Illegal

by Paul Levine

  Payne saw a Hispanic man and a young boy carrying fishing poles along a rocky beach. Were there any fish still alive in this cesspool? Payne pulled the Lexus into a diner across the street from the lake. The orange fireball of the sun was just sizzling out of the water. Payne couldn't help but think of fried eggs. He awakened Tino and asked if he wanted some breakfast.

  Tino rubbed his eyes, yawned, and said, "If you're paying, Himmy, I'm eating."

  TWENTY-NINE

  The cop was staring at them, Payne decided. An Imperial County sheriff's deputy. His black-and-white parked in the diner lot. The cop was eating grits and French toast.

  Okay, relax. The cop's staring at us because we're the only other customers.

  Payne was beginning to think he didn't make a very good fugitive. He looked guilty just eating breakfast.

  Tino drowned his pancakes and bacon in gloppy syrup. Payne stuck with a plain omelette, coffee, and dry toast.

  The deputy looked up from his own plate. Young guy. Chunky, with a thick neck, his cheeks and nose sunburned, but pale around the eyes from his sunglasses. The waitress, a tired high school girl wearing no makeup, approached the cop's table. "Harley, you want some more coffee?"

  The cop raised his cup and nodded. His gaze drifted back to Payne, who looked down and chewed his toast.

  "So, Himmy. Why are you divorced from that chica caliente?"

  "None of your business."

  "You cheat on her?"

  "Never."

  "Beat her up?"

  "Of course not."

  "You a drogadicto or alcoholico?"

  "Give me a break, kid."

  "So how come she dumped you?"

  "How do you know I didn't divorce her?"

  Tino's laugh was hearty and unself-conscious. A boy's laugh. Adam's laugh.

  "I wasn't there for her when she needed me," Payne heard himself confess.

  "Where were you, vato?"

  "I was there but not really there. I didn't open up. Didn't give enough." Payne shot a look at the boy. "You don't understand, do you?" Tino shrugged. "Just loving somebody isn't enough. You have to dig deep inside yourself and bare everything, no matter how painful."

  "Then you can give enough?"

  "Then you can bond, and each person gives to the other. It's simple math. Love equals feelings plus action. You may not know it, but that's what you're doing for your mother."

  Tino forked a syrupy chunk of pancakes. "I think I get it, vato." They ate in silence. Then Tino pulled an iPod from his pocket and put on the earbuds. "Where'd you get that?" Tino pretended he couldn't hear. Payne repeated the question, doubling the decibels. Tino unplugged one earbud. "Borrowed it." His tone saying, "Don't bother me, man."

  "Who from?"

  " El boxeador with the big mouth."

  "Quinn? Cullen Quinn lent you his iPod?"

  "He didn't say no. 'Course, he was sleeping."

  "You sneaked into their bedroom?"

  "After I went to the toilet."

  "Shit. What else did you take?"

  " Nada. I swear on Saint Teresa."

  The boy slipped the earbud back in, listened a moment, and sang off-key, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.?Que caca! "

  "The Carpenters. That'd be Quinn."

  Several yards away, the deputy patted his mouth with a napkin, stood, and hitched up his belt, loaded down with a gun, ammo, radio, flashlight, and other doodads.

  The deputy sidled over to their table. His name tag read, "H. Dixon." "Morning, folks."

  "Good morning, Deputy Dixon," Payne said, cheerfully. Just like picking a jury, using the man's name. A sign of friendliness.

  "You're not from around here, are you?"

  "Hope that's not a crime." Smiling as he said it.

  "Nope. We love tourists." The cop paused a beat. "Medium rare."

  Payne figured he should laugh, so he did.

  "What's with your T-shirt?" The cop nodded his sunburned face toward the steroid-pumped skull of Barry Bonds.

  "My Jose Canseco shirt was dirty."

  "You're kind of a wise guy, aren't you?"

  "As long as that's not a crime, either."

  The cop turned to Tino, who'd kept his head down, forking pancakes into his mouth. "What's your name, son?"

  Tino kept eating.

  "C'mon now, chico. You know your name, doncha?"

  Tino pulled out the earbuds. "Harry Potter."

  "He's such a joker." Payne kicked the kid under the table.

  Dixon kept his eyes on Tino. "Well, you have a good day, Harry." He put on his hat and nodded to Payne. "You drive real careful now, sir. We've lost tourists in some hellish accidents lately."

  Payne watched the deputy walk out the front door.

  Heading toward his cruiser, the cop stopped alongside the Lexus. Then he walked a full 360 degrees around the vehicle, as if sizing it up on a dealer's lot. Or maybe memorizing the license plate.

  Payne was quickly losing his appetite. "Finish your pancakes, kiddo. We gotta get going."

  THIRTY

  The Lexus was purring at 75 on an empty stretch of road, and Payne could not get Deputy Dixon out of his mind. Was life so boring that the desert cop had to hassle every stranger who came through town? Or did his gut tell him that the Anglo guy in the fuck-you T-shirt and the Hispanic kid with a smart mouth made odd traveling companions?

  Payne tried not to think about it as they blasted past saguaro cactus and mesquite trees and creosote bushes in the vast stretches of parched land. He swerved to avoid a raccoon waddling across the road. Turned on the radio. On a distant, scratchy station, Los Lobos were singing "The Road to Gila Bend."

  Payne checked the rearview mirror. Shit. A police car, maybe half a mile back. Was it Dixon? He eased his foot off the gas.

  Los Lobos turned to full-bore static, and Payne hit the dial. In a second, he heard a familiar baritone voice.

  "Every wetback holds a dagger pointed at the heart of America. I no longer live in California. I live in Mexifornia."

  "That's the guy who lent you his iPod," Payne told Tino.

  "What a cabron, " the boy said.

  "This isn't a melting pot," Cullen Quinn bellowed. "It's a cracked pot overflowing with illegals."

  "That idiota talking about me?"

  "If the federal government can't stop the illegals, what about us?" Quinn ranted. "The citizenry. What about the good folks who've formed well-armed militias under the Second Amendment? If a burglar breaks into your home, you can shoot him. How about aliens sneaking into our country? Should we start selling hunting licenses?"

  "I don't think he got enough sleep last night," Payne said.

  "And you know who's to blame?" Quinn said, picking up steam. "Everyone who hires these lowlifes and freeloaders. Right here in California, we have the biggest employer of illegals in the country. I've called him out before, and I'll do it again."

  Simeon Rutledge, Payne knew. Quinn's favorite target.

  "It's fat cat Simeon Rutledge in the San Joaquin Valley. Rutledge Ranch and Farms, a quarter million acres of prime valley land. He hires thousands of illegals every year. What terrorists lurk among them? What diseases do they bring with them? Rutledge doesn't care, living in his mansion, thumbing his nose at the law."

  "Quinn needs new material. He's been beating this drum forever."

  Payne glanced again at his rearview mirror. The cop was still there, keeping the same distance.

  "Rutledge lures the wetbacks with promises of greenbacks. But you folks are the ones who pay when the illegals land in our hospitals and jails. And you foot the bill for their hordes of children in our public schools."

  "What an asshole," Tino said. "A real asqueroso."

  "We need to crack down on the employers as well as the illegals," Quinn continued. "Are you listening, Simeon Rutledge? I've challenged you to debate a dozen times, but all I hear from your lawyers is that you're too busy. 'Mr. Rutledge is a working man.' Yeah? Well, I've got anot
her term for it. 'Racketeer.' Why don't the feds bust you? Because you've bought off every politician from Sacramento to Washington. If I'm lying, sue me, Mr. Rutledge. Go on. Get your high-priced lawyers to sue me, you greedy S.O.B."

  Jimmy turned off the radio, looked back. The police car had picked up speed. It closed the distance, its blue bubble light flashing.

  THIRTY-ONE

  "I won't sue you, Quinn. But I sure as hell might kill you," Simeon Rutledge said.

  One hundred seventy-five miles north of the Burbank studio where Cullen Quinn was shouting into a microphone and three hundred miles from where Payne was driving, Rutledge straddled a sawhorse, sharpening the blade of a ranch implement called an "emasculator." As he listened to an old portable radio perched on the railing of a horse stall, his lips stretched into a slash as angry as a knife wound. "I'll strangle you with my bare hands."

  "Did I just hear you threaten Cullen Quinn's life?" Charles Whitehurst asked.

  "You gonna testify against me, White bread?" Rutledge laughed, hawked up some phlegm, and spit into a pile of straw.

  "As you well know, Simeon, the attorney-client privilege precludes me from ever testifying-"

  "Screw the privilege. If you ever turned on me, Charlie, you'd be singing soprano the rest of your life." Rutledge gestured with the two-bladed emasculator, ordinarily used to de-nut stallions, not shysters. "If a man called my granddad the names Quinn calls me, Granddad would have killed him without a second thought."

  "Ezekiel Rutledge's ways don't work anymore, Simeon."

  "Don't be too sure."

  "Jesus, Simeon. When are you going to stop trying to prove you're as tough as your grandfather?"

  Rutledge flashed his lawyer a look that stung like a bullwhip. "Ain't too many men I let talk to me like that."

  "I thought that's what you paid me for."

  Rutledge laughed, the sound of a boar crashing through a tangle of brush. "My granddaddy never would have hired you, Whitehurst. Wouldn't have understood your ways."

  A proud and defiant man, Ezekiel Rutledge had lost his Mississippi cotton plantation to the banks and the boll weevils before heading west to make his fortune in the 1930s. He had the foresight to hire Mexicans for his farmwork. Field hands who complained about working conditions were likely to be flogged or sent back home, sometimes sprawled over the back of a horse. Simeon Rutledge could still remember his grandfather explaining the economics of cotton farming.

  "We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them."

  No, you didn't amass a quarter million acres of prime farmland by being a gentleman or a limousine liberal. You blew up dams, poisoned neighbors' wells, horsewhipped union organizers, and occasionally shot government agents as trespassers.

  Then came Jeremiah Rutledge, Simeon's father, who nearly lost the farm. Jeremiah spent money on whores and booze and dice, and drove a sapphire blue Caddy convertible as if the devil were riding shotgun. Marriage and middle age slowed him from a gallop to a canter, and he eventually cleaned up. Remembering his own father's lessons, Jeremiah pushed competing farmers into foreclosure, paid off politicians, and diverted rivers without regard for the law, his neighbors, or the Ten Commandments.

  "I'm not trying to turn back the clock." Rutledge doused the blades of the emasculator with disinfectant. "I'd just like to find a way to shut Quinn up."

  "You've got bigger problems, Simeon."

  "If it's the migrants, we've dealt with that for years."

  "Not like this," Whitehurst insisted. "This time it's different."

  The two men were just outside the gelding stall in the main barn of Rutledge Ranch and Farms. Whitehurst had been Simeon Rutledge's lawyer for three decades and had gotten him out of numerous scrapes, from breaches of contract to paternity raps. But in recent years, as Whitehurst moved up in society circles, Rutledge felt his legal advice had gotten prettified and sissified. As if he no longer wanted mud on the Persian carpets of his fancy law office. Lately, Rutledge had been wishing his lawyer had the cojones of his stallion.

  Whitehurst had the trim physique of an aging squash player. Back in the Transamerica Building in San Francisco, his office walls proudly displayed parchment from Stanford and Harvard. When Whitehurst had walked into the barn today, he shot discreet glances downward. Checking his English brogues. You never knew when a wad of horseshit might get stuck in the threading of the hand-cut calfskin.

  In his dusty cowboy boots, Rutledge harbored no such fears. His appearance was far less refined. Rutledge thought he could pass for a longshoreman. Or a guy who slopped boiling tar on roofs. Or, with his short, bristly gray hair, a retired Marine Corps drill instructor. Wide shoulders, a thick chest that strained against the buttons of a dirty denim work shirt. His skin was the texture of tree bark and sun-baked the color of tea. Hands thickened with calluses. Knuckles like walnut shells from wrestling steers and shoveling shit and punching out big-mouthed bastards in bars from Fresno to the Mexican border.

  Whitehurst had dropped in by helicopter, and Rutledge would end up paying for the charter service as well as $800 per hour for his lawyer's gloomy tidings. The call setting up the meeting had been cryptic. They couldn't speak on the phone. One way to jack up the bill, Rutledge knew, was to predict an apocalyptic event of biblical proportions, which could be avoided only by the skills of your London-tailored savior.

  Rutledge was barely curious about what ill winds brought Whitehurst to the ranch. He was too old and too rich and too ornery to give a double damn about whatever his lawyer was toting in his green alligator briefcase. If the I.R.S. or D.H.C. or I.C.E. or any other bureaucratic bull slingers were after him, well, let them take their best shot. As for Whitehurst and all his drama, let him cool his heels. Preferably in horseshit.

  Rutledge was not clueless as to the goings-on in Washington. He read the newspapers and even watched that twitchy woman Katie Couric on TV once in a while. The failed immigration legislation the year before had brought the weasels out of their holes, screaming hate at illegals. The Department of Homeland Security was under pressure to do something-anything-to close what was essentially an open border with Mexico. Not good news for the man who employed thousands of migrants in the Central Valley, some for just a few weeks during harvest season, some full-time.

  Rutledge had seen these waves of nativism come and go. His father had hired Mexicans legally under the braceros program. Even now, Simeon Rutledge employed some documented aliens as guest workers, but the numbers were limited by law, and the paperwork took forever. He didn't see any difference between a Mexican with papers and one without. He paid decent wages and provided the best working conditions he could and still make a profit. He admired the courage of the men and women who risked death to come north and look for honest work. He couldn't understand why Europeans who braved an Atlantic crossing in search of a better life should be held in higher regard than Mexicans who crossed the desert last week, pursuing the same dream.

  Big mouths like Quinn and the fear-mongering politicians didn't understand crap. Farmers always faced ruin. The weather was either too hot or too cold. Too much rain or too little. Not enough workers when you needed them, and too many when there was nothing to do. Market prices tumbled without warning. Just now, almond prices were in the crapper, thanks to all those Hollywood health nuts buying acreage and planting trees.

  Sure, the government was a threat, but nothing compared to a flooded field or a February frost. So, just because his lawyer showed up with a brow as furrowed as a lettuce field, Rutledge wasn't going to alter the day's schedule, which included castrating a stallion who'd been raising hell in the east pasture.

  "So what should I do about Quinn, Counselor? Sue him, shoot him, or debate the damn fool on the radio?" Rutledge scratched at his bushy mustache with a knuckle. The whiskers hid a divot in his upper lip, a reminder of a bar fight and a broken beer bottle forty years earlier.

  "Things the way they are, I'd prefer you kept a low profile, Simeon."

&nbs
p; "And just how are things?"

  "There's a team in the Justice Department working full time on the investigation," Whitehurst said. "It's called 'Operation New River.' But it might as well be called 'Operation Rutledge.' The feds have targeted you for-"

  The barn door opened, and both men were blinded an instant by the blazing sunlight.

  "Hold on, Whitebread." All Rutledge could see was the silhouette of a huge horse. A frothy-tailed, rambunctious white stallion who'd been terrorizing the mares. It was time to settle him down.

  "I'm gonna de-nut White Lightning," Rutledge said, brandishing the shiny steel emasculator. "Then you can tell me why I should crap my pants over some bureaucrats with fat briefcases and skinny ties."

  THIRTY-TWO

  Payne pulled the Lexus to the berm, and the Imperial County sheriff's cruiser pulled up behind him.

  "It's the dude from the diner," Payne said, looking into his side mirror.

  "We ain't done nothing wrong," Tino said.

  "Maybe so, but let me do the talking."

  Payne watched as Deputy Dixon spoke into his radio, then stepped out of the cruiser. He walked slowly toward them, a purposeful, heavyset young man in reflective sunglasses.

  Payne zipped the window down and sang out, cheerfully, "Hey, there, Officer. We meet again."

  For a moment, no one spoke as an open-bed truck trundled north, a dozen Hispanic men in work clothes huddled in the back. A cyclone of dust swirled across the highway, oily fumes in its wake. Watching the truck pass, Dixon said, "Temporary work permits. Otherwise, the beaners would be hiding under tarps."

  Beaners, Payne thought. Not a good sign.