Imperial (8 page)

Can you tell me the story of the successful time?

Coyote comes over here and talks to me, see. He tells me how they gonna do it. He got two or three workers, and they come with me and the other
pollos.
We go across the border at the night time. There’s a field, and then another field, and then the coyote workers take us to a van. We all lay out in the second field. That day we were thirteen or fourteen people. We all had to keep quiet. We all had to lie down until after three hours, when Border Patrol weren’t there no more.

Were you afraid?

You don’t think that it’s scary. All you think is,
you gotta cross.
The people that cross the border, sure they’re riskin’ somethin.’ Like dyin’ in the sun, you know . . .

Did you feel that?

No, because I was too young. I wasn’t thinkin’ at all.

And were you scared of the coyotes?

Naw. If you listen to them, they don’t do nothin’.

You were boys and girls, men and women together?

That’s right.

How were the girls treated?

Actually, like, they convince the girls that they’re gonna cross the border for free, if they pay with their body.

But that’s not true, is it?

The cokehead snickered.—Nope. The girls fuck the coyote, and then at the end they
still
gotta pay if they wanna get out of the hotel room where they keep ’em locked up . . .

All right. So you were in the second field until the Border Patrol left. What then?

From Mexicali to San Fernando it took us a day and a half. We had to sleep in the mountains. I forget the name of the place, but it was inside a ranch. The coyote took me over to my sister’s house and she paid him the twelve hundred dollars.

So she didn’t have to pay half up front?

Nope.

And then what?

I was in school over there. I was thirteen. That’s the thing about America. You study for free. But then my Mom died, so I went back here. My Dad was already buried. When I got bored, I went back by coyote a second time. But now that I was big, I had a lot of problems with my brother-in-law. He told my sister that I didn’t help him out with housework. They were really American people. And, just like most of them think, it actually
is
easy to make more money in America. But you
waste
more money over there, too. So I came back to Mexicali again. After that, I didn’t need coyotes no more. I had my high school ID. So I came back a lot of times.

We stood together looking across a sealed parking lot which evilly shone with black puddles reflecting the border lights round and unreal like those not yet winnowed cantaloupes, and I asked him: You want to come over with me now? I’ll buy you dinner in Calexico.

Oh, no! Can’t do it now, man! That high school ID’s twenty years old now . . .

So if you wanted to go to the U.S., you’d get a coyote?

Not if I can help it. They always talk
bastard and bitch, bastard and bitch . . .

VARIOUS PUBLIC APPRECIATIONS

An old man in a Mexicali bar who kept buying me beers which were tinted bloodred with tomato juice and chili said: They are criminals. They traffic in human lives.—And he began to tell me a story about how when he was living in Arizona (illegally, as it happened; he’d been a
solo
) he’d found two human skeletons in the desert: relics, he was sure, of the coyotes. A coyote of his acquaintance claimed one skull, polished it and placed a red candle inside. The old man brooded over that for years.

And the Border Patrol? I asked him.

Also criminals.

We’ve had scores of people die in the last couple of years, a reporter in El Centro said. Probably four or five in Imperial County last month. (This was in May.) There would have been more, but it hasn’t been so hot. They get stranded in the desert and the coyotes leave ’em. They’ll do anything to move the people, like shuffling a hundred of ’em in back of a tractor-trailer rig. Last year one of them crashed and a lot of folks got hurt. And often they have to cross the All-American Canal. Ten to fifteen will drown there in the next several months. They’re not highly thought of here. Most of the people who live here don’t hold anything against illegal immigrants. They may call Border Patrol or they may not. But the coyotes . . .

Well, don’t some of the coyotes perform a service?

The majority do not. They’ll abandon ’em in a heartbeat. The really sad thing is when people try to cross the mountains and they freeze to death.

That was what the Americans tended to say, particularly when they were speaking officially. I remember when the
Calexico Chronicle
ran a front-page article entitled
Undocumented Migrants Speak of The Smugglers
[
sic
]
Total Disregard For Their Safety.
(Had the smugglers been considerate, would the
Calexico Chronicle
have said so?) Tom Wacker, chief of the El Centro sector, was quoted as saying: We are trying to identify and prosecute the smuggler in every group that’s apprehended. We need to get these criminals behind bars where they can’t harm anyone.

But one former
pollo
smiled when I quoted to him what Chief Wacker had said. He replied: They choose one of their number to throw to the Border Patrol, the one they most dislike. In a chorus they denounce him as their coyote. And the judge doesn’t have time to listen and figure it out.

And how often is the one they denounce the actual coyote?

Not very often. Because they might need to cross by coyote again next time.
⁷

He was one of the members of another “family” in Algodones who on a very hot morning stood in their underwear, washing their clothes by hand against the rocks of the windy Colorado River, whose high clay banks were shagged with reeds. The white sand on the Arizona side told sad stories paragraphed with the naked, widely-spaced footprints of running men, and the tracks of Border Patrol vehicles curving and curling like immense wood shavings, whirling around the running men until they had caught them. The former
pollo
and his “family” were on the Mexican side, of course. After they finished washing their clothes, they’d go into the weeds to hide until nightfall.

We’re gonna relax tonight, then try again tomorrow night, he said.

Why?

Well, we get used to it here. Not so different from our home.

An old coyote who’d led many chosen ones out of Algodones had told me how hard it could be to sleep there with the heat and the mosquitoes, but when I asked the former
pollo
about this, he said that after a week or two you got used to it. He’d already been there a month. In that month he and his “family” had tried six times, each time carrying four liters of water because it was not safe to drink from the Colorado.

I’m waiting to cross, he reiterated patiently.

But not by coyote?

No money.

He didn’t blame the coyotes so much.—They don’t wanna get caught by the Border Patrol, he explained. It’s not that they’re leaving ’em there.

In your experience, are they thieves or are they honorable men?

They sincerely do want to cross you over to win their money.

What chance do they give you?

Fifty-fifty. The coyote knows the road—but so does the Border Patrol . . .

His opinion was characteristic. The Americans called the coyotes villains. The Mexicans considered them useful—maybe a little cowardly sometimes, maybe mercenary; perhaps they did take advantage of their female passengers from time to time, but, still, where would most
pollos
be without them?

Yesterday when we crossed over on the east side, the Border Patrol let us walk quite a distance, another
pollo
told me. I’m sure they’d already seen us. Then they caught us and verbally abused us. They like to let us get dehydrated and tired, so we can’t run from them as fast.

How can you be sure they saw you?

He laughed.—They were watching from the freeway with binoculars.

And what happened to your coyote?

Well, he was safe in Mexicali, of course. As for the
pollista,
he ran.

You don’t blame him?

No! I would have done the same!

THE PROCEDURE (1)

Well, there’s all kinds of people who want to go to coyotes, remarked a man who smelled of stale sweat, dirt, prison, booze and tears. He was Roberto the Honduran, whose wife and children had all perished, every single one, in Hurricane Mitch. He wanted to cross over to Northside. But he could not afford the coyotes. He went on: One of them rounds up the others, and goes to the hotel room, where the coyotes pay him a commission.
They’re
not looking for
pollos
on the street. Oh, no! They’re in motel rooms, waiting for the people.

THE PROCEDURE (2)

From here to the crossing, it’s the guide, one
pollo
explained. Then the coyote takes you across. Then your friend on the other side pays the coyote, who comes back and pays the guide.

CARLOS’S STORY

My friend Carlos, he who was too fat to clamber over the fence and too poor to hire a coyote, expressed a pseudo-American opinion one day when he said: The thing is, you know, they take you to the desert. No water. If someone’s dying, they don’t care. They leave you to die.

But when I said: You saw them leave somebody? he replied: Well, actually, I got across the border. I got to L.A. For me they weren’t so bad.

I thought you didn’t have money.

I ripped ’em off! he said, grinning.

You ripped off a coyote? That’s pretty good. Tell me everything.

Well, they take me to a motel room and feed me. Beer and whatever you want. They pay for everything. At three in the morning we go to the park. There’s a hole under the ground, and we start running through the bushes and hide. They take me to Signal Mountain, one guide in the front, one at the end. There were seven people with me. So we started walking, walking, walkin’ all night till we got to one town—I think it was, like, El Centro—and then another van was waiting for us.

You must have been tired, I said, for I had seen Signal Mountain from Northside, squat and blue on the horizon, veiled by blue-grey clouds. Crossing it at night must have been frightening and exhausting.

Yeah, he said. We hid near the Immigration checkpoint. After they searched the van, after we got the green light, then we got in the van. Then we ride our way to Santa Ana. There was an apartment out there and they take us. We don’t pay till we get there. Your friend here pay money, and you’re free to go.

Were there any women in your group?

Oh, they just rape ’em.

How many in your group?

Two.

And what happened to them?

They were fine. They fucked the guide, that’s all.

And then what?

I just got off the truck and ran! You see, they told us there was some guys in the apartment with guns, and they would guard us until our relatives paid for us. Well, no relative was gonna come; I’d just lied to the coyotes, that’s all. Before we get to the apartment, man, there was a stop sign, so I just jumped out and I ran. Because I had no money. They didn’t follow me, because the others would have run out, too. I went to a house, you know, and there was this Mexican lady cleaning, and I asked if I could have some water. She told me to stay awhile, and then she gave me two dollars for the bus to L.A. Then I went straight to the mission,
⁸
man. Later I got a job passing out flyers on the street . . .

CASH ON DELIVERY

In his reference to that guarded apartment near Los Angeles, Carlos had touched on one of several necessary cruelties of the human-smuggling industry. Since the coyotes had little mind to bring people to Northside without compensation, and since most
pollos
could not afford to pay up front—indeed, the arrangement protected them, because the coyote had the best incentive to deliver them safely, instead of pocketing their money and murdering them—the merchandise, namely, the
pollo
himself, needed to be held until payment. Carlos had been gutsy, rash and lucky.

These holding areas could be found in almost any town in Imperial County. In Calexico, in that strip of border hotels on Fourth Street whose bathrooms stink of disinfectant like Greyhound bus terminals, whose weary curtains are often peep-holed with cigarette burns, whose televisions lean and leer, there was one owned by an old white man whose wife or companion was a beautiful, hard young Mexicana. When you asked this man how he was, he’d say: Well, I’m here.—He hated President Clinton and believed that America’s problem was that it was being run by a bunch of goddamned intellectuals. He hated the Border Patrol, too. He called them flakes. He said that everybody accused the Mexicans of corruption, but it was worse over here. He had
goddamned
convincing proof that the Border Patrol sold entry cards to aliens for five
goddamned
grand a head,
goddammit.
The Border Patrol hated him, too; three officers told me so. This was the kind of hotel it was. In those days I always stayed there. It was not one of the rock-bottom haunts of street-whores and heroin addicts, the places whose filth lies beyond words. I never found one of those in Calexico. As the owner himself liked to say: It’s not so bad.—Maybe because it was not so bad (it was not especially cheap, but it was private), I frequently heard darkskinned men say to the Mexicana: You have any rooms that face the street? Would it be okay if I see one?—Vans and panel trucks parked themselves in front of the tiny rooms. A former coyote who visited me there said quietly: What you have to imagine is twenty or thirty people all crammed into this room. And maybe somebody wants to sleep, but he can’t sleep because there’s no room on the floor. And maybe somebody wants to use the toilet, but he can’t because the coyote’s in the bathroom screwing all the girls one by one.