“Swear on Ganesha.”
“Okay! I swear on Ganesha and Lakshmi and Krishna!”
“Yeah. Okay.” Miguel hesitated. “You swear?”
“I already did. Stop being a jerk. I wouldn’t have told then, and I won’t tell now. Quit insulting me.”
I was trying not to show how much it hurt to find out that he hadn’t trusted me all along. Miguel knew everything about me. He even knew about the time I peed the bed in third grade, and I hadn’t even told Joe that, because I knew Joe would have made fun of me for weeks. But Miguel had been keeping a huge secret from me. And even now, I could tell that he was still worried about me knowing.
I changed the subject. “So that lawyer guy is what Milrow’s like, huh?”
“Yeah. Milrow Meats. They play for keeps.”
It almost sounded like an ad slogan: Milrow Meats. We play for keeps.
At another time, it might have seemed funny. But after meeting that cold-blooded lizard named Lawrence Maximillian, it mostly felt like an understatement.
CHAPTER 23
It turned out that Maximillian the lizard lawyer had gone to visit Joe, too, and he’d done the same thing to Joe that he did to us. Acted all nice, then turned mean when Joe started asking questions.
Joe signed the papers, too.
The next day, we all sat on our bikes, staring at the Milrow meatpacking complex. Steam rose from the chimneys, and the normal nasty smells of manure and rot billowed off the feedlots, joined by the mooing of the cows.
Something had happened there, but now nobody was supposed to talk about it. It was going to be a secret forever.
“That place took my whole family,” Miguel said. “It just ate them up. Ground them up and threw them away when they weren’t useful.”
“They aren’t eaten up,” I said. “They’re down in Mexico. They’ll figure out a way to come back to you.”
Miguel shook his head. “Coming across the border isn’t like it used to be. My dad said it was easy when he came across. Nobody minded so much if you wanted to come over and work hard. Nobody watched the border much, back then.” He shrugged. “Now they got all kinds of Border Patrol and army down there…. It’s dangerous now.”
“That’s okay,” Joe said. “We got all this cash from Milrow. You can hire one of those guys who guides people across.”
“Coyotes,” Miguel said.
“Yeah. Them. You can hire a coyote. With all this money we got you can hire a good one.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the wad of bills, but Miguel wasn’t looking at it. He was still looking at Milrow.
“Money,” Miguel said. “I can’t believe I took their money.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” I said.
Miguel’s jaw clenched at that. “You always got a choice. Just sometimes you don’t like the choices you got. But you always got a choice. And I chickened out and took Milrow’s money, all because I was scared of being kicked out of the country.”
“Yeah, well, I was scared you were going to get kicked out, too,” I said. “We all took the money. Not just you. No way I was going to be the guy who got you kicked out.”
“Me, either,” Joe said.
When Joe found out that Miguel didn’t have his citizenship, his reaction had been to laugh about it, and then to be impressed at all the ways Miguel and his parents had been fooling the system. He’d hardly been bothered at all that Miguel had kept his situation secret for so long. I asked Joe about it later, about why he wasn’t bothered about the lying, and he just looked at me like I was crazy.
“It’s like Miguel’s secret identity, right? You don’t see Spider-Man or Superman giving away their secret identities. Batman? You got to be kidding. Some secrets are too dangerous to share.”
“Yeah, but even they’ve got some real friends.”
“This is the biggest secret in the whole world,” Joe said. “But it’s Miguel’s secret. If you’re going to be his real friend, you keep it to yourself, and you don’t complain about whether he told you before. You step up and prove that you were worthy all along. That’s what a real friend does. You step up. You get it?”
I kind of did. And I was kind of impressed, too, because Joe wasn’t the kind of guy you expected to hear that stuff from. He could fool you with all his joking and craziness and bad grades. You could think you knew him because of the way he acted on the outside, but then inside, he was completely different.
Joe was still talking to Miguel, coming up with ideas to help. “Maybe we could get your parents, like, night-vision goggles and stuff, so they can come across easier. There’s this whole website we can get stuff like that on, and then we could ship it down and they could be like ninjas and sneak across.”
Well, not completely different. He was still bugnuts.
“You think Maximillian will actually try to help you stay here?” I asked Miguel. “Or was he just saying that stuff?”
“Now that we signed those papers?” Miguel shrugged. “I bet ICE shows up any second, and I’m needing Joe’s ninja gear, too.”
Joe leaned against his handlebars. “I don’t get what people think you’re supposed to do in Mexico. It’s not fair to send you off to some place you never lived in your life.”
Miguel laughed. “You think ICE cares about fair? All they care about is that I don’t look white and I don’t got papers. Heck, if I lived in Alabama or Arizona or any of those nutball states with the anti-foreigner laws, they probably would have just grabbed me off the street.” He glanced over at me. “Probably, they’d grab you, too, Rabi. You look kind of brown yourself. I’d totally deport you.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Just sayin’. If your mom lived in Arizona… Shhooooo! She’d be gone before you knew it. Driving While Brown. That’s a criminal offense down there. A cop would pull her over and ask for her papers and the next thing you knew, she’d be in jail.”
“Now you’re just talking crazy,” Joe said. “It’s not that bad. Nobody’s going to just grab you for no reason.”
“What do you mean, no reason? She’s brown, isn’t she? She talks with that funny Indian accent, doesn’t she? You might not have to worry about this stuff, because you look like an American,” Miguel said. “Me and Rabi? We need some camouflage.”
“We should dye our hair blond,” I said. “Then we’d totally blend in.”
“Totally,” Miguel said. “Surfer style.”
“In Iowa?” Joe asked.
“Why not? You think I can’t be a surfer? I’ll get me a surfboard and be, like, crazy California. One hundred percent pure American surfer.”
“It would help if you lived near an ocean,” I said.
“If I was going to dye my hair, I’d go green,” Joe said.
Miguel gave him an incredulous look. “Green? They’d shoot you for being an alien, for sure, then.”
“Or a leprechaun,” I said.
“I got it.” Miguel snapped his fingers. “Red, white, and blue. That would do the trick. ICE wouldn’t come near me then.”
We all started laughing, imagining red, white, and blue hair like the Fourth of July.
“Sparklers!” Joe said. “You could have sparklers, like, in your ears or something.”
“Now you’re just talking crazy. Next thing you know, you’d put me on stilts, too.”
“ICE wouldn’t even see you! They’d walk between your legs!”
After all the bad stuff that had been going on, it was good to laugh.
But when the laughing was done, Milrow Meat Solutions was still sitting there with its big old meatpacking plant and all its feedlots, and the mystery of whatever had gone wrong. Miguel’s face turned grim again.
“I shouldn’t have taken the money,” Miguel repeated. “That lawyer guy made me afraid, but I shouldn’t have taken his money. That’s how they always do it. Trying to keep people afraid.”
“Let it go,” I said. “We should get to baseball practice.”
“Are they even h
aving it?” Miguel asked.
“I doubt Mr. Cocoran is going to be up for coaching, that’s for sure,” Joe said.
“Yeah, well, let’s go find out,” I said, not liking the way Miguel kept staring at Milrow. “It’s not smart for us to be hanging around here, anyway.” I nodded at a guy who was over by the doors of the Milrow building. He was looking right at us. “We don’t want them to think we’re going to make trouble.”
I kept pulling at Miguel, and finally he let us drag him away. I didn’t like the way he resisted, though. It was almost like he was starting to get his old fight back, except this time it was the kind of fight that he could only lose. The sooner he forgot about Milrow, the better.
We pedaled back down the highway, talking about other things, random things, but I couldn’t help thinking back to what Miguel had said at Milrow, about needing to look like you fit in. Like you belonged.
If Joe had been the biggest illegal border-hopping ninja in the world, no cop in a million years would ask to see his passport or his green card or his immigration papers, because Joe had blond hair and pale skin. That was what an American was supposed to look like.
All Miguel wanted was to be left alone, but people were all lining up to take a whack at “the immigration problem” or “be tough on immigration”—and that meant Miguel was basically a real small baseball in a game where everyone wanted to take a real big swing.
* * *
When we got to the baseball field, it turned out Joe was right about practice. A bunch of kids were leaving as we skidded our bikes to a stop.
Andy, our first baseman, came by. “Practice is canceled.”
“Yeah?”
“Cocoran’s sick or something.”
“So what’re those guys doing?” Joe asked.
Andy looked over his shoulder. “It’s Sammy. Him and some other guys are waiting for you, Miguel.” He looked at us. “You really made him mad about something.”
I guess it’s not all that surprising that between the zombies and the ICE raid and lizard Maximillian, I’d completely forgotten our fight with Sammy at his house.
Andy said, “He’s looking for payback. All he’s talking about is how you and Rabi are toast.” Andy slapped Miguel on the back. “I’d get out of here if I were you.”
Across the baseball field, Sammy and his buddies had caught sight of us. Even from a distance, you could tell they were smiling. My stomach dropped into my shoes. No way was this going to turn out good.
They started toward us.
I tugged Miguel’s sleeve as he straddled his bike. “Andy’s right. Let’s roll out of here,” I said. “We don’t want trouble.”
But Miguel was watching Sammy, and he had the same expression on his face as he’d had back at Milrow—the look he got when he was about to step up.
“Miguel?” I said. “Let’s go, man.”
“Nah. I think I’m done running.”
“If we go out there, they’re going to kick our butts,” Joe said.
“Guess we got to kick theirs first, then.”
Joe nodded slowly, seeming to digest this. “Okaaaay. Final stand, huh?”
“Something like that.”
One on one, Miguel could probably take Sammy and send that boy home crying. But Sammy had six of his biggest friends with him now: Travis Thompson, Sid Meacham, Rob Ziegler, Bart Lewis, Dale Toomey, and Otis Andrews. I could practically see the stats of doom over their heads.
Instead of batting averages and on-base percentages, I was seeing number of punches to knockout and health counters that went off the charts. Our own stats didn’t add up—no way, no how.
Bart Lewis, all on his own, had a reputation for pounding. I’d run into him once by accident, coming around a corner in the school, and he’d just slammed me up against the lockers—wham!—and kept on walking.
“Miguel,” I said, “they’re going to wipe us all over the dirt.”
“I’m not running.”
“So call it a strategic retreat,” I said. “Let’s get Sammy some other time. We’ll get him when he’s not with his goons.”
“If I run, I just keep running. All the time. They like us running and staying quiet. Ducking down, taking it. That’s how they want us. They want us to be afraid.”
“ ‘They?’ ” I asked, with a sinking feeling. “It’s just Sammy and his goons. There’s no ‘they.’ It’s not like this is a conspiracy or something.”
Miguel shook his head. “There’s always someone like Sammy who thinks we should back away. If it’s not Sammy, it’s his dad, or that Milrow lawyer, or it’s some foreman out at the meatpacking plant telling people they should shut up and keep working and be grateful they got a job. It’s always the same. Maybe they let you live, but you can’t respect yourself. Lying low doesn’t do any good. It just lets bad people think they can do bad things to you. Keep quiet, or stand tall, it doesn’t matter. End of the day, they just keep coming after you.”
“They’ve got baseball bats,” I said.
“We do, too.”
“This is insane!” I said. “Let’s just get the heck out of here.”
“You can go,” Miguel said. “I don’t mind. This isn’t your fight.”
I sure wanted to run. But I knew I’d hate myself forever if I ran off and left Miguel behind. With a sinking feeling, I realized that I was in this fight with him, no matter how stupid it was.
Joe was looking wild-eyed. “This is going to be so epic.” He got off his bike and stood by Miguel.
It was stupid to fight when you were going to lose. There was no way we could beat these guys. But it was like Miguel didn’t care. Losing didn’t mean the same thing to me that it did to him: For me, it was getting a pounding. For him, it was backing down.
I muttered my worst Bengali curse as I got off my bike and joined up with my friends. “Let’s go, then.”
We met Sammy and his goons halfway across the baseball field. Sammy stared down his bruised nose at Miguel.
“I figured you’d be in Mexico by now.”
“I decided to stick around.”
“You don’t get to decide. We decide.”
“Not when someone stands up to you.” Miguel grinned. “Then you run for the porch like a little baby.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Not if I kill you first.”
I started to worry that we weren’t just talking about getting a whipping. Miguel and Sammy didn’t like each other. I mean, really didn’t like each other.
“Come on, guys,” I said. “Let’s not do this.”
“Afraid?” Sammy taunted.
I looked at him, thinking, Yes. But I said, “No.”
“Sure you are. How ’bout you go run back to that red-dot mommy of yours?”
“How about you shove off before we kick your teeth in?” Joe said.
The other boys all laughed at that. I knew them all. They weren’t bad guys, mostly. But with Sammy, it was like they just stopped thinking. Like they couldn’t remember that we’d gone to birthday parties together when we were little. That their little brothers or sisters had been our friends. It was like, as they grew up, they turned into something else.
“Go back where you came from,” Sammy said.
“I came from here,” I said. “Born and raised.”
“Stupid Indian.” He made a fake-y kind of war whoop with his hand over his mouth. “Wa wa wa wa wa.”
“Wrong Indian, jerkwad.”
“Oh, right, you’re the ones who wear the towels on your heads.”
I wanted to do that whole Gandhi thing where you don’t resort to violence, I really did. I’m not a fighter, and I knew that if we started swinging that we’d get creamed.
Sammy smirked at me like he owned me.
So I socked him. Right in the nose. Wham!
Sammy howled. “Owwwwww!” and doubled over clutching his face as blood spurted from his nose.
I have to admit, for a second, it felt so great to pound hi
m.
Everyone was staring at me, as amazed as I was that I’d unloaded the first punch. But then I noticed that Miguel and Joe were looking worried, and so was everyone else. I realized suddenly that maybe this fight hadn’t had to happen after all. Maybe everyone had been as afraid of fighting as I’d been, but now it was too late, and Sammy was howling mad.
CHAPTER 24
“I’m going to kill you!”
Sammy charged.
Cue replay of the fight on Sammy’s lawn, only this time, Sammy had the advantage of numbers. I tried to make a run for it, but Sammy snagged me and then he started pounding. A tornado of punches. I hit the ground. Sammy jumped on top of me, whaling away.
Joe jumped on Sammy’s back and Miguel gave him a kick and then the other guys piled in, too. And just like I’d known, there were too many of them and they were way too big. I couldn’t get Sammy off me. Dale Toomey had grabbed my legs and was holding me down while Sammy pounded.
Miguel got free of Bart Lewis and charged in to help me. He got one good hit on Sammy and then a bunch of the other guys grabbed him and started beating on him like bongo drums. Miguel knew a little wrestling, and I saw him flip Travis Thompson right onto his back, but the others were too much for him. Sammy gave me a final kick and left me to Dale, so he could go after Miguel.
I kicked free from Dale’s grip and scrambled out of the dirt, trying to stay clear as he came after me again. Not far away, Otis Andrews had Joe down on the ground and was rubbing his face back and forth in the dirt.
“How you like that dirt wash?! You like eating dirt? You like that?”
Joe’s face was all muddy and spitty and bloody.
I felt terrible, and not just because I was getting the stuffing beat out of me.
I’d done this. My punch had started it. I’d been trying to get Miguel to not fight, and then I’d ended up jumping right into the middle of it.
Had there been some other way out?
Running away sure would have been smarter.
Sammy and a couple of the other guys had Miguel down, and they were kicking him every time he tried to get up. He looked terrible.
I wanted to cry, but there wasn’t anything to do except keep fighting. It was either keep fighting or curl up and bawl, and I didn’t think they’d stop, even then.