The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

drunk tank. Several cops are standing on the trailer’s steps enjoying the display. I stand with them and bask in the flickering lights until one of the cops notices me.
    â€œWhat you got there, pops?” a Mexican cop asks.
    â€œIt’s a murder weapon.” He takes a step forward, unsure if I’m drunk, his hand falling to his holster. “I’ve been paid to dispose of it.” I hand the sledgehammer over.
    â€œOkay, why don’t we come inside and talk about it?”
    The drunk tank is lit with fluorescent lights, loud as humming-birds.He scrapes a metal folding chair across the floor and sets it next to his desk.
    â€œOkay. Are you a citizen?
¿Es usted ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América?
”
    â€œA citizen?”
    â€œSí, Americano, de dónde eres.
You speak English okay, but I need to ask anyway.”
    Anyone who works on the street knows there’s a rule in L.A. the cops have: Special Order 40, or what the
trabajadores
call
“santo cuarenta.”
The cops can’t stop you if they think you’re an illegal, only if they think you’re an illegal about to commit a crime. This is to encourage illegals to come forward if they have information about a crime. They also can’t hold you for more than twenty-four hours if the one thing they’ve got on you is that you’re an alien. It’s tougher in L.A. for illegals now, meaning cops have to ask you where you’re from no matter what. But as long as you lie and tell them you’re from here, they won’t check your background or report you to immigration. As long as you lie.
    â€œÂ¿Es usted ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América?”
he asks again.
    As long as you lie.
    â€œHello?
¿Es usted ciudadano?
”
    Everything I have earned in this life by lying, I have lost. By lying.
    â€œSir, I’m not going to ask you again.
¿Es usted ciudadano?
”
    The cop took down the story, asked me to sign a written statement, then turned me over to central processing, where the facts of my illegal status were noted on a long sheet of ruled paper. I had no birth certificate, no proof my daughters were citizens, no legal paperwork, no official state ID cards, no passports, no check stubs or electric bills—nothing to establish that I’d been in this country for years. I had lived in that invisible space where people like me live, the placebetween darkness and blindness where you try to make a life and everything is paid for in cash and sweat.
    A public defender tried to attach me as a material witness in an ongoing murder investigation to halt my deportation, but Tenant, Adam, and Diego’s body couldn’t be located, and aside from the bloody sledgehammer, my statement was the single piece of evidence they had. The case was declared inactive, and I could be deported to Mexico right away.
    â€œDon’t worry,” my public defender said. “You can be back in Los Angeles by tomorrow night. We’ll get you home.” But where was home?
    Before sunrise we were corralled, our wrists cuffed in plastic twist ties like the necks of garbage bags, and shuffled onto a long, olive green bus with iron mesh on its windows and a steel partition between us and the driver. The bus drove through Downtown, an abandoned area with plenty of room, until it reached a steep freeway overpass, which we had to speed up on to get to driving speed. It was the way an airplane must feel taking off—speed, force, and elevation—and I got that twisted knot in my stomach again, that feeling I had when, over the ledge, I saw Diego’s body.
    Laid out in front of the dawn like a rug made of jigsaw pieces was Los Angeles. Through the wire-mesh window screens, endless fly strips of houses,
homes,
and the skeletons of those yet to be built; naked mounds of land that would soon be smothered by new homes, built with the hands, and on the bones, of the old landlords,