All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  I STAY IN TOUCH WITH SUZIE CANALES, and in 2015 she shares excellent news. By challenging the companies’ permits, CFEJ has negotiated some settlements with refineries that have enabled her spin-off group—the Environmental Justice Housing Fund—to relocate certain residents of the city’s fence-line communities. I visit Consuelo and Hipolito Gonzalez that September, about six months after they left Dona Park for a 2,250-square-foot ranch-style home in a manicured neighborhood in Corpus. They proudly show me the walk-in closet of their master bedroom and the marble floors of their kitchen. “I feel like I belong here, like I should have had this since I was married,” Consuelo says. “I feel like I deserved it since I was a young girl.”

  Even so, she maintains ties to her old neighborhood, most recently by helping Suzie review applications of other Dona Park homeowners wishing to relocate. There seems to be enough settlement money to move about a dozen families, yet they have received 126 applications. How, she wonders, will they make such tough decisions?

  I return to Dona Park to find the old ASARCO/Encycle site obstructed by a thirty-foot screen that is nearly half a mile long. Through its mesh, I can make out tractors toiling in the dirt, an American flag rippling in the breeze, and, beyond that, the port. The site’s new owner, a subsidiary of Plains All American Pipeline, plans to store massive tanks of Eagle Ford crude here—a prospect that so upset Consuelo, she was on the verge of applying for a loan to leave Dona Park on her own when Suzie called with news about the settlement.

  Across the street, a taqueria has opened that advertises Jalisco-style seafood in its windows. Hoping its shrimp is caught far from our port, I turn down Vernon Street and drive by the Gonzalezes’ former homestead. Soon after they vacated it, the Environmental Justice Housing Fund razed the property so that no new family could take up residence there. Only the lawn remains. A few properties away is another green gap—evidence of a second buyout from the settlement. Yet the neighborhood remains active. Elders relax on front porches. Kids’ bikes clutter the yards.

  Merging onto the interstate, I feel compelled to stop at Our Lady of Corpus Christi, a nearby Catholic chapel and college. With its Spanish colonial architecture and stained glass windows, it has made a noble attempt at beauty. Its polar blue dome is flecked with golden stars. Yet there is no direction you can turn from which you do not see a refinery. They encircle the chapel like an encroaching army of iron and steel. Rivulets of smoke snake above the sanctuary’s grounds. Petcoke clogs the bird feeders. Eighteen-wheelers drown out the wind chimes.

  As I pace along the sidewalk between the chapel and the college, wondering if there could ever be a prayer capable of ameliorating any of this, I remember an encounter I once had with a monk here. Brother Michael was his name. In his early twenties, he wore a cowboy hat and a long dark robe. Though he hadn’t lived here long, his father worked for a refinery in Beaumont. I asked what he thought of being in such proximity to industry.

  “There is this thing called Corpus Christi crud, and it stays in your lungs. I think it is because of the refineries,” he said, stroking his considerable moustache. “The ground has been tainted by whatever was here before. We have all these fruit trees, but we’ve been told we can’t eat from them. We’ve been forbidden to do a garden. We can’t grow any food here at all.”

  I must have looked saddened by this, because he tried to cheer me up.

  “But hey,” he said with a grin, “flowers are okay!”

  With that, he continued on toward the chapel. I retreated to my car, grateful at least one of us would then pray.

  NOTES

  1. Activism runs strong in this family. One of Suzie’s sisters, Juanita, is married to Lionel Lopez, who directs the South Texas Colonia Initiative. “Must have been in the water,” Juanita jokes.

  2. According to the Port of Corpus Christi’s website (http://www.portofcc.com), back in the thirties, Nueces County was home to “3,760 wells in 89 oil fields, within a radius of 125 miles of the port.”

  3. Some of Suzie’s accolades include the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Environmental Justice, the HERO award from the University of Texas Medical Branch National Institute for Environmental Health and Sciences, and the Texas Observer’s 2012 People’s Friend Award. The honor she finds most gratifying, however, is a 2015 “trailblazer” award from the Corpus Christi League of Women Voters. “Locally, I am considered a pain in the ass, so to be recognized here, well, I just can’t believe it. I’m supposed to be the troublemaker!” she told me.

  4. Benzene, a natural part of crude oil and gasoline found in petroleum products and cigarette smoke, is a known carcinogen. Short-term exposure can cause drowsiness, dizziness, and unconsciousness; long-term effects include leukemia and shrunken ovaries.

  5. In an e-mail to Suzie dated December 9, 2008, Dr. Donnelly wrote, “I am having to dodge a number of consultants to CITGO & other refineries who want to shred our study.”

  6. Indeed, the EPA soon awarded $7 million in grants to researchers to study how low-income communities are impacted by pollutants.

  7. Although Suzie has, as of July 2015, never heard directly from Jackson again, she did receive follow-up from the EPA chief via Al Armendariz, a scientist who briefly held the position of EPA regional administrator in Texas. Beloved by activists and scorned by industry personnel for publicly supporting the idea of relocating fence-line communities (among other things), Armendariz took a job with the Sierra Club after causing a scandal for comparing his enforcement strategies to Roman crucifixions.

  5

  The Bonder and the Dealer

  FALFURRIAS IS A MOSTLY TEJANO TOWN OF 5,000 AN HOUR AND A HALF north of the border. If you’ve heard of it, it’s probably for one of two reasons: its U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint, which boasts one of the highest drug seizure rates in the borderlands, or its shrine to Don Pedrito Jaramillo,1 a legendary curandero who died a century ago. Not for its fine dining. Yet that is why I have come. Though I could happily eat tacos six nights a week, additional options are sought on the seventh. When I complained to a friend about the region’s lack of culinary diversity, he told me about a French restaurant that recently opened here. “It’s real good,” he said proudly. “The chef is from France.”

  I convince Greg to join me for the drive. Now mid-June, the sorghum has turned rust-red. Sunflowers slump, heavy with seed. Caracaras dot the sky, their necks white, their feathers black, their beaks mango-orange. It is ninety-seven degrees with almost no breeze. Downtown Falfurrias smells like hamburger patties, courtesy of a twenty-four-hour Whataburger. The window of EZ Pawn says WANT CASH? WE’LL WORK WITH YOU! The marquee of the Star of Texas restaurant says EAT HERE OR WE BOTH STARVE.

  Eventually we pull into the gravel lot of a mobile home turned bistro with a banner that says ANDRE’S in red block letters. From the outside, it looks as humble as any other local eatery, but as I draw closer, I see the doormat is emblazoned with the Eiffel Tower. Inside, black and white photographs of France deck the salmon-colored walls alongside American flags and a Pepsi clock. An elevator version of the theme song to Titanic croons from the speakers. I grab a menu from the stack at the counter and, sure enough, between the requisite enchiladas and steaks, find listings for escargot, coq au vin, and boeuf bourguignon.

  I glance up to see a woman in a zebra-patterned silk blouse and capris emerge from the kitchen. Her sandals glitter with rhinestones; her wrists sparkle with silver. She could be forty or she could be sixty: her auburn hair, swept into a twist and streaked with blond highlights, betrays no secrets. She strides over to greet us, beaming through dark lipstick, somehow showy and refined all at once.

  “Welcome to Andre’s,” she purrs. Her smoky voice is heavily accented, as if she spent her youth chain-smoking in Parisian cafés. “Will you join us for lunch?”

  We take our seats amid ranchers with dolled-up wives and construction workers relaxing with their buddies. Most are downing the $6.99 King Ranch Ca
sserole Special, but I order the bourguignon and Greg opts for the chicken-fried chicken. Both are served on white china plates dusted with parsley flakes. “Enjoy!” she sings out, clasping her hands together.

  My bouef has been marinated tangy-tender in wine, but Greg’s chicken is the winner: fried as delicately as tempura, then drizzled in a light butter cream sauce instead of gravy. That’s sacrilege in this state, but I wind up stealing half of it. When the chef returns to check on us, I barrage her with questions. Sophie Boykin is her name and she is indeed from France—Bordeaux, to be exact—but her father was an ambassador, so they traveled. She worked for the French embassy herself a few years, with stations in Dakar and Rio de Janeiro before she met the Texan who lured her here.

  “I absolutely fell in love with Texas. You have the mountains, you have the cactus, you have the cowboy,” Sophie says, then pauses. “Once in a while, I have an urge for civilization. I want to be stuck in traffic. So once a year I travel to France for fifteen days, and after fifteen days I am ready to come back.”

  “What do the locals think of your menu?” I ask.

  “They say, ‘Escargot, oh my God,’ and I say, ‘Excuse me, you have to take the slimy creature out of your mind.’ I say, ‘You eat meat,’ and they say yes. I say, ‘You eat pork,’ and they say yes. I say, ‘So don’t bother my snails.’ It’s not like I go to the garden to find them. From Florida I get my shells.”

  We chat about the restaurant business in between her rotations around the room, where she refills iced teas and settles bills with a calculator and a pen. After the lunch crowd simmers, she joins us at our table with a mug of hot tea and daintily steeps the bag. She is the kind of woman who is so put-together, you can feel a little shabby—until she lavishes you with attention, and then you feel fabulous. At one point she leans in close, as if to reveal something juicy. Greg and I lean in too, despite being the only other people in the room.

  “This,” she announces, waggling her fingers at the walls, “is just for fun. Our real business is bail bonds.”

  “Bail bonds?”

  “Oh yes, honey,” she says, sitting back with a smile.

  “Who do you bond?”

  “Everybody,” she says, taking a sip of Earl Grey. “I get the dumbasses who get paid $250 to drive $1.5 million worth of merchandise to Houston. That is 50 percent of my business. I also get the Avon Cartel. There are six of them. You see them and you think grandmother, but they take a bus from the Valley and hide drugs beneath their clothes.”

  “But isn’t bail-bonding …” I search for a nonjudgmental word. “Risky?”

  “When I start this business, I was nervous getting a criminal out of prison. But as you go, you see how they cry, these big grown men. I arrest people and they say, ‘If I knew you were coming, there would have been a shoot-out.’ And I say, ‘Too bad, I am here and you are in your underwear and I will tie you up like a pig.’”

  She tells us about the time she bailed out a smuggler on a $20,000 bond. Soon after his release, he kidnapped his children from their mother’s house and fled. Fortunately, Sophie had given him her 1–800 number for his weekly check-in phone call, so she traced the number to an apartment complex in San Antonio. She drove there one morning, parked her car, and waited. After a time, a curtain rustled, as if someone was peeking behind it. Clad in high heels and a business suit, she tucked her Taser into her purse and knocked on the door. A little girl with big green eyes answered. Her daddy was doing the wash, she said. Sophie instructed her to go into the bedroom with her brothers and sisters and shut the door. Then she turned to see a man walk in, holding a scoop of laundry detergent and wearing only underwear.

  “And he says, ‘Who are you?’ and I say, ‘Your worst nightmare, honey. Get on your knees or I shoot you.’ I don’t have a gun on me—just handcuffs—but he doesn’t know that. And he says, ‘I need to dress,’ and I say, ‘No. Where you’re going, you’ll get a nice new suit. I think it is bright orange.’”

  Usually her clients are so surprised to find her on their doorstep, she can handcuff them before they react. But occasionally they bolt, and then Sophie must chase them.

  “Once, one jumps out the window and I chase him and leap and he kicks me and I kick him. He almost broke my rib. The judge adds to his bond, and guess who he calls to bail him out? Me. I say, ‘Okay, honey, I come get you, and I bring you a stick,’ and he says why, and I say, ‘So you can beat me with it, because I would be so stupid to get you out of jail again, I would deserve it.’”

  When regulations were more lenient, Sophie even used to cross into Mexico to haul back clients who broke for the border. U.S. citizens were easy to deal with: she simply paid off any federales she met along the way. Mexican nationals required more finesse. Once, she had a twenty-seven-year-old flee on a $250,000 bond for cocaine. She spent weeks tracking him down and finally found him sitting alone at a bar in a Mexican border town.

  “I make him drink two bottles of tequila so he is drunk, then I put him in the backseat and tell the border guards, ‘My boyfriend, he’s drunk.’ And I drive him off to jail.”

  While she enjoys a good chase now and then, Sophie says the trick to bail-bonding is to eliminate the possibility of flight.

  “In court, the judge will say, ‘I give you thirty days to take care of your affairs and then you come back for a five-year sentence,’ and I say, ‘Your honor, in one month my client will be drinking a tequila in Mexico City. I am not paying his $400,000.’ So they go to jail immediately instead of in thirty days. That is why I always go to court with my clients.”

  At that, her cell phone rings. It’s Sylvia, her bail bond assistant, calling to ask for her signature. “Want to see my office?” she asks, pulling away from the table.

  We pile in to her sleek black Dodge. As she fires up the engine, Rush Limbaugh resounds through the speakers. “He’s my favorite,” she says, lighting up a Winston cigarette.

  We zip along a partially constructed stretch of U.S. 281,2 dodging bulldozers and bright orange cones as we do, and turn onto County Road 201. Sophie parks by a trailer decked with a wooden sign reading SELINA’S BAIL BOND in a feminine script.

  “Who’s Selina?” I ask.

  “The singer,” she says, as if it were obvious. “I call it that because the people in this area like her.3 But I spell it differently.”

  She swings open the office door. Sylvia, a middle-aged Tejana, is puffing on a Virginia Slims as she interrogates a client over the phone. A framed portrait of Jesus hangs on her wall, a sixteen-ounce Big Gulp sits by her side, and a cheetah-print handbag rests at her feet. Leaning over her desk, Sylvia waves an unsigned check at Sophie, who signs it with a flourish.

  Van Gogh prints round out the office decor, along with a manual typewriter and a trashcan heaped with shredded documents. We follow Sophie into her own office, which features family photos and September 11 memorabilia of the Twin Towers. Propped on her long wooden desk are what she calls “my Bibles”: the King James Version, covered with a needlepoint reading “When you saw only one set of footsteps, it was then I carried you,” and a dog-eared volume of Texas Criminal Laws.

  “Look at that,” Sophie says, pointing at two duffle bags and three pairs of enormous Nike sneakers parked in a corner. “I hold these for my clients. They are black men from North Carolina caught hauling marijuana, forty pounds.”

  Opening a file folder, she hands over a copy of her bond application. Nine pages long, it is riddled with typos but remarkably thorough, with fill-in-the-blanks demanding everything from credit card and social security numbers to detailed descriptions of tattoos and piercings.

  “We see who is married, who has children, and where does Grandma live, because the grandson always run to Grandma,” Sophie says. “If it is a girl, Grandma don’t care, but if it is a son, she will hide him. She will use her social security check to get him out of jail.”

  She typically charges clients 10 percent of their bond plus a $500 service fee, or $1,500
for a $10,000 bond. If she has even the slightest doubt about someone, however, she jacks up the rate.

  “I charge 30 to 40 percent on the $500,000 bond. I don’t go cheap. I charge those assholes the full amount because they’ll wind up either in prison or dead. That’s their profession.”

  And if they haven’t got the money, Sophie charges collateral: mortgages, cars, land. “You know what collateral is best?” she asks, a smile spreading across her lips. “The wife’s wedding band.”

  That’s when I notice hers: a shimmering rock colossal even by Texas standards. “So, this is a pretty profitable business?”

  “You aren’t rich, but you live well,” she concedes, noting that at one time, there were sixteen bail bond agencies in Falfurrias, roughly the same number as restaurants. “Ninety percent want to be in this business because of the money. They get money, they spend it spend it spend it, then guess what? Two years later, you get called in court, the client doesn’t show up, and you must have that money to pay the state of Texas.”

  The most Sophie has ever lost on a bond is $40,000, but she says that represents less than 1 percent of her client history. When I ask how she stays so successful, she motions me near.

  “When they first call us up, we say, ‘Oh honey, no problem, we come get you out of jail right away,’” she says, her voice maple-sweet. “We wait until the deal is done, and then when they come out after forty-eight hours in jail and they are submissive, we get in their face and we tell them the rules.” Her voice turns venomous. “I say, ‘Do not worry about the cops, worry about me. Like you say in your language, I am cabrona.’”