Almost Home

Outside the city at the border, the coyotes used night vision goggles to scan for border guards. Given the all-clear, Ruiz and his companions crossed the braided bed of the Rio Grande, running, wading, and swimming over three channels. They brought nothing but the clothes on their backs.

The group ran for two hours, at one point through a small neighborhood, 40 people charging down the darkened streets and setting off a cacophony of barking dogs. They made it to the safe house, and the next night the coyotes brought them to the train.

As they rolled north for three days toward an unknown destination, the temperature began dropping. April temperatures along their route can dip into the 20s. "It was freezing," Garcia says. We were huddling together, hugging each other for warmth."

The group finally left the train in what they later found out was Kansas. From another safe house, the coyotes, a full-service agency, dispatched their charges to various destinations, some by plane to New York, some by bus to Memphis. Ruiz and his companions went by van to Atlanta to join more than 50 people from Garcia's home village.

Atlanta before 9/11 was still booming, and the duo had no trouble finding construction work. One boss told them that a job they finished in four days had taken his American crew more than two weeks. But the terrorist attacks sent the economy into a tailspin. The supply of work slowly dried up, and by February of 2004, it had disappeared. Ruiz and Garcia headed south hoping for agricultural work while Enrique went to Fort Lauderdale.

Agricultural work in most of Florida means fruits or vegetables, but in the northern town of Mayo, it means pine straw. Ruiz and Garcia found work gathering pine needles to be baled and used in landscaping. Their housing was crude, a ramshackle bungalow far from town, no air conditioning, the windows broken. They slept on a tile floor without blankets or mattresses -- not that it mattered.

"The work was really heavy, so we would arrive just dead," Garcia says. "We didn't feel anything."

At the end of a week of backbreaking labor, the boss handed them their checks: $130 each. They had been expecting $500.

"We worked from sunup to sundown without seeing anybody all day except for 15 minutes when they would come and get the bales," Garcia recalls, the memory of his anger showing on his face. "To work for so long and then for them to give you that..."

The same day, they left for Fort Lauderdale, joining Enrique in a Spartan, one-bedroom apartment in Wilton Manors, the fifth and sixth men to move in. Despite the cramped quarters for six construction workers, the apartment is spotlessly clean. Air mattresses with sleeping bags take up most of the floor space in the bedroom, but in the living room is a couch, a TV, even a PlayStation -- to decrease the temptation to go out and spend money, they explain. There are no posters, no knick-knacks, few clothes. The only decoration is a tapestry of the Virgin of Guadeloupe. The duo that did two weeks' work in four days had found an equally focused home in South Florida.

"There are a lot of people that walk around well-dressed with nice trucks, but in Mexico they don't have anything," Garcia says. "We want to work. We want to save money. The more money we save, the quicker we can go home."

Despite rural Mexicans' traditional mistrust of chilangos, people from Mexico City, Ruiz's affable nature won over his roommates from Hidalgo.

"I met Gregorio here in Fort Lauderdale," roommate Antonio Hernandez says. "He was so relaxed, he would just walk up and chat with this person, then chat with that person. He was easy to get along with."

On July 22, Garcia came home from work just as Ruiz was heading to the same site for the late shift. The two talked about the job, the weather, a few meaningless sentences before Ruiz headed out the door. The next time Garcia would see the man who had been his constant companion for three years, rescue workers were pulling his broken body from the rubble in Hobe Sound.

It fell to Garcia to break the news to his sister Laura, an attractive, dark-eyed 27-year-old.

"She works, but she can't make it on her own," he says. "She depended on him." Remembering the call, he looks at the floor in silence. Eventually he says one word: Duro. Hard.

In a photo Laura sent to Ruiz, their daughter Katia gazes calmly into the camera over her seventh birthday cake, having gotten used to celebrating without her father. Still, she will likely harbor some childhood memories of the man who worked so hard to give her a better life. Her younger sister, Jessica, who at 5 has spent most of her life without her father, will probably not.

For Garcia, the adjustment is just beginning.

"We have to move on with our lives," he says, but his voice is full of doubt. After a journey of more than 4,000 miles and three years together, he can't quite believe that "we" doesn't include Ruiz.