Solito by Javier Zamora

Author:Javier Zamora [Zamora, Javier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

5-24-99

“Today I get you to La Línea,” Coyote says first thing in the morning. We’re in Sonora, the last state before the fence. Yesterday was our longest day since the twelve-hour bus ride to Guadalajara, but it felt even longer—three hours, plus three hours, plus four. I’m tired of sitting.

Coyote sounds proud. We’ve moved so fast. He got Marcelo back into the bus. He’s in a good mood. He went to the market and got us actual breakfast: refried beans, eggs, and two types of tortillas. These tortillas are different than before: flour tortillas, flat and big. The burnt spots almost the size of eyes, and they actually taste good. Better than the thin corn ones we’ve been eating.

In Guadalajara, Coyote never ate with us. We never received a thin-tortilla eating tutorial. We’ve been stacking the thin circles on top of each other to make them thick like the tortillas back home. When Coyote was around to eat, we had chips, or bread, or tacos—self-explanatory. But now, we watch him lay a corn tortilla flat in his palm, then he takes the other palm and rolls it over the tortilla—it looks like a rolled-up carpet. Then Coyote uses his tortilla-carpet to move his eggs and dip into his beans. All of us watch him eat.

Marcelo, the least impressed, says, “That’s what Mexicans do in Los Ángeles.” He’s always reminding us he’s lived in La USA. That he’s done this trip before.

“¿Simón?” Chino asks, tearing a part of the bigger flour tortilla and using it to grab eggs with his hands like we do back home.

Marcelo nods.

Coyote looks up and says, “¿What? Eat. We have seven or eight hours today, and we have to get you chamarras.”

“¿Chamarras?” Chele asks.

“Chamarras,” Coyote says again. We blankly look at him. “¿You don’t know chamarras?”

We shake our heads.

Coyote looks at Marcelo. “¿Do you?” He’s become our Mexican translator.

“A sweater,” Marcelo says.

“Ahhh,” all of us respond with our voices or our heads moving up and down.

“Kind of. More like a jacket,” Coyote corrects Marcelo. “You need jackets for the desert. It’s hot during the day, but cold as fuck at night.” He pauses. “¿Don’t you feel it? Nights are colder than Guadalajara here.”

He’s right. When we get off the buses at night, the air almost matches the AC. It was hot in Los Mochis, but at night in Ciudad Obregón, it was cold.

“Eat, and then chamarras.”

The flour tortillas fill me up. We eat everything on our paper plates.

“La Línea,” Coyote repeats again, wiping all of his beans with one last swipe of his rolled-up tortilla-carpet. “That’s where I stay.”

No one says anything.

“I drop you tonight in Nogales, where another coyote, un pollero, will take you across. Then I turn back around tomorrow. Today, we travel through Hermosillo to Nogales. Seven hours.”

“¿What’s a pollero?” Patricia asks.

“Like a coyote, but for La Línea. They walk you across.”

“¿Why pollos?” Chele asks.

“You’re our chickens.”

When Coyote says that, the only thing I hear is: Los pollitos dicen pío pío pío. Cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.