Crossing the Wire (5 page)

I
HAD NEVER UNDERSTOOD
before, what a long, long way it was to the border. The train continued on through the night and into the next morning and afternoon. Whenever it stopped, we knew we were in danger. We would turn the radio off and listen to the sounds from outside. Once, we heard people running, and the shouts of police ordering them to stop. I was sure that our hiding place would be searched, but it wasn't. After half an hour, the train was moving again.

Inside our Suburban, there was hardly any rocking motion and practically no noise. I rested easy again. Julio was pretty sure that the carrier wouldn't be searched until the final inspection before the crossing of the border, when every nook and cranny of these vehicles would be searched for people and drugs.

I asked how we would know when it was time to get out, and Julio said we would wait until a stop lasted for an hour. Until then,
we wouldn't even poke our heads out to see where we were.

“How will you know it is Nogales?”

“Because I've been told what it looks like. It's a city spread all over the hills, looking down into Nogales, Arizona, which they say is much smaller. There's a metal fence, more like a wall, in between.”

“How is that possible to be looking down from Mexico into the States? Aren't they above us?”

“Listen, I'm telling you what I heard. Here's something else. There are two really long tunnels that run under the border. They carry the storm waters that run off the Mexican hills. That's how I'm going to cross. You can come with me if you want.”

“Wouldn't you drown?”

“The tunnels are dry most of the time. People live in them, that's what I heard. Street kids. Cholos.”

“Gangs?”

“They take people through for money, but if you know the password, they'll just let you go by.”

“Do you know the password?”

“Forward and backward.”

“What about the police on the Mexican side and the Border Patrol on the American side? Don't they try to stop people from crossing through the tunnels? It sounds too good to be true!”

“Have you been living under a stone? On the Mexican side, the police are easily bribed.”

“Who bribes them?”

“The coyotes, who else? In this case, it would be the cholos. As for the American side, who knows? Maybe the Border Patrol doesn't watch their end of the tunnels all the time. Maybe they get paid off, too.”

“It sounds like you have it all figured out.”

“You never have it all figured out. Something unexpected always happens. You do what you can and hope for good luck.”

“Did you have good luck once you finally got to your aunt and uncle's in Texas?”

“At first I did. I worked five months at a turkey farm.”

“Doing what?”

“Sweeping, mopping, shoveling, chopping heads, plucking feathers, pulling the guts out. Hard work, 'mano, but I was good at it. I was able to make good money and send hundreds of dollars home to my parents, for them and my brothers and sisters. But then the police came. My aunt and my uncle were always fighting. The neighbors got tired of it.”

“Did you get to keep your job?”

“Are you kidding? They went to jail, and so did I. We were all illegal. If you stay out of trouble up there, they'll leave you alone. They need the workers. But if you get into trouble, your life is like a tin can that gets kicked down the road.”

“They deported you back to Honduras?”

“Eventually, on an airplane, with a Migra escort just for me if you can believe it. What a view. I was flying like a bird, above the clouds sometimes. Even when you are below the clouds, you're
still so high that the cars and houses look tiny.”

“I can only imagine! What did you mean, they deported you ‘eventually'?”

“They kept me in jail four months.”

“Really?”

“Really. Two months in the juvenile detention, but then it got so crowded, I had to wait in the county jail. Why it took so long, I have no idea. That jail was a scary place, 'mano. Tejanos, Mexicans, Central Americans, blacks, Anglos…it was like five different animals dropped into a barrel.”

“Anglos? I thought all the gabachos were rich. What were they doing in jail?”

“You don't know very much about El Norte.”

“What were the guards like?”

“They were mean. They liked to throw the lights on in the middle of the night, get you out of bed, search your cell while a vicious dog growled and snapped at you. They let the dog come within this close of biting you, and then they pull him back.”

“So, here you are heading north again.”

“What else? You never go hungry there, once you find work. When I told my father I was going to go back to El Norte, he said, ‘If you want to go, go.' In Honduras, on days he can find work, all he makes is a dollar and a half American, and that's doing construction. Sometimes, when I could get away with it, I could make two dollars, stealing bananas from the company plantation and selling them in San Pedro Sula. If you're a kid from the village,
forget about a real job.”

“How much did you make in El Norte?”

“Six dollars an hour, ten hours a day.”

“Sixty American dollars in a day? Is that possible?”

“Believe it. That's why I'm going back.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She said, ‘Okay, go try. God bless you.' I found a seashell yesterday that I'm going to give her eventually. Who knows when.”

“In between trains, you traveled to the ocean?”

“Guess what? Mazatlán is on the ocean.”

“I didn't know it was that close. I always wanted to see the ocean. I missed my chance!”

It was dark, early evening, when we finally climbed out through the roof of the automobile carrier. Julio was sure we had reached Nogales. We were able to sneak through the train yards, past warehouses and abandoned boxcars with families living inside. A little girl had her hand out begging. We soon reached the lights of the city, with the border wall in sight. The traffic was all backed up.

“They're waiting to get through the Port of Entry gates,” Julio said. “C'mon, let's take a look around.”

I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been with Julio. He had never been in Nogales either, but from the way he carried himself, you would never believe it.

The air smelled of broiling meat and onions from the taco carts, and of diesel fumes. That much was like Silao, but there were many more gabachos. Fresh from the States, they were flocking to
the shops down the street. Taxis were honking at kids racing through the traffic to beg work from Mexicans returning from the American Nogales, arms full of shopping bags. Julio explained that some people had the documents to cross back and forth.

With me at his elbow, Julio threaded his way through the crowds and the tourist shops, the pharmacies, past some hotels with campesinos spilling out of the lobbies onto the streets. I told him that in Silao, farmers never stayed in hotels.

“Before they stitched up your head, Victor, did some of your brains spill out? Those are mojados. They haven't crossed the border yet, but can't you see how wet they are? The ones lined up at those pay phones over there are talking with relatives and labor contractors on the other side. See that one with the straw hat over there, talking to the slick guy? That's a leader of a mojado group bargaining with a coyote. Getting the bad news about how much it's going to cost.”

Ahead, people were milling around an ice-cream cart. A girl bought a chocolate-covered frozen banana on a stick. My eyes followed it to her mouth. All I'd eaten since my mother's tamales was a can of stew Julio had shared with me on the train. I closed my eyes and imagined the taste of the chocolate-covered frozen banana. My stomach felt like a small animal with claws, but that was nothing new.

We kept moving. We walked along a narrow, cobbled street lined with homes, mostly of concrete. Every window was barred with heavy wrought iron. The yard walls were high and studded with
broken glass. The border rap thumping from car speakers set me on edge and so did the number of police, all different kinds. Nogales wasn't anything like Silao. How were we even going to find a safe place to sleep?

We walked around the Plaza de Toros, our eyes on the bullfighting murals. The entrance of the arena was swarming with street kids. We came to a small park wedged between streets with heavy traffic, where kids darted out to wash windshields at the stoplights. In the center of the park, taquerías and other carts ringed the bronze statue of a man whose head was a bathroom for pigeons.

Not far away, we looked over a guardrail into the yawning opening of a huge concrete storm tunnel. “Look, we've already found one,” Julio said. About seven feet high and twice as wide, the tunnel drained a dry wash that ran down from the hills. All around the mouth of the tunnel, the concrete was spray-painted with graffiti: names, slogans that cursed the police, symbols I couldn't read, and the words Los Vampiros.

The entrance was poorly lit, but we could see kids hanging around outside and others disappearing inside. One of the kids, sitting in the shadows on a broken slab of concrete, held a paper bag to his face, like a horse with its muzzle in a feed bag. “What in the world is he doing?” I asked Julio.

“You really don't know? He sprayed paint in there, and now he's inhaling the fumes. His brains are cheese!”

We turned away from the city center. Narrow lanes led up the gullies and into a neighborhood on the hillside where dogs barked
and the headlights of cars fell on kids kicking balls in a rain of dust. Some of the houses were made of concrete blocks or adobe bricks, and looked like my family home. Others were stitched together of boards, plywood, tar paper, mud, and cardboard, with roofs of metal sheeting weighted by tires, rocks, even wheelbarrows. A strong windstorm might blow them down. A heavy rain, and they might slide into the gullies.

Below the hills, the tall metal border wall, topped with barbed wire, was bathed in stadium lights from one end of the city to the other. On the American side, a strip of bare ground was patrolled by green-and-white trucks that Julio said were the Border Patrol. Kids were throwing rocks from our side of the wall down onto the American side, trying to hit one of the Migra trucks.

We kept climbing in search of a place to hide and sleep. We followed the edge of a landslide full of garbage. At last we found a patch of hillside without houses. A lone mesquite tree drew us like a magnet.

Julio called as we got close. No one answered. We crawled under the sheltering branches. There was garbage strewn around, some spray cans, the smell of urine, but no one was there. We spread out our blankets, put our heads down, and hoped for the best.

T
HE CHOLOS CAME IN THE
middle of the night. I was in a deep sleep, and so was Julio. They woke us with kicks. There were six of them, two with flashlights. They said it was their tree. The girl who was with them giggled when they said we owed them rent. She went through our things.

“We'll just leave,” Julio said.

“Not until you pay,” growled their leader, the biggest of the pack. He was wearing baggy clothes and gleaming white sneakers.

“No money,” reported the girl. “Nothing in their stuff worth anything.” Like the others, she had a triangle of blue dots tattooed on her wrist. All had weird-looking rings of fresh gold paint around their mouths.

The boys moved in closer, like wolves to the kill. The youngest one, no older than ten, was keeping a powerful flashlight beam in my eyes. I pulled the coins out my jeans pocket and told them it
was all that I had. An unseen hand struck my wrist, and the coins went flying.

“Hey, you guys,” Julio said in a friendly voice. “Paisano twenty-seven.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” cackled the leader. He had a voice like a crow.

“It means you let us go,” Julio said.

They all started laughing. Their leader said, “That's the same stupid so-called password we keep hearing in Los Vampiros. You chuntaros, there's no password. It is only a joke going around to be played on lowlifes like you from Honduras or Guatemala or wherever you're from. Now give us your money, the serious money.”

I didn't mind being called a stupid, skinny fool. Chuntaro described how I felt to find myself completely at their mercy. Meanwhile, Julio's face hardened. Suddenly he looked tough and dangerous, nothing like the boy I had known on the train.

“Your money,” croaked the crow.

“Try his pants,” giggled the girl.

The pack moved closer yet. “I'll get it myself,” Julio growled. A flashlight beam followed his hand as it slid under his belt. Next thing I saw was a blunt piece of metal, out of which jumped a deadly looking blade. “Who wants it?” Julio roared, and they all jumped back. He started waving the knife wildly, lunging at the cholos. They ran like rats dumped out of a sack, and they didn't come back.

“I don't believe you,” I cried, half in admiration and half in
shock. “They could've killed us. What if they also had weapons?”

“They would have had to use them.”

“You had big money after all? Coyote money?”

“I got nothing, same as you.”

“Then, why—”

“I was keeping my pants on, that's all. Let's get out of here.”

“Maybe I can find my coins.”

“Those paintheads might come back. Grab your things and let's go.”

We stumbled across the hillside in the eerie glow from the light towers along the border. Chuntaro, I told myself. How are you going to get across now?

We made our way downtown, to the bus terminal. In the middle of the night, it was full of people who looked half dead. Eventually, a bench opened up. As soon as we sat down, we were joined by a slouching man with a large silver belt buckle. “Where are you going?” he asked as he lit a cigarette. His face was flushed and he smelled of liquor.

“Don't know,” Julio said, “and we don't have any money to get there.”

“Aaah,” the man replied. “You have nothing. Nothing but nothing.”

The man took a long pull on his cigarette, slowly let it out. “There's money to be made in the desert…if you have strong backs.”

“And if we get caught,” Julio replied, “we go to jail for ten years,
maybe twenty or thirty, no?”

“What is the matter with you two? You have to think positive, or you'll never get anywhere in life.”

“Thank you for your advice, señor,” Julio said respectfully. “We will consider what you had to say.”

“I'll be around,” he said, and shambled away.

“Drugs?” I asked, when the recruiter had vanished.

“What else? They always need mules to replace the ones that get caught.”

“Are you actually going to consider it, like you said? And risk jail?”

“Do I look like I had a horse for a mother and a jackass for a father? Did you forget that I've already been in prison? Did I make it sound like a holiday in Cancún?”

“Sorry if I've irritated you, Julio.”

“You haven't, 'mano. Nogales has. I don't want to spend a minute longer at the bottom of this outhouse than I have to.”

“I'm with you,” I said.

He laughed bitterly. “The password is no good, but there's always another way. We just have to keep our eyes open.”

Daytime found us looking for work at the gas stations, the small groceries, the tourist shops, tire repairs, shoe repairs, and a small factory that made roof tiles. People shook us off. They didn't even want to talk.

At the Port of Entry, we tried to make a little money carrying shopping bags for people returning from the other side, mostly
from the Wal-Mart. I recognized the blue bags from the Wal-Mart in Silao. The problem was, there were too many kids. It was like a flock of sparrows going for the same few seeds. We didn't have any luck. My hunger felt like a clenched fist.

At a taquería, Julio bought tacos for both of us. We sat on a low wall close by and ate very slowly. Julio was watching a young man trying to buy something to eat. He had the chest of a bull and arms like tree trunks. I started paying attention and noticed that he could barely speak Spanish. He looked as Mexican as anybody, yet it was all he could do to order two tacos. He had an American ten dollar bill in his hand.

“Ten,” the vendor said. The young man looked very confused as he handed over the bill.

The vendor hadn't missed the confusion. In fact, he took advantage of it. He put the ten dollars away quickly and started helping the next person. The young man stood there for a second with his tacos. Then he turned away, looking lost as a bird that's just hit a window. For some reason, he didn't understand Mexican money. He had just paid more than ten times too much.

Julio jumped up and got in the middle of it. With some weak excuse I couldn't hear, the vendor had to hand over the change. The young man with the muscles gave half to Julio as a gift, then sat beside us on the wall and started in on his tacos.

Julio spoke enough English to have a conversation with him. I didn't understand a word except his name, Hector. Later, as we went our separate ways, Julio told me that Hector was from
Colorado. He'd been deported only the day before. Hector hadn't been in Mexico for nineteen years, ever since crossing on his mother's back. He grew up American, but without documents. He graduated from high school and was a football star—American football. He had a good job at a place that sold farm machinery. A week ago, he'd had a little traffic accident. When he couldn't show the police a driver's license, even a fake one, they took him in and then the Border Patrol got ahold of him.

“Can you believe it?” Julio said.

“What's he going to do?”

“Pay the coyotes to take him across.”

“The cholos, through one of the tunnels?”

“He told me he'd almost been tricked into trying that. Just in time, he found out that the Americans had recently closed the tunnels on their side with chain-link gates. They only open them up when it's flooding—so the cholos who live inside won't get pinned against them and drown. You know what, Victor? Before it gets dark, we better find out where it's safe to sleep.”

Our search ended at the Plaza de Toros, which turned out no longer to be a bullfighting arena. The city had turned it into a place for the homeless to sleep. We went inside to take a look. The protected places under the colonnades were already marked off by families and were filled with their belongings, with kids keeping guard. No matter—there was no sign of rain. We spread out our blankets in the middle of the arena.

Julio was in a bad mood the next day, and I knew why. He had
been counting on the tunnels. I asked him what he thought about hiking east or west along the border, then crossing someplace past where the metal wall ended.

“I'm afraid it might come to that,” Julio said darkly. “From what I hear, it's a long, long way across the desert—four, five days, maybe a week. Without a coyote to guide us, what would be our chances?”

“If the tunnel wasn't closed, and the password had worked, what were you going to do once you got to the other side?”

“Get back on the train. On the way to Phoenix, it goes through Tucson. From what I hear, those are cities where we would blend right in.”

“Tucson is where my friend was going—to his brother's house—but he had coyote money.”

“There has to be a way, if we just keep our eyes open. Meanwhile, we need to figure out how to feed our stomachs.”