“Tell him not to worry. We did the right thing. It was not a lie.”
“Senora?”
“Stirman lured many others to a similar fate. It is the same, whether he served this devil or some other.”
It had been a long time since I’d felt unsure of my Spanish, but I wasn’t certain I’d understood her correctly. I set down my coffee.
“ Senora, how did you come to this ranch?”
“The Green Highway.”
“?Mande?”
“The power lines.”
I knew what she meant. The power line poles that ran through the South Texas plains were kept clear of brush and cactus, making a perfect path for illegal immigrants who wanted to stay off the roads without getting lost. The Green Highway. A determined illegal could walk for hundreds of miles along those grassy corridors, straight into Uvalde or San Antonio.
“So… you never met Will Stirman?”
She shook her head, her expression apologetic. “McCurdy would not trust someone else to pick his women. He knew what he wanted-the kind who made him angry. He would pretend to be a border agent and search the Green Highway himself. He separated me from two friends, promised to let them go if I cooperated. I thought I knew what he wanted. I was wrong. He brought me here. He went slowly with me. My blindness excited him, I think. But it also made him careless. He did not remember the lock, the third night.”
She related the story without faltering, without showing any emotion other than grim satisfaction. I imagined her alone in the dark, tired and beaten and bloody, escaping and stumbling down to the river, following it as she’d followed the power lines, trusting her sense of direction to lead her out of McCurdy’s property. Somehow, she had found help. She had made the sheriff believe her.
“After all that,” I said, “you chose to come back. You made a home
… here.”
“You cannot move away from the dead, senor. When I spoke against Stirman, I spoke for all of the women like me. I live here now for all of them.”
I could translate the words, but her meaning seemed alien to me. I could not imagine doing what she had done.
“Stirman will come after you,” I said. “He will not be kind.”
She turned her face to receive a wet breeze from the window. I realized she knew more about pain and fear than I could ever imagine. I could say nothing that would scare her.
“This is my home,” she said. “Velo tu.”
I looked at the garlic ristras, the sunlight on the cornflower walls, the pot of steaming water on the stovetop. I did see.
Gloria Paz had exorcised fear from this place-from this small part of McCurdy’s ranch. I wondered if that was why the new owner had allowed her to live here. Gloria had succeeded where he had failed.
“Tell Mr. Barrow to come visit,” Gloria Paz said. “It has been too many years. He can bring me more shotgun ammunition. Tell him not to despair.”
Only then did I realize who she reminded me of-her small frame, her stubborn expression, the tense set of her shoulders, as if she were ready to lead a charge. She reminded me of Erainya.
I managed to say, “I’ll tell him.”
Sam Barrera came back inside. He muttered an apology. He slipped the cell phone into his pocket, looked around the room as if he’d misplaced something.
“Are we done?” he asked me.
It seemed a strange thing to say, since he hadn’t participated in any of the conversation. Perhaps he could see from my expression that I’d learned what I needed to know. Or perhaps he saw the goat’s milk and Folgers on the stovetop and decided not to risk it.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I guess we’re done.”
On the drive back through Castroville, we passed our friend the deputy. He was leaning against the hood of his unit, supervising a group of men placing sandbags across the entrance of Haby’s Bavarian Bakery. He tipped his hat to us. I imagined he was congratulating himself on being right-the city folk were beating a hasty retreat after a hopeless visit with the crazy woman.
The hills retreated behind us. I waited for Barrera to speak.
When he didn’t, I said, “You framed Will Stirman. Gloria Paz lied for you.”
Just when I thought he wasn’t going to acknowledge my statement, he said, “So now you know.”
“At the risk of sounding rude-were you fucking insane?”
“Did you miss the chains?” Sam asked. “The bloodstains on the wall?”
“That was McCurdy. Will Stirman had nothing to do with those women.”
“Not those women, maybe. But a thousand others. He sent them to sweatshops, brothels, slave ranches. Fred and I knew. We had both crossed paths with Stirman before. He was a monster. This was our chance.”
“You used the public outrage about the McCurdy case. Your clients wanted a scapegoat and you knew Stirman was an easy sell.”
“We started the investigation thinking it was him. Fred and I both. When we found out… Gloria admitted there was no supplier. McCurdy handpicked the women he wanted. Fred and I were too far along at that point. We’d gotten in Stirman’s face. We’d already convinced a couple of his men to turn on him and provide evidence. How did we know they were lying? That they just wanted an excuse to divide up the boss’s business? After we realized the truth, we decided… what the hell? Gloria was willing to cooperate. We would bring Stirman down.”
“You. Sam Barrera. Mr. By-the-Book.”
“Circumstances were different, eight years ago.” His voice was tinged with bitterness.
“Erainya knew about the frame-up?” I asked.
“Fred wouldn’t have told her.”
“Then why is she reluctant to call the police?”
He hesitated. “We have too much to lose.”
“ Your reputation. She did nothing wrong.”
He gave me a wary look.
There was more to it. He wasn’t worried about looking bad, having his frame-up exposed eight years later. Who would believe the truth anyway, or care? No prosecutor would be anxious to file charges against Barrera and an old Mexican lady for taking a demon like Will Stirman off the streets.
We were back in the city now. Barrera turned south on I-10-not the way to my place.
He exited on Commerce and headed through downtown.
I didn’t want to talk to him, but finally I said, “Where the hell are you going?”
He drove to South Alamo and turned right, into Southtown.
Under different circumstances, this would’ve been fine with me. Invariably, Southtown was where I ended up whenever I had free time. I loved the dilapidated houses, the palm trees and crumbling sidewalks, old cantinas next to new art studios, tattoo shops, folk magic botanicas, pan dulce bakeries.
Back when I was still speaking with my best friend Ralph, we would kick around down here, occasionally kicking heads when business called for it. Two Northsiders, we would joke that this was the neighborhood we should have been born in. Southtown was where San Antonians came to remember why we lived in San Antonio.
Barrera parked on Cedar, in front of a big blue Victorian with a FOR SALE sign out front.
“What?” I asked.
He looked at me like the answer was obvious. “Home.”
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Sam lived in an upper-middle-class two-bedroom in Hollywood Park. His street was sleepy and safe and white-bread and about as far from Southtown as you could get.
“Look, Sam, as much as I love shopping for houses with you-”
