The first two times he crossed the Rio Grande, he had only made it to the opposite bank when the bright lights flashed on and the gringos in their dark green uniforms had rounded them up, herded them to a big white van as though they were herding sheep. Two hours later Luis was back on the other side of the river, walking toward home.

        He didn’t try again for four months because he was busy courting Ofelia, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the village auto mechanic, Arturo Sanchez. Since there were very few cars in the area to work on, Arturo had had plenty of time on his hands over the years, with the result that he had fathered eleven children, so when nineteen-year-old Luis asked Arturo’s permission to marry sixteen-year-old Ofelia, Arturo readily agreed, even though it meant that the newlyweds would have to live with Luis’s grandparents, parents, two brothers, one sister and a great-aunt in a four room shack. Arturo was also swayed by Ofelia’s tearful confession that she was pretty sure she was pregnant.

        On his third try at making his way across the Rio Grande, Luis took Ofelia along. It wasn’t until they had traveled the thirty-three miles from his village to the Rio Grande near Nuevo Laredo, a goodly portion of it on foot, and were standing at the river’s edge, looking at the rushing water caused by a heavy rain that morning, that Ofelia turned to Luis and tearfully confessed, "Luis, I can’t swim."

        Luis finally found a log that seemed willing to float and he sat Ofelia on the log, her legs hanging down on either side, her arms clinging to as much of the log as she could reach around, then Luis pushed the log across the river, hanging onto the back end of it and kicking as hard as he could. They ended up a good mile down the river from where they started but somehow they reached the other side. They had all of their extra clothing bundled up together, and Ofelia had been given the job of holding the bundle under her elbow, but that hadn’t lasted past the first dip of the log beneath the water, so they arrived on the other side of the river bank with no clothes except what they had on and both of them soaked to the skin. So when they climbed the riverbank and found three border patrol agents waiting for them there, Luis felt disappointment but also some degree of relief.

        Ofelia didn’t accompany Luis on his next four tries because she was beginning to have trouble with her pregnancy-morning sickness and bladder problems and so on-so she stayed behind. Luis hugged her. "I’ll reach San Antonio, get a job, make five hundred dollars the first week, and send most of it to you. There are people there who only charge one-fifth of what you’re sending home and they guarantee the money will arrive safely or you get your four-fifths back. You can buy clothes for the baby." He said such things each time he set off on a new attempt to make it to San Antonio, and, on his seventh try he had actually made it past the trees on the other side of the river and to the wonderful American highway, had actually seen the sign that said, "San Antonio 157 miles."

        "It was almost like I was there," he told Ofelia when he got back home. They were sitting on a bench in the village’s tiny town square, their place to talk privately about Luis’s dream, since there was no privacy at all in the house of Luis’s family. Luis was holding Ofelia who was leaning awkwardly against him.

        "Luis," she said, "you know the man that comes to the village once a month to handle matters of law, the old man with the white hair and pink eyes? He told me something very important. He told me that if I have my baby in the United States, then the baby will be a citizen of that country."

        Luis frowned. "How much did he charge you for this information?"

        Ofelia blushed. Unlike Luis, who had the mahogany skin and jet black eyes of his Indian forebears, Ofelia had more Spanish than Indian in her blood so she was fair of skin and in the bright light of the late afternoon, her blush showed clearly. "He…he only asked to touch my stomach, Luis. He said that to touch the stomach of a woman deep in her pregnancy is good for a man’s…maleness."

        Luis scowled, straightened his back, clenched his fists, but since Luis was only three inches taller than Ofelia’s five feet, and was skinny on top of that, he wasn’t able to appear very ferocious. "I should fight him," he said. "The next time he comes to the village, I’ll challenge him to a fight."

        "He’s a weak man, Luis. I think you should have mercy on him and only give him a dirty look." She bent and kissed Luis on the cheek. "But the thing is," she said, "I’ll be due to have my baby early next month. If we cross the river when my pains start, I should be able to have my baby there. And," she said, smiling, squeezing Luis’s skinny arm, "you can push me across the river on an inner tube. Don’t you remember, Luis? It was in the newspapers. The man used a big truck inner tube, made a place on top using a piece of canvas so it was like a boat?"

        Luis frowned. "And where would we get the truck inner tube and the canvas?"

        Ofelia giggled. "From my father’s truck. He never uses it because he has no business and has no gasoline." She shrugged. "We’ll borrow the inner tube. As for the canvas, my father has a big piece in his garage."

        Luis sighed. "I don’t know, Ofelia. These people that did it before, they made it to the United States safely?"

        "Well…no. The woman drowned. But I want to do this, Luis. I’m going to do this. You see, if I have my baby there and it’s an American citizen, then they’ll let us stay too to be with our baby. It only makes sense, Luis."

        Luis frowned, didn’t say anything.

        Ofelia made all the arrangements. Luis wasn’t sure how she managed to get the tire off the truck and the inner tube out of the tire, but he knew all of her brothers were fond of her and none of them were fond of their father, so she probably got some help there. The canvas was covered with oil and grime but Ofelia cleaned it off as best she could and she attached it to the inner tube with some strong rope that she had also found amongst the clutter in her father’s garage. She also arranged for old Senor Rodriguez to drive them in his dilapidated vegetable truck to the river when her pains started.

        She awoke Luis on a muggy night in late July. "It’s time to go," she said, heaving herself to a sitting position on their narrow bed. "The pains have started. The inner tube is at Senor Rodriguez’s house and he will take us to the river in his truck."

        By the time they reached the river, Ofelia’s pains were coming every fifteen minutes or so and Luis was getting worried. "Maybe we should go back to the village. What if you have the baby in the middle of the river? What if…"

        "My mother said that a woman’s first baby is always slow, Luis. We have time." Then she grimaced, gritted her teeth, didn’t speak for a moment, then climbed awkwardly down from the truck’s passenger seat, with Luis’s help. "But we’d better hurry, I think," she said.

        It was a dark night, no moon and an overcast sky, a good night to try to cross the river, so they weren’t the only ones on the riverbank. "We need to go farther down," Ofelia said. "I can walk all right, Luis. I’ll carry our bundle of clothes-it’s not that heavy-and you carry the inner tube."

        The trip across the river went smoothly. The current carried them down-river a ways but this actually got them farther away from the others making the attempt, so when they landed, there was no one there and it was a dark area amongst a grove of thick-growing trees. During the crossing, Ofelia had curled up on the tarp that covered the top of the inner tube, curled up clutching the bundle of their possessions, determined not to lose it again, no matter what happened, and as Luis helped her onto the muddy river bank, she continued to hold it tightly against her side. "Now what?" Luis asked.

        Ofelia sat down on the riverbank. "This is good, Luis. You’ll have to help me but I know what to do. First we need to take the tarp off the inner tube and spread it out. Find some spot that’s not too damp."

        And of course, just as Luis spread the tarp and Ofelia lay down on it, the lights flashed on.

        They placed Ofelia on the back seat of the big white van, let her lie on her side with her head propped on the bundle of belongings. Luis sat on the edge of the seat beside her, holding her hand, shivering. One of the Americans, a young one with yellow hair and a smooth boyish face, said something to the one driving, but Luis couldn’t understand English well enough to know what he had said, only thought that the young man was arguing with the other man, who was heavyset, had a thick gray mustache and a ruddy complexion. This man said something back, spoke sharply, and a few minutes later they were on the bridge, headed back to Mexico.

        Ofelia gave birth to Juan and Juanita at a little clinic in the first village on the other side of the river. The driver of the van had first stopped after they crossed the bridge but there had been more words between the two Americans, sharp words they seemed to be, then the driver had driven on until they came to the clinic. The young American with the yellow hair had helped Luis half-carry Ofelia into the clinic then he had said to Luis in Spanish, "Good luck and congratulations," then he had gotten in the van and the Americans had gone back to their brightly-lit country.

        "I have no money," Luis told the doctor in the clinic, a heavy-set woman who towered over him, wearing a blood-spattered white smock. She frowned but said, "Bring her in. You’ll pay me later."

        When they got back to the village, Luis said, "Now I must get to San Antonio and find work. We owe money to the clinic and we have two new mouths to feed. I’m going to leave tomorrow night."

        Ofelia sighed but didn’t argue.

        On his ninth try Luis managed to get past the river bank on the other side of the river although only a hundred yards or so, but on his tenth and eleventh tries he was again caught on the river bank, along with the usual crowd, some of whom had become familiar to Luis. One of these, a tall, lean man who came from a village farther south than Luis’s, told Luis as they got out of the van at the far end of the bridge, "What you need is a coyote, my friend. Many people reach the big cities of San Antonio, Houston and Dallas with the help of a coyote."

        Luis frowned. "Yes, I’ve heard of these men who help people get across the river and up into the state of Texas, but I’ve also heard that they cost much money."

        The man grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. "I’ll send you to a man who only charges twenty dollars American. And he guarantees success."

        It took Luis two months of picking cotton and shoveling out Senor Romano’s stables to earn twenty dollars American but he finally found himself standing in a cluster of trees at a point a mile or so down from his usual crossing place. The coyote was a big man with long hair and a thick mustache. Besides Luis, there were two other men and one middle-aged woman with her teenage son. "The fence is higher here," the coyote told them, "so the Americans don’t pay it as much attention. What they don’t know," he said, grinning, "is that there is a hole in the fence, a hole large enough for even me to crawl through." He held out his hand. "I’ll take your money now, then I’ll show you the hole once we’re over there. We have to move fast just in case they happen to come this way."

        They paid the coyote, followed him across the river, then ran to the fence. Luis, with the others, scurried around, looking for the hole, then turned toward the coyote, needing his help. But what they saw was the coyote wading back to the other side of the river. He turned to wave then disappeared into the trees. Luis headed for the fence, started to climb it, but was only half way to the top when the lights flashed on.

        After that, Luis decided he was going to travel strictly on his own. He walked along the riverside on his thirteenth try, kept walking until he came to a wide place in the river, the water moving fast. He crossed himself, waded into the river and started swimming. He made it, barely, crawled up on the riverbank and lay there until he got his breath back. When he finally stood, he pulled his canvas-wrapped bundle of clothing from beneath his shirt and set off into the trees. He reached a section of fence that was in shadow and he tossed his bundle over then climbed carefully to the top. When he dropped down on the other side, he lay there for a moment, listening, and when he heard nothing but crickets chirping and an owl hooting, he went trotting off over a hill and into a woods.

        He had brought along some beef jerky and he chewed on this as he hurried through the night, then when dawn began to break he found a crevice between two huge boulders and he stayed there throughout the day. It was cool though, early October, so he didn’t suffer from the heat. But he did suffer from thirst.

        As the sun rose, he set off, staying close to the highway. He made his way to the access road that ran alongside the highway, kept walking until he saw a tall sign that said "Mobil Gas." He was so thirsty by this time that he didn’t hesitate when he came to the shiny building that sat near an exit ramp from the busy highway, headed straight for a water faucet at the side of the building and gulped down water until his stomach ached. He was headed back into the trees when he heard a voice call out in Spanish, "Stop." Luis thought of running, but he knew they would catch him. He turned and walked back toward the big white van.

        On his next try, he did run. He had gotten at least twenty miles north of Laredo, staying in the trees near the highway, when he saw nine or ten Mexicans standing in a cluster in a field. Surrounding them were six Border Patrol agents and when one of them caught sight of Luis, he yelled. And Luis turned and ran into the trees. He ran for a long time, ran until he could run no more, dropped down on the ground. He was in a field surrounded by woods and when he looked around, he thought he had escaped. But then he heard the motor, saw the van lurching across the field toward him. He sat there and waited.

        "What you have to do," Fernando Mora told him, "is become a brush-walker." Luis had heard about Senor Mora from a man in the village. "Senor Mora lives in the big white house outside the city of Anahuac," the man told him. "He’s rich, owns two cantinas and a feed store. He got rich in the city of Houston, working on one of those fields where Americans go to hit little white balls with a stick. He knows how to do it, Luis. He made his way to Houston and lived there for four years, came back with his pockets full of American dollars."

        So Luis went to the big white house, found Senor Mora, a tall, lean man with a stringy gray beard, sitting in his back yard, drinking from a large can of beer. "It’s from the country of Australia," Senor Mora said, holding up the can. "It’s much better than American or Mexican beer. Much better." But he didn’t offer any to Luis so he could see how much better it was. When Luis told him he had already tried to get across the river and up to San Antonio fourteen times, Senor Mora sipped from the big can and said, "I made it all the way to Houston on my sixth try. What you have to do is walk in the brush. Not close to the highway but deep in the brush that runs all the way through the valley and up to San Antonio. Take plenty of water-use the plastic bottles that milk comes in--and plenty of jerky and don’t go near anybody else. The Border Patrol calls people who travel this way ‘brush-walkers’ and they have a lot of trouble catching such people."

        Luis thanked him, bowing and smiling, then turned to leave. "Wait," Senor Mora said, and he held out the big beer can. "Here. Take this," he said. "It’s empty but you can sell the can."

        Luis decided to wait until spring to try to brush walk to San Antonio. During the winter he found a few small jobs, mostly using a shovel or a broom or his back, bringing in a little money but not enough to pay for the food that he and Ofelia and the twins ate, as his father frequently reminded him. He also spent a lot of time preparing for his next trip to the north. He found two of the milk containers and practiced sipping water a little bit at a time. He thought carefully about what he was going to take with him and he rolled it all into an old blanket and figured out the best way to tie it over one shoulder and down across his waist. When the weather turned warm in early March, he decided it was time to leave. He packed his pockets with beef jerky, wrapped the blanket roll around his shoulder, hooked the water bottles on his belt, kissed Ofelia and the twins good-by, and set off on a clear night when there was a fairly warm breeze.

        Six days later, Luis was somewhere north of Cotulla, Texas, still sticking to the brush, but he’d had to cross the Nueces River-it was just a narrow stream compared to the Rio Grande-and that had put him out in the open for a while. He hadn’t seen anyone at all though and had even taken the time to wash out his clothes in the river. The water didn’t look too muddy and Luis was getting low on water so he drank some of the river water, drank a little more than he intended to, in fact, so he wasn't surprised when he got a stomach ache that night and had a good case of the runs for the next two days, but he kept moving, even though he was feeling weak and wobbly.

        On his second night after crossing the Nueces River, he went to sleep in a pile of hay he happened across out in the middle of a field. He hadn’t seen any houses around so he felt safe, figuring he would get up before daylight the next morning and get back into the trees. He woke up with the sun in his eyes and he sat up, feeling panicky, then stood and started toward the tree line. That’s when he saw the dog.

        It was a big dog, jet black with a small head and pointed ears and it moved toward Luis, it’s fangs bared. It didn’t growl, didn’t make a sound, and that scared Luis more than if it had barked and growled at him. He was thinking about running when he heard a man’s voice.

       There were sharp words spoken in English and the dog immediately moved back and sat down, but continued to watch Luis.

        The man was big, looked Mexican but was wearing a gray Stetson and a neat gray suit, but Luis saw that the black boots the man wore were scuffed and dirty and he was wearing a T-shirt beneath the jacket that didn’t look very clean. The man said something to Luis, something in a deep voice, and Luis looked up at him and said, "No Ingles." The man scowled and spoke again and Luis realized then that he was speaking Spanish, although with a strange accent and with words mixed in that Luis didn’t recognize. Still, he understood well enough to know that the man was asking him where he came from. Luis pointed toward the horizon. "Houston," He said.

        "Houston is that way," the man said in Spanish, pointing in a different direction. "I think you came from Mexico." When Luis didn’t answer, just sat there with his head down, the man said, "You want work?"

        Luis couldn’t believe his ears. "Yes, senor," he said.

       "Yes, I want work. Very, very much."

        The man led him across fields to a scattering of buildings. There was a house, made of stone, with a wide backyard. There was no grass in the backyard and it smelled of chicken droppings, although Luis saw no chickens. There was a big red barn that sagged a bit to the left and another building, a long wooden one. It was to this building that the man led Luis. He took Luis inside and pointed at a double row of stalls. "Work horses," the man said in his strange Spanish. "I breed and sell them. I need somebody to clean this place up. It’s got dirty lately."

        The man was standing close to Luis and Luis could smell whiskey on his breath. He could also smell the powerful odor of horse manure. "I’ll give you twenty dollars a day for a week. You clean this place out good, put in fresh hay. They’re out in the corral right now but I bring them in at night." The man swayed, bent closer to Luis. "There’s a kitchen in the back of the house, plenty of canned stuff, frozen stuff. You can eat some of it." He stared at Luis out of red-rimmed eyes. "Well? You want the job?"

        "Of course," Luis said. He was thinking that he would make over a hundred dollars in just one week. "Of course, senor. I’ll start right now."

        The man said something that Luis didn’t understand, then he walked across the yard and into the house.

        The stable was filthy and Luis found a shovel and started shoveling manure out into the middle aisle of the stable and from there he used a wheelbarrow to move it outside, where he started forming a huge pile. Just before dark, he heard the sound of horses and he stood aside and watched the man herd and lead the big, docile animals into their stalls. When the man finished, he left without a word. Luis thought about the food in the kitchen but he decided to face that challenge the next morning. He found a pump, drank his fill of cool water, then dug one of the last pieces of jerky from his pocket and ate it, then spread his blanket on the ground just inside the stable, and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

        He was up the next morning before dark though, cleaning out the stable aisle, when the man came in and started feeding the horses. After that he drove them outside and Luis started shoveling more manure from the stalls.

        The man came back, saw Luis’s bed roll, and told him, sounding angry, "I told you to sleep up in the loft. Now come with me. I’ll show you how to heat the food."

        Luis ate something that was labeled "Salisbury Steak," sitting on the kitchen steps. After nothing but jerky and some berries over the last several days, the food tasted delicious, and after he finished the meat and the soft potatoes, he yearned for another one, but he didn’t want to seem greedy. Instead he ate a can of peaches in syrup, then crawled up into the barn’s hayloft and slept with a full stomach, the first time in weeks.

        When Saturday came, Luis had cleaned out the stable, sprinkled fresh straw in all the stalls, and had learned how to help feed and water the horses. He woke up Saturday morning, thinking he would be paid this day and then he could be on his way to San Antonio. Once there, he would find some way to send most of the money to Ofelia. But when he walked out into the coolness of early dawn, he saw a white van pulling around the side of the house. He thought about running but he decided he would just take his wages, ride the van back home, give all but five dollars to Ofelia, then start his journey again. But the owner of the ranch was nowhere around when a tall black man, wearing the dark green Border Patrol uniform, stepped out of the van and motioned Luis toward the back seat.

        Luis’s first thought was of his blanket roll, which was in a corner of the hayloft but before he turned to go for it, he thought of the money he had coming and he told the Border Patrol agent, feeling panic now, "I have salary coming. One week. More than one hundred dollars."

        The agent was joined by a big white man with a belly pushing at his uniform shirt. This man said in Spanish, "Get in the van."

        "But I have money coming to me, senor. Please."

        The two men moved toward him. The big man again said, "Get in the van."

        Lupe looked toward the house, saw no one. He turned to go get his blanket roll but the two men moved against him, pushed him into the van and closed the door. As the van pulled away, Luis looked back, saw the owner of the ranch standing in the back yard, his hands in his pockets.

        "You should stay at home for a while," Ofelia told him when he got home. "You’re so thin, Luis, you look like you have no fat at all. And the twins are almost walking but they don't know you. They think your brother Felix is their father."

        "I’m leaving in the morning," Luis told her. They were lying in their narrow bed. They had made love but Luis had been tired and still angry from what had happened to him, so it was brief and unfulfilling for both of them. "In a month," he told her, "I’ll send you money."

        Eighteen days later he reached the southern edge of San Antonio. He was exhausted, thirsty, hungry, but he hadn’t varied from his brush-walking route, staying deep amongst trees whenever he could, waiting until dark to cross open fields that he couldn’t walk around. He had run out of water twice during his journey but he hadn’t gone near a stock tank to refill his milk bottles, although he knew he was close to one on several occasions when he had caught the smell of cattle dung. Instead he waited until he happened upon a creek or small stream. He had made the jerky last, although there had been times when he yearned to eat a whole strip of the dry meat. As he’d walked along he kept an eye out for berries and he’d come across some. Not many but enough to supplement his beef jerky diet.

        When he began to pass near a lot of houses, it became difficult to stay in the brush, but there always seemed to be some, even near the houses on the south side of San Antonio. "Stay on the south side of the city," Senor Mora had told him. "There are more Mexicans there than gringos.

       Don’t walk around with your blanket roll. Find a good place and hide it. Find a job there on the south side. Don’t go to the north side to work, even if you’re promised good money. Some of the house builders, they use those that crossed the Rio Grande because they can get them cheap, but the INS they hit those places every so often. And get a shirt that doesn’t look like that work shirt you’re wearing. Get a gringo shirt, then look for a job."

        Luis hid his blanket roll at the top of an incline beneath an overpass, where it couldn’t get wet and where no one would be likely to chance on it. He walked up to a quiet neighborhood street, hesitated for a moment, his heart pounding, then walked to a busy street. There were cars passing by the dozen, big, shiny cars, most of them, and when Luis walked down the sidewalk, he soon found himself passing people.

        It seemed strange to be around people after so long without seeing anyone at all, and at first he shied away, moving out to the edge of the street. But he soon realized that most of the people he was passing were brown-skinned like him, and he heard Spanish being spoken, although it was that strange Spanish that the horse ranch owner had used. He looked down at himself, realizing that he stood out some because of his worn and wrinkled jeans, his beat-up tennis shoes, his faded work shirt, so when he passed a boy wearing a shirt with some words in English on it, Luis dug in his pocket for two of the seven dollar bills he carried.

        The boy understood most of Luis’s Spanish, but he laughed when Luis offered him two dollars for his shirt. Luis finally paid the boy four dollars for the black shirt with words in white on the front, the number 12 on the back, even though the shirt was worn and had a good-sized hole in the back. When he offered the boy his own shirt, the boy laughed, walked away wearing nothing above the waist.

        It was a warm day in June and Luis was thirsty but he soon found a service station that had a restroom on the inside and he went in the restroom, drank deeply of the water from the faucet, then took off the shirt and splashed water under his arms. He walked down the street looking at the businesses, finally went into a little restaurant that advertised tacos and enchiladas. There was a woman at the counter, sitting on a stool behind the cash register. There were no customers and the woman was reading a newspaper. She was a big woman, with gray-streaked dark hair pulled tightly back from a round, shiny face. Luis walked up to her and said, "I’m looking for work."

        The woman looked him up and down. "You’re an illegal," she said in Spanish.

        Luis thought about lying but the woman didn’t treat him like someone who was about to call the INS. "Yes," he said. "I have a wife and two children in Mexico and I want a job so I can send them money."

        The woman studied him for a long time, just sitting there with her brow furrowed. Then she said, "Three dollars an hour, and you can eat your dinner here. If there’s no work to do, you leave. I don’t pay anyone to stand around doing nothing."

        Luis took a deep breath, nodded. "Thank you," he said.

        "What will I do?"

        The woman grinned, showing a front tooth with a gold star in it. "Everything," she said. "Wash dishes, sweep, mop, clean off the tables, take out the garbage. Everything."

        "Good," Luis said. "I can do that."

        At the end of the week, Mrs. Garza handed Luis sixty-five dollars. "That’s your first week’s pay," she said. "You’ve done well, Luis. Tomorrow is Sunday and I’m closed. I go to Mass on Sundays then I rest." They were standing in the crowded little kitchen of the taqueria and Luis had just finished putting away the last of the pots and pans. He accepted the money with a big smile, made a slight bow to Mrs. Garza. "Maybe you can tell me who I can go to to send money to my wife," he said.

        Mrs. Garza locked the back door, led Luis out to the front door. "The post office is closed tomorrow," she said.

       "On Monday I go to send checks to pay my bills. I’ll buy a money order for you and mail it to your wife. You’ll pay for the money order and the stamps, of course."

        "Of course," Luis said, following her out into the humid night. "And thank you, Senora Garza."

        Mrs. Garza studied him, a frown on her face, then she said, "Go to the second street over, Ontiveros Street, then walk down until you see the numbers 3-3-8. That’s old lady Montoya’s house. She’ll let you use her bathroom and sleep on her back porch for five dollars a week. Also, you must help her out. She’s a very old woman. She needs help."

        Luis was smiling so wide, his lips hurt. "Thank you, Senora Garza. Thank you so much."

        "The first thing you do," she said before she walked away, "is as soon as old lady Montoya will let you, take a bath. You smell like a goat, Luis."

        Luis sent Ofelia fifty dolars that week, then sixty the following week. He wrote a letter to go with the third money order, sitting at a table in the taqueria after Mrs. Garza closed, writing slowly and clumsily. He had gone to school for three years but then he had stopped going because he didn’t have clothes to wear in the classroom, so his writing ability was weak. He wrote: "I am well, Ofelia. Kiss for me Juan and Juanita. When you have saved $1000, I will come home. Luis."

        Other than work in the taqueria, Juan didn’t do much of anything. He kept only a few dollars for himself so he didn’t have money to do anything other than do odd jobs around old lady Montoya’s little house, cutting her grass with an old hand-pushed mower, straightening the boards on her collapsing fence. He got in the habit of going to Mass on Sundays, at first to please Mrs. Garza, then because he liked the quiet of the church, the peacefulness. When he had been in San Antonio six weeks, he happened on a yard sale, was amazed to find clothes that would fit him, clothes that had been worn by a teenage son, and was even more amazed when he was able to buy two pairs of trousers, three shirts, several pairs of socks, all for only two dollar bills and three quarters. He felt so good about this, he treated himself to a candy bar at the little store near the taqueria.

        He received a letter from Ofelia in November. She had had even less schooling than Luis so he knew, when he saw how well it was written, that she had gotten some help with the writing. "Dear husband," it said, in neatly printed letters in black ink, "I and Juan and Juanita are well. I am saving the money, as you said, except that I have bought new clothes for the babies and a dress for myself. Also, and I hope you don’t mind, I loaned some money to your brother Felix so he could buy new shoes so he could try to get a job in Nuevo Laredo. He is good with the babies, giving them pony rides on his back. I hope you are well. Ofelia."

        Over the next several months, Luis sent the money without letters, and received none from Ofelia. Then, in the summer of the following year, thirteen months after he came to San Antonio, he received a letter from Ofelia: "Luis, I have saved the thousand dollars. You have been good to send this money to us. Will I see you soon? Ofelia."

        Luis made himself a new blanket roll, stuffed his pockets with beef jerky, filled the same kind of milk containers with water from old lady Montoya’s kitchen faucet. He also put some candy bars in his blanket roll and some chewing gum.

        In the early hours of the morning, he walked south, passing the overpass beneath which he had hidden his old blanket roll. He had never gone back for it but had no desire to see if it was still there. He thought about walking along the edge of the highway, all the way to the Rio Grande, knowing that if they picked him up, all they would do was give him a ride across the border. But he decided he wanted to take his time, do it his way. When he reached the highway, he stopped and looked back and he saw the glow of the city and he stopped and stood there, thinking, remembering his many crossings of the Rio Grande, his long trip walking through the brush of South Texas, his finally reaching this big city.

        When he sent his next money order to Ofelia, he sat at one of Mrs. Garza’s tables and he wrote, "Ofelia. I think we should wait until you have two thousand dollars." He paused, thinking, then added, "I don’t mind that you loaned money to Felix to buy shoes. Luis."

        Then he went about his daily routine.

Paul Perry has been writing fiction for thirty-five years with more than 150 stories published, most of them in literary magazines. In October of 2000, Pocol Press published his short fiction collection STREET PEOPLE. He has a second collection in the works entitled LOST PEOPLE. His novel, A ROOM IN UENO, won the $300 1st Prize in Southwest Louisiana University's 1998 Deep South Writing Conference Novel Competition, judged by renowned author Ernest J. Gaines. The novel also won the $500 1st Prize, the NFWS Bancroft Award for the Novel, in the 2000 Florida Community College Writers' Festival. The judges were novelists David Poyer and Lenore Hart. His second novel, LETTER FROM CHICAGO, 1932, won the $200 2nd Prize in Gardenia Press's 2001 novel competition. In February, 2002, Paul had a chapbook of short fiction published by Argonne House Press entitled THE ONTIVEROS STREET TRILOGY. Paul is married to Toshi, whom he met in Japan fifty-three years ago. They have three sons, six grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.

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