The Line Becomes a River

by Francisco Cantú

  Walking into his hospital room, I was surprised by how thin he was, how frail he seemed. He had bruises under his deep-set eyes, a feeding tube in his nose, an IV line in his arm, and a huge gash across the left side of his skull where half his hair had been shaved off. Ey vato, he whispered to me. I smiled at him. I like your haircut, I said. He seemed far away, his eyes scanning the room as if searching for some landmark, something to suggest the nature of the place he had come to.

  Morales’s childhood friend from Douglas was there and told me Morales couldn’t see out of his left eye, but the doctors thought the sight would come back eventually. Morales’s mother and father were there too, speaking softly to each other in Spanish. A little while after I arrived, Cole and Hart came, still in uniform after finishing their shift. They stood over Morales, and Cole reassured him that soon he’d be back in the field raising hell just like before. I could see a wet glaze in Cole’s eyes as he spoke. I excused myself from the room, saying I’d come right back.

  Outside I stood in the parking lot, trying to gather my strength. I thought about the tears in Cole’s eyes, about Morales’s far-off gaze, about his parents huddled in the corner, becoming smaller and smaller as uniformed agents filled the room to hover at their son’s bedside. My face became hot and I could feel moisture collecting in my eyes. The glare of the sun grew brighter. The outlines of the surrounding cars and trees grew sharp and began to blur. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I would not go back, I decided, I would not let the water gather into tears.

  —

  Late in the afternoon I took the border road out to the lava flow, driving for more than an hour across rocky hills and long valleys. The earth became darker as I neared the flow, devoid of brush and cactus. To the south a pale band of sand dunes underlined the base of a nameless cordillera, shifting at the horizon in shades of purple and dark clay. As I drove slowly over the lava flow, I looked out across black rocks glistening as if wet in the afternoon sun, rocks pockmarked from when the earth had melted and simmered between erupting volcanoes, a molten crust cracking and shifting as it cooled.

  —

  Driving along a small dirt road through the reservation, I was waved down by a man in a passing car. We each pulled over on the side of the road and exited our vehicles to talk. The man was tall with long hair and he stared into the distance as he spoke. He introduced himself as Adam, telling me he lived in a nearby village with his family, a place agents referred to as the vampire village. He told me that strange vehicles had been passing through the village, vehicles he didn’t recognize as belonging to any of the residents. It’s a small place, he said, only us Indians have any reason to visit. People don’t pass through unless they’re from there, unless they have family there or something.

  Adam’s wife stepped out of the car and joined us at the side of the road. She stood close to her husband and kept her hands in her pockets except to sweep back the hair from her face. She began to speak to me slowly, as if measuring her words. This morning, she said, just after Adam left for work, a group of men came to our door. I was alone—it was just me and my son. She gestured at their car and her hand trembled in the air. Their son sat alone in the backseat, playing with a misshapen toy figurine. The boy wore glasses like his father and as I glanced at him I noticed how his body would occasionally seize as if struggling to contain some inner terror. Suddenly the boy began to thrash his head and then he looked out the window at us, his eyes magnified by his thick lenses, his mouth open wide as if shrieking in pain.

  The men at the door asked me for water, Adam’s wife continued, but they weren’t wearing backpacks, they didn’t look like normal crossers. How do you mean? I asked. We live twenty miles from the border, she explained, lost migrants pass through all the time. But these men were different, they didn’t seem lost. They weren’t tired, they weren’t afraid, you know? They were wearing camouflage pants and they didn’t have backpacks. They always have backpacks.

  You know, whenever people come to our door, she continued, we give them water and we call the Border Patrol right away and they always just sit there, waiting to get picked up. They just want out of the desert. But these men got upset when I said I was calling Border Patrol. You better not, they said. Then they demanded food and more water. I didn’t feel like I had a choice, so I gave them what they wanted and they took it with them back into the desert.

  We’ve had break-ins before, Adam said, while we were away. They rummage through the house, you know, like they’re looking for guns or something. They leave things a mess, but all they ever take is food. And they leave the water running, they always leave the water running.

  Adam’s wife looked down at her feet and continued her story. Later that morning, she said, I heard these noises from out in the desert, like big branches were being snapped in half or something. It was so loud it woke my boy. A couple hours after that I watched through the window as this minivan drove into town past our house and parked next to the church. It looked like it had broke down—there was smoke coming up from under the hood and everything. Two men got out, a Mexican and an Indian, and they started going through the village from door to door. That’s when I called Adam at work.

  I told her to lock up the house, Adam said, to put the blinds down and wait for me to get home. We’ve never seen that van before, you know. It’s still parked there, right in front of the church. I looked at Adam and his wife. I’ll go take a look at the van and run its records, I finally said. If you give me your number, I’ll let you know if I find anything.

  Soon after Adam and his wife drove off, I stopped a slow-moving vehicle with three occupants driving north from the village. The driver was Mexican and had a shaved head and a cold look about him. He was covered in tattoos, with two teardrops inked at the corner of his left eye. Next to him, a drunk and toothless man swayed in the passenger seat. I asked the man his name and he told me I could call him Michael Jackson. Everyone in the car burst out laughing. Just kidding, he said, I’m an Indian. Everyone laughed again, even harder.

  I asked the woman in the backseat for her ID, and when she reached for her purse I stopped her. There better not be any weapons in there, I said. She looked at me and began to laugh and everyone else laughed too, louder than before, in a way that made me sick. I called in their records and was informed by dispatch that the drunk man had a warrant from the county sheriff for drug smuggling. I told dispatch that the man was a tribal member, and asked for assistance from the tribal police.

  Back at the car I asked the drunk man to step outside and I escorted him to my patrol vehicle. There’s a warrant for your arrest, I told him. Oh, he said, that’s okay. I’m going to handcuff you and place you in the back of my vehicle until we get it sorted out, do you understand? That’s okay, he said, swaying. I shut the man in the backseat and watched him double over and begin to weep.

  I walked back to the car and asked the driver for consent to search the vehicle. The man glared at me. Listen asshole, I said, you can stare at me all you want, but your buddy’s smuggling warrant gives me probable cause to search this vehicle with or without your consent. The man shrugged his shoulders. The car’s hers, he said, nodding to the woman in the backseat, I don’t give a shit what you do. I ordered the man to step outside for a pat-down and the woman began laughing to herself. The driver stared glassy-eyed into the distance as he spread his legs and leaned with his arms splayed against the vehicle. As I pulled a knife from his pocket, I looked up to see his gaze fixed on the distant dust cloud of an approaching police truck.

  The tribal police officer, barely nineteen years old, stood at the edge of the road with the tattooed man and the laughing woman as I searched their vehicle. After the search yielded no results, I walked over to the man and threw him the keys to the car. Be on your way, I told him, Michael Jackson stays with us. The woman shuffled back to the car and the man smirked at me, a glint in his eye. As the car slowly made its way up
the road, I asked the tribal officer what would happen to the drunk man. Well sir, he told me, I just got word from my supervisor that his warrant is non-extraditable outside of county jurisdiction. He’s lucky you stopped him on the res. I shook my head. The officer shrugged. But since he’s drunk as hell I’ll take him back to the station until he sobers up or someone comes to get him, whichever comes first.

  It was dark when I finally drove down the dirt road that led to the vampire village. The place seemed abandoned and I saw no lights except for a lamp hanging in front of the old adobe church. The minivan that Adam’s wife had mentioned was still there, covered in dust and surrounded by foot sign. I called dispatch to run the plates and the VIN, but the records came back clean. Through the heavily tinted windows I could see that the backseats had been removed. The inside was covered in dirt and strewn with burlap twine and empty water jugs. There were two spare tires and an extra car battery and patch kits and cans of Fix-A-Flat scattered across the floor. I followed the vehicle’s tire sign through the empty village to the two-track that passed by Adam’s house. In the desert beyond the house I saw several places where brush had been run over and tree branches had been broken to make way for the vehicle’s passage. At the end of the two-track, the tire sign turned into the open desert and the ground became rocky and hard to cut. I inspected the ground for toe digs and kicked-over rocks with my flashlight and scanned the tangled scrub at the edge of the wash for blackened water jugs and spray-painted bundles. I stopped walking and turned off my light to listen. I knew that the men in camouflage were out in the desert. I knew that they had emptied the broken-down van and brushed their load up in some nearby wash or thicket, that they were waiting for the right time to move it again, to load it into some other disposable stripped-down vehicle. And I knew, finally, that I would not find them.

  Before driving back to the station, I called Adam at the number he had given me earlier in the day. He was home and I could hear his son crying in the background. I told him that the van’s records had come back clean, that I had followed the two-track south of his home and hadn’t found anything. I told him that he should call the station if the men came back to the house or if he heard any more strange sounds coming from the desert. He was silent for a moment and then he thanked me. I could hear the muffled voice of his wife and I knew she was still afraid, and I began to wonder if I was doing them some grave disservice, if I should tell them that I had seen the men from the van, that they were still out there and that the men in camouflage were still out there too, and that they would all come back, that they would forever remember the location of Adam’s home, that they would not forget his wife and her suspicion. I wanted to tell him to take his young family and move somewhere new, somewhere far from the border, somewhere where his home would not be at the remote crossroads of drug routes and smuggling corridors. I stared out the windshield as I thought of what to say. Finally, I asked Adam why everyone called his village the vampire village. He thought for several seconds and then said he didn’t know. He chuckled at first and then he began to laugh and I laughed too because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I laughed and kept the phone to my ear, waiting for him to say something more.

  —

  On my way home from working the swing shift, I saw a man lurking in the darkness at the corner of my street. It was early in the morning, maybe two or two-thirty, and the man was alone, standing under the streetlight as if he was waiting for someone. My headlights passed over him when I turned onto my street, and I could see that he had a shaved head and tattoos. He didn’t look at me, but he watched my truck as I passed, and I was seized by a sickening feeling that I was the one he was waiting for.

  I continued past my house and kept going for several blocks before turning down a side street. I kept driving, slowly making my way through the neighborhood, not knowing where to go. After a while I felt foolish and turned around to make my way back home. I drove by the corner where I had seen the man and no one was there, just the empty sidewalk, yellow and broken beneath the streetlight. I made a full circle around the block and still I saw no one, so I pulled into the dirt alleyway behind my house and switched off the headlights as I approached my driveway.

  I exited my vehicle quickly, leaving my things inside. I went into my house without turning on the lights and made my way through the rooms, still wearing my uniform and my gun belt. I called the police department on my cell phone, pacing back and forth in my kitchen as I told the dispatcher about the man I had seen standing outside my home. I’m an agent, I said. Oh, the woman replied, we’ll send someone right away. I hung up the phone and stood alone in the darkness of my living room, hunched next to a window, peering through the blinds at an empty street.

  —

  I drove alone to the firing range at the edge of town. A cold wind was whipping across the grounds, so I piled rocks at the foot of my target stand to keep it from blowing over. Against the cardboard backing, I stapled a large sheet of paper printed with the gray silhouette of a man, concentric squares descending into his chest. I stood at various distances from the target: three yards, seven yards, fifteen yards, twenty-five yards. I practiced unholstering and firing my service weapon with both hands, with one hand, with my body bladed to the left and to the right, kneeling and from the hip, standing on either side of a barricade.

  After completing the course of fire, I shot at a smaller target with my own .22 caliber pistol. As I paused to reload, a yellow bird landed atop the target stand. I waited for it to fly off, but the bird continued hopping across the top. I started to walk downrange to scare it off, and then I stopped. I looked around. The range was empty. It occurred to me then that perhaps I should shoot the bird, that I should prove to myself that I could take a life, even one this small.

  I dropped the little bird with one shot. I walked over and picked up its body and in my hands the dead animal seemed weightless. I rubbed its yellow feathers with my fingertip. I began to feel sick and I wondered, for one brief moment, if I was going insane. At the edge of the firing range I dug a small hole beneath a creosote bush and buried the bird there, covering the fresh dirt with a small pile of stones.

  —

  At midnight on Christmas Eve, just before the end of my shift, I heard gunshots ring out in Mexico. I stopped my vehicle at the top of a small hill and stood on the roof to watch the sparkling of fireworks along the southern horizon.

  After returning home, I woke my mother, who had come to visit once more for the holiday, her eyes bleary with worry and sleep. We sat together in my empty living room, talking through the night-weary hours of the morning, drinking eggnog and stringing popcorn around an artificial tree. My mother asked about my shift. It was fine, I said. She asked if I was liking the work, if I was learning what I wanted. I knew what she was asking, but I didn’t have the energy to think of it, to weigh where I was against what had brought me there. The work isn’t really something to like, I told her curtly. There’s not a lot of time to sit around and reflect on things. A slow look of resignation came across my mother’s face. It’s my job, I told her, and I’m trying to get used to it, I’m trying to get good at it. I can figure out what that means later.

  You know, my mother said, it’s not just your safety I worry about. I know how a person can become lost in a job, how the soul can buckle when placed within a structure. You asked me once how it felt looking back on my career. Well, the Park Service is an institution, an admirable one, but an institution nonetheless. If I’m honest, I can see now that I spent my career slowly losing a sense of purpose even though I was close to the outdoors, close to places I loved. You see, the government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose. I don’t want that for you.

  I cut her off. I was too exhausted to consider my passion or sense of purpose, too afraid to tell my mother about the dreams of dead bodies and crumbling teeth, about the bird I had buried beneath stones, about my hands shaking at the wheel. Mom—I said—l
et’s open a present.

  —

  After dark, the scope truck spotted a group of twenty heading north toward the bombing range. The operator said that they were moving slowly, that it looked like there might be women and children among them. He guided us in and we quickly located their sign and then lost it again across a stretch of hard-packed desert pavement. We split up and combed the hillside, hunting for toe digs and kicked-over rocks. As I looked desperately for sign, I thought of the deadly expanses that stretched between here and the nearest highway, the nearest place that the group might stop for aid. On the walk back to our vehicle I became furious. There were supposed to be twenty of them, they were supposed to be slow, but still I couldn’t catch up, I couldn’t stay on the sign, I couldn’t even get close enough to hear them in the distance, and so now they remained out there in the desert—men, women, and children, entire families invisible and unheard—and I was powerless to help them, powerless to keep them from straying through the night.

  II

  My mother named me for Saint Francis, San Francisco de Asís, the patron saint of animals. At bedtime, she would read aloud to me from The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, a medieval anthology of writings about the saint. She read to me of his sermon to the birds, of the brotherhood of poverty, and of the very first nativity scene, which Saint Francis staged with live animals in a cave above the mountainside village of Greccio. She read to me, too, the story of a fearsome wolf that laid siege to the town of Gubbio, devouring livestock and townsfolk when they strayed into the countryside. It is written that in those days the people of Gubbio “were in great alarm, and used to go about armed, as if going to battle. Through fear of the wolf, they dared not go beyond the city walls.”