From Gene’s Notebook

Shadow Walkers, Hunched and Fast.

Mansions, right out of Gone With the Wind, on Missouri bluffs above the brown Mississippi.

Who the hell is in them?

Pretend slaveowners?

Make-a-killing lawyers?

No one is outside; the porches huge, the lawns green and sloped; the trees spreading.

One car with Florida plates. A new second-home summer location?

Decades ago, I’d be interested in the columns, the interior wood, the out buildings; now, I don’t give a shit, and I skip Missouri’s bloody Civil War battles, more like a four-year family versus family killing and robbing time, and I skip the lingering Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher and Nigger Jim and steamboat and distant patchy green islands out in the swirl to what I fast learn: the Mexican immigrants, minus papers, the thousands who do luxury landscaping and orchard work, even work in the returning vineyards ….

It’s a Sunday, a sweltering twilight, and the black-Seminole tells me, “I go to Mexico every several months, saving every cent I make in this place (Pizza Hut, and here’s a road tip, PH salads, pay for one and eat as many bowls as you want, and I do) to see my husband.

“I met him here in this river town; he was a gardener, and one day, the Border Patrol, they’re all over, in and out of uniform, picked him up, and flew him back to Nayarit.”

She’s tall, heavy and she’s the first back-Seminole I’ve met.

“I’m from down near Del Rio, Texas, where the Seminoles, who were moved west went, at least those who didn’t go to Oklahoma.”

I want to hear more, but five teen girls have come into Pizza Hut, and a family of four behind me is getting impatient with this woman of history lingering over my table and me; she goes back to the counter ….

And all that salad took most of my pizza appetite, along with those dipped-in-sauce salty breadsticks, so half my pizza is left.

She comes the bill. I downing my fifth glass of water, dehydrated and exhausted I am (And that is another story, one full of sex and skirts and water and rivers and floods and loggers and fainting); I wearily ask her to box the pizza; she does and I leave.

Not much twilight. Still hot. The slaves, it’s Sunday, rest day a century and a half ago, and that’s what I read; but this is not about slaves ….

All around, the mansions, no one, no one, on the lawns …and then from a side street - yes, there are small houses and trailers, still not consigned to the fields and woods to the rolling west, come two dark men, young.

I head towards them, and they start to jog, and I yell in Spanish. Espere; tengo pizza; le gusta pizza?

They stop running, and I catch up.

Aqui! Tomenla. Skinny and dark, they extend their hands and I give the boxed pizza to one.

They tell me a little, in Spanish, how one works illegally as a landscaper and the other up river in metal-box making plant, where he arrives each day in a van that picks other illegals and him up and then takes them back.

They’re from Oaxaca, and don’t want to say anything else; they have to know the guy back in Nayarit, and if not him, someone just like him.

They’re in deep shadows, under the leafy trees in front of the mansions, going farther and farther east, not to a mansion, to a room, to eat the pizza, to get ready for the landscaping truck at dawn and the box van at dawn, and it can’t be too far off- as the twilight is sitting over the town, the mansions, the river, the bluffs, and even the small houses and trailers ….

…near my room, a Montana union woman - pipefitter - is sitting outside, drinking wine, talking on a cellphone, petting a brown dog, her car with a sticker “Together the union works, apart it falls.”

She waves, and motions me to come back when she’s finisher her call. When I do, she’s in her room, and I’m glad she is. I don’t knock.

From the river and mansions and black-Seminole, and even Civil War and slave history, I have enough, and then there are the two skinny guys with the PH box, passing the mansions in shadows ….