Chapter 14

Faith

By 1986 Dad had become a truck driver with nothing left to haul but marijuana.

Through his early thirties, he could do little with the trucking business he had inherited from Grampa except watch as it crumbled around him and his step-uncles usurped what few dirt-hauling contracts came the way of our barrio.

As a result Dad could no longer sleep at night and would pace the length of the new addition to our house incessantly. Every three or four hours, Dan and I would hear his muffled footfalls on the carpet, which increasingly lost its ability to absorb the concussion of his steps year after year, so that by the time we were in our teens, we could feel him plant his feet in his bedroom, even though that part of the house was built on concrete.

Then he would stomp his way to our room and throw open the door in total disrespect of our privacy, at any hour of the night, but especially at daybreak.

I think he did this at first to catch either one of us masturbating, in an attempt to humiliate us. But then it just became his habit, thrusting open the door to wake us up, get us on some small task before we dressed for school on school days, or get set to work proper on weekends.

He would stand there in his Y-fronts, looking like a lean, tall, diapered child with his curly black locks backlit and haloed from the overhead light in the kitchen. He’d scratch at his belly quietly and turn something over in his mind and in his mouth, and then he’d say in a small, heavy baritone, “Levántensen.” You two get up.

That’s how our days invariably started back then.

How they ended, for him, was just as unvaried. After some perfunctory attempt at keeping shop, Dad would normally repair to one of the makeshift bars that dotted the poorer subdivisions just outside the Port of Brownsville and drink many of the dollar-fifty Budweisers, increasingly dreading the wobbly two-mile drive home in the dark as the night wore on, because the lights in his trucks were unreliable.

Dad felt at home among the dispossessed at this time, I think maybe even superior, and for five years he listened as his meager inheritance spilled out of the unplumbed urinals in the piss rooms of those bars, splashing a clear yellow onto the baked earth just on the other side of the plywood walls.

It was in those bars, on soiled and untreated planks of plywood flooring, that I spent much of my time away from school as a child, watching and listening from the safety of the floor, facing the people in the tavern as my father put in marathon hours on barstools. The men at the bar talked of nothing to one another, spoke in a vague and cryptic lingua hispanica, a pidgin code that insinuated more than clarified.

As a child listening in, I figured there was much being left to allusion or circumspection, and that as an adult, I would eventually be allowed in on the big secret, but I have come to realize this has never been the case: Men in bars have nothing to say.

When I’d grow sleepy, I’d curl up in the cab of his dump truck, parked just outside, and wait for him to finish drinking and drive us home.

Dad drank lengthily and with intention, so I would tire and retreat, giving him the freedom to overtly ply the unremarkable bar whores without fatherhood weighing in on his conscience.

Later, when I was in my teens, he’d come to confide in ugly detail these secretive instances. “See that bar over there?” he’d say, in abhorrent and gleeful English as we drove by some ramshackle building. “I fuck a lot of women in that bar. . . .”

I would wince when I remembered the long hours I spent there with him, sleeping in the cab of his truck.

At home Mom kept sentinel over the bookkeeping. She watched the flow of money slow to a trickle and then stop outright when I was in junior high. She tried to keep her desperation to herself, but there was no way for her to hide her worry.

For anyone listening, there were rumblings all around of our deeper declension into poverty. My sisters, brother, and I knew things had turned outright dire when our mother stopped shopping at El Centro Supermarket and had to shop at Lopez Superstores, which catered to the people on welfare in Brownsville.

Shopping at El Centro had been a badge of honor for Mom, a status for the family. She taught me this at a young age, and I thought everyone knew it, too. Once, at a barrio party at some neighbor’s house, someone mentioned a sale on milk at Lopez.

“We don’t shop at Lopez,” erupted from my five-year-old mouth, in Spanish. “That’s where poor people shop,” I said with authority. This was immediately met with nervous laughter, and later with a sound beating on the way home.

To see my mother come home with Lopez Supermarket on her grocery bags when I was in the seventh grade was a watershed in my life. It was then that I realized we were in real trouble.

One morning Mom surprised me by showing up at my seventh-grade homeroom algebra class and removing me, getting us on the road out of Brownsville, heading north. There was no explanation.

“Are we going to Kingsville?” I asked. Sylvia was in school there, at what was then Texas A&I University, and I could think of no other reason for us to drive that way. Syl, as the oldest, was the first of the girls to attend the local farming university, in Kingsville, Texas, about an hour outside of Corpus Christi. She’d qualified for a number of federal grants and loans in her bid for freedom, all of this done in something nearing secrecy from Dan and me: One day, Syl was just gone, and I had no idea where she was off to. I had no idea what “college” was.

“Sientáte y lla cállete,” she snapped at me in irritation. Sit down and shut up.

While she was growing up, Mom spoke English, though she knew Spanish. Everyone in Brownsville knows Spanish. But after years of living with my father and Gramma, she’d forgotten most of her English and spoke only Spanish now. She’d gone native.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me what we were doing that morning, that Mom and I were driving shotgun for Dad, who was on the road somewhere behind us in one of his flat-nosed tractor trailers, carrying a large load of marijuana and headed north. I had heard the stories, knew some of the tactics of smuggling by this point, but I didn’t make the connection. Mom and I were driving ahead of him to ensure the customs station was closed, and if it happened to be open, we were charged with turning back and warning him.

We headed north on Highway 281, one of two highways out of the Rio Grande Valley. This is an unkempt, sun-roasted, and broken-up tarmac with its northernmost terminus just outside of San Antonio. It cuts right up the center of the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost spit of the geopolitical border of Texas with Mexico. The only other escape out of the area, Highway 77, is equally dismal in vistas, but parallels the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. That route slices through the largest nonfunctioning ranch in Texas, the King Ranch, one of the oldest ranches in Texas and with the bloodiest history. It’s been out of full operation for years, producing only a dismal percentage of what it did in its heyday, but its continued existence has little to do with cattle ranching.

The King Ranch provides the real border between Mexico and Texas: 200 miles of uncrossable, wretched, and sun-drenched land.

Before the Patriot Act, back in the 1980s, there were two U.S. Customs checkpoints blocking the migration of drugs, fruit, people, reptiles, and parrots on the roads between the United States and Mexico—both about one hundred miles north of the Mexican border at highway choke points.

The station on Highway 77, in Sarita, is the busier and better financed. It boasts the newest in anti-immigrant technology, full staffing, and a huge billboard with a creepy propagandist image of “The Good Border Patrol Agent” and his militant German shepherd asking you to drive safe and be sure to turn in them wetbacks if you see them.

The checkpoint in Hebronville, back then, was an Airstream trailer with an attached carport to protect the agents from the sun, and it would often be closed for breakfast or lunch, so we were headed toward that one.

Mom is driving on 281, headed north that hot summer morning. I’m accustomed to this. Outside in all directions, the farmland throbs in a liquid, mundane mirage, like every other morning. Brown asthmatic plants and stunted trees sizzle during the hot hours of the day, which is most of every day. Drivers become hypnotized by the redundancy of the farms, the hum of the tires, the visible and predatory heat. Under the spell of the third-world sun, imagination and reality eventually begin to slide back and forth seamlessly, soporifically, so that you’re hypnotized into an uncaring, unquestioning stupor in order to let the time move on without punishing your mind further.

Mom and I drive through this scenery like we have a hundred times before. We say nothing to one another. By now, we have each decided that the other is unworthy of conversation. We stare out the windows and think very different things.

The old Bonneville struggles along at top speed, sputtering through its third engine in its ten years with us. Air-conditioning is a luxury long lost, so my window remains half open, drying out our sinuses and sucking the moisture from our skin.

Inside the Bonneville, I am stupefied to near unconsciousness by the drive. The torpor lulls me into a hypnagogic state, a dreamlike trance of fantasy and escape, so I really don’t mind these drives anymore.

Mom, on the other hand, is electric. She sits upright, hands clenching the beige Pontiac steering wheel. An hour into the drive and she has not yet told me where we’re driving.

She plays the radio unbearably low, keeping the music just under audial reach, making each country song sound like a memory.

Mom is thinking about the hundred dollars she and Dad had spent before six o’clock that morning—one hundred dollars that would help them make two thousand dollars, if things went right.

Their first stop on this morning felony excursion was to Dad’s cúrandera, whom we knew as La Señora, Dad’s personal witch doctor, for an emergency session. They were let right through at five in the morning, and they had only one burning question: Will the checkpoint on Highway 281 be open?

After years of sitting through them with Gramma, I didn’t have to be there to know exactly how the session in the cúrandera’s office went.

La Señora is older, matronly, dresses in a thin frock with her hair pulled back in a bun. She has them sit across from her desk, in a black leather love seat with chrome handles. A panorama of photos hangs around her office, some wallet-sized, others larger and in portrait. A pencil sketch of a Camaro by one of her grandsons hangs next to a window. It’s really not very good.

She listens closely to their question, nodding sleepily at their preoccupation. Sympathizing. Understanding. They’ve reached a decision and they can’t turn back, they tell her; they need to do it; no other choice anymore.

She stands up abruptly and walks behind her desk, which is cluttered with sheets of notebook paper crawling with ink: illegible notes, names of people, sets of cryptic numbers, home addresses of saints. She closes her eyes and scribbles something on her yellow legal pad, nonsense to anyone else reading it.

Then she walks over to a chest of drawers. On top of it is a cluster of saintly action figures, candles, incense, and photos of her own grandchildren, each bearing a remarkable similarity to all the other photos. In the center of her Sears-Roebuck chiffonier sit two cheap leaded crystal bottles, both filled with clear liquid. She gently finds a matching shot glass and lifts it to the light, making it sparkle.

She places the glass on the surface before her and into it pours out one bottle’s contents, then the other. When the two clear liquids mix, they turn a deep crimson and thicken like plasma. She nods her head, as if her suspicions have been confirmed.

She turns back to her desk, plops her large figure back into her chair, and then turns to face them on the love seat.

Before her, on the desk, sits a glass orb filled with water resting on a black plastic ring. No shit. She sits up straight, closes her eyes, and regulates her breathing into a loud rhythmic, slipping, flowing stream of in-out, in-out breathing that unconsciously forces Mom and Dad to do the same thing. After a few seconds, when they’ve moved into their own theta waves, she opens her eyes suddenly and strikes the glass orb sharply with a metal wand, making it ring loudly in the clear morning air.

Then she lifts the orb between her two pudgy hands and stares deeply into the inverted image of the room around it. She holds it up to her face and peers intently—and they, sitting opposite, can’t help it either: They also peer deeply into that inverted image of the room, too, though they try not to.

Sitting opposite this chicanery and watching everything she does, attempting to apply meaning to it, and watching what your money has bought you, you’re drawn into the ritual and you can’t help but try to figure it out, I always felt, even as a kid, when I was in there with Gramma.

What does she see in the orb? Did it move? Did something just move? Look deeper; it’s upside down. That’s me there, that’s her, that’s JFK behind me, there’s the Camaro in pencil . . . was that a flash of color? Does that mean something to her? Does it mean something to me? Does that mean anything at all? What the fuck does it all mean?

Does it mean anything at all?

“No,” she says with certainty. “The checkpoint will not be open this morning. Go in peace. God be with you. You can pay Maria, who is just now getting up and feeding the chickens.”

When Mom and I reach the checkpoint at 11:45 that morning, it is very much open for business. A line of cars five deep stretches back from the Airstream trailer. Our job now is to go through and then turn back around and report to Dad that his doom is indeed imminent.

Mom is visibly shaken. She turns off the radio with a hard click and considers this, considers her options. She goes over her instructions in her head, the “if/then” variables. Though she never said it or asked, I think she assumed I had figured the whole thing out by this point, though I really had not.

From the car, we can see a skinny middle-age white guy in green border patrol garb sitting on a reclining chair in the open doorway of the Airstream trailer facing the cars as they pass under the tin roof. It must have been 110 degrees inside the trailer, 100 in the shade.

From his position, never bothering to get up, he sits fanning himself with a newspaper and sleepily peers into the cars, asking if everyone is an American citizen, waiting for an accented answer, smiling, and then waving them through, like a sympathetic priest granting absolution to his untidy native and newly Catholic horde.

There is a very specific profile of mule that border patrolmen look for. Mom and me, we don’t fit any of these profiles, but we feel visibly guilty just the same. She turns the radio back on, and rolls up her window.

Suddenly, she turns her head sharply to face me and I automatically shift my body away from her, pressing myself against the passenger door because I’ve been slapped too many times from the driver’s seat and I’ve learned to protect myself. There is venom in her eyes but no blow headed my way.

“Don’t you dare do anything stupid here,” she spits at me in English. This catches me by surprise. Never before had I seen this amount of hatred from her. Well, just once before, that time in the third grade. Her eyes rip into me with an accusation of possibilities, and then they turn back to the bumper of the car in front of us. Her hand nervously turns the radio off, then back on again, but she rolls the volume back to nothing.

That’s when I figure out what we’re doing here.

“Hi, where y’all goin’ta today?” asks the skinny little man in the swelter. Mom’s window is now only halfway open, and in her nervousness she rolls it all the way up.

“Hi, sorry. I mean, San Antonio,” as she opens the window.

“Y’all American citizens?” he asks, disinterested.

“Yes,” she says, and she leans back so he can get a clear look at me, nodding my head. I don’t say anything except a quiet “Yep” when I nod, but he has not heard me.

There is an uncomfortable pause, I think because they’re supposed to hear your accent. There is an anxious beat and he still hasn’t let us go when I say, “Yes, I am,” a bit too enthusiastically, and that doesn’t go over very well either.

Mom laughs nervously. She had been hoping our light skin would exonerate us, without problem.

“Y’all have a nice day,” he says, like he hasn’t noticed anything awkward.

We drive through, and I feel her seethe for the next few miles.

That was about noon.

Somewhere behind us, at a roadside rest stop, Dad and my older brother Dan are waiting near Raymondville in Dad’s tractor-trailer, which is attached to the trailer with the marijuana. In the argot of the smuggler, these trailers are said to have a clavo, which translates to “nail” in English.

The two center I beams that run the length of the trailer make perfect housing once you weld metal plates all along the underside and at the tail end. It creates a long rectangular box sealed at the rear end with the axle of the rig.

Ten fifty-pound square blocks of marijuana can be slid down the length of the rig, which can carry up to five hundred pounds’ worth of pot, enclosed at the end with a plate, creating the image of, well, a “nail.” This is what Dad and Dan are carrying.

I wonder dimly if Dan has figured out what he’s doing out here, on the road north when he should be in high school, but Dan has always been more streetwise, much savvier than me.

I figure that if I’ve figured it out, he’d have figured it out long before.

It turned out that Dan was actually doing most of the driving, because Dad was too frightened, too panicked, but this was not unusual. Dan was sixteen at the time, but he had been driving trucks since he was ten. The thirteen-gear diesel trailer was not foreign to him. Every day after school and weekends, he’d have most of Dad’s obligations to fulfill because Dad would give up sometime during the day, or during a hangover, and rely on Dan to finish up for him. Dan was expected to be something of an indentured servant as firstborn son.

Me, I was a late bloomer, the runt. I learned to drive automatic at ten, and standard around thirteen, which is considered unacceptable on the Mexican farm, and I could sense my father’s disappointment.

I resisted learning because I did not want my brother’s responsibilities. I resisted learning because, unconsciously, I understood that this was a point of macho pride with my father, and I wanted to avoid this despicable association with the peasant-minded friends of his, even at that age.

“Chuyíto lla máneja con Chúy,” he’d say to me as we’d drive around the outskirts of Brownsville, avoiding sheriffs and cops because his truck had no working turn signals or brake lights, let alone insurance, or reliable brakes. He was referring to some cousins of his, saying how young Chuyíto was now driving with his father, older Chúy.

This was meant as a direct challenge to me. (Chúy is pronounced “chewy,” and is somehow a nickname for the name Jésus. Chuyíto, a diminutive of Chúy, was Jésus Jr. Beyond that, I have no explanation.)

They lived in a cluster of mud-soaked hovels behind our barrio, vaguely related to Grampa or Gramma. Don’t remember which.

Chuyíto was my age, about fourteen, and his skin was the gray color of the mud puddles that eternally surrounded his ramshackle clapboard house, even in drought, a result of the absent plumbing. Planks of lumber sometimes led from the doorstep to dry ground, you could see from the dirt road. His sisters were loud, prenatally obese girls who had every quality of unlikable spinsters or single baby mamas from age six. My only contact with them was on the school bus, which we had to share because there was no “short bus” for their trip to the remedial school, and their whole family, it seemed, was too proud and thick to learn English, so they went to different schools, until they were old enough to quit.

Chuyíto, the boy my father was comparing me with, rarely wore shirts, like his own father. They simply didn’t see a need for them. Elder Chúy sported a huge swollen brown belly that spilled laterally over the front of his trousers, which were usually a brown polyester relic that never seemed to cover the elastic bands of his underwear, and neither one of them ever seemed to wear shoes. Any sort of shoes.

Sometimes, elder Chúy would pull into our driveway very late at night and hock a pistol from Gramma for five dollars so he could get a final six-pack of Budweiser while he had a gang of children hanging on for dear life to the back of his pickup truck, as he drunkenly maneuvered through the dark and dirt roads, dreading the finality of an evening when he had to report home, brood in tow.

Chuyíto was a direct facsimile of his father, except molecularly condensed by about two-thirds. His fourteen-year-old belly protruded with parasites and his nose perpetually ran with an electric green infection. He had quit junior high and was now driving his own dump truck, earning a man’s wage, and this was a sign of virility in the barrio, for both him as a preteen and for his father. Soon Chuyíto would have a wife and child and live in the same hovel or hovel complex with Chúy.

Now, to be compared with this crude germ of a boy, to be asked to compete with him for the sake of my father’s pride—this just repulsed me to no end.

Once more I saw that there would never, ever, be an understanding between my father and me. We were alien to one another, and he could not understand why.

“Cúando yo era tú edad, yo era una vérga con ójos!” (“When I was your age, I was an erect cock with eyeballs!”) Dad liked to boast to me when he was feeling good about something he’d done. This apparently was a very good thing. Something virile, cocklike. Dad had lots of colorful quips like that.

When he was dissatisfied with me or Dan, he’d violently exclaim, “No valés tres tajádas de vérga!” which roughly translates into “Your net worth is equal to or less than that of three slices of cock!” Mexican men have an unusual fascination with cocks.

Anyhow, this phrase was apparently a bad thing, and I was supposed to feel shame, though I simply could not, try as I might, because it just made me giggle at the image. And wince, of course: Three slices of cock? Man, that just sounds painful.

No, there would never be an understanding between myself and this stranger who called himself my father, this man whom I disliked more and more every day I knew him. And I outright refused to let him take any pride from what I did.

This is why I was ever the shotgun rider at this time, ever the passenger accompanying the women on errands, which was supposed to feminize me, humiliate me, and that is why Dan was “privileged” to drive him around—and not me—and why Dan was stupidly risking the rest of his life and good name for Dad today.

Mom and I drive on to Hebronville. I’m dehydrated. I want to stop at a store.

“We can’t,” she says to me. “We have to turn back; I think we’re behind.”

She is obviously on a schedule of a sort, one she doesn’t impart to me—you can’t undertake something of this magnitude without a plan, right? You have to have contingency plans, things mapped out, timed out, choreographed. . . .

Still, I’m hungry and really thirsty. So I persist. Certainly we have time to get to a convenience store. They can’t have scheduled this thing to hinge on a few minutes. Certainly they’ve devised this thing more cleverly than that.

“Please,” I plead. “Just stop at the 7-Eleven.”

Begrudgingly, she pilots the noisy car around the small town and finds a small convenience store. I get out with a couple of dollars and come up short when I try paying for some donuts and a chocolate milk. I return to the car for more money.

“Just get in!” she yells, and I do, leaving the food at the counter.

Mom whips the car around and I’m in trouble. Used to it by now.

She drives forcefully and loudly through side streets and gets back on Highway 281 heading south. It’s about twenty minutes back to the checkpoint, but it will be on the opposite highway, the one headed south so hopefully we won’t arouse suspicion, slipping through there twice in one day in our noisy car.

She turns off the radio with a snap. Really annoyed with me. The windows are up, but somehow it isn’t so hot anymore. I look out my window and try to think of other things.

We travel like that for a few minutes and when the checkpoint is in sight, we hold our breath so the guy won’t see us and right then we see Dad and Dan and the trailer heading right for the checkpoint.

Dad had become nervous, or maybe brave, though very likely he was blinded by his $100 faith in his cúrandera and had charged forth without waiting for Mom’s report.

“Oh, God,” my mother says, and I felt all the blood drain from my face from just the tone in her voice. I had never heard her voice so charged with fear.

“Oh, God,” she says again. With her left hand, she grabs the knob that controls the headlights and flashes at Dad, who is only a few hundred feet from the checkpoint. She flashes four times, in clear view of anyone who is paying attention. I wonder if that is their signal that the checkpoint is open, but question the wisdom of doing it while he is next in line, in full view of the guy at the checkpoint, were he to look over his shoulder through the window at the noisy southbound car he has just seen drive through his checkpoint.

She slows down, slows terrifically down, the noisy car going less than twenty miles per hour on the highway, and for a moment, I can see Dad is driving. I can see that the blood has drained from his face, too, making his eyebrows stand out a rich black on his pallid, deathly white forehead, his face a grotesque mask of someone pretending desperately to act like everything is A-OK, but doing it horrifically badly.

I see Dan in the passenger seat, holding onto the handrail above the door as a means to steady himself through this craziness, through this stupid, unnecessary risk, and he looks calm, collected, uncaring. Like he isn’t there. Does he even know what they are carrying? Am I reading into the look on his face?

There are no cars ahead of them now. The trailer is next in line. It slows to a crawl, and I can see Dad desperately trying to ignore the crazy flashing noisy Bonneville rattling through the southbound lane, keeping his eyes fixed to the road, pretending like he isn’t smuggling anything in the empty trailer behind him. This empty, useless trailer with the I beams all sealed up, with the two Mexican men driving it, with no obvious destination, no paperwork, no affiliation with any hauling or trucking company. No, sir. Not trafficking in drugs. Just driving through. To Houston, probably. Circuitously. Looking for work. Oh, yes; we’re American citizens—that’s not why we’re nervous. We can prove that; that’s nothing. We’re nervous because it’s the pot we’re hiding. And because we’re only getting $2K for risking ten years. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that just fucking hysterical?

But the skinny white guy is having lunch and can’t be bothered.

In one of the weirder moments of this whole debacle, the Bonneville, the Airstream trailer, and Dad’s tractor are all lined up like some cosmic event and we see the skinny border patrol agent with a white napkin tucked in his chin and Dad’s bloodless face up in the trailer through the window of the Airstream as the agent waves them through with a fork, like he’s conducting an orchestra: “Go on through. Go on through. Go on through.”

Mom continues driving south, stunned by what has just happened, and I am careful not to say a word. We almost reach Raymondville and stop at a Whataburger to get a quick, wordless lunch, then spend some time sitting in a parking lot, waiting. When she feels it is safe to return, she turns the car around and heads back north, back through the same checkpoint.

“Are you sure this is safe?” I ask. She doesn’t answer.

When we pull up again to the checkpoint headed back to Hebronville around three o’clock in afternoon, there is a different border patrol agent at the trailer. He is a small, clean-cut militant Mexican with a southern drawl, and he does not like others who remind him of himself.

“Y’all American citizens?” he demands instantly, leaning into the car through the window, smelling for marijuana smoke. You can never be sure who is Mexican these days.

“Oh, yes,” says my mother, who is probably quite relieved the hard part is over and it looks like we are getting away with it.

“How ’bout you, son? You a ’Merican citizen?” He gave me a direct glare through reflective sunglasses.

There is nothing more potentially hostile than the indigenous ego interpreting the laws of his conqueror upon his own people.

“Yes, sir.” I say, careful not to move or fidget or look away, like I’ve learned.

He reminds me of something Dad used to say, when he was feeling clever. “Never give a Mexican a pencil,” he’d say. “They’re better with shovels and machetes.”

The sunglasses give away nothing, sitting on his nose in stark contrast to the deep, coffee color of his face. He looks back at my mother, then at me, like he smells the nervousness of earlier. Something tugs at his intuition. He is very good at his job, even if horribly loathing of self. By watching him, you wonder what itches him more: his red neck or his wet back.

“Where ya’ll headed?” the sunglasses finally ask.

This catches Mom off guard. Her subterfuge had ended when Dad had driven through the checkpoint. She left all her answers back in Raymondville.

“We’re going to Hebronville,” she says unconvincingly.

Had he asked one more question, had he pressed it, we would have been in some sort of trouble. But he doesn’t, and he backs off and motions us through. We drive off, but we aren’t exactly relieved. That instance showed us that at any minute, it could have been all over. Crossing the checkpoint was only the superficial point of relief: When you’re this far on the side of wrong, everything is a threat, every moment a reason to panic, and we were just not good at it.

Mom drives the Bonneville through Hebronville, and we are about to hit the open highway again—281 turns into the “business district” in all those tiny Texas towns—when we notice Dad’s trailer in the parking lot of a cheap motel by the side of the road. Dan is lodged between the rear-most tires, working on the brake lights. I am very nearly surprised that they aren’t working.

Mom is as alarmed to find them there as I am. This confirms my suspicions that there had been no planning beyond the consultation at the cúrandera’s. This whole debacle had been based on nothing more than $100 worth of faith.

Mom pulls up next to the trailer, and I think she expects a victorious reunion. She gets out of the car and almost runs up to Dad with her arms out, who turns to her and suddenly looks like he’s about to punch her.

“Pínche vieja pendéja!” he erupts when he sees her. (“Stupid fucking woman!”)

Mom stops cold.

“Que chingádos estábas pensándo?” (“What the fuck were you thinking?”)

Her face is a cocktail of misunderstanding. Then we both suddenly realize what he is upset about: the flashing of the headlights.

“If they would have just turned around for a moment, it would all be over and it would all be your fault,” he spits at her in Spanish.

His words continue to snap and hiss around her like bullets in a firefight, like he’s been trained to do, mercilessly, and she follows him forward to the cab of the truck, kowtowing to her ongoing punishment.

I have a moment alone with my older brother, both of us keeping out of the fray. We’d both learned to ignore the invective when it was directed at someone else, but especially when it was directed at us.

“Hey, shithead,” he says to me in typical blithe and brotherly greeting, not looking up from under the trailer in the failing light. Squinting.

“Do you know what’s going on?” I ask.

“You mean about the pot?”

“So you know?”

“Dad said Mom was not going to tell you cuz you’re a fag.”

“So where is it?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” he says, continuing on the wiring. “Probably under here somewhere,” he says as he bangs at the side of the I beam with a pair of pliers, which make a dull clunk. He stops looping the black electrical tape on the brake lights, curious now too, and knocks again under the I beam. It’s more a thud than a clunk this time.

He dislodges himself and walks over to where I stand. We both stare at the trailer. From where we stand, it looks like every other piece of near-broken down equipment we’ve ever owned. Rusting, miserable, and totally criminal.

There is a cluster of pallets loaded at the fore of the trailer, over the fifth wheel, but it is otherwise barren. Then, as if in answer to our question, it hits us like a punch in the nostrils: the unmistakable smell of moist marijuana. Sweet, sweet heavenly marijuana.

“So where do you think it is?” he asks me.

“Fuck if I know,” I answer truthfully. I was two years away from even smoking my first joint; I didn’t know the calculus of smuggling.

Later on, when I do learn the metrics of it all from my Uncle Richard, I learned a few other things Dad had done wrong. The most important of which was that he traveled in the middle of the day, in the heat. When you’re carrying pot through the checkpoints, Richard said, you travel really early in the morning or late in the evening, when it can’t be smelled and when the agents are changing their twelve-hour shifts. The more dominant smugglers paid drivers to go through repeatedly, like Mom and I had done to observe shift changes, and had the best hours down to a science. But most important: never late at night, and never, ever under the heat of the sun. Had Dad been stopped, even for a minute, the whiff would have certainly given them away.

The other thing, Richard said, was to carry a load of mechanical farming junk on the trailer like you’re driving somewhere with an obvious purpose. And have a story about the destination, written paperwork and shit. White man magic. Dad had done none of this.

“Lucky for us, La Señora was right!” Dad said, walking back with Mom, excited and seemingly over his histrionics. “She made them blind and we were let through like they were closed!”

I thought, Oh, for fuck’s sake, and was about to say something when my brother swatted me on the back of the head, to save me from further abuse and to protect me from my mouth.

When we left them, Dan was doing the driving. They pulled out of the parking lot and headed off to Houston and their payoff. Mom and I turned south, back to Brownsville. Mom was her usual quiet self, except this time she played the radio louder. This meant she was thinking. It was getting dark and I was sleepy, so I slept. She would get us home. She knew the way.

For that, I could trust her.

Maybe this day was what cemented her decision to leave him, though it would not happen for some years more. Maybe she had made the decision before and had convinced herself to stay longer, for the sake of the children, like a good Catholic martyr. Then again, maybe Mom just swallowed the abuse that day and put it away to process later. I never knew and have not yet asked; perhaps eventually I will. She never talked to me about these things, and by this time I knew better than to tell her anything because she told my sisters—whom she felt were her real family, freshly hatched and safe—anything we discussed. She kept none of my secrets from them, and all were open to humiliation.

For that, I could not trust her.

She turned a blind eye to the nights he came home late, stinking of some new whore, I knew that. Or figured as much. But now that he was risking the lives and futures of his sons—her sons, ignored and feral—would she do something now? Now that her children were in jeopardy, would she seek the divorce that lurked in every corner of the house?

I’d like to think that, would like to think that she was looking out for us, that it was for our benefit she would eventually pursue that divorce. But I know better than to believe it because when she did get the divorce, it was well after all of us were gone, all of us except for Derek, and she’s still paying for that guilt.

And so is he.

When I was in high school and college, I read books about concentration camps—J.G. Ballard, Viktor E. Frankl, some bad Vietnam memoirs—and I didn’t quite understand why I identified so readily with them, the grind of that low, tough gear that gets you through an impossible experience, seemingly without end. How you just keep on. And on. Hope disappears. And you still go on. Then suddenly it’s over. And hope doesn’t surprise you again, once it’s gone. It has a different name. Different face. And you’re not happy to see it, or surprised. It’s like a long-forgotten agreement. Sort of a, “Oh, there you are. I’ve been expecting you, I think.”

That’s what we experienced. Mom, Dan, and I lived in an emotional concentration camp, held captive by a petty tyrant and his mother. There was no hope of escape, which is also why we were so foreign to each other, for years and years after.

When you live in a concentration camp, it’s every man for himself, I felt back then.

Not that Frankl would agree. But maybe he would have agreed with my mother, who was hoping—always hoping—for Dad’s better self to emerge, to make better choices for his family, and not put them in harm’s way.

It never would, so Dan and I had to shift our faith to Mom, and hope that her better self would emerge, to save us.

It did, eventually, but that would take time, and I was long gone by then.