I was jarred from my window-gazing by the jangling of Beto’s cell phone. I can’t hear you, ma, I heard him say, tranquila. He turned to Manuel and asked if he would pull over. After the vehicle came to a stop, he opened the passenger door and wandered into the grass at the side of the road, pressing the phone to his ear. I watched as he paced back and forth and then finally put the phone in his pocket to stare at the grass bending at his knees.
We continued south across the Animas Valley on a broad dirt road. Suddenly Manuel slowed to a stop. What is it? I asked. Shhhh, Beto whispered, pointing to the road. There, barely five yards from our sputtering vehicle, an antelope stood staring at us through the windshield, regarding us with wide, shining eyes, as if we were a band of misfit ghosts. Outside the passenger window, another animal shuddered beside the road, too fearful to follow its partner. Later, as we drove up into the pine-oak woodlands of the Peloncillo Mountains, a pack of coatimundi, thirty strong, paid us no mind as they swarmed the road in front of us, sniffing the dirt with pointed noses, their round bellies low to the ground, their tails held high in the air.
We stopped at an abandoned campsite deep in the Peloncillos to eat our bagged lunches. Beto and I sat across from each other at a picnic table while Manuel stayed in the vehicle to listen to the scanner. Is everything all right? I asked Beto. He set his sandwich on the table. It’s my cousin, he said. He died yesterday in Juárez. My mom just got the news. She doesn’t yet know how it happened. We ate our sandwiches in silence, then Beto laughed to himself and began to tell me stories. He told me about crossing the border with his cousin to party in Juárez when they were still too young to drink. He told me about house parties in El Paso, about drinking in the desert at the edge of town, about the two of them chasing girls at the clubs and bars when they finally turned twenty-one. He trailed off and shook his head, and I watched his eyes track the movements of a red bird fluttering between the branches of an oak tree. It’s weird, Beto said, all these animals. He paused, thinking. You know, yesterday when I was pissing at the edge of the road, a black butterfly flew right in front of me—a big one. I can’t stop thinking about it. He continued nervously, as if he was afraid of what I might think. A few years back, the day before my grandma died, I saw one just like it in the West Texas desert, flying out across the grass.
—
At night, off duty, Hayward drove us up into the mountains. As we climbed, we could make out white patches of snow on the sides of the highway. We drove into town, parked by the old theater, and walked straight to the nearest bar, a place called the Buffalo. After we’d ordered, I put a handful of quarters in the jukebox. When the first notes of Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” began to ring out, Beto smiled widely and looked over at me, letting out a Mexican grito.
After our first beer, I walked with Manuel through the cold to a nearby gas station to buy cigarettes. On our way back we stopped at a bridge over a deep-set creek and blew smoke as we spoke into the dark air. My wife and I are going to buy a house, he told me, on the east side of El Paso. That’s great, I told him. Congratulations. Manuel stared down into the creek. No one in my family’s ever owned a house, he said.
Back at the bar Beto was talking with a middle-aged woman, his hand resting on her thigh. This is Suzy, he smiled. She says we ought to go up the mountain to the opera house. Shit, said Hayward, that sounds fantastic. We left the bar and crowded into his truck with Suzy in the front seat guiding us up a winding road. The windows of the old opera house glowed with warm light and inside it teemed with people and smelled of wood smoke. The floors and the ceiling were made from wood and the adobe walls looked the same as they might have a century ago. We sat and ordered beers and listened to the men singing and playing fiddle, our bodies absorbing the warmth and the smoke and the sound of it all. Outside I stood with Hayward to escape the crowd and he told me about his wife, about how he married his best friend, how you know you’ve met the right person when they don’t aim to change you but appreciate you for who you are.
Manuel and Beto tired quickly of the fiddle music and soon we were driving back down the mountain with Suzy to have one last drink at the Buffalo. After another round of beers Beto began to sway. He danced with Suzy, putting dollar after dollar into the jukebox. Hayward, still sober, sat with Manuel and me, telling us about growing up in Virginia. He was a quarterback in high school, he told us, and his wife was the head cheerleader. That’s how we first met, he said, at the football games. Hayward’s father, a police chief, encouraged him to join the force as soon as he graduated from high school. Hayward was the youngest recruit they’d ever had.
An old country gospel song came on and Hayward smiled. Before all that, he said, I used to sing in a gospel group with my brothers and sisters. We toured around some, he said, opened for some pretty big shows. He smiled. One of our songs got recorded by one of the big gospel acts. I turned away and saw Beto leaning in to kiss Suzy.
As Hayward drove us back down the mountain, Beto snored in the passenger seat while I stared at the lights of the town in the valley below, twinkling like a place of happiness and promise.
—
I drove with Manuel and Beto through a broad desert valley to the border. For several hours we sat parked next to a water tank in a low canyon, listening on the radio scanners to the scouts, one on a hilltop to the west and another in the mountains above us. A man with the code name Metro 4 called to Alpha 3, describing our every move along the dirt road, noting each time we turned or parked or stepped out of the vehicle to piss. The scouts left their positions at nightfall and the frequencies went silent.
The next day when we resumed our sweeps the frequencies were still quiet. At night we parked at the water tank and the stars glared above us in a moonless sky. We sat in our vehicle and listened to a cartel lookout crew south of the line. Manuel told us that they were following an armed convoy along a Mexican highway. We could hear how the men worked themselves into a frenzy, how some of their voices cracked with the excitement and adrenaline surging through their bodies and how others whimpered with panic. The lookout crew is in charge of protecting the local boss, Manuel explained, and the convoy is made up of members of a rival cartel. Later, a man named Víctor Chulo came on the radio and told his crew that the convoy was passing through the territory with the blessing of the boss. They’re probably on their way to a cartel ranch for a high-level meeting, Manuel told us. I imagined what the ranch might be like, how the stars might look from there. It must be up in the mountains, I thought to myself, hidden in a beautiful place where I must never go.
—
Beginning in 2008, the writer Charles Bowden conducted a series of interviews with a former cartel hit man, known in Mexico as a sicario. Bowden eventually arranged for the sicario to sit down for several days of videotaped interviews with Molly Molloy and the Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, who compiled his testimony in the documentary El Sicario, Room 164. As a condition for appearing on film, the sicario insisted that his voice be altered and his face obscured, so it was agreed, at Rosi’s suggestion, that he would wear a black veil over his head, much like the hoods used by executioners of old.
In Bowden’s preface to the book that compiles these interviews, he writes of the sicario: “Nothing in his appearance signals what he has been and what he has done.” Yet he has managed “to kidnap people, torture them, kill them, cut them up, and bury them when the rest of us cannot imagine doing such things.” In his testimony, the sicario describes the act of killing: “I never doubted at the moment I got the order, I never doubted, I just pulled the trigger. I could not even think. I did not know the person . . . For me, it was nobody.”
He goes on to explain how, almost as a rule, he and all the cartel men he knew and worked with were always high and drunk when carrying out their work. After killing or torturing a target, the sicario says, “I did not fully realize what I had done until two or three days later when I was finally sober
. I realized how easy it was that the drugs and the world that I was in were controlling and manipulating me. I was no longer myself.”
When those they had kidnapped were executed, the bodies were buried in mass graves known as narcofosas. “I think that here in the border region that . . . well, let’s say that if there are one hundred of these narcofosas, maybe only five or six of these places have been discovered,” he says. “I cannot tell you exactly how many people have been buried in this fashion. It is impossible to say.” Nevertheless, “these numbers are very important, very representative. One hundred persons. Can you imagine one hundred people buried in a cemetery, but they are piled one on top of another? Can you imagine trying to identify, trying to recognize those people? Can you imagine in a one-hundred-twenty-square-meter lot, ten meters by twenty meters, that there are fifty people buried in a common grave?” He describes the lengths to which the cartel goes to obscure the identities of its victims: “It is necessary to put lime and other chemicals on the bodies,” to “remove all of their clothing and other belongings so that the bodies will not leave any traces, so that they cannot be located or identified.”
—
After our team concluded its operation in New Mexico, my coworkers returned to El Paso for the weekend and I stayed behind to pay a visit to my uncle, who had recently retired and moved from Santa Fe to the outskirts of a small town in the boot heel. I arrived Friday night after dark and my uncle greeted me at the door, hunched and backlit by the warm glow from the house. He hugged me under the porch light. It’s been years, he said. He backed away to inspect me, his hands at my shoulders. You look strong, he said, gesturing for me to come indoors.
Inside, the house was filled with boxes and unarranged furniture. He let out a nervous chuckle. I’m just renting until I can get something built out at the property. His eyes gleamed. We’ll go out for a hike tomorrow, he said, and I’ll take you by the site. You can tell me what you think.
In the morning I awoke on the couch and found my uncle gone. I browsed lazily through the living room, looking through boxes of my uncle’s old photographs. There were images of him and my father, his only brother, hiking through the mountains of Southern California and New Mexico, grinning as they tied fishing flies onto long lengths of line and arched their rods toward sparkling streams. My uncle, having no children of his own, had collected endless images of me and my half siblings—each of us separated from the other by many years and great distances. There were pictures of us as infants, as toddlers, as young children posing clumsily for our elementary- and middle-school photographs. Farther down in one of the boxes were images of my father beaming at the side of our young mothers, his many past wives. In one photograph, he stands at the edge of the sea with the mother of my youngest half sister. In another, he stands on a green hillside with my mother on the first day of their short marriage, my mother luminous in a white cotton blouse and a purple shawl, my father with a striped shirt loose and whipping in the wind.
I looked up from the box and glanced out the window to see my uncle making his way toward the house. I stood and watched him from the kitchen window as he jogged down the dirt road in a slow and gangling manner, his hands sheathed in leather work gloves. For years a degenerative disease of the peripheral nerves had been coursing through his body, eating away at the muscle tissue in his feet, arms, and hands. Unable to flex his calves to draw up his forefeet, he lifted his knees all the way to his waist in order to run without stumbling. The gloves, he told me later, were to protect his hands when, inevitably, he tripped and fell to the ground.
After a small breakfast my uncle took me out to the property along the Arizona state line where he had laid the foundation for his new home. It’s not much, he said, shrugging. I looked out across his flat and dry acres, laid over with pale grass and tangled thickets of mesquite. I could sense that he held misgivings about the isolation, that he was eager for me to find something of worth in the yawning landscape, the tremendous dome of clear sky. I’m not sure exactly what it is, he said as he looked out at the property with his hands on his hips—I guess it just feels good to be close to a place that’s still wild. I looked across his land to the horizon. You can see mountains in every direction, I said.
We drove west toward a trailhead at the base of the Chiricahua Mountains and stopped at the place where a creek, cold with snowmelt, flowed over the dirt road. My uncle ushered me out of the car and pointed to the pale and leafless trees looming at the banks of the creek. I came here for the sycamores, he told me. He lifted his legs to step over the rocks at the edge of the creek, explaining how the trees reminded him of the sycamore canyons that cut through the mountains of Southern California, where he’d spent his young summers working in an apple orchard with my father. He told me about the day he first came to this spot, on honeymoon with his second wife in 1992. He recalled how they stumbled upon this same creek bed flowing across the road, and then, as if recounting the discovery of some cherished thing long ago traded away, he described his breathless surprise at finding these great white trees from his youth. I couldn’t sleep that night, he said, because of the sycamores. The next day he and his wife went driving in the mountains above the creek and came across a small and perfect apple orchard. My uncle looked upstream. I’ve been back up in these mountains time and again since I moved here, he told me, but I can’t find a trace of it. Not even an overgrown clearing, not even an old stump. He rubbed his hands against the cold and stared down at the slow current of the creek. I still dream of apple orchards, he said, twisting his face at the water.
We arrived at the trailhead in the late morning and set out together up the north fork of Horseshoe Canyon. As we hiked past fire-blackened trees, my uncle began to recount all the natural things he had been made to destroy in the years he worked as a contractor in Santa Fe. At one job site he tore down a mighty pine tree and cut it into pieces. On another job he carved a road into a still-wild hillside. He described the guilt that consumed him in the weeks after such acts, visiting him even in his sleep. It’s overwhelming sometimes, he said, to think of all the trees I’ve killed, all the scars I’ve left in the land.
I wanted to tell my uncle that I had known men to do much worse, that I still carried with me images of landscapes laid to waste, places riddled with the shells of burnt-out vehicles and piles of rusting bicycles, places where even the most isolated trails and roads were lined with every kind of trash imaginable—blankets and burlap bundles, old clothes and cut wire, twine and pull-string handcuffs and gallon water jugs painted black, stomped and slashed open, awaiting the slow decay of coming centuries. I wanted to tell my uncle that I had known men to engage in senseless acts of defilement, depositing car seats and furniture on far-off hilltops and in remote washes, decorating cacti with women’s undergarments, hanging twisted bike frames from the towering arms of saguaros, dislodging massive boulders to tumble down sloping mountainsides, and setting fire to anything that would burn—abandoned automobiles and trash piles and proud desert plants left to smoke and smolder through the night.
We continued hiking until we arrived at the high wall of a crumbling dam, where we decided to stop for a lunch of apples, cheese, and peanut butter. As he ate, my uncle seemed to me like a small and gentle bird, and I wondered at his capacity to demolish the landscape, despite his need for solace in wild places. He turned to me and smiled. How’s your job? he asked. I chewed an apple, thinking of how to reply. I wanted to tell him that I had reached a point at which I could barely sleep, a point at which my mind had become so filled with violence that I could barely perceive beauty in the landscape around me. I wanted to tell him that I feared there was nothing for him here, that he would find no peace in these borderland deserts. I breathed a deep breath and looked over at the water held back by the sagging dam. The job is good, I finally said. It’s nice to be out of the office, to have some work back in the field. My uncle leaned on one arm and joined me in looking out across the
dark waters of the lake.
Later, as we made our way back to his truck, I thought briefly that I might tell him about the wolf dream, that I might confide in him my fear of coming unraveled. We walked side by side and I watched as he lifted his knees, his dangling feet thudding upon the trail. I worried, briefly, that the blood that ran in him might be the same that runs in me. Blood that fills the head with visions, that pulses away at sleep, that eats slowly at the muscles. Blood run through with ruin.
—
I jogged through the streets of El Paso to Rim Road and up Scenic Drive. The air was cold and thick after a winter rain, and white wisps rose from the smokestacks east of the city. To the south I looked across an expanse of streets and buildings to where dark clouds had gathered over the tops of the Juárez Mountains, above white words that had been built into the mountainside with massive piles of painted rock: “CD JUÁREZ,” they read. “LA BIBLIA ES LA VERDAD, LEELA.” The lettering was ugly and crude, but it reminded me where I was, above two cities stretching across the floor of a once mighty river basin ringed by arid and stony peaks, seething and glimmering as their residents prepared for the coming night.
To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of a crushing cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. As I ran and drove through the city, oscillating from work to home, the insecurity in Juárez drifted through the air like the memory of a shattering dream. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, the city was perpetually presented as a landscape of maquiladoras, narcos, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, massacres, shootings, turf wars, mass graves, corruption, decay, and erosion—a laboratory of social and economic horror. This narrative, of a city fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace, had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came within the city’s orbit. To comfortably exist at its periphery, I found myself suspending knowledge and concern about what happened there, just as one sets aside images from a nightmare in order to move steadily through a new day.
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