The Braindead Megaphone

by George Saunders

  We walk the fence line. The neighboring rancher isn’t on board, so the Op will be confined to about a three-hundred-yard stretch of this ranch.

  “We’re in a real rat race here,” Curtis says on his cell, as we start back to the cars. “The Media’s pounding us.”

  We Media look around, puzzled. We’re not pounding anybody. We’re just walking quietly behind Curtis, having our little Media thoughts.

  We take a shortcut back through a grove of mesquite. Shannon says this reminds him of a forest near the Knights of Pythias home where he was sent to live during his parents’ divorce. Soon it becomes clear we’re lost. The cars can’t be more than a hundred yards away, but we don’t seem to be getting any closer. Curtis suggests somebody send a radio message to base camp, i.e., the cars, see if somebody can honk a horn or something.

  Radio contact proves problematic.

  From the front of the group, some grumbling: Ahead is a creek. There’s much concern, shouted optimization instructions, extended hands, some awkward scrambling up the opposite muddy slope, good-humored postcrossing comparisons of soaked pants legs, Media and Minute-persons united as one.

  Then the group bunches up. Again, a surprise: There’s a barbed-wire fence ahead, literally five feet from the lip of the creek, and as the front of the group struggles through the fence (coats snagging on barbed wire, on mesquite branches, raindrops plopping off trees), a cry goes up: Jeez, another fence!

  Besides this one?

  Yes, yes, a whole other fence.

  We are, like, caught between these two improbably close-together, nonparallel fences, in a forest no cow could ever enter. How odd. What a perverse rancher.

  “Makes you kind of respect the illegals,” a Minute-person says sweetly.

  Suddenly: shouts of consternation from the front of the group, which has freed itself from the two-fence trap, only to find—

  “What you got?” Curtis shouts.

  It appears there is a second creek, which may even qualify as a small, deep river, beyond this second fence, which is proving even stouter and more gnarly than the first. Jesus, where the hell are we? Who designed this freaking ranch, Escher?

  “I thought all y’all media were supposed to be neutral,” smirks Shannon. “Not so neutral now, are you?”

  This is so nutty as to be hilarious.

  “We’re being neutral,” I say. “By not making fun of you.”

  “Attention all units!” Curtis cries out, to those of us still on this side of River Two. “If you have not crossed the ravine yet, do not cross! I repeat, do not cross!”

  I can see the headline now, if anyone escapes to write it: “Minutemen Die of Starvation in Tiny Thicket, Comically Close to Own Cars.”

  A photographer with bad knees goes down, is lifted to his feet by Brian, the guy who last night advocated the annihilation of Fallujah, whose face, as he goes to the photographer’s aid, is transformed by a look of sudden radiant concern.

  In time, as in a beautiful dream, we arrive back at the cars. Is our leadership crushed, humiliated, bitterly angry, ordering us not to tell anyone? On the contrary. Our leaders are cheerful, triumphant, hyped with victory, as if this Getting Lost never happened, or maybe as if, having been closely involved with embarrassing debacles all their lives, they have learned an excellent coping strategy: deny, smile, move on.

  Through my mind runs the phrase: Shows Good Spirit.

  WITH GUNS IT IS NOT SO FUNNY

  At dusk, the same Good-Spirited crew that nearly met its doom in the Land of Infinite Fences arrives back at the ranch, heavily armed. We Media are kind of shocked into silence at the extent of the armament. Every Minuteman’s got at least a shotgun, a rifle, or a machine-gun-looking semiautomatic weapon. My Team Leader, Art (a fearsome biker-looking dude, six-one, 250, shaved-headed, bearded, tattooed, who is, in fact, a biker but is also a troubleshooter for a fiber-optic network and a member of Mensa), has, in addition to his semiautomatic: a .45 down each pants leg, a long, jagged knife he calls his “Arkansas toothpick,” and a two-shot Derringer designed to fire shotgun shells.

  I tell him that because I’m a Liberal and he’s so large, I expect that, if there’s trouble, he will carry me to safety.

  He gives me a look I would describe as: the ornery-eye-twinkle-of-possible-friendship, reminding me of my childhood friend K., who was equally happy explicating The Art of War or driving his head through a wall.

  Darkness falls; the moon comes up. Our Team advances into the brush. Through a kind of willful mass hypnosis, aided by all this wishful costuming, things suddenly go very Vietnam, and a tense, watchful quiet falls over the group.

  It’s scary—partly because we’re making it scary and partly because (1) real illegals really do cross here, led by real members of the real smuggling cartels, and (2) these are real guns.

  Suddenly, weirdly, I find my eyes tearing up: How many times, through the long centuries of life on earth, has one group of men sneaked armed into the woods, hoping to surprise a second group not expecting them? And where has this gotten us? I feel sad for whomever we might catch (some little family even now timidly approaching in the dark?) and sad for the Minutemen, plodding forward like ghosts doomed to hunt That Which Causes Them Anxiety through all eternity.

  We spread out in the dark, three teams of three Minutepeople each, about a hundred yards between each group.

  This is the total extent of Operation Sovereignty: nine guys, four Media, along a few hundred yards of border, on one small ranch, in the huge state of Texas.

  A tiny patch of Catcher in a thousand miles of Rye.

  OUR TEAM MAY SURPRISE YOU

  Our Team takes up its position: in some long grass, besieged by bugs. I wish we could sit over there, on that less buggish dirt road, but Art has positioned us here, and something in me is cheerfully rising to the faux-military discipline.

  Soon the sky is crossed with parallel rivers of low milky stars.

  Scott’s from Houston, the founder of the Texas Militia. He’s just out here getting some experience points, he says. This is his first Op, he can only stay a week; what with work (graphic design) and his Militia stuff (four membership applications at home waiting to be processed), he’s superbusy. Plus, of course, he’s got RenFaire coming up—

  “RenFaire?” I say.

  “Renaissance Faire,” he says.

  “Do you…You do that?” I say.

  He does. He does the whole deal. He’s got a twelve-hundred-dollar suit of leather armor, does an English accent but, no, has not developed a role-play, seeing as how he is merely a Playtron, and Playtrons are not paid to interact with patrons, i.e., Mundanes.

  Our third Team Member, Lance, so far known to me only as an angry, frustrated voice piping up now and then to express a sense that everything is all fucked up and being orchestrated by sinister forces from far away, is sitting under a tree. I join him there, out of the moonlight, in what, in daytime, would be shade.

  He recently married a Russian woman he met online, he says. For many years, he says, he was a—

  The next bit is unintelligible. Or impossible. I ask him to repeat.

  No, I’ve heard right: For many years he was a dancer with the Houston Ballet.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t know it to look at me now,” he says.

  He and his wife appeared on a Ricki Lake segment on Russian mail-order brides. He didn’t do what so many guys seeking Russian brides do, he says, i.e., go to a mass meet-and-greet in some St. Petersburg hotel; his wife is from a small town, and he went there to meet her, and they really connected, from the heart. She’s a great lady, and they’re so happy together, she’s just—he shakes his head, not quite believing his good fortune.

  When he talks about his wife, the paranoiac quality of his political discourse drops away, and he becomes relaxed and confident. He owns a construction company but is thinking of doing something different with his life, making some investments. He’s thinking, in fact, of buying the RenFaire
in Houston.

  I’m a little confused. Does he know…Does he know that Scott also is involved with RenFaire?

  “Sure, that’s how we met,” he says. “Scott’s in the Torturers’ Guild.”

  We wait and wait for some Mexicans to blunder over the border and plop into the irrigation ditch.

  But nobody comes.

  NEARLY THE DEATH OF SOME GUY NAMED CARL

  Waiting implies an eventual end to waiting, which produces dramatic structure.

  Somebody radios: Team Two, a car is approaching your position.

  A car is indeed approaching. Art’s whispering on the radio: Is it one of ours? Is it? Anybody read me?

  No answer.

  “You Media, take cover around the corner,” he says. The corner is, like, behind those trees, ten feet away.

  I take cover by walking over, standing there, feeling a little stupid.

  Scott drops to one knee, raises his shotgun. Lance goes down on his belly, sights down the barrel of his semiautomatic. Our Team suddenly looks like a Baghdad checkpoint.

  I’m thinking: Hold on now, isn’t this probably a rancher, a lost rancher, a lost tipsy guest of a rancher?

  The car—a white Oldsmobile—appears, slowly, slowly, just the way a drug smuggler or cartel pickup car would.

  It seems to pause as it passes.

  Somebody hisses: He just—Did he just drop something? Lance and Scott rush forward to have a look at the dropped thing. What is it? Drugs? A bag of, uh, narcotics?

  Negative, it’s just a plastic bag they hadn’t noticed before.

  A call comes from Team One, down the line: The vehicle was Carl. This makes us, Team Two, very angry. That stupid Carl! Why the hell didn’t Carl radio? Who is Carl, anyway? How many Ops has he done? Scott barks: “Carl better pull head out of rear, or next time he’s going to get his car filled with lead!”

  “No, no,” Art says. “No free fire permitted, don’t get all—”

  The Minutemen cannot detain an illegal. They cannot harass. All they can do is call the Border Patrol. So why the guns? They don’t, they say, want to be overrun by the cartel. Has a Minuteman ever been shot, or shot at, by the cartel? No. But conceptualizing the cartel dudes as Scarfacian monsters, the Minutemen come out armed to meet them in the night and thereby rev themselves up, and yet there’s no training—Art is the most experienced Minuteman on our Team (Lance and Scott are both first-timers).

  So, a prediction: Eventually, somebody’s going to get shot. It may be a Minuteman, it may be a cartel dude, it may be some little kid standing scared at the back of a group of migrants—but eventually, I tell Art, all this tension and drama is going to lead to something tragic.

  “You don’t come into my house, man,” Art says.

  “This isn’t your house,” I say.

  “Oh, it sure is,” he says. “This is my country.”

  “Your house is your house,” I say. “This is some dude’s ranch.”

  IF ONLY THERE WERE MICROWAVE POPCORN

  Boredom sets in. Our Team talks.

  Boy, do we.

  At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree. I say I don’t like big agribusiness. They agree. We agree that NAFTA stinks, but for different reasons: I say it disadvantages the small Mexican farmer; they say it presages a European Union–style mega-nation. They, like me, are not fans of President Bush (who called the Minutemen “vigilantes”), but they, like me, do like Jon Stewart.

  They do not like: George Soros; La Raza; signs in Spanish; the term Hispanic; the term African American (“I’m not an Irish-American, I’m an AMERICAN”); the federal government (which, they claim, routinely provides the Mexican government info on the time and place of their Ops); the fact that the Mexican Flag Guy at the rally was holding the Mexican flag higher than the American flag; being compelled to accommodate anyone, in any way (“I don’t mind being compassionate,” says Art, “but I don’t want you to force me to be compassionate”); and the dull conformity of the American masses (“Most people are sheep,” says Art. “They’re sheeple. The guys you meet out here? Are at least trying to get out of the sheepskins.”).

  A civil war’s coming within the next four years, they say: The warring parties will include the police and the government/corporate coalition and the Mexicans and the people like them, the non-sheeples, for whom the government is, even as we speak, preparing secret concentration camps.

  We go on and on, because we’re bored and because, turns out, we all belong to the same species: the American Male Opinionated Chatterbox.

  Around midnight a tough-looking guy with a bandage across his nose, a former Air Force sergeant everyone’s been, not surprisingly, referring to as Sarge, comes stomping over. “What is this?” he barks. “A prayer meeting?”

  The Team freezes, suddenly identified as: Yappy Fems Who Talk Too Much.

  “We’re talking too quiet for God to hear us,” says Lance.

  “God always hears us, man,” says Art solemnly.

  Sarge stomps off, spends the rest of the night sitting by the irrigation ditch like a bitter mystic. We continue to enthusiastically surmise, theorize, construct alternative governmental models, occasionally crack up; we start at a respectful whisper and gradually modulate up to kegger-level roaring. If there were any Mexicans in the vicinity that night, I expect they mistook us for a New Age sleepover, went down the road a few ranches, and crossed there.

  HAVING STEMMED THE TIDE OF INVADING ILLEGALS, WE RETIRE FOR THE EVENING

  We’re tired. Art’s face, earlier lean and savage, begins to kind of melt, increasing in affability and weariness, until finally he makes the call: Knees and legs are going here, maybe we should live to fight another day, tomorrow let’s remember the lawn chairs.

  We quit at three, slog back to the cars.

  “Ready to debrief, sir!” shouts our sole black Minuteman, Booker, who then shines his flashlight on Brian, who’s got a tricked-out AR-15 with a SureFire sighting module. Booker’s tongue drops out of his mouth, and he starts moaning and thrashing his head around.

  “Dude, what are you doing?” says Brian.

  “I just had an orgasm,” says Booker.

  Curtis gathers us around.

  All in all, he feels, it went well. He was impressed with the professionalism exhibited here tonight. These media people didn’t see a single white racist KKK person out here tonight, he doesn’t believe.

  “That’s right,” says Booker. “They haven’t hung me up yet!”

  WELL, NOT ALL OF US RETIRE

  I can’t find a room in Eagle Pass, so just start driving. I make it nearly to Del Rio, start falling asleep at the wheel, then park the minivan in a white-stone quarry, get out to pee.

  Mounted on a pile of drill pipe is the severed head of a buck.

  Around the head, five does pay tribute.

  At the sound of my many electronic doors flying/ sliding open at once, the mounted head grows a body, then disappears up a steep cliff, followed by its worshipful does.

  It occurs to me I’m too tired to be driving.

  I sleep a few hours, drive west all morning. I pass a vulture feeding on a baby deer, then another vulture feeding on a second baby deer, then a third vulture feeding on a small unrecognizable thing, decide to discontinue the noting of vulture sightings.

  Then it’s Big Bend National Park, like a Pecos Bill cartoon. Cacti, dust devils, a couple of mules preparing to fuck, the horizon a kind of Model Showroom for Used Mountains: Here’s something kind of Gibraltar, if you like that; a huge cleft chin; a classic butte; a Tibetan hooked-nose cliff; four in a row we just got in from Peru (see how they’re covered with green near their peaks?); a flattop; a Rushmorish one with faces in it, but not the faces of anybody famous.

  Above the Used Mountains appear three Muppet-looking clouds, the size you imagine God to be when you’re a kid and imagine God has size.

  The countryside is so big, so gorgeous, that it outs human ideas for what they are: inventions,
projections, approximations, delusions. In the face of all this Size, action seems pathetic and comic, and fearful, preemptive action seems most pathetic and comic of all.

  I find I’ve been made sad by Minuteman dread. They take a fact and make the worst of it. This beautiful world, all this magnificence, seems to inspire in them only a fear that the beautiful world will be taken away. I liked them, I had a good time with them, but it feels good to be away from them, out in all this open space, where anything could be true, and what is true might even be good.

  A PLACE WHERE WHAT IS TRUE IS AT THE VERY LEAST BEING MADE A LITTLE BETTER

  In the old days, the border crossing at Rio Grande Village was considered a Category B, or “historical,” crossing. Mexicans from Boquillas would cross by rowboat to shop at the little American grocery, and it was considered part of “the Big Bend experience” for American tourists to cross into Boquillas and spend the day there.

  But a few months after September 11, a TV helicopter shot some footage of a couple of guys wading across, and Boquillas was identified as an example of Appallingly Porous Border Syndrome. On May 10, 2002, the crossing was closed, as were those at two nearby villages, Paso Lajitas and Santa Elena.

  The effect of these closings has been the slow death of the villages. Boquillas has shrunk from 250 to 90 people. The store, denied its Mexican shoppers, has lost 40 percent of its business. Paso Lajitas is made up mostly of people too old to relocate and who have to drive eleven miles on a terrible dirt road to get their drinking water. Santa Elena is now down to just three families.

  I hear about this from Cynta de Narvaez, a former Manhattan debutante, Studio 54 vet, crew chief for the French hot-air balloon team, and river guide, as we sit on her porch in Terlingua.