El Gavilan

by Craig McDonald

  Able sat in his cruiser and appraised the sign:

  Notice to Horton County Employers:

  Hiring illegal immigrants or those with false identifications is a federal crime! It’s the law!

  —Sheriff Able Hawk

  Three similar billboards had already been posted at the north, east and west county lines.

  A middle-aged man on a bicycle coasted to a stop alongside the sheriff’s dusty cruiser. “She’s a beaut’, Sheriff Hawk,” the cyclist said, nodding with his helmeted head at the new billboard.

  Able nodded. “So you support me, then?”

  Balanced on the toe of one sneaker, fists still tight on the handlebars, the man shrugged. “Why not? It’s not like Mexico’s sending us her best or brightest, right?”

  Able gave the cyclist a thumbs-up and got his cruiser in gear.

  Radio crackle, then DeeDee said, “Sheriff Hawk? Sheriffs Denton and Pierce wanna know if you’re up for a coffee out to Big G’s along I-70?”

  The sheriff sniffled with allergies—something new was abloom—and clicked the mic. “Headed that way anyways. Tell ’em to give me a bit to get over there, Double D.”

  Able hooked a U-turn on the two-lane and doubled back north. Two miles from the destination truck stop, the sheriff of Horton County saw a new message posted on the marquee above Jay Richmond’s used car lot:

  Spanish Spoken Here!

  Stop in new Mexican Friends!

  We’re doin’ deals!

  The sheriff smiled crookedly. Well, that wetback-loving cocksucker.

  Able shook his head. At least dumbass “Dealin’ Jay” lacked the brains to post his message in Spanish so its intended recipients could maybe read the boldface bastard.

  THREE

  Shawn O’Hara took a last scan of the week’s police blotter.

  There were plenty of DWIs—never a shortage of drunk drivers.

  There were several stops of speeders in school zones. Lots of Hispanic-sounding names attached to those. The local cops had a new acronym, DWM: Driving While Mexican.

  Smash-and-grabs and purse-snatchings abounded on the West Side. The victims and witnesses of these all described suspected perpetrators as “looking Mexican.”

  Shawn, two weeks shy of his second anniversary as editor of the New Austin Recorder, executed a find/replace to swap out “Mexican” for the politically correct “Latino.”

  The journalist selected one nugget from the blotter to develop as a headline item.

  The old-timers and retired cops Shawn had consulted swore that the last Horton County sporting house in memory had been closed down in the early seventies.

  Of course there were always some straying housewives and drug-addicted young single women who’d put out for cash or a fix here and there, but Horton County, and its county seat of New Austin, hadn’t had a working whorehouse in more than forty years.

  But a few days back, Sheriff Able Hawk and his crew had busted up a ring of working girls operating out of a slab, run-down ranch house in a former blue-collar working tract gone mostly Mexican—make that Latino—on the city’s West Side.

  The houses were built in the 1950s for factory families of three or four.

  Now each of those dilapidated houses was home to two or three families of four or more. The driveways and sidewalks of the neighborhood were lined with rusted old Astrovans and Aerostars … two or three antiquated vans to every dilapidated house.

  The sheriff’s boys arrested six women—all Hispanic—most of whom spoke little to no English.

  The sheriff’s boys had booked the women for prostitution.

  More striking: the women were catering almost exclusively to a “Mexican clientele.”

  According to the last census, the West Side of New Austin was 45 percent Latino. And that census was already a few years old. The previous census had found the neighborhood was then 85 percent white, 14 percent African-American and 1 percent “other.”

  Call it “sea change” stuff.

  The parking lots in the strip malls around the West End were lately crammed with taqueria trailers.

  The signage for the West Side check-cashing businesses, cigarette outlets and beer and wine drive-thrus all read in Spanish now.

  Shawn’s desk phone rang. He scooped up the receiver and said, “Shawn O’Hara. May I help you, please?”

  “You could get back here, Shawn,” a silky voice said. “It’s your day off, Shawn, you know? Our promised day together? And it’s late afternoon. You still taking me to dinner?”

  A just detectable Latin inflection—the echo of her aging parents’ authentic, still-strong accents. She said, “We haven’t known each other long enough to give you the right to neglect me yet.”

  He said, “Just shutting down the computer now. Give me five minutes.”

  Shawn saved his changes to the police blotter and shut down his iMac. He slapped around on his desktop until he found his keys under a pile of faxed police reports. He switched off the police-band radio, shut off the lights and locked the door behind himself.

  The newspaper’s office was located on New Austin’s main street, between the bakery and a tax-preparation storefront that was all but dormant six months of the year.

  The newspaper editor, the youngest in the Recorder’s history, strode down Main Street, waving at the working barbers and druggists and butchers who waved or nodded back at Shawn from behind stenciled storefront windows.

  His apartment, a shotgun loft above a bar spread along the length of a city block, was three blocks from the newspaper office. Shawn climbed the fire escape that trailed up the back of the building. Patricia Maldonado met him at the door and handed him a cold Corona with a slice of lime wedged in the lip.

  Patricia, forehead and bare arms and legs glistening, was wearing one of Shawn’s T-shirts and nothing else.

  He could hear the window air conditioners running, but with the summer swelter and heat rising from the business below it was a losing battle.

  Patricia kissed him, her mouth tasting of lime and beer, and he squeezed her bare ass with his free hand, kicking the door closed behind him with his shoe. “Got lonely, huh, Patty?”

  “Patricia,” she said. “And ‘lonely’ is one word for it.” She toyed with the snaps of his untucked denim shirt.

  Patricia was a student at the vocational college in Vale County, where she was wrapping up a major in restaurant science and marketing. Her parents—two of Horton County’s rare documented, naturalized Latinos—owned Señor Augustin’s, an upscale Mexican restaurant they had launched in the mid-1990s.

  Patricia was lately spooking Shawn with her frequent hints about wanting children … with stubborn marriage talk.

  Now Patricia walked backward, leading Shawn deeper into his own apartment, room by room, French kissing and helping him shed his clothes along the way.

  When they reached the bedroom, Shawn was naked.

  The light through tall windows on two sides of the bedroom glowed amber in Patricia’s raven hair and black bedroom eyes.

  She pulled off the T-shirt and drew Shawn down onto the bed atop her.

  They had been dating for three weeks.

  * * *

  Sprawling together on the damp comforter and sheets, bathed in sweat, they stroked one another’s skin, hearts still not settled. His hand was down there. He’d been trying to talk Patricia into waxing her pubic hair. So far, she had been resistant … and annoyed.

  Shawn told her about the short piece he’d just written on the prostitution bust. When he told Patricia the names of the women arrested, she jerked her head up sharply and searched his face. “Oh God,” she said. “That’s what happened to Luz?”

  Shawn frowned. “You know her?”

  “She is a hostess weeknights at my folks’ place,” Patricia said. “Luz didn’t show up for work the past two nights. We’ve been trying to reach her. Mother even called the hospitals.”

  “She’s still in county lock-up, I suppose,” Shawn s
aid. “Probably couldn’t make bail, so there she sits.” He stroked the lank hair back from Patricia’s damp forehead. “Couldn’t look good for your folks anyway, right? I mean, being linked to a hooker?”

  Patricia shot him a look, café au lait cheeks running to red. “Jesus, she’s not a whore, Shawn. She must be more desperate for money than I knew. Luz’s mother, Severina, and her daughter, Elizabeth, are back in Matamoros, living in poverty I doubt you can fathom. Her mother is very sick and there is nobody else to care for Liz, who is three. Time is short. If Luz truly was sleeping with those men, I’m sure it was to make more money to bring her family here where they can have a life, Shawn. I mean, well, Jesus …”

  Shawn kissed her forehead; it tasted salty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That is terrible.”

  Patricia sat up. “I need to let my folks know what’s happened to Luz.”

  Shawn ran his fingernails down her long back, tracing down to her tailbone. “Use the phone there,” he said. It was sitting on the nightstand by the bed. He was watching her ass.

  “No,” she said, slipping on black panties. “I’ll call from the kitchen. Be right back.”

  Shawn propped up his pillow and sat up, watching her walk nearly naked through the rooms of his apartment to the kitchen, which opened onto his fire escape. Downstairs, from the bar below, he heard someone break a rack of balls. He heard billiard balls drop and roll in the coin-operated pool table.

  He slid off the limp condom and knotted it off and tossed it atop a copy of his own discarded newspaper. He reached across the bed and picked up Patricia’s pack of Merits and butane lighter and fired one up, balancing a promotional ashtray for the film The Man Who Wasn’t There on his belly. He couldn’t hear Patricia’s words, but he watched her pacing back and forth, gesturing vigorously with her right hand while holding the phone to her ear with her left. Her big, small-nippled breasts—the real things—swayed with each emphatic hand thrust. Her tangled black hair, flat belly and shapely hips … Shawn felt himself getting hard again. He thought he’d keep pressing her to go bald down there.

  Patricia hung up his phone and walked back through his shotgun apartment, frowning.

  She sat down on the bed next to him, one leg tucked up under her, and he stroked her left breast with his fingernails. Still frowning, she grabbed his cigarette from him, took a long draw and said, “Damn that Able Hawk, anyway. Usually I’m on the page with him, but this time … ?”

  Shawn scowled. “Are you joking? You support our sheriff? Son of a bitch is like some fascist with all these raids and billboards and that damned blog of his.”

  “You’re such an absolutist, Shawn. Always black and white with you. You’re maybe too certain of things.”

  Patricia took another deep drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out and moved the ashtray to the side table. “Hawk is a realist. Look around. This can’t continue, Shawn. The town is collapsing around us. Neighborhoods are overrun with too many people. There’s crime like this area hasn’t seen. Our schools can’t begin to keep up. Test scores are falling and state funding with them. Most of the illegals come across from Mexico with the equivalent of an eighth-grade education—the adults, I mean. So you can imagine the level their kids are at in comparison with the ones already here.”

  Shawn was shaking his head. Patricia narrowed her eyes. “I know exactly what you’re thinking, Shawn O’Hara, and step careful now, because it’s close to racist thinking on your part. Don’t even say it.”

  “What?”

  “You’re thinking that I’m some kind of traitor to Hispanics and Latinos because I support much of what Hawk does. My family played by the rules, Shawn. My mother and father are legally here. I was born here. We spent years legally getting my grandmother and grandfather here. This stuff of sneaking across the border and making money and sending money back to Mexico and then expecting some kind of amnesty, it isn’t fair. Sixteen billion dollars earned by underpaid illegals and sucked out of our own economy and funneled to Mexico. It’s criminal.”

  Shawn shook his head. “Big so what? And where’d you get that stuff? Hawk’s blog?”

  She bit her lip. “Maybe … But it’s a thing we all know. And it isn’t just my family who’s worried, Shawn. Other legals feel the same about Able Hawk. He’s a hero to many in the Latino community, hard as that might be for you to grasp. Friends and enemies, they have a name for him, El Gavilan. It’s Spanish for the Hawk.”

  Shawn smiled crookedly. “God, Able must love that dumbass nickname.”

  Patricia shook her head. “Hawk’s a realist, like I said. We love this country too, Shawn. I don’t want to see it wrecked or crippled by presumed compassion or wrong-headed charity.”

  Shawn didn’t know where to begin to rebut that one. He leaned forward and kissed her mouth, his hand squeezing Patricia’s breast. “I can see that. That makes sense.”

  He sounded insincere to his own ears.

  Patricia shifted her arm, felt Shawn’s erection. She said with a frown, “So much for conversation.”

  THEN

  Not long after crossing the border, Thalia’s mother and father came to see that immigration worked best when one already had family in the North. Better still if that family was established and best of all if some of those family members had become U.S. citizens. Then a kind of Jacob’s Ladder could establish itself, hastening ascension and assimilation of ensuing waves of clan members who made it across.

  But that wisdom came too late for the Gómez clan.

  They had no such foothold.

  They were the first of their family to cross, spoke no English and so had to find their own way.

  Young as she was, Thalia tried hard to see what advantage they had gained coming to America.

  What had been the lure?

  The trip across the desert to Arizona had been a nightmare that cost them everything. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons had been lost.

  For what?

  In Veracruz, in the manner of all young children with reasonably good parents, Thalia had thought her father some kind of lesser God. Crossing the desert, she’d seen Francisco crazed and crying and helpless to save the lives of his own children.

  She had seen her father become a wild-eyed madman who gutted her uncle as she and her mother looked on.

  On their third day in Arizona, her father had bought a dilapidated ’68 Falcon that could barely hold his surviving family. He’d bought the car from a fat bald man with gold front teeth who ran a used car lot on a gravel strip by an all-night truck stop.

  The man spoke badly accented Spanish and was willing to sell a car to an obvious illegal immigrant with no insurance and no operator’s license.

  A handwritten sign behind the cash register cautioned in English:

  Cash ONLY!

  All Sales Are FINAL!

  Absolutely NO Refunds

  &

  NO Returns!

  That last line might have been the car salesman’s notion of a grim joke. He never explained to the Gómez family—not in Spanish—what the sales policy was.

  Francisco Gómez paid two hundred seventy-five of the one thousand American dollars they’d brought across the border for the Falcon that had thrown a rod and couldn’t go much faster than a bone-shaking fifty mph. It had a leak that required the Gómez family to carry several jugs of water in the already crowded car—to make frequent stops to refill the damaged radiator.

  The sloshing water jugs and the need to keep them at hand and filled were a bitter reminder of the jugs they had banked their lives on making their ill-fated border crossing.

  By the time Francisco realized what a lemon he had bought, they were deep into northeastern Arizona with no way to turn back.

  FOUR

  Thalia Ruiz freshened the three sheriffs’ coffees. The tallest of the lawmen—a very slender man—didn’t hand Thalia his cup, so she had to reach over the shorter, huskier sheriff to reach the mug. Her breast accidentally brushed the
shorter sheriff’s arm. The man, Sheriff Walt Pierce, gave her a smile that Thalia didn’t return. She felt his gaze on her hips as she moved to the next table.

  “The ass on that one, huh?” Sheriff Pierce smiled meanly at Able Hawk.

  Sheriff Hawk said, “Enough of that shit, Pierce. Thalia’s one of my legals. And she’s a good kid. So just let it be, cocksucker.”

  Hawk examined Pierce over the rim of his coffee cup. Pierce was what you’d call a sometimes “useful idiot” to Hawk’s mind. Pierce was a flavor of tool about half the time at any rate.

  The other half?

  Sometimes Pierce was strangely effective in getting results, if one construed arrest rates and resulting convictions as “getting results.” Hawk was dubious that many of Pierce’s arrests were righteous collars. Even across county lines, Hawk had heard rumblings of Pierce massaging evidence and suborning witnesses to firm cases.

  But Hawk didn’t have the luxury of choosing his peers; the voters in the adjacent county decided Pierce’s fate every four years, just as Hawk was beholden to his Horton County constituents for his own continued employment.

  The one thing Walt consistently struck Able as being was a potentially dangerous enemy.

  The tall sheriff—Jim Denton of neighboring Phipps County—said, “Speaking of ass, as in taking it up same, you’re fuckin’ killing me, Able. I mean all the pressure you’re putting on your illegals. They’re goddamn running to my county now.”

  “Mine too,” Walt said sourly. Walt was something of a dandy. He wore gold chains. He also had rings on most every finger. Fraternity rings; lodge and service organization rings. Able thought Walt looked like a short white pimp with a buzz cut.

  “That’s why we need to be in lockstep,” Able said. “United front’s what’s called for. We implement the same protocols and follow the same strategies. We make them illegals someone else’s problem farther out to other compass points.”

  “That’ll endear us to our neighbors for sure,” Jim said.

  Able smiled at her as Thalia brought him a slice of banana cream pie. He received a smile back. After she was gone, talking around a mouthful, Able said, “That’s why, in turn, you two’ll have a talk with your neighbors, just as I’m having with you now. Then they, in turn, can do the same with some others.”