Paul Levine: Illegal

Exhaustion kicked in along with the bourbon. His eyes drifted closed, then opened, then descended again like balky garage doors. His last conscious thought was of Adam tossing a ball to him. The boy was rangy, all legs and elbows, with a rubbery arm. He could throw hard. Just like Payne at that age, fast but wild. With that thought, and the timeless echo of a leather ball smacking into the pocket of a finely oiled glove, Jimmy finally cruised into a restless sleep.

El Tigre pulled the pickup truck off the highway, onto a dirt road west of La Rumorosa. Nothing for miles except dark canyons and sheer cliffs.

Everyone piled out of the truck bed. Two of the campesinos from the south began urinating several feet away, the splashing audible. Barnyard animals, Marisol thought, so inconsiderate they cannot walk twenty feet to relieve themselves behind a cactus.

She heard El Tigre screaming into his cell phone.

"?Chingalo! One car? I told you, a van! Asshole! I got ten pollos."

"What's happening?" Mirasol asked Rey, his leaden eyes hidden now behind sunglasses.

"Stupid gabacho driver on other side only has one car," Rey said. "We got to make two trips across."

Once again, Marisol tightened her grip on Tino's hand.

After another explosion of Spanish curses, El Tigre clicked off the phone and, for the second time tonight, counted his passengers. Luckily, he had just enough fingers to complete the tabulation. "Five men, five women." He looked toward Tino. "I'm putting you with the men. Are you a good runner?"

"The fastest in Caborca," Tino said.

El Tigre showed his gold-toothed smile. "New plan. Women first."

He explained his strategy as if he were Pancho Villa at the Battle of Chihuahua. He would take the women through the canyons and across the border to his idiot gabacho friend, who had a single car waiting. Then El Tigre would come back and lead the men down the same path. By the time they got across, the driver would have taken the women to a stash house near Calexico and returned to his hiding spot near the border. El Tigre would then take the five men-including Tino-to the same stash house. There would be no charge for El Tigre's extra effort.

"It will all work out." He sounded pleased with his brilliant tactics.

Marisol shook her head. "My son goes with me."

He gave her a poisonous look. "The woman who asks for credit does not make the rules. By the time the second group gets to the border fence, the sun will be up, and we can be spotted. We may need to run."

"I can run as fast as any man here," Marisol said.

" Chingad. You will do as I say."

She knew she had embarrassed El Tigre by arguing with him. Backed him into a corner. Now he had to save face. Still, she would not relent.

"My son goes with me."

His face colored."?Chinga to putas!"

"If my son does not go, neither do I. Please give back our money."

El Tigre's laugh was liquid, a toilet flushing. Then he shouted, "Rey!"

The sleepy-eyed nephew seemed to wake up. He pulled the gun from his waistband and stuck it under Marisol's nose. "Shut up, woman."

Tino leapt at Rey, knocked the gun to the ground, then pummeled him with a flurry of punches. The boy was skinny, but his long arms whirled like propellor blades, and several blows landed, breaking Rey's sunglasses. Off balance, Rey fell awkwardly into an ocotillo shrub, cursing in Spanish and English and maybe some words he just made up.

El Tigre grabbed Tino by the back of his T-shirt, lifted him off his feet, and swung him against the side of the truck.

"Don't touch my son!" Marisol flew at the man, tearing his hand away.

A gunshot echoed off the canyon walls.

Rey stood there, eyes wide, pupils dilated, gun pointing in the air. "We do what my uncle says, or I swear, I will kill someone tonight."

"I'm not afraid of you, grifo, " Tino said.

"Tino, quiet!" Marisol ordered.

"Listen to your mother, pendejo, " Rey said. "You die out here, nobody gives a shit. Birds eat your eyeballs for breakfast and your balls for lunch. Out here, you're nothing but a grease spot in the sand."

They had walked two hours, down one canyon, and up another, El Tigre shoving Marisol every time she looked back over her shoulder.

"The little bastard will be fine," he said.

She had long dreamed of leaving Mexico. But not at the barrel of a gun. And not leaving her son behind. She wondered if the separation suited El Tigre's intentions.

She could not run from the stash house until he returned with her son.

"When we get to Calexico," El Tigre had told her, "you can take a bath and change your clothes and I will have your boy there in time for lunch. After dark, there will be a ride to Los Angeles. Between morning and evening, we will have some time together."

Marisol wondered if there might not be something more pleasant to occupy her afternoon. Being bitten by a scorpion perhaps.

"Bring my son to me," she said. "Then we shall see."

He grunted like a pig rooting out a tasty morsel. In the dim light of the stars, she could not make out his expression, but in her imagination, he licked the saliva from his lips.

They followed a rocky trail, the five women and their coyote. In the dark, it was a shadowy landscape of volcanic rocks and sand washes. Scrub oaks and greasewoods. In the distance, outlines of mountains formed the backdrop for the night sky. Marisol realized those mountains were in the United States. Part of the same mountains on this side of the border. The dirt would be the same, the rocks, too. And the people?

We are human beings. We are all of one blood, are we not?

The land leveled out as they neared the border. El Tigre shushed them, for sound carried great distances in the desert night. They were exposed here. Visible to border agents with infrared binoculars.

El Tigre had boasted that he never used the same entrance point twice. Marisol hoped the man knew what he was doing. They were close enough to see the border fence, steel mesh twelve feet high topped by razor wire. No sounds but the crunch of their shoes and the hoot of owls.

Marisol shortened her breaths as she neared the fence, as if her very exhalations might set off an alarm. El Tigre used wire cutters to make an opening, and within seconds, Marisol stood on the hard-baked earth of los Estados Unidos. It felt strangely anticlimactic. Certainly, there was no joy. Not with Tino left behind. But even when he got here, what would her feelings be? What would the future hold? The beginning of some grand adventure, the fulfillment of her father's dream? Or were greater catastrophes ahead?

Lights flashed, and Marisol stiffened. Border Patrol?

But then El Tigre shouted, "Ay! There's the gabacho now."

Car headlights. Two more quick flashes. The car hidden in some pinyon trees several hundred yards from the fence. The women ran toward the headlights.

The car was old-very old-but clean. Orange with a white stripe, air scoops on the hood, and an engine growling like a predatory animal. Tino would probably know the name of the car. She did not, but a decal on its long hood had an illustration of a tornado and the word "Duster."

Four women-two campesinas from the south, one Guatemalan, and the pregnant girl-squeezed into the backseat. El Tigre motioned Marisol into the front seat, where she was sandwiched between the two men. The driver was a long-haired, bearded young man in a baseball cap. He immediately slid his hand along Marisol's thigh before grabbing the floor-mounted gearshift.

With the headlights off, the man gunned the engine, slipped the gearshift into first gear, and spun up the dirt road, and deeper into California.

They had just pulled onto a paved road when Marisol heard the sirens.