Pilar was sitting on the bench in front of their house, holding Concepción in her arms and watching Alejandro sketch a picture of them, as he liked to do. Concepción giggled as she played with a wooden toy José had made for her. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day. Her mother walked toward her, carrying a basket of fresh, warm tortillas.
Suddenly Pilar felt a jolt, and the dream shattered. She was awake. She tried to get oriented, but it was almost pitch black all around her. It felt like two other girls were curled up around her in a very tight space. Why does it smell awful, like body odor and something else, something disgusting? Where am I?
Then Pilar remembered being in a dank room with a concrete floor, stone walls, and pillars, with two other girls and three men who assaulted them over and over. She remembered her night with El Tigre, and it made her feel sick. Instinctively, she reached for her small silver crucifix. It was still there. It had always made her feel comforted, but now fear was more powerful.
Someone opened the door to the compartment. It was night, and she could only feel a man’s rough arms pulling her out. She stumbled when he set her on her feet. Her legs had gone to sleep. Her head pounded from the drugs Jorge had forced her to swallow before he’d pushed her into the truck, and she was groggy.
The man led her from the truck to a long, low cinderblock building in the middle of a parking lot. Another man with an automatic rifle grunted for him to put her in a room at the end of a hallway. Stained sleeping bags covered the floor, and an awful smell came from a bucket in the corner. The man who had pulled her out of the truck pushed the other two girls, still half-asleep, into the room.
“Wait here,” a man told her gruffly in bad Spanish. “Eat this.”
Pilar looked at her captor. He was a muscular white man with light hair and a beard.
He tossed some cold corn tortillas to Pilar. The tortillas were stale, but she was starving, so she ate one of them, saving the rest for the other girls.
“I’m thirsty. Can I have some water?” Pilar asked.
“That will cost you, chica. What do you have to give me for it?” the man grunted.
“I have nothing,” Pilar answered, sinking to the floor. “Please, we must have been in that truck a long time.”
“You have something I want,” he said, grabbing her arm, pulling her up, and pushing her against the wall. He unzipped his jeans. When he was done, he walked into another room, came back with a bottle of Topo Chico mineral water, and casually tossed it to her.
After two days, the light-haired man told the girls they would move on that evening. Pilar had heard a television somewhere in the building. Some of the language had been English, with which she had a basic familiarity. She’d learned a little in school and sometimes she’d had to deal with English-speaking customers in her work at the factory. But the voices on the TV had spoken quickly, so she’d been able to understand only a few words. Once, she thought she’d heard Christmas music. They are taking me farther and farther away from Concepción and Alejandro, she thought. I have to find a way back to them before I go any farther. She swallowed her pride and approached the bearded man as he was taking her to a waiting van.
“Are you going to tell me you will miss me?” he asked, and then he added with a laugh, “I’ll miss you.”
“Maybe you could let me stay behind?” Pilar forced a smile. “We could go to your house, and I could cook for you. I’m a good cook. I would be there just for you.”
Squinting, he hesitated for a minute. Then he said, “Yes, and run away when I am gone. Do you know what Sangre Negra’s men would do to me when you didn’t show up with the others?”
Pilar did not know, but she knew it was pointless to try to persuade him.
“You can kiss me goodbye,” he laughed, grabbing for her.
Pilar backed away. I can’t let them defeat me, no matter what they do to me. I must get home to my child.
Two men took the girls to a large, enclosed white-panel truck. A group of men speaking different dialects of Spanish, looking the worse for travel, were loaded in with them. They must have been in the other rooms, Pilar thought. There were no seats in the van, and the air was stifling, despite a few holes cut out of the roof of the truck.
Pilar guessed they were in the truck for about seven hours. Her legs were cramped from standing, although the girls took turns making space for one of them to sit down for a while. The driver stopped for gas several times, and she could hear conversations in Spanish, but increasingly in English, outside the truck. At one stop where there seemed to be a lot of people in the area, she cried, “Help us!” but another passenger quickly clamped his hand over her mouth.
“Don’t make any noise,” he whispered. “We are across the river. We will get good jobs in the United States and be able to send money back to our families. But if the police catch us, they will put us in prison or send us back.”
“Por favor, señor, we are good girls. These devils kidnapped us. They brutalized us in ways I cannot say. We want to go home to our families. These two girls are just children. I have a husband and baby who need me.”
“We men have families to support. We need the work in Los Estados Unidos so we can send money back to them.”
“I am the main person supporting my family, señor. My husband is ill. It is just as important for me to go home as for you to go to a strange land where you don’t speak the language and don’t know you will get a job,” Pilar heard herself argue.
“You are just women,” the man retorted, growing angry. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
Pilar turned away and screamed, “Help us!” louder than before.
The man, who was large and strong, clamped his hand over her mouth as hard as he could. Pilar stumbled and fell against Josefina. He kept his hand over her mouth until the van had pulled back out onto the highway.
The noise from the road grew louder and more consistent. Pilar guessed they had entered a city—but which city and which state? She tried to remember the geography of the United States. Was this Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona? California would be too far. It had been a long time since she’d studied geography in school.
The truck finally stopped, and the driver opened the back door. It was night. The outside air was muggy and warm, but it felt good compared to the stifling, rancid air inside the truck. The driver ordered everyone out. Pilar saw that they were in a neighborhood with similar houses all around. She could hear dogs barking. They walked, one by one, into a one-story house with a fence around it.
“Lie down,” a guard ordered them once everyone was inside. “Don’t think of trying to leave. There are armed guards all around the yard. We will shoot anyone leaving this house. Men, take off your trousers and put them in a pile over here.”
Several of the male passengers protested this last order. “We can’t go out or go to work without our pants,” the man who had silenced Pilar objected. But when a guard leveled his gun at them, they obeyed.
Pilar looked for Josefina and Teresa. They had gotten separated. When she found them in one of the three small bedrooms, they all smiled for the first time since their ordeal began. They hugged Pilar as if they were schoolgirls separated over the summer, reuniting. “I am so relieved to see you, Pilar,” Josefina said. “Do you know where we are? I am so scared. I want to go home.”
Pilar wrapped her arms around Josefina to comfort her. She was surprised at how much she had worried about the two younger girls when she hadn’t been able to find them—how she felt responsible for them, even though she barely knew them. They are so young and scared, she thought. The girls clung to her, sensing that she was stronger than they were.
The next day, after they slept, Pilar studied the house, looking for a way to escape. But escape seemed impossible. Someone had nailed the windows shut, and groups of armed men sat and talked or drank at the front and rear of the small house. There was one bathroom and always a line to use it. At one point it backed up, and no one came to fix it. It was fall, but it was still hot outside. It was unbearably hot and smelled disgusting inside.
When they first arrived at the house, the men who had traveled in the van were happy that they had reached Houston and were about to start the good jobs they had been promised. But soon, as they realized that the armed guards were not there to protect them but to control them, they grew disgruntled. Two days after they arrived in Houston, five heavily armed Mexican men with tattoos like the ones Jorge had had on his arms arrived and gathered the men together. The apparent leader of the group told the men that they must pay the coyote who had arranged their transport an additional entrance fee to the United States. They would have to work it off by working in a factory. The coyote would take their room and board out of their wages until they completely paid off their debt. The captive men grew angry, looking for some way to vent their anger and frustration. The girls stayed together and out of sight as much as they could.
Pilar never stopped thinking about escape. One of the younger guards, who’d been recruited in the United States, liked to watch the three girls. Pilar took advantage of this to draw him into conversation: “Señor, I was wondering where we are. You seem to be an important man here. I would think you would know all about where we are in this big city?”
“This is East Houston,” he said.
“Is this a nice part of town?”
He snorted. “No, this is a very poor area. Too many Spanish people crossing the river, coming to Houston, living on top of each other like ants in an anthill. There are some good people living around here, some have papers or are citizens, but it’s still a dangerous part of the city.”
Pilar assumed they could get help from other Mexicans living nearby if they could escape their guards. She had been watching and trying to determine the most promising time to get away from them. She decided their best opportunity would be during the afternoon. The guards always nodded off in the shade of oak trees in the front and back yards after lunch. She studied the locks on the doors. She knew a little about hardware from when she’d helped her father in the store. She thought the cheap locks on the doors of the old house would be easy to pick. Their captors primarily relied on the armed men outside and the growing atmosphere of hopelessness inside to keep their prisoners from escaping.
But there was still the chain-link fence around the house. How could they get through it? Pilar studied the fence from all of the windows of the house. The people who used to live in the house to the north had owned two large dogs. The guards used to keep a dog at the house where the prisoners were, but it had grown old and died and had not been replaced. Over time, the dogs had dug a hole under the fence where they’d passed from one side to the other. The dogs were gone, but the hole was still there. Pilar and Josefina were petite—small enough, she believed, to lie down and slip under the fence where the dogs had dug. Teresa was another matter, but Pilar didn’t have any other ideas. Since they had been living mostly on dry tortillas and beans since they got on the truck out of Mexico, all of them had lost weight, even Teresa. Pilar had to hope Teresa had lost enough weight to squeeze under the fence.
Since she didn’t know what was going to happen to them or when, Pilar felt pressure to act as soon as her plan was formulated. The only thing she still needed was something to pick the lock on the door with.
She thought of her silver barrette. But she had left it behind as a clue on the off chance someone was looking for her and found the place they had been confined. She asked Josefina and Teresa if they had anything thin and strong she could use to pick a lock. She searched the drawers in the kitchen without luck. Then she quietly went to each of the few female captives, asking them if they had a thin metal object on them. Just as she was about to give up, a woman handed her a safety pin she had used to hold up her bra.
“Perfect,” Pilar said. “Tomorrow after lunch we will make our escape.”
Pilar estimated that she could run from the back door and slide under the fence, making it to the house next door, in one minute or less. She had noticed that a Mexican family lived there. She would get them to telephone the American police, who would rescue them.
So, on the third day of their confinement, Pilar, Josefina, and Teresa crouched in the kitchen, peered out the window, and waited until both of the guards sitting under an oak tree in the backyard finished their lunch and leaned against the trunk of the tree to take a nap. Their guns lay on the grass beside them. Five long minutes after she saw the guards’ shoulders and heads slump forward, Pilar inserted the safety pin into the lock on the back door and slowly jiggled it until she heard the click that meant it was unlocked. Another minute passed while she waited for her breath to be normal again, and then she slowly opened the door just wide enough to slip outside. She kept her eyes on the guards as Josefina and Teresa followed her.
When they were all outside, she whispered to the others, “Run to the yellow house to the left. Now!” All of them took off, Pilar in the lead. The noise of their feet stirring up the gravel on the driveway between the houses woke the guards, however. The men grabbed their guns and jumped to their feet.
Pilar slipped easily under the fence and reached the back door of the yellow bungalow. She pounded on the door.
“Help! Help us! We are being held captive. Call the police!”
A young boy’s face appeared in the window. “Mama, Mama,” he yelled in Spanish to someone inside the house. “Las señoritas!”
Pilar heard a man’s voice inside yelling in Spanish, “Don’t open the door, Tomás. Get away from the window. It’s none of our business. Come here.” The man sounded scared.
How can these people not help us?
Looking back, Pilar could see that one of the guards had caught up with Teresa, who had not quite made it through the fence. He dragged her to the ground with his gun drawn. Pilar pounded on the door harder. She begged, “Please, please help us.”
“I am going to put a bullet through this one’s head if you two aren’t back inside the house in one minute,” the guard yelled to Pilar and Teresa in a stone-cold voice.
Pilar knew that she could dash around the yellow house and perhaps get away herself. But the sight of Teresa, terrified, with a gun pointed at her head made her stop.
I can’t sacrifice her life for mine, she thought. This was my plan, and she is just a child.
Pilar walked back to the house where they had been confined; she was frustrated and angry. She’d thought the family next door would help them get free. But they had turned her away, probably afraid to get involved with the gunmen next door or the police. Suddenly Pilar felt tired, more tired than she had ever felt in her life. She wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Any other escape seemed impossible. As Pilar passed the guard who had yelled, he kicked her as hard as he could in the back of her legs, making her stumble. “If you try that stunt again, we will kill all three of you! Understand?”
She didn’t want the guards to see her cry, but once Pilar was back in the house, tears of frustration and hopelessness came. Exhausted, she fell asleep thinking, Maybe escape is impossible.