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

then let them go—José first, Enrique afterward.
    They find each other and another train. Now, for the first time, Enrique clambers aboard. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station. From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen.
    They know nothing about riding the rails. José is terrified. Enrique, who is braver, jumps from car to car on the slow-moving train. He slips and falls—away from the tracks, luckily—and lands on a backpack padded with a shirt and an extra pair of pants.
    He scrambles aboard again. But their odyssey comes to a humiliating halt. Near Tierra Blanca, a small town in Veracruz, authorities snatch them from the top of a freight car. The officers take them to a cell filled with MS gangsters, then deport them. Enrique is bruised and limping, and he misses María Isabel. They find coconuts to sell for bus fare and go home.
    A DECISION
    Enrique sinks deeper into drugs. By mid-December, he owes his marijuana supplier 6,000 lempiras, about $400. He has only 1,000 lempiras. He promises the rest by midweek but cannot keep his word. The following weekend, he encounters the dealer on the street.
    â€œI’m going to kill you,” the dealer tells Enrique. “You lied to me.”
    â€œCalm down,” Enrique says, trying not to show any fear. “I’ll give you your money.”
    â€œIf you don’t pay up,” the supplier vows, “I’ll kill your sister.”
    The dealer mistakenly thinks that Enrique’s cousin Tania Ninoska Turcios, eighteen, is his sister. Both girls are finishing high school, and most of the family is away at a Nicaraguan hotel celebrating their graduation.
    Enrique pries open the back door to the house where his uncle Carlos Orlando Turcios Ramos and aunt Rosa Amalia live. He hesitates. How can he do this to his own family? Three times, he walks up to the door, opens it, closes it, and leaves. Each time, he takes another deep hit of glue. He knows the dealer who threatened him has spent time in jail and owns a.57-caliber gun.
    â€œIt’s the only way out,” he tells himself finally, his mind spinning.
    Finally, he enters the house, picks open the lock to a bedroom door, then jimmies the back of his aunt’s armoire with a knife. He stuffs twenty-five pieces of her jewelry into a plastic bag and hides it under a rock near the local lumberyard.
    At 10 P.M., the family returns to find the bedroom ransacked.
    Neighbors say the dog did not bark.
    â€œIt must have been Enrique,” Aunt Rosa Amalia says. She calls the police. Uncle Carlos and several officers go to find him.
    â€œWhat’s up?” he asks. He has come down off his high.
    â€œWhy did you do this? Why?” Aunt Rosa Amalia yells.
    â€œIt wasn’t me.” As soon as he says it, he flushes with shame and guilt. The police handcuff him. In their patrol car, he trembles and begins to cry. “I was drugged. I didn’t want to do it.” He tells the officers that a dealer wanting money had threatened to kill Tania.
    He leads police to the bag of jewelry.
    â€œDo you want us to lock him up?” the police ask.
    Uncle Carlos thinks of Lourdes. They cannot do this to her. Instead, he orders Tania to stay indoors indefinitely, for her own safety.
    But the robbery finally convinces Uncle Carlos that Enrique needs help. He finds him a $15-a-week job at a tire store. He eats lunch with him every day—chicken and homemade soup. He tells the family they must show him their love.
    During the next month, January 2000, Enrique tries to quit drugs. He cuts back, but then he gives in. Every night, he comes home later. María Isabel begs him not to go up the hill where he sniffs glue. He promises not to but does anyway. He looks at himself in disgust. He is dressing like a slob—his life is unraveling.
    He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he has to go find his mother.
    Aunt Ana Lucía agrees. Ana Lucía