The Only Road (8 page)

The bus jarred to a
stalling stop in Arriaga. Jaime blinked a few times as his sleepy brain tried to make sense of what was going on. Right, time to get off.  Ángela looked like he felt—tired, disoriented, and grumpy—except her black hair was matted into a huge knot from where the wind had tangled it. They made sure to grab their backpacks and the food bags before following the rest of the passengers off the bus.

“Stay close to me,” Ángela said, not that Jaime had any intention of doing otherwise.

The bus ride had taken close to six hours with all the checkpoints. A clock inside the station said it was 9:53 p.m. The people who got off the bus took off in various directions and disappeared into the night. Jaime and Ángela
stayed within the lights of the bus station, looking around.

The bus station seemed to be in a mostly abandoned part of town. If it was a town.

The wind shifted, bringing scents of salt water and rotten fish from the Pacific Ocean ten kilometers away. An old man staggered by, muttering to himself. He stopped in front of a burned-out light post and began swearing at it for ruining his life. Next to the station two cars sped down the main
carretera
that the bus had come in on, engines roaring as they zipped by going a million kilometers an hour. A handful of rundown storefronts stood in front of the station, locked up tight for the night. Cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and dog poop littered the area between the station and the gravel street.

Other than that, there wasn't much beyond trees and electrical posts. Unless you counted the graffiti painted on the locked partition of one of the storefronts: “
¡Váyanse centro americanos!
” followed by rude words. The graffiti gleamed with fresh spray paint.

“They don't want us here,” Jaime said under his breath.

Ángela stood on her toes as if the extra height would help her see their destination. “No one knows we're here.”

“Not us, you and me. Us, Central Americans.” Jaime pointed to the tag that seemed to bleed from the store.

Ángela pressed her lips and then turned away quickly. “We need to find this refugee shelter.”

“What's it called again?”

“Iglesia de Santo Domingo.”

“Which way is it?”

“I don't know, I don't know!” she cried, and hid her face in her hands. Jaime tried to place a hand on her shoulder, but she shook him away. “Stop with all the questions!”

Ángela crumbled onto the concrete. Jaime crouched next to her and put his arm around her. This time she didn't resist. In his head he heard what Tía, Ángela's mother, always said when one of the children cried:
He's just tired. Poor thing needs to sleep.

Tired. So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
He
had fallen asleep in Pancho's truck;
he
had dozed off in the bus. He never thought whether Ángela had as well. He didn't even know if she had slept the night before.

He licked his lips. He wasn't used to worrying about other people. That was Mamá's job. And Ángela's. And Miguel's. What would Miguel do?

The answer came as if Miguel were right there whispering in his ear: break things down and look at everything logically.
Un paso a la vez
. One step at a time.

Jaime gave Ángela's shoulder an extra squeeze. “We'll figure it out. First thing we have to do is find this church. We'll have to ask someone.” Preferably not the old man who was now shouting random words at the light post.

Ángela took a deep breath as she tried to regain control.
“We have to be careful. The security checkpoints we went through, they weren't just for drug traffic. Remember the Salvadoran woman.
Los mexicanos
really don't like us. They think we're all criminals and not as worthy in the eyes of God.”

He knew all this, of course. He knew their lives were at stake. Just as he knew what would happen if they were sent home. “We have to find this church. We can't sleep here.”

“Right.” Ángela stood up, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “We'll have to find a pay phone and use our last pesos to call Papá. Hopefully he can get ahold of Padre Lorenzo, who can—”

Jaime waved her to stop. His attention returned to the graffiti like a magnet pull. Something was written under the hateful words. He edged closer to the grass median that divided the bus station parking lot from the street, to be sure he read correctly. “God welcomes all at Santo Domingo, 17A. Norte.”

“Ángela, look!” He pointed at the writing. “Could it be a trick?” The address could lead them straight into whatever gang ran Arriaga or into
la migra
headquarters. But he had a feeling they could trust it. Late as it was, with no one around to ask, it was their best option. There were no pay phones in sight.

“We don't have another option,” Ángela said. “We have to try it.”

The street corner in front of the bus station told them what number avenue they were on and the cross street in front. Assuming Arriaga worked on a grid of some kind (as Tapachula had, as well as the villages back home) with number streets going up or down, they should eventually find the church. If they had the right address.

They followed the dark paved highway until it crossed the railroad tracks and the streets changed from
sur
to
norte
, but then encountered a series of wrong turns.

In the dark, in a strange town, every place seemed dangerous. Down one gravelly dirt street, rowdy voices screamed behind closed doors until something like a gunshot demanded silence. Ángela and Jaime grabbed each other's hand and ran the other way. Another wrong turn led them down a dark street where two men outside a bar leered and beckoned to Ángela.

“
Ven, muñeca
, I want to show you something.”

Jaime did what Miguel would have done: he told them off for being disrespectful pigs whose mamás had not raised them properly and that they should rot in hell. Except while Miguel would have said it out loud, Jaime said it inside his head. Outside his head they both ignored the men and hurried to find a safer street.

After some other streets that dead-ended at someone's house or by the river, they finally found a street that crossed 17A Norte. A wooden cross with the faded words
“Santo Domingo” written on it was nailed to a post. An arrow pointed down the street.

Smoke rose into the night sky from what smelled like a bonfire, and laughter echoed from the nearby river. The residential street of crumbling houses ended in front of a rundown church. Its stone and concrete structure was barely standing, requiring the aid of rope and string in a few places. A few men sat outside on the steps smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and speaking in low voices. When Jaime and Ángela approached, the overweight man in the middle stood up.

“Are you looking for shelter? I'm Padre Kevin,
bienvenidos
.”

Padre Kevin looked nothing like any priest Jaime had ever seen before, with his sandals, flowery Bermuda shorts, blue tank top, and the cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. But he wore a silver crucifix around his neck, and the faded words painted on the wall behind him did say “Iglesia de Santo Domingo.”
At least
, Jaime told himself,
he didn't look like an officer or a gang member either
.

“
Gracias
,” Ángela said. “Do you have space for us?”

The priest inhaled from his cigarette and laughed. “There's always space for God's children, just as long as you don't mind squeezing a bit. You, kid, do you want to sleep with the men or stay with your sister and the women and children?”

Too tired to think, he shrugged. Of course he didn't
want to stay with the little kids, but he'd never slept anywhere without a family member in the same room, or a cousin in the hammock next to him.

“We'll stay together,” Ángela answered for him.

Padre Kevin took a deep drag from his cigarette before handing it to one of his
compañeros
. He led the way into the church, which was little more than a large room with pews pushed to one side. Through the moonlight seeping from the open windows, Jaime saw mounds and shapes huddled across the floor.

“If you need the bathroom, the river's less than two hundred meters away. The church's plumbing is clogged, but there's a water basin through that door over there.” Padre Kevin kept his voice low as he pointed out the features of their first night's accommodation.

He gave them two tattered blankets and waved to a spot near a wall that was free. Ángela laid one blanket over the dirt floor. They took off their shoes and lay down, using their backpacks for pillows, and covering themselves with the second blanket.

It had been twenty-four hours and five hundred kilometers since Jaime's parents had woken him up in the middle of the night. Now, as he lay next to his cousin on the hard, dirt floor in a rundown church run by a weird priest, he took a deep breath. Before he'd finished exhaling, he fell fast asleep.

The sun coming through the
open church windows woke them up earlier than they would have liked. But even without the sun, the people shuffling around and babies crying would have gotten them up anyway. It took a few blinks for Jaime's eyes to focus, and a few more for his brain to register what the church looked like.

To say it didn't compare to the church in Tapachula would be like saying a rock wasn't like a rainbow. The two had absolutely nothing in common. This one had a “natural” skylight where the roof had caved in, no paintings, and a crucifix that was little more than two branches tied together into a cross. Patches of the stone walls were missing; dust crumbs from the wall next to Jaime and Ángela clung to the tattered blanket. Bits of cloth were sewed together to make
a curtain in the middle of the room, separating them from the men. In the thick humidity, body odor mingled with dirty diapers and whiffs from the polluted river occasionally joined forces. When Jaime grabbed his shoes, a black cockroach scurried from the laces to find a new hiding place.

And then there were the people. About fifty women and children crammed into their half of the church, making it hot and stuffy despite the draft. On the other side of the curtain there were probably just as many men. Or more.

“Is everyone here going to El Norte?” Jaime asked Ángela as he gave his shoes a good thump before putting them on.

“
Me imagino
.” Ángela looked around at the women and children waking up. “Gangs like the Alphas are all over Centro América.”

Jaime stopped to think about it. If there were about one hundred people here, in this one little church, in a little town, how many other immigrants were there in other refugee centers throughout México? There must be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, heading to El Norte every day. That couldn't be right. He must be adding it up wrong; Miguel had been the one good at math. On the other hand, Jaime's logic made perfect sense. “Even if only half of them make it across the border, which we know is very hard, how can one country fit so many extra people?”

Ángela
licked her lips as if she didn't want to think about that. “That's why they're building a wall. I saw a picture of a fence going into the ocean. They say it's to keep their country safe. But really, it's to keep us out.”

Jaime recalled a couple of photos that Tomás had sent of the ranchland where he worked—pastures and mountains with no buildings as far as the eye could see, so different from home, where houses clustered together with banana trees growing between them like weeds. True, El Norte was huge, and there were some empty parts. But how long would the land stay empty, especially if there were thousands sneaking in each day? He knew they were unwanted, unwelcome. He could only hope that there'd be some room left in the world for him and his family.