There was a time when it hadn't been called Bunktown. It had been just another patch of land whose neighbors were a mite fuzzy on where exactly the borders happened to be. Which was ironic now for a number of other reasons.
Then back in the nineteen-thirties, an ambitious president had pushed out his New Deal for America, and this had been one of the places the government had picked for several developments. They'd acquired it, paid some money to each of the neighbors who might have had a claim on it. Then they'd spent a few years settling lawsuits from those same farmers and ranchers who still tried to graze their livestock on the land they'd sold. Once upon a time in Texas they would have done more than sue, but a lot of the locals had been hard hit by the great depression, and enough of the old guard were hungry enough that they could even choke down their pride for a few moments, take the paycheck, and just have to accept that they were going to have to deal with more jobs in the area, more money in the local economy and better infrastructure. Such a hardship!
When the bulk of the legal issues were settled, the Works Progress Administration had come in and put up brick buildings, laid down gravel roads, and used the area as their primary headquarters for all the infrastructure that went into the local counties.
After the bulk of the work was done, and Cooperston (Not to be confused with Coopers Town, which was down in El Paso,) had the full benefits of good roads, water that didn't cause regular cholera epidemics, asphalt roads that connected them to the highways and allowed for far easier transportation and trade, and a coal plant plus transformer station that could easily handle the electrical load of the region with enough left over for rainy days, the happy landowners adjacent to the area had celebrated by bribing the mayor and county commissioner to redo the land surveys, and determine that the federal government had vastly overreached, and give them “their” land back.
The government by that point had more than enough of the fine residents of the Cooperston area, and more or less abandoned the area, with the exception of the transformer station and lines at more or less the center of it. Which was fine by most of the neighbors, but they tried a third round of lawsuits anyway, to try and get more money out of Uncle Sam.
The neighbors, who enjoyed the vastly increased real estate values gained by the new deal and new infrastructure, all tried to grab as much of the land as possible for themselves, but mostly ended up canceling each other out. None of them were big enough shots to pull an old fashioned Texan land grab and deal with the consequences, so they sat and sulked at each other for years afterward. And the land sat unused and bare, much as it had for centuries before. Hell, except for the river at one corner of it and the tiny green patch along the water, most of it was just sand and rock and snakes. Really, none of the landowners adjacent to it had really WANTED it, they just didn't want their neighbors to have it. Or anyone else, really.
This went on until roughly about 1950.
And then the border patrol decided to ramp up their operations in Texas.
*****
Cyrus told absolutely none of this history to Beth as they rolled up to the transformer station, and the cluster of shacks, and small brick bunkhouses that remained of the old WPA compound. He figured he didn't know exactly what circumstances she'd end up in later in life, and it was best to just show her, and let her make of it what she would.
As their Chevy rolled in, he saw figures peeking out through cloth drapes that had been strung over the old bunkhouse windows, heard voices break the air as mothers called small children back inside. He saw motion to the right, suppressed an urge to duck, and glanced over to see a couple of dozen kids running up from the river, a few stopping to stare at him, their eyes white against their tan skin. More yelling from the bunkhouses, at one point a squat woman, wearing a dress that consisted of sewn-together feedbags, came out and banged a spoon on a frying pan. That got the kids' butts into gear, and they fled inside as fast as they could.
Cyrus didn't watch the end to that particular drama. He marked where other tire tracks had cut the soil recently, and steered the Chevy in, juggling the extender, the clutch, and the gearshift to get her stopped without seizing the engine up. Only once the truck was off, did he look up and over to the main building of Bunktown.
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Once it had been the WPA's meeting hall, and the offices for its administrators. Now, cloth recycled from feed bags and other farm supplies hung over the hollow windows, and a trio of old men sat in chairs on the porch, under the shade the overhanging roof. One tottered back and forth in an old rocking chair, and two more sat on opposite sides of a barrel, a game of checkers between them. But all had stopped their afternoon business, and were now staring at him, like a mouse watching an approaching snake.
The men playing checkers stood and started backing up when Cyrus pulled out his cane... then relaxed, as he set the end to the ground, and put his weight on it. Cyrus grimaced. Yeah, he should have been a little more careful. At this distance a long metal tool could easily be mistaken for a longarm.
The three started talking to each other, hushed voices, and the snippets he caught were no language he knew. Maybe Spanish, maybe something else. They fell silent when Beth slid out behind him, and the truck door echoed around the old compound as she slammed it shut. Then it faded, to be replaced by the omnipresent whine of the transformer station.
The sun was hot on Cyrus's scalp as he stumped across to the main building. His legs were cramped up from driving; it had been a long time since he'd had to leave the house, and driving for twenty miles hadn't done his muscles any favors.
As they got closer to the porch, and Cyrus' eyes adjusted to the shade, the features of the old man rocking within it swam into view. His jaw was slightly crooked, one corner of his mouth open in a permanent lopsided leer. A couple of silver teeth gleamed among the yellowed aged grin. His eyes were glazed with cataracts, and his hair was a few stringy tufts of gray and white. But he watched Cyrus come impassively, and he was the only one, as the two sitting by the barrel got up and hurried inside.
Cyrus knew he was intruding here. He hesitated, a few dozen feet from the porch, and tried to find his nerve. He hadn't spoken to strangers since Dallas, and that had gone so poorly...
Then he felt small fingers find his hand, and he looked down to see his sister staring up at him. Her trepidation was clear, at least equal to his own, and that gave him strength. He had to be strong for her, to help her keep it together. And if he could keep her from cracking, then he could be brave.
It wasn't so different from what he'd seen south of Seoul, now that he thought of it. The guys on the front lines, how they kept it together on the firing line, because they didn't want their pals to break worse.
“Seňor?” Cyrus asked. “I don't mean any harm here. I just have some questions, and I hope you can answer them.”
The old man rocked, bony fingers clutching the armrests. Cyrus looked down to Beth, who shrugged.
“Seňor?” Cyrus tried again.
“He can't hear you,” came a low voice from the doorway, and Cyrus startled, stepped back, steadied himself on his cane as his leg tried to spasm and drop him.
“He's deaf as a rock,” the woman explained, as she came out of the building. “When the bombs fell, he was too close, and now he can't hear anything.”
“Ah. Uh. Lo s-siento,” Cyrus said, blinking, and studying her.
She was somewhere around his own age, late twenties or early thirties. Tan skin, wide brown eyes, and a serious, sombre, thin face that seemed a bit too long for her head. She was wearing a simple green dress with flowers on it, that had been patched up many times. Some effort had gone into trying to match the colors, but they still stood out, even to his eyes. Her hair was held back by a red kerchief, and it was straight and short cut, framing her head well. It was something like Bettie Page's cut, without the bangs. And as his eyes traveled down her form, he couldn't help but notice she had a few more similarities to the inestimable Miss Page.
Then he remembered himself, and forced his eyes up. “Sorry,” he tried again. “I know we're making you nervous.”
“I'm not nervous in the slightest,” the woman said, folding her arms. “But usually good things don't happen when people from town come out here by themselves, not after the morning, anyway. They're usually trying to buy something we don't sell, or try to scare money out of us.”
“Should I have come in the morning?” Cyrus blinked.
“If you want workers, yes. That's when the trucks come out, and the men go to work the fields. Or whatever jobs you want them to do. That's where they are now. They'll be back tonight.”
“Yeah, I heard that,” Cyrus nodded, trying to get his mind on track. It had been a while since he'd had to think about Bunktown. “They didn't want y'all on their property.”
“No, they didn't used to mind that,” the woman shrugged. “But now la migra comes for them if too many of us are there. So we are here. And now they are at no risk themselves from la migra. But if we are raided here, then all the farms lose their workers.”
Cyrus pursed his lips. “La migra?”
“Border patrol.”
“Oh. Sh...” he stopped, looked at Beth. “Shucks. Okay, I can see how that would be bad. We're nothing to do with them. We just have questions. Nothing bad's going to come of them.”
“That remains to be seen,” she said, studying him. Then she sighed. “I'm Catalina. Catalina Morales Who are you two?”
“Cyrus and Elizabeth Colfax,” he said, working his hand free from his sister, and offering a handshake. She took it. Her grip was strong, for her thin frame, and more callused than his own.
“Come in. Sit down. Have coffee and ask your questions. And I will try to see if we can find answers, so you can leave before more trouble comes to us.”