Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  * * *

  The NADA session ends and we’re clunking again, through alleys and the wrong way down one-way streets. Bemis generally drives like a maniac but that’s more often than not how traffic flows in this city and he’s just going with it, over medians and through stop signs and up a hillside in the northwestern part of the city to a slum barrio and Casa Tabor, home of Father Peter and Sister Betty. They’ve been instrumental in helping Bemis make the connections, build the trust necessary to start needling people in chapels. NADA is not a church-sanctioned practice, but it is not yet banned, and when you know the right people, you can ease it in here and there.

  Father Peter and Sister Betty have been in Juárez since 1995, helping out wherever the archdiocese needs them. Casa Tabor is their home and ministry, a shelter and a clinic, a respite and a rebellion, one house in a hilltop slum with the dual purpose of spreading the word of God and indicting U.S. policies that destroy the hardest-working Juarenses. Father Peter just turned ninety and Sister Betty is only a decade behind him but they haven’t slowed down much in their devotion to the Church or their railing against NAFTA. We drink tea and they rail. God is good but the Free Trade Agreement has wrecked small Mexican farms and the livelihoods of all those farmers. God is good but the Free Trade Agreement has brought to Juárez countless factories of American companies that pay 90 percent less than they would north of the border even though the cost of living in Juárez is only about 10 percent less than it is in the big cities of Texas. God is good but the American willingness to pay for drugs … to pass out guns … God is good … but the human …

  Betty has painted a whole cosmos on the cinder blocks of the wall outside their kitchen window, a mandala of sorts, great swirls of blackness and swirls of stars and even the gritty gray of the unpainted cinder block seems pulled into the domain of the metaphysical. I marvel at the wall’s ability to stand despite the weight and warp of infinity. The universe is beautiful, Betty says. That’s why we must destroy the world. She says it with a smile and I know she means only to destroy the world of evil and sin and all that NAFTA bullshit but that doesn’t make her words sound any less apocalyptic.

  She’s got another wall, opposite the cinder-block cosmos, painted with murals unfurling like scrolls, murals with paintings of doves and so many brown faces in anguish and at the center of each scroll is a big space filled with a tiny font, thousands of handwritten names—all the murdered and disappeared of Juárez.

  Betty tries to write all the names, tries to record everything taken from the city by The Violence. Almost the entire wall is full, four scrolls maybe three feet wide and five feet tall, the writing so small that all the ink looks like nothing, like maybe just some splatter from one of the swirls of the cosmos on the opposite wall got a bit out of hand, but when you get close, when your nose is almost touching the splatter, there is a name, or a word to let you know there was a name. Yolanda Tapia. Unidentified. Jorge Chaparro. Unidentified. Unidentified.

  Betty tries to write a few names a day. She asks visitors to write a few names. And still she has stacks of pages of names that she needs to add to the scrolls. She asks if I want to add a name. She consults her many pages, riffles through them looking for where she last stopped. The next name on the list is Joshua Reyes. How about that, she says. Your name is Joshua. I take the marker and add his name to the list. Later I’ll notice his name already on a scroll. It is tough to keep track of so many names. She will never catch up, will run out of wall or time, she worries, because she is getting old. I won’t tell her that Joshua’s name is already on the wall. She must have lost her place in the pages, doubled back and repeated. What does it matter? He might as well have died twice. Efficiency and accuracy are not the point. I don’t guess she aims to finish. This is not a memorial in the way the Vietnam Wall is a memorial, the names stuck in stone because the war is over and the killing done. This is an act of meditation, a constant engagement with what has been lost, what is being lost in a world that must be destroyed.

  Also in the yard, between the cosmos and the scrolls of the dead, is a serpentine path of stones, a labyrinth Betty has made for the women she counsels, for them to pace through after sixteen-hour days in the maquiladora or after beatings by their husbands or after the murder of their children. I walk the labyrinth. Being in its curl is comforting, makes me feel small but not lost, more like held or even carried. Like maybe a fetus is not so different from a labyrinth. I follow its spiraling path that makes me face the cosmos and then the scrolls of the dead and then the cosmos and then the scrolls of the dead and I spiral all the way to the center, where there is no clear way to face at all.

  April 4, in the Year of Our Lord 2015

  Another labyrinth, this time in the desert of Chaparral, New Mexico, with people who call themselves The Ruined. Those countless ones, they say, throughout the ages who have encountered the presence of the living God to such an extent that they are ruined for the things of this world. The Ruined is a collection of a half dozen families who’ve removed themselves from society, who joke often about how others see them as a cult. We are not a cult, say The Ruined, laughing.

  Tomorrow is Easter and Bemis and I will head to the Valley of Juárez for dinner with some pastoral workers but tonight we are spiraling. These labyrinths are popping up everywhere along the border, little manifestations of confusion and the need to have a path, however circuitous, through it all. I’m supposed to be meditating on my relationship with Jesus as we spiral but I think of a murder just written up in El Diario. Yesterday in colonia Independencia II, near Santa Margarita, a young couple stabbed an old man to death after trying to steal his TV, probably to pawn for dope money. Maybe this kind of news is good, not the fact of the murder but the style: no unidentified men with automatic weapons jumping out of a Toyota, no beheading, no duct tape, just your run-of-the-mill junkies-in-love stabbing that could happen in any city, the kind of thing El Diario might never have reported in recent years.

  Bemis currently lives with The Ruined because of some turmoil at home with his wife. He doesn’t offer many details about the situation and I don’t pry. I don’t ask if she’s grown weary of his choosing to spend so many days and nights in Juárez rather than at home with her. I don’t ask if she’s had some revelation about acupuncture as a sham. I don’t ask anything except how long he thinks he’ll be with The Ruined. I don’t know, he says. I like it here. Bemis and I have a simple understanding, that he will spread the needles far and wide and I will follow them and we will not worry too much about each other as humans. The arrangement is easy but also strange because his job as a healer is to empathize with people and my job as a writer is to empathize with people and yet we share a slight distrust of each other that keeps us from being pals. I have my suspicions about whether his needles heal. He has his suspicions that I will write that I have my suspicions about whether his needles heal. So I don’t ask any of the questions I should to help you empathize with Bemis but this is not a story about Bemis. He says, I don’t want to be another gringo parading around like I know what’s best for everyone.

  His long hair is uncombed and his clothes wrinkled and his eyes are so tired as he makes his way through the labyrinth. Perhaps by way of letting you know Bemis a little bit better I can offer this observation: his name is one you might recognize from toilet seats. Well, it’s not his name exactly but for several weeks after I met him I felt I recognized his name and then one day there it was on the bottom of a toilet seat. The Bemis company so dominates that market they own the domain name toiletseats.com. They manufacture nearly half of the toilet seats in use in America. Your bare ass has been on a Bemis is the slogan they don’t use but could. It’s the only thing keeping you from falling in. To be fair, the acupuncturist I’ve been following around is not of that particular Bemis clan. But something about the association, when it strikes me, helps me understand him so much better, like he is of the category of things that you might never notice because they do their job quie
tly, a seemingly unremarkable entity that you will probably never fully appreciate for keeping you, and everyone you ever have to ride in a car or elevator with, from being soaked in some serious shit.

  But also out of fairness I dig a bit deeper looking for a less crass association to cement to his name, some other image to have in mind so that I’m not constantly smirking at him when I think of it. Bemis originates from the Old French beau and mes, meaning “beautiful mansion,” a phrase that originally denoted not just a house but something like a wedding hall, a fancy place to live but also to conduct religious rites outside the church, somewhere comfortably secular that also, when necessary, has the guts to house the Holy Spirit. Well, alright. Somewhere in the collision of toilet seats and secular chapels is Ryan Bemis, an unassuming blue-collar type with a bent toward the spiritual. Somebody who just does what needs to be done. Somebody who more than a few people have told me is an honest-to-God healer. Somebody whose soul pretty well fits, who keeps others from falling in too much shit. I guess that holds true whether or not his needles work.

  We spiral ourselves to exhaustion. At the labyrinth’s center, one of the youngest among The Ruined gives a sermon, a boy no older than nine. There is no conviction like the conviction of the young. I miss it terribly. The boy shakes as he recounts an encounter with God, shakes on account of both the cold night and his fiery conviction. God hugged him. He and God are pals. At the moment I can find no good reason to doubt the boy. Then The Ruined ask me to share something. I mention I’m chasing Bemis’s needles. I mention I’ve just come from Trinity, spent the morning walking around the obelisk monument that marks the location of the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb. I say it was a pilgrimage of sorts, that hundreds of us caravanned and then circled the lava obelisk like Muslims around the Kaaba but with quite a bit less intent and fervor, that I guess it wasn’t all that different from walking this here labyrinth, that I don’t guess there will be many days in my life bookended by such strange circumambulations, chasing the zenith of our technological bend toward savagery and then the nadir our technological bend toward vigor. Nukes and needles. Amen. We light some candles and send them skyward in paper lanterns and they float on and flicker off into the darkness of the star-pocked sky except for one that immediately catches fire and crashes into creosote. The bush burns. The Ruined rush over and extinguish the burning bush with stomps and then we all go to sleep.

  April 5, in the Year of Our Lord 2015

  In El Paso, Bemis and I pick up a couple of chickens for Easter dinner and cross over at Fabens, Texas. We follow Sister Maria Eugenia down into the valley. She wants to meet us at the border, escort us to Barreales. The Mexican army has moved into the Valley of Juárez in the last few weeks and they’re stopping everyone, extorting everyone, El Diario says. Our Easter birds need safe passage and the nun will provide. We follow close behind her little white jalopy of a car with wheels so thin and wobbly it looks more likely to get somewhere slithering than rolling but she manages fifty-five and has no fear. On her back window is a decal, big and faded: the Looney Tunes bird Tweety.

  At the chapel Sagrado Corazón de Jesús we sit through mass led by Padre Ramirez. Only twelve of us are in the pews. Barreales is abandoned. The whole Valley of Juárez is abandoned. The towns of Guadalupe and El Porvenir and La Esperanza, the whole fifty-mile stretch of farmland, from the eastern boundary of Juárez down along the spout of Texas, all unequivocally forsaken on the Mexican side. Somewhere around 90 percent of the nearly twenty thousand people who lived in the valley are gone, most fled but plenty missing or killed in the last seven years. While Juárez racked up all the headlines, these small farming villages amassed a higher per capita murder rate. And here The Violence hasn’t yet let up. We walk from the chapel toward the home of Beatrice, a pastoral worker who’s attended Bemis’s NADA trainings in Juárez. Sister Maria Eugenia is needle-trained too and she and Beatrice had hoped to set up a clinic here, like the one at Santa Margarita, but they cannot heal anyone when there is no one to heal. Nearly every adobe house on every block is abandoned, many of them burned to the ground, the charred spine of their vigas sunk in ash. The village is about six square blocks around the plaza but Beatrice has a hard time counting more than ten houses that are currently occupied. We pass a dilapidated day care with Tigger and Winnie-the-Pooh painted on a crumbling wall. Next to Beatrice’s house is a baseball field. Six weeks ago there was a gunfight at the ball field. A battle, really. A waging of war. Two dozen men and forty minutes of nonstop gunfire and grenades. We walk out onto the sandlot. There is no grass. There are no foul lines. There is no sense that it was ever any kind of diamond or that anyone ever played here. There is desert and steel shell casings.

  For many years the Juárez Cartel ruled this valley, the premier corridor for moving drugs and people over the border of rural West Texas. In 2008 the Sinaloa Cartel made a play for control of the valley in the midst of the chaos of President Felipe Calderón’s crackdown on cartels in Juárez proper and that was a war for a while but the Sinaloa pretty much won and now they are fighting among themselves. After the recent ballfield gunfight, El Negro, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel in the valley, was arrested. El Papacho, the jefe of Sinaloa’s sicarios, was also arrested. He would show up at 2:00 a.m. at the houses of anyone who hadn’t fled the valley yet, threatening people and kidnapping and killing and burying bodies under porches. Now that he and El Negro are gone there is a vacuum of power and that is why, just last month, State Attorney General Jorge González Nicolás sent five hundred soldiers from the Mexican army to live at a gymnasium down the road from Guadalupe. Nobody knows what’s next. Two days ago El Diario reported that El Papacho ratted out the whole Sinaloa operation in the valley, gave up locations of mass graves and weapons caches and names. When the soldiers aren’t shaking down the locals, they are helping to dig up their families’ bodies. Maybe the Sinaloa Cartel is done here for a while but that doesn’t give Beatrice much solace. She knows only that vacuums fill always with blood.

  We sit down to the Easter chickens. Even through the thick mud walls of the house we hear Beatrice’s dog, an epic bawl and roar that drowns out Sister Maria Eugenia’s prayer. He’s hungry, Beatrice says after Amén. She got the dog when her husband died in 2010, after she shut down the little bodega next to her house from fear of extortion. The dog is my gun, she says.

  Sister Maria Eugenia has a Tweety Bird key chain and hangs it off her habit alongside her rosary. She worries Tweety more than the rosary. I like the little bird, she says. He is small but makes trouble. The thing I remember most about Tweety is that he was always on the verge of being eaten alive. We shred the chicken and drop it into corn tortillas. Five years ago Easter was not so quiet, Sister Maria Eugenia says. That day hundreds of flyers were dropped all over La Esperanza and El Porvenir, little posters issuing a warning for everyone to leave or die. That night the chapel at El Porvenir was burned down. Nobody fought the fire because they were hiding or packing to leave.

  For many years Beatrice and Sister Maria Eugenia were absolutely resolute that they would never leave the valley, both nearly sixty and stubborn as hell, two old pals not likely to let a bunch of punks run them from home. But that last gun battle at the sandlot spooked them. They will not lie to me—for the first time ever they thought of leaving. They talked about it for hours over the phone, afraid to go outside. Then, the night after the ballfield gunfight, Padre Ramirez showed up at Beatrice’s house. He’d never had any interest in her acupuncture but he showed up that night falling apart. She laid him on her bed. Cleaned his ears. Stuck them with the needles. De nada. She knew then that she would stay.

  Sister Maria Eugenia is more reticent about the needles. She thinks they help people but she does not proselytize about them like Beatrice. If people come to me, then people come to me, she says. Next week she’s headed to a big convention of nuns and padres to discuss the role of the Church in bringing Juárez back from the brink of the abyss but she doesn’t plan
to bring her needles. Even the other nuns she lives with don’t know that she’s trained in acupuncture. She is worried the Church may crack down on needles, like they’ve done with other folk remedies. Mostly she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself. In the valley, anything might be interpreted as taking a stand. And people who take a stand do not last long. Of everywhere I’ll go with Bemis, the valley is the only place I’ll never see the needles used.

  Oh, but people are painting! says Beatrice. This is a filament of hope she’s lately strung through her heart to keep it afloat. After dinner we’ll drive over to Guadalupe so she can prove it. She will point out a lot of abandoned cotton farms and a lot of murdered people’s houses and the infamous Reyes/Salazar Bakery, owned by a family of six who were gunned down, no police ever bothering to investigate the murders. She’ll show us exactly where people are painting. Past the plaza and its benches, where the decapitated heads of the Guadalupe police were once displayed, is the town hall, with one fresh coat of peach paint on one wall. A good sign, she’ll say, when they paint. Even just to cover the blood.

  Lukas is the name of Beatrice’s dog. Eventually he gets to making so much noise, impossibly shaking the thick adobe walls with his bark, that we interrupt dinner to look in on him in the backyard. Beatrice says he’s a Doberman, but he’s Doberman mixed with tyrannosaurus, a towser lumbering out of the shadows, the whole shadow of the house seemingly come to life, monstrous and looking inbred for insanity and reared for bloodlust. In my boots I’m a man of average height and this dog is on all fours looking me straight in the eye, panting real slow right into my mouth. His eyes are bloodshot cue balls drooping beside his snout. Once daggers aimed heavenward, his ears are now permanently folded into stubs where demonic horns might have been sawed off. He’s emaciated the way the Valley of Juárez is now emaciated but all the more terrifying on account of it. Every last pulse is a chance to eat you alive. He’s all ribs and teeth, his pendulous jowls once muscled enough to rip a human torso in half with a single bite, but now it’s clear he’ll have to gnaw some because the strength has waned. With her bodega closed, Beatrice can’t afford to feed him as much as she should. That makes him angrier. The thick chain around his neck is the most solid thing on him but there’s no question he’ll rip free of it whenever he likes. He quits breathing and starts to roar. He rears back on his hind legs and towers and he’s got this hard-on, this big red dog boner that seems impossible to sustain in the midst of such emaciation. Anything truly monstrous is wrought only on account of the parts that are beyond all comprehension. Bemis and I cower. Sister Maria Eugenia worries Tweety. Beatrice reaches out and pets the beast.