The Travelers

"…interesting historical references in addition to it being an intriguing adventure. I have never seen these issues described from such an intimate point-of-view. A very interesting, exciting, and compelling tale.

Tasia Ramage, Roswell independent

Walt Long has given us a small slice of New Mexican history, with a subject that is as multi-faceted as it is controversial. His characters are real, dealing with real problems, daily life and decisions that affect individuals, families and friends as well as a nation. Are there solutions, is caring wrong when it breaks the law, can hate-mongers be allowed to decide who lives and who dies? A fascinating tale, with more questions than answers, compassion and controversy. An engaging read, that makes one think.

Linda O’Connor

….Walt Long has written a five star book that everyone needs to read.

Fran Lewis

….entertaining and informative…contains unknown information regarding illegal immigration, immigration reform, and information on racist hate groups. It gave me insight into a problem that the author has experienced first hand. It is an exciting, character-driven adventure!

Brad L. Camp, Denver, Colorado

THE

TRAVELERS

By Walt Long

SMASHWORDS EDITION

By

Walt Long

Smashwords Edition License Notes:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2009 by Walt Long

INTRODUCTION

Illegal immigration was nearing a crisis level in 1986, with an estimated three to eight million undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America having entered – and remained - in the United States. Cries of lost jobs and unfathomable benefits paid to intruders who didn’t contribute to the system resounded like a war cry over a nation already steeped in recession. Government agencies tried with little success to monitor the immigrants – and to deter their entry - while public feelings became ever more sharply divided between the nationalistic protectors of our borders, and the more liberal champions of human rights. For the fourth consecutive year Congress would debate immigration reform, finally passing a watered-down act - the Mazzoli-Simpson Bill - that had previously failed in the fall of 1984 during the waning days of the 98th Congress.

Proponents of harsh reform argued in frightening dialogues that if we didn’t regain control of our borders, we would face dire consequences – but that particular legislation did little, in reality, to mitigate the invasion. One of the bill’s authors, Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, stated that The first duty of a sovereign nation is to control its borders, thereby setting up a false analogy between crossing the border in search of work, and invading a sovereign nation with hostile intent. The essential approach of this bill was to stem the flow of illegals into the United States by closing off their access to jobs. The central employer sanctions provision of the bill proposed penalties on employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. It also contained worker identification provisions to provide employers with a means to show they had tried to comply with the law. Finally, as if to purposely countermand its very intent, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants who had been in the country since 1980, so they could remain here, change jobs, and ultimately become citizens.

The most glaring irony is that employer sanctions are not a means of controlling the border, but rather an admission that we are unable to do so. Even more unsettling, there was – and remains – no easy way to resolve the conflict, no simple differences to split…at stake are fundamental values, humanitarian concerns, and strong cultural bonds.

* * * * *

The philosophical, economical, and political problems associated with mass immigration meant little to the countless small ranching and agricultural communities throughout the southwest United States where brown-skinned, Spanish speaking migrant workers were settling in ever greater numbers. Resentment, frustration, and overt racism were creating widening rifts between the hard-working rural denizens, driven at once by the need for cheap labor on the one hand, and the inherent compulsion to defend their traditional values on the other. There was a need for seasonal labor - there was a need for jobs - and there was a need to protect what was most dear, a person’s home and way of life. And wherever there is a need, there will always be someone bright and daring enough to fulfill that need…

* * * * *

At one time or another, almost everyone has what they believe is a great idea…a business venture, a means of augmenting the family income, or a plan to change the world. Americans are peculiarly gifted in this way, innovation being the cornerstone of our great culture. Given the embers of a smoldering brainstorm, however, most rational people proceed carefully – researching, planning and considering all the potential pitfalls and consequences. They employ a risk/reward formula that will usually tell them if it’s a viable plan. Many things have to be taken into account, not the least of which is the inherent morality and legality of their actions. On occasion, it’s possible for the rewards to outweigh even the most fervent principles. At this juncture a prudent person will generally abandon the plan – believing that no reward is worth more than his soul.

But others overlook the trees for the panoramic view of the forest. They set out with little more than raw confidence and a sort of possessed tunnel vision. Normal questions regarding legality and moral purpose are like potholes that can be easily sidestepped. History bears witness to the fact that results, and not motive, are the weightier factors in judging a man’s actions.

* * * * * * * *

"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."

Ronald Reagan, Farewell Speech, 1989

* * * * * * * *

CHAPTER ONE

Late July, 1986

The most difficult part of Mickey’s plan – so far, at least - was locating an affordable twenty-foot cube van that would pass for an authentic bread truck and in good enough condition as to not arouse suspicion. A new truck was out of the question. The cost would have been prohibitive, but more importantly, he didn’t want to be remembered buying it. With the help of a friend in the used car business and a barrage of phone calls, he located a 1979 GMC step van in Phoenix that was in surprisingly good shape and running condition for a seven year-old truck.

Sight unseen? Mickey asked, eyes narrowing slightly. You think that’s a good idea?

His friend, Jake Harmony, looked over the list of five prospective vehicles he had located, and nodded. Yeah, it’ll be all right. I’ve dealt with this guy before – he’d tell me if there was anything seriously wrong with it. It’s the best of the lot, and the mileage isn’t bad. Then, with a clearly inquisitive look, he mumbled a little tentatively, He says if you’re delivering bread, it’s perfect.

Mickey ignored the question, indicating that discussion of the matter was closed. When he had called Jake three days ago with the request to help him locate a large step van, he had said only that he would be delivering baked goods to the border. Although it seemed strange and curiosity was gnawing at him like a tapeworm, he knew better than to push it. They had been friends for a long time.

Mickey shrugged and stood to leave. Okay, let’s go for it, He said. I’ll bring you the cash in a couple of hours.

Jake rode a Greyhound Bus to Phoenix where, as a licensed dealer, he paid wholesale for the truck and drove it back to Albuquerque. Then he sold it to Mickey for eighty-five hundred dollars, making a quick thirteen hundred for himself. The paperwork was all completed in Jake’s living room.

After that it was easy. He had friends in the south valley that cleaned it up and did some light bodywork, even giving it a fresh coat of white paint. In less than a week it looked almost as good as new. His brother-in-law – or more precisely, his little brother’s brother-in-law - was a good sheet metal man, and between them they reconfigured the back of the van, fabricating a partition four feet inside the rear overhead door that effectively sealed off from view about seventy-five percent of the interior, leaving a narrow entrance on the right side scarcely wide enough for a person to slip through into the sizeable, hidden compartment.

While the truck was being worked on, Mickey drove to El Paso and spent several days watching commercial vehicles drive across the bridge into Ciudad Juarez, paying close attention to the drivers’ routines and how they interacted with the border guards. He drove back and forth across the border as many as four times a day, observing the activity around the bridge.

It wasn’t possible to get an absolutely clear picture of the bustling traffic and the many attendants with their respective duties at the bridge without drawing undue attention to himself. All vehicles crossing the border came under the scrutiny of uniformed federal, state and city officials who patrolled the steamy pavement on the alert for obvious violations of any sort. In addition, guards working for Immigration, Customs, and the Department of Transportation were likewise stationed at all port entries, and could red-flag any vehicle at any time, and pull them from the line. Of the greatest concern to Mickey was Immigration, but he quickly recognized that all border personnel presented a grave danger.

In between his brief trips into Juarez, he visited the sprawling headquarters of Sunrise Bakery, Inc. in east El Paso. He brazenly applied for a driver’s job – under a fictitious name, of course, and supplying equally fictitious information. Feigning good-natured curiosity, he inquired at length about the delivery of baked goods into Mexico…was it difficult getting those accounts?…did they have to go at a certain time?…he even asked, laughing, if the drivers had to submit to a search every time they crossed the border. He was further emboldened seeing how casually those deliveries were discussed – most of the employees he interviewed merely shrugged and described the long waits and associated tedium of their daily treks across the border as a nuisance, and little more.

He walked all around the huge warehouses and loading docks, talking with drivers and taking scores of Polaroid shots, when he was sure he wasn’t being watched, of the delivery vans emblazoned with the company logo – noting the colors and the placement carefully – and all the complimentary lettering, including permit numbers, weight, and unit numbers on the doors and the cowling. He even bought several products from their retail store saving the labels so he could duplicate the colors exactly. He would make various copies of these as a reference for the sign painter.

Finally, when all was done, he returned to the south valley garage where he had left the van. After a careful inspection, he settled up with the beaming craftsmen who had skillfully rejuvenated the inconspicuous delivery truck. He then drove it to the Motor Vehicles office in Belen where he registered it obliquely to McAllister Dairies, so it could carry New Mexico plates. Everything was paid for with cash. He was comfortable knowing that if it ever came under scrutiny, it would be traced to a dairy farm that no longer existed.

* * * * * * * *

Sunrise Bakery was the largest commercial bakery in the southwest United States, with offices in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Gallup, and El Paso. They produced seven types of bread, English muffins, doughnuts, and a beguiling variety of pastries and snacks. Their delivery vans were visible on the streets twenty-four hours a day. His would be one of more than eighty vehicles that traveled the Rio Grande corridor, and would not attract attention.

The idea had been born during one of his frequent visits several months earlier. He had noticed that a store in Ciudad Juarez sold Sunrise Bakery products, and that set his plan into motion. Large trucks were crossing the border daily, delivering baked goods from El Paso to the super markets in Juarez. He reasoned that if they could do it, then so could he. It was the type of audacious scheme that he tackled with the cold efficiency of a surgeon – never doubting for an instant that he would be equal to the task.

* * * * * * * *

Henry Mickey McAllister grew up in the south valley on a poor, mom-and-pop dairy farm that was eventually forced out of business by the big, coldly efficient corporations. He watched his dad suffer through the indignity and financial morass of having to sell off all his animals and equipment. After making a futile attempt at farming, the senior McAllister was overcome with depression, turning to alcohol and gradually becoming a non-responsive and abusive recluse. With virtually no recourse, his mother became more and more distant - clearly afraid of, and not wanting to provoke her recalcitrant spouse. Henry and his little brother, Lonnie, were left entirely on their own to try and make sense of the unraveling downward spiral that was turning their safe and predictable home into a nightmare. Like his mother and Lonnie, Henry also started to withdraw, tired of the beatings and verbal abuse. By the time he was fourteen he was staying away from home for days at a time. The occasional visits to his bleak old childhood home became less frequent and infinitely less bearable.

Although he had matured and toughened considerably for his tender age, he was still a smallish, wiry, sandy-blonde Anglo who had to prove himself regularly. The south valley was an ethnic hodgepodge of Hispanic immigrants, Native Americans, and deeply rooted Anglo farmers and ranchers who – for the most part – traced their heritage back to the early settlers following the Civil War. As a simple means of survival, people typically kept to their own, existing peacefully according to the time honored law of live and let live. Most south valley residents, regardless of ethnicity or social status, grew up peacefully beneath the umbrella afforded by heritage and family. A young man like Henry, however, left to his own devices at an early age, was forced to develop a noteworthy and cunning sense of self-preservation.

The nickname of Mickey was a natural outgrowth of the local pronunciation of McAllister as Mickallister. He became attached to a group of socially inept, nomadic kids who, like him, had independence forced upon them. They were dropouts, for the most part…eighteen to twenty-one years old, and a few older. Some of the older boys had apartments or trailers where they took turns congregating - where they drank beer, smoked marijuana and brought girls. Henry didn’t like drugs – he saw it as a sign of weakness – but he learned a lot from the older kids about survival on the streets. Although he didn’t mind selling weed to the local punks, he steered discreetly clear of hard and what he called dangerous drugs, and he soon developed a reputation as someone that no one wanted to cross. The years of beatings by his father had hardened him with a quiet resolve to not ever let anyone impose their will upon him. He finally left home for good in 1978 when he was seventeen, joined the Navy, and swore that he would never return to the farm and be a slave to the earth like his father and virtually everyone he had grown up with.

He was able to accumulate a modest bankroll during his three-and-a-half year stint in the Navy by loan sharking – lending money to shipmates at twenty percent interest – so that when he returned home he wasn’t forced to accept what he referred to as a chump job. He didn’t have any long-term plans when he left the Navy, but he knew that there would always be people like his ship-mates who couldn’t survive from one payday to the next…people with human weaknesses, who would be glad to pay him to do what they couldn’t do for themselves.

Henry McAllister never received a formal education – that would bother him in later years – but what he lacked in education, he more than made up for with grit and imagination. Although he earned a reputation for being fearless, his greatest asset was not fearlessness, but raw nerve. He was often afraid, but would never allow his fear to show…the years of scratching and fighting for acceptance had infused in him an uncanny ability to read and understand the people he was dealing with. He came to understand that everyone was afraid, and as long as they were afraid, he could control them. It was the result of experience gleaned from the streets, and the years of successfully dealing with people who were always looking for an edge. As he matured, his own confidence and courage grew as people demurred to him more easily.

If he had to fight, he would fight…and no one ever wanted to fight him again. At less than one hundred-sixty pounds, he was a relentless battler who would only stop when he was pulled away, or when the man was beaten.There’s two kinds of men in the world, He was heard to say, those who are willing to die, and those who aren’t. You only have to worry about the ones who are willing to die.

He discovered, too, that people only grew defensive and resorted to violence when they sensed a decisive threat and imminent danger. The calm, unwavering demeanor he developed was a measured defense against the malice and bald-faced aggression he encountered in many people. Giving them no reason to bare their fangs, he felt, was an added advantage. Everything Mickey did or said was calculated and measured - nothing was ever done without purpose. His dark blue eyes would sparkle one minute and turn hard as steel the next…one way or the other, he would get his way.

* * * * * * * *

Stuart Wedman was hard at work, as usual, in the back of his creative two-man sign shop called Valley DeSigns. He generally had a part-time helper, but he was alone on this late summer afternoon, hand-cutting eighteen-inch letters from sheets of a two-inch thick high-density foam material. The cheap Radio Shack buzzer he had installed just a few weeks earlier alerted him that a customer had come into his cramped eight-foot by twelve-foot combination office and reception area. He emerged from the back wiping the dust off his hands on a shop rag that he carried tucked into his waistband, while he sized up his potential customer.

How can I help you? He asked, in a friendly, practiced voice. The man standing before him appeared to be in his early twenties, not overly friendly, and dressed almost too casually in jeans and a dark blue polo shirt. He seemed to have a hard edge, like a bill collector or government investigator, but Stuart was confident he had no business pending with either, so he dismissed the thought.

I’m Henry McAllister, Mickey said, shaking hands and holding a simple file folder in his left hand. I’m the maintenance supervisor for Sunrise Bakery in Albuquerque - we’ve got a delivery van we need to get lettered, and we need it quick. He opened the folder and began laying photographs of existing company delivery trucks and logo specifications on the small round table that made up the reception area. Framed photos and renderings of stylish signs and vehicle graphics that served as Stuart’s portfolio covered two of the walls. A shelf supporting a cheap coffee pot and several mugs resting upside-down on a small towel took up the area next to the door leading into the work area. Stuart looked curiously at the crude artwork.

It’s a twenty-foot van, Mickey continued, showing a picture of the new van, we just got it back from the body shop. It got dinged up in Las Cruces and we really need to get it back up and running. A shop in El Paso would normally do this, but they can’t get to it for a few days, and we’ve got to have it.

Stuart studied the photographs and the logo, trying to visualize in his trained mind about how big everything would have to be on a twenty-foot truck, and how long it would take to produce it. I’ll be glad to work you up a quote, He offered. I can probably have you some numbers by this afternoon…

Having lived his entire life in the south valley, Mickey continued without hesitation. These were his people - suspicious and aloof with strangers, but clannish and trusting with their own. Above all, they were approachable…no one in the rural southwest was averse to bending rules in the cause of survival. Although he didn’t know Stuart Wedman personally, he knew – by association – with whom he was dealing. He could speak openly to this man.

No, here’s the thing, Mickey interrupted, in a tone that Stuart felt was mildly menacing, this has to be done tomorrow. He pulled some money from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. Look, I’ve been authorized to give you five hundred dollars…that’s about a hundred more than we usually pay for a truck like this. But you have to have it ready by tomorrow afternoon. He studied the sign painter for some sort of reaction. Believe me; we don’t usually pay cash like this. Normally it would take a month or more to get paid, but they’re really desperate for this one.

Stuart looked at the money, and then at Mickey. Five hundred dollars - cash. I don’t know…it’s a lot of work…maybe, if I could get started on it right away. How soon can you get the truck to me?

I can have it here in an hour. It has to be ready to leave for El Paso by Wednesday morning, so you can work all night tonight and tomorrow night if you have to.

Stuart looked again at the pictures and the artwork, but he couldn’t take his eyes completely off the money thrown carelessly onto the table. Gauging the size of the logo on the completed trucks, he started running numbers through his mind…two hours for patterns, maybe three hours on each side and two more on the back – ten, possibly twelve hours total. That was considerably more than his shop rate of thirty dollars an hour, and being paid in cash made it that much better. And, of course, if he did a good job and finished on time, the potential for future work with this large company was impossible to overlook. He smiled at his visitor, shrugged, and said hopefully, Okay, let’s give it a try…

And with that a deal was struck - Mickey would pick up the van at eight o’clock Wednesday morning. Stuart pocketed the money, wrote up an invoice noting that it was paid, and Mickey was already making plans for a trial run. He would pick up three or four tall rolling pan racks and trays, enough to hide the fake wall, and fill them with baked goods from several sources. An artist friend of Lonnie’s had painted the partition in dark, mottled tones that to Henry looked like shit, but would serve as a sort of camouflage backdrop once the racks were placed just inside the overhead door. Anyway, he thought cynically, if they ever decided to search the truck it wouldn’t matter if Michelangelo had painted the backdrop - they were busted.

The possibility of getting caught was a simple fact of life, and you dealt with it when it happened, like a car wreck or a house fire. It wasn’t something that a person spent a lot of time thinking about. You planned carefully and took every necessary precaution, and then you just hoped you were sufficiently alert and smart enough to do the right thing when something went wrong…because somewhere along the way, it would.

* * * * * * * *

CHAPTER TWO

Wednesday, July 23, 1986

* * * * * * * *

Henry guided the dusty old ‘78 Seville east along the two-lane highway through Los Lunas, across the river, and south onto unpaved County Road 267. Here the road narrowed with no shoulder and barely room for two vehicles to pass. Huge cottonwoods blocked everything on the right except