This is the worst crossing the coyote has made in years. He knew he shouldn’t have brought a kid. Two kids. Four women. He knew there’d be problems. But then again, he admits to himself, those six have been the ones to survive this trek so far. They’re stronger than he gave them credit for, even the asthmatic one. Dammit, El Chacal would never have agreed to bring that kid if he’d known about the asthma. Sneaky pendejito. He’d like to wring the kid’s neck. But first he has to get them to shade, to water.
‘Come on! Pick it up!’ he says. There’s no time to lose.
He really tries, but Beto cannot move. He cannot pick it up. He coughs and splutters, and shakes his head and leans on his knees, and the sun beats down on the back of his head. His black hair eats and swallows the heat from the sun, and his head is so hot, and his neck is burning, and Beto wants to make a joke. He tries to think of a joke he can make without using words, without spending precious breath. It hurts. It’s so scary. Enormous pressure on his chest, gigante. An elephant, a hippo, the gargantuan, double-wide tires of a Mack truck, crushing trash in el dompe. It mashes down on his lungs. An avalanche of garbage. He cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. There are no jokes.
Marisol rubs his back and murmurs into his ear, because she’s seen this before. Her daughter Daisy had asthma when she was younger. Not this bad, but still, Marisol is familiar. Daisy’d been croupy as a baby, and as she grew into a toddler, she and Rogelio had her tested for allergies. Dogs, cats, pollen. They had to be careful with her, because whenever something triggered her, she struggled for days. They’d have to take her to the emergency room for albuterol treatments. Once, she had an asthma attack on a playdate, and it was terrifying, because Marisol was sitting in the kitchen with the other mom, drinking tea, and Daisy didn’t come to her until it was too late. She was already in trouble. Marisol dug frantically through her purse and came up empty-handed. The inhaler was on the bathroom counter at home. They raced out of there so fast, Marisol didn’t even buckle her seat belt. When she pulled out, she backed into the bumper of a car parked at the edge of the driveway, and she didn’t even stop to leave a note. At home, she turned on the hot shower to steam up the bathroom, and gave Daisy three puffs from the inhaler. Then a fourth. Daisy sat on the closed lid of the toilet, and Marisol stood in the steam, clutching her phone, ready to dial 911. It was tense and frightening, but within minutes, the sucking sounds in Daisy’s little chest subsided. The whistling loosened. She breathed.
Beto worsens. Gone is the loose, gurgling cough he’s had all week. Gone is the previous wheeze. He hacks, dry and tight.
Marisol raises her voice over the sounds of his distress. ‘Stay calm. Breathe slowly.’ But her own heartbeat is quick as a rabbit’s.
There’s no shade here. El Chacal turns in circles, combing the landscape for a better spot, some minor refuge from the sun. If they have to take a break, they need to break in shade. Every minute here saps the water tables of their bodies that much lower. But there’s nothing nearby, and the kid cannot move.
‘Try to stand up straight,’ Marisol tells him.
He tries, he unfolds himself. But this time, when he coughs on the exhale, there’s no breathing in again. His eyes are round with panic, his hands fly up to his throat, and the skin on his neck sucks in. Then the tiniest honk of a wheeze, and he coughs again. And again, he cannot inhale. And now his lips are turning blue. Beto’s fingernails are turning blue. It happens so fast. He flaps his hands near his neck.
Marisol snatches the inhaler from him, and shakes it, and puts it in his mouth, and squeezes it, but it’s empty like the sky, barren. There’s nothing. Beto falls back on his bottom, and it’s almost comical because he’s such a payaso and he’s always making everybody laugh, so it’s almost funny, because he falls down on his butt like a diapered baby with his legs extended, but it’s not funny at all, because he’s writhing now, and even that desiccant cough has ceased. They’re all gathered around him now, they’re all terrified, they’re breathless, but there’s nothing they can do, even though six miles away, as the crow flies, in a brightly painted orange building on Frontage Road in the tiny community of Río Rico, Arizona, there’s a pharmacy. Behind the counter in that pharmacy, there’s a bin containing four brand-new albuterol inhalers. Of course, there are nonprescription alternatives as well, and steroids for when symptoms are acute. When Beto passes out, Nicolás starts chest compressions. He doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to do, but he can’t do nothing, so Marisol joins him, tips Beto’s head back, pinches his nose, and breathes into his mouth. She blows with all her might, but she can’t get his little chest to rise.
They’re on their knees in the desert, all of them. The migrants pray while Marisol and Nicolás work on Beto. They stay that way for a long time, much longer than it would be reasonable to expect that their efforts might bear fruit. No one wants to acknowledge the passage of time. No one wants to be the one to call it, not even El Chacal. They feel a critical danger to their immortal souls, to be the one to admit: Beto is gone. Soledad and Rebeca are both crying, Lydia’s crying, Luca is crying. But there are no tears, with all that crying. There’s no water left in their bodies to make tears. El Chacal puts his hand at last on Nicolás’s shoulder.
‘Basta,’ he says.
Nicolás finishes his compressions, but then stops Marisol from leaning down again, from trying another breath. He reaches across Beto and puts his hands on her shoulders. They lean toward each other with the boy between them. They make a tent with their bodies.
‘No,’ Marisol says. She puts her hands on him, on his forehead, on the stillness of his heart. She reaches for his hands, brings them in front of him, still supple.
He is so small.
The other deaths. Or other losses. They were excruciating.
But they felt… rational. They felt somehow honest: there was risk undertaken. And risk sometimes results in the collection of an unjust payment.
But this. Jesus.
Marisol crumples over him, all the breaths he couldn’t take. She gulps them, she squeezes them in her fists. ‘Papá Dios.’ She cries over him until, at last, El Chacal pulls her away.
One by one, he pulls them each away. He puts his body between theirs and Beto’s. He touches their arms or their shoulders, and releases them. Slim and David stand beside the grim-faced coyote, each with one hand on the other’s shoulder.
‘We will carry him,’ Slim says.
El Chacal looks up at him. He considers the angle of the sun, their deficit of water, the fatigue of their depleted bodies.
‘No.’ He shakes his head. He takes the painted sheet from his pack and, to Slim, says, ‘Help me wrap him.’
Then El Chacal takes a phone from his pack, powers it on, and drops a pin to mark the location. ‘I’ll come back for him.’
They all stare at him, but no one moves.
‘I promise,’ he says. ‘We have to go now.’
This time, Luca doesn’t look back.
In a remote campsite at the end of an unnamed road that’s traveled not infrequently by the green and white trucks of the US Border Patrol, two RVs are waiting. The RVs have been parked there for two days, with tarps stretched from poles out front, and coolers full of beer and food nearby. There are lawn chairs set around a central campfire, and country music on an old-fashioned radio with a retractable antenna and a knob on one side. The men sitting at that campsite each day have made sure to nod and wave at the passing Border Patrol agents when they come. The men in those lawn chairs have done the pleasant, casual work of making themselves and their vehicles familiar. The agents stopped by one day and talked to them for maybe ten minutes. The men allowed the agents to look inside their RVs. They had nothing to hide.