Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  He didn’t take along a can of pepper spray. It’s standard issue, but he is disinclined to use it on recalcitrant subjects. When he was a cop back in Mississippi, he didn’t like to use it, either.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when he came on them. Two of the four had on ski masks. One had a backpack. Was there a gun in it?

  “Levántense!” he cried. The four got up.

  One started talking to the others in English. It wasn’t pidgin English, it was real English, with a thick Hispanic accent. Were these “mules” carrying dope across? Was there an American among them?

  “Manos arriba!” he commanded. In his time on the border, he’s gotten handy with commands in Spanish, not that he could carry on a real conversation. The four put up their hands. But they weren’t responding fast enough, didn’t have enough terror in their eyes. He got out his gun, and he yelled at them again, throwing in some profanities. He can’t remember what he said. All he remembers is the force that came out of him and the ability to act on instinct and adrenaline.

  “Pongan sus manos detrás de las cabezas! Ahorita!” he yelled. Three of the four put their hands behind their heads—pronto. That’s when the fourth took off running. Then one of the others started to come around behind Ty. The lawman lunged at him, swung him around, stood the guy in front of him as a shield. He told the other two to lie facedown. He was yelling all over the place now. He got out his radio and called for help. When the backup came, the aliens were cuffed and shoved into the van. Ty took off after the one who’d fled. He was bushed up.

  “I found him facedown. He was a little uncooperative. I had to whack him a couple times.”

  As it turned out, there wasn’t dope in the backpack, and none of the four aliens had a gun, and all were Mexican, and all were in the “system.” Meaning that the USBP had a prior record on each. The agent had fretful dreams for a few nights afterward.

  Having just finished telling this story, he has anticipated your question. “Now, I could be lying, right? How would you know if I mistreated any of them, once we had them in custody? I could have roughed them up a little, if I wanted to. But I did not mistreat them, no matter how scared I was. I refused to let myself go over the line. I have never let myself go over that line as a law enforcer.”

  Once, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, when he was working as an inexperienced lawman, Ty (who was maybe twenty-six) watched an older cop slam an Asian teenager into the back of a squad car. The kid, who was in cuffs and who didn’t speak English, began squirming in the seat. The veteran policeman jerked him out of the car, got him by the hair at the back of his head, started smashing his face against the trunk. Whawk, whawk, whawk. (The teller of the story is making this sound in the back of his throat; you could mistake it for the sound of a wooden bat cracking bone.) The prisoner came up and spit out two teeth. He was bleeding. He urinated on himself. He started bawling. The young officer, who wondered if he might faint, or vomit, walked away. It turned out that the reason the kid had been squirming in the back of the squad car was because he had to go to the bathroom—and couldn’t communicate it. For the next two weeks, Ty says, he talked almost nonstop about that incident with another young officer who was present, and also with his wife. It was his sense of helplessness that was so awful, he says. He didn’t know how he was supposed to react. He was trying to fight his own instincts. He didn’t even know the abusing cop’s name. He also knew that if he tried to say something to him, much less report him, the cop would have confronted him with something like, “Hey, haven’t you ever seen blood before? This is what we do.” So Ty didn’t do anything, except let himself be tormented. Until the feeling wore away.

  Pause. “I mean, okay, sometimes you’ll be out here, on this job, and you get some little Mexican sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds who are doing nothing but coming over to steal cars or whatever. And they’ll look back at you as you’re putting them in the van, and they’ll be sucking their teeth, and there’s nothing really wrong, in my view, with rapping or slapping one or two of them with the back of your hand. I’m not saying I’d take the stick to them. I’m saying maybe I might want to take the stick to them. But I wouldn’t, not unless there was absolutely no other alternative. I’m a lot older now. I think I know how to handle myself a lot better. I’m stronger at what I need to do.”

  On a different visit, talking again of the conflicts inherent in being a hard-soft cop, a hard-soft Ferrell, he’ll say: “It’s a law enforcement deal. The way I’ve always done it is to treat them with respect right from the start. And yet if they don’t respond to that, then I have to adjust my treatment and manner accordingly—to what I need to accomplish to get the job done. You remove all doubt—immediately. You’ll be able to know how they’re going to react. Then the situation either de-escalates, or you have to ratchet it up. It just depends on their response. What I’m trying to convey to them right off the bat is: ‘Look, this is my job. This is what the government of my country has hired me to do. I’m an agent of the U.S. government.’ In the best situation, it never has to go beyond that.”

  A picture of what that agent looks like: brush top, fair features, moonish face, bowling-ball head with jug ears, semiwatery blue eyes, buff torso tapering to a slim waist. You see Ty and you get a quick sense of the family’s Scotch-Irish lineage. He’s got a high-timbred voice. He’s on the short side, about five feet seven and a half. If he gained ten pounds, he might be at risk of seeming fat, but as it is, the cop looks very solid, looks very much like a cop, whether in his Border Patrol uniform or out of it. Out of uniform, he likes to wear T-shirts and tennis shoes and ball caps, the latter to shade his wide forehead, which can singe and blister in the desert sun. For all the discernible gentleness in him, there’s something very Ferrell and masculine about him, not least in the way he moves, taking ownership of physical space in subtle, forceful ways. It’s the same physical claiming of space I’ve experienced with both his father and grandfather. He used to be called “Waddle” by his grandpop, when he was waddling around the sheriff’s office in Natchez in the early seventies with a toy star and a plastic six-shooter. But Waddle doesn’t waddle now.

  On a bookshelf in Tommy Ferrell’s office in the sheriff’s department in downtown Natchez, there is a framed photograph. Three cops with the same name are holding guns and wearing military outfits and gazing heavenward. It’s a staged thing, done in dark hues. It’s a little like one of those Civil War fake fronts that people stand soberly in front of in costume. The picture seems both scary and a little comic. It’s as if the three Ferrells—Billy, Tommy, Ty—each with his piece and head lofted upward at nearly the same tilt, are on a direct beam with the Almighty. But even looking at it casually, you can see something different in the face of the youngest William T. Ferrell: softness. It’s almost as if Ty is playacting the part of a lawman—which isn’t at all true.

  Another kind of picture: If you drive northward out of downtown El Paso, Texas, along old historic U.S. Route 85—where the road is known as Paisano Drive—you’ll have the strange sensation of being able to look directly into another country. Two nations, two peoples, side by side, literally and figuratively. The civilization of Mexico is just over there, on your left, on the other side of a fence that you can see through, on the opposite bank of a famous and shallow and listless brown rope of water known as the Rio Grande—Big River. If the weather is sunny and warm, which it nearly always is in El Paso, you’ll see clotted humanity on the bank.

  Old tires are floating in the river. Mothers are washing clothes. Little kids are swimming and wading and laughing. Knots of men, talking, are passing the day, their faces shaded by straw hats. On this side—God’s side, you’d say—there’s a superhighway directly above Paisano, with its frightful roar of cars doing seventy-five. It’s Interstate 10, which runs through downtown El Paso. (Going the other way, I-10 will take you to California, through New Mexico and Arizona.) The University of Texas at El Paso is also directly above Paisano Drive, pitched
into hillsides, with its fine big buildings and promises of future good jobs to those who apply themselves.

  If you continue slowly along this route, you’ll have the almost disorienting sense of being able to reach out and touch the hands and faces on the other side. Literally, you could pitch coins across if someone didn’t want to stop you. There are cameras positioned on high poles along the route. There are SUVs with U.S. Border Patrol insignia on them, and sitting inside the vehicles are USBP agents. The vehicles are usually parked at right angles to the road. Along the route are also signs nailed to utility poles advertising discount bus fares to Denver and Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

  Just beyond the figures on the bank, on the counterpart of Paisano Drive, dilapidated cars and trucks and crazily painted school buses will be belching and fuming along at what seems like five miles an hour, past the Pemex gas stations and convenience stores and squalid housing. The school buses, which serve as public transportation, are conveying the people of Ciudad Juárez, a hazy, horizontal sprawl of 1.7 million people. El Paso and Juárez, two sides of a vast border city. El Paso’s population is 700,000. It’s the seventeenth-largest city in the United States. Its per capita standard of living is far below that of many places in America—but life there must seem rich beyond imagination to the people on the other side of the tantalizing dream. Seventy-six percent of what was once called El Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North, is of Hispanic descent. The two towns form the largest border community anywhere in the world. Increasingly, they form the united states of “Amexica.” Over four hundred years of history have interlocked them.

  Ty and his wife, Carla—she’s from back home, too—came to the American side of Amexica when he finished his training at the Border Patrol Academy in mid-1997. He was twenty-nine. He was a college dropout who had worked as a cop in his native state in two incarnations for the previous five years. He had recently quit officers candidate school in the Mississippi National Guard, which he had gone into at seventeen, while he was in high school, once again trying to do what he felt might please his father. (His father has had a long history in the army and the guard.) The reason Ty dropped out of OCS six months shy of obtaining a commission, an act that was incomprehensible and enraging to his father, was because he’d get so wrought up with stomach cramps every midweek before the weekend’s military obligations—not that his father knew it. The son kept it a secret. “I aged,” he says. “My psyche aged ten years,” he says, coping with the stress of OCS training in the guard. Sometimes he would almost bawl himself to sleep.

  The graduate knew almost nothing about life in the border Southwest and found the desert an extreme culture shock, and not just the look of it. It perplexed him why those who were in the overwhelming majority seemed to be making instant judgments about him because of the color of his skin, because of the fact that he talked Anglo—and a funny Anglo at that, one with a Southern drawl. There were fifty-six agents in Ty’s graduating class, and more than half were assigned either to the El Paso station of the USBP or to the sector immediately west and northwest of El Paso, which is the Santa Teresa, New Mexico, station. By the luck of the draw, Ty got posted to the latter, which allowed so many atavistic cowboy-cop genes to click in. While the El Paso station is entirely urban and is about thirteen miles in length (with hundreds of federal agents patrolling its border twenty-four hours a day), the Santa Teresa station, next door, is almost entirely rural. It begins at the edge of the city and runs out into the New Mexico desert for about sixty-seven miles. It’s full of arroyos and washes and draws and mesas, not to say rattlers. If you’re a citizen of Mexico and you get caught coming across the border in the Santa Teresa sector, you’ll still be known as a wet, short for wetback, by agents talking to each other on the radio, at least according to agent Ty Ferrell. It’s a technical irrelevance that there isn’t any water to swim or wade across.

  On the western edge of El Paso (which itself is at the very tip of west Texas), there is a place called Smeltertown and Monument One. Historically, it’s a popular crossing spot. This is where Mexico and the states of Texas and New Mexico come together. There are mountains, and the river, and the crossing can be punishing. West of here, the border between nations ceases to be a river. The Rio Grande, which forms the natural boundary between America and Mexico through all of Texas, cuts north at Smeltertown and goes up into New Mexico. In the Santa Teresa station, the border between two countries is a fence line—and often no fence at all. The Santa Teresa station is maintained twenty-four hours a day by several hundred agents. Really, says Ty, it’s like trying to catch minnows with a salmon net; it’s like trying to bail out the ocean with a Dixie cup. Too many of them, too few of you. There are two other Border Patrol stations in New Mexico—at Deming and Lordsburg—and their areas of jurisdiction are even emptier and wilder than Ty’s station. But the Santa Teresa station—beginning on the rim of exurbia and running straight west into the desert—is wild and empty enough.

  For much of the Santa Teresa station, the line marking American soil is invisible. Now and then, you’ll see a little green sign: BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. All along the Santa Teresa line, hidden behind boulders, along trails, behind bushes and trees, are the infrared motion-detecting sensors. “Freds,” they’re called by Border Patrol agents. The Freds may be protruding an inch or two up from the sand, like spooky little eyes. When a foot falls near a motion sensor, alerts go off at command and control centers. The operator who is monitoring the sensors relays by radio message to an agent that the 489 Port One, for instance, has just had three hits. The agent in the field may be parked nearby in an SUV, or he may be patrolling the same area on foot or on horseback or atop an ATV. Sometimes the wind will trigger a Fred; sometimes a four-legged desert night creature will falsely set it off.

  First day on the job, Ty was in on the apprehension of fourteen illegal immigrants. A Fred had been tripped and the illegals were all caught nearby. They were rounded up and loaded into the vans. That night, the border patrolman went home and told Carla he’d do the job for free. Carla, who’s known Ty since she was fifteen (they dated on and off for nine years through high school and college before they married), thought to herself: Gee, I’ve never heard the free word before.

  When he started, Ty says, they were catching as many as three hundred aliens a day, about one hundred per shift. Now, he says (late fall of 1999), “we’re lucky if we get eighty on all three shifts.” It doesn’t mean that the flow of human life coming across the border has lessened—it means that it has shifted. Word among the crossers has passed: The Deming and Lordsburg sectors, further west, afford the better chance of getting over. Further west, into rural Arizona, proceeding toward California, the apprehension rates have been enormous. And they keep growing. (In the summer of 2000, the Washington Post reported that, on a single June night, in the vicinity of Douglas, Arizona, 1,400 illegal crossers were stopped. In one month—May 2000—in Cochise County, Arizona, the Border Patrol detained and returned to Mexico about 43,000 crossers.)

  When Ty arrived in the Southwest, the El Paso station averaged more than a hundred getaways a day, he says, “although those are only the getaways that are seen. You work the El Paso station, you’re mostly a security guard. You’re watching a fence. It’s not really law enforcement, in my view. It’s not like being a cop at all. We have to do some of that, too, out here—sitting in the truck, parked, waiting for them. Sitting on the line, in the van or a truck, is a bore. We all take our shifts doing watches. There’s a watch up on the top of Monument Three. You just kind of sit there, like a sentry. But then, other times, you get to do all this other stuff. You learn some amazing skills. Like sign cutting.”

  He’s talking about the art of tracking. Agents sometimes speak of it as “cutting the sign.” Watch an inheritor cutting the sign right now. He’s bent over, studying a little indentation in the sand, which is a human footprint. He hasn’t gotten off a horse to do this; he has climbed out of a four-wheel-drive veh
icle. This footprint, which an ordinary person might have missed altogether, is about three feet inside the border of the United States. In another sense, the footprint seems a planet away from whatever once got formed in the sign cutter’s gene pool—but that’s an illusion. The agent of his government is reading a quarter-inch-deep blemish in the New Mexico sand with all his senses, as if it were strange braille. He’s off duty today. He’s in his ball cap and jeans and T-shirt. It’s a Sunday. He has taken his visitor out to the line in his own vehicle, a green Suburban, which he purchased from the Border Patrol. He loves going to the line, whether he’s on duty or not. There are times, says Carla Ferrell, when her husband will get off work at, say, midnight and stay in the shop (which is to say the Santa Teresa station headquarters), shooting the shit nearly till dawn with fellow agents who’ve just come off duty.

  He’s down on one knee. He’s so focused, intent. “This track’s not fresh,” he says. “Somebody came across, I’d say, maybe as much as half an hour or an hour ago.”

  How does he know?

  “These tiny little beetles and bugs. That’s one way you know. It takes a while for beetles and bugs to find their way into a track. Then, too, you can see how the wind has swept the edges of it just a little. That also tells you it’s not fresh. He went out that way.” He’s pointing in the direction of what seems like desert nothingness.