They settled in El Paso. Javier’s father got a job as an auto mechanic. His mother found work in an industrial laundry, cleaning hotel uniforms and gowns from the hospital. Javier’s brothers went to public school, riding the city bus back and forth. They were happy. Then something went wrong with their paperwork. A notice got lost in the mail, and they missed a deadline to file for permanent status. His father put on his ziplock suit and went downtown to see a judge, who remanded him to custody and began deportation proceedings. That night, Javier’s mother packed the children and took them to their tío Christopher’s house. She worried that ICE was looking for them. She quit her job at the laundry and found cash work as a maid in a motel, moving them into a one-bedroom apartment behind a grocery store. Javier turned four. He had a musical laugh and a brain for numbers.
Just before Christmas his father was deported. Sheriff Roy had been elected the month prior, and suddenly you had to be careful walking down the street. Sheriff’s deputies would raid the supermarket at random hours, trying to catch mothers shopping for groceries and fathers buying Huggies on their way home from work. After the elementary school on the east side got raided, Javier’s mother took the kids out of school. From then on, Javier spent his days at the neighbor’s watching SpongeBob.
When he turned seven, the neighbor was snatched up at a nail salon. A week later Javier’s mother got a new job, working on the estate of a very rich man. She put Javier in the car and drove the ninety minutes to Marfa every morning before dawn. On the way, she helped him practice his English, singing to songs on the radio. For eight hours, if the master wasn’t in, he would roam the grounds, looking for lizards and climbing the stone walls. His mother brought him water and beans and tortillas for lunch. If the master was there, Javier would lie in the shade under his mother’s car and read. He made stick people, tying the sticks together with grass and giving them names. His favorite was always Paolo, which was his father’s name. They spoke on the phone every few days, his father washing dishes now in a restaurant in Juárez. He was still appealing his deportation, but a resolution didn’t look good. When Paolo last spoke to a lady on the phone, she offered a hearing date five years in the future.
One day the master arrives while Javier is out by the pool. He is a tall white man with silver hair and two young women that look like his daughters. Javier waves. He is a people person, that boy, always talking. The master frowns and says something to a man in a suit with a pistol on his hip. That night Javier’s mother is fired. A friend gets her a job at Walmart, working from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., but three nights later sheriff’s deputies raid the store and take his mother to jail. At 5:00 a.m. deputies kick down the door to Javier’s apartment. His eldest brother, Ramon, manages to escape out a bedroom window, but Javier and Lupo are pulled screaming from their beds.
*
The next thing Simon knows they’re in the van. Somehow Flagg has found three bread trucks for the other children. They pull out in a cloud of dust, aware that reinforcements may be on their way. At the interstate they split up, the fantasy van heading west, the bread trucks going east, then splitting further. Flagg and Katniss ride ahead of Simon and the others, dirt bike engines throttled to three thousand RPM. Katniss rides one-handed, her injured arm dangling. They will have to see to her shoulder soon, before she bleeds to death, but if she’s weak or struggling, she doesn’t show it.
Simon sits in the back of the van, his eyes open but not really seeing. Louise holds a cold compress to his face, dabbing his brow. She sings to him in a low voice, as the Prophet sits on the cooler talking to Javier in Spanish. The words flow over Simon, because he is a submarine sinking down, impervious to the drama of the moment.
Later, Flagg will recount their victory in minute detail, how he flanked the surviving agents at the gate, while Cyclops laid down covering fire. After the men surrendered their weapons, Randall hog-tied them. In the main office he pulled the hard drives from the surveillance system while Cyclops threw open the cage doors. Parents were reunited with children. Most of you will have to set off on foot, Flagg told them. Hoof it. But if they spread out, slept during the day, and traveled at night, they should be able to avoid ICE patrols. There was no guarantee that they would make it, he said, but it was a shot. But if they trusted their children to him, he would make sure they all got out. That they got somewhere safe. Unbeknownst to Simon, calls had been made over the previous twelve hours. Trucks and drivers rallied. Safe houses arranged.
Outside the detention center, mothers hugged their sons. Fathers hugged their daughters. For better or worse, decisions were made. Crying children were put in vans, reaching for Mommy or Daddy. What impossible choices the people of this Earth are forced to make.
For Simon it was a waking dream.
They drive back roads to Marfa, elevation rising. The old Simon is dead. That coddled, innocent lamb obsessed with his own navel. Blood has been spilled. He has pulled the holy trigger, has shocked the foul ogre. There is no turning back. The war is on, and, as the Prophet tells him over Cracker Jacks and cheese, No one has ever won a war with words.
One day when humanity is extinct or reduced to feral tribes living in cave-side retreats, they will sing songs of everything we took for granted. Of mystical signals that flew by wind and burrowed under the ground, lighting up the darkness and cooling the air. Of filthy liquids pumped from the earth, heating the indoors and fueling our metal horses. Of humans traveling at unimaginable speeds over unthinkable distances. How we flew through the troposphere and spoke to people in far-off lands, as if by sorcery. Sweet waters could be chilled and turned into solids and eaten from sticks. Popsicles, they called them. Oh, the wonders of the Before Time, in which women on tropical continents sewed clothes that were then loaded on boats and shipped across oceans. So many riches. So much power. And all we had to do was decide.
Would we cleave together or cleave apart?
At a stoplight in Alpine, they wait with the engine idling. Outside the window a red tallboy dances in the breeze. GRAND REOPENING reads the sign. The plastic tube man curtsies and bows, throwing his arms in the air with rabid, Pentecostal fervor. Rationally, Simon knows its movement is driven by an electrical fan based at his feet, but viewed through the window of the van from a prone position, all Simon can see is the miracle of dance. A creature of pure movement, joyous, thin skinned, first ducking from sight, then springing into view.