Imperial by William T. Vollmann Read Free Book Online Page A

pontificated to me for years about the manifold beauties of neighborliness; he gave anybody water who needed it; he loaned out his generator to a poor man with heat stroke; but when I asked him whether he’d ever seen illegal aliens come through, he laughed with vicious joy and told me that one night just last week a coyote and his passengers had stopped on this very back road. They needed help; their tire had blown and they had no spare.—’Cause I know what they was up to, he sneered. I was not about to let ’em do it for free. I charged ’em twenty-five dollars for my help. Yeah, they spoke a little English . . .—I wondered how much he would have assisted a Mexican who spoke no English and carried no cash.
    Ah, sweet money! Money whispers that there are coyotes for every budget. I met a man in Sacramento whose friend’s son, holder of an American passport, ran into some drug-related difficulties in Guadalajara. The United States consulate could do nothing. The man went to a friend of a friend in Sacramento. For five hundred dollars this coyote gave him a telephone number. For an additional fourteen thousand dollars (this happened in 1989, so I suppose it would have cost twenty-five grand in 1999, and after 2001 only Saint Juan Soldado knows), the Mexican guards were paid off, the prisoner loaded into an ambulance, ferried down a dirt road to an airstrip, and flown to Texas, where some bribed American official or employee (he did not tell; I did not ask) allowed them to continue on to Oakland without clearing customs. They landed on a private runway belonging to a certain large American corporation. The man who told me this story was along for the journey. I have been acquainted with him for years, and I trust him. How nice and friendly anyone’s coyote would be, if one had fourteen thousand dollars . . .

A LIVING ADVERTISEMENT
    Toward Yuma the state of California becomes even drier, burdened with sadly shifting sand dunes and grotesquely ancient crags; that’s the Arizona look. Here the All-American Canal is wider and richer, almost a real river like the Colorado from which it flows, fringed with vegetation where the people hide. (It works both ways, a Mexican told me. The Border Patrol also has lots of places to hide.) And over at Southside, in the already mentioned town of Algodones, where two Mexican and two American states meet, the Morelos Dam supports a statue of the Virgin who looks out along the Colorado River. In the inevitable place upon which the Virgin’s back was turned, I saw a hammock hanging upon girders like a weary pupa, shading a pair of sandals and a small daypack.
    The man in the hammock stuck his head out at last. He felt sad now. His friend had tried the river crossing into Arizona just a day before. His plan, which was not very logical but better than no plan, was to wait here for three or four days, then, if his friend did not return, to make the attempt, hoping and believing that his friend must have made it, in which case he himself might succeed. Should his friend return, then they would try another place.—Not as easy as before, the man whispered, since many Border Patrol . . .
    He was a timid man, leaving initiative up to others. The Border Patrol had caught him too many times now. Slender, richly bearded and moustachio’d, he said with a gentle smile that he wanted a restaurant job, maybe waiting tables or washing dishes. He wore a black cap emblazoned with the name of a famous American restaurant chain. He had attained Arizona not long before, but the freight train he tried to catch passed him by too quickly; then the Border Patrol arrested him. He was not angry with them, he interjected quickly; they did their job and he did his.
    I gave him twenty pesos and he brightened, commending me to God. Now he would cross today, as soon as he had eaten. He would not wait for darkness, because he went alone. In the rich tangle of brush, robbers both Mexican and American would settle into