Illegal

THIRTY-FOUR

Wanda, the enormous Americana with the machete, was yelling. "Wake up! Wake up! There's work."

Marisol lifted her head from the dusty wood floor. The cabin at the Sugarloaf Lodge smelled of mice droppings and unwashed bodies. Nearly thirty immigrants were crammed into the one room. The other four women from her group, and perhaps two dozen more from earlier crossings. Men, women, children.

Marisol saw Wanda leaning down, veined breasts tumbling out of her sleeveless shirt like a pair of soccer balls. "C'mon, honey. Ah'm gonna send you out before the Frito Bandito wakes up, horny as a toad."

The Frito Bandito.

That's what Wanda called El Tigre. Wanda owned the Sugarloaf Lodge and housed the migrants until vans arrived to take them north.

"My son," Marisol protested. "I told you-I must wait for him."

"Problem is, the Frito Bandito ain't brought no kid across yet. And as long as you're here, the Bandito's gonna sniff around here, waiting for me to turn my back."

"But my Agustino…"

"Ah'll make damn sure the Bandito puts him in the next load."

"You can do that?"

"Me and my machete, damn right. Now, you want to earn some cash? My driver will take you to the plant and bring you back tonight. By the morning, you'll be eating burritos with your boy."

Marisol wanted to believe it was true. She felt she could trust the woman. Hadn't Wanda already protected her from El Tigre?

"This plant," Marisol said. "What exactly is it?"

"It's a job," Wanda said with a shrug of her mountainous shoulders. "But it ain't exactly a weekend in Palm Springs."

Marisol rode in a van with four stone-faced men, Hondurans and Guatemalans. The driver was an old Mexican farmhand who said they would all be paid twelve dollars an hour. Almost one hundred dollars a day! And Tino would be here in the morning.

If the job is good, perhaps we can find a place to live. Stay a while, save money, then move deeper into California. The farther from the border, the better.

"Twelve dollars an hour is a lot," she said.

"You will earn every nickel," the driver said grimly. "And you will curse the day God created the cow."

Within minutes, they passed a body of water. Black and befouled. Back home, Father Castillo had preached about the fiery pits of hell, but even his imagination could not have stirred up this sight. Islands of manure floated in an ocean of urine, the foulest place she had ever seen. Her stomach clenched at the sulfurous mixture of rotting eggs, diseased flesh, and steaming excrement.

The van neared an enormous gray building with no windows. Outside, endless feed lots, thousands of cattle squeezed so close together, they seemed like one gigantic brown beast, its skin undulating in the morning sun.

Once inside the plant, the migrants were herded into an office where a middle-aged woman at a desk ordered them to sign documents. Marisol doubted the others could read English. The documents seemed to say that the workers understood the risks of the work and would not seek compensation for any injuries.

A man wearing goggles and a white jumpsuit rushed into the office, shouting he needed half-a-dozen "beaners" for the conveyor line. The man, an Anglo with a reddened, chilled face, cursed the stinking Mexicans who didn't show up for work.

A fucked-up night shift, he complained. The line had shut down for an hour after a man lost a hand in the meat augur. The woman at the desk made a joke about "finger food." The red-faced man's voice was unnaturally loud, as if he might be hard of hearing. One of the stun guns wouldn't fire, and animals were backed up at the kill line. A gut-cooker shorted out, and they ended the shift eight hundred kills short. "Get every beaner you got on the production line," he ordered, looking toward Marisol for the first time. "I need one sticker and one knuckle dropper, preferably sober. Two kidney pullers. Don't matter if they're drunk or on meth. Maybe even better if they are."

The man hurried out, and the woman at the desk sent Marisol to the women's locker room to change. Moments later, the conveyor line foreman, a Chicano named Carlos, chunky with a broom-bristle mustache, strutted into the locker room as Marisol stood in her panties and blouse. She modestly turned her back to him but could feel his eyes on her. He watched silently as she stepped into a jumpsuit, then put on a chain-mail apron, armored gloves, and knee-high rubber boots. She wondered what her job would be and if this man with dried blood under his fingernails would be training her.

Carlos told her to hurry up and get her cute culo moving. His only other advice was not to drink any water, because it would be three hours before her first pee break.

"Do you want some tina?" he asked.

"Tina?"

"Crystal meth. To get you through the shift."

She shook her head.

"First day it's free. If you're still here tomorrow, I have the best prices in the plant."

"No, thank you."

He stared at her in the blatant way of Hispanic men, the way a bulldog admires a lamb chop. "Did you come north with a man?"

Another shake of the head.

His look straddled the bridge between sympathy and delight. "Do you know what they call a woman who crosses the border alone?"

The very same thing El Tigre had asked her. Did all these pendejos belong to the same club of prehistoric men?

"La chingorda," the foreman said. "The fucked one."

"I can take care of myself."

"You're going to need a friend, chica. Now, follow me to the kill floor."

The kill floor.

Whatever she had to do, she told herself, she could handle. She followed Carlos through a heavy metal door and was hit by three sensations at once. The noise, the cold, and the squishing of her boots through puddles of blood. Large men wielded power saws that chunked through the spines of the cows, cutting them in half. Conveyor belts whined and meat grinders whirred at such a high pitch it hurt her ears. The cold was worse than any winter she had experienced.

Hispanic men carried sides of beef on their backs and hoisted the carcasses onto hooks. Other men hacked at the corpses like serial killers, indifferent to their victims.

Men in clean jumpsuits and goggles watched from metal catwalks that crisscrossed the plant twenty feet above the floor.

Carlos led her to a table next to a conveyor belt. Two short, sturdy women with impassive Indian features stood, flanking her, not looking up from their work. Carlos grabbed a chunk of bloody meat from the passing belt, tossed it onto the table and with three swift slices trimmed the fat. In one motion, he tossed the meat back onto the moving belt and hurled the scraps onto a second, higher conveyor. That was the extent of his instruction.

He leaned close and whispered in her ear, "I could have put you on the gut table. Ten hours pulling out intestines by hand." He smiled and scratched his bristly mustache with a blood-sticky fingernail. "But you're too pretty for that job."

He wished her buena suerte by grabbing each of her buttocks, then walked away.

Three hours later, Marisol was no longer cold. Sweat ran down her neck and trickled between her breasts under the chain-mail apron. Her right forearm ached and her fingers cramped into a curled position. She tried using her left hand for cutting, but her movements were unsure. She either cut away too much meat or too little. Twice, she sliced into the armored glove of her right hand. Once, the knife flew out of her hand, barely missing the woman to her left.

In her life, she had never imagined such a place.

Again, she thought of Father Castillo. She wanted to tell the priest that hell was not an inferno of sulphuric fires and suffocating heat. Hell was an icy, metallic cold. Hell was the whine of saws chewing through flesh and the stench of torn intestines spilling across countertops.

Marisol had hammered ten-penny nails through two-by-fours for hours. She had spread tar on roofs in the blistering August sun. She had cut sheet metal with hand tools. But no physical labor ever compared with this.

Drained of energy, her jumpsuit splattered with blood, her goggles steamed, Marisol felt her knees buckle. Close to fainting, she braced herself on the table. The woman to her left pointed to the clock and told her to take a break.

Back inside the locker room, Marisol took off her hard hat, apron, and gloves. She washed her hands and blood-speckled face. She saw two women taking paper-wrapped empanadas from their lockers. Marisol could smell the pork. If she spent a full day on the kill floor, she thought, she might never eat again. Certainly not meat.

She hurt everywhere, from a dull ache between her shoulder blades to a tingling sensation down her arms. How would she make it through the day? She pulled off her bloody boots, lay down on a bench, and closed her eyes.

As she drifted off, she thought of Tino. Dreamed of walking with him along a clean stream where the water splashed over rocks with the sound of chiming bells.

Marisol awakened with the sensation that she was falling.

Her feet hit the floor, and she was moving. Being pulled by the hair. Carlos screaming at her: "Break is ten minutes, not thirty!"

Calling her a stupid Mexican bitch. Dragging her across the tile into the shower room. Marisol yelling for help, other women sitting on benches, eating lunch, not making a move.

Carlos banged open a door to a toilet stall, pulled her inside, slammed the door behind them. His eyes wild and bloodshot. The eyes of a drogadicto.

He spoke so rapidly in Spanglish she could barely understand him. He seemed to be comparing her unfavorably to his wife, who had given him four sons and a daughter, cooked like an angel, and had an ass that smelled like roses. Whereas Marisol was a stuck-up mamey who should be begging to swallow his mermelada de miembrillo. Then he struck the side of her head with an open palm. She staggered backward and her ears rang.

"I should fire you right now."

"Fine. Do it."

"But I'll fuck you first."

"You'll have to kill me and fuck a corpse."

He slapped her again, this time across the face, blurring her eyes. He jammed his hands into her armpits, picked her up, and slammed her against the side of the stall. Once, twice, three times, her head banged the wall. She felt herself go limp.

He ripped the front of her jumpsuit open, breaking the zipper and trapping her arms in the sleeves. Slid his hand into her panties, tore through her thick pubic hair and jammed a finger inside her. She struggled, but he was too strong. He leaned close and stuck a slobbering tongue into her ear. An hour earlier, she had watched cow tongues sailing by on a conveyor, and now she thought she would puke.

He inserted a second finger into her, twisted deeper. She stiffened with pain.

"Dry as an anthill," he complained. "But a pretty mouth."

He tried kissing her. He smelled like chilled blood and decaying flesh.

She swung her head back and forth, but he used his free hand to grip her jaw. In a second his tongue was in her mouth, licking her teeth. More pressure on her jaw muscles, and her mouth popped open, his tongue darting inside. He was saying something and drooling into her mouth at the same time. She gagged.

Then bit down as hard as she could.

Carlos screamed and spit blood.

Marisol spit, too. The tip of the man's tongue flew out of her mouth.

He reached for her throat, but she ducked and clawed at his face. Found his eye socket. Dug two fingers in deep as they would go-another scream-tore downward, tried to rip out the eye. The eye stayed, but the lid opened like a zipper. Blood spurted, and Carlos howled like a wounded boar.

Marisol wanted to slip around him, escape the stall. Carlos sunk to his knees, moaning, his bulk blocking her path. She tried to climb over him to the top of the door. He grabbed her ankle and pinned it.

Struggling to his feet, Carlos wrapped both arms around her legs, immobilizing her lower body. He whipped from side to side, cursing in Spanish, calling her the whore of all eternity, showering both of them with his blood, crushing her against the metal wall of the stall. Bolts of pain shot up her spine and into the base of her skull. She fought to stay conscious, knowing that if she passed out, she would never wake up.

Still in his grip, she wrapped one arm around his neck, squarely across his Adam's apple. Pulled back as hard as she could. Carlos gasped, choked, sprayed more blood. His eyes bulged like a toxic fish. He heaved forward and back, desperate to shake her off. She summoned the last of her strength to pull her arm even tighter around his neck. A gurgle bubbled from his throat like a breath exhaled under water.

His wishbone snapped with a cra-ack, and his slivered tongue shot out, a bloody dart between his lips.

She slid off him just as he pitched forward, his forehead banging into the tile wall. He sank to the floor, his skull bouncing off the toilet tank and into the water, which quickly turned a foamy pink.

Marisol stood there, panting and trembling. She could pull his head from the toilet, where he seemed to be drowning, or she could run.

She opened the stall door and ran.

She expected security guards to grab her. Hadn't the noise attracted attention? But the only people in the locker room were three women on their breaks. If they heard the commotion, they did not care to investigate or sound an alarm.

Marisol stripped out of the jumpsuit, now covered with human as well as bovine blood. She climbed into her jeans, tugged on her blouse, slipped into her sneakers, and ran. She passed through the front office, the woman at the desk looking up, saying something, but Marisol was out the door before the words reached her.

Her mind was a blur. A highway ran along the slaughterhouse property. But to where?

I have nowhere to go.

Horrified, she looked at her hands. Bloody and shaking uncontrollably. If La Migra caught her, she would be deported. Or worse, sent to prison. If she walked along the highway, the police would stop her.

A van was just pulling out of the parking lot. Six migrants in the back, the driver staring at her. The old Mexican from this morning, the man who brought her here from the stash house. He stopped and waved her to come closer.

Hesitantly, she moved toward the van. The driver opened the window. She could not decipher his look. Anger? Fear? Compassion? Or merely the acknowledgment that the expected had indeed occurred?

In the distance, she heard a police siren.

"Get in, child," the driver said. "There is no time to waste."