great distances. We wear huaraches on our feet and the matches last for days. My teammates called me a mountain goat. I could go all day.”
Héctor said, “I am not much at running up mountains.”
Miguel seemed to be turned away from Héctor now, his voice falling distant.
“These cigarettes. I am probably not good at running the slopes any more, either.”
Héctor heard Miguel lie down, rustling in his corner, then grow silent, except for his breathing. Their conversation for this day was over. Héctor stretched out on the hard concrete, closed his eyes and thought of mountain goats running wild and free along green slopes. How pleasant to live as a goat with all the berries and vegetation his family could ever want to eat growing where they lived and played, with no worries about the future, with no thought of what may lie beyond their lush, green slope, and no concern with trying to cross difficult obstacles to keep the family fed.
When sleep came, Héctor dreamed not of contented goats, but of a withered corpse swinging in the hot wind.
ONCE EACH DAY the door opened and a coyote delivered sandwiches or fruit with drinking water. During the thirteenth night, Héctor awoke to someone kicking his boot.
“Get up. Get up! Let’s move. Quickly now!” a man barked, his voice unfamiliar.
Then Héctor heard Miguel say, “I am awake, mister.”
The stranger in the room held a flashlight, and in the shadows Héctor could see Miguel stumbling to his feet, as if he were not quite awake. The room, aside from the narrow shaft of light from the flashlight, remained dark, and Héctor felt certain the morning light was yet hours away. In seconds he and Miguel stood fully alert. He caught a glint of metal across the stranger’s chest, no doubt a gun strapped there.
“Follow me. Do not speak, but move quickly,” he said. “Piss before we leave.”
How strange this all was. The faceless stranger commanded their complete obedience, yet they had no way of knowing who he was. Héctor felt like a schoolboy being told to piss, but both he and Miguel did as they were told. When they finished, they followed the stranger a few meters to a pickup truck. He motioned to the back, and the men climbed in. In seconds they were racing down the road. The wind chilled Héctor, and he pulled his knees to his chest.
Miguel spoke first, “I guess this is it, Héctor. This night we will cross into America.” He paused, then added, “Or maybe we are about to be killed. Who can know these things until they happen, heh, pollo?” He laughed at his attempt at humor, but Héctor did not smile. He had been wondering if this man with the gun was part of the plan. Perhaps he was a lawman. Perhaps the coyote had been killed, and this man planned to take Héctor and Miguel into the desert and kill them. How could he know? He was a pollo, indeed, a scared shitless little chick, just as Miguel had said when they had met.
The truck slowed and turned into the parking lot of a large, nondescript building, perhaps a warehouse. The driver flashed his lights three times, and immediately the huge door to the building rose. The truck entered the building before the door fully opened, and in seconds it closed behind them.
Miguel prodded Héctor with the heel of his boot and whispered, “Knowing you has been a pleasure, Héctor.”
Miguel’s face wore no expression, no hint of seriousness or humor, excitement or fear. This Miguel fellow could joke his way through a firing squad to hide his emotions.
Inside the warehouse florescent lights glowed bright. Héctor eyed a large delivery truck and counted fifteen men. Most sat in a group on the floor along the left side of the large, open room. A few busied themselves around the delivery truck, and Héctor wondered if it would deliver him across the border. The building appeared to be a storage facility for toys. Crates and bins of dolls, puppets, toy drums, and other children’s playthings overflowed onto shelves along the high walls. Héctor thought of little Alejandra. Perhaps he could keep a doll for her, present it to her when she and her mother arrived in America.
The stranger who had driven them here got out of the truck, and Héctor saw him for the first time in the light. A gun strapped across his broad chest, he looked like the professional wrestlers Héctor had seen in comic books and on posters along the streets in Mexico City. His upper arms were the size of Héctor’s thighs, and Héctor thought this man had no need of a gun. He wore canvas pants, black boots, and a green shirt with snaps up the front. His straw cowboy hat, white and spotless, seemed oversized, as if his commanding figure called for a hat bigger than anyone else wore.
“Go over there with the others,” he said, motioning to the group sitting along the wall.
Héctor and Miguel did as they were instructed. How strange to be in a room with so many men without speaking. The men who were not seated, the ones in charge, moved quickly and smoothly without any words. Each seemed to have a job to do, and each had done his job many times before. Héctor looked around at the men among whom he sat. He saw in them what Miguel had claimed to see in him just days before. They looked nervous mostly. To sit silently and do as other men commanded was an odd and humbling way for a man to behave. But each of them knew they had chosen to be here, and each would do as he was told in order to achieve his dreams. Héctor felt a strong connection to these strangers. He thought about their ride to America in the back of the delivery truck. Perhaps there they would talk of their loved ones, of what they were leaving behind and of the places they planned to go in El Norte. Perhaps some would become friends, and maybe even settle in the same town in Texas or South Carolina or Arizona. These thoughts calmed Héctor’s nerves, and thrill replaced the dread he had felt over Miguel’s talk of impending death.
In less than four minutes, the back of the truck had been completely loaded with crates of toys. One of the men slammed shut the back of the delivery truck, and with it Héctor’s hopes of riding smoothly into America vanished. So, he and these pollos would not be riding in this truck after all. He felt his shoulders droop.
Then, “Okay, pollos. Here, now. Let’s go,” the man with the gun said.
The men rose to their feet, and shuffled over to the truck where the man stood.
One at a time a worker took a man underneath the truck and came out alone. Héctor could not understand what was happening. When his turn came, he crawled under the bed of the truck with the man. A small hole, no bigger than the lid of a barrel, opened above Héctor’s head.
“Climb in, and lie flat. Your head goes that way, your feet at this end. Pack in tight. We have many of you. Now go,” he said, guiding Héctor, helping him disappear into the dark underbelly of his deliverance.
2
THEY HAD NOT lain together in far too many nights. When anyone asked her about him, Lilia would say, no, no, I have not heard from him yet. Yet, as if a future with her husband were certain.
When the driver slowed to nearly a stop, Lilia slid from the back of the truck and began the short, hot walk home from the agave fields. She passed two pigs, the one with the crescent-shaped, black patch on its back and the other with the odd gait, as if one of its legs were shorter than the rest. She knew them well, and the silly hens, too, who pecked the dust beside her path. Passing the shack of the old widow who lived just down the lane, Lilia smelled the familiar scent of her fish stew on the warm Pacific breeze. Before Lilia reached the courtyard, she heard her grandmother Crucita singing an old tune she often sang when she cooked or worked her clay or swept the courtyard. The music sounded like home. How strange to feel both joy and sadness at once.
