Manny Bustos knows hunger. He has known it for so long, sometimes he thinks of it as a friend. Fourteen years old and wandering the streets of Juárez, Mexico, Manny longs for the day when he will have the courage to cross the dry riverbed of the Rio Grande, the once-great carving river that defines the border between his homeland and America. In Manny’s mind America is paradise. In America there will be no more begging, no beatings by the bigger boys, no waking up to suffocating mornings inside the cardboard box where he sleeps.

Then Manny meets Robert Locke, an American soldier who wanders into the Mexican barrio and drinks himself sick every night. Manny can’t understand the strange things the soldier mumbles as he slips in and out of awareness, but he knows the man is decent and will not hurt him. And for Manny, for whom survival is a dangerous game he must play every day, the soldier’s acts of kindness are a miracle. Could he be Manny’s ticket out of Mexico?