Dark Water - Laura McNeal [2]
My mother sighed. “It could be he’s in the wrong field for his talents.”
On Friday, the boy just stood there, hands in his pockets like the rest of the men. He didn’t even look into our car like the others did. “Why do they come here?” I asked my mom.
“I don’t know why they pick this corner,” she said.
“I mean cross the border.”
“To work.”
“But they clearly don’t have work.”
“The hope of work,” she said.
That’s when I thought of Hoyt. My uncle Hoyt grew so many avocados that he had to employ people year-round to fertilize, water, pick, prune, and patrol fences to keep thieves from stealing bins of fruit worth thousands of dollars, a crime called—I’m not kidding—“Grand Theft Avocado.” All of his employees were Mexican. I asked him about it once, why every farmworker you ever saw in Fallbrook was Hispanic.
“I don’t know who picks corn in Iowa or lingonberries in Sweden,” Hoyt said, “but white teenage boys don’t pick avocados in California. Neither do grown white men. Not enough money in it for them. Or status.”
I didn’t ask if his guys were legal, because I knew generally who was and who wasn’t. The legal ones had drivers’ licenses. They could go home to Mexico on planes and come back on planes. The illegal ones worked seven days a week for years at a stretch, saved their money, then went home for about eight months to be with their families. Every time they went home, they had to borrow money to pay coyotes who smuggled them back in.
“Do you think they’re happy, the workers?” I asked. You could ask Hoyt questions like that and he wouldn’t get defensive.
“I’ll tell you a story,” Hoyt said. “You know Esteban, right? His kids and wife are here because he has papers. He brought them legally about ten years ago. That was when I was building Robby’s tree house.” My cousin Robby. “I took Esteban’s kids up into the tree house because I thought they’d like to play in it. And you know what his youngest kid said? He looked around with this really serious face and asked, ‘Who’s going to live here?’ ”
Robby’s tree house was pretty nice, with cedar shingles on the outside and two framed windows and a peaked roof, but there was no electricity or plumbing or even a door, and it was about eight feet square.
“That’s because,” Hoyt went on, “in the village where they were born, plenty of people lived in places worse than that tree house. I’ll tell you what, Pearl. I’m going to take you and Robby with me to Esteban’s village in Mexico next time I go. I want you to see why he left.”
On Friday after school, I decided to ask Hoyt if he ever hired guys from the street corner. I found him standing in his driveway, shaking his head in frustration while Esteban talked in Spanish on a cell phone. Esteban kept saying the same phrases over and over again, and I didn’t know what they meant, but I could tell he was calming somebody down.
“What’s the matter?” I asked Hoyt when Esteban had gone away.
“They’ve deported one of my guys.”
“How did they get him?”
It was a mystery to me how the border patrol made decisions. There were lots of day-labor pickup points like the corner where I’d seen Amiel, and those places didn’t change much, so you’d think agents would know right where to go.
“He was at the grocery store,” Hoyt said.
“Does that happen a lot?”
“It didn’t used to,” Hoyt said.
“What will happen now?”
“We’ll get the money together to help him cross again, which means about four thousand dollars, or he’ll give up and go home.”
“So …,” I said, stalling until I could think of the right words. “Do you need any help in the meantime?”
“Why? Can you prune avocados?”
“Well, maybe, but I was thinking of someone you could hire.”
“Who?”
I didn’t know Amiel’s name yet, and I fumbled for a way to make a juggling mime sound employable. “This guy I saw at the corner of Stage Coach. You know, where they gather when they want work.”
Hoyt looked amused. “What, is he handsome?”
“No. I mean, that’s not why.” I told Hoyt about the mime routine and the headstand. “He just seemed unusual