The Crossing

The following is an excerpt from the Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, about two identical twin brothers who flee violence in El Salvador, headed for the United States. The twins have set out separately from El Salvador and meet up in Mexico. In the following section, they have just left a safe house in Reynosa, Mexico, and boarded a small, inflatable boat onto the Rio Grande.

The current yanked the small raft into the center of the river, sucking the Flores twins toward the Gulf of Mexico as the coyote fought it to the opposite shore. They couldn’t see much in the blackness apart from the stars and the outline of trees against the darkness. It wasn’t so bad out here, thought Raúl, compared to what he had imagined during the days in the safe house, though the raft did wobble as it cut across the current, and he could feel the cool water lapping uncomfortably close.

Before they left, the coyotes had told them that migrants like them had died making this crossing; Raúl couldn’t help picturing corpses submerged in the water beneath him.

Once both rafts had bumped onto the Texas shore, the coyotes yelled at the group to run. They took off into the chaparral, struggling through dense brush as thorns ripped through the fabric of their pants. The whole group ran for about an hour; they were in the United States, but all that amounted to so far was a frenzied scramble through a thicket. They stopped to rest for a while at a roadside spot with good cover. Later they packed into trucks again to be driven up to the desert. There they’d walk overland, circumnavigate the Falfurrias immigration checkpoint, and meet up with a truck on the other side for the drive to Houston. The twins’ plan was to call their brother, Wilber, once they made it there; though they were already in Texas, Houston still seemed like a long way away.

About an hour north, away from McAllen and well into the flat, quiet expanse, their driver pulled over. But as they cut the headlights and the migrants began to get out of the truck, a border patrol car sped up, flashing.

The world went silent inside the twins’ heads, as everyone scattered in different directions. Ernesto lurched into action, Raúl following close behind. They ran and ran until the lights were far behind them, then crouched in the night and caught their breath.

They looked around and spotted Edy, a nineteen-year-old from Honduras, with whom they’d exchanged only a few words. Besides Edy, they were alone — everyone else had vanished into the desert.

The trio set out walking, with no idea where they were heading but knowing they needed to move.

“Don’t worry, guys,” Edy said.”

“We’ll get there. We’re close. Don’t worry.”

“We got this, guys. We’re getting there.”

They walked with renewed confidence in spite of their thirst and the unbroken horizon of empty, blistering terrain. “I can’t wait to get a job,” Edy said. He was planning to stay in Houston, where his dad lived. “Construction, restaurant, whatever — I’ll get any kind of job. Think about it — how great will that be? We’re close. We’re so close.”

The three spent two aimless days and a night eking out a pathway through the parched rangeland. During the day they hid out and rested, and at night they walked, tangling their feet in the scrub and tumbleweed, rolling their ankles in an occasional divot or one of the cattle muck pits strewn through the flat expanse like mines. Around three in the morning of the second night, the stars bright in the sky, Raúl heard a sharp yipping sound behind him. Evil spirits, he thought, on the hunt again. The noise repeated, louder. “What’s that?” he whispered. They all stopped. Ernesto and Edy had heard it, too.

“Fuck,” Edy said. “Coyotes.” They picked up their pace, but the yipping followed them, seeming to get closer and more varied. They walked faster. Every bark felt like a prophecy: the animals caging them in on all sides, their three bodies nothing but future meat. Edy picked up some stones and hurled them into the blackness, and Ernesto and Raúl followed suit. But the yips didn’t stop.

“Shit,” Ernesto said. They found a low mesquite tree and scurried up into the slim branches, a handful of rocks in each of their pockets. Raúl knew that coyotes, those scavengers, ate corpses. Were they such obvious prey?

“What do we do?” Raúl asked. Ernesto and Edy didn’t answer. They spent an hour up in the tree, pitching rocks toward the sounds, until eventually the animals lumbered away.

The next day their thirst became unbearable. It scratched their throats as though they were swallowing bits of chaparral. And Edy was sick — his stomach hurt, and as they walked, he had less and less to say. Normally he took a medication every day, he said — he’d been off it for a week now. They needed help. Ernesto texted Wilber Jr. — they were in his territory now, after all: “We’re in the desert in Texas,” he wrote. “Me and Raúl.” “We’re lost. We have no food or water.” Their parents had told him they were coming, they knew, but they didn’t get a reply.

As the third night fell, they could hear only the sound of their feet crunching through the scrub. Lost in thought, Ernesto tripped on something and fell. Another log, or a water trough? He reached his hands out to catch himself, but as he hit the ground, his hands pressed into a soft mass that collapsed in a wet, sickly mess under his weight. As he got his bearings and pushed himself up, he realized he’d fallen onto a human body. He screamed. Raúl ran up behind him. They could see in the dim moonlight that the corpse was headless. Ernesto fell back onto the ground away from it and began to shake and hyperventilate. A migrant, alone and decapitated, in their very path.

“I touched it,” he said. “I touched it with my own hands.” Raúl and Edy soothed him, but Ernesto couldn’t speak for a long time. They kept walking, then rested at dawn and through the heat of the next day. While the two others slept, Ernesto forced his eyes to stay open. He couldn’t shake the feeling of death on him. When he finally nodded off, he dreamed that two men were chasing him to cut off his head. He awoke with a start. A text popped up on the screen. “Okay, está bien.” It was their brother Wilber.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in Berkeley, California. For the past decade, she has worked in the fields of refugee resettlement and immigrant education.

Find out more on her website LaurenMarkham.info and follow her on Twitter @LaurenMarkam_

The Far Away Brothers is available September 12th, wherever books are sold.