Interface

29

Eleanor made the mistake of giving out her full name. Since her name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachable by everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phone number must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on the wall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.

She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of the night. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o'clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundred dollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop. She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon got into the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she went to bed.

This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take, because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kids would not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night and ask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tears whenever they got themselves into a Situation. And although Eleanor's kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kind of prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their way into Situations.

But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seen enough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids were more apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would be there at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sure enough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off at night, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she just stopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.

It didn't help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones pre­vented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanical parts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all night long, as people left messages for her. She put the answering machine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow, but that didn't help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Why the hell are these people calling me?

She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her, when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to the Afterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of the night, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting into Situations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of the Senator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.

Where had these people gotten the weird idea that the government was going to take care of their problems?

The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government had told them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration) they didn't go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in their own problems and they got self-righteous about it and started calling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.

She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budget deficit, the decline of the schools, and El Nino all at once.

She would he awake every night for hours, sensing the distant clunking of her answer machine under the pillow in the next room, and run through this series of thoughts over and over again, like a rat on a treadmill, exhausting herself but never going anywhere.

One morning in the middle of April she got up, turned on her coffee maker, took the pillow off her answering machine, and played back the messages, as she did every morning. Today there were only four of them. The people who had Eleanor's phone number written on the walls of their trailers and project flats had begun to learn that she never responded to messages and, bit by bit, weren't bothering to call anymore.

One of the messages was from someone speaking a language that Eleanor had never heard before. He rambled on until the machine cut him off. Then there were a couple of irate voters. And then there came a voice she recognized: it was one of Senator Marshall's political aides, calling from Washington.

"Hi, this is Roger calling from D.C. at nine a.m. local time."

Eleanor glanced at her clock. It was 7:15. This message had just come in while she was showering.

"We have a major problem that's up your alley. Please call me as soon as you can."

Eleanor picked up her phone and started punching numbers. She got through to Roger in D.C. During her month of working for Senator Marshall she had spoken briefly to this man once previously, and seen his name on a lot of memos.

Senators were too important to do anything personally. They were like sultans being carried around on sedan chairs, their feet never actually touching the ground. They showed up at the Capitol to make speeches and cast votes, and they made a lot of essentially social appearances, but most of the actual grunge work was delegated to a few key aides. This Roger character was one of those aides. He was a highly media-conscious, touchy-feely sort who spent a lot of time worrying about Senator Marshall's image with the folks at home. When a high-school band made a trip to Washington, D.C., it was Roger who made sure that they got in to the Senator's office for a photograph and a brief chat.

"Hi, Eleanor, I'm glad you called back," he said. "Look, I got a call this morning from Roberto Cuahtemoc at the Aztlan Center over in Rosslyn."

Rosslyn was part of Arlington, Virginia, right across the bridge from Eleanor's hometown. Aztlan was a Hispanic advocacy group. Roberto Cuahtemoc had formerly been Roberto something-else and had switched to a Nahuatl last name during his college years. He was obscure to northeastern Hispanics, but in the Southwest, particularly among migrant workers, he was revered.

Naturally, he and Senator Marshall hated each other. At least, they did in public. In private they had apparently reached some kind of an arrangement. When Roberto Cuahtemoc phoned the Senator first thing in the morning it probably meant he was pissed about something.

"He's really pissed," Roger said. "He got a call from Ray del Valle this morning at seven a.m. our time, which means that our buddy Ray was up and at 'em at five a.m. in Denver."

Ray del Valle was a Denver-based activist and protege of Cuahtemoc. He was young, smart, and, considering the intensity of his convictions, Eleanor had found him easy to get along with.

"What's Ray up to?" she said.

"He's convinced that some migrant family is getting screwed over by Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center. There's a little kid involved. It's the kind of thing where he could really beat our brains out in the media, and believe me, if anyone understand that fact, it's Ray. So before he makes the Senator out to look like Francisco fucking Pizarro or something, please get over there and show the flag and tell everyone how concerned the Senator is. Are you ready to write down this address?"

"Shoot," she said.

Fifteen minutes later she was there. It was a straight shot. She'd used most of her first paycheck to fix up the Volvo. She crept up to the edge of Highway 2, looked both ways, and punched the gas, spraying dust and rocks back into the Commerce Vista, screaming a wild left-hand turn on to the highway, headed southwest toward Denver. She weaved her way through heavy truck traffic, passing one trailer park after another, eventually getting into the heavy industrial zone of southern Commerce City - all the stuff that Harmon had avoided when he'd first taken her to look at the Commerce Vista. Passing out of the refinery zone, over and under freeways and railway lines, she entered a flat, hot warehouse region of north Denver that catered entirely to semitrailer rigs and the men who drove them. One parking lot had been turned into a makeshift bus station where you could catch a bus straight to Chihuahua. Finally she passed under Interstate 70 and into the area she was looking for.

Her destination was a tiny brick bungalow in a neighborhood of tiny brick bungalows. The neighborhood was entirely Mexican-American and it seemed like 90 percent of its population was clustered around this particular house. She had to park her car a couple of blocks away and excuse her way through the crowd until she reached the epicenter.

The center of attention wasn't the house itself; it was a pickup truck parked in its driveway. A yellow Chevy pickup, at least twenty years old, rusted in many places, with a white fiberglass camper cap attached to the back, held on to the box by means of four C-clamps. The truck's tailgate and the rear window of the camper cap was spread open like a pair of jaws to provide a view inside: a couple of bulging Hefty bags filled with clothes, and a flannel sleeping bag, zipped open to expose its colorful lining (mallards in flight over a northern wetland) and spread out flat on the rusted steel floor to soften its corrugations. There were a couple of pillows shoved into the corners and some wadded-up sheets and blankets.

And there were a lot of flowers too. A number of bouquets had been tossed in on top of the sleeping bag. More bunches were leaning against the side of the truck or resting on the roof of the fiberglass cap.

At the very center of the action were two men whom Eleanor recognized. One of them was a tall, good-looking young man in jeans and a blazer. With his black ponytail he could have passed for a full-blooded Apache. This was Ray del Valle. He was talking to a local newspaper reporter who covered the Chicano affairs beat.

Eleanor didn't pay much attention to them. She just made her way through the crowd, trying to suppress a gag reflex that was gradually rising in her throat. She got close enough that she was practically standing in between the two men, staring into the maw of the pickup truck.

Last night, the four children of Carlos and Anna Ramirez had lain down on that sleeping bag to sleep while their parents, sitting up front in the truck's cab, had driven them across the high plains southeast of Denver. They had gone to sleep quickly, and slept well, not because it was cozy but because the back of the truck was full of carbon monoxide leaking from the truck's exhaust. Three of the children had died. One was in the hospital in critical condition, with irreparable brain damage. Carlos and Anna Ramirez had not known what was going on until they had arrived here, early this morning, at the home of Anna's sister.

She knew all these things from her phone conversation with Roger. He had run through the story quickly and tersely and she had listened in much the same spirit, looking at it as a political problem to be solved. But now that she was here in the middle of a sniffling and wailing crowd, looking into the bed where the innocents had died, the emotional impact suddenly hit her like a truck. Eleanor put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes, and tried to suppress the urge to become physically ill.

"Eleanor," Ray del Valle said, "come on, let's talk somewhere else. You don't want to dwell on this." Eleanor felt Ray's arm tightening around her shoulders. He led her around the truck and into the backyard, gently but surely, like a ballroom dancer leading his date around the floor.

She took the opportunity to rest her head on his chest for just a moment. She didn't exactly cry, though tears were in her eyes.

"It's a hard thing for a parent to look at, isn't it?" Ray said. "It's our worst nightmare come to life. Like an image from the Holocaust."

Eleanor took a half step away from Ray and drew a few deep breaths. "Are the parents inside?" she said.

"Yes. Anna has been sedated. Carlos is drinking a lot and vowing to kill himself. Anna's family is trying to keep him on an even keel. It's very difficult."

"I heard that there is a problem with the surviving child's medical care and I am here to inform the Ramirez family that Senator Marshall is at their service in whatever capacity is needed. Do you think that you could go in and relay that message to them?"

Ray snorted with just the tiniest hint of amusement and glanced down at his wristwatch. "The Senator runs a tight ship. As always."

Ray went into the house and came out a couple of minutes later with Anna's sister Pilar. From a distance Pilar seemed utterly stonefaced, but from arm's length her eyes were swollen and red and she looked stunned, rather than impassive.

"I told her what you said," Ray said. "She has authorized me to explain the child's medical situation."

"Okay."

"When they arrived this morning and found their four children unresponsive, they called the ambulance. Three children were pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth, the eight-year-old girl Bianca, still had a pulse. The ambulance took her straight to Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center."

"Why there?" Highlands was a private hospital, well endowed, certainly not the closest to this bungalow. Not the kind of place where migrant workers ended up.

"Carbon monoxide poisoning was obviously the culprit here. And Highlands has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It is the best treatment. So that's where they went. The emergency room staff at Highlands treated Bianca but they refused to admit her for hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Instead they dumped her back to Denver County, where she is now."

"How can they justify that?"

Ray just shrugged. "As we say in the Third World, Quién sabe?"

Something clicked in the back of Eleanor's head. Maybe it was her temper breaking. She squared her shoulders and flared her nostrils. "Would you please come with me, Ray?" she said.

"Okay. Where we going?"

Eleanor realized that she didn't even know. "We're just going to take care of a few things, that's all."

The two of them got into Eleanor's car and headed in the direction of Denver County Hospital, were Ray knew some doctors.

"This happens hundreds of times every year," Ray said. "All over North America."

"What happens?"

"Exactly this situation. Remember what a migrant worker is: someone who migrates. These people cover a lot of territory and the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck. It's always the same: the parents sit up front in the cab and the kids lie down in the back and try to sleep. The exhaust comes up through holes in the floor, or else it leaks through the crack under the tailgate. In warm weather they open the windows and survive. But if it's chilly, like it was last night, they close the cab up and suffocate."

"You'd think that they would have gotten some indication before. That their kids would have gotten headaches or felt woozy."

Ray snorted. "If you drove for eight or ten hours in the back of a truck, you'd feel that way even without carbon monoxide."

At the county hospital, Ray tracked down Dr. Escobedo, a young internist who was looking after Bianca. They all sat around a table in the corner of the cafeteria.

"Should Bianca be here, or at Arapahoe Highlands?" Eleanor said.

"At Highlands," Dr. Escobedo said without hesitation, and without rancour.

"Why?"

"They have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber."

"And that is the standard treatment for this kind of thing?"

"Not exactly," he said. "That's the problem."

"What do you mean, not exactly?"

"Well, for example, there are a lot of migrant workers up in Washington State, and this kind of thing has happened up there on a fairly regular basis. Now, there is a hospital in Seattle that has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which is basically used to decompress divers with the bends. When you put a patient with carbon monoxide poisoning into such a chamber, it helps get oxygen into their tissues, which is what such a patient needs. So people up there have learned that when an unconscious kid is pulled out of the back of a pickup truck, you send them straight to the one hospital with the hyperbaric chamber. But this is kind of a new practice, and in the eyes of some, it's experimental."

"And that's what the people at Highlands think."

"Exactly. If this treatment were standard medical practice, they'd have no excuse not to admit Bianca. But because they can label it experimental, there's no way they'll admit her. Because they know they'll lose money."

"Why does Denver have a chamber like this?" Ray said. "We don't have many scuba divers around here."

"It's used for diabetics and other people with poor circulation," Escobedo said. "So it's popular in areas with a large middle-aged and elderly population that's well insured. It's an expensive treatment with a high profit margin for the hospital. Which is why they don't want to tie up the chamber with a charity case."

"Okay, I get the picture," Eleanor said. "Now, who is in charge of Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center?"

"The chief administrator is Dr. Morgan," Escobedo said.

Eleanor stood up and yanked her jacket off the back of the chair. "Let's go kick his white ass," she said.

Ray and Escobedo looked astonished and glanced at each other, a bit nervously. "You might want to call ahead and find out where he is first," Ray suggested.

"I'm sure that an important man like Dr. Morgan has a secretary who is very good at putting people like me off - over the phone," Eleanor said. "The more I get in that secretary's face, the more helpful she'll be."

"This may not be an appropriate time for me to get political," Ray said, after they had been driving in silence for a few minutes, humming down Broadway toward the rolling, prosperous southern suburbs. "But this is going to be a long drive and I can't help myself."

"Shoot," Eleanor said. " It would be unlike you not to get political."

"Okay. Well, there is one question you have forgotten to ask me about this whole affair."

"What question is that?"

"Why did the Ramirezes suddenly jump into their truck and take a six-hour drive across the prairie in the middle of the night?"

Eleanor thought that one over, feeling slightly embarrassed. "I thought you said this was what migrant workers do. They migrate."

"They're human beings," Ray said.

"I know that," Eleanor said, somewhat testily. Ray had a tendency to be a little too obnoxious in his political correctness.

"So they have to sleep. They generally do it at night. And they drive during the daytime, like everyone else."

"Okay. So tell me, Ray, why did the Ramirezes suddenly get it into their heads to jump into their truck and go on a long night drive?"

"Because a couple of months ago, after the State of Union address, there was a stock market crash."

Eleanor looked over at Ray. He was smiling back at her mysteriously.

"I'll bite," she said.

"The capital markets crashed. People sold their stocks and needed somewhere else to put their money. In times of economic uncertainty, people tend to invest in commodities. So, on the Chicago Board of Trade, the price of beef went up. Raising cattle became a money-making proposition. But it takes time to raise cattle, you don't make a full-grown steer overnight. So cattlemen in this state began to raise a larger number of calves than usual.

"In the expectation that they'd be able to make more money off them when they were full-grown," Eleanor said. She did not know the first thing about ranching but this concept seemed simple enough.

"Right. Well, by now, these calves are starting to get big and starting to need more food - you know how growing children are. In this part of the country, cattle graze - they eat grass out on the range. Much of the range land is owned by the federal Government, and cattlemen are allowed to graze their cattle on that land.

"There is a nice patch of BLM land that I know about six hours from here. It's in the basin of the Arkansas River, so it always has plenty of green grass, but unlike a lot of the other land around there it hasn't been converted to truck farming yet."

"Truck farming... that means vegetables and so on?"

"There's a lot of that stuff down there along the Arkansas," Ray said. "Migrants work there, picking vegetables for shipment to Oklahoma and Texas."

"Okay. Go on."

"Last year, when the price of beef was low, no one wanted to use this land and so a number of migrant workers - including the Ramirezes - went there and parked their trucks and trailers on it and started living there. Set up a little community. Planted some little gardens and so on. Waiting for the next harvest to come in."

"But last week, a cattleman in that area found that he was running out of land on which to graze all of these calves that he started when the price of beef got high. And now, in place of the community of migrant workers that used to be on that land, this man's cattle are there, eating the lush green grass."

"You're saying that the Ramirezes were kicked off the land."

"They and all the other people living there were evicted yesterday," Ray said. "The closest place for the Ramirez family to stay was Anna's sister's house, here in Denver. So they put the kids in the back of the truck and came here."

"Oh."

"Hundreds of people are on the road today, all over the High Plains, because some cattle got hungry," Ray said. "And I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were several more cases of carbon monoxide poisoning in the backs of pickup trucks that we haven't heard about yet."

"If I am a cattleman," Eleanor said, "and I want to use a piece of BLM land, and some migrant workers happen to be living on it, then what is the mechanism? How do I make those workers go away? Call the cops?"

"No you don't call the cops. There are a number of approaches one could take," Ray said, "but if I had the right connections, my first choice would be to make a phone call to the Alamo."

Eleanor thought this one over for a minute.

"Ray, if nothing else, you just guaranteed Bianca Ramirez a spot in the hyperbaric chamber," she said.

Eleanor was right. Dr. Morgan did have a very capable secretary.

She could tell just by looking at the woman that she knew her business.

"Good morning, my name is Eleanor Richmond and I just got off the phone from talking to my boss, Senator Marshall," she lied, "and based on the results of that conversation I think I can promise you that the single most important thing that your boss Dr. Morgan will do this whole month, possibly this whole year, will be to have a conversation with me right now."

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ray and Dr. Escobedo grinning at each other. This was like a carnival ride for them.

Dr. Morgan's secretary was cheerful enough about it. If she was pissed off, she was good enough not to show it in front of Eleanor. She reached Dr. Morgan on his car phone; he was on his way in.

Within fifteen minutes, Dr. Morgan, Eleanor, Ray and Dr. Escobedo were all sitting around a table in Morgan's office. They made small talk about what kind of additives they wanted in their coffee and what a nice day it was. Then things got quiet, and Eleanor found that everyone was looking at her expectantly. She folded her hands in her lap and composed herself for a moment.

"I'm not very good at this sort of thing," she said, "so maybe the best way for me to proceed is just to come out and say something."

"Shoot," Dr. Morgan said.

"This is an exercise in raw political brute force. You will give Bianca Ramirez treatment in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber or else the Senator, I'm sure, will make it his mission in life to turn this medical centre into a smoking hole in the ground."

"Consider it done," Dr. Morgan said cheerfully. "Dr. Escobedo, you'll make the arrangements to send Bianca over?"

"Yes."

"Excellent," Dr. Morgan said. He seemed pleased and cheerful, as if he woke up every morning of his life and got slapped around by a U.S. Senator. "Now, is there anything else on the agenda?"

"God," Eleanor said, an hour later, over breakfast with Ray, "I really overdid it. I'm so embarrassed."

Ray shrugged. Significantly, he didn't try to disagree with her. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You got what we wanted."

After she had dropped Escobedo off at the county hospital; it had come to their attention that neither one of them had had any breakfast. So now they were at a little family place not far from the Alamo. Eleanor was having huevos rancheros. Ray was licking his lips over a huge steaming bowl of tripe.

"I tend to forget how powerful a senator is," Eleanor said. "I probably could have just made a phone call and gotten the same result. Instead I came in like Rambo. Used a flame thrower where I could have flicked a Bic."

"Hey, if nothing else it was great theatre," Ray said. "That's your genius, you know."

"Huh?"

Ray was studying her face interestedly. "You don't know, do you?" he said. "You just do it on instinct."

"Do what on instinct?"

Ray shook his head flirtatiously. "I don't want to make you self-conscious and ruin it."

"What are you talking about?"

"I really admire what you did to Earl Strong, you know," he said, changing the subject none too subtly.

"Yeah, you tell me that every time we see each other."

"Now what we need to do is get that flame thrower aimed at the right target."

"Aha," she said. "The hidden agenda comes out."

"I told you I was paying for breakfast. What did you think?"

"And an excellent breakfast it is," she mumbled, chewing her first mouthful. They ate in silence for a minute. Both of them were ravenous. Emotion burns calories.

"I talked to Jane Osborne," Ray said. "I was all ready to be pissed at her, but she's nice."

"Here's the part where I ask who Jane Osbourne is."

"She's a forest ranger out in La Junta."

"A forest ranger? In the prairie?"

"Funny, that's exactly what she said when she was assigned there," Ray said. "She likes forests. She went into the Forest Service hoping she would end up in one."

"Logical enough."

"She didn't count on the fact that the Forest Service owns a lot of grassland. Including the piece of land where the Ramirez family was living until yesterday. And they need people to look after that land. These people are called forest rangers. They wear Smokey Bear hats and everything. So Jane Osbourne is stuck out there, not a single tree, much less a forest, for a hundred miles, in this shitty, dead-end GS-12 position, driving around in a pickup truck chasing dirt bikers and replacing signs that have been shotgun-blasted by the local intellectuals."

"Must be disappointing."

"Yeah. But it's not as bad as what comes next."

"And what's that?"

"She's about ready to turn in for the evening when she gets a call from On High and she is ordered to personally evict about a hundred migrant workers from this patch of grazing land."

"How does a single woman do that?"

"She called in a few other rangers and brought in some federal marshals too, as a show of force."

"Who gave the order?"

"Her boss. Who got it from Denver. And they got it from Washington. I'm sure."

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Eleanor said, "but I'm sure that this wasn't the only patch of federal land in Colorado that was housing squatters."

Ray smiled. "You got that right."

"Have any other such communities been evicted?"

Ray shook his head.

"Just this one," Eleanor said.

"Just this one."

"So this wasn't a blanket order from Washington. It was targeted at this one piece of land."

"Sure looks that way."

"And why," Eleanor said, "do you suppose that some bureaucrat in D.C. would suddenly take an interest in this one parcel?"

Ray shrugged. "I can only speculate."

"Please do."

"This bureaucrat probably went to law school with one of Senator Marshall's aides. Or was his college roommate. Or their kids go to the same day care. Something like that."

Eleanor waggled a finger at Ray. "There you go making assumptions. How do you know there's a connection to Caleb Roosevelt Marshall?"

"The piece of land in question adjoins the Lazy Z Ranch," Ray said, "and the cattle grazing on it now all wear the Lazy Z brand."

"Say no more." Eleanor said. "You win."

The Lazy Z ranch was owned by Sam Wyatt. Sam Wyatt was Caleb Roosevelt Marshall's biggest private contributor. And the president of Senator Marshall's PAC. Sam Wyatt was one of a dozen or so constituents who could get through to the Senator on the phone whenever he wanted to.

But in this case, he probably hadn't. This was too much of a dirty detail for the Senator to mess around with personally. He had probably just called one of the Senator's aides. He had probably called Shad Harper, that underaged son of a bitch who had the office across the hallway from Eleanor's.

Ray was watching her in fascination. "You have this look on your face like you're plotting an assassination," he joked.

"Something like that," she said.