Illegal

TWELVE

They had walked two hours, down one canyon, and up another, El Tigre shoving Marisol every time she looked back over her shoulder.

"The little bastard will be fine," he said.

She had long dreamed of leaving Mexico. But not at the barrel of a gun. And not leaving her son behind. She wondered if the separation suited El Tigre's intentions.

She could not run from the stash house until he returned with her son.

"When we get to Calexico," El Tigre had told her, "you can take a bath and change your clothes and I will have your boy there in time for lunch. After dark, there will be a ride to Los Angeles. Between morning and evening, we will have some time together."

Marisol wondered if there might not be something more pleasant to occupy her afternoon. Being bitten by a scorpion perhaps.

"Bring my son to me," she said. "Then we shall see."

He grunted like a pig rooting out a tasty morsel. In the dim light of the stars, she could not make out his expression, but in her imagination, he licked the saliva from his lips.

They followed a rocky trail, the five women and their coyote. In the dark, it was a shadowy landscape of volcanic rocks and sand washes. Scrub oaks and greasewoods. In the distance, outlines of mountains formed the backdrop for the night sky. Marisol realized those mountains were in the United States. Part of the same mountains on this side of the border. The dirt would be the same, the rocks, too. And the people?

We are human beings. We are all of one blood, are we not?

The land leveled out as they neared the border. El Tigre shushed them, for sound carried great distances in the desert night. They were exposed here. Visible to border agents with infrared binoculars.

El Tigre had boasted that he never used the same entrance point twice. Marisol hoped the man knew what he was doing. They were close enough to see the border fence, steel mesh twelve feet high topped by razor wire. No sounds but the crunch of their shoes and the hoot of owls.

Marisol shortened her breaths as she neared the fence, as if her very exhalations might set off an alarm. El Tigre used wire cutters to make an opening, and within seconds, Marisol stood on the hard-baked earth of los Estados Unidos. It felt strangely anticlimactic. Certainly, there was no joy. Not with Tino left behind. But even when he got here, what would her feelings be? What would the future hold? The beginning of some grand adventure, the fulfillment of her father's dream? Or were greater catastrophes ahead?

Lights flashed, and Marisol stiffened. Border Patrol?

But then El Tigre shouted, "Ay! There's the gabacho now."

Car headlights. Two more quick flashes. The car hidden in some pinyon trees several hundred yards from the fence. The women ran toward the headlights.

The car was old-very old-but clean. Orange with a white stripe, air scoops on the hood, and an engine growling like a predatory animal. Tino would probably know the name of the car. She did not, but a decal on its long hood had an illustration of a tornado and the word "Duster."

Four women-two campesinas from the south, one Guatemalan, and the pregnant girl-squeezed into the backseat. El Tigre motioned Marisol into the front seat, where she was sandwiched between the two men. The driver was a long-haired, bearded young man in a baseball cap. He immediately slid his hand along Marisol's thigh before grabbing the floor-mounted gearshift.

With the headlights off, the man gunned the engine, slipped the gearshift into first gear, and spun up the dirt road, and deeper into California.

They had just pulled onto a paved road when Marisol heard the sirens.

Blue lights flashing, two Ford Expeditions sped after them.

"Shit! Border Patrol!" The driver stomped on the clutch, shifted gears, and floored the accelerator. The car fishtailed, then straightened, and Marisol was thrown against the seat.

The next few minutes seemed to her to be one high-pitched scream. The actual screams of the four women in the backseat. The wail of the sirens. The shouts in Spanglish from left and right, the driver and El Tigre cursing at each other, arguing where to go.

Marisol saw the arm of the old-fashioned speedometer, as it fluttered between 105 and 110. They would crash. She was sure of it. A tire would explode. They would careen off the road and into a boulder. Her head would fly through the windshield, and Tino would be left alone. She squeezed her eyes shut and chanted a prayer.

"Protegeme de la muerte, y te llevare una rosa de Castilla, al Santuario de Tepeyac."

"You are winning them!" El Tigre shouted in English. Marisol thinking he meant "losing them," as the two Border Patrol vehicles fell behind.

"Don't matter none," the American driver said. "Bastards will have a chopper over us in a couple minutes."

Barely slowing down, the Duster screeched off the asphalt and onto a gravel road that sloped upward and undulated through a series of rises and dips. Headlights still out, the car seemed to be a missile, launched into the night sky, headed toward some explosive crash landing.

The driver tugged the wheel hard and skidded off the road, coming to rest between a line of manzanita bushes and a single mesquite tree. In front of them, the outline of a mountain appeared as a menacing tower set against the soft glow of the Milky Way.

"Out! Everyone out!" the driver shouted.

"?Aqui?" El Tigre asked, confused.

"I'm on parole. Ain't gonna be stopped with a car full of greasers."

"Where are we?" Marisol asked. "Where do we go?"

"The trailhead." The driver pointed to a pile of railroad ties. Nothing but the darkness of the mountain beyond.

"You cannot leave us here." Marisol imagined the horrific night. Lost on a mountain with un coyote estupido, whose only competence was probably as a rapist.

"It don't look like it, but there's a good trail," the driver said. "You go up one side of the mountain, come down the other. You'll cross a creek and reach another trailhead, looks just like this one. I'll be there in the morning and take you to the stash house in Ocotillo."

"Ocotillo?" Marisol said, fear creeping up her spine. "But we are going to Calexico."

"Too much heat to go that far. Ocotillo's closer."

"But my son. He will not know where I am."

"Tough shit," the driver snapped. He gestured toward the women in the backseat. "Git out!?Vaya!?Vaya! "

Marisol grabbed El Tigre by an arm. "Take me back! Take me to my son now."

"There is no going back," he said glumly, staring at the looming mountain.

They navigated by the light of the stars. No flashlights allowed. Border agents with rifles patrolled these mountains on horseback, El Tigre claimed. Citizen militias, too. Drunken men with guns. Scurrying on all fours up a steep path, she thought she saw a mountain lion. But maybe she imagined it.

Minutes later, an animal howled in the darkness. Eerie, nearly human screams. A peasant Guatemalan woman crossed herself and chanted prayers. Claimed the animal was a chupacabra, the bloodsucking creature of myth.

The endless, unknowable night, Marisol thought, had hardly begun.