Enrique's Journey Part 2

"Do I want to have them with me so badly," she asks herself of her children, "that I'm willing to risk their losing their lives?" Besides, she does not want Enrique to come to California. There are too many gangs, drugs, and crimes.

In any event, she has not saved enough. The cheapest coyote, immigrant advocates say, charges $3,000 per child. Female coyotes want up to $6,000. A top smuggler will bring a child by commercial flight for $10,000. She must save enough to bring both children at once. If not, the one left in Honduras will think she loves him or her less.

Enrique despairs. He will simply have to do it himself. He will go find her. He will ride the trains. "I want to come," he tells her.

Don't even joke about it, she says. It is too dangerous. Be patient.

REBELLION.

Now Enrique's anger boils over. He refuses to make his Mother's Day card at school. He begins. .h.i.tting other kids. At recess, he lifts schoolgirls' skirts. When a teacher tries to make him behave by smacking him with a large ruler, Enrique grabs the end of the ruler and refuses to let go, making the teacher cry.

He stands on top of the teacher's desk and bellows, "Who is Enrique?"

"You!" the cla.s.s replies.

Three times, he is suspended. Twice he repeats a grade. But Enrique never abandons his promise to study. Unlike half the children from his neighborhood, he completes elementary school. There is a small ceremony. A teacher hugs him and mutters, "Thank G.o.d, Enrique's out of here."

He stands proud in a blue gown and mortarboard. But n.o.body from his mother's family comes to the graduation.

Now he is fourteen, a teenager. He spends more time on the streets of Carrizal, which is controlled by the Poison gang and is quickly becoming one of Tegucigalpa's toughest neighborhoods. His grandmother tells him to come home early. But he plays soccer until midnight. He refuses to sell spices. It is embarra.s.sing when girls see him peddle fruit cups or when they hear someone call him "the tamale man." Sometimes his grandmother pulls out a belt at night when Enrique is naked in bed and therefore unable to quickly escape her punishment by running outside. "Ahora vamos a areglar las cuentas. Now we are going to settle the score," she says. She keeps count, inflicting one lash for each time Enrique has misbehaved.

Enrique has no parent to protect him on the streets of Carrizal. He makes up for it by cultivating a tougher image. When he walks alongside his grandmother, he hides his Bible under his shirt so no one will know they are headed to church.

Soon, he stops going to church at all.

"Don't hang out with bad boys," Grandmother Maria says.

"You can't pick my friends!" Enrique retorts. She is not his mother, he tells her, and she has no right to tell him what to do. He stays out all night.

His grandmother waits up for him, crying. "Why are you doing this to me?" she asks. "Don't you love me? I am going to send you away."

"Send me! No one loves me."

But she says she does love him. She only wants him to work and to be honorable, so that he can hold his head up high.

He replies that he will do what he wants.

Enrique has become her youngest child. "Please bury me," she says. "Stay with me. If you do, all this is yours." She prays that she can hold on to him until his mother sends for him. But her own children say Enrique has to go: she is seventy, and he will bury her, all right, by sending her to the grave.

Sadly, she writes to Lourdes: You must find him another home.

To Enrique, it is another rejection. First his mother, then his father, and now his grandmother.

Lourdes arranges for her eldest brother, Marco Antonio Zablah, to take him in. Marco will help Enrique, just as he helped Lourdes when she was Enrique's age. Marco once took in Lourdes to help ease the burden on their mother, who was struggling to feed so many children.

Her gifts arrive steadily. She sends Enrique an orange polo shirt, a pair of blue pants, a radio ca.s.sette player. She is proud that her money pays Belky's tuition at a private high school and eventually a college, to study accounting. In a country where nearly half live on $1 or less a day, kids from poor neighborhoods almost never go to college.

Money from Lourdes helps Enrique, too, and he realizes it. If she were here, he knows where he might well be: scavenging in the trash dump across town. Lourdes knows it, too; as a girl, she herself worked the dump. Enrique knows children as young as six or seven whose single mothers have stayed at home and who have had to root through the waste in order to eat.

Truck after truck rumbles onto the hilltop. Dozens of adults and children fight for position. Each truck dumps its load. Feverishly, the scavengers reach up into the sliding ooze to pluck out bits of plastic, wood, and tin. The trash squishes beneath their feet, moistened by loads from hospitals, full of blood and placentas. Occasionally a child, with hands blackened by garbage, picks up a piece of stale bread and eats it. As the youngsters sort through the stinking stew, thousands of sleek, black buzzards soar in a dark, swirling cloud and defecate on the people below.

Enrique sees other children who must work hard jobs. A block from where Lourdes grew up, children gather on a large pile of sawdust left by a lumber mill. Barefoot atop the peach-colored mound, their faces smeared with dirt, they quickly scoop the sawdust into rusty tin cans and dump it into big white plastic bags. They lug the bags half a mile up a hill. There, they sell the sawdust to families, who use it as kindling or to dry mud around their houses. An eleven-year-old boy has been hauling sawdust for three years, three trips up the hill each day. The earnings buy clothes, shoes, and paper for school.

Others in the neighborhood go door-to-door, offering to burn household trash for change. One afternoon, three children, ages eight to ten, line up in front of their mother, who loads them down with logs of wood to deliver. "Give me three!" one boy says. She lays a rag and then several pieces of wood atop his right shoulder.

In one neighborhood near where Enrique's mother grew up, fifty-two children arrive at kindergarten each morning. Forty-four arrive barefoot. An aide reaches into a basket and places a pair of shoes into each one's hands. At 4 P.M., before they leave, the children must return the shoes to the basket. If they take the shoes home, their mothers will sell them for food.

Black rats and a pig root around in a ravine where the children play.

At dinnertime, the mothers count out three tortillas for each child. If there are no tortillas, they try to fill their children's bellies with a gla.s.s of water with a teaspoon of sugar mixed in.

A year after Enrique goes to live with his uncle, Lourdes calls-this time from North Carolina. "California is too hard," she says. "There are too many immigrants." Employers pay poorly and treat them badly. Even with two jobs, she couldn't save. She has followed a female friend to North Carolina and started over again. It is her only hope of bettering her lot and seeing her children again. She sold everything in California-her old Ford, a chest of drawers, a television, the bed she shares with her daughter. It netted $800 for the move.

Here people are less hostile. She can leave her car, even her house, unlocked. Work is plentiful. She quickly lands a job as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant. She finds a room to rent in a trailer home for just $150 a month-half of what the small garage cost her in Los Angeles. She starts to save. Maybe if she ama.s.ses $4,000, her brother Marco will help her invest it in Honduras. Maybe she'll be able to go home. Lourdes gets a better job on an a.s.sembly line for $9.05 an hour-$13.50 when she works overtime.

Going home would resolve a problem that has weighed heavily on Lourdes: Diana's delayed baptism. Lourdes has held off, hoping to baptize her daughter in Honduras with Honduran G.o.dparents. A baptism would lift Lourdes's constant concern that Diana's unexpected death will send her daughter to purgatory.

Lourdes has met someone, a house painter from Honduras, and they are moving in together. He, too, has two children in Honduras. He is kind and gentle, a quiet man with good manners. He gives Lourdes advice. He helps ease her loneliness. He takes Lourdes and her daughter to the park on Sundays. For a while, when Lourdes works two restaurant jobs, he picks her up when her second shift ends at 11 P.M., so they can share a few moments together. They call each other "honey." They fall in love.

Enrique misses Lourdes enormously. But Uncle Marco and his girlfriend treat him well. Marco is a money changer on the Honduran border. It has been lucrative work, augmented by a group that for years has been in constant need of his services: U.S.-funded Nicaraguan contras across the border. Marco's family, including a son, lives in a five-bedroom house in a middle-cla.s.s neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. Uncle Marco gives Enrique a daily allowance, buys him clothes, and sends him to a private military school in the evenings.

By day, Enrique runs errands for his uncle, washes his five cars, follows him everywhere. His uncle pays as much attention to him as he does his own son, if not more. Often, Marco plays billiards with Enrique. They watch movies together. Enrique sees New York City's spectacular skyline, Las Vegas's shimmering lights, Disneyland's magic castle. Negrito, Marco calls Enrique fondly, because of his dark skin. Marco and Enrique stand the same way, a little bowlegged, with the hips tucked forward. Although he is in his teens, Enrique is small, just shy of five feet, even when he straightens up from a slight stoop. He has a big smile and perfect teeth.

His uncle trusts him, even to make bank deposits. He tells Enrique, "I want you to work with me forever." Enrique senses that Uncle Marco loves him, and he values his advice.

One week, as his uncle's security guard returns from trading Honduran lempiras, robbers drag the guard off a bus and kill him. The guard has a son twenty-three years old, and the slaying impels the young man to go to the United States. He comes back before crossing the Rio Grande and tells Enrique about riding on trains, leaping off rolling freight cars, and dodging la migra, Mexican immigration agents.

Because of the security guard's murder, Marco swears that he will never change money again. A few months later, though, he gets a call. For a large commission, would he exchange $50,000 in lempiras on the border with El Salvador? Uncle Marco promises that this will be the last time.

Enrique wants to go with him, but his uncle says he is too young. He takes Victor, one of his own brothers, instead. Robbers riddle their car with bullets. Enrique's uncles careen off the road. The thieves shoot Uncle Marco three times in the chest and once in the leg. They shoot Victor in the face. Both die. Now Uncle Marco is gone.

In nine years, Lourdes has saved $700 toward bringing her children to the United States. Instead, she uses it to help pay for her brothers' funerals.

Lourdes goes into a tailspin. Marco had visited her once, shortly after she arrived in Long Beach. She had not seen Victor since leaving Honduras. If the dead can appear to the living, Lourdes beseeches G.o.d through tears, allow Victor to show himself so she can say good-bye. "Mira, hermanito, I know you are dead. But I want to see you one more time. Come to me. I promise I won't be afraid of you," Lourdes says.

Lourdes angrily swears off Honduras. How could she ever live in such a lawless place? People there are killed like dogs. There are no repercussions. The only way she'll go back now, she tells herself, is by force, if she is deported. Soon after her brothers' deaths, the restaurant where Lourdes works is raided by immigration agents. Every worker is caught up in the sweep. Lourdes is the only one spared. It is her day off.

Lourdes decides to wait no longer. With financial help from her boyfriend, she baptizes seven-year-old Diana. The girl's G.o.dparents are a trustworthy Mexican house painter and his wife. Lourdes dresses Diana in a white floor-length dress and tiara. A priest sprinkles her daughter with holy water. Lourdes feels that one worry, at least, has been lifted.

Still, her resolve to stay in the United States brings a new nightmare. One morning at four, she hears her mother's voice. It is loud and clear. Her mother utters her name three times: Lourdes. Lourdes. Lourdes. "Huh?" Lourdes, half awake, bolts up in bed, screaming. This must be an omen that her mother has just died. She is inconsolable. Will she ever see her mother again?

Back in Honduras, within days of the two brothers' deaths, Uncle Marco's girlfriend sells Enrique's television, stereo, and Nintendo game-all gifts from Marco. Without telling him why, she says, "I don't want you here anymore." She puts his bed out on the street.

ADDICTION.

Enrique, now fifteen, gathers his clothing and goes to his maternal grandmother. "Can I stay here?" he asks.

This had been his first home, the small stucco house where he and Lourdes lived until Lourdes stepped off the front porch and left. His second home was the wooden shack where he and his father lived with his father's mother, until his father found a new wife and left. His third home was the comfortable house where he lived with his uncle Marco.

Now he is back where he began. Seven people live here already: his grandmother, agueda Amalia Valladares; two divorced aunts; and four young cousins. They are poor. Gone are Marco's contributions, which helped keep the household financially afloat. agueda has a new expense: she must raise the young child left by her dead son Victor. The boy's mother left him as a baby to go to the United States and hasn't shown any interest since. "We need money just for food," says his grandmother, who suffers from cataracts. Nonetheless, she takes Enrique in.

She and the others are consumed by the slayings of the two uncles; they pay little attention to Enrique. He grows quiet, introverted. He does not return to school. At first, he shares the front bedroom with an aunt, Mirian, twenty-six. One day she awakens at 2 A.M. Enrique is sobbing quietly in his bed, cradling a picture of Uncle Marco in his arms. Enrique cries off and on for six months. His uncle loved him; without his uncle, he is lost.

Grandmother agueda quickly sours on Enrique. She grows angry when he comes home late, knocking on her door, rousing the household. About a month later, Aunt Mirian wakes up again in the middle of the night. This time she smells acetone and hears the rustle of plastic. Through the dimness, she sees Enrique in his bed, puffing on a bag. He is sniffing glue.

Enrique is banished to a tiny stone building seven feet behind the house but a world away. It was once a cook shack, where his grandmother prepared food on an open fire. Its walls and ceiling are charred black. It has no electricity. The wooden door pries only partway open. It is dank inside. The single window has no gla.s.s, just bars. A few feet beyond is his privy-a hole with a wooden shanty over it.

The stone hut becomes his home. Now Enrique can do whatever he wants. If he is out all night, no one cares. But to him, it feels like another rejection.

At his uncle's funeral, he notices a shy girl with cascading curls of brown hair. She lives next door with her aunt. She has an inviting smile, a warm manner. At first, Maria Isabel, seventeen, can't stand Enrique. She notices how the teenager, who comes from his uncle Marco's wealthier neighborhood, is neatly dressed and immaculately clean, and wears his hair long. He seems arrogant. "Me cae mal. I don't like him," she tells a friend. Enrique is sure she has a.s.sumed that his nice clothes and his seriousness mean he's stuck-up. He persists. He whistles softly as she walks by, hoping to start a conversation. Month after month, Enrique asks the same question: "Would you be my girlfriend?"

"I'll think about it."

The more she rejects him, the more he wants her. He loves her girlish giggle, how she cries easily. He hates it when she flirts with others.

He buys her roses. He gives her a shiny black plaque with a drawing of a boy and girl looking tenderly at each other. It reads, "The person I love is the center of my life and of my heart. The person I love IS YOU." He gives her lotions, a stuffed teddy bear, chocolates. He walks her home after school from night cla.s.ses two blocks away. He takes her to visit his paternal grandmother across town. Slowly, Maria Isabel warms to him.

The third time Enrique asks if she will be his girlfriend, she says yes.

For Enrique, Maria Isabel isn't just a way to stem the loneliness he's felt since his mother left him. They understand each other, they connect. Maria Isabel has been separated from her parents. She, too, has had to shuffle from home to home.

When she was seven, Maria Isabel followed her mother, Eva, across Honduras to a borrowed hut on a Tegucigalpa mountainside. Like Enrique's mother, Eva was leaving an unfaithful husband.

The hut was twelve by fifteen feet. It had one small wooden window and dirt floors. There was no bathroom. They relieved themselves and showered outdoors or at the neighbor's. There was no electricity. They cooked outside using firewood. They hauled buckets of water up from a relative's home two blocks down the hill. They ate beans and tortillas. Eva, asthmatic, struggled to keep the family fed.

Nine people slept in the hut. They crowded onto two beds and a slim mattress jammed each night into the aisle between the beds. To fit, everyone slept head to foot. Maria Isabel shared one of the beds with three other women.

When she was ten, Maria Isabel ran to catch a delivery truck. "Firewood!" she yelled out to a neighbor, angela Emerita Nunez, offering to get some for her.

After that, each morning Maria Isabel asked if angela had a ch.o.r.e for her. angela liked the sweet, loving girl with coils of hair who always smiled. She admired the fact that she was a hard worker and a fighter, a girl who thrived when her own twin died a month after birth. "Mira," Maria Isabel says, "yo por pereza no me muero del hambre. I will never die out of laziness." Maria Isabel fed and bathed angela's daughter, helped make tortillas and mop the red-and-gray tile floors. Maria Isabel often ate at angela's. Eventually, Maria Isabel spent many nights a week at angela's roomier house, where she had to share a bed with only one other person, angela's daughter.

Maria Isabel graduated from the sixth grade. Her mother proudly hung Maria Isabel's graduation certificate on the wall of the hut. A good student, she hadn't even asked her mother about going on to junior high. "How would she speak of that? We had no chance to send a child to school that long," says Eva, who never went to school a day and began selling bread from a basket perched on her head when she was twelve.

At sixteen, a fight forced Maria Isabel to move again. The spat was with an older cousin, who thought Maria Isabel was showing interest in her boyfriend. Eva scolded her daughter. Maria Isabel decided to move across town with her aunt Gloria, who lived next door to Enrique's maternal grandmother. Maria Isabel would help Gloria with a small food store she ran out of the front room of her house. To Eva, her daughter's departure was a relief. The family was eating, but not well. Eva was thankful that Gloria had lightened her load.

Gloria's house is modest. The windows have no panes, just wooden shutters. But to Maria Isabel, Gloria's two-bedroom home is wonderful. She and Gloria's daughter have a bedroom to themselves. Besides, Gloria is more easygoing about letting Maria Isabel go out at night to an occasional dance or party, or to the annual county fair. Eva wouldn't hear of such a thing, fearful the neighbors would gossip about her daughter's morals.

A cousin promises to take Maria Isabel to a talk about birth control. Maria Isabel wants to prevent a pregnancy. Enrique desperately wants to get Maria Isabel pregnant. If they have a child together, surely Maria Isabel won't abandon him. So many people have abandoned him.

Near where Enrique lives is a neighborhood called El Infiernito, Little h.e.l.l. Some homes there are teepees, st.i.tched together from rags. It is controlled by a street gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. Some members were U.S. residents, living in Los Angeles until 1996, when a federal law began requiring judges to deport them if they committed serious crimes. Now they are active throughout much of Central America and Mexico. Here in El Infiernito, they carry chimbas, guns fashioned from plumbing pipes, and they drink charamila, diluted rubbing alcohol. They ride the buses, robbing pa.s.sengers. Sometimes they a.s.sault people as they are leaving church after Ma.s.s.

Enrique and a friend, Jose del Carmen Bustamante, sixteen, venture into El Infiernito to buy marijuana. It is dangerous. On one occasion, Jose, a timid, quiet teenager, is threatened by a man who wraps a chain around his neck. The boys never linger. They take their joints partway up a hill to a billiard hall, where they sit outside smoking and listening to the music that drifts through the open doors.

With them are two other friends. Both have tried to ride freight trains to el Norte. One is known as El Gato, the Cat. He talks about migra agents shooting over his head and how easy it is to be robbed by bandits. In Enrique's marijuana haze, train riding sounds like an adventure. He and Jose resolve to try it soon.

Some nights, at ten or so, they climb a steep, winding path to the top of another hill. Hidden beside a wall scrawled with graffiti, they inhale glue late into the night. One day Maria Isabel turns a street corner and b.u.mps into him. She is overwhelmed. He smells like an open can of paint.

"What's that?" she asks, reeling away from the fumes. "Are you on drugs?"

"No!" Enrique says.

Many sniffers openly carry their glue in baby food jars. They pop the lids and press their mouths to the small openings. Enrique tries to hide his habit. He dabs a bit of glue into a plastic bag and stuffs it into a pocket. Alone, he opens the end over his mouth and inhales, pressing the bottom of the bag toward his face, pushing the fumes into his lungs.

Belky, Enrique's sister, notices cloudy yellow fingerprints on Maria Isabel's jeans: glue, a remnant of Enrique's embrace.

Maria Isabel sees him change. His mouth is sweaty and sticky. He is jumpy and nervous. His eyes grow red. Sometimes they are gla.s.sy, half closed. Other times he looks drunk. If she asks a question, the response is delayed. His temper is quick. On a high, he grows quiet, sleepy, and distant. When he comes down, he becomes hysterical and insulting.

Drogo, one of his aunts calls him. Drug addict.

Enrique stares silently. "No one understands me," he tells Belky when she tries to keep him from going out.

His grandmother points to a neighbor with pale, scaly skin who has sniffed glue for a decade. The man can no longer stand up. He drags himself backward on the ground, using his forearms. "Look! That's how you're going to end up," his grandmother tells Enrique.

Enrique fears that he will become like the hundreds of glue-sniffing children he sees downtown.

Some sleep by trash bins. A gray-bearded priest brings them sweet warm milk. He ladles it out of a purple bucket into big bowls. On some days, two dozen of them line up behind his van. Many look half asleep. Some can barely stand. The acrid smell of the glue fills the air. They shuffle forward on blackened feet, sliding the lids off their glue jars to inhale. Then they pull the steaming bowls up to their filthy lips. If the priest tries to take away their glue jars, they cry. Older children beat or s.e.xually abuse the younger ones. In six years, the priest has seen twenty-six die from drugs.

Sometimes Enrique hallucinates that someone is chasing him. He imagines gnomes and fixates on ants. He sees a cartoonlike Winnie-the-Pooh soaring in front of him. He walks, but he cannot feel the ground. Sometimes his legs will not respond. Houses move. Occasionally, the floor falls.

Once he almost throws himself off the hill where he and his friend sniff glue. For two particularly bad weeks, he doesn't recognize family members. His hands tremble. He coughs black phlegm.

No one tells Enrique's mother. Why worry her? Lourdes has enough troubles. She is three months behind in school payments for Belky, and the school is threatening not to let her take final exams.

AN EDUCATION.

Enrique marks his sixteenth birthday. All he wants is his mother. One Sunday, he and his friend Jose put train riding to the test. They leave for el Norte.

At first, no one notices. They take buses across Guatemala to the Mexican border. "I have a mom in the United States," Enrique tells a guard.

"Go home," the man replies.

They slip past the guard and make their way twelve miles into Mexico to Tapachula. There they approach a freight train near the depot. But before they can reach the tracks, police stop them. The officers rob them, the boys say later, but then let them go-Jose first, Enrique afterward.

They find each other and another train. Now, for the first time, Enrique clambers aboard. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station. From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen.

They know nothing about riding the rails. Jose is terrified. Enrique, who is braver, jumps from car to car on the slow-moving train. He slips and falls-away from the tracks, luckily-and lands on a backpack padded with a shirt and an extra pair of pants.

He scrambles aboard again. But their odyssey comes to a humiliating halt. Near Tierra Blanca, a small town in Veracruz, authorities s.n.a.t.c.h them from the top of a freight car. The officers take them to a cell filled with MS gangsters, then deport them. Enrique is bruised and limping, and he misses Maria Isabel. They find coconuts to sell for bus fare and go home.

A DECISION.

Enrique sinks deeper into drugs. By mid-December, he owes his marijuana supplier 6,000 lempiras, about $400. He has only 1,000 lempiras. He promises the rest by midweek but cannot keep his word. The following weekend, he encounters the dealer on the street.

"I'm going to kill you," the dealer tells Enrique. "You lied to me."

"Calm down," Enrique says, trying not to show any fear. "I'll give you your money."

"If you don't pay up," the supplier vows, "I'll kill your sister."