by Don Winslow
Ben has negotiating skills.
What he says next is, “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. Neither do I. So we leave this island alone, and you do the same.”
“I’d lose respect,” Eddie says.
“For what?” Ben asks. “Something that never happened?”
A long silence, then Eddie says, “Aloha.”
* * *
O goes to say good-bye to Pete.
“I’ll miss you,” Pete says. He reaches into his tackle box, comes out with an onion-bagel egg sandwich, and hands it to her. “For the trip.”
“I’ll miss you, too.”
“You can always come back.”
“No, I can’t,” O says.
She looks around at the blue ocean and the green mountains, sunshine glimmering off a distant waterfall, and feels sad that she can never come back.
Banished from paradise.
Me and Adam, she thinks. And the other Adam.
O puts her arms out and hugs Pete. “Good-bye, Pete.”
He kisses her hair and says, “Good-bye, daughter.”
Paradise.
The Last Ride
The first time he saw the child, she was in a cage.
Ain’t no other word for it, Cal thought at the time. You can call it what you want—a “detention center,” a “holding facility,” a “temporary shelter”—but when you got a bunch of people penned up behind a chain-link fence, it’s a cage.
He thought about what his daddy said when Cal called his old man’s cancer his “health problem.”
“Call it what it is,” Dale Strickland told his son. “Ain’t no point in calling it what it ain’t.”
So that was bone cancer, and this was a damn cage.
Cal still don’t know what it was about the girl that struck him special. Why her, why that kid out of so many? Hell, they had hundreds of kids behind them fences, why this one so damn particular?
It could have been her eyes, but all the kids had those big eyes staring out from behind the fence—eyes like you see in them paintings of kids they sell out at the gas station up on the highway. Maybe it was her fingers twined through the links like she was trying to hold on to something. Maybe it was the runny nose, the dried snot caked over her lip.
She couldn’t have been more than six years old, Cal figured.
Their eyes met for just a second, and then Cal moved on.
Walked past that cage so jammed it looked like a feed lot, except these were people, not cattle, and they wasn’t “mooing,” they was talking or shouting or asking for help. Or they was crying, like that little girl.
Cal Strickland saw her and then walked past her, and how a man can walk right past a crying child would be a good damn question, except the answer was that there was so damn many there was nothing else a man could do.
Call it what it is, don’t call it what it ain’t.
So that was the first time he saw her, at what they called Ursula, the big holding center in McAllen. Cal wasn’t stationed there anyway. He was just trying to grab some supplies to take back to Clint, where they didn’t have enough of anything—blankets, soap, toothpaste—to handle the people they had there.
He didn’t expect to see her again.
Then he did.
Just yesterday.
At Clint.
Now he rides his ATV along the barbed-wire fence and finds what he expected to find.
The wire has been cut and the grass tamped down where illegals camped the night before. A charred patch where they’d built a small fire and garbage they left behind—old cans, a couple of plastic water bottles, a dirty diaper.
“Fuckin’ Mexicans,” he mutters as he gets off the ATV and grabs his repair kit. Except he knows that it probably wasn’t Mexicans but Salvadorans, Hondurans or Guatemalans. Mexicans still come, but not so much anymore, not like they were in the nineties, when he and his daddy used to ride the fence and find it cut about every damn day. They rode horses then, not ATVs, and much as his daddy used to cuss out the “wetbacks” and threaten to shoot the coyotes who brought them up there, Cal remembers his reaction when the guy from the vigilante group came and asked him to join.
“Get off my ranch,” Dale Strickland said. “And if I see any of you here again with your dumbass cammies and your ARs, I’ll shoot you myself. All I got is a Remington thirty-aught, but it’ll do the job, I guess.”
A few days later, when they were riding fence, his old man said out of nowhere, “That ain’t about them trying to defend the land, it’s about them being scared their dicks ain’t big enough. I ever hear about you joining them assholes, I’ll figure you ain’t inherited what’s rightly yours.”
Cal didn’t join them assholes.
He signed with the Border Patrol.
Mostly because it was a job, and jobs was hard to find around Fort Hancock, Texas, in them days, after he got out of the army.
He couldn’t stay on the ranch, especially not after his daddy died, because the ranch was barely enough to support Bobbi, if his sister even managed to hold on to it.
It was mostly just six hundred acres of dirt and dry grass getting drier every year, and there was no money in cattle anymore anyway. They tried a little bit of everything—growing cotton and even fruit trees, but there wasn’t enough water for the fruit, and cotton . . . well, most of the cotton was grown across the border in Mexico, and they couldn’t compete with the cheap labor. Bobbi was selling off pieces of the place in order to keep the rest of it.
Cal tried cowboying for a while, working on ranches all over the area—the Woodley ranch, the Steen place, Carlisle’s big spread—but there was less and less of that work, too. He gave a thought to trying rodeo, but while he was a pretty good roper and rider, pretty good wasn’t good enough to make any money at it.
You had to be great, and he knew he wasn’t.
So he went with the Border Patrol.
It paid well, had good benefits and was steady. The Border Patrol snapped Cal right up. He had the military background, was used to hierarchies so knew how to follow orders, spoke border Spanglish and knew the territory better than the back of his hand, having been born and raised here. Hell, Stricklands have lived on the border since before it was a border.
“I’ve been patrolling the border my whole damn life,” he said when he took the job.
So Cal don’t live on the ranch anymore, he got a little apartment in El Paso, but he comes out a few times a week to check the fence. The immigration had slowed to a trickle the past few years, but now it’s started again, and a cut fence is a problem, because they don’t need what few cattle they got wandering into Mexico. In the old days, at least so he was told, the ranchers and the vaqueros used to ride back and forth across the border all the time, stealing each other’s cattle, which would probably be frowned upon these days.
These days what comes across the border is people and dope.
He twines a new piece of barbed wire into the cut fence, twists it with pliers and reminds himself to come out later in the week with the stretcher to tighten it up.
Fuckin’ Mexicans.
He drives the ATV to the old corral and gets off. Leans against the pipe-rail fence. Riley ambles over and snorts his reproach at being replaced by the machine.
“Sorry, boy.” Cal scratches the horse’s sorrel muzzle. “I’ve picked up a few pounds you don’t need to carry.”
Truth is, the gelding is getting old. Was a damn fine cutting horse, a good worker back in the day when they had more cattle to cut.
Cal scoops up some grain from a bucket and the old horse eats out of his hand.
“See you in a few days,” Cal says.
He takes the ATV back into the barn.
His old man’s pickup truck, a red, 2010 Toyota Tacoma—is still sitting there because neither Cal nor Bobbi has the heart to get rid of it. Shit, the keys are still lying on the front seat, his old 30.06 rifle still in the window rack.
Da
le Strickland loved that truck, although Cal was always busting his balls about buying a foreign vehicle.
“Them Jap trucks,” Dale said, “you keep ’em in oil, they run forever.”
Cal, he has himself a white Ford F-150.
He buys American.
Bobbi has breakfast waiting for him when he gets back to the house. Four eggs over hard, sausage links and bacon, black beans, scorched tortillas and coffee that could have made it to the table on its own.
“Angioplasty on the side,” Bobbi says as she sets the plate on the table. She has yogurt and fruit and NPR on the radio.
“How can you listen to that shit?” Cal asks.
“Same way you can watch Fox News,” Bobbi says.
Bobbi is a West Texas liberal, which don’t make her a unicorn but something much rarer. Compared to a West Texas liberal, Cal thinks, unicorns are a dime a dozen.
Actually, Cal don’t watch much Fox News, but he won’t tell Bobbi that. He don’t watch much news at all—sure as hell not the “Communist News Network”—because it’s too damn depressing and the Border Patrol is always in it these days, journalists swarming around the detention centers like flies around fresh shit. They say they’re just doing their job, but Cal wants to tell them that he’s just trying to do his.
Would tell them also, except he ain’t allowed to talk to them.
“They’ll come on like they’re your friends,” his boss told him, “but they’re really only trying to fuck you.”
The other day, a reporter from the New York Times (or the Jew York Times, as Peterson would have it, but Peterson’s an asshole) came up on him in the parking lot asking if he’d answer some questions.
“I’m interested in what it’s like to work here,” the reporter asked.
Cal kept walking.
“You won’t talk to me?” the guy pressed.
Apparently not, because Cal kept on walking.
“Were you told not to?” The guy pressed a card in his hand. “Daniel Schurmann, New York Times. If you ever want to talk.”
Cal put the card in his shirt pocket. Talking to a New York Times reporter wasn’t the last thing he would ever think of doing, but it would be the next-to-last, after maybe wiping his ass with a wire brush.
Bobbi looks tired.
Her long red hair is thin and dirty, and she has on the same old T-shirt she had on three days ago.
Why shouldn’t she be tired? Cal thinks. The strain of trying to keep the ranch going, waiting tables at Sophie’s in town and an eighteen-year-old son with an “opioid problem.”
Jared’s supposedly living with his useless father in El Paso and has a job in a body shop, but Cal doubts either of those things is exactly the case. He suspects that Bobbi thinks the same, that her son is living on the street and shooting heroin, so why shouldn’t she look worn down?
She is.
Now she asks, “How’s work?”
“It’s work.” He shrugs.
“I watch the news.”
“I thought you just listened,” he says.
“We rip children from their parents and put them in cages?” she asks. “Is that who we are now?”
“I’m just trying to do my job,” Cal says. “I don’t always like it.”
“Hey, you voted for the guy.”
“Didn’t see you in the booth,” Cal says.
“I just assumed.”
You assumed right, he thinks. Like you usually do. I did vote for the guy, because there was no way I was going to vote for a woman who thought the country owed her the White House because her husband got a blow job.
And a Democrat to boot.
“We need to do something about Riley,” Bobbi says.
“I know. Just . . .”
“Just what?”
“Just not yet,” Cal says.
“We’re going to have to do it sooner or later,” Bobbi says. “The vet bills alone . . .”
“I pay the vet bills.”
“I know you do.”
Cal gets up. “Gotta go put some kids in cages.”
“Come on, don’t be like that.”
He gets up and kisses her on the forehead. “Thanks for breakfast. I’ll be back later in the week, check on the fence.”
Cal walks out to his truck. It’s seven in the morning, and he’s already sweating. They say it’s a “dry heat,” but so’s an oven.
He saw the little girl again yesterday.
She’d been transferred to Clint.
Which means we haven’t found her parents, Cal thinks.
Well, since we took her from them.
The Clint facility sits four miles from the border amid neat rectangular fields along Alameda Avenue southeast of town.
El Paso is just six miles west on Route 20.
The facility is a group of nondescript buildings powered by big solar panels, which makes sense to Cal, because the one thing they got plenty of out here is sun.
Clint was never designed to hold people.
It was built as sort of a forward logistical base from which to launch patrols. Which is what Cal mostly does. He and two other agents take horse trailers from Clint and go ride the border, scouting drug trails and immigrant tracks.
Kind of like one of them old black-and-white John Wayne movies his old man used to watch on TV.
“You’re the modern-day cavalry,” Bobbi said to him one time.
Cal don’t quite see it that way, but he knows what she meant, and he loves his job, spending long days in the saddle doing a good thing, protecting the country. And helping people, truly, even though the “media” rarely give them credit for it, because from time to time he tracks down a group of illegals who, judging from their footprints, are clearly lost and would otherwise die of dehydration or sunstroke out there in the hundred-degree heat, and those are real satisfying moments for Cal, saving people’s lives like that.
Other days, though, they wouldn’t find them in time, they’d only find the bodies, and those are the not-so-good moments, especially if it’s a woman or a kid, and Cal curses the coyotes that dumped them out there with no food or water or no other directions but a finger pointing north.
If Cal had his way, he’d shoot the damn coyotes and leave their bodies on the fence or the wire. It ain’t like he don’t know who they are—hell, he went to high school with one of them.
Jaime Rivera used to come back and forth across the border like it didn’t exist. Sometimes he’d be in school at Fort Hancock, then he’d just be gone, and then he’d be back again.
Cal played football with him, lined up right beside him at left tackle while Jaime played tight end. They was friends, used to drive across the border to a remote flat out in the desert, sit in their trucks and drink beer together, that sort of thing.
Jaime eventually settled on the other side of the border, decided he could do better in Mexico smuggling a little weed, which Cal didn’t find particularly offensive. But then he started trafficking people, and even that Cal wouldn’t have taken personally, just considered it the usual sheepdog-versus-coyote border business, except that Jaime just took the immigrants’ money and then didn’t give a shit what happened to them once he had it.
So yeah, they was teammates back in the day, but now if Cal was absolutely, positively sure he’d get away with it, he’d put a round in Jaime’s head and leave him as a buffet for the vultures and the real coyotes.
Told him so, too.
One night after Cal found the bodies of a mother and child out in the desert, he had one too many adult beverages, looked up Jaime’s number over in El Porvenir—shit, he could probably shout over there—and told him he’d like to leave his corpse out in the sun.
“Why don’t you come over here and try, hoss?” Jaime asked. “We’ll see who ends up meat.”
“You know, you had pretty good hands,” Cal said, “but you couldn’t block for shit.”
“Never wanted to,” Jaime said. “But hey, Cal, no offense. If you ever want to make som
e real money, I guess you have my number. You might even be able to hold on to that dogshit ranch of yours.”
Much as Cal hates Jaime, Jaime hates him right back, because Cal Strickland has been hell on his operation. By far the best tracker the Patrol’s got, Strickland knows every trail and piece of brush in this country, he’s hellacious at setting ambushes, and he’s put more than a few of Jaime’s people behind bars.
If Jaime could put a price on his old friend, he would.
And it would be a big price.
Now Cal rolls up to Clint and finds a parking spot, which ain’t easy, because half the lot is taken up with huge tents set up to house the overflow of inmates. The storerooms and warehouses have all been converted to makeshift holding cells.
Cal gets out of the truck.
The protesters are out early, holding signs in English and Spanish: FREE THE CHILDREN. There’s only a couple of reporters. Most of them have gotten bored and moved on to the next story, Cal figures.
Fine with him.
He walks past the protesters into the office.
Twyla is behind the desk.
She’s what Cal’s grandma would have called “big-boned.” Tall, broad-hipped, wide-shouldered, with short black hair and blue eyes. And awkward as a newborn filly—watching Twyla walk is like waiting for an accident to happen. She has what the same grandma would have called a “hitch in her get-along,” and the word around Clint is that she got blown up by an IED in Iraq and there’s still a piece of metal in her hip.
Cal don’t know if that’s true.
He does know that he likes her.
A lot, maybe too much.
They’re pals.
Or as Peterson told him, “You’re in the friend zone, brother. And once you’re in the friend zone, you don’t get in the end zone.”
But Peterson’s an asshole.
Twyla smiles when she sees Cal walk in. “Another day in paradise, huh?”
“Gonna be a hot one.”
“Already is.”
When he’d first introduced himself as “Cal,” she’d asked, “Is that short for California or Calvin?”
“Calvin.”
“Like in Calvin and Hobbes,” she said.
“Huh?”