by Texas
At this place the Rio Grande was so shallow that the Mexicans could walk almost completely across, needing to swim only the last few yards to the American side, and there the American guides had stationed two Mexican men, who helped the women. When all were safely ashore, El Lobo blinked his lights and was gone.
They had come to some of the loneliest land in Texas, that stretch along the river which not even the hardiest settlers had attempted to tame. Rocky in parts, steeply graded, bereft of trees, with only dirt trails leading inland, it was a terrain so forbidding that Candido was glad he had stayed with his sister: This is dangerous. Stay close to me.'
The eighteen wetbacks were led to a miserable truck, which had bounced over these roads many times, but before they were allowed to climb in, a man named Hanson growled: 'Fifteen bucks, and I put you on a back road to Fort Stockton.' He stood in the shaded glare of the headlights, verifying the payments, and when all were accounted for, he piled the Mexicans in and started north, but as he drove, a cohort rode atop the cab of the truck, keeping a shotgun aimed at the passengers.
'Don't no one try to jump off,' he warned. 'We don't want to show La Migra how we move about.'
There was a moon, rising at about nine and throwing only modified light, but it was enough to permit the Mexicans to see the wild terrain they were traversing. 'Oh, this can't be Estados Unidos!' a woman cried, and the gunman replied in Spanish: 'It sure is. Three hundred miles of it.'
At four in the morning, when they were far from the river, the driver, seeing a chance to earn a lot of money with no responsibility, made the engine cough and then conk out. 'Damnit,' he cried, 'we've got to fix this,' and he ordered the Mexicans to leave the truck and stand well back while he worked on it. To their delight the engine began to sputter, caught, and then purred mcelv. At these welcome sounds the Mexicans started toward the truck,
when, to their horror, the two anglos revved the motor and took off across the desert, leaving the wetbacks stranded, with no guide, no food and, worst of all, no water.
It was a trip into hell. At ten in the morning of the second day, when the sun was blazing high, the first Mexican died, a man in his forties whose swollen tongue filled his mouth. An hour later, six others were dead, but the two Guzmans still survived. 'Manuela,' Candido whispered, 'we must look for plants, anything.'
They found nothing, none of the big cacti which often saved lives in such circumstances, and by noon, three more were dead. Overhead, the sky was an arch of blue; not a blemish obscured the sun, which beat mercilessly on the hapless Mexicans. Two o'clock passed, with more than half the wetbacks, ironic name, dead, and in the late afternoon, in that dreadful heat, Manuela gasped one last plea for water, stared madly at her brother, and died.
Three men made it to U.S. 80, a hundred and forty miles west of Fort Stockton. In despair they tried to flag down motorists, none stopped. Candido finally threw himself in front of an approaching car while his companions waved frantically, but they did not need to do this, for the man driving the car was Officer Talbot, who had been searching for them.
'Poor sons-a-bitches,' he said to his partner, 'let's get them something to drink.' They drove eastward to Van Horn, where Talbot tossed the three in jail, but not before providing them with all the liquid they could drink.
They were returned to Mexico, of course, and since Candido was too ashamed to go back to Moctezuma to inform his family of Manuela's death and of how it had occurred, he slipped back into El Paso, found a job, saved his money, bought a gun, grew a mustache so as to alter his appearance, and went back to El Lobo as if he had never seen him before: 'Is it true, you take people into los Estados Unidos?'
'Fifteen dollars to me, fifteen to the men on the other side.'
Til go.'
'I'll take you through the barriers in north El Paso.'
'I was told there was a better crossing at Banderas.'
'You want to go that way, all right.'
This time a party of nineteen illegals drove beside the Rio Grande to the little town, where the emigrants paid their fee and swam the river. On the far side Hanson was waiting with his same rickety truck, the same shotgun assistant. They left the river at dusk, rode through the night, and at about three in the morning, the truck broke down again.
mo
'Move (act here while we fix it,' Hanson said, hut as he spoke, Candido and two other wetbacks whom he had recruited en route-shot him and the assistant dead Commandeering the truek, they sped toward where U.S. 80 would have to he, and long before dawn they were at the outskirts of Fort Stockton. Disposing of the truek in a gully, they shook hands and made their way variously into the town and into the fabric of American life.
Candido, moving alone along the highway, started back west, to give the impression, if questioned by police regarding the desert murders, that lie had been in the States for some time. But he had walked only a few miles when he was met by a pickup roaring eastward from El Paso. As soon as the driver spotted Candido, whom he easily identified as a wetback, he screeched to a halt: 'What you lookin' for, son 7 '
The driver was a big, florid man in his late thirties, dressed like a sheriff, and he terrified Candido, who whispered: 'Solamente espanol, senor,' whereupon the man surprised him by saving in easy Spanish: 'Amigo, if you seek work, vou've met the right man.'
He invited Candido to sit beside him, and together they rode to Fort Stockton and a short distance to the north, where they came upon a frontier ranch with an ornate stone gate and a sign which said:
EL RANCHO ESTUPENDO
LORENZO QUIMPER
PROPRIETOR
'Come in and grab yourself some grub,' the rancher said, and in this way Candido Guzman became a permanent resident of the United States and a lifelong employee of Lorenzo Quimper, who owned some nine ranches for which he needed reliable workmen. Few immigrants had ever dared so much to find haven in Texas, few would serve it more faithfully.
In the city of Detroit things were not going well for the Morrisons. Todd, the father, could see that within a few more months his branch of the Chrysler Corporation might have to shut down. The ax had already fallen on his wife, Maggie, for one Friday morning three weeks earlier the principal of her school had handed her the gray-toned sheet of paper teachers dreaded:
The Cascade Public Schools District Board of Education, meeting in regular session, voted last night to take certain actions necessary for its survival. It is my duty to inform you that your teaching contract will
not be renewed upon its expiration at the close of the 1968 spring term, and both your job and your salary will end at that time.
The Morrisons were aware that even with the loss of Maggie's income, they could survive if Todd kept his job, but there was an additional aggravation: their two children—Beth, an extremely bright thirteen, and Lonnie, aged eleven—had already stated that under no circumstances did they want to leave the Cascade schools, which they had grown to love and which enrolled all their friends.
The Morrisons had long practiced the art of family democracy, with ample discussion of most problems, and they did not back off from this unpleasant one: 'Kids, if things get worse at Chrysler, I'm going to get laid off. What then?'
That would be horribly unfair,' Beth cried.
They fired your mother, didn't they?'
'Yes, but the school board's a bunch of cruds.'
'We must consider the possibilities if I do lose my job,' Todd said.
'You could become a policeman,' Lonnie suggested. The News had an article about needing more cops.'
'Not my age, and not my salary,' his father replied. He was thirty-seven, his wife thirty-three, at the exact time in their lives when they needed every penny to enjoy the amenities they treasured—a good movie now and then, books—and to afford careful attention to health, orthodontics, a sensible diet, durable clothes. And these cost money. Their house carried only a six-thousand-dollar mortgage, and they had never been extravagant with cars or socializing; th
ey drove one new Plymouth and one very old Ford.
Normally they should have been at the cresting point in their careers, with Todd looking forward to rapid promotion and Maggie being considered for a principalship. Now the bottom was falling out of their world, and they could not even guess where the terrifying drop would end.
'Well, what shall we do if I'm fired?' Todd asked again, and his three advisers sat silent, so he explored the subject: 'Ford and GM won't take me on, that's for sure. Stated frankly, my type of work is ended unless I can find a job in Japan.'
The Morrisons laughed at this suggestion, but then Beth asked: Transfer 7 WTiat's a practical possibility?'
'I don't really know. For your mother, no school jobs in these parts, nor in places like New York, but I hear there are openings in California and boom towns like Atlanta.'
'I'm attracted to neither,' Beth said bluntly in her surprisingly
adult manner, whereupon her mother said: 'You'll like whatever we have to do, Miss Beth, and remember that,' and the girl said: 'I know. I don't want to leave Cascade, but if we have to, we have to.'
'I vote for California,' Lonnie said. 'Surfing.'
Todd ignored this suggestion: 'I really think I'll have to start looking for a new job.'
'What could you do?' Beth asked.
'I'm good at what I do . . .'
'Yes, you are, dear,' Maggie said quickly.
'I can keep an organization on its toes. Maybe labor relations. Maybe selling something.'
'Death of a Salesman!' Beth cried. 'Willie Loman of the auto trade.'
'You'd be awfully good at labor relations,' Maggie said as she cleared the table. 'But where?'
The next three weeks passed in growing apprehension as Maggie Morrison applied to one school district after another; the results were not depressing, they were terrifying. At night she told her family: 'Enrollments dropping everywhere in the city. Everyone suggests we move to some new area. We may have to.'
In the month that followed, the spate of news from Chrysler was so depressing that Todd could barely discuss it with his family, and it was at one of these doleful meetings that the word Texas was first voiced. Todd said: 'I hear that electronics is real big in the Dallas area. If they're expanding . . .' Beth said she did not want to go to Texas, too big, too noisy, but Lonnie could hardly wait to get started: 'Cowboys! Wow!'
On the next Friday night Todd was fired.
In their despair, the Morrisons organized as a team: Todd studied the want ads; Maggie continued to seek work as a teacher, or even as a teacher's helper; Beth, with remarkable maturity, took charge of the housework; and Lonnie volunteered for extra chores. But each week the family savings declined, and the children knew it.
Todd applied for three dozen different jobs, and was rejected each time: 'I'm too old for this, too young for that. I know both the assembly line and sales, but can't land a job in either. This is one hell of a time to be out of work.'
It was Maggie who found him a job, and she did it in a most peculiar way. She was in the industrial section of the city interviewing at a school for children with special problems, when she met a woman whose husband worked for a firm that had developed a
new line of business: 'What they do, Todd, they overhaul automobile engines. They have new diagnostic machines to spot weaknesses, other machines to fix them. They've had real success in Detroit and Cleveland, and they want to franchise widely. This woman said there were real opportunities.'
Early next morning Todd was at the new company's office, and he learned that what his wife had reported was true. Engine Experts had hit upon a system for adding years to the life of the average automobile engine and its subordinate parts; intricate new machines diagnosed trouble spots and instructed the workmen how to repair them. The initial cost of the system was rather high, but the cash return of the four installations that Todd was allowed to inspect was reassuring, and he entered into serious discussion with the owners.
'What we want to do,' the energetic men said, 'is break into the Dallas, Houston market. Go where the cars are, that's our motto.'
'I don't have the funds to buy in,' Todd said truthfully, but the men said: 'We don't want you to. You know cars. You have common sense. We want you to go to Texas, scout out the good locations, what we call the inevitables, and buy us an option on the corner where the most cars pass, but where an industrial shop would be allowed. Would you be interested?'
'What are the chances I'd fall on my ass?'
'We'd carry you for one year, sink or swim. But we think you'd swim, especially in Texas, where they have poor public transportation and people are nuts about their cars.'
They offered Todd a year's assignment in Texas—Dallas or Houston, as he wished—during which he was to identify eight locations and arrange for the purchase of real estate and the issuance of licenses to open Engine Experts shops. That night he handed his wife and children pencils and paper and asked them to take notes as he lined out their situation: 'Six months ago this family had income as follows. Father, twenty-six thousand dollars; mother, eight thousand dollars. Total how much, Lonnie?'
'Thirty-four thousand dollars.'
'Well, we both lost our jobs. Salary right now, zero. We can get something for the house. Our savings go steadily down, but still nineteen thousand dollars. Should have been a lot more, but we didn't anticipate.'
'We can cut back,' Beth said. 'I don't need special lessons.'
'We can all cut back, or starve. I've been offered a job in Texas
'Hooray!' Lonnie cried. 'Can I have a horse?'
'The salary will be eighteen thousand dollars, with promise ofj a bonus if 1 do well.'
'You'll do well,' Maggie said.
It was agreed. The Todd Morrisons of Michigan, a family deeply imbedded in that state, would move to Houston, Texas On a morning in July 1968, with tears marking all their faces, they left Michigan forever and headed south. They did not paint on their truck the ancient sign G.T.T., but they could have, for the social disruptions which were forcing them south were almost identical with those which had spurred the migrations to Texas in 1820 and 1850. They, too, were in search of a better life.
In that summer of 1968 a different family of immigrants —mother, father, four daughters—moved quietly into the oil town of Larkin, and within three weeks had the owners of better-class homes in a rage. They were such a rowdy lot, especially the mother, that an observer might have thought: The rip-roaring boom days of 1922 are back!
They were night people, always a bad sign, who seemed to do most of their hell-raising after dark, with mother and daughters off on a toot marked by noise, vandalism and other furtive acts. They operated as a gang, with their weak and ineffective father along at times, and what infuriated the townsfolk particularly was that they seemed to take positive joy in their depredations.
Despite their unfavorable reputation—and many sins were charged against them which they did not commit—they really did more good than harm; they were an asset to the community, and they had about them elements of extraordinary beauty, which their enemies refused to admit.
They were armadillos, never known in this area before, a group of invaders who had moved up from Mexico, bringing irritation and joy wherever they appeared. Opponents of the fascinating little creatures, which were no bigger than small dogs, accused them of eating quail eggs, a rotten lie, of raiding chicken coops, false as could be; and of tearing up fine lawns, a just charge and a serious one. Ranchers also said: 'They dig so many holes that my cattle stumble into them and break their legs. There goes four hundred bucks.'
The indictment involving the digging up of lawns and the making of other deep holes was justified, for no animal could dig faster than an armadillo, and when this mother and her four daughters turned themselves loose on a neat lawn or a nicely tilled vegetable garden, their destruction could be awesome. The armadillo had a long, probing snout, backed up by two forefeet, each with four three-inch claws, and two hind feet with
five shovel-like
claws, and the speed with which it could work those excavators was unbelievable.
'Straight down,' Mr. Kramer said, 'they can dig faster than I can with a shovel. The nose feels out the soft spots and those forelegs drive like pistons, but it's the back legs that amaze, because they catch the loose earth and throw it four, five feet backwards.'
Mr. Kramer was one of those odd men, found in all communities, who measured rainfall on a regular basis—phoning the information to the Weather Service—and who recorded the depth of snowfall, the time of the first frost, the strength and direction of the wind during storms, and the fact that in the last blue norther 'the temperature on a fine March day dropped, in the space of three hours, from 26.9 to 9.7 degrees Celsius.' He was the type who always gave the temperature in Celsius, which he expected his friends to translate into Fahrenheit, if they wished. He was, in short, a sixty-two-year-old former member of an oil crew who had always loved nature and who had poked his bullet-cropped sandy haired head into all sorts of corners.
The first armadillos to reach Larkin were identified on a Tuesday, and by Friday, Mr. Kramer had written away for three re search studies on the creatures. The more he read, the more he grew to like them, and before long he was defending them against their detractors, especially to those whose lawns had been excavated: 'A little damage here and there, I grant you. But did you hear about what they did for my rose bushes? Laden down with beetles, they were. Couldn't produce one good flower even with toxic sprays. Then one night I look out to check the moon, three-quarters full, and I see these pairs of beady eyes shining in the gloom, and across my lawn come these five armadillos, and I say to myself: "Oh, oh! There goes the lawn!" but that wasn't the case at all. Those armadillos were after those beetles, and when I woke up in the morning to check the rain gauge, what do you suppose? Not one beetle to be found.'