Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  They were voraciously beautiful, and for once, Anna chose not to care what was indigenous and what was exotic, what was healing for the park and what harmed it. Later, if she felt truly wild and crazy, ultimately devil-may-care and irresponsible, she might try littering simply to see if she could do it.

  “Why’s the land all torn up on the left bank?” Cyril asked.

  “They’re putting in a golf course,” Carmen answered. Her voice was carefully neutral; so much so that it left the listener in no doubt that she loathed the idea of the development.

  A water-sucking, pesticide-drenched whore of a golf course smacked down in the middle of the desert. Anna snorted. Only Tiger Woods in perfectly pleated trousers could make a golf course attractive anywhere. Even he might fail on the sere banks of the Rio Grande. Not my problem, Anna told herself firmly, and put it from her mind with a deep breath. The air was so clean and dry she scarcely felt the need for inhaling and exhaling. Pure as it was, it felt as if it might permeate the flesh without bothering to trouble the lungs.

  “It’s not in the park?” Cyril asked.

  “Nope.”

  “There wasn’t a sign or anything,” Cyril said. “You know, like ‘Give Up All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.’ Or ‘Now You’re on Parkland, Stop Having Fun.’”

  “There used to be a sign but the river rangers talked the NPS into taking it down. There’s no need for a sign. It makes no difference to the river whose land it flows through. Technically all the land on the right is Mexico and all the land on the left is the United States. Since the border was closed eight or nine years ago, according to the law, if we drift over the center of the river and into Mexico then drift back into U.S. waters—we’ve broken the law.”

  Anna recalled a dustup over that issue years before. One of the river rangers was so incensed over the sudden closure he called the Border Patrol to come and arrest a bunch of lily-white college kids down from New York State to go rafting. He was trying to make the point that if it was illegal for anybody to do it, then the law should be enforced against Americans as well as Mexicans. What he succeeded in doing was pulling off a magnificent career-limiting gesture.

  Anna put the border issues with the golf course. Not her problem.

  Letting the talk of the others meld again with the chuckle of the water, she watched red-eared box turtles slide off their perches on stones and logs, hiding themselves beneath the dark water. Red-eared turtles were as much an invasive species as the giant reeds, but today Anna wasn’t going to hold it against them. Everybody had to come from somewhere and she appreciated that they allowed her to share their space with them.

  “We’ll be in the park after we round that bend.”

  Anna glanced back to see Carmen pointing downriver, where the land began to wrinkle then reared up in sudden bluffs, high and sheer and burnt-gold in the strong light. Leading up to—or falling away from—this crown of shale were ash-gray hills pocked with cacti. Here and there a splash of luminescent yellow-green or shocking pink sparked from a blooming plant.

  “Cool,” Anna heard the boy say. He had a nice voice. Mucho basso profundo and coming out of a rib cage that a big man could probably fit his hands around. The kid was nowhere near the size of the noise he made, at least not in breadth. He was paddling opposite Anna and she watched him for a moment, her paddle idle across her knees. Out of self-defense she bet he’d learned every skinny joke there was, from turning sideways and sticking out his tongue to look like a zipper to having to run around in circles in the shower to get wet. He was at least six feet tall and weighed a hundred and twenty to a hundred and twenty-five at a guess.

  “Are you and Cyril related?” Anna asked, seeing it for the first time.

  “Twins,” Cyril called from behind her. “I’m the pretty one. It’s important that you remember that. I’m real sensitive on that issue.”

  “I’ll remember,” Anna said.

  “Steve.” The boy introduced himself in his marvelous voice.

  “You should go into radio,” Anna said before she realized it would be taken as an insult. He groaned. Evidently he’d heard that one before as well.

  Being rude was shoved back to keep company with the golf course and the border issues and the evil intruding grasses.

  Not my problem, Anna reassured herself. Much of her life, when she’d chosen to think about it, which was not all that often, she’d assumed being lazy and irresponsible and self-centered was the easy way. Practicing it was turning out to be a lot harder than she’d thought. There was so much in the world to not care about, so much to blow off, brush off or otherwise put out of her mind. Clearly she wasn’t going to become proficient in it at the rapid pace she had expected. Littering would be out of the question for at least a year or two. Maybe gum, she thought. In a few months she could begin training by spitting her gum out on the ground instead of carefully folding it in the slip of paper the stick came in and carrying it in her pocket until she remembered to put it in the trash or laundered it with the cigarette butts and pop-tops and other bits of refuse she was constantly picking out of the world.

  “Hola,” Carmen called. Anna pulled out of her mind to see a group of vaqueros on the left bank, three men on horseback and a half-dozen scrawny cows. The rafters stopped paddling and the men on the bank waved. One of the girls, Christine, who, despite being considerably overweight, wore the low-cut spandex shorts and high-cut spandex top that Cyril showed off to such advantage, waved back. A pale fold of fat rounded over the tight band, and Anna hoped the girl had had sense enough to slather her soft white underbelly with sunscreen before exposing it to the elements.

  Christine took a camera from her dry-bag and began clicking pictures of the cowboys. A tall Mexican in a wide-brimmed hat that looked as if it had herded many cows over the years smiled widely then pulled a disposable camera from his belt and took a picture of the raft. The other vaqueros laughed, touched the brims of their hats respectfully, and kicked their horses into a walk as the raft drifted downstream of them.

  “Wow,” Christine said. “Mexicans. All we ever get are Puerto Ricans.”

  “Chrissie doesn’t get out much,” Cyril said. “She is from a small desert isle in the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Staten Island,” Chrissie defended herself. “And I do too get out.”

  “No,” Steve corrected her. “Sometimes they let you out. It’s a whole different thing.”

  “They’re on the left bank. I thought the Mexicans couldn’t cross the river and be in America because of the drug thing,” Chrissie said. The raft took them from the last view of the vaqueros as they started pushing their small herd into the water to cross back to the Mexican side of the river.

  “Nobody told the cows,” Carmen said. “Technically they aren’t supposed to come over to get them but the park kind of turns a blind eye. Once in a while the rangers will round them up and take them up to El Paso where they get auctioned off or slaughtered. Mostly they just let the vaqueros retrieve them. It’s a whole lot cheaper than trucking them the length of Texas.”

  Silence didn’t fall, but Anna tuned the talk out and put herself back into the natural world. Or tried to. The pit that had opened inside her altered the landscape. She could see it when she looked inward, a great black hole, wide and deep and without light, yawning like the mouth of an underground cavern. Around it the desert hills rolled away, the river wound by, the sky rose into the ether. She could see herself, small and fragile, on her hands and knees at the rim of the crater trying not to be sucked into the darkness.

  “Weird,” she said aloud, and shook her head to free herself of the image.

  “Are you okay?” Paul asked quietly.

  Anna wasn’t sure how to answer that, at least not if she answered honestly. “Fine,” she told him.

  “It will be,” he promised.

  Since she had known him, Paul had never broken a promise to her. Anna contented herself with that and so she forced the pathetic image to crawl slowly away from the
abyss on its hands and knees.

  FOUR

  At the entrance to Santa Elena Canyon, the river grew wide and a rocky beach formed on the American side where runoff had laid down a sandy wadi, as gold as a trail of mica in the afternoon sun. Willows softened the stone views on the east side and on the west huge rocks, tumbled like the blocks from a child’s toy box, lay helter-skelter. “This is home for tonight,” Carmen said. “Put in at that little point. You’ll still get your feet muddy but the rocks will keep the worst of it down.”

  Anna was tired. An easy day of paddling and she was as tired as if she’d done something. Bone and muscle had not been taxed but the hole inside had been pulling, dragging her from the beauty of the desert, the howling from the depths drowning out the talk of the kids she’d depended on for distraction. As the day wore on the first euphoria of hot sun and river creatures was weighed down by the darkness within.

  Thoughts she could not quite catch flitted bat-black through her mind. I’m wasting the world, she thought as she helped carry camping gear from the raft to the sandy expanse fifty feet from the water’s edge. I am wasting Texas and Paul.

  By herself and talking with Paul, Anna had tried to think herself free of the miasma. The man she killed was not a nice individual. He was a monster. She killed him in self-defense, though, if justice mattered, she should have been able to shoot him in cold blood and been given a medal for doing so. There were no thoughts that she had robbed a wife of a loving husband or children of a father. No sense that she had taken a fine mind that, left to work on, would have added anything of merit to society. Anna was not sorry he was dead; she wasn’t sorry it had been she who dispatched him. Those necessary evils could have been cured by logic. The hole that had opened within her was deeper in scope and significance, her own idiosyncratic Pandora’s box. The endless twilight and cold of the north had melded with the endless cruelty of humankind. Her mind turned on war and plague and pestilence, famine and genocide and the rape of the women in the Sudan. The six o’clock news lodged in her brain and played visions of the brutality of her race in an endless tape loop.

  She had tried meditating on love and courage, bright satin sashes and whiskers on kittens, but they seemed such tiny points of light in the ink of her internal sky.

  Shaking herself like a dog fresh from its bath, she cleared her mind long enough to help Carmen screw the table legs onto the sectioned tops that unrolled into work surfaces and spread plastic cloths over them. The tablecloths were mismatched, one white with blue figures of windmills and Dutch children in wooden shoes, the other pink-and-yellow plaid. Images from childhood stirred and Anna remembered sitting at a table with a cloth very like these, removing the fingernail polish from nails bitten down to the quick and badly painted in hot pink. She wasn’t more than six or seven. Her elbow had knocked over the bottle of acetone and, as she’d wiped it up, the pictures on the cloth had come up with it, leaving a whitish smear where figures had once been. Anna had covered her sin with the toaster and never told anyone. Now, more than forty years later, she wondered what her mother had thought when she’d noticed—as she had to have done—the odd blank patch. Even this thought saddened her. Her mother was gone, wiped away as the little people of ink and plastic had been, nothing left but a blank spot colored with the vague guilt of a child.

  “And the groover. Ta-da!” Carmen’s voice cut through the fog of the past. She held up an army ammo can, metal with a hinged top, about eighteen-by-six-by-fourteen inches.

  “I’ll set it up,” Anna volunteered.

  “No, you’re on vacation,” Carmen protested.

  “What is it?” Chrissie asked.

  “This is our commode,” Carmen told her.

  Chrissie’s round face blanked and she looked all of twelve years old. “What do you do with it?”

  “You sit on it,” Carmen said. “That’s why it’s named ‘the groover.’ The can leaves parallel grooves in the posterior of the sitter.”

  “Gross.”

  “Not as gross as getting cactus spines in your butt,” Cyril said.

  Carmen pulled a plastic toilet seat from one of the dry-bags the gear was stowed in. “We are a class act. We have a seat. No groovy butts for us.”

  The sight of the toilet seat slammed Anna back into the bunk-house on Isle Royale, the brightly painted Winter Study toilet seat leaning against the wall behind the woodstove, the seat kept warm to be toted through the snow to the outhouse as needed. Post-traumatic stress, Anna told herself. Sudden flashbacks, mood swings, sleep interruption. The diagnosis struck her as pat, trendy, overused and surely not one that could be applied to an individual who had killed one lousy person. Masses maybe, women and children and babies blown apart. She did not deserve to water down the ailment with her single paltry corpse.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll put it up,” Anna repeated.

  Carmen looked at her too long then, perhaps seeing a shadow of Anna’s grim landscape, handed her the can and seat and a mesh bag with toilet paper and hand sanitizer. “There’s a great spot up the creek bed. You’ll know it when you get there,” she said.

  “Let me,” Paul said.

  “No.”

  “Want me to go with you?”

  “No.”

  Anna sounded ungrateful and weird and she knew it and could do nothing about it. As she walked away she heard the raucous silence of the group and was relieved when Steve’s booming voice shattered it with words that made the others laugh.

  Setting up wilderness privies was not Anna’s favorite thing—though it was much more pleasant than taking them down and infinitely more pleasant than cleaning the cans back at the wilderness cache. She wanted to be away from people for a few minutes. Solitude, not for the joy of it as had formerly been the case, but to hide raw edges beginning to unravel. To be mad was bad enough. To be seen as mad was embarrassing. To see the worry in Paul’s eyes was intolerable.

  The dry creek bed cut straight as a razor up toward the sheer rise of the entrance to Santa Elena Canyon. Horse manure littered the sand where the animals had wandered over from Mexico to munch on American grass. A bit of housekeeping would be called for before they pitched their tents, but the boulders strewn on the sand made for lovely private sites. In a way, this was Anna’s honeymoon. That thought gusted beneath her depression in a zephyr of air scented with the washed cotton and sun smell of Paul Davidson. The momentary joy was damped by the thought that, given her bizarre state of mind, she would not be the wife that he deserved.

  “Damn,” she said aloud, and again shook herself. Maybe a slight coup contra-coup injury of the brain would have the effect of electrodes pulsing shocks into her frontal lobe.

  A feathery willow and a boulder as big as an Airstream trailer marked the entrance to the bathroom. Carmen had been right. She knew it when she saw it. The sandy creek bed angled away into the hills and Anna stood on a gentle shoulder of land. Rocks and trees formed a high wall on one side. On the other was the river, bending wide and smooth into a towering rift in the rock. A room with a view.

  The sun was low in the west. The last of its light struck gold from the shale wall and turned the subdued greens of the desert a brighter shade. Above the cliffs the sky was a turmoil of clouds, round and fierce, their bellies sagging close to the mesa. Sunset fired their edges and cast deep purples into their ephemeral canyons.

  Don’t waste this, Anna told herself. People are not all there is to the world.

  THE night CONSPIRED to help Anna hold on to her fragile resolve. There was a moon, not quite full, but bright enough through the clear air to cast shadows. Though she cooked on a two-ring propane stove, Carmen had built a fire in the fire pan and there was the comfort of sitting around a blaze sipping wine from plastic cups and listening to the murmur of the Rio Grande. Coyotes sang briefly and bats came out, swooping low over the creek in search of insects. The towering clouds that had followed them all day surrounded the moon as the last of the chocolate Oreo cake was consumed and a wind
smelling richly of rain blew from the northwest.

  “Everybody put their flies up?” Carmen asked. Cyril, Lori, Chrissie and Steve scrambled up and disappeared behind the willows and rocks sheltering the kitchen area. “Looks like we might get wet tomorrow,” Carmen said. “Did you notice the river’s come up since this morning? It’s been raining in the Coahuilas. Most of our water comes from there.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Anna said, but as she spoke she remembered the sticks and leaf litter and occasional plastic water bottles floating past the raft. When rivers rose they washed the banks clean, pushing whatever floated downstream.

  “We should have a good run tomorrow. In a way, it’s easier when the water is higher. There’s more between the raft and the rocks.”

  A woman screamed.

  Paul and Anna were on their feet before it had time to echo from the cliffs. Steve’s voice melted through the willows. “Lori is harassing the wildlife,” he called to one of the others. “She’s freaking out a national park spider.”

  “It was about to bite me,” Lori hurled back.

  “Correction,” Steve called to an audience lost in the rocks and trees. “She was harassing and feeding the wildlife. I think there are big fines with that.”

  The sheriff and the priest and the ranger sat again in the folding chairs.

  “What do you guys do when you’re at home?” Carmen asked. “Red lights and sirens?”

  Paul laughed. “It shows?”

  “You two jumped like hunting dogs hearing the whistle.”

  Before the fire burned itself out, and long before Carmen and the others went to bed, Paul and Anna walked hand in hand to their tent. While she had been setting up the groover, Paul had cleared an area of horse apples, nestled their tent between three boulders, and arranged the dry-bags with their personal gear on a rock the right height for a bureau.