Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (20 page)

But up in the front seat, things were more somber. Weather was coming in—gusts of wind buffeted the car, and within a short while falling snowflakes could be seen whirling through the headlight beams. Emilio and Máximo had seen snow and knew what it meant to a bad car with bad tires. Emilio, now at the wheel, slowed down and turned on the wipers. I stopped myself in the middle of a question about the forecast: forecasts weren’t much a part of life in most of rural Mexico, which had only occasional access to radio, television, or newspapers. We would take things as they came. I decided to forgo sleep for a while and see what developed.

We drove along, slower and slower. Presently a heavily loaded van sped by us, dangerously fast; two of the guys in back remarked that it looked like the van of Roberto Espinosa, one of the El Mirage
coyotes.
This observation served only to remind everyone of the news that had been circulating around the orchards the entire week before: Flagstaff was where Immigration had nabbed twenty-one people in two Florida-bound vans just the previous Sunday—this route was no secret to them. And Flagstaff was now less than twenty-five miles away. We had plenty to worry about.

As the road got icier, Emilio revealed how little he knew about driving in snow. He made the usual mistakes: his feet got heavier instead of lighter on the gas and brake pedals, as though muscle could cure our lack of traction; he would brake when turning instead of before a turn. On one steep switchback, when a skid resulted, he turned the wrong way to pull out of it, and the back of the Squire fishtailed around and into a snowbank on the side of the road. Everyone piled out and pushed the car back onto the shoulder. When we were back inside, shivering, Emilio looked me in the eye for the first time I could remember.

“
You’re from Colorado, aren’t you?”
He knew I was.
“Don’t you know how to drive in this?”

He knew I did. The problem was, I was reluctant to drive because of the risks of getting caught. A strict interpretation of the law could land me in jail. We had discussed this, and they had agreed not to ask me except in an emergency. But this was an emergency. As I slid behind the wheel, I began to formulate my excuses: if they kept driving, someone—perhaps an innocent third party—was likely to get hurt. Any officer ought to understand that. I eased the big wagon from the shoulder to the road, and on into the blizzard.

The drive from Flagstaff east to Albuquerque, New Mexico, takes about six hours under normal conditions; it took us twelve or thirteen, with the wind gusting and headlights probing the entire way. I stopped there for gas around noon the next day. The snow had temporarily abated, but the wind was blowing hard and cold and continued to shake the car; instead of taking the chance to use the rest room and stretch their stiff legs and backs, the guys in back all just stayed there, buried under piles of blankets. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the gaze of the gas station attendant; whatever the cause, they seemed to have gone into a sort of hibernation, talking very seldom, moving around even less. If your bladder could take it, I mused, it was not a bad strategy for surviving a lo-cal, high-mile, long-while drive like this was shaping up to be.

With Emilio pumping the gas, Máximo refilling oil and transmission fluid, and I paying, it was a quick pit stop. Enlivened by the wind and freezing temperatures, the three of us did some talking as we rolled across eastern
“Nuevo México,”
Emilio at the wheel. We were done now, for the most part, with mountains, a plus for our safety but a minus as far as interesting reasons to keep our eyes open. The countryside was desolate, windswept, and patched with snow; fence posts and frosted cattle were the only sights above grass line. It was old country, home to Spanish explorers who rode up from Old Mexico, the first Europeans in what’s now the United States. They were the ancestors of Hispanics in much of the Southwest. Tijeras, Pajarito, Santa Rosa, Anton Chico: the towns named on highway signs reflected the heritage, made you wonder what the old Spaniards did when it got this cold.

The Mexicans shivered. The little they joked or horsed around made me realize how much this was an ordeal for them: everyone in the car, except for me, came from a land of sugarcane and avocados. The drive, for them, was nothing more than the unpleasant means to a Florida end—a dire passage to a warm and sunny place where they could work. There was precious little of Kerouac here, no driving-as-spiritual-quest. My companions were there not for the experience but for the possibilities, the money—
the fight,
as the job search translated in Mexican slang. This was a business trip, a decision made about potentials. And, yes, it was an adventure too, but for my companions in the front seat of the Country Squire, that came second.

Emilio, Smith Ranch’s fabled superpicker, seemed the most driven. Thirty years old, he told me he had spent almost all of the past fifteen years in the States; Arizona and Florida he knew better than his home state of Querétaro. Between seasons, instead of going home to spend evenings in the cantina, he migrated elsewhere in the States to earn more: often in the fall, he told me, he traveled from Florida to South Carolina to pick tomatoes and bell peppers, to North Carolina for apples, or even up to Maryland for cucumbers. Most Mexicans I had met worked hard, but few so unremittingly. Emilio had a manic drive, what seemed a workaholism. And yet, as I sat next to him, he seemed calm; the desire to work did not translate into antsiness when he was trapped in transit, unable to work. Behind his black handlebar mustache—the biggest in the group—and his jet black hair—the longest—he spoke quietly, unassumingly. He looked more like a hippie, the antithesis of the anal-compulsive, hypercompetitive American achiever. He mystified me.

Máximo was easier to place. He was more a worried, responsible parent. We chatted as the day again drew dark, as Máximo took the wheel and exhausted Emilio fell asleep against the passenger-side door. Though only twenty-seven, my age, Máximo already had five kids. It was his third season in the States. He had arrived this time in September and hoped to return home as soon as possible—probably July, but sooner if he had the money. He was earning for his family, and he pulled out his wallet to show me pictures of his kids. Two of the girls were in their First Communion dresses. There was a tiny boy, held in the arms of a woman whose head hadn’t quite made it into the photo.
“This must be your son, Mínimo,”
I said, joking with him. Máximo didn’t get it.

“
No,”
he corrected me,
“that’s Pedrito. You know what he said when I went back and saw him last summer? He said, ‘Daddy, can I go with you to the North next year?’ He’s only seven years old!”

The rest were daughters, and Máximo told me about them. There was Piedad, the oldest at twelve,
“and already bossing the others around. But she’s a great help to her mother.”
Ana, eleven, did well in school when she wanted, but often daydreamed;
“she ran away once, but everyone knew where she was—down by my uncle Rafa’s place, where they grind the sugarcane in spring. My wife, Camilia, carried dinner down to her when it was getting dark, and Ana burst into tears and followed her home.”
I had no stories of children to share, only of my own sisters, and my parents. We talked a long while and then were quiet; I closed my eyes, and Máximo, thinking me asleep, softly began to sing to himself... just a little tune, soft notes in a deep male voice. It was a tender, unmacho thing to be doing. It made me feel good. Slowly, I too drifted off.

A queasy, amusement-park sensation woke me up. I took in the situation as quickly as possible. We were on the downside of an overpass; we were skidding on glare ice; and the car ahead of us was too. Stepping hard on the brakes, Máximo had the wheels locked. As a result, the rear of the Squire kept fishtailing around until, though eastward bound, we were looking straight into the sunset. Then, with a jolt, the rear bumper connected with a guardrail, spinning us back around to forward, and a stop. Máximo looked at me and Emilio; then we all piled out his door, as Emilio’s was up against the rail.

We were vastly relieved: the left rear taillights were smashed, and the bumper bent a bit into the crumpled rear fender, but the wheels were clear and it appeared we could go on. Back in the car, the rear-seat hibernators had woken up and were full of questions. Most of them thought someone must have struck us from behind. Nobody was hurt. They stayed awake with us the next couple of hours, and their watchfulness, along with the extremely slippery roads, produced an atmosphere of tension and quiet inside the Squire.

That was why I was so surprised when my observation that Amarillo couldn’t be far away provoked a storm of laughter in the back.
“What's so funny about that?”
I inquired.

“
Amarillo—you said it wrong!”
laughed Chucho, pointing an accusing finger at me.

I knew right away what he was getting at. We had been having a running battle, over the miles, over what I considered their mispronunciation of the names of American cities. In the mouth of a Mexican, Denver often became “Dem-bare,” New York “New Jork,” Miami “Meeyahmee”—sometimes I had no idea what they were saying. So, continuing in my role as
el maestro,
I had begun to correct them.

But now it was Chucho’s turn to get back at me.
Amarillo,
the Spanish word for “yellow,” described many things about the Texas Panhandle—the color of wheat, the long dead grass, the soil, the edges of the sunset this time of year. But not the way I had pronounced it.

“
Amarillo,”
said Chucho emphatically (ah-ma-RRREE-yo),
“Amarillo, Amarillo, Amarillo
...”

“
Okay, fair enough,”
I said, pronouncing it his way.

Rush-hour traffic, such as it was, was slow in Amarillo, and got worse as the snow started again. The roads were so slippery that Máximo slowed to fifteen miles an hour and held at that speed as we left town on a straight shot into the Great Plains. So it continued for a tense hour or more, until the defroster began having difficulty keeping ice off the windshield. Máximo was then forced to slow even more, and four or five times we got out to scrape the ice off with our own fingernails and wallets. Finally, a complaint from the far back concerning a lack of heat alerted us to the real problem: the air coming out of the heating vents was itself as cold as ice. Goddamn Squire! The heater had stopped working ... and the night and the storm had just begun.

We quickly realized that even a car full of blankets might not keep us warm in the impending freeze, and a movement began among some of the men to look for some kind of shelter. Emilio and Chucho were the first to state their preference for a motel. Most of the others resisted, though, leery of spending any more money than the absolute minimum to arrive at our destination. I stayed out of the argument until it appeared deadlocked, and then suggested it might be less a question of staying warm than of staying alive: we were in the middle of nowhere, without heat, in a worsening storm. I could see his breath as Emilio added his agreement. Máximo crept on silently into the advancing storm, virtually unable to see. The next town, it was finally decided, in the next town we’d see about a motel.

But the next town had no motel—or anything else, for that matter—and, unable to see road signs, we rolled slowly on to the next, whenever it might appear. Sometimes it was thirty or forty miles between towns in this part of the world—and at our speed that was a long time. By the time the first motel sign was finally spotted, about three hours later, the resistance to the idea had dissolved. Outside it was a blizzard, and inside an icebox; lacking gloves, Máximo had wrapped not only his hands but the entire steering wheel in a blanket. The rest of us sat shivering; there was frost on the inside of the windows now too. For obvious reasons I was elected to step into the blizzard and do the talking in the motel office.

It took me a while to locate the manager’s door, and, once inside, I had to work hard to remember my poor friends freezing outside and keep it short. The manager and his wife were Iranian, with obscure reasons for being in this godforsaken part of Texas; their room was so warm it seemed they were trying to recreate the desert. I arranged for a two-bedroom for me and “my friend,” and thought, on my way back to the car, that at least the weather had done us this backhanded favor: the night was too bitter for the manager to come checking.

A satellite dish brought television channels in a variety the men had never seen. As we turned our own room into a sauna, they lounged around the double beds, the younger guys arguing over the controller and searching for police shows. All we lacked was food: nothing but the odd Coke and potato chip had been consumed since we’d left Phoenix, more than forty-eight hours before. But the euphoria of warmth made up for the ache and edginess of hunger. With three to a bed and two on the floor, we were asleep in no time.

*

At 6:00 A.M. Máximo again took the wheel. As the others piled in and arranged themselves, he crossed himself and said a small prayer. The roads were still slick, and we needed all the help we could get.

En route to the interstate ramp, we approached a railroad crossing. The warning arms were up, the signals were dark, there was no sign of a train anywhere—but Máximo slowed anyway. He looked both ways.

“
Nervous?”
I asked him, smiling. He shrugged, not comprehending; a few months later I’d discover that I hadn’t understood either. Visiting his part of Mexico, I learned that crossing signals, where they existed, were never to be trusted. Many were actually operated by hand, by an attendant who lived next to the crossing; if this person happened to be out back feeding the chickens when the train approached, the motorist was out of luck.