Troubled Waters

by Carolyn Wheat

  The man was tall and wiry, his long, tanned feet clad in huaraches. The only part of his face that was visible beneath the straw cowboy hat was the jet-black mustache. A cigar, undoubtedly a prime Havana import, protruded from his lips.

  “Pretty cocky,” the other INS man said. “Anybody who’s ever seen a Newsweek would recognize him.”

  He turned back to his boss. “And this is the guy they think they can get out of the country without anyone noticing?”

  “They’re desperate,” Walt replied. “They can’t leave him here either. They know we’re inspecting all the farms around here that use migrants.” He saw no reason to inform his associate that they were staking out the van Wormer place based on inside information.

  “So why don’t we bust them now?”

  “Because I want the boat. We go down now and we get Baltasar and Sobel. Big deal. I want them all, and I want that boat. So we wait until they reach their destination. We follow them and when we have a full house, we round them up.”

  Dana Sobel drove to the rear of the van Wormer farm and pulled up next to the trailer. The straw-hatted man opened the door and got in. She drove; he sat in the passenger’s seat. They sped out of the trailer area toward the highway.

  Walt and his companion stepped into their car and followed from a discreet distance. One thing about the long, straight farm roads, you could stay far behind and still see your quarry. Of course the bad part was, your quarry could see you in the rearview. But since Sobel knew he’d be there, he didn’t anticipate any problem.

  The second man to emerge from the trailer wore a Toledo University Rockets T-shirt, his tanned arms sticking out of the sleeves. His cutoff jeans were ragged and his sockless feet were thrust into ancient boat shoes. A New York Mets cap shielded his face and hid his unruly black hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail like the girl’s.

  From a distance, he looked just like Joel Alan Rapaport.

  But the voice that emerged from the half-hidden face spoke with a Spanish accent.

  “Should we go now?”

  Jan looked at her watch. Dana had been gone for ten minutes. Time enough to have lured Walt Koeppler far away from the van Wormer farm.

  She nodded. She and Joaquín Baltasar walked slowly toward Rap’s car. He opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat, while Jan walked around to the other side.

  As he started the engine, Joaquín rubbed his upper lip. “I shall have a requiem mass for my mustache. It has been with me since I was sixteen. But I suppose it was necessary to remove it.”

  Dale Krepke lowered his binoculars. What incredible luck! Not only was the INS out of his hair, following Sobel and Che Guevara, but Rapaport was alone with Gebhardt.

  He shook his head. Busted for drugs more than once, supposedly in a recovery program, but here she was sitting next to her favorite dealer. It went to show what he knew already: There was no such thing as an ex-junkie.

  He stepped behind the wheel of his Jeep and kept a discreet distance as he followed the vintage Mustang. Fire-engine red. Krepke shook his head; that just showed the kind of balls Rapaport had, driving around the countryside in a car that screamed “drug dealer on the loose.”

  What do you say to a national hero? Jan sat in the passenger’s seat of Rap’s beloved Mustang and wondered whether her companion would prefer conversation or silence. Did he want to talk about the newspaper articles he’d written about the Nicaraguan contra activity in Honduras?

  Finally she could stand the silence no longer. “I read the article about you in Newsweek,” she said. Her fingers clutched the armrest so tightly they ached. “In fact,” she went on, trying for a conversational tone, “a friend of mine wrote it. Ted Havlicek.”

  Her companion’s face broke into a wide smile. “Sí,” he said, nodding his head. “Sí, Teodoro es mi amigo.”

  That was about the extent of Jan’s Spanish. Ted is my friend. Conversation languished. She focused on the plan.

  They were supposed to meet another car out on Pickle Road, near the radio station. Joaquín would step into that car and be whisked away toward the New York-Canada border, a new approach they all hoped the INS wouldn’t be prepared for. Jan would drive the Mustang back to Our Lady of Guadalupe and start her new life with Ron, her work for the sanctuary movement finished at last.

  She took the turn that would lead them toward the radio station. She smiled and then frowned as she remembered the summer of ’69 and the Spanish-language program they’d broadcast for the migrants. The smile was for their innocence; the frown was for the time Kenny took the wrong tape and “Mellow Yellow” went out over the airwaves instead of pro-union speeches.

  Rap had been furious, called her cousin a stupid little fuck who played practical jokes with people’s lives. But if there was one thing she knew about her long-dead cousin, it was that there wasn’t a practical-joking bone in his body. He’d been a totally serious kid, and he’d wanted more than anything to be a real part of their group. He would never have sabotaged the broadcast on purpose.

  So someone had slipped him the wrong tape. But who, and when?

  Why was easy. Why was so that Kenny would get a reputation for screwing up, a reputation that would come in handy when the parathion canister proved to be real instead of fake.

  The corn was shoulder-high. Ready to eat. She’d stop at a farm stand on the way back from the rendezvous and buy a dozen ears for dinner. Home-grown tomatoes, too, hand-harvested, not picked by machine for the ketchup factory.

  Her mouth watered, but her mind clicked along, remembering the tape screwup in vivid detail. Whose job had it been to make the tape in the first place?

  Rap’s, of course. He was the electronics wizard, the one who knew what dials to turn for the best sound. Abe Murillo made the tapes at the White House, on Rap’s equipment, since the station didn’t want its facilities used directly for the migrant union movement.

  So who was to say Rap didn’t intentionally bury the real Murillo tape and substitute the Donovan song?

  Or maybe Dana, who practically lived in Rap’s one-room lair in the White House. She’d been in the forefront of the “lynch Kenny” movement at the time.

  Then Ritamae’s voice, strong and sure, sounded in her head: How long the boy been dead? This shit is not where you need to be at right now.

  The other car was a plain white van. It sat in a roadside picnic area, as if its occupants were about to spread a checkered cloth and enjoy Grandma’s cold fried chicken and Aunt Susie’s potato salad. But the men in the car didn’t look like picnickers.

  They didn’t look like sanctuary movement people either. They were bulky and big and menacing. They stepped out of the van and stepped over to the Mustang as if about to make an arrest.

  Jan’s heart stopped. Walt? Had their elaborate deception been a complete bust? Had Walt Koeppler seen at once that the man in the Rockets T-shirt was Joaquín, not Rap?

  She was so panicked that she failed to notice the plain tan sedan sliding into the alfalfa field next to the picnic area. She also failed to notice Dale Krepke stepping out of his car and heading toward the rendezvous.

  The two men stepped over to the car. Joaquín got out and said, “Is all set? Go to Canada?” He handed a small pack to the man, who took it and tossed it into the back of the car.

  The big man in the plaid sport shirt nodded. “Yeah, yeah. All set. Just get in the car, okay?”

  Joaquín stepped toward the white van. Krepke ran up, gun drawn, and yelled, “Stop. You’re under arrest. I’m a federal officer.”

  “So are we,” the taller of the two men replied. “Put down that gun.”

  Joaquín reached over and pulled the gun from the waistband of the man in the plaid shirt. He pointed it directly at Dale Krepke and pulled the trigger. The young DEA man grabbed his stomach and fell to the ground, moaning.

  Jan stood transfixed. It was just like Miguel. A horrible replay of the day she’d watched Miguel bleed to death in the dust. But who wa
s this guy, and why was he here? And who were the big guys in the white van? They weren’t the people she expected to meet, but who—

  Joaquín strode toward the dying man, who sobbed and prayed as he clutched his bleeding stomach. He lowered the gun to the man’s temple, then fired off two more rounds. The head disappeared, replaced by a huge puddle of blood. The moans ceased.

  “You killed him,” Jan whispered. She was shaking badly and she wasn’t sure whether the moisture on her legs was sweat or urine.

  “What the hell—” The plaid-shirted man seemed to realize only belatedly that his gun had just killed a federal officer.

  “Get the fuck in the car, you stupid shit,” the other man yelled.

  Joaquín shrugged. “I do what I have to do,” he replied. “In my country such a man could not—”

  “In your country, you torture women and children. Get in the fucking car before I forget what I’m supposed to do with you, you piece of—”

  It came to Jan that the man she’d known as Joaquín Baltasar didn’t talk or act like a refugee from political persecution.

  “Who is he?” she asked in a small voice. “He’s not Joaquín, is he?”

  “Lady,” the man replied, “you don’t want to know who he is. This whole mess is going to take a hell of a lot of explaining in Washington.”

  The other man, having stashed “Joaquín” in the van, came over to Jan, a speculative look on his face. “I checked his ID,” he said. “DEA. This guy was after drugs, not illegals.”

  “Drugs,” the other man said with a self-satisfied smile. “That’ll work. This whole thing can go down as a bad drug bust, Cookie here can take the fall, and we can get Caña Dulce out of the country and into—”

  “Caña Dulce?” The name hit Jan in the stomach. Since going to work for the sanctuary movement, she’d learned more than she’d ever wanted to know about Central American politics. Caña Dulce, Sugar Cane, was the ironic nickname of a torturer notorious for his sadism even in a country where cruelty was an everyday occurrence.

  So the man they’d thought was Joaquín, the man they’d risked their lives to free, was really a torturer. How in hell had he been slipped into their sanctuary stream? Who had known about it, and how had—

  “You say word one about all this, Cookie,” the big man said, holding his gun to her chin, “and we—”

  “No, Cal,” the other man cut in. “We can’t rely on her to keep her mouth shut. There’s only one thing to do. When the Ohio state cops come out here and find Junior’s body over there, they’d better find hers too. Drug deal gone wrong. One dead fed and one dead dealer. Case closed.”

  Jan lifted her knee in the classic female defense move she’d learned in sixth grade and took off in a dead run toward Dale Krepke’s car. He’d left the motor running and the keys in the ignition. She tore away, tires squealing and gravel flying. She heard gunshots and knew they were aimed at her. But she also knew they’d have to get Caña Dulce out of there before any other law enforcement people showed up. They couldn’t afford to follow her.

  But could she afford to go back to Our Lady of Guadalupe? Could she expect that the truth she’d tell would be believed? Or would the government deny any knowledge of Caña Dulce, would the death of the mysterious drug cop be put on her tab?

  Anything that would happen to her would happen to Ron as well. They’d pull out their tired old conspiracy laws and wrap all of them up in a nice neat package and send her and Ron and Father Jerry to jail for a hell of a long time.

  She couldn’t do that to him. She headed the car south, driving along back roads so obscure they had no numbers to identify them. She ditched the car along the side and walked until she reached a gas station in a little town with a civil war memorial in the middle. She cadged a ride to Fremont and spent four hours in the bus station, waiting for the first bus to God-knew-where.

  As she sat on the hard bench in the tiny bus station, a tear rolled down her cheek. By now, Ron would know it had all gone sour. By now, he’d know she wasn’t coming back.

  Honeymoon City was far, far away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I want my life back.

  She had to pee. It was ten minutes until her break, when Teri from Housewares would step up and take the register. Her left hand swept the merch across the scanner and the green numbers lit up the console over her head.

  Anybody could do this job. Hell, they could train monkeys and pay them in ripe bananas. You didn’t even have to be able to add or subtract, just read the numbers on the console and make change accordingly.

  I want my life back.

  It had been so long since she’d had a life. Since she’d even considered the possibility of a life. Fourteen years down the drain and all she had to show for them was a series of low-paying jobs, a lot of drunken nights in cheap motels, and a head of hair destroyed by too many color changes.

  Way in the back of the bustle and noise, the chatter of customers, the wail of toddlers, the beeps and pings of machines, the canned music played an old Beatles tune.

  there are

  places

  I remember

  all my life

  Places like her hometown, which she hadn’t seen since that night in 1982 when she ran for her life. Places like Our Lady of Guadalupe, where she’d married Ron Jameson.

  She gave the customer a big smile and said, “Thanks for shopping at Wal-Mart.” Old Sam Walton would be proud of her.

  God, she had to pee. Where was Teri? She glanced up at the big clock behind the register. Five more minutes.

  She flashed a smile at the next customer, a wan young woman with a huge pregnant belly and a towheaded toddler in the seat of the wire shopping basket. “What a cute little boy,” she said, infusing her voice with an enthusiasm she didn’t really feel.

  If I’d had a life, would I have had a child?

  Not with Ron. Unless they could do some kind of medical miracle thing and extract his sperm and plant it in her belly like they did with cows.

  She hummed along with the Beatles.

  some are dead

  and

  some

  are

  living

  Kenny was dead. Ron was living. Or at least she assumed Ron was living. What if she went back only to find that he’d died?

  Two more minutes. The speaker’s words from last night’s AA meeting came back to her in startling clarity, almost as if she could see them on the green console: “We’re only as sick as our secrets.”

  Too many secrets. That was the trouble. That was why she couldn’t have her life back.

  But what if she told the secrets? What if she stopped running, stopped hiding, and went back? Would she go to jail? Maybe. But maybe not, if she told all the truth, all the secrets.

  A hand tapped her shoulder. She froze, then turned to see Teri holding her money tray, ready to take register four so Jan could go on break.

  Jan flashed a grateful smile and rushed to the Ladies. She used the toilet, then stood in front of the mirror as she washed her hands in the ugly yellow soap.

  I want my life back.

  She took off her royal-blue smock, laid it carefully on the little bench in the anteroom, and went to her locker. She took her purse and walked out of the store into the Kansas sunshine, taking her first steps homeward.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tarky smiled. It was the hard, bright smile of anger. A smile like a knife, slicing through Wes’s hot fury.

  Tarky had always been the spider to Wes’s glittering butterfly. Tark was the sinister, quiet creature sitting inside the intricate web, waiting for a victim to enmesh itself in sticky strands.

  “You know, John Wesley,” he said in a tone of total unconcern, “that line’s getting a little tired. Every time you hit a bump in the road, you try to fire me. I’m—”

  “A bump in the road?” Blood suffused Wes’s face; I began to worry that a stroke was on the way. “I just learned that I supposedly took money fro
m people making bogus airplane parts and you call that a bump in the road?”

  Tarky held up a hand. “Wait a second, Wes. I can explain.”

  “I can explain, too, Tark. You ran short of money to pay off the loan sharks so you sold your most valuable possession—my name. You made some goddamn phone call quashing some goddamn investigation I never even heard about, and now I’m going to spend the rest of this campaign explaining it.”

  Neither man seemed to care that I was in the room. They were both enraged, Wes in a loud and Tarky in a quiet way.

  Wes shook his head. “I can’t afford this, Tark. I was kicked out of the state house, remember? This is my last big chance. If I lose this one, the party won’t even bother putting me up for city council.” He ran his fingers through his carefully moussed and sprayed hair.

  “I gotta cut you loose, Tark. The only thing that’s going to give me any credibility is standing up there and saying I didn’t know what my campaign manager was doing. The voters may not believe it, and the press sure as hell won’t believe it, but it’s all I’ve got. I mean it this time, Tark.”

  “No, you don’t.” The cigar shifted from one side of Tarky’s mouth to the other. I caught a glimpse of brown-stained lower teeth. “You don’t mean it, Wes. You and I have been together too long. You need me.”

  Wes let out a long sigh. He reached up and loosened his tie, letting it hang from his neck like a striped noose. He shook his head. “No,” he said in a soft, deadly tone. “No, I don’t. Not anymore. I know all I need to know about winning elections. I can hire another campaign manager. What I can’t do is keep you on and win this election.”

  Tarky sat absolutely still. He seemed to shrink into the chair. In the dim light of the skybox, his dark skin looked sallow.

  “Wes, you know nobody’s ever going to hire me if you let me go.” The tone was uninflected, but there was a great sadness underneath it precisely because Tarky was trying so hard not to beg.

  “You’ve got more to worry about than that, Tark. If you used campaign contributions to pay off gambling debts, you could face indictment.” Wes’s tone was apologetic, as though he was pointing out that his friend had egg on his tie.