The Only Road

Despite a tense moment at a checkpoint, the children are successfully smuggled across the border between Guatemala and Mexico. They are left there, alone but for each other, and Jaime continues to be plagued by what-ifs and guilt for surviving while his cousin and best friend did not.

Their options for moving further north are the bus, a train, or walking. None of them are safe, and each has its own attendant dangers. They decide to try the bus and make their way to the station. There they discover that a bus ticket is more than some of their neighbors can earn in a day and gain a new appreciation for how much money they will need for the trip. They explore the town of Tapachula while they wait for the bus and discover a church. There Jaime takes out his sketchbook, which he carries everywhere, and loses himself in trying to draw what he sees.

Jaime and Ángela eat some of the food their abuela packed, then Ángela makes Jaime memorize Tomás’s number, in case they are separated or lose the paper it is written on. Jaime continues to be extremely afraid of what might await them on the way north: 

In an illegal journey of four thousand kilometers, they were going through places more corrupt than his village, running from gangs more violent than the Alphas, going to a country where no one, except Tomás, wanted them there (55).

The cousins board a bus for a five-hour ride to Arriaga. Jaime uses the time to sketch everything he can see, then an elderly woman asks him to draw her portrait. Though she is speaking Mayan, Jaime can understand what she’s asking and is happy to oblige her. To his surprise, she insists on paying him for the picture. To Jaime, it “[d]idn’t matter how little twelve pesos translated to. He was now officially a ‘professional’ artist. Nothing could take that away from him” (62).

As the bus goes north, two dirty and bloody men come aboard only to disembark a few miles further. Right after that, the bus is stopped at the first of several checkpoints. Not until the third is the bus searched and the passengers interrogated. A drug-sniffing dog is brought on board, and a guard confiscates something, probably marijuana, from a tourist couple. When the dog alerts at the back of the bus, the guard accepts a bribe from two men obviously smuggling large amounts of drugs. Another officer comes through and demands the riders show proof of Mexican citizenship; a woman tries to bluff her way past them but the guard hears her accent and “drag[s] her off the bus,” where another guard hits her and she “crumple[s] to the dirt, blood oozing from the side of her head” (72).

The guard returns to the bus, and Ángela fakes a Mexican accent to convince him they are citizens. The guard is distracted by Jaime’s sketchbook and flips through it, then tears out the sketch of a lizard, which is what Jaime had been drawing when he heard that Miguel was dead. Jaime takes comfort in having his sketchbook at all: “He could live with this different, violated feeling, he supposed, just as long as he never lost the book completely. It was his life, or what remained of it” (76).

The cousins arrive in Arriaga without further incident, though it is nearly 10:00 p.m. and the bus station is deserted. Jaime notices some graffiti that reads “¡Váyanse centro americanos!” (78), and the cousins hurry to find the refugee shelter their village priest had told them about. Ángela is tired and overwhelmed and begins to cry; Jaime asks himself what Miguel would do and resolves to take things “[u]n paso a la vez. One step at a time” (79). With a little luck, they make their way to Padre Kevin’s shelter, Iglesia de Santo Domingo, where they use the river as a bathroom and are given a place on the floor to sleep.