Borderland

by Peter Eichstaedt

  Juárez and the border towns were as much of a war zone as Iraq and Afghanistan had been, but it was an undeclared war. America simply didn’t want to admit it, he told himself, because doing so would mean accepting that this country was part of the problem. Some soldiers in this war south of the border wore uniforms. But most didn’t.

  Now the war had spilled across the border, he thought. No longer was it someone else’s problem. No longer was it someone else’s father, mother, child, aunt, or uncle who had taken a bullet or who had turned up missing or who was found dangling from a highway overpass. This time it was personal. His own father had been shot, execution style. And for what? What was my father doing?

  He had never told Sam how he felt, that he had forgiven him, despite what he had done. There was one thing left that he could still do for his father—find his killers and bring them to justice.

  Chapter 8

  Juárez, Mexico

  It was late morning when Dawson drove across the bridge and into Juárez. He paused at the entry booth and waved his passport at the Mexican immigration official, who only nodded and motioned Dawson on with a wave of his hand.

  He turned down the street that led to his mother’s neighborhood at the edge of Old Town, where he stopped at a traffic light. A man with his face painted like a circus clown was working the intersection by juggling fake bowling pins. Dawson smiled, lowered his window, and handed a buck to the man, who moved on down the line of stopped cars. Five minutes later, Dawson turned onto a narrow street lined with cars parked half on and half off the cracked and crumbling sidewalks.

  For years he’d pleaded with his mother to move into something better, but she insisted that she was okay right where she was, and in the same breath would say that the house was almost paid off. She had a low monthly mortgage that she paid to the government out of her salary as a processor of automobile licenses. Soon the house would be hers.

  He stopped in front of her house and turned his engine off. It looked the same as he remembered it. The windows were protected by welded re-bar that he’d painted years ago to match the window frames. The fenced yard was still a small jungle of flowers and cactus that surrounded a dry concrete birdbath. Bougainvillea draped from baskets hanging on the looping metal framework of the porch awning.

  His mother’s fifteen-year-old Subaru was parked on her short concrete driveway, behind a chalky, dented and faded blue Chevy Suburban. The house was dark, and he suspected that she was still at the morning Mass. She had taken a few days off to mourn his father, she said, and was going to the neighborhood church every day to pray. Dawson lowered his window and listened as church bells pealed across the flat-topped houses of the crowded the neighborhood.

  He’d wait, since he didn’t have a key to her house. He slumped down deep in his front seat, pulling his baseball cap down and closing his eyes. She’d be back soon.

  A thundering bass soon vibrated his car. He reached up to adjust the rearview mirror. The source of the noise was a gray king-cab pickup truck with wide tires and darkened widows. The thumping grew louder as the truck seemed to be on a collision course with his rear bumper.

  His heart pounded as he braced for the impact. The truck swerved away at the last moment. Dawson glanced up as the thump-thump-thump passed. The truck slowed, then stopped near the end of the block. The thump-thump-thump continued. Four men climbed out, all grasping automatic AK-47 pistols loaded with double banana clips. They looked up and down the street.

  Dawson slouched deeper, peering over the dashboard. The four men approached the front door of a house. Two kicked it open and disappeared inside, with two remaining outside. Popping sounds came from the inside the house. Moments later, the two men emerged from the house and they all climbed back into the truck. The doors slammed shut. The truck lurched forward, tires spinning, and disappeared around the corner in a cloud of blue smoke.

  Mournful cries broke the ensuing silence. Dawson sat up. A woman staggered out of the house and collapsed, wounded and bleeding, on the sidewalk. His heart pounding, Dawson slowly got out of his car as the church bells sounded with frighteningly clarity. He heard another cry, this time from behind him, and wheeled. It was his mother, who held her hands to her mouth as her face crumpled into tears. She was not alone. Standing with Mercedes was his aunt, a woman whom he’d rarely seen, and a man he knew to be a distant cousin, Suray Benitez, and his wife and daughter.

  The relatives from the mountains. Suray, as he preferred to be called, had a leathery face and wore a straw cowboy hat. His daughter’s hair was pulled into a tight ponytail that trailed down the back of her knee-length white dress. White shoes and socks contrasted starkly with her dark skin. Dawson nodded and shook Suray’s hand. He was lean, stern, and erect, wearing a threadbare suit coat and Western shirt buttoned at the neck. His hands were calloused and rough. His wife’s name was Rosa, Dawson recalled. The plump woman with long, dark hair tied in a thick braid wore a colorful skirt that nearly touched the pavement and a blue blouse covered with a woven shawl.

  His mother staggered, and Dawson reached out to take her in his arms. But she dashed past, her cries joining that of another woman who’d emerged from a neighboring house. Dawson yelled, “Mama, please, it’s not safe!”

  She ignored him. “She needs help!” Mercedes said, darting down the street. The wounded woman raised herself to her knees and, her face twisted in agony, reached out and wrapped bloodied hands around his mother’s legs. Others had emerged from the nearby homes, most standing mute and numb, their arms folded across their chests, fear clouding their faces. There was nothing they could do.

  Dawson wheeled at the sound of an ambulance and two military-style police vehicles rounding the corner, sirens screaming, lights flashing. The vehicles screeched to a halt at the house. A dozen black-clad men jumped out, shouting and taking positions in the street, which was promptly taped off and closed. Medics quickly unloaded a gurney.

  Dawson turned to Suray and motioned for him to help get his mother. Medics had taken her by the arms and tugged her away as they began working on the wounded woman, who was now on her back and choking, seemingly on her own blood.

  On any other day, his mother’s face would have been flush with the satisfaction of having done right by God. But the horror of the shooting and the clamor of the police and rescue vehicles blocking the street had wiped that away, replacing it with terror and tears.

  “This is terrible,” Mercedes said, shaking her head as she clutched Dawson’s arm to her breast. “Muy terrible. Muy, muy malo.” Very terrible. Very, very bad.

  “This place is getting too dangerous, Mama. It’s insane. You need to get out of here.”

  She looked at Dawson in shock, as if just now recognizing him. “It’s a wonder you weren’t shot.”

  “It’s you who’s in danger, Mama. Not me. You need to move.”

  “Where, mi hijo? Where am I going to go?”

  Suray, a lean and hard-looking native from the Sierra Madre mountains, looked at him woefully and shook his head. “No place is safe in Mexico these days. They’re shooting people everywhere.”

  “This is chaos, Mama,” Dawson repeated. “You need to leave.”

  She looked at him with her best sympathetic smile, her face edged by her thick white hair pulled tightly back and bunched in a matronly bun. “God will take care of us.”

  “Yeah, right,” Dawson said. “Let’s go inside. At least we’ll be out of the line of fire.” She turned, not listening, and walked to her door.

  ***

  An hour later, the inside of the small house was alight with burning candles covering end tables and shelves, filling the rooms with a stifling and waxy glow. Suray, his wife and daughter, and Dawson’s aunt sat in the living room, their eyes vacant from the shooting, their voices quiet as they watched a television, the sound low.

  Loosely woven tapestries of Jesus hung on the walls. Mercedes’s favorite was Jesus kneeling in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying as a beam of
moonlight breaks through the clouds and lights His face. Another was the agonizing, blood-streaked face of Jesus, His head crowned with spiky thorns and His sorrowful eyes cast up to the dark and cloudy night.

  “You’re going to burn the house down, Mama,” Dawson said, as he sat in her cramped kitchen. She’d changed her bloodstained dress, and her sister had already washed it in the kitchen sink and hung it out to dry behind the house.

  Mercedes’s eyes flared. “Hush! These candles are for my neighbor, but also your father. You must have respect. Your father’s spirit may be lingering here. I don’t want any trouble. We must pray that his spirit will find some peace.”

  Dawson shook his head slowly. “You don’t need to trouble yourself for Sam’s benefit. He doesn’t deserve all of this prayer.” The saints, the spirits. He’d heard it all before. Religion, as much as it existed for him at all, lingered on the fringes of his consciousness. He kept it there.

  He’d seen religion up close in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it left a wasteland of human debris thanks to suicide bombers who wrapped themselves in explosive vests or drove bomb-laden cars and trucks. He loathed religious zealots, no matter their stripe or color.

  “Why are you still so critical of him?” she asked.

  “He abandoned us, Mama,” Dawson said softly, as if he should not have to remind her. “He left us penniless. You had to work many jobs just to survive.”

  “But Kyle, he went to prison.”

  “That’s because there are laws against swindling elderly people out of their money by selling them swampland. When he was released, what did he do?” he continued. “Did he stick around? No. He took off again and left us with nothing, not even a car to get around.” He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Why do you always defend him?” he asked.

  Mercedes looked down, then buried her face in her hands and whimpered.

  Now he felt terrible. He stood, walked around the table, and put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry.” He was. They didn’t need to argue at a time like this. It was tough. Tough on both of them.

  His mother opened the oven door and removed a deep casserole dish piled high with steaming tamales and put them on the table. The last thing Dawson wanted to do now was eat.

  “Are you coming to the funeral, Mama?”

  Mercedes looked at him for a long moment, not saying a word.

  Dawson shook his head in frustration. “Where did Suray get a big vehicle like that?”

  “Suray works up around Creel. He’s a driver. I guess it’s someone else’s truck. Suray came here to pick up parts and supplies.”

  “For whom?”

  “Oh, mi hijo. There is much about your family that you do not know.”

  It was true and it worried Dawson, even more than the shooting. She was always taking care of her so-called relatives. She was half Indian, her mother having been a pureblood Raramuri native from a highlands of the Sierra Madres. She called them all her cousins, and Dawson remembered her Raramuri cousins visiting not long after he and Mercedes had returned to Juárez from Florida. They came to Juárez to work, or more often to beg on the streets. Some spoke Spanish, but usually badly. “One quarter of your blood is Indian,” Mercedes said. “Don’t you forget that.”

  Dawson gazed out the kitchen window and saw Suray open the hood to the bulky, old Suburban. Dawson got up, slipped through the kitchen, and went out the side door.

  Suray had shed his church coat and his shirt, and wearing just an undershirt over his jeans, fitted a wrench on a heavy nut and strained to turn it. Suray’s cowboy boots looked vaguely familiar. Then Dawson remembered. He once had left those boots at his mother’s house, intending to toss them out. He shook his head at the thought. Suray freed the nut and wrestled with a fan belt.

  “Esta bien?” Dawson asked. It goes well?

  Suray grunted as he reached down to free the belt from a lower pulley, then lifted the belt up as if he’d extracted a diseased part from an animal carcass. The old fan belt was badly cracked and bound in black electrical tape.

  “You are lucky that it did not break,” Dawson said.

  Suray straightened and nodded. “Si.”

  “This SUV,” Dawson said, looking at the chalky paint covering a body that was dented and scratched, with tires that were undersized, mismatched, and mostly bald. “Is it yours?”

  Suray nodded yes. “I am a driver.”

  “For whom? Turistas?”

  Suray shook his head, then wiped his hands on a rag.

  Dawson waited for Suray to explain, but he said nothing. Suray ripped open the cardboard binding around a new fan belt, unfolded the stiff rubber belt, and worked it with his hands. He quickly bent over the engine again, slipping the belt into the pulleys.

  “Many turistas in Creel?”

  Suray shrugged. “Come and I will show you the village of your mother, your family.”

  Family? Dawson swallowed at the thought. Family was not his forte. Neither he nor his father for that matter, he thought. Indian family? It was another side of his life that he’d ignored. Yet there it was, right in front of him. Suray was his cousin, one among many, Mercedes had said. But Dawson wondered.

  He walked around the Suburban and stuck his nose inside the open window, catching the acrid scent of fresh marijuana. Dawson knew that the cartels used the Raramuri people as labor, forcing them to cultivate and process the marijuana, then drive their product to the border towns. It was then repacked and carried across the border. As he watched Suray work, he sensed raw anger. It had flashed in his cousin’s eyes, not from anything that he’d said, just something that was there, Dawson thought, and could emerge at any moment. It frightened him. Although Dawson felt guilty about it, having ignored this part of his family may have been a good thing.

  After tightening a couple of nuts, Suray climbed in the Suburban, pumped the gas, and turned the key. The engine roared to life, a cloud of blue smoke roiling behind the SUV. Suray raced the engine several times. The belt didn’t squeal. He shut off the engine.

  Suray climbed out, then glanced down the street to the neighboring houses, before circling to the front and slamming the hood shut.

  “It has become dangerous here,” Dawson said.

  Suray shrugged. “The killing is everywhere. You can only pray to God that He will spare you.”

  Chapter 9

  Rancho la Peña, New Mexico

  Dawson squinted at the Mormon temple spire rising into the cloudless blue sky. The sun was high, but the day was not yet hot. His gaze dropped to the sprawling asphalt where gleaming SUVs and black limos crowded the wide drive that circled a gurgling fountain. Parked near the temple entrance was a sleek, black hearse with tinted windows.

  Dressed in a dark suit, Dawson stood near the curb as people streamed past, most of whom he did not know. He felt uncomfortable and incredibly alone, as if he was a stranger at his own father’s funeral, a minor character in the final scene of someone else’s drama. As the temple filled, no one took notice of him. Just another face in the crowd. This is what I get. He’d kept his father at arm’s length for most of his adult life. Still, he had never imagined his father’s funeral would be like this. His stomach soured at how his stepmother had made a public spectacle of what should have been a quiet memorial service for man who met a violent and as-yet unexplained death.

  What was Sam doing? Even as a child, Dawson had sensed his father’s compulsive nature, his willingness to grasp at straws, thinking they were strands of gold. With that compulsion came danger. Now Sam was dead. That he had been killed was no surprise. The danger Sam had flirted with all his life had caught up to him.

  Dawson also realized now that he and his father were not all that different. He too longed for danger and had been drawn to it like a moth to flame. Like Sam, he had tossed everything to fate, left his family behind, and climbed aboard a jet that took him to Baghdad. He had duplicated his father’s behavior, all the while resenting the man.

  “I’m
so sorry about your father,” said a voice that snapped him back to the present. He turned to see Jodie Serna and her husband, Trini, standing beside him. She wore a long black skirt and a large, floppy black hat.

  Dawson mumbled thanks and took her hand. As he did, Trini Serna leaned close. A man in his early fifties with a head of graying hair, a goatee, and sunglasses, he squeezed Dawson’s upper arm and spoke in a soft voice. “I’ve talked at length about this with the senator, and we want you to know that we are doing everything in our power to get to the bottom of this.”

  Feeling like he was being double-teamed, Dawson took a step back. “Thanks, Trini. I appreciate that. I know that Jacquelyn does, too.”

  “We owe it to your father and to you,” Trini Serna said. “It’s the least we can do.”

  Dawson nodded. Yes, he thought, digging into his father’s murder certainly was on Madsen’s agenda. Sam had been one of Madsen’s longest and biggest contributors, to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars for his various campaigns, including this one. The money was mostly funneled through a multitude of political action committees that made a mockery of campaign financing laws. As Madsen’s senior advisor, Dawson knew that Trini often acted on behalf of his boss, without Madsen being directly involved. Trini was never far from Madsen’s side and if anybody had Madsen’s ear, it was him.