'I felt sorry for you, Payne. Everybody did, after that lousy luck you had. But stuff happens. People deal with it.'
'I don't want to talk about-'
'Just 'cause your life's shit doesn't mean you have to drag everyone else down the sewer.'
Again, the doorbell, the chimes as insistent as machine-gun fire. In the background, Payne heard a man shout, 'Police! We have a warrant!'
'Judge, calm down. The state's gonna offer you a deal. You're the first one busted. That puts you in a great position. I'll bet if you resign the bench and cooperate, you could avoid prison-'
'Bullshit. It's over for me.'
'The state doesn't want to try the case. They want to work something out.'
Payne waited but there was no reply.
'Judge…?'
A thunderclap. The unmistakable sound of a gunshot. Then the soft thud of a body hitting the floor.
NINE
Where is that sack of greasy onions, that sorry excuse for a man who calls himself the Tiger?
Marisol looked out through the broken window, one hand on Tino's shoulder. She would not let the boy out of her sight until they were in the United States. Her worst fear was separation, some horrific event that would pry them apart.
It was after midnight. Of course, El Tigre was late. She supposed it was too much to ask that he display a solid work ethic. Punctuality. Attention to detail. Basic competence. Like Americans.
The thought made her smile. She was beginning to think like her father.
She sat, cross-legged, in an adobe mud house that smelled of raw sewage. The stash house was located in a grim neighborhood of shacks with corrugated metal roofs. Outside, naked children played tag deep into the night. Undernourished dogs rooted in garbage cans, and chickens pecked at the dry ground.
The street was unpaved. The people were unwashed. The cars were skeletons sinking into front yards. The shade trees had long since been chopped into firewood.
Marisol could not wait to say adios, Mejico.
Not that she thought the streets of California were lined with rosebushes or paved with bricks of gold. She believed Father Castillo, back home, who warned that the route to the U.S.A. was a trail of thorns through a cemetery without crosses.
But just listen to the others, clucking like roosters. Campesinos in straw hats, a Guatemalan family with their woven sacks, a teenage love-struck couple from Ensenada, the girl pregnant. Hopelessly naive in their dreams of the promised land. One woman claimed that everyone in San Diego was a millionaire with a swimming pool, a German car, and a Mexican maid. A middle-aged man smelling of tobacco and sweat boasted that a job waited for him in a fish cannery and that he would own an almost new Chevy Silverado by the end of the summer. A Guatemalan man, his dusty feet in torn huaraches, said that he was headed to the San Joaquin Valley to pick crops. He called it a 'Garden of Eden.'
Marisol knew that the American Eden can be a garden of bones, that peasants like these often never reach those fertile fields. And those who do? She had heard stories that some growers were kind and decent to the migrants. Others treated them like oxen without the yokes.
She had heard talk of construction jobs in Phoenix, where thousands of homes were being built by rich Americans. But then later, others said the jobs had run as dry as the wells of her village. Who knew for certain?
A cousin from Jaripo had crossed last year. His mother told Marisol he picked grapes for twenty cents a tray. How many grapes in a tray? How long to pick them? She could not even guess.
So yes, there is work. Farms and factories. Restaurants and hotels. Drywall and roofing. Logging and demolition. Fisheries and meat-packing plants. But first, they must arrive safely.
They are the pollos. The cooked chickens. Men like El Tigre are the polleros, the chicken wranglers.
Marisol again thought of her father and wondered what he would say to her now. He was one of those Mexicans who loved the idea of America, insisting that Marisol learn English. Some of her earliest memories were watching Sesame Street on American television, after her father salvaged a satellite dish from a trash pile. Edgardo Perez even required her to read the English translations of Mexican authors.
'Papi, doesn't it make more sense to read Carlos Fuentes in Spanish?'
'In Atlanta, they read him in English.'
Atlanta being the home of his favorite baseball team, the Braves. He watched on the satellite, cheering for Vinny Castilla, born in Oaxaca. Surely, Edgardo Perez would approve of her going north with Tino. But not like this. Not rushed and unplanned.
When her father worked at the Ford plant in Hermosillo, the company provided a house. Her mother gardened and knitted and cooked. Marisol remembered a childhood filled with fresh flowers, birthday parties, and heart- shaped ensaimadas, topped with whipped cream. For a while, at least, it was a life dipped in honey.
After her father was fired, he promised to take the family to El Norte, but the closest they got was a village outside Caborca in the state of Sonora. They arrived by bus, for even though Edgardo Perez had built Fords, he did not own one. Just outside the village, in the high desert, a dust devil whirled across the road and blasted the bus windows with a funnel of blinding sand. Welcome to your new life, parched and cruel, the spirits of the desert seemed to say.
Her father tried raising grapes, but there was not enough water. He looked for work. Roofer. Carpenter. Handyman. But the villagers were poor and did their own repairs, if any at all. Even worse, they seemed to resent the Perez family.
'Aristocracia,' they called them, with contempt. Thinking the family put on airs along with their freshly washed clothes.
Only in Mexico, Marisol thought, could a fired factory worker with no money in the bank be considered haughty for keeping a clean house and making sure his children finished secondary school.
The roar of an engine stirred her from thoughts of the past. Tino leapt up and looked out the broken window. A red pickup truck with dual rear wheels and a long cargo bed kicked up dust as it slid to a stop in front of the adobe house.
El Tigre wiggled his belly out of the cab, shouting instructions for the pollos to hop into the back.
Tino whistled. 'A Ford F-350, Mami. Brand new. Did abuelo make these?'
A note of hopeful pride in his voice, Marisol realizing yet again that her son needed a man in his life.
'I don't think so,' she said. 'Your grandfather built cars. Lincolns and Fords.'
The ten travelers piled into the bed of the shiny red pickup, Marisol thinking, Why not just paint a sign on the doors, Illegals Here!
Standing on the running board, El Tigre counted his passengers. 'Tonight, you walk in the desert,' he proclaimed, like a Mexican Moses. 'Tomorrow, you walk in Los Angeles!'
Marisol and Tino sat with their backs pressed against the rear of the metal toolbox that ran the width of the cab. They each wore one backpack. Before they left home, Marisol fought back tears as she told Tino they could only take what they could carry. Not the plates or silverware that had been her grandmother's. Not the kitchen table handmade by her father from mahogany scraps.
Just three changes of clothing each. Tino's baseball glove. Photographs of his abuela y abuelo, both gone now. Everything else they left behind.
They each wore jeans and their new Reeboks, purchased in Mexicali along with 'travel kits.' Tins of sardines and crackers and gallon jugs of water. Band-Aids, blister cream, and sunblock. Everything for the aspiring pollo except a green card. Still, Marisol could not shake the feeling that disaster faced them at every bend in the road.
'And what do you do, Agustino, if anything bad happens and I am not there?'
'Call J. Atticus Payne. But don't worry. I will take care of both of us.'
