Crossing the Wire (14 page)

I shivered to see three Border Patrol vehicles parked at the highway junction, two at the café and one at the gas pump. We took a right, toward Tucson. A little farther on we passed a Migra machine on the side of the road. Hansen called it a cyclops. It was a hoist with a policeman sitting in a box high in the air, watching the brush through huge binoculars. “The Border Patrol catches a lot of people as they're nearing the highway,” Hansen said. “Relax, Victor.”

“I'll try,” I said. “What kind of animals do you study?”

“Not turtles,” he said. “I study the tigre.”

“You mean puma?”

“No, not the mountain lion. I'm talking about a cat that's even
bigger, and covered with beautiful spots—the Mexican tigre. Its English name is jaguar.”

“I thought you had to go far down in Mexico to find them, close to Guatemala….”

The man shook his head and smiled. “To find very many, that's true. They used to live in southern Arizona a long time ago, and now a few are moving north again, across the high desert from the Sierra Madre. I check on my ‘scratchers'—little fur catchers I tack to the trees—and I check my cameras. A couple months ago I got a picture of a jaguar at the head of the canyon you came down. That was at night, with a trip wire. What I wouldn't give to see that magnificent animal in person.”

“I did,” I said. “Last night.”

Hansen turned to stare straight at me. “You're telling me you saw a jaguar in these mountains? Are you sure?”

“I saw one once before, and I've also seen a puma. I know the difference.”

“Where did you see a jaguar before? In a zoo?”

“In the wild. In Chiapas, close to Guatemala.”

Hansen reached over and touched my arm. “Maybe your luck will rub off on me. Where exactly did you see the one last night?”

“It was crossing the ledge across the peak.”

Hansen pounded his steering wheel. “Fantastic! I can watch for that! Funny thing…every once in a while, mountain climbers cross there before they break out their ropes and go for the summit. They call it the Lion's Ledge. From now on, at least in my book, it's the Jaguar's Ledge.”

T
HE JAGUAR MAN RECOGNIZED
the name of the street that Rico's brother lived on. He used to live nearby. There were many stoplights to wait for, shopping centers to pass by, beautiful palm trees. Rico had come a long, long way to be this silent so close to his destination. The neighborhood Hansen turned into was filled with houses beyond the wildest dreams of anyone from Los Árboles. I myself was daring to dream that I would be able to work alongside Rico cleaning the swimming pools. If not, his brother might let me clean the cars that he bought and sold.

Hansen braked across the street from the number we were looking for, 321. He let us out. He said he would go and get gas, then come back to see how things turned out.

We stood on the sidewalk across the street. I felt like hiding as cars went by. Some of the drivers were talking on cell phones. All it would take was for one of them to call the Border Patrol.

“Reynaldo is married, I know that much,” Rico said. “I know he
has kids, but I don't know how many or anything about them.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I'm thinking Reynaldo must be away at work. I don't see a truck for his swimming pool business.”

“There's a car. Probably his wife is home. Go find out.”

“It all comes down to this,” Rico said. “All my hopes and dreams, and I feel sick.”

“Go, 'mano! I'll be waiting right here.”

I sat on the curb. Rico dragged himself across the street and up to the front door. He pressed a button. A woman with a curly dog in her arms came to the door. They talked. Something wasn't right. She was shaking her head. She pointed to the next house, then closed the door.

Rico called me over. “It's this house over here. She wouldn't explain—I must have got the number wrong. I want you to come with me.”

“Okay,” I said.

The man who answered the door was mostly bald and very well fed. “I'm Rico,” Rico said. The man stared at him. “Reynaldo, it's me, your youngest brother, all the way from Los Árboles.”

“I'm not Reynaldo,” the man said, as a boy of nine or ten came to the door and stared. The boy was drinking a can of soda.

It took a few seconds to unravel the confusion. Rico had the address right in the first place. Reynaldo lived next door, or used to. The neighbor explained that Reynaldo and his family had left in the middle of the night, about three weeks ago.

“Why?” Rico asked.

“He would have been arrested. His family would have been deported.”

“Arrested for what?”

“Stealing cars!” the boy blurted out.

“SUVs, vans, and pickups,” the neighbor said. “Every week or so, there'd be a new one in front of his house. We believed him when he said he was buying and selling them. He always said it was a way to make some extra money.”

“Omar's in jail!” the boy interrupted.

“Who's Omar?” asked Rico.

“One of Reynaldo's sons,” the man answered. “Omar was always getting into trouble.”

“Why was Omar arrested?”

The neighbor grimaced, and said, “The police have connected him to something really awful.”

“What is it?”

“Just a couple of hours before Reynaldo took off, there had been a shooting during a high-speed chase on the freeway. One coyote group got crazy-mad at another, for taking their mojados.”

“Four people got killed,” the boy exclaimed. “The two coyotes in front and two of the mojados under the camper shell.”

“That's enough, Juan,” his father said. “Go back to your PlayStation.”

“You think Reynaldo's son was really involved?” Rico asked.

“He was in the van that did the shooting. The police think that Reynaldo and his son were stealing vehicles to be used in smuggling wets across the border.”

The neighbor looked at his watch. “That's all I know.” He reached for the doorknob.

I wondered if Rico was thinking what I was thinking. If we had arrived here earlier and started working for Reynaldo, we might have been criminals and not even known it.

“Can you help us out?” Rico pleaded. “We have nowhere to go. We were hoping to find work.”

“Sorry,” the man said, and then his face hardened. “I can't get myself or my family involved in this.” He closed the door on us.

As we walked across the street, Rico's eyes weren't even focusing. “I had no idea,” he said.

“Maybe your father was right,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your father told me Reynaldo wasn't honest. Maybe he knew something.”

“When? When did my father tell you that?”

“Right after you left. When I had to tell them you'd gone north.”

“Why didn't you tell me about this before?”

“When we met in Nogales, I started to tell you about that night. You cut me off. You didn't want to hear anything about your parents.”

Rico kicked the curb. “Okay, let's forget about that. The question is, what do I do now? What do
we
do now?”

“We find work,” I said. “What else?”

“Didn't that gabacho who gave us a ride say he'd come back? What's taking him so long?” Rico's face flushed with anger. “I bet he's long gone.”

“Well, he said he would take us to Tucson and he did.”

“He lied, Victor. He said he was going to come back after he got gas, and he didn't. Now what do we do?”

“Figure out how to get to La Perra Flaca, where there's work in the onions and the chilies. Miguel might be there.”

“Ah, the great Miguel.”

“I know you're disappointed, Rico.”

“Disappointed
isn't a strong enough word.”

Just then, a red vehicle rounded the corner, the bearded man at the wheel. The window came down. “I got something to eat,” Hansen said. “I hope you like burgers and fries and Cokes.”

We ate at a small park nearby, on a table under a cottonwood tree. Rico explained about his brother leaving in the middle of the night, but nothing about why. Hansen asked what we were going to do next. I told him about La Perra Flaca and Miguel, how we needed another ride.

The jaguar man was giving it some thought. “Hitchhiking, you'd have no chance.”

“Do you have any ideas?” I asked hopefully.

“Only one. Let's go for another drive.”

“Many thanks,” Rico and I both said at once.

“But no farther. Not to Chicago.”

We drove east on the interstate with me expecting a Border Patrol roadblock any minute. An hour and fifteen minutes is a long time to hold your breath. By the grace of God, Hansen got off the freeway at Willcox without being stopped. His map showed a dead-end road going north but no marked towns.

Our gabacho friend went to ask directions at the KFC. I thought of my little brother. When my family would go to Silao, Chuy would beg to eat there, but we couldn't afford it. Chuy always called it “The Little Old Man.”

Hansen came back chuckling. “I should have guessed. The Skinny Dog is just a nickname—Mexican humor. La Perra Flaca has another name—Winchester Heights. It's fifteen or twenty miles up a gravel road, but it's not marked. If we leave Cochise County, we've gone too far.”

We started into the desert on the gravel road. Now it was my turn to have my hopes as high as the sky. All my thoughts were on my lone wolf. “Wait for me there,” Miguel had said. “I'll be along.”

Was he waiting for me? I had a powerful feeling that he was. If they deported him as quickly as before, he would be there by now.

“This has to be it,” Hansen said. We had just topped a rise. Ahead lay many dozens of trailers and small houses scattered across the desert.

The street into La Perra Flaca was as rough as any road I'd seen along the border. The fourth trailer looked like it must be a store. It had a Coke machine. Dave Hansen came to a stop in front of it. We knew better than to ask him to wait. He had a long way to go to get back to Baboquivari Peak. We thanked him as we were getting out. “It's nothing,” he said.

I told him that my family would always be in his debt.

“Good luck to you both.”

“And to you,” I said. “I hope you see the jaguar.”

He drove away with a smile on his face.

Rico was wrinkling his nose at the smell of raw sewage. I remembered a remark of Miguel's and was confident we'd found the right place. We would soon find out our fate. “La Perra Flaca?” I asked a man coming out the trailer door with a bag of potato chips.

“Yes,” he said.

The woman behind the counter knew Miguel, but from the year before. “If he had arrived,” she said, “I would have recognized him.” She reached for her burning cigarette and pulled deeply on the smoke, her face all bones and hollows. She had sorrowful eyes.

My disappointment was deep. So was Rico's—he looked sick. For all his comments, he had been counting on Miguel, too. “The Border Patrol must have put him in jail,” I said.

“Maybe not,” said the woman. “From what I hear, everyone is being bused back to the border. So many are coming across, there's no room in the jails.”

“I hope you are right, but if so, he would have come here.”

“I'm sorry. Bad luck comes in many shapes and sizes. What else can I do for you boys?”

“Is there work here?”

“Not enough,” the sad lady said. “The onions are about gone, and the early work on the chilies is mostly done. Many of the workers are leaving.”

“Where are the fields? I didn't see any.”

“Most of them are an hour away.”

“How long would we have to wait until the work picks up?”

She reached for her cigarette. “July. Until the chilies begin to ripen.”

W
E SAT IN THE SHADE
of the trailer and licked our wounds. We were as bad off as we looked, all covered with scratches and festering cactus needles. “Welcome to El Norte,” Rico said with heavy sarcasm.

“At least we made it this far.”

“Look around—we're nowhere.”

“Nobody said it was going to be easy.”

Rico looked at me sourly, but then he calmed down. We tried to think it through about Miguel.

“I still think they must have put him in jail,” I said. “If they let him out recently, he's on his way.”

“Who knows what happened? When you come north, nothing can ever be known. What became of Fortino and the three others I started out with from home? Were they robbed, were they tortured? Are they still in jail? Are they in the States? Did they go home?”

“I know what you mean. Maybe we'll never know. I keep wondering about Julio, my friend I told you about, with the inner tube. I wonder if he really made it. Or if he might still be trying to get across.”

“What about Torres, the Migra patrolman? Did he die in that helicopter, and what about Jarra and Morales? Did they get caught? Did they get away?”

“I think about those things, too. I think about how my family is doing. I don't have any idea.”

“Up here you don't know anything. It stinks. La Perra Flaca stinks, the whole thing stinks.”

“It looks like it's you and me, 'mano, whatever happens.”

“You're right about that. At least we have each other.”

We went back into the store and asked some more questions. The sad woman, whose name was Señora Perez, said that a labor contractor was coming soon, possibly that evening, to pick up workers for the asparagus harvest in the state of Washington. “What is asparagus?” I asked.

“If I had a can I would show you. I've never eaten any myself. It's a green thing that comes out of the ground like a spear, without any leaves or anything.”

“Washington sounds good,” I said, “but Miguel told me to wait here.”

“That would have made sense a month ago. Miguel knows there's no work now. If he shows up, I'll tell him where you have gone.”

 

The state of Washington turned out to be a long, long way. The journey took two days and the night in between. We traveled in
darkness, almost thirty hiding in the back of a big rental truck. It was hot in there, but bearable. We heard the story about some wets who fried to death in the trunk of a car.

Stopping for food along the way was too risky. Rico and I had no food. The mojados gave us this and that from their backpacks. The bathroom stops were few—side roads the driver knew about, with trees to run behind. In Idaho, I caught a glimpse of endless fields of green. Potatoes, the mojados said. “Do they grow corn here?” I asked. “Yes,” came the answer, “but machines do all the work.”

At the end of the journey we got out in Dayton, a small town in the eastern part of Washington. A couple hours farther north, we heard, and we would have been in Canada. Five hours west, we would have seen the ocean.

The countryside was beautiful to my eyes: great rolling hills blanketed with waving wheat, and above them, mountains they called the Blues, all covered with trees. On the flat ground between Dayton and Waitsburg, the next town, there was much asparagus to be harvested.

The work was hard, and it took skill. You move along the row, reaching down to cut the spears just below the ground with a long-handled knife. Cut too deep, and you damage the plant. If they aren't long enough, you leave them for the next day. You have to be fast, because you get paid for how much you pick. We were going to be able to work ten hours a day, six days a week.

Right from the start, I was making around sixty dollars a day, the same amount Julio and Miguel had talked about. Sixty dollars a day! Rico was making around forty. Enrique, the labor boss, gave
us $50 each to get by on until the first payday, which couldn't arrive too soon.

Enrique had a distinguished silver mustache and a limp. I wondered if Rico saw the resemblance to his father. I didn't ask. Enrique told us who to see about fake green cards and Social Security cards. “They'll let you pay later,” he said. “You'll get by with those. Nobody wants to check up. Just don't think they will fool anyone at the border.”

Rico and I lived in a dormitory close to the cannery. It was clean and had hot showers. My first time, I turned on the cold and stood under it, which gave Rico a good laugh. Then I scalded myself, and finally I got the idea.

There were two stores in town with used clothes that people had given away. The clothes cost us so little, they were practically free. The food at the grocery store was expensive, but we never went hungry. Our little notebook, where we kept track of our earnings, told us we were making a lot of money.

The asparagus was going to last until the middle of June. Then it would be time to harvest the cherries somewhere else in Washington. After the cherries, we heard there might be a problem finding work for a few weeks. But then the plums would be ripening. Next would come the peaches. Apples would last into October. I found out how lucky we had been to find work in the asparagus. Little would be grown here next year. The cannery was going to close because Americans were buying their canned asparagus from Peru.

I was learning all this and more from a friend I had made, Pablo Ortega, who had seven kids back in Morelos. Pablo told me about his migrations and those of most of the mojados I was working with. By the middle of October, they would be leaving for Florida, Arizona, or California to pick oranges, lemons, or grapefruit.

For the winter, Pablo himself was going to go someplace near San Francisco, to wait in the parking lot of a store called the Home Depot. He would work each day for whatever person drove up and hired him. He might plant trees, build fences, help people move their things from an old house to a new house—whatever they wanted. He said Rico and I could come along. If you were lucky you could make some good money, but winter wasn't really the best time. Some days there were forty men in the parking lot trying to get work and only a few people coming to hire laborers.

I told Pablo I would be thinking about it, but I was pretty sure I would rather work in the orchards.

Pablo told me to be careful with the good asparagus money. There would be times when work was scarce and times with no work at all. There would be times I would be paid little and charged a lot to sleep elbow to elbow with other mojados on the floors of trailers.

As Rico worked in the asparagus he didn't say much, to me or to anybody. He had no interest in getting to know the other men. They often sang as they worked, and made jokes, but Rico never broke a smile. I tried to encourage him, told him that this was everything we had struggled for. I got nowhere. Whatever he was
going through, he didn't want to talk about it. I knew he felt terrible, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

The last day of May was payday. By then we'd worked eleven days, and had made an astounding amount of money. I was going to be able to send two hundred and fifty dollars home. Two hundred and fifty dollars!

The very thought of my mother holding that money order in her hand put me on a mountaintop of happiness. The next time, I would be able to send a lot more.

Gone was the fear of my family having to leave home, the fear of my mother ever having to beg on the street. No more hunger in our house, never again if I could help it. That's right, Chuy, have another helping. New clothes for everyone, and my sisters could start thinking about school!

In order to cash our paychecks, Rico and I walked from the dormitory to the main street. Pablo came along to show us how to wire the money.

At the IGA—the big grocery store—the lady behind the office counter spoke Spanish. First she gave me cash for my paycheck. Pablo showed me how to fill out the paper. It had to be done very carefully, with my mother's three names as required. From memory, I printed the exact address of the Western Union in Silao where she was expecting it. I printed my own name carefully, then the amount I was sending, $250.

I handed the paper back to the lady, along with the cash. She asked if my mother had an ID to present in Silao. I said that she
did. The lady filled out the paper for me to keep, and showed me the line with a special number in case there was any problem. “Ten dollars more for the transaction,” she said. “Fifteen if you want it to arrive today. Otherwise it will arrive tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is good,” I told her. “I don't know when exactly my mother will come for it.”

I walked away from the counter. My heart was soaring. This had to be the greatest feeling in the world.

There's a part of the store where roasting chickens go around and around on spits, like on the carts in Mexico. I bought one for Rico and me to share by the river, along with some other things. Pablo was meeting some friends at the pool hall.

On the sidewalk outside the store, I waited for Rico. I was still overjoyed at the thought of my mother at the Western Union—the moment she first heard that a money order had arrived, and then when she saw the amount. She would ask them to turn the dollars into pesos. They would hand her around 2,700 pesos.

Two thousand, seven hundred pesos! My mother's tears would flow on that money, not only for the amount, but also to know, after eleven long weeks, I had made it safely across the wire. If only I could see the faces of my sisters and my little brother when she brought home the money and the news.