Beyond This Point Are Monsters

Chapter Four

Ford said, “Please state your full name for the record.”

“Secundo Alvino Juan Estivar.”

“And your address?”

“Rancho Yerba Buena.”

“That is the area depicted on the map to your left?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re employed there?”

“Yes.”

“In what capacity?”

“Foreman.”

“You’re responsible for the operation of the ranch?”

“The court appointed young Mrs. Osborne boss during Mr. Osborne’s absence. I take orders from her. If there are no such orders, I do the best I can without them.” A suffusion of scarlet spread across Estivar’s cheeks and into the whites of his eyes. “When the ranch makes money, I don’t claim any credit; when there’s a robbery and a murder, I’m not about to take the blame.”

“No one is putting the blame on you.”

“Not in words. But I can smell it a mile away, so I think I’d better clear something up right now. I hire people in good faith. If it turns out their names and addresses are phony and their papers forged, that’s not my fault. I’m not a cop. How can I tell whether papers are forged or not?”

“Kindly simmer down, Mr. Estivar.”

“I’m in the hot seat, it’s not so easy to simmer down.”

“Suppose you try,” Ford said. “A couple of weeks ago, when you and I discussed your appearance here as a witness, I told you this proceeding is to establish the fact that a death has occurred, not to hold anyone responsible for the death.”

“You told me that. But—”

“Then please bear it in mind, will you?”

“Yes.”

“When did you first arrive at the Osborne ranch, Mr. Estivar?”

“In 1943.”

“From where?”

“A little village near Empalme.”

“And where is Empalme?”

“In Sonora, Mexico.”

“Were you carrying border-crossing papers?”

“No.”

“Did you have any trouble finding employment without such papers?”

“No. There was a war on. Growers needed help, they couldn’t afford to bother about little things like immigration laws. Hundreds of Mexicans like me walked across that border every week and found jobs.”

“A lot of them are still doing it, are they not?”

“Yes.”

“In fact, there’s a profitable underground business in Mexico which consists of supplying such men with forged papers and transportation.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“We’ll go into this subject more thoroughly a little later in the hearing,” Ford said. “Who hired you to work on the Osborne ranch in 1943?”

“Robert Osborne’s father, John.”

“Have you worked there steadily since then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So your relationship with Robert Osborne goes back a long time.”

“To the day he was born.”

“Was it a close relationship?”

“From the time he could walk he followed me around like a pup. I saw more of him than I did my own kids. He called me Tío — uncle.”

“Did this relationship continue throughout his life?”

“No. The summer he was fifteen his father was killed in an accident, and things changed after that. For all of us, I guess, but especially for the boy. In the fall he was sent off to a prep school in Arizona. His mother thought he needed the influence of men — she meant white men.” Estivar glanced briefly at Agnes Osborne as though he expected her to issue a public denial. But she had turned her head away and was looking out the window at a patch of sky. “He stayed at the school two years. When he returned he wasn’t a kid any more tagging along behind me asking questions or coming over to my house for meals. He was the boss and I was the hired man. And that’s the way it stayed until the day he died.”

“Was there any ill-will between Mr. Osborne and yourself?”

“We disagreed once in a while, about business, nothing personal. We had nothing personal between us any more, just the ranch. We both wanted to operate the ranch as profitably as we could, which meant that sometimes I had to take orders I didn’t like and Mr. Osborne had to accept advice he didn’t want.”

“Would you say there was mutual respect between you?”

“No, sir. Mutual interest. Mr. Osborne had no respect for me or any other members of my race. It was that school she sent — he was sent to. That’s what changed him. It taught him prejudice. I was used to prejudice, I’d learned to live with it. But how could I explain to my sons that their friend Robbie didn’t exist any more? I didn’t know the reason. I thought many times of asking her — his mother — but I never did. After he died it bothered me that I didn’t try harder to find out why he’d changed, maybe talked it over with him like in the old days. Deep down I kind of expected that eventually he’d tell me all about it on his own and I shouldn’t try to hurry it because there was lots of time. But there wasn’t.”

Estivar stopped to wipe the beads of sweat off his forehead. A hush had fallen over the courtroom, as if each person in it were straining to hear the sound of time running out, the slow drag of the minutes, the quick tick of years. Ford said, “On the morning of October thirteen,1967, did you see Robert Osborne?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“Very early, while it was still dark, I heard him whistling for his dog, Maxie. About half an hour later my wife and I were eating our breakfast when Mr. Osborne came to the back door and asked me to step outside. He sounded upset and mad, so I got out there fast as I could. The dog was lying on the ground with froth all around its mouth and its eyes kind of dazed-looking, like it might have been hit on the head or something.”

“You stated that Mr. Osborne was ‘upset and mad.’”

“Yes, sir. He said, ‘Some filthy so-and-so around here poisoned my dog.’ Only he didn’t say ‘so-and-so,’ he used a very insulting term meaning the lowest kind of Mexican. For myself, I don’t care about names. But my family heard it, my wife and my younger children who were still at the breakfast table. I ordered Mr. Osborne to go away and to stay away until he had his temper under control.”

“Did he do so?”

“Yes, sir. He picked the dog up in his arms and left.”

“Did you see Mr. Osborne again later?”

Estivar rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “No.”

“Will you please speak louder?”

“That was the last time I saw him, heading for the ranch house with the dog in his arms. The last words we spoke to each other were in anger. It weighs heavy on me, that goodbye.”

“I’m sure it does. Still, it was not your fault.”

“Some of it was. I knew how much the little dog meant to him. It had been a present years ago from someone who — from a friend.”

Ford began pacing up and down in front of the empty jury box, partly from habit, partly from impatience. “Now, Mr. Estivar, it is not my intention during this hearing to explore the complicated subject of migrant labor in California agriculture. We must, however, establish certain facts which affect the case, bearing in mind that you, as foreman, are caught in the middle of the problem. On the one hand you represent the growers whose business it is to market the crops for a profit. On the other hand you are aware that the present system — or lack of system — encourages the breaking of laws on the part of Mexican nationals, and the exploitation of these nationals on the part of the growers. Is that a fair statement of your situation, Mr. Estivar?”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

“All right, we’ll proceed. In the late summer and early fall of 1967, who was employed at the Osborne ranch besides yourself?”

“In August my three oldest sons were there, Cruz, Rufo and Felipe. My cousin, Dulzura Gonzales, acted as the Osbornes’ housekeeper, and my youngest boy, Jaime, worked several hours a day. We employed half a dozen border-crossers, Mexican citizens with permits that allowed them to cross the border every day and work on ranches within commuting distance. We also had a part-time mechanic who came out from Boca de Rio to service the machinery.”

“That was in August, you said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you using any migrant labor at the time?”

“No. We couldn’t get any. The grape strike was going on up in Delano and Mexican nationals were being used as strikebreakers. A lot of them were lured away from this area by the promise of higher wages in the vineyards up north; the rest were taken by the larger growers. The Osborne ranch is a comparatively small family operation.”

“What happened in September with regard to this operation?”

“Plenty, all of it bad. My second son, Rufo, got married and went to live in Salinas so his wife could be near her family. My third son, Felipe, left to try and find employment in another line. I lost even Jaime, because school started and he could only help on Saturdays. The border- crossers had their minibus stolen off a street in Tijuana and couldn’t come to work without transportation. By the end of the month only Cruz, my oldest son, was still with me working full-time. We were putting in sixteen-hour days until that old G.M. truck arrived with the men in it.”

“You’re referring to the men you subsequently hired to harvest tomatoes and dates.”

“‘Subsequently’ makes it sound like I sat around thinking about it first. I didn’t. I hired them as soon as they could pile out of the truck. Then I phoned Lum Wing at his daughter’s place in Boca de Rio and told him he had a job cooking for a new crew.”

“How many men were in this crew, Mr. Estivar?”

“Ten.”

“Were they strangers to you?”

“Yes.”

“They were not, as far as you knew, wetbacks or alambres.”

“No. They were viseros, Mexican nationals registered as farm hands with visas that allowed them to work in this country. Anglos usually called them green-carders because the visas are in the form of green cards.”

“Did the crew present their visas, or green cards, to you?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do then?”

“I told the men they were hired and entered their names and addresses in my books. My son, Cruz, showed them where they were to eat and sleep and store their gear.”

“Did they have much gear?”

“Migrants travel light,” Estivar said. “They live light.”

“Did you examine the visas carefully when they were presented to you?”

“I looked at them. Like I mentioned before, I’m not a cop, there’s no way for me to tell by looking at a visa whether it’s genuine or not. If I hadn’t hired those men they’d have just gone over to Mr. Bishop’s place across the river or to the Polks’ ranch east of that. All the small growers were desperate for help because of the huelga, the grape strike, and because it was the height of the harvesting season.”

“Did the crew have a leader?”

“I’m not sure you could call him a leader exactly, but the man who drove the truck did most of the talking.”

“You said it was an old G.M. truck.”

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Very. It was burning so much oil it looked like a smokestack.”

“Who owned the truck?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you check the vehicle registration?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I never thought of it. Why should I? If you drove up to the ranch and asked for a job picking tomatoes, I wouldn’t check your car registration.”

Ford raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Would you give me a job, Mr. Estivar?”

“I might. But you wouldn’t last.” There was a burst of laughter from the spectators. Estivar did not join in. Color had spread across his face again except for a thin white line around his mouth. “You’re too tall. Tall men have a rough time doing stoop labor.”

“What day was it when the crew arrived at the ranch in the old G.M. truck?”

“September twenty-eighth, a Thursday.”

“So that by the time Robert Osborne disappeared, October thirteen, the men had been working at the ranch for two weeks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you get to know any of them personally?”

“I don’t run a social club.”

“Still, it’s possible that one or two of the men might have told you about their wives and families back home, things like that.”

“It may be possible but it didn’t happen. The men were paid by the lug. They didn’t want to talk any more than I wanted to listen.”

“How often were they paid, Mr. Estivar?”

“Once a week, same as all the other crews.”

“On what day?”

“Friday. Mr. Osborne wrote the checks on Thursday night and I handed them out in the mess hall while the men were having breakfast.”

“What did they do after work on payday?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“Well, what do crews usually do?”

“They go into Boca de Rio and cash their checks. The bank is closed on Saturday, so on Friday nights it stays open until six. The men settle accounts with each other and some of them buy money orders to send back home. They go to the laundromat, the grocery store, the movies, a bar. There’s usually a crap game in somebody’s back room or garage. A few get drunk and start fights, but they’re generally pretty quiet about it because they don’t want to attract the attention of the Border Patrol.”

“What kind of fights?”

“With knives, mostly.”

“Do they all carry knives?”

“Knives are often used in their work. They’re tools, not just weapons.”

“All right, Mr. Estivar, did the crew that was working for you on October thirteen, 1967, leave the ranch right after work?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the truck?”

“Yes.”

“Did they return that night?”

“I was just going to bed when I heard the truck drive in shortly after nine and park outside the bunkhouse.”

“How do you know it was the old G.M.?”

“The brakes had a peculiar squeak. Besides, no other vehicle was likely to park in that particular spot.”

“Nine o’clock is pretty early for a big night on the town to conclude, isn’t it?”

“They were scheduled to work the next day, which meant they had to be in the fields before seven. You don’t keep bankers’ hours on a ranch.”

“And were the men in the fields the next morning before seven, Mr. Estivar?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t get a chance to ask,” Estivar said. “I never saw any of them again.”