Coyote Blue (11 page)

Chapter 14 – Lies Have Lives of

Their Own

It took just six weeks for Samson Hunts Alone, the Crow Indian, to become Samuel Hunter, the shape-shifter. The transformation began with the cowboy on the bus mistaking Samson for a Mexican. When Samson left the bus in Elko, Nevada, and caught a ride with a racist trucker, he became white for the first time. He expected, from listening to Pokey all those years, that upon turning white he would immediately have the urge to go out and find some Indians and take their land, but the urge didn't come, so he sat by nodding as the trucker talked. By the time he got out at Sacramento, California, Samson had memorized the trucker's litany of white supremacy and was just getting into the rhythm of racism when he caught a ride with a black trucker who took amphetamines and waxed poetic about oppression, injustice, and the violent overthrow of the U.S. government by either the Black Panthers, the Teamsters, or the Temptations. Samson wasn't sure which.

Samson was booted out of the truck in Santa Barbara when he suggested that perhaps killing all the whites should be put off at least until they told where they had hidden all the money. Actually, Samson was somewhat relieved to be put out; he'd only been white for a few hours and wasn't sure that he liked it well enough to die for it. His immediate concern was to get something to drink. He bought a Coke at a nearby convenience store and walked across the street to a park, where, under the boughs of a massive fig tree, amid a dozen sleeping bums, he sat down to consider his next move. Samson was just summoning up an obese case of hopelessness when a nearby bundle of rags spoke to him.

"Any booze in that cup?"

Samson had to stare at the oblong rag pile for a few seconds before he noticed there was a hairy face at one end. A single bloodshot eye, sparkling with hope, the only break in the gray dinge, gave the face away. "No, just Coke," Samson said. Hope dimmed and the eye became as empty as the socket next to it.

"You got any money?" the bum asked.

Samson shook his head. He had only twelve dollars left; he didn't want to share it with the rag pile.

"You're new here?"

Samson nodded.

"You a wet?"

"Excuse me?" Samson said.

"Are you Mexican?"

Samson thought for a moment, then nodded.

"You're lucky," the bum said. "You can get work. A guy stops near here every morning with a truck – picks up guys to do yard work, but he only takes Mexicans. Says whites are too lazy."

"Are they?" Samson asked. He figured that after persecuting blacks, hiding money, stealing land, breaking treaties, and keeping themselves pure, maybe the whites were just tired. He was glad he was Mexican.

"You speak pretty good English for a wet."

"Where does the guy with the truck stop? Has he been by today?"

"I'm not lazy," the bum said. "I earned a degree in philosophy."

"I'll give you a dollar," Samson said.

"I'm having trouble finding work in my field."

Samson dug a dollar out of his pocket and held it out to the bum, who snatched it and quickly secreted it among his rags. "He stops about a block from here, in front of the all-night diner." The bum pointed down the street. "I haven't seen him go by today, but I was sleeping."

"Thanks." Samson rose and started down the street.

The bum called after him, "Hey, kid, come back tonight. I'll guard your back while you sleep if you buy a jug."

Samson waved over his shoulder. He wouldn't be back if he could avoid it. A block away he joined a group of men who were waiting at the corner when a large gate-sided truck pulled up, the back already half full of Mexicans.

The man who drove the truck got out and walked around to where the men were waiting. He was short and brown and wore a straw Stetson, cowboy boots, and thick black mustache over the sly grin of a chicken thief. The men who worked for him called him
patron
, but ironically, the common term for his profession was
Coyote
.

He scanned the group of men and made his choices with a nod and the crook of his finger. The men chosen, all Hispanic, jumped onto the back of the truck. The Coyote approached Samson and grabbed him by the upper arm, testing the muscle. He said something in Spanish. Samson panicked and answered him in Crow: "I'm on the lam, looking for a one-armed man that killed my wife." To Samson's surprise, this seemed to satisfy the Coyote.

The Coyote had been smuggling illegal aliens into the country for five years, and from time to time he encountered an Indian from the South, Guatemala or Honduras, who could not speak Spanish. Not being able to tell one Indian language from another, he assumed that Samson was one of these.
All the better
, he thought,
it will take longer for him to find out.

After the Coyote brought his men over the border, he gave them a place to live (two apartments in which they slept ten to a room), food (beans, tortillas, and rice), and three dollars an hour (for backbreaking work that most gringos would never consider doing). He charged his customers eight dollars per man-hour and pocketed the difference. At the end of each week he paid his men in cash, after deducting a healthy amount for food and lodging, then drove them all to the post office, where he helped them buy money orders to send home to their families, leaving them nothing for themselves. In this way the Coyote could keep a crew under his thumb for three or four months before they found out that they could make more money working at menial jobs in restaurants or hotels. Then he would have to go back to Mexico for another load. Lately, however, he had been augmenting his crew with Mexicans who had found their own way over the border, and this allowed him to stretch his time between border runs.

The work was the hardest Samson had ever done, and at the end of the first day, back knotted and hands bloodied from swinging a pickax, he slept in the back of the truck until the
patron
slapped him awake and led him into the apartment to show him his cot. Sleeping in a room with nine other people was nothing new to Samson, and the food, although spicy, was plentiful and good. He fell asleep listening to the sad Spanish love songs of his co-workers and feeling very much alone.

As the weeks passed he would hear the other men in the room whispering in the dark and this made him feel, even more, that he was the only person in a world of one. He had no way of knowing that they were talking about him, about how they never saw him send any money home, and about how they could take his money and no one would know because he was a dumb Indian and couldn't speak Spanish. Samson listened and imagined that they were talking about their homes and missing their families. He knew nothing of the Latin quality of machismo, which tacitly forbade the admission of a man's melancholy except in song.

The plan was to wait until the boy was taking a shower, then go through his pants and take the money. If he protested, they would cut his throat and bury him on the large estate where they were terracing hills into formal gardens. Whether they would have really killed the boy was doubtful; they were good men at heart and had only turned their minds to murder because it made them feel worldly and tough. When the boy was gone their nocturnal whispers turned back to boasts of the women they would have, the cars they would buy, and the land they would own when they returned to Mexico.

Samson was saved on a hot afternoon when the owner of the estate approached the Coyote while the crew was taking a break, eating cold burritos in the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

"Immigration took one of the busboys in my restaurant," the rich man said. "Do any of your guys speak English? I'll pay you to let him go."

The Coyote was shaking his head when Samson spoke up: "I speak English." The Coyote's chicken-stealing grin dropped like a rock. He had thought that he would be able to hold on to the Indian boy for a long time, and here he had gone and learned English in his spare time. The boy was worthless now. Better to cut the loss and see what he could get.

To quell their curiosity and dampen their ambition, the Coyote told the rest of the crew that the rich American had bought the boy for sexual purposes, and they all grinned knowingly as they watched Samson ride away in the long white Lincoln.

Samson found that it was easier to be Mexican while working in the restaurant. The work, although fast paced, was not heavy, and he was given a cot in the storeroom to sleep on until he found a place of his own. The owner was content with speaking a pidgin English peppered with Spanish words and Samson answered him by speaking a modified version of Tonto-speak. By this time Samson had also picked up a few essential Spanish phrases ("Where are the spoons?" "We need more plates." "Your sister fucks donkeys in Tijuana") which helped him make friends with the Mexican dishwashers and cooks.

From the moment he had arrived in Santa Barbara, a grinding homesickness began to settle in Samson's heart. When he lay in the dark storeroom at night, waiting to fall asleep, it would rise up and wash over him like a black tide, carrying with it a slithering blind predator that gnashed at the last shreds of his hope. "Forget what you know," Pokey had told him. With this in mind he set to do battle with his rising hopelessness. He refused to think of his family, his home, or his heritage. Instead he concentrated on the conversations he overheard in the restaurant as he cleared tables and poured coffee. Because he was Mexican, and a menial laborer, he was invisible to the affluent Santa Barbara customers, who spoke openly about the most intimate details of their lives, oblivious to the Spanish fly on the wall…

"You know, Ashley has been having an affair with her plastic surgeon for six months and…"

"If I can get my legal ducks in a row, I should be able to push the convention center through the city council and…"

"I want the bathroom Southwestern, but Bob likes Art Nouveau, so I called our attorney and I said…"

"I know the offshore drilling is ruining the coast, but my Exxon shares have split twice in two years, so I said to my analyst…"

"Susan and the kids went to Tahoe, so I thought it was the perfect chance to show Marie the house. The bitch spilled a whole bottle of massage oil in the hot tub and…"

"I don't give a damn whether they needed it or not. If you do your job right you can sell air conditioners to Eskimos; need has nothing to do with it. Remember the three
m's: mesmerize, motivate,
and
manipulate
. You're not selling a need, you're selling…"

"Dreams," Samson said, coming out of his shell to finish the sentence of a young insurance sales manager who had taken his agents to lunch so he could chew their ass. Samson surprised even himself by speaking up, but the man at the table seemed to be giving the same speech that he had heard from the powder-blue dream salesman. He couldn't resist.

"Come here, kid," the man said. He was wearing a wash-and-wear suit, as were the other five men at the table. A half-dozen acrid aftershaves clashed among them. "What's your name?"

Samson looked around the table at the men's faces. They were all white. He decided at that moment to use a new name, not the Mexican name he had taken, Jose Cuervo. "Sam," Samson said. "Sam Hunter."

"Well, Sam" – he extended his hand – "my name is Aaron Aaron. And I'll bet with some training you could outsell every man at this table." He put his arm around Samson's shoulders and spoke to the rest of the group. "What do you say, guys? I'll bet you each a hundred bucks that I can take a busboy with the right attitude and turn him into a better salesman than any of you hotshots inside of a month."

"That's bullshit, Aaron, the kid's not even old enough to get a license."

"He can work on my license. I'll sign his applications. C'mon, hotshots, do I have a bet?"

The men fidgeted in their seats, laughing nervously and trying to avoid Aaron's gaze, knowing from Aaron's training that the first one to speak would lose. Finally one of them broke. "All right, a hundred bucks, but the kid has to do his own selling."

Aaron looked at Samson. "So, kid, are you ready to start a new job?"

Samson tried to imagine himself wearing a suit and smelling of after-shave, and the idea appealed to him. "I don't have a place to stay," he said. "I've been saving so I can get an apartment."

"I've got it covered," Aaron said. "Welcome aboard."

"I guess I could give my notice."