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Short Story: The Easy Way In

© Rachel Trezise, 2007.

When the freightliner hit Sarita at the edge of the Rio Grande Valley, Tyrone knocked on the sleeper compartment three times. ‘Ai yai yai,’ he said, rubbing his neck as he steered into line. The lights from the border checkpoint lit the dead June-bugs clinging to the wind-shield. The patrol agent opened the cab door. ‘Where you headed?’ he said as he climbed the fender and leaned inside. He aimed a flashlight around. ‘What you hauling?’ Tyrone took a deep breath. ‘Houston,’ he said. ‘I’m empty.’ This was the final back stop on the main north-south highway to snag immigrants. He knew he had to stay cool: Tell them he was running empty and if caught, feign surprise, claim that the people must have sneaked on while he was sleeping. The flashlight landed on the girl’s naked legs. ‘Who’s she?’ the agent said. Tyrone looked at the girl. She was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen maybe. Tiny green eyes and a big bee stung mouth. Brandy, she said her name was. ‘That’s my girlfriend, sir,’ he said, but he’d met her less than an hour ago. She was a runner who worked for Abel. He was giving her a ride to a transaction. Pretty though. The agent stood down. Tyrone checked the clock and winked at the girl. The inspection had taken less than a minute and the truck was rolling again.

Inside the packed trailer, José kneeled on the floor, his jeans sodden with sweat, his body flanked by other people. There was a woman next to him. He could feel her soft, fleshy body against his arms. When he heard the three knocks a second time he pressed forward, squeezing through the wall of limbs until he reached the hole in the rear of the trailer. Twenty minutes into the journey, when the heat had become restrictive, he’d torn away part of the insulating fabric and exposed the bracket of a taillight. He’d punched the taillight out. There wasn’t much air coming through but by pushing his mouth against the tear, he could taste fresh oxygen. He and what looked like a hundred other people had boarded the freightliner in a field in the Rio Grande Valley, something like an hour ago. It was hard to measure time now; it was hard even to breathe. Then his head had been filled with images of squat white houses with rocking chairs on their porches and the stars and stripes flapping in the breeze - pictures he’d seen on TV. He was on his way to a meat packing plant in Iowa where his brother Lorenzo was. He was thinking about Lorenzo again when someone struck him across the back of his head. ‘Move away selfish boy,’ the voice said. ‘We all need some air.’ At the top of the trailer, a child had started crying.

The radio was playing hip-hop, its continuous beat vibrating across the floor of the cab. Brandy could feel it throbbing against the soles of her ugg boots. There was a sticker on the dashboard which bore the legend, Wild Child. She stole a sideways glance at the driver, getting an eyeful of his muscular forearm. She noticed a gold wedding band on a chain around his neck, and she wondered what it meant. Was he separated or divorced, or did wearing it on his ring-finger somehow affect his driving? Tyrone, he said his name was. Once a week he hauled fresh milk from upstate New York to Texas, returning with watermelons. ‘Do you like my rig?’ he’d said when he opened the cab door for her. ‘It’s a refrigerator on wheels.’ The refrigeration unit was turned off though. When the bumping sound from inside the trailer started again, he quickly cranked the radio up. Brandy unhooked her seatbelt and put her case on the cab floor, sidling along the seat until she felt the seam of his jeans against her thigh. ‘I was getting lonely over there on my own,’ she said. He smiled at her, exposing a gap to the side of his front teeth. She put her hand on his knee. As she did, another vehicle in the adjacent lane started hooting at them. It was a Fruit of the Loom truck, the driver gesturing wildly at Tyrone before disappearing into the dark future of Highway 77. ‘Those fucking people,’ Tyrone said. He slapped her hand away, swatting her like a crane fly. ‘They’re fucking up my truck.’ Brandy sidled back to her original position in front of the sticker on the dashboard. ‘Sorry for breathing, sweetheart,’ she said.

Some of the Mexicans had worn three or four layers of clothes to avoid the added burden of luggage. José had seen them in Harlington at twilight, lying under the scrub trees waiting for the truck to arrive. Most of them had crossed the Rio Grande on inner tubes. The didn’t know how to swim. All of them had met two or three smugglers since way back in Mexico. They were already exhausted, but excited too. They were in America and on the move. This was the last leg of their journey. They were peeling the clothes off. He could feel the soaking layers of nylon and cotton on the floor of the trailer. When he stood up, he could hear the liquid squelch under his sneakers. He’d long since been forced away from the tear in the wall and each breath was stale and smarting, as though the air was on fire. The child was still wailing and a woman kept shushing it. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said, crying. ‘We’ll be there soon. Don’t cry.’ After a while, the baby’s weeping relented. ‘He’s dead,’ somebody said. ‘The baby’s dead.’ José clung to the corrugated floor as pandemonium struck. Men and women pounded at the side of the trailer with fists and shoes. Others threw bits of clothing out of the hole, hoping to attract attention. José thought about the Nokia his mother had given him. She’d programmed it to 911. Reluctantly, he reached into his back pocket to retrieve it, accidentally striking someone with his elbow. ‘Hola,’ he said to the voice on the line. ‘Estamos en untráiler. Nos asfixiamos.’

‘What’s the problem?’ the dispatcher said. She sounded laconic. ‘What’s the address?’

‘Nos asfixiamos. Por favor!’

‘OK, I can’t…’

‘Aydeme!’

‘Sir,’ she demanded. ‘What’s the address?’

‘Estamos aqui. Estamos aqui ilegalmente…’ José stopped speaking when he realised the line was dead. Feverishly, he tried again. But the signal was spent.

It was hot in the cab. The air conditioner was broken. Tyrone sucked air over his teeth and pressed the window down. He could feel a cold sweat break on the back of his neck, a rivulet trickling onto the collar of his wife-beater. His cell-phone sounded and he looked at the caller ID. It was Abel. ‘You have to take them to Houston,’ he said. ‘Or it ain’t gonna work out.’ He’d met Abel at a truck-stop two weeks earlier, a short, sturdy man with a mouth which seemed to have been cut with a single chisel blow into pliant flesh. He said he had a family with a wrecked-up car that needed a ride north. Tyrone said sure. It was only when he was rolling away with the wetbacks in the trailer that Abel threw a wad of Benjamin’s into the cab. Tyrone tried to throw it back. ‘No, dude,’ Abel said, waving, ‘they’re immigrants, man.’ Money was handy though. This time it was $8000, for driving fifteen of them 45 miles up the highway, needn’t go a mile off his usual route. Tyrone never saw them board. Abel said it was best if the passengers never got a look at their driver in case something went wrong on the road. They were making a holy racket and playing hell with his trailer now. It sounded like there were a lot more than fifteen. ‘Okay,’ he said dropping the call. He looked at the girl. ‘First he asked me to take them to Corpus Christi,’ he said scowling. ‘Now they want me to take them to Houston. That’s like six hours. Shit.’

José was next to a woman again, a girl of his own age. He could smell her sweat, intoxicating and fatty. She was crying angrily, clawing at the insulating fabric with her fingernails, pausing intermittently to try to catch her breath, repeatedly muttering the word ‘Grandma,’ when she’d got enough. After four of five minutes she stopped crying. ‘Listen,’ she said, shouting. ‘My name is Faviola González-Buendia. I’m from Honduras. I’m eighteen years old. I’m going to Chicago. My father did not pay the Gringos $2000 to kill me. He paid them to get me over the border, alive. We’ve got to rock this trailer over or we’re all going to die.’ Her voice became submerged under a wave of cacophonic noise. The women were screaming. The men were shouting and swearing. The trailer began to sway some, but many people still clung to the corrugated floor, still hoping to make it to their destination undetected. Close by, somebody vomited. It smelt like honey and jalapeo. José held the tail of his drenched shirt to his mouth and bit on it, sucking the perspiration. He was relishing the warm salt dissolving on his tongue when a man fell on him, a fat man. ‘Hey,’ José said, pushing him, but there was no response. It was dead weight.

It was 12.15 by the clock in the service station. Tyrone carried the water bottles in the crook of his arm. ‘Thanks for stopping by,’ the clerk said. Tyrone grunted. He hadn’t had a choice. It was the only gas station open in a hundred mile stretch, some ghost-town called Refugio. He crept along the length of the trailer, some forty-eight foot. At the rear he stopped and listened. There was silence. They’d kicked the left taillight out and it hung from its lonely cable, the hole revealing a chunk of the foamy insulation material. He forced a bottle through the hole. He stood back awhile listening but it was still deathly quiet. When he pushed the second through somebody pulled it, he could feel the pressure from the base. ‘How many of you are there?’ he said. Hands started clapping on the sides of the trailer, tentative at first and then frenzied. ‘El Niño,’ somebody shouted, thrusting their fingers through the cavity. ‘El Niño. EL NIÑO.’ He pushed seven more bottles through.

‘What the fuck does ‘El Niño’ mean?’ he said when he started the engine. The girl stared at him. ‘Weather,’ she said. ‘Or California, I’m not sure. Something about the weather in California.’ Tyrone shrugged. He took the Hershey’s bar out of his ass pocket and threw it at her. From the corner of his eye he saw her smile.

Now, most of the people were too far gone to shout or bang. Everyone was sinking to their knees. Some thrashed their way to the front of the trailer and found a place in the blackness to lie down and die. José could hear them dying. They flailed for a minute, kicking and striking. And then they stopped striking. The fat man was still draped over his legs. He tried to lift his knees, to shove him, but he wasn’t strong enough. His head was pounding. An enormous black pain stabbed at his brain repeatedly, like an iron bar hitting him. After a while he began to believe there was an iron bar hitting him. Another passenger had been hitting the trailer walls with a load brace earlier - it must have been him. Soon he started to think he was dead. ‘Lorenzo,’ he yelled. And then he realised Lorenzo wasn’t there. Lorenzo was in Fort Dodge. ‘I’m just a dirty Mexican who took the easy way in,’ he’d said, when José had admired him on the telephone. ‘And congratulations brother, soon you will be too.’ But this was no easy way in. ‘Faviola,’ he shouted instead, remembering the girl. He wanted to hold her hand. ‘Faviola!’ She didn’t answer. He touched the walls, the floor, he touched the dead man, checking he could feel, checking he was still there.

The girl hadn’t eaten the candy. She was still holding it in her fist like a prized jewel. It was probably melting by now. They were getting close to a truck stop just south of Victoria. Tyrone parked on a side road, next to a tree-studded horse pasture. The digital clock on the dashboard said it was 1.37. ‘You wanna go in that store for me, Brandy?’ he said. ‘They’ll need water. Thirty bottles, say. The stubby ones.’ He gave her twenty dollars. She put the candy inside her case but stayed where she was, the money loose in her hand. ‘Go on baby, I need to piss. I know you’re sweet on me.’ Tyrone urinated against a wheel, his head cocked over his shoulder. He watched the girl crossing the highway, her legs iridescent in the reflectors. He walked to the rear of the trailer and knocked on the door. It was quiet again. ‘Everyone alright in there?’ he said. He put his ear against the hole. There was a muffled sound, somebody moving. Suddenly, there was a voice in his ear. ‘Sir,’ it said. Tyrone jumped. ‘Sir. Open the door. Open the door por favor. Body is dead. A body is dead.’

‘Dead?’ Tyrone said. He unlocked one of the doors. Before he could open it, a group of wetbacks jumped out, five of them. Some slipped through the wire fence and disappeared into the horse pasture. One of them ran straight across the road. There were scores of them inside, all tangled together on the trailer floor. He went back to the cab for his cell phone. ‘Abel,’ he said, panicking. Abel was high on cocaine. He could hear the restiveness in his voice. ‘How many people did you put in my fucking rig? You screwed me, man! You’ve fuckin’ screwed me.’

The store clerk was busy with a girlie magazine. He hardly looked at Brandy. She walked through the hygiene aisle and picked a canister of antiperspirant up. She hid it in her waistband. The restroom was flooded. It was a humid night. Her hair was damp with sweat. She set the deodorant on the shelf and reached for a bunch of napkins, mopping the moisture from her armpits. She looked at herself in the spotty mirror, gasping with disappointment. She had a lipstick in her case but she’d left it in the truck. She bit her lips, bruising them slightly. She pinched either cheekbone watching her skin turn pink, thinking about Tyrone’s biceps, thinking about clamping that wedding band between her teeth and ripping it clean away. ‘Y’all carry water?’ she said walking back into the store. The clerk pointed lazily at the fridge. Suddenly, a Latino burst through the glass door. He squatted on the white tiles, hiding his eyes from the bright light. ‘Agua,’ he said. ‘Agua.’ Brandy squinted out of the window, across the interstate. Tyrone had unhooked the trailer. He was climbing into the cab, a bandana wrapped around his face. As the Freightliner started moving she turned to the store clerk. ‘Are there rattlesnakes in those fields out there?’ she said.

José woke up next to a mesquite tree. There was a thorn in his arm. ‘Lorenzo,’ he said, his voice painful, choked. ‘Who’s Lorenzo?’ somebody said. There was a girl kneeling beside him, some of her full, nut coloured breast exposed through a rip in her white bra. She put a plastic bottle in his hand. José looked at the bottle. It was almost empty, a few beads of clear liquid clinging to its base. ‘Who’s Lorenzo?’ she said again, prodding him. ‘You’ve got a cell phone haven’t you?’ she said. ‘In your pocket? You’re lying on it. The policia came and went. Call Lorenzo. Tell him you’re in Texas, hiding in a field.’ José reached into his ass pocket and squinted at the clunky Nokia his mother’d given him. He shaded his eyes from the dawn sun and looked at the girl. ‘You’re Faviola, ain’t you?’ he said. She took the bottle out of his hand and swallowed what was left. ‘Faviola González-Buendia,’ she said.

© Rachel Trezise, 2007.

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