Illegal

by Paul Levine

  The wise guy was Detective Eugene Rigney. A pair of plainclothes buddies with him, heading for the restaurant.

  Payne didn't think about what he did next. He just did it. Leapt at Rigney, wrapped both hands around his neck, knocked him back into the restaurant window, the glass shuddering.

  Payne heard himself screaming "bastard" and "suckered me" and "nothing left."

  "I got nothing left!"

  Heard Sharon, too, shouting at him to stop.

  Saw the startled look in Rigney's eyes, his hands clawing at Payne's fingers.

  Felt sparks flash down his spine, one of the other cops slugging him in the back of the neck. Then a punch to the kidneys that loosened Payne's grip and dropped him to the pavement. Then the hard-shoed kicks. His back. His gut. Inches from his nuts. Cops were great kickers.

  He curled into a ball, protecting the family jewels with one hand, his patched leg with the other.

  "Stop it!" Sharon shouted, pulling the men off him.

  Rigney was coughing and squawking, his voice hoarse. "You fucking loser. If your ex wasn't a cop, I'd toast your ass right here."

  "We oughta arrest him," one of his buddies said. "Assaulting an officer."

  Sharon got between the men and Payne, who was on all fours, struggling to get to one knee. "Go eat lunch, guys," she told them. "No harm, no foul."

  "No harm?" Payne said. "I think I have internal injuries."

  "Shut up, Atticus."

  Rigney spat on the sidewalk, muttered several multi-syllable words that all seemed to have "mother" in them, then led his pals inside.

  Sharon crouched down and cradled Payne's head in her palms. Her hands felt cool to the touch on his blazing cheeks. He thought he might cry.

  Jeez, what's wrong with me?

  When she spoke, her voice was as sweet as a lover's lament. "Jimmy, I want you to get some help."

  "I'll be fine once I piss some blood."

  "Not what I'm talking about. You know what I mean."

  "What?"

  She pulled his face to her chest, his chin resting between her breasts. He could stay here a while. Like forever.

  "Oh, Jimmy. Baby…"

  Oh, man. How long since she called him that, her voice soft as a feather? How long since her eyes shone like silk, the color of honey?

  "Jimmy. Listen to me. You can't see Adam tonight."

  "No?"

  "Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever."

  Pain, hot as lava, boiled through his body. He felt his chest tighten, his stomach knot. He wanted to scream at Sharon to stop.

  I don't want to hear this!

  "Adam's dead," she breathed into his ear. "He's been dead over a year. A Saturday morning on the P.C.H. You were driving the car."

  Payne's head throbbed. Boulders careened down a mountain slope, crashed into one another, shook the ground.

  Still cupping his face, she wouldn't let him look away, even as his eyes moistened. "Why torture yourself this way? Why torture me?"

  A boulder landed on top of him, crushing his skull, grinding him into dust.

  Tears tracked down her face. "Our little boy is gone, Jimmy. It doesn't mean we should forget him. But we can't pretend he's still here. Do you understand?"

  A tremble ran through his body.

  "Jimmy! Answer me!" Her voice sharpening, a finger poked in his eye.

  "I understand."

  "Do you? Because it's not enough just to say it."

  What is enough?

  Nothing he could think of.

  He'd visited therapists, studied the motel artwork on their walls, listened to their New Age music, all flutes and zithers. Answered their questions as they tiptoed around the stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Blah-blah-blah.

  "Do you have suicidal ideations?"

  "I have homicidal ideations."

  "You want to kill the other driver? The illegal alien."

  "Didn't matter he was illegal. He was drunk. And he ran."

  Another shrink touted the "healing placidity of Zen." Oddly, the guy had nervous, fluttering hands with nicotine-stained fingernails. He told Jimmy a parable about a man being chased by a tiger. The man leaps off a cliff and grabs a vine. Looking down, he sees another tiger, waiting to devour him. Terrified, the man notices a wild strawberry growing out of the cliff. He swings on the vine and plucks the strawberry from its bush.

  "Oh, how sweet it tasted!" the shrink burbled.

  "I see the tigers," Payne said. "But where's my fucking strawberry?"

  Now Sharon gently ran a hand through his hair. When she spoke, her voice was strained, a dam holding back a flood. "You have to accept our losing Adam. You have to move on, Jimmy. If you don't, you won't make it. You'll die."

  SEVENTEEN

  Payne drives a vintage Pontiac Firebird, gold as the setting sun. Just like Jim Rockford in the old TV series.

  Growling at 60 on a straight stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, north of the Palisades. Gray, misty morning, onshore breeze ripping at the sand, two fun boards lashed to the roof rack.

  Adam says something about the waves looking small and mushy, and if it's not a good day, maybe they can leave early and play catch at the park. Payne saying, fine with him, the water looking cold as steel.

  Nearing Malibu, Payne's eyes flick toward the beach, appraising the waves, watching gray terns scavenging the shorebreak.

  The blink of an eye, a flash of red to his right, the mere notion of a color, nothing more.

  A pickup truck runs the red light at Topanga Canyon, slashes at them from the passenger side. Never braking, just plowing into the Firebird.

  Payne instinctively reaches across Adam's chest to press him into his seat. Even belted, Adam is thrown sideways, his head whipping left and right, a rag doll, the crack and snap of vertebrae lost in the explosion of steel and glass. The Firebird catapults across the highway and smashes into a concrete barrier.

  Adam doesn't cry out. Just a whoosh of air from his lungs, a gurgling from his throat.

  Payne blinks to clear his eyes, hot rivulets of blood streaming from his scalp. He's pinned between his son and the driver's door, which itself is jammed against the concrete barrier. Then the pain. It hits Payne so hard he cannot isolate it, cannot tell torso from limb, but he is reasonably certain his right leg is twisted into an unnatural position. He cannot see his son, though he feels the dead weight of him.

  "Adam. Adam, can you hear me?"

  A man's voice from outside the driver's-side window. "Lo siento mucho."

  "My son," Payne says. "Can you see him? Is he okay?"

  The man leans through the open window. Leathery skin as creased as an old belt. The rank odor of tobacco and beer overladen with a fishy smell.

  "El chico. El chico.?Dios me perdone!"

  Suddenly, he is gone, his smell lingering. Footsteps, the man running along the pavement, the sound fading. Payne hears ocean swells, but when his eyes close, his mind pictures not the surf, but waves of blood pounding a black sand beach.

  EIGHTEEN

  Lying facedown under a palm tree, Tino's chest was on fire. Moments earlier, Rey and his two idiot friends had ripped off the duct tape, removed the bags of cocaine, and dumped him.

  Tino touched his chest, ran a finger around his back. Red and blistered, the tape shredding his skin. He felt dehydrated, disoriented, hungry. It seemed to be midday, the sun high in the sky. City noises. Traffic. Horns.

  Where am I? Where is my mother? What is this place?

  He got to his feet, blinked against the glare. Used hypodermic needles were scattered on the ground. The sound of splashing water. A large pond, a lake really, with a shooting fountain. He scrambled to its edge, drank from the water, which tasted of rust and algae. On a nearby path, two black women in nurses' uniforms stared at him, eyes alarmed, as if they'd just seen a mouse in the cupboard.

  He tied the drawstring of his torn sweatpants and got to his feet. Not far away, towering skyscrapers gleamed in the sunlight. Th
e tallest buildings he had ever seen. He must be in the United States, but where?

  He wanted to get moving. What if Rey and the other two came back? What if La Eme was looking for him? Or the Border Patrol?

  Stiff and aching, he walked along a path that ran past a row of palm trees. A filthy, bearded man in ragged clothes lay snoring alongside a metal shopping cart filled with junk. The man smelled of piss and vomit. Hands folded together on his chest like Tino's abuelo in the funeral home. Between the man's knobby fingers, an open bag of potato chips. Tino carefully pried the bag from the man's filthy hand. A grunt, a snort, and the man opened runny eyes that seemed to look in different directions.

  "Fucking little greaser!" The man reached for a broom handle under his cart and swung wildly.

  Tino ran.

  Wherever he was, it was a scarier place than La Rumorosa with those narcotraficantes. Running along a path, he saw a boathouse at the edge of the lake. A park, he realized. A park in the middle of a city. He came to an intersection of two busy streets and read the signs. Alvarado. Wilshire.

  He chose Wilshire. Ran past a sign for Westlake Avenue, another for Bonnie Brae. Kept running. Past big buildings and parking lots. Burlington. Union. Loma. Feeling stronger with each block flying by. Believing if he ran far enough and fast enough, he could find his mother. Knowing the foolishness of the thought almost before it was formed.

  He heard a noise overhead and looked up. A helicopter with police markings. So low and so loud he was certain it had come for him. The Border Patrol? Or the F.B.I.? They knew about the cocaine. He saw the markings on the helicopter: L.A.F.D.

  Los Angeles Fire Department.

  Los Angeles!

  The helicopter veered toward a huge building, hovered, then descended to its roof. A sign in front of the building: Good Samaritan Hospital.

  Tino remembered his mother reading him the story of the Good Samaritan from a Bible with pictures. Robbers attack a man walking along a road. They beat him and take his clothes and money. No one will stop and help the man. Someone from the Samaritan tribe comes along. He bandages the man's wounds, takes him to an inn, feeds him, and gives him money. And Jesus says that's how you get to live forever.

  A really nice story. Except the stuff from the Bible never happens in real life. In real life, if you're lying by the road, bleeding, someone comes along and steals your shoes.

  My Reeboks!

  Tino untied his laces, pulled off his right shoe, removed the insole. There was the crumpled card his mother had given him. "J. Atticus Payne, Esquire." A very important man. One of the biggest lawyers in Los Angeles.

  "If anything bad happens and I am not there, go see Mr. Payne."

  Tino studied the address. Delano Street. He had no idea how to get there. No money. No papers. But his mother had taught him to be brave.

  " You're my little valiente."

  He looked left. Looked right. Then he started walking.

  Cars went by, but few people were on the sidewalk. When he spotted an Anglo woman, he asked in English where he could find a bus station, but she stepped off the curb to avoid him.

  Two hours passed. The sleepless night began to take its toll. Fatigue crawled up his legs. Hunger gnawed at his gut.

  A police car rolled past. The cop eyed him, suspiciously. Tino fought the urge to run. The police car kept going.

  He stopped in front of a small, neat house and watched as a man with hands stained the color of carne asada fertilized a flower bed. The bed was filled with plants taller than Tino. Stems topped by purple and orange flowers shaped like birds' beaks.

  "Flor ave del paraiso," the gardener told him.

  Birds of paradise.

  Beautiful. Tino had seen them once before, surrounding the house of a rich family in Caborca.

  The gardener wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and offered cold water from a cooler. When Tino told him he was hungry but had no money, out came a chicken tortilla wrapped in foil. And then another. The gardener was from Loreto in Baja. He had been here seven years without papers, and that made Tino feel better. He showed the man the card of Mr. J. Atticus Payne, Esquire.

  "Van Nuys. I can tell you how to get there," the gardener said, proudly. "The subway station is within walking distance for a strong boy."

  "I didn't know there was a subway here."

  "Most gabachos do not know, either."

  The gardener gave him directions to the Wilshire-Vermont station, with instructions to ride to Universal City. There, he would take a bus to Van Nuys. The gardener could not tell him exactly which bus to take, but a smart boy can figure it out. Then he gave Tino money. Winking, he said there are no toll collectors on the subway, so save a dollar twenty-five and buy a Coca-Cola. Use the rest for the bus.

  Tino thanked the man and headed toward the subway station. Soon, he thought, he would be speaking to one of the most important lawyers in all of Los Angeles. A good man who had helped the poor mojados cooked in that trailer truck. As he walked, Tino grew more confident. J. Atticus Payne, he concluded, must truly be a Good Samaritan.

  NINETEEN

  Payne imagined swinging Adam's baseball bat.

  Smashing Manuel Garcia over the head. Crushing bone to splinters, tissue to mush. Luxuriating in each crack and squish. Reveling in the blood, feeling no more guilt than a kid stomping a grasshopper.

  But could he really do it? Thinking about killing was one thing. Watching the life seep out of a man was another. That was the debate raging inside him.

  Payne had left Sharon at the restaurant, her face pale with worry. She had buckled him into the front seat of his Lexus, as if he were a child, giving him a little peck on the cheek. A charity kiss, to be sure.

  His body aching from his run-in with the protect-and-serve crowd, Payne headed west on Wilshire. He had a notion about stopping at the La Brea Tar Pits. He used to take Adam to the museum there. All boys love dinosaurs and fossils. Adam would spend hours drawing pictures of the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, whose remains have been preserved in the tar.

  A few minutes into the drive, Payne saw a Home Depot, and by instinct, swung into the parking lot. Two dozen Hispanic men in dirty jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps squatted on their haunches or sat on the curb, smoking, talking, hoping for an honest day's work. Keenly appraising the shoppers exiting the store with lumber, plywood, paint. Offering their services in an eager Spanglish.

  "Buen trabajador."

  "Puedo arreglar todo bien rapido."

  "?Barato!"

  Not a green card in the bunch, of course. A good deal for the homeowner too scared to clean his own roof gutters, too cheap to pay a licensed contractor.

  The odds were great that Manuel Garcia wasn't within five hundred miles of here. But didn't Payne have to look, anyway?

  Garcia was the driver of the blazing red Dodge Ram truck. An SRT-10 with the 500 horsepower Viper engine. Not the rusted-out Chevy pickup you'd expect an illegal immigrant to drive. Garcia was a solid citizen… of Mexico. Without papers, he'd landed a job on a sardine boat on the Monterey docks. He stayed out of trouble, manned double shifts, and with overtime was paid more than most schoolteachers. He sent money home to his wife and kids. He made a down payment on the Ram truck three weeks before driving to L.A., when the sardine boat went into dry dock for maintenance.

  So it was by chance that, on a gray and misty Saturday morning fourteen months earlier, Jimmy and Adam Payne crossed paths with the hardworking and hard-drinking mojado. A man who would flee on foot from the crash, leaving behind his new truck and a dying boy.

  Eight weeks after Adam's funeral and one day after the cast came off his leg, Payne drove upstate and waited for the sardine boat to return to port. He stood on the dock, a copy of Garcia's driver's license photo in his pocket. He watched the boat, Fish Reaper, enter the harbor, a blizzard of cawing gulls tailing it. Garcia was not aboard. The crew hadn't seen him. The boat's skipper said he'd been a solid crewman, nimble with the nets. Never missed a
day's work. Never gave anyone any problems, not even when he put away a case of beer on a Sunday night. A clerk at the cannery said Garcia had not picked up his last paycheck.

  Payne drove inland and found Garcia's trailer in the little town of Spreckels.

  No one home.

  Payne broke the flimsy lock. The place clean, the air stuffy. Clothes folded. Small TV on a table of cinder blocks. Letters from his wife. Payne copied down the address from an envelope. The city of Oaxaca in Mexico.

  For the next month, Payne haunted the Parker Center downtown. Each day, he'd drop in, taking the homicide detectives to lunch, following up with tips, rumors, ideas. The police couldn't find Garcia. A friend in Homeland Security got Payne a meeting with the regional director of the Border Patrol. No record of Garcia coming in or going out.

  Payne carried Adam's aluminum baseball bat in his car. Each evening, when he should have been sitting home with Sharon, holding her, consoling her, he drove through the barrios of East L.A. One night, in Boyle Heights, he thought he saw Garcia walking out of a 7Eleven. Payne yanked the car into the parking lot and jumped out, waving the baseball bat. "Remember me, asshole? You killed my son!"

  The man froze, eyes blank with fear, as if Payne were insane. When he got close, Payne realized it wasn't Garcia. Didn't even look much like him. By this time, several bare-chested, tattooed young men in baggy pants had streamed out of the store. The gang known as K.A.M. Krazy Ass Mexicans. Payne jumped into his car and burned rubber, gunshots peppering his trunk.

  Payne figured Garcia had returned home to avoid arrest. He called local police in Oaxaca. No help.

  "I'm going to Mexico," he told Sharon three months after they had buried their son.

  "Why?"

  "To find Garcia."

  "And then what?"

  He didn't answer.

  She begged him not to go. She needed him. She sobbed, shoulders heaving, even after there were no more tears. Jimmy stayed.

  His grief formed its own universe, created its own gravity. Grief parched him, drained him of blood and filled him with dust. Grief encircled him like leather cinches on a madman, squeezing the breath from him. He was of no use to Sharon. Whatever she needed, he was unable to give.