Both Sides

by Gabino Iglesias

  “What can I do for you, Milly?”

  “I have an unidentified decedent out by El Hundido. Need your help.”

  “How exactly?”

  “Access to all the 911 calls bounced over to CBP in the last forty-eight hours. He had a phone with him, it’s possible he dialed for help.”

  “You know Fraley would have to request that.”

  “Fraley’s out of office.”

  “And so here you are.” Salgado sucked the last of his soda and dropped his cup on the Formica—enough was enough. “You know what? You was right earlier. We do need to talk. I heard from Agent Maloney. He tells me this is the third time this year you’ve interceded in his duties. That was the word he used: interceded. You know what that means? It means fucked with, Milly. I get that you don’t like him but he’s a good agent—”

  “—Tom Maloney is an asshole.”

  “Maybe so. But you gotta stop this, I’m not kidding. Your little Sheriff Department ID is good for answering the phone and buying toner for the printer. That’s it. Now we all know what your son did for us, and I don’t forget that…”

  Her glare was a dead end.

  Salgado softened with a sigh. “Milly, what you’re doing here? It’s dangerous.”

  “This state doesn’t identify deceased border crossers individually. John Doe here is John Doe. What am I meant to do, nothing?”

  “The next time Maloney reports you, I have to send it upstairs.”

  Félix arrived with the food. “Jou’ wan’ for another Coke, Yoe?”

  Salgado shook his head. He kept his eyes down on his chile until he was gone.

  Milagros leant forward. “The ranch owner says he heard choppers flying low and hard two nights ago. Chase and scatter, right? Prevention through deterrence?”

  “Come on, what do you want me to say? It’s sad?”

  “Two nights ago that body was a kid, Joe. A kid. He had a name. A family.”

  “You jump into a fire pit, a name don’t make you any less burnt.”

  “I want to talk to recent detainees up at Aguayo County Processing. If anyone crossed over with him, that’s where they’ll be.”

  Salgado laughed almost with admiration. “I can’t give you the 911 calls and I sure as hell can’t let you in there, Milly. So, if we’re done here…”

  Milagros finished her coffee and sucked her teeth for the last of its flavor. “How’s your son doing?”

  He looked down. “Jack’s… changed.”

  Milagros hadn’t wanted to go there but he had given her no choice. “Is he getting help?”

  Salgado nodded. “I find him sometimes… in the middle of the night. He’s out digging in the yard for IEDs. Thinks he’s back in Kirkuk half the time. He still wakes up in the middle of the night screaming your boy’s name.” He looked up at her now with red eyes.

  “But he’s alive. My Rafael? When things got bad, you know what he did? He interceded. You know what that means? It means you owe me. Not just for a fourth time. Or a fifth time. But the rest of your life, Joe.”

  Salgado contemplated his chile, steam curling up from the deep green and red sauces—Christmas-style.

  Milagros looked away and out of the window at the scorched hills above town. There was only dogbane, smoke tree and the occasional desert flower.

  “Milly I… I need this job. I can’t help you without Fraley’s agreement. I’m sorry.”

  “Then enjoy your food.”

  The Medical Examiner’s Office was in the state capital, a three-hour drive away. As usual, Milagros skipped the sign-in process and entered through the rear, into the loading area. The whiteboard on the wall was split into cells brimming with numbers, nationalities, coordinates—corresponding to an unidentified body in the morgue. Beneath almost every cell there was a code relating to the lockers opposite which contained the items recovered with the remains. It was death’s own lost property office: toothbrushes, photographs, cell phone chargers, coins, rosaries, medications. A separate kid-sized whiteboard from Target had been affixed alongside it, exclusively for data relating to lone skulls.

  When Milagros had started her work, it was the brutal reality of biology that had shocked her, the unspoken obvious: people had jawbones, people had hips, spinal columns, different colored eyes. But after a few years, the physical impact had faded.

  Yet the lockers never failed to break her heart. They were a silent memorandum to the fact that human beings made choices in life—which shoes to wear, which gods to follow, which loves to cherish at the end. Each locker was a sarcophagus decorated with the ornaments of cataclysm.

  Milagros centered herself and looked at the stainless steel table in the center of the room. The body bag was already out. Rudi’s items had been stacked neatly next to him. They, too, would be bound for the lockers.

  A door opened and Carly Hanlon, the Medical Examiner, entered. She was a tall woman in scrubs, her only visible features indigo blue eyes and sinewy, freckled forearms. Giving Milagros a nod, she unzipped the body bag and got to work.

  “Okay, death by dehydration but you already knew that much… Some pretty gnarly ankle injuries here, likely consistent with razor wire. Where was he found?”

  “Out by El Hundido. The nearest border barrier deploys concertina wire.”

  “Yeah, that jives with these injuries. El Hundido, huh? Ranch land?”

  Milagros nodded.

  “Figures. These blisters are severe. Even with a hundred gallons of water he wouldn’t have made it far.” She inspected the grubby sneakers. “Full of fine sand. Would have been like walking through burning glass.” She inspected the label. “Panam—that’s a Mexican brand?”

  “Uh-huh. And probably the kind you buy in a city.”

  “So could be a clue to work with, no?”

  “But, Doc, once you factor out the swelling, they look about two sizes too big.”

  Hanlon peered at the boy’s feet again. “You’re right.”

  “He probably didn’t start his journey with them. Who knows what happened to make him switch up.”

  “What about this?” She held up the soccer jersey, once white, now stained with blood and vomit, caked with mud. Turning it around, they saw the large blue H over the heart.

  “Honduras,” Milagros said. “But no name or number on the back.”

  Hanlon proceeded to inspect the body inch by inch, jotting down notes. Approximate age, height, weight, cavities, fillings, medical devices, birthmarks, scars, tattoos.

  Rudi’s body gave her very few clues.

  But then Hanlon felt something beneath the side-seam of his jeans. She made an opening in the denim, then prized out the gleaming object with forceps. It was a gold wedding band. “Stitched it in to hide it from the coyotes?”

  “Or whoever else.”

  “Is it just me or is he a little on the young side to be married?”

  “Probably wasn’t his ring, Doc. Maybe his mother’s. He would’ve pawned it once he got to ABQ or Phoenix or wherever he was dreaming of.”

  Hanlon logged the wedding ring and put it with the rest of the belongings. As she worked, Milagros scanned through the photos she had taken that morning. She spent a long time looking at the boy’s hummingbird.

  “Colibrí,” she whispered. “¿A dónde ibas?”

  “What you got?”

  “Just this. He painted this on a rock near where he died—” Milagros handed over the camera.

  “Kid could paint.”

  “Zoom in right there. You see he signed it?”

  “‘Rudi’.”

  “Uh-huh. Which probably made him a Rodolfo.”

  “Rodolfo from Honduras who could paint—not a lot to go on, Milly.”

  They both contemplated the boy in silence for a while.

  “When I was little my grandmother used to tell me, ‘If you see a hummingbird, someone on the other side is trying to send you a message.’ Thing is, we got a lot of them in Aguascalientes. In the mornings, I would
look out my window as a little kid and would see them flitting from flower to flower. I asked my grandmother about it once. If the hummingbird is a message from the dead, how come I see so many, Abuelita? She laughed and said ‘Milagros, the dead have a lot to tell us.’”

  Hanlon smiled sadly, then began to zip the body bag back up. Something made her stop. She ran her finger along the dead boy’s head. It came back grey and bloody. Flipping on her lamp, Hanlon inspected the scalp.

  “Fairly deep cut right here. Looks infected, also. Some kind of sawdust or concrete around the wound?”

  Milagros peered at it. “Someone hit him with something?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. Maybe he fell.” Hanlon picked up Rudi’s hat and looked inside. “Yeah, same greyish markings. Some blood too.”

  “Strange. I walked through that ranchland, all different kinds of terrain—” Milagros looked down at the dusty scuff marks on her own pants. “Nothing that color on me.”

  Hanlon’s cell phone buzzed in her pocket. “Milly, it’s late. I gotta head home. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”

  They embraced. “God bless you, Doc.”

  At the cold first blush of dawn, Milagros Posada entered Mexico. The city was in an arid basin surrounded by mountains. Up on the largest, a colossal message had been carved with lime, a knock-off Hollywood sign:

  THE GRASS WIZENS

  THE FLOWER WITHERS

  BUT THE WORD OF GOD LASTS FOREVER

  At its grand old heart, Ciudad Cabral was made up of elegant colonias of belle époque townhouses where governors and bankers had once lived. There were nice schools and good restaurants. Students from the art school painted poetry on the walls of communal gardens:

  —La melodía de tu mirada baila con los acordes de mi alma—

  Normal lives could be lived beyond the sound of gunfire and screams. Here, Ciudad Cabral was not defined by its horrifying homicide statistics or black ribbons tied to doors.

  But Milagros had come for Colonia Frontera, a city within a city, the square mile that leeched onto the border crossing. Here, meth was cheaper than five minutes on a donkey painted in zebra drag. Teeming slums pushed up against the border wall, built out of American refuse, old garage doors, rusted metal sheets, useless car parts. People lived on top of one another, in rickety club sandwich houses made of whatever they could repurpose.

  The population was made up of the rejected, the deported, the denied. Many had once come to find work in the border factories. Trapped in a loop of low-pay and hard work, far from home, they had turned to cristal. The drug raged through the city like a river, wrapped in tiny balloons of varying color, each one denoting its cartel producer. Here, the perfume of cooking oil and spices mixed in with the sweet window-cleaner smell of cristal. Colonia Frontera was a chaos of colorful breeze blocks, crooked satellites, playing children, comatose hopheads, blood puddles. Voices carried. Music blared. Laughter and screams could be heard from the storm drains, from the ñongos, little bunkers made in the hills of silt and trash.

  Standing up on a hill, Milagros surveyed the sub-city. On the broken brick wall across the street, somebody had painted in black:

  ¡BIENVENIDOS A COLONIA FRONTERA!

  POBLACION: DEMASIADO

  The little houses were most densely built nearest the border gates itself. Leading away from the crossing, they became more sparse. The paradox was not lost on her: the closer they were to escaping this place, the more Colonia Frontera became a place.

  Following the river east with her eyes, Milagros saw the place she was looking for. On the fringes of the shanty town, the old jade-colored warehouse with a new sign:

  SOLUCIONES TELEFÓNICAS INTERNACIONALES

  As she made her way down the hill and towards the river, a series of men in hats had offered her safe passage to America.

  “Cross now! With this president, if you don’t act fast, you’ll never make it in.”

  The sun rose morosely behind dove-grey cloud.

  Eddie Nieves struggled with his tie in the reflection of a puddle outside the call center. A cigarette bobbled on his lips as he mumbled to himself.

  “Eduardo,” Milagros called.

  The cigarette dropped into the puddle. He had lost weight, the teenage linebacker she remembered replaced by a tall, skinny man. But it was how old he looked that shocked her most. It hardly seemed impossible that he could have been in her son’s grade.

  “Milly?”

  They embraced amid laughter and tears, without words but both aware how different things were since they had last seen each other. He let her straighten his tie, then led her to a café nearby. It was just a few plastic tables inside a repurposed wedding tent but the place was packed. A European soccer match on a pirated stream played on the TV while corridos blared through tinny speakers. Though the words were sad, the accordion and trumpets were jubilant. That was México, Milagros thought. Forever wringing what joy it could from life’s pain.

  She chose the table at the back. Pink cursive had been woven into the canvas behind it:

  ♥︎ KELSI & ANTHONY — CONGRATULATIONS ♥︎

  The waiter came and Eddie ordered them two coffees.

  Milagros nodded. “Your Spanish has improved.”

  “Eh, just a couple phrases.”

  “You’re sure you won’t be too late for work?”

  “Nah, they won’t can me, my English is too good—” He cleared his throat and put on an exaggerated smile. “Good morning, sir. I see that you have a 2010 Chevy Cruze in your name and I just wanted to check that you were aware your lease was coming up?”

  She smiled. He had always been a funny boy. She had liked having Eddie come to her house because she knew it would mean hearing Rafael laugh all night. When she went to wake them in the morning, she’d swear they were still smiling in their sleep. For Eddie, he was like a brother. He would have followed him to the ends of the earth.

  And when the time came, he had. Milagros had to admit it had made her feel better, knowing that Eddie would be shipping out with her son. If anyone would keep him safe it was the linebacker with rage in his stomach and love in his heart. But looking through the plastic window now at the dead river, she recalled her grandmother’s words, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

  “How are you doing, Milly?”

  “You know.”

  The coffees arrived. Feeling the heat curl up in her face, Milagros realized how exhausted she was. “What about you, Eduardo?”

  He smiled sadly down into his cup with a shrug. He hadn’t lost the gesture since childhood. The type of kid who’d dive headlong into a bee swarm on a dare but couldn’t look his best friend’s mother in the eye.

  “I’m here. Still waiting, I guess. Sometimes I get hopeless. But then I think about what you used to say: to the bad times a good face. I’m glad for those memories, you know?”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you, hijo.”

  “Nah, you don’t get to be sorry. Not you, Milly. You only ever given the world your love.”

  They both sipped their coffee in a maze of memories.

  “Been meaning to give your this.” Eddie took out his wallet and opened a secret compartment. Milagros picked up the crumpled photograph of Rafael and Eddie. They were both shirtless against a wildly violet Iraqi sunset, a football balancing on Eddie’s head, her son toasting the photographer with a can of Coors.

  “That was Kirkuk. The night before… You know. I wanted to give this to you sooner but, well, I guess deportation kinda threw me against the wall.”

  Seeing her son’s face was a rush of nauseating pain and love. She knew Rafael’s face as well as she knew anything in this world yet the shock of his beauty always reduced death to a fairytale. How could this boy, so strong, so vital, no longer be with her? Without having the words to ask for it, she put the photograph in her purse.

  “You know, Milly, since they sent me here I done two things. One, learn Spanis
h. Two, I started praying.” Eddie laughed. “You wouldn’t have believed that one, huh? Back when you was vouching for me in the principal’s office?”

  “Well, if He’s there, He hears you.”

  “I hope so, right? Every night, I ask Him to look out for Raf.”

  Milagros finished her coffee. She hadn’t come for this. “Eddie, hijo. Listen to me, I need your help.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “You know where El Hundido is?”

  “I ain’t passed through in years, but I know it, sure.”

  “I want to speak to the pollero that runs the route into that land.”

  “Oh, Milly… I don’t do that no more. That was a few months when they first sent me here. But it was bad. Real bad. Now I been at the call center two years. If I wanna get back home, I can’t have no convictions.”

  “I’m not asking for you to take any risks. I just need a name.”

  “You don’t understand—these people will kill you if you go there asking questions.”

  She fixed him with her eyes, same as she did when he had gone too far as a kid. “Two men came to my door, Eduardo. One was a medic, in case I fainted. The other one spoke. ‘Milagros Posada? I have been asked to inform you that your son has been reported dead in Kirkuk, Iraq, May 27th, at eleven-hundred hours. He was killed by enemy fire while attempting to protect his fellow troops. On the behalf of the Secretary of Defense, I extend to you and your family my deepest sympathy in your great loss. Ma’am, Rafael is an American hero.’”

  Tears stung Eddie’s eyes. “I’m alive today because of Raf. Jack, too. A few other guys. But if I send you to the smugglers… Look, I can’t have that on my shoulders, Mil.”

  She took out her phone now, brought up the picture of Rudi, dead under the bush. “On that day those men came, my life ended. Do you understand that? Now I want you to look at this—” she handed over her phone. “His name is Rudi. The Medical Examiner thinks he was between thirteen and sixteen years old. He died in a desert, too. But his mom didn’t get any flag, didn’t get any visit. She doesn’t know where he is. That’s what I do now, Eddie. That’s the only reason why I’m still here. I’ve come to make that phone call.”