He said nothing. He just stared.
The time in prison had only strengthened my resolve to quit the business entirely and return home as quickly as I could. While in the cell, my only reprieve from constant tedium had been thoughts of going to Albuquerque with Lonnie. Soon as I walked through the door, never feeling happier to see her, I told her we were leaving as soon as our stuff was packed. I had to settle her down because she was frantic. She kept hugging me and repeating, “Don’t ever do that, call me, tell me what’s going on, I would have taken you money!” I told her there was no way of communicating with her and I apologized and also to look on the bright side of things, we still had our money that we had saved up. She hugged and kissed me, suddenly scared that something might happen to ruin all our plans. While we packed she kept cursing Galvan. I kissed her on the mouth and set out to get some packing boxes.
Marcos and I had a last meal at the café on Main Street. He’d given me his address and phone number and was doing all he could to keep our farewell from being solemn or emotional. He promised to be best man at our wedding. I told him he was the best friend I had ever had and I would call him as soon as we got our house. We recounted the crazy times: our first meeting on the beach in San Diego, two years ago, the party girls, the jail, and La Zona. He’d hidden weed in the false bottom of his trunk and he had his cut of the money to buy himself that dream cabin in the mountains and live the life he always wanted—hunting, fishing, and hiking in the woods in upstate Michigan. I had to keep myself together because I didn’t want to let him go. I managed a smile and walked him out and watched him drive off, burning rubber down the street, as if to say, We did it, brother, we did it! I never saw him after that, but I’m pretty sure he stayed in the Michigan backcountry to hunt and fish.
When I got back to the pad, Rick, Carey’s roommate, had come over to help us load the truck. Carey hadn’t really talked about him much except to say they were close friends. He wore polished combat boots, jeans, and a muscle shirt. After getting the heavy stuff packed, he said Carey had invited us over for a glass of wine. I still had a lot of things to do but we drove to Rick and Carey’s trailer the next day, in the evening. I figured I owed Carey a visit because he’d always been on call, ready to drive at a moment’s notice to San Diego or do pickups.
I was eager to leave, hardly able to contain my excitement of going home with Lonnie and money. But leaving made me anxious about a whole new set of problems. Things didn’t feel right. There was an unsettling stirring in the air that I picked up when going out for boxes. Maybe it was seeing the sheriff at the post office when I went in to buy packing tape, or the siren I’d heard last night, or the unmarked DEA cars gathered in the motel parking lot. It was probably just my jittery nerves. There was also the unresolved anxiety of seeing Theresa again. And what about my mother? Would it work out when I moved my father in with us? I was also planning to see Grandma and Santiago and help them out. I convinced myself that there was nothing weird or menacing about the guy in the suit who had slowed his car to point at me. He wasn’t pointing at me but at another person on the sidewalk. The jeep that followed me a few blocks before turning off was not tailing me, it was just going on its own business. There was no one monitoring me in the grocery aisle when I was buying groceries for the road. I had to let go of my paranoia. After everything was packed and ready for our departure, a few glasses of wine were just what I needed to relax.
Lonnie and I sat in Carey’s kitchen, sipping wine and talking. Someone knocked, and Carey’s roommate, Rick, came out of the back bedroom. Through a curtain that partitioned off the living room, I could hear Rick and a man whispering. I also heard movement in the bushes outside.
Something was wrong.
“What’s up?” I asked
“Selling to a customer,” Carey said. “It’s okay.”
I went into the living room. Rick was weighing out an ounce of heroin for the guy.
“Do it when we’re not here,” I said.
“Everything’s cool; this is Wade.” Rick smiled.
“Bullshit. The guy’s a narc!”
“Carey, tell your buddy to chill his wheels,” Rick said.
“What’s up?” Carey asked.
“Get me a pistol,” I said. “This guy’s not leaving here.”
“What?” Carey said.
“He’s a narc. I know it.”
“That’s crazy, I’ve known him for years,” Rick lied.
“You’re a fucking narc!” I hissed at the guy and grabbed him by his shirt and shoved him against the wall. My whole life was slipping out of my grasp. In a moment’s time, everything spun out of control. My plans, future, dreams collided with the immediate reality, a smoldering wreck.
“I told you I know him!” Rick lied again.
“He’s a narc,” I repeated.
“I have the money in my car. I’m outa here,” the narc said.
They walked out.
I stood in the frame of the open door and watched them go toward a car under a streetlight. Carey was behind me, with a pistol. Lonnie sat at the table, her eyes wide with fright.
I saw the narc open the truck and the tip of a rifle barrel rising. The narc’s voice shattered the silence.
“This is a bust! Federal agents!”
Screaming, Rick hit the ground, begging, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”
The sky and the grounds lit up like midday, with spotlights from the air and the ground. From cars, bushes, trees, and the air, they opened fire. Jeeps, helicopters, and agents’ cars whirled around the trailer.
I turned and yelled, “Get down, Lonnie!” She crouched in a corner on the floor.
I was in the doorway and I leaped out onto the ground, zigzagging and rolling as bullets bit the dust and gouged the trailer’s tin siding. Carey returned fire. My ears burned with a stinging pain, and blood reddened my right side from head to waist. A disembodied arm still clutching a pistol flew by. It belonged to an agent who had crept behind me with the intent of executing me; he was aiming behind me to shoot me in the head when Carey blasted him, tearing his arm off.
It was all-out war. Except there was only one of us returning fire, and scores of FBI sharpshooters raining bullets on us.
I couldn’t hear anything, I only saw the bullets ripping the dirt around my feet. I raced into an orchard at the side of the trailer. Agents pursued me. Adrenaline exploding in me, I tore my white T-shirt away, kicked my cowboy boots off, and bolted through the orchard.
Bullets zinged in branches and spattered the trunks of trees.
Gunfire paused and frenzied voices cried out. They had them. I shot a glance over my shoulder to measure the distance between me and the pursuing agents.
I reached the end of the orchard and climbed over a cinder-block fence topped with barb wire. The thorns pierced my palms and raked my stomach. I was bleeding as if mauled by a tiger.
On the other side, I was equally as startled as the old woman who was standing there, clutching her nightgown and staring up at the hovering helicopter, its strobe lights sweeping the area.
“It’s okay,” I said, and ran through her yard and into a field with a warehouse. On one side of the warehouse was a pile of old lumber. I crawled into it and piled planks over me. I would wait here for an opportunity to cross the road.
A police car pulled within a foot me. A policeman got out, his black boots inches from my face, the engine exhaust and heat stifling me.
“I don’t see a thing here. Make sure them cars stay close together. He ain’t gonna cross the road,” he said into the mike, and drove off.
Unaware that I dozed off, I was woken later by headlights. I had thrown the boards off in my sleep.
“What the hell happened to you?” a man said, standing by his headlights. I couldn’t see his face.
I stood.
He was a watchman, making the rounds.
“I got beat up at a party,” I said lamely.
“Need a ride?”
&n
bsp; I directed him to my house. The cops must’ve known him, because on the way we passed freely through a roadblock.
“Turn here,” I said. “Stop.”
“In the middle of the—?”
But I was gone, darting in and out of the palm tree grove. I guessed the driver had given the cops a sign.
Instead of going into my house, I jumped the wall of the vacant house next door. No sooner had my feet landed on the backyard grass than a swarm of police and agents converged on my house with weapons drawn and bullhorns roaring orders to surrender.
I watched the whole scene: bullets shredding the house, battering ram shattering the door. They searched what was left of the house and left.
The back door of the vacant house was open. I went in to rest a bit on the couch. I fell asleep, then was awakened by a voice talking to another neighbor. A man’s hand was on the doorknob, the door an inch open, and I crept off the couch and snuck out the back before the man came in.
I crawled on my belly to the road and stood up and walked as if everything was normal. The two on the porch stared but said nothing.
About thirty yards up I paused at the ditch to look back and saw them talking again. I sprinted down the ditch to Billy’s house. Billy was a long-haired hippy who sampled our weed shipments and sold small quantities to friends in the area. He showed me the headlines and read me an article about how I was a drug kingpin, now with a felony warrant. A reward was being offered to anyone with information leading to my capture. Of the many lies it contained, it claimed that I had tried to murder an FBI agent. One of them had been shot and seriously wounded and was in the hospital. I was considered armed and dangerous. Lonnie, Carey, and Rick had been caught. Billy told me the area was swarming with agents. I called my sister and told her I couldn’t explain the details, but my life was in great danger. She had to come get me right away. Billy stashed me until she arrived a day later. We made it through the roadblocks and all the way to Albuquerque with me hiding under the backseat of her Bronco. In the darkness, with the driveshaft spinning next to my ear, the tires sizzling on asphalt, I was in shock. My ears had a ringing buzz that wouldn’t go away. Everything had blown up. One moment my girl and I were having wine with a friend, and the next I was a fugitive with an attempted murder rap. I tried to place things in order, but my mind was a kaleidoscope of lights and gun blasts and terror, and my heart raced wildly. My peaceful dream had exploded in a convulsion of death and destruction. I was supposed to be driving this road with Lonnie to get married and settle down and prove to everyone how I had made it and how wrong they were about me.
The day after I got to Albuquerque, I called a lawyer, who checked on what the cops had. I was shattered by the news that the FBI had issued an all points bulletin for my arrest. I felt trapped. I thought briefly of fleeing to Mexico or Canada, but I didn’t even have money for coffee, so I decided to turn myself in. First, though, I hot-wired a ’63 Impala from the downtown municipal parking lot and drove northeast out of Albuqueque to the Sandia Mountains. I was petrified with fear and needed some time to drive and think. Being in the mountains gave me the illusion that everything was going to turn out all right.
By the time I reached Sandia Peak it was night. The sky was cold and brilliant and the air pungent with pines and chilled granite. I needed to be out here. This was as close as I’d ever come to believing in God. I’d prayed for salvation before but I wasn’t praying for salvation this time. I couldn’t bring myself to kneel on the ground and talk to God, so I sat on a boulder and looked up and awkwardly pleaded with him to set things straight. Looking down at the valley of lights, I gazed at the general area where my mother’s house lay. Her maid would be washing supper dishes now. My mom would be preparing her kids for bed, reading stories to them, kissing them good night.
In the other direction, I looked to where my brother and father and I had lived in a small gardener’s shack behind Mrs. Larazola’s red-brick Victorian. I thought, If only I had one more chance to make it right again. Just one more chance to take it all back and make it the way it was. I could cope with my father’s alcoholism, my mother’s abandonment, my brother’s violence toward me, my sister’s indifference.
Farther south was Estancia, a handful of glimmering beads in a sea of black. I knew Grandma was kneeling at her cot and praying for me. Prayers might help others but not me. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with life on these terms. With remorse, I recalled the warning Lonnie’s father gave her: Don’t go with him, you’ll end up in trouble. He was right; she was in jail with Carey and Rick. I should have known better than to take her with me. I was on the verge of being gunned down in the streets like a dog. Now everybody could point and say, I knew it. I told you. He’s no good. He’s nothing but a criminal. It hurt to admit they were right. Still, I wanted to explain to someone that it was all a mistake. All I ever wanted was to have what others had. I didn’t want sympathy or pity. I just wanted a fair go at the things they had. But to get those opportunities, I had to go outside the law. Now I just wanted peace.
I asked God that if he was going to let me die, let it come quickly and without suffering. I’d had enough. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve my life, but I’d done the best I could with what I had. I raised my head to the moon and wondered if my grandfather was watching me from heaven. Looking up at the stars, I wished he could tell me what to do. I missed him, missed his Indio roots and the Indio culture that offered kindness and understanding. I wished I knew how to survive in the woods like Marcos. I wanted to take off across the snow and lose myself in the forest, moving over boulders and through trees, my path illuminated by the moonlight. The sad fact was that there was nothing to keep me in society—no family, no friends, nothing at all. I was utterly alone.
FIVE
I had been extradited from New Mexico and was in the Yuma County Jail. I had seen the court counselor from Galvan’s parties, a two-bit hustler who sold Galvan information from trial transcripts. He let me use the jail phone to call my sister in Albuquerque. A criminal defense attorney specializing in drug cases had agreed to represent me if I could pay the fifty-dollar fare to fly him in, and I was calling to borrow the money from Martina. It was strange to hear her kids quarreling in the background, accompanied by Saturday morning TV cartoons, slamming pans, and Martina’s voice saying the pancakes were almost ready. Behind me, in the jail, other life sounds echoed—curses, banging, pissed-off convicts hollering, and guards barking orders into their crackling walkietalkies. Our worlds were galaxies apart. Between her screams at little Chris to get ready for soccer practice and to order Chad and Cindy to get dressed, I asked if she could lend me fifty bucks. It seemed like such an insignificant request at her end of the phone, but from mine it was life or death. She threw the phone down and slapped one of the kids, who started crying. “Don’t you start that! Wipe those tears and pick up those clothes!” It was a scene I knew well. Every holiday I would drop by for dinner and then take them to the park or to play pinball at a burger joint. My visits were rare, but enough to keep my relationship as their uncle intact.
I expected her to lend me the money. When she said no, I wanted to beg her to reconsider but was too proud. I realized that my mother had already succeeded in turning Martina against me. I felt bitter because I’d always done things for her. When she and Chris had married, they’d rented a cockroach trailer at Dead Man’s Corner, in Southside barrio. Mieyo and I would push Chris’s junker on the cold mornings to get it started and helped them out as much as we could until Chris got into the Carpenters’ Union. Eventually, with Chris’s GI Bill, they’d bought their first house close to my mother’s. When Chris had been promoted to journeyman carpenter, it doubled his salary and they’d purchased a small apartment complex and bought two new cars. That’s why I couldn’t believe it when she said no. I knew that cops scared her and thought maybe she was afraid that she was helping me escape, or that lending me money was illegal. But it was more than that. It had been four months s
ince I had last seen her, and she was much more guarded and wary of me now. She’d been hanging around our mother, and Mother’s rejection of me was rubbing off on her. Since Martina’s insular white middle-class life had no room for problems like me, being loyal to that white world meant turning her back on me and believing my mother and the Feds, who accused me of being a dangerous criminal. She went into labored apologies about how bills had to be paid on time, and how they were barely making ends meet. I cut her short by saying I had to go; it was okay. I was staring at the phone wondering who to call next when the counselor came up behind me and took me into his office.
“How’d it go?” He wore a gold watch, tassel loafers, gold neck chain, new clothes. Galvan was paying him well.
“I’ll be out in no time,” I forced myself to say.
“That’s good. Lonnie told me to give you this.” He opened a drawer, took out a letter, and tossed it toward me on his desk.
“Can you read it to me?” I stared out the barred window as he read how Lonnie was sorry for the way things turned out. No matter what it took, Carey had promised to get her out. He’d written the judge on her behalf, blaming himself and agreeing to do her time. They’d found my wallet in her purse, with my driver’s license in it, and that was how they knew who I was. She launched into how sorry she was and how she still cared about me, but during the time I’d been in jail in Mexico, she and Carey had fallen in love. It wasn’t on purpose; Carey made her feel safe and loved, especially when she doubted that she’d ever see me again. He’d called her every day, put money in her account, and consoled her in the visiting room. They had started by holding hands, then embracing, and finally kissing. Things happen, she wrote. Please don’t be mad at me.
There was a discomforting pause. After a while the counselor said smugly, “You want a little blast to pick you up?” He laid a line of cocaine on his desk and snorted half of it. He offered me the straw and I shook my head no. He did the rest.
A Place to Stand Page 10
