The Only Road

by Alexandra Diaz

  Except he didn’t really believe they were made up. Especially when they arrived at the next checkpoint.

  A large building stood alone in the middle of the jungle. Concrete and steel with spotless white paint, just its presence radiated a sense of foreboding against the lush green.

  Ten cars waited in front of them, and many more beeped their horns behind them. Loads of guards milled around, their rifles ready in their hands.

  On the window seat next to him, Jaime felt more than heard Ángela utter a prayer. He could feel her fear. Jaime sent a prayer of his own, this one to Miguel. Please help keep us safe. As far as they had traveled, they were still only in Chiapas, the most southern state in México. They were going to need a lot of help.

  Sweat dripped down their faces as they waited in the sweltering bus for permission to continue. The driver opened the door, but no breeze entered, and no one dared exit. It felt like hours before a guard stomped on with thundering steps. He didn’t have a rifle, but his hand was wrapped tight around the leash of a dog. Ángela tried to wedge herself between the seat and the window. Jaime seized her hand, both for comfort and to keep her from doing something stupid. With her pathological fear of dogs, he wouldn’t be surprised if she was tempted to jump out the window and risk her chances against the armed guards.

  The dog, though, was small and looked like Snoopy with floppy ears framing its cute face. His black nose twitched as he investigated the front crevices of the bus.

  “Don’t worry,” Jaime whispered so low he hoped Ángela heard. “He’s just a sniffer. He won’t hurt us.” Except dogs smelled fear, and Ángela was practically oozing in it. A sudden dread overcame Jaime. Maybe this was a new thing—training dogs to smell fear in people so the guards could weed out the foreigners.

  No, he thought, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. There was nothing to worry about. Unlike Ángela, who still had the teeth marks on her leg from where she’d been bitten as a little girl, he liked dogs and this one wasn’t intimidating. Especially if he imagined the dog sitting on top of his doghouse wearing an old-fashioned fighter pilot cap.

  After giving the driver a quick sniff, the dog started whining at the tourist couple up front.

  “Abran las bolsas,” the guard said, pointing to their backpacks. The orange-haired guy said something in an unfamiliar language but then opened his backpack.

  The guard riffled through and quickly came up with a little plastic bag holding what looked like dried herbs. Orange-haired guy tried to explain in his foreign language, but the guard didn’t care. He looked out the window, checked the location of the other guards, and pocketed the bag before moving the dog on.

  The dog trotted down the aisle, panting in the stuffy bus, wagging his tail, and poking his nose in everyone’s luggage. Through his brown, black, and white coat, Jaime could count his ribs.

  When the dog got to them, Ángela squeezed Jaime’s hand extra tight. She kept shifting her gaze between the dog’s open mouth and the open window. Jaime squeezed her hand back.

  Maybe it was Jaime’s imagination, but the dog seemed to take an extra-long time checking out their food bag. They’d spent the day in Tapachula and while they’d kept their things with them the whole time, was there any chance someone might have slipped something incriminating into their bags? Were he and Ángela mules, transporting illegal drugs without knowing it? That had happened to Marcela’s brother and he had spent months in a Mexican prison.

  Or maybe the dog liked sniffing good food. Whether due to bravery or poor judgment, Jaime offered the dog a sniff of his free hand.

  “¡No lo toques!” The guard jerked the dog away to the next people but not before Jaime felt the softest lick on his palm.

  In the back of the bus the dog began barking like crazy. Ángela cowered and held Jaime’s hand to her chest, but Jaime, along with everyone else on the bus, glanced quickly to see what was happening.

  Two men were sitting on the bench in the back of the bus, their hands resting on two black duffel bags. Jaime couldn’t remember if they had been on the bus at Tapachula or had gotten on elsewhere. He couldn’t remember them at all. They weren’t loud, their faces could have blended into any other face on the bus (except the tourists up front), and their jeans and T-shirts were what everyone wore. If Jaime had to remember all the people on the bus, those two would have been left out. Maybe that was their job, to be forgettable.

  Except now, with the dog barking like crazy, no one would forget about them.

  The men, however, didn’t even flinch. The one on the left, whose dark eyebrows joined above his nose, reached into his pocket and then held out his hand. The dog handler shifted to shake the man’s hand and in an instant put his hand into his own pocket. It was impossible to see what happened unless you knew. And everyone on the bus knew. These two unrecognizable men had just bribed the guard to keep his mouth, and the dog’s, shut.

  “¡Cállate!” The officer ordered the dog to shut up and gave him a sharp jerk on the lead. The dog obeyed but kept staring at the men’s bags. The guard turned to leave and had to yank the reluctant dog several times; the dog didn’t seem to understand why he was being punished for doing his job right.

  “Pobrecito,” Jaime said once the dog, and his corrupt handler, had left.

  “What do you mean, ‘poor thing’? He almost attacked us.” Ángela let go of her cousin’s hand and wiped her palms on her jeans.

  Outside, the dog was being yanked to the next vehicle, his café-colored eyes fixated on the bus like the bone that got away.

  “He just wanted a friend. Someone to give him chorizo and believe him when—”

  “Shh.” Ángela pretended to stretch so she could glance at the non-memorable men in the back of the bus. When she straightened back up in the hard seat, she glared at him. “Nothing happened in here. The dog came in and left. That’s it.”

  Jaime’s lips pressed and scrunched. “Pero—”

  “No but.” Ángela grabbed his shirt to bring his ear close to her mouth. “Think about it. Remember the Alphas, what people with that kind of money, that kind of power, can do if they think you’ll give them trouble. Nothing happened.”

  Jaime grumbled as he pulled his shirt out of her grasp, but then nodded.

  He turned to a new page in his sketchbook. In a corner a brown, black, and white Snoopy dog appeared, his teeth gleaming in a smile as his tongue retrieved a bit of chorizo clinging to the strap of his fighter pilot cap.

  Involved in his drawing, Jaime barely noticed that the bus still hadn’t moved until Ángela nudged him.

  “Change places with me, rápido,” Ángela muttered, already climbing over him. Jaime paused in mid-doghouse sketch and slid over to the window seat without questioning her.

  Moments later another immigration officer stomped up the steps into the bus, a rifle slung over his broad shoulders. He ignored the tourist couple as if they weren’t even there and asked the teen who had been playing on his phone where he came from.

  “Acaxman, just outside of Tapachula,” the teen said.

  “Poor you.” The guard snickered as if there were few things worse than being from Acaxman. The teen shrugged, but the guard had already moved on to speak to the family with three young children.

  “Niños, tell me where you’re going.”

  But the children, the oldest no more than five years old, stared at him with wide eyes; the girl, the middle child, still chewed the gum she’d found under the seat. The guard waited, and nothing. Finally he turned to their parents. “¿Son mexicanos?”

  “Sí.” The papá pulled out some documents from his back pocket and smoothed them out for the guard. La migra looked through them and grunted before handing them back and moving on.

  He chatted a bit with the lady with the caged chickens, asking what she was cooking and teasing, or threatening, that he’d stop by for dinner. Two seats from Jaime and Ángela, a young woman was also asked where she came from.

  “Por favor,�
�� she pleaded. “I come from Chiapas.”

  Jaime sneaked a glance at Ángela, and she confirmed his suspicion with the slightest shake of her head. Judging by the woman’s accent, Jaime would have guessed she came from El Salvador. The fact that she twitched almost uncontrollably, shifting her head as if she were looking for a hiding place, didn’t make her lie more convincing.

  The guard seemed to guess the same thing. He crossed his arms over his chest and stood with his feet shoulder width apart. “Chiapas? Do you have proof? You sound Central American to me.”

  From his seat Jaime noticed the back of her brown neck reddening as she cleared her throat. “No, no, I have allergies, my throat, it always happens in the spring.”

  His patience gone, the guard pointed his rifle at her and barked, “Get off the bus. We’re sending you back to Guatemala.”

  “But I’m not Guatemalan,” the woman insisted, no longer lying.

  “Who cares, you can return to your country from there.”

  “Please, you don’t understand,” the woman cried and pleaded. “I must get to Texas. My husband, he beats me. My children, they have nothing to eat. Please, in God’s name.” The woman clutched a lumpy plastic bag to her chest, as if it would shield and protect her.

  It didn’t. The guard grabbed her and dragged her off the bus, pushing her toward a guard waiting outside. That man whacked her across the head with his arm. She crumpled to the dirt, blood oozing from the side of her head where the guard’s watch had caught her. Not that he noticed or cared. A sharp nudge in her stomach from his rifle and the Salvadoran woman was back on her feet. For a second she looked like she would bolt, but the outside guard took hold of her arm and twisted it behind her back until she had no choice but to follow. Her screams echoed across the jungle until she was flung into one of several windowless white vans waiting a few meters away.

  The bus driver did nothing. His job was only to drive the bus and collect the fare. If this was his regular route, he probably saw this happen every day.

  It took every clenching muscle in Jaime’s body to keep from wetting himself. In a few minutes that could be him and Ángela too.

  “Keep drawing, keep drawing,” Ángela muttered as the gringa tourist gasped and seized hold of her partner’s freckled arm.

  Jaime stared at his sketchbook as if he’d never seen it before. Draw? How could he draw at a time like this, when he’d just seen a woman literally thrown out of the bus? But Ángela was right. He had to pretend he had nothing to be scared of. As if he belonged. As if he were mexicano.

  Hand shaking a second time within the bus ride, he began doodling next to Snoopy. Before he realized what he’d drawn, the Bat-Signal appeared at the top of the page—the sign that someone in Gotham City needed Batman’s help.

  Great, no hidden symbolism there. Could his sketch be more obvious? Still, he didn’t erase it, just continued with the next doodle.

  By the time their guard was back on the bus and at their side, Jaime’s page not only had Snoopy and the Bat-Signal, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mickey Mouse scattered around. Half the kids at school had similar doodles in their notebooks. Hopefully the guard had kids.

  “Are you two together?” the guard asked. His breath reeked of coffee and too many cigarettes. Jaime glanced at him briefly before returning to shaping Yoda’s ears just right. Keep calm and blend in.

  “Yup,” Ángela said with more assurance than Jaime felt. As she continued, he couldn’t help but notice her accent had changed. She was putting less emphasis on the last vowels of her words, making her tone more neutral. “Abuela needs help for a few days. It’s getting hard for her to roll out the tortillas.”

  The beauty about that lie was that it really wasn’t a lie. Their grandmother was struggling with the tortillas and always welcomed any help. Jaime doubted those lie detectors they showed in movies could have picked out the deception. After all, it wasn’t as if the guard had actually asked where they were going.

  “You’re not from Chiapas, are you?”

  “Veracruz,” Ángela named a different Mexican state without hesitating. But a state not exactly where the bus was heading, nor where it came from. The lie detector in Jaime’s head flashed warnings like the lights on the guards’ cars outside. If Ángela realized her mistake, she didn’t show it. “¿Ha estado allí? Have you been there? It’s beautiful.”

  Again Jaime noticed the difference in her accent, particularly her verb choice. In Guatemala they would have said, habés estado allí. Good call, Ángela. And thank you, Mexican TV shows.

  The guard caught the verb use, and at the sound of it gave them a slight nod of approval. Just as Jaime was about to relax, the guard reached over Ángela and poked him in the shoulder, causing the pencil to slip and streak, giving Yoda a double-ended lightsaber.

  “What about you, boy, do you like helping your abuela make tortillas?”

  “Sometimes,” Jaime said with a shrug, even though his brain had gone into panic mode. He didn’t know if he could imitate a Mexican accent and remember to use the verb forms they did. He stuck with what he did know—sketching and doodling.

  “What you got there?” The guard grabbed the notebook out of his hands and began thumbing through it.

  Jaime swallowed a gasp. His book. How dare this guy take it, his grubby hands leaving prints on the fresh sheets. It took all the restraint he had to keep from grabbing it back. On the floor, blocked from view by their bags, his cousin dug her heel into his foot. Her message couldn’t have been clearer: don’t you dare do anything stupid.

  The anger turned to fear as he tried to remember what he’d drawn, and whether there was anything that would obviously link them to Guatemala. He mentally flipped through the pages in reverse order. The people on the bus, the statue of Benito Juárez, the church. Then recollections of his last week at home—Rosita playing with Quico; Tío and Tía outside in the patio; Abuela struggling with her tortillas; Mamá taking a siesta; Papá sticking his tongue out at him; Laura, the pretty girl at school he never got the nerve to talk to, and now it was too late; Miguel’s funeral . . .

  The sound of ripping paper returned him to the stopped bus. Bits of paper clung to the rings from where la migra officer had torn a page. Ángela’s foot pressed against his, a reminder not to freak out. A page. Only one. Jaime allowed himself the smallest breath.

  “My son likes lizards. He always saves them from the cat.” The officer waved the drawing Jaime had done when he had gotten the news about Miguel. The book thumped back onto his lap.

  One hand flapping the lizard portrait to fan himself from the stuffy bus air, the other resting on his rifle, the guard moved down the aisle to question the next people.

  Too soon to breathe properly, Jaime held the sketchbook tight in his lap. It felt like a different book, worn and more pliable, the cover not as crisp as it had been. He could live with this different, violated feeling, he supposed, just as long as he never lost the book completely. It was his life, or what remained of it.

  Five minutes later the guard left the bus. No cars blocked their way anymore, and a different guard waved them off. Heavy sighs of relief escaped everyone, from the bus driver to the youngest in the family of children. As they passed the windowless white van, everyone turned to stare at it, and then at the empty seat that a few minutes before had held a woman searching for a better life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The bus jarred to a stalling stop in Arriaga. Jaime blinked a few times as his sleepy brain tried to make sense of what was going on. Right, time to get off.  Ángela looked like he felt—tired, disoriented, and grumpy—except her black hair was matted into a huge knot from where the wind had tangled it. They made sure to grab their backpacks and the food bags before following the rest of the passengers off the bus.

  “Stay close to me,” Ángela said, not that Jaime had any intention of doing otherwise.

  The bus ride had taken close to six hours with all the checkpoints. A clock inside th
e station said it was 9:53 p.m. The people who got off the bus took off in various directions and disappeared into the night. Jaime and Ángela stayed within the lights of the bus station, looking around.

  The bus station seemed to be in a mostly abandoned part of town. If it was a town.

  The wind shifted, bringing scents of salt water and rotten fish from the Pacific Ocean ten kilometers away. An old man staggered by, muttering to himself. He stopped in front of a burned-out light post and began swearing at it for ruining his life. Next to the station two cars sped down the main carretera that the bus had come in on, engines roaring as they zipped by going a million kilometers an hour. A handful of rundown storefronts stood in front of the station, locked up tight for the night. Cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and dog poop littered the area between the station and the gravel street.

  Other than that, there wasn’t much beyond trees and electrical posts. Unless you counted the graffiti painted on the locked partition of one of the storefronts: “¡Váyanse centro americanos!” followed by rude words. The graffiti gleamed with fresh spray paint.

  “They don’t want us here,” Jaime said under his breath.

  Ángela stood on her toes as if the extra height would help her see their destination. “No one knows we’re here.”

  “Not us, you and me. Us, Central Americans.” Jaime pointed to the tag that seemed to bleed from the store.

  Ángela pressed her lips and then turned away quickly. “We need to find this refugee shelter.”

  “What’s it called again?”

  “Iglesia de Santo Domingo.”

  “Which way is it?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” she cried, and hid her face in her hands. Jaime tried to place a hand on her shoulder, but she shook him away. “Stop with all the questions!”

  Ángela crumbled onto the concrete. Jaime crouched next to her and put his arm around her. This time she didn’t resist. In his head he heard what Tía, Ángela’s mother, always said when one of the children cried: He’s just tired. Poor thing needs to sleep.