Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  Four paces one way, six paces the other.

  He stopped walking and tried to close his eyes, but the moment he nodded off, his thoughts drifted to that boxcar in Monterrey, to the smell of unwashed bodies and super-heated air, to that feeling of being buried alive. He had never been afraid of small spaces before that, but he often awoke at night now with the sense that someone had just stuck a plastic bag over his head and he couldn’t breathe. That’s what he felt at this minute. He was choking to death in this concrete tomb. It was worse than that time he jumped into the river in Esperanza to save Enrique’s little sister, Sucely. The water sucked them down to a dark place where they couldn’t tell rock from sky. It felt like La Llorona, the spirit who drowned her children, was holding tight to their legs. Sucely grabbed his neck, nearly sealing off his windpipe. But he managed to claw his way back to shore. He was thirteen at the time. So young. So strong. He wasn’t that strong anymore.

  Four paces one way, six paces the other.

  He thought of all the stupid shit he’d had to endure to get to this point. How the Mexican police boarded their buses and tried to trick people by saying, “amárrate las cintas”—the way Guatemalans say, “tie your shoelaces,” instead of the Mexican, “amárrate las agujetas.” It was like a kid’s game. If you moved, you were gone. If you forgot your fake birth date or the pretend place you were born, you were gone. If you were too bold or too scared, if you didn’t have enough bribe money on you, if you complained, if you allowed even a shred of common decency to invade your veins, it was over.

  And that was just to get to the border. Then it was the brutal desert crossing, the way you had to become an animal, always dodging helicopters, outrunning the big men in their uniforms with their gun belts and ATVs. The burning sun that boiled you from the inside out. Blackened your skin. Fried the soles of your shoes like you were walking across a hot griddle. You thought you had enough water on your back yet every time you ended up drinking your own urine through parched lips to stay alive. Then curling up in the pitch-black trunk of a super-heated sedan next to other rank-smelling people—you crushing them, them crushing you. Always feeling like you were going to die of suffocation or heatstroke. Some of the people crossing were little kids and young women. Rodrigo remembered the terror in their eyes, the way he felt like less of a man because he could do nothing to ease it.

  It peeled off a layer of your humanity. Even after you showered and changed into clean clothes, the smell of desperation never left. It stayed with you as you traveled from Arizona to Colorado, an English-language book in your hand, hoping that no one would actually speak to you. You didn’t have any money to buy food so you went a day and a half without. You didn’t have enough English to ask where a bathroom was so you held it in as long as you could—twenty hours if necessary. You were so afraid. So afraid. Better to pee your pants than chance speaking and getting deported. Every white face felt threatening. Every uniform made your blood pressure soar.

  By the time you arrived in a place like Lake Holly, the sight of a police car made you duck between buildings, your heart kicking up in your chest like you’d swallowed a fistful of hot peppers. All to get a job—any job. You’d shovel shit with your bare hands for five dollars an hour if somebody showed you the money. This wasn’t about making a fortune. This was about making it from one day to the next. It was lunacy. Sheer lunacy.

  The police took his shoelaces when they put him in this cell. The laces were so old, they fell apart when the officer unthreaded them from his boots. They would have taken his belt but he didn’t have one. When they took the laces, Rodrigo thought they were crazy. He had come this far—did they really think he would kill himself? But now, sitting in this cell for so many hours with no one to talk to, the unbearable loneliness and confusion of his life began to work its way into his marrow like a cancer.

  They thought he had killed Maria Elena. That would not be a simple deportation. That meant prison—a long, long stretch in prison. He had done five months in federal prison the last time for buying a Social Security card from his employer. He had gone nearly insane from the noise and the confinement and the casual cruelty that made you always hold yourself in. He could not survive that again.

  Four paces one way, six paces the other.

  At this moment, he wished he had a rope or a belt or even those rotten shoelaces. After all, what good was he to his family in here? Señor Porter had promised he would only be in this cell twenty-four hours. But Rodrigo knew that worse things might await him.

  He jumped when the metal door to the entranceway clanged open. The Spanish cop was standing there, freshly shaved and changed from yesterday. He had that shark look to his eyes. He showed more of his teeth than he needed to when he smiled. Rodrigo reflexively leaned his back against the cinderblock wall of the cell.

  “Afternoon, Rodrigo,” said the detective. “How’s that lip you fell on yesterday?”

  Rodrigo just stared at him. Porter had suggested to Rodrigo yesterday that perhaps he hadn’t tripped in the woods. Perhaps he was assaulted by this detective. Rodrigo had tried to tell Porter the truth, but the señor held up a hand to silence him. Rodrigo saw right away that Porter couldn’t tell him to lie, but he very much wanted Rodrigo to agree with his story. The truth didn’t seem to matter to Señor Porter any more than it mattered to the detective. They were both playing him. He had no real friends here.

  The detective pulled a chair in from the hallway and stuck it in front of his cell bars. Then he sat down.

  “Thought we’d talk a little more.”

  “What about Señor Porter?” asked Rodrigo.

  There was the slightest twitch to the detective’s shoulder blades. Then he stood up and shrugged. “Okay, Rodrigo. You don’t want to talk to me. That’s your right. So we’ll just do what we have to do without your cooperation.” He got up to leave.

  Rodrigo felt a panic thrumming in his chest. The detective seemed so confident. That could only mean they were going to arrest him either way.

  “Wait,” said Rodrigo. “I didn’t kill her. Why do you think I killed her?”

  The detective very calmly and slowly put the chair back in place, scraping the legs along the bare concrete floor, adjusting and readjusting it with annoying fastidiousness. He didn’t speak until he was looking straight into Rodrigo’s eyes.

  “You lied to me, man. You told me you’d broken off the relationship with Maria soon after you arrived.”

  “I—I did.” What is “soon”? What does this man want?

  “When?”

  “November, I think.”

  “You said October before.”

  “I did?” Rodrigo felt suddenly like he had the runs again. And now he couldn’t use the toilet, not with this detective in the room. He felt so trapped—by his body and his circumstances.

  “You never saw her again after that?”

  Rodrigo blinked. No, he couldn’t say that. That would be a lie. So he said nothing.

  “Look, Rodrigo—you gotta tell me the truth. I just came from watching some film footage. A hunter rigged a video camera at the lake. It picked up everything—and I do mean everything—that went on there from October first until now. You’re on it, man. You and Maria Elena. A lot. And I don’t think your wife would like to see what I just saw.”

  Rodrigo slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. The detective had to be telling the truth. They were at the lake last fall. Where else could they go? They had no money, no means of transportation. He lived in a room with three other men. She was a live-in housekeeper with no privacy. He had to travel almost two miles on foot one way to see her. The reservoir was near where she was living. It was private and quiet and beautiful at night with the water reflecting the sky so perfectly, Rodrigo could hardly tell up from down. She brought fruit and tortillas and a blanket to lie on and he brought the beer. They stayed up by a grove of tall pine trees, far enough from the path so that no drunken teenagers could bother them.

  Som
etimes the pinesap would stick to their clothes. Sometimes the needles got lodged in their hair. But the smell beneath those towering evergreens was so fresh, so pure. Rodrigo thought there were few places on earth more beautiful to make love. When things were bad, he usually thought about home. But every now and then the image that came to his mind was of those moonlit nights at the lake. He remembered the soft crunch of deer hooves through the leaves, the whoosh of a fish breaking the surface of the water, the distant hoot of an owl.

  And okay, sure, it was wrong. He loved his wife, Beatriz—his Triza. She was the mother of his three children. But he was human, wasn’t he? He was lonely and when he and Maria Elena were together, she made him feel like a man again. Looking up, seeing those bright pinpricks of light scattered across the sky, feeling her hot breath on his chest, her delicate fingers wrapped inside his large callused hands, he felt so reassured. Almost like he was back in Esperanza.

  “We were at the lake, yes.” Rodrigo let the words out in one long expelled breath.

  “In March?”

  “Once, yes.”

  “What happened?”

  Rodrigo lifted an eyebrow. What did this police detective think happened? He was a man, surely. Did Rodrigo need to go into details about such a private matter?

  “You fought?” asked the detective.

  “No. Never. We didn’t talk much at all. I didn’t kill her. I’ve told you that.”

  “Then why didn’t you report her missing?”

  “Because we had already broken it off. She was just—she was leaving. And I came to say good-bye.”

  “Leaving? For where?”

  “She had lost her job. She was talking about going back to Guatemala.”

  “So Maria just happened to see you the same day she disappeared and you never contacted her again.”

  “I didn’t know that was the day she disappeared.” This was bad news. Very bad news. This detective would make a lot of this fact, Rodrigo knew.

  “You’ve never seemed too upset about her being dead.”

  “What do you know about what I feel?” Rodrigo could not suppress the irritation in his voice. For a moment, he forgot himself, his circumstances. He felt only a heat rising inside of him at the casual presumptions this detective made in his nasal, swallowed Spanish. “You cross the border twice the way I have, you learn quickly that human life has very little value. You can only do so much and no more. I have a family. I have responsibilities. So I can do nothing.” Just thinking about how long it had been since he’d heard his family’s voices made Rodrigo’s heart ache with longing. Then again, maybe it was better if they didn’t know what was happening to him right now.

  The detective tapped his pen on his notebook and stared at him. “We have you on video at the lake with Maria on the afternoon she disappeared in the very place her body was recovered. Her American employer says Maria told her she was going out with you that day. The employer is willing to testify to that in court.”

  Rodrigo felt something cold and thick congeal inside of him. “I didn’t kill her,” he repeated softly.

  “Maria Elena was tied up and weighted down in the lake using the same sort of nylon rope a lot of the landscaping contractors use to tie up bushes. You’ve worked with a number of local landscapers, Rodrigo. You could have gotten your hands on that rope easily.”

  “I would never hurt anybody.”

  “Video doesn’t lie, man. Why don’t you just come clean? You loved her. You love your family. Do right by both of them. By your conscience. You didn’t mean to do it. You’re a good man, I can tell. You just didn’t want her to come between you and your family, that’s all.”

  Rodrigo couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone was pouring cornmeal down his throat. Each breath just made the next one harder. This couldn’t be happening. They would lock him away for twenty-five years on a murder charge. A state prison this time. Full of murderers and rapists and gang members. Big men. Blacks who hate Latinos. Latinos who hate immigrants. Guards who hate everybody. He had survived so much but he couldn’t imagine surviving twenty-five years of that.

  “If I tell you I killed her—if I confess—will they just deport me?”

  “I don’t know what they’ll do, Rodrigo. But you stand a better chance of people being sympathetic if you tell the truth: you did it to protect your family.”

  Rodrigo closed his eyes and tried to think of what his friend Anibal would do. Wise, calm Anibal. He would tell Rodrigo to trust in God and be truthful. Always truthful. Rodrigo had messed up—no doubt about it. But not this way. Not like this.

  He took as deep a breath as he could manage. It felt like a rubber band was wrapped around his chest. “I did not kill her, Detective,” he said as evenly as his shaky voice would allow. “That is the truth. Am I going to go to prison?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that one, Rodrigo.” The detective’s eyes got hard and shiny. Then he rose from the metal chair and folded it with a finality that made Rodrigo feel as if he were being folded up and disposed of the same way.

  Chapter 19

  The hotel conference room was a sea of pink- and white-linen tablecloths and gold-rimmed china. The hundred and fifty or so faces—mostly white with a heavy representation of blondes, natural or otherwise—were the ones Adele expected at such an awards luncheon: directors of nonprofits, defense lawyers, university professors, journalists, and a few wealthy socialites who gave liberally to liberal causes.

  The waiters and waitresses were typical, too. Many of them were immigrants—some Latino, some black. A good portion, Adele suspected, were working off fake papers at barely minimum wage. No one else seemed to notice the irony. They were honoring Adele for her work in bridging the gap between immigrants and Americans in her community. But any one of these waiters or waitresses could have told the audience firsthand just how wide the gap was these days. Twenty-five years ago, hard work and clean living could eventually secure an immigrant a green card and with it, the driver’s license, education, and business opportunities that bought a toehold on the middle class. The people who came now stood no such chance. One raid, one infraction, one employer who looked at them the wrong way, and they were gone.

  Adele was here this Tuesday afternoon to accept an award from the New York State Empowerment League for her work as executive director of La Casa. The award included a check for five thousand dollars—money the center sorely needed. Still, she felt a hollowness inside of her, as hollow as the clink of the empty wineglasses on the table, as the director of the Empowerment League, a dead ringer for Martha Stewart, walked up to the microphone.

  “Before Adele Figueroa started La Casa, Lake Holly was a place of fear and mistrust. A place where Latinos felt unwanted and unwelcome . . . ”

  Was it really different now, Adele wondered? Matt Rowland, Brendan Delaney, and Eddie Giordano had already been released on bail for the brutal assault on Luis Guzman. Guzman, on the other hand, was still handcuffed to a bed at Lake Holly Hospital. As soon as he recovered enough, he was going to be arraigned for assault with a deadly weapon and transferred to the county jail. No matter that Guzman had no prior felonies. Or that he drew that pathetic pocketknife and exacted a superficial wound in self-defense.

  “. . . Before La Casa, there was no dialogue with the police, no sense that Latinos and non-Latinos could come together as a community . . .”

  Some dialogue, thought Adele. The police had covered up the murder of that undocumented Latina at the lake until they could come up with another undocumented Latino to pin it on. The Guzman situation was even worse. The police took Guzman’s fingerprints and fed them into the database while he was still in intensive care, which automatically alerted ICE that the local police had an undocumented alien in their custody. ICE faxed over an immigration detainer within twenty minutes of receiving the prints. Guzman was now guaranteed of being deported even if the DA’s office eventually dropped the felony charges.

  Adele was so deep in thoug
ht that she didn’t realize it was her turn to speak until the audience rose to its feet and gave her a round of applause. She blushed, feeling embarrassed for her lack of attention. She grabbed her notes, dropped them on the floor, then bundled them together and carried them to the lectern in her arms like some magic trick gone awry. She’d had a good speech prepared—all about the symbiotic ways in which Latinos and Anglos helped each other and worked together to make Lake Holly a richer, more vibrant community. A few months ago, she believed it. Now she wasn’t so sure. Still, she saw no choice but to give the audience the upbeat speech they had paid for. There was only so much truth people could stomach over coffee and crème brûlée.

  She drove back to La Casa after the luncheon. She could feel the tension as soon as she walked through the door. The men were clustered in tight groups, their voices soft and strained the way they got after a raid. Nobody was using the computers to study English today. Even the pool players in back seemed to be doing more talking than playing. Enrique Sandoval was at her heel, his normal shyness gone, replaced by something closer to panic.

  “Señora Adele—is it true what happened? That three white teenagers beat Luis Guzman last night and he is the one being charged? Everyone is talking about it here. Everyone.”

  Adele gave a quick glance around the room. She could feel the men watching her and pretending not to at the same time. Some began to gather around them. The playfulness she normally felt in them was gone, replaced by fear mixed with rage and frustration. A lot of them probably knew Luis. He was no poster boy, certainly. He drank too much and passed out sometimes in Michael Park. But he was not a violent drunk. If he was in a fight with three white teens, it was not because he started it.