Chapter Thirty
They’ve all packed their scant belongings, prepared and eaten the remaining food, and are drinking instant coffee by the time the sun begins to slant toward the horizon and El Chacal returns.
Beto has nothing to pack. Marisol has ditched her black wedges in favor of some Adidas trail hikers.
No one talks as they ascend the staircase out of the apartment one last time.
There are two open-bed pickup trucks parked outside, and the back of one is half-filled with several dozen plastic gallon jugs of water, painted black.
Lorenzo approaches the white truck, so Lydia herds Luca toward the blue one.
Beto, the sisters, and Marisol all climb in after them, among the water jugs. Nicolás, too. He sits beside Marisol.
“So, do you have a girlfriend back at college?” she asks.
Nicolás shakes his head.
“You know, my daughter is a college student in San Diego. A sociology major. What’s your field of study?”
Nicolás’s eyebrows animate themselves across his forehead. “I study evolutionary biology and biodiversity in the desert,” he says.
“Oh.” Marisol is unable to muster any appropriate follow-up questions.
“What the hell is that?” Beto asks.
Nicolás laughs. “It means I study how organisms evolve, and what environmental factors influence that evolution, and vice versa.”
Beto looks at him blankly.
“Specifically, I study the migration patterns of certain desert butterflies, and the effect of those changing migration patterns on certain flowering shrubs.”
“Desert butterflies, huh?” Beto says suspiciously.
“Yes.”
“You study, like, where they go?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s, like, a whole job? That’s all you do?”
Nicolás grins at Beto.
“Man, I want to go to college,” the boy says.
El Chacal is securing the liftgate at the back of the other truck, and now he walks over to theirs.
He looks at them individually, checking their gear.
His own shoes are solid, lightweight hikers, dusty enough to appear as if they could belong to any migrant, albeit one with the means to buy himself boots for the trek.
He’s dressed like he was the day he met them in the plaza—close-fitting jeans and a gray Under Armour T-shirt this time.
His backpack, sitting on the seat in the cab, is tiny.
His jacket, made of waterproof Gore-Tex, is light enough to tie around his slim waist. His cheeks, as usual, are a cheerful shade of pink in the light brown expanse of his face.
Everything about his body seems designed for the wilderness.
He is lean, muscular, compact, and he moves with efficiency as he steps from migrant to migrant, examining their footwear, their moods, the weight of their packs.
Nobody with a sniffle or a sneeze will be allowed to make the journey. He stops when he gets to Beto.
“Where’s your bag?” he asks.
Everyone else is clutching their pack in front of them. Beto has nothing.
“I don’t need no bag, güey,” Beto says. “Everything I need is right here.” He taps on the side of his head with one finger.
“That crazy brain of yours going to keep you warm tonight?”
“What are you talking about, warm?” Beto says. “No manches, güey. We’re in the middle of a heat wave. It’s like a million degrees outside.”
It is April in the Sonoran Desert, and uncommonly warm this week. Today’s high was ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit.
“So you don’t have a jacket? A coat, sweater, nothing?” El Chacal asks.
“I’ll be fine!” Beto says.
“Out of the truck.” El Chacal unlatches and folds down the tailgate.
“órale, güey,” Beto says. “For real, I’m fine, I don’t need a jacket.”
“Out,” El Chacal repeats. “I was very specific. I told you what you needed, I told you what would happen if you didn’t adequately prepare.”
“But—”
“And you find yourself a coyote who says he will take you across without the right gear? Don’t fucking pay him. Because he doesn’t give a shit about you, and you will die, understand? Come on, now. Out.”
“But I’ll get one! I’ll get a jacket!” Beto’s voice is rising to a frantic pitch.
“It’s too late,” the coyote says, slapping a hand impatiently on the bed of the truck. “Get a jacket and I’ll take you next time.”
Beto stands up and begins to move slowly toward the tailgate, reluctance in every cell of his body.
Luca tugs on Mami’s arm, but she doesn’t respond.
She should have checked with him. He seems a thousand years old, but he’s only ten, and he saved them; he bought their passage.
So how hard would it have been for her to ask: Now, Beto, you have a good jacket, right?
But she didn’t. And now it’s too late. There’s nothing she can do.
She squeezes Luca’s hand, a meager apology for her failure of foresight, her scarcity of heroism.
The rest of the migrants look helplessly at Beto, but Nicolás is unzipping his pack.
Beto sits with a thump on the back of the liftgate, his feet dangling over, procrastinating.
He riffles through his brain for an argument or plea he might make.
“Here.” Nicolás tosses a heavy, fleece-lined, zippered hoodie onto the boy’s lap.
Beto’s face brightens at once, and Lydia heaves a relieved smile. Luca grins. Beto snatches up the thick, brown fabric and scrambles back to his feet. He ties the arms of the hoodie around his waist while Nicolás zips his backpack again.
El Chacal watches the young PhD student. “You have another one for yourself?”
“And a thermal, plus a rain poncho.”
The coyote nods and slams the liftgate back into position.
Beto has already returned to settle himself back into his spot beside Luca, but El Chacal walks around the side of the pickup truck and speaks quietly into the boy’s ear.
He leans his hands on the edge of the truck, and Beto twists to face him, one knee flopped over, the other propped up.
“You were lucky Nicolás helped you out,” the coyote says to the boy. “I never take kids across, and this is why. I’m not trying to babysit, and I don’t want anybody dying of stupidity. Don’t make me regret bringing you.”
Beto’s face endures a rare slash of stillness, and the sincerity of it threatens to rob Lydia of her careful restraint.
“When I tell you that something’s important, you heed me, understand?
” El Chacal says. Beto nods earnestly. “Because when I say importante it means you will die if you don’t listen.
This journey is no joke. If I say jump, you jump.
If I say cállate, you shut your mouth. If I say you need a jacket, you need a pinche jacket.
” He takes one step back and turns so he can see the migrants in both truck beds.
He raises his voice so they can all hear.
“Same goes for all of you. You hear? This is a grueling journey. Two and a half nights of arduous hiking, and I am your only lifeline. If there’s any problem with that, or if you don’t think you can make it, this is your last chance to say so. ”
The coyote carries a pistol on these crossings to aid in convincing reluctant migrants about the absolute nature of his authority.
He makes sure the migrants know he has the gun by carrying it quite openly in a holster slung low around his jeans.
It serves mostly as a useful psychological prop, and he very seldom has to use it.
Beto isn’t impressed by the gun, which he glimpsed when the coyote was standing beside the other truck, but he is affected by the subtle intensity of the man’s words. Beto knows the truth when he hears it.
“Oye,” the boy says. “I’m sorry.” Beto is like a wide-open moon shining up at the coyote, and something in his yearning sends the memory of Sebastián falling across Lydia’s mind like a ruler across an outstretched knuckle.
How long will the memory of his father sustain her own child?
How long before he’s looking up at strangers this way?
Grief-adrenaline swamps through her body, but Lydia closes her eyes and waits for it to pass.
El Chacal nods, opens the passenger door, and climbs in.
They drive southwest into the desert sunset.
There’s nothing unusual about a couple of trucks full of migrants heading out into the wilderness from Nogales.
No one will try to stop them; anyone who looks can see what they’re up to, but no one here cares.
Lydia is the only one concerned about hiding herself.
She slumps low in the bed of the truck, and shields her face with her faded hat when other vehicles approach and pass.
“Why south?” Luca asks as they turn left out of the town, but she doesn’t know.
She’s relieved when the drive turns to barely paved roads that eventually become unpaved roads that eventually become trails that can hardly be called roads at all.
They are pocked with holes and ruts, and the gravel feels loose beneath the tires.
They’re alone in the desert now, no other cars for miles around, and the migrants hang on to the edges and bounce uncomfortably in the beds of the pickup trucks, their bones juddering when they cross a dip they aren’t expecting.
Lydia holds Luca down to keep him from flying out, but their progress is careful and slow.
When the trucks eventually point west, and then northwest, Luca wonders if they’re moving perpendicular to that boundary now, that place where the fence disappears and the only thing to delineate one country from the next is a line that some random guy drew on a map years and years ago.
They haven’t seen another vehicle for almost an hour, so to pass the time, Nicolás names some of the species of animals that live here, some they might encounter on their travels: ocelots, bobcats, coatimundi, javelina, whiptail lizards, mountain lions, coyotes, rattlesnakes.
“Rattlesnakes?” Marisol says.
Rabbits, quail, deer, hummingbirds, jaguars.
“Jaguars!” Beto says.