Read The Governor's Wife for Free Online Page A

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 México 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 Ángeles. 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,