Cocky Biker(17)

With tears in my eyes I nodded, but I was lying. I didn’t really understand.

Not until I was older.

My mother was taught English by my Grandmother, who died before I was conceived. Her father died, too, during a raid on the drug cartel’s home where he worked and lived. He was one of the bad guys. Her brother died that day, too. He was her age and trying to be like their father. He died being like him.

Sofia, my mother, was very scared and alone when he found her. The men in her life had kept her sheltered, but he said he would show her great things, if she’d just trust him.

He was powerful. Charismatic. Educated about life in ways she was not. He told my mother he saw potential in her and offered to smuggle her into America.

He promised to take care of her and the baby who was on the way…me.

But when she got here, she all too quickly discovered what kind of evil he was. And she was told there was no way out. She had no money. No friends. No support.

And she had a baby to house and feed.

He manipulated her mind, but he never killed her spirit.

I was raised in a house of prostitution. I saw things a little girl never should, although the women tried to shield me as much as possible. I didn’t know why I was the only child there. Sometimes the women got pregnant but the babies always left. It was just the way things were.

When I was ten years old, my mother’s body was dragged out past my door.

At the sight of her bloody corpse, I screamed, “What happened to my mommy!? Where are you taking her?! Let her go! LET HER GO!!!”

Her limp, naked legs made a horrible scratching sound on the jagged carpet, and I grabbed onto them so hard the sheet came off. One of his thugs covered her but I’d seen more than I should have.

I completely lost it.

I begged through sobbing screeches, “DON’T TAKE HER FROM ME! MOMMY!!! MOMMY!!” And as they pushed me off and I fell to the ground, I whispered, “Don’t leave me here all alone.”

One of the other sex-slaves, a woman in her twenties from Guatemala named Louisa, yanked me back and covered my mouth. She’d seen the men begin to get irritated, and she didn’t want them to punish me. I was always getting punished, and she knew they wouldn’t spare me even that tragic day.

In a stupor, I heard three of the other women whispering in Spanish what had happened to my mother. I couldn’t understand them all the way, but I got pieces of what they were saying. And I knew ‘muerto’ meant dead. I’d heard the word used in that hellhole many times and I knew then that it wasn’t a trick. My mother was gone forever.

It was like she never existed.

There was no funeral.

There was no report made to the police.

You can’t trust the cops.

They’re in on it.

If you run for help, you’ll be tortured. Not just sent back to your country…but whipped and beaten until you can never talk again, ever. That’s what they’ll do to you.

“If I don’t find you first.”

That is what he told my mother. That is what she believed. They all did and still do.

People think human smuggling and trafficking are the same. They’re not. Smugglers get you across the border and then you have to find your own way. They don’t hold you hostage. They just get you safely here.

Traffickers use people. Make money off them. Hold them hostage with lies and threats, making them sex-slaves, sweatshop workers, sell them for ‘marriages,’ always convincing them that they can’t go to the police. Yes, it goes on here in beautiful and free America. But no one talks about it.

I have never gone to the cops with what I know. Is that because I don’t believe they can help me? Partly, yes. But really it’s because…they wouldn’t let me kill him.

“Luna, I heard what happened to your momma.”

Sniffling and terrified of the evil man, I nodded.

In the fireplace behind him, flames licked the air, his imposing profile all the more terrifying to me because of them. He was counting money – cash. Lots and lots of cash. It lay on the table in dirty stacks next to a box with more inside, and his slimy fingers relished the feel of the paper as he picked up each note one by one.

“It’s too bad. She was sought after. Beautiful, though time was starting to take a toll on her looks. But you are growing old enough to take her place, so I guess there is no real loss here…is there?”

Images of what the women had to do in this house flashed before grief-stricken ten-year-old eyes as I held my breath in terror.

He smiled hideously. “Your tits are big now, too, just like hers.” That I hit puberty at age nine was the sickest joke nature ever played.

On a low, ugly chuckle, he asked himself, “I wonder how much they’d pay for a virgin.”