Stars Always Shine (10 page)

Place smiled as he became amused at the realization that Rosa did not even follow him out to the pastures that morning. “She’s tired too!” he said to himself as he walked through the stall barn.

He worked quietly as he dragged and pulled water hoses. He noticed immediately that his extra duties were mounting because a calf had stepped on a sprinkler, breaking the plastic base. Mitch had advised Place to work at a steady pace the entire week, and not to become nervous as the work piled up. But being alone in the pastures for the first time and with the sun offering little light, Place felt insecure and unsure. He recalled things he often fantasized about. He brought back the dream he had of working a much smaller ranch, but one of his own. He imagined how his own quiet place would soothe him and he thought it strange that most people, even those who could afford to, resigned themselves to living false lives, lives that weren’t genuine—they were made up and guided more by what moved them in the eyes of their peers and competitors. But there was always something specious about those lives, and Place saw them as lying lives and he wanted no part of that. He no longer wanted to exist that way.

As Place finished setting the hoses in a few pastures, Salvador strode out and quickly began working alone in an alternate field. Place completed what he was doing and then walked over to talk to Salvador about the week’s plans.

“Buenos días,” Place started as he approached a hunched-over Salvador. “¿Qué onda?”

“Buenos días, vaquero,” Salvador responded without looking up. Wondering why Place was working alone, he asked “¿Y tú, por qué no me llamaste esta mañana? ¿Quieres hacer todo solito?”

Place explained to Salvador that he and Mitch thought it would be best if Place worked alone the entire week. This would show Jacqueline and Mickey how much they needed to keep an extra hand on the ranch, and that Salvador would be the prime candidate. Besides, Place added, it wasn’t fair. Salvador had already put in sixty hours of work for free.

It was an interesting strategy. Place looked at Salvador knowing that he was thinking about it. Salvador stopped working for a few seconds to scratch the back of his head and evaluate the plan. He continued with the hose he had pulled straight, working in thoughtful silence, as Place walked to the next hose. The two men jumped the fence together as they started for an adjoining pasture.

Salvador asked Place how his back felt. And before Place could answer, he sensed that Salvador already knew. His back twitched with aching spasms. His hands were wooden, his fingers swollen from the work of tugging, grasping, pushing, and holding. His arms felt taut and taxed, his biceps and forearms announcing a burning strain at even the slightest effort. His legs were cumbrous, inflexible and compacted, so that each step was really a movement in lifting his entire body as much as it was in propelling it forward. The simple act of walking became a struggle. His knees felt dry and pummeled from the pounding of repeated landings after jumping over fences. His ankles and heels flamed with sore sensations from walking in the uneven fields. And both men knew that even hot rubs and massages would do little to make oppressed muscles feel liberated. Place had learned as a child laborer that it was the mind that carried you through—if you had a strong one. Your mind convinced the rest of your body to keep at it, keep going because poco a poco, you thought you would arrive. You would start to daydream about all the things your urgent effort would earn you. You made sense of your place in the universe by convincing yourself that in the arrangement of the cosmos, your strain would eventually be eased—at least reciprocated if not rewarded. But then, after a while, even your mind could take no more, and your body refused to acknowledge what only seemed like lies.

“It’s a rough life, the life of a cowboy,” Salvador said in Spanish, laughing, as he seemed to mock what Place was thinking. “Y además, la vida cuesta en dólares, pero se gana en pesos.”

Salvador worked with Place until lunchtime. As they ate together on the deck, Place conveyed the seriousness of the plan for him to work alone all week. It had to be done. And Salvador relented. Mitch made him feel a little better when she asked Place to ask Salvador if he would help with the calves after they were finished eating.

It was during lunch that Salvador again brought up the issue of becoming legal. He had heard of the new immigration law on the Spanish-speaking radio station. The law invited those who had worked full-time in the fields or on food- and fiber-producing farms and ranches for the past ninety days, to apply for temporary legal residency in the form of a green card. Proof of current steady employment would also be required. In exchange, those who worked and walked with the self-conscious feeling of being illegal, and lived with the burdensome necessity of always looking over a shoulder, could be granted residency for up to ten years.

Salvador did not qualify. He had worked in orchards and fields for many months when he first arrived, and even then he was paid in cash most of the time. But his most recent work had been spent on this ranch—a horse ranch—and unless Americans started eating horses in the immediate future or horseskin jackets, shoes, and belts became the fashion, his work experience would not meet the parameters of the new law, and so he did not have the necessary proof. What luck, he thought, that it was a horse that got away that day he ended up on Thundering Thoroughbreds Ranch instead of a cow from Sweet Milk Dairy. At the time it seemed like such a positive sign.

However, what might qualify Salvador, he suggested to Mitch and Place, was that he had made a wise investment a month ago as the announcements of the new law began hitting Spanish-language airwaves. He purchased the birth certificate and paycheck stubs from one Camilo Sixto Cárdenas de la Vega. These check stubs showed field work for a little more than the past ninety days, and now the newly pseudonymed Salvador Camilo Sixto Cárdenas de la Vega would only need to show documents that attested to steady, current work.

Mitch studied the check stubs and the birth certificate, asking Place questions that he then asked Salvador.

“The date on the birth certificate would make you twenty-five years old. How old are you anyway?” Mitch asked, realizing how little she knew about Salvador.

“Casi cuarenta,” Salvador answered.

“How would you explain the age difference?” Mitch asked Salvador through Place.

“Voy a decir que soy alcohólico, y parece que soy más viejo que mi edad,” Salvador replied, his answer oddly logical. After all, it is not unusual for alcoholics to look much older than their true age.

“Good answer,” Mitch said, nodding her head after hearing the English version. “Why has the guy sold you his birth certificate and check stubs? Where is he?”

The many-named Camilo Etc. needed to leave the country immediately, Salvador explained. It was vital to his freedom that he sneak back into Mexico after sneaking out of the county jail here. Salvador happened to be the highest bidder to the desperate man’s papers, and he was willing to try to gain American residency through these documents.

“What if they think you’re him?” Mitch asked.

Salvador knew that the escapee’s fingerprints, mug shot, and other vital statistics were of record to local law enforcement agencies. Surely they could see that
this
Camilo was not the Camilo who had denied the secure quarters, close fellowship, and three square meals a day of county hospitality when he decided to return to his own country. Camilo the lawbreaker just happened to have the same name
and
the same birth date as Camilo the ranch hand. That happens a lot. But he didn’t have the same height and weight as the Salvador Camilo. He could add that he lost his birth certificate and the fugitive Camilo found it. Who knows who
that
Camilo really was?

Mitch thought for awhile. Place knew that in her mind she was manipulating various variables. Assessing different situations. Weighing the scales of abstract justice to see how this could balance out evenly. “Let me think about this some more. I’ll need to make some phone calls and visit a few people. Just sit tight for awhile.”

Salvador explained that the interviews would be in three days at Grange Hall only a mile away.

In one of the holding pens, Mitch and Salvador stroked a frightened calf and assured it that the mugging it might have witnessed last week with Mickey’s lasso and bolus assault would not take place here. Mitch loaded the balling gun. It was a long, thin, metal, rodlike tool with a chamber at one end which held one large pill. There was a chrome-plated ring at the other end. Salvador slowly but forcefully pressed his body against a shoulder of the tentative calf as he pushed it into a confining corner of the steel pipes that made up the holding pen. He pried the calf’s mouth open a little as Mitch inserted the rod quickly and as far down the calf’s throat as she could. She pushed on the ring at the end of the tool, and the bolus was sprung even farther inside the animal. She pulled the balling gun out carefully, and patted the good patient on the head before Salvador turned it back out to the pasture. Within an hour, Mitch and Salvador had all six calves medicated.

Along with the balling gun, Mitch had purchased enough hay to last a week. As she spread the feed out on the ground, she thought of the irony of fattening up Jacqueline’s and Mickey’s cattle, which would be slaughtered within a year. But to be food, they needed food first. Mitch was feeding the hungry calves more for their well-being than the residual effect that would produce better beef for the owners than if the calves lived on just the pasture grass alone.

In the late afternoon, as Place was repairing some of the irrigation hoses, Mitch walked out to the pastures to report her findings.

“He’s right about that immigration law,” she said. “It’s a good opportunity for him. Invite him over for dinner tonight. We need to talk about what’s going to happen.”

“What do you think?” Place asked. “Do you think he can pull it off?”

“Oh, we can pull it off, all right. I’m not worried a bit. Remember, he has excellent legal representation,” Mitch said, and laughed at her own comment. “My primary goal for him is to get Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill to keep him on for awhile. At least as long as we’re here. Once he gets that residency card, he’ll be like one of us.”

As Mitch walked to the ranch house, Place thought about how she would maneuver this challenge. Her methods and actions often made Place feel nervous and hollow, but she liked playing with the law. “It’s what lawyers do,” she had once told her soft husband. But during the past few years, she had begun to lose respect for her profession. She had taken numerous humiliating verbal beatings from chauvinistic judges; had witnessed in court and in chambers how some attorneys and judges were well entrenched in blatant cronyism and self-interest; and lately, she had been defeated, both professionally and ideologically, by the realization that the law differs too much with one’s economic and social status. Certain individuals had better chances than others regardless of guilt or innocence. The letter of the law was an S with two vertical lines drawn through it. Place looked up at her departing figure and yelled, “Showoff!”

Mitch turned, raised a rebellious fist and yelled back, “It’s for life and liberty!”

After dinner, Mitch and Place cleared the table while Salvador ran back to his house to retrieve his check stubs and birth certificate. She reviewed each check stub carefully and examined the birth certificate once more.

“Now what is going to happen is he will have an interview down at Grange Hall,” Mitch began, her tone almost secretive and conspiratorial. “Interviews are all day during regular business hours and for that day only. If you don’t make it that day, you have to go all the way to Sacramento. I think it’s safer here. At the interviews, he’ll have to get in line to get a number first. My sources tell me that there will be a lot of people out there even though many of the Mexicans are wary because they think it’s a ploy to capture a whole truckload of illegals.” She paused as Place relayed the information to a wide-eyed Salvador. “He’s fine with the check stubs as far as meeting the time requirements. And I think now he can pull off the identity thing with the birth certificate. Tomorrow I’m taking it to an associate who can revise the dates a little. He’s an expert in his field. We don’t want this Camilo to have the same birth date as the real Camilo. That’s just too close.” Mitch hesitated and shifted the subject. “Did you know that Camilo what’s-his-name is wanted for cocaine trafficking and distribution? The guy’s a player, and some local authorities are very interested in finding him.”

Place informed the new Camilo of the charges. Salvador did not know the particulars. He only knew the drug-dealing Camilo was in a hurry the day he auctioned off his documents at a park that only migrants and substance abusers frequented with regularity.

“Anyway, that shouldn’t create a problem,” Mitch continued. “There isn’t even a social security number on these check stubs, which is not unusual, considering the circumstances. What he needs to do is to go to Grange Hall early in the morning. Right when they open. Tell him to talk to guys who have just had their interviews and find out what kinds of questions they’re being asked. He should wait a little while before taking a number. He needs to calculate it so he has a number, but he doesn’t want that number called until after lunch. Then he can get in line for an interview. But it’s important that he find out what the interview is like. Who is conducting the interview, that sort of stuff. We don’t want any snags or unforeseen questions to pop up. Tell him to come back to the ranch by about ten-thirty or eleven.”

Salvador was impressed with Mitch’s knowledge and attention to details, and he liked her approach. Up to that point, he had wondered about Mitch’s take-charge attitude. He thought it odd that it was Mitch who formulated, planned, and assigned things while Place stood by peacefully receptive to his wife’s, a woman’s, ideas and orders. He had thought to ask Place about this, but he knew it would make him feel uncomfortable and culturally misaligned. But it was starting to make sense to Salvador, and he could see that Mitch was the strong one. Mentally and emotionally she was capable and she could face things head on, look at them with penetrating eyes, and figure out a way to deal with situations and people. The strong one, Salvador concluded, whether male or female,
should
be in charge.