Troubled Waters

by Carolyn Wheat

  “Because she didn’t tell Harve what she knew,” Dana replied. She reached for a soft pack on the brass table and pulled out a cigarette. I wanted to beg her not to light it, but I knew she wouldn’t listen. I steeled myself against an onslaught of smoke and hoped to hell Dana’s information would be worth it.

  “You think if she had, she’d be—” I broke off, realizing I’d almost said alive. And yet she was alive. Whatever alive meant to that still, frail body.

  “I think whoever attacked her would have thought twice if he’d known it wouldn’t do any good. And if she’d taken her own lawyer into her confidence, the person who tried to kill Jan would have had to kill Harve too. As it is, whatever Jan knew will die with her.”

  “You sound awfully sure she’s going to die.”

  Dana’s black eyes narrowed. “Don’t try to trap me, Cassie. I was raised by one of the best cross-examiners in the business. For one thing, I wasn’t finished. What I was going to say was, whatever Jan knew will die with her—unless she told someone else before she was attacked.” She blew a cloud of smoke and let her lips form a near smile. “Like maybe her husband.”

  “How did you know?”

  Now the smile became real. “Is that really the most important question?”

  “I suppose not,” I replied. I was growing more and more impatient, with Dana or with myself I wasn’t quite sure. All I knew was that I was on the defensive, when I’d intended to take the lead. I was supposed to be asking tough questions that would have Dana squirming on her peacock throne. Instead I was the one scrambling for an answer, taking in new ideas and rolling them around in my brain, trying to assimilate them before the next onslaught.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get the point. If Jan told Ron what she knew, then Ron’s in danger. But she didn’t. Ron doesn’t know any more than I do, and as you can see, that’s not much.”

  “Nice try, Cassie. But if Jan did tell your brother what she suspected, then you’d definitely deny it in order to protect him. So I’m not so sure I buy this act of yours. Going around and asking everyone what they know, pretending you don’t already have all the information you need.” She stared at me with no friendliness in her dark eyes.

  “And of course,” she went on, “you’ll take everything you know back to Luke Stoddard and cut a deal to get Ron out of all this. No matter who else it hurts in the process.”

  Dana ground her cigarette into a ceramic ashtray that looked as if it had been made by a kid at camp. And perhaps it had been. On the cigarette-scarred end table was a picture of a little boy, maybe five years old, with long curls and a tie-dyed T-shirt over his shorts. Dana and Rap’s hippie kid.

  I let my eyes roam around the cramped living room. There were bits and pieces of Dana’s life scattered around—Indian-made pillows with silver-threaded puffy elephants embroidered on them, feminist books with torn jackets tumbling from bookshelves, a framed photo of a bride and groom on the mantel.

  The groom had Rap’s prominent nose and Dana’s piercing black eyes. I pointed and asked, “Dylan?”

  Dana’s eyes followed my finger. “Yeah. And that’s his wife, Brittany. Can you believe it?” A stream of smoke punctuated her words. “My kid, named after Bob Dylan, with hair like a Marine, marrying a Stepford Wife. They shop at Penney’s and own a minivan.”

  My smile was wry, remembering Ron’s teasing me about Ted. “What a condemnation. They’re actually normal people. How humiliating for you.”

  “Their oldest kid, Brianna, is getting to where she’s ashamed of Grandma Dana. Thinks I ought to wear skirts and panty hose like her other grandma.” Her belligerence was mixed with sadness; some part of her would have liked to be a grandmother to her son’s children. But the price was too high.

  “The turning point of my life,” Dana said, looking at one of the elephant pillows, “was when I was raped in Turkey.”

  “You were what?” Was she about to tell me that her son’s father might have been a Turkish rapist instead of Joel Rapaport?

  She shook her head and looked into my eyes. “No,” she amended. “The turning point of my life was when Rap told me it wasn’t important, that it was just another symptom of Third World anger against American imperialism.” I began to feel as if I were attending a seventies consciousness-raising session. I considered reminding Dana that my consciousness was plenty high already, but she continued musing aloud.

  “As if I’d deserved to be raped because I was carrying an American passport.” She took another drag of her cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray, which was near to overflowing with butts. “And then on top of that, I found out that he was using our so-called honeymoon in Nepal to buy and sell heroin. When I learned I was pregnant, I ran home to Daddy—only to find out he’d dumped Mom and married a second-year law student named Mindy. They met me at the airport, and Mindy was even bigger than I was. Her daughter was born two months before Dylan.”

  “What has all this got to do with Jan?”

  “I’m coming to that.” She waved her cigarette at me. “Rap, as you might guess, wasn’t big on paying regular child support. Oh, he threw me a few bucks when he had money, and he bought Dylan all kinds of weird presents, like a gigantic African drum or an Indonesian shadow puppet. But steady money wasn’t his thing, so when he offered to cut me in on one of his businesses, I said yes.”

  “I hope to God both of you had the sense to make it something besides drugs.”

  She nodded, sucking in a lungful of smoke and letting it out through her nostrils like a petulant dragon.

  “He got a contract to rebuild used parts for small planes and helicopters. He hired migrant farmworkers to do the actual rebuilding. And when we started working with the sanctuary movement, we used refugees to do the work.”

  I took a stab in the dark. “And Jan found out.”

  To my secret relief, Dana nodded. “She stumbled on the trailers right after she and Ron were arrested.”

  Trailers? What did trailers have to do with all this?

  “She went into a long rap about ethics, accused Rap and me of running a sweatshop.”

  Sweatshop. Trailers. Illegal immigrants rebuilding airplane parts in trailers. This was beginning to make sense.

  “But it wasn’t a sweatshop,” I said in a flat voice.

  “No. Not really. They were making motherboards. At least that’s what Rap said. For airplane control panels.”

  Again I kept my voice uninflected. “You were making counterfeit parts. The kind of parts the FAA says is causing plane crashes in Third World countries.” Thanks to CNN, I was reasonably up-to-date on the bogus parts investigation going on in Washington.

  “They can’t prove those parts came from our factory,” Dana said, but her voice sounded sulky, like a teenager hoping to hell her parents will buy her excuse for breaking curfew.

  Dana sat with bowed head, the cigarette in her hand burning close enough to her fingers to cause pain. She came to with a start, and dropped the butt into her ashtray, where it lay smoldering.

  “He told me they were legal,” she said at last. Her tone had lost its belligerence; she sounded beaten.

  “Right. People make legitimate airplane parts in trailers all the time. I’m sure Boeing has a few old Airstreams lying around in—”

  “Cut the crap, Cassie.” Dana raised her head and glared at me. “I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t ask, all right? I thought what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.”

  My head hurt. I would have liked to ask for a glass of water to take an aspirin, but I didn’t want to break the flow of our discussion. I let the pain charge my voice with impatience. “Why wasn’t there a trial? Why weren’t you and Rap even indicted?”

  She spread her stubby hands in a gesture signifying that she’d come to the end of her knowledge. “I have absolutely no idea. One minute we were going to get Joaquín Baltasar out of the country and the next thing I know that DEA agent is dead and no one knows or cares about the factory.”

&
nbsp; “There’s something else I’ve got to ask,” I said. I stared into the inscrutable black eyes. “How could you go from sixties idealism to exploiting workers to make bogus parts? What were you thinking?”

  “The sixties.” The scorn in her voice was scalding. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those who get all misty when you see a hash pipe. The good old days of flower power and don’t trust anyone over thirty. What a crock.”

  “I didn’t say that.” I hated being on the defensive, but I hated even more being called a sixties sentimentalist. “We were trying to do something good, trying to help some of the poorest and hardest-working people in this country. How do you go from doing that to putting those same people in trailers so they can make bogus parts that kill other poor people?”

  She fumbled for another cigarette. The veins in my head were thumping in protest, but the one way to end this conversation was to take away Dana’s smokes.

  “And where did we get with our children’s crusade, Cassie?” The words floated out on a stream of blue smoke. “Are migrant farmworkers better off? A little, maybe, but the truth is that if they are, we had nothing to do with it. We were playing at being radicals, but the minute we got busted, we turned to Harve to get us out of it. The one thing I learned from the sixties—and the seventies; don’t forget, I’m also a casualty of the women’s movement—is that for every gain made by progressives, there are two steps back. There’s always a conservative backlash; we pay for every gain twice over.”

  I remembered my cynical conversation with Ron on the way to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Dana’s attitude was perhaps a shade darker, but the similarity in tone made me uncomfortable. But then I’m a born devil’s advocate, driven by some inner force I can’t control to take the opposite position in every argument. So where Ron’s cheerful acceptance of our radical past pushed me into cynicism, Dana’s contempt brought out a desire to defend at least our good intentions. I pushed away the realization that good intentions were also known as paving stones to hell.

  Dana’s passion culminated in a fit of choking. She put her hand to her chest and hawked out a gob of phlegm, which she spat into a tissue. “God,” she said, “I sound like my grandfather used to in the mornings. Before he died of lung cancer.” She stuffed the used tissue into a pocket and said, “There was something else going on back then. Something I never got to the bottom of. One more thing I didn’t really want to know. But my guess is it was a lot more important, and a lot more dangerous, than our piddling little factory.”

  “Like what? Drugs?”

  “Besides the drugs.” She reached for her pack of cigarettes. I hoped I wasn’t going to die of asphyxiation before this conversation was over.

  “He used to take the boat out at night. And there were extra refugees, people Father Jerry didn’t know about. People I wasn’t supposed to know about. And some of them were armed to the teeth.”

  Strange refugees with guns sounded like drugs to me. Unless—the thought crowded into my throbbing head as I drove away from Dana’s nondescript apartment complex—unless Rap was also running guns.

  Jan had accused one of us of working for the government as an undercover agent. Could she have been right—and could Rap have been supplying weapons to the contras under cover of the sanctuary movement?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  July 16, 1982

  Jan stepped out of the AA meeting into hot, bright sunlight. After leaving Harve’s office, she’d passed up a downtown meeting to come to the 1:30 at Our Lady of Guadalupe so she’d be on the spot to start her inquiries. She decided there was no point in asking Father Jerry if he knew anything about a factory; if Dana and Rap were doing something illegal, they wouldn’t have confided in the priest. Instead she asked Belita Navarro, who was now seventeen and worked part-time for the Migrant Ministry, where Dana was supposed to be this morning.

  “Ms. Sobel is out by the van Wormers’, I think,” Belita replied, looking up from the typewriter on her desk. “You know, where they got that trailer camp behind the big house.” She wore a peach-colored shirtwaist dress, and her long, glossy black hair was held back by a matching peach headband. Her family had settled out after the parathion accident, her father going to work at the ketchup factory, and her mother cooking for Rosita’s Luncheonette on Superior.

  Jan nodded. She could find migrant camps with ease now, even if they couldn’t be seen from the highway. You took the dirt roads, followed the line of poplar trees, aimed for what looked like broken-down, abandoned shacks.

  But she’d been to the van Wormer place before. She’d seen the migrant camp. And there was nothing there that could remotely be called a factory.

  Still, it was a lead. She thanked Belita and stepped out of the makeshift office. Shading her eyes with her hand, she gazed across the fields toward the van Wormer farm. Too far away; she could barely see the huge, newly painted red barn, with its Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol on the front.

  She opened the door to her ancient VW beetle and climbed inside. Driving along the back road toward the van Wormers’ outer fields, the ones farthest away from the farmhouse, she caught a glimpse of something silver glinting in the sun.

  Trailers.

  Some farmers used old trailers as migrant housing.

  But the van Wormers didn’t; they had cinderblock cabins.

  So what was causing that silver gleam?

  Jan drove along the dirt road, willing herself to go slowly so as not to kick up dust. She wanted to approach as unobtrusively as possible.

  The trailers were old-fashioned aluminum cylinders that gleamed in the sun like shards of glass. When you first saw them from the road, you thought maybe they were a mirage, but then you decided it was the sun glinting off a hidden pond behind the cornfield. Only after you’d bounced along the rutted dirt road did you realize that what you were seeing was man-made. And then you hoped they were unoccupied. Hot as hell in there, you thought. I just hope nobody—

  You hoped wrong. Jan hoped wrong. When she’d first overheard Rap and Dana talking about “the factory” she’d figured that she was new to the underground railroad and didn’t have to know everything. But Miguel’s death and the growing suspicion that someone had tipped Walt Koeppler changed all that. Now there were no secrets she was prepared to tolerate.

  She pulled her car into the tall weeds beside the road and stepped out. She was about a quarter mile from the trailers.

  There were three of them. She walked up to the first and peered in the window. It was open about six inches, no screen. She heard Spanish spoken in the slow Mexican way, soft and lilting. Men and women sat hunched over card tables, hands moving with incredible swiftness in the moisture-heavy air. Playing cards? Dominoes? No, nobody could sit in that trailer, sun beating down, no ventilation to speak of, just to play games.

  But the hands, she could see the hands. They were darting in and out, working with small boardlike things. Jan recalled a toy she’d had as a child, where you poked a blunt needle with yarn through a card with punched-out holes to make a picture. That was what it looked like they were doing.

  Jan stood back from the window. This wasn’t what she pictured when she thought of a factory, but then again, weren’t there card-sized boards that went into computers? Could that be what the people in the trailer were doing—making computer boards?

  Whatever they were doing had to be worth money. Rap didn’t do things that weren’t profitable. Three trailers, maybe eight people to a trailer. Twenty-four people making little board things. And maybe this wasn’t the only shift. Maybe another group came in when these people left for the day. And maybe this wasn’t the only site; you could stash any number of little trailer complexes like this behind the barns and silos of family farms and nobody would see them from the road.

  She began to picture a network of trailers, a hidden factory complex that employed refugees. Miguel and Pilar had surfaced seemingly out of nowhere, yet now she suspected they’d once sat, for how long she didn’t know, at thes
e card tables, doing something with the little boards.

  Did Rap and Dana bother to pay these people, or was hiding them from La Migra all the salary they received?

  Bile rose in Jan’s throat. They’d used her, Rap and Dana, they’d sent her out on a back road to watch Miguel bleed to death, when all the time they were bleeding their workers. Doing it for money, not because they cared about—

  “Señora, por favor.” A voice cut into her thoughts. Jan jumped and turned, clutching her heart.

  “Oh, my God. You scared me. I was just—” She was just what? Passing by? Looking for someone? Fear clutched her bowels; she suddenly realized how dangerous it was to know things you weren’t supposed to know.

  Her fear deepened as she looked at the man’s weathered face. His brown eyes were hard and bored straight into hers. This was no humble campesino used to taking orders from rich men, used to keeping his eyes respectfully on the ground as he listened to what others had to say. This was no migrant worker, American or Mexican. Nor did he seem like the educated, polite Salvadorans she had helped cross into Canada.

  If anything, this man was what the refugees were fleeing from. A thug, a man used to holding guns on people. A cruel man whose cruelty had received official sanction back home. Wherever home was.

  “You will come with me, señora,” the man said. Jan took her eyes from the impassive brown face and looked down at his hands. He held a blunt-nosed blue revolver in one hand. It looked as though it belonged there, as though his hand and the gun were old friends.

  Although she stood on the sun-drenched soil of Ohio, Jan felt the kind of bowel-melting fear she’d heard about from the refugees. She’d heard stories of the desaparecidos and wondered how it was possible in a civilized country to be subject to instant disappearance, to fear every knock on the door, every stranger.

  Was it possible, could this cruel brown man disappear her, here and now, in the sunlit afternoon in Lucas County, State of Ohio, United States of America?