Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (39 page)

I spent the evening at the Edwards’s home. From its modest size, I understood that farmers in the area were more land rich than cash rich. As his wife set the table, I snuck a glimpse of a small swimming pool through the kitchen window—the baptismal pool of which Tiberio had spoken. I felt I knew a lot about Edwards already, but much of what I was seeing confounded my expectation. To Mexicans he was
“el patrón,”
a name which conjured in my mind images of a vast hacienda or plantation. Sure, Edwards was wealthy, but hardly a high roller. His wife set down two big plastic bowls full of potato-vegetable soup, and Edwards said grace. “Nothin’ too fancy,” said the farmer.

Edwards’s son, daughter-in-law, and three-month-old grandson came over after dinner for a brief visit. My friends had briefed me: they had bought chewing tobacco for him, in exchange for his silence regarding their drinking. I felt like I had a secret dossier on everybody. The son spoke Spanish, I knew, which was of great use to his father in running the farm; he had learned it during two Mormon missionary years in Paraguay. I spent the night in a guest bedroom at the son’s house, and the next morning returned to the fields with his father. As I helped out with various chores, Edwards warmed to me and became more talkative. I was full of questions.

“Plácido was the first,” he said, answering one of them. “One day, I guess you could say he just came knockin’. At first I didn’t like the idea of Mexicans—we’d always had regular farm hands around, and local kids to help out with the harvest. But now it seems all the kids are in school or something, and I don’t know what happened to the farm hands. Mexicans underpriced ’em, I guess. Everybody was starting to use Mexicans. And so when Plácido came down the road, I said okay.”

Every year Plácido had returned with more from Ahuacatlán. Some branched out to other farms but were sometimes mistreated: instead of the paycheck, Immigration would arrive, having been “tipped off” by an unscrupulous employer. Or the living conditions were terrible. But Edwards treated his men decently and that, I knew, was why they loyally returned every spring.

We were driving out across a field to a tractor that had been abandoned in the midst of plowing when a hydraulic line broke. There was no road here; the field was furrowed like a giant washboard, and we crossed it sideways, the truck bouncing violently up and down. Edwards repaired the line, gave the diesel engine a few minutes to warm up, and invited me into the cab. We began to plow.

“That Jesús loved these things,” he said, as the steel disks of the plow lifted vast volumes of earth behind us. “He learned most of what there is to know about heavy machinery here. Never looked prouder than in the seat of our trailer rig.”

Jesús had boasted to me of the way the farmer trusted him with heavy machinery, some of it worth “millions of pesos.” I recalled a postcard he had sent me: it was a prank photograph, of a semitruck with a flatcar trailer, hauling one sole item: a potato as big as the trailer itself.
“Hello from Idaho, of the big potatoes,”
he had written.
“We hope you find yourself in good health. ¡Que vivan los Tecos!”
Long live the Owls!

Edwards swerved slightly to avoid a telephone pole, part of a long string of them, the only things for miles to cut across the horizon. “You ever see ’em eat a pig?” he asked suddenly. “Roast a whole pig?” I said no, and he shook his head disapprovingly.

“Well, every spring—I think it’s June sometime—they go buy a pig from Perkins down the road, and they have a feast. They keep that pig for a couple of days, and then they butcher it—right in front of the trailers! Cut its throat, hang it up, and let the pig pump all its blood out. Sometimes before it’s all the way dead. It’s not the way we do things around here, I’ll tell you that. Then they start a fire and cook it on a stick, sort of barbecue style. Thing takes all day. ”

He shook his head some more, and sort of smiled.

“I tell you one thing, though—they’re ingenious. You ever seen anybody tie up a pig?”

Actually, I said, I had, in Mexico.

“How on earth do they do that? How do you get a rope to stay around a pig? Nobody around here knows how to do that. ”

I explained about the lack of fences in Ahuacatlán, the need for ingenuity. If anybody could tie up a pig, I suggested, these guys could. Edwards was admiring.

Finished plowing, we drove the truck to a distant part of the farm, where he wanted to show me the giant potato bins. The drive took about twenty minutes, on dirt roads through land stunning for its isolation. There was nothing around. I had asked Edwards about Evangélica, but had learned little other than that she was a small girl to be carrying what it appeared would be a big baby, and that she spent all her time around the trailer, cooking for the guys and doing their laundry. Edwards had offered no comment at the time, but now he brought it up again.

“You know, I used to see her, that Evangeline, out on these roads, just cryin’ and cryin’. I asked my son to find out why, and he said she was just homesick. But I’ll tell you something, if I’d been treated the way that Jesús treated her, I’d be homesick too. Did you know they’d all go in to the dances in Blackfoot Saturday nights, and leave her at home? She didn’t have any friends, and no way to get around. Why, one weekend my wife felt so sorry for her she brought her home, and they sat around and did sewing together. Neither of ’em knew what the other was saying, of course, but ... I don’t know. It’s not right to treat your wife that way. ”

“Wife? Did they get married?”

I kicked myself the moment I said it. “Well, I assumed they were married,” said Edwards, a note of unpleasant surprise in his voice. “You saying she wasn’t his wife? I sure wouldn’t have let them live together if I knew she wasn’t his wife!”

“No, no! I’m sure she was his wife! I just meant—did they go through another ceremony up here? I was just thinking maybe they went through some other ceremony up here—for Immigration or something.”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Edwards unhappily. But he didn’t bring it up again, and later he resumed calling her Jesús’s wife, much to my relief.

*

Finally it was time to depart from Idaho, to return to home and to work. Edwards and his wife gave me their good wishes, and inscribed to me a copy of the Book of Mormon. It was a loss, having missed my friends, but an unexpected gain to have been able to talk to Edwards himself.

Before climbing back into my car, I took a last walk through the trailer home, trying to picture them all there. Items they had left behind offered clues to their lives in Idaho. On the dresser tops were piles of pay stubs, and lists of dates and hours worked—to be compared, no doubt, with the farmer’s own accounting, “11 agosto—10 horas 12 agosto—13 horas 13 agosto—11 1/2 horas.” I saw that sometimes they had worked seven days a week, and up to sixty-five or seventy hours. Under the back porch was a pile of knee-high rubber boots, all covered with dry mud, and stiff leather work gloves. There was an ad torn out of a Spanish-language magazine—it might have been
¡Alarma!
—for an aphrodisiac potion. In one room, more delicately decorated than the rest, was a photograph of Jesús stuck into the frame of a dresser-top mirror—it had been
their
room. And underneath it, a spiral notebook with Evangélica’s name on the cover. I opened to one page:
“Raquel, I hope you find yourself well and at your husband’s side. Raquel, you’re already forgetting about me. You almost don’t write me anymore. I’ll write you right away. Tell Reyna to write me. Send me the other photo, the one where I’m with Jesús
... ”

Across the opposite page were verses, scribbled randomly:
“I love you. I miss you. Don’t forget me.”
And
“Evangélica Leal Olvera
+
Jesús Garcia.”
And
“from she who loves and desires you, Evangélica.”
It was too private, and too sad; I felt bad about reading more. She would be home by now, close to her family again, no longer scared. If anyone truly suffered because of the whole immigration mess, I thought, it was women like Evangélica, and the wives and kids who stayed at home.

In a room which appeared to be Plácido’s was a large water bed—I had listened to it described in detail one night in Pablo’s cantina in Ahuacatlán. Few there had ever heard of such a thing, and one man even asked me if it was true.
“But don’t you get wet?”
On the floor was a mailing from a psychic in Miami Beach, in Spanish. Drawers and cupboards were empty, save for the occasional bag of
chicharrones
or cookies, a paper bagful of beans. The only things full—and they were packed to the brim—were the closets. They were hung with jeans, long underwear, work boots, jackets, thick shirts—the sorts of heavy clothing required by the cool northern climate. They were a symbol of labor, and a symbol of expectation: No need to take these home. They would be back to wear them next year.

* *

AFTER IMMIGRATION
caught him in the back of the bus in Laredo, I never expected to see Alonso again. What a surprise when I walked into the cooperative’s warehouse, in Querétaro City, and saw him behind the counter, selling seeds and honey.

“
You gave me their address that night in the bus station,”
he explained, grinning from under a baseball cap that read “PAC-MAN.”
“You told me to write you there. Well, after they sent me back, I came and asked for a job instead.”
His timing had been good; the cooperative had had an opening.

He worked for six months, and then left again for Texas. There has been no word from him since; but then, none was ever expected.

*

Despite his plan to leave Los Angeles quickly for higher-paying work on a California farm, Carlos remained in the city. He quit the job engraving trophies after several months; after an interim period helping his cousin Martín in the welding shop, he found a job in a “recycling plant.” I hadn’t heard from him in nearly a year when one day I received a letter, with his return address, written in a scrawling, uneven hand that did not remind me at all of Carlos:

Dear Ted,

Hi! How are you?

I’m sorry I didn’t write you earlier, but I had an accident.

I don’t know how to tell you this, but I lost my hand. It happened at the “recycling.” I was cleaning up, and slipped, and my hand got caught in a conveyor belt. The roller broke it totally. Everything happened so fast, I was in shock. I didn’t cry, I didn’t lose much blood, the ambulance arrived quickly and took me and my hand to the hospital. The doctors did everything possible to reconnect it, but they couldn’t save it—the bones, nerves, tendons, muscles, everything was destroyed, and so they amputated it.

It was his right hand. The script was hard to read because he was writing with his left. The company’s insurance paid most of his medical bills, including some costs of rehabilitation. Carlos began attending a course, “in the best computer school in Los Angeles.” With his savings, he enrolled simultaneously in an advanced English class.

Learning about computers had been Carlos’s dream all along in coming to the States, but until the accident, as he noted, he had been unable to afford it. It had been a sad year: his uncle Cándido had died three months earlier of his kidney ailment. And a “Dear John” letter had come from his girlfriend in Mexico—but at least those had been expected.

How to tell you ... in truth, it was very hard for me. I felt morally destroyed. But little by little I’m getting used to my new self. I’m a realist, and I have to go forward, and fight to survive. It happened in the past, and I live in the present, preparing myself for the future

*

Emilio, Máximo, Chucho, and the four others I had joined on the slippery wintertime drive to Florida soon consolidated their two households into a two-bedroom trailer home on the outskirts of La Belle. Picking juice oranges was good work, but in their opinion thirty to forty hours a week wasn’t enough of it: by the end of the month, they had found another orchard where they could work fifty to sixty.

Emilio soon revealed himself to be a binge drinker, disappearing with the station wagon on weekends and twice getting fined and jailed for driving while under the influence. The second time he lost his job for missing work, but soon found another in La Belle. After a fall of picking apples in Michigan, he returned to Florida, where he is said to be still. The others say he shows no inclination to return to Mexico.

Máximo left for home after five months, having worked hard and enjoyed himself little. He lives with his wife and six children in Escanelilla, a
rancho
near Ahuacatlán. The man who used to pray before driving off on an icy road saved enough money to buy a car, and now operates a bright orange taxi, with lighted sign on top—the only taxi—in Ahuacatlán.

Chucho returned home with Máximo to a wife and four children. Six months later he went back to Arizona to work a season in citrus but returned immediately thereafter. He is one of the best-dressed men in his
rancho,
and often invites male neighbors over to watch or listen to his compact portable television/stereo. At home the floor around his feet is usually crowded with an assortment of marbles, toy cars, crawling babies, and sometimes a piglet. Two large
guayabo
trees grow over the house where his aged mother and retarded brother also live. He speaks constantly of returning to the United States.