Land of Careful Shadows (9 page)

“If I was opening up a Starbucks, you'd be right,” said Adele. “But La Casa doesn't serve lattes and espressos. We're sort of at the bottom of the food chain. Nobody wants day laborers hanging around their neighborhood.”

Downstairs, little feet pounded across the floorboards. Children's voices filled the house like water coursing through a shallow streambed. The children were coming in from play. Vega rose. “I should leave you to your work. I've gotta let Metro-North and the Lake Holly PD know about Ortiz.”

“I'm headed back to La Casa anyway. I'll walk you out.” In the big room on the first floor, the children were putting away their coats in their cubbyholes and gathering around a long table where Linda and two teachers were pouring juice into Dixie cups and setting out oatmeal cookies on paper napkins. Adele grinned, watching Vega pick his way past the low tables full of tiny three- and four-year-olds as if he thought he might crush one. Adele nodded to Linda.

“Thanks for helping out here today. I'll be over at La Casa. Call me if you need me.”

Linda put down the carton of juice and gestured—not to Adele, to Vega.

“Wait up, Jimmy. I want to talk to you a moment.”
Jimmy?
Adele looked at Vega and noticed a blush creep into his toffee-colored cheeks. He was attracted to this
rubia,
this blond Anglo-Saxon. Adele could feel it. And for some reason, it stung.

Linda must have caught the look that crossed Adele's face because she quickly added: “Jimmy and I were friends in high school.”

“Oh.” The word had a glacial edge to it. Adele was behaving childishly. She couldn't explain why.

Linda called back over her shoulder, asking the two teachers to hold down the fort while she stepped outside a moment. She grabbed an Ann Taylor peacoat in the front hallway. Vega helped her into it. Adele managed to get into her own lumpy fleece jacket with no one's help, thank you very much.

Outside, the wind had picked up. The three of them walked along the outer edge of the chain-link fence to Adele's car. Linda turned to Vega.

“I was going to call you,” she said. “But they needed me here this morning and I got busy.”

Vega toyed with the fence, pulling on the links so they puckered and rattled. Adele noticed that he seemed nervous and tongue-tied in Linda's presence. He hadn't been that way at all upstairs. What was it about Latin men and their obsession with blondes? It's not like Linda was beautiful or anything. Her face resembled those pale likenesses in Old Dutch paintings: skin the color of just-cut apples, eyes that took on the ambient shade of the sky. She was skinny rather than svelte, bony rather than sculpted. When she turned her wrists, blue veins snaked along the undersides like she'd drawn them on in pen.

“I'm pretty sure I remember the woman in that photograph you showed me,” said Linda. “I'm also pretty sure I filled out a client profile sheet on her but I can't seem to find it. She came in only once or twice to see if anyone wanted to hire her as a cleaning lady. I remember her because I had a job for a nanny. Most clients will take anything you find for them. But she wouldn't work in a home with little kids. ‘No young children.' I remember her saying that. I may have set up an interview for her. It would be on the intake sheet if I could find it but I can't.”

“Do you remember her name?” asked Vega.

“I think it was Maria. I don't remember her last name.”

“Well,” Vega laughed. “That only narrows the list down to like a third of the Latinas in the county.”

“I know. Sorry,” said Linda. “But even if I remembered a last name, sometimes clients give me fake ones and change them periodically so that may not help you as much as you think. But I do remember that she was with a man when she came in. I see him at the center from time to time. He never did an intake sheet. I've asked a few times but he's always refused. I know he usually comes in with Enrique Sandoval.”

“I know Enrique,” said Adele. Enrique had a crush on her. She could feel it. The way he'd hop from one foot to the other, like he was walking on fire in her presence. Kind of the way Vega was behaving with Linda now. “Enrique comes in with his older cousin a lot. Anibal—”

“—This isn't Anibal,” said Linda. “Anibal has a mustache. And his fingers—” Linda held up her left hand and made a slicing motion across the digits. Anibal was so good with his hands, you'd have to look closely to know that some of his fingers were partially amputated. “This other man—I saw him this morning before I came over to the preschool. He and Enrique and Anibal got picked for a job clearing brush over in Wickford. His shoe was falling apart.”

“You mean Rodrigo.” Adele had seen the boot. Tied together with string. They had some castoffs in a closet and she tried to find him a pair that fit but they were all too small. Adele felt bad for Rodrigo. He had so much dignity when he was trying to stuff his feet into the castoffs. He was so unfailingly gracious, thanking her for her efforts. It would have been easy to drive to Target, buy a pair of cheap work boots out of her own pocket, and come back. But then she'd have to do it for every client. And they all had sad stories. So she helped Rodrigo get thicker string to keep the sole tied to the boot and hoped he'd either earn enough to get a new pair or someone would donate the right size.

“This guy's name is Rodrigo?” asked Vega. He bounced a look from Adele to Linda. “Rodrigo what?”

“I don't know,” Adele admitted. “Unless a client does an intake sheet, we don't know anything about them.”

“But you know what he looks like. You know who he's working for today.”

Adele looked at Linda. She didn't normally get involved with the nitty-gritty of hiring the way Linda did. And beyond that, she wasn't sure if this was a conversation they should be having.

Linda must have picked up on the same sense of foreboding. She folded her arms across her chest and gave Vega a wary look. “If I tell you where Rodrigo's working, what will happen to him?”

“Nothing.” Vega shrugged. “I just want to talk to him.”

“Like you just wanted to
talk
to José Ortiz?” asked Adele.

Vega gave her a dark look.

“I don't want to get Rodrigo in trouble,” said Linda.

“This guy could turn out to be a material witness to a homicide investigation—”

“—Oh, so now it's a homicide investigation,” said Adele. “What happened to, ‘I have no further information'?”

She'd caught him. She could see it in his face. If Rodrigo really did know this Maria and she was anything other than an accidental drowning, he was looking at all sorts of legal problems. Maybe Linda didn't know what the stakes were here, but Adele did.

Vega's Bronx accent became edgier and more pronounced. “You are impeding a police investigation, Ms. Figueroa.”

“Not impeding,” Adele corrected. “Just making sure all the safeguards are in place. You put together a solid case for probable cause and Rodrigo will come to La Casa, represented by Scott Porter, to answer your questions.”

Inside the school, one of the teachers pounded out three chords on an out-of-tune piano someone had donated. The children began to sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider”—even the ones who didn't yet speak a word of English.

“I don't believe you two,” said Vega. He punched the side of the fence. It made a sharp twanging sound. The fence was on its last legs. It needed replacing, like everything else at La Casa. “Here you make it sound like the police aren't doing their jobs—and the moment you can actually help—you lawyer up. That dead woman is Latino too, you know. And probably just as undocumented.
Dios mío,
she's a mother! She's got a baby somewheres. Doesn't she matter as much as your precious day laborers?”

Linda went to speak but Adele motioned for her to stay silent. This was lawyer-to-cop right now. “We are happy to cooperate, Detective. But you and I both know that you're not looking for an ID on a drowning. You're looking for a suspect in a possible homicide. And you're salivating because you think you've got one in your crosshairs.”

“You wanna play games? Go ahead,” said Vega, backing away. “Play all the games you want. But I'll get this guy. With or without your help.”

“I'm just doing my job,” Adele shot back.

“Yeah?” he stomped off. “Well so am I.”

W
ork. Rodrigo finally had work. It had been two weeks since he'd gotten hired for anything. The last had been thirty dollars to move a treadmill and exercise bike from the basement of a house to the newly renovated master bedroom suite on the second floor. The exercise bike wasn't too bad. But the treadmill was sheer hell. It weighed 350 pounds and couldn't be disassembled. He, Enrique, and Anibal had all lifted it together and carted it up two flights of stairs. By the top of the second floor, they were all dripping with sweat. They got more exercise moving the equipment, he suspected, than the woman who paid them would ever get using it.

But no matter. Today was better. Today, he would get a hundred dollars for ten hours of work clearing brush and branches from a field, plus a sandwich for lunch. And there was more work tomorrow. And the day after that. The boss, a tall, thickset Paraguayan who came here thirty years ago when immigration was a matter of a plane ticket and a willingness to work, said he might need them for the whole week. That meant five hundred dollars. A chance to buy new work boots that didn't need to be held together with string. Enough money to phone home and wire some back. After his first trip to the United States five years ago, Rodrigo had been able to save enough to build his family a small cinderblock house in Esperanza with running water and electricity and to pay for his two older children's schooling. But they'd had to mortgage the house to pay for this second border crossing. Forty thousand quetzals, the equivalent of 5,200 American dollars. If he didn't send money home soon, Beatriz could lose the house. Juliza and Lorenzo would be kicked out of school. His little Stephany wouldn't even get to start on an education. Then where would his family be?

He refused to think that way.
Be positive.
It was early April, after all. Landscaping jobs were picking up. The men at La Casa said the U.S. economy was getting better. Tighter borders meant fewer immigrants. Less competition. Things were bound to turn around. He hoped so.
Dios mío,
he hoped so.

A lot of the Latin-American men Rodrigo knew hated the geography of suburban New York. Such cold winters. All those bare trees and gray skies and icy winds that whipped through your clothes like you weren't wearing any. But Rodrigo liked the landscape, liked the way the hills rose and fell in little puckers and swells, soft like a quilt on an unmade bed. He loved walking by the wood-frame houses in the evenings, seeing the golden glow from the windows, smelling wood smoke from chimneys in the crisp evening air.

His dream was to make enough money to go back to his hometown in Guatemala and live there with his family in comfort for the rest of their lives. If he could achieve that, he would not think unkindly about his time here in the North. His
adventure.
That's how he liked to think of it. The two terrible journeys across Mexico and the border, two times nearly dying in the desert. That stretch in prison and then a detention center. The fear. The crushing loneliness—they would all fade in time. If things worked out, he would sit one day in the sunny, dusty square in Esperanza where the stray dogs roamed, playing dominoes with Enrique and Anibal, eating mangoes so ripe the juice ran down their faces, and they would speak of those hills. And their battle scars. And they would laugh.

It had been clear and mild most of the day, but it was late afternoon now and the heat of the sun had started to fade. Their boss, Señor Silva, was a gray-haired man with grizzled, leathery skin. Even when he spoke English to the
Norte Americanos,
his voice seemed laced with a strong Spanish accent. He had hired Rodrigo, Enrique, and Anibal to clear out a three-acre field behind a huge shingled house that looked big enough to be a hotel. Silva said the family lived in New York City and only came up on the weekends. The back three acres had been used as sort of a dumping ground for brush and vines and now the owner planned to landscape it. The land needed to be cleared right down to the dirt. Branches had to be removed, vines hacked, thorny bushes dug up.

When they got to the field that morning, the land was wet from days of rain. Beneath the brambles and weeds, there were sinkholes of mud. Anibal, always resourceful, helped Rodrigo wrap his sock in two plastic supermarket shopping bags before he stuck it in his tied-up shoe so his foot would stay dry. A good idea, but it didn't work. As the day wore on, the bags gave out and by lunchtime, Rodrigo's sock was soaked through and covered with mud as if he hadn't been wearing any boots at all. It reminded him of his barefoot boyhood in Guatemala where he didn't own a pair of shoes until he was sixteen. The difference was, Guatemala was warm, the ground mostly soft. Here, it was cold and wet and hard. The bag just added to the mess so all day, Rodrigo felt like he was walking on a dead fish.

Silva had two Weedwackers in his truck with his company's name, Green Acres Landscaping, on the side. But he said it was too dangerous for the men to use the Weedwackers until they had cleared the worst of the brush by hand. He had assumed the men would have their own work gloves and seemed annoyed when they didn't. But he handed them each a pair of thin ones from the truck. The gloves didn't entirely stop the blackberry thorns from piercing their skin but Rodrigo found that if you grabbed them hard, you often got less pricked than if you tried to be delicate about it.

They started with the large branches, carrying them over to the boss's wood chipper and feeding them into the machine. Rodrigo was thankful that Silva at least supplied goggles. He'd known a man on his first trip to the States who'd lost an eye from a piece of wood that shot out of a chipper.

Rodrigo and the men worked well together. Even though he wasn't related to Enrique and Anibal, here in the States, they treated him like a brother. Anibal had even started calling him that.
Hermano,
this, and
hermano
that. They all missed their families so they needed to invent connections wherever possible.

The work was hard. Bending. Cutting. Carrying. All the thorns that stuck to your clothes and cut right through your hoodie and jeans. All the different plants you didn't want to get on your skin or you'd itch for a week. The insects you had to worry about. Ticks that could give you a fever and make your joints ache. Underground wasps' nests that could swarm if you disturbed them. But it was a million times better that they were all together. Together, they developed a rhythm. And always, they talked. What they would do first when they got back to Esperanza. (Enrique would find his young wife, Zulma, and stay in bed with her for twenty-four hours—only Enrique didn't use such polite language to explain it.) What they missed most. (Rodrigo: having little Stephany on his shoulders when he walked to church.) The funniest thing that happened since they arrived. (Anibal needed to buy some sheets for his mattress. He walked up to a saleswoman in a store and asked for “shits.” She pointed to the restroom.) They worked hard but they laughed too and the laughing made Rodrigo forget how much he ached or how cold and wet his toes were. For a moment—just a moment—he actually forgot how very far he was from home.

Señor Silva never smiled, but as the day wore on, he seemed to grow a grudging respect for how hard his three employees worked and he left them on their own for several hours while he drove off to check up on other jobs. Enrique joked that they could slack off a bit now that the boss man wasn't here, but Anibal frowned.

“We have a chance to work with him for a week, maybe longer. If anything, he should come back and be surprised at how much we have accomplished.”

Rodrigo agreed with Anibal. They had to give the work their best effort. But even as he said this, he knew it would be hard to impress a man like Benito Silva no matter what they did. Rodrigo suspected Silva was more like them than he pretended, a man who had come here with nothing and clawed his way up. The American Dream, these
Norte Americanos
call it. Except it really was a dream now. Benito Silva came before Latinos had to worry about getting deported and starting all over again.

Rodrigo hoped Silva would be fair with them at least—pay them what he'd promised. Some employers start out with the amount that they are going to pay and they whittle it down over the course of the day. They deduct for a sandwich at lunch, for the use of safety equipment, for breaks to eat or piss, for transportation—for just about everything.

Norte Americanos,
in Rodrigo's experience, were the best employers. Especially the wealthy ones. They were polite. They paid what they promised. They talked like you understood what they were saying and that was hard because you had to do a lot of nodding and guessing. But they seemed to want you to like them. The people who cheated him the most were other Latinos—the legal ones—and other immigrants in general, especially the ones who'd once been on the bottom themselves. They seemed to divide the world into cheaters and losers and they walked around with a held breath in them, waiting to see which one you'd turn out to be. Rodrigo would have thought that coming up the hard way would make a person more sympathetic to the suffering of others. But in his experience the opposite was true. To weather life at its sharp, remorseless margins, you needed thick calluses and an indifference to pain. People didn't seem to shed those defenses easily, not even when they didn't need them anymore.

The men had gotten about half of the three acres free of vines, thorns, and branches by about four-thirty in the afternoon. Rodrigo removed his baseball cap and raked a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. He was dying for some water. Silva kept water in his truck but he had not returned for about two hours.

“He should be back soon,” said Enrique, wiping his face with his sleeve. “He promised we'd quit at six.”

The area had nothing around it. “Wickford,” Silva called it, though if the men had had to walk back to Lake Holly from here, they wouldn't have had a clue what direction to start in. The house was on a winding road, narrow as a cow path. This time of year, with the trees not yet leafed out, Rodrigo could see a patchwork of other enormous houses on neighboring streets. Nobody seemed to be home. The entire area looked as if no one really lived here. Every now and then, he'd hear a dog bark from somewhere far off or the soft brakes of a delivery truck. Sometimes a plane would fly overhead and Rodrigo would stop for just a moment and watch the scarf of white tail smoke in the sky. He'd been on a plane once, a couple of years ago, but it wasn't a happy experience. It was the time they deported him back to Guatemala. The deportees were shackled together in a van with mesh windows until they reached the tarmac. Then they were frisked and escorted by armed immigration agents onto the plane. He would have liked to have enjoyed the experience, this coming home by airplane and seeing his family again. But it felt heavy with failure, especially after five months in prison, five months where he couldn't send a penny home.

The field they were working in felt hemmed in and isolated at the same time. To the left of the field was a small street that presumably wound toward some of these other houses Rodrigo could see. To the right was a wooded area, thick enough that even with all the leaves down, it felt dense and claustrophobic. Rodrigo hoped they wouldn't get stranded here when it got dark.

He turned back to helping Enrique dig up the roots of a barberry bush when he heard the slow creep of a car down the road. He wanted to believe it was Silva, but Silva's rusted-out Dodge pickup truck announced itself with the wheeze of an old man's lungs. This car was quiet. And slow. A neighbor's, perhaps.

Rodrigo straightened and leaned on his shovel. Enrique stopped shoveling and did the same. Both men were hoping for water. Rodrigo's throat was starting to burn. It was a panic reaction, he knew, a vestige of that first border crossing. He'd had to cut his four gallons of water—all thirty-three pounds—off his back to outrun
la migra
, even climbing a razor-wire fence barehanded. He'd spent the next twenty-eight hours in the desert, his hands swollen to the size of baseball mitts, drinking his own urine and praying that he wouldn't die nameless under some bush, his family never knowing his fate. Five years had gone by and still he couldn't shake that sense of panic he got when he went too long without water.

Anibal, hacking at the branches of a vine, grunted to Rodrigo and Enrique that the señor would be back soon and wishing it wouldn't make it come faster. But Rodrigo was now transfixed by the car.

It was an American car. Dark blue. Not an SUV or fancy sports car like the ones the Anglos drove around here. A maid service perhaps. A pizza delivery. But there was no company name on the side. This car was traveling like it didn't know where it was going. It pulled beyond the driveway of the house and turned onto the adjoining street. Rodrigo went back to his digging. Then he caught the movement from the corner of his eye. The car had made a U-turn. It was creeping alongside the house again.

“Ay, you two. This is no time to stop working,” Anibal chided.

Enrique squinted at the car. His eyesight wasn't great. And besides, it was hard to see inside the sedan in daylight. Like looking in a pond caught in the glare of the sun. But Rodrigo's eyesight was much better. On his second journey across the border he'd earned the nickname
Ojos
—“eyes.” Whenever the border patrol helicopters flew overhead, their rotors beating close enough to part the hairs on a man's head, the people scattered and threw themselves under mesquite bushes. It was what you had to do or the men in the helicopters would radio your location and
la migra
would ride up in their trucks and arrest you.

But the shade beneath the bushes was also the place where rattlesnakes curled up. Twice Rodrigo's eyes had saved another traveler's life by spotting the snake and redirecting the panicked person to another bush. It wasn't
things
he could see so much as
movement.
In the case of the snakes, the way the light pearled on their bodies in the sand, the way the dust seemed to shimmer around them. It was the movement he saw now again. A reach of a hand near the dashboard. Across something. A light bar. Only cops had light bars.