Imperial Read Free Page B

Already resigned, they quickly became philosophical, and in some cases even cheerful, slapping their knees and poking one another smilingly in the ribs. Soon they’d join the people staring out the panes of the holding cells. After eight hours or so, if they had no criminal history, they’d be sent back to Mexico.
    (As I reread this chapter almost a decade later, in these days of “extraordinary rendition” and the Patriot Act, I suppose that a body fears capture more nowadays. But how can I be sure? Our Department of Homeland Security seems disinclined to let me watch any more hunts and chases.)
    We got some that made the river, but we bagged the rest of ’em, an officer was saying, but already the Border Patrol had found other game.—Two made it up into the housing development, a woman’s excited voice cried on the radio, but we’re tryin’ to inch up on ’em . . .

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE
    What did the bodies come here for? We all know the answer. I remember how on one of my many bus rides south I was meditating on the heat and strangeness of this corner of California when the man beside me awoke, and turned toward the window like a plant toward the sun. Soon we would come to the sign which read IMPERIAL COUNTY LINE and a few minutes later we’d pass the Corvina Cafe, which would surely be as closed and dead as one of those corvina floating belly-up in the Salton Sea. The man sat gazing alertly eastward across the desert flats toward the long deep green stripe of date plantations and the dusty red and blue mountains beyond. I inferred that this landscape was his by birth or long residence. Perhaps he had been away from it for awhile. He’d told me that he was coming from a Fourth of July party at his sister’s, but I’d seen the policeman standing in the loading area, watching to make sure that he boarded this bus whose disinfectant, pretending to be pine or lemon, stung the nose with its bad chemical smell. He’d slept with his chin in his hands all the way from Indio and past the tan silence of the Jewel Date Company’s former factory parallel to the railroad tracks where rusty flatbed cars gave off heat. Now he sighed a little, and turned toward me as eagerly as he had strained toward the mountains. He offered me Mexican candy, praising it because it was cheap. Openhanded, gruff and husky, he longed to tell the tale of his life. He’d served twenty-four years in the Spanish army—or maybe he’d been an American soldier stationed in Spain, this fine point being occluded by his broken English and my ignorance of Spanish. At any rate, Spain had failed him, evidently by means of woman trouble. Now he was living in El Centro to be near his eighty-two-year-old father who had once been a mechanical genius but who lately did little more than putter around the air conditioner, trying to grow coolness like a vegetable and then inbreed and harvest it. When he spoke of his father, tenderness came into his voice in just the same way that the yellow flowers of the palo verde tree come briefly back even in July or August if there is rain. His father was too old to drive a car, so once our bus pulled into the El Centro station, my friend would be walking home in the hundred-and-ten-degree heat, which killed illegal aliens easily.
    The ones who crossed alone were called solos. The ones who paid to be taken across were pollos— chickens. And who better to shepherd chickens through dangerous ways than a coyote ? That’s truly what they were called! Coyotes never eat chickens, do they? (Every day, many pollos die, a taxi driver told me with solemn exaggeration. The newspaper said that only two hundred and fifty-four illegals had died last year, to which the taxi driver replied: Liars—assassins! Two or three a day die right here! They hide the bodies under the sand so that the Border Patrol won’t see.—They do die, a lifetime pollo later told me, but not that many.) Then there were the chicken-handlers, the