Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (36 page)

From somewhere in the distance came the howl of a pack of real coyotes. It was a haunting, indeterminate sound, a succession of wails that arrived unsteadily, as though carried on a breeze—but the night was still. It was hard to pinpoint the source; I decided the pack must be moving. Would they know we were there, have smelled us? Coyotes don’t attack people, but their calls were filled with foreboding. The pack circled 270 degrees around our camp, crying out sporadically, just when I would have guessed they’d left. For warmth and comfort I collected a few branches and built a small fire.

At first I felt guilty when I heard steps behind me: Plácido, certainly, would not approve of a fire so close to a town. But I turned around and saw it was Jesús and Evangélica, coming over to join me. The little fire was almost out but Jesús, to my great relief, dragged over a couple of big logs and suggested we really get it going. It had been too cold for him and Evangélica to sleep too. I rejoiced. We had it roaring in no time, and soon were joined by several of the others—a certain minimal level of comfort, apparently, was more important than the possibility we’d be detected by
La Migra.
Lying on the dirt, I was soon asleep.

*

We were ready for the Indians long before I suspect they ever got out of bed. Shortly before dawn we were on our feet, brushing the dust from our clothes, kicking dirt over the embers of the fire. The sunlight made its first appearance at the top of a nearby hill, and we spent a long hour or two shivering, watching it drop tantalizingly toward us. When it hit our heads and shoulders it felt good, but by the time it had reached the whole group it was already too hot. We walked to refuge in the designated rendezvous spot, a nearby arroyo.

I was pretty scared. It would be my first time trying to pass, in full daylight, as one of them. Victor’s
serape
was draped over my shoulders, while sweatshirt hood and baseball cap masked my head. Again I was glad for the size of our group—with seventeen, the smugglers were less likely to notice any one person. But what if they found me out? What would a coyote do in that situation? I imagined it would depend on the person, what he had at stake and how likely he figured I was to land him in trouble. The skittish kind of coyote would probably flee, but a different sort might conclude that I was the one who should disappear. If there was a mafia involved, or drugs, it would all be worse; but the do-it-yourself quality of our walk across the desert made me think our smuggler was more likely to be local, and smalltime. I wondered how long my heart could pound at its present, rapid rate before wearing me out completely.

I looked around at the others. They were scattered along thirty or forty feet of the arroyo, sitting or squatting, knees tucked up, heads bent forward, waiting ... Americans never wait like that, I thought to myself. Americans, by comparison, don’t know how to wait—we pace, or we worry, we make telephone calls. Never would we sit in a low, dark place, quietly, patiently waiting to be taken up in what fate has already decreed. Only Mexicans, and those from other countries too “uncivilized” to consider waiting an affront. We waited two or three hours.

The Indians stomped up from out of nowhere. Jesús got up from next to me and, with Plácido, spoke briefly to them. They were carrying shotguns under their arms. A dirt road ran nearby, but the Indians had parked somewhere else—we would walk there. Everyone stood up and fell into line, with one Indian leading and the other in the rear. We had to pass by the rear-guard Indian as we fell into line; I walked as casually as possible, catching a glimpse that told me only that he was short, fat, long haired ... and carrying that gun. Seen from behind, the Indian in the lead also looked chubby, except that he was tall. Both were clad in overcoats. We walked faster than I guessed the Indians, by their bulk, were accustomed to. In five minutes we arrived at the edge of a landfill, and were directed into a large ditch. There was one car nearby, a pea-green Nova as old as the one I had driven in Phoenix. The tall Indian in charge explained in English to Jesús and Plácido that it was the only car they had; they would have to take us in several loads to where we would meet the
coyotes.
All of a sudden I realized the Indians didn’t speak a word of Spanish—why had I assumed they did?—and that, apparently, they weren’t the ones who actually would deliver us in Phoenix. Jesús and Plácido were having a little trouble understanding what I, of course, had grasped perfectly; I hoped madly that they wouldn’t turn to me, out of reflex, to ask for help with translation.

The first load was selected by the tall Indian, and left. The shorter one, beardless, remained, nervously looking all around. He tried a couple of words of Spanish out on Victor, who responded as though the guy were an idiot. But the Indian persevered with attempts at conversation, gun tucked in the crook of his arm, trying just about everyone with simple phrases in English. “What’s goin’ on? How you doin’ today? Where you from?” I prepared to lash out with a spray of Spanish if he persisted with me, but he gradually lost interest and paid attention mainly to a large front-end loader flattening out rubbish way across the dump. I slipped my wallet to Jesús for safekeeping.
“If he gets suspicious, I don’t want him to have any evidence about who I am,”
I whispered.

In half an hour the Nova was back, and I got waved in with the second load—five of us, plus the driver. I hunched down in the backseat, my face well out of the range of the rearview mirror. But the sweating Indian seemed at least as nervous as me, and I doubt he ever checked it. One reason was that, apart from us in back, there was nothing to be seen in the rearview mirror—the Nova, traveling up to 80 MPH on dirt backroads, put up a great red cloud of dust. We shot over cattle guards so fast they felt like a single bump, an outstretched snake. Twice the accelerating rear wheels fishtailed out to the side and we gripped the seats, but the Indian had probably grown up on these roads and eased off in time. We passed from the Papago to the Pima reservation, through small hamlets with strange names (Ali Chuk, Pia Oik) and back along unmarked roads to the desert. When we were in a seldom-traveled area of squat scrub pines, the driver pulled off the road a couple of hundred feet and shooed us out with his hands. Obedient as ever, we unloaded—and, without a word, he pulled out in a noisy cloud of dust.

We were nowhere—there was nothing around. We worried we had been betrayed, abandoned for reasons unknown. But finally Tiberio and Conce, passengers in the first ride, appeared from behind some distant bushes—the man had dropped us off at the wrong clump—and bid us in. It was another hiding place. Apparently, the real
coyotes
were going to rendezvous here with the Indians and pick us up. Again we waited.

The desert sky was clear, and the temperature soon up in the eighties. All my clothing made me look sick, like an invalid—and, because of the way I sweated beneath Victor’s blanket, I did indeed feel feverish. But it was better than the alternative of being a sore-thumb
gabacho.
I found a little piece of shade and wiped my brow.

“
You’re scared, aren’t you, Teo?”
said Jesús, sitting down next to me.

“
Scared?”
Mexicans were not always New Age males, admiring of those who shared their feelings and vulnerabilities.
“No, I’m not scared. I’m just fucking hot.”
I thought that sounded convincing.

“Well, why don’t you take off some clothes?”

“
You know why not.”
It was my disguise.

Jesús chewed on a piece of hard green grass and sat.

I asked,
“You’ve been through this a lot. Don’t these guys ever scare you?”

Jesús shrugged.
“Not too much. You just have to pay close attention to what's happening, be ready for anything. ‘Ponte buso.’ ”
“Make like one who’s been abused,” was the slang phrase: alert, wary, suspicious.
“The money is the main thing. The gun is for that—to make sure we pay, after they do their part of the deal.”

The guns were both back within an hour, and so were the rest of our group, the final three arriving with both Indians in the last carload. For another hour we waited some more, the Indians standing guard—for us, or against us? I wondered—guns cradled in their arms. When, at last, three more vehicles arrived in a big cloud of dust, my heart could not have pounded harder if I’d just run a one hundred-yard dash. I peered through the pines to see who got out.

The first was a Hispanic woman, middle aged, who might have looked more at home in a Laundromat. She drove an old Dodge pickup truck that had had a lot of body work done but never been repainted. Second was a Hispanic man, fortyish, wearing a polyester sport coat and driving a well-polished Pontiac Bonneville. Third was a sunken-chested Anglo in jeans, dwarfed by a huge four-wheel-drive International Travelall, the epitome of a gas guzzler. In the passenger seat of his car was an olive-skinned, heavy man, with dark, receding, oily hair, sunglasses, and a chain dangling on his chest—none of this was what I had expected. Several hip young Hispanic men were what I had expected.

“
Who is that guy?”
I asked Jesús, quietly, of the boss.

“
I don’t know—the Indians called him last night. He looks like the one who puts everything together.”

The four new arrivals and the Indians conferred, and the Indians gestured toward Plácido, who stood up and joined them. None appeared to have the least interest in the rest of us, for which I felt greatly relieved. We were to them another group of wetbacks, the great Mexican export, and nothing more; in this human commerce, they were simply shippers. Plácido returned and circulated among us to collect half the fare—one hundred dollars from each—and we in turn watched intently as he returned to them with that great wad of cash. If they were going to screw us, we knew, now was the time. The olive-skinned man took the money, counted it, and then separated an amount and gave it to the Indians.

“
What’s that all about?
” I asked Jesús.

“
Their commission. The Indians called him, so they get a percent. I think it’s ten percent.”
That, I figured, would be $20 for each of us, or $340—not bad for a morning’s work. Next the olive-skinned man peeled off amounts for the woman and the Hispanic man ... and things began to happen fast.

“
¡Vamos! Let’s go!”
the man yelled to us. He held up four fingers; the woman held up five—the numbers they wanted for their respective cars. Genaro split us up, and we ran to the cars. I glanced at the olive-skinned organizer, but he was off lighting a cigarette—his work was done.

Five people climbed into the back of the woman’s Dodge pickup. She threw two large dark tarps over them and drove away. Two others, meanwhile, were busy cramming themselves into the trunk of the Bonneville. The Hispanic man unceremoniously slammed the lid when no feet or fingers were protruding, and opened the rear door. There was room for one person on the floor, across the transmission bump, and for another across the seat. His car filled, he drove away as well.

That left eight of us, plus the Anglo and the boss, for the Travelall. We had to jog right in front of them as we piled in; I kept my head down, waiting in huge anxiety for one of them to grab my arm—say “Hey, wait a minute!”—but I made it inside. Plácido, Rolando, Conce, Tiberio, Victor, and I climbed over the rear seat and into the back deck, where we scrunched down, alternating directions, big fish in a small tin. It was like our sleeping arrangement in the cold desert night, except the compression was involuntary, the chill emotional. Jesús and Evangélica sat in the rear seat, the Anglo driver and boss in front. The engine was revved up, a Doors tape was plugged into the cassette player in front, and, in an instant, the patch of desert was empty again.

Not much of the muffler was left underneath us, and between the engine roar and the music it was almost impossible to hear what was being said up front. We in the back, also, had enough to occupy our attention. Besides the blazing sun coming through the windows—open windows in the front of the big car didn’t seem to ventilate the rear at all—we soon realized there was a lot of exhaust leaking through the floor. The eyes of Conce and Rolando, who were especially close to the source, reddened and began to water; Rolando began to cough and wheeze. But we were packed in so tightly, and the risk of getting up seemed so great, that no one complained. Unable to bear the heat any longer, I took off Victor’s blanket and Tiberio’s sweatshirt and used them for pillows—if I were caught now, I decided, I would just run.

The drive was long and unpleasant. When finally we stopped, it was to let the olive-skinned man out. I sat halfway up and recognized the intersection, inside a wealthy quarter of Phoenix. At the driver’s beckoning, Jesús moved into the vacant front seat. We pulled back into the traffic, and presently the driver turned off the radio and tried speaking to Jesús. “So, where you guys from?”

“From?”

“Yeah, where you from? You know, what’s your home?
Casa,
home?”

“Oh, we from Querétaro.”

“Quer-ert——” The driver had difficulty. “Yeah, I think I drove some guys from down there last week. Picking oranges, like you guys.”

“What?”

“Oranges. You know, pick oranges?”

“Oh. Jes.”

“Yeah, I got laid off a few months ago, nothing goin’ on, I got a wife and kids to feed and rent to pay, you know?”

“Really?” Jesús had a talent at this; his short response convinced the driver he was being understood.