to transport people. They called themselves Snakeheads and had decades of practice ‘sliding immigrants under the noses of the fat Americans,’ as one had said. All she had to pay them was $23,000, or work it off in a factory north of Phoenix. $23,000. Might as well have been a million. One had to be desperate to embrace such a debt, because with the Snakeheads, the debts were mortgaged in blood.
***
She found the cloth partially buried in the middle of a dry lakebed. The ground around it was hard, flaking away like the scales of a carp. The prickly things that grew in the desert stopped to within a dozen meters, either unable to, or unwilling to grow any nearer. As she approached, she felt its pull, as if it knew she was near and was causing her to move closer. But that couldn’t really have been happening. After all, it was a desert night, and a cold American wind cut through her, like the Siberian winds of her youth. It was she who wanted the cloth. All she wanted was to be warm. She had to tug it free from the sand. Although the moon shone high above her, there was no reflection in the oily black fabric, as if it wasn’t even there. Or as she’d learn later, as if the material inhaled the light.
But all of these thoughts happened later… when she was in the crosshairs of the border guard, when she was about to die, when her entire world was about to change, like the night she learned that she hadn’t been the first born and the true value her father had placed on her head.
With shaking hands, Bao-yu wrapped the cloth around her trembling body. She didn’t even shake it clean and could feel the hard bits of sand and dirt pressing against her skin. She was thankful as she continued to shamble vaguely in the direction she thought was the way to America. She only stumbled once, a prickly cactus reaching out to jab at her legs. Eventually, when exhaustion overwhelmed her, she managed to find a low point in the ground that protected her from the wind. She curled herself into a ball and wrapped the cloth around her. She soon found sleep, and like she was once again in the womb, dreamed of what could be on the other side of the thin, pliable skein separating her from the rest of the universe.
***
Fifteen Chinese had been transferred from the shipping container. She’d lost track of the time the journey across the ocean had taken. All she knew was that when the doors had opened, the smell of clean air had made her weep with joy. The stench from the waste buckets was horrible, but nothing compared to the smell of the old woman who’d died on the third day.
Bao-yu had first smelled that smell when she was back in her home watching her mother make baozi with plum sauce. The sickly sweet scent always reminded her of childhood, even when she passed steam barrels on the streets of Harbin after her mother’s death. But the smell in the container had grown and deepened and became part of their every breath, reminding her not of something sweet, but of something dead. And when she’d been forced to use the buckets, she tried not to look at the body stuffed into the corner. She’d tried not to see the old woman’s ankles turn first blue, then black, then some color that blended too well with the dark.
They’d been separated into several moving vans. Hers was already crammed so full with equally terrified Mexicans that everyone was forced to stand. The truck ran hard up the side of a mountain, then back down the other side. To keep from breaking their necks, they were forced to hug each other, the van bucking and jumping over rocks and desert scrub, the metal walls anything but tender to their shoulders, elbows and heads. She’d lost count of the screams and shrieks, many of them her own, until the inevitable happened. The van rose one last time, then twisted in a way it hadn’t before, sending her and the others spiraling against each other in a free-for-all of broken bones and blood.
Through some laughable vicissitude of fate, she was able to crawl free, along with a pair of young Mexican men and an older Mexican man. The young men, who’d been traveling together, limped back the way the