Read Online Imperial by William T. Vollmann - Free Book Online

here. He had goddamned convincing proof that the Border Patrol sold entry cards to aliens for five goddamned grand a head, goddammit. The Border Patrol hated him, too; three officers told me so. This was the kind of hotel it was. In those days I always stayed there. It was not one of the rock-bottom haunts of street-whores and heroin addicts, the places whose filth lies beyond words. I never found one of those in Calexico. As the owner himself liked to say: It’s not so bad.—Maybe because it was not so bad (it was not especially cheap, but it was private), I frequently heard darkskinned men say to the Mexicana: You have any rooms that face the street? Would it be okay if I see one?—Vans and panel trucks parked themselves in front of the tiny rooms. A former coyote who visited me there said quietly: What you have to imagine is twenty or thirty people all crammed into this room. And maybe somebody wants to sleep, but he can’t sleep because there’s no room on the floor. And maybe somebody wants to use the toilet, but he can’t because the coyote’s in the bathroom screwing all the girls one by one.
    Officer Murray said that one time a woman in Calexico had telephoned an agent for help. It came out that she’d hired a coyote to get her son as far as Calexico, and then her money ran out, so the coyote’s pollistas were holding the kid in a room in that hotel and would not let him go. The Border Patrol rescued and deported him. So the woman lost her money, and I don’t know what the coyote did to her.

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF CHICKENS
    One additional consequence of the cash-on-delivery system was that if the package got lost in transit, the shipper saw no reason to inform the recipient, who now would not be liable for payment. To my mind, this was the most evil aspect of the trade. A pollo trusted himself to a coyote, and either arrived in due course or else disappeared forever, in which case the ones who loved him never learned his doom.
    If a people dies on a coyote, said Juan the cokehead, coyote’s not gonna tell the other people that they died.
    All right. But let’s say your sister up in the San Fernando Valley paid the coyote half to bring you, and then you died. What would happen then?
    Actually, the cokehead said, the people that come from south Mexico, at the beginning the coyote gets in touch with their family by phone. So then they never get the coyote’s number and address. And if the pollo dies, the coyote just never call no more. So they never find out. The people that live here in Mexicali, they’re more safe. Because they know who’s the coyote in this town. But still it’s not that safe. Sometimes, the pollos get out in that hot, hot desert where they never been before. And they’ll be waitin’ there for the ride that doesn’t show up.
    Border Patrol agents possessed any number of gruesome stories on this subject. Gloria Chavez, for instance, told of twenty-two people who were found in a boxcar in the heat of south Texas after sixteen hours. A sharp-eyed agent saw a feebly reaching hand. All of them were saved.

THE UNKNOWN END OF SERAFÍN RAMÍREZ HERNÁNDEZ
    In the same palm-treed park where Carlos and his “family” prepared and hoped to cross the border, on a hot afternoon two young men were distributing flyers for a pollo who’d vanished twenty days ago, in company with twenty-one other hopeful chickens. The chicken-handlers had taken him across the desert to Northside in a 1979 Dodge van which overheated and finally caught fire south of Carrizo Wash. While the two men were telling me this nice story, a Mixteca street musician squeezed her accordion which butterflied so beautifully red and black, and the girl looked at me most mournfully and hopefully—in short, most professionally—while her younger sister held a beggar’s cup in my face, wearing an even more plausible sad expression; and the smallest sister of all crawled in the dirt, drinking from the big water jug which she