The Long Road North
Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and snakebite plague the journey of the wetback, but there’s only one danger that counts.
(Page 2 of 6)
“Can you swim?” Javier asked his younger brother.
“Some,” Juan answered.
“But not in this,” Javier said, and smiled. “You would get caught in the trash or a log would hit you. Then you would drown.” He squatted on his heels to watch the river. “I wonder how many have drowned here?”
Juan looked at him.
“No one knows what happens to the ones trying to cross. In the river, we’re neither here nor there, so no one counts.”
Juan shrugged indifferently and settled on his heels to watch the river. They turned in unison as a man came around a bend in the trail. His pants legs were rolled above the knee and his bare feet were stuck in an old pair of unlaced shoes. He was carrying his shirt. “Lots of water,” Javier greeted him.
“Enough,” the man agreed.
“How long will the river be up?”
“Who knows,” the man answered as he passed. “A week. Maybe more.”
They watched the man till he disappeared around the next bend, then turned back to the river. “What do you think?” Javier asked. “Will we make it or not?”
“Pues, sí,” Juan shrugged, unconcerned.
“We’ll see,” Javier said and stood up.
Climbing out of the river bottom, Javier indicated what appeared to be an impenetrable thicket of mesquite. Grass rose a foot and a half to an intricate crisscross of mesquite limbs that formed a green wall. “The first fifty miles,” he said, “it’s like this. Only worse.” He turned and climbed the bank to the railroad tracks.
In town, they waded through the jam of American tourists and Mexican vendors on the narrow sidewalks. Away from the bridge and past the market and curio shops, they found an inexpensive restaurant where each ordered carne guisada, tortillas, frijoles, and Pepsi Cola. They ate slowly, using pieces of tortilla to delicately tear the stewed meat into shreds, which they rolled with beans and salsa into small tacos. When he finished, Javier cleaned his teeth with a napkin and got out his cigarettes.
From the restaurant, they walked to a small corner grocery store. Javier selected two plastic net shopping bags: one blue-and-green plaid and the other orange and yellow. He asked the woman behind the counter for six cans of refried beans, six cans of large sardines, a small bottle of salsa picante, two loaves of Bimbo white bread, five packages of crackers, four packs of Parade cigarettes, several boxes of matches, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Javier distributed the purchases between the two plastic bags, tied the strap of his canvas bag to the plastic handles of one shopping bag, and draped them both over his right shoulder like saddlebags. Juan transferred the shirt and pair of pants from the cardboard box into his own shopping bag.
At a hardware store, Javier bought a compass for himself and a white straw hat for Juan, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be plastic. So equipped, they retraced their steps down Avenida Guerrero toward the bridge, turned west, and in the early afternoon sun, walked out past the railroad station and the cemetery into the slums of Nuevo Laredo.
On the low side of the streets, the soggy contents of houses were draped on fences and shrubs or piled on any dry surface to catch the sun. Block after block, the houses became poorer until the town finally petered out with one last corner grocery. Squatting in the shade against the wall, a man watched them approach. “Hey, where you going?” he called when they got closer.
“Más allá,” Javier evaded. Farther on.
“Toward Carrizo?” The man stood to face them. Beneath his straw hat, he had yellow eyes and a three-day growth of beard. “A truck is coming that will take you.”
“We’ll see,” Javier answered and they walked into the store. Inside, he asked the señora for a half-gallon plastic milk bottle and then bought himself and Juan a Pepsi. When they walked back out, a man was sitting in an old red pickup parked in the shade of the building next to the man with yellow eyes. The driver looked at Javier and Juan with their boots, hats, and plastic net shopping bags. “I imagine you want to cross the river,” he said.
“It is a possibility,” Javier admitted.
“I can take you both toward Carrizo where a man has a boat. Twenty dollars.”
“Ten each?” Javier asked.
“That’s right. Ten each.”
Javier gave him a ten and put his bags in the back of the truck. “What about your friend?” the man asked.
Javier looked at Juan and shrugged. “He doesn’t have any money.”
“You could loan it to him,” the man suggested.
“Not when I have barely enough to cross the river,” Javier answered and started climbing in.
“Fifteen for both,” the man offered.
“Leave him here,” Javier said coldly, and sat down in the back of the truck to indicate he was ready to leave. The driver shrugged and started the engine. As the truck drove away from the store, Juan and Javier looked at each other but made no sign. As the truck pulled onto the road, the driver glanced into the mirror and saw Juan standing forlornly with his shopping bag. He stepped on the clutch and brake, leaned out the window, and shouted angrily, “All right. Get in!”
The truck ran west along the gravel road a mile south of and parallel to the river. Where the land was low and flat, standing water came up to the truck’s axle and the flooded mesquite flats looked like swamps shimmering with heat, reflecting the blue sky with its stray white clouds. Speaking above the sound of crunching gravel and the partially submerged muffler, Javier touched Juan’s arm and said, “We may have to walk all of tonight in water.”
Impassive, Juan blinked once like a shiny black crow inwardly focused on not falling off its wire. “We cross today?”
“At sunset. If we can get away from the river at night, the little airplane won’t see us.”
“Little airplane?”
“From emigración. They patrol with the airplane and in jeeps and trucks.” Then, pointing at the submerged pasture, “Do you think you can sleep in water?”
“I’d rather walk in it.”
“Walk enough, and you can sleep anywhere,” Javier assured him.
The truck faltered twice before reaching dry land and going on toward Carrizo. After fifty minutes of driving they came to a large white warehouse closed and overgrown with weeds and sunflowers. On the far side of the building, the driver stopped the truck in front of a solitary shack. “For ten dollars,” he complained when he got out of the truck, “this is as far as I can take you.”
As Juan and Javier climbed down with their belongings, an undernourished adolescent in a large cowboy hat and black jeans tucked into cowboy boots loped out from the shack and stopped before them. “You want to cross the river,” he said, his pale eyes tracking independent of each other. Not knowing which eye focused and which stared into space, Javier hesitated and the driver said, “Hector, where’s Rodrigo?”
“He’s coming now. Any minute,” the boy promised. He was so thin—a backbone inside a ragged white T-shirt—it appeared unlikely that he could propel the cowboy boots. “Three others are already waiting. We’ll take them all today.”
“Then I’ll leave these two with you,” the driver said, and got back in his truck. As he drove away, Juan and Javier followed Hector to the shack, which was circumscribed by a ring of trash as far as the arm could throw. Away from the road, the tin shack, its roof weighted down with worn-out tires, had been expanded by a makeshift awning covered with huisache branches and a lean-to kitchen. An old Formica-and-chrome kitchen table and chairs sat in the shade of the awning.
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