The Border

by Don Winslow

  It was different when he first got to Victorville.

  He came onto the yard seven months ago with the endorsement of Rafael Caro and got an instant introduction to Benny Zuniga, the Eme llavero, the shot caller. Zuniga has been the mesa for all of USP Victorville forever, twenty-five years now into a thirty-to-life sentence.

  He gives the orders inside and on the streets.

  So Eddie got instant status when Zuniga greeted him personally on the iron pile.

  “I’ve heard good things,” Zuniga said.

  “Mutual,” Eddie said, holding back a sigh of relief. Keller had laundered his PSI, but you never knew. Zuniga would have had one of his people take a good long look at the report.

  The cell was a small improvement on Florence—thirteen by six—but it had to be shared by two guys. Eddie didn’t mind; the prison is 50 percent over its max and a lot of the vatos are in triples, the weakest guy sleeping on the floor.

  There was a bunk bed, a stainless-steel toilet and sink combo, and a small table with a single stool bolted into the floor.

  And it’s air-conditioned, Eddie noticed.

  It was the freaking Four Seasons compared to Florence.

  When he first went into his new cell, a young vato—skinny, tall, his head shaved—sat nervously on the lower bunk, looking up at Eddie.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Julio.”

  “The fuck you doing, Julio?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Eddie said, “the fuck you doing on my bunk?”

  “I thought maybe you’d want the top,” Julio said.

  “Who told you to think?” Eddie asked.

  Julio hustled up to the top bunk.

  “Did Zuniga talk to you about me?” Eddie asked.

  “I’m supposed to do whatever you need,” Julio said. “Keep the cell clean, do your laundry, get your commissary. Whatever you want . . .”

  Eddie saw Julio was looking at him funny.

  “Chill,” Eddie said. “I don’t play that. I’m not your daddy and you’re not my bitch. When I want pussy, I’ll get real pussy. But you’re my cellie, so no one fucks with you. That wouldn’t reflect good on me. Anyone bothers you, you come to me, no one else, you understand?”

  Julio nodded, relieved.

  Eddie asked, “Whose car are you in?”

  “I’m doing my bones with Eme now.”

  “If this works out,” Eddie said, “I’ll try to get you off the bumper.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Make my bed up.”

  That night in the dining hall Eddie got a seat at the head table, with Zuniga and the other shot callers.

  “This is a Mexican prison,” Zuniga said. “You got about a hundred güeros, most of them Aryan Brotherhood, five hundred mayates, but a thousand border brothers. Say three hundred are norteños, but the rest are in line. The warden is Mexican, most of the guards are Mexican. We run this place.”

  “Good to know.”

  “It ain’t like it is in state,” Zuniga said. “We work with the güeros and we fight with the norteños, but we all hate the blacks. Even the guards hate the blacks. It’s todo el mundo against the mayates.”

  “Got it.”

  La Eme, the Mexican Mafia, was formed all the way back in the ’50s, but it was a Southern California gang, sureños, mostly made up of convicts from LA and San Diego—city guys who abused their country cousins, fruit pickers from the rural northern part of the state.

  So to protect themselves the northerners formed Nuestra Familia, and almost thirty years later the feud between the sureños and the norteños was more vicious than between the races. In fact, La Eme—which ran the various sureño gangs—was closely allied with the Aryan Brotherhood.

  Brown hated brown more than it hated white.

  La Eme, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Black Guerrillas all started when the prisons desegregated and threw the races together on the same cell blocks and yards. People being what people are, they started killing each other right away and quickly formed into the gangs to protect themselves. When the prisoners got out, they took the gangs to the streets, spinning a revolving door that never stopped.

  Same with the big Central American gangs.

  In the late ’80s, a lot of Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans started to run away from the shitholes their countries had become and came to California. Without jobs, schooling or connections, a lot of their young men ended up in the system, where they weren’t black, white, norteño, or sureño.

  They were just fucked.

  The Mexicans, the blacks, the Aryans turned them out, robbed them, hooked them on junk, extorted them. It was good business at first, but then the totally expected happened.

  Some of these guys turned out to be pretty tough—former soldiers or guerrillas in their countries’ civil wars—and they decided to get organized and fight back.

  A Salvadoran named Flaco Stoner founded Wonder-13, soon to be known as Mara Salvatrucha. An old ’50s gang called 18th Street revived itself as Calle 18, and together they became some of the most violent gangs in the prison system. Some of the mareros were fucking crazy—they had done some serious shit back home during the wars—beheadings, disemboweling—and they just let that crazy loose in the joint.

  Even La Eme backed off them.

  And just like the other prison gangs, the ones who made it home took the gang with them, established clicas of Mara Salvatrucha and Calle 18 not only in LA and other American cities, but also back in San Salvador, Tegucigalpa and Guatemala City.

  Eddie laughs his ass off when he hears dumbass ignorant politicians like John Dennison say they’re going to send the gangs “back to where they came from.”

  They were hecho en los Estados Unidos.

  Made in the USA.

  And the prison administrations were never serious about curbing prison violence. It was exactly the opposite—they wanted the prisoners fighting one another instead of the guards.

  Shit, they needed the gangs to run the prison.

  Needed them to maintain discipline and order.

  And if a bunch of white trash, beaners and niggers killed one another, it was no loss, was it?

  “What kind of job you want?” Zuniga asked.

  Eddie didn’t know. He’d never had a j-o-b in his fucking life. He didn’t know how to do anything but sling dope and shoot people, and his job in Florence was basically to jerk off. “I dunno. The kitchen?”

  “You don’t want the kitchen,” Zuniga said. “You really have to work there. You want custodial.”

  “A fuckin’ janitor?”

  “Tranquilo. Your partner will do the work.”

  So Eddie got a job on the custodial crew, watching some peasant mop the floors and clean toilets. The sheer fucking monotony of prison life settled in. It was different monotony than Florence, but monotonous all the same.

  He didn’t “get married”—officially join La Eme—but his status as a cartel man gave him the prestigious status of camarada—a comrade, an associate—and that was enough. Even though he didn’t get the black hand tattoo, he was accepted into la clica—the inner circle.

  And he lived by las reglas—the strict rules La Eme had established for its members in prison.

  No fighting with other members.

  No ratting.

  No cowardice.

  No hard drugs.

  You could drink, you could smoke a little yerba, but you couldn’t do chiva because no one can trust a junkie and a junkie is useless in a fight.

  No “baseball”—homo shit.

  They were allowed to turn other inmates out—sell them to suck cock or put out for the Aryans, for instance. If you were a “baby,” a bitch, if you wouldn’t or couldn’t fight, Zuniga or the others would rent you out, but the Eme carnals or camaradas weren’t allowed to use your services. That was for peckerwoods or mayates, not for proud, macho Mexican men of la raza.

  You didn’t do that and you didn’t interfere with ano
ther member’s business. And you sure as shit didn’t disrespect his ruca or his girlfriend, you didn’t cast a lustful eye in the visiting room, and when you got out, you didn’t mess with a member’s woman.

  You broke any of the reglas, you made it on a list you didn’t want to be on. It took the votes of three full members to put your name on la lista, but once it was on, you were as good as dead.

  It was strict, but Eddie understood the reasons. They needed las reglas, needed the discipline to maintain their dignity, their self-respect in a place that was designed to take it from them.

  Las reglas kept you strong when you wanted to break down.

  He came off the exercise yard back to his cell one day and watched Julio make “clear.”

  The kid stripped the insulation from a piece of wire and dunked it into the “stinger,” a batch of old, strong wine in a plastic bucket on the floor of the cell. Then he plugged the other end of the wire into a wall socket.

  The wine began to heat.

  It took a while, but the alcohol distilled and then ran through a length of rubber hose into a second bucket, producing a drink twice as powerful as the standard homemade prison hooch.

  Julio offered Eddie a sip.

  “It’s good,” Eddie said.

  Julio shrugged. “Of course it’s good, I’m the best hooch maker in Victimville, at least among the Mexicans.”

  Eddie was on the yard, waiting his turn at the bench press, when Zuniga came up to him. “I was wondering if maybe you could do some work, campa.”

  “Anything,” Eddie said, hoping it wouldn’t be too heavy. He catches a murder beef in here, his deal with the feds is gone and he never gets out. But he can’t say no to the mesa, so he just hoped.

  “A lop just checked in,” Zuniga said. “One of us. Been going around talking about he’s in for armed robbery, but a wood in the office pulled his card—turns out he’s a chester.”

  A child molester, Eddie thought. A white clerk found his real rap sheet and took it to the Mexicans to handle. It was a rule—white disciplines white, black disciplines black, brown disciplines brown.

  It’s that jacked-up prison justice. A guy from one race can’t put his hands on a guy from another. If a white guy jumped this Mexican chester, the Mexicans would have to first beat up the white guy, touching off an endless cycle of retaliations, then they’d have to beat up the chester, too. So this makes its own weird kind of sense; the whites hand it over to the Mexicans to take care of their own.

  But discipline was expected. If Zuniga knew he had a short-eyes on his yard and didn’t do something about it, he would lose massive respect. The whole raza would, if it got out they tolerated a vato like that.

  “I was wondering if you’d walk the dog on him,” Zuniga said.

  “No problem,” Eddie said, intensely relieved it was just a beating. “Shit, if you want to green-light him . . .”

  “No, just a beating,” Zuniga said. “I want him off my yard.”

  And you want to see if I’m legit, Eddie thought. You have a few hundred guys you could give this to, but you want me to pass a heart check.

  Okay.

  You want me to do it out in the open, Eddie thought.

  Make a show of it.

  “You’ll do a bit in SHU,” Zuniga said, “but they won’t pile charges on you.”

  “I just did Florence,” Eddie said. “It was all SHU. Besides, I got kids of my own.”

  “Respect, ’mano.”

  Zuniga gave him the name and walked away.

  Why wait, Eddie thought, so the next morning at breakfast he sat and listened to the chester over at another table with other lowlifes bragging about how he pulled his gun but it jammed so the cops got him, and Eddie thought, Who is this stupid fuck?

  So when the guy got up from his chair Eddie got up from his, and as the guy was coming toward him Eddie swung his tray like an ax into the guy’s throat and the guy would have gone down like a felled tree except Eddie had already dropped his tray, grabbed him by the front of the shirt, and started pumping rights into his face—bam, bam, bam, bam—four straight shots, and then Eddie drove him to the floor, landed on top of him and whaled away until his arms got tired and then he started slamming knees into the guy’s ribs and then his crotch and then rained elbows and forearms onto his face.

  Eddie felt himself getting winded and the guards didn’t seem to be in any particular rush to break this up—they had kids of their own, too—and the rest of the guys were all hooting and hollering and shouting encouragement—“Fuck him up, mess him up, ese!”—and the guy was whimpering and crying and bleeding and begging for Eddie to stop, but Eddie knew the rules—you don’t stop until the monkeys pull you off—so he just kept busting up the guy’s face until finally he felt hands grab the back of his shirt and he let himself be hauled up as the rest of the guys cheered for him.

  The chester was lying there curled up but Eddie got another kick into his balls and stomped on his knee. Saw Zuniga nod his approval, and one of the AB shot callers gave him a respectful nod, too, on his way out.

  At his disciplinary hearing the CO asked him what started the fight and Eddie said, “With all respect, sir, you know what started it. Y’all tried to hide that guy’s PSI, gave him some idiot cover story, but you know that’s not going to go here.”

  The CO gave Eddie thirty in SHU and Eddie waived his right to an appeal.

  The fuck could he appeal? There was video of it and, anyway, he wasn’t denying it, he was proclaiming it. The word got out—Eddie Ruiz was not only a narco big shot, he was a tough guy in his own right and in the car with La Eme.

  The administration didn’t push for assault charges, the chester refused to file and got sent to protective custody so was off Zuniga’s yard, and Eddie did his thirty like a man.

  La Eme took care of him in the hole, too, sent down sandwiches and Little Debbie cakes through a guard they had on the arm, and one time he even brought Eddie a bottle of Julio’s clear so Eddie could just sit in there and get pleasantly shit-faced.

  Eddie shared it with his SHU cellie, Quito Fuentes, an ancient Mexican narco doing an LWOP for his role in the Hidalgo thing all the way back in ’85. Turns out that motherfucking Art Keller had literally pulled him through the border fence so he could arrest him in the States.

  Quito wasn’t ever getting out and the monkeys threw him in the hole every chance they got because he was a cop killer and they didn’t ever forget that. He was half a babbling lunatic by then, carrying on a virtually nonstop conversation with something or someone he called “the honey-dripper,” so Eddie was happy to get him drunk if it would shut him and the honey-dripper up for a little while.

  But fuckin’ Keller, man, right?

  Through the fuckin’ fence?

  It didn’t seem that long before a monkey opened the door and said, “Ruiz, you’re going back to main street.”

  “Hey, Quito,” Eddie said, “give the honey-dripper my regards, okay?”

  “The honey-dripper, he says good luck.”

  “Who’s the honey-dripper?” the monkey asked as he walked Eddie back to his old unit.

  “The fuck do I know?”

  He got back to his cell, it was spick-and-span and Julio was waiting for him like the fucking butler. “Welcome home.”

  “Thanks for the clear.”

  Julio almost blushed.

  “We need to talk about that,” Eddie said. “We’re leaving money on the table. How much can you get for this shit?”

  “Fifty bucks for a twenty-ounce water bottle.”

  “I’ll get the okay from Zuniga,” Eddie said. “We’ll go into business and I’ll let you keep twenty percent.”

  Eddie walked down to the mesa’s cell—a “birdbath,” an end-of-the-row cell on the ground floor. Three Emes were with him but Zuniga gestured for one of them to get up so Eddie could sit on the stool.

  “Thank you for the goods,” Eddie said.

  Zuniga nodded. “I heard they had you w
ith Quito. How is he?”

  “Crazy. Totally spun.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I want to sell some hooch,” Eddie said.

  Zuniga laughed. “That fuckin’ Julio can cook, huh? It’s lunch money. Go with God.”

  Eddie went and started a business selling clear.

  The stinger itself, though, like a good bread yeast, never got touched but was carefully hidden away behind the wall of a little-used storage shed and only taken out when it was time to make another batch of clear.

  Eddie started other businesses.

  There were two babies on his tier, one a real B-cat complete with mascara, lipstick and long curly hair.

  Eddie sought out their daddy. “They work for me now.”

  The guy totally bitched, didn’t as much as say shit, but what was he going to do? Eddie had MM’s blessing.

  Eddie took the B-cat aside. “What’s your name?”

  “Martina.”

  “Well, Martina, I’m your daddy now,” Eddie said. “If I can find a long-term lease for you, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’m turning you out by the throw. I’ll let you keep a third, the rest goes to me. You have a problem with that, I give you to the blacks as a pass-around pack. That’s after I beat you so ugly they’ll shove your face into the pillow while they fuck you.”

  Martina had no problem with it.

  Neither did the other bitch, a skinny little guy named Manuel.

  “You’re Manuela now,” Eddie said. “And you need to up your game. Shave, for Chrissakes, and I’ll get you some fucking makeup.”

  Eddie found a nice old lifer and leased Martina out to him for six months in exchange for a third of the lifer’s commissary. Manuela he put out on a one-off basis for cigarettes and stamps, both of which he could turn over for a profit.

  Or Julio could—Eddie put him in charge of the small shit.

  And the still.

  Eddie tipped a guard for the little wall space in the storage shed to hide the stinger and then got that boy to cooking every chance he got. When he wasn’t cooking, Julio was out selling the bottles.

  No cash, ever.

  All stamps, phone cards and commissary.

  Eddie sipped on a new batch of clear and figured that life was good.