Illegal (4 page)

The house was a one-story, two-bedroom California bungalow with a small porch devoid of furniture. The faded green stucco could use a fresh coat of paint. The dreary 1950s kitchen smelled of mildew, the low-pitched roof leaking during winter rains. The perfect home for the unhappily divorced man.

Payne flicked on the night-table lamp, made from a bowling pin, and stared straight into Sharon's face. An eight-by-ten glossy, taken on Mammoth Mountain. A ski trip, the background a heaven of powdery snow. Sharon's cheeks pink from the cold, Adam bundled in a parka.

Smiling. Laughing.

Old times. Good times. Short times.

Oak bookshelves lined one wall. Scott Turow and George V. Higgins. Crime stories well told. Payne didn't like those courtroom novels where the lawyers were heroes. Too unrealistic.

No, it wasn't the oysters. Or the lonely bed. Or the choking memories. The day was still with him, and all the days before that. A ton of crap had floated down the stream since the crash and the divorce.

Adam playing baseball. The worst part of the divorce was spending nights without his son. At least Sharon was decent about it. He could see Adam practically anytime he wanted.

Payne gave up on sleep, grabbed the TV remote, and turned on Channel 56, home of
Twilight Zone
and
Hawaii Five-O
. Payne loved the classic shows, even though he wasn't born when they first aired.

The TV flickered on, and there was a young James Garner with an even younger Tom Selleck.
The Rockford Files.
Selleck was Lance White, the perfect detective, solving cases without breaking a sweat, pissing off Rockford, who usually got beaten up and tossed into jail, before turning crud into gold. Payne identified with the Rockford character, except his crud always turned into more crud.

At a commercial, Payne flicked to one of the movie channels.
The Big Lebowski
was just coming on, great opening scene, a tumbleweed at the mercy of the wind, blowing from the desert into Los Angeles. The
shit happens
philosophy of life. Who could argue?

He'd seen the movie the first time with Sharon, who didn't share his enthusiasm for a wacky story about a stoned slacker. Sharon was both a good cop and a dogooding cop, someone who believed the words carved in the granite of the courthouses.

Yeah, spend an hour with Judge Rollins, and try singing that tune.

Payne vowed he wouldn't flip to Channel 9. Cullen Quinn's late-night show would be on. He'd be railing about the Mexican border and encouraging the yahoos to shoot all illegals on sight. It wasn't just Quinn's politics that upset Payne. The broad-shouldered, blow-dried bastard was recently engaged to Sharon and had given her a rock so humongous it would make Paris Hilton blush. To Sharon's credit, she seldom wore the engagement ring, explaining that a cop's jewelry shouldn't be worth more than her car.

Payne kept his promise for a full twenty seconds before flipping to the Satan of the Airwaves.

"We're going the way of the Roman Empire." Quinn leaned toward the camera, his silvery blond hair frozen in place. "The Romans opened the gates and the Goths came storming in. With no respect for Roman culture or language or customs, the Goths burned Rome to the ground."

Quinn paused and lifted his chin, as if daring his viewers to take a poke at him. "Did you see those Mexican protesters in the streets? 'Open the borders!' And those weren't the Stars and Stripes they were waving. Those were Mex-i-can flags."

"¡La Reconquista!"
Quinn boomed in his broadcaster's baritone. "That's what the illegals want. To reconquer
their
land. And we're handing it right back to them. Welfare and schooling, all paid for by
you,
my friends. Their children bring lice and bedbugs into our schools. Our hospitals and prisons overflow with illegals, infected with hepatitis, TB, and chingas."

Chingas,
Payne thought. A new one on him.

The big mug seemed to have put on weight. His neck bulged out of his shirt collar. His crooked nose, product of a Golden Gloves fight, actually looked good on him. Made him less of a Ken doll. The son of a Philadelphia butcher, Quinn was a lifelong pal of Sharon's oldest brother, Rory. Both boys had hung out at the Police Athletic League gym, where they would beat each other senseless in the ring. Quinn went on to Villanova and claimed to have fought classmate Howie Long to a draw in club boxing. Long became a collegiate heavyweight champion and, later, a member of the pro football Hall of Fame. Quinn became the mouth that roared on Los Angeles radio and television.

Payne watched as Quinn gestured with a meaty hand.

"And still the wetbacks pour in, thousands every day. Millions on the way. The barbarians are inside our gates, my friends, and our walls are tumbling down. And who's benefiting from this invasion? The big growers like Simeon Rutledge, owner of Rutledge Ranch and Farms. When will Washington crack down on—"

Payne hit the "Mute" button and studied Quinn. With his face tinted orange by makeup, he looked like a scowling pumpkin. He wore a gray Italian suit so finely tailored it disguised the fact that he was beginning to resemble a whale. His designer shirt seemed to be silk, in that trendy off-purple all the rage for the next fifteen minutes or so.

Every night, the same rant. Like being stuck at a dinner party next to a guy complaining about his hemorrhoids.

Earlier today, Payne told Judge Rollins he was going to change. Of course, a man will say a lot of crazy stuff when he's staring into the barrel of a gun. Had he meant it?

Payne's eyes grew heavy. With the fog settling in, his mind sorted through a variety of possible weekend plans.

Take the hydrofoil to Catalina.

Bring along Heidi Klum.

Reread the Travis McGee paperback that began: "There are no one hundred percent heroes."

The ringing telephone jarred Payne. He fumbled for the handset.

"Yeah?"

"You stupid shit. You asshole. You total fuck-up."

Payne was fairly certain it wasn't a wrong number. "Judge?"

"I knew you were a sleaze," Walter Rollins said. "But I didn't know you were a rat."

"Judge, I'm sorry, but—"

"Shut up!"

"C'mon, Judge. You're the one who took the bribe."

"I said, shut up! I don't have much time."

Over the phone, Payne heard the judge's doorbell ringing.

"I felt sorry for you, Payne. Everybody did, after that lousy luck you had. But stuff happens. People deal with it."

"I don't want to talk about—"

"Just 'cause your life's shit doesn't mean you have to drag everyone else down the sewer."

Again, the doorbell, the chimes as insistent as machine-gun fire. In the background, Payne heard a man shout, "Police! We have a warrant!"

"Judge, calm down. The state's gonna offer you a deal. You're the first one busted. That puts you in a great position. I'll bet if you resign the bench and cooperate, you could avoid prison—"

"Bullshit. It's over for me."

"The state doesn't want to try the case. They want to work something out."

Payne waited but there was no reply.

"Judge . . . ?"

A thunderclap. The unmistakable sound of a gunshot. Then the soft thud of a body hitting the floor.

Marisol looked out through the broken window, one hand on Tino's shoulder. She would not let the boy out of her sight until they were in the United States. Her worst fear was separation, some horrific event that would pry them apart.

It was after midnight. Of course, El Tigre was late. She supposed it was too much to ask that he display a solid work ethic. Punctuality. Attention to detail. Basic competence. Like Americans.

The thought made her smile. She was beginning to think like her father.

She sat, cross-legged, in an adobe mud house that smelled of raw sewage. The stash house was located in a grim neighborhood of shacks with corrugated metal roofs. Outside, naked children played tag deep into the night. Undernourished dogs rooted in garbage cans, and chickens pecked at the dry ground.

The street was unpaved. The people were unwashed. The cars were skeletons sinking into front yards. The shade trees had long since been chopped into firewood.

Marisol could not wait to say
adios, Méjico
.

Not that she thought the streets of California were lined with rosebushes or paved with bricks of gold. She believed Father Castillo, back home, who warned that the route to the U.S.A. was a trail of thorns through a cemetery without crosses.

But just listen to the others, clucking like roosters.
Campesinos
in straw hats, a Guatemalan family with their woven sacks, a teenage love-struck couple from Ensenada, the girl pregnant. Hopelessly naive in their dreams of the promised land. One woman claimed that everyone in San Diego was a millionaire with a swimming pool, a German car, and a Mexican maid. A middle-aged man smelling of tobacco and sweat boasted that a job waited for him in a fish cannery and that he would own an almost new Chevy Silverado by the end of the summer. A Guatemalan man, his dusty feet in torn huaraches, said that he was headed to the San Joaquin Valley to pick crops. He called it a "Garden of Eden."

Marisol knew that the American Eden can be a garden of bones, that peasants like these often never reach those fertile fields. And those who do? She had heard stories that some growers were kind and decent to the migrants. Others treated them like oxen without the yokes.

She had heard talk of construction jobs in Phoenix, where thousands of homes were being built by rich Americans. But then later, others said the jobs had run as dry as the wells of her village. Who knew for certain?

A cousin from Jaripo had crossed last year. His mother told Marisol he picked grapes for twenty cents a tray. How many grapes in a tray? How long to pick them? She could not even guess.

So yes, there is work. Farms and factories. Restaurants and hotels. Drywall and roofing. Logging and demolition. Fisheries and meat-packing plants. But first, they must arrive safely.

They are the
pollos
. The cooked chickens. Men like El Tigre are the
polleros,
the chicken wranglers.

Marisol again thought of her father and wondered what he would say to her now. He was one of those Mexicans who loved the
idea
of America, insisting that Marisol learn English. Some of her earliest memories were watching
Sesame Street
on American television, after her father salvaged a satellite dish from a trash pile. Edgardo Perez even required her to read the English translations of Mexican authors.

Atlanta being the home of his favorite baseball team, the Braves. He watched on the satellite, cheering for Vinny Castilla, born in Oaxaca. Surely, Edgardo Perez would approve of her going north with Tino. But not like this. Not rushed and unplanned.

When her father worked at the Ford plant in Hermosillo, the company provided a house. Her mother gardened and knitted and cooked. Marisol remembered a childhood filled with fresh flowers, birthday parties, and heart-shaped
ensaimadas,
topped with whipped cream. For a while, at least, it was a life dipped in honey.

After her father was fired, he promised to take the family to
El Norte,
but the closest they got was a village outside Caborca in the state of Sonora. They arrived by bus, for even though Edgardo Perez had built Fords, he did not own one. Just outside the village, in the high desert, a dust devil whirled across the road and blasted the bus windows with a funnel of blinding sand. Welcome to your new life, parched and cruel, the spirits of the desert seemed to say.

Her father tried raising grapes, but there was not enough water. He looked for work. Roofer. Carpenter. Handyman. But the villagers were poor and did their own repairs, if any at all. Even worse, they seemed to resent the Perez family.

"Aristocracia,"
they called them, with contempt. Thinking the family put on airs along with their freshly washed clothes.

Only in Mexico, Marisol thought, could a fired factory worker with no money in the bank be considered haughty for keeping a clean house and making sure his children finished secondary school.

The roar of an engine stirred her from thoughts of the past. Tino leapt up and looked out the broken window. A red pickup truck with dual rear wheels and a long cargo bed kicked up dust as it slid to a stop in front of the adobe house.

El Tigre wiggled his belly out of the cab, shouting instructions for the
pollos
to hop into the back.

Tino whistled. "A Ford F-350,
Mami
. Brand new. Did
abuelo
make these?"

A note of hopeful pride in his voice, Marisol realizing yet again that her son needed a man in his life.

"I don't think so," she said. "Your grandfather built cars. Lincolns and Fords."

The ten travelers piled into the bed of the shiny red pickup, Marisol thinking, Why not just paint a sign on the doors,
Illegals Here!

Standing on the running board, El Tigre counted his passengers. "Tonight, you walk in the desert," he proclaimed, like a Mexican Moses. "Tomorrow, you walk in Los Angeles!"