Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  Macario has spent hours watching the World Trade Bridge, thousands of trucks passing over through Laredo and into the heart of America every day. They must be stopped and searched according to some kind of a system, sniffed by dogs for drugs, but if the narcos use them, most of what they send must get through.

  “What do you say, chango, I lead you out of this cagadero and you go get rich in Paradise?”

  Macario had smiled and said he wasn’t looking to cross, legally or illegally, but thanked Nacho for the offer. The boy didn’t seem like much more than a ventana, one hired to watch the river with binoculars and report on anything moving. It is a slippery world here so close to the border, some people claiming to be more than they are, others not revealing their claws until it is too late.

  “You’re not going to be tan burro to try it on your own, are you? Un aviso, güey, stay off the river unless you’ve got permission, and don’t be hanging around with chapinos and cotrachos.”

  The people most obviously here to cross are, in fact, from Guatemala or Honduras, with others from El Salvador and even a few Cubans, who march up to the Migra officers on the bridges and get themselves put into the refugee process.

  “You be sitting with those people, doesn’t matter whether on the street, in a bus, even in the shelter where they let the ones who got caught and sent back stay– and before you know it there’s six tipos wearing masks and carrying cuernos de chivo threatening to shoot and pushing you into their van. They take you where don’t anybody care and they line you up and say hand over your money, hand over your cell phone if you got one, hand over that telephone number of your brother back in Huehuetenango or the socio you got waiting up in Tucson. They gonna call your family for some ransom.”

  “And if you don’t have a number?”

  “Then they going to darle chicharón right away instead of later. Créame amigo, when you get up the nerve to go, you look for Nacho.”

  They loop around north to the neighborhood of the shelter and Macario pays the driver and gets out. He had hoped to find work here while he was studying the situation, but with the flood of desperate people coming through there is nothing left. Nothing legal.

  There is a television set playing at either end of the bar in El Rincón, turned to different channels. Macario sits on the Telemundo side and orders a beer. It is a familiar place, the same neon cerveza logos, the calendars with Aztec maidens showing off their huge chichis, the team photos of local fútbol teams on the wall, Los Tigres del Norte on the jukebox. But where at home the talk would be of work and sports and local politics, here it is assassinations and prison escapes, blood feuds, and the ever-changing tactics of la Migra on the other side of the water. It is a very norteño-looking crowd, all Mexicans as far as he can tell. He avoids the eyes of the ones with the most expensive boots. Too many predators locked in a single cage.

  Twice he saw the baby turtles hatch on the beach in the Gulf. Thousands of them crawling out from their sandy nests on the same day, shells still soft and vulnerable, struggling with their little curved flippers across the broad beach to the surf, the sky filled with swooping gaviotas and halcones, the first half-kilometer of the surf boiling with silvery, razor-toothed fish, the beach itself patrolled by gorging dogs and half-wild pigs. Getting through to the open ocean is only a matter of numbers and blind luck.

  Unless you are a more observant turtle.

  Macario notices that the drinkers are all looking up at the TV screen and takes a glance, expecting to see Carmen Villalobos or Mónica Spear in something that barely covers their nalgas. Instead it is news footage from his home, San Martín Texmelucan, where a huge black cloud is blowing across the town. A huge black cloud caused by a pipeline explosion, says the newsreader, thought to be the result of huachicoleros attempting to install a hot tap.

  “Están buen jodidos,” mutters the man standing behind him, and yes, it looks like the people there are truly fucked– dozens dead, more burned or with ruined lungs.

  There are many people in this city, in this Mexico, who have nothing to do with the rateros who have infested it, the ones who have made their deal with the devil and will soon, he hopes, die miserably at the hands of the government or their rivals in crime. These honest people must lock their doors and windows against the tempest roaring outside, praying for a change in the weather. Nuevo Laredo was always a border town, a haven for smugglers, but now it seems less a city than a way station to hell, the place where gringos come to manufacture what is too expensive or too poisonous to make in their own country, the place where the poor of Central America flock to be preyed upon by murderers.

  The news camera, in a helicopter over the site of the explosion, is enveloped in black smoke.

  “Qué rollo con el hoyo, güey?.”

  It is Nacho, slapping his back and sitting at the empty stool to his left. He immediately turns his back to the bar and scans the crowded room with nervous eyes.

  “You’re back.”

  “Cómo no? I deliver my pollos and I come back. Estoy como un espírito, chango, they don’t see me.”

  “And if you can stop talking for a moment, they don’t hear you.”

  “Listen, amigo,” says Nacho, leaning close, “I got to beg you a favorzote.”

  The boy looks like he hasn’t slept in days.

  “Dígame.”

  “Not here,” says Nacho, getting up off the stool. “Take a walk with me.”

  They walk on Felipe Ángeles, passing the shelter that Macario looked into on his third day here, a roof and a meal for a few days, run by people with good hearts, but now seeming to him more like a corral meant to hold the sheep for the narcos until ready to be slaughtered. Nacho tries to seem carefree, but keeps turning completely around as he talks, making sure nobody is following.

  “I cross with a group of ten cotrachos pendejos– you know how they are from down there. This one woman is pregnant, big as a whale, and I’m helping her off the raft on the other side when the pinche Migra step out of the reeds, two of them.”

  “You were caught.”

  “I was betrayed, te juro, somebody on this side who has a deal with those cabrones and needs to throw them a couple fish now and then. So they take me to their processing and these idiot hondurehos– I bet it was that pregnant bitch– tell them that I’m the pollero. Which means they charge me with transporting. And this fucking pocho behind the desk, this Garza, sounded like he was born there right in Laredo, he tells me hijo, I will let you go this time, but if you ever come back, transporting or not, you go to federal jail.”

  “They tell me those prisons are like hotels compared to ours.”

  “Hombre, they got gangs inside there I never even heard of.”

  “You could tell them you’re with the Zetas.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” says Macario. “Maybe you’ll live to be twenty.”

  “But this is not over. They do all their typing into the computer, they take pictures of me, take my fingerprints with ink, and then this hijo de puta Garza holds me until it’s dark again before he loads me into the van with a mess of indios chapinos who got caught that day and they back it up to the little crack you walk through on foot on the Juárez-Lincoln Bridge.”

  “So you’re back home.”

  “No, I’m completamente jodido, güey, cause that’s where the Zetas have their people waiting after midnight, looking for fresh meat.”

  “But if you paid your cuota–”

  “I was going to, I just didn’t have time before I left with the pollos.”

  “And besides, you’re invisible.”

  Nacho looks like he might cry. “This rompehuevos grabs ahold of me right there, the Border Patrol guys are behind their windows watching, probably laughing at me, and I try to explain to him.”

  “You said there was a favor I could do for you.”

  They have come to the corner of Independencia, the boy stopping, looking in all directions before he c
ontinues.

  “They want five thousand yanqui dollars by tomorrow or I’m dead.”

  “I don’t have that much.”

  “But you do have some, and you do want to cross over. I know a truckero who can drive you all the way to Houston.”

  “And how much do I pay you for bringing me to him?”

  “Nothing. You pay him to take me along with you.”

  “IT’S CALLED REMEDIATION,” SAYS Rick, like he’s talking to a fucking third-grader. “We’ve got three sites you’ve contracted to clean up, two reserve pits full of cuttings and an oil spill, and your people haven’t gone near them.”

  “Everybody is in a fucking hurry.”

  “One of the pits is right on the road into New Center. It looks bad.”

  “What”– says Brent, lounging in the Chairman’s office while Harleigh is on his way back from some tribal event– “the real estate values are gonna suffer? This reservation was a fucking eyesore before the first drill spudded in, and that’s what it’s going back to.”

  “Harleigh’s talking about a facelift.”

  “Harleigh’s a politician, he’s got to say shit like that, and you’re supposed to be covering his ass. If you were doing your job people wouldn’t be complaining about the reserve pit, they’d be looking at a big sign that says ‘Site of Another Successful Energy Extraction– Keep America Strong.’”

  “Are you planning to clean up those sites or not?”

  If this kid got the job to shut his mother up, it hasn’t worked. She’s been mouthing off in the paper, specifically complaining about ArrowFleet.

  “We’ll do something.”

  “At least throw some dirt on top of it.”

  “If that’s what it takes to shut people up, sure. You dig down miles underground, pump shit up from there under pressure, there’s bound to be something to show for it.”

  “Something toxic.”

  “How bout a couple ‘No Swimming Allowed’ notices? Or don’t enough of the people here read?”

  Rick doesn’t see the humor in this. “You push the Chairman too far,” he says, “he’ll cut you loose so fast.”

  “You think so?”

  Brent can tell the kid doesn’t like him sitting at Harleigh’s desk. He leans back in the swivel chair, playing with a beautifully fashioned old spearhead.

  “Big ship goes down, Ricky boy,” he says, “the captain stays with it.”

  Rick crawls back into his hole.

  Once they sense you’re more than willing to take it all the way, they always blink first. It’s what scares all the second-rate characters about Roark in The Fountainhead, it’s what the Objectivist meant when she said that animals survive by adjusting themselves to their surroundings, but men, real men, succeed by adjusting their surroundings to themselves. Brent buzzes Doris, another one scared to look him in the eye.

  “Doris,” he says into the chief’s squawk box, “can you get me that number in Idaho? And be sure to let him know the call is coming from Chairman Killdeer’s office.”

  IT WAS A CAMARO in a custom-looking shade of gold, California plates, and the man with her could have been as old as thirty. By the time Clemson got himself turned back in their direction on the 2 they were long gone, though he hunted in ever-widening circles for an hour. Then he stopped in at the coffee shop that was the Dakota Diner and before that the Prairie Hen’s Pantry that Don and Evelyn Nussbaum ran forever. Spartina is obviously very well liked there, a good worker, but nobody knew or would tell about the man in the Camaro.

  It’s not a fit place for women anymore, Yellow Earth, Clemson thinking of the shacks off base in Biloxi when he was stationed there, how the decent girls had to walk in squadrons and even that didn’t spare them what the GIs had to say. He was young then, with the big war on, and never thought about what the folks in Biloxi thought of the invasion. Some made out pretty good, of course, the ones running the honkytonks and cathouses that weren’t Off Limits for some reason. The army must have known everything that was going on, the army could do anything they wanted in that time, so they must have chosen not to shut it all down. Clemson remembers slot machines in the bus station, in the grocery stores, remembers half the fellas stationed at Keesler losing all their pay in one crooked game or another. And by some miracle he met Nora, survived the war, and took her back up here.

  He remembers walking her home after a USO dance, through the worst of it, men calling out to her, women calling out to him, and how none of it seemed to touch her, chatting pleasantly to him in her musical voice. He thought at the time she was the most innocent girl he’d ever met, but later learned Nora had the Southern woman’s skill of seeing without acknowledging. If I do not choose to recognize it, it does not exist.

  He’s never had that talent.

  Jake Wiltorp had mentioned seeing her at the Havva Javva, and he figured she’d tell him sooner or later, and maybe good for her going out to make her own money instead of depending on him to come around on whatever new gadget she had her heart set on. Industrious. And it was a relief to see they don’t make the girls wear some kind of short carhop uniform. If they took a day off his life for every little lie he told his Pa–

  He can’t bear the thought of a confrontation, of raising his voice to his Tina. He got the license number though, one of those vanity jobs– SRFZUP– which makes it easy to remember. And Busby Curtis’s boy Tolliver is a deputy now, with access to all that law enforcement computer business–

  His father shot a wolf once, back when there were wolves, that was raising hell with the stock. Left it out for the crows and the buzzards, and maybe as a warning for its friends, if it had any.

  “You can scare em away,” Pa said, “but they’ll just come skulking back.”

  THE MEN ARE MAKING the drum talk. Six of them at the moment, big men sitting around in a circle and striking it in unison, a few with their traditional shirts and feathers on, some just with T-shirts and tractor caps, at least three of them wearing sunglasses, which seems to be accepted now as something like a traditional mask. They are the beating heart of the Powwow. Harleigh remembers as he passes, as he always does, the thrill of the first time Granpaw Pete brought him into the circle. The old man’s leathery hand over his little boy hand over the stick, making the drum talk with the men, raising his thin voice with theirs to chant.

  “This, at least,” his grandfather would say each year, “remains unbroken.”

  The veterans have put up their flags, Harleigh at the microphone for the solemn moment before he handed it over to Nick Straighthorn, the rodeo announcer they brought over from Bozeman. His job now is to mingle in the stands and in the refreshment area, pressing the flesh, admiring how big the little ones have gotten, fielding compliments and complaints. There is no simple ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ for the Chairman.

  He stops in front of the grandstand to watch the Women’s Traditional Dance for a moment, the ladies circled in their shawls and beads, bouncing lightly to the drumbeat, holding themselves like queens, raising their eagle feather fans when an honor beat comes. He knows all of the local women out there, some of them with enough personal tragedy to fill a TV miniseries, but they stand straight and serene, inhabiting the beautifully beaded cloths and buckskins rather than just wearing them, braids glistening and wrapped with ribbons or fur, all pride and elegance. He’d tried to get Fawn interested in taking part, but she was feuding with the daughter of Shirley Plenty Fox, who taught it on the reservation. Or that’s what she said.

  “We have to talk.”

  Rick McAllen has appeared beside him. Rick has been dogging him with this environmental business, even people with wells already paying off on their land getting into the act, as if you can bring the money up by magic.

  “Not another spill, I hope.”

  A wastewater pipeline had bust over by Wabek, spewing brine over about twenty-three acres, and people were legitimately upset. ‘Metal fatigue,’ said the Company, though they didn’t explain why they did
n’t use metal that wasn’t so tired. They’d made good on some fencing to help people keep their stock off the poisoned ground, and were working up a remediation plan.

  “Not that bad,” says Rick, “but it’s got to be dealt with. You know the PeteCo-Cloud Number Four?”

  “White Shield?”

  “It’s paying out good, got the Christmas tree up, couple tanks, but they left the spoil-pit they dug behind.”

  “Sometimes it takes a while to–”

  “Four months. There’s some bad-looking sludge in the bottom of it, dead birds and animals by now, and the smell is–”

  Harleigh starts to walk away. “I’ll look into it.”

  Ricky follows after him. The job came with sixty grand a year, good pay for a reservation gig, but the kid looks like hell.

  “You could use some sleep, buddy.”

  “People got my cell phone number. They call when the spirit moves them.”

  “Turn it off.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I got two. One where everybody’s got the number, and that I shut down at nine o’clock every night. Then there’s the emergency phone, only the law and a few other people got that number, and it better be an emergency.”

  “People aren’t happy, Harleigh.”

  Harleigh puts his hand on Rick’s shoulder. “The people who haven’t struck it rich aren’t happy,” he says. “And they weren’t happy before. Welcome to my world.”

  A final shout and drumbeat, the women in the arena stopping as one, holding their spot for a moment as there is applause and people crying out in the three languages and Nick back on the microphone telling folks to show their appreciation. Harleigh uses the moment to disengage from Rick and move on. Rick’s job is to identify problems and deal with them, not to come to him with every sob story about a sick heifer.

  But four months is not good.

  He invited some of the Company men to the powwow, give them a taste of Indian culture, and sees a few high up in the stands. The way people are mixed these days they don’t look so out of place, and the couple from Oklahoma might even be some bit Creek or Cherokee by blood. Harleigh climbs up, passing men who look like rig workers in between shifts. Good for them, they can say they’ve really been here.