Woman in Black (23 page)

The others had merely grumbled and shuffled their feet, not wanting to anger the one person who seemed to have any idea which direction they should head. Concepción was the only one who'd dared stand up to Hector. “You're a liar and a thief. Worse than the
gabachos
,” she'd hissed, thrusting her face close to his, so close that she'd caught the sour whiskey smell on his breath.

But the
coyote
had only laughed in her face. “You can turn back, if you like. Or take your chances out there,” he said with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. “
Como se quiere.
” Suit yourself.

Concepción had chosen to continue on, as had the others. They'd come this far; why turn back now? Desperation will make a lunatic out of a sane man, she knew. And they were all desperate. The men desperate to find work up North so they could send money to their wives back home. Their women desperate for a fresh start in the Promised Land. But what they hadn't counted on was just how brutal the elements would be. Had they not arrived under cover of night, had they known the full extent of what lay ahead, would they have chosen to go on? Concepción couldn't speak for the others, but she knew nothing would have made her turn back. Her life was of little consequence to her now. All that was left for her was to accomplish what she'd set out to do.

That first night they'd walked until dawn, the sunrise a bloody gash along the horizon before they'd stopped to rest. Alberto Muñoz, their self-appointed leader in Hector's absence, stated that they were now far enough into the desert to keep from being detected by the border patrol's infrared devices. He'd made this crossing once before and was now positioning himself as an authority in the matter. Though Concepción couldn't help wondering why, if he knew so much, he hadn't spoken up earlier, when everyone had been so fearful of the
coyote
's leaving them to fend for themselves.

When Alberto suggested that they rest for a few hours before continuing, she reasoned, “Wouldn't it make more sense to keep going while it's still cool out and rest when the sun is high?”

“I'm tired and my feet hurt,” Guadalupe Reyes complained. A small, sallow woman with bad teeth, Guadalupe had been complaining ever since they'd left Las Cruces, while her long-suffering husband, a sad-eyed man with drooping jowls, had mostly sat silent. She was thirsty, she was hungry, she couldn't move her bowels. She'd whined until Concepción had wanted to slap her.

The others were tired, too, so they voted in favor of saving their strength for the even longer trek ahead. It wasn't until the sun was high in the sky that they had reason to regret that decision. For it wasn't the bountiful sun of Las Cruces that coaxed seeds into sprouting and buds into flowering; this was a cruel sun that withered everything in its path and sucked the moisture from your very flesh. There was no escaping it, either. No shaded doorways or awnings under which to duck. No trees, even, except those clinging stubbornly to the banks of the arroyos, scrawny-looking things scarcely fit to shelter a bird. The sun beat down with a relentlessness that rendered you mad before crushing you under the hot iron of its wheel, as it had Luis Fernández.

Luis, a farmer whose crops had dried up in the drought that had held their region in its grip for the past two years in a row, had been on his way north to seek work in the fertile fields of the San Fernando Valley, where he'd heard a man could earn enough picking fruit in one week to feed his entire family back home for a month. The trouble was that Luis wasn't a young man. The intense heat, coupled with the lack of food and water—by then, they'd nearly run out of both—was testing even the hardiest constitutions, and for the sixty-year-old Luis, it had proved fatal.

In the beginning, the genial farmer had kept them distracted with his jokes and stories, but by the end of the second day, he'd fallen silent. So it came as a shock when, as they were crossing an arroyo, he ground to a sudden halt, bellowing, “
Dios! Donde está?
” He stood swaying on his feet like a
borracho
, legs spread to keep from being pitched off balance, shaking his fist up at the pitiless sky. “Show your face, you rotten bastard!”

“It wasn't God who abandoned us,” young Santos growled in response. “It was that stinking whore's son of a
coyote
.”

“
Hermano
, come sit. You're tired and need to rest,” Concepción urged, gently taking hold of Luis's arm and attempting to guide him over to the riverbank while the others looked on in glazed-eyed exhaustion. But the poor man was no longer in his right mind by then, and he shook her hand off as if it had been a fly.

“
Diablo!
” he hissed at her, his bloodshot eyes staring through her at something—or someone—only he could see. His battered straw hat sat atilt on his head, wisps of white hair poking from underneath it like ticking from a featherbed. He swung around to jab a finger in the direction of his fellow travelers, squatting on their heels in the dust. “You'll all burn in hell!”

Edgardo Estevez, a heavyset man whose large belly had shrunk over the course of their journey until it now resembled a deflated balloon drooping over his belt, let out a harsh, cracked laugh. “We're already there, my friend, in case you haven't noticed.”

Hours later, Luis was dead.

Unlike poor Elena, he had a decent burial, at least. They scraped a shallow grave for him out of the parched soil and fashioned a cross out of small rocks laid side by side.

Natividad Vargas was the next to go. After three days in the savage sun, the plump little berry of a woman withered like a raisin and grew so listless that she was unable to keep up. When she and her husband, Ernesto, fell behind, Concepción despaired of ever seeing them again.

But on the afternoon of the following day, a lone figure appeared on the horizon from the direction in which they'd come, wavering in and out of view amid the heat that rose from the desert floor in shimmering waves. When it drew closer, she saw that it was Ernesto. He was alone.

After he caught up to them, Concepción listened with a heavy heart to his sad but all too predictable tale. “She begged me to go on without her. She didn't want me to die, too.” Ernesto's eyes were red-rimmed but dry—he was too dehydrated even for tears. “But I told her I wouldn't leave her, not ever, not for anything. I told her we would go on together as soon as she was strong enough to continue. But she never … she—” A big, stalwart bear of a man, Ernesto buried his head in his hands, breaking into dry, hacking sobs.

Concepción, close to the breaking point herself, took him in her arms and held him as he wept like a child. She offered no words of comfort, for she knew there were no words for such grief.

Now, five days into it, all she could think about was water. Water, in all its many forms. Deep, cold lakes ringed with snowcapped mountains. Streams tumbling over rocks. Rainwater dripping from eaves. She dreamed of the slow-moving river where she used to swim as a child, and she'd have traded her soul for a dipper of cool, sweet water from the well in her village back home. Her thirst was an entity unto itself, a creature that raved and clawed inside her and would have killed for more than her meager ration had she unleashed it. Was she going mad, too?

Part of her would have welcomed it. For madness would soon be followed by death, which would reunite her with her daughter.

At times, she could have sworn she was there already. She would see her daughter skipping ahead of her, calling over her shoulder for Concepción to hurry up or they'd be late.

But late for what?

The past and the present became one, the visions dancing before her eyes no less real to her than the merciless landscape through which she trudged. She recalled the day of Milagros's birth and felt as if she were experiencing it all over again, her insides cramping with the pain. She could see the midwife at the foot of her bed, her withered brown hands, like the dried roots she used in brewing her potions, massaging the taut, rippling mound of Concepción's belly. And Gustavo peeking apprehensively into the room, hat in hand, looking not so much like an expectant father as like an errant schoolboy poking his head in where it didn't belong. She could hear the old midwife, Lupe, shooing him away, scolding that he had best behave himself now that he was about to become a father, and that if he didn't, she would come after him herself and beat some sense into him.

By then, his reputation was well-known among the villagers. But Concepción loved him despite his errant ways. How could she not? Even coming home late from bars stinking of liquor, he never walked in without a smile on his handsome gaucho's face, brimming with apologies and offering promises, no doubt heartfelt in that moment, that it was the last time, that he would never do this to her again. What did he need with all that when he had her? he'd say, pulling her into his arms. She was everything to him, the sun, the moon, and the stars all wrapped up into one. He would kiss her neck and whisper in her ear that he'd give her as many babies as she wanted, if only she would forgive him this one last time.

Each time Concepción would hate herself a little more for swallowing his lies. It wasn't until Milagros came that all that changed. In the instant that she first laid eyes on her daughter, the love she'd felt for her husband was transferred to the tiny, precious bundle with which she'd finally been blessed, after so much misfortune. Oh, she knew that Gustavo, in his own way, had tried to be the husband and father he'd always vowed to be. But the drink had had a hold on him as strong as the devil's. By the end, the only thing that had dried up had been his promises to quit drinking, until finally he stopped coming home altogether.

But now the daughter who'd filled that void inside her was gone, too. Which was why Concepción was so determined to make it through this ordeal. If she died out here in the desert, her soul would be in a state of eternal unrest, she feared. She had to stay alive long enough to accomplish what she'd set out to do. After that, she would willingly meet her maker.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Guadalupe Reyes wailing, “It's useless. We don't even know if we're going in the right direction. We're all going to die!” While the others had withered, she'd only grown more bloated. Her face, taut and shiny, was like a giant blister about to burst.

Concepción listened to as much of it as she could stand before she finally snapped, “If you're going to die, then hurry up and get on with it so you can leave the rest of us in peace!”

Guadalupe was shocked into silence.

Alberto Vargas spoke up in her defense. “She's right,” he said wearily. “We could be going in circles, for all we know.” The macho authority he'd bandied about earlier was nowhere in evidence now. His shoulders were slumped with exhaustion and defeat.

“We know that's west.” Concepción pointed toward the distant hilltops, cast in the pinkish glow of the rising sun. “Which means if we keep going in that direction, we're bound to get to a road eventually.” They were in California, that much she knew. A place where everyone owned their own car, two or three in some cases, she'd heard tell. And where there were cars, there were bound to be highways.

“Yes, but how much farther can we go without food or water?” asked the boy, Santos.

“We've come this far,” she reminded him. “We'll make it the rest of the way, God willing.”

“What about my wife? Was that God's will, too?” demanded Ernesto. “An innocent woman who'd have given her last drop of water to save someone else?” He glared at Concepción almost accusingly.

She thought once more of Milagros. Her innocent, good-hearted daughter, whose life had also been cut short. “I can't give you reasons.” She spoke to Ernesto as a mother would to her child, firmly but not without compassion. “All I know is that we can't lose faith or we
will
die.”

Somehow they summoned the strength to continue on. They trudged across the bare, scrubbed plain, passing through clumps of ocotillo and cholla that tore at their flesh and left them bleeding. After what seemed an eternity they crossed from the desert into scrublands, where the terrain was hillier and where they grew increasingly less mindful, while scrambling up boulder-strewn slopes, of the rattlesnakes that might be lurking in the crevices between rocks. So what if they were bitten? Death would only come sooner that way.

At midday, they stopped to rest beneath a rocky outcropping where there was some shade, at least. They passed around the last of the plastic jugs, in which only a scant inch or so of water remained, each taking a careful sip. When the sun had dipped below the horizon, they set out once more, Concepción urging them on despite her own exhaustion.

They were making their way up a steep ridge when she heard a sound that was like the rushing of a stream. The others heard it, too, and several people fell to their knees with cries of joy, while the more practical-minded, Concepción among them, were spurred on to scramble the rest of the way to the summit so as to more quickly reach the blessed body of water they imagined was on the other side.

But when she crested the ridge, there was no stream. It was something even better: a highway. The rushing sound they'd heard was that of cars whipping along it at high speed.

Concepción sank to her knees, sending up a heartfelt prayer of thanks. The boy, Santos, went charging down the slope, staggering in his delirium and crying out hoarsely. He might have succeeded in attracting the attention of a passing motorist if Alberto Muñoz, his good sense restored, hadn't run after him and tackled him to the ground.

“
Cuídate!
” warned the older man. “Don't you know what will happen if they catch us?”

It was at that moment that Concepción realized the journey,
her
journey, was far from over. Having emerged from the very fires of hell, she was now faced with another, seemingly insurmountable obstacle. How was she to locate her son-in-law, Eduardo, in this strange land, when she spoke no English and didn't know her way around? Where she would constantly be at risk of being apprehended by the authorities and sent back? She contemplated this as she stumbled along by the side of the road after having parted company with the others (at the suggestion of Alberto, who'd said that they would be too conspicuous traveling in a group).