Imperial (4 page)

See all those cars in there?
Stolen,
my guide triumphantly explained. From America.

Well, I said, I’m glad they have a new home, Juan. How do you know they’re stolen?

I don’t think these people have enough money to buy a new car—or ten new cars.

He said that in Mexicali it cost two or three hundred dollars for a brand-new stolen American automobile, which I considered not a bad price. He said that another industry of the householders along this road was to hide emigrants on consignment until nightfall, then help them try to swim the canal. And just as he finished explaining these matters, we came upon a man in sunglasses who was driving a brand-new van with tinted windows. We had seen no other vehicles before, and we saw none afterward except for one water truck whose corroded white cylinder tank slowly bled water as it went. The man in sunglasses rolled down his night-dark window to study us, which was the only reason that we could see him at all. He was gripping a pair of binoculars against his face. When he had digested us, he drove slowly past, the window still down. He was watching the canal now through his binoculars.

Think he’s a coyote? I asked.

What else?

Now we arrived at a little shrine to the Virgin and a cross. Someone had died, perhaps a
solo.
Juan read the inscription. Yes, he said, the man had drowned trying to cross into America, where everything was wider, cleaner, safer, more expensive, more controlled and more homogeneous. And by this shrine we parked the car and ascended the levee of crumbing mud-dust to gaze at the United States, where of the three of us only I could legally go. It was hot and thorny and dry on the Mexican side with all those American fields appearing so cruelly green like Paradise,
because the water belongs to America,
as Juan put it. Beside us, a skinny horse browsed in garbage.

Some chocolate-brown boys were swimming in the coffee-colored canal, and on Northside, very close to Wistaria Check as I said, a white truck was parked and two middle-aged white men were trying their luck at catfishing, ignoring the boys who ignored them. Juan pointed to the boys and said: See those poor people over there? They’re gonna try for the night time, then they’ll walk through all the fields . . .

Ask them where they’re going.

They’re gonna go to Canada, they say, unless Border Patrol catch them.

Ask them if they know where Canada is.

They say, they don’t know, but somebody told them it’s a real nice country where you don’t get hassled like you do in America.

On our side, the dusty desert side, an obelisk marked American dominion, and later I learned from the Border Patrol that the canal actually lay slightly north of the true border, but those guardians found it needlessly troublesome to assert their authority over the few slender feet of United States sovereignty between the marker and the water. Officer Murray said to me: If I saw people on the Southside of the canal, I’d just wave to ’em. You see a raft, now, you just back off. Don’t wanna spook anybody.

A day or two later the local papers carried a story about how Border Patrol agents had shot one of those rafts with a pellet gun. The raft capsized, and one or two aliens drowned. (There are Border Patrol officers in boats, and they’re like
fishing,
a
solo
in Algodones told me. They cut open or shoot at the rafts and let ’em drift downriver.—Last night there were about seven shots, his comrade said, shrugging.) But the drownings, I hope, were an aberration.
²
I never at any time met a
solo
or
pollo
who expressed physical fear of the Border Patrol. Murray insisted that some agents bought fast food with their own money for the frightened Southside kids they’d captured.

But the Mexican consulate never hears that, Murray said bitterly.

They’ll probably start rafting pretty soon, he muttered.

He stood listening to the canal, which was long, low, black with bamboo. His job was not to shape the destiny of those who sought America, but merely to postpone it. For what could he do to them, but lock them in a holding cell, then deport them back to Southside so that they could try again? And for a moment, as we stood there, each of us letting his private thoughts fall into the pit of the night, I almost pitied the futility of his occupation, as I suspect he did mine (the main purpose of my essays being to line birdcages), but then I fortunately persuaded myself that all vocations and callings are equally futile. He talked about how beautiful it was when he patrolled the shoulder of an onion field at dusk with the bees returning to their hives, and I started to like him. He told me about the fine catfishing he’d had in the canal, and we gazed at the sparse weak lights which shone from Mexico, until suddenly the radio said: There’s already a rope across. Looks like it’ll be near Martin Ranch.

Okay, said Murray, I’m up on the canal bank.

Okay, copy, replied the radio.

They could be running across the fields right now, he said to me. Okay, he’s got sign.

We were in the car now, speeding toward the place. We stopped by a wall of hay, which we smelled more than saw in the dark humid night. Border Patrolmen were searching with their lights.

Right here you got the traffic, Murray said.

And he shone his flashlight on fresh footprints in the sand.

These kids should be easy to catch, he went on, half talking to himself. But I feel naked; I don’t have a spotlight. I don’t have any alleylights . . .

The long field appeared green through an agent’s nightscope. The Border Patrolmen hunted and searched, as the crumbly earth devoured their feet up to the ankles. It was silt from the days of the ancient sea. They came through the field, stalking it with headlights which rendered the furrows cruelly bright.

Maybe we’ll find the bodies, Murray said. Maybe not. It’s just pure luck. But these kids tripped a sensor.

I can’t see ’em anymore, another officer said, resting his hands on his Sam Browne belt.

I got an eye on your bodies, said the nightscope man, whose monitor made the word
bodies
seem chillingly appropriate, for in the green night the aliens glowed white like evil extraterrestial beings or zombies out of a science-fiction movie. The nightscope man could also reverse the contrast if he chose, so that the
bodies
became green silhouettes in a glowing white field of night-ness.—They’re layin’ up in the middle of the field, he went on, directing the hunters through a darkness which neither they nor the aliens, who surely thought themselves safe, could penetrate. How eerie it was! Only the nightscope man could see! The aliens lurked on faith that the darkness was their invincible friend. The Border Patrolmen could scarcely perceive where they set their own feet; they could have been approaching a precipice; but they approached the unseen
bodies
with equal and, as it proved, more justified faith.—Lookin’ dead smack in the middle, said the nightscope man. Yeah, I got a fix on your bodies. Turn left. Three steps more. Another coupla steps. They should be right in front of you, right down there in those . . . Yeah, you got ’em.

Now came the wide circle of the spotlight. The hunters’ cars circled the field. And the
bodies,
hopelessly silhouetted, resurrected themselves from the fresh earth, giving in to capture and deportation. They rose, becoming black on black. And the shadow of a man whose hands were on his head was replicated manifold. Two of them with their hands on their heads stood gazing down at the half-empty jugs of water they’d carried. Sad and submissive faces gazed into the darkness, half-blinded by the brightness as the Border Patrolmen frisked them. Yes, the
bodies
stood wide-eyed in the light, all in the line, with their hands obediently behind them. Coughing, shuffling, they began to cross the fields.

You know what? a Border Patrolman said to one of the
bodies.
You really need to brush your teeth. You’ve got wicked bad breath, guy.

The
body
was silent. In the nightscope it had been as white as one of the freshly dead fishes in the cool green poison (or should I say “reputed poison”?) of the Salton Sea. Now it began to reveal itself to be brown—Hispanic, sunburned and field-stained.

Let’s go,
amigos.
Come on. Let’s go; let’s go.

None of the captives looked terrified. It was as Officer Murray had said: People realize they’re not going to jail for the rest of their lives, so they calm down.

Now, that irrigator’s car over there just happens to be in a convenient place, an agent was saying. We’ll have to check him out . . .

The Mexicans walked more quickly now, carefully cradling their water jugs, attended by the bright, bright lights. Now they sat in a line on the roadside, a long line of them, with their jugs and bottles of water between their legs. Most of them wore baseball caps. They were young, wiry, strong to work. Their eyes shone alertly in the night. Already resigned, they quickly became philosophical, and in some cases even cheerful, slapping their knees and poking one another smilingly in the ribs. Soon they’d join the people staring out the panes of the holding cells. After eight hours or so, if they had no criminal history, they’d be sent back to Mexico.

(As I reread this chapter almost a decade later, in these days of “extraordinary rendition” and the Patriot Act, I suppose that a
body
fears capture more nowadays. But how can I be sure? Our Department of Homeland Security seems disinclined to let me watch any more hunts and chases.)

We got some that made the river, but we bagged the rest of ’em, an officer was saying, but already the Border Patrol had found other game.—Two made it up into the housing development, a woman’s excited voice cried on the radio, but we’re tryin’ to inch up on ’em . . .

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE

What did the
bodies
come here for? We all know the answer. I remember how on one of my many bus rides south I was meditating on the heat and strangeness of this corner of California when the man beside me awoke, and turned toward the window like a plant toward the sun. Soon we would come to the sign which read IMPERIAL COUNTY LINE and a few minutes later we’d pass the Corvina Cafe, which would surely be as closed and dead as one of those corvina floating belly-up in the Salton Sea. The man sat gazing alertly eastward across the desert flats toward the long deep green stripe of date plantations and the dusty red and blue mountains beyond. I inferred that this landscape was his by birth or long residence. Perhaps he had been away from it for awhile. He’d told me that he was coming from a Fourth of July party at his sister’s, but I’d seen the policeman standing in the loading area, watching to make sure that he boarded this bus whose disinfectant, pretending to be pine or lemon, stung the nose with its bad chemical smell. He’d slept with his chin in his hands all the way from Indio and past the tan silence of the Jewel Date Company’s former factory parallel to the railroad tracks where rusty flatbed cars gave off heat. Now he sighed a little, and turned toward me as eagerly as he had strained toward the mountains. He offered me Mexican candy, praising it because it was cheap. Openhanded, gruff and husky, he longed to tell the tale of his life. He’d served twenty-four years in the Spanish army—or maybe he’d been an American soldier stationed in Spain, this fine point being occluded by his broken English and my ignorance of Spanish. At any rate, Spain had failed him, evidently by means of woman trouble. Now he was living in El Centro to be near his eighty-two-year-old father who had once been a mechanical genius but who lately did little more than putter around the air conditioner, trying to grow coolness like a vegetable and then inbreed and harvest it. When he spoke of his father, tenderness came into his voice in just the same way that the yellow flowers of the palo verde tree come briefly back even in July or August if there is rain. His father was too old to drive a car, so once our bus pulled into the El Centro station, my friend would be walking home in the hundred-and-ten-degree heat, which killed illegal aliens easily.

The ones who crossed alone were called
solos.
The ones who paid to be taken across were
pollos—
chickens. And who better to shepherd chickens through dangerous ways than a
coyote
? That’s truly what they were called! Coyotes never eat chickens, do they? (Every day, many
pollos
die, a taxi driver told me with solemn exaggeration. The newspaper said that only two hundred and fifty-four illegals had died last year, to which the taxi driver replied: Liars—assassins! Two or three a day die right here! They hide the bodies under the sand so that the Border Patrol won’t see.—They do die, a lifetime
pollo
later told me, but not that many.) Then there were the chicken-handlers, the
pollistas
or
polleros
whom the bigshot coyotes deputed to do the dirty work of canal-crossings and the like. Officer Murray called them “scouts.”—They’re pretty chicken, he said, not meaning the pun.—Like their bosses, they sometimes ran away when it was dangerous, leaving their passengers to die of thirst. For it was so very hot! When his father died, my seatmate might move away from Imperial County, on account of the heat. In his low, hoarse, not unpleasant voice, he remarked that he didn’t mind sitting outside in a hundred and five degrees, but when it got up to a hundred and fifteen, then his cold beer turned into hot coffee, and it was time to go indoors. He uttered many a melancholy jest of this character. I’d already begun to think of him as
the old soldier,
and was almost appalled that he was my age, thirty-eight; he looked twenty years older. This working man, dark and wiry, had resisted many solar assaults, armored by no more than an upturned cap-brim, but each attack had shriveled him a little more, so that he’d eventually be desiccated to his very soul. The hot, dry sunlight instantly warms flesh to a state near burning, then cauterizes it and stains it brown. Born in Brawley, which our Greyhound soon would reach, he’d never been to the Salton Sea in his entire life. (How far was it? Half an hour’s drive?) As a boy he’d been too busy in the fields, he said; after that he’d tried his luck in Spain. And now as we continued south on Highway 111 he began to explicate the crops to me, each time weighing himself down with a new story of dreary and dangerous drudgery.