Paul Levine: Illegal

Blue lights flashing, two Ford Expeditions sped after them.

"Shit! Border Patrol!" The driver stomped on the clutch, shifted gears, and floored the accelerator. The car fishtailed, then straightened, and Marisol was thrown against the seat.

The next few minutes seemed to her to be one high-pitched scream. The actual screams of the four women in the backseat. The wail of the sirens. The shouts in Spanglish from left and right, the driver and El Tigre cursing at each other, arguing where to go.

Marisol saw the arm of the old-fashioned speedometer, as it fluttered between 105 and 110. They would crash. She was sure of it. A tire would explode. They would careen off the road and into a boulder. Her head would fly through the windshield, and Tino would be left alone. She squeezed her eyes shut and chanted a prayer.

"Protegeme de la muerte, y te llevare una rosa de Castilla, al Santuario de Tepeyac."

"You are winning them!" El Tigre shouted in English. Marisol thinking he meant "losing them," as the two Border Patrol vehicles fell behind.

"Don't matter none," the American driver said. "Bastards will have a chopper over us in a couple minutes."

Barely slowing down, the Duster screeched off the asphalt and onto a gravel road that sloped upward and undulated through a series of rises and dips. Headlights still out, the car seemed to be a missile, launched into the night sky, headed toward some explosive crash landing.

The driver tugged the wheel hard and skidded off the road, coming to rest between a line of manzanita bushes and a single mesquite tree. In front of them, the outline of a mountain appeared as a menacing tower set against the soft glow of the Milky Way.

"Out! Everyone out!" the driver shouted.

"?Aqui?" El Tigre asked, confused.

"I'm on parole. Ain't gonna be stopped with a car full of greasers."

"Where are we?" Marisol asked. "Where do we go?"

"The trailhead." The driver pointed to a pile of railroad ties. Nothing but the darkness of the mountain beyond.

"You cannot leave us here." Marisol imagined the horrific night. Lost on a mountain with un coyote estupido, whose only competence was probably as a rapist.

"It don't look like it, but there's a good trail," the driver said. "You go up one side of the mountain, come down the other. You'll cross a creek and reach another trailhead, looks just like this one. I'll be there in the morning and take you to the stash house in Ocotillo."

"Ocotillo?" Marisol said, fear creeping up her spine. "But we are going to Calexico."

"Too much heat to go that far. Ocotillo's closer."

"But my son. He will not know where I am."

"Tough shit," the driver snapped. He gestured toward the women in the backseat. "Git out!?Vaya!?Vaya! "

Marisol grabbed El Tigre by an arm. "Take me back! Take me to my son now."

"There is no going back," he said glumly, staring at the looming mountain.

They navigated by the light of the stars. No flashlights allowed. Border agents with rifles patrolled these mountains on horseback, El Tigre claimed. Citizen militias, too. Drunken men with guns. Scurrying on all fours up a steep path, she thought she saw a mountain lion. But maybe she imagined it.

Minutes later, an animal howled in the darkness. Eerie, nearly human screams. A peasant Guatemalan woman crossed herself and chanted prayers. Claimed the animal was a chupacabra, the bloodsucking creature of myth.

The endless, unknowable night, Marisol thought, had hardly begun.

Waiting in the canyon near the border, Tino watched Rey answer his cell phone. El Tigre calling. Rey listened a few seconds. Stomped in a circle. Shouted, "?Chingalo!?Chingalo!"

Listened some more. "What am I supposed to do with them?"

Two more "chingalos."

"No time to babysit, Uncle. I got my own delivery to make."

"Where's mi mami?" Tino demanded when Rey hung up.

"Sucking a border agent's cock," Rey taunted him. "Now, shut up, chilito!"

All my fault, Tino thought for the hundredth time. Blaming himself, for who else could he blame? Because of him, they had to run. He wanted to race through the canyons all the way to the border. Desperate to find his mother. Wanting to feel her arms around him.

Rey wouldn't say what had happened. Just waved his pistol and screamed at Tino and the four men to get in the truck. They sped back to La Rumorosa along the same winding road, sliding through steep turns, Tino scraping his elbows in the cargo bed.

Once back at the stone house, Rey grabbed a submachine gun-a Mac-10 Tino recognized from TV shows-and herded the four men into the house, locking them in a back room.

"But you, chilito… " He waved the gun barrel toward Tino. "You are coming with us."

Before Tino could answer, Rey swung the gun toward a small tree and fired a burst, nearly cutting the trunk in half. Rey's two friends-the morons he called "Mundo" and "Chuco"-laughed like donkeys. They all rapped knuckles and passed around a bottle of wine. Rey offered Tino a sip, but he shook his head, and all three brayed some more, calling him "lambiscon."

"I'm no suck ass," Tino said, and they laughed some more.

After several minutes of shooting the gun and drinking the wine, Rey grabbed Tino's backpack and yanked it open. Three T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, some socks. "Nothing but shit here, cabron. "

Tino remained silent. Unwilling to show his fear, hoping they could not see his knees wobbling like a broken bicycle.

Rey pulled out Tino's prized baseball glove. A Vinny Castilla model. Soft brown leather with an aroma better than fresh-baked bread. He had bought the glove with the money he earned delivering lunch to workers at his mother's job site.

Rey smacked Tino across the face with the glove. Turned to his friends. "Ay! Mama's boy thinks he is a baseball player."

He tossed the glove to Mundo, who tossed it to Chuco. All of them seemed to be around the same age. Nineteen or twenty. Shaved heads. Dirty clothes. Stinky bodies. Scratchy facial hair like grass trying to grow out of sand. Now all three pawed through Tino's belongings, mangy dogs at a garbage can.

After finding nothing of interest other than the baseball glove, Rey ordered Tino to take off his shirt. Tino shook his head, and the two others grabbed him, stripped off the shirt, and pinned his arms behind his back.

Mundo grabbed the chain around Tino's neck. Attached to the end was a clear plastic envelope, and inside, a photo of his mother. "Look, chilito still sucks his mother's tit."

More laughs, all around.

Rey disappeared into the house, while Mundo and Chuco pushed Tino to the ground. Mundo ripped Tino's sweatpants down to his knees. Tino squirmed and yelled, fearing they were perverts. He got one arm free and flailed at them. He would die fighting before he would let the filthy maricons soil him.

Chuco pulled the sweatpants completely off, then took a knife to the material that enclosed the drawstring. When the cloth tore open, four twenty-dollar bills, rolled up tight, popped out. Tino had put the money there, just as El Tigre had advised, to keep it safe from thieves. Chuco grunted his pleasure and grabbed the bills. Mundo pinned Tino to the ground, the boy screaming, "Give it back! That's all I have!"

Rey returned, straddled Tino, and placed a plastic bag filled with white powder on his chest. It took Tino a moment to figure out what was going on.?Cocaina! They were not perverts. They were drug traffickers.

Rey wrapped a long strand of tape around Tino's chest, securing the bag in place. They flipped him and taped two more bags on his back.

And they're making me their mule!

Chuco and Mundo carried Tino, still struggling, onto the cargo bed of the truck, opened the toolbox, removed a false bottom, and placed him inside.