" No teman el censo. "
"Yes, Mrs. Bonner," Congressman Delgado said. " 'Do not fear the census.' That is our message this day."
Two hundred thirty-five miles south of the Governor's Mansion and two blocks north of the Rio Grande, the governor's wife stared out the tinted window of the black Suburban as their five-car caravan rolled around the San Agustin Plaza in downtown Laredo. She had flown in the night before and stayed at the La Posada Hotel on the plaza. She would fly back to Austin that afternoon. Up front, a state trooper drove, and her Texas Ranger bodyguard rode shotgun. She sat in the back seat with the congressman. His aftershave reminded Lindsay of her father when she was a little girl riding in his lap and pretending to steer the old Buick. Congressman Delgado pointed out the window at a white church with a tall clock tower.
"The San Agustin Cathedral," he said. "I was baptized there. And that is the old convent for the Ursuline Sisters, but the nuns are gone. And the Plaza Theatre, it is shuttered now, but I watched many cowboy movies there as a child. That was, of course, many years ago." He chuckled. "I was born in Laredo, but I am afraid I will die in Washington."
Ernesto Delgado had first been elected to Congress in 1966. He was seventy-eight now and had no thought of retiring.
"The plaza seems…"
"Dead?"
She nodded.
"Yes, it is March and our streets should be crowded with college students on spring break, staying in hotels on this side of the river and partying on the other side. Gin fizzes at the Cadillac Bar and pretty girls in Boys' Town-Nuevo Laredo once boasted the cheapest drinks and the best prostitutes on the border. It is legal in Mexico, prostitution."
A wistful expression crossed the congressman's creased face, as if he had experienced all that Nuevo Laredo had to offer in his younger days.
"Now the Cadillac Bar is closed, and Nuevo Laredo has only the drugs and violence to offer, so the DPS issues travel warnings. 'Avoid traveling to Mexico during spring break, and stay alive,' the one this year said. So the students, they go to Padre Island instead. And the streets of Laredo are empty."
The streets were empty. The few pedestrians on the plaza walked slowly, as if they had no place to go. Palm trees and old Spanish-style structures lined the brick-paved plaza, a few elderly tourists snapped photos, and some of the businesses still seemed alive-Casa de Empeno, Casa Raul, Pepe's Sporting Goods, Fantasia Linda-albeit protected by burglar bars. Other storefronts sat boarded-up, left to decay in the dry air. Faded murals, a fenced-off movie theatre, a forgotten convent-the streets of Laredo were paved but not with gold. The town seemed tired and weary, like an old person who recalled an earlier time, when her life had meaning. When she was useful. Lindsay Bonner was only forty-four, but she often felt like that old person. Or this old town. Old. Useless. Unnecessary. She still had the energy, the drive, and the desire to be useful and necessary, but she had no place. No purpose. Her husband was the governor and her daughter a college student; her jobs as mother and wife were finished now. She was the governor's wife, but that was not the same as being a wife. It was a role she played; it was not her. So she volunteered around Austin, but she was always the governor's wife. She could not escape that identity. That prison. Those cameras. That was her role now, a pretty face that brought out the cameras.
A photo op.
Local television and newspaper reporters and cameramen ready to record every moment of her visit to the border followed in vans with their stations' logos stenciled in bright colors on the sides. A Department of Public Safety cruiser manned by two well-armed state troopers led the way; a local police car with two well-armed cops brought up the rear. Security for the governor's wife and a U.S. congressman. Their DPS driver cocked his head their way.
"You know what they call an American in Nuevo Laredo?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Victim."
He laughed. He was Anglo. The congressman responded with a pained expression.
"Border humor. The cartels, they killed over one hundred Americans last year and kidnapped many more who have never been seen again. But the Nuevo Laredo mayor, he says we have only a public relations problem, that with better press, the tourists will return to the border. Of course, Nuevo Laredo is under martial law and the mayor, he sleeps on this side of the river. I think that is what they call, denial."
The caravan coursed through the maze of narrow one-way streets that was downtown Laredo and then past the bridge leading into Mexico. They turned north and accelerated onto Interstate 35. They drove through the city landscape at seventy miles per hour, only the palm trees distinguishing the journey from that through any other city in Texas, and the governor's wife had journeyed through most the last eight years. They exited the interstate and turned west on Mines Road. They soon reached the outskirts of Laredo, and beyond that, the city became the desert. The land lay vast and empty and flat, brown and parched from the drought, only scrub brush and dirt as far as the eye could see.
Lindsay Bonner had been born in Boston but had grown up in the Hill Country of Texas, a land of streams and rivers and lakes, so contrary to this land. She had been to the border the tourists see, but never to the borderlands. Her husband did not campaign here. He said it was simply a matter of getting the most bang for your campaign buck. There was little bang for a Republican on the border: the people who inhabited this harsh land were Democrats, poor Latinos who did not contribute to political campaigns and who did not vote. So to the politicians in Austin, they did not exist. Perhaps that was why she had jumped at the chance to come south.
She often felt as if she did not exist. And she was a Democrat.
She had never told her husband, of course, and she had never officially registered, but she had always voted straight-ticket Democrat-except she had always voted for her husband. The bonds of matrimony. Or the guilt of a Catholic: to love, honor, and obey, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. Father O'Rourke had said nothing about a husband converting to Republican. It was worse. She was smiling at the thought of what her husband would say if he ever learned her secret-there would be profanity-when they abruptly veered off the highway and turned south onto a bumpy dirt road that cut through dense brush "Chaparral," the congressman said.
— and bounced her about. The DPS cruiser in front kicked up a cloud of dust that enveloped their Suburban. But visible in the distance through the dust was a low shadow that seemed to rise from the desert and extended east and west as far as she could see until it disappeared into the haze. The shadow grew taller and taller as they came closer until it loomed large overhead. But it wasn't a shadow.
"What is that?"
"That, Mrs. Bonner, is the border fence."
"But it's not a fence. It's a wall."
"Yes. Some portions along the border are fences, but here it is a wall. Eighteen feet high, constructed of steel with six feet of reinforced concrete below ground-apparently the Department of Homeland Security thinks the Mexicans will be arriving in Abrams tanks."
"This is what Bush wanted in America? Our own Berlin Wall?"
"Obama voted for the border wall, too, Mrs. Bonner, when he was in the Senate. He was a politician before he became the president."
They stopped in front of a massive gate guarded by two Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and wielding military-style rifles as if guarding the gates to a kingdom. Or a prison. Were they keeping them out or someone else in? Her Texas Ranger bodyguard threw open his door. Dirt blew in with the hot wind; Lindsay averted her face until the Ranger stepped out of the vehicle and slammed the door shut as if he were angry at the Suburban. He pushed his cowboy hat down hard on his head to prevent the wind from taking it north to San Antonio and marched over to the Border Patrol agents. After a brief discussion, the agents opened the gate, reluctantly it seemed. The Ranger returned, removed his hat, and got back in the vehicle, grumbling something about "Feds." They drove through the gates, and Lindsay sat up, anticipating what she would see on the other side, which was Nothing.
She saw nothing but more chaparral and dirt. She had expected something, perhaps a panoramic view of the majestic Rio Grande. But the river was nowhere in sight. The wall just cut through the land like a random mountain range.
"So the border wall isn't actually on the border?"
"Oh, no," the congressman said. "The border runs right down the middle of the Rio Grande, so the wall, it is off the border. Here, about a mile. Elsewhere, maybe two miles." He chuckled. "Over in Eagle Pass, the public golf course runs right along the river. The golfers, they would be hitting their balls and suddenly Mexicans would dart out of the carrizos, the thick reeds by the river, and race across the fairways and into town where they could mix in with the locals. So Homeland Security built the fence on the town side of the golf course, to block the Mexicans' path. But they also blocked the golfers' escape. So now the Mexicans jump out of the carrizos with guns and rob the golfers."
He now gave out a hearty laugh.
"You cannot make that up," he said.
"A border wall that's not on the border. That doesn't make any sense."
"There is little on the border that makes sense, Mrs. Bonner. As you will see, this side of the wall is another world entirely-a world that is not Mexico, but that is also not America."
"Then what world is it?"
"This, Mrs. Bonner, is the colonias." He turned to the window and pointed. "Oh, look-a jackrabbit." He turned back. "Ah, we are here."
The Suburban braked to a stop and stirred up dust that soon dissipated in the wind. The Ranger opened the back door for the governor's wife. Lindsay stepped out and immediately surrendered her hair to the wind. The ninety-degree heat felt like an oven after the air conditioning inside the vehicle. The press crew bailed out of their vans and began unloading their equipment. The troopers and police got out of their cruisers with their large guns strapped to their waists and stretched their large bodies; they must have recruited the biggest men on the force to guard the governor's wife. Congressman Delgado came around and stood next to her. They were both decidedly overdressed, she in a cream-colored linen suit and low heels, he in a tan suit and tie. He inhaled the dry air.
"Ah, spring on the border. It is the same as summer." He extended a hand as if gesturing at a grand monument. "Welcome to Colonia Angeles, Mrs. Bonner. The border's version of a gated community."
They stood at the entrance to this community of angels. But it was not heaven on earth. The dirt road continued on and seemed to disappear into the dust, just a rutted path winding through a vast shantytown of dilapidated structures that in the distance seemed to merge together to form a massive inhabited dump. Half-naked brown children played in the dirt road and down in the river, dull in the hazy sun. Women carried water from the river in buckets and cooked over open fires; smoke rose into the sky in thin spires. An enormous pile of smoldering refuse stood tall near the river; with each gust of wind, paper and plastic items broke free and danced across the dirt as if attempting an escape. Rats rummaged through the refuse. The congressman was right: this was another world. A third world.
"How many people live here?"
"Six thousand. Or perhaps seven."
The women had stopped their work and the children their play, and they now stared at their visitors, as if frozen by the sight of the black Suburban and the police cars and the cameras. Or frightened. One barefooted little girl in a dirty white dress broke away and ran over to Lindsay. Her hair was stringy and gray with dirt. Her face was gaunt. She had pierced ears and dangling earrings. She carried a naked doll.
"?Que lindo el cabello! "
"She says your hair is pretty," the congressman said. "She has probably never before seen red hair."
Lindsay leaned down to the girl and said, " Gracias, mi amor. El tuyo tambien es bonito."
"Ah, you speak Spanish."
"Enough to converse."
"Juanita!"
A woman down the road called to the child then clapped her hands.
"?Venga!?Andale! "
The child twirled around and ran to the woman.
"She is afraid," the congressman said.
"The girl?"
"The woman."
"Why?"
"Anglos. Police. Cameras."
The woman and child disappeared. All the residents seemed to fade into the shadows. The dirt road suddenly lay vacant except for a few stray dogs and chickens. Two pigs. A goat. The colonia was now a ghost town. The congressman leaned in close and lowered his voice.
"May I suggest, Mrs. Bonner, that the troopers and the police stay here with the vehicles. The Ranger also."
"Why my Ranger?"
"Well, the Texas Rangers are not… how shall I say… well regarded here on the border."
"Why not?"
"History, Mrs. Bonner. History."
She turned to the police. "Please stay here."
They didn't argue.
She turned to her Ranger. "You, too."
He did argue.
"But, ma'am-"
"Ranger Roy-"
She felt utterly stupid calling her Texas Ranger bodyguard "Ranger Roy," but his surname was Rogers. Roy Rogers. Ranger Rogers was even worse than Ranger Roy.
— "if these people fear us, we won't accomplish what we came here for today."
"Mrs. Bonner, your safety requires that I accompany you. The governor, he wouldn't be happy."
Lindsay embedded her fists in her hips and craned her head up at Ranger Roy. He was a strapping young man of twenty-eight; he had played football at UT. He had been her bodyguard for her husband's entire second term; he had become something of a son to her. A very large son. She had no doubt he'd die before seeing her harmed.
"Who would you rather have unhappy with you-the governor or me?"
Ranger Roy had faced that same choice many times. He knew the wise answer.
"Uh, yes, ma'am, I'll wait here."
"Thank you." She gestured to the press crew. "Let's talk to these people."
They stood as if embedded in the dirt. A burly TV cameraman smoking a cigarette shook his head.
"No way. My producer didn't say nothing about going into the colonias. And we sure as heck ain't going in there without the cops."
"Why not?"
"Because this colonia is controlled by the Los Muertos cartel."
" Controlled? This is America."
He snorted like a bull, and smoke shot out of his nostrils.
"No, Mrs. Bonner, everything on this side of the wall, it's just a suburb of Mexico." He jabbed a fat finger at the vast colonia that confronted them. "Ma'am, you go in there, you might never come out-you can't even call nine-one-one 'cause there ain't no phone service out here, landline or cell."
Congressman Delgado must have noticed her face flushing with her spiking blood pressure; he took Lindsay's arm.
"Come, let me show you the river."
They walked away, but she heard the cameraman grumbling behind her back.
"Don't see why I gotta risk my life just 'cause some diva from Austin-"
"Shut up," Ranger Roy said.
Lindsay smiled. Roy was a good son. They continued a short distance to a low bluff overlooking a narrow strip of brown water. She had never before seen the Rio Grande. She had expected majestic. It was not.
"The Rio Grande disappoints you?" The congressman gave her a knowing nod. "Yes, I understand. It is not what you had envisioned, this dirty little river. But you see only the tired old man, not the strong young hombre that was born in Colorado. I have stood where the river begins, twelve thousand feet up in the San Juan Mountains, where the headwaters are cool and clean and rapid, fed by the melting snow. The water you now see, it has traveled seventeen hundred miles through New Mexico and West Texas and it must journey two hundred miles more before it will empty into the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica. To the Mexicanos, it is not the Rio Grande, the big river. It is the Rio Bravo del Norte. The brave river of the north."
But the river did not seem brave or big. It seemed ordinary, too ordinary to separate two nations. The congressman sniffed the air.
"Something has died." His eyes searched the sky. "Ah, yes. See the vultures?"
He watched the birds circling, then his gaze returned to the river.
"The dams and the drought take the water. Upriver, before the Rio Conchos joins the flow, you can walk across without getting your feet wet… or your back."
He smiled at his own joke then gestured at the children playing in the shallow water on the other side below their own slums. They waved; she waved back. Less than two hundred feet separated them, America and Mexico.
"If not for the river, you would not know which side is Mexico and which side is America," the congressman said. "But it is a very different world, if you are standing here and looking south or standing there and looking north. It is hard to believe this sad river holds so much power over human life. The river decides if you are American or Mexican, if you deserve ten dollars an hour or ten dollars a day, if you live free or in fear. If your life will have a future. My parents had not a peso in their pockets when they crossed the river, but I am a member of Congress." His eyes lingered on the Mexican children. "If you were born on that side, would you not come to this side?"
"I would."
"They do. Mexicanos have always been drawn north, for the pull of America acts like a magnet on their souls. They think the stars shine brighter on this side of the river. Perhaps they do."
He stared at the river a long moment then held a hand out to Mexico, to the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo and the vast desert beyond.
"All this land was once Mexico, and Laredo straddled the river. After the war, Mexicanos moved south across the river and began calling that side Nuevo Laredo. But families still straddled the river, and all through my childhood, we crossed this river daily as if it were a neighborhood street instead of an international border. There are still footbridges up and down the river, from the old days. It was nice on the border back then."
"What changed?"
"Drugs. All that was nice was washed away in the blood from the drug war. This is now un rio de sangre… a river of blood. Forty thousand Mexicans have died in the last four years. It is violence we fund, with our appetite for the drugs. One pound of heroin on that side of the river is worthless. On this side of the river it is worth one hundred thousand dollars. Our drug money has made Nuevo Laredo the bloodiest place on the planet. But we think, Oh, it is their problem. But it is just there, on the other side of this shallow little river. How long before the violence is here, on this side of the river?" He pondered his own words. "Six nations have flown their flags over this land, but it is the cartels that now claim sovereignty over the borderlands."
He squinted at the sky and seemed to contemplate the endless blue.
"We have put a Predator drone over the border, as if this is Afghanistan. Perhaps it is."
"This is not what I expected."
"No. The borderlands is not like the rest of Texas. The land and the people are brown, the language is Spanish, and the culture is Mexican. And we are burdened by history. In Dallas and Houston and Austin, people look to the future. Here, they look to the past. Wrongs beget by wrongs, so many wrongs over so many years, that there will never be a right. Not on the border."
Lindsay turned and looked north toward the wall in the distance. Then she turned back to the river.
"The wall is there and the river here."
"Yes, we are on the American side of the river but the Mexican side of the wall."
"These people, they're trapped by the river and the wall."
"They are trapped by much more than that." He held a hand out to the colonia. "They fled Mexico, hoping for a better life in America. But the wall blocks their path into America. And that is their dream, Mrs. Bonner, to live beyond the wall. But for now they must live here in this no man's land, neither here nor there-neither Mexico nor America."
The congressman took her arm and escorted her toward the colonia as if leading her into a fine restaurant. He was thirty-four years older than her with thick white hair that contrasted sharply with his wrinkled brown skin and thick in the middle and short, but she felt secure next to him, like a girl with her grandfather.
"Come, you are safe with me."
He pulled his coat back to reveal a gun in a belt holster.
"You carry a gun?"
He shrugged. "Of course. It is the border."
The congressman led the governor's wife into Colonia Angeles. Ranger Roy made a move toward them but retreated when she held up an open hand to him. They walked down the dirt road past shacks and shanties, small and odd-shaped and pieced together with corrugated tin sidings and cinder blocks and scrap wood with black plastic tarps for roofs and wood pallets stood upright for fences and seemingly held together with wire and gravity. They continued past lean-tos and huts with thatched roofs, lopsided travel trailers embedded in the dirt with sheet metal overhangs, and abandoned vehicles that lay as if they had been shot from the sky and left to die where they landed. A yellow school bus sat buried in the dirt up to its wheels; it was now a home. Clothes hung over droopy lines and flapped in the dry breeze. They heard babies wailing and Spanish voices. Small children splashed in dirty water that had pooled in low gullies, women and girls cooked and washed outside, and boys played soccer on a dirt field.
"Don't they go to school?"
"No. The buses do not come to this side of the wall. The bus drivers, they are afraid to come in here, and the mothers, they are afraid to take their children out there, afraid they will be detained and deported if they go into Laredo."
"Don't the truant officers come looking for them?"
The congressman chuckled. "No, they do not come into the colonias."
"But there are so many children."
"Yes, the colonias are like child-care centers, except no one cares about these children."
The congressman pointed at large drums sitting outside some residences.
"Water tanks. Fifty-five gallons. The water truck comes each week. They buy non-potable water-they call it 'dirty water'-to wash clothes and cook, and clean water to drink, in the five-gallon bottles."
"They don't have running water?"
"Oh, no."
"How do they take baths?"
"In the river. But it is contaminated, with raw sewage. That is what you smell."
The air was as dry as dirt, and the stale breeze now carried a foul stench.
"Raw sewage? From Mexico?"
"From both sides. There is no sewer system in this colonia, so they dump the waste in the river. And many of the American-owned maquiladoras, the factories on the other side, they dump their industrial waste into the river."
"But that's illegal."
"In some parts of the world. But as I said, Mrs. Bonner, this is another world entirely. Cancer rates are quite high, and the children, they always have the open sores and many illnesses from the river-hepatitis, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, even dengue fever. You have had your shots?"
"My shots?"
Lindsay Bonner had seen poverty before, in the rural counties and the inner cities. But she had never before seen anything like this. Colonia Angeles looked like a scene from one of those "feed the children" commercials on Sunday morning television. But this wasn't Guatemala or Africa. This was America.
"How did all this come to be?"
"These colonias, they began appearing along the river back in the fifties and sixties. But during the eighties and nineties, the population exploded with the immigration boom, some say because Reagan granted amnesty and citizenship to the Mexicans already here, so more followed, also hoping for citizenship-if not for them, at least for their children born here. They know the law, too."
"My husband, he calls those children 'anchor babies.' "
"Yes. He does. Anyway, this is flood plain land, worthless for regular development. So the owners sold off small lots to Mexican immigrants, just pieces of dirt, with no roads or utilities. They built their homes with whatever scrap material they could salvage, piece by piece, what the sociologists call 'incremental construction.' Not exactly the American dream, as you can see. But it is all they can afford."
"In Austin, these places would be bulldozed as unfit for human occupancy."
"This is not Austin, Mrs. Bonner. This is the border. Travel up and down this river, and you will see nothing but colonias outside the cities, two thousand at last count. The state says four hundred thousand people live in the colonias, but I think there are many more, perhaps one million. How can the state know for certain when the federal government cannot even get an accurate count for the census?"
"So they live without running water, sewer…?"
"Electricity."
"I thought the state had funded services for the colonias? "
"Yes, ten years ago, the state issued five hundred million in bonds to provide utilities to the colonias, and about half now have them. This colonia does not."
"So when will these people get utilities?"
"They will not. The money has run out. Most of these people will die without ever having turned on a light or flushed a toilet."
"We need more money."
"But, Mrs. Bonner, your husband vetoed more money for the colonias."
"He did? Why?"
"He said the federal government should pay for the utilities since these people are illegal immigrants. Squatters, I think he called them."
"They're human beings. And they shouldn't have to live like this."
"Tell your husband."
"I will."
"But to be fair to the governor, we need billions, more money than the State of Texas can provide, to keep up with the people coming across the river and the children born here. The borderlands, it is both the poorest and the fastest growing population in all of America. That is why we must count them for the census, so the borderlands can get its share of federal funds."
"But they're not citizens."
"That does not matter. The census counts everyone living in America, legal or not. Funds and seats in the House are divvied up by population, not citizenship. If only these people will fill out the forms and be counted, Texas will get three, maybe four more seats in Congress and billions more in federal aid. Each of these residents is worth fifteen hundred dollars, if we can get them counted."
"My husband wants to send these people back to Mexico, but he sends me down here to get them to fill out the census reports so Texas can benefit from their presence here?"
"Odd, is it not? But we need federal money to do what the state cannot afford to do. The problem is, we are asking these people to come out of the shadows and be counted while ICE conducts raids right here on the border. They do not trust the government. And, of course, they did not receive the census forms."
"Why not?"
"No mailing addresses. The colonias do not officially exist, at least as far as the Postal Service is concerned. So the Census Bureau must send workers in, to go door to door, to count the residents. But they are too afraid."
"The workers or the residents?"
"Both."
"We have boxes of forms in the back of the Suburban. We can give them the forms, and they can fill them out and mail them in."
"Mrs. Bonner, these people do not go to the post office, and most cannot read or write."
"The forms are printed in Spanish, too."
"They cannot read or write Spanish or English."
"But we've got to try!"
Lindsay Bonner prided herself on being a positive person who never lost hope-not when volunteering at the food bank or the AIDS clinic or even the homeless shelter in Austin-but the heat and the stench and the filth now seemed to suffocate her spirit that day. She fought back tears.
"We can try."
The congressman offered a grandfatherly squeeze of her shoulders and a sympathetic expression.
"Yes, Mrs. Bonner. We can try."
They walked down the dirt road and stopped at a shanty with a covered contraption sitting above an open fire like a cookout. The congressman leaned over the pot and sniffed.
" Tesguino. Homemade corn liquor." He called into the home."?Hola! "
A hand appeared and parted the blanket that served as the front door. A young Mexican woman peeked out; she held an infant in her arms. Lindsay smiled and spoke to her in Spanish.
" Buenos dias, Senora. I am Lindsay Bonner. We need you to be counted for the census."
" No habla, Senora. No habla. "
The woman pulled the blanket shut in Lindsay's face. But, of course, she did habla. They walked down the dirt road, deeper into the colonia. Lindsay approached every woman she saw, but she received the same reception. No habla, Senora.
"I travel all over Texas, and people always want to talk to me. But not here."
The congressman patted her shoulder as if consoling her.
"Do not be offended, Mrs. Bonner. These women, they do not know you are the governor's wife. They do not even know who the governor is. They have no television, no cable news, no English newspapers. These people do not live in our world. Here in the colonias, you are just another Anglo whom they fear."
"Where are the men?" Lindsay said.
"Gone. For good or for the day. They come and they go, leaving pregnant women behind. The men who do stay leave before dawn and return after dark. And you do not want to be in the colonias after dark."
"How do they get through the gate, with the Border Patrol?"
"They do not. They came here to work construction in Laredo, but the wall prevents that. So now they work for the cartels in Nuevo Laredo."
"Where do these people get food?"
"Across the river."
"They work and shop on that side and sleep on this side… This is just a suburb of Mexico."
The breeze blew stronger, and she gagged at the foul smell from the river. The congressman held out a white handkerchief to Lindsay. She took the handkerchief and covered her mouth and nose. For a moment, she thought she might throw up.
"Perhaps we should go back?" the congressman said.
"No."
She removed the handkerchief from her face and marched down the dirt road to a shack constructed of old garage doors for walls, a black tarp for the roof, and a dirty blanket for a door. A clay flowerpot with a single yellow sunflower sat outside.
"?Hola! "
A small brown face peeked out. A child's face. A haunting dirty little wide-eyed face. Lindsay smiled at her, and the child smiled back. Lindsay reached into her pocket and pulled out a peppermint from breakfast at the hotel. She stepped closer and leaned down and held the candy out to the girl. The child hesitated but took the candy. Then she was gone. Lindsay stood straight and faced the congressman.
"We've got to get these people counted, so we can get that federal money. So we can help them."
"But I am afraid that they do not trust us."
"Is there anyone here they do trust?"
"Yes. There is such a person."
"Who?"
"The doctor."