In his imagination, the desert had always been hot. Nothing but sand for miles and miles, blazing sun over sizzling, baked land; cow skeletons bleached pure white by the heat.
But here he was, freezing to death in a mythic land of hot.
This wasn’t his plan, to end up lying here in the middle of nowhere, caught on rusty barbed wire, blood spilling from a hole in his side, staining the dry ground and gathering into chilly red pools around him. But nobody’s plan ever concludes with the hero panting in the dirt like a mongrel dog. He smiled at this thought, tried to imagine a world where he was prepared for this ending, a world where he didn’t begin with the same tired dreams of glory and money, just one little trip across the border, one large hiking backpack, a thousand miles, pick up and drop off, no problem.
The trip had begun smoothly enough. They drove for most of a day, cruising along a dusty Mexican highway at a steady 60. Tiny rural towns rolled by, one after the other. They stopped for gas at run-down stations, where he bought Pepsi in thick, bluish glass bottles from toothless vendors who all looked the same. They saw very few people. Nobody seemed to notice them, much less ask any questions about their journey.
He didn’t ask what they were carrying. He knew it was best to know as little as possible. He didn’t need to ask, anyway - he already knew what the backpack contained. He’d watched enough of the news reports that show up once or twice a week on Southern California television stations, footage of Border Patrol agents unloading bag after bag, tallying up their finds. 100 kilos of cocaine, 50 kilos of heroin, sometimes those spectacular busts where the agents come across thousands and thousands of kilos of pot, so much they have to stack the neat bricks against the wall outside the station, like a child’s fort built with marijuana instead of couch cushions.
The man he traveled with said his name was Jorge. He knew it wasn’t. After all, Jorge knew him as Richard, which was not what his mother called him. They drove mostly in silence, listening to the norteno ballads that crackled over a dozen different radio signals.
The man who called himself Jorge was quiet with the easy silence of a person who knows he risks nothing. Jorge’s job was to drive up to the border, point out the route and hand over some supplies, a map, an address in Los Angeles and, of course, the backpack. Then he would drive away, covering the journey in reverse, unrolling all the miles they had logged, back to the starting point, where he would pick up another Americano and begin the trip all over again.
The adventure had begun a week ago, at a dusty bar near the square in one of those central Mexican towns that tourists never visited. He had sat at a table in the corner, drinking a half-warm Modela Negra, and listening intently to the man sitting across him. This man, who did not offer his name, wore a cream-colored shirt, stained yellow under the arms, and buttoned over a firm, round paunch. A large gold crucifix hung around his neck, suspended from a gaudy chain. As the man spoke, he gestured with the cigar clutched in his right hand, punctuating his speech with smoke trails that coiled above their heads in thick, odorous rings.
The man told Richard that the trade was getting increasingly difficult, that the Border Patrol presence had increased so that it was practically impossible for anyone who looked even the tiniest bit brown to get five steps past the fence.
He and his “associates”, he said, were losing too much money. He was tired of watching newscasts featuring DEA agents gleefully detailing how much of his property they had intercepted.
So he had started using Americans to cross the border for him. Young, clean-cut, good-looking Americans who wouldn’t alert the suspicions of the agents who patrolled the border fence, outfitted with dogs and infrared goggles and heat sensors. These American kids, he’d learned, could toss on a floppy hat, some binoculars and one of his backpacks and waltz right across the border, no problem.
In the event they were questioned, the Americanos were trained to give the same ready story. They had left their car in Tecate, they would explain, on the Mexican side of the border and were starting on the first leg of the Pacific Crest Trail, the backpacking route stretching up through the western states, all the way to the border with Canada.
And, he rejoiced, it had worked. Five times so far. Richard would be the sixth. The man laughed and sucked on his cigar. You American kids, he said. You’ll do pretty much anything for enough money. Must be all those commercials, all that TV you watch. Makes people greedy.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Richard smiled at the memory of the man’s presumption, his certainty that he knew all about Americans and their motivations. But he knew that the man had it wrong. Because the kind of kids he was picking up didn’t need money.
He hadn’t needed the money. That dusty day, when he sat with the man in the bar on the square, he didn�t have much. But to get more would have meant only a quick call home and a trip to the nearest tienda, where he would line up with all the other people waiting for wire transfers from relatives in the U.S. He could have called and asked his parents and they would have sent him as much as he needed. In fact, he’d already called twice in the six months since he flew down to Mexico City to celebrate finishing high school and to enjoy a summer before beginning the next task on his lifelong to-do list.
Graduate from high school. Check.
Backpack through a foreign country. Check.
Head off to college. Check.
Except it hadn’t happened like that. He had gone to Mexico to escape for a while, to “chase down some adventures,” as his dad had said with a hearty slap on the back.
But when it came time to head north again, he just - didn’t.
He hadn’t decided to stay in a big moment like those in the movies, where the main character gazes out onto the crashing waves of some pristine beach and realizes, right then, that this is where he belongs and then triumphantly splashes into the surf, laughing and free.
It hadn’t been nearly so dramatic. The day he had planned to leave came. And then it went. And then more days went by. And he never left. Never thought about leaving. He just stayed, wandered far away from the tourist destinations, away from Mexico City, Cabo, Baja, and all of that.
His four years of private school Spanish class meant he could go wherever he pleased, hitching rides across the country, sitting in dozens of bars and dozens of squares just like the one where he met the man who sent him on this journey that was, he figured, just a few hours from ending.
