Illegal (16 page)

"Maybe it is. They arrest me, I'll have a platform."

"And if you're imprisoned?"

"I'm counting on you to keep that from happening, Charlie."

"You can't buy your way out of this one. Jesus, Simeon, sometimes I wish you'd fire me."

"Say the word, and I'll hire a smart Jew lawyer who's still hungry. So are we done? I'm not getting rid of my
mojados
or my
putas
."

"If you don't take precautions, Simeon," Whitehurst said, "I shudder to think of the consequences."

"While you're shuddering, I'm gonna do some work." Rutledge turned his attention to a young Hispanic man leading a huge white horse into the gelding stall. Alongside, an older man with cabled forearms gripped the horse's halter. The horse whinnied and stomped the floor like a spoiled child, its tail sweeping back and forth like a geisha's fan.

"You know why I castrate fine-looking beasts like White Lightning?" Rutledge asked.

Whitehurst sighed. "So you'll be the only stallion left on the ranch."

"Gelding mellows him out so he can pasture with the mares without humping 'em and dumping 'em."

The older Mexican man stroked the horse's flank and whispered in his ear. The stallion seemed to relax.

"Jorge, I ain't got all day," Rutledge said. "You done singing love songs to that big bastard?"

"
Relámpago Blanco
knows in his heart what you're going to do to him,
jefe,
" Jorge answered.

Rutledge moved around the horse, examining it the way a pilot checks an aircraft before taking off. He ran his hands over the horse's sheath and leg, then peered into its eyes. This was a strong and handsome animal, and Rutledge felt something akin to love for him.

Jorge filled two large syringes, one with a tranquilizer, the other with an anesthetic to be injected into the testes. Rutledge would perform the tricky surgery himself. His father had shown him how, just as his father before him. Maybe Whitehurst didn't understand how traditions were passed from fathers to sons in the natural order of the universe. Land. Horses. Crops. Migrants. Whores.

Jorge handled the injections. It took the anesthetic only two minutes to work. While he waited, Rutledge thought about his lawyer's advice. Whitehurst was looking out for him. The savvy old lawyer didn't want him indicted, even though he could make a ton of money with a big show trial, the mother's milk of those silk-suited shysters.

Rutledge watched his lawyer peer over the top of the stall from the outside. Just like a hired mouthpiece. A spectator, enjoying the action from a safe distance.

"It's not just the feds I'm worried about," Whitehurst said. "Legal Services lawyers are making noise about suing you under RICO."

Rutledge picked up a scalpel. He patted the horse's flank, and leaned underneath. He pinched the scrotum, got no reaction, then made a quick incision. "I thought RICO was intended to bust the Mafia and whatnot."

"Smart poverty lawyers use it to go after substandard housing conditions."

As Jorge stroked the horse's muzzle, Rutledge peeled back the walls of the scrotum and pulled out the baseball-size testes. "They think I'm abusing my workers?"

Whitehurst didn't answer. He seemed fascinated as Rutledge tossed the testes into a bucket, where they landed with a
plop-plop.

"Jorge, how long you work for me?"

"Thirty-two years,
jefe
. I started one week after I crossed over."

"Ever feel abused?"

"Only by mosquitoes during
irrigación
."

Rutledge moved swiftly, attaching the jaws of the emasculator to the spermatic cord. "How are your kids? Camilo, Dulce, Nieve, and one more boy. What's his name?"

Jorge stifled a laugh. "You know his name,
jefe
. It's Simeon."

"Hear that, Whitebread?" Rutledge tightened the emasculator and snapped the handles shut. The device hung from the underside of the horse like a giant, vise-gripped pair of pliers. In three minutes, the tissues of the spermatic cord would be crushed. The horse whinnied and wriggled its hindquarters but didn't seem to be in pain.

"My abused worker names his son after me." Rutledge came up from under the horse. "Young Simeon's a pharmacist in Sacramento. Owns his own shop, competes with the chains and still makes money."

"
El jefe
paid my boy's way through school," Jorge said, his voice filled with reverence. "Paid for the girls, too. Dulce and Nieve both went to Cal Davis. Dulce's a teacher. Nieve's in gradu ate school learning wine-making."

"I want the first bottle from her vineyard," Rutledge said.

"It will be called 'Zinfandel Simeon.' "

"Named after me or her brother?" Simeon teased.

"After you,
jefe
. Her brother drives her crazy."

Rutledge smiled. His best employees felt like family. He had no one else. He ducked back under the horse, released the emasculator jaws, and checked for bleeding. A few drops, nothing more. "Lots of antibacterial solution," he instructed Jorge. "Check him every couple of hours."

"I'll sleep right here," Jorge said, pointing at a pile of straw.

"No need. White Lightning's not exactly Barbaro."

"Is not a problem,
jefe
. If the horse is in pain, I should be here."

Rutledge threw an arm around Jorge and squeezed his shoulder. "That's my man."

Embarrassed, Jorge broke free and gave a slight bow. "Pardon me, El Patron, but I was listening before, about how some lawyers want to do you harm."

"Nothing to worry about, my friend."

Jorge cupped one of Rutledge's hands in both of his own and lowered his head, as if in the presence of royalty. "I only want to say, that if you ever need me for anything, no matter what, I will do it."

Rutledge smiled playfully at him. "What if I ask you to cut off someone's balls?"

"It would be done,
jefe
. And without painkillers."

Wanda, the enormous Americana with the machete, was yelling. "Wake up! Wake up! There's work."

Marisol lifted her head from the dusty wood floor. The cabin at the Sugarloaf Lodge smelled of mice droppings and unwashed bodies. Nearly thirty immigrants were crammed into the one room. The other four women from her group, and perhaps two dozen more from earlier crossings. Men, women, children.

Marisol saw Wanda leaning down, veined breasts tumbling out of her sleeveless shirt like a pair of soccer balls. "C'mon, honey. Ah'm gonna send you out before the Frito Bandito wakes up, horny as a toad."

That's what Wanda called El Tigre. Wanda owned the Sugarloaf Lodge and housed the migrants until vans arrived to take them north.

"My son," Marisol protested. "I told you—I must wait for him."

"Problem is, the Frito Bandito ain't brought no kid across yet. And as long as you're here, the Bandito's gonna sniff around here, waiting for me to turn my back."

"But my Agustino . . ."

"Ah'll make damn sure the Bandito puts him in the next load."

"You can do that?"

"Me and my machete, damn right. Now, you want to earn some cash? My driver will take you to the plant and bring you back tonight. By the morning, you'll be eating burritos with your boy."

Marisol wanted to believe it was true. She felt she could trust the woman. Hadn't Wanda already protected her from El Tigre?

"This plant," Marisol said. "What exactly is it?"

"It's a job," Wanda said with a shrug of her mountainous shoulders. "But it ain't exactly a weekend in Palm Springs."

Marisol rode in a van with four stone-faced men, Hondurans and Guatemalans. The driver was an old Mexican farmhand who said they would all be paid twelve dollars an hour. Almost one hundred dollars a day! And Tino would be here in the morning.

"Twelve dollars an hour is a lot," she said.

"You will earn every nickel," the driver said grimly. "And you will curse the day God created the cow."

Within minutes, they passed a body of water. Black and befouled. Back home, Father Castillo had preached about the fiery pits of hell, but even his imagination could not have stirred up this sight. Islands of manure floated in an ocean of urine, the foulest place she had ever seen. Her stomach clenched at the sulfurous mixture of rotting eggs, diseased flesh, and steaming excrement.

The van neared an enormous gray building with no windows. Outside, endless feed lots, thousands of cattle squeezed so close together, they seemed like one gigantic brown beast, its skin undulating in the morning sun.

Once inside the plant, the migrants were herded into an office where a middle-aged woman at a desk ordered them to sign documents. Marisol doubted the others could read English. The documents seemed to say that the workers understood the risks of the work and would not seek compensation for any injuries.

A man wearing goggles and a white jumpsuit rushed into the office, shouting he needed half-a-dozen "beaners" for the conveyor line. The man, an Anglo with a reddened, chilled face, cursed the stinking Mexicans who didn't show up for work.

A fucked-up night shift, he complained. The line had shut down for an hour after a man lost a hand in the meat augur. The woman at the desk made a joke about "finger food." The red-faced man's voice was unnaturally loud, as if he might be hard of hearing. One of the stun guns wouldn't fire, and animals were backed up at the kill line. A gut-cooker shorted out, and they ended the shift eight hundred kills short. "Get every beaner you got on the production line," he ordered, looking toward Marisol for the first time. "I need one sticker and one knuckle dropper, preferably sober. Two kidney pullers. Don't matter if they're drunk or on meth. Maybe even better if they are."

The man hurried out, and the woman at the desk sent Marisol to the women's locker room to change. Moments later, the conveyor line foreman, a Chicano named Carlos, chunky with a broom-bristle mustache, strutted into the locker room as Marisol stood in her panties and blouse. She modestly turned her back to him but could feel his eyes on her. He watched silently as she stepped into a jumpsuit, then put on a chain-mail apron, armored gloves, and knee-high rubber boots. She wondered what her job would be and if this man with dried blood under his fingernails would be training her.

Carlos told her to hurry up and get her cute
culo
moving. His only other advice was not to drink any water, because it would be three hours before her first pee break.

"Do you want some tina?" he asked.

"Tina?"

"Crystal meth. To get you through the shift."

She shook her head.

"First day it's free. If you're still here tomorrow, I have the best prices in the plant."

"No, thank you."

He stared at her in the blatant way of Hispanic men, the way a bulldog admires a lamb chop. "Did you come north with a man?"

Another shake of the head.

His look straddled the bridge between sympathy and delight. "Do you know what they call a woman who crosses the border alone?"

The very same thing El Tigre had asked her. Did all these
pendejos
belong to the same club of prehistoric men?

"La chingorda,"
the foreman said. "The fucked one."

"I can take care of myself."

"You're going to need a friend,
chica
. Now, follow me to the kill floor."

Whatever she had to do, she told herself, she could handle. She followed Carlos through a heavy metal door and was hit by three sensations at once. The noise, the cold, and the squishing of her boots through puddles of blood. Large men wielded power saws that chunked through the spines of the cows, cutting them in half. Conveyor belts whined and meat grinders whirred at such a high pitch it hurt her ears. The cold was worse than any winter she had experienced.

Hispanic men carried sides of beef on their backs and hoisted the carcasses onto hooks. Other men hacked at the corpses like serial killers, indifferent to their victims.

Men in clean jumpsuits and goggles watched from metal catwalks that crisscrossed the plant twenty feet above the floor.

Carlos led her to a table next to a conveyor belt. Two short, sturdy women with impassive Indian features stood, flanking her, not looking up from their work. Carlos grabbed a chunk of bloody meat from the passing belt, tossed it onto the table and with three swift slices trimmed the fat. In one motion, he tossed the meat back onto the moving belt and hurled the scraps onto a second, higher conveyor. That was the extent of his instruction.

He leaned close and whispered in her ear, "I could have put you on the gut table. Ten hours pulling out intestines by hand." He smiled and scratched his bristly mustache with a blood-sticky fingernail. "But you're too pretty for that job."

He wished her
buena suerte
by grabbing each of her buttocks, then walked away.

Three hours later, Marisol was no longer cold. Sweat ran down her neck and trickled between her breasts under the chain-mail apron. Her right forearm ached and her fingers cramped into a curled position. She tried using her left hand for cutting, but her movements were unsure. She either cut away too much meat or too little. Twice, she sliced into the armored glove of her right hand. Once, the knife flew out of her hand, barely missing the woman to her left.

In her life, she had never imagined such a place.

Again, she thought of Father Castillo. She wanted to tell the priest that hell was not an inferno of sulphuric fires and suffocating heat. Hell was an icy, metallic cold. Hell was the whine of saws chewing through flesh and the stench of torn intestines spilling across countertops.