Both Sides

by Gabino Iglesias

  The remains of his small fire are still ashy and warm; a cracked Motorola radio has been unceremoniously left behind in a tangle of blankets and burlap and old clothing.

  Three black jugs of sweating water still sit in the cooler shadows of the deep hole itself.

  But the Shadow Wolves who found this remote cave have chosen not to go any farther. The mysterious scout has retreated up the flanks of Baboquivari Peak, what they call Waw Kiwulik. It is their most sacred place and the home of I’itoi, the god and creator of the O’odham, who according to Josef, the lead Wolf, lives in a cave on the mountain.

  Nico doesn’t know how much Josef, wearing a Phoenix Suns T-shirt under his camo jacket and checking his iPhone, actually believes this stuff…

  But if Josef won’t go, no one will.

  Joaquin went to University of Arizona, majored in literature.

  He once admitted to Nico he wanted to be a writer but returned to the reservation to become a cop, instead. He’s got a young wife, twin boys, and maybe still writes stories in his spare time. Nico has no idea.

  The reservation is a rough place, so many struggling with addiction, poverty, despair. Drugs and the lure of easy drug money only make it worse, a constant gravitational pull. The Nation is a battleground for the U.S. government and the Mexican cartels, as the O’odham try to stay out of the line of fire.

  It’s a war they didn’t ask for, never wanted.

  No one lives here untouched, unscathed, and every family has its own stories.

  Nico thinks Joaquin’s a good cop, but he’s in a bad spot, caught between two cultures. Two worlds. The Shadow Wolves, mostly elder tribal members, are tolerant of government interference but hardly cowed by it. Surprisingly, it was this older vanguard who voted recently to allow the Border Patrol to put up IFTs on the Nation, a line of integrated fixed towers more than a hundred feet tall, festooned with night vision cameras and radars. The hope is that these electronic deterrents will force-multiply law enforcement efforts across the border, while simultaneously decreasing the need for boots-on-the-ground teams like Nico’s, or even the Shadow Wolves themselves. But it was a cadre of younger O’odham who argued vigorously against the surveillance towers, believing they’ll only undermine tribal sovereignty, when so much of it has been lost already.

  One thing the whole Nation agrees upon is they’ll never allow a physical wall to be built across their lands.

  But all Nico knows is that all these trail sensors and IFTs, the tracking and chasing, have only pushed the narcos deeper and higher into the mountains.

  As Josef says, they’re in wolf and jaguar territory now.

  The home of I’itoi.

  The Man in the Maze.

  Joaquin glasses the next ridge, freshly painted in deep shadows the color of bat wings, and thoughtfully chews on a CLIF bar.

  “It’s getting dark soon,” he says. “Time to head down.”

  “We still have daylight. An hour, maybe more. More than enough. We can grab this guy, Quino.”

  But night comes fast in these mountains, so Joaquin only shrugs; his irritating, universal gesture for yes, no, and maybe.

  “Josef’s already said no.”

  Josef and the other Wolves are kneeling apart, talking quietly in a mixture of O’odham and Spanish. They all speak perfectly fine English—Nico’s even heard Navarro singing along with Tom Petty—but out in the desert, in the presence of I’itoi, they hardly ever do.

  Nico figures they mostly do it so he can’t make out what they’re saying about him.

  “Convince him otherwise,” Nico says, nodding in Josef’s direction.

  “I can’t.” Joaquin offers Nico a CLIF bar. “And you’ll never find this guy without Josef. Let it go. Let him go. It’s been a long day. And he’s already long gone.”

  But Nico can’t either. Not now. Not sweating through his camo, tired and aching, his blood hot and pulsing fast behind his eyes. He never wanted the transfer out of Charlotte to this godforsaken place, this far corner of the world filled with furious sunlight and dust and creosote, where he’s constantly chasing shadows back and forth over the border. So, he’s decided to take this one personally. It’s shitty, thoroughly unprofessional, but the others resent his clumsy presence anyway, and he’s beyond frustrated at hunting these goddamn ghosts—at least this one fucking rabbit—thorough the mountains, forever a few moments too late.

  Always another goddamn peak or ridge behind.

  “Well, I’m gonna talk to him,” Nico finally says, leaving Joaquin to simply shrug again.

  Yes, no, maybe.

  Or better yet: Good luck.

  Josef is a big man with dark eyes and salt and pepper hair he wears in traditional rolls.

  He sports a deep half-moon scar under his left eye where a horse kicked him when he was a kid, and he has a black tribal tattoo on his chin.

  He wears a gold chain around his neck and a big Timex watch.

  He’s a tribal elder who represents the Chukut Juk District on the legislative council, and he is entrusted with handing down the himdag, the O’odham’s cultural values.

  He claims his people have been living in this desert for 10,000 years.

  He started tracking when he was nine or ten, learning it from his father. The DEA once had an open case on Josef’s father, who was both a tracker and a goddamn good smuggler.

  There are a lot of ex-smugglers and former DEA file titles in Josef’s extended family on both sides of the border.

  Nico and Josef are hardly close, despite the hours they’ve spent in the desert together. There’s a certain wariness, not quite distrust but something damn close to it, between the two men.

  Nico is the nominal task force leader but they both know Josef is really in charge—his word is law—which is why Joaquin won’t argue with the older man.

  Unlike Joaquin, Josef’s never left the reservation, not for any real length of time. He acts as if there is no world beyond these canyons and mesas, this desert valley. But despite his indifference to Nico and his overall reticence, Nico has come to respect the man’s ability. As an investigator he admires it, even if he can’t begin to explain it. Josef’s a goddamn Jedi—although he acts like he has no idea what that is—able to cut for sign through the densest thickets or scrub. Even with all the high-tech surveillance at Nico’s disposal, Josef still sees things in the land, reads the dust itself, in a way no camera or sensor can. And although Nico rejects any sort of Indian mysticism bullshit, he readily admits, as a practical matter, that he would never want Josef Montana chasing him.

  That’s why it’s particularly frustrating the Wolf has decided to pull his pack up short now.

  “Josef, c’mon, work with me here. Please. We’ve got light and time on our side.”

  The Wolves used to be near forty strong, but there’s barely a dozen of them now, often no more than a handful together at any time. They’re not all O’odham, there’s a mix of Navajo, Ogala Sioux, Kiowa, Apache. But they’re all old me—although there have been female Wolves in the past. Joaquin tells Nico there are too few younger tribal members interested in these sort of traditions now. Some start to take it up, but it’s hard to learn, nearly impossible to master, and much easier to put down for cellphones and e-cigarettes and TVs and iPads.

  The remaining Wolves watch Nico and Josef get ready to square off, and on some unseen signal, move away.

  As Navarro walks by he’s smiling and whistling to himself. Nico swears it’s “Hotel California”.

  They all know how this is going to end.

  Josef motions to the hole and the flotsam and jetsam of trash around it. “Too late now. We’re an hour behind, maybe more.”

  His voice is rough, old. Like nails in a coffee can. Navarro told Nico he used to smoke a pack a day and then gave it up.

  He looks up at the fading sun as if that decides it.

  “We can make that up,” Nico counters.

  Josef nods,
slow, deliberate. “We can.”

  Nico doesn’t miss the subtle jab. “Jesus, Josef, don’t act like I can’t keep up.”

  Josef outweighs Nico by maybe fifty, sixty, pounds. Whenever they drive somewhere together, he occupies a seat in Nico’s Durango, like a foreign army. But out here, the big man is nimble, graceful. He’s in his element and glides through the greasewood. Nico was a midfielder for his college lacrosse team, one of the fastest players at one of toughest of the positions, and still he struggles in this goddamn desert.

  Both Joaquin and Josef have reminded him it’s not about speed, it’s about knowing where you’re going.

  Their Rabbit is fast, too, and has always known exactly where to go, how to run and hide. Until today. Nico feels like they’ve finally chased him down, cornered him. There’s no more room to run and no way even Rabbit can hop over Waw Kiwulik—seven thousand feet of granite rising from the desert—and Nico can’t imagine the scout easily scaling it, either.

  Its stony face is impassive; ominous and forbidding.

  “It’s just a pile of rocks, Josef, a fucking line you’ve drawn in the sand—”

  Josef laughs, sharp, unpleasant. He puts a heavy, calloused hand on Nico’s shoulder, turning him away from the peak and back toward the sun-scorched desert below them.

  “And some lines mean just as much to you and your people.”

  “C’mon, Josef, not this tired routine again…”

  But Josef uses a free hand to point at some distant mesquite, a few rugged prickly pears and massive saguaro. The knotty, red fruit that ripens on the saguaro is important to the O’odham, and it’s harvested for three weeks in the summer, before the desert monsoon season really hits. Nico never thought about rain over the desert, but during a monsoon, the sunny skies suddenly blacken and race; they spark and shine with endless chrome lightning.

  The washes, the arroyos, churn with clay and angry water the color of blood.

  Nico and his team have been trapped on the flanks of some these peaks in lighter squalls and can only imagine what it’s like for Rabbit to face the full fury of a storm alone.

  It must be hell of a show, though.

  They roll in and roll out again, a crashing symphony, but the water dries so fast in their wake, it’s like they never passed at all.

  Josef’s continuing, still pointing this way and that. “You buy them, sell them, guard them. All these invisible lines, like your new IFTs, like your laws. And yet we are bound by them, abide by them. On one side is one thing and on the other is another, and only you get to decide this for us. But from up here, from Waw Kiwulik, it all looks the same.”

  The same invisible lines Josef are describing also cut the great mountain in half as well. The eastern face is managed by the Bureau of Land Management as part of the Baboquivari Peak Wilderness area. Waw Kiwulik’s western face is still controlled by the O’odham, who’ve been fighting to get back their whole mountain for years. But both sides are a mecca for rock climbers, and, actually, anyone can visit Waw Kiwulik. Even the O’odham only ask visitors to fill out a permit, which makes Nico only more furious that Josef is invoking this sacred bullshit—some obscure tribal myth or law—now.

  Josef’s beliefs seem to conveniently come and go just like the monsoons. For reasons all his own, he doesn’t want to follow Rabbit any farther.

  Josef finally lets Nico go. “He’s in the hands of I’itoi now. It is out of ours.”

  Nico now steels himself for an I’itoi story. He’s heard several, from Joaquin, even Navarro, but never Josef. Myths about how I’itoi made the butterflies in every color imaginable but also made them silent, because the birds were jealous of such a beautiful creature also sharing their song. Old, bastardized legends about how Spaniards once came digging for gold on Waw Kiwulik—possibly a take on the Seven Cities of Gold—and how I’itoi made the mountain swallow them whole.

  I’itoi is the Elder Brother and Waw Kiwulik is the navel of the world. The O’odham appeared from the cave after a great flood, maybe even a desert monsoon, and I’itoi exists at the edge of a great labyrinth, the maze of life. It’s an image Nico has seen on O’odham pottery, and was even made famous in a popular cable show.

  Some might say stolen, appropriated.

  But Josef claims he’s never watched that, either.

  The maze represents a man’s life; all his experiences, his choices. And like Joaquin said, Josef is choosing not to follow Rabbit up Waw Kiwulik, for whatever his reason. But he’s making that choice for Nico too, and when Josef simply falls silent—no new I’itoi tale today— Nico wants to know why.

  “Josef, Rabbit’s probably helped move fifty thousand pounds of weed over the Nation. Hundreds of kilos of meth and coke and fentanyl. Hands down, he’s the best scout the cartels have, and he’s been a royal fucking pain in our ass all summer. But now that we’ve finally got him, really got him, you’re ready to just walk away?”

  Josef blinks at him, and he usually doesn’t even blink when staring straight at the sun.

  But it’s the only answer Josef seems willing to give.

  “Wolves my ass.” Nico points at Josef. “Fuck it then, you and your so-called pack hang out down here. I’m going up after him on my own. I’ll file my sacred permit or whatever when I get back.”

  Nico knows he’s being disrespectful, belligerent. He’s making this goddamn choice, trying to goad the older man.

  “You won’t find him,” Josef says.

  “Watch me. He’s just a man, Josef, a—”

  “No,” Josef says, shaking his head, hair rolls swaying. “No. You’re wrong, Agent Costa. He’s just a boy.”

  And this stops Nico.

  Mouth open, anger still smoldering.

  He glances at the spider hole again, taking another good, long look at all the trash around the tiny campsite. It looks exactly like all the others he’s ever seen and wonders why—how—Josef can be so certain. Is it the turn of a leaf, some fresh moisture on the rocks? A faint Nike tread crossed later by a thin trail of ants only he can see.

  It’s bullshit.

  But Nico asks anyway, “How old?”

  “Fifteen, no more than sixteen.”

  Now Nico is the one who laughs, still disbelieving. “You’re really going to tell me you know that by how he walks? How he runs? You’re good, Josef, but not that good. No one is.”

  But when Josef only shrugs; when he doesn’t bother to argue or even try to explainwhen the other Wolves stare pointedly at their boots, and even Joaquin looks away—Nico suddenly gets it.

  It hits him like a storm. The only thing that makes any sense.

  “Jesus, you think he’s O’odham. A boy from the Nation. Maybe even someone you started teaching to track.”

  Josef nods, almost adds a smile. “Not a rabbit at all. A wolf pup.”

  “When did you figure this out?” Nico asks. “Or did you know all along?”

  Josef looks toward the peak, then at fresh, thin clouds scudding low over the desert; the real threat of a late monsoon blowing in. “If he’s O’odham, he’s in the maze now. There’s no need to follow him. You can’t walk his path. It’s impossible.”

  “And I’m just supposed to leave it all up to your god beneath the mountain?”

  “Or to the Nation. We will handle him, in our own way, in our own time.”

  “I’m not sure that’s good enough.”

  But Josef only nods again…as if he knew Nico would say that all along too.

  “If you do this thing, Special Agent Costa, you’re not really chasing Rabbit anymore. You’re only chasing yourself.”

  Joaquin tries to stop him.

  “Nico don’t be stupid. It’s getting dark, the weather’s turning.”

  Nico wheels on him. “Did you know too? Know Rabbit was O’odham? A fucking kid?”

  Joaquin hesitates, embarrassed. Ashamed. “I heard the others talking. They suspected.”

  “They�
�re fucking proud, Quino. One of their own, getting one over on me. And what was the end game? Let me drag my ass all over the Sonoran Desert until I got tired of it? Everyone have a good laugh? At least now I know why we were always a few steps behind, and it wasn’t because I was slowing anyone down.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  But Nico knows it is.

  “I don’t understand, Quino. I just don’t.”

  “You understand more than you know, amigo. You always have. You’ve listened, you’ve watched, you’ve learned.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now,” Joaquin agrees. And although he doesn’t say it, it’s still there: On one side is one thing and on the other is another.

  Nico will always be on the other side of that invisible line from Joaquin and Josef and the others.

  “That’s bullshit,” Nico says. “Josef doesn’t want me here. I get that. I don’t want to be here either. But I didn’t make this situation or create this border or fuck you out of your land or your history. I’ve got a job…a duty. And if you and your fucking people could handle it on your own, I wouldn’t even be here.”

  Joaquin steps back. “Not fair, amigo. Not even close.”

  “No less fair then all of you playing me for a fool. Just another fucking white man.” Nico straps his own AR-15 behind his back and re-positions his pack, eyeing the mountain ahead.

  But Joaquin’s not quite ready to stand aside. “It’s just a choice, Nico. A choice.”

  “No,” Nico says. “That’s what you don’t get. Now that I’m here, I don’t have a choice at all.”

  It’s not about speed, it’s about knowing where you’re going.

  But as darkness descends on Nico, it’s slow going all the way around.

  Painfully slow—hand over hand in some spots, as Waw Kiwulik’s sharp-toothed granite slices his palms deep. He can’t cut for shit, not like the Wolves, so he’s just guessing at Rabbit’s direction, and now the foolishnessthe futility—of this chase is painfully obvious, too.