It took him four attempts to get into America. Three times he was smuggled across the border and dropped near San Diego, left to make his way north to San Francisco, where he was to meet up with his handler. Three times he was captured in Camp Pendleton by Marines and turned over to the Border Patrol. The fourth time he was able to pass through the vast military base undetected and continue moving north. Once he arrived in the Bay Area, he was immediately put to work in the mountains surrounding the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. He worked hauling all the necessary equipment in before planting season and then camped inside the marijuana grow during the season, tending the crop.
He remained undetected in this capacity for five years before he began longing for a more stable situation. Most of the money he made, he sent home, since his living expenses consisted of whatever he needed to survive six months in the woods, which wasn’t much. No rent, no PG&E bill, no bar tab, no nothing other than food. Then at the end of his fifth season, he walked away and never came back.
He started as a day laborer, which cut the money he could send home substantially. Rosa complained, but what could he do? He worked as a laborer for two years, living in a small corner of a garage in San Mateo. Carlos hadn’t seen his wife in more than seven years and yearned for the chance to return home and reunite with his family. His daughter was in the first grade and would write him letters, but sadly he knew Rosa forced Maria to do these things. There was no way Maria could have remembered Carlos, she’d only been an infant when he crossed into America.
One evening after he was finished with work, he went to a local bar, where he would drink a few beers, listen to music, and knew two or three people. As he sat talking to a friend, a woman he’d never seen before walked into the bar. She sat alone for perhaps fifteen minutes, and when Carlos’s friend left to use the restroom, the woman approached Carlos. The two struck up a conversation, and soon they were laughing and drinking. Carlos drank far more that evening than he ever had in the past. He wasn’t a man to lose control and surely wasn’t a man to overindulge.
Carlos woke the following morning and found himself in the woman’s bed in East Palo Alto. His head throbbed and his mouth felt dry as talc. Soon she swept into the room and told him frankly he had to leave. He gathered himself and didn’t see the woman again for ten months until suddenly she appeared at the same bar he’d met her at the first time, only now she carried a car seat with baby Salvador securely strapped inside.
The woman told Carlos Salvador was his son and that she was moving and could not care for the boy. With that, the woman set Salvador on the tabletop and vanished into the night. Carlos had almost stopped beating himself up for being unfaithful to his wife when all this happened. He was now not only wrought with guilt brought on by his infidelity, but panic stricken over how he was going to provide for the child, not to mention what he would tell his wife, Rosa.
Carlos shared the garage with three other families, and through those relationships he was able to leave Salvador with the women while he and their husbands went out and eked out a living. Salvador’s mother left Carlos with the child, but she also provided Carlos with the child’s birth certificate, which made registering Salvador for school much easier when the time came. The year Salvador began first grade, Carlos started his own landscaping business. Most of the labor he performed to date, including his time in the marijuana fields, had been horticulturally based, so focusing on a landscaping business was a natural transition from his employment as a day laborer.
Soon, Carlos was able to move himself and Salvador into a small studio in a nicer part of San Mateo, enabling Salvador to attend a school rated much higher than the schools in the neighborhood they previously lived in. All went well for the two, and as Carlos grew his business, he was able to send more money to Rosa. Regrettably Carlos was not able to bring himself to tell Rosa about Salvador. He also never mentioned to Salvador that he had a stepmother and a half-sister; it was a burden that haunted Carlos every day of his life.
Chapter 22
When the bad thing happened, he and Salvador were eating dinner in the studio. Neither thought anything of it, as power outages were not something out of the ordinary in California. Vehicle accidents could cause them; overloaded grids during hot weather were another cause. Carlos didn’t know and didn’t really care since every other time the electricity went off-line, it had been no more than two hours before PG&E restored power and everyone got back to doing whatever it was they’d been doing.
The following day, Carlos found his truck would not start. He was about to begin tinkering with the engine when he noticed several of his neighbors were also under their vehicles’ hoods. This caused Carlos a degree of concern, wondering if some nefarious vandal had been up to no good the previous night. He could ill afford to spend money on unscheduled repairs with his budget stretched to near breaking as it was.
By the third day, Carlos knew something very bad was happening, but wasn’t quite sure what to do. He’d walked Salvador to school the first day, but no one was there other than a few other confused
