South Texas
The borderlands
Black feathers spun lazily above in a cloudless, azure sky.
Teoâs head hurt as he lay on the hard earth watching the big black birds. His stomach throbbed queasily.
He didnât know where he was, only that he was somewhere north of the border, somewhere in Tejas. Somewhere on a huge ranch the coyote had called El Dorado.
Teofilo Perez was ten years old and he was dying.
âMamacÃta!â
Teofiloâs hands clawed sand. Then he remembered.
Sheâd sent him off to scavenge another part of el dompe with Chaco and his gang. Then she and PapacÃto had run away.
When Teo had stayed up all night waiting for them, Chaco had laughed.
âThey arenât coming back. It happens all the time. Todo el tiempo.â Chaco had stared indifferently toward the north. âThere are many orphans in el dompe. Left behind when their families disappear over the wire. My fatherâ¦too.â
Now Chaco was gone as well.
Sweat stung Teoâs eyes like hot tears. Where was he?
Burrs and thorns bit into his back. Here there were snakes and spiders in the high grasses; wild animals, too. If Teo didnât get up and go on, heâd die.
Then it would all be for nothing.
He was burning up, from the inside out; starving, too. He felt as thirsty for water as a bone-dry sponge. Then the coyotes started howling again, and he tasted the coppery flavor of his own panic.
He had to get up and catch Chaco. He had to keep walking north through the endless sandy pastures choked with mesquite and huisache that led to el norte.
To Houston. To Tiá Irma.
Chaco had warned him to stay out of the open, so La Migra couldnât spot him from their helicopters.
Teo felt too weak to stand, so he lay on the hard, packed ground, his swollen, sunburned lids blinking, his eyes blurring every time he opened them. Through the screen of his dense lashes a too-bright sun spun above the stunted oak trees, shooting diamond-patterned pricks through the branches. The orange orb grew bigger and bigger until it exploded in a blinding brilliance that flooded the white-heat of that harsh, unforgiving sky.
His last meal had been breakfast two days agoâtwo boiled eggs and three tortillas that had been gritty and stale. His hands fisted again; he tried to swallow, but his tongue was too swollen and his throat too raw and gritty.
Fat black flies buzzed. Some mysterious creature grunted and snorted in the thicket. Teo shivered as he imagined the claws of a puma or the teeth of a coyote.
âAyudame, Dios.â
He wanted to go home, not to Cartolandia, which was pocho for Cardboard Land, the barrio where theyâd lived near el dompe in Nuevo Laredo. No, he wanted to go back home to his mountainous village, Tepóztlan. But there were no jobs there for PapacÃto, no future for any of them. Nothing.
Nada, nada, mi hijo.
PapacÃto had said those same words a week ago after government tractors and bulldozers had crushed their shack and bedraggled garden along with thousands of others and left them homeless again.
The next day, PapacÃto had run away. Probably to look for work in el norte.
Teo couldnât remember the last time heâd been in school or even his last bath. He felt like a slab of meat drying in the sun, a worn-out corpse.
PapacÃto had promised him a house in el norte with a flush toilet, toys, a garden where he could play.
Swish. Black feathers were falling out of the sky, crash-landing clumsily, settling themselves in the branches of the thorny thicket.
Vultures.
Teo stared stupidly at the big black bird folding his wings. Another bird hopped out of a tree and scuttled closer.
Teo had to get up, but when he struggled to his knees, he reeled dizzily. Once he had crawled on bleeding knees to pray to the Virgin in Mexico City. That memory was followed by a sweeter one. He was home in the cool shade of his porch, lying on his hammock, and his mother and grandmother were singing him a lullaby. He began whispering his Hail Marys.
When he opened his eyes again, he was on the ground, and the buzzards were circling lazily against the pale blue. Through swirls of dust, a lone rider on a big black horse moved toward him. The tall man, whose low-crowned sombrero was the color of dust, wore a strange costume of weathered rawhide. He was as filthy as Teo, yet he sat on his horse with a world-weary cockiness that said he was somebody, more than border trash from el dompe.