True Allegiance

The Environmental Protection Agency had ruled—and Congress hadn’t overruled them—that the smelt fish were threatened by water overuse from the river. She protested; she sued. It didn’t matter, according to the government, that her husband’s father had bought the farm, worked it up from nothing. It didn’t matter that her husband had worked his heart out, almost literally, on the farm, keeling over at the ripe old age of fifty-two while grazing those damn cattle. It didn’t matter that she had fifty-some employees and their families dependent on her.

All that mattered was the smelt. That damn fish.

They restricted her water supply. They told her that no amount of lobbying could change it; the rest of the state simply didn’t care about the Central Valley, and the environmental interests refused to compromise. They’d won a great victory for the smelt, and they were satisfied with it.

For a while, she lived with the situation.

Then the land began drying up. The cattle began dying. She tried to sell them before they died of thirst. She tried to sell the land. But like the river, the market had run dry. No one would buy it. The listing agency kept dropping the price, but the land was worthless, and the mortgage on the land made it a financial deadweight for investors. The land was the water; without the water, the land meant less than nothing.

She joined a consortium of farmers working to overturn state and federal legislation protecting the smelt. She spent endless afternoons with her neighbors propping signs along the highway reading, “CONGRESS-MADE DUST BOWL.” She wrote letter after letter to the State Water Resources Control Board, begging them to reconsider. In return, she received form letter after form letter thanking her for her interest, but informing her that the law required the current water distribution scheme. After a while, she stopped meeting with the other farmers. She knew that made no difference to the regulators. And she didn’t have the money to give to the lobbyists to cut their backroom deals with the environmental protection agencies. All her money was gone.

She began laying off her workers. One by one, they left, taking their families with them. Her accountant told her that her best option was bankruptcy. She resisted it as long as she could; she bargained with her creditors, took out credit cards, begged for swing loans from friends. Then, when all of that failed, she told him to begin filing the paperwork.

She was a week away from filing when she received the letter. It came from one of her former employees, Emilio. He’d immigrated from Mexico decades before, crossed the border illegally. She’d paid him well, sponsored his citizenship, and brought his family over to join him. “He’s a valuable employee,” she told her skeptical friends. “And if you were living on that side of the border, wouldn’t you jump it? He’s not taking money from anybody except me, and I’m paying him for work.”

He was one of the last men to be laid off as the ranch died. She cried the night she told him the cash had run out. He thanked her, hugged her, and moved his family to Los Angeles.

She clung harder to the land. It didn’t produce anything anymore, but it was everything to her. She gradually sold off whatever was left of her cattle. She doggedly paid down the mortgage. She dropped her health insurance and her life insurance. Every last dollar went into buying the worthless, barren stretch.

Then, one day, she received her property tax bill. The state government, hard up for cash, had decided to raise the property tax—she owed a supplemental $15,000.

The same day, she received a letter from Emilio.

He and his family had been forced to take a small apartment in East Los Angeles. Emilio had gotten a job at a local factory. Their son, Juan, had enrolled at the public high school.

That’s where he had been killed.

One of his classmates, apparently, had tried to recruit him into a gang. When he refused, several of the gang members found him in the bathroom. They began punching him. When he fell, they kicked him. And when he didn’t get up, they fled.

An hour later, the janitor found him. The doctors tried to relieve the bleeding in his brain by drilling, but it was no use. Now Emilio was begging for money to bury the boy. He was fifteen years old.

That afternoon, Soledad took the supplemental property tax bill, nailed it to a wooden box, aimed her shotgun at it, and blew a hole in it the size of a fist.

That night, she emptied her last bank account, some $25,000, and signed a check for $5,000. She sent it to Emilio. She’d always wanted to pay for the boy’s college—she’d told Emilio that. Now she paid for his coffin.

The next morning, she took the other $20,000 and converted it to cash.

Then she went shopping.

She had plenty of fertilizer, could obtain Tovex easily, and had her boys order nitromethane, supposedly so that they could race their hot rods around the area.