At Journey’s End, a Dark River, Perhaps a New Life

At 1 a.m., Enrique waits on the edge of the water.

“If you get caught, I don’t know you,” says the man called El Tirindaro. He is stern.

Enrique nods. So do two other immigrants, a Mexican brother and sister, waiting with him. They strip to their underwear.

Across the Rio Grande stands a 50-foot pole equipped with U.S. Border Patrol cameras. In daylight, Enrique has counted four sport utility vehicles near the pole, each with agents. Now, in the darkness, he cannot see any.

He leaves it up to El Tirindaro, a subspecies of smuggler known as a patero because he pushes people across the river on inner tubes by paddling soundlessly with his feet, like a pato, or duck. El Tirindaro has spent hours at this spot studying everything that moves on the other side.

Enrique, 17, tears up a small piece of paper and scatters it on the riverbank. It is his mother’s phone number. He has memorized it. Now the agents cannot use it to locate and deport her. She left him behind in Honduras more than 11 years ago and entered the United States illegally to seek work. In all, Enrique has spent four months trying to find her.

El Tirindaro holds an inner tube. The Mexicans climb on. He paddles them to an island in midstream. He returns for Enrique with the tube.

He steadies it in the water.

Carefully, Enrique climbs aboard. The Rio Bravo, as it is called here, is swollen with rain. Two nights before, it had killed a youngster he knew. Enrique cannot swim, and he is afraid.

El Tirindaro places a plastic garbage bag on Enrique’s lap. It contains dry clothing for the four of them. Then El Tirindaro paddles and starts to push. A swift current grabs the tube and sweeps it into the river. Wind whips off Enrique’s cap. Drizzle coats his face. He dips in a hand. The water is cold.

All at once, he sees a flash of white--one of the SUVs, probably with a dog in back, inching along a trail above the river.

Silence. No bullhorn barks, “Turn back.”

The inner tube lurches along. It is May 21, 2000. Agents will catch 108,973 migrants in this area alone during fiscal 2000. The tube sloshes and bounces. Enrique grips the valve stem. The sky is overcast, and the river is dark. In the distance, bits of lights dance on the surface.

At last, he sees the island, overgrown with willows and reeds. He seizes the limb of a willow. It tears off. With both hands, he lays hold of a larger branch, and the inner tube swings onto the silt and grass. They have crossed the southern channel. On the other side of the island flows the northern channel, even more frightening because it is closer to the United States.

El Tirindaro circles the island on foot and looks across the water. The white SUV reappears, less than 100 yards away. It is moving slowly along the dirt trail, high on the riverbank.

Its roof lights flash red and blue on the water, creating a psychedelic sheen. Agents turn to aim a spotlight straight at the island.

Enrique and the Mexicans dive to the ground face-first. If the agents spot them and lie in wait, it could spell doom for Enrique. He is closer to his mother than ever. Authorities could deport the Mexicans back across the river, but they could send him all the way to Honduras. It would mean starting out for the ninth time.

For half an hour, everyone lies stone-still.

Crickets sing, and water rushes around the rocks. Finally the agents seem to give up. El Tirindaro waits and watches. He makes certain, then returns.

Enrique whispers: Take the others first.

El Tirindaro loads the Mexicans onto the tube. Their weight sinks it almost out of sight. Slowly, they lumber across the water.

Minutes later, El Tirindaro returns. “Get over here,” he says to Enrique. “Climb up.” He has other instructions: Don’t rustle the garbage bag holding the clothes. Don’t step on twigs. Don’t paddle; it makes noise.

El Tirindaro slips into the water behind the tube and kicks his legs beneath the surface. It takes only a minute or two. He and Enrique reach a spot where the river slows, and Enrique grabs another branch. They pull ashore and touch soft, slippery mud.

In his underwear, Enrique stands for the first time on U.S. soil.

*

NEARLY FROZEN

As El Tirindaro hides the inner tube, he spots the Border Patrol.

He and the three immigrants hurry along the edge of the Rio Grande to a tributary called Zacate Creek.

Get in, El Tirindaro says.

Enrique walks into the creek. It is cold. He bends his knees and lowers himself to his chin. His broken teeth chatter so hard they hurt; he cups a hand over his mouth, trying to stop them. For an hour and a half, they stand in Zacate Creek in silence. Effluent spills into the water from a three-foot-wide pipe close by. It is connected to a sewage treatment plant on the edge of Laredo, Texas. Enrique can smell it.

El Tirindaro walks ahead, scouting as he goes.

At his command, Enrique and the others climb out of the water. Enrique is numb. He falls to the ground, nearly frozen.

“Dress quickly,” El Tirindaro says.

Enrique steps out of his wet undershorts and tosses them away. They are his last possession from home. He puts on dry jeans, a dry shirt and his two left shoes. It has been three days since his right one was stolen, and all he has been able to find is a second left shoe to replace it. He told his mother about it when he called her, but there was no time for her to send any money for a proper pair.

El Tirindaro offers everyone a piece of bread and a soda. The others eat and drink. Enrique is too nervous. Being on the outskirts of Laredo means they are near homes. If dogs bark, the Border Patrol will suspect intruders.

“This is the hard part,” El Tirindaro says.

He runs. Enrique races behind him. The Mexicans follow, up a steep embankment, along a well-worn dirt path, past mesquite bushes and behind some tamarind trees, until they are next to a large, round, flat tank. It is part of the sewage plant.

Beyond is an open space.

El Tirindaro glances nervously to the right and left. Nothing.

“Follow me,” he says.

Now he runs faster. Numbness washes out of Enrique’s legs. It disappears in a wave of fear. They sprint next to a fence, then along a narrow path on a cliff above the creek. They dash down another embankment, into the dry upstream channel of Zacate Creek, under a pipe, then a pedestrian bridge, across the channel, up the opposite embankment and out onto a two-lane residential street.

Two cars pass. Winded, the four scuttle into bushes. Half a block ahead, another car flashes its headlights.

*

PUFFS OF CLOUDS

It is a red Chevrolet Blazer with tinted windows. As they reach it, locks click open. Enrique and the others scramble inside. In front sit a Latino driver and a woman. Enrique has met them before, at a house across the river frequented by El Tirindaro. They are part of his smuggling network.

It is 4 a.m. Enrique is exhausted. He climbs onto pillows in back. They are like puffs of clouds, and he feels immense relief. He smiles and says to himself, “Now that I’m in this car, no one can get me out.” The engine starts, and the driver passes back a pack of beer. He asks Enrique to put it into a cooler. The driver pops a top.

For a moment, Enrique worries: What if the driver has too many?

The Blazer heads toward Dallas.

Border Patrol agents pay attention to Blazers and other SUVs. Headlights tilted up mean there are people in the back, weighing down the vehicle, says Alexander D. Hernandez, a supervisor in Cotulla, Texas. Weaving means the load is heavy and causing sway. When the agents notice, they pull alongside and shine a flashlight into the eyes of the passengers. If the riders do not look over but seem frozen in their seats, they are likely to be illegal immigrants.

Enrique sleeps until El Tirindaro shakes him. They are out of Laredo and half a mile south of a Border Patrol checkpoint.

“Get up!” El Tirindaro says. Enrique can tell he has been drinking. Five beers are gone. The Blazer stops. Enrique and the two Mexicans, with El Tirindaro leading, climb a wire fence and walk east, away from the freeway. Then they turn north, parallel to it. Enrique can see the checkpoint at a distance.

Every car must stop.

“U.S. citizens?” agents ask. Often, they check for documents.

Enrique and his group walk 10 minutes more, then turn west, back toward the freeway. They crouch next to a billboard. Overhead, the stars are receding, and he can see the first light of dawn.

The Blazer pulls up.

Enrique sinks back into the pillows. He thinks: I have crossed the last big hurdle. Suddenly he is overwhelmed. Never has he felt so happy.

He stares at the ceiling and drifts into a deep, blissful sleep.

Four hundred miles later, the Blazer pulls into a gas station on the outskirts of Dallas. Enrique awakens. El Tirindaro is gone. He has left without saying goodbye. From conversations in Mexico, Enrique knows that El Tirindaro gets $100 a client. Enrique’s mother, Lourdes, has promised $1,200. Clearly, this is all business, and the driver is the boss; he gets most of the money. The patero is on his way back to Mexico.

Along with fuel, the driver buys more beer, and the Blazer rolls into Dallas about noon. America looks beautiful. The buildings are huge. The freeways have traffic exchanges with double and triple decks. They are nothing like the dirt streets at home. Everything is so clean.

The driver drops off the Mexicans and takes Enrique to a large house. Inside are bags of clothing in various sizes and American styles, to outfit clients so they no longer stand out.

They telephone his mother.

*

LOURDES

Lourdes, 35, has come to love North Carolina. People are polite. There are plenty of jobs for immigrants, and it seems to be safe. She can leave her car unlocked, as well as her house.

A gray album holds treasures: pictures of Belky, her daughter back home. At 7, Belky wears a white First Communion dress; at 9, a yellow cheerleader’s skirt; at 15, for her quinceanera, a pink taffeta dress and white satin shoes. There are pictures of Enrique too: at 8 in a tank top, with four piglets at his feet; at 13 in the photograph at Belky’s quinceanera, the serious-looking little brother.

Lourdes has not slept. All night, since Enrique’s last call from a pay phone across the Rio Grande, she has been having visions of him dead, floating on the river, his body wet and swollen. She told her boyfriend, “My greatest fear is to never see him again.”

Now a female smuggler is on the phone. The woman says: We have your son in Texas, but $1,200 is not enough. $1,700.

Lourdes grows suspicious. Maybe Enrique is dead, and the smugglers are trying to cash in. “Put him on the line.”

He is out shopping for food, the smuggler says.

Lourdes will not be put off.

He is asleep, the smuggler says.

How can he be both? Lourdes demands to talk to him.

Finally, the smuggler gives the phone to Enrique.

“Sos tu?” his mother asks anxiously. “Is it you?”

“Si, Mami, it’s me.”

Still, his mother is not sure. She does not recognize his voice. She has heard it only half a dozen times in 11 years.

“Sos tu?” she asks again. Then twice more. She grasps for something, anything, that she can ask this boy--a question that no one but Enrique can answer. She remembers what he told her about his shoes when he called on the pay phone.

“What kind of shoes do you have on?” she asks.

“Two left shoes,” Enrique says.

Fear drains from his mother like a wave back into the sea. It is Enrique. She feels a moment of pure happiness.

*

WAITING

She takes $500 she has saved, borrows $1,200 from her boyfriend and wires it to Dallas.

In the house with the clothing, the smugglers wait. From the bags, Enrique puts on clean pants, a shirt and a new pair of shoes. The smugglers take him to a restaurant. He eats chicken smothered in cream sauce. Clean, sated, in his mother’s adopted country, he is happy.

They go to Western Union. But there is no money under his mother’s name, not even a message.

How could she do this?

At worst, Enrique figures, he can break away. Run.

But the smugglers call again.

She says she has sent the money through a female immigrant who lives with her, because the woman gets a Western Union discount. The money should be there under the woman’s name.

It is.

Enrique has no time to celebrate. The smugglers take him to a gas station, where they meet another man in the network. He puts Enrique with four migrant men being routed to Orlando, Fla. They stay overnight in Houston, and at midday, Enrique leaves Texas in a green van.

Five days later, Lourdes’ boyfriend gets time off from work to drive to Orlando, where Enrique has been staying with other migrants and waiting for him to arrive. Her boyfriend is handsome, with graying temples and a mustache. Enrique recognizes him from a video that his Uncle Carlos had brought back from a visit.

“Are you Lourdes’ son?” the boyfriend asks.

Enrique nods.

“Let’s go.” They say little in the car, and Enrique falls asleep.

By 8 a.m. on May 28, Enrique is in North Carolina. He awakens to tires crossing highway seams: Click-click. Click-click. “Are we lost?” he asks. “Are you sure we aren’t lost? Do you know where we are going?”

“We’re almost there.”

They are moving fast through pines and elms, past billboards and fields, yellow lilies and purple lilacs. The road is freshly paved. It goes over a bridge and passes cattle pastures with large rolls of hay. On both sides are wealthy subdivisions. Then railroad tracks. Finally, at the end of a short gravel street, some house trailers. One is beige. Built in the 1950s, it has white metal awnings and is framed in tall green trees.

At 10 a.m., after more than 12,000 miles, 122 days and seven futile attempts to find his mother, Enrique, 11 years older than when she left him behind, bounds from the back seat of the car, up five faded redwood steps, and swings open the white door of the mobile home.

To the left, beyond a tiny living room with dark wooden beams, sits a girl with shoulder-length black hair and curly bangs. She is at the kitchen table eating breakfast. He remembers a picture of her. Her name is Diana. She is 9. She was born in California, not long after Lourdes came to the United States, while she lived with a former boyfriend from Honduras.

Enrique leans over and kisses the girl on the cheek.

“Are you my brother?”

He nods. “Where is my mother? Where is my mother?”

She motions past the kitchen to the far end of the trailer.

Enrique runs. His feet zigzag down two narrow, brown-paneled hallways.

He opens a door.

Inside, the room is cluttered, dark. On a queen-size bed, under a window draped with lace curtains, his mother is asleep. He jumps squarely onto the bed next to her. He gives her a hug. Then a kiss.

“You’re here, mi hijo.”

“I’m here,” he says.

*

CONCLUSION

“The Odyssey,” an epic poem about a hero’s journey home from war, ends with reunion and peace. “The Grapes of Wrath,” the classic novel about the dust bowl and the migration of Oklahoma farmers to California, ends with death and a glimmer of renewed life.

Enrique’s journey is not fiction, and its conclusion is more complex and less dramatic. But it ends with a twist worthy of O. Henry.

Children like Enrique dream of finding their mothers and living happily ever after. For weeks, perhaps months, these children and their mothers cling to romanticized notions of how they should feel toward each other.

Then reality intrudes.

The children show resentment because they were left behind. They remember broken promises to return and accuse their mothers of lying. They complain that their mothers work too hard to give them the attention they have been missing. In extreme cases, they find love and esteem elsewhere, by getting pregnant, marrying early or joining gangs.

Some are surprised to discover entire new families in the United States--a stepfather, stepbrothers and stepsisters. Jealousies grow. Stepchildren call the new arrivals mojados, or wetbacks, and threaten to summon the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport them.

The mothers, for their part, demand respect for their sacrifice: leaving their children for the children’s sake. Some have been lonely and worked hard to support themselves, to pay off their own smuggling debts and save money to send home. When their children say, “You abandoned me,” they respond by hauling out tall stacks of money transfer receipts.

They think their children are ungrateful and bristle at the independence they show--the same independence that helped the children survive their journeys north. In time, mothers and children discover they hardly know each other.

At first, neither Enrique nor Lourdes cries. He kisses her again. She holds him tightly. He has played this out in his mind a thousand times. It is just as he thought it would be.

All day they talk. He tells her about his travels: the clubbing on top of a train, leaping off to save his life, the hunger, thirst and fear. He has lost 28 pounds, down to 107. She cooks rice, beans and fried pork. He sits at the table and eats. The boy she last saw when he was in kindergarten is taller than she is. He has her nose, her round face, her eyes, her curly hair.

“Look, Mom, look what I put here.” He pulls up his shirt. She sees a tattoo.

EnriqueLourdes, it says, across his chest.

His mother winces. Tattoos, she says, are for delinquents, for people in jail. “I’m going to tell you, son, I don’t like this.” She pauses. “But at least if you had to get a tattoo, you remembered me.”

“I’ve always remembered you.”

He tells her about Honduras, how he stole his aunt’s jewelry to pay drug debts, how he wanted to get away from drugs, how he ached to be with her.

Finally, Lourdes cries.

She asks about Belky, her daughter in Honduras; her own mother; and the deaths of two brothers. Then she stops. She feels too guilty to go on.

The trailer is awash in guilt. Eight people live here. Several have left their children behind. All they have is pictures. Lourdes’ boyfriend has two sons in Hondruas. He has not seen them in five years.

Enrique likes the people in the trailer, especially his mother’s boyfriend; he could be a better father than his own dad, who abandoned him to start another family.

Three days after Enrique arrives, Lourdes’ boyfriend helps him find work as a painter. He earns $7 an hour. Within a week, he is promoted to sander, making $9.50. With his first paycheck, he offers to pick up $50 of the food bill. He buys Diana a gift: a pair of pink sandals for $5.97. He sends money to Belky and to Maria Isabel Caria Duron, his girlfriend in Honduras.

Lourdes brags to her friends. “This is my son. Look at him! He is so big. It’s a miracle he’s here.”

Whenever he leaves the house, she hugs him. When she comes home from work, they sit on the couch, watching her favorite soap opera, with her hand resting on his arm.

Over time, though, they realize they are strangers. Neither knows the other’s likes or dislikes. At a grocery store, Lourdes reaches for bottles of Coke. Enrique says he does not drink Coke--only Sprite.

He plans to work and make money. She wants him to study English, learn a profession.

He goes to a pool hall without asking permission. She becomes upset.

Occasionally, he uses profanities. She tells him not to. Both remember their angry words.

“No, Mami!” he says. “No one is going to change me.”

“Well, you’ll have to change! If not, we will have problems. I want a son who, when I say to do something, he says OK.”

“You can’t tell me what to do!”

The clash culminates when Maria Isabel telephones collect and her call is rejected because some of the migrants in the trailer do not know who she is.

That was right, Lourdes says; they cannot afford collect calls from just anyone.

Enrique flares and begins to pack.

Lourdes walks up behind him and spanks him hard on his buttocks, several times.

“You have no right to hit me! You didn’t raise me.”

Enrique spends the night sleeping in her car.

In the end, however, their love prevails. Their differences ease.

Enrique and his mother are conciliatory at last. They are living in her trailer home to this day.

More than that, they might be joined by Maria Isabel.

One day, Enrique phones Honduras. Maria Isabel is pregnant, as he suspected before he left. On Nov. 2, 2000, she gives birth to their daughter.

She and Enrique name the baby Katherine Jasmin.

The baby looks like him. She has his mouth, his nose, his eyes.

An aunt urges Maria Isabel to go to the United States, alone. The aunt promises to take care of the baby.

“If I have the opportunity, I’ll go,” Maria Isabel says. “I’ll leave my baby behind.”

Enrique agrees. “We’ll have to leave the baby behind.”