The Only Road Read online

  They had no choice but to move from the dirt track where Señora Pérez had dropped them off and follow him. Vida kept to their feet, hackles raised and turning her nose and pricking her one ear from one direction to the other. At least she wasn’t growling anymore. Still, Jaime’s scrunched shoulders didn’t relax.

  The boy left them at a shack made more out of cardboard than metal. Seven other people sat huddled inside. When Jaime asked Ángela if she thought they were safe to stay there, he received a roar of laughter from the inhabitants.

  “La migra doesn’t come here, if that’s what you mean,” said a Mexican man with a head that looked like an anvil had squashed it. “But that’s because this area’s run by the Diamantes.”

  Another Mexican, this one with a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once, continued, “The coyotes pay the gang a cut of the crossing fee to let them do business with us. Junior Diamantes members come by all the time to sell drugs, but other than that, they leave us alone. Just as long as you don’t cause them no trouble.”

  Jaime and Ángela glanced at each other. They didn’t for a second believe the Diamantes would leave them alone for too long. They’d have to figure out how to cross, and fast.

  When Ángela didn’t say anything, Jaime took a deep breath and asked the question himself. “Which one of those coyotes is any good?”

  “None of them,” two or three answered at once.

  “I’ve been here four weeks,” a man with a grizzled beard and South American accent explained. “And it seems half of the people these dimwits take across get caught on the other side. The others wash up downstream with a bullet in their head. If you can, go with Conejo.”

  “He’s the cheapest of the good ones,” one Salvadoran man agreed. “I paid another coyote, only to end up right back here a week later, half-dead from dehydration, and poorer than dirt. I wish I had saved more then and paid Conejo the higher price first. Conejo’s clients don’t get caught or sent back as often as the rest.”

  “That’s because they’re killed or die trying to cross,” said a different man who came from the south, Nicaragua or maybe Panamá.

  “No!” The Salvadoran slapped his fist on the dirt floor. “They don’t come back because Conejo’s that good.”

  “How much does he charge?” a Guatemalan woman asked.

  “And how much is he paying you to talk him up?” the other man demanded.

  The Salvadoran looked like he was about to attack the cynical man. “For that, I hope your corpse rots in the desert. The kid asked who the best coyote is, so I’m telling him, you son of a gun. He charges twenty-one hundred dollars, and that includes the drive to the safe-house on the other end. He won’t take pesos.”

  Ángela and Jaime looked at each other as they huddled in their cardboard corner with Vida on high alert. They couldn’t get over how much money that was for one night’s work—it took their parents a whole year to earn that amount. But on the other hand, what choice did they have? Going with someone cheaper, and less reputable, could cost them their lives. In unison they both let out a sigh. This Conejo did sound better than the others.

  “We’ll check him out in the morning,” Jaime whispered. Maybe, just maybe, the Salvadoran was mistaken about Conejo’s rates. Because if that was what Conejo really charged, they’d never come up with the extra money.

  • • •

  Unlike the shifty coyotes in the immigration camp, Conejo didn’t lurk around seeking business. Customers came to him.

  Jaime and Ángela slept in the next morning and waited until the afternoon to follow the directions the Salvadoran man from their cardboard shack had given them to seek out Conejo. Ángela’s ankle was better, but she still walked with a limp. They went through neighborhoods with decaying walls, where they felt eyes glaring at them through slatted windows; dark alleys with homeless men begging for any coin they could spare; and trash-littered streets with girls wearing very little except empty expressions on their faces. From a shadowed doorway a man came at them with a knife, but Vida bared her teeth with a deep growl and the man backed off.

  They found Conejo munching on peanuts and playing pool against himself in an outdoor cantina, just as the Salvadoran man had said. It made sense immediately why this man was called “conejo.” Sticking out from his pouchy lips were two large front teeth. His face was long, body slight, and legs lean. He was even a bit twitchy like a rabbit, and at the slightest noise would freeze to look at different directions. His shoulder-length black hair covered his ears, but Jaime wondered if they were large and twitchy too.

  “Twenty-two hundred dollars each,” he said with his back toward them before they had even reached him.

  The thin desert air made Jaime struggle for enough oxygen. That was a hundred dollars more than what they’d heard last night. Each. They might as well find another smuggler because there was no way they could afford him.

  Jaime tapped Ángela’s shoulder to go, but his cousin crossed her arms over her chest. She stood her ground with determination he hadn’t seen since Xavi disappeared. “Two thousand dollars each since there’s two of us.”

  Conejo pocketed the next ball before his nose twitched and he jerked his attention at Vida. “Is that thing coming too?”

  “Claro,” Ángela affirmed.

  “Are you paying for her crossing fee?”

  Ángela put her shoulders back and glared into the rabbit man’s amber eyes. “She pays her own way by alerting us if anyone is near.”

  Conejo threw a nut on the ground. Vida looked at the food and then at Ángela as if waiting for permission to eat it. Ángela nodded before Vida gobbled it up with a crunch. Conejo raised both his eyebrows, impressed. “Twenty-two hundred dollars each and the dog goes free.”

  Jaime and Ángela exchanged looks. Ángela gave him a slight nod before glancing at Vida. Jaime sighed and nodded back. Going with Conejo did seem like the best option. And there was the fact that this was the first coyote they’d met that Vida seemed to like.

  “Do we have your word?” Jaime held out his hand like businessmen on la tele did to seal deals. “Twenty-two hundred dollars each?”

  Conejo took his hand and shook it hard without breaking eye contact. “Be back here at ten o’clock sharp, any night except Sunday. With the money.”

  He threw Vida another nut and returned to his game, where he pocketed two balls in one turn.

  • • •

  “We should just call Tomás. He can come over and hide us in his car to go back,” Jaime said the next morning as they walked the streets of Ciudad Juárez with Vida at their heels. They’d spent half the night thinking of ways to earn Conejo’s extra money.

  The downtown area, an hour’s walk from their camp, seemed like a more promising place to earn money. At least the buildings weren’t made of metal sheets and cardboard. But from here they saw what stood against them: the river with its cemented sides, the giant wall behind it, the armed guards, and the tall buildings of the Promised Land that was El Paso, Texas, and the rest of los Estados Unidos. All so close, Jaime could throw a stone and have it fall into the other country. But unless he were a stone, getting there was near impossible.

  “And if they catch us crossing in Tomás’s car, they send us back to Guatemala, and throw Tomás in jail for smuggling,” Ángela said.

  She was right, he knew that, but he hated having come all this way just to face a dead end. Especially when he thought about how close they were. Tía had said there was about two thousand dollars in each of their jeans. Which meant they were two hundred shy of Conejo’s fee. Each. He came back to the same question they’d asked the night before: “So how’re we going to earn the extra money?”

  “Maybe I can get a job as a nanny,” Ángela said as she noticed a dark-skinned woman pushing a stroller with a blond toddler.

  “Should we talk to her?” Jaime asked. But before they could ask the babysitter if she knew of extra jobs, the pair had disappeared into the crowd.


  A huge sigh escaped both of them. Hopeless. The people who could afford a nanny in Ciudad Juárez probably lived behind security-guarded gates. In his head Jaime went through his abilities. Thanks to Señora Pérez, he was better at swinging a hammer, but not skilled enough that people would actually pay him. At the mercado in Lechería, the merchant had paid him in rotting fruit for carrying boxes. He knew without asking that Conejo wouldn’t accept squashed papayas as payment.

  “If Xavi were here, he’d figure something out,” Ángela muttered. Vida’s ear pricked at the name. Ángela scooped up the dog and buried her face in the white-and-brown-patched hair.

  Jaime stopped next to her, his hand on her shoulder. Yes, Xavi would have thought of something. He was good at taking charge. Like Miguel. What would they have done? Jaime glanced through his sketchbook at the picture of Miguel’s funeral. An idea began to take shape.

  Without the cover, the front sheets were bending and curling, but the blank ones toward the back were still in good condition. The old woman on the bus had paid him twelve pesos for his drawing even though she had been poor. Would other people pay him to sketch their portraits? He counted twenty sheets of paper left in his book. His last pencil was almost at its full length, but since his sharpener had been stolen with his bag, he’d have to chip away the wood by hand. Not ideal, but not impossible.

  “We need to go someplace where all the gringo tourists walk by,” he said, his eyes shining with new hope and determination.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They found an empty bench in the huge Parque El Chamizal with paved paths, irrigated grass, and shade trees. It was near the city center and very close to the border, and very far from their ugly camp. The day was cloudless and hot, but not too hot to keep people indoors. Jaime began to set up shop. First he tucked in his frayed T-shirt, which he’d cut to tie the brace for Ángela’s ankle, and brushed off his dirt-covered jeans as best he could. Then he used the back of a used page to draw portraits in each corner of four famous people everyone would recognize—Jennifer Lopez, Jesús Cristo, President Obama, and Mickey Mouse. He held out the sketchbook with one hand and his pencil with the other.

  Every time someone passed by their bench, he waved his pencil as if he were drawing in the air and pointed to his sketchbook.

  “Me make you? Me make you?” he asked each person. He wished he knew more English, but that was the best he could say. Ángela couldn’t remember how to say “draw” or even “paint” in English, so wasn’t able to help his vocabulary. Instead she mended the large rip in her jeans—if Abuela had been there she would have been scandalized that Ángela had gone around the whole state of Chihuahua showing so much leg. Vida lay down at their feet and gave every passerby a hopeful one-ear look.

  Most people ignored Jaime, but finally he noticed a group of girls a bit older than Ángela. The one in the front with long blond hair and skin browned by the sun carried a bag with the face of Frida Kahlo, one of México’s most famous artists. If this blond gringa liked Frida, maybe she’d like her portrait sketched.

  “Me make you? Make you como Frida?” He pointed to her bag with his pencil and then at his sketchbook.

  She stopped and looked at him, then at the sample sketch of the famous people. She asked a question he didn’t understand while rubbing her fingers together. That he understood. She wanted to know how much.

  “Tain,” he said. He wanted to charge more—the poor viejita on the bus paid twelve—but ten was the highest he could count in English.

  She nodded and smiled as she sat down on the bench. “Sure.”

  He took his time outlining her face before filling in her features. Her eyes were small, but her cheekbones and smile highlighted her face, making her very pretty. He ignored the pimple on her forehead but made sure to include her beaded dangling earrings. She sat still with her chin up like a perfect model during the time it took to draw her. He couldn’t have asked for a better subject and, as a result, the drawing turned out really well. He wished he could keep it for himself.

  He remembered to sign the bottom with his illegible autograph before handing her the portrait. She broke into a wide grin that had him smiling back in an instant. He knew the words “fantastic” and “beautiful” and took it to mean she liked it. Then she asked him something he didn’t understand.

  “¿Tú años?” she asked again, and comprehension suddenly hit him. She wanted to know how old he was.

  “Tain ahn tu,” he said, holding out his ten fingers and then two more.

  “Twelve?”

  He nodded and hoped what she’d said was correct.

  She carefully rolled up the portrait and pulled off a spare hair band from her wrist to hold the shape. Then she dug into her Frida bag for her wallet. Instead of the ten-peso coin he was expecting, she handed him a crisp US note, green with blue watermarks, and the number 20 on each corner.

  “No, tain.” He held out his hands, showing her again his ten fingers.

  She shook her head no and waved him away as if it was nothing. How could anyone think twenty dollars was nothing? She had given him more than fifteen times what he had asked. She must be very rich.

  “Tank you,” he said. He couldn’t make the “th” sound but knew she understood. He stared at the note for a second longer before tucking it deep into his pocket.

  It wasn’t until then that he noticed Ángela had convinced one of the portrait lady’s friends to let her reattach a shirt button that had come loose. She handed back the shirt and was given a few bills in return. Once the group had left, Ángela showed her earnings. Three dollars.

  “I didn’t ask for any price. That’s just what he gave me,” Ángela explained. She tried not to look disappointed. “We must accept and be grateful for whatever we can get.”

  They were discussing how to get their next clients when a brown-haired woman with pale skin who had been watching stormed up to them, demanding something. They looked at each other nervously. Was she accusing them of stealing?

  She let out an exasperated sigh and then pointed to Ángela’s mended jeans, pinched her thumb and forefinger, and shook the skirt she wore up and down.

  “I think she wants you to sew her skirt,” Jaime said. “Or else she’s afraid of caterpillars going up her legs.”

  Ángela smiled with a nod and pulled out her sewing kit.

  “It’s a lucky thing I still have this,” she said, and Jaime knew she’d forgiven him for losing the backpacks on the train.

  The new gringa made cutting motions with her fingers and pointed to where she wanted the alterations. Ángela folded the skirt in position and confirmed before making the cut with her micro scissors. The lady stood there in the middle of the park, looking at her phone while Ángela tried not to poke her legs with a needle.

  “Me make you. Tain dola,” Jaime called out. He didn’t think he could say “twelve,” but now that he was changing his rate from pesos to dollars, that was good enough. People paused to look at Ángela fashioning a skirt still on the lady. An old couple stared first at Ángela, the woman nodding her approval of Ángela’s technique, before turning to Jaime, who pointed from his portrait sample to them. “Tain dola.”

  “Five,” her husband said as he pushed up his thick glasses.

  “Sí, yes,” Jaime agreed, even though the old man’s gold watch implied he could pay more. Like Ángela had said, they had to accept whatever they could get.

  Jaime drew the couple sitting together, the lady with a wide fake smile and her husband scowling as if his face had frozen that way years ago. The sketch turned out well, but Jaime didn’t have any problem giving it up. The old man grumbled but handed him ten dollars. Maybe they figured because there were two of them, the price was five each. This time, Jaime didn’t correct them. He took what he got.

  By now, two children were posing for photos with Vida—her missing ear made the children exclaim “how cute” a million times. They fed her their ice
creams and pork rinds while Jaime tried not to be jealous; he and Ángela hadn’t eaten anything today—everything they earned they needed for the crossing. When the parents said it was time to leave, the children began jumping up and down, whining and begging their parents for something. Jaime couldn’t help but think he and his cousins back home never acted like that.

  The father, who spoke decent Spanish, turned to Jaime. “My children love your dog. How much for her?”

  “She’s not for sale,” Ángela said with a needle in her mouth.

  “A thousand pesos?” The father raised his eyebrows as if daring them to refuse. Jaime wasn’t sure of the conversion rate, but he knew it was a good amount toward their crossing fee.

  “Absolutely not,” Ángela confirmed, her eyes never leaving her job.

  The father looked at Jaime to see if he would try to convince the stubborn seamstress. Jaime lifted his shoulders in a shrug as if there was nothing he could do. Secretly, though, he was glad. If Vida hadn’t found them under the car in Lechería, they might have never made it this far. If she hadn’t caught the rabbit, Señora Pérez might not have driven them here. No, Vida stayed.

  The father sighed but slipped Jaime a fifty-peso note for letting his children take doggie selfies. A bit confused, Jaime thanked the family anyway. He couldn’t get over how generous all these gringos were, especially when the news always said how they didn’t like immigrants. True, he wasn’t in their country (yet), but it was weird how they expected to pay for everything. He would have never thought of charging people just to take a picture of their dog. The customs were so different from what they were back home. He wasn’t sure if he would ever get used to them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It took them two days to earn the money they needed to cross and have enough to buy a couple tacos at mealtimes; the migrant camp offered nothing more than keeping la migra out. The skirt that Ángela had altered had ended up looking weird, but the lady loved it, saying it was exactly what she wanted, and came back the next day with shopping bags of clothes she’d bought that didn’t fit right. When a security officer came by to inquire why a seamstress had set up shop in the middle of the public park, Ángela’s client waved him away with a few dollars. The lady complained a lot, but seemed to think she was getting a good deal, so paid well.