Illegal

FIFTY

Marisol lost all sense of time. Inside the van, the air grew stale and unbearably hot. She felt queasy, forced herself to picture trees, swaying in a breeze. Remembered the Mexicans trapped in the trailer truck the summer before. If she died here, what would become of Tino?

Fight off the fear.

Across from her, an Indio woman struggled to her knees, chanted something Marisol did not understand, and keeled over, facedown onto the filthy floor. Her lips frosted with white foam and her body twitched.

Marisol squeezed past two men, lifted the woman's head to help her breathe. Someone banged on the wall separating them from Guillermo, the driver. Someone else shouted in Spanish to stop, a woman is dying, but the van continued on.

A Honduran man tore apart the matting that covered the taillight assembly, then punched through a plastic casing and tore out the light by its cord. The pavement appeared through the hole.

Marisol helped carry the woman to the back. Two men held her face close to the opening, begging her to suck in the fresh air. Her body twitched then stilled, twisted into unnatural angles.

Women screamed. Men prayed. Others averted their faces, as if shamed to see the woman so exposed in death.

Finally, the van lurched to a stop. The driver's door opened and slammed shut. Angry voices outside. The rear doors popped open. The migrants, minus one, stumbled out, soaking up the air, baking with the scent of horses and manure. Marisol blinked against the sunlight. A red barn, a corral, a riding ring. Cornfields in the distance, the stalks taller than any man.

Several men-Chicanos and Anglos-surrounded the group. Jeans and blue T-shirts with the lettering: "Rutledge Ranch and Farms."

Guillermo, the driver, demanded to know who damaged the taillight. The Honduran man stepped forward, said something about the dead Indio woman. Guillermo punched him in the stomach, and the man fell to his knees, gagged, and vomited into the dust, spraying the man's boots.

"Fucking peasant!" Guillermo kicked the man.

Maybe not insane like Chitwood, Marisol thought, but just as mean. Just like Carlos at the meat plant, vicious and cruel to his own people.

"Stop that shit!" another man ordered. Big. Older, with a brushy silver mustache. Cowboy boots and jeans.

"Sorry, Mr. Rutledge, but I'm tired of these fuckers messing up my trucks."

"I'm tired of them dying." Watching two workers haul the Indio woman away. "Give her a proper burial."

Mr. Rutledge, Marisol thought. Back at the chicken ranch, Guillermo said that Mr. Rutledge might kill Chit-wood.

This man must be El Patron. There was a tenderness in his manner. He had put a stop to the beating. He treated the dead woman with respect. Maybe this place would not be so bad.

"You're one pollo short," Rutledge said.

"Chitwood offed one."

"Shit. Did you tell Zaga to get over there?"

"Yes, sir. Said he'd take care of it."

Guillermo turned back to the migrants and ordered them in Spanish to stand in a line. He asked questions while Rutledge watched. Have you ever picked grapes? Used a backhoe? Anyone here work with wells, irrigation equipment, agricultural limestone?

The men in the Rutledge Farms shirts wrote numbers on the migrants' arms with marking pens. Assignments to the fields where they were to be sent.

"What sweetness do we have here?" Rutledge asked, when he got to Marisol. Looked at her in that way men do. Smiling eyes. Lying eyes. The tenderness seemed to have blown away with the red dust.

"Maybe indoors work, if she can cook," Guillermo said. "If she can't, we're short in the lettuce fields."

"I'm thinking about the club."

"Maybe a bit too old for that, Mr. Rutledge."

"Guillermo, I bet you a hundred bucks she's not a day over twenty-five."

"I'm thirty-one years old," Marisol said in her best English. "And I'm a carpenter, not a field hand."

Both men laughed, El Patron's eyes wrinkling. "I'm sixty-six and still filled with piss and vinegar, panocha."

Using the Spanish word for raw sugar, a slang term for vagina. Yes, she had been wrong about El Patron. At first, he had seemed compassionate. But now this disgusting side. And what was this club that she might be too old for?

Rutledge stared hard at her, his lips tightening. He grabbed her blouse with both hands, tore it open, buttons popping. She wore no bra, and her full breasts tumbled free. She made no effort to cover herself, instead glaring back with hatred.

"Like a couple scoops of toffee ice cream," Rutledge said. "And I do love my ice cream."