero in the mid-1800s who became one of México’s greatest presidents. Juárez hadn’t been influential for Guatemala, but they studied him in school, just like they learned about Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi.

  Ángela rested with her head on Jaime’s lap, her arms folded over her backpack on her chest. When they were younger, Papá used to call them (along with Miguel) Hugo, Paco, and Luis after Donald Duck’s nephews—they sometimes fought, they sometimes ganged up on one another, but at the end of the day they’d curl up together like puppies in a litter. They hadn’t slept that way in years, but Ángela never went through the phase of being too old to cuddle and comfort her little brother and cousin. Jaime hoped he never did either.

  He pulled out his sketchbook from his own bag and balanced it on the armrest of the bench as he sketched with broad strokes the statue of the great hero.

  “If there was a presidente like Juárez now, do you think gangs like the Alphas would be taking over México and Centro América?” Ángela asked, her eyes shut, but she faced the statue as if contemplating him through closed lids.

  “No, he wouldn’t allow it.” Jaime glanced from the statue to his sketchbook and back to the real statue as his left hand shaded in the eyes. “People even say that if Benito Juárez had come to Guatemala a hundred
and fifty years ago, we would have never had the civil war our parents and grandparents lived through. He was that great.”

  Ángela stayed quiet for such a long time, Jaime thought she had fallen asleep.

  “Do you think we’ll ever go back?” she asked.

  Jaime looked around the picturesque park with its fountain and gazebo; the church that had made Jaime feel like he was living in art; and the statue of the man who changed Mexican history. But the view of Volcán Tacaná, half in Guatemala, half in México, was blocked by the buildings, as if it weren’t there.

  “Yo no sé. I hope so.”

  “You think it’d be safe?”

  If gang members beat someone to death for not joining them, what would they do to two who ran away to avoid joining them? “Maybe in five or ten years, when they’ve forgotten us. Or if Benito Juárez reincarnates and there’s a revolution.”

  Ángela let out a snort that was half laugh, half disappointment. “I don’t believe in that Mayan legend that a great king will return.”

  “Then, no.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Spiderwebs of cracks crisscrossed over the windshield of the bus taking Jaime and Ángela from Tapachula north to Arriaga. The engine rattled and groaned like every wheel rotation caused it great pain. Every dark-tinted window was wide open and still the air in the bus was hot, humid, and stuffy—no different from the buses back home.

  Outside, the lush jungle foliage seemed to take over the landscape, including an abandoned immigration checkpoint.

  After a best-out-of-three battle of rock-paper-scissors, Ángela got the cooler window seat but promised to change places halfway through the five-hour ride. Jaime didn’t grumble. From the aisle seat he had better access to unsuspecting subjects. The church visit had inspired him, and he was determined to capture in his sketchbook as much of his journey as possible. It was the only way to make the trip bearable, and to forget why they had to take it.

  Jaime turned to a fresh sheet in his fat sketchbook; if he used both sides of the pages, he had about eighty free pages left. Plenty. An anchor to hold his sketchbook steady in the lurching bus would be nice, but every great artist had to learn to draw in less-than-ideal situations.

  His first models were obvious—a young white tourist couple sitting up front, their overstuffed camping backpacks wedged between their legs. Jaime couldn’t stop staring at the man’s hair, orangey-red like the memory of the setting sun he and Tomás had shared. Jaime had never seen hair quite that alarming and was sure it had to be dyed. Except the longer he stared at it, and noticed the freckles on the back of the man’s neck and the fine golden-red hair of his arms, the more convinced Jaime was that the color was real. If only he had his paints with him. He would have loved to try and match the exact shade. Instead he settled on switching his colored pencils between pressing lightly with the red and a bit harder with the orange. Not perfect—hitting a pothole in the road gave the man a piercing on his neck—but the color wasn’t too far off.

  He skipped the teenager playing on his phone (a great artist only chooses subjects of interest) and drew the family with three small children, freezing time with the moment the little girl popped the discovered gum from under her seat into her mouth. He was about to start on the four chickens (two white with black specks, one red, and one with plumas so black they looked blue) crammed into a wire cage diagonally from him, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. The small elderly woman behind him in a white embroidered linen dress motioned to herself repeatedly as she babbled in Mayan with an occasional Spanish word thrown in.

  “Claro que sí,” Jaime agreed with a grin as he turned around in his seat to face her. Although he didn’t speak much Mayan and couldn’t have translated her words, he understood what the little old lady wanted. He sharpened the brown pencil as the viejita smoothed down her silver hair wrapped in a bun.

  Friends and family sometimes asked Jaime to draw their portraits—Miguel had begged for one of himself dressed as Superman, and his little cousins especially loved being immortalized as cartoon caricatures—but this was his first time drawing for a stranger. What if she didn’t like it? What if he made her look ugly?

  Ángela, turning away from the window where she’d been reading the name of every village they passed by, nodded encouragement.

  The bus bumped up and down as it trekked north, but Jaime rested the sketchbook steadily on the backrest as he shaded her diminutive features. He smoothed out her wrinkles and captured the brightness in her eyes. The hand-stitched embroidery surrounding the collar of the dress seemed to almost jump off the page. In ten minutes he finished and tilted the book for her approval.

  She squealed with delight, placing a wrinkled hand on his cheek, but then pointed to the empty bottom right-hand corner, waving her fingers as if she were holding a pen.

  Jaime remembered what his fourth-grade teacher had said when they had studied Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa: “The famous painting is unsigned, but at least we know Leonardo painted it. If not, it would be virtually worthless.” Not that his art was worth anything, but it was fun to pretend it would be. He switched from the colored pencils to the lead one, and wrote his full name in a lavish scribble: Jaime Antonio Rivera Muñoz.

  Slowly, carefully, he tore out the page from his book. He picked at the raw edge to remove the scraggly bits of paper. It was worth it to see the viejita’s skin crinkle into a smile and to hear her utter words of gratitude he didn’t specifically understand as her spotted hands clutched the portrait to her heart.

  At the next village she once again nudged his shoulder. She stood, barely a meter and a half tall, with her fist outstretched. Jaime shook his head. “No es necesario.”

  “¡Sí!” she said with such insistence it would have been rude for Jaime to disobey. He held out his hand, and three coins tumbled into it.

  “Gracias.” He beamed at her as she waved her hands over him in a blessing and shuffled off the bus, one hand laden with her shopping bags and a cane, the other cradling his drawing as if it were a treasure.

  Ángela, who had alternated between looking out the window and watching the transaction, nudged him in the ribs. “How much did you get?”

  Jaime turned over the heavier gold-and-silver coin and then the two bronze ones to read their value. “Twelve pesos.”

  “Look at you, Diego Rivera,” Ángela teased. “You keep this up and you can fly us to Tomás on an airplane.”

  Jaime rolled his eyes but was secretly pleased. It wasn’t too hard imagining he was related to the famous Mexican painter—after all, they shared a last name. But to someday be known around the world for his paintings like Diego Rivera? He couldn’t imagine how great that would be.

  He did the peso/quetzal conversion quickly in his head. If he was right, twelve pesos would only buy him a drink and, if he was lucky, a cookie. Didn’t matter how little twelve pesos translated to. He was now officially a “professional” artist. Nothing could take that away from him.

  • • •

  There were no villages around when two men appeared from the bushes and flagged down the bus. Their clothes were dirty and torn, as were their faces. One had crusted blood from a gash on his forehead, while the other’s bottom lip hung like a wet sock on the washing line. They each gave the driver a coin and hovered near the front instead of going the length of the bus and sitting down.

  About ten kilometers later the bus driver pulled over again to the side of the road. A truck zoomed by with a whoosh that made it feel like the bus would tip over. The battered men thanked the driver and disappeared back into the bushes.

  A few minutes after that, the brakes squeaked and protested as the bus slowed down again. Through the open window Jaime saw no village, no buildings anywhere in sight, just lush trees, overgrown bushes, and long grasses all squeezed together, fighting against one another for their right to live on a bit of earth. Everyone on the bus shifted to look out the cracked windshield, where lights flashed their warning.


  Something was wrong.

  A hushed whisper vibrated through the bus. “La migra.”

  Orange cones blocking the road forced the bus to come to a complete stop. Only one guard was on duty, but a rifle hung from his shoulder, ready to be snapped into his hands the second he needed it.

  Jaime clenched his pencil tightly.

  The guard leaned into the bus, hands on the open doorjamb, to peer inside. Jaime jerked away before they could make eye contact and felt his face burn with self-indignation. So obvious. So guilty. The guard was sure to know he didn’t belong in México. But the guard just turned back to the driver. “Anyone new gotten on? Anyone I need to know about?”

  The driver shook his head. “No.”

  It was mostly true. After all, the men they’d picked up in the middle of nowhere weren’t on the bus anymore. They must have known about the stop, and how to avoid it. Clever. And at the same time risky. The bus driver could have easily mentioned where he dropped them off; drivers back home would have if they thought they’d get paid for the information. Instead this driver seemed content in minding his own business and doing only his bus-driver job. The guard returned his gaze outside, taking in the six cars waiting behind the bus, then moved a few cones out of the way and waved them by without asking any further questions.

  No one was on duty at the next checkpoint, a tiny wooden structure on the side of the road, and it was only because Ángela read the sign announcing it that Jaime even realized what it was.

  He let out a deep breath. Maybe there was nothing to worry about. Maybe the stories he’d heard—stories of how la migra beat you up, sent you to prison, and then returned you to your country in pieces, if you were lucky—were just stories, tales told to prevent people from attempting the journey.