No Witness But the Moon(88)

Oliva stared straight ahead. His voice turned husky and barely rose above a whisper. “On the second day, we ran out of food. On the third day, we ran out of water. On the fourth, we drank our own urine. We were lost. The coyote told us to give him all our money so he could buy water and get help. We never saw him again.”

“He abandoned you?” asked Vega.

“Yes. After that, some became too weak to travel. The group began to split up. Hector’s son, Miguel, got bitten by a scorpion. Hector had to walk much slower for the boy’s sake. I was by myself. I had to keep going. My family in Honduras was depending on me.”

“How did you know where you were going?”

Oliva pointed to the vaulted ceiling of the church where a fresco of saints acted out their own life-and-death dramas. “I followed the North Star at night. That was all I could do. My nose bled. My tongue swelled. My skin felt like it was on fire. On the fourth day, I spoke to the mountains.” He closed his eyes. “On the fifth, they answered back.”

Vega felt stung by the enormity of such suffering—the sheer loneliness of it. To die in the desert is to die twice. Once in the body. Once in the soul.

“The doctors told me that when two good Samaritans found me by an Arizona roadside, I had only hours to live,” said Oliva. “At the time, I believed I was the only one of the twelve to survive.”

“You didn’t know that Hector and Antonio—um, Edgar—had survived?”

Oliva shook his head. “How could I know? We did not travel under our real names. We could not draw attention to ourselves or our situation once we were here. I didn’t even know the name of the coyote who abandoned us. We called him “Chacho” because he had this little bit of facial hair beneath his chin. He was so young, I think that’s all he could grow, even after we were out there several days.”

“How did you find out Hector was alive?”

“Years later, when I lived in Queens, I met Father Delgado and told him my story. That’s when he introduced me to Hector. I moved up to the Bronx and began to work at the church. Neither of us knew that Edgar had survived. Not until Edgar contacted Hector through a cousin’s Facebook page.”

Oliva brushed a hand along the beveled edge of the pew in front of him. “You need to understand,” he said slowly. “Edgar wasn’t trying to be hurtful when he disappeared from his family. He was just living a very different life than they would have been comfortable with.”

Vega nodded. “They wouldn’t have accepted his homosexuality?”

“Probably not,” said Oliva. “At least not then. This was twenty years ago.”

“So what made him come forward now?”

“Edgar saw the book.”

“The book?”

Oliva rose. “Come. I will show you.”

Oliva ushered Vega out of the nave and into the hallway that connected the church to the rectory. They walked past Delgado’s office until Oliva came to a small janitor’s closet full of mops and brooms and cleaning supplies. Oliva felt around on a shelf for something.

“This is why Edgar contacted Hector.”

Oliva pulled a book from the shelf and handed it to Vega.

“Song of My Heart? A celebrity memoir? Why would Edgar care?”

Oliva took the book from Vega’s hands and thumbed through the well of pictures. “Look.”

Oliva pointed to a faded photograph of a young Luis in a hoodie and loose jeans. He was standing next to a graffiti-covered wall and talking to several Latino men, some of them old enough to be his father. Luis’s nose was broader than it was now. His cheekbones were less defined. Even his body was different back then. He had a teenager’s narrow and undefined torso. He was ropy from lack of food, not physical conditioning. His squint however, carried the same dazzling self-assurance he could still summon on a dime.

But it wasn’t Luis’s appearance that caused Vega to rear back. It was the man in the center of the group that Luis was talking to. A man with a soft chin and shy smile.

Vega lifted his gaze from the picture and stared at Oliva. He felt his lips forming around a question too terrible to contemplate. But he already knew the answer. There was only one way that Jesús Ricardo Luis Alvarez-Da Silva, a Mexican from the northern state of Sonora, could have ended up in the same photograph with Edgar Antonio Ponce-Fernandez, a Honduran trying to cross the border. Luis was “Chacho,” the teenage coyote who had gotten those men lost in the desert and then abandoned them twenty years ago. Luis was responsible for the deaths of six men and three teenage boys, including Hector’s sixteen-year-old son, Miguel.

“So that’s why Edgar and Hector went to Luis’s house. They knew.”

Oliva nodded. “Once Edgar saw the book, he was consumed with revenge. He wanted to find a way to get even with Luis. It was different for Hector. For him, it was all about Miguel. He never forgave himself for what had happened to his son. He thought the only way to find peace would be if he could make things up to his daughter, maybe by bringing his granddaughter here. So Hector and Edgar asked Luis for money. A few weeks ago. And he paid. But then . . .” Oliva’s voice trailed off. He looked suddenly embarrassed.

“But what?”

“I think maybe they got greedy. Maybe Hector gambled the first money. I don’t know. He changed after that. They both did. The money seemed to make things worse. It was like, no amount of money could ever be enough. They went back a second time. That’s when all the bad stuff happened.”