Sentries Quotes

“He was fourteen and he had come across the river in the night blackness, in the desert dark he had come across, alone. That’s how he made the picture in his mind as he stood in the darkness alone on the U.S. side of the river. He had done it.”
― Gary Paulsen, Sentries

“become right now. I will find work and there will be money to send home and there will be food for them.” His name was David Garcia and he was thin with a slight curve to his back and a bush of black hair that needed to be cut. He had the high, strong cheekbones and straight lines of his dead father, killed in a fight of honor, and his eyes were a quiet, serious gray. His arms were corded and tough, as were his legs, and he wore a tired-looking cap with CAT across the front and he carried a worn old army knapsack as old as the Second World War. In the knapsack were a pair of socks, two oranges he had taken from a stand in Juárez when the wind was right for taking them, and nothing else. Nothing. He had come up from Chihuahua by stealing a ride on the train, had crossed the boundary river at night without the aid of coyotes—those who helped people cross for money and sometimes stole from them or, worse, killed them—and he felt pride that he had done it alone. He was making his way north, far north, because it was early summer and all the work was in the north now. Men who came back told of the work in the northern states in the early summer. There were sugar beets to thin with the hoe, and the farmers paid much money for the work and would hire anybody who was willing to do it. “For every hour you are paid three dollars,” the men said in the cantina when they drank the warm beer and talked. “That is how it works out. For every hour you are paid three dollars American and there is food, frijoles with some meat for one meal a day, and a place to sleep. A dry place to sleep. And you don’t have to be too careful about the authorities in those northern states.”
― Gary Paulsen, Sentries