Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [28]
“Well, my response to the promotion wasn’t all that gracious, either. You people caught me by surprise.”
“Have you thought about it?”
“Some, but not enough to make a decision.”
She hesitated, seemed to be making a decision of her own. Her eyes moved around the room, resting on the rubber plant in the far corner. When they returned to me she said, “Perhaps it would help you make up your mind if I told you why I feel so strongly about you accepting it. To do that, I’ll have to explain where I’m coming from.”
Her phrasing brought my guard up. I’d never once heard Gloria use the words “where I’m coming from,” but I had heard Mike Tobias utter them on any number of occasions. To me they suggested that the two had gotten together and scripted a sales pitch.
“Sharon?” she said. “Please hear me out.”
“All right.” Mentally I subtracted the extra fifteen minutes of travel time to Novato.
“My mother was born in Tijuana,” she began. “Very poor. My father deserted her when my sister was four and she was pregnant with me. She decided to make the trip north across the border; there was an aunt who had married a Mexican-American who would help. One night she took my sister and waited on the hill above the canyons. When it was time, they crossed with the others who were there.”
I knew the hill—a ridge of them, actually. When I was a child, friends of my parents had a small ranch on Monument Road, in the unincorporated area of San Diego County, within sight of the border. During our visits there, I’d see the people patiently waiting on the hills. By daylight a festive mood prevailed: they would picnic and barbecue, and the children would play. But at dusk everything became curiously quiet. Even on the hottest nights, they would then don layer upon layer of clothing—whatever they were able to bring with them. And at dark their figures became indistinct as they continued to wait for the moment when la migra—their name for the U.S. Border Patrol—was looking the other way. Then they would move out, disappearing into the untamed canyons—canyons with names like Deadman’s and Smuggler’s Gulch—eluding rattlesnakes, scorpions, and bandits.
They were called pollos—chickens—by their predators. I’d seen them running along the drainage ditches beside Monument and Dairy Mart roads, fleeing alongside the San Diego Freeway—now eluding not only la migra and the American variety of bandit but also, I was told, crooked Tijuana policemen who had crossed to prey on their own people. The polos came from diverse backgrounds and places, but they had in common three things: they were poor, desperate, and very, very frightened.
Gloria went on, “My mother was attacked by bandits in Smuggler’s Gulch. She wasn’t raped, but they took what little money she had. All she was able to save was the address of the safe house in San Diego where she was to wait until my aunt could come for her. She walked there from the border, seven months pregnant, carrying my sister.”
But that was fifteen miles, give or take. I tried to imagine the journey, but couldn’t.
Gloria said, “I was born two months later in a migrant workers’ shack in Salinas, where my aunt’s family was working the lettuce harvest. The doctor was Hispanic; he assisted at births for free. My mother was ashamed to take his charity, but she knew he’d issue a birth certificate proving I was born on American soil. Three years later the INS caught up with her, and she and my sister were deported. I stayed behind with my aunt. You see, I was an American citizen.”
As she spoke, I’d waited for some display of emotion that would contradict the flat, staged quality of her recital. All I got now was a faint bitter smile. Was she that tightly controlled? Given the history she was relating, she should have been angry. And why was she telling this story to me, anyway?
In the same passionless tone she went on, “My mother died a few years later in Tijuana. I barely remember her. To this day my sister hates me, even though I’ve repeatedly tried to help her. I don’t blame her; I was the one who