This is the third installment in a six part series on a Nicaraguan's journey to the United States. You can find the series in its entirety here.
The Coyote was a heavy-set Mexican, with a welcoming smile, and an ability to turn a “No” into an “Alright” with a simple look and a “Come on…”
Choco met him, along with his five traveling companions, outside a fried chicken restaurant on an unusually dry night in Guatemala City. Getting to Guatemala had been simple enough; nobody even asked him for his Nicaraguan identification card.
The Coyote instructed the voyagers to get into the back of his pickup, and so started the first leg of the trip, up to the Mexican border. As they neared this first border, the pick-up veered off an abandoned stretch of the Pan-American, and the Coyote told the travelers they had to lay down, he was going to cover up the bed. Choco remembers that after his eyes adjusted, he spent those hours hidden away under the bed-cover studying the feet that lay in front of him. The red slip-ons, with a rose-like bow near the pinky toe. The slight cleavage between the toes, the long skinny bones, the veins bulging through like cables under a carpet. The slight scar near the ankle. The ankle bone like the bulging eyes of a fish. Their pungent smell. Choco claims he would be able to recognize those feet immediately if he ever saw them again.
Choco felt the pick-up slow down and stop, and heard the Coyote chat with someone, and by the tone it seemed to be a lifelong friend. The conversation went on for a while; at one point, the Coyote even got out of the pick-up, and Choco had the irrational fear that the Coyote had forgotten about them and was going to go out drinking with this friend of his and leave them all lying there. But the Coyote returned, got back into the driver’s seat and took off.
It must have been three or four hours that they spent bundled up like matches in that pick-up bed, before the Coyote made a pit stop and let them out. They were in Chiapas, the Coyote said, once they get to Oaxaca it will be safer and they wont have to lie down. But every time they pass through a city he will play it safe and cover up the bed. Once they get north of el D.F. they will have to spend the entire time under the bed.
And so it went. They traveled for nearly three days, through the nauseating roads that wind up the mountain ranges in southern Mexico, through the noisy cities that seem to celebrate every day with a parade, through the heat that baked them to near delirium. A majority of the time they spent it lying down, close enough to each other to share sweat stains, and knowing every movement by any one member implied an adjustment by all the passengers. Limbs lost so much blood circulation that some of the passengers would confuse their own arms with that of their neighbors, or would try to wake up their neighbors’ arm thinking it was their own.
They finally reached the Northern border town, and Choco felt the tension that had been rising since they passed Monterrey reach a boil. They felt the pick-up be stopped on a couple of occasions. In the last instance, Choco heard the Coyote talking to someone. The Coyote suddenly lifted the bed-cover and yelled at them to get out. He had been stopped by the Mexican police. The immigrants lined up, and a large, Ogre-like Mexican official whispered something into the Coyote’s ear. The official then asked where the travelers were from, and one by one they named their country of origin. Five from Nicaragua, one from Honduras. The officer yelled back at his partner in the squad car, “Hey, we got a dirty one!” The Honduran woman defended her country with pride, and the Mexicans laughed.
“Alright, each of you has to give me five hundred dollars,” the Coyote said. He collected the money and handed it to the officer. It didn’t seem sufficient to satisfy the Ogre, he looked the Honduran up and down and said, “What is her name?” The Coyote immediately responded, “Venga hombre, que esta panzona” (“Come on, man, she’s pregnant”), and the officer gave a disgruntled, “Alright…” They shook hands and the travelers got back into the pick-up.
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