She bought enough paperback books and comic books to fill each sack to the three-quarters level, then she bought some twine with her last money and tied the sacks at the top. After that, she used the remaining twine to make straps so the sacks would rest on front and in back of her body when she stood and walked. It balanced the load, even though it was heavy.
When she arrived home hours after dark, Adan showed his panic and clutched at her, almost crying with worry. He had no one else in the world. She calmed him and had him help her remove the heavy sacks, then she showed him the treasures inside. Adan was elated. Books in English, books in Spanish, with some the same book in both languages so he could translate the harder words, and the comics were adventure, pure and simple. He read voraciously after that, and his mother encouraged him.
At night, she would tell him stories of his father and how they met and fell in love. As the months passed, they continued living as before, with occasional people coming by to pay his mother for natural remedies or to perform curing spells on loved ones.
One evening, when it was only the two of them, she gave Adan a photo that had been sealed inside plastic. “This photo was taken by your father, Vincent.”
He touched the photo, moving his fingers over it as if to feel his father’s presence. She said, “He was such a good man, mijo, my son, and you are much like him.”
“Where is this? You are standing by a big rock near a white church.”
“In a small village called La Linda. We were married there in the church, two years before this picture was taken.”
“Can we go there?”
“Not now. The town is abandoned, as is the church, and it is a dangerous place far from here.” She smiled, wistful. “Your father carved our initials in that rock by the church.”
“I would like to go sometime.”
“We shall see.” She touched his cheek.
Two weeks later, she told Adan they were going on a special trip. A friend showed up in a beat-up nineteen-fifty Chevrolet pickup and took the mother and son on a long, bumpy, dust choking twelve-hour ride through the mountains and along rocky, uneven roads to La Linda, and the church. The driver was in his sixties, an old friend of Adan’s father named Poli, and happy to drive them. “Your father,” Poli said, “Was much of a man. Honest, brave, and most of all, good inside,” He touched his chest, “In the Corazon. He helped many people out in this area. He loved it here, loved the solitude, he said, and the sky. I believe he would have built a home in a place such as this.”
“What happened to him?” Adan asked.
Poli glanced at Adan’s mother for any warning sign, but got a nod to go ahead, so he told it. “Vincent had come back here, to the church for something important. I drove him, along the very road we used to get here, and we talked as the road passed under our wheels. He said things would soon change in his own family, with his father and brother.”
“What was it?”
“He did not say. He asked me to leave him at the abandoned church for a while, and to drive into the ghost town to keep watch for any sicarios from the cartel. They were around very much at that time.” His eyes turned sad, but he did not cry.
Poli took a deep breath and continued, “I was gone maybe thirty minutes when I saw a dust trail coming from the east and straight for the church. I hurried back, but when I arrived, the vehicle had driven away, across the rough hills where I could not follow. Vincent was nowhere to be seen.” He stopped talking and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “I tried to follow, and kept the dust trail in sight for an hour, then it disappeared. I searched for the entire day, but that was the last I saw. I returned to tell your mother what happened. There was nothing else I could do.”
Adan felt sad, and his stomach felt funny, but he understood. “Thank you for telling me.” He thought a second and said, “Do you know what he was doing at the church?”
“I don’t. He was at the rear of it by the big rock.”
Adan nodded, and walked off to be by himself. Poli drove them home the next day after that, another long, bouncing, twelve-hour trip in the tough old pickup. In the following months Adan read daily, with his mother’s help on the more advanced books. He also noticed her weight loss and illness, which caused a growing fear in him. Losing her would be a terrible blow, and he prayed nightly that she would get better. She finally became so ill that even people needing remedies stopped coming by. No matter what happened during the day, she always told him of her father, the white mansion, and how the grandfather forced them apart and had his men force her back into Mexico to stay. They even bribed the immigration official at the port of entry so her crossing card was revoked. That crushed her spirits, but by then she was pregnant, she said, and all her love was for the beautiful son she bore some months later.
She always hugged him when she said it, and her eyes seemed soft and brown as a doe’s.
He remembered her last words.
Your father is a good man, but he didn’t know about you when they took him. If you can find him and tell him about me, he will welcome you. He lived in a white mansion far out on a ranch near Terlingua. It was his father who forbade us to marry. He sent men to take me away, back to Mexico, but they did not know I was with child, with you. It is justice for you to unite with your father.
Too tired to say any more, she drifted into a deep sleep and died before sunup the next morning. Adan dug the grave and buried her behind their one-room adobe home forty-five miles south of the Rio Bravo.
He remained in the home for almost a year, reading the books, eating the last of the stored beans and using a small sack of corn masa to make tortillas by patting the masa between his hands. Adan cooked them over an open fire of mesquite sticks that heated a flat sheet of tin that rested on stones placed at each corner of the fire. He also ate the few fresh garden items they grew.
Then the men of the Cartel moved into the area with their guns and drugs. He saw some of them more than once. A short, stocky man who was the leader that they called Flavio and a slender black man who was always with him. He heard the name John Factor, and always recognized him because of his black skin and the ever-present pistol with the long silencer he carried in his shoulder holster. They were the top ones. A few others showed at the same time, then more and more, and Adan left on foot one night, wearing huaraches that he made from an old tire and strips of leather cut from a discarded boot. One of the Raramuri, the mountain-dwelling Tarahumaras who ran such long distances had come through one day and showed him how. He wore what he had, the clothes on his back.
Adan reached the nondescript ranch house a mile south of the river, and the one where most smuggling was organized before groups crossed the water. He had no money, but the men and the hard-faced woman with eyes that glittered like black flint lived there, and told him he could work his fee off around the ranch. They said she could sell him when they moved him across the river, and far way into Colorado.
It was two AM when enough people showed up for the passage, everyone loaded into vehicles, with twenty in the first vehicle, a van. The van driver put the vehicle at the edge of the shallow water crossing on the river as violent thunderstorms cracked and rumbled over the mountains east of them. The van crossed the river, so crammed with people Adan was sure it would sink out of sight, but the sturdy vehicle crossed the gravel bar with only a little struggle.
The gringo and two Mexican men then opened the trunk of the green Ford, and the gringo covered the small light inside, using a cloth. He pulled out the bulb just as a wet, cold wind blew toward them from the river’s flow, the wind moving upriver and against the car, and all the while the lowering darkness showed a river rising very fast.
The lightning flash and immediate boom of thunder made Adan duck as the smugglers pushed and shoved and hit them to force the people in the trunk. One smuggler shot at an elderly man while he was in there, struggling to get out. Adan was so close that the muzzle flash lit everyone in stark relief.