The Weight of Shadows Read Online Free

with a wall of men in dark tactical gear and assaultrifles.
    A boot pressed down on the side of Octavio’s head, crushing his ear. The men were placed in the dog cage mounted on the back of the border patrol vehicle and then were taken to a booking station. Octavio could hear the
pollero
vomiting in the next cell, while another man attempted to tell the officers that their friend’s body was somewhere in the desert. One of the agents gave Octavio a Coca-Cola and smiled at him—told him in broken Spanish that things would turn out okay. Hours later they scanned his fingertips and had him sign some papers, most likely a voluntary departure form. He was loaded on a bus and driven for hours to a Mexican port of entry far from where he had attempted to cross. He was unloaded. An officer removed his cuffs and pointed toward the entrance of a building. It was not yet dawn, but the structures in the distance started to gain the vaguest of contours.
    After my final night of work at the restaurant, after a meal of sliced duck breast in mole negro, and after several glasses of snuck tequila that retails at about fifty dollars a shot, I remembered only three things: dancing with two very tall, very attractive Russian women to a Cuban bolero, taking a deep and caustic drag of an American Spirit lit at the wrong end, and Octavio shaking my hand with a folded hundred-dollar bill in his: a hard-earned contribution toward my citizenship. “Qué esperas, cabrón?”

CHAPTER 2
Martín y Yoli
    Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship.
    â€”Ronald Reagan
    When Martín became my father, he was skinny. He isn’t fat now, but there’s a photo of him from that time in which he’s bathing a black puppy in a washbasin, and in it he looks like a lanky kid. Somehow, even though he was about to have a child himself, he looks placid. His arms look relaxed, and he’s holding the wet puppy very gently. He looks present in that moment, like his mind is occupied with nothing other than kneading suds into a puppy’s back with his thumbs.
    The person taking the photo, maybe Martín’s mother Estela, may have captured a moment of genuine calm, or it may just seem that way to me because I’d like to imagine they weren’t devastated by the news that they’d soon be parents; I know how I would have felt about it at his age, twenty. Or maybe the photo was taken just before anyone knew.
    The puppies—two white, two black—were only a few weeks old, and they lived in a cardboard box lined withblankets. The box was in an entryway that led to the courtyard of the family home in Fortín. I remember seeing the photo for the first time when I was eight and being really drawn to three large metal tanks nestled between pots of young anthuriums. They looked like helium tanks for balloons, and my mom explained that they were filled with gas for the house, that in Fortín there was a truck that rode around town delivering them door to door, with a guy on the back shouting “Gas!” My mom said it was the same gas that came through the pipes in our place in Chicago and heated the oven, and I wondered whether those pipes were connected to tanks of gas somewhere in the basement of our apartment building. My mom said the gas came from the utility company, that there was a whole world of pipes and wires underneath the city, and that she didn’t really know exactly how it all worked, but it didn’t work like it worked in Mexico.
    They always referred to Mexico. How this was different in Mexico or how that was oddly similar in Mexico, and I got some idea but never really a complete picture of what it meant. I had no recollection of it at all, just the sense that being from there affected almost every aspect of how we lived in