by Paul Levine
Tino wanted to picture Jimmy doing the same thing for him. But he wouldn't let himself paint the image. Because if Jimmy never followed through, if he turned out to be the kind of man his mother always seemed to meet, well, it's better not to get your hopes up. But this American seemed different. Sometimes, he showed a warm heart. Sometimes, the courage of a valiente. And other times, when he grew quiet and looked away, just like now, Tino knew he was in pain.
Payne glanced at Tino, wondering just what he was thinking. Was he picturing a reunion with his mother? Or did he fear he'd never see her again?
They drove through the Borrego Badlands, past stands of cottonwoods and jumping cholla cactus with spines like fishhooks. There was little traffic, and Payne pushed the Mustang to 80 on the straightaways.
Just past a rocky wash, three mangy coyotes stood at the side of the road, staring at them, not even twitching, as they roared past. The old Mustang's A/C struggled to keep the car cool, then failed. Payne slowed and put the top down. Speeding up again, a hot dry wind blasted them.
They turned South onto Peg Leg Road, and a white van with darkened windows crossed the center line heading straight at them. Payne swerved and laid on the horn, catching a look at the craggy-faced driver, who shot him the bird.
Asshole.
A sign on the van said Sweet Valley Raisin Co.
They passed through the hamlet of Borrego Springs, where some joker had erected a street sign showing the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. A blinking traffic light, then onto Montezuma Valley Road, which curled up a mountainside dotted with greasewood. A sign warned of mountain lions. Payne was more concerned about a man named Chitwood who was partial to a Ruger carbine.
"There, vato." Tino pointed to an unmarked dirt road, just where Wanda had said it would be. Payne braked and downshifted but still took the turn too fast, the Mustang fishtailing.
"Cool, Himmy."
"Yeah. Way cool."
The dirt road, pocked with holes, continued uphill along the mountain's edge. The air began to cool and carried the hint of moisture. They spotted a bighorn sheep perched on a rocky outcropping as if on guard duty. Water tumbled down a rocky cliff and into a small stream. Along the banks, white flowers with yellow centers looked like fried eggs, gleaming in the sunshine.
They came to another dirt road, this one blocked by a locked gate. Two signs welcomed them: Private Property and Trespassers Will Be Eaten. Just as Wanda had told them. Payne pulled the Mustang as far off the road as possible without putting it into a ditch. From here, they would walk.
They climbed over the gate and headed up a well-maintained private road, just wide enough for a single car. Or maybe a van. Green ferns lined the road, further evidence they'd left the desert behind. Somewhere in the undergrowth, water burbled over rocks. Above them, two golden hawks glided in the afternoon updrafts.
After about a mile, the dirt road opened into a canyon. Boulders the size of ships lined each side. In front of them was a barn, a ranch house made of stones and logs, and an open-air structure of ten-foot-high wooden poles topped by a corrugated metal roof that provided a rectangle of shade. It looked like a giant carport, but its job was to keep migrants from frying in the sun.
No one there.
"What now, Himmy?"
"Now we look around."
They headed toward the shaded area. A dusty, candy-apple red Harley chopper painted with orange flames sat next to one of the wooden poles. Chickens hunted and pecked at the ground, rooting about for whatever it is chickens hunt and peck for. Security cameras sat atop four metal poles, each about fifteen feet high.
The door to the barn was wide open. Inside were three white panel trucks that looked freshly washed. Not a speck of desert dust.
Payne motioned Tino into the barn for a closer look, a few clucking chickens following them. All three vehicles were Ford cargo vans. No windows on the side panels. The rear windows had been tinted so dark as to resemble black mirrors. You could pack a couple dozen people into the cargo area if they were very good friends.
The barn smelled of straw and chickenshit… and fresh paint. A gallon can of black paint sat open on the wooden floor, a set of stencils and a spray gun nearby. Several small brushes soaked in a large glass jar filled with turpentine. The lettering on the panels of each truck appeared fresh.
One truck proudly proclaimed it was owned by Precision Glass Co. of Palm Desert. Another said Valley Plumbing, with an address in Apple Valley. The third was Sand Dunes Electrical, Inc., of Calipatria. Each truck had heavy-duty suspension, useful for throwing off Border Patrol agents looking for low-riding vehicles.
Payne was willing to bet his bowling ball that no glass installers, plumbers, or electricians would ever park their asses in these vehicles. He hurriedly scribbled the company names and license plate numbers.
They headed back into the brilliant sunlight of the yard and neared the poles supporting the sheet metal. A cra-ack echoed, a single gunshot splintering a pole and showering Payne with wood chips. He dived toward Tino, knocking him to the ground, shielding the boy with his body.
A second gunshot kicked up dirt near Payne's ear. His mind flashed with only one thought.
Save the boy.
FIFTY
Marisol lost all sense of time. Inside the van, the air grew stale and unbearably hot. She felt queasy, forced herself to picture trees, swaying in a breeze. Remembered the Mexicans trapped in the trailer truck the summer before. If she died here, what would become of Tino?
Fight off the fear.
Across from her, an Indio woman struggled to her knees, chanted something Marisol did not understand, and keeled over, facedown onto the filthy floor. Her lips frosted with white foam and her body twitched.
Marisol squeezed past two men, lifted the woman's head to help her breathe. Someone banged on the wall separating them from Guillermo, the driver. Someone else shouted in Spanish to stop, a woman is dying, but the van continued on.
A Honduran man tore apart the matting that covered the taillight assembly, then punched through a plastic casing and tore out the light by its cord. The pavement appeared through the hole.
Marisol helped carry the woman to the back. Two men held her face close to the opening, begging her to suck in the fresh air. Her body twitched then stilled, twisted into unnatural angles.
Women screamed. Men prayed. Others averted their faces, as if shamed to see the woman so exposed in death.
Finally, the van lurched to a stop. The driver's door opened and slammed shut. Angry voices outside. The rear doors popped open. The migrants, minus one, stumbled out, soaking up the air, baking with the scent of horses and manure. Marisol blinked against the sunlight. A red barn, a corral, a riding ring. Cornfields in the distance, the stalks taller than any man.
Several men-Chicanos and Anglos-surrounded the group. Jeans and blue T-shirts with the lettering: "Rutledge Ranch and Farms."
Guillermo, the driver, demanded to know who damaged the taillight. The Honduran man stepped forward, said something about the dead Indio woman. Guillermo punched him in the stomach, and the man fell to his knees, gagged, and vomited into the dust, spraying the man's boots.
"Fucking peasant!" Guillermo kicked the man.
Maybe not insane like Chitwood, Marisol thought, but just as mean. Just like Carlos at the meat plant, vicious and cruel to his own people.
"Stop that shit!" another man ordered. Big. Older, with a brushy silver mustache. Cowboy boots and jeans.
"Sorry, Mr. Rutledge, but I'm tired of these fuckers messing up my trucks."
"I'm tired of them dying." Watching two workers haul the Indio woman away. "Give her a proper burial."
Mr. Rutledge, Marisol thought. Back at the chicken ranch, Guillermo said that Mr. Rutledge might kill Chit-wood.
This man must be El Patron. There was a tenderness in his manner. He had put a stop to the beating. He treated the dead woman with respect. Maybe this place would not be so bad.
"You'
re one pollo short," Rutledge said.
"Chitwood offed one."
"Shit. Did you tell Zaga to get over there?"
"Yes, sir. Said he'd take care of it."
Guillermo turned back to the migrants and ordered them in Spanish to stand in a line. He asked questions while Rutledge watched. Have you ever picked grapes? Used a backhoe? Anyone here work with wells, irrigation equipment, agricultural limestone?
The men in the Rutledge Farms shirts wrote numbers on the migrants' arms with marking pens. Assignments to the fields where they were to be sent.
"What sweetness do we have here?" Rutledge asked, when he got to Marisol. Looked at her in that way men do. Smiling eyes. Lying eyes. The tenderness seemed to have blown away with the red dust.
"Maybe indoors work, if she can cook," Guillermo said. "If she can't, we're short in the lettuce fields."
"I'm thinking about the club."
"Maybe a bit too old for that, Mr. Rutledge."
"Guillermo, I bet you a hundred bucks she's not a day over twenty-five."
"I'm thirty-one years old," Marisol said in her best English. "And I'm a carpenter, not a field hand."
Both men laughed, El Patron's eyes wrinkling. "I'm sixty-six and still filled with piss and vinegar, panocha."
Using the Spanish word for raw sugar, a slang term for vagina. Yes, she had been wrong about El Patron. At first, he had seemed compassionate. But now this disgusting side. And what was this club that she might be too old for?
Rutledge stared hard at her, his lips tightening. He grabbed her blouse with both hands, tore it open, buttons popping. She wore no bra, and her full breasts tumbled free. She made no effort to cover herself, instead glaring back with hatred.
"Like a couple scoops of toffee ice cream," Rutledge said. "And I do love my ice cream."
FIFTY-ONE
Jimmy pushed Tino flat against the ground, his own chest covering the boy's head.
Save the boy.
The third shot plunked into the pole.
Tino squirmed beneath him. "Stay down!" Payne ordered.
He could feel his own heart beating, unless it was coming from Tino, squashed beneath him.
Two more gunshots splintered wood from the pole, each a bit lower, a bit closer. The shooter seemed to be enjoying target practice.
The shooting stopped. Dust filled the shadowy air. Chickens squawked. From somewhere in the canyon, an owl hooted.
"Who the fuck are you!"
Hands raised, Jimmy got to his knees. "My name's Payne. This is Tino. We don't mean any harm."
"Everybody means harm." The man held a Mini-14 carbine with a curved magazine. "Give me your wallet."
Payne reached in his back pocket and tossed over his wallet. The man thumbed through the currency and took out Payne's business card.
"J. Atticus Payne, Esquire. Whoopty-do." He pocketed the card and tossed back the wallet. "Why you here?"
"I'm looking for the boy's mother. Marisol Perez."
"If she's a beaner, she's gone. This ain't no resort."
The man's eyes danced in different directions. Payne had expected a massive ex-con with a shaved head, arms pumped into tree trunks from hoisting iron. But this was a jumpy little guy with long, greasy hair and bloodshot eyes with enlarged pupils. He wore paint-stained jeans and cowboy boots and no shirt. A long, jagged scar ran across his bony chest. A tattoo, a swastika, was crudely etched on his forehead.
"Are you Chitwood?" Payne asked.
"Fucking-A."
"Wanda told us to come see you."
"The Whale? Fuck her with a fire hose. She got no right sending you up here."
"Wanda said you were a kind soul with a good heart, and you might help us." Payne hadn't told three lies in one sentence since his last trial.
Thoughts trudged across Chitwood's face like a caravan of elephants. "The fuck you talking about?"
"I have Mami 's picture." Tino reached inside his shirt and took the photo from the plastic case hanging from his neck. Fearlessly, he walked toward the gun-toting tweaker, who squinted at the photo.
"The little pistola from the slaughterhouse." Chit-wood cackled a wet laugh and focused on Tino for the first time. "You favor your mama, boy. Coulda used a teddy bear like you at Perryville."
Tino looked confused. Payne chose not to tell him that Perryville was a prison, and from his scrawny looks, Chitwood might have been passed between inmates like a teddy bear himself.
"So you remember her?" Payne said.
"The Whale sent her over after she messed up some foreman at the plant. I shipped her out today."
"Today!" Tino's green eyes went wide.
"You just missed her, chico. Hell, you probably passed each other on the highway."
"Where?" Payne asked. "Where'd you send her?"
"Same place I sent everybody the last two months."
"Tell us!" Tino shouted.
"What's in it for me, you little pecker?"
"The way I see it," Payne said, "you're an important player in the ever-changing tapestry of our nation."
Chitwood snorted. "The fuck's that mean?"
"The warp and woof of the twenty-first century. You're running the new Ellis Island, and doing it with great humanity. So, of course you'll help a boy find his mother."
Chitwood cocked his head and studied Payne as if trying to figure if someone had just tried to sell him a Nigerian gold mine. Then he showed a gap-toothed grin.
"Okay, Payne. I'm warping and woofing. Leave the little beaner here, and I'll ship him out on the next van tomorrow, right to his mama."
"Just tell us where she is, and I'll take him there myself."
Without warning, Chitwood wheeled to his left and fired the carbine, blowing off the head of a chicken scratching the ground fifty feet away. Wanda had been right. For a twitchy guy with jumping eyes and a buzz on, Chitwood was a damn good shot.
"Dinner," Chitwood explained as the headless chicken hopped in a circle, spurting blood, before keeling over. Motioning toward the barn with the muzzle, he said, "Let's the three of us talk a bit. Maybe we can work something out."
Once inside the barn, Chitwood ordered Payne and Tino to sit on a bale of straw while he leaned against a wooden staircase that led to a hayloft. Payne waited to hear how they could "work something out," keeping his eyes on the carbine.
"Nice tat." Payne stared at the man's forehead. "Nazi Low Riders?"
"San Berdoo chapter," Chitwood replied, proudly.
Maybe it was the drugs. Or the loneliness of the place. Whatever the reason, Chitwood started talking about himself and didn't want to stop. He droned on about stealing cattle, selling guns, and smuggling drugs from Mexico, all before he was twenty-one. Then prison, parole, and living off the land in the Patagonia Mountains north of Nogales. For a while, some legitimate work on isolated ranches, where the best-looking females were sheep.
Chitwood boasted that he knew the deserts and mountains better than the vultures and bobcats. That's why the D.E.A. hired him-he hawked up some spit at the thought-as a tracker.
He could "cut signs," as the trackers say, following illegals through rocky country that showed no footprints. A tiny stone turned the wrong side up. A snapped branch. A broken spiderweb or a shred of clothing on the thorns of a cholla cactus. If a man pays attention, it's amazing what his senses can tell him. "If the wind's right, I can smell their shit half a mile away."
"Now, about the boy's mother," Payne said, "where did you-"
"And I can tell Mexican shit from white man's shit. It's all those beans and peppers and gristle."
"My mother!" Tino blurted, unable to take it any longer. "You said you knew where she is."
"Relax, chico. You stay here tonight, help with chores while your lawyer friend goes back home. Like I said, I'll send you off to your mama tomorrow."
Chitwood was looking at Tino the way a dieter looks at a chocolate eclair.
"Won't work that way," Payne said. Trying not to show his fea
r.
"Shut up! I need you gone. Zaga's gonna be pissed enough. I ain't gonna start explaining what some lawyer's doing poking around."
"That your boss? Zaga? Why not let me talk to him?" Payne thinking that someone sane and sober- anyone-would be preferable to dealing with this nut job.
"You ain't got a vote on this."
"I just want to tell him that the boy and I are a team. Where I go, he goes."
Chitwood pointed the carbine at Payne's chest. "Keep talking and my chickens will be pecking out your eyes by suppertime. You're gonna git, and the boy's gonna stay."
Payne took inventory. Wire cutters on a Peg-Board. A hammer, a saw, a coil of rope, assorted tools. All too far away. Chitwood would drop him with a single shot just like one of his chickens. On the floor was the can of black paint and the open jar of turpentine. Out of the corner of his eye, Payne saw Tino following his gaze.
"I gotta pee," Tino said.
His cue, Payne thought. The Tino Perez distraction, just like in Quinn's house and with the deputy on the highway.
"Piss over there, chico." Chitwood gestured to a pile of straw thick with horse dung. Nearby, leaning against a post, a long-handled pitchfork.
Tino shot Payne a quick sideways glance before walking toward the straw pile. The two of them were beginning to communicate wordlessly.
As he neared the closest cargo van, Tino stumbled and fell. One foot kicked the paint can, which overturned, splattering black paint onto the driver's door.
"Shit!" Chitwood grabbed a rag and hustled toward the van. "Stupid little fuck!"
Payne sprang to his feet.
Sensing movement, Chitwood wheeled around and swung the carbine toward Payne.
Tino grabbed the glass jar, yelled, "Pinche puto," and splashed turpentine into Chitwood's eyes.
Chitwood's scream was high-pitched and shrill. Payne barreled into him, knocking him into the cargo van. They bounced off a side panel, and Payne got both hands on the carbine, wrestling it free. The gun flew across the barn. Howling, Chitwood grabbed the wire cutters and slashed at Payne, who took a step backward and slipped in the wet paint. As he fell, Chitwood came at Payne, wheeling the blade left and right.