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

their ambuscades by nightfall. They enforced their greed with knives and pistols. It had happened to him twice before. He’d be crawling low in the bristling darkness, and then suddenly he’d be caught; they’d stripped him naked, finding every coin.—They will shake you for pesos, no importa if you live or die, he said. I hope to God I get over there.
    Sometimes the Mexican police had robbed him also. They did not come specifically for that, only to examine him for drugs, but if in the course of the examination any valuables were discovered, why then, they became the property of the discoverers.
    His wife, like the wives of so many other bodies, awaited him in Los Angeles. It was now July, and he had not seen her since last May when they’d crossed the border successfully at Tijuana, the Border Patrol not yet having erected metal fence in the place that they had found. A month afterward, he’d learned that his mother was dying. So he went back to Morelos to say goodbye to her. His wife had remained in the United States. She was a chambermaid, a link in a hotel chain. She earned barely enough for rent and food. There was no possibility that he could pay any coyote. But if he only could . . .
    If I didn’t have my wife, he asked me, why would I be suffering and trying? She’s the only thing I have in life. Without her I don’t care if I die.

“YOU GOTTA CROSS”
    The coyote came out with his shoulders down like a charging bull. I nodded and smiled, but he looked at me with a strangely flat, almost watery gaze which I have long since learned signifies a gazer who cares not what evil he does, someone utterly and inhumanly unreachable. I saw this gaze once in a Russian paramilitary policeman during the Yugoslav civil war; he soon held a bayonet to my throat to “test” me. I saw it in some teenagers in Harlem who seared my arm with a cigarette butt.
    Ask him if it’s okay to talk to him here in the street, I asked the cokehead.
    Sure, the cokehead replied.
    Ask him how he got started and why he—
    The coyote stared into my face with his watery eyes and said in perfect English: I got started same as you, by asking questions. But I’m not gonna answer any of your fuckin’ questions. Now get the hell out of here.
    And turning to the cokehead, he told him in Spanish: If you don’t cut this gringo loose right now, I’m gonna hurt you bad.
    I’m just workin’ for money, the cokehead protested, but the coyote roared at him like a bull and swung his big beefsteak arms.
    He followed us for a good four blocks, threatening the cokehead, but not me.
    The cokehead’s name, as I said, was Juan. He had crossed the border illegally many times, sometimes as a solo, sometimes as a pollo. It depended on how much money he had.
    What made you decide to go the first time? I asked him.
    My sister lives there in America. I wanted to go and find out how it is.
    How did she get there?
    My parents went over by coyote and took my sister. My Dad came back alone. Then he died. I stayed here with my older sister.
    So when you wanted to come to her, what happened?
    Well, my sister find out about me over there, and they send a coyote to me. We started, but then the Border Patrol found us and the coyote ran. So the Border Patrol caught us. He just wrote my name and then we come back . . .
    And then?
    We got caught like three times until we finally made it.
    Can you tell me the story of the successful time?
    Coyote comes over here and talks to me, see. He tells me how they gonna do it. He got two or three workers, and they come with me and the other pollos. We go across the border at the night time. There’s a field, and then another field, and then the coyote workers take us to a van. We all lay out in the second field. That day we were thirteen or fourteen people. We all had to keep quiet. We all had to lie down until after three hours, when Border Patrol weren’t there no more.
    Were you afraid?
    You don’t think that it’s scary. All