The Line Becomes a River

by Francisco Cantú

  Saint Francis, who lived in Gubbio at the time, announced to the townsfolk that he would leave the city gates and venture to the lair of the wolf. He made his way into the countryside with a small band of city residents following at some distance to witness his dealings with the animal. As he approached, the beast came running at him with open jaws and the look of murder in its eyes, but Saint Francis made the sign of the cross and the wolf closed its jaws and lay quietly at his feet. “Brother wolf,” Francis said, “thou hast done much evil in this land, destroying and killing the creatures of God without his permission; yea, not animals only hast thou destroyed, but thou hast even dared to devour men.” The wolf lowered its head as if in recognition. “All men cry out against thee,” the saint continued, “all the inhabitants of this city are thy enemies; but I will make peace between them and thee, O brother wolf.”

  Saint Francis proposed a compact: in exchange for the wolf’s promise to cease its killing of livestock and townspeople, the residents of Gubbio would feed the animal every day for the rest of its time on earth. “Thou shalt no longer suffer hunger,” he told the wolf, “as it is hunger which has made thee do so much evil.” The saint held out his hand and asked if the wolf would pledge to obey the promise. The wolf’s reciprocating gesture of accord has been depicted through the centuries in paintings, illustrations, murals, and statues. The animal is depicted as bowing its head in agreement, as placing its paw in the hand of Saint Francis, as standing upon its hind legs and leaning against the saint’s chest as if to lick his face.

  The dentist introduced a small mirror into my mouth, cocking his head and pushing the tool at different angles against my cheeks. For several minutes he picked and prodded at my teeth, scraping my gum line with a long metallic tool. He glanced up at me. Do you know you’re a grinder? he asked. I looked at him. Sorry? You grind your teeth, he said. Did you know? Oh, I said. No, I didn’t know. Well, he said, it’s getting kind of ugly in there. I looked around, feeling strangely panicked. I had no idea, I said. It’s nothing to be alarmed about, he assured me, it’s really quite common. But it does seem like something you’ve started in the last few years—there’s nothing in your file about it.

  What you do for work? the dentist asked as he grabbed my chart from the countertop. I’m a Border Patrol agent, I told him. Wow, he said, that must be exciting. Where are you stationed—here in Tucson or out in the desert? I thought briefly about how much I should tell him, unsure if he was probing or merely being friendly. Well, I answered, until a few weeks ago I was a field agent. I was stationed a few hours from here, out in the middle of nowhere. But I just took a detail to the sector headquarters here in the city. Low-level intelligence stuff. I see, said the dentist. Is the work stressful? The grinding, you know, it comes with stress. The question surprised me—no one had ever asked me so plainly. I paused to think. It’s not stressful, I said, no. Hmm, the dentist said, seems stressful to me. I thought of my dreams. Well, I confessed, fieldwork could be intense sometimes. But I’ll just be doing computer stuff now.

  The dentist silently jotted his notes in my file. So why’d you leave the field? he asked. Won’t you be bored? I began to feel annoyed with his questions, concerned that I was somehow telegraphing cowardice or insecurity. It’s kind of a promotion, I said, it’s a chance to learn something new. Another side of the job, you know? The dentist looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I used to have an office job, he told me, there’s only so much you can learn at a computer screen. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Look, I finally said, I don’t know what else to tell you. I thought it would be nice to have a break from the field, to live in the city for a while. All right, all right, he said, holding up his hands. I feel you. I’m just trying to make sure you don’t grind your teeth out.

  —

  Hayward gave us our orientation. Six of us had been detailed to the new intel center from various stations across the sector, most of us with less than five years in. He took us to get new identity badges, showed us how to use the keyless entry system, and gave us a tour of the office. It’s like NASA space command in here, he joked. The room was cavernous and without windows, filled with the sound of stale air gusting through floor vents. A multitude of double-monitor computer workstations were situated around a wall of television displays offering an assortment of live camera feeds, real-time maps, and live twenty-four-hour news coverage from the major cable networks.

  This is where we keep track of it all, Hayward told us. You all will be responsible for maintaining a detailed shift log around the clock and writing up daily reports for the sector chiefs summarizing the significant happenings around the sector. You’ll take phone calls from the stations and keep track of emails. You’ll collect and disseminate intelligence reports and safety briefs, log the opening and closing of checkpoints and road blocks, monitor weather events like big storms and fires, and on and on. You get the drift. The main thing is for us to keep track of significant incidents at the station level—agent-involved shootings, dead bodies, big-time dope seizures, arms confiscations, apprehension of known gang and cartel members, things like that. You’ll field calls from the station supervisors and note the time of incident, GPS coordinates, and star numbers of the agents involved, and you’ll write up a brief narrative regarding each event. The rest is pretty much cake. There’ll be plenty of dead time, but there’s lots of sector brass moving in and out of here, so look busy, keep your boots polished, your uniform pressed, and mind your sirs and ma’ams.

  Outside the building, Hayward leveled with us before giving us an early dismissal. For you boys coming straight from the field, he said, this might seem boring as hell for a while, I know it did to me. He explained that he preferred being in the field, but that his wife wanted them to work their way back to northern Virginia. I’ll be honest with you, he said, I’m trying to get the hell out of Tucson Sector. This is a good opportunity for me as a supervisor—lots of promotion potential. Might even help get me and my wife to D.C. someday and that’s why I’m here, plain and simple. But it’s a good opportunity for you guys too, a good stepping-stone if you want to get your supe bars or a permanent intel position. And hell, you’ll work eight-hour shifts five days a week, and you get to live in the city. And there’s air-conditioning, another agent chimed in. That’s right, Hayward said, you can’t beat the air-conditioning.

  —

  Every day at sector intel an email from the DEA came through a shared inbox. The email contained photographs and excerpted information from open-source U.S. and Mexican news media relating to the recent cartel activity in both countries. The summaries included photos of human bodies that had been disassembled, their parts scattered, separated, jumbled together and hidden away or put on display as if in accordance with some grim and ancient ritual. Victims’ faces were frozen in death, reverberating outward from the computer screen without identity or personal history, severed from the bodies they had inhabited and the human relations that had sustained them.

  Each email was presented in bullet-point form, offering little more than place names followed by a brief description of the carnage that occurred there. Acapulco, Guerrero: Two dismembered bodies found cut into twenty-three pieces near entrance to karaoke bar, decapitated heads hanging from velvet ropes, faces peeled off and draped on poles. Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas: Four mutilated bodies left on display in heavily trafficked downtown area, accompanying narco message—“This happened to me for being a snitch and a pussy, but I swear, I’ll never do it again.” Tepic, Nayarit: Two unidentified males executed and posed in front of neighborhood shop, reportedly skinned alive before having hearts torn out. Mexico City: Beheaded male left in truck outside elementary school with body seated at the wheel, head placed on dashboard. Zihuatanejo, Guerrero: Two corpses found discarded near freeway, accompanying narco message—“Here’s your trash, please send more.”

  —

  I dream that I am clenching my jaws, unable to stop, unable
to pull them apart. I clench harder and harder until an overwhelming pressure builds. Then, slowly at first, my molars begin to pop and burst.

  I dream that a piece of my tooth has chipped off in my mouth. As I hold the jagged shard in my hand, I feel other teeth slowly starting to flake apart. I hold my mouth closed so that I won’t lose the pieces, until finally they become too many and I must spit them into my hand, where I look upon them with desperation.

  I dream that I am grinding my jaws from side to side, that my teeth are slowly catching and breaking as they are dragged across a decaying surface.

  I dream that each time I close my mouth my top teeth become snagged against my bottom teeth. I try to carefully unlock my jaws, to slowly separate them, but the teeth pull and scrape against each other, cracking and crumbling in my mouth.

  I dream my molars are falling to pieces, filling my mouth like clumps of hardened dirt.

  I dream that I am at the dentist’s office clenching my teeth in the lobby, pleading with the receptionist to let me in. She gives me a mouth guard but it doesn’t help. Waves of pressure surge through my gums, ripping and cracking at my teeth as if they lie upon a fault line.

  I dream that I am not dreaming, that I am truly clenching my teeth until they shatter in my mouth. I am desperate to stop myself, desperate for help. This is real, I think to myself. The other dreams were different—this one is real.

  —

  For his book Amexica: War Along the Borderline, Ed Vulliamy conducted extensive interviews with Dr. Hiram Muñoz, chief forensic autopsy expert for the Tijuana homicide department, who has dedicated himself to deciphering the language of drug war killings: “Each different mutilation leaves a clear message. They have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means they talked too much—a snitch, or chupro. A man who squealed on the clan has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth. . . . If you are castrated . . . you may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel. Decapitation is another thing altogether: it is simply a statement of power, a warning to all, like public executions of old. The difference is that in normal times, the dead were ‘disappeared’ or dumped in the desert. Now they are executed and displayed for all to see, so that it becomes a war against the people.”

  —

  My mother came to Tucson for several days to see a cardiologist recommended by a friend. When she told me, I was surprised. What’s wrong with your heart? I asked. It’s nothing serious, she said, just palpitations. She offered a faint smile. It’s like my heart doesn’t know what to do with itself now that I’m retired.

  After my mother’s appointment, we made dinner together and sat in my yard watching the sun set behind lava-capped mountains. At the doctor’s office I got to talking with this rancher in the waiting room, my mother told me as we sat down to eat, a man with property all along the border. You wouldn’t believe his stories. Oh yeah? I replied. I’ll bet I would.

  She began to tell me about a local boy the rancher knew, a teenager who showed up at school one day with an expensive new car. Everyone in town thought the boy must have been dealing drugs, but the rancher found out that every day after school he would go to McDonald’s and buy bags full of hamburgers. He’d take them to a stash house, or to some hideout spot used by border crossers, and sell them for twice as much as he bought them for. He did this every day, the rancher told her, until finally he had saved up enough money for a new car.

  The rancher explained how he used to get calls from men who said they wanted to buy land to ranch on. They would buy up property but they wouldn’t ranch it, he said, they knew nothing about ranching. They wanted the land so that they could hunt people along the border. They moved in and welcomed other men to join them, men with assault rifles and night-vision goggles and bulletproof vests. He told my mother that he hated dealing with these men. He hated them, but he understood them.

  The man admitted it was hard to ranch along the border. He had lost count of how many times his home had been broken into. Usually the crossers just took food and water, but sometimes they would take tools and other things they could sell.

  The Border Patrol is always too far away, the rancher said, they’ve never been able to do a thing about it. At this point, my mother said, the man became angry. It’s inhumane what the government does, he told her. Border Patrol doesn’t stop these people at the line, they let them cross and they chase them on the north side—thirty, forty, fifty miles or more north of the border. They let these people wreak havoc on ranchers’ land, they let them die in the desert.

  My mother narrowed her eyes and looked at me. Is it true? she asked. I think it’s a little more complicated than that, I said. I’d call it an unintended consequence. My mother tilted her head and stared at me unbelievingly. I glared back at her. What do you want me to say? I snapped. That agents are purposely driving people to their deaths? Field agents don’t write border policy. We just show up and patrol where we’re assigned. My mother shook her head as if my words were those of an apologist or a fanatic. I looked away from her. A line of ants made their way up the leg of my chair. Anyway, I said, I’m not a field agent anymore. My mother reached out and touched my arm. I’m glad you’re not in the field. What I want more than anything is for you to be safe. I lifted my gaze and looked at my mother’s face. She smiled weakly.

  This rancher, my mother began again, he told me about these men he would see every so often on the side of the road, men asking for rides back to Mexico. He said they would feign injury or lie in the middle of the road to get him to stop. Once he stopped, the men would get in the back of his truck and refuse to move, they would pretend not to understand when he told them to get out. He said that the men scared him, that they would glare at him with hostility, that sometimes he even recognized prison tattoos on their faces and arms. My mother shook her head. Listening to him, all I could think about was you working out there in the desert, squaring off against men like that all by yourself. She looked at me. I’m so happy you’re not out there anymore, she said. I’m so happy you’re safe.

  I looked out across the yard. Well, I said, at least you’re happy. My mother tilted her head. Oh, she said, you don’t like the new position? I shrugged. I don’t know. Everyone says it’s a good move. And sure, it’s smart to go into intel after a few years in the field, to work on putting together the big-picture stuff. But I guess intelligence work just sounded a lot more exciting than it really is. I stared at the silhouette of the volcanic mountains in the distance. It feels like a retreat, I finally said.

  —

  The migrants who survive the journey through Mexico’s interior and evade capture across the U.S. border are often shepherded by their smugglers to “drop houses” in the suburbs of southwestern cities and towns. In Phoenix, a police report reviewed by Wall Street Journal reporter Joel Millman in 2009 described the discovery of twenty-two men in the small upstairs bedroom of a rental property on a sparsely populated block of homes. “The subjects I found,” wrote the local detective, “were all in their underwear and laying in a line next to each other along the walls and inside the closet.” The men “had been jammed in so tightly and so long that the wallboard showed indentations from bare backs pressed against it. Pink walls, decorated with the stickers of Disney characters, were stained with sweat smudges. Down a short hallway was a tiny laundry room labeled ‘Office.’ There, according to captives’ accounts to investigators . . . immigrants were beaten and ordered to produce phone numbers of relatives in the U.S. who were then called and told to wire ransom money.”

  Millman reported that in Phoenix alone, authorities discovered 194 drop houses in 2007 and 169 in 2008. In 2009, Phoenix officials reported that 68 such houses were raided in the first five months of the year, leading to the discovery of 1,069 undocumented migrants. The pro
liferation of drop houses like these, Millman wrote, marked “a shift in the people-smuggling business. A couple of decades ago, workers commonly traveled back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border . . . Now, organized gangs own the people-smuggling trade.”

  This takeover, according to U.S. and Mexican police, was in part “an unintended consequence of a border crackdown.” As border crossings became more difficult, traffickers increased their smuggling fees. In turn, as smuggling became more profitable, it was increasingly consolidated under the regional operations of the drug cartels. Every surge in border enforcement has brought a corresponding increase to the yield potential of each prospective migrant. For smuggling gangs, holding clients for ransom is a simple way of maximizing profit. Matthew Allen, the senior agent in charge of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Phoenix, put it succinctly to Millman: “The alien becomes a commodity . . . One way you raise the value of that commodity is by threatening [and] terrorizing someone.”

  —

  Hayward assigned me the job of putting together a report on a drug trafficking cell active in the southwestern part of the state. For weeks I ceaselessly entered names into databases, collected criminal histories, and analyzed smuggling techniques and crossing patterns. I was able to see each time an individual had been detained or arrested, each time they had been charged with a crime by federal, state, or local authorities. I was able to see each time an individual had entered the country on foot or by car, and if by car, the license plate number and registration information and the names and dates of birth of every other person in the vehicle. I was able to ascertain, through public records, the names of anyone—friend, family, or associates—who had ever shared an address with a given individual. I was able to access marriage licenses and death certificates. I was able to browse through alerts placed by a multitude of law enforcement agencies on any particular individual, home, or vehicle, alerts that notified me if a person was known to be violent or incompliant, if a house had been used to hide drugs or undocumented migrants, or if a vehicle had ever been seized containing arms or narcotics or had ever been referred for secondary inspection by customs officials, Border Patrol agents, or drug-sniffing canines. Using a firearm’s serial number, I was able to query whether or not a particular weapon had ever been reported as lost or stolen, whether or not it had ever been present at the scene of a crime. I was able to call up the photographs used on each individual’s driver’s license or state identification card. I was able to stare at their shadowed faces and gaze into their pixelated eyes.