The Long Road North
Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and snakebite plague the journey of the wetback, but there’s only one danger that counts.
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Coyotes sang in the night, the sky turned gray, they lay down to sleep again. By eight o’clock the next morning it was hot in the brush and again they were walking. By noon, they had all but depleted the salty water just to keep their mouths wet. Their faces were a perpetual shade of red beneath their hats; their clothing soaked with sweat; their eyes stinging with perspiration. They stopped to rest beneath a mesquite, and, too hot and too dry to want them, ate beans spread on soda crackers, which, since they had no saliva, stuck to their teeth and gums.
They rested till two before starting again. The brush quivered with heat under the afternoon sun, and the sky was devoid of clouds. Though they had crossed two dirt roads, they hadn’t come to any more windmills and began to think they’d passed them in the night. From the sun and sweat, Javier’s left eye started to itch and turn red. Occasionally, when they stopped to wet their mouths—an act that only defined the thirst—Javier would look up at the blank sky and shake his head. “No quiere nublarse.” It doesn’t want to cloud up, he would say, and smile sadly as if it were a small favor that he was being senselessly denied.
One sip after another of the water which, at the end, was merely provocation, and finally the jug was empty. Their lips burned from the sun and they became acutely aware of their thirst. Tongue, palate, lining of the mouth: it felt as if they would slowly swell and stick together. What wasn’t the heat, a branch in the face, or the next footstep was beyond their attention. Twice they saw rattlesnakes—one coiled and one moving through the grass—and twice ignored them.
At five they came to a windmill. The water was salty, but they no longer cared. It freed their mouths and they took off their shirts to soak with water and sponge themselves. After they had slaked their thirst, they sat beneath the water tank to rest. “How far?” Juan asked.
Javier thought of how long they had walked before saying, “Tomorrow we come to a highway not far from Carrizo, from there, it’s ninety miles to San Antonio.”
“Ninety miles,” Juan repeated.
“But who knows,” Javier consoled him. “Perhaps someone will give us a ride.”
They walked till sundown, ate, and slept. When the moon rose, they walked. At dawn, they found a windmill where they rested until the morning heat drove them on. Again the sky was cloudless; the heat, visible, audible. The brush trembled with the transmission of the sun’s rays passing through, rebounding up from the ground, and shimmering humidly above; the heat’s reverberation climbed slowly, reaching higher and higher cycles, yet hitting no limit.
During the night, Javier’s eye had continued to itch, and with the renewed heat and sweat and rubbing, started to swell closed. By midmorning, his eyelids had swollen into a puffed slit through which Juan could see bloodshot veins radiating out from the black iris. When they stopped at noon, the eye was sealed shut, they were low on water, and they discovered a new torment. Black lusterless flies, small and flat, clung to their pants legs and rode along peacefully until they came to a halt. Then, in a swarm, they attacked hands, faces, and necks, sending the two brothers into a slapping frenzy. Spurred by the flies, the moved on through the heat of the day.
After more than an hour without water, Javier and Juan saw a windmill on the horizon. Their relief, however, slowly turned to despair when, goal in view, they saw how tedious their progress was. With the afternoon heat growing to a crescendo, in their thirst and exhaustion, the windmill appeared to advance before them on the horizon.
The windmill, they found, was surrounded by a deer-proof fence; large mesquite trees drooped around a dark pond of motionless water. The gate to the enclosure was padlocked, and within was a silent and ungrazed sanctuary of green. Javier climbed the gate, then Juan, and they jumped into the lush grass. Like shadows, black peccaries moved away from the far side of the pond. Midway to the windmill, knee-deep in grass, a deliberate and unequivocal rattle struck them like a current of electricity. Rooted to the ground, statues in the glade, they listened to the warning fill the enclosure. Pulse hammering, breath shallow and constricted, neither could see the snake or locate the sound. When it stopped, the silence was absolute and alarming.
They stood paralyzed for a moment, then Javier lifted his cedar stick and tapped the ground before him. When there was no response, he continued to try the grass until sure there was no immediate danger of being struck. They moved forward two steps, prodded the grass, and continued the procedure until they reached the windmill. Still shaking, they washed their hands and faces, ran water over their heads, filled the jug, and left the enclosure.
Hastened by the thought of the road, goaded by their nearness to complete exhaustion, they plodded on. The heat broke at five and there was a light breeze, but by then each step forward was punishment, and Javier’s eye was red and swollen. At the top of every crest, they thought they would see the highway. Each time they saw more brush.
The sun set and they stopped. Javier opened a can of sardines, which they ate with the last of the crackers, and sipping the water like expensive whiskey, they sat in the dusk and smoked a cigarette. Juan stood up to kick out a spot to sleep and look north. “Qué es eso?” he asked, and pointed toward a red blinking light.
“What?” Javier asked with vague interest.
“There’s a light.”
Javier raised himself to his knees and sighted north through his good eye. “Carrizo! It must be the radio antenna at Carrizo. Come on,” he said, getting to his feet, “we’re almost there.”
The red light winked at them as they walked, telling them how far they had to go and how slowly they had traveled. At the top of a hill they could see a set of white headlights flash intermittently through the brush as a vehicle moved east to west. The next time they saw headlights they could hear the faint, mournful whine of a truck approaching and then receding in the night. The two brothers came to a pasture where the underbrush had been cleared and they walked quickly toward the road. At a fence, outside the possible sweep of headlights, they sat down on the ground to watch the pavement. “What do you think?” Javier asked. “If we ask for a ride, we might be in San Antonio tonight.” He savored the idea. “Or la emigración might catch us.”
“And if we don’t ask for a ride?” Juan asked.
“Then we walk another seven days. More, if we have to work for food.”
Juan looked straight ahead at the road and didn’t answer.
“There are always risks,” Javier decided and started for the fence.
The first car caught them in its headlights—Javier with his swollen eye, and black baseball cap; Juan with his white hat—and speeded up. A pickup passed and then a large Oldsmobile sedan hit its breaks as soon as they appeared in the light. They picked up their bags and ran toward the red taillights. A man on the passenger side leaned out and shouted in a friendly voice, “Vámanos a San Antonio.”
Javier and Juan stopped running.
“¿A dónde van?” the man called, “Quieren un ride?” Where you going? Want a ride?
Silence.
“¿Van a San Antonio?” he asked again.
Silence.
And then, “¿Son de México?” Are you from Mexico?”
“Sí,” Javier answered, knowing that it was too late. “Somos de México.”
“Bueno, vámanos a México,” the man said and got out. “Somos de la emigración.”
Within two hours, the car erased what it had taken Javier and Juan three days and nights to do and they were back at the border. The next morning they were processed, and in the afternoon they were put on a bus with other illegal aliens and driven across the bridge to be let out in Nuevo Laredo. Between the two of them, they had five dollars that Javier had held back for an emergency and a couple of cans of food. They stood for a minute watching the people stream back and forth across the bridge, and then Javier turned and started west, retracing their steps to the railroad trestle, over the embankment and through the brush, until he came to a stop beneath a large oak next to the river. “Here we rest,” he said, and set his bags down.
“Then what?” Juan asked.
“Start again.”
For once not impassive, Juan allowed a flicker of surprise to cross his face. “How?” he asked.
“That we’ll think about while we rest,” Javier said, and squatted down to watch the river. “But we’ll make it.” He looked up at Juan. “Do you know why?”
Juan shook his head.
“La necesidad nos obliga,” Javier said.
Necessity obliges.
Javier and Juan arrived in San Antonio thirteen days later on Sunday morning; on Monday Javier went back to his roofing job, and Juan began as a carpenter’s helper on Wednesday. 
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