That’s why most who crossed bought maps, hand-drawn things that tried to make sense of that tangle of canyons and arroyos and roads. Endless trails that had been worn smooth and glassy by centuries of callused feet; places where water and shade could be found, dugouts and holes where you could lay up and hide from the camisetas verdes, the americano Border Patrol in their green shirts. Most of these maps were also marked with tiny calaveras, faded ink warnings marking those smuggling paths controlled by los narcos. They would kill you if they found you there, and leave your body to rot as a warning to others.

As would the bajadores, thieves and murderers who preyed on anyone they could catch.

Maps were expensive, but guides—los coyotes—cost even more. For a handsome fee, they promised you safe passage not only over the river, but to the cities on the other side: Houston and Dallas and Chicago and New York. Places that meant nothing to Chayo, places so far away they might have been la luna. He’d heard all about the men and women and children who’d hiked through the desert only to find themselves crushed into small airless cars and vans, driven to houses where they waited for days or sometimes weeks to be moved on. Sometimes more money would be demanded of their families, and sometimes a woman or child was taken away in the middle of the night anyway, never to be seen again.

Like Chayo’s fellow normalistas.

Chayo understood that he and Neva could not be found, could not be caught. Not now. As far as anyone knew, they were already dead. They’d been taken away in the middle of the night, and everything they might know about their attackers, the men in the police cars and uniforms, had disappeared with them. It would be worse for them and, more important, their families, if they were caught now. They had to get across the border.

Chayo had no money for a map or for los coyotes.

He would have to be both.

—