Imperial (5 page)

Here came another date orchard to our left, with busy birds silhouetted in the palm-crests, uplifting their beaks, clicking and crying even in the heat of midday. I admired the shade and luxurious fruit of those trees, but the old soldier turned to me with a bitter smile and said that the most perilous labor of his life had been ascending toward the birds on a rickety ladder leaned against each tree in turn, with no one holding the bottom for him; his job was to tie bags around immature dates so that they’d not be lost. Little and lean, he’d scampered into the sun which burned him until he resembled the black fly with alert yellow eyes which one often finds crouching in the dusty crease of a palm’s fan. Sometimes he got dizzy; sometimes the ladder slipped. His memories were stained with terror.

By the time he’d completed this relation, our Greyhound bus had drawn close to an onion field in glorious flower, and the old soldier croaked out that working in the onion fields had left him stinking of onion juice, his eyes watering day and night. After a week the onion juice was literally under his skin. (I thought of what Officer Murray had said: When you get people out of an onion field, you wanna roll your windows down.) No matter how long he bowed beneath the showerhead, scrubbing himself red, the onion smell kept oozing out of him so that he stank even to himself and coughed himself to sleep. Eventually he began to bring up blood from too much coughing.

No, I hung it up, the old soldier said. Don’t wanna pick in the fields no more. I got me a ladyfriend, she about forty, forty-five years old. And every morning she drives from El Centro all the way to Yuma. There are four of them people; they share gas. Then she picks. Imagine that, a forty-five-year-old lady and still out there picking! What a tough gal! One time she brought me a cantaloupe from the field. Another time, it was a big watermelon . . .

And he smiled a smile of loving pride. But then his bitterness landed on him again, like flies on a sweaty face. We’d come to a place of white puffballs left behind in the dark fields. The old soldier said that they were cantaloupes—no plants, only the pale spheres sticking out. The migrant workers would turn them up later. He had been among the up-turners of cantaloupes and of so many other crops, following the harvesters on foot, gleaning up lost fruits under that hot, dusty, greyish-white sky. He began to tell me how it was, waving his withered hands as he angrily, dolefully whispered, describing the ache between the shoulderblades, the throbbing in the small of the back, the shooting pains in the arms, the hands that after gripping and lifting all day became dirt-stained baseball mitts which could no longer open or close, painfully throbbing in the bones. Beyond these agonies he remembered with all his hatred the Imperial summers, which had moved one woman on a hundred-degree Saturday evening in Indio to tell me how she had realized that this planet truly orbits a star of immense heat and brightness; whenever she stepped outside on an Imperial day, she could keep possession of only a slender slice of moments before being overpowered by stuporous confusion. Once she was safely back inside, everything on her person, every key or card, every square inch of her blouse, gave off heat. And yet the migrant workers had to spend all day outside, sometimes working for less than the legal minimum wage. The old soldier had finished with that. He could not bear it anymore.

The
Imperial Valley Press
stood on his side. In a section entitled “
OUR OPINION: TIME FOR A CHANGE
,” that newspaper laid out the problem: As important as agriculture is to the county, there are limits on a community with an economy so dependent on farming, because agricultural workers do not exactly get the highest salaries . . . Finally, agriculture is not as strong in the Imperial Valley as it has been in years past. The
Press
slavered over the smoothly-named
Gateway to the Americas Project,
which would soon erect houses and industrial parks near the new Calexico East Port of Entry. It
could create thousands of jobs.
The hoped-for future of the Imperial Valley: strip malls, office parks, chain stores, Los Angelesization. Meanwhile the old soldier’s ladyfriend went on fruit-picking, and in hopes of doing the same thing the
pollos
and
solos
slithered up and down the border fence.

THE FENCE

Yes, they slithered up and down the fence with ominous grace, like the floor-show girl in her summer dress who flew around the catpole at the Miau-Miau Club on the Mexican side, spreading her legs to show each sector of her audience in turn that she wore no underwear; she did pull-ups, flashing her bottom in the red rotisserie-light which translated her into meat; then she somersaulted naked up the pole and descended it upside down, her hands outstretched, gripping it between her thighs solely, until her long hair was sweeping the floor and the men shrieked in triumphant admiration. And the aspirants flowed palely up and down that metal fence in strange and elegant ways which should have elicited equal applause; but they were mere men who mopped their foreheads with bandannas and who stank of sweat, which is our humanity; maybe they’d earn a hundred dollars somewhere before the Border Patrol caught them. They became
bodies.
Another name for them was
EWIS—
entries without inspection. Bureaucrats subclassified them into
criminal aliens
and
administrative aliens.
The United States was their road mirage, a silver-blue illusion of refreshment far ahead upon their burning path. More than one
solo
told me that he’d rather do prison time in America than be free on the streets of Mexico, because in America he got better fed.—America! That was the dream in which they overwhelmed themselves. They’d glean cantaloupes, bag dates, or weed onions—anything. About the “average man” he arrested Officer Murray said: You never know if he just did fifteen years for shootin’ a cop in Salt Lake City or if he’s just lookin’ for work.—Yes, I occasionally meet such charmers as Hugo from San Salvador with his teardrop tattooed beside his left eye, and his ring which said 13 ; he kept saying he was good people; he’d been in prison a long stretch; and was I fuckin’ INS? Hard and paranoid, he threatened me, and tried to rob me; in the end I had to punch him. Then there were the joy-riders, the Mexicans running across the night fields just to see what they could see, the businessmen in suits and slacks rushing over on a lark to steal American watermelons. But most of the people whom I interviewed, well, they were just looking for work. And they gathered and swarmed there against the literal edge of Southside, yearning, planning according to their resources: brute strength to leap, run, hide and suffer, or cunning to spy out an easy secret way, or wealth to pay a coyote. They waited literally in the wall’s shadow, preparing to be brave, learning the weft of the forbidden country ahead. Near the post office, hot, filthy men settled down to sleep behind the bushes, laying out plastic bags of belongings. Yes, they told me; they aimed to cross into America. In Mexicali on that single night there were hundreds like them. (We get real busy in January, February and March, Murray said. Right now it’ll be quiet. Last night we only caught eighty-five aliens. A week ago on midnight shift, we did five hundred and eighty.) They gathered, pooled, collected themselves into waves. How could one miss them? Merely approach the wall, the music of the strip clubs fading into faint strange shrillnesses as one walked north past hot alley lights. White white smoke arose from the sidewalk barbeque stands. A weary vendeuse, perhaps Mayan or Mixtec, walked by, her platter of stuffed animals strapped below her breasts. Now here came another alley, old style, cracked and dark, with shuttered luminescence reflected in its stygian puddles. A pool of urine, a brightly lit PEMEX station under construction, the gargantuan anthill of sand illuminated uselessly, a square area of dirt lit up like a nightmare grave . . . Then Cristóbal Colón the border fence stood silent. How apt was that street’s name! For Cristóbal Colón was of course the discoverer of the New World
circa
1492. And there indeed lay the United States of America, also known as Northside, hot and still beyond the fence through whose holes the eyes of a Border Patrol vehicle spied out Mexico unwinkingly. Closer to the legal crossing, at Morelos Street, ran a line of palms white-limed to head-height. Two rapid men in caps ghosted by. I saw them lunge at the fence and skitter partway up, hanging on it like those bees which cling with their forelegs to one of the many small yellow flowers of the palo verde tree; but then they leapt lightly back into Southside to free themselves from the alert green-clad men in white cars who’d instantly appeared—for to find a way across this subdelineation, and trade hunger for home-sickness, was not so easy. The fence required that they be agile as well as desperate. It more than any other factor had inflated coyotes’ prices from two hundred to twelve hundred dollars a head. The Border Patrol could be proud.

Well, at this time, said Duty Officer Michael Singh at Calexico Station, from inside of town it goes out approximately five miles, and about the same to the east. Right now we’ve got our crew putting up picket fence fifteen feet high . . .

That must have slowed the aliens down, I said.

Well, it has eliminated family groups. They’re coming underneath, but we have to knock that out, too.

Officer Singh was right and wrong about the family groups. For at Madero and Ayuntamiento, in Niños Héroes Park, in sight of the big dullish grey water tower with the hidden camera, my friend Carlos, swarthy, big, tattooed, moustached, filthy, sweat-stinking, sat in the darkness of palms with a gang of other
solos
each of whom had come from a different Mexican state, one from Guatemala even, and all of whom planned to jump the fence either that night or the next, depending on how brave they felt and how many Border Patrol cars they saw. Most of those men had done prison time in both Mexico and in the United States—tattooed Mario, for instance, had passed fourteen months in Santa Nella. In Mexican prisons you got only one meal a day, a bowl of beans, so he liked Santa Nella better. Roberto said much the same. He was strong; he wanted to work in the American fields for three or four dollars an hour . . . They’d slept in the park that entire week. Whenever the police inquired their business, they replied: We’re waiting for night to get across, at which the police shrugged and left them alone. And they literally called themselves a family. Whoever found food shared it with his brothers, they said.

Dan Murray, right as always, had said: See, we used to get a lot of groups, some female, some mixed. They go over, we chase ’em, they run back. This cat and mouse stuff, that’s what this fence will stop.

Will the fence get any higher?

Well, what we’ve done, we’ve stopped the females and the heavier-set individuals.

For that reason Carlos was despondent, fearing that he’d grown too fat and old. He said: I am never goin’ there, man. Here I am in the park, eatin’ nothing. Where else can I go? Only people I know is these people. They gonna go tonight, but not me. I’m too heavy to get over.

And as he sat with his temporary brothers, lurking in the darkness beneath those white-painted palm trees, a policewoman pedaled her bicycle up to them and stopped, dropping her booted feet to the ground. A line of brass cartridges was strapped across her broad back. She told the family that she’d arrest them all if they were in the park half an hour from now. Her partner also cycled up and began writing down their names in his notebook.

Where else can I go? muttered Carlos, wringing his hands.

CANALS AND RIVERS

Well, there was always the All-American Canal. Carlos had swum it only two weeks ago, carrying thirty pounds’ worth of supplies: bread and baloney, then water for two days. Once he’d crawled up into Northside, peeked through the bamboo, and crossed the levee road (Officer Murray’s colleagues must have been hunting elsewhere), he’d begun to walk. He walked for two nights, all the way up to Niland, and then he got caught. He didn’t mind so much. He’d been creeping into America ever since 1982, when coyotes charged only two hundred dollars from Tijuana, because there was no metal fence back then.
³
Now it cost twelve hundred dollars there—nearly the same as here. That corrugated steel wall of landing mat (some of it Air Force surplus from an easy little war of ours called Operation Desert Storm) presently extended three hundred and sixty-three feet into the ocean, then continued by fits and starts across all southern California. (We have so many gaps in this fence, lamented Gloria I. Chavez, the public affairs officer at Chula Vista. But these gaps are covered by agents.) Carlos saw no purpose in taking a bus all the way to Tijuana to gamble through one of those narrowing gaps. Sweating and stinking in the darkness, he told me that if his “family” went over without him, he might try the water route again. But his perils commenced even before he could drag his heavy, sodden body into Officer Murray’s jurisdiction. Robbers preyed on the
solos.
So on occasion did uniformed agents of Mexican dominion.

In the clipped lingo of the Border Patrol, American sentinels were called Alpha, while their Mexican counterparts were Beta. Accurate as they undoubtedly were in their depiction of the power relation between the two nations, those designations scarcely overwhelmed me with their tact. Alpha pursued Beta’s nationals whenever, like Carlos, they tried to breach Northside; Alpha’s nationals swaggered around Southside like lords. And so Beta sometimes cooperated with Alpha in a less than enthusiastic spirit. In the grubby wilderness of freeways, warehouses and cut-rate stores between San Diego and Tijuana there is a municipality called Chula Vista, which like so many of its kind in California no longer exists as a distinct entity; its grid shades into those of National City to the North and Otay to the south; and here I met a handsome, pugnacious Border Patrolman named Brian Willett who told me about the bad old days when Beta had declined to cooperate with Alpha at all. Willett once witnessed a murder in No Man’s Land, just beyond the gleaming corrugations of the wall. He radioed Beta on the special frequency set aside for such occasions (like many of his colleagues, he spoke fluent Spanish), but Beta would not come. All the while, the murderer kept staring into Willett’s face. Finally he leisurely sawed off his victim’s hand and flapped it at Willett in a mocking wave. Willett assured me that nowadays, whenever one side witnessed a crime in progress on the other, an officer employed the special frequency with excellent results. Beta sometimes even acted to interdict illegal border crossings! And on the Arizona line, in the Mexican border town of Algodones, one of Beta’s representatives proudly informed me that Alpha had just given him a new white Bronco in which to chase criminals. The result—and a highly desirable one, to Alpha at least—was that Mexican cops had begun to squeeze the border-crossers harder—not so much the fence-jumpers, for they went over very quickly, but the canal- and river-swimmers such as Carlos who were slower and hesitated upon the Southside bank for hours or days, waiting for the perfect moment. Of these water-striders, the
solos
found themselves at greater risk of police interference than the
pollos,
because in one
solo’
s bitter words: Coyotes pay money for the police, so if the police ask you who you work for, and if your name is not on their list, you’re fucked. You go to jail.