The Only Road by Alexandra Diaz Read Free Book Online Page A

avoid joining them? “Maybe in five or ten years, when they’ve forgotten us. Or if Benito Juárez reincarnates and there’s a revolution.”
    Ãngela let out a snort that was half laugh, half disappointment. “I don’t believe in that Mayan legend that a great king will return.”
    â€œThen, no.”

CHAPTER SIX

    Spiderwebs of cracks crisscrossed over the windshield of the bus taking Jaime and Ángela from Tapachula north to Arriaga. The engine rattled and groaned like every wheel rotation caused it great pain. Every dark-tinted window was wide open and still the air in the bus was hot, humid, and stuffy—no different from the buses back home.
    Outside, the lush jungle foliage seemed to take over the landscape, including an abandoned immigration checkpoint.
    After a best-out-of-three battle of rock-paper-scissors, Ángela got the cooler window seat but promised to change places halfway through the five-hour ride. Jaime didn’t grumble. From the aisle seat he had better access to unsuspecting subjects. The church visit had inspired him, and hewas determined to capture in his sketchbook as much of his journey as possible. It was the only way to make the trip bearable, and to forget why they had to take it.
    Jaime turned to a fresh sheet in his fat sketchbook; if he used both sides of the pages, he had about eighty free pages left. Plenty. An anchor to hold his sketchbook steady in the lurching bus would be nice, but every great artist had to learn to draw in less-than-ideal situations.
    His first models were obvious—a young white tourist couple sitting up front, their overstuffed camping backpacks wedged between their legs. Jaime couldn’t stop staring at the man’s hair, orangey-red like the memory of the setting sun he and Tomás had shared. Jaime had never seen hair quite that alarming and was sure it had to be dyed. Except the longer he stared at it, and noticed the freckles on the back of the man’s neck and the fine golden-red hair of his arms, the more convinced Jaime was that the color was real. If only he had his paints with him. He would have loved to try and match the exact shade. Instead he settled on switching his colored pencils between pressing lightly with the red and a bit harder with the orange. Not perfect—hitting a pothole in the road gave the man a piercing on his neck—but the color wasn’t too far off.
    He skipped the teenager playing on his phone (a great artist only chooses subjects of interest) and drew the family with three small children, freezing time with the momentthe little girl popped the discovered gum from under her seat into her mouth. He was about to start on the four chickens (two white with black specks, one red, and one with plumas so black they looked blue) crammed into a wire cage diagonally from him, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. The small elderly woman behind him in a white embroidered linen dress motioned to herself repeatedly as she babbled in Mayan with an occasional Spanish word thrown in.
    â€œ Claro que sí, ” Jaime agreed with a grin as he turned around in his seat to face her. Although he didn’t speak much Mayan and couldn’t have translated her words, he understood what the little old lady wanted. He sharpened the brown pencil as the viejita smoothed down her silver hair wrapped in a bun.
    Friends and family sometimes asked Jaime to draw their portraits—Miguel had begged for one of himself dressed as Superman, and his little cousins especially loved being immortalized as cartoon caricatures—but this was his first time drawing for a stranger. What if she didn’t like it? What if he made her look ugly?
    Ãngela, turning away from the window where she’d been reading the name of every village they passed by, nodded encouragement.
    The bus bumped up and down as it trekked north, but Jaime rested the sketchbook steadily on the backrestas he shaded her