Enrique's Journey Part 14

Lourdes thinks of how her own mother couldn't provide enough food for her children, how she could hate her, too. When she was eight years old, Lourdes sought out odd jobs. A neighbor gave her clothes to wash in the river twice a week. When she was nine, her mother dispatched Lourdes and Rosa Amalia, then ten, to work for a former neighbor as live-in maids. With no money, Lourdes quit elementary school. When she was fourteen, her mother sent her to live with her eldest brother, Marco, in southern Honduras. "My mother is sacred to me. I thank her for the little she did for us," Lourdes says.

Enrique is harboring "a silly resentment," she tells him. She didn't forget him. Why can't she get him to reason? He's an ungrateful brat. Lourdes gives her son a dark prediction: "G.o.d is going to punish you," she says. Someday, she tells him, your daughter will treat you the way you now treat me.

Enrique drinks more and more beer. Their fights are often sparked by Lourdes's advice: Don't drink and drive. Control your vices. Be more frugal. You can't spend $1,000 as if it were $10.

"Mira, hijo... Look, son...," she begins.

Enrique cuts her off. "All you do is yap, yap, yap! You keep sticking your nose into things that are none of your business!" he tells her. She treats him as if he were still the infant she left behind. Didn't he fend for himself growing up? Didn't he hop freight trains across Mexico?

"Shut up. Leave me in peace!" he yells. Friends worry. They hear hatred in his voice.

Enrique loves to contradict his mother, to set her off, even when he knows she is right. He talks over her. He leaves his clothes and shoes strewn in the living room, empty beer cans on the front lawn. He tells Lourdes he's going out, then refuses to tell her where.

Enrique makes Lourdes mad-and guilty.

She cooks his dinners. She packs his lunch. She washes his clothes at the Laundromat. She drops off his car and insurance payments for him. She lends Enrique $20 here and there-more if he needs it. Would he have turned out different, she asks herself repeatedly, if she hadn't left him?

For Enrique, alcohol is an escape from the fights. Almost all of the men on his paint crew, depressed to be away from home, are big drinkers. Unlike in Honduras, in the United States beer is cheap. Some sip Budweiser on the job, stashing the cans in an empty paint bucket when the supervisor stops by. Most swing by a store to pick up a twelve-pack at the end of the workday.

At home, four men drink. One can chug twelve beers as Enrique drives him home from work. Enrique sucks down ten beers on weeknights, often with friends in front of the house. He goes to bed at midnight or 1 A.M., getting up at 6 A.M. for work. On Sat.u.r.day, the drinking begins at 4 P.M. Enrique and a housemate can down forty-eight beers together. Sometimes they drink until dawn. They head to work without sleeping.

Enrique is breaking a promise he made to leave his addictions behind once he crossed into the United States. But he feels abnormal, as if he were crawling out of his skin, if he isn't high.

At least he's not sniffing glue.

Going out to drink gets him out of the trailer, where nine people live and Enrique must sleep on the living room sofa.

It also gets him away from Lourdes.

From Thursday through Sunday, in the evenings, he goes to a local bar, a gray stucco building with plywood over the windows and a gravel parking lot. Inside, under a dark, low-slung ceiling, there are four pool tables, a long bar, and a jukebox that plays Latino music.

He frequents a discotheque with a $7 entry fee. There are iron bars over the door. Inside, the walls are painted black. Next to the dance floor a DJ plays nortena and ranchera music. Green and red lights cast a glow over the crowd. Eight women work as ficheras-Latinas who will sit and talk to men willing to buy them $10 beers. Six beers buys two hours of companionship, $5 a dance. A few ficheras provide s.e.x for more.

Enrique and his friends splurge at a topless bar. Women dance on a platform. Men tuck dollar bills into their bikini bottoms. Twenty dollars buys an invitation to a smaller room, where a dancer brushes her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the men's faces. A lap dance is more. Enrique usually spends $150 each visit. One night he invites his friends to this bar, which charges $15 each to get in, and he pays for everything. He blows $300.

When he has money for drinks and marijuana, Enrique is calm and quiet. Otherwise, he gets testy. Sometimes Enrique doesn't have enough money to pay Lourdes his share of the bills. He isn't sending as much money to his daughter as he could.

Lourdes tries to scare Enrique straight, playing on his ignorance of the United States. "If you keep this up," she warns, "I'll have you locked up." She tells him that parents can do that in the United States, even if children haven't committed a crime. Enrique soon learns that Lourdes is lying.

Four months after Enrique arrives in the United States, his work hours get cut. He decides to accompany a painter on his crew to find temporary jobs in South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.

Even on the road, living out of motel rooms, Enrique maintains one ritual. Each Sunday, he telephones his girlfriend, Maria Isabel, in Honduras.

She waits for his call at the home of one of Lourdes's cousins. When she answers the telephone, she is so overcome with emotion she cannot speak. Enrique talks for one or two hours. Maria Isabel cries and cries.

"Maria Isabel, say something, anything," Enrique pleads.

"I miss you. I love you. Don't forget me," she says.

He sends her $100 or more a month. He vows he will be back in Honduras within two years.

Eventually, Maria Isabel tells him of some of the problems she, too, is having. Enrique's family constantly criticizes her. "Don't pay attention to them," he tells her. It is not that easy, she says. Maria Isabel lives across the street from Enrique's grandmother, sister, and three aunts. When she was eight months pregnant, one of Enrique's uncles insinuated that the baby didn't belong to Enrique.

Lourdes prepares for Enrique's return and their first Christmas together again. She has grown to dread the holiday. Year after year, she promised Enrique and Belky she would see them for Christmas. Each time she let them down. Each Christmas she cried and became more hard-hearted. She wished that Christmas would never arrive.

This year, paying Enrique's smuggler has left her strapped for money. She puts up a small plastic Christmas tree. She crowds it with ornaments.

"What an ugly tree," Enrique says. "You put so many things on it that it looks like a pinata!" In Honduras, his aunt had a real tree. She set up a Nativity scene with hay inside her house. There were fireworks. The whole family gathered at midnight for a special meal.

On Christmas Eve, Lourdes goes to bed early. Enrique goes out drinking with friends. He comes home late and drunk. The next morning, Lourdes gives her son a shirt. Enrique doesn't have a gift for his mother.

New Year's Eve is better. Lourdes has never celebrated New Year's Eve in the United States. It brings back too many memories of Honduras, where she would run home from a party at midnight to hug her mother.

This year, she goes to a party with Enrique. At midnight, she kisses her son. Enrique hugs her back, hard. "Happy New Year. I love you," he tells his mother. For the first time in all her years in the United States, Lourdes doesn't cry on New Year's Eve.

HONDURAS.

Criticism of Maria Isabel by Enrique's family grows. Gloria's grandchildren play next door. They return and repeat everything they've overheard Enrique's family say about Maria Isabel.

Jasmin, they say, is dirty and ill cared for. The girl loves to build little houses out of mud behind Gloria's house. Maria Isabel changes her clothes several times a day. Still, in Gloria's disheveled home, where the back door is left open to the muddy yard, her efforts are futile.

Enrique's sister says that Jasmin is barefoot, badly dressed, her hair uncombed. She is skinny and pale and often has a cough. Why, Enrique's family asks, did Maria Isabel stop breast-feeding her after six months? If Enrique sends money, why doesn't Maria Isabel take Jasmin to a good private doctor, not the public clinic?

Maria Isabel cooks, cleans, and goes out on errands and purchases for Gloria's store. She walks Gloria's grandchild to kindergarten. She helps care for the four children in the house while Gloria tends to customers in her little grocery store.

Belky understands Maria Isabel's dilemma. She, too, has always lived as a guest in someone else's home, feeling pressure to make herself useful.

Still, concerned about Jasmin, Belky hounds Maria Isabel: "Why is the girl all dirty? You need to take better care of her."

Sometimes Maria Isabel doesn't respond. Other times, she bristles: "No, I take care of my girl." They have no right to criticize. One of Enrique's aunts has a son who is just as skinny as Jasmin. Should she have to explain that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s stopped giving milk? If the women next door are so concerned about Enrique's interests, why did some of them treat him like a dog, she wonders, when he lived in their home?

The women next door have another reproach: Maria Isabel is misspending the hard-earned money, $100 to $150 a month, that Enrique diligently sends his daughter.

Maria Isabel spends most of the money on Jasmin. She also gives $15 a month to Gloria. She stocks Gloria's refrigerator with fruit, milk, and chicken. She gives Gloria's daughters pocket change. She sends $10 across town to her mother to help her buy heart and asthma medicine.

To the women next door, Maria Isabel is showering money on her family that rightfully belongs to Enrique's child. They know exactly how much she gets. Maria Isabel's money comes in a joint wire that Enrique and Lourdes send to one of Lourdes's relatives.

Enrique's aunt Mirian vigilantly watches when Maria Isabel goes shopping, whom she goes with, how many bags they have when they return.

Mirian, a hairstylist, hears that Maria Isabel has bought hair dye for herself and Gloria's daughters. Mirian is livid; she is so broke she can barely buy used clothes for her three children. When she visits Gloria's house, she sees a can of Jasmin's powdered milk spilled on the floor. Gloria's grandchildren are racing around with fistfuls of white powder in their hands.

Another day, Mirian scolds Maria Isabel for paying $150 for a chest of drawers to store Jasmin's clothes. "You were a fool to buy such an expensive piece of furniture." My cousin could have gotten you a better one for a third of the price, Mirian tells her.

Maria Isabel seethes. She says nothing.

She is grateful for what Enrique sends. Still, most of the money pays for diapers, clothes, medicine, and food for his daughter. Powdered milk alone costs $20 a month.

Maria Isabel has spent most of her life deprived of decent clothing. Can't she buy a dress or splurge $2.50 to get her hair dyed? She cannot live with her aunt Gloria, who is in financial distress, without helping.

Mirian, a single mother, is desperate for money. Since the birth of her third child, she has cleaned a sister's house for $35 a month and food. As each of her children begins elementary school, Mirian's costs rise. They need books, supplies, and $1.50 per day for lunch at school.

"Enrique doesn't send me a dime!" she moans. His only wire has been $20 on her birthday. She remembers changing Enrique's diapers as a baby, and how later, when he was a teen, she looked out for him. When Enrique was a glue sniffer living in his grandmother's home, she cooked his meals. Now, when she is in dire need, all of Enrique's money flows to the girl next door.

She isn't spying on Maria Isabel, Mirian tells her family. She's just protecting Enrique's infant by demanding that Maria Isabel be a better mom. Does Enrique know, Mirian angrily asks her sisters, that Maria Isabel sends money across town to her mother?

When Jasmin turns eight months old, Mirian mails Enrique a letter: Your daughter isn't being well cared for, she writes. Maria Isabel is misspending your money. I've seen some of the clothes you sent Jasmin strewn in the dirt behind Gloria's house. Enrique recalls that when he visited Gloria's house, the children there were dirty. He asks Mirian to keep an eye on Jasmin.

On the phone, he also chides Maria Isabel: "If you don't take good care of that girl, I will come to Honduras and take her away from you!"

For a moment, Maria Isabel is silent. Then her voice turns stiff. "No one takes my daughter away from me."

Gloria is fed up with the digs at Maria Isabel, how her actions are scrutinized, how Enrique's family tries to control her. "Stop bothering Maria Isabel. You are driving me nuts. Stop criticizing her," she tells the women next door.

Gloria's grandson Allan plays rough with Jasmin, who is smaller. He picks her up by the waist and throws her to the ground. He bites her and pulls her hair. When Jasmin is nine months old, Allan plops her inside Gloria's green wheelbarrow. From the porch of her grandmother's home, Belky screams, "Allan, leave the girl alone!"

Allan is already pushing the wheelbarrow. It tips.

Jasmin tumbles to the ground. She wails. Maria Isabel is out on an errand. "Gloria! Allan has thrown the girl off the wheelbarrow!" Belky yells.

Gloria snaps. She shouts across the dirt street that divides their homes: "You think this child is an a.s.sa.s.sin? All you do is talk s.h.i.t. You stick your noses in everything!" She curses. She tells them to mind their own business.

Then she offers up Jasmin. "Here she is. Take her! You can raise her. Let Enrique send money to you," she says. "If the dollars are causing you to make all these allegations, keep the d.a.m.n dollars!"

For months, the families don't cross the street or speak. But Gloria's grandchildren do. They hear the women next door say they think Maria Isabel is having an affair. When she's out doing errands for Gloria, they say, she's really seeing a boyfriend. Maria Isabel is enraged; they are sullying one of the few things she has-her honor. Whenever Maria Isabel sets off on an errand, one of Enrique's aunts steps outside and inquires across the street, "Adonde vas? Where are you off to?"

Jasmin will soon turn one year old.

Lourdes and Enrique send $400 and instructions: they want a joint birthday party for Jasmin and Mirian's one-yearold daughter. That way, Lourdes figures, there will be a video to send north of everyone together.

Maria Isabel feels she is being forced to have her daughter's celebration with women who have maligned her as a bad mother. She has barely stepped into their home since Jasmin's birth.

On Jasmin's birthday, Maria Isabel dresses her in the red dress and white shoes Enrique and Lourdes sent for the party. She sends Jasmin next door. Maria Isabel stays behind, sobbing.

Gloria finally tells Maria Isabel that she should go next door long enough to be in the video for Enrique. Jasmin and the other children have already taken turns whacking her pinata. Maria Isabel arrives as Jasmin is blowing out candles on her Winnie-the-Pooh cake. She balances Jasmin on her hip, nervously adjusting her daughter's party hat. "Happy birthday to you!" the children sing in English. Maria Isabel does not sing. She wipes away tears. A half hour after arriving, she retreats to Gloria's.

Enrique has a short lull in work; he stops sending money. Maria Isabel finds a job sanding chairs at a small furniture factory for $35 a week.

UNITED STATES.

A year after Enrique's arrival, Lourdes's boyfriend smuggles his fourteen-year-old son into the United States. The boy was eight years old when his father left Honduras. That's when the boy started drinking and getting into fights. His father hopes that bringing him to the United States will straighten out the teenager. Instead, he finds new troubles. Teachers constantly call his father in to discuss his behavior. After six months, he drops out of school.

Enrique blames the boy's father for his aggressiveness and penchant to fight. As a boy, Enrique says, he never had a father to protect him. "If his father had been with him, he wouldn't be that way," Enrique says. "He wouldn't be in trouble." The teen and Enrique share a room and drink together. Lourdes fears that the boy is reinforcing Enrique's sense of abandonment.

Enrique drinks more and more. His eyes are red from smoking marijuana. After work he eats, showers, and goes out to play pool and drink late into the night.

Enrique calls Maria Isabel less often-every two weeks, then every month. He tells her he wants to bring her to the United States in a year.

But he hasn't saved any money for a smuggler.

Enrique has never returned to his low: sniffing glue. Now, a few days before Christmas, twenty-two months after he left Honduras, beer and marijuana are no longer enough. He ends the workday by pouring a little paint thinner into an empty Pepsi can. He brings it home. He does the same the next night. The thinner doesn't give him as good a high as Honduran glue, but it's handy.

Over the holidays, his family and others who share the trailer move into a newer, three-bedroom duplex. It has a big kitchen and a living room with three sofas draped in lilac floral slipcovers. There is enough s.p.a.ce to hang a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a wooden carving of the map of Honduras, and a small American flag. Still, the home is crowded. There is little room for Enrique to hide his growing habit.

Twice in two weeks Lourdes has seen her son hold a smelly handkerchief over his nose. She never steps inside Enrique's bedroom. One morning, concerned that he hasn't gotten up for work, she walks in. She smells something funny, like paint.

"What are you using?" she demands.

"Nothing. Nothing! "

She asks about the smell. Enrique yells at her. Lourdes senses that he is hiding something.

For a few days, Enrique stays cooped up in his bedroom, listening to reggaeton music. He has been sniffing thinner for two weeks. One night, he decides to go out. He walks through the living room, toward the front door.

He is hiding something under his arm. "What do you have there? Show me," Lourdes says from the living room sofa.

"None of your business."

Enrique tries to brush past her. Lourdes jumps up and grabs Enrique by the shirt. She smells paint thinner. She's asked friends some questions. Now she knows what the smell means.

Enrique shakes himself loose.

Lourdes's words tumble out. She doesn't care that her boyfriend and three of his relatives are in the living room, listening.

"You're broken, ruined. A drug addict! Why did you even come here? To finish s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g yourself up?"

Enrique curses.

"You're a disgrace. Get your act together! Instead of seeing you this way, I wish G.o.d would take you from me!" Lourdes says. If you keep sniffing thinner, Lourdes tells him, you have to move out. She must think of her daughter.

Enrique does not respond. He peels out of the gravel driveway in his car.

Lourdes is despondent. She worries that he will kill himself driving recklessly. For the first time in her life, Lourdes feels as though she wants to die. Maybe if she were gone, she tells herself, Enrique would know what it is truly like not to have a mother.

That night, Enrique realizes that his body cannot withstand the thinner. Each time he inhales it, the left side of his head, where he took the worst of the beating on top of the train, aches badly. His left eyelid, which still droops slightly from the a.s.sault, pulses and twitches. He has excruciating pain when he turns his head.

He stops sniffing.

He's not doing it because his mother wants him to. He is doing it for himself. He focuses on his old habit, drinking.

One morning at 2 A.M., Enrique is caught doing 55 miles per hour in a 35-mile-per-hour zone. He gets tickets for speeding and having an open container of beer in his car. The sticker on his license plate is expired. Police give him a breath test. They impound the car and take him to jail, where he spends the night. Lourdes sends her boyfriend to bail him out. Enrique's license is revoked for a week.

Many of the men in his paint crew drive drunk. Nearly four times as many Hispanic drivers as non-Hispanic drivers in North Carolina have been charged with driving while impaired. Enrique's workmates tell him not to worry. The government, they say, just wants you to pay a lot of money and tell a judge you are very sorry. The real problems, they tell him, begin with your third arrest.

Enrique pays an attorney and the government $1,000. He tells a judge he is very sorry.

HONDURAS.

Life in Gloria's house has turned tense.