To think, Mia had been waiting for the one. The skin-crawling abuse of our bodies was to be a nightly torment. At first, Mia tried to act brave, for my sake, mostly, but all the while I knew how much she was hating on herself for what she felt she had pushed us into. “These fuckers don’t own us, not now, not ever,” she’d repeat this, her mantra when we found a minute or two to talk without being overheard. Asleep or awake, we learned fast how to guard our own shadows.
Only after our daily duties of scrubbing floors, scouring the scum out of the big-shit bathroom and all the other lesser hideous morning hour duties, were we sent out to sit our butts on sticky swivel chairs along a line of foldout tables in the trimming tent. It was a whole different setup from the scene at Bonnie and Bruce’s, where the trimmers had been all women. Here, aside from us four girls, it was all men, Guatemalans and Mexican dudes who were sent back to their rusted, cramped and leaking trailers at night and only allowed into the main building during mealtimes.
We worked by kerosene lamplight well into the evening hours. The other two girls joined us in the trimming tent later on, after the day’s cooking was done, the four of us padding around like the inmates we were in our disgusting athletic socks. Our captors figured we wouldn’t get far if we were either brave or stupid enough to run. We didn’t have a pair of shoes between us.
“Don’t get caught up in feeling too hella sorry for anyone aside from you and me,” Mia warned, late one evening on account of my being visibly agitated watching Valeria being pushed around by Jose Luis. There was no such thing as a washing machine on that godforsaken mountaintop. The kid shivered with cold in the night air as she wrestled a bunch of threadbare sheets she’d hand washed and hung on a long laundry line that was strung under the eaves at the back of the house. “Get a move on, bitch,” he’d said, pushing her around, like she was no better than a donkey. “Get back inside, make up the beds.” She had rubbed her knuckles raw, scrubbing at sheets and clothing with nothing but a cheap bar of soap.
I prayed to God we’d get out alive, somehow, anyhow, despite being threatened each and every day that should we even try to attempt to make a run for it, the motherfuckers would not hesitate to shoot.
Mia was up and down in her handling of our total living nightmare. We were basically sex slaves. “Never in my worst dreams,” she cried, over and over. It was like we’d become caged animals waiting for a chance to attack. All the while we tried our best to stick to the only plan we could think might work and pretend to become a little more docile by the day.
She’d worried the skin around her eyes into such a mess with the hideous stress of it all. I begged her to stop making things worse for herself.
“We have to do what we have to do to get out, Mia,” I reassured her. “Keep our feelings under wraps. We’re tough, we’re survivors — you said so yourself, remember?”
It was the sex, being forced to fuck that was the worst of it. If you really want to know how we dealt with it, like Mia said, we reduced ourselves to becoming robot girls. Unfeeling half the time, numb, and yet other times, every tiny hair would stand on end. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t us, despite what they did to us we tried so damn hard to make ourselves believe that none of it mattered, that it was not the real us it was happening to at all.
“Come on, Mia, I’ve learned to do what you said we must,” I reminded her, when I could see that she was starting to lose it. “Keep on moving your mind to a different space.” I worked so hard it almost killed me to pretend to be one of the stony-faced figures I’d seen up close one time in the wax museum at Fisherman’s Wharf. Once I was an effigy of Taylor Swift putting up with faceless strangers poring over her, day in, day out, the next I’d make out in my mind I was Jennifer Lawrence in the Hunger Games, ready to spear our captives with my fucking bow and arrow.
We were all slaves of some kind or another in that place, yet we were still alive and breathing in our hideous mountaintop existence. We had to stay alert to get out.
Most of the trimmers were as helpless one way or another, if not more so in the end. We found out how these men had been given zero choice but to suck it up, take the heat, grow the weed all summer, see the harvest through to the end. Most of them had been brought there by force. The cartel kidnapped them from small villages in Central and South America. If one of them so much as dared to refuse the work or tried to run away, his wife and kids, his entire family would be taken out. Just like that.
One of the guys told me this, one of the younger Guatemalans who dared whisper some of what happened to him in the long hours we together spent in the trimming room.
The girls had it worse in that it was their own people who sold them to Jefe Hombre, for Christ sakes.
Camila and Valeria said nothing much about themselves to Mia and me those first few weeks. Over time, they had slowly started to place their trust in us, confide. “We grew up together on the same street in Guadalajara,” Valeria explained. They’d turned seventeen the previous summer, shit, they were kids, a whole year younger than Mia and me.
They were timid and kept a constant eye out during their work in the kitchen after the breakfast hour, terrified someone might hear them talking to Mia and me over the hum of the gas-powered generator. The divulged all this horrific stuff while the four of us were gathered around the sink, washing sweaty work clothes. Camila talked of the vile and horrendous things she’d seen firsthand, hangings, executions, kidnapping — fucking hell, she’d witnessed a beheading, can you believe? It was all they had known since they were small, the world of bad men.
It was after two dueling drug lords were crossed, we learned, the two of them were offered up to Jefe Hombre as payment to settle the feud.
Mia and me coming into the house was in reality, a pair of fresh bodies that provided the younger girls a reprieve from their dreaded bedtime duties.
“Camila needs to heal,” Valeria whispered, taking my hand. “She lost a lot of blood,” she said, pointing to the other girl’s stomach. “I was afraid.” She made us tea with small bunches of pungent dried herbs, tied and dipped into mugs of boiling water, wild stuff, nettles, twigs and leaves of clover they’d gather in their brief time outdoors.
Valeria began brewing more intense, woody concoctions into hot tea for Mia and me. “For slow down fertility,” she said, patting our bellies.
It came down to sex for survival within the prison walls of a ten-foot metal and electric fence. I’d never wish such a thing on my worst enemy. I began to see that it was me who was keeping it together for the both of us. Mia had slipped into a trancelike state. She told me: “I feel like I’m watching myself in a horror film on TV.” It was like none of it was real it was so bad.
She’d always been the one to take the lead, ever since we’d buddied up in tenth grade. No one was more surprised than me in that I was the one who was keeping Mia going much of the time, not the other way around. We whispered to one another in the dead of night, back in the sanctity of our bunks, after we’d done our best to scrub up, clean ourselves from yet another of those sick service sessions. We’d climb into one bunk, night after night, and huddle together to quietly brainstorm and plot our way out.
Somehow I even managed to make her laugh at times at the horror of it. Crying had grown old. Part of my dippy old self hung in there if only for her. I love that girl’s laugh. It comes from somewhere deep inside. It’s distinctive. I’d pick out Mia’s big ol’ belly laugh anywhere, low and rumbling and sometimes she lets out a loud snort. I can’t wait to hear her laugh again. “We’re out of here, Mia, real soon,” I promised her. “Fuckers won’t see us for dust.”
Weeks passed. It was November, we guessed. We’d gotten to be good and fast at the trimming and the rest of it, human mechanization working at its best. The more efficient we were the faster it was over.
Jefe Hombre declared himself a softie slapping a couple packs of sanitary pads on the countertop after he’d made one of his three-hour round trip supply runs into town.
We were faking how long we were on our periods, well, I was, Mia was working her own denial by then.
One time he came back with a stick of lavender scented deodorant and a bottle of cheap shampoo, two packs of new socks, women’s size for once. “Go make yourself pretty,” he said to Mia, handing over his gifts like he was the prince of charm.
Fights broke out in the trimming tent. A couple of the Mexican dudes mysteriously disappeared. We kept our heads down as tensions rose from being cooped up and overworked so long. Three more men failed to show for supper one night. The four of us girls began to exchange frequent knowing glances.
Pile after pile of resin-coated buds from the six-foot plants that had grown in the dappled sunlight of summer, crossed our laps for weeks on end. I’d learned to trim without looking, it was monotonous, staring out of the window yearning for the freedom of the sky. I spent most of my time willing the Feds to fly by, praying for the sound of helicopter blades. They never came.
We resorted to tying plastic bags over our socks when the rains came in. Camila and Valeria taught us how to pack the trimmed bud into turkey bags the men concealed under false flatbeds in a small fleet of freshly washed and polished trucks.
We were forced to sit at our trays all day every day and most of the night towards the end of trimming season. My butt cheeks were numb for weeks.
After the last of the crop was trimmed, the tequila came out. Demands on Mia and me picked up at a new, even more abusive pace.
One night, Jefe Hombre made a drunken tequila-trade with Jose Luis, switching Mia for me. This happened just the once. The boss man, he flew into a jealous fit over something that was said about Mia. Jose Luis backed off with a black eye.
By then, Mia wasn’t doing so well. I’d been keeping tabs on our monthlies. I told her outright I’d kept a count of the sanitary pads in the bathroom. She point-blank refused to talk about it, first time she’d ever been unwilling to talk shit with me on any subject. Neither of us was ready to spit it out — the truth, I guess, to say the words.
“Chances are it’s the shock of it all,” is what I said “Slows down the regularity in between periods.”
We were given a beating apiece after getting ourselves caught talking to the Guatemalan guy in the trimming tent one evening. Not he or any one of them had dared to make a move on Mia or me, not the whole time they’d been without their wives and girlfriends. We never knew if they were all more than halfway decent dudes in the moral sense or scared shitless of what would happen to them if they even thought of messing with us.
At night, they scuttled off to their shacks like the cockroaches they’d been reduced to. I worried what was gonna happen to those we’d gotten to be something like sociable inmates with given that their disappearance rate was getting more frequent. So far, I figured, Mia and me had made it through the worst of it. We were living and breathing. We still had a chance.
It was around Thanksgiving, we’d calculated. Mia grew wistful with the change of season, reminiscing about the leftover feast that Bobby would bring back to the ranch after working the holiday shift. “Big ol’ plate of turkey, gravy, mashed sweet potato, cornbread, all the fixings,” she said, her eyes glazing over. “My favorite. A whole pumpkin pie if there was an extra.”
There was no feasting for us that Thanksgiving. No celebration, no such thing as TV, or radio, zero contact with the outside world.
We’d hatched our plan for implementation after the bulk of the weed was packed and gone from the compound.
Mia would go first. I’d follow. “Girl power, baby,” I said. We watched and waited with the patience of saints for the moment the tequila resurfaced.
“It’s a ballsy move,” she agreed, “Us waiting for the moment when they’re good and drunk.” We poured them one shot after another, fooled around, waited until they passed out, one by one as we’d seen them do plenty of times before. Once we were totally sure they’d crashed out, Mia made a run for it, hacking through the fence with a pair of wire cutters someone had negligently left behind after securing the false flatbeds.
One of the goons must have detected a shift in our mood, earlier. Normally they turned in at that time of night. Mia wasn’t even close to squeezing through the small, ragged hole she’d made when they were on to her like a pack of wolves on a chicken. It was the final unraveling of our having stupidly thought we could outsmart our captives.
One of them smashed Mia in the back of the head with a pistol. I was convinced she was dead when I was pushed out to watch, my hands behind my back as they hauled her away from the fence. I pissed myself with fear, more for Mia than for me.
A stumbling Jose Luis dragged my ass outside while they tied Mia like a sack of rice to a rail in the shed. They continued to make me watch and then they forced us apart. For two days they left her there. On the second day they brought me out again to make me look on as they shaved her head and hosed her down.
I begged them to stop, I pleaded, promised I would do anything they asked of me. I was left alone for the first time in weeks, huddled on my bunk, crying, shaking constantly, and for the first time, I doubted either of us would ever make it out alive.
Camila crept up the stairs to feed me little bits of food, the same scraps it turned out she was coaxing Mia to eat. Valeria was too terrified to do anything other than shake with fright and look at me like she had seen a ghost. She begged me not to run. “Too, too dangerous,” she said. “Next time, they kill us all.”
Chapter 22
Maggie
Though Walter’s kitchen is every bit as dated as our kitchen back at the ranch, the oldschool copper tones were easier on the eye, homely, even, in a retro sort of way. As far as I could tell, Walter’s house is thankfully watertight not to mention blessedly warm thanks to the heat that pumps out of one of those big, round stoves that look like a spaceship. Marcus helped him fill it with wood when he’d opened up the house.
After the ordeal of the evening before, my heroics with the carjacking and all, the last thing I’d expected was to hear from Bridget so soon.
“Don’t pin too much hope on the law,” Lori warned. “They’re as much in the dark as we are when it comes to locating the cartel’s guerilla grows.”
Walter concurred. “The more remote the site where Mia’s at, the more likely it is heavily protected with booby traps and armed guards packing AK-47s.”
“Aside from their heinous crimes against humanity, these bastards hack down hundreds of trees, though not enough to be visible from the air,” Lori explained. “They’re ruthless in their digging of ditches for their crude dam constructions, hauling in yards of plastic hose and irrigation equipment. Unless there’s a random spotting by aerial search, the law is rarely ever close to finding them.”
“If it’s a big enough grow, we’re talking thousands of plants raised during the season, worth anywhere up to 50 or 60 million dollars,” Walter added. “I hate to say it, but the last thing these operators care for is human life.”
“Then there’s no time to wait on the authorities extricating Mia,” I replied, regaining my composure. “Walter, Lori, where the hell do we start?”
Lori called her people. Walter called his. Everyone and anyone they thought might be of help. In turn, they asked their contacts to follow up with friends and neighbors of their own as to where Mia might have possibly been seen at some point in time. “We have a slim chance to find Mia,” Lori said. “It’s time to take a stand.”
I was shaken to the core. “It is what it is, Maggie,” Lori said, taking my arm. “Don’t shy away from the truth. It’s important that we all fully recognize what’s going on here.”
Walter was quick to call out the futility of confronting armed guards, the real and present dangers of the region’s dark underworld. “There are all kinds of lunatics out there,” he said. “Exploitation being the name of the game. It’s an epidemic.”
Lori and Walter agreed to cover ground together, by driving over to Trinity County in the east
. They planned to check in with storekeepers and gas station attendants en route to Weaverville, a community hub and county seat in the far eastern reach of the Emerald Triangle.
“No telling how far into the forest Mia might be,” Lori said. “Someone may have seen her. The only thing that makes sense is to spread out, cover all the bases we possibly can.”
~ Marcus came up with a plan for he and I to head north along the Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt State Park and up to the town of Fortuna and out to Ferndale and the coast. “You’d best extend your route and scour the redwood communities back down along the Ferndale Petrolia Road to the southern reach of the Lost Coast,” Walter suggested, unearthing a crumpled, beer-stained paper map of the Redwood region from a pile of papers on a small desk wedged between the fridge and the wall oven. He smoothed it with his hands, flattening it out on the kitchen table. The four of us pored over it as I made an outline to weave our way up and back on down through the King’s Range National Conservation Area.
It was arranged that Little Honey Momma would stay with a dog-friendly neighbor of Walter and Lori’s while we were away. I felt bad for her, she’d gotten so comfortable in Walter’s house, splayed out like the queen of Sheba on the cushion he’d placed for her by the stove. I hoped for the best, that she’d hang on to delivering her pups ‘til we were back at Walter’s with Mia, all of us safe and sound.
~ Deer scattered as we approached a tall, forged iron gate set into heavy-duty fencing. It was mid afternoon. A narrow driveway led to an A-Frame home fronted by an orchard of bare fruit trees. A pack of broad-winged turkey vultures hovered overhead.
Lori had set us up with a place to stay for the night in the home of her old friends, Lizzie and Jack. She’d described it as: “A Shangri-la of sorts, though times have changed. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll stick it out up here. If anyone is able to help put word out, they will.”
We found Lizzie and Jack to be a fit looking pair, slim and toned for their advancing years given the outdoor life and their necessary rounds of constant, daily labors.
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