Champagne for Buzzards

by Phyllis Smallman

  The angle of the lane, swinging away from the barn around a stand of trees and then back towards it, put the barn between the house and where Boomer was coming up the lane. For a few seconds more I was out of Boomer’s sight. I raced for the barn but stopped at the door, not going inside, flattening myself against the wall.

  The front and back doors of the barn were open to let the air blow through. Anyone coming up the lane could see right through the barn. If I stepped into the opening Boomer would see me silhouetted against the light. He could drive right into the barn on his machine and run me down.

  The sound of the ATV was loud. He was at the barn. My time had run out.

  On the side of the barn was a lean-to, a place to store old machinery and the ride-on lawn mower. It was the only cover. The creak of the rusted hinges on the door was barely covered by the sound of the machine.

  Inside, dust motes danced in the light from the grimefilmed window. A green tractor, a bailer, an old wagon and various other pieces of equipment — I headed deep into a dusty tangle of forgotten machinery, crouching down between the wall and a wooden box of spare parts. Not the best. If he had any idea where to look for me, I was done.

  My heart was pounding. I heard the sound of Boomer’s machine make the turn around the barn to the house. The sound died. I held my breath, struggling to hear everything. What was Boomer doing? Was he heading for the barn? Senses working overtime, straining to hear, I tried to guess.

  The tension was too much for me. I couldn’t bear not knowing where he was and what he was doing. I took down a rusted pipe wrench hanging on the wall and crept out of my hiding place to the grimy window. Boomer had parked by the back door and was on the kitchen porch. He reached for the door. The fact that the inside door was open, that only the screen door was in place, well, Boomer must have been sure someone was there, but he didn’t knock. He was going to open the door and walk in.

  But he had to get past Dog, who was going crazy. Boomer thought better of stepping into the kitchen. He circled the house, heading for the front door.

  Dog was going ballistic. He must have raced from the kitchen down the hall to meet Boomer at the front door.

  I could hear the second machine, growing louder and getting closer with each second that passed.

  Dust tickled my nose. I sucked in my breath and pinched my nostrils, trying to stop it, ending it in a cough of a sneeze. The roar of the other engine filled the shed. I eased back to the window. Sheriff Hozen came into sight outside the grimy pane. Boomer walked around the side of the house to the edge of the porch and leaned on the railing.

  Their first exchange was lost in the noise of the machine but Boomer’s body language was saying he wasn’t happy with what he was hearing.

  When the engine died I heard the sheriff’s words clearly. “Forget the girl, we’ll get her later. Keep your mind on what’s important.”

  Boomer cursed viciously.

  “Look,” the sheriff said, standing up on his machine, “This is your fucking disaster. Get your ass out there and solve it. The bitch can wait.”

  Boomer kicked the railing. I heard the spindle crack. He stomped down the stairs and marched to his ATV.

  I stayed where I was until the sound of their machines faded. Would they come back? There was no way I was going back into the house to wait and see if they showed up again.

  And no way I was hiding in the shed until Tully and Ziggy came home. What if Boomer returned and did something awful? Crackling fire, the smell of gas, and crawling from a burning trailer — those memories kept me from running for the house.

  Slowly, I opened the creaking door, not quite believing they were gone, more than half-expecting them to be waiting for me. The yard was empty and quiet.

  I slipped from the shed and hesitated. Should I get the dog? I didn’t know if he would be an asset or a liability. Best not. I started down the lane towards the road, feeling vulnerable in the open. My steps faltered and stopped.

  I could head for the road but there was a deputy waiting there. There were open fields to the right of the lane. Across them was Sweet Meadow Farm. Being on foot, I would be caught in no time. There had to be another way.

  Joey was rubbing his neck along the boards of the gate as if waiting for me to come and get him, and for once he came along like a prince when I grabbed his halter and led him towards the barn to get the saddle. Don’t ask me why I thought that piece of dog food would be any help. I just wanted to be able to move if I needed to, moving being preferable to hiding or being caught out in the open on foot. And to ride him, I needed a saddle and bridle. There was no other way. I was tightening the girth when I heard the sound.

  CHAPTER 38

  It wasn’t a big sound, more a dry rustle, like someone moving in the wood shavings in the stall off to my left.

  I froze. My hand stopped in the act of lifting a stirrup down, every hair on my body at attention, taking in sensory information and not liking the results.

  Humming softly to myself, moving around Joey, ducking under his jaw and away from the sound, I looked over the saddle in the direction of the noise. Nothing.

  How did Boomer get back into the barn without me hearing or seeing him? The thought made my legs go weak.

  A scream bubbled in my throat.

  I gathered the reins. Would Joey let me mount him from the wrong side? Always twitchy at the best of times, he would probably dance away from me while I had one foot in a stirrup. Even if I was able to mount him, could I kick Joey into action and bolt outside before the unknown man leapt out of the shadows and grabbed his bridle? If that happened the stupid creature would probably go crazy, dumping me on the concrete floor in his own horse chestnuts, and then stomping me to death. Besides, Clay had drummed into me that I was never supposed to mount before I was out of the barn.

  Maybe the noise I heard wasn’t human. Maybe what I heard was a rat. Somehow this thought didn’t give me comfort, rats being only one of the many things that scare the shit out of me.

  Keeping Joey between me and whatever was hiding in the empty stall, I started to lead Joey to the door. We almost made it too. A man stepped out of the stall. He stood between me and the light at the opening.

  He was a small dark man, with piercing black eyes. His clothes were in threads and I could smell his feral scent over the odor of horses and hay. Long hair grew wildly around his head and a scraggily beard covered the bottom half of his face but I knew it was the face I’d seen in the woods.

  CHAPTER 39

  Joey tried to rear back, lifting me off my feet. “What do you want?” I said.

  “Por favor,” he said and then went off in a long string of words I didn’t understand.

  Words from high school Spanish came back. “No entiendo,” I don’t understand.

  He tried again, even faster this time, which did nothing for my comprehension. I didn’t have to tell him my Spanish was bad but I did anyway. “Mi Espanol es malo.”

  He nodded and gave me another string of words but I didn’t get one of them.

  And then I remembered another phrase that always came in handy: Can you speak slowly? I tried it in Spanish. “Puedes hablar mas despacio” or something close to that.

  “Si,” he said and nodded. “Tengo hambre, tengo sed.” He pointed at his mouth. Hungry — he was saying he wanted something to eat or drink. This I could handle.

  “Si,” I said. All I had to do was convince him to wait here for me and then I could run to the house and call for help while locking myself in one of the bedrooms. My mind was already calculating which door was strongest, which one would actually lock, which one I could shove something in front of while I waited for help.

  I said, “Regreso en un momentito.” I just hoped I’d told him I’d be right back and not that I had bags of cash in the living room. We didn’t get to find out.

  Tully and Ziggy ma
de the turn into the yard. My Spanish friend dove for cover in the empty stall.

  “Get out of here,” Tully told me when I’d explained the situation.

  “And leave you here to do what?”

  “Don’t know, but I really can’t see why this guy is our problem. You don’t know what he’s done.”

  “The sheriff and Boomer are out there looking for him with guns. That tells me the guy in the barn is in a lot of trouble.”

  “Still not our problem,” Tully said.

  “Why hasn’t the sheriff told us why he wants him?”

  “It doesn’t matter to us why the sheriff wants him.”

  “True, but damn, do you want to leave him to the mercy of the Breslaus? If we turn him over to them, I don’t think he’ll ever make it to jail.”

  “Can’t hurt to talk to him, Tully,” Uncle Ziggy put in.

  Tully rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Please,” I begged, “let’s just give the guy a chance. I’m all for turning him over to the authorities, just not ones that have Boomer on their team.”

  Tully wasn’t happy but said, “All right, I’ll go out to the barn and figure out what we’ve got.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Uncle Ziggy put in, and then said, “Wait a minute.” He went to his truck and came back with a length of heavy pipe.

  “You always have one of them handy?” I asked.

  Zig nodded. “Pays to ’cause some guys just don’t listen real good, so’s you have talk to them in a language they understand.”

  “Not a bad idea, Zig.” Tully headed for the bunkhouse, leaving us to watch the barn door, expecting the guy to come charging out to attack us. Joey hip-hopped about. I stroked his neck, trying to settle him down as Tully returned with a handgun hanging down by his side.

  “Do either of you speak Spanish?” I asked. They shook their heads.

  “Then I’m going with you.”

  We were still arguing about that when Marley pulled in. “I speak Spanish,” she said when she heard the story.

  “It’s true, Marley was real smart in school,” I assured Tully.

  “Yeah,” she said, with a nod in my direction, “While Sherri was studying anatomy in the back of a car, I was studying all the other subjects.”

  “What?” Tully asked, hung up on the anatomy lesson.

  “Let’s go see what he has to say,” I said.

  The guy was more frightened than we were, cowering deep in wood shavings in the farthest corner of the stall, waiting for the blows to start falling.

  “Why didn’t he run?” I wondered aloud.

  “Too done in by the looks of him,” Tully said.

  It was true. The man, skeletally thin, was beaten; there was no running left in him. He was curled up in a fetal position with his bare feet, swollen and cut, poking towards us. On his left foot a sore had festered and was draining white pus. Insect bites and scratches covered his bare arms, which protected his head.

  “And there’s nowhere left to run,” I added. “Boomer and Red Hozen are out back waiting for him. They probably chased him in here.”

  Marley bent down and started to talk to him. Her voice was soft and kind, almost as if she were talking to a hurt child. He uncurled and looked up at her with hope in his face.

  We waited. This talking went on for rather a long time until finally Marley said, “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Tully asked.

  She looked up at Tully and said, “He’s been held as a slave.” Tully made a sound of disgust. “He’s lying. Why would he think we’d believe that?”

  “Because it’s true,” Marley said. “I’ve heard about it happening.”

  “I haven’t,” Tully said.

  “Yes you have,” Marley said. “Think of women from foreign countries held as prostitutes. We’ve all heard of it happening.”

  “But in Florida…here?”

  Ziggy patted my arm. “Go get him some water and something to eat, Sherri.”

  I stuck Joey in a stall and went for food. When I came back with the plastic grocery bag of sandwiches, bottled water and fruit, Marley was sitting in the shavings with the ragged man.

  When I handed over the food, he tore into it with both hands. Marley told him to go slowly but, although he nodded in agreement, it didn’t stop him from shoveling in the food. “What’s the story, Marley?” I asked as we watched him eat.

  “The Breslaus are into human trafficking,” she replied. We all jumped in with questions, our words tripping over each other and making no sense, sure she was making a mistake, wanting her to be wrong.

  “It’s true,” Marley said. Her quiet words were sad and spoke of defeat.

  She had accepted the truth but Tully shook his head in denial. “It doesn’t happen here. The guy is just trying to get your sympathy.”

  “I know it’s true,” Marley said. “Florida is the third largest state for trade in humans, right behind California and New York.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “David told me this is happening all over the state. There’s a bill before the Florida legislature right now to stop human trafficking. David went up to Tallahassee to represent a coalition of churches. The churches have been working hard to change the law.” Her eyes were full of tears. “Victims, those who get away, are usually too afraid to go to the police because they get deported. David’s church sponsored one man who escaped, I’ve met him, and I know it’s true.” Tears washed over the brim of her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

  Uncle Ziggy went to Marley. “It’s okay, honey,” he said, patting her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  Nothing was okay. He was just trying to wipe away the hurt and grief from her face.

  CHAPTER 40

  “Tell us what happened,” Tully said. “How did he get away?”

  “As near as I can tell he was brought to the Breslau place late on Thursday night along with five others. They were chained to the walls in a transport truck. Three men were left in the truck to be moved on somewhere else while Ramiro and the other two were taken off the truck. They were taken upstairs in the house and each of them was chained to a wall in a different room. The next night they were taken out and put back into a truck.” She wiped a knuckle under her nose. “They were being moved to a new farm. He doesn’t know where. He got away Friday night.”

  I could’ve wept a river of tears at the sheer awfulness of it. “Who did this?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t know the names of his captors but I think from the description one of them was Boomer.” She ran her hand up her arm. “Does he have tattoos up and down his arms?”

  “Yeah, that’s him,” I agreed.

  “Ramiro,” she looked at the man. “That’s his name.”

  “Si, si,” the man agreed. He pounded his chest with the flat of his hand. “Ramiro Aguila.”

  “Yes,” Marley agreed. “He wants us to remember his name. He’s afraid he’ll be taken and never heard of again. He wants us to remember him. He’s Ramiro Aguila from Jalapa, Guatemala.”

  “Si, si,” the man said again. “Ramiro Aguila, Jalapa.” The rest of what followed was beyond me.

  Marley translated. “He says please tell everyone who he is and that he was here.”

  We all nodded and agreed that was who he was and that we would remember his name.

  He went off on a long excited speech which was too fast for me to follow but from Marley’s horrified look it was pretty dramatic. “His family doesn’t know where he is or what’s become of him.” She consulted him for a minute and then she said, “It’s been over a year.”

  I reached out my hand for Tully’s arm, needing to hold onto him, needing to feel safe. Dying in a strange place, where no one knew your name or who would remember you, and with no one ever to tell the people you left behind what had happened to you — well, the thought made us ed
ge closer together.

  Tully squatted down in the straw with knees that cracked and held out his hand to Ramiro. “I’m Tully Jenkins, son.” The man shook Tully’s hand.

  “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you if I can help it and we’ll remember your name.” Tully looked to Marley. “You tell him what I said and tell him I’m not a man that goes back on a promise.”

  Marley did as Tully asked. “Gracias,” Ramiro said, nodding his head and smiling. “Gracias.”

  Marley asked a question and Ramiro nodded his head and began to explain something. Twice Marley asked him to slow down; that I could understand but none of the rest. He just seemed to want to get it all out there while he could, before he was swept away again. Maybe he really didn’t feel he’d been rescued; perhaps he saw us as only a reprieve not a safe harbor. And maybe he was right. Could we save him, no matter what Tully vowed?

  At last Ramiro ran out of words and Marley turned to us. “After dark, Ramiro was the next to the last one taken out of the house to be loaded into the truck by two of the men. The old man and another man were upstairs bringing down the last captive — Ramiro uses the word slave.” She lifted a shoulder and wiped her face across it. “That’s what they were you know, slaves, part of a crew that was moved from place to place to work. They were beaten and worked nearly to death. At night they were locked in the back of an old transport truck with nothing for a toilet but a bucket.”

  It was hard to hear. None of us could look at Ramiro anymore.

  “They’d been held on a farm.” With a bark of a laugh she wiped her palms across her face. “The American dream turned into the American nightmare for cheap tomatoes. The crop was finished there so they were being moved again to a new farm.”

  Marley pushed back her hair and took a deep breath. “He has no idea what today’s date is. When I told him, we worked it out. He’s been held for fifteen months.” She looked up at us and wailed, “How could anyone do that?” Sitting in the shavings beside her, Ziggy hugged her to him. “The two men were quarreling. When they put Ramiro in the truck, before they chained him to the wall, they started yelling and shoving each other, this young man and the older man. They’d been arguing all night. The older man started pushing the younger man away from him towards the back door of the truck. He was screaming at him. They started fighting. Overhead the hatch was open for ventilation. Ramiro went out the hatch and down the side of the truck while they were still fighting. He was in the woods before they knew he was gone but they came after him pretty quick. He’s been out in the woods since then. While they searched for him, he’s been living out in the palmettos, trying to stay alive. He ate grubs and ants and drank from pools of water. One morning he saw a panther. He was afraid to go into the jungle, that’s what he thought it was, thought he’d get lost and never be able to find his way out. He wanted to stay close, near other people. By Sunday, after he’d spent a day hiding in the palmettos and drinking groundwater, he was really ill, he thought he was dying. He couldn’t travel then.