Just after midnight a blacked-out truck roared across the spikes and three of its tires went. We tore after it, speeding blindly through a cloud of dust until we realized the vehicle had turned. We doubled back to where the tire sign left the road and followed it until we came upon the truck abandoned at the foot of a hill. In the back of the truck we found two marijuana bundles and a .22 rifle. Cole sent us to scour the hillside with our flashlights, but we recovered only one other bundle. It’s a fucking gimme load, Cole said. I asked what he meant. It’s a goddamn distraction, that’s what. They’re waiting us out. But my classmates and I didn’t care—we were high from the chase. We drove the truck into a wash until it became stuck, and we slashed the unpopped tire, leaving it there with the lights on and the engine running. On the way back to the station I asked Cole what would happen to the truck. He told me he’d call the tribal police to seize the vehicle, but I knew he wouldn’t. Even if he did, they wouldn’t come for it. They wouldn’t want the paperwork either.
—
After sundown Cole sent Morales up a hill near the highway with a thermal reconnaissance camera. Let me borrow your beanie, vato, he said to me, it’s cold out. I handed it to him and stayed inside the vehicle with the others. An hour later Morales spotted a group of ten just east of mile marker five. We rushed out of the car and set out on foot as he guided us in on the radio, but by the time we got there the group had already scattered. We found them one by one, huddled in the brush and curled up around the trunks of palo verde trees and cholla cactus. Not one of them ran. We made them take off their shoelaces and empty their backpacks and we walked all ten of them single file back to the road. For a while I walked next to an older man who told me they were all from Michoacán. It’s beautiful there, I said. Yes, he replied, but there’s no work. You’ve been to Michoacán? he asked. I told him I had. Then you must have seen what it’s like to live in Mexico, he said. And now you see what it’s like for us at the border. We walked on, and then, after several minutes, he sighed deeply. Hay mucha desesperación, he told me, almost whispering. I tried to look at his face, but it was too dark.
At the station I processed the man for deportation. After I had taken his fingerprints he asked me if there was any work for him at the station. You don’t understand, I said, you’ve just got to wait here until the bus comes. They’ll take you to headquarters and then on to the border. You’ll be back in Mexico very soon. I understand, he assured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean out the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. I’m not here to bring in drugs, I’m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.
—
Cole took us to a lay-up spot just off the highway where he had almost been run over by smugglers. He led us to a wide wash full of old blankets and discarded clothes and pieces of twine and empty cans of tuna and crushed water bottles. We climbed out of the wash and walked up to a nearby cactus, a tall and sprawling chain-fruit cholla, and Cole asked if any of us had hand sanitizer. Someone tossed him a small bottle and he emptied the gel on the black trunk of the cactus. He asked for a lighter and with it he lit the gel, then stepped back to watch the flames crawl up the trunk, crackling and popping as they engulfed the plant’s spiny arms. In the light from the fire, Cole packed his can of dip and took a pinch into his mouth. His bottom lip shone taut and smooth, his shaved black skin reflecting the light from the flames. He spat into the fire and the rest of us stood with him in a circle around the cholla as it burned, laughing and taking pictures and videos with our phones as thick smoke billowed into the night, filling the air with the resinous smell of hot asphalt.
—
Cole was ahead scouting the trail in the darkness when he radioed to us about the mountain lion. Come with your sidearms drawn, he said. We figured he was fucking with us. We were talking loudly, walking with our flashlights on—surely a mountain lion would shy away. We continued down the trail until the ground leveled off and it was then that a sharp hiss issued up from the darkness beside us, a sound like hot wind escaping the depths of the earth. Holy fucking shit, we said. We drew our sidearms and shuffled down the path back-to-back, casting light in all directions. I felt a profound and immediate fear—not of the danger posed to us by the animal, but of the idea that it might show itself to us, so many men armed and heedless.
—
There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things, the sense in what we do when they run from us, scattering into the brush, leaving behind their water jugs and their backpacks full of food and clothes, how to explain what we do when we discover their lay-up spots stocked with water and stashed rations. Of course, what you do depends on who you’re with, depends on what kind of agent you are, what kind of agent you want to become, but it’s true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze. And Christ, it sounds terrible, and maybe it is, but the idea is that when they come out from their hiding places, when they regroup and return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they’ll realize their situation, that they’re fucked, that it’s hopeless to continue, and they’ll quit right then and there, they’ll save themselves and struggle toward the nearest highway or dirt road to flag down some passing agent or they’ll head for the nearest parched village to knock on someone’s door, someone who will give them food and water and call us to take them in—that’s the idea, the sense in it all. But still, I have nightmares, visions of them staggering through the desert, men from Michoacán, from places I’ve known, men lost and wandering without food or water, dying slowly as they look for some road, some village, some way out. In my dreams I seek them out, searching in vain until finally I discover their bodies lying facedown on the ground before me, dead and stinking on the desert floor, human waypoints in a vast and smoldering expanse.
—
In 1706 the Italian priest Father Eusebio Kino climbed to the summit of a volcanic peak just south of the international boundary line that would come, nearly 150 years later, to separate the territory of the United States from the contiguous lands of Mexico. From this vantage point, he looked out across a massive dune field and hardened flows of black lava, all the way to the glistening blue arc of the Gulf of California. It was then that Father Kino, the first white man to reach this high and isolated place, recognized what the native people of this desert had long known: that the landmass of Baja California was not the island that conquerors and missionaries had always assumed it to be, but was in fact connected to the rest of the North American continent, a narrow peninsula reaching down into ancient and teeming waters. Across the pale sands and shimmering sea, Father Kino could make out the mouth of the Colorado River and the wooded peaks of Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, the peninsula’s highest range.
Down in the dune field, Father Kino encountered a wandering people. They cleared long strips of dry ground for ceremonies and traced massive figures onto the surface of the earth, human and animal shapes scraped into the desert pavement and lined with carefully placed stones. For untold centuries they had inhabited a landscape of craters, collapsed calderas, and jagged mountains half buried by sand. They met with few other peoples, occasionally trading goods with neighboring tribes and granting passage to those who journeyed across their parched lands on pilgrimages to collect salt at the nearby edges of the sea.
To Father Kino these people were feeble and ragged, barely surviving on a diet of roots and lizards. But they understood that there was life to be had in the desert, a life worth struggling for. To the Europeans the entire region was a malpaís, a bad country, but those who made their lives there knew it as a pl
ace inextricable from the terrain that surrounded it, a single unbroken expanse.
—
After three months we were finally released from the training unit and dispersed into rotating shifts to work under journeymen agents. I was sent to midnights and partnered with Mortenson, a four-year veteran of the patrol. I’ll tell you what, Mortenson said to me on our first shift together, it throws me for a loop every time they assign me to be a journeyman. Seems like just yesterday I was a trainee myself. My first journeyman was salty as shit, Mortenson scoffed. He kept going on about the “old patrol” and the “new patrol,” about how nobody with less than eight years in the field should be a journeyman. But that was before the big hiring push—there’s so many people coming in and out of the station nowadays that even junior agents move up fast. Mortenson smiled. So here I am, your very own journeyman.
Listen, don’t worry about calling me sir or any of that bullshit. He looked over at me as he drove us down the highway. My old man is the hardest-ass cop you’ll ever meet, made me call him sir ever since I can remember. Shit, I’m twenty-three years old and all I’ve ever known is law enforcement. Mortenson stared out into the darkness beyond his headlights. What about you? he asked. I’m twenty-three too, I told him. Well there you go, he said, the last thing I need is a dude my own age calling me sir. But hell, he smirked, I’ll let you wash the ride at the end of the shift.
Early one morning, before dawn, Mortenson brought me to the port of entry. It’s smart to make friends with the customs agents, he told me—they keep their eye on the foot traffic and the vehicles that cross through the port, and we take care of everything in between. If you get these guys to like you, sometimes they’ll throw you some good intel. He introduced me to a supervisor and got permission for us to monitor the video feeds in the camera room. For nearly an hour we watched a grid of dimly lit buildings and roads surrounding the port until the sun slowly began to rise outside, bleeding warmth onto the screens. Mortenson pointed toward a monitor in the far-left corner and we watched as the pixelated figures of two men and a woman cut a hole in the pedestrian fence. We bolted from the room and ran to the site of the breach, rounding the corner just in time to see the men already scrambling back through the hole to Mexico. The woman stood motionless beside the fence, too scared to run.
As Mortenson inspected the breach, the girl wept beside me, telling me it was her birthday, that she was turning twenty-three, pleading for me to let her go and swearing she would never cross again. Mortenson turned and took a long look at the woman and laughed. I booked her last week, he said. She spoke hurriedly to us as we walked back to the port of entry and while Mortenson went inside to gather our things I stood with her in the parking lot. She told me she was from Guadalajara, that she had some problems there, that she had already tried four times to cross. She swore to me that she would stay in Mexico for good this time, that she would finally go back to finish music school. Te lo juro, she said. She looked at me and smiled. Someday I’m going to be a singer, you know. I believe it, I said, smiling back. She told me that she thought I was nice, and before Mortenson returned from the port she snuck her counterfeit green card into my hand. I don’t want to get in trouble at the processing center like last time, she said. I looked toward the port of entry and slipped the card into my pocket. When Mortenson came back we helped her into the patrol vehicle and drove north toward the station, laughing and applauding as she sang “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” to us from the backseat. She’s going to be a singer, I told Mortenson. The woman beamed. Shit, he said. She already is.
—
At night, finally allowed to patrol on my own, I sat watching storms roll across the moonlit desert. There were three of them: the first due south in Mexico, the second creeping down from the mountains in the east, and the third hovering just behind me—close enough for me to feel smatterings of rain and gusts of warm wind. In the distance lightning appeared like a line of hot neon, illuminating the desert in a shuddering white light.
—
At the station I was given the keys to a transport van and told to drive out to the reservation where two quitters had been seen wandering through the streets of a small village. When I arrived it was just after dark and I noticed few signs of life as I drove past the scattered homes, scanning for disheartened crossers. In the center of the village a small adobe church stood in an empty dirt lot, and I saw that the front door had been left ajar. I parked the van and left the headlights shining on the entrance. I walked to the heavy wooden door and leaned with all my weight to push it open, causing a loud and violent scraping to rise up and echo into the dim interior.
Inside the church, the light from my flashlight glinted off tiny strings of tinsel hanging from the ceiling. A large piece of fabric depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe was strung across the front wall, and beneath it I saw two figures lying on a blanket that had been spread out between the pews and the altar. As I approached, a man looked up at me and squinted, holding out his hand to block the light. We were resting a little, he said. It’s just that we are lost, muy desanimados. A woman huddled close to him, hiding her face. The man propped himself up on one elbow and told me that they had crossed four days ago, that their guide had left them behind on the first night when they’d failed to keep pace with the group. They were lost for days, he said, with nothing to drink but the filthy water from cattle tanks. Puede ser muy fea la frontera, I told him. The man shook his head. Pues sí, he replied, pero es aún más feo donde nosotros vivimos.
The man told me that they came from Morelos. My wife and I, we’re just coming to find work, he said. He rubbed his eyes in silence. I have fresh water for you, I told them. At the station there’s juice and crackers. The man looked at me and smiled weakly, then asked for a minute to gather their belongings. He stuffed some things into a backpack, then helped his wife to her feet. Her face was streaked with dried tears, and when she turned toward me I saw that she was pregnant. How many months are you? I asked. The woman looked away and the man answered for her. Seis meses. He smiled. My wife speaks perfect English, he said, shouldering the backpack. He stopped in front of the altar, bowing his head and making the sign of the cross. I waited at the door as he mumbled a prayer. Gracias, he whispered. Gracias.
Outside I looked at their faces in the glare of my headlights. The woman seemed young. Where did you learn English? I asked. Iowa, she told me quietly. I grew up there, she said, I even got my GED. She kept her head down and avoided my gaze as she talked, glancing up only briefly at my uniformed body. Why did you leave? I asked her. She told me that she had returned to Morelos to care for her younger siblings after their mother died. In Morelos I made some money teaching English at the kindergarten, she said, I even tutored the adults in my village, people preparing for the journey north. For a few seconds she seemed proud, and then she shook her head. But the money there, it isn’t enough. She glanced up at her husband. It was my idea to cross, she said. I wanted our child to have a life here, like I did.
The man took a moment to look at me in the light. Listen, he said, do you think you could bring us back to Mexico, como hermano? You could drive us down to the border, he pleaded, you could just leave us there, allí en la línea. Like a brother. I sighed and turned my head, squinting at the darkness beyond the church. I have to bring you in, I told him. It’s my job. The man took a deep breath and nodded and then climbed into the back of the transport van, holding out his arms to help his pregnant wife.
I gestured at a case of water bottles on the floor. You should drink, I told them. I grabbed the metal door of the cage and paused. What are your names? I asked. The man looked at me strangely and glanced at his wife. Then, as if it were nothing, they took turns introducing themselves. I repeated their names and I told them mine. Mucho gusto, I said. They replied with polite smiles. Igualmente. I turned my head and then bolted the cage and shut the door.
In the driver’s seat I turned to look at the couple through t
he plexiglass. The man held his wife and gently whispered to her, cradling her head. Just before I started the engine I could hear the soft sound of her sobbing. As I drove through the unmarked streets of the village, trying to find my way to the highway, I felt for a moment that I had become lost. Beyond the last house, I saw a white dog in the darkness at the edge of my headlights, staring into the night.
At the station, I sorted through their things with them, discarding perishables and sharp objects. I had them remove their belts and their shoelaces and I tagged their backpacks and handed them a claim ticket. I counted and took note of their money, in pesos and in dollars, and then handed it back to them, telling them to keep it close. Inside the processing center I filled out their voluntary return papers and entered their names into the computer. Before leaving them in their cell I wished them luck on their journey and asked them to be safe, to always think of their child.
The Line Becomes a River Page 3