by Don Winslow
“The comic strip?” she asked. “A boy and a tiger?”
“Which one was Calvin?”
She thought about it for a second. “I don’t remember. The boy, I think.”
“That’s good,” Cal said. “I’m not a cat guy.”
“Dogs?”
“Horses.”
“I’ve never even been on a horse.”
“Where are you from?” he asked, because this was well-nigh inconceivable.
“El Paso,” she said.
“A city girl.”
“I guess.”
Now he asks, “Anything new?”
“Same shit, different day.”
“Well, I’m headed out on patrol,” Cal says. He can’t wait to get the hell out of there.
“No such luck, mister,” Twyla says. She holds up a clipboard. “You’re on guard duty until further notice.”
“The hell—”
“All hands on deck until the crisis is over,” Twyla says. “Welcome to my life. Time to do the count.”
“The what?”
“You’re a jailer now, cowboy,” Twyla says, “and we got to count the prisoners, see that we got ’em all.”
That’s when he sees the girl again.
The “detainees” at Clint are held in several buildings—or tents—around the facility, and Cal and Twyla are assigned to the largest one.
She’s not in an actual cage now but alone in a corner in a cinder-block room that serves as a large cell. Alone, because almost all the kids still left are boys, and she has to be segregated. From adults, too. They’re held on the other side of the room, a chain-link fence between them.
She sits on the floor and looks up at Cal.
Those damn eyes.
“What’s her story?” Cal asks.
“Luz?” Twyla asks. “Same old story. Salvadorans seeking asylum. She and her parents were processed at McAllen, then separated. Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three . . .”
The number of kids changes about every day, as some are released to families in the U.S., others to group homes, a few reunited with their parents and deported, while most are transferred to facilities all over the country.
“How long has she been here?” Cal asks.
“Three weeks? Forty-four, forty-five . . .”
“That’s a little longer than seventy-two hours,” Cal says.
By law children were supposed to be processed out, reunited with parents or sent to approved family or friends within three days.
“We can’t locate her parents,” Twyla says. “Best we can tell, they were deported. They could be in Mexico, El Salvador, anywhere.”
“They have to be looking for her.”
“I suppose,” Twyla says. “But how do they know where to look? Forty-six, forty-seven . . .”
Yeah, Cal thinks. The system, such as it is, is chaotic. Kids have been taken to multiple holding centers, spread out all over the country. In Texas alone they’re being held in Casa Padre, Casa Guadalupe or the tent city in Tornillo. Shit, there are kids in Chicago.
“So now what?” Cal asks. “What’s the plan?”
“When has there been a plan?” Twyla asks. “Forty-eight, forty-nine . . .”
Cal looks at Luz and says in Spanish, “It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.”
She doesn’t answer.
“She’s stopped talking,” Twyla says. “About four days ago. She used to cry. Now nothing.”
“Has she been seen by anyone?”
“An ORR counselor comes in a couple of times a week,” Twyla says. “But there are two hundred eighty-one kids here. As of this morning. We have sixty-five in our unit if you want to help me count.”
“You seem to be doing fine.” He forces his eyes away from the girl and follows Twyla across the room.
“Cal, don’t get pound-puppy syndrome.”
“The hell does that mean?”
“You know what it means,” Twyla says. “When you go to the animal shelter and fall in love with every puppy but you can only take one of them home? We can’t take any of them home.”
“She belongs with her people.”
“I agree,” Twyla says. “But what are you gonna do?”
The best we can, Cal thinks. What the protesters and the media don’t understand is that we’re not monsters, we’re people doing the best we can with what we have. Which ain’t enough. Not enough soap, toothpaste, feminine stuff, towels, clean clothes, medication, doctors, staff, hours in the day or night.
The guy I voted for started a war with no preparation or plan on how to wage it, and here we are.
Kids have lice in their hair, kids are getting sick with chicken pox, kids have scabies, kids cry all the time. It’s a constant backdrop, like NPR droning at Bobbi’s all the time, except it’s heartbreaking and you can’t shut it out.
Unless you’re Roger Peterson.
“I don’t hear it anymore,” he tells Cal. “It’s a mental discipline.”
It’s mental all right, Cal thinks, but he ain’t so sure about the “discipline” part.
“The parents should never have brought their kids in the first place,” Peterson says. “It’s not our fault.”
“It’s not the kids’ fault either,” Twyla says.
“What are we supposed to do,” Peterson asks, “throw open the doors and let every suffering kid in the world in?”
“Maybe,” Twyla says.
Peterson says, “I think Iraq scrambled your eggs.”
“That’s enough,” Cal says.
Peterson smirks and walks away.
“I can defend myself,” Twyla says.
“I know. I was just trying—”
“I know what you were just trying to do,” Twyla says. “Don’t. When I need a knight in shining armor, I’ll read a fairy tale.”
“Got it,” Cal says. “We got all the kids we should have?”
“All present and accounted for,” Twyla says.
Why was I such a bitch to him? Twyla asks herself when she gets back to her apartment that night.
She strips off her clothes and puts them right in the washer. One of the things about working in Clint is that your clothes smell from being around all the dirty inmates and their dirty clothes. It sticks to you, and people in town sometimes hold their noses when agents walk into a room.
Twyla gets into the shower and lets it beat on her for a long time as she tries to scrub the smell out of her skin.
She knows it’s not the only reason she feels dirty.
There’s also that little girl traumatized into near catatonia.
Maybe that’s why I was such a bitch to Cal. Or maybe because Peterson stumbled onto being right, which for him would be a lucky accident. Or is it because I have feelings for Cal that I probably shouldn’t oughta have?
Twyla has seen the way he looks at her sometimes, and she’s not used to men looking at her that way. Even in woman-starved Iraq, the guys in her unit thought that she played for the other team, and not one of them ever made a play on her.
She knows that she’s awkward and appreciates the irony of her mother, an art-loving wannabe bohemian misplaced in El Paso, naming her for the famous dancer Twyla Tharp.
Shit, even my last name is awkward.
Kumpitsch.
In high school the mean girls used to call her “Lumpitsch.”
Twyla Lumpitsch.
After those horrible four years and a pointless semester at community college, she decided her best bet was in the army, and she enlisted. She’d done almost her whole deployment in Iraq when she got blown up. When she was let out of the hospital with an honorable discharge, an artificial hip socket and a slight limp, she signed on with the Border Patrol, which was always looking for female agents, even if they were a little dinged.
Twyla looks at the big scar on her left hip, something else bound to make her unattractive, if a man ever got so far as to see her naked hip. She had a couple of casual boyfriends before Iraq, none after, not
only because she doesn’t want one seeing her scar but because she also doesn’t want one to see what else comes with sleeping with her.
Getting out of the shower, she dries off, puts on a robe and walks into her little kitchen to make what passes for dinner. Every Saturday, Twyla goes to the supermarket and buys seven microwave dinners. She has one plate, one fork, one spoon, one knife, a drinking glass and a coffee cup.
Twyla likes it that way, clean, spare, uncomplicated. Easy to make, easy to clean up. The little apartment is immaculate—the bed made army style, the towel folded neatly on its rack.
Twyla controls everything she can.
She nukes her Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes and corn and sits down in front of the television to eat. A Rangers game is on. Twyla likes baseball because it has neat lines and numbers. Three strikes are always an out, three outs always half an inning.
Cal isn’t what you’d call exactly handsome, she thinks. His hair is thinning, and there are probably more holes on the left side of his belt than the right. But he has nice eyes, and he’s funny and soft-spoken, and most of all he’s kind and he looks at her that way, like she’s pretty.
And you were so mean to him, she thinks.
The game is in the top of the seventh when it starts to come on.
It doesn’t happen every night, but it happens too many, and she knows the symptoms. It starts with a sick feeling, then a headache, and then she starts blinking and can’t stop.
She gets up and goes for the bottle of Jim Beam in the cupboard above the sink. Twyla always pours it into the glass, because drinking from the bottle would mean she has a drinking problem, which she doesn’t have.
Twyla belts it down like a dose of medicine, which it sort of is. She doesn’t really like the taste. What she likes is the calming effect and the hope that it might forestall the inevitable, for a little while anyway.
When she puts the bottle away, her hand is shaking.
She goes into the bathroom, shuts the door and pushes the towel against it to muffle the sound. Then she lies down on the cool tile floor, and before she knows it she’s curled up into a fetal position back inside the armored vehicle, her head pounding from the concussion, her side a mass of shredded flesh and shattered bone, she’s trapped inside the burning vehicle and there’s bleeding and yelling and her buddies hurting and dying, and she hears herself screaming.
Twyla puts her hands over her ears and waits for it to pass.
It always does, just as it always comes back.
Cal can’t get her out of his head.
The little girl, Luz.
Them eyes.
Looking up at him . . . accusing?
Or asking.
Asking what?
Can you help me? Can you find my mami and papi? Asking, maybe, What kind of man are you?
Good goddamn question, Cal thinks as he unwraps the silver paper from his fast-food burrito. It takes some skill—one hand on the wheel, the other extracting half the burrito and getting it into his mouth. But he’s had lots of practice. The attendants at the drive-thrus know him by name.
He’s thirty-seven, no wife, no kids, lives on the east side of El Paso in a nondescript one-bedroom apartment with rented furniture. Had a fairly serious girlfriend a couple of years ago, a nice woman named Gloria, a kindergarten teacher, but she broke it off because she couldn’t “reach him.”
“You’re so inside yourself I can’t reach you,” she said. “And I’m tired of trying. I can’t do it anymore.”
Cal pretended not to know what she meant, but he did. His mom used to say something pretty similar about his dad, which is probably why she up and left. He knows he’s the same way, but he also thinks it’s true of most people, that the best part of ourselves is trapped inside the worst part of ourselves and just can’t manage to get out.
Biting the little packet of hot sauce open and squeezing some out on the burrito, he thinks that maybe the same thing is true of countries, that somehow we lock up the best part of ourselves and don’t even realize it, maybe not even when we put children in cages.
So what kind of a man are you? he wonders.
Good goddamn question.
In the morning he goes into the office and asks Twyla, “You got the file on that girl Luz?”
She don’t look good, pale and tired like she didn’t sleep.
“ORR has all the files,” she says.
“Can you get hold of hers?”
She looks at him hard. “Why?”
Cal shrugs.
“Yeah, that ain’t gonna do it,” Twyla says.
“Thought I might take a shot at finding her folks,” Cal says.
“So the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Health and Human Resources, Homeland Security and the ACLU can’t find them,” she says, “but Cal Strickland can?”
“I just wonder how hard they’re trying,” Cal says. “I mean, they got a few thousand kids to deal with, I just got this one.”
“You do?” she asks. “I warned you about this, Cal.”
“I can take care of myself, Twyla.”
“Well, I guess I had that coming,” she says. “Okay, I’ll have a beer with the ORR lady. She ain’t a bad type. But no promises.”
“Thank you.”
There’s this moment.
Except neither of them can reach out and take it.
Next morning Twyla hands him a thin file folder.
“It cost me three beers,” she says. “That lady can drink. We’re not supposed to have this, so read it and shit-can it.”
“I’m appreciative.”
It’s the perfect opportunity to offer to take her to dinner or even just a beer to pay her back, but Cal can’t make the words come out of his mouth, so he just takes the file and goes to his truck.
The girl’s last name is Gonzalez, and she is Salvadoran.
Her mother is Gabriela, twenty-three. She and Luz were caught wandering on this side of the border on May 25, processed at the big station at McAllen and held for two days before Luz was taken from her mother and moved to Clint.
Every detainee has an Alien Number.
Luz’s is 0278989571.
Gabriela was deported out of McAllen on June 1.
Put on a plane back to El Salvador.
Without her daughter.
She has to be out of her mind with worry, Cal thinks, but nothing in the file indicates that she’s made any contact. There’s no note that she’s called the ORR hotline, but it was only just set up, and she might not even know about it. There’s no record of calls to any of the processing centers, ORR, Homeland, or Immigration, but she might not know who to call.
Hell, even Legal Aid lawyers are having a hard time wading through the alphabet soup of agencies, never mind an unsophisticated young woman who doesn’t speak the language and is scared out of her wits.
If she’s even alive, Cal thinks.
There was a reason she fled El Salvador, and that reason might have been waiting for her when she got back.
And where’s the father?
The file shows no family in the U.S., so no potential sponsors to release Luz to.
Then what are we going to do with the kid? Cal wonders. Farm her out to a group home, foster care? Keep her in custody until she’s eighteen? And then what? She’ll be no more legal than she is now.
What she’ll be is messed up.
Luz might get real lucky and end up with a warm, loving family who takes good care of her, but there’ll always be a part of her that wonders why her mom abandoned her. Or she might get unlucky and end up in a horror-show group home or a fucked-up foster family and get abused, emotionally, physically or sexually or the whole trifecta.
So we have to find her mother.
He starts in the cells.
Of the several hundred inmates at Clint, probably a third are Salvadoran, so maybe one or more of them knows Gabriela Gonzalez.
Except ORR won’t let him go through their records.
“I already
gave you a break on one file,” the ORR lady says. “I can’t let you go fishing through all of them.”
“Are you trying to tell me,” Cal says, “that we’re in charge of these people’s welfare but we’re not allowed to see their files? Why not?”
“HHS is embarrassed enough already by this clusterfuck,” she says. “The media is all over every sad story. You think we need you spreading more?”
“I’m not going to the damn media,” Cal says. “I’m just trying to find a little girl’s mother.”
“That’s not your job, it’s mine.”
“Then maybe you should do it.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” she says. “But let me ask you this, Agent Strickland: Is the mother trying? You’ve seen the file. There hasn’t been a single outreach, a single phone call. Have you ever considered the possibility that the mother doesn’t want to be found? That she simply abandoned the girl? I’ve been in human services a long time. I’ve seen babies left in garbage cans.”
Cal feels his face get red. “No, I hadn’t thought of that.”
She looks at him for a few seconds and then says, “Maybe if you came in tonight, you’d find the office door unlocked. But if you make a Mongolian opera of this, Strickland, my hand to God I’ll get you transferred to the Canadian border, where your balls will freeze off and drop in little crystals down your leg.”
“Thank you.”
“No,” she says. “Don’t thank me. Don’t ever thank me.”
When he comes back that night, Twyla is there.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Pulling a double,” she says. “I can use the overtime. More to the point, what are you doing here?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s a pretty simple question, Cal.”
“I don’t want to pull you into this.”
“Pull me into what exactly?”
“The less you know—”
“Fuck you.” She turns her back on him and walks away.
He goes down to the ORR office and finds the door unlocked.
It takes him hours to go through the files, which are a damn mess. No consistency of format or requirements. Some note national origin, others don’t. Some have the date of arrest, others only the date of intake into a facility.
He does the best he can.
First he takes out every file that identifies a Salvadoran.
