Warday

travel in the area.

To make a long story short, if an illegal goes to the airport, said illegal is going to be caught.

The Immigration Police are a fearsome crew, especially when they appear out of nowhere, their dark glasses glittering, their scorpion faces expressionless, and say, “ID, please”. We were on the concourse, passing an exhibit of new Ford Americars when it happened. We hardly even had our wallets out before there were two military police trotting over, and another three cops.

The reason? We didn’t have stamped airline tickets “visible on our persons at all times,” to quote the regulation.

The cop put our cards into a processor about the size of a recorder. The alarm flashed green (no doubt to con the criminal into thinking he’d passed the test and thus prevent a struggle). We were made to stand against the wall and searched. Jim’s recorder and his precious box of diskettes were left alone. California actually wanted us to keep our possessions. They don’t want potential deportees to leave so much as a used toothpick behind to give them a possible reason to return to the state after they have served their sentences and been ejected.

We were marched out of the airport, past the long rows of ticket counters. Japan AirLines, All-Nippon Airways, Singapore Airlines, Cathay-Pacific, Philippine Airlines, Thai Airlines, British Airways, Caledonian, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Aer Lingus, Air Prance, South African Airways, Pan Am, TWA, Delta.

You can fly from San Francisco to Tokyo ten times a week, to London, Singapore, or Paris eight times, to Bonn five times, to Taiwan four times, to Milan twice.

There is no American city except L.A. with near the service.

New York, Washington, and San Antonio are not on the schedules, of course, and most other American cities are barely there.

You cannot fly from San Francisco to Minneapolis at all, but you can go nonstop to Buenos Aires on British Airways or Pan Am, twice a week.

Just being in that airport—despite the cops and the handcuffs—made me long for the magnificent ease of jet travel as I remember it. I even have dim recollections of flying in pre-jet days from San Antonio to Corpus Christi with my father, and the hostess handing out mint Chiclets in cellophane packets. I remember my amazement on learning we were a mile high. I feel equally amazed now that I am earthbound.

Things one took for granted never quite seem lost. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism, but somewhere in the back of my mind I always assume that things will one day return to normal, which means life as it was in about 1984.

I remember when Hershey bars got bigger.

And the Ford Tempo, and Chinese restaurants with menus ten pages long, and they had it all.

I remember inflation, and how happy everybody was when it ended—and how unhappy when it started up again, right after the ’84 election.

And OPEC. I wonder if it still meets, and if the Israelis send representatives or allow their Arab client-states to continue the pretense of independent participation.

Walking along in that spit-and-polish gaggle of officers, I considered the idea of just breaking and running.

But I want to live. Badly.

Ticket clerks glanced curiously at us as we passed, and I thought of light on wings and how small the ocean seems from a jet.

I thought of the magical land of Somewhere Else.

They don’t have Immigration Police Somewhere Else.

They don’t have Red Zones and Dead Zones and British civil servants.

Somewhere Else the corn is always safe to eat and you don’t see cattle vomiting in their pens.

They never triage Somewhere Else, and they don’t write Bluegrams.

They don’t love each other as Anne and I do, either, not Somewhere Else, where the sky is clean and death is a hobby of the old.

Somewhere Else they assume that they have a right to exist and do not stop to consider that it may be a privilege.

California needs the rest of America. It must not be allowed to become a separate nation. If there is such a thing as a geopolitical imperative in our present society, it is to prevent this from happening. The current California immigration laws are an affront to the very memory of the Bill of Rights—and in most parts of this country it is much more than a memory.

We were taken to a holding pen right in the airport, an airless, windowless room jammed with miserable people and booming with fluorescent light.

We remained there, without food or water or access to counsel, for fifty hours. We slept as best we could on the black linoleum floor, entwined with the other captured.

I was the first to appear before the magistrate. He was a cheerful young man in a blue Palm Beach suit and one of the raffish gray panamas that California’s affluent class wear nowadays.

They are gray because they are dusted with lead.

He was perhaps thirty. “Let’s see, you’re one of the ones dressed as a priest. Funny. This is funny too: By the power vested in me by the state of California, I sentence you to two years at hard labor, to be followed by transportation out of state.” He banged a gavel. “Next case,” he said, absently shuffling papers.

My mouth was dry. I was too shocked to make a sound. Two years in prison, just like that. No jury, not even a chance to ask a question. And where was my lawyer? What the hell happened to my side?

I didn’t hear Jim’s sentencing, but I could see by his expression when we entered the prison bus, which was waiting at the far end of the main building, that he had been hit too. I held up my hand, indicating the number two. He nodded and held up first one finger and then another, then another.

Jim had done worse than I had; he was in for three years. Why the stiffer sentence? I found out later that he had asked the judge for a jury trial.

The bus was an old model with cyclone fencing welded into the windows. It rattled and shook along. There were ten of us, men as well as women, all handcuffed, seated on narrow steel benches.

When I realized that no guards were back here in the un-air-conditioned part of the bus, I began to talk.

“Maybe we can get word to someone in the federal government,” I said. “Perhaps they can help.”

Jim stared at me as if I had gone completely mad. “Look,” he said, “I’ve still got my recorder and my disks. Once we get to the prison, they’re going to be locked in a property room. Maybe stolen or erased.”

Obviously there was no time to fool around with government officials. “So we break out of the bus. How?”

“Not too hard, it isn’t very secure. I think they expect illegals to be passive. You remember how to fall?”

My mind went back to basic training. I had fallen then, often enough. “I guess so.”

“We’re gonna jump and hope for the best.”

“Jim, we’re wearing handcuffs.”

“That’s not much more of a problem than that door.”

The rear door of the bus, once the fire exit, was welded closed.

“How can we possibly jump?”

With an angelic expression, Jim raised his eyes.

Right above us was a ventilator. It was pushed open. Jim passed the word that he and I were going out on the roof if we got the chance, and we’d pull anybody up who cared to follow.

We waited, then, for the bus to leave San Francisco proper. We had no idea of our destination, but we were soon across the Bay Bridge and going through Oakland on Route 80, heading toward Richmond.

We passed Richmond, moving at about forty miles an hour. The bus slowed as we reached the Hercules exit. We turned off and took a right beneath the railroad tracks onto a two-lane blacktop called Crow Canyon Road. It was 9:15 A.M. The Zephyr would be leaving San Francisco at noon.

I prayed that I would see Anne again.

We passed the Crow Canyon golf course and a big truck depot, then began climbing a hill. Soon our speed