by David Cole
"Thank you," Rey said. "Thank you very much."
We left him by his truck, watching us to make sure we drove away.
"I just don't understand where you're going with this," Rey said, winding his way carefully down the side of the ravine and trying to ignore the hosts of children who ran alongside the pickup, their hands out to beg.
"Me neither."
"Then let's get ready to spring your ex-husband from that jail."
At midnight, new guards appeared at the jail, three of them visible from the street. Rey took ten thousand dollars of my money, saying he'd start bargaining at seven and work his way up.
Rey had traded the Harley for a '59 Ford stepside with empty chicken crates stacked four deep in the short bed. Although he'd parked three blocks away, I'd walked to the main street, looking down to the jail. If the guards called Garza, if other police cars rushed up, I would drive away. But in less than ten minutes Rey came out of the jail, a supporting arm wrapped around Jonathan. Nobody followed them for the first block, then one by one the three jail guards came out of the jail and ran in different directions. We got back into the truck.
Rey turned off the street, down an alley. As we got nearly through the alley, a green Land Rover pulled across the alleyway, blocking our pickup. Rey rammed the gearshift into reverse and stomped on the gas pedal. A woman got out of the Land Rover and waved at us.
"Stop!" I shouted.
"Jesus Christ, Laura! That's the policia."
"No. Stop."
He put the shift into park, goosing the engine. I opened my door to get out.
"Who is that?" he asked.
"You met her in Scottsdale," I said.
It was Taá Wheatley.
"Take off your shoes," she said.
"What?"
She held out a black plastic trash bag.
"Give me your shoes."
"Why?" I said, but sat on the broken pavement to pull off the shoes.
"Now your bra."
Rey came up to us, watched as I wiggled my bra out from underneath the wifebeater shirt. She tossed it into the bag.
"Now I know you," he said slowly. "I wasn't sure in Scottsdale, things were happening so fast. But you're that woman."
"Yes. I'm that woman. Laura, give me your wristwatch."
"What's going on? Taá, why are you here?"
"Wristwatch."
I hesitated, but Rey grabbed my arm and unstrapped the watch.
"Anything else?" he asked Taá.
"I don't think so. But I've got a sweep."
Setting down the trash bag, she took an electronic sweeper wand from her back pocket and started running it along my body.
"Hold up your arms."
"There were transmitters in my shoes? My watch? I thought you told me that those two anklets were the way you people would do surveillance on me?"
"We lied."
"Even my bra?"
"We had to try everything we could. That's why we didn't get your clothes from Sonoita, so you'd wear whatever I gave you."
"I changed some of them," I said.
"Yeah. But not your bra, not those Nike sneakers. Turn around."
She swept up and down my back, hips, along my thighs.
"I think you're okay now."
"How about me?" Rey said.
"We bugged your Humvee only. But that's sitting back with that crazy old biker. I saw your house, though."
"How the hell did you see my house?"
Taá pointed up.
"Intel satellites. Everywhere that Laura went, the satellites did go. Poetic, no?"
"Poetry my ass. So who else knows about my house?"
"Nobody."
"Not possible," I said. "I've seen your intel center. I know how many people work there. I don't believe that Dance, or Nasso, doesn't know about Rey's house."
"Well. Nasso. I've been having some problems with him lately. As for Dance, he wouldn't know one satellite photo from another. I was working alone at AZIC when you crossed at Sasabe. I saw you drive south. Then the satellite orbit took it out of range for ninety minutes. Nasso had some interviews, so I was all alone again when the satellite did its next pass. I fiddled the data. It happens, sometimes. The shots don't work because of cloud cover, smog, forest fires."
"Nasso," I said. "What kind of problems?"
"Personal."
"So he doesn't go for dykes," Rey said. "Neither do I, really."
"Actually," Taá said with disgust, "it wasn't about sex at all. All my arguments with him are about power and control."
"But truth is," Rey said, "without you, I'd never have been able to spend time with my daughter."
"She's at your house."
"I can't believe you put a tracking device in my bra!" I complained.
"You're a fool to think we'd give you the chance to get away from my house without taking a lot of precautions to run digital surveillance."
"You let me go?"
"Sure. The tampon thing was convenient, but I'd have thought of another excuse to leave you alone, to let you get out of the house and think you were getting away from me. From us. I've got another surprise for you."
"Nothing you can tell me will be a surprise," I said. "Not after the bra thing."
"Luna."
That staggered me. She pulled a sheaf of papers from her bag, showed me printouts of all kinds of LUNA chat room materials.
"We used Carnivore," Taá said. "At the Phoenix switch hotel."
"I thought you couldn't legally set Carnivore to pick up specific traffic."
"Legally? Don't you understand, Laura? Nothing about this whole operation is legal. Even the threats of executing the federal arrest warrants against you. Those warrants would be thrown out by any respectable federal judge."
"Are you telling me that you didn't even delete them from the system?"
"You're catching on. Dance will lie about anything if he thinks he can crack this smuggling ring."
"So," Rey said. "Why are you telling us all this?"
"I'm not sure."
"You're protecting Meg, aren't you?"
"In a way."
"And protecting my daughter?"
"In the same way. It's more than that, but I can't tell you. Yet."
She looked at the pickup, cut her eyes between us and the truck bed.
"You got him in the back?" Taá asked.
"Who? Nobody's with us."
"I just watched you take Laura's ex-husband out of that jail."
"Good Christ," Rey said. "What don't you know?"
"I'll leave you with just this one question. Who is Luna?"
"It's a lot of people," I said, separating the sheets of paper. "I mean, look at the different ways that LUNA13 writes. Some messages use capitals, some don't. I'd say there are at last five different people here, all with access to the same user name."
"Ah. But who's behind all this?" Taá asked.
"I thought Jonathan would tell me."
"I've seen his camper. He doesn't even have a bank account that I know of. No. It's not him. Somebody's spending major money to help these women. Who is it? Dance doesn't really care. Once he decided that there were two smuggling rings, he eliminated any desire to go after Luna. He's after whoever is making millions of dollars smuggling in these foreign women and then selling them in the US for prostitution, slavery, whatever."
"Does he know who's behind it all?" I said.
"Nope. But Jake ... Jake knows something he's not talking about. I'm going. Anything else you want to tell me, about what you're doing on your own?"
"Nothing," Rey said quickly before I could open my mouth.
"Don't trust dykes, do you." Taá was both bitter and resigned.
"Don't trust federal law agencies. And whoever works for them."
"Fair enough. One last thing. I'd leave that Humvee parked right where it is. As things stand, nobody knows the location of your house. For your daughter's sake, I'd like to keep it that way."
"Thanks," I said. "And if
I need to talk to you? I mean, to you only. Give me a cell number, an email address, anything that only you will read."
"On the papers I gave you. The last sheet."
Taá took a half-step toward the pickup, but Rey jumped in front of her.
"Not a chance," he said.
"I was only curious. I wanted to see what the man looked like who set up Basta Ya, the man who's helped so many Indian women down here."
"Another time, maybe."
"Just keep him alive. Better yet, tell him to disappear deep into Mexico."
31
Interlude. Late night, shading into early morning, shading into false dawn.
Jonathan and I talked and didn't talk. Intervals of each. Alex and Amada slept like babies, like teenagers, like young people who think it's going to last forever. Rey came into the sun room twice, first claiming that he was hungry, two hours later that he had just woken up and couldn't go back to sleep. We banished him both times.
It was like a foreign movie. Italian. No. Almodovar. Women on the Verge.
You watch movies, he'd said at one point.
Don't you? I'd said. Doesn't everybody?
It's Hollywood, he'd answered. It's make believe. Down here, life is raw.
I thought of the woman I'd seen executed right in front of my eyes. I realized I'd pushed that unpleasant memory so far down into my subconscious that it was painful just to probe in there, trying to recall her face. All I could remember was the bulldozer.
They say when you have a bad accident, you can't remember any of the details. For days, for weeks, sometimes you'll never remember.
I thought of a scene from Schindler's List. The Jewish woman architect, who tells Ralph Fiennes that the foundations have been poured badly, that the whole building is wrong, that it will collapse. He orders her shot. The blood bursts sideways from her head, her body flops.
Good God, that's only a movie, I thought. What's wrong here?
Are my memories of happiness just a few days ago, memories of being happy on Heather's ranch, are those memories as false as a movie?
The first conversation was really, really short.
"Tell me," he said. "Back then, what did we see in each other?"
"Sex."
"Be serious."
"I am. No woman forgets her first lover."
"What did we have?" he said, as though it was a mystery seen dimly from the distance of so many years.
"You had a pickup truck. You took me away from the Hopi mesas. We went out anywhere to be alone."
"Together, I mean."
"We made love in your pickup."
"That's all we had? Sex?"
"No. Sex was just the opening act."
"For what?"
"Freedom."
"From what?"
"You don't remember?"
"I don't even remember the sex."
"I don't expect anything from you," he said. "For getting me out of jail."
"You owe me nothing."
"I mean, I expect nothing. No favors. No kindness."
"Forget it."
"What did it cost?"
"Cost?"
"To bribe the guards. To get me out."
"You don't need to know that."
"Had to be in the thousands. US thousands."
"Doesn't matter."
"Had to be a good chunk of money to buy me out of that jail. Ten thousand minimum."
"Don't get on with this. It doesn't really concern you, what it cost."
"Easy for you to say. Ever spend a night in a Mexican jail?"
"Not a Mexican jail," I said. "There was a jail in South Dakota ... maybe Iowa. The graveyard shift jailer tried to rape me."
"Guess I was long gone by then."
I nodded.
"What do you do, to make so much money?"
"I work on the edge."
"On the edge."
"Yes."
"Edge of what?"
"Between a little money and a lot."
"Is it legal? What you do?"
"I work on the edge," I said again. "I'm not even sure where that edge is any more. Not about what's legal and what isn't. About who I am. What I'm doing."
"Ah," he said with a smile. "Identity. Who are we, anyway? Listen. Did you ever get back up to the rez?"
"I lived there for a year."
"In Hopi?"
He seemed incredulous that I'd have ever gone back.
"No. In Tuba City."
"Want to tell me about it?"
"No," I said after a long time. "That part of me I don't want to talk about."
"So what's left to talk about?" he asked.
"Our daughter."
"Ahhhh," he sighed. "That."
"Who is Luna?" I asked him later. "Nobody."
"Come on, Jonathan. It's too late for games. I know that it's not a single person. I know it's the way women talk to each other, once they're out."
"Once they're free."
"That too."
"Luna. It's a password. It's ... a recognition thing."
I took out Xochitl's Palm Pilot and re-created the chat room. I showed him the prompt, asked if he ever joined in.
"No. Believe it or not, I've never owned a computer. Never turned one on. No idea what this thing is you're showing me."
I thought for a moment of joining the chat, but I wasn't ready for that yet, didn't quite have the one question formed that I had to ask. I turned the Palm off.
"But you do know about Luna?"
"It's ... what do I say, it's an escape route. They talk, offer advice, tell each other about jobs, money, cities, hairstyles."
"How did you get involved, Jonathan?"
It was the first time I'd said his name, and I stumbled over it.
"Johnny," he said. "Down here, they call me Johnny. Or Juan. As for when ... a woman approached me about a year ago."
"You met her?"
"Never. First, I got a letter. Then a man came to see me."
"And?"
"The man gave me a cell phone. After that, I talked to the woman."
"Who was she?" I asked, thinking that it had to be Mari Emerine.
"She said she was called Luna. She knew there were women being smuggled into Mexico, then sold in the US as sex slaves, strippers, servants. Things like that. She said she could help with false identity papers, money, travel. A lot of things."
"But you never met her."
"No."
"What happened to the women who got out?"
"I don't know," he admitted.
"You ever hear from them?"
"Never. That was part of the deal. So they wouldn't compromise me. Compromise the network."
"Luna."
"Yes."
"Was it a code word?" I asked. "Or her real name?"
"I never knew. She helped over a hundred women. That's all I know."
"Did you ever know Xochitl?"
"Xochitl Gálvez?"
"Yes. So you did know her."
"Know of her. Met Subcommandante Marcos once at a workers' strike. But Xochitl wasn't at that rally."
"No, no, no. This woman I know named Xochitl, she worked at a maquiladora."
"Can't be the same woman. Xochitl Gálvez is the name of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Vicente Fox government."
And so one more little thing was explained. I told him about the Xochitl I knew. But he wouldn't talk about the only real thing I wanted from him. After another hour, I finally had to ask him, straight out.
"Where's our daughter?"
"I don't know where Spider lives now," he admitted.
"This picture. Did you take it?"
"Nope. She sent it to me. Said she was living in West Hollywood."
"You really don't know where she lives?"
"No."
Jonathan had showered and was now eating his fourth bean and chile burrito. He wore an old tanktop and jeans that Rey had given him. Almost totally bald, his scraggy untrimmed beard had grown below his
Adam's apple. I'd seen him in just the jeans, seen scars all over his torso. I figured he was just over fifty years old but totally without the paunch and love handles of men his age.
Looking at his face ... weird.
Think of your first lovers, I mean, do you really remember what they looked like? Do you really recognize people you haven't seen for decades? Do you even know who they are?
Weird.
"About Spider," he said. "When she was, I don't know, sixteen, seventeen. I got a postcard from Alabama. She knew where I was back then."
"Where was that?"
"Prison. I was doing three to seven, up in Florence. A bar fight, somebody hit somebody hit somebody, I was the only drunken person left when the cops got there. Had blood on my knuckles. DNA match showed my blood on a dead guy. So she sent me this postcard, said she was coming west from Alabama. Moving to California. Stopped by, actually stayed in a motel in Florence for a week and visited me every day."
"What was she like? What did she look like?"
"Um."
"I haven't seen her since you took her from me."
"Hey, Laura, I'm sorry. That was totally wrong for me to do that."
"We were young, we were ... on the edge back then. Wild. Crazy. I hardly remember those days."
"Me either. I'd eaten some peyote that day, that's all I remember. You were ragging me about leaving a jar of honey open, and there was this long trail of ants across the kitchen floor and up onto the tabletop and into the honey. You were ragging me, hell, I don't remember anything more than picking up Spider and a box of Pampers and getting into my pickup and driving until I ran out of gas in an Iowa cornfield. I tried to call you, at that camp we'd broken into, where we were living. But you'd already gone."
"Looking for you, Jonathan."
"Even I didn't know where I was. Family took me in, told me how to feed Spider. I was high almost every day, so I left Spider with that family for a year. Went back, got her, moved to Minneapolis, got a day job as a trucker, we drove all over the country for ten years. Been in every state except Oregon. I loved that girl."
"So did I."
"I loved you, Kauwanyauma."
"Who knew what love was, back then. We were so young. The picture, Jonathan. How did you get her picture? Tell me how she knew where to send it."
"She said she looked me up on the Internet. Said she found two hundred and seventy-three guys named Jonathan Begay, and she was contacting all of them in Arizona first, and if that didn't work, she'd start in other states. I was working in Yuma back then. Front desk clerk. Hardware store. I sold a lot of dynamite to those militia crazies. I guess I got mixed up with them, for a while. Hard to forget my crazy AIM years, protesting the government. So that's when I got the picture. I drove right out to LA without stopping. Went to the address in West Hollywood, but they said they didn't know her there. Still got that address."
