Chapter Thirty-Two
They don’t wait until dark to set out. As soon as the sun dips near the ridge at the western end of the valley, and their shadows lengthen to undulating streaks of black along the desert floor, El Chacal tells them to make themselves ready.
“Tonight is difícil,” the coyote tells them.
“Eight miles, rough terrain. You have to keep up. If you fall behind, we cannot wait for you. I won’t risk the whole group for one individual.
So listen up, esto es importante. It’s life or death.
” El Chacal clears his throat to make sure everyone’s listening.
“Just west of here, the road we crossed early this morning cuts north and runs sort of parallel to the route we’re taking, okay? ”
They all nod.
“If you get separated from the group. If you fall, if you twist an ankle, if you decide you need a rest or a piss or a scratch or a sleep, if for any reason you cannot keep up, you go to that road. That is the Ruby Road. Border Patrol and locals pass there regularly. You won’t die out here if you get to that road.
In a few hours, someone will find you there. ”
It’s a grim business, the Ruby Road, and none of them can picture it yet, not while things are going well.
Right now that road is to be avoided at all costs, it’s the very nexus of their fear.
It’s impossible for the migrants to imagine the desperation that might, only a few hours hence, convince them to seek deliverance there.
“We travel this way.” El Chacal gestures with a slice of his hand. “North. So which way is the road? I want you all to know it. Lorenzo! Which way is the road?”
Lorenzo doesn’t answer.
“It’s west,” El Chacal repeats with exasperation. “Which way is west?”
Lorenzo reaches for his phone but there’s no signal in the desert.
“It’s that way.” Luca points west.
“Claro que sí.” The coyote ruffles Luca’s hair. “This kid’s not gonna die in the desert.”
They eat nuts and strips of beef jerky while they walk.
The PhD student Nicolás has some kind of protein paste in single-serving tinfoil tubes.
They look and smell disgusting, but they’re packed with nutrients, and indeed, his energy is impressive.
He’s directly behind Lydia this evening, and he makes quiet conversation as they walk.
She wonders if the protein tubes are caffeinated.
“Whatever you do, don’t go to Arivaca,” he’s saying. “If you’re dying of thirst, those people will pull up a lawn chair and sip lemonade while they watch.”
“Ah, they’re not so bad,” El Chacal interrupts from ahead. “There are good people in Arivaca, too. Life is complicated for them, living so close to the line.”
Nicolás raises his remarkable eyebrows. Although Arivaca is a tiny, remote town of fewer than seven hundred people, a forty-five-minute drive down empty roads from its nearest neighbor, Nicolás, like most people who live in southern Arizona, knows its reputation as a merciless, hardscrabble outpost, a place where vigilante militiamen murdered a nine-year-old girl and her father years ago, hoping to pin the blame on illegal migrants.
The vigilantes wanted to stoke community fear and incite outrage by inventing a group of murderous migrant bogeymen, so they broke into the Flores family home, and shot little Brisenia in the head.
She was wearing turquoise pajama bottoms and red-painted fingernails when she died, curled up on the love seat in her living room.
But because Nicolás is a young, politicized liberal who’s never been to Arivaca, he hasn’t observed how the shame of that murder still weighs on the tiny town.
He’s never been close to a tragedy that barbaric, never experienced a shock so primitive that it shakes him to the very core of his beliefs.
In short, Nicolás has never had a fundamental change of heart.
So he’s unaware of the way Newton’s third law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.
In any case, the point is moot. Lydia has no intention of going to Arivaca, a place where the only way out is to turn yourself in, to ask for help.
She and Luca are going to make it to Tucson, to safety.
They hike almost three miles without incident, and it’s amazing to watch the colors leach back into the desert after the day’s blanching.
There’s a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment—a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight—when the desert is the most perfect place that exists.
The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over the apex before the crash.
The light droops ever farther from the sky, and Lydia can smell the heat of the day wicking away from her skin.
Luca’s backpack bobs in front of her. For the first time since she stood up from the chair on her mother’s back patio in Acapulco and left her iced paloma sweating on the table, Lydia feels like they might survive.
A weird lurch of something like exhilaration.
And then, quite suddenly, it’s very dark and very cold.
Colder than the night before, if she’s not imagining it, and that chill has the effect of prompting all fifteen of them to move faster.
The ground is jagged, studded with rocks, pitching and rising unpredictably, pockmarked by the hidey-holes of unseen animals.
Lydia prays that no one falls. The sisters have been uncommonly quiet, she notices, and she worries about their stamina, so soon after their bodies have endured those other traumas.
Lydia prays, too, for Luca’s feet in his new boots, and for Soledad’s and Rebeca’s feet, for her own feet.
Dear God, keep them strong and unblistered, let them step only in places where human feet are supposed to go.
El Chacal moves at a brutal pace. The rendezvous point is just over a dozen miles north of the border as the crow flies, but those miles cover some of the roughest terrain in North America, with elevation changes of up to seven thousand feet.
Their two-and-a-half-day path winds around the worst of the impassible sections, and funnels them toward cattle tanks in case they get desperate for water, all while keeping them as far away from popular hiking trails and known migra patrolling routes as possible.
At the end of tonight’s walk, near dawn, when they make camp in a cavelike formation a few miles west of Tumacacori-Carmen, Arizona, they’ll be almost home free.
The migrants don’t know this yet. They don’t know any of the details, really, because El Chacal likes to keep things relatively covert.
If anything goes wrong, if a migrant wanders off, or lags behind and gets picked up, the coyote doesn’t want that migrant confessing the whole thing to Border Patrol.
All they need to know is to follow El Chacal.
To do what he tells them to do. If they listen, if they obey, if they persevere, he’ll see to it that they survive this journey.
Tomorrow night, they’ll be pleasantly surprised by the shortness of their walk.
There will be the delighted sounds of wonder among them as they approach the campsite where two RVs are waiting to drive them up the crude, unpaved road that eventually ushers them onto the kind of smooth northern highway they’ve all envisioned; the flat, wide pavement of Route 19 awaits.
The Border Patrol checkpoint there is closed for a specific number of hours each week.
The coyote, with the exchange of regular money for reliable information, knows which hours those are.
It’s a forty-five-minute drive from there to Tucson, to the optimistic anonymity of urban Arizona.
It’s so close. The migrants don’t even realize how close.
But now, in the fifth hour of their vigorous hike, as the loose gravel of the black slope they’re descending in some unnamed canyon slips treacherously underfoot, just as their spirits are beginning to mirror the fatigue of their bodies, there’s an almighty crack in the sky, followed by a downpour.
They’re shocked, all of them, and even Nicolás and El Chacal, who are both well prepared with rain gear, are soaked before they manage to get their ponchos on.
Their bodies want them to seek shelter, and it takes some measure of minutes for them to quell those instincts and return to their pace, trudging through those curtains of rain.
Luca’s jeans are heavy with rainwater and he has to walk with his legs spread apart because the wet denim chafes between his thighs and against one spot at the back of his left hip.
He’s glad for the new hiking boots, and glad that Mami insisted he wear them all around the apartment for the two days in Nogales, to break them in.
He’s glad he hadn’t complained or argued, even though he’d wanted to.
But even with that extra practice, with each step he’s increasingly aware of a pinpoint, a tiny dot only the width of a thread, on the back of his left heel, that’s beginning to trouble him.
At first he ignores it. Then he addresses it.
He tells it that no puny, insignificant speck of pain will prevent him from reaching his destination.
He tells it that he would endure a hundred such pains, a thousand, without blinking an eye.
He is Luca! His whole family has been murdered! He is unstoppable!
“Mami.” His voice is soft with pain, curdled.
“What is it, mijo?”
“I have a blister,” he confesses. It’s excruciating. He cannot go on.