Illegal

by Paul Levine

  A dry wind pelted the windshield with sand. The Sugarloaf was Wanda the Whale's stash house, the place El Tigre dropped off Marisol. There could be armed guards and pit bulls and who knows what. Payne was reasonably certain there would be no doorman and concierge.

  "What are we waiting for?" Tino asked.

  "I need to plan our assault."

  "Why don't we just find the Whale and ask her about Mami?"

  "Not how it's done." As if he knew.

  He scanned the property. Six squat cabins with cedar siding and drooping porches, spread out across a few scrubby acres. No swimming pool, no restaurant, and damn little shade from the desert sun. A cow fence of unpainted logs ran along the perimeter. A few feet inside the row of logs was another fence, this one of barbed wire. A scarlet eucalyptus tree bloomed in the yard of the nearest cabin. A sign read: Office and No Vacancy. Parked under the tree was an Eldorado convertible, vintage late-sixties. The car had once been red, and now was the rusty orange of a Tequila Sunrise.

  "Only one car out front," Payne said. "No one around, but the sign says the place is full."

  "So?"

  "You ever see Rockford Files?"

  Tino shook his head.

  "Classic show. We'll watch it sometime."

  Tino scowled. "Don't say stuff you don't mean, Himmy."

  "I mean it. Channel 56 still shows reruns. Once we find your mom, if she says it's okay, we can hang out."

  "?Verdad?"

  "You bet. For a career criminal, you're not a bad kid." Payne tousled the boy's dark hair.

  The boy flashed a smile. "So, what's Rocket Files have to do with anything?"

  " Rockford Files. Jim Rockford's a private eye. This is where he'd walk up to the office and tell the woman behind the counter he's looking for someone named Marisol Perez. The woman says, 'Never heard of her.' But Rockford won't let up. Then a big goon with prison tats comes out of a back room and growls, 'This guy giving you trouble, Agnes?' Rockford makes some smart-ass remark, and the guy picks him up by the neck and throws him halfway to L.A."

  "But this Rockford doesn't give up, right?"

  " Exactamente, kiddo. He gets his nose bloodied but never quits."

  "Just like you, Himmy. So what do we do now?"

  "We avoid the office. We circle around, check the cabins in back, away from the road."

  The boy grinned. "Great plan, Rockford."

  They got out of the car, both wearing brand-new Nike Zooms, black high-tops, the Kobe model. Payne didn't like Kobe Bryant, and he didn't like the sneakers they'd just bought in Ocotillo. Still, they beat the bowling shoes he'd worn on the way out of Mexico.

  With Payne leading, they hopped over the log fence at the side of the property, then paused at the barbed wire. Three strands, rusty and dangerous. While Payne considered how to avoid leaving a trail of blood, Tino jammed a sneaker on the middle strand and pushed it down. He grabbed a smooth spot on the top wire and pulled it up, gesturing to Payne to duck under. Payne got through, then he did the same for Tino, giving him an admiring look.

  "Ay, Himmy. All Mexicanos know how to get through barbed wire."

  They jogged along the edge of the property, hunched over like commandos, staying as far as possible from the front cabin with the Office sign. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked. It sounded like a big, unhappy dog.

  The closest cabins appeared empty. They circled the perimeter. Still nothing, until they reached the cabin at the rear of the property. From inside, a scratchy Spanish-language radio station played a ballad.

  " 'Cielito Lindo,' " Tino said. "Ranchero music."

  As they drew closer, they heard overlapping voices, speaking in Spanish. The morning was already hot, and Payne wondered why no one was on the porch or in the yard. Then he saw the slab of wood, a two-by-four, in a slot, sealing the front door. The windows were covered with perforated metal screens. The residents were locked in.

  Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos.

  They climbed the steps to the cabin. Payne lifted the board from its slot and opened the door. Stifling inside. Bare floors and walls. No beds, no chairs, no sofas. An open toilet and a sink toward the rear. But the place was not empty. Maybe three dozen men, women, and children, with backpacks, plastic bags stuffed with clothes, and water jugs. The talking stopped dead, everyone staring at them.

  No Marisol Perez.

  "?Hola, amigos!" Payne called out, with as much cheer as he could muster.

  A man clicked off the radio. The only sound was a horsefly buzzing and banging against one of the screened windows. Then, a girl of about ten started to cry. The migrants exchanged glances and raised their hands in surrender.

  "They think you're La Migra, " Tino told Payne.

  "Tell them I'm a friend. Ask where they're going from here. It might be the same place your mom was sent."

  Tino began chattering, and the hands eased down. As several men replied in staccato Spanish, Payne looked toward the migrants. Most avoided his gaze. Men with work-hardened hands and wary eyes. Exhausted women clutching their children.

  Dark, broad Indian faces, their ancestry tracing back centuries, to the Aztecs. A man and woman with Asian features. Others seemed to be mestizos, the mixed-blood descendants of Europeans and indigenous peoples.

  Tino nodded toward two men in wife-beater tees with bandannas low on their foreheads. "Those two cholos say they're going to L.A. to get rich selling drugs and robbing gabachos."

  "Great. That'll make Cullen Quinn happy."

  "The Guatemalans over by the shitter say they're going to some vegetable farms upstate, but they don't know where. Those two guys by the window were promised jobs in a gypsum quarry right down the road."

  Payne remembered the signs for Plaster City, which wasn't a city or even a town. Just a quarry and a factory turning gypsum into plaster for drywall.

  "So why are they still here? They could practically walk there."

  "Jobs never happened. There've been immigration raids. Everything's on hold."

  One of the men, thin and wiry in a long-sleeve plaid shirt, dusty jeans, and work boots, said, "Sin papeles no hay trabajo."

  Without papers, no work.

  "Different now. Very bad," the man said, trying out his English.

  Tino gestured toward a man in the rear of the cabin. "That guero says he's a fisherman. The coyotes promised him a job on a sardine boat. A couple of others, landscaping work; and two of the women, janitors in office buildings in San Diego. But they've been here three days, and no one's shown up to get them."

  "Who the fuck are you? The employment agency?"

  Payne wheeled at the sound of the gravelly voice. Filling the doorway was a humongous woman in purple L.A. Lakers shorts. "Are you Wanda?" "No, dipshit. Ah'm Paris Fucking Hilton." The woman's thighs ballooned out of her shorts like sausages bursting through their casing. Massive breasts, pale as uncooked biscuits, oozed from the sides of her pink sleeveless cropped tee, the word "Princess" spelled out in sequins. Her stringy, bleached hair was fastened to spongy curlers, though it was doubtful a formal evening was in the works. Her jelly-roll belly, the color of Crisco, spilled over the top of her shorts. She raised her right arm, the flesh quivering like flan on a slippery plate. Her meaty hand gripped a three-foot-long machete.

  "Ya'all here to poach my beaners?" A voice like spoons banging tin pots. Hillbillies and hayrides and banjos.

  "No, ma'am," he said.

  "Last time a low-life poacher came around, Ah fed his pecker to my bull mastiff."

  "I'm not a trafficker. I swear."

  Waving the machete in Payne's face, she said, "You're not a cop. Ah pay enough of 'em to know." She looked Payne up and down, exhaling a little piggy snort. "You look like a city boy." She pushed the flat end of the machete against his hip and turned him a full 360. "Kind of cute, but you got a skinny butt. So what the fuck you doing on my property?"

  "I'm looking for a woman."

  "Well, you found one, cutie pie." She jabbed the ti
p of the machete into Payne's midsection, just south of his navel. "But Ah doubt you got enough sweet meat on your bones to do the job."

  "The job?"

  "Ah ride cowgirl style."

  Payne had no answer, other than a lip-trembling, openmouthed gape.

  Wanda the Whale let out a laugh that shook her shoulders and rippled her stomach rolls. "Jesus, Ah haven't seen a look like that since Ah strangled a man between my thighs."

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Once Wanda the Whale was convinced that Payne didn't intend to kidnap her pollos, she put down her machete. When she started talking to Tino, she relaxed even more, calling him the "cutest little burrito west of the Pecos."

  She took them to her cabin, the one with the Office sign, advising them not to pet the dog. As if anyone would try. Chained to the porch railing was a bull mastiff with watery eyes, drooping jowls, and a chest that resembled an iron breastplate. Payne guessed the dog could have boxed middleweight, about 160 pounds.

  Once inside, Wanda opened a small fridge and handed them Cokes that could have been cooler. Like a newly christened ship easing down the slipway, she settled her giant buttocks into a sagging plaid recliner. Pleased to have guests who "spoke American," she spent several minutes talking about herself. Her real name was Wanda Baker from Arkadelphia, Arkansas. At eighteen, she'd been an exotic dancer in a bar near the Pine Bluff Arsenal, an army base where she collected sweaty dollar bills from soldiers who liked their women plump and jiggly. She ran off with a corporal, "a cute little bugger," who went AWOL to marry her.

  "The smaller the man, the meaner the drunk," she told them, recounting a maxim of married life.

  Her husband had read a magazine article about this big lake down by the Mexican border. The Salton Sea. He figured he could earn a living pulling mullet from the water, so they headed west. His business ended when he caught more truck tires than fish. The marriage ended when he started washing down meth with cactus wine. One night, he came after Wanda with a tire iron. She whisked him off his feet and bear-hugged him until she heard his ribs snap like stalks of celery.

  Wanda started up a low-rent whorehouse in the cabins, servicing the dust-covered, phlegm-hacking men who worked at the gypsum quarry just down the road. The "Sugarloaf Spa," she called it, in a triumph of marketing over reality. A small operation, with a few Mexican women, a few runaways from the Midwest. Wanda avoided arrest by providing freebies for local cops and town bigwigs. She'd probably still be "Madame Wanda," but for a judge from Ocotillo who picked up a dose of the clap. Cops shut her down but let her open the stash house in return for monthly bundles of cash.

  Now, beached in her recliner, Wanda the Whale tried to cool herself with a handheld Japanese silk fan, as rivulets of sweat tracked down her cleavage. She explained that the No Vacancy sign was posted because she never rented any cabins. The Sugarloaf was a way station, providing a night or two of housing for the flood of Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans who crossed La Frontera without papers.

  After a couple good years, things had slowed down. Upstate, strawberries and citrus got hammered in a winter freeze. Farmers with only half a crop needed half the workers. The slowdown in home construction killed jobs for laborers. And the feds had scared off a lot of businesses who needed workers.

  "A perfect shitstorm," she informed them. "Getting so a woman can't make a semi-honest living." She shifted her weight in the chair, and the cabin may have tilted a little more out of plumb. "So who's this gal you're looking for?"

  "Mi mami," Tino said. "Marisol Perez."

  The woman's face brightened. "The pretty one. Ah should have known. She told me she got separated from her boy."

  "That's her! Is she here?"

  "I can see the resemblance now. You got the same shape face, the same complexion. But those green eyes of yours threw me off."

  "Where is she?" Payne said. "Is she okay?"

  "Ah never would have sent her to the slaughterhouse, except to get her away from that douche bag El Tigre."

  "She's working?"

  "Where?" Tino pleaded.

  Wanda sighed, her breasts heaving under the cropped tee. "Let me tell you what happened."

  Tino's eyes filled with tears as Wanda repeated what her driver had told her. Marisol fighting off a foreman at the plant, hurting him real bad. Hell, maybe even killing him.

  "Ah couldn't bring her back here. Cops would be banging on my door. If not them, then the cousins of that asshole foreman. Had my driver take her to a stash house in Hellhole Canyon."

  "Is she still there?" Payne asked.

  Wanda shrugged. "Hard to tell. Place is run by a tweaker named Dickie Chitwood. Real trailer trash. Rumor is, the place is owned by some rich guy upstate."

  "We'll need directions."

  "Ain't far, as the crow flies. About three hours if you don't get lost. Or three days if you do."

  "We'll find it."

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  Payne's look shot her a question.

  "Chitwood's partial to a Ruger carbine. Damn good shot for someone stoked on crystal meth. And he don't have a kind heart like me, so you take care."

  FORTY-EIGHT

  On her second day in Hellhole Canyon, Marisol sat in the shade and watched the Nazi argue with a Hispanic man who wore work boots, jeans, and a T-shirt printed with the name of a raisin company. He was about forty, with a sun-creased face.

  "You're one pollo short, Chitwood."

  Chitwood. The Nazi's name. Marisol pledged to remember that. If the time ever came, she would help bring the man to justice for shooting the Honduran man through the forehead, instead of the apple through the core.

  "You can't count, Guillermo." Chitwood scratched at his goat's beard with a filthy fingernail. "Must be them inner-city schools."

  "If Zaga don't kill you, Rutledge will."

  "Fuck them." Chitwood's rifle was slung over a shoulder. Marisol thought Guillermo was either very brave or did not know that Chitwood was an insane drogadicto.

  Guillermo dug the toe of one boot into the dirt. Came up with a wet clump. Blood. "You shot one, didn't you?"

  "What's the matter, Guillermo? Feeling sorry for your countrymen?"

  "My family's lived in California for five generations. My ancestors owned ranches when yours were in debtors' prison."

  "You're still a greaser to me."

  "Eres un basurero humano." Spitting out the words, calling him a human garbage dump. "I don't like the pollos any more than you do, Chitwood. They embarrass me, give my people a bad name. But I do my job and get stoned on my own time. You're a fucking lunatic."

  "I don't have to take your shit. I don't work for you."

  Chitwood fingered the rifle butt. Marisol felt herself stiffen. She pictured him whipping the gun around, killing Guillermo, then shooting all the migrants, herself included.

  "Zaga's in Calexico," Guillermo said. "If I call him, he'll be here in two hours."

  "Like I give a shit. Just load your goddamn van and get going."

  "Maybe I'll call Mr. Rutledge directly. He'll have your ass."

  "Then who'll live out here with no hot water, chickenshit up to their ass? Rutledge can't afford to lose me."

  "Rutledge can afford to lose anyone he wants."

  Chitwood lifted the rifle and fired a burst into the air. Marisol winced. But Guillermo stood in place, never moving. "I'm taking the pollos, you stupid shitkicker. But this isn't over."

  Five minutes later, Marisol and the others were herded into the back of a windowless white van. A sign on its side read, Sweet Valley Raisin Co. Maybe that was where she would be working. The dark, windowless compartment stank of sweat and dust and urine. Nineteen men, women, and children packed inside, shoulders scrunched against one another, arms across knees.

  Packed like animals in a pen, Marisol thought. Like the cattle at the slaughterhouse. As the van pulled out and headed to an unknowable destination, she said yet another prayer, not for herself, but for h
er son, wherever he might be.

  FORTY-NINE

  Jimmy and Tino headed east on I-8, then turned north on the 86 at El Centro. Near the lake, they took the Salton Sea Highway west into the desert. By midday, the sun was high, the air blazing hot. Sand blew across the highway and ping ed off the Mustang's windshield.

  Tino could not stop thinking about what Wanda had told him. So many strange feelings. Pride at how his mother fought back, but shame that he wasn't there to rescue her. His mother, who would do anything for him.

  "That cabron at the slaughterhouse," the boy said. "You think he's dead?"

  "Wanda didn't seem to know."

  "If he isn't, I'll kill him myself."

  "Keep your eye on the ball, kid. We're looking for your mom, that's all."

  "A gabacho wouldn't understand."

  "You'd be surprised."

  "It's a matter of honor," Tino said.

  "Fine. After we find your mom, kill whoever you want. But you're riding with me now, and I set the rules."

  "You're not my father!"

  Payne clenched his teeth so hard his jaw muscles danced. "No, Tino. I'm not."

  They were both silent as the car hurtled past creosote washes and scrub mesquite. Tino tried to figure out what had just happened. Why was Jimmy mad at him? Or was he? No, more like he was hurting.

  "I'm sorry, Himmy. You been good to me."

  "It's okay."

  "We'll do what you say."

  "Fine."

  Tino was dealing with emotions he couldn't quite fathom. He didn't want to lose his new friend. "Still gonna let me watch Rocket Files with you someday?"

  "Rockford. Yeah. And if I'm not in jail, I'll take you to a Dodgers game."

  "You serious, vato?"

  Jimmy smiled and punched Tino gently on the shoulder.

  An odd feeling overcame the boy. He figured the lawyer must have taken his own son to baseball games. Tino pictured Jimmy clearing a path around their seats, shoving guys to give his son a clean shot at a foul popup, the kid reaching up with a new glove that Jimmy had oiled for him. Wasn't that what fathers did?