Imperial (7 page)

That was why some
solos,
tough, brave, or merely stupid, chose to walk. Their ears burning in the sun, they found a place to hide until nightfall, then pushed on. When their water ran out, they sucked on the vague green sweetness of an unripe cotton ball. One cannot eat it, for even in its immature state the inside is full of white fibers. That is why younger is better. Younger is juicier. At least it gives one a little energy. But between the purple-hearted alfalfa fields along the border and the citrus orchards near Coachella one finds many utterly sun-exposed places—no fields or orchards, just green brush already going orange-brown in the heat. Yes, one can follow the East Highline or the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but now we know that that may not pan out. And the New River, well, that’s hell. It might be wiser just to trudge the unremarked dust. But then, at a hundred fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, sucking on a cotton ball will carry a fugitive only so far. From Calexico north through El Centro and then Imperial to Brawley is not so bad, or might not be if the Border Patrol refrained from preying upon that route (here we might quote Officer Dan Murray again: If we see someone with mud on their shoes, we just say, c’mon, get in the car!), but then, as the Salton Sea begins to widen and devour the horizon, it comes time to choose: east side or west side. Either way one finds only nothingness tan and flat between sea and mountains, just going on and on, salt-baked sand and stinking dead birds, multicolored railroad cars speeding like cloud-blocks in a windy sky. Yes, the
bodies
walk by night, but from Calexico to Indio is nearly ninety miles if one stays on the road.
⁴
A well-trained soldier can walk this distance in a night and day; most people cannot. The sun will find them. It toasts the haystacks as brown as nuts. One
solo
whom I met in Mexicali told me how he had lain in a cave of honey-colored hay bales near the All-American Canal all day, then trudged the thirty miles from Calexico up to Niland between dusk and dawn. (Carlos had taken two days and nights to make the same trip, but Carlos was out of shape. Moreover, this other
solo
had crossed in the autumn, when the nights were longer and cooler.) Having the knowledge or good fortune to avoid the aerial gunnery range to the east, he followed the Ho Chi Minh Trail all the way up until it intersected Highway 111, then swung around Calipatria and headed through a long dry patch on the Slab City side. He was arrested in Niland in the middle of the following morning when, stained with dust and sweat, he sought to change sleeping places to better escape the sun. He was lucky. He didn’t die.

THE RIDE

It was to escape such inconveniences that the
solos
who could afford it sometimes became
pollos.
The coyotes’ recruiters,
polleros,
⁵
were ubiquitous in Mexicali. Everybody who slept or worked on the street knew at least half a dozen.

What do they do? I asked Carlos.

They come up to you in the park and say: Hey, man, you goin’ to L.A.?

How do you decide which to trust?

When you don’t know nobody, you just go with the first one.

The coyotes promised a known route studded with safehouses, and motorized transportation where it was needed. Obviously, the faster a
body
could get out of the border area, the better became his odds of living underground in America. Consider the case of the elegantly dressed woman who sat sipping a drink in the lounge at Calexico International Airport. Officer Murray approached her. She happened to be an illegal from Peru. Usually it was easier to pick them out there at the airport, Murray said, because they were sweating and breathing heavily from their dash from the ravine,
puffing and puffing,
as he put it. The Peruvian woman looked plausible, but anybody with dark skin who sat that close to Southside was likely to get scrutinized. Farther north, in Mecca, Indio or Los Angeles, she might have gotten away with it. So that was her mistake, which she had full leisure to repent in the holding cell.
⁶

And if a car could convey an immigrant across the hottest desert stretches of Imperial County, he had less reason to fear dying of thirst. In a surly testimony to the coyotes’ effectiveness, Murray told me: You get hits out here, you gotta respond fast. You never know if they’ll get pulled into a vehicle.

Why didn’t they all arrange to get pulled into a vehicle, then?—Because in one man’s words,
the farther you go, the more you pay.
When you can pay nothing, you go nowhere, unless you walk, swim or crawl, dragging your hunger along.

Coyotes offered the
pollos
one another’s companionship. At least they wouldn’t face the Northside all alone.—Officer Murray said to me: When you’re out in a field, or east in the checks, you often get a group of thirty.—Those large groups, of course, were mainly coyote-run;
solos
by definition didn’t travel in packs like that. Sometimes I saw heads popping up over the fence, waving arms all peculiar and inhuman in the dark, and the kids would run back out of a pool of light when the Border Patrol came. They were on their own, and I rarely saw more than half a dozen of them. Laughing and running, they gave one another courage to face the brightness of the wallscape. And if they’d had a guide, a wise coyote or his proxy, how much braver they would have been!

Then, too, some coyotes offered tricks and diversions, like the man I met in Mexicali who hired street youths at a hundred good American dollars per day to jump the fence and draw off the Border Patrol while he inserted his
pollos
into another section of wall. This coyote also knew the crops in the American fields very well, and the concealment they gave at various seasons. He knew how to introduce his clients to the pale heads of onion flowers at night. (You have groups here and all the onion juice comes out of ’em, Officer Murray repeatedly said. Sometimes it gets so powerful that I can’t see.) He knew about those caves in the walls of hay bales, and tunnels in the tall corn. When I interviewed him, briefly and under uneasy circumstances, he said he’d never give away his best tricks. But he promoted himself as if he were a circus ringmaster, promising thousands of bombastic marvels, experiences, colorful lures for the Border Patrol, whom he dismissed with exaggerated scorn. I did not much believe in him.

On occasion the coyotes could protect their
pollos
against American citizens who did not wear uniforms, such as the gaunt bald man in the Drops just east of Slab City who had pontificated to me for years about the manifold beauties of neighborliness; he gave anybody water who needed it; he loaned out his generator to a poor man with heat stroke; but when I asked him whether he’d ever seen illegal aliens come through, he laughed with vicious joy and told me that one night just last week a coyote and his passengers had stopped on this very back road. They needed help; their tire had blown and they had no spare.—’Cause I
know
what they was up to, he sneered. I was not about to let ’em do it for free. I charged ’em twenty-five dollars for my help. Yeah, they spoke a little English . . .—I wondered how much he would have assisted a Mexican who spoke no English and carried no cash.

Ah, sweet money! Money whispers that there are coyotes for every budget. I met a man in Sacramento whose friend’s son, holder of an American passport, ran into some drug-related difficulties in Guadalajara. The United States consulate could do nothing. The man went to a friend of a friend in Sacramento. For five hundred dollars this coyote gave him a telephone number. For an additional fourteen thousand dollars (this happened in 1989, so I suppose it would have cost twenty-five grand in 1999, and after 2001 only Saint Juan Soldado knows), the Mexican guards were paid off, the prisoner loaded into an ambulance, ferried down a dirt road to an airstrip, and flown to Texas, where some bribed American official or employee (he did not tell; I did not ask) allowed them to continue on to Oakland without clearing customs. They landed on a private runway belonging to a certain large American corporation. The man who told me this story was along for the journey. I have been acquainted with him for years, and I trust him. How nice and friendly anyone’s coyote would be, if one had fourteen thousand dollars . . .

A LIVING ADVERTISEMENT

Toward Yuma the state of California becomes even drier, burdened with sadly shifting sand dunes and grotesquely ancient crags; that’s the Arizona look. Here the All-American Canal is wider and richer, almost a real river like the Colorado from which it flows, fringed with vegetation where the people hide. (It works both ways, a Mexican told me. The Border Patrol also has lots of places to hide.) And over at Southside, in the already mentioned town of Algodones, where two Mexican and two American states meet, the Morelos Dam supports a statue of the Virgin who looks out along the Colorado River. In the inevitable place upon which the Virgin’s back was turned, I saw a hammock hanging upon girders like a weary pupa, shading a pair of sandals and a small daypack.

The man in the hammock stuck his head out at last. He felt sad now. His friend had tried the river crossing into Arizona just a day before. His plan, which was not very logical but better than no plan, was to wait here for three or four days, then, if his friend did not return, to make the attempt, hoping and believing that his friend must have made it, in which case he himself might succeed. Should his friend return, then they would try another place.—Not as easy as before, the man whispered, since many Border Patrol . . .

He was a timid man, leaving initiative up to others. The Border Patrol had caught him too many times now. Slender, richly bearded and moustachio’d, he said with a gentle smile that he wanted a restaurant job, maybe waiting tables or washing dishes. He wore a black cap emblazoned with the name of a famous American restaurant chain. He had attained Arizona not long before, but the freight train he tried to catch passed him by too quickly; then the Border Patrol arrested him. He was not angry with them, he interjected quickly; they did their job and he did his.

I gave him twenty pesos and he brightened, commending me to God. Now he would cross today, as soon as he had eaten. He would not wait for darkness, because he went alone. In the rich tangle of brush, robbers both Mexican and American would settle into their ambuscades by nightfall. They enforced their greed with knives and pistols. It had happened to him twice before. He’d be crawling low in the bristling darkness, and then suddenly he’d be caught; they’d stripped him naked, finding every coin.—They will shake you for pesos,
no importa
if you live or die, he said. I hope to God I get over there.

Sometimes the Mexican police had robbed him also. They did not come specifically for that, only to examine him for drugs, but if in the course of the examination any valuables were discovered, why then, they became the property of the discoverers.

His wife, like the wives of so many other
bodies,
awaited him in Los Angeles. It was now July, and he had not seen her since last May when they’d crossed the border successfully at Tijuana, the Border Patrol not yet having erected metal fence in the place that they had found. A month afterward, he’d learned that his mother was dying. So he went back to Morelos to say goodbye to her. His wife had remained in the United States. She was a chambermaid, a link in a hotel chain. She earned barely enough for rent and food. There was no possibility that he could pay any coyote. But if he only could . . .

If I didn’t have my wife, he asked me, why would I be suffering and trying? She’s the only thing I have in life. Without her I don’t care if I die.

“YOU GOTTA CROSS”

The coyote came out with his shoulders down like a charging bull. I nodded and smiled, but he looked at me with a strangely flat, almost watery gaze which I have long since learned signifies a gazer who cares not what evil he does, someone utterly and inhumanly unreachable. I saw this gaze once in a Russian paramilitary policeman during the Yugoslav civil war; he soon held a bayonet to my throat to “test” me. I saw it in some teenagers in Harlem who seared my arm with a cigarette butt.

Ask him if it’s okay to talk to him here in the street, I asked the cokehead.

Sure, the cokehead replied.

Ask him how he got started and why he—

The coyote stared into my face with his watery eyes and said in perfect English: I got started same as you, by asking questions. But I’m not gonna answer any of
your
fuckin’ questions. Now get the hell out of here.

And turning to the cokehead, he told him in Spanish: If you don’t cut this gringo loose right now, I’m gonna hurt you bad.

I’m just workin’ for money, the cokehead protested, but the coyote roared at him like a bull and swung his big beefsteak arms.

He followed us for a good four blocks, threatening the cokehead, but not me.

The cokehead’s name, as I said, was Juan. He had crossed the border illegally many times, sometimes as a
solo,
sometimes as a
pollo.
It depended on how much money he had.

What made you decide to go the first time? I asked him.

My sister lives there in America. I wanted to go and find out how it is.

How did she get there?

My parents went over by coyote and took my sister. My Dad came back alone. Then he died. I stayed here with my older sister.

So when you wanted to come to her, what happened?

Well, my sister find out about me over there, and they send a coyote to me. We started, but then the Border Patrol found us and the coyote ran. So the Border Patrol caught us. He just wrote my name and then we come back . . .

And then?

We got caught like three times until we finally made it.