Imperial by William T. Vollmann Read Free Book Online

sought to change sleeping places to better escape the sun. He was lucky. He didn’t die.

THE RIDE
    It was to escape such inconveniences that the solos who could afford it sometimes became pollos. The coyotes’ recruiters, polleros, 5 were ubiquitous in Mexicali. Everybody who slept or worked on the street knew at least half a dozen.
    What do they do? I asked Carlos.
    They come up to you in the park and say: Hey, man, you goin’ to L.A.?
    How do you decide which to trust?
    When you don’t know nobody, you just go with the first one.
    The coyotes promised a known route studded with safehouses, and motorized transportation where it was needed. Obviously, the faster a body could get out of the border area, the better became his odds of living underground in America. Consider the case of the elegantly dressed woman who sat sipping a drink in the lounge at Calexico International Airport. Officer Murray approached her. She happened to be an illegal from Peru. Usually it was easier to pick them out there at the airport, Murray said, because they were sweating and breathing heavily from their dash from the ravine, puffing and puffing, as he put it. The Peruvian woman looked plausible, but anybody with dark skin who sat that close to Southside was likely to get scrutinized. Farther north, in Mecca, Indio or Los Angeles, she might have gotten away with it. So that was her mistake, which she had full leisure to repent in the holding cell. 6
    And if a car could convey an immigrant across the hottest desert stretches of Imperial County, he had less reason to fear dying of thirst. In a surly testimony to the coyotes’ effectiveness, Murray told me: You get hits out here, you gotta respond fast. You never know if they’ll get pulled into a vehicle.
    Why didn’t they all arrange to get pulled into a vehicle, then?—Because in one man’s words, the farther you go, the more you pay. When you can pay nothing, you go nowhere, unless you walk, swim or crawl, dragging your hunger along.
    Coyotes offered the pollos one another’s companionship. At least they wouldn’t face the Northside all alone.—Officer Murray said to me: When you’re out in a field, or east in the checks, you often get a group of thirty.—Those large groups, of course, were mainly coyote-run; solos by definition didn’t travel in packs like that. Sometimes I saw heads popping up over the fence, waving arms all peculiar and inhuman in the dark, and the kids would run back out of a pool of light when the Border Patrol came. They were on their own, and I rarely saw more than half a dozen of them. Laughing and running, they gave one another courage to face the brightness of the wallscape. And if they’d had a guide, a wise coyote or his proxy, how much braver they would have been!
    Then, too, some coyotes offered tricks and diversions, like the man I met in Mexicali who hired street youths at a hundred good American dollars per day to jump the fence and draw off the Border Patrol while he inserted his pollos into another section of wall. This coyote also knew the crops in the American fields very well, and the concealment they gave at various seasons. He knew how to introduce his clients to the pale heads of onion flowers at night. (You have groups here and all the onion juice comes out of ’em, Officer Murray repeatedly said. Sometimes it gets so powerful that I can’t see.) He knew about those caves in the walls of hay bales, and tunnels in the tall corn. When I interviewed him, briefly and under uneasy circumstances, he said he’d never give away his best tricks. But he promoted himself as if he were a circus ringmaster, promising thousands of bombastic marvels, experiences, colorful lures for the Border Patrol, whom he dismissed with exaggerated scorn. I did not much believe in him.
    On occasion the coyotes could protect their pollos against American citizens who did not wear uniforms, such as the gaunt bald man in the Drops just east of Slab City who had