Enrique's Journey Part 4

He has slept on the ground; in a sewage culvert, curled up with other migrants; on top of gravestones. Once, on top of a moving train, he grew so hungry that he jumped forward to the first car, leaped off, and raced to pick a pineapple. He was able to reboard one of the train's last cars. Another time, he had gone two days without water. His throat felt as if it was swelling shut. There were no houses in sight. He found a small cattle trough. It was frothy with cow spit. Under the froth was green algae. Beneath the algae was stagnant, yellow water. He brought handfuls to his parched lips. He was so thirsty it tasted wonderful.

Each time he is deported, Enrique knows he must quickly get back over the river, into Mexico, away from Guatemala's lawless border towns. Once he was deported at 2 A.M. and spent the night cowering, sleepless, near the border guard station, afraid for his life.

Migrants usually head to the border town of Tecun Uman to cross the river. Its lifeblood is trafficking in arms, drugs, and people. It teems with violence, prost.i.tutes, and dest.i.tute migrants. They die at a rate of two or three a week. Tecun Uman is controlled by two rival gangs, both born in Los Angeles: the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street.

In Tecun Uman, the river is wider, slower, easier to ford. A platoon of large pa.s.senger tricycles wheels migrants from the bus stop to the riverbank, swerving along the main, rutted, dirt road to avoid pigs and trash burning in the middle of the street.

The bank's muddy sh.o.r.es reek of sewage. Salsa music blares from restaurants that double as houses of prost.i.tution. Some Central American children, penniless, get stuck here, turning tricks, doing drugs, and stealing, says Marvin G.o.dinez, legal a.s.sistant at Tecun Uman's Casa del Migrante shelter. Workers unload scores of tricycles piled high with toilet paper and Pepsi-Cola and load them onto rafts bound for Mexico. The rafts are a few planks of wood lashed on top of two tractor tire inner tubes. Dozens of the rafts crisscross the river. A man uses a long cane to push against the river bottom or ties himself to the front of the raft with a long rope and swims. Migrants prefer to pay to cross in a raft than risk the river alone.

Enrique prefers to cross the river in El Carmen, where the bus leaves him, even though there are no rafts and the Rio Suchiate is more narrow, fast, and rocky. The water is the color of coffee with too much cream. The nasty river reaches his chest. Each time he crosses, as the rainy season approaches, the river is higher and higher. He always crosses with one or two other migrants, in case he slips and starts to drown. Chin high, he staggers across, stumbling on the uneven riverbed, lurching into the hollows, straining against the current. Exhausted, he reaches the far bank.

This is his seventh try, and it is on this attempt that he suffers the injuries that leave him in the hands of the kind people of Las Anonas.

Here is what Enrique recalls: It is night. He is riding on a freight train. A stranger climbs up the side of his tanker car and asks for a cigarette. The man moves quickly, but Enrique is not alarmed. Sometimes migrants riding on the trains climb from car to car, trying to move forward or backward.

Trees hide the moon, and Enrique does not see two men who are behind the stranger, or three more creeping up the other side of the car. Scores of migrants cling to the train, but no one is within shouting distance.

One of the men reaches a grate where Enrique is sitting. He grabs Enrique with both hands. Someone seizes him from behind. They slam him facedown. All six surround him. Take off everything, one says. Another swings a wooden club. It cracks into the back of Enrique's head. Hurry, somebody demands. The club smacks his face.

Enrique feels someone yank off his shoes. Hands paw through his pants pockets. One of the men pulls out a small sc.r.a.p of paper. It has his mother's telephone number. Without it, he has no way to locate her. The man tosses the paper into the air. Enrique sees it flutter away.

The men pull off his pants. His mother's number is inked inside the waistband. But there is little money. Enrique has less than 50 pesos on him, only a few coins that he has gathered begging. The men curse and fling the pants overboard.

The blows land harder.

"Don't kill me," Enrique pleads.

"Shut up!" someone says.

His cap flies away. Someone rips off his shirt. Another blow finds the left side of his face. It shatters three teeth. They rattle like broken gla.s.s in his mouth. The men pummel him for what seems like ten minutes. The robbery has turned into blood sport.

One of the men stands over Enrique, straddling him. He wraps the sleeve of a jacket around Enrique's neck and starts to twist.

Enrique wheezes, coughs, and gasps for air. His hands move feverishly from his neck to his face as he tries to breathe and buffer the blows.

"Throw him off the train," one man yells.

Enrique thinks of his mother. He will be buried in an unmarked grave, and she will never know what happened. "Please," he asks G.o.d, "don't let me die without seeing her again."

The man with the jacket slips. The noose loosens.

Enrique struggles to his knees. He has been stripped of everything but his underwear. He manages to stand, and he runs along the top of the fuel car, desperately trying to balance on the smooth, curved surface. Loose tracks flail the train from side to side. There are no lights. He can barely see his feet. He stumbles, then regains his footing.

In half a dozen strides, he reaches the rear of the car.

The train is rolling at nearly 40 miles per hour. The next car is another fuel tanker. Leaping from one to the other at such speed would be suicidal. Enrique knows he could slip, fall between them, and be sucked under.

He hears the men coming. Carefully, he jumps down onto the coupler that holds the cars together, just inches from the hot, churning wheels. He hears the m.u.f.fled pop of gunshots and knows what he must do. He leaps from the train, flinging himself outward into the black void.

He hits dirt by the tracks and crumples to the ground. He crawls thirty feet. His knees throb. Finally, he collapses under a small mango tree.

Enrique cannot see blood, but he senses it everywhere. It runs in a gooey dribble down his face and out of his ears and nose. It tastes bitter in his mouth. Still, he feels overwhelming relief: the blows have stopped.

He recalls sleeping for maybe twelve hours, then stirring and trying to sit. His mind wanders to his mother, then to his family and Maria Isabel, who might be pregnant. "How will they know where I have died?"

Enrique's girlfriend, Maria Isabel, is sure Enrique hasn't really left Honduras. This is all a joke. He has probably gone to visit a friend. He'll be back any day.

A couple of weeks after Enrique disappears, his paternal grandmother, Maria, traverses Tegucigalpa to talk to Enrique's relatives and Maria Isabel. Has anyone heard anything from Enrique, who came to bid her good-bye before leaving for the United States?

It is no joke.

Maria Isabel knows Enrique longed to be with his mother. He spoke often of going north to be with Lourdes. Still, how could he leave her? What if he is harmed or killed crossing Mexico? What if she never sees him again?

She cries and blames herself for Enrique's departure. Then she prays. "G.o.d," she whispers, "grant me one wish. Get Mexican immigration authorities to catch Enrique and deport him back to Honduras. Send him back to me." It is a well-worn prayer in Honduras, especially by children whose mothers have just left them to head north.

Maria Isabel doesn't feel well, forcing her to quit night school. She loses weight. What if she is pregnant and Enrique dies trying to make it to his mother?

A friend offers a solution. The two of them will journey to the United States together. Maybe, the friend says, they will find Enrique as they make their way through Mexico. Maria Isabel has no money. Her friend, who works at a clothing store, says she has cash. She has saved 10,000 lempiras, roughly $570. It's not enough to hire a smuggler. But if Maria Isabel will accompany her north, the friend says, she will share it. "We'll be happier there. There, we'll have everything," the friend says.

Maria Isabel has decided. They set a date to leave. She will go and find Enrique.

A MISTAKE.

Enrique falls back asleep, then wakes again. The sun is high and hot. Enrique's left eyelid won't open. He can't see very well. His battered knees don't want to bend.

He grabs a stick and pulls himself up. Slowly, barefoot, and with swollen knees, he hobbles north along the rails. He sees a rancher and asks for water. Get lost, the rancher says. Enrique grows dizzy and confused. He walks the other way, south along the tracks. After what seems to be several hours, he is back again where he began, at the mango tree.

Just beyond it, in the opposite direction, is a thatched hut surrounded by a white fence. It belongs to field hand Sirenio Gomez Fuentes, who watches as the bloodied boy walks toward him.

At the one-room medical clinic, Dr. Guillermo Toledo Montes leads Enrique from the outside porch, where patients wait to be seen, to an examination table inside.

Enrique's left eye socket has a severe concussion. The eyelid is injured and might droop forever. His back is covered with bruises. He has several lesions on his right leg and an open wound hidden under his hair. Two of his top teeth are broken. So is one on the bottom.

Dr. Toledo jabs a needle under the skin near Enrique's eye, then into his forehead. He injects a local anesthetic. He scrubs dirt out of the wounds and thinks of the migrants he has treated who have died. This one is lucky. "You should give thanks you are alive," he says.

Sometimes the doctor hands the most difficult cases to a hospital in Arriaga, a town one and a half hours away. Arriaga's Red Cross workers retrieve, on average, ten migrants per month who have fallen or been beaten up by bandits or gangsters. "They threw me off the train," they explain. Some have been shot. Others have had their hands cut open trying to protect themselves from machete blows. Injured migrants who land in isolated stretches of the tracks and cannot move wait one or two days until someone finally walks by.

In Las Anonas, the Red Cross retrieves a seventeen-year-old Honduran boy who lost his left leg. They come for a woman who is convulsing. She has not eaten for six days and has fallen off the train.

They pick up three migrants mutilated by the train in as many days. One loses a leg, another his hand; the third has been cut in half. Sometimes the ambulance workers must pry a flattened hand or leg off the rails to move the migrant. Other times, the migrant is dead by the time they arrive. They aren't supposed to transport dead people. Still, sometimes, they take the body away, so coyotes and vultures won't eat it.

The Arriaga hospital chronicles a parade of misery. Two weeks before Enrique's March beating, a Salvadoran was found crumpled and unconscious and by the tracks, his left arm broken. In April, a Honduran broke his foot falling from the train. Another, a.s.saulted by someone wielding a machete atop the trains, arrived with the ligaments in his right hand severed. In May, a Honduran had a fractured right clavicle. In June, a Nicaraguan had a broken right rib. In July, a seventeen-year-old Honduran lost both legs. In August, a Salvadoran arrived with his leg hanging by a bit of skin and muscle. In October, two Salvadoran youths on top of a train were electrocuted by a high-tension wire. One had second-degree burns over 47 percent of his body. In December, a Honduran arrived with both legs and ankles broken. Most often, says social worker Isabel Barragan Torres, migrants lose their left legs to the train.

Some amputees stay in the area, too ashamed to go back and let their families see what has become of them. To the many injured who do return to Central America, the hospital social worker pleads, "Tell other people there not to travel this way."

"Why don't you go home?" the doctor treating Enrique asks.

"No." Enrique shakes his head. "I don't want to go back." Politely he asks if there is a way that he can pay for his care, as well as the antibiotics and the anti-inflammatory drugs.

The doctor shakes his head. "What do you plan to do now?"

Catch another freight train, Enrique says. "I want to get to my family. I am alone in my country. I have to go north."

The police in San Pedro Tapanatepec do not hand him over to la migra. Instead, he sleeps that night on the concrete floor of their one-room command post. At dawn, he leaves, hoping to catch a bus back to the railroad tracks. As he walks, people stare at his injured face. Without a word, one man hands him 50 pesos. Another gives him 20. He limps on, heading for the outskirts of town.

The pain is too great, so he flags down a car. "Will you give me a ride?"

"Get in," the driver says.

Enrique does. It is a costly mistake. The driver is an off-duty immigration officer. He pulls into a migra checkpoint and turns Enrique over. You can't keep going north, the agents say.

Next time, he prays, he will make it.

He is ushered onto another bus, with its smell of sweat and diesel fumes. He is relieved that there are no Central American gangsters on board. Sometimes they let themselves be caught by la migra so they can beat and rob the migrants on the buses. They move from seat to seat, threatening the pa.s.sengers with ice picks and demanding everything they have.

Enrique's bus picks up other deportees at migra stations along the way. As Mexican officials call out their names, the migrants step out of large cells, some with open-trench toilets br.i.m.m.i.n.g with feces and urine. They are handed their belongings. Apart from the clothes they wear, all that many have left are their belts.

Some migrants realize, sitting on the bus, that they can take no more. They are out of money. They have pa.s.sed through cold, heat, hunger. They slump in their seats, weak. Often something tragic has broken their willpower: a violent a.s.sault, a rape, or a fall from a train. They no longer believe it's possible to reach America.

Others have been on the bus dozens of times. They vow to keep trying, no matter what. They rest on the bus, recharging for the road ahead. They plot how they will try again, using knowledge gained from previous attempts.

There are twenty migrants on Enrique's bus, and they are depressed. They talk of giving up, heading back to El Salvador or Nicaragua. For long stretches, the bus is quiet, save for the rattle of the m.u.f.fler.

In spite of everything, Enrique has failed again-he will not reach the United States this time, either. He tells himself over and over that he'll just have to try again.

THREE.

Facing the Beast.

Enrique wades chest-deep across a river. He is five feet tall and stoop-shouldered and cannot swim. The logo on his cap boasts hollowly, NO FEAR.

The river, the Rio Suchiate, forms the border. Behind him is Guatemala. Ahead is Mexico, with its southernmost state of Chiapas. "Ahora nos enfrentamos a la bestia," migrants say when they enter Chiapas. "Now we face the beast."

Painfully, Enrique, seventeen years old, has learned a lot about "the beast." In Chiapas, bandits will be out to rob him, police will try to shake him down, and street gangs might kill him. But he will take those risks, because he needs to find his mother.

This is Enrique's eighth attempt to reach el Norte. First, always, comes the beast. About Chiapas, Enrique has discovered several important things.

In Chiapas, do not take buses, which must pa.s.s through nine permanent immigration checkpoints. A freight train faces checkpoints as well, but Enrique can jump off as it brakes, and if he runs fast enough, he might sneak around and meet the train on the other side.

In Chiapas, never ride alone. His best odds are at night or in fog, when Enrique can see immigration agents' flashlights but they cannot see him. Storms are best, even when they bring lightning and he is riding on a tank car full of gas; rain keeps immigration agents indoors.

In Chiapas, do not trust anyone in authority and beware even the ordinary residents, who tend to dislike migrants.

Once the Rio Suchiate is safely behind him, Enrique beds down for the night in a cemetery near the depot in the town of Tapachula, tucking the NO FEAR cap beneath him so it will not be stolen.

On previous trips, Enrique slept close to the train station, which is several blocks from the cemetery. Once, he rested in a clump of gra.s.s next to the dilapidated depot. Another time, he found an abandoned house nearby. He lay down a sc.r.a.p of cardboard and used another piece as a blanket to keep mosquitoes away. From there, he could watch for trains leaving for the north. Missing one meant waiting two or three days for the next train.

But Enrique has been caught twice near the depot in police sweeps. The officers seal off surrounding streets and leave little room for escape.

The cemetery, Enrique decides, is a better bet. He is close enough to hear diesel engines growl and horns blare whenever a train pulls out but far enough to avoid police who hover around the station looking for migrants. Enrique hopes there will be a train tomorrow. He stuffs a few rags under his head for a pillow and slips into sleep.

"Wake up." The warning is only a whisper, but Enrique hears it. The words are from a gangster sleeping next to him, on top of a mausoleum.

Five pickups have coasted silently up to the cemetery with their lights out, filled with munic.i.p.al police. Now, just before dawn, the officers start moving in. "Spread out!" They stride through a tangled maze of pathways, fanning out among the graves, carrying AR15 rifles, 12-gauge shotguns, and .38-caliber pistols.

The cemetery is beautiful. The moon is yellow. The sky is midnight blue. Enrique can see stars around the ceiba trees shrouding the headstones. Crosses, entire crypts, are painted periwinkle, neon green, purple. Wind touches the tree branches, and they murmur in the gathering light. A bigger gust moves the vast limbs, and the sound builds slowly until the wind commands the branches to dance and the leaves to t.i.tter. The burial ground greets the sun with a symphony.

Police radios crackle. Enrique peeks over the edge of the mausoleum.

The graveyard might be beautiful, but it is filled with peril. A seventeen-year-old girl waiting for a train was dragged out among the headstones three years ago, then raped and murdered. The year before that, a young man's forehead was beaten in with a metal tube. Before that, a rag was stuffed into a young woman's mouth and she was raped, then beaten to death with stones.

But Enrique has found four members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, who use the graveyard as their hideout. On an earlier trip, he had met El Brujo, one of their comrades. They will provide protection, even in the darkest corners of this burial ground, where migrants pile excrement, old clothes, and sardine cans, where visitors leave candles burning on top of tombs, and where a witch comes to sacrifice chickens. Without these gangsters, Enrique would never venture here, behind the black iron gates.

In this migrant dormitory, he has washed his mouth with urine, a home remedy for his still aching, broken teeth. He has pa.s.sed up graves covered by foot-high rectangular blocks, called mesas, with triangular headstones that would make good pillows. Instead, he has chosen the roof of the mausoleum, a one-room crypt holding the remains of four members of the Conchalitos family, the owners of a local restaurant. He and Big Daddy, fifteen, of the Mara Salvatrucha have settled on top. One stucco wall is tagged, in aerosol spray, MARA SALVATRUCHA and EL YAGA, a local leader.

But these words provide no protection against what he and Big Daddy see happening below. The police, in blue uniforms, are encircling them and thirty-odd additional migrants who have spent the night among the dead. Some of the migrants are trying to run, stampeding among the graves. Enrique knows that is futile; the last time he tried running from the police in the cemetery, he was caught and deported.

He and Big Daddy flatten themselves on the mausoleum roof.

Enrique tries not to breathe.

But some of the police look their way. Enrique and Big Daddy pretend that the officers do not notice them.

Then Big Daddy sees one of the policemen peer up over the edge of the crypt and straight at him. Big Daddy can't help himself. He giggles.

"Get down," the officer says.

There is no escape. Enrique and the others are marched off to the Tapachula jail. "Name? Age? Where are you from?" They are led through four metal doors into a courtyard, then into three small cells. Stink wafts from toilet pits. Men and boys press against the metal bars, trying to get fresh air.

Finally, everyone is taken to a jail next door, run by la migra. The jail has several holding cells, rooms with concrete benches and iron doors. Each cell is packed. The agents take Enrique and about twenty others to a patio. As they mill about, a rumor circulates: a train is leaving at 10 A.M.

"I can't miss it," Enrique says to himself.

He sees an old bicycle leaning against the patio wall. Now he watches la migra carefully. When they are distracted, he climbs on top of the bicycle. Other migrants hoist him higher. He grabs a water pipe and pulls himself over the wall and onto the roof of an adjoining house. He jumps to the ground. His head pounds; it is still swollen from being battered.

But he is free.

Enrique runs back to the cemetery, a way station for migrants. At sunup on any given day, it seems as uninhabited as a country graveyard. But then, at the first rumble of a departing train and the hiss of air from its brake lines, it erupts with life. Dozens of migrants, children among them, emerge from the bushes, from behind the ceiba trees, and from among the tombs.

They run on trails between the graves and dash headlong down the slope. A sewage ca.n.a.l, twenty feet wide, separates them from the rails. They jump across seven stones in the ca.n.a.l, from one to another, over a nauseating stream of black. They gather on the other side, shaking the water from their feet. Now they are only yards from the rail bed.

On this day, March 26, 2000, Enrique is among them. He sprints alongside rolling freight cars and focuses on his footing. The roadbed slants down at 45 degrees on both sides. It is scattered with rocks as big as his fist. He cannot maintain his balance and keep up, so he aims his tattered tennis shoes at the railroad ties. s.p.a.ced every few feet, the ties have been soaked with creosote, and they are slippery.