Illegal

by Paul Levine

  Rent was cheap, and the place was close to the courthouse, bail bondsman's office, and the police station. The small backyard had been paved over to provide parking for three cars, even though many of Payne's clients arrived by bus, walking the last few blocks from the Van Nuys Civic Center.

  The shelves were lined with law books that Payne never read, the desk cluttered with mail never to be answered. Atop his first-generation fax machine, a single slice of pepperoni pizza looked alarmingly like a chunk of plasterboard with skin cancer. He tossed the envelope with the hundred-dollar bills into a desk drawer and opened a cabinet that was intended for litigation files but contained vodka, bourbon, Scotch, tequila, and coffee liqueur. Payne had not been much of a drinker until the accident. After his surgery, he sought relief from the pain by washing down Vicodin with white Russians.

  He contented himself now with some Maker's Mark, neat, in a dirty cup. He kicked some files off an old corduroy sofa and stretched out. He did not know what he would do in the morning, though he vaguely recollected that he had an eight a.m. hearing in Superior Court, just down the street.

  Exhaustion kicked in along with the bourbon. His eyes drifted closed, then opened, then descended again like balky garage doors. His last conscious thought was of Adam tossing a ball to him. The boy was rangy, all legs and elbows, with a rubbery arm. He could throw hard. Just like Payne at that age, fast but wild. With that thought, and the timeless echo of a leather ball smacking into the pocket of a finely oiled glove, Jimmy finally cruised into a restless sleep.

  ELEVEN

  El Tigre pulled the pickup truck off the highway, onto a dirt road west of La Rumorosa. Nothing for miles except dark canyons and sheer cliffs.

  Everyone piled out of the truck bed. Two of the campesinos from the south began urinating several feet away, the splashing audible. Barnyard animals, Marisol thought, so inconsiderate they cannot walk twenty feet to relieve themselves behind a cactus.

  She heard El Tigre screaming into his cell phone.

  "?Chingalo! One car? I told you, a van! Asshole! I got ten pollos."

  "What's happening?" Mirasol asked Rey, his leaden eyes hidden now behind sunglasses.

  "Stupid gabacho driver on other side only has one car," Rey said. "We got to make two trips across."

  Once again, Marisol tightened her grip on Tino's hand.

  After another explosion of Spanish curses, El Tigre clicked off the phone and, for the second time tonight, counted his passengers. Luckily, he had just enough fingers to complete the tabulation. "Five men, five women." He looked toward Tino. "I'm putting you with the men. Are you a good runner?"

  "The fastest in Caborca," Tino said.

  El Tigre showed his gold-toothed smile. "New plan. Women first."

  He explained his strategy as if he were Pancho Villa at the Battle of Chihuahua. He would take the women through the canyons and across the border to his idiot gabacho friend, who had a single car waiting. Then El Tigre would come back and lead the men down the same path. By the time they got across, the driver would have taken the women to a stash house near Calexico and returned to his hiding spot near the border. El Tigre would then take the five men-including Tino-to the same stash house. There would be no charge for El Tigre's extra effort.

  "It will all work out." He sounded pleased with his brilliant tactics.

  Marisol shook her head. "My son goes with me."

  He gave her a poisonous look. "The woman who asks for credit does not make the rules. By the time the second group gets to the border fence, the sun will be up, and we can be spotted. We may need to run."

  "I can run as fast as any man here," Marisol said.

  " Chingad. You will do as I say."

  She knew she had embarrassed El Tigre by arguing with him. Backed him into a corner. Now he had to save face. Still, she would not relent.

  "My son goes with me."

  His face colored."?Chinga to putas!"

  "If my son does not go, neither do I. Please give back our money."

  El Tigre's laugh was liquid, a toilet flushing. Then he shouted, "Rey!"

  The sleepy-eyed nephew seemed to wake up. He pulled the gun from his waistband and stuck it under Marisol's nose. "Shut up, woman."

  Tino leapt at Rey, knocked the gun to the ground, then pummeled him with a flurry of punches. The boy was skinny, but his long arms whirled like propellor blades, and several blows landed, breaking Rey's sunglasses. Off balance, Rey fell awkwardly into an ocotillo shrub, cursing in Spanish and English and maybe some words he just made up.

  El Tigre grabbed Tino by the back of his T-shirt, lifted him off his feet, and swung him against the side of the truck.

  "Don't touch my son!" Marisol flew at the man, tearing his hand away.

  A gunshot echoed off the canyon walls.

  Rey stood there, eyes wide, pupils dilated, gun pointing in the air. "We do what my uncle says, or I swear, I will kill someone tonight."

  "I'm not afraid of you, grifo, " Tino said.

  "Tino, quiet!" Marisol ordered.

  "Listen to your mother, pendejo, " Rey said. "You die out here, nobody gives a shit. Birds eat your eyeballs for breakfast and your balls for lunch. Out here, you're nothing but a grease spot in the sand."

  TWELVE

  They had walked two hours, down one canyon, and up another, El Tigre shoving Marisol every time she looked back over her shoulder.

  "The little bastard will be fine," he said.

  She had long dreamed of leaving Mexico. But not at the barrel of a gun. And not leaving her son behind. She wondered if the separation suited El Tigre's intentions.

  She could not run from the stash house until he returned with her son.

  "When we get to Calexico," El Tigre had told her, "you can take a bath and change your clothes and I will have your boy there in time for lunch. After dark, there will be a ride to Los Angeles. Between morning and evening, we will have some time together."

  Marisol wondered if there might not be something more pleasant to occupy her afternoon. Being bitten by a scorpion perhaps.

  "Bring my son to me," she said. "Then we shall see."

  He grunted like a pig rooting out a tasty morsel. In the dim light of the stars, she could not make out his expression, but in her imagination, he licked the saliva from his lips.

  They followed a rocky trail, the five women and their coyote. In the dark, it was a shadowy landscape of volcanic rocks and sand washes. Scrub oaks and greasewoods. In the distance, outlines of mountains formed the backdrop for the night sky. Marisol realized those mountains were in the United States. Part of the same mountains on this side of the border. The dirt would be the same, the rocks, too. And the people?

  We are human beings. We are all of one blood, are we not?

  The land leveled out as they neared the border. El Tigre shushed them, for sound carried great distances in the desert night. They were exposed here. Visible to border agents with infrared binoculars.

  El Tigre had boasted that he never used the same entrance point twice. Marisol hoped the man knew what he was doing. They were close enough to see the border fence, steel mesh twelve feet high topped by razor wire. No sounds but the crunch of their shoes and the hoot of owls.

  Marisol shortened her breaths as she neared the fence, as if her very exhalations might set off an alarm. El Tigre used wire cutters to make an opening, and within seconds, Marisol stood on the hard-baked earth of los Estados Unidos. It felt strangely anticlimactic. Certainly, there was no joy. Not with Tino left behind. But even when he got here, what would her feelings be? What would the future hold? The beginning of some grand adventure, the fulfillment of her father's dream? Or were greater catastrophes ahead?

  Lights flashed, and Marisol stiffened. Border Patrol?

  But then El Tigre shouted, "Ay! There's the gabacho now."

  Car headlights. Two more quick flashes. The car hidden in some pinyon trees several hundred yards from the fence. The women ran toward the headlights.
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br />   The car was old-very old-but clean. Orange with a white stripe, air scoops on the hood, and an engine growling like a predatory animal. Tino would probably know the name of the car. She did not, but a decal on its long hood had an illustration of a tornado and the word "Duster."

  Four women-two campesinas from the south, one Guatemalan, and the pregnant girl-squeezed into the backseat. El Tigre motioned Marisol into the front seat, where she was sandwiched between the two men. The driver was a long-haired, bearded young man in a baseball cap. He immediately slid his hand along Marisol's thigh before grabbing the floor-mounted gearshift.

  With the headlights off, the man gunned the engine, slipped the gearshift into first gear, and spun up the dirt road, and deeper into California.

  They had just pulled onto a paved road when Marisol heard the sirens.

  Blue lights flashing, two Ford Expeditions sped after them.

  "Shit! Border Patrol!" The driver stomped on the clutch, shifted gears, and floored the accelerator. The car fishtailed, then straightened, and Marisol was thrown against the seat.

  The next few minutes seemed to her to be one high-pitched scream. The actual screams of the four women in the backseat. The wail of the sirens. The shouts in Spanglish from left and right, the driver and El Tigre cursing at each other, arguing where to go.

  Marisol saw the arm of the old-fashioned speedometer, as it fluttered between 105 and 110. They would crash. She was sure of it. A tire would explode. They would careen off the road and into a boulder. Her head would fly through the windshield, and Tino would be left alone. She squeezed her eyes shut and chanted a prayer.

  "Protegeme de la muerte, y te llevare una rosa de Castilla, al Santuario de Tepeyac."

  "You are winning them!" El Tigre shouted in English. Marisol thinking he meant "losing them," as the two Border Patrol vehicles fell behind.

  "Don't matter none," the American driver said. "Bastards will have a chopper over us in a couple minutes."

  Barely slowing down, the Duster screeched off the asphalt and onto a gravel road that sloped upward and undulated through a series of rises and dips. Headlights still out, the car seemed to be a missile, launched into the night sky, headed toward some explosive crash landing.

  The driver tugged the wheel hard and skidded off the road, coming to rest between a line of manzanita bushes and a single mesquite tree. In front of them, the outline of a mountain appeared as a menacing tower set against the soft glow of the Milky Way.

  "Out! Everyone out!" the driver shouted.

  "?Aqui?" El Tigre asked, confused.

  "I'm on parole. Ain't gonna be stopped with a car full of greasers."

  "Where are we?" Marisol asked. "Where do we go?"

  "The trailhead." The driver pointed to a pile of railroad ties. Nothing but the darkness of the mountain beyond.

  "You cannot leave us here." Marisol imagined the horrific night. Lost on a mountain with un coyote estupido, whose only competence was probably as a rapist.

  "It don't look like it, but there's a good trail," the driver said. "You go up one side of the mountain, come down the other. You'll cross a creek and reach another trailhead, looks just like this one. I'll be there in the morning and take you to the stash house in Ocotillo."

  "Ocotillo?" Marisol said, fear creeping up her spine. "But we are going to Calexico."

  "Too much heat to go that far. Ocotillo's closer."

  "But my son. He will not know where I am."

  "Tough shit," the driver snapped. He gestured toward the women in the backseat. "Git out!?Vaya!?Vaya! "

  Marisol grabbed El Tigre by an arm. "Take me back! Take me to my son now."

  "There is no going back," he said glumly, staring at the looming mountain.

  They navigated by the light of the stars. No flashlights allowed. Border agents with rifles patrolled these mountains on horseback, El Tigre claimed. Citizen militias, too. Drunken men with guns. Scurrying on all fours up a steep path, she thought she saw a mountain lion. But maybe she imagined it.

  Minutes later, an animal howled in the darkness. Eerie, nearly human screams. A peasant Guatemalan woman crossed herself and chanted prayers. Claimed the animal was a chupacabra, the bloodsucking creature of myth.

  The endless, unknowable night, Marisol thought, had hardly begun.

  THIRTEEN

  Waiting in the canyon near the border, Tino watched Rey answer his cell phone. El Tigre calling. Rey listened a few seconds. Stomped in a circle. Shouted, "?Chingalo!?Chingalo!"

  Listened some more. "What am I supposed to do with them?"

  Two more "chingalos."

  "No time to babysit, Uncle. I got my own delivery to make."

  "Where's mi mami?" Tino demanded when Rey hung up.

  "Sucking a border agent's cock," Rey taunted him. "Now, shut up, chilito!"

  All my fault, Tino thought for the hundredth time. Blaming himself, for who else could he blame? Because of him, they had to run. He wanted to race through the canyons all the way to the border. Desperate to find his mother. Wanting to feel her arms around him.

  Rey wouldn't say what had happened. Just waved his pistol and screamed at Tino and the four men to get in the truck. They sped back to La Rumorosa along the same winding road, sliding through steep turns, Tino scraping his elbows in the cargo bed.

  Once back at the stone house, Rey grabbed a submachine gun-a Mac-10 Tino recognized from TV shows-and herded the four men into the house, locking them in a back room.

  "But you, chilito… " He waved the gun barrel toward Tino. "You are coming with us."

  Before Tino could answer, Rey swung the gun toward a small tree and fired a burst, nearly cutting the trunk in half. Rey's two friends-the morons he called "Mundo" and "Chuco"-laughed like donkeys. They all rapped knuckles and passed around a bottle of wine. Rey offered Tino a sip, but he shook his head, and all three brayed some more, calling him "lambiscon."

  "I'm no suck ass," Tino said, and they laughed some more.

  After several minutes of shooting the gun and drinking the wine, Rey grabbed Tino's backpack and yanked it open. Three T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, some socks. "Nothing but shit here, cabron. "

  Tino remained silent. Unwilling to show his fear, hoping they could not see his knees wobbling like a broken bicycle.

  Rey pulled out Tino's prized baseball glove. A Vinny Castilla model. Soft brown leather with an aroma better than fresh-baked bread. He had bought the glove with the money he earned delivering lunch to workers at his mother's job site.

  Rey smacked Tino across the face with the glove. Turned to his friends. "Ay! Mama's boy thinks he is a baseball player."

  He tossed the glove to Mundo, who tossed it to Chuco. All of them seemed to be around the same age. Nineteen or twenty. Shaved heads. Dirty clothes. Stinky bodies. Scratchy facial hair like grass trying to grow out of sand. Now all three pawed through Tino's belongings, mangy dogs at a garbage can.

  After finding nothing of interest other than the baseball glove, Rey ordered Tino to take off his shirt. Tino shook his head, and the two others grabbed him, stripped off the shirt, and pinned his arms behind his back.

  Mundo grabbed the chain around Tino's neck. Attached to the end was a clear plastic envelope, and inside, a photo of his mother. "Look, chilito still sucks his mother's tit."

  More laughs, all around.

  Rey disappeared into the house, while Mundo and Chuco pushed Tino to the ground. Mundo ripped Tino's sweatpants down to his knees. Tino squirmed and yelled, fearing they were perverts. He got one arm free and flailed at them. He would die fighting before he would let the filthy maricons soil him.

  Chuco pulled the sweatpants completely off, then took a knife to the material that enclosed the drawstring. When the cloth tore open, four twenty-dollar bills, rolled up tight, popped out. Tino had put the money there, just as El Tigre had advised, to keep it safe from thieves. Chuco grunted his pleasure and grabbed the bills. Mundo pinned Tino to the ground, the boy screaming, "Give it ba
ck! That's all I have!"

  Rey returned, straddled Tino, and placed a plastic bag filled with white powder on his chest. It took Tino a moment to figure out what was going on.?Cocaina! They were not perverts. They were drug traffickers.

  Rey wrapped a long strand of tape around Tino's chest, securing the bag in place. They flipped him and taped two more bags on his back.

  And they're making me their mule!

  Chuco and Mundo carried Tino, still struggling, onto the cargo bed of the truck, opened the toolbox, removed a false bottom, and placed him inside.

  "Me and my carnales, we're Eme, " Rey said.

  Mexican Mafia. Tino didn't believe it for a second. These guys were stupid peasants who sold drugs without kicking up a percentage to La Eme.

  "You got some work to do for us, chilito, " Rey continued. "And if you fuck it up, you're gonna get tagged and bagged." He slammed a piece of plywood into a slot, sealing off Tino.

  The plywood groaned above Tino's head, tools clattering into the upper half of the box to cover up the false bottom. Then, the click of a padlock. Silence. Tino was as alone as a corpse in a coffin. The only light seeped through tiny airholes drilled in the side of the box.

  He felt the fear close tight around his heart, fought against it, could not conquer it. But then he came to a realization that startled him, made him feel the passage from boyhood to manhood in one moment of flaming brilliance, as if from a shooting star. He cared for another person more than for himself. So he was not afraid to die. But he could not stand the thought of his mother's heartache if tonight he vanished from the face of the earth.

  FOURTEEN

  Jimmy Payne clawed through the cobwebs of sleep and awoke on the sofa in his office. His stomach felt as if he'd eaten the shells along with the oysters the night before. His mouth seemed to be full of burrs.