by Paul Levine
Payne flicked on the night-table lamp, made from a bowling pin, and stared straight into Sharon's face. An eight-by-ten glossy, taken on Mammoth Mountain. A ski trip, the background a heaven of powdery snow. Sharon's cheeks pink from the cold, Adam bundled in a parka.
Smiling. Laughing.
Old times. Good times. Short times.
Oak bookshelves lined one wall. Scott Turow and George V. Higgins. Crime stories well told. Payne didn't like those courtroom novels where the lawyers were heroes. Too unrealistic.
No, it wasn't the oysters. Or the lonely bed. Or the choking memories. The day was still with him, and all the days before that. A ton of crap had floated down the stream since the crash and the divorce.
C'mon, think happy thoughts.
Adam playing baseball. The worst part of the divorce was spending nights without his son. At least Sharon was decent about it. He could see Adam practically anytime he wanted.
Payne gave up on sleep, grabbed the TV remote, and turned on Channel 56, home of Twilight Zone and Hawaii Five-O. Payne loved the classic shows, even though he wasn't born when they first aired.
The TV flickered on, and there was a young James Garner with an even younger Tom Selleck. The Rockford Files. Selleck was Lance White, the perfect detective, solving cases without breaking a sweat, pissing off Rockford, who usually got beaten up and tossed into jail, before turning crud into gold. Payne identified with the Rockford character, except his crud always turned into more crud.
At a commercial, Payne flicked to one of the movie channels. The Big Lebowski was just coming on, great opening scene, a tumbleweed at the mercy of the wind, blowing from the desert into Los Angeles. The shit happens philosophy of life. Who could argue?
He'd seen the movie the first time with Sharon, who didn't share his enthusiasm for a wacky story about a stoned slacker. Sharon was both a good cop and a dogooding cop, someone who believed the words carved in the granite of the courthouses.
Equal Justice Under Law
Yeah, spend an hour with Judge Rollins, and try singing that tune.
Payne vowed he wouldn't flip to Channel 9. Cullen Quinn's late-night show would be on. He'd be railing about the Mexican border and encouraging the yahoos to shoot all illegals on sight. It wasn't just Quinn's politics that upset Payne. The broad-shouldered, blow-dried bastard was recently engaged to Sharon and had given her a rock so humongous it would make Paris Hilton blush. To Sharon's credit, she seldom wore the engagement ring, explaining that a cop's jewelry shouldn't be worth more than her car.
Payne kept his promise for a full twenty seconds before flipping to the Satan of the Airwaves.
"We're going the way of the Roman Empire." Quinn leaned toward the camera, his silvery blond hair frozen in place. "The Romans opened the gates and the Goths came storming in. With no respect for Roman culture or language or customs, the Goths burned Rome to the ground."
Quinn paused and lifted his chin, as if daring his viewers to take a poke at him. "Did you see those Mexican protesters in the streets? 'Open the borders!' And those weren't the Stars and Stripes they were waving. Those were Mex-i-can flags."
"Mex-i-can" sounding vile, the way you might say "roach infested."
"?La Reconquista!" Quinn boomed in his broadcaster's baritone. "That's what the illegals want. To reconquer their land. And we're handing it right back to them. Welfare and schooling, all paid for by you, my friends. Their children bring lice and bedbugs into our schools. Our hospitals and prisons overflow with illegals, infected with hepatitis, TB, and chingas."
Chingas, Payne thought. A new one on him.
The big mug seemed to have put on weight. His neck bulged out of his shirt collar. His crooked nose, product of a Golden Gloves fight, actually looked good on him. Made him less of a Ken doll. The son of a Philadelphia butcher, Quinn was a lifelong pal of Sharon's oldest brother, Rory. Both boys had hung out at the Police Athletic League gym, where they would beat each other senseless in the ring. Quinn went on to Villanova and claimed to have fought classmate Howie Long to a draw in club boxing. Long became a collegiate heavyweight champion and, later, a member of the pro football Hall of Fame. Quinn became the mouth that roared on Los Angeles radio and television.
Payne watched as Quinn gestured with a meaty hand.
"And still the wetbacks pour in, thousands every day. Millions on the way. The barbarians are inside our gates, my friends, and our walls are tumbling down. And who's benefiting from this invasion? The big growers like Simeon Rutledge, owner of Rutledge Ranch and Farms. When will Washington crack down on-"
Payne hit the "Mute" button and studied Quinn. With his face tinted orange by makeup, he looked like a scowling pumpkin. He wore a gray Italian suit so finely tailored it disguised the fact that he was beginning to resemble a whale. His designer shirt seemed to be silk, in that trendy off-purple all the rage for the next fifteen minutes or so.
Every night, the same rant. Like being stuck at a dinner party next to a guy complaining about his hemorrhoids.
Just what does Sharon see in this bozo, anyway?
But then, what did she see in me?
Earlier today, Payne told Judge Rollins he was going to change. Of course, a man will say a lot of crazy stuff when he's staring into the barrel of a gun. Had he meant it?
Sure, but just how do I do it?
Payne's eyes grew heavy. With the fog settling in, his mind sorted through a variety of possible weekend plans.
Take the hydrofoil to Catalina.
Bring along Heidi Klum.
Reread the Travis McGee paperback that began: "There are no one hundred percent heroes."
The ringing telephone jarred Payne. He fumbled for the handset.
"Yeah?"
"You stupid shit. You asshole. You total fuck-up."
Payne was fairly certain it wasn't a wrong number. "Judge?"
"I knew you were a sleaze," Walter Rollins said. "But I didn't know you were a rat."
"Judge, I'm sorry, but-"
"Shut up!"
"C'mon, Judge. You're the one who took the bribe."
"I said, shut up! I don't have much time."
Over the phone, Payne heard the judge's doorbell ringing.
"I felt sorry for you, Payne. Everybody did, after that lousy luck you had. But stuff happens. People deal with it."
"I don't want to talk about-"
"Just 'cause your life's shit doesn't mean you have to drag everyone else down the sewer."
Again, the doorbell, the chimes as insistent as machine-gun fire. In the background, Payne heard a man shout, "Police! We have a warrant!"
"Judge, calm down. The state's gonna offer you a deal. You're the first one busted. That puts you in a great position. I'll bet if you resign the bench and cooperate, you could avoid prison-"
"Bullshit. It's over for me."
"The state doesn't want to try the case. They want to work something out."
Payne waited but there was no reply.
"Judge…?"
A thunderclap. The unmistakable sound of a gunshot. Then the soft thud of a body hitting the floor.
NINE
Where is that sack of greasy onions, that sorry excuse for a man who calls himself the Tiger?
Marisol looked out through the broken window, one hand on Tino's shoulder. She would not let the boy out of her sight until they were in the United States. Her worst fear was separation, some horrific event that would pry them apart.
It was after midnight. Of course, El Tigre was late. She supposed it was too much to ask that he display a solid work ethic. Punctuality. Attention to detail. Basic competence. Like Americans.
The thought made her smile. She was beginning to think like her father.
She sat, cross-legged, in an adobe mud house that smelled of raw sewage. The stash house was located in a grim neighborhood of shacks with corrugated metal roofs. Outside, naked children played tag deep into the night. Undernourished dogs rooted in garbage cans, and chickens pecked at
the dry ground.
The street was unpaved. The people were unwashed. The cars were skeletons sinking into front yards. The shade trees had long since been chopped into firewood.
Marisol could not wait to say adios, Mejico.
Not that she thought the streets of California were lined with rosebushes or paved with bricks of gold. She believed Father Castillo, back home, who warned that the route to the U.S.A. was a trail of thorns through a cemetery without crosses.
But just listen to the others, clucking like roosters. Campesinos in straw hats, a Guatemalan family with their woven sacks, a teenage love-struck couple from Ensenada, the girl pregnant. Hopelessly naive in their dreams of the promised land. One woman claimed that everyone in San Diego was a millionaire with a swimming pool, a German car, and a Mexican maid. A middle-aged man smelling of tobacco and sweat boasted that a job waited for him in a fish cannery and that he would own an almost new Chevy Silverado by the end of the summer. A Guatemalan man, his dusty feet in torn huaraches, said that he was headed to the San Joaquin Valley to pick crops. He called it a "Garden of Eden."
Marisol knew that the American Eden can be a garden of bones, that peasants like these often never reach those fertile fields. And those who do? She had heard stories that some growers were kind and decent to the migrants. Others treated them like oxen without the yokes.
She had heard talk of construction jobs in Phoenix, where thousands of homes were being built by rich Americans. But then later, others said the jobs had run as dry as the wells of her village. Who knew for certain?
A cousin from Jaripo had crossed last year. His mother told Marisol he picked grapes for twenty cents a tray. How many grapes in a tray? How long to pick them? She could not even guess.
So yes, there is work. Farms and factories. Restaurants and hotels. Drywall and roofing. Logging and demolition. Fisheries and meat-packing plants. But first, they must arrive safely.
They are the pollos. The cooked chickens. Men like El Tigre are the polleros, the chicken wranglers.
Marisol again thought of her father and wondered what he would say to her now. He was one of those Mexicans who loved the idea of America, insisting that Marisol learn English. Some of her earliest memories were watching Sesame Street on American television, after her father salvaged a satellite dish from a trash pile. Edgardo Perez even required her to read the English translations of Mexican authors.
"Papi, doesn't it make more sense to read Carlos Fuentes in Spanish?"
"In Atlanta, they read him in English."
Atlanta being the home of his favorite baseball team, the Braves. He watched on the satellite, cheering for Vinny Castilla, born in Oaxaca. Surely, Edgardo Perez would approve of her going north with Tino. But not like this. Not rushed and unplanned.
When her father worked at the Ford plant in Hermosillo, the company provided a house. Her mother gardened and knitted and cooked. Marisol remembered a childhood filled with fresh flowers, birthday parties, and heart-shaped ensaimadas, topped with whipped cream. For a while, at least, it was a life dipped in honey.
After her father was fired, he promised to take the family to El Norte, but the closest they got was a village outside Caborca in the state of Sonora. They arrived by bus, for even though Edgardo Perez had built Fords, he did not own one. Just outside the village, in the high desert, a dust devil whirled across the road and blasted the bus windows with a funnel of blinding sand. Welcome to your new life, parched and cruel, the spirits of the desert seemed to say.
Her father tried raising grapes, but there was not enough water. He looked for work. Roofer. Carpenter. Handyman. But the villagers were poor and did their own repairs, if any at all. Even worse, they seemed to resent the Perez family.
"Aristocracia," they called them, with contempt. Thinking the family put on airs along with their freshly washed clothes.
Only in Mexico, Marisol thought, could a fired factory worker with no money in the bank be considered haughty for keeping a clean house and making sure his children finished secondary school.
The roar of an engine stirred her from thoughts of the past. Tino leapt up and looked out the broken window. A red pickup truck with dual rear wheels and a long cargo bed kicked up dust as it slid to a stop in front of the adobe house.
El Tigre wiggled his belly out of the cab, shouting instructions for the pollos to hop into the back.
Tino whistled. "A Ford F-350, Mami. Brand new. Did abuelo make these?"
A note of hopeful pride in his voice, Marisol realizing yet again that her son needed a man in his life.
"I don't think so," she said. "Your grandfather built cars. Lincolns and Fords."
The ten travelers piled into the bed of the shiny red pickup, Marisol thinking, Why not just paint a sign on the doors, Illegals Here!
Standing on the running board, El Tigre counted his passengers. "Tonight, you walk in the desert," he proclaimed, like a Mexican Moses. "Tomorrow, you walk in Los Angeles!"
Marisol and Tino sat with their backs pressed against the rear of the metal toolbox that ran the width of the cab. They each wore one backpack. Before they left home, Marisol fought back tears as she told Tino they could only take what they could carry. Not the plates or silverware that had been her grandmother's. Not the kitchen table handmade by her father from mahogany scraps.
Just three changes of clothing each. Tino's baseball glove. Photographs of his abuela y abuelo, both gone now. Everything else they left behind.
They each wore jeans and their new Reeboks, purchased in Mexicali along with "travel kits." Tins of sardines and crackers and gallon jugs of water. Band-Aids, blister cream, and sunblock. Everything for the aspiring pollo except a green card. Still, Marisol could not shake the feeling that disaster faced them at every bend in the road.
"And what do you do, Agustino, if anything bad happens and I am not there?"
"Call J. Atticus Payne. But don't worry. I will take care of both of us."
"All right, my little valiente. "
"I am not so little, Mami. "
The truck headed west through a mountain pass on Federal Highway 2, then across a rocky, barren landscape, over bridges that traversed ravines and dry washes, finally curling up a mountain road through narrow canyons, dangerously close to steep cliffs. It was a moonless night-helpful for crossing undetected-the only light the twinkling stars overhead.
"It's okay, Mami, " Tino said. "Everything will be okay."
Marisol hadn't realized it, but she was squeezing her son's hand. Squeezing so hard, he had to pry her fingers loose.
"Of course it will," she said.
They came to a mountain town called "La Rumorosa" — named for the winds that whistled through the canyons-and stopped outside a small house of sand-colored rocks. A threadbare sofa and two living room chairs, springs sprung, sagged in the front yard, facing a fire of mesquite wood. Three young men lounged on the furniture, one cleaning what looked like a sub-machine gun, the other breaking down a handgun. The third man smoked a joint. He waved in the general direction of the truck but didn't get off the sofa.
El Tigre banged his horn. "Let's go, Rey!"
Rey, the pot smoker, looked to be about twenty years old. Baggy pants, shaved head, his body all cords and wires. A muscle-tee displayed his tattoos: Aztec symbols, Mexican flag, and a green snake that crawled up his neck. His goal in life appeared to be to spend as much time as possible in prison.
Heavy-lidded, Rey jammed a handgun into the front of his pants, lazed his way around the truck, and peered into the bed.
"Who are you?" Tino asked, before Marisol could keep him quiet.
"You ever hear of the Avenue 57 Chicos?" Rey's smile showed yellow teeth and undisguised malice.
"No."
"You will, chico."
Great, Marisol thought. A gangbanger. Or, at the very least, someone who wanted to be.
El Tigre hit the horn again. He must like the sound. Then he swung his bulk out of the cab, stood on the running boa
rd, and said, "Rey's my nephew. He'll watch for bandits until we cross over. But stay out of his way. He is a terrible shot."
"?Chingate, Tio!"
Rey telling his uncle to have sex with himself. The family must be very proud of the young man, Marisol thought.
El Tigre plopped back into the cab, and his nephew slithered into the passenger seat. With a final toot of the horn, El Tigre gunned the engine. Spitting up dirt, the truck bounced onto the mountain road and into the darkness of the Mexican night.
TEN
Payne called 911 and was immediately cross-examined.
"Yes, I'm sure it was a gunshot."
"No, I'm not at the judge's house."
"No, I'm not armed! Jeez, get the paramedics over there!"
A woman at the other end of the line asked him to hold a moment.
Payne paced in a tight circle. Fully awake now, wound tight, filled with regret. Judge Rollins was corrupt, but he didn't deserve this.
"Is this Mr. James Payne?" asked the woman on the phone.
Oh, shit.
He hadn't given his name.
The woman recited his home address and the fact that he had three unpaid parking tickets and two citations for failing to clear brush from his property.
The L.A.P.D.'s enhanced caller I.D. The city can't fix the potholes, but it can snoop into our living rooms.
Technology would lead the cops straight to his front door. They would ask all those nosy cop questions about his visit to the judge. They probably wouldn't do a Rodney King on his skull, but who wants another Grand Jury looking into his affairs?
Payne clicked off without saying good-bye. He needed time to think, and this wasn't the place. He dressed hurriedly, grabbed the envelope with the five grand he had skimmed, and hopped into his car. Headed west on Oxnard, hung a right on Van Nuys, and parked on Delano, two blocks from his office. Payne was seldom in his office between nine and five, much less in the middle of the night. Still, no use advertising his presence with his Lexus by the door.
The chambers of J. Atticus Payne, Esquire, solo practitioner, occupied a one-story, wood-shingled bungalow built in the 1920s and not updated since. The paint was peeling, the porch sagging, and the siding tearing loose. A California Craftsman gone to seed.