Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (38 page)

We followed the patrol car. Suddenly, Jesús had an idea.
“Teo, if they’ll talk to you, see if you can keep the car. We’ll need it in Phoenix, and you can drive it back.”

“
You really think you’re going to be deported?”
Jesús bit his lip and nodded.

“
I’ll see what I can do.”

The mood was somber as we were led into a holding cell. Just as the officer was about to lock the door, I called to him. “Excuse me, sir! Sir? May I have a word with you, please?” He stopped and stared, searching the faces for the one that had spoken English.

I raised a hand. “Over here.” He looked at me, befuddled.

“Huh? Where’d you come from? What’re you doin’ in there?”

I shrugged.

“Well, get on outta there!”

He took me back to the squad room, where I told my story. I was a journalist, I explained, traveling with them for a story. “What do you plan to do with these guys?”

“Immigration’s already on their way,” said the sheriff. I would have to ask them about the car, he added. But there was no reason he could see why I was in any trouble. On my request, he directed me to the town cafe where, guiltily, I filled my stomach and contemplated what to do next. Should I be worried about Immigration? In the opinion of one policeman, anyway, I was guiltless; I decided at least to give it a try. I returned to the station to have another talk with my companions.

“
They’ve called La Migra,”
I said, when the sheriff let me into the cellblock.

“
Ay, cabrón.” “Hijo de la chingada.”
Tiberio said,
“We’re fucked.”

“
The car,”
said Jesús, handing me the keys.
“Go get the title to the car. We’ll write your name on it before they get here.”

“
That won’t mean anything unless it's notarized,”
I said. Then, after a silence,
“Where will they take you?”

“
Are we in Idaho or Utah?”
I confessed I didn’t know either.

“
Well, in Utah, they usually deport you to El Centro, California—Mexicali is the border town. But we’ll come back to Phoenix.”

“
But how will you afford it?”

There was no answer. Their faces were gray, devoid of expression. I had a credit card; I passed Jesús the rest of my cash.
“Call it a loan. ”
We discussed the things Immigration should and should not learn about our association. I then shook hands all around, embraced Jesús through the bars, and left the jail.

Immigration did not arrive until evening. For some of the time, I talked to the deputies. No, they conceded, catching Mexicans wasn’t necessarily part of the job. But a big local mine had closed recently, unemployment was high, and, frankly, people just didn’t like the idea of Mexicans coming through town and taking jobs. So they helped out Immigration when they could. The jail, I discovered, had five other cells full of Mexicans, and nobody else. The town was Nephi, Utah.

I was nervous about meeting the Immigration officers. My companions had helped me much more than I had helped them, but police sometimes had a twisted way of looking at things and might accuse me of “aiding and abetting” aliens. I was counting on my friends and the language barrier to keep me safe.

The four Immigration agents, all plainclothes, arrived from Salt Lake City with two vans late that afternoon. After introducing myself to the one in charge and explaining that the detainees were acquaintances of mine, I asked about the disposition of the Cadillac. I was referred to the legal officer, a sallow man in a leather jacket. The response was swift. “The car was used in violation of US. immigration law and is subject to impoundment. But before we tell you about the car, buddy, I think you’d better learn about your rights.” I swallowed hard as he read me the Mirandas and took me to another room. In trouble again.

They held me for nearly twenty-four hours, and questioned me for three of them. They contacted the INS regional headquarters, their chief counsel in Washington, D.C., and my editor in New York. Finally the legal officer returned. The verdict was in, and it was disappointing news—to him. “We’re going to have to let you go,” he said. “Not because I want to, but because we don’t think we could make the charge stick before a judge.

“But let me tell you something, mister,” he said as I stood up, smiling. His thumb and forefinger came together in front of my face. “You came this close.”

My relief turned to depression as I walked by the door to the cellblock: the cells were empty. My friends had been taken away. Memories of Alonso getting caught filled my mind—I couldn’t stand the thought of another friendship ending that way, in a blank of sudden absence. I hitchhiked to Salt Lake City and caught a plane to Phoenix that night.

*

Getting back took them all of four days. I was sitting again on trailer steps at Smith’s ranch, helping a man write a letter home, when a custom-painted pickup truck with mag wheels pulled up. I jumped up as Jesús, dressed the same as he had been the last time I’d seen him, climbed out of the passenger seat. The driver, a Chicano with leather jacket and mirror glasses, leaned back against the car. Jesús looked exhausted.

“
Where are the others?”
I asked.

“
In a little house. He’s keeping them there until I get the money. Look—we have to go around and make a collection.”

It was a standard
coyote
m.o.: take a group on spec, but don’t release them until somebody has paid up. The workers at camp were familiar with it, and mostly sympathetic. Fortunately, it was Saturday evening, and most had some cash left from payday the day before. We passed hats once, and then a second time, and, when that came up short, a third time. An uncle of Jesús kicked in nearly $100; Jesús’s brother Vicente, in Colorado, had already sent another $100 by Western Union in response to my phone call.

“
There,”
Jesús said finally.
“Six hundred dollars.”
He and the
coyote
drove away. A short time later the group was back.

They were very tired, but had a good story to tell. After being “processed” near Salt Lake City, they had been
flown
to El Centro, California, a first for all of them. From the Immigration office to the plane to their release, they were handcuffed together, in a long line. The flight had been chartered just for them—an astonishing and ridiculous expense. The futile gesture of capturing the group, picking them up and taking them to Salt Lake City, flying them to southern California, and transporting them to Mexicali must have cost the government $1,500 at the very least; add to this the group’s expenses of $600 for another
coyote,
and the cost of alternative transportation to Idaho—probably another used car—and the price tag approached $3,000 ... all to keep five Mexicans from starting work on time!

Tiberio apparently had gotten sick on the plane. Evangélica had never witnessed anything so amazing in her life.
“We flew right through the clouds!”
she said enthusiastically. The others mainly looked tired, like they had been through a wringer. The flight had been interesting, but upsetting. They had been on the road, under the most adverse conditions, for two weeks now. More than anything else, they wanted to eat.

Immediate plans were uncertain. There were possibilities: they could stick around Phoenix, maybe work awhile, and buy another car; or they could solicit more money from other relatives in the States and buy a car that way. Jesús worried that if they didn’t arrive on time Farmer Edwards would find someone else. On his request I called the man directly, explained what was happening, and asked if there was any chance he might wire them some money as an advance. But Edwards was suspicious and uncooperative, asking time and again who I was. “If they want to work, they’re darn well gonna have to get up here themselves,” he concluded. “They’re good boys, but this can’t be my problem.”

Plácido, who had made it to Idaho on the first trip, rang two days later, in the midst of these deliberations. Farmer Edwards was getting impatient, he said; they’d better get up there. No means had been discovered, they answered. Finally it was decided that Plácido would come down to pick them up himself. He didn’t have a license, didn’t like to drive—in fact, his eyes were bad, he had no glasses, and his back hurt. But he did think that other Mexicans working down the road would loan him a car, and so it was decided.

We waited anxious days for Plácido to arrive. When he did, it was time to face up to a problem no one had cared to deal with: with the addition of Plácido to the group, there would be eight people in the car—an impossible number for all but the most desperate travelers. There was only one reasonable solution: I offered to stay behind. This was accepted, but only with a promise to come visit before the season ended.

The day after they drove off on the final, successful leg of a long journey to Idaho, I boarded a plane and flew home to begin writing. Somewhere in the air, talking to the guy in the seat next to me, sipping a cocktail, listening to rock—not
ranchera
—music in the headphones, I thought about another border, the one existing between two cultures in the same country. Like the line at Sonoita, it was invisible, marked by parts of town, railroad tracks and boulevards, places in the heart and mind. I was on that border, I realized, and bound to stay there for a long time.

FARMER EDWARDS
first caught sight of me seated in the doorway of the vacant trailer home, enjoying an Idaho October sunset and wondering where everybody was. I had spoken to Jesús ten days before on the phone, had received a map directing me to this place, and had arrived perhaps an hour earlier by car to find ... nothing.

Edwards approached the way a landowner approaches a trespasser: a little mean, a little wary, with a greeting that was not at all what he meant: “Anything I can do for you?”

“Lookin’ for some friends of mine, some Mexicans—Jesús, Plácido, Conce ... are you Mr. Edwards?”

“I am. You say they’re your
friends
?”

Mexicans tended to find it comical that an American would spend his time hanging out with illegals. Americans tended to find it strange. But I told the farmer about my project, reminded him of the time I had called from Phoenix, and explained about the rendezvous I had arranged with the guys. Once he understood he shared the bad news.

“Well, I’m afraid they left this morning.”

“What? You’re kidding!”

“You can blame it on me. It was so close to the end of the season—actually, the potatoes are all in—and they were champin’ at the bit so to get home—you know how it is—that two days ago I told ’em they could go. Well, yesterday they finally got a car they’d been wrangling over for some time with the guys down the road, and they left. It’s probably my fault they’re not here for you.”

I was crestfallen. I expected I’d see them again someday, but it had been a long time, and a long drive, and my expectations had been so high. In my backseat was a twelve-pack of beer, still cold from the convenience store down the road. The thought of it made me blue. The farmer didn’t seem to know how to handle my silence and disappointment.

“Um, you uh, you want to come water the cattle?” he blurted. I nodded vaguely, and climbed into his old pickup truck. A lame sheepdog jumped in the back, next to a large plastic water tank. We drove down a dirt county road along the edge of his property, turning off on a rough trail that led to a corral. “They irrigated all of this, during the season,” said Edwards, gesturing to unplanted fields on both sides of us. A few potatoes the tractor had missed were scattered among the furrows. “And that’s just a little bit of it.” I had to turn my head to take in all of what he indicated.

The county road had been littered with potatoes for the last ten or so miles of my drive; to avoid them, I’d had to drive a slalom course in my small car. As a semitrailer rig full of potatoes roared by on the road behind us, I saw more bounce out. We were near American Falls, Idaho, fifty miles north of the Utah line, and the potatoes made me wonder why there weren’t more Irish out here, alongside Mormon settlers.

We stopped and parked at the corral. The wind had begun to blow across the treeless fields, and I zipped up my jacket.

“They used to hate it when it got this cold,” said Edwards, of the Mexicans.

“Yes, I know.”

The cattle were Edwards’s winter project. “They summer up in those mountains,” he said, pointing out a row of hills to the north. “Jesús and all helped me bring ’em down yesterday.” I jumped out to open the gate of the corral, and Edwards drove in slowly. Within seconds we were surrounded by enormous, chest-high, brown-and-white bodies, mooing and pushing and angling for a position near the round sheet-metal trough, which Edwards had begun to fill from the tank in the back of the pickup.

At about 5:00 P.M. we were through; Edwards climbed back in the pickup and called his wife at home on the CB radio. “Leavin’ now, honey,” he said. “Okay,” she replied presently. He hung up the microphone, but then, as an afterthought, picked it back up. “Bringin’ company,” he added. “Okay,” answered his wife. I was beginning to feel better.