Michener, James A. (172 page)

To appreciate the various ways in which the magnetic attraction of Texas could be exerted, it is necessary to understand the related cases of Ben Talbot and Eloy Muzquiz. Neither was born in Texas, yet each came to treasure it as a home he did not wish to leave.

Talbot was tall and thin, a reticent man born in northern Vermont close to the Canadian border, and since his father had served for manv years as aU.S. Border Patrol officer checking the movement of Canadians south from Montreal, he, too, decided to apply to the service after graduating from the University of Vermont in 1944. Instead, the son was tapped by Selective Service for the army and sent to the South Pacific, where on steaming Bougainville up the Slot from Guadalcanal he vowed that if he got out alive, he would never again live in a hot climate—'Vermont for me!'—and on sweltering nights, lying beneath his mosquito net bathed in sweat, he thought of his father's cold assignment along the Canadian border.

When he returned to the States he found that his military duty in a hardship post had given him so many credits that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was almost forced to accept him, but after he had been sworn in, with his father watching in approval, Talbot Senior told his son: 'Ben, work hard in the Spanish school, master the language, and serve your obligatory stretch along the Mexican border. We all had to learn Spanish and do our tour down there. But do everything you can, pull every trick in the book to get assigned back here for your permanent duty.'

'I intend to.'

The Spanish teacher in the academy despaired of ever teaching Talbot a word of that mellifluous language, for his flat Vermont drawl caused him to pronounce every word in a high, nasal wail, with equal emphasis on each syllable; manana came out mah-nah-nah —no tilde—as if each group of letters was personally repugnant, and he pronounced longer words like fortaleza as if the syllables were a chain of connected boxcars bumping slowly down a track.

'Candidate Talbot,' the instructor pleaded, 'don't you ever sing words, when your heart is joyous?' and he replied: 'I sing hymns. Words I speak.' But because of his studious mastery of vocabulary and his skill in putting those words together in proper sentences, his teacher had to concede: 'Talbot, you speak Spanish perfectly, but it isn't Spanish.'

They'll understand,' Ben countered, and when he reached his indoctrination assignment at El Paso and began apprehending illegal Mexican aliens trying to sneak into the country, the wetbacks did understand when he interrogated them, for he spoke very slowly, like a machine running down, and enunciated each of his Vermont-style syllables clearly. Older officers would listen in amazement to the sounds which came from his lips and watch with sly grins as the Mexican listening to them gazed in wonder. But

slowly, after about his third question, a light would suffuse the Mexican face as the alien realized that the tall man with the severe frown was speaking Spanish. Often the captive would gush out answers in relief at having solved the mystery, so that Talbot proved quite effective. At the end of his training his superior reported: 'Ben looks so stiff and forbidding and speaks such horrible Spanish that he starts by terrifying the men he interrogates. But when they see the sympathy in his eyes and listen to the slow, careful way he pronounces each syllable, I think they feel sorry for him. At any rate, he gets better results than most.'

His avowed plan of doing well along the border so that he might return to the more pleasant duty along the Canadian frontier received its first slight tremor when he was assigned to the duty station at Las Cruces, up the line in New Mexico. He had been there only a few weeks when he realized that he wanted rather strongly to be back in El Paso: That's where the real work goes on. He was not homesick for the place, and certainly not for the food or the heat, but he did miss the teeming vitality of that bilingual town, with Ciudad Juarez across the river, and he must have conveyed his feelings to his superiors, because after six months of chasing illegals through the brush of New Mexico he was reassigned to El Paso, and there began the long years of his service.

His childhood days in the Vermont woods had enabled him to master the tricks of tracking, and to him the traces of all animals, including man, told a clear story. He could look at a dry riverbank around El Paso and determine how many Mexicans had made it across during the night, their approximate ages by the patterns of their shoes, whether he was seeing the signs of a group or merely an accumulation of many singles, and where they were probably heading. He was uncanny in predicting, or as he said, 'making a wishbone guess' as to where these fugitives would intersect some main road, and often when they appeared he would be there awaiting them.

He never abused a Mexican he captured. Calling them all Juan, which he pronounced as if it were Jew-wahn, he talked with them patiently, offered them coffee or a drink of cold water and shared his sandwiches, explaining in his oxlike Spanish that they would not be mistreated but that they must be sent back home. Of course, once they were back across the Rio Grande, they would probably turn around and come north again. That was understood by all.

Nothing deterred them, not the clever detective work of Border Patrol Officer Talbot, nor the formal checkpoints along the highways, nor the surveillance airplanes that flew overhead, nor the

dangers involved in running across a rocky yard and jumping onto a moving Southern Pacific freight train headed east. They came alone, in pairs, in well-organized groups of eighteen or twenty and in casual hundreds. They were part of that endless chain of Mexican peasants who left their homeland in search of employment in a more affluent country. How many crossed the river illegally? Thousands upon thousands. How many were caught? Perhaps only ten or fifteen percent. But if dedicated men like Ben Talbot had not been working diligently since the Border Patrol was first established in 1924, the flood northward would have been three times as great.

In early 1960, Talbot sent a well-reasoned report to his superiors stating that in his opinion more than two million illegal Mexican aliens had crept into the United States in the preceding decade and that there appeared to be no diminution of the flood: 'The pressures which send them north—poverty, the cruel indifference of their government, the mal-distribution of wealth in a wealthy country, and the awful pressures of population growth which both church and government encourage—show no signs of being brought under control, so we must expect an unending continuation of the present inflow and must begin to study what it will mean when the southern part of Texas becomes a de facto Hispanic enclave.' He ended his report with two revealing paragraphs:

The gravity of the situation is exemplified by the case of one Eloy Muzquiz, citizen of Zacatecas, 850 miles to the south. Thirty-one years old, perpetually smiling, and apparently a good citizen whether in Mexico or the United States, he leaves his home in Zacatecas every winter about the tenth of February, travels by bus to Ciudad Juarez, crosses the Rio Grande illegally, either evades me or is captured by me. If I catch him, ! send him back to Mexico, and that afternoon he recrosses the river and eludes me. He hops a freight, heads east to where I do not know, works in Texas till the fifteenth of December, when he reappears in El Paso heading south. Since he is then leaving the States, we let him go. He returns by bus to his home in Zacatecas, plays with his sons, gets his wife pregnant once more, and on the twelfth of February is back in Ciudad Juarez trying to break through our lines. He always succeeds, and just before Christmas we see him with that perpetual smile, walking briskly along and wishing us a Merry Christmas as he heads home. Eloy Muzquiz is our perpetual problem.

One other thing. I should like to withdraw my application for reassignment to the Vermont-Canada border. I have now learned colloquial Spanish and feel a growing affection for El Paso and its problems. 1 would like to continue my duty on the Texas-Mexico border.

He was accurate in every statement he made about Muzquiz, but there were a few crucial facts which the persistent Mexican worker had succeeded in keeping hidden. He did smile all the time, even when captured at the railway yards, and he was a good citizen in both his countries. He did go home each Christmas to be with his family, and he judged his visit successful if he left his wife pregnant, his daughter and two sons were each born in September. He did invariably move east by hopping a Southern Pacific freight, and he did reappear in El Paso about the fifteenth of December, each year with a somewhat larger roll of American fifty-dollar bills, which he would deliver to his wife in Zacatecas. It was the long period from 12 February to 15 December that remained a blank in Ben Talbot's records.

In 1961, for example, Muzquiz came north to Ciudad Juarez on schedule, and as always he went to a Mexican grocery, where he filled his small canvas backpack with the staples required for the trip northeast: two small cans of sardines, six limes, four cans of apricots with lots of juice, two very important cans of refried beans, and a large bag of the one essential for an excursion into the United States, pinole, a mixture of parched corn, roasted peanuts and brown sugar, all ground to the finest possible texture. When mixed with water it produced a life-sustaining beverage, but it could also be eaten dry, and then it was more tasty than candy. As Eloy told the woman shopkeeper: 'Four pinches of pinole keeps you moving for a whole day. A bag like this? It could carry me to Canada.'

With all items packed according to what he had learned on seven previous trips, he left the store casually at about one in the afternoon, walked down to the dry riverbed, watched for an appropriate time when the immigration officers were occupied with three Mexicans they had caught, and slipped into the United States. Working his way cautiously eastward, he came upon the familiar freight yards of the Southern Pacific, where he hid beside a line of stationary boxcars, peeking out to watch the freight engines shunt long lines of laden boxcars before they started on the cross-Texas trip to San Antonio and on to Houston.

That was the train he would be catching within a few hours, and during the waiting period he reminded himself of safety precautions he had accumulated on various trips: Remember, if it should rain in the next hour, don't try. Let the train ride off without you. That was how Elizondo lost his legs, slipping on mud. Remember, if it should be rocky where you make your jump, let the train go. That's how Gutierrez died, tripping and falling under the wheels. Remember, keep your hands clear of the coupling. That's how

Cortinas lost his left hand, when the engines stopped suddenly And remember, if the ear you land m has cargo that can shift, get out, even if you have to jump. When the marble blocks shifted sideways they crushed Alarcon, didn't they? And when that cargo of grain broke loose it smothered Salcedo, didn't it 7

On the freight trains east, death was a constant companion, and it was prudent to wedge a block in the sliding doors to keep them from slamming irrevocably shut; once forty were trapped in a freight car which had to lay over in a blinding Texas blizzard, all froze to death. In another instance, thirty-seven died from the stifling heat, which reached one hundred and forty degrees.

At two-ten on this February day, Eloy Muzquiz watched the freight forming with the greatest concentration, calculating his line of approach and trying to identify some car in which it would be relatively safe to ride. At two-twenty he adjusted his bundle, grasping the strings at the bottom and securing them about his waist so that his groceries would not bounce about as he ran. At two-twenty-five the engineer sounded his whistle, and the first straining of the heavy wheels occurred.

As long as the train remained stationary, the wetbacks dared not board, since the Border Patrol would pick them off, but once the boxcars started forward, there would be a general rush in which so many Mexicans dashed for the train, the guards had no chance to intercept everyone. Now as the train lurched forward in sudden jolts, Eloy and some seventy other men—looking like a horde of ants rushing toward some fallen morsel—made a wild dash for the boxcars and the metal framework under them. Muzquiz, easily in the lead, was about to reach the cars when the tall, thin figure of Ben Talbot stepped out from behind his own hiding place to intercept him and two others.

There were two rules in the El Paso game: it was widely known that American officers would not treat their captives brutally, and it was understood that no Mexican fugitive would strike or fire at an immigration officer. It was a relentless struggle, carried on through all the hours of a day, but it was honorable, and now when Talbot grabbed the three Mexicans, it was as if they had been playing a friendly game of touch football. They stopped trying to run, Talbot said 'Okay, compadres,' and Eloy looked up at him, smiled as if they were brothers, and walked calmly into captivity.

He was led to a clearing station, documented for the eighth

time, and returned once more to Ciudad Juarez, where without

[even changing stride he walked to the river, crept across when no

Dne was patrolling, made his way to the railroad yards, and headed

For the next freight, which hauled more than a hundred and fifty

boxcars. With customary skill, his bundle tied close to his back, he sped across the yard, calculated his leap, and made his way into a boxcar filled with freight that was safely lashed down.

The Border Patrol in El Paso always assumed that Muzquiz remained aboard the train to San Antonio, losing himself in that growing metropolis where Spanish-speaking citizens were commonplace, and Officer Talbot had sent inquiries to that city, asking immigration people there to be on the lookout for Eloy, but Muzquiz was too clever to act in so predictable a manner.

When the freight train stopped for water in Fort Stockton, 245 miles to the east, he remained hidden for twenty minutes, knowing that La Migra—the immigration people—would be chasing the men who jumped off right away When this did happen, with him watching the frantic game from a peephole, he casually dropped down from the boxcar and sauntered across the yard to a rusted Ford station wagon that had stood beside a deserted road for years. Opening the creaking door carefully lest it fall off, he crept inside, pulled the door shut behind him, and went to sleep, the fourth time in four years he had done this.