Enrique's Journey (7 page)

Enrique and a friend, José del Carmen Bustamante, sixteen, venture into El Infiernito to buy marijuana. It is dangerous. On one occasion, José, a timid, quiet teenager, is threatened by a man who wraps a chain around his neck. The boys never linger. They take their joints partway up a hill to a billiard hall, where they sit outside smoking and listening to the music that drifts through the open doors.

With them are two other friends. Both have tried to ride freight trains to
el Norte.
One is known as El Gato, the Cat. He talks about
migra
agents shooting over his head and how easy it is to be robbed by bandits. In Enrique's marijuana haze, train riding sounds like an adventure. He and José resolve to try it soon.

Some nights, at ten or so, they climb a steep, winding path to the top of another hill. Hidden beside a wall scrawled with graffiti, they inhale glue late into the night. One day María Isabel turns a street corner and bumps into him. She is overwhelmed. He smells like an open can of paint.

“What's that?” she asks, reeling away from the fumes. “Are you on drugs?”

“No!” Enrique says.

Many sniffers openly carry their glue in baby food jars. They pop the lids and press their mouths to the small openings. Enrique tries to hide his habit. He dabs a bit of glue into a plastic bag and stuffs it into a pocket. Alone, he opens the end over his mouth and inhales, pressing the bottom of the bag toward his face, pushing the fumes into his lungs.

Belky, Enrique's sister, notices cloudy yellow fingerprints on María Isabel's jeans: glue, a remnant of Enrique's embrace.

María Isabel sees him change. His mouth is sweaty and sticky. He is jumpy and nervous. His eyes grow red. Sometimes they are glassy, half closed. Other times he looks drunk. If she asks a question, the response is delayed. His temper is quick. On a high, he grows quiet, sleepy, and distant. When he comes down, he becomes hysterical and insulting.

Drogo,
one of his aunts calls him. Drug addict.

Enrique stares silently. “No one understands me,” he tells Belky when she tries to keep him from going out.

His grandmother points to a neighbor with pale, scaly skin who has sniffed glue for a decade. The man can no longer stand up. He drags himself backward on the ground, using his forearms. “Look! That's how you're going to end up,” his grandmother tells Enrique.

Enrique fears that he will become like the hundreds of glue-sniffing children he sees downtown.

Some sleep by trash bins. A gray-bearded priest brings them sweet warm milk. He ladles it out of a purple bucket into big bowls. On some days, two dozen of them line up behind his van. Many look half asleep. Some can barely stand. The acrid smell of the glue fills the air. They shuffle forward on blackened feet, sliding the lids off their glue jars to inhale. Then they pull the steaming bowls up to their filthy lips. If the priest tries to take away their glue jars, they cry. Older children beat or sexually abuse the younger ones. In six years, the priest has seen twenty-six die from drugs.

Sometimes Enrique hallucinates that someone is chasing him. He imagines gnomes and fixates on ants. He sees a cartoonlike Winnie-the-Pooh soaring in front of him. He walks, but he cannot feel the ground. Sometimes his legs will not respond. Houses move. Occasionally, the floor falls.

Once he almost throws himself off the hill where he and his friend sniff glue. For two particularly bad weeks, he doesn't recognize family members. His hands tremble. He coughs black phlegm.

No one tells Enrique's mother. Why worry her? Lourdes has enough troubles. She is three months behind in school payments for Belky, and the school is threatening not to let her take final exams.

AN EDUCATION

Enrique marks his sixteenth birthday. All he wants is his mother. One Sunday, he and his friend José put train riding to the test. They leave for
el Norte.

At first, no one notices. They take buses across Guatemala to the Mexican border. “I have a mom in the United States,” Enrique tells a guard.

“Go home,” the man replies.

They slip past the guard and make their way twelve miles into Mexico to Tapachula. There they approach a freight train near the depot. But before they can reach the tracks, police stop them. The officers rob them, the boys say later, but then let them go—José first, Enrique afterward.

They find each other and another train. Now, for the first time, Enrique clambers aboard. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station. From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen.

They know nothing about riding the rails. José is terrified. Enrique, who is braver, jumps from car to car on the slow-moving train. He slips and falls—away from the tracks, luckily—and lands on a backpack padded with a shirt and an extra pair of pants.

He scrambles aboard again. But their odyssey comes to a humiliating halt. Near Tierra Blanca, a small town in Veracruz, authorities snatch them from the top of a freight car. The officers take them to a cell filled with MS gangsters, then deport them. Enrique is bruised and limping, and he misses María Isabel. They find coconuts to sell for bus fare and go home.

A DECISION

Enrique sinks deeper into drugs. By mid-December, he owes his marijuana supplier 6,000 lempiras, about $400. He has only 1,000 lempiras. He promises the rest by midweek but cannot keep his word. The following weekend, he encounters the dealer on the street.

“I'm going to kill you,” the dealer tells Enrique. “You lied to me.”

“Calm down,” Enrique says, trying not to show any fear. “I'll give you your money.”

“If you don't pay up,” the supplier vows, “I'll kill your sister.”

The dealer mistakenly thinks that Enrique's cousin Tania Ninoska Turcios, eighteen, is his sister. Both girls are finishing high school, and most of the family is away at a Nicaraguan hotel celebrating their graduation.

Enrique pries open the back door to the house where his uncle Carlos Orlando Turcios Ramos and aunt Rosa Amalia live. He hesitates. How can he do this to his own family? Three times, he walks up to the door, opens it, closes it, and leaves. Each time, he takes another deep hit of glue. He knows the dealer who threatened him has spent time in jail and owns a.57-caliber gun.

“It's the only way out,” he tells himself finally, his mind spinning.

Finally, he enters the house, picks open the lock to a bedroom door, then jimmies the back of his aunt's armoire with a knife. He stuffs twenty-five pieces of her jewelry into a plastic bag and hides it under a rock near the local lumberyard.

At 10 P.M., the family returns to find the bedroom ransacked.

Neighbors say the dog did not bark.

“It must have been Enrique,” Aunt Rosa Amalia says. She calls the police. Uncle Carlos and several officers go to find him.

“What's up?” he asks. He has come down off his high.

“Why did you do this? Why?” Aunt Rosa Amalia yells.

“It wasn't me.” As soon as he says it, he flushes with shame and guilt. The police handcuff him. In their patrol car, he trembles and begins to cry. “I was drugged. I didn't want to do it.” He tells the officers that a dealer wanting money had threatened to kill Tania.

He leads police to the bag of jewelry.

“Do you want us to lock him up?” the police ask.

Uncle Carlos thinks of Lourdes. They cannot do this to her. Instead, he orders Tania to stay indoors indefinitely, for her own safety.

But the robbery finally convinces Uncle Carlos that Enrique needs help. He finds him a $15-a-week job at a tire store. He eats lunch with him every day—chicken and homemade soup. He tells the family they must show him their love.

During the next month, January 2000, Enrique tries to quit drugs. He cuts back, but then he gives in. Every night, he comes home later. María Isabel begs him not to go up the hill where he sniffs glue. He promises not to but does anyway. He looks at himself in disgust. He is dressing like a slob—his life is unraveling.

He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he has to go find his mother.

Aunt Ana Lucía agrees. Ana Lucía is wound tight. She and Enrique have clashed for months. Ana Lucía is the only breadwinner in the household. Even with his job at the tire store, Enrique is an economic drain. Worse, he is sullying the only thing her family owns: its good name.

They speak bitter words that both, along with Enrique's grandmother Águeda, will recall months later.

“Where are you coming from, you old bum?” Ana Lucía asks as Enrique walks in the door. “Coming home for food, huh?”

“Be quiet!” he says. “I'm not asking anything of you.”

“You're a lazy bum! A drug addict! No one wants you here.” All the neighbors can hear. “This isn't your house. Go to your mother!”

“I don't live with you. I live alone.”

“You eat here.”

Over and over, in a low voice, Enrique says, half pleading, “You better be quiet.” Finally, he snaps. He kicks Ana Lucía twice, squarely in the buttocks. She shrieks.

His grandmother runs out of the house. She grabs a stick and threatens to club him if he touches Ana Lucía again. Enrique turns on his heel. “No one cares about me!” he says. He stomps away. Ana Lucía threatens to throw his clothes out onto the street. Now even his grandmother wishes he would go to the United States. He is hurting the family—and himself. She says, “He'll be better off there.”

GOOD-BYE

María Isabel finds him sitting on a rock at a street corner, weeping, rejected again. She tries to comfort him. He is high on glue. He tells her he sees a wall of fire. His mother has just passed through it. She is lying on the other side, and she is dying. He approaches the fire to save her, but someone walks toward him through the flames and shoots him. He falls, then rises again, unhurt. His mother dies.
“¿Por qué me dejó?”
he cries out. “Why did she leave me?”

Even Enrique's sister and grandmother have urged María Isabel to leave Enrique, to find someone better. “What do you see in him? Don't you see he uses drugs?” people ask her. Her uncle is also wary of the drug-addicted teenager. He and Enrique both work at the same mechanic's shop, but the uncle never offers him a lift in his car to their job.

María Isabel can't leave him, despite his deep flaws. He is macho and stubborn. When they fight, he gives her the silent treatment. She has to break the ice. He is her third boyfriend but her first love. Enrique also provides a refuge from her own problems. Her aunt Gloria's son is an alcoholic. He throws things. He steals things. There are a lot of fights.

María Isabel loses herself in Enrique. At night, they sit on some big rocks outside his grandmother's home, where they have a bit of privacy, and talk. Enrique talks about his mother, his life with his grandmother María and his uncle Marco. “Why don't you leave your vices?” María Isabel asks. “It's hard,” he answers quietly. When they walk by his drug haunts, she holds his hand tighter, hoping it will help.

Enrique feels shame for what he has done to his family and what he is doing to María Isabel, who might be pregnant. María Isabel pleads with him to stay. She won't abandon him. She tells Enrique she will move into the stone hut with him. But Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead. Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation. “If you had known my mom, you would know she's a good person,” he says to his friend José. “I love her.”

Enrique has to find her.

Each Central American neighborhood has a smuggler. In Enrique's neighborhood, it's a man who lives at the top of a hill. For $5,000, he will take anyone to
los Estados.
But Enrique can't imagine that kind of money.

He sells the few things he owns: his bed, a gift from his mother; his leather jacket, a gift from his dead uncle; his rustic armoire, where he hangs his clothes. He crosses town to say good-bye to Grandmother María. Trudging up the hill to her house, he encounters his father. “I'm leaving,” he says. “I'm going to make it to the U.S.” He asks him for money.

His father gives him enough for a soda and wishes him luck.

“Grandma, I'm leaving,” Enrique says. “I'm going to find my mom.”

Don't go, she pleads. She promises to build him a one-room house in the corner of her cramped lot. But he has made up his mind.

She gives him 100 lempiras, about $7—all the money she has.

“I'm leaving already, sis,” he tells Belky the next morning.

She feels her stomach tighten. They have lived apart most of their lives, but he is the only one who understands her loneliness. Quietly, she fixes a special meal: tortillas, a pork cutlet, rice, fried beans with a sprinkling of cheese. “Don't leave,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes.

“I have to.”

It is hard for him, too. Every time he has talked to his mother, she has warned him not to come—it's too dangerous. But if somehow he gets to the U.S. border, he will call her. Being so close, she'll have to welcome him. “If I call her from there,” he says to José, “how can she not accept me?”

He makes himself one promise: “I'm going to reach the United States, even if it takes one year.” Only after a year of trying would he give up and go back.

Quietly, Enrique, the slight kid with a boyish grin, fond of kites, spaghetti, soccer, and break dancing, who likes to play in the mud and watch Mickey Mouse cartoons with his four-year-old cousin, packs up his belongings: corduroy pants, a T-shirt, a cap, gloves, a toothbrush, and toothpaste.

For a long moment, he looks at a picture of his mother, but he does not take it. He might lose it. He writes her telephone number on a scrap of paper. Just in case, he also scrawls it in ink on the inside waistband of his pants. He has $57 in his pocket.

On March 2, 2000, he goes to his grandmother Águeda's house. He stands on the same porch that his mother disappeared from eleven years before. He hugs María Isabel and Aunt Rosa Amalia. Then he steps off.