“Three feet of concrete,” she says. “They won’t get in here.”
Nic nods. “They might wait.”
The woman shrugs. “They could.”
“You know them?”
The woman nods like she’s remembering the death of a loved one. “The Liberty Boys. I’ve seen them around. This is the first time they shot up my house, though. Not too thrilled about that.”
Nic notices Rita standing in the corner, arms crossed, looking down at the floor, the way she gets around other adults. He picks her up, presses her face to his chest, and she cries. He holds her tight, but not too tight, afraid of hurting her now that he’s done having to push her into the floor, and he puts his free hand on the woman’s shoulder and says, “Thank you…”
The woman nods. “Susan.”
“Nic. This is Rita.”
“Just the two of you?”
Nic hesitates before nodding, and Susan sees it, that chasm inside him, and reaches out and squeezes his shoulder, says, “Can she have c-a-n-d-y?”
Rita perks up a little, raising her face away from Nic’s shoulder, recognizing the series of letters, and Susan laughs.
“Smart kid,” she says.
“She loves to read,” Nic says. “She reads to me some nights, even though she’s making up most of the words. And yes, she can have some. I hate to ask since you’re already putting yourself out for us, but I left my pack upstairs. Do you have any water?”
She nods, points to the cot. “Sit.”
Nic does, and feels that weight of the world he’d been carrying for the past few weeks suddenly come off his shoulders a bit, if just for a few moments, and he wants to lie down and sleep, to just lay there with Rita and hold her and maybe even allow himself the indulgence of crying, but he doesn’t, because he can’t. Not in front of Rita.
He watches as Susan roots around until she finds a bottle of water, which she hands him, and he offers Rita a bit. She wraps her lips around the mouth of the bottle and immediately backwashes into it, and he laughs, lets her have her fill, and takes his own drink.
When they’re done, Susan is holding out a chocolate bar. It’s a wrapper he doesn’t recognize, some kind of off-brand, and Rita eyes it with suspicion until she remembers she’s four and it’s candy, so she takes it and mumbles a whispered, “Thank you.”
“Still has good manners. You’re doing a good job, Dad.” Susan sits on the far end of the cot, giving them space. “So, you headed to the border?
“Thanks.” Nic says. Rita is struggling with the wrapper so he takes the candy bar out of her hands and opens it. Considers taking a bite because his stomach is twisted up on itself, but it’s more important that Rita eat, so he hands it to her and she leans against the wall, taking small nibbles. “Border, yeah. Is it true? They still have power on the other side?”
Susan nods. “They do. Not too far from here, even.”
“Does anyone know why?”
“Some fella came through here a few weeks back,” Susan says, taking a bottle of water for herself and cracking the cap. “Some kind of scientist. According to him, the electrical grids in the US are a lot more sophisticated than down in Mexico, which actually made ours more vulnerable to that big solar flare that hit us.” She pauses, thinks. “Corona something…”
“Coronal mass ejection,” Nic says.
She snaps her finger. “That’s what he called it.” She raises her hands, like she’s cradling something. “So, there’s also a whole lot more bedrock north of the equator, and when the burst hit, all that energy wanted to go somewhere, which in the US was right into the grids. Whereas down in Mexico a lot of that energy dissipated into the soil. So essentially, the entire US grid got fried to a crisp, but Mexico came through it pretty good. I heard there are still some dark spots, but they’re a lot closer to being back online. Up here, he said it’ll be ten years at least, and that’s optimistic.” She drops her hands into her lap. “But who knows? I’m not a scientist.”
“Why are you still here?”
“Folks like you and your girl,” she says, glancing down at Rita and smiling. “People need a waypoint. Place to stop, rest up, get water. Hell, had those idiots outside not shown up, I’d probably be having this conversation with you anyway, just under less tenuous circumstances. Anyway, I moved out here for a reason. It’s quieter. Whether I have electricity or not doesn’t much change things for me.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” Nic said. “I just... I wish I knew why those assholes…,” he stops, glances at Rita, who doesn’t seem to be listening. “I don’t know why they’re after us. I thought people like that just wanted to stop folks from coming into the United States. Why would they care that I’m going the other way?”
Susan leaned forward. Took a long sip of water. Sighed hard, her body nearly deflating as she did.
“They like to say it’s because they don’t want our sweat and labor helping another country get back online,” Susan says. “They think folks ought to be here. But you know, it was never about whatever talking point they were clinging to...”
She takes a long sip of water.
“The cruelty was always the point,” she says.
She lets that hang for a moment, that pats the cot and slides to the floor, picks up a battered paperback. “Get some sleep. You look like you need it. I’ll keep watch. With any luck they’ll get bored and move on.”
Nic starts to formulate a protest, but Rita is already chewing on the last of her chocolate and curling into a ball next to him, so he kicks his legs out and wraps around her, pulling her little body tight into his, and he puts his nose into her dark, tangled hair. Says, “You are very best little girl.”
He breathes in the smell of her hair and sweat, and by the time he exhales, he’s asleep.
He dreams of running, but his legs are slow, like he’s moving through water, his feet barely touching the ground, and he leans forward, trying to use his hands too, to pull himself forward.
He dreams of faceless monsters in the desert and the low rumble of their threats. He never sees them, just knows they’re there, lurking on the edge of the shadows.
He dreams of Rita and Maritza.
He dreams of fire.
No, not a dream. Something acrid strikes his nose. He coughs. Looks up at the vent in the upper corner of the shelter, sees thin tendrils of smoke seeping through the slats. Susan, kneeling down with her back to him, is looking up at it, too. She goes back to rummaging through a foot locker, and turns around with two gas masks. “Don’t have a third.”
Nic nods. “You take one, give Rita the other.”
Susan thrust one of them at him. “It’s yours.”
Nic smiles. “Women and children first.”
“First off, that’s a bit regressive,” Susan says. “Anyway, rules have changed. I don’t have a little girl to look after. Take the damn thing, will you?”
Nic takes one and puts it over Rita’s face, fiddling with the straps until it fits her. She protests and tugs at it and he pats her, tried to keep her calm. “Please honey, just breathe deep, and don’t take it off, okay?” Then he stands and is about to hand the other mask back to Susan, but both her hands are full with the AR-15 she’s holding across her chest.
“Me and them boys out there were going to have this out sooner or later,” she says. “They suspected I was helping people like this and they been waiting for an excuse, and, well, the law don’t mean much around here these days. And I ain’t going to let them win. The reason those chickenshits are burning the place down is because they’re afraid to come in. They want us to run out.”
She opens the door of the shelter, to a basement hazy with smoke. The engines still roar outside, interrupted by the occasional hoot and holler, or the crack of a gunshot into the night sky. Susan leads them across the basement to an old shelving unit heavy with painting supplies and rusted tools. She grabs it and with a grunt and a groan she pulls it asid
e. It opens onto a dark corridor. She hands him a lantern, a small thumb of flame flicking in the middle.
“What is this?” Nic asks, peering into the void, at the smooth walls, the aged wood beams holding it up. “This looks like it’s been here for a long time.”
“It runs about a half-mile under the border and into the desert,” Susan says, checking over the gun. “If you get lucky you’ll come across the federales. They patrol the border, help people cross over, fight back against these idiots. Bit of a gamble, but hey,” she says, glancing over her shoulder, at a volley of gunshots from outside. “Pretty nice of them, considering how we used to treat their people.”
Nic raises an eyebrow at her. “Something tells me this isn’t an escape tunnel.”
Susan shakes her head. “I’ve been looking to take a chunk out of these boys for a long time now. But let’s just say...” Susan’s gaze trails off along with her voice, before snapping back. “Let’s say I have some things I’m working on making up for. And that’s why you need to keep that little girl safe.” Susan reaches down and ruffled Rita’s dark hair. “Make this count.”
“You’re going to hold them off with that?” Nic asked.
“Told you, I been waiting for this day. I got a few more surprises in store for them.” She slaps him hard on the back. “Now go on, Dad. Keep teaching her good manners.”
She turns and disappears into the smoke engulfing the basement. Nic wraps his hand around Rita’s, her little fingers disappearing into his palm, and he pulls her forward into the dark, holding the lantern ahead of him, the light barely making a dent. When he’s far enough he can’t see the basement anymore, there’s a great thump, and the tunnel shakes, dust cascading onto his shoulders, and Nic says a little prayer that Susan took out that chunk she was looking for.
When Rita starts to fall behind Nic pulls off his mask and yanks her onto his hip, holding the lantern out with the other hand, jogging until they come to the end, to an old wooden ladder leaned up against the packed earth.
He puts the lantern down next to Rita and tells her to wait and she nods, and he climbs up, presses his hands above him and feels plywood. He pushes hard, ends up with a mouth full of sand, but gets the thing aside and sees the sky above him, starlight scatted like diamonds. He reaches down and pulls up Rita and takes a fleeting moment to point up, to show it to her, because he wants her to see something beautiful.
“Aren’t we lucky, to have met someone so nice tonight? And don’t the stars look pretty?” Nic asks, looking at her, desperate almost, and when she smiles his heart fills up, and he’s glad to know that this night may include the seed of something good that might one day grow to blot out these feelings of terror.
“Daddy?” she asks. Then, she states it: “Daddy.”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
She leans into Nic and says, “You are the bery best daddy.”
Nic swallows hard. Almost shatters, but holds it together. He takes that swell of emotion and uses it as fuel. His body simply forgets how exhausted he is, how long it’s been since he’s eaten. He climbs out of the hole, hears those engines in the distance. Behind him can just make out the smoke against the sky, and the twinkle of the flaming house, red and orange flapping in the air like a flag.
Far in front of him, twin beams of light bounce in unison as they travel over the rough terrain. And beyond that, more starlight. In the last several weeks of traveling south through a powerless America, he hadn’t seen anything close to this much light.
Everything is muddy and dark, so he holds Rita close and runs hard in the opposite direction of the engines, focusing on the ground, looking for the smoothest path he can. He knows if he stumbles or falls, twists or breaks an ankle, that’ll be the end of it.
And he wonders, briefly, if him having a child with him would make any difference to the men chasing him. The men whose faces he hasn’t even seen, whose lives he had never touched, whom he had never wronged or even interacted with, but who wanted him dead none the less.
It wouldn’t matter, though. It never did.
The cruelty was the point.
With the rumbled threat of the engines growing behind him, Nic runs harder, toward those bouncing beams of light, and the promise he made Maritza.
WAW KIWULIK
By J. Todd Scott
“They can’t,” Joaquin says, glancing back at the camouflaged knot of men behind him, circling the spider hole.
“No, they won’t,” Nico answers, his eyes—his anger and frustration—hidden by dark Oakleys.
But not well.
Joaquin, his grey eyes now fixed on the fiery ceiling of a late afternoon Sonoran sky, shrugs.
“They’re Shadow Wolves,” Nico pushes. “This is what they do, Quino. When one wolf finds the prey, it calls in the pack. All that shit.”
“No,” Joaquin says, “This is what they choose to do.”
“But not that?”
Joaquin only shrugs again, shouldering his AR-15, staring at the sunset.
Nico knows he’s fallen into some sort of mystical, circular O’odham logic…as round and deep and mysterious as the empty spider hole it took their team three days to find.
He’ll never quite get it—and never fucking escape it.
“What about you?” Nico asks, although he’s already resigned to the answer.
“I choose to stay out of it, amigo,” Joaquin says with a smile, and a resigned look of his own he doesn’t even try to hide.
They check coordinates and take a water break six hundred feet above the desert floor in the long, dusky shadows of nearby Baboquivari Peak.
The rugged mountain is the most sacred site on the Tohono O’odham Nation.
More than two million acres of O’odham land stretch in all directions below them; raw, unforgiving, southern Arizona desert. The Sonoran Desert. The color of pale bone and dried blood; crisscrossed haphazardly by torchwood copal and mesquite and scrub and calcified ridge lines. Blocky mesas rise like teeth in the distant horizon. From up here, Special Agent Nico Costa can see into Sonora, Mexico, itself. The O’odham have always lived on both sides of the border, even though their ancestral lands were carved up more than 150 years ago by the Gadsden Purchase.
A sale no one bothered to tell them about.
As compensation, tribal members have been historically allowed to move back and forth freely over the border for religious pilgrimages; to visit southern family members, to buy and trade and sell. O’odham culture is a unique mix of Native, American, and Mexican. Sells, Arizona, the capital of the Nation, has both a Basha’s grocery store and the Gu Achi trading post.
Supposedly, in O’odham, Sells translates to “Tortoise got wedged.”
But over time, immigration and drug issues started to take precedence over tribal freedoms, and the US government forced them to use a handful of loosely monitored gates, little more than steel and concrete posts and wire in the scrub.
Now, they’re down to one—the San Miguel gate. Or as the O’odham call it, the Wo’osan Gate.
With a tribal ID card, tribal members can still cross the border at Wo’osan, but it bothers the O’odham they have to prove anything at all; that they need to justify their ancestral right-of-way across land that has always been theirs.
Every crossing is like cutting your arm to show the blood beneath your skin.
Once called the Pima, or the Papago, they call themselves the O’odham.
The Desert People.
Yet, even as the O’odham continue to adhere to laws they didn’t make and borders they didn’t draw, the cartels—the narcos—indiscriminately use their ancient and sacred trails. The reservation and Mexico share about seventy-five miles of border, and the narcos claim much of it as their own, spinning a tangled spiderweb of smuggling routes on both sides of it. They employ human mule trains and blacked-out, vehicles stolen from Phoenix and Tucson—even horses—to move coke, meth, marijuana, and fentanyl through the
desert. They leave their dead behind in the unforgiving terrain, and some of have taken to marrying tribal members to increase their access to the reservation. And although the O’odham have always pushed back at these incursions, even allowing a broader U.S. border enforcement presence and endless sensors and cameras across their sacred lands, it’s never enough.
We always want more, Nico thinks. Just like the narcos.
Like this specialized border task force, made up of federal agents like Nico himself, and tribal police like Joaquin, and the last few Shadow Wolves—the infamous Native American trackers. The narcos put spotters high up on the peaks and ridges, young men armed with two-way radios and binoculars and even NVGs, to help guide drug caravans over the border, routing them safely past Border Patrol units and helicopters. They hide in caves, these spider holes, for days on end, drinking bottled water and eating Spam and beans and tortillas and oranges and scanning both the endless sky and desert.
They make more money for their families in a week than they’d make otherwise in a year.
Last month, Nico’s task force found a granite rock outside a cave that had been marked like a monthly calendar, each day gone by scratched off with a blade into the quartz.
They’ve been on the hunt for this most recent redoubt for days, and Nico figures they’re less than thirty minutes behind the scout who was hiding here. They’ve nicknamed him Rabbit, something that sounds like “tobi” in O’odham, because of the man’s small footprint and light tread. The Wolves joke that he hops across the desert, hiding behind the saguaros and barrel cacti. They’ve been after Rabbit for weeks now, almost all summer, and he’s fast, elusive, and very, very good.
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