Read Online Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario - Free Book Online

tried to ride freight trains to
el Norte.
One is known as El Gato, the Cat. He talks about
migra
agents shooting over his head and how easy it is to be robbed by bandits. In Enrique’s marijuana haze, train riding sounds like an adventure. He and José resolve to try it soon.
    Some nights, at ten or so, they climb a steep, winding path to the top of another hill. Hidden beside a wall scrawled with graffiti, they inhale glue late into the night. One day María Isabel turns a street corner and bumps into him. She is overwhelmed. He smells like an open can of paint.
    â€œWhat’s that?” she asks, reeling away from the fumes. “Are you on drugs?”
    â€œNo!” Enrique says.
    Many sniffers openly carry their glue in baby food jars. They pop the lids and press their mouths to the small openings. Enrique tries to hide his habit. He dabs a bit of glue into a plastic bag and stuffs it into a pocket. Alone, he opens the end over his mouth and inhales, pressing the bottom of the bag toward his face, pushing the fumes into his lungs.
    Belky, Enrique’s sister, notices cloudy yellow fingerprints on María Isabel’s jeans: glue, a remnant of Enrique’s embrace.
    María Isabel sees him change. His mouth is sweaty and sticky. He is jumpy and nervous. His eyes grow red. Sometimes they are glassy, half closed. Other times he looks drunk. If she asks a question, the response is delayed. His temper is quick. On a high, he grows quiet, sleepy, and distant. When he comes down, he becomes hysterical and insulting.
    Drogo,
one of his aunts calls him. Drug addict.
    Enrique stares silently. “No one understands me,” he tells Belky when she tries to keep him from going out.
    His grandmother points to a neighbor with pale, scaly skin who has sniffed glue for a decade. The man can no longer stand up. He drags himself backward on the ground, using his forearms. “Look! That’s how you’re going to end up,” his grandmother tells Enrique.
    Enrique fears that he will become like the hundreds of glue-sniffing children he sees downtown.
    Some sleep by trash bins. A gray-bearded priest brings them sweet warm milk. He ladles it out of a purple bucket into big bowls. On some days, two dozen of them line up behind his van. Many look half asleep. Some can barely stand. The acrid smell of the glue fills the air. They shuffle forward on blackened feet, sliding the lids off their glue jars to inhale. Then they pull the steaming bowls up to their filthy lips. If the priest tries to take away their glue jars, they cry. Older children beat or sexually abuse the younger ones. In six years, the priest has seen twenty-six die from drugs.
    Sometimes Enrique hallucinates that someone is chasing him. He imagines gnomes and fixates on ants. He sees a cartoonlike Winnie-the-Pooh soaring in front of him. He walks, but he cannot feel the ground. Sometimes his legs will not respond. Houses move. Occasionally, the floor falls.
    Once he almost throws himself off the hill where he and his friend sniff glue. For two particularly bad weeks, he doesn’t recognize family members. His hands tremble. He coughs black phlegm.
    No one tells Enrique’s mother. Why worry her? Lourdes has enough troubles. She is three months behind in school payments for Belky, and the school is threatening not to let her take final exams.
    AN EDUCATION
    Enrique marks his sixteenth birthday. All he wants is his mother. One Sunday, he and his friend José put train riding to the test. They leave for
el Norte.
    At first, no one notices. They take buses across Guatemala to the Mexican border. “I have a mom in the United States,” Enrique tells a guard.
    â€œGo home,” the man replies.
    They slip past the guard and make their way twelve miles into Mexico to Tapachula. There they approach a freight train near the depot. But before they can reach the tracks, police stop them. The officers rob them, the boys say later, but