William Collins
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First published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2017
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
This eBook edition published in 2017
Copyright © 2017 Joe Tone
Joe Tone asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Map copyright © 2017 David Lindroth Inc.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008245573
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008204822
Version: 2017-07-14
Every man suddenly became related to Kino’s pearl, and Kino’s pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man’s enemy.
—JOHN STEINBECK, The Pearl
As he walked across the bridge that morning, approaching the invisible line that separated him from Texas, it wasn’t hard for José to envision what would come next: the welcoming American half-smile, the face-down scan of his passport, the keyboard pecking, the faux-polite please come with me, sir, and the pat down, always a pat down, before a waterfall of questions about his brother. He’d be lucky to get out of there by lunchtime.
It was only eight in the morning, but already it was 80 on its way to 101, with the sun preheating the pedestrians on the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. “Bridge One,” as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents called it, was the span used by the thousands of people who crossed by foot each day between Nuevo Laredo, in northern Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, and Laredo, Texas. José inched across, U.S. passport at the ready.
He was forty-three. He was thick through the chest and shoulders, soft in the middle, filling out his five-foot-seven frame. His black hair was thinning on top and fading at the temples; his round face was Etch-A-Sketched with proof of his status as lifelong laborer and father of four. He’d been trudging across this bridge for most of his four decades.
Crossing was once a breeze. Mexican or American, you could stroll across the bridge in either direction, the Rio Grande slogging beneath you, and through the checkpoint in a matter of minutes, often by just declaring yourself a citizen. It was the ease of crossing that made living on the border alluring: the ability to visit a favorite relative, attend a birthday celebration or quinceañera, play in a soccer game, or party in a country other than your own. You crossed the border the way people in other towns crossed a railroad track, so fluidly that residents referred to the two cities as one: Los Dos Laredos.
Over the years, though, the one-thousand-foot walk across had become excruciating, even for those who weren’t yanked out of line the way José was. It started after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when more agents were dispatched to keep the cable-news nightmares at bay. Armed with scanners, X-rays, and political consensus, Customs and Border Patrol agents, soon to be rebranded as “Border Protection” agents, started scrutinizing every crosser, looking for reasons to turn someone away. The line into Texas could take hours now, even if your name didn’t make the feds’ hard drives spin.