Illegal

by Francisco X. Stork

  “What’s best for me is to leave. Is that what you mean?”

  My father fixed his eyes on the barefoot man. The answer was yes. But he couldn’t say it.

  I pressed on. “What if I give you the cell phone? Do you still want me to leave?”

  I wanted him to answer the question. I wanted to hear the words, so there would be no more doubts, ever.

  “Emiliano, son. Things didn’t work out. You coming to Aurora, living with us, it got too complicated. Yes, Nancy and Abe had concerns about you being here and the legal consequences, but I still got you here and could have kept you here. I fought for you. The cell phone pushed their fears over the edge. It took things to another level. I … agree with them, son. It is now too dangerous for all, including you. People know where you are. All it would take is a phone call to ICE. I don’t know who wants the cell phone or why or how they found Abe. All I know is that Abe and Nancy are scared out of their minds. They’ve done their best to protect you so far. The ten thousand dollars is the best way they can think of keeping you from getting hurt. Abe came up with the plan.”

  “Who told Mr. Gropper about the phone?”

  “I don’t know. Abe said that they would have arrested you if he hadn’t talked them out of it. It was probably some government official. Abe came up with the plan to offer you money to leave. I know he comes across as pushy and self-centered, but he really has your best interests at heart. We all do.”

  “He threatened Sara.”

  “He said what he needed to say to convince you.”

  “You know. People want to kill me in Mexico.”

  My father covered his face with his hands. I got the impression that this was what worried him the most. But not enough, apparently. He shook the envelope with the money.

  “This will help you and your mother find a safe place. You can hide in Mexico. If you don’t give them the phone …”

  “Giving you the cell phone and then getting out of the United States. That’s the only alternative.”

  “Emiliano, what do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to say it! Say it!” Then, lowering my voice, “It’s important.”

  “All right. Okay. Giving me the cell phone and going back to Mexico is the only alternative. What else can I say? I tried, son.”

  It was done. I felt a quiet, sad peace. It was like the river I had just crossed or like the rare shade you sometimes find in the desert. I leaned back on the bench. The image of our house in Juárez destroyed by thousands of machine-gun bullets came to me. Evil was a stone thrown on calm waters, its ripples extending in larger and larger concentric circles. Perla Rubi’s father, Hinojosa, Abe Gropper, and now my own father were the ripples of evil. It was so easy to become another ripple. All you had to do was let it happen.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Okay,” I repeated. “You can have it. Here, take it, I need to go to the bathroom.” I tossed the backpack at his feet.

  Bob grabbed my arm just as I was standing. “Don’t do anything stupid. Please.” I know he was trying not to sound menacing, but he didn’t succeed.

  “The cell phone is in my backpack. I’ll get it for you when I get back. I need to go to the bathroom.”

  Bob loosened his grip on me when he saw that I was leaving the backpack behind.

  I opened the door to the men’s room and immediately saw what I hoped to see. There was a row of three windows up on one of the walls. I zipped up the sweatshirt and climbed onto a rusty radiator. I reached and pushed the window out. There was just enough space for me to crawl through if I could only pull myself up. With my arms fully extended, I grabbed the windowsill and got my chin up, but the wall was smooth, and I could not use my legs for leverage. I jumped down and saw a bucket with a mop in a corner of the bathroom. I placed the upside-down bucket on top of the radiator and the new height allowed me to push myself up and out. I came down in the back of the station and ran quickly to the side parking lot, where I crouched between two cars. A few minutes later I saw Bob come out the front entrance with the backpack in one of his hands. Bob walked over to a gray Mercedes parked in a handicapped space in front of the station. It looked like the same dark car I had seen outside Bob’s house that morning. Bob conferred with the driver. The driver opened the door and got out. He was a tall, well-built, blond man in his thirties with blue pants and a white, long-sleeve shirt. I figured he was the man smoking in the car this morning and the man who was supposed to take me to the bus station from Abe Gropper’s house. Either that or kill me.

  Bob and the driver walked around the station. When they came to the side facing the parking lot, I crawled under the car. The legs of the driver were so close I could have touched them by extending my arm.

  “He’s around here,” the driver said. “Or he went over to the farmers’ market.”

  “The phone is in the backpack,” my father said. “You don’t need the boy. The phone is all you need.”

  The man opened the backpack and searched. “It’s not here. Damn it! I told you not to let him out of your sight! He had to go in that direction. To the farmers’ market. Come on!”

  I saw the man and my father hurry away and get into the gray Mercedes. I crawled out and lifted my head slowly over the hood of the parked car. Bob and the driver pulled away in the Mercedes. I was able to see that the license plate had the picture of Abraham Lincoln on it. But I could make out only two letters and a number.

  “AR9,” I repeated to myself.

  Mario brought me a sheet of paper and pencil with my lunch. I looked up at the camera when he handed them to me.

  “No one is in the monitoring room. I checked.”

  “Thank you. How did you know?” I had been yearning for paper and pencil.

  “You’re a reporter so … But don’t get your hopes up about getting anything you write out of here.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Do you know how La Treinta Y Cuatro got her name?” Mario said, out of nowhere.

  “No. Do I want to know?”

  He laughed. “Her real name is Rosaura Martel. No one knows how she got the name of La Treinta Y Cuatro. But a lot of us think it refers to the thirty-four days that she kept a detainee in isolation. A Fort Stockton Detention Center record.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “That’s just what I needed to hear.”

  “It’s good you still have a sense of humor.”

  “What else do I have left?”

  Just as he was leaving, Mario said, “Director Mello is making plans to move you. I saw some paperwork.”

  “Where?”

  Mario shrugged. “Maybe El Paso. Sometimes women are moved there when their hearing’s been scheduled so they’ll be closer to the IJs.” He must have noticed the blank look in my eyes. “Immigration judges.”

  I thought immediately of Norma Galindez. Maybe she saw the merits of my asylum claim. Maybe she called Wes Morgan and found out he had been killed and decided to help me. And then the negative thoughts came, and these carried the weight of truth. Maybe Emiliano understood my message and did not return the phone, and I was about to suffer the consequences.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Soon. Two or three days at most. It’s good, isn’t it? Things have not been good for you here. Someplace else will be better.”

  “Or worse. Mario …”

  He raised his hand and asked me to stop. “I can’t.”

  “You can call someone for me. One phone call. Sandy Morgan in Alpine. When you find out where they’re taking me. Call her.”

  Mario looked up at the camera and then shook his head. “That’s the woman from the message I gave you. The message about her father getting killed.”

  “Yes.”

  He stood in place, shuffling his feet. Then, with sadness in his voice: “I have a family. Two daughters, six and four. My parents live with us. My wife’s brother just moved in. They all depend on the sixteen dollars an hour I make here.” He
turned around and opened the door and stepped halfway out.

  “One phone call. When you get home. Who will know? Please, Mario.”

  He turned to me. There was color in his cheeks. “I don’t know what’s going on with you or why they got it in for you. But it must be something heavy. Yesterday, one of the other guys told me that La Treinta Y Cuatro had a new freezer delivered to her house. And then, after that, she got two boxes of frozen steaks taken to her house by a delivery truck. He lives across the street from her, so he saw the whole thing. Someone got to her, right? We have a saying here: el que da quita. It means—”

  “I know, he who gives can take away.”

  “I wish I could help you. I really do. But I can’t afford to get noticed by the same people who are giving La Treinta Y Cuatro freezers and steaks.”

  Mario walked out and shut the door with a bang before I could say anything else. I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t really blame him. Maybe I asked too much from people. Did I ask too much from Emiliano?

  I felt like kneeling down and praying the way I did when I was a child. But the only prayer that came to me was for God to help my little brother put all these animals in jail. And I didn’t know if that kind of angry wish counted as a prayer. Instead, I sat down on the floor, and using the breakfast tray for support, I wrote a letter to Emiliano on the piece of paper that Mario had brought me. Emiliano would never receive the actual letter, but I felt that my written words would find an invisible route to his heart.

  Dear Emiliano:

  I am writing because this is my way of being close to you and I know that the hope and love behind my words will find their way to you and you will feel their strength.

  The first thing I want to tell you is to stop thinking that all this is your fault. Knowing you, you are still blaming yourself for our attack in the desert. If it helps any, I can tell you that I have plenty of blame for myself also. I could start with my decision to take that cell phone from Juana Martinez’s drawer and go on from there. I made you keep the cell phone and made you promise to contact Yoya.

  So, you see, there’s plenty of blame to go around. There’s plenty of hurt to go around too. For me and maybe for you too. I know that being with Papá’s new family could not have been easy. But I want you to think about the fact that maybe Papá is to be commended for all he did for you and me despite the opposition of his wife and father-in-law.

  It’s good for me to write you this letter so you can see that I’m not the same Sara you used to know. This Sara is struggling to see the good and to seek the light. I don’t know if I can even pray anymore, if you can believe that. I miss the faith that I got from being around Mami, and I miss the laughter that came from our joking around with each other. Just now I remembered the time when you coated the toilet seat with Vaseline. Only, you didn’t expect Mami to be the first one to sit on it. Remember the shout she gave in the middle of the night? That was the first time I heard her swear and I’m glad she was swearing at you when she did it!

  I have been in isolation for I don’t know how many days, and things happen to how you see the world when you are all alone. I’m not myself. The only thing that kept me going was the contact that I had with the women here. There are mean women here, don’t get me wrong. Why should this group of human beings be any different than any other group? But, Emiliano, these women are carrying so much suffering and their future is so hopeless. I hope that soon I can get out of isolation so that I can spend whatever days I have here with the other women. If I were cut off from the suffering and the hopelessness of the other women, my soul would shrink and die. I will do what I can for them, fill stupid forms and translate and write letters, but these efforts will be pitifully small compared to what is needed. And anyway, it’s not so much my efforts to help as it is about my being in contact with that suffering.

  The one thing that is becoming clear to me is that I need to believe that my life has meaning regardless of how long it lasts. It has to have a purpose now and not only when I get out of here. I want to share this with you, and please don’t think I’m sounding like Mami’s telenovelas, because if something happens to me, I want you to continue doing what is right.

  No matter what happens to me, you must keep going in the direction I know you have taken. Remember you used to tell me that out in the desert, once you find the right direction, all you need to do is walk. One step at a time. This path that you have chosen is the right path and I say this full of worry and concern for your safety. In a way none of us could have anticipated, I think that you are fulfilling Mami’s prophecy: In the United States you will be the Emiliano that God wants you to be. Be careful. Watch your step. I’m walking beside you.

  I love you very much, little brother. Be good.

  Sara.

  I left the Aurora train station and walked for three hours on Liberty Street—a name I found appropriate under the circumstances. The temperature dropped whenever the sun disappeared behind gray clouds, so I kept the sweatshirt on. Now and then I reached into the right-hand pocket and touched the metallic bag with Hinojosa’s cell phone. What inner voice prompted me to put the phone in my pocket rather than in the backpack? How could that not be a sign that I was doing the right thing? Somewhere back in Texas, Sara was praying for me. I had lost everything else in the backpack, but all I needed was in my wallet. I had most of Mrs. C’s money in there and her note with the name of the retired policeman and the place where they could tell me where to find him.

  Stan Kalusa—St. Hyacinth Basilica

  All I knew was that St. Hyacinth Basilica was somewhere in Chicago, and Chicago was east of Aurora. I knew that Chicago was an hour’s drive from Aurora. An hour’s drive, assuming you drove on a highway, was, say, fifty miles. I had a long way to go. At the pace I was going, I would get to Chicago in … thirteen hours. I saw a concrete bench next to a coffee shop and sat down.

  It was overcast and the air cool enough for me to keep my sweatshirt on despite the body heat generated by the walking. I saw a police car stop on the opposite end of the street. I stood up and went into the coffee shop. Through the glass window of the shop, I watched the policeman write a ticket. I bought a large bottle of water and waited until the police car drove away. I had this sense of constant weariness, like when you’re going down a steep, rocky cliff. One wrong step and you’re gone. How can anyone live with that kind of fear?

  I went out to the same bench and slowly drank the water. Calculating distances and the speed of walking reminded me of Sara. When we crossed from Mexico into Big Bend National Park, she had urged me to walk faster. I had slowed down to three miles an hour after the sun was up and Sara thought that was too slow. I remembered how she walked behind me, and I could almost hear her thoughts. She was thinking that walking for a paltry six hours a day was such a waste. We could get to Sanderson in half the time if we walked for twelve hours a day. The memory made me smile.

  I was repeating to myself the license plate of the Mercedes back in Aurora when an old Lincoln Continental with a sign on the door that read NAPERVILLE TAXI stopped in front of the coffee shop. The taxi driver, a young man whose size and weight made him look older, got out and walked into the coffee shop. He came out with a tall cup of coffee. I watched him struggle to get behind the steering wheel without spilling his drink. I waited until the taxi driver was breathing normally again and then approached him.

  “Excuse me. How much do you charge to Chicago?”

  The taxi driver looked at me the way you looked at someone who couldn’t afford to buy what you were selling.

  “Where in Chicago?” The man was taking the plastic top from the cup to let the coffee cool.

  I was about to say St. Hyacinth Basilica, but I stopped myself. From now on, I was going to be careful with my trust. “Downtown.”

  The taxi driver ripped open a packet and poured the sugar in the coffee. After the fourth packet, the taxi driver said, “You have to pay what the meter says, but I’d say a trip to downtown C
hicago run you about ninety bucks, not counting tip.”

  Ninety dollars was a lot of money. If I couldn’t find Gustaf’s friend, I would need all the money I had to survive. “Thank you,” I said to the taxi driver.

  “Hey,” the taxi driver called after me.

  I turned to face him.

  “Cheapest way to Chicago is the train. Ticket to Union Station in Chicago run you about eight bucks. You got eight bucks?”

  I nodded.

  “Hop on. I’m going to the station now to wait for fares. I’ll give you a lift.”

  I hesitated. “What station?”

  “Naperville. It’s ten blocks if you want to walk.”

  Naperville was the next station down the line. I didn’t think my father and the man in the Mercedes would think to wait for me there. I went around the car, opened the door, and got in. The taxi driver lowered my window.

  “You’re kind of ripe, man,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

  I lifted my forearm to my nose and sniffed. Is that what ripe smelled like?

  “I got caught in the rain,” I told him.

  “Mmm-hmm,” the taxi driver said as he made a U-turn. “My dog smells like that when he gets wet. No offense, man.”

  “No offense.”

  I noticed the green-and-yellow cardboard pine trees hanging from the rearview mirror. The deodorizers could not hide the lingering smell of cigarette smoke in the car. An air-conditioner vent sent a cool stream of air directly on my face and I felt suddenly sleepy. Maybe ninety dollars for a comfortable ride to Chicago was not too much to pay, especially if I could nap on the way there.

  “Now, don’t go buying the ticket on board or they’ll charge you extra. I never ride the train, but that’s what my customers tell me.”

  We were at a stoplight and I was about to speak, when the police car I had seen by the coffee shop pulled next to us. I slid down a few inches on the seat. When the light turned green, the taxi driver waited a few moments for the police car to pull ahead.

  We drove in silence for a block and then the taxi driver spoke. “People around here are all riled up over whether Naperville should be a sanctuary city. You know what that means? Sanctuary city?”