Illegal

by Francisco X. Stork

  “Okay.” I started to rise.

  “I said there were three things. I haven’t finished with the first.”

  I sat back down and waited.

  Nancy straightened her back. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to work for Mrs. Costelo or for anyone.”

  “Why?”

  I was calm. I asked the way I heard Trevor ask when he was told he couldn’t eat strawberry jam.

  “Because you don’t have the legal right to work in the United States. It is against the law for people to hire you. You are putting the employer at risk.”

  Nancy’s cheeks turned pink, and then red blotches appeared on her neck. I could almost see the migraine inching its way to her head. She shut her mouth tight as if trying to keep the words on her tongue from jumping out. I was about to argue that if Mrs. C was okay with the risk, then what was the problem, but Nancy Gropper could not contain herself.

  “And not just your employers; you’re putting us all at risk just by being here. I think it’s just incredibly irresponsible of you to do that!” She touched the keys on her laptop and then turned the screen toward me. “Read it!”

  I kept my eyes calmly and steadily on Nancy’s face. There was a thumping in my chest—a sign that anger was not far behind. I had to stay calm. No anger. She was waiting for my anger and I wasn’t going to give it to her.

  “Okay, then I’ll read it for you.”

  She turned the laptop toward herself and leaned forward. She read slowly as if she were reading to someone who was Trevor’s age and not as intelligent.

  “Title 8 U.S.C. 1324 parenthesis lowercase a. Offenses. Harboring. Subsection 1324 parenthesis lowercase a, parenthesis 1 parenthesis capital A, parenthesis lowercase i, makes it an offense for any person who knowingly or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place.” Nancy looked up to make sure I was listening before continuing. “You understand?”

  “Yes.” I’m not stupid, I felt like saying.

  “Listen to this: Penalties. The basic statutory term of imprisonment is five years unless the offense was committed for commercial advantage or private financial gain, in which case the maximum term is ten years.” Nancy closed the laptop. She grabbed the bottle of water and brought the straw halfway to her mouth before she put it down again. “So, we basically can end up in jail for five years. That’s why you can’t go around letting people know you’re here illegally. That’s why you can’t work for Mrs. Costelo. She’s liable to get ten years, by the way, because she’s using you for a commercial advantage. Not to mention the fact that she is also violating the law by hiring you and by not reporting any wages she pays you to the IRS.”

  “IRS?”

  “The Internal Revenue Service. The federal agency that collects taxes. Mrs. Costelo was obligated to file a 1099 with the IRS. You think she did that?”

  I was silent. Nancy’s outburst had reached its peak. There was nowhere for her anger to go except to maybe kick me out of the house. With Mrs. C’s money, I had enough money for a hotel someplace for a little while. But I was glad I had contained my own anger. I did not explode. Nancy Gropper’s true feelings about me had come out and there was something peaceful and satisfying about that.

  I spoke slowly and calmly: “You don’t want me here. I don’t want to be here. What do you want me to do?”

  “It is not that I don’t want you here,” Nancy protested. “Having you here is a risk. And you being here is wrong. It violates the law. This is a sovereign nation of laws.”

  I wanted to tell her that Bob was also an illegal alien, a violator of the laws, when she married him. Instead, I said, “But it is not just that I violate the law. I don’t think you like me being here. Even if I were legal, you wouldn’t want me here. It’s okay to admit it. I don’t want to be here either.”

  Nancy sighed. “No, you are wrong.” She tugged her braid. “I’m sorry if that’s the impression you got. The truth is I like you. I know I haven’t shown it and I’m sorry about that. Trevor adores you. How can I not like you?” She did her best to smile. “I’m afraid and when I’m afraid I turn into a real grump. I don’t know. I guess I try to protect myself from feeling vulnerable.” Nancy’s eyes filled with water and I almost reached out to touch her arm.

  “Nancy, I …”

  “Let me finish. I’m afraid for Trevor, for me, for Bob, for my father, for the business we have worked so hard to build. Bob told me about your sister and what happened in Juárez. About the people who tried to kill her in Juárez and even afterward, when you crossed into the United States. Can you tell me one hundred percent that I should not worry that those people won’t come looking for her here? They don’t know she’s in a detention facility. They probably think she’s with her father. And how hard will it be to find out where he lives? Don’t you think I have cause to be afraid? To not want you here because of the risk you bring?”

  Hinojosa’s cell phone was under her washing machine. There was no way I could tell Nancy that her fears were unfounded. I looked into her eyes to detect dishonesty, but all I saw was a woman who was very scared. She was right. I was putting Trevor and all of them at risk just by being there. I had to move out of that house as soon as possible. I opened my hands and said, “What can I do?”

  “I’m just asking you to minimize the risks.”

  “I need to work. I don’t think I can be here all day … without working.”

  There was a knowing smile on Nancy’s face. “Like father like son.”

  “Yeah.” It came to me just then that Bob’s need to work, to get ahead in the world, was probably the reason Nancy had married him or maybe even fallen in love with him. “I’ll talk to Mrs. C on Monday. I’ll tell her I can’t paint her shed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You said there were two things. Two things you wanted to talk to me about.”

  “Your father called. He said your sister wanted to talk to you. Bob told her you’d be here at two and gave her my cell phone number.”

  I turned to read the digital clock in the microwave. It read 1:57. “In three minutes? Really?” My heart started to race. Sara was going to call me, just like Yoya had predicted. Nancy Gropper entered a password and handed her cell phone to me.

  “Go. Go downstairs and talk to your sister.”

  I never thought I would feel the urge to give Nancy Gropper a hug, but I did just then.

  I stood quickly and flew down the stairs to the basement and past Trevor absorbed in reading Lego instructions. The phone began to ring just as I reached my room. I let it ring a couple of times while I tried to calm myself. Mello is probably listening, I thought. Be careful with what you say, I told myself.

  “Sara?”

  “Emiliano.”

  Her voice was cold, distant. It didn’t have Sara’s warmth.

  “What is it? Are you okay? You sound … ill.”

  “Nothing. I am all right. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “How’s your asylum petition going?”

  Come on, Emiliano, you can do better than that.

  “Good. It’s proceeding. I only have a minute, so listen carefully, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still have Hinojosa’s phone?”

  “Yes … but I haven’t done anything with it. I haven’t even taken it out of that metallic bag.” Why was Sara asking about Hinojosa’s phone? She had to be in danger. She was being forced to call me. “I don’t have it with me. I have it hidden.”

  “Someone is going to contact you soon and ask you for the phone. When they do, I want you to give it back to them.”

  “Who’s going to contact me? How … ?” How do they know where I am? is what I was going to ask but didn’t. It didn’t matter how, they knew.

  “Someone, you’ll know who it is when they
ask you for it. The only thing that matters is that you give it to them. Do you understand?”

  I understood, all right, but I thought it would be good to pretend I didn’t. “I don’t understand; who is asking you to do this? Did Hinojosa’s people get to you?”

  “That’s not important. You need to give the phone to the person who asks for it. It’s over. You have no choice. It’s like when you went to the Tarahumara mountains with Brother Patricio. You had to do what Brother Patricio told you to do. You had to walk where he told you to walk, you had to step where he told you to step. You had to follow his instructions exactly, otherwise you would die. It’s the same now. The consequences are exactly the same if you don’t do what I am telling you.”

  “But …”

  “Just do what I am asking you to do. The phone was given to me. I decided to bring it to the U.S.! It’s my decision what to do with it!”

  I had never heard Sara speak to me that way. All I could think of was that she was telling me in her own way that she was not free to talk.

  “Okay,” I said. “Before you go, there’s a reporter from El Paso who called Father. He wants to interview you.”

  “What? Please, Emiliano. I beg you. I have to go now. Do what I’m asking you. Do it for Linda.”

  I held Nancy’s phone against my ear for a few minutes, then I walked out of my room. I sat next to Trevor, who was assembling pieces of Legos into separate piles. I sat there because it was the nearest chair and I was having trouble standing and because, right then, I needed to be next to someone like Trevor. I would think and go over Sara’s words all night long and for days after that if needed, but right then I needed to be close to a child, someone still in touch with goodness.

  “Liano, look!” Trevor was holding up a huge box. “It’s the Death Star. Mommy got it for me this morning when we went to the mall.” On the box, there was the picture of a giant, gray sphere with hundreds of separate inner compartments. It reminded me of a beehive for robotic bees. There were green rays shooting out of one of the sphere’s sides. The recommended child’s age was fourteen, which meant nothing to Trevor. “But you still owe me fifty dollars.”

  I took the box from Trevor’s hands. It was empty. Trevor had already taken out what looked like hundreds of small plastic bags and laid them on the floor in an order that only Trevor understood. There was something about the Death Star, the Empire’s maximum weapon, that reminded me of the evil powers that wanted Sara and me destroyed. There was no corner of the universe beyond the Death Star’s deadly reach.

  “The Death Star is bad. It can destroy planets. Why do you want to build something like that?”

  Trevor thought for a moment, then: “Oh, Liano. It doesn’t have to be bad. It can be whatever we want. We can make it good. We can make it a Life Star. From now on we’ll call it ‘Life Star.’ ”

  We can make it a Life Star, I repeated to myself, shaking my head.

  If only the real world worked that way.

  Trevor took the cell phone upstairs to his mother and asked for permission to go to the park with me. The park was my idea. I had to get out of the house and think about Sara’s words. If I didn’t move, I would explode. Sara sounded like she was in pain and her tone and words were not her own. Someone was forcing her to say what she did. But what was the real message that she wanted to convey to me?

  When we got to the park, I said to Trevor, “I need to spend some time alone now. I have to think very hard about something. I’m going to go sit on that bench. Look, you see that little girl on the slide. She’s playing all by herself. Why don’t you introduce yourself and make friends with her?”

  Trevor nodded. Then, looking in the direction of the girl on the slide, “What if she doesn’t want to talk to me?”

  “Just say, ‘Hello, my name is Trevor and I’m building a Life Star.’ She’ll ask you what that is. You explain it nice and slow, and then if she wants to talk to you, she will ask you something else and so on and so forth.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I’ll buy you an Icee. A blue one. The kind your mother doesn’t want you to have.”

  Trevor’s eyes widened for a second. Then he surprised me by turning slowly around and walking to the bottom of the slide, where he waited for the little girl. I couldn’t hear what he said or what she said back to him, but when they walked to the swings together, he turned and gave me a look that seemed to say It worked.

  I sat on a green wooden bench replaying the conversation with Sara. I thought that whatever it was she really wanted to tell me was hidden in her reference to my trip to the Tarahumara mountains with Brother Patricio. Her actual words in the telephone conversation did not match what happened in the trip. I repeated her words in my mind.

  It’s like when you went to the Tarahumara mountains with Brother Patricio. You had to do what Brother Patricio told you to do. You had to walk where he told you to walk, step where he told you step. You had to follow his instructions exactly, otherwise you would die.

  But Sara knew that during that trip, Brother Patricio did not give me any instructions. He never once told me where to walk or where to step or what to do with my life. He let the mountains teach me whatever lessons I needed to learn.

  The trip happened two years after Mami received Bob’s petition for a voluntary divorce and two weeks after I was caught stealing an expensive camera. It was all Mami’s idea, not the stealing of the camera, the trip. Mami was desperate. She must have looked for signs of repentance in my heart and not seen a single drop. What she saw in there was a stinking mixture of bile, anger, and hatred. Hatred for school, for church, for our life of poverty, and, most of all, for my father.

  It was a four-day trip, but two of those days were spent on buses and trains getting there and getting back. I expected constant preaching from Brother Patricio but there was none. There wasn’t much of any talking, in fact. All we did was live with the Rarámuri for two days and two nights. We slept in a dirt-floored room and ate tortillas and beans. We climbed in and out of their copper-filled canyons and watched the Rarámuri run barefoot on the dusty mountain trails. There was no single moment when I decided to abandon the path of delinquency I’d been on. Brother Patricio told me that when we got back to Juárez, he was going to start a group of desert explorers who would hike and camp out in the Chihuahua desert on weekends and he wanted me to help him. What was Sara trying to tell me? I was clueless. All I knew was that holding on to the phone could cost Sara’s life and that seemed like a very high price to pay.

  Then I was plagued with doubts about whether I had made things worse for Sara by making up that stuff about the reporter from El Paso. I thought that if whoever was listening knew that she was being sought for an interview, they would not want to call attention to themselves by harming her, but what if my remarks had the opposite effect? How does one figure out the right things to say and do? I was lost.

  On the way back from the store where I bought Trevor the promised Icee, I thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad living here. If one day I stopped feeling that someone was going to grab me and send me back to Mexico, this place wouldn’t be so bad. The grass in the front yards was a tender green and there were trees with small red buds coming out. Apple trees maybe? The oaks, like the one in Mrs. C’s backyard, must be the last to bloom. All the yards could use a good raking to get rid of the dead grass and leaves left over from fall. I could make a fortune here. I could train Trevor to help me. The two of us could work together in the afternoons after I finished painting. Why not? When I was Trevor’s age, Paco and I would go to the garbage dumps, looking for aluminum. If I turned Hinojosa’s phone over to whoever contacted me, I could stay here, make some money, be a big brother to Trevor. And if I returned the phone, Sara would be safe. Returning the phone was the safe path. Maybe it was the only option. The one that would keep Sara and me and others safe.

  “Liano?”

  I stopped. There were still traces of blue on Trevor’s lips
and we were only a block away from the house. “Let’s walk around the block again so that your blue lips turn normal before your mother sees you. Why doesn’t your mother let you have Icees? They’re not made with peanuts.”

  Trevor shrugged. “Maybe because of the chemicals used to make the colors.” He stuck out his blue tongue. “She thinks they’re bad.”

  I felt guilty about the influence I was having on Trevor. He wasn’t so sure about all of his mother’s rules anymore. Either that or more willing to disobey some of them. Well, honestly, I didn’t feel all that guilty. If Trevor became more of a kid and less a little adult because of me, was that so terrible? Not to mention it was kind of nice to irritate Nancy.

  “Your mother is right. Your tongue looks sick. It might fall off. Then you wouldn’t be able to talk.” I tried speaking without moving my tongue. “Eoo uuu aaa eeek.”

  Trevor screeched and tried to do the same. “Aaa nnnn eeeee!”

  “Okay, okay.” I looked around. The front yards were all empty. It was a gray Saturday afternoon, but the sun was out there somewhere. Trevor had a gray sweater that Nancy made him wear but he didn’t really need. A car pulled into a driveway ahead of us and a woman and a man came out and took department store bags from the back seat.

  “Liano?” Trevor said, tugging my arm.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you like the clothes that Mommy got you?”

  “What clothes?”

  “Mommy put the box in your room. It came this morning in a big, brown truck and Mommy put it next to your bed in your room.”

  “I didn’t see it.” All of me had been lost in the call from Sara.

  “I was with Mommy when she ordered them online. I gave her some ideas.”

  “Why? Clothes for what?” When the few clothes I had got were dirty, I walked three steps from my bed to the washer and cleaned them. The washer reminded me of the dryer and the dryer of the cell phone beneath it. Every time I thought of the cell phone, I felt a burning sensation in my chest. I burped.