But while there are countless possible culprits behind the surge of immigrant deaths in South Texas—overzealous “security” policies, climate change, sadistic coyotes, silence—I find only one listed in the three-ring binder on Davila’s desk. In report after report, the cause of death is listed as “hiking through ranch illegally.”
“I DON’T KNOW IF THIS body is a stinker or a bloater or what,” Davila says as we climb into a black Ford F-150. He never knows what awaits him on these runs: scattered bones, a freshly vacated corpse, or something in between. I’m not sure what to hope for myself. My heart is already thumping in my throat.
Glancing around the cab of the truck, I see that we’re bringing along a camera tripod, a camouflage jacket, a flashlight, gloves, a body bag, and a M4 carbine semiautomatic assault rifle, all coated in dirt. Davila explains that he does a lot of four-wheeling and off-roading on the job—hence, the grime. This Ford doesn’t actually belong to him. It got impounded by the county after the owner was arrested for drug smuggling. A couple hundred such vehicles line the field adjacent to the sheriff’s department, each with a date scrawled across the windshield with shoe polish, waiting to be repossessed or auctioned. Some are spanking new, while others have had their hoods rolled back like sardine cans to reveal whatever stash they held within. Many wear Houston plates, which practically scream “Search me” to Davila.
“It seems like any group, no matter who they are, is always going to Houston. From there, they get shipped all over the place,” he says.
Whenever he spies a Houston plate coasting down the highway, he calls it in to see if it’s been reported stolen. Other warning signs include a lack of backseats (yanked out to make more room for cargo) and reinforced springs (which give the appearance of a lighter load). Smugglers also tend to congregate in certain parts of town, such as the convenience stores off U.S. 281. “You see someone walking out with thirty chicken legs and thirty Gatorades, you know what they’re up to.”
We are zipping along County Road 201 now, past the detention center and Selina’s Bail Bonds toward downtown Falfurrias. Davila points out landmarks like the old dairy, which used to sell sweet cream butter out of yellow and blue boxes. Now the Whataburger stands where the creamery once did, and the main strip is lined with a deserted movie theater, dollar stores, loan offices, and pawnshops. Of Brooks County’s 7,200 residents, nearly 40 percent live below the poverty line.
“You find someone lost in the woods and you take them home, call their loved ones, and say, ‘Hey, for five hundred bucks, I’ll take them to Houston.’ Then you wait for the money to be wired over, and you put them on a bus,” Davila says. “I’d say 40 percent of the population here is involved like that.”
Indeed, I’ll turn on the news the next day to learn that the wife of the justice of the peace in nearby Kenedy County has been busted for transporting nine undocumented immigrants in her Hummer. She charged $500 a head.
As someone born and raised in Falfurrias, Davila finds it all disheartening. “That’s the hardest part of this job, policing your own, the people you grew up with,” he says, shaking his head and stroking his moustache. He’s a handsome man, late thirties with thick black hair and dark olive skin. Though he routinely sees hideous things, he seems inherently upbeat, always joking and grinning. His name is stitched across his shirt and his rubber bracelet reads PEACE. Leaning over the steering wheel, he flicks on the radio:
This heat has got
Right out of hand.
It’s Bananarama, the eighties British pop band. The song is “Cruel Summer.”
A RANCH HAND WEARING a rosary as a necklace ushers us in at the gate of a sprawling Brooks County ranch, one Davila asks me not to name. We’re among the last to arrive—the Border Patrol, the justice of the peace, and the sheriff are already here, and the undertaker is on the way. The body is located in the far recesses of the property, so we must travel in a caravan so no one gets lost. As we amble down the caliche road, Davila points out where gaping holes have been cut into the barbed-wire fence. Some ranchers leave out ladders in the hopes their fences might be spared, but the hikers don’t seem to use them. It’s the same with the water. Afraid, perhaps, of being poisoned by the big tanks painted blue especially for them, the immigrants opt to break the valves off windmills and drink that water instead.
At 3.3 miles, we switch to four-wheel drive, take a right, and begin off-roading through the brush. I am trembling now—and Davila doesn’t help when he notes that this seemingly deserted ranch is actually teeming with smugglers. “There ain’t someone looking at us. There’s a whole lotta people looking at us.”
He is constantly reminded that the smugglers monitor his actions. Not long before our meeting, a stranger approached him at the store and said, “I noticed your antenna is bent, what happened?”
Davila laughed it off—“I hit a butterfly,” he told the man—but the point was clear. People know what kind of car he drives, and where and when, which is especially disconcerting given that he has a young daughter. I ask how he deals with the stress, and he quips, “I take a lot of blood pressure pills.”
In time, we see a navy hoodie dangling from a fence. The truck ahead of us parks and so do we. The brush has grown too thick for driving. It’s time to start hiking.
I SMELL THE BODY BEFORE I SEE IT. The scent wraps around my face like a hot towel, burning my eyes and singeing my throat. It is violent and rancid and frightening. I start breathing through my mouth instead of my nose, but that transfers the sensation to my tongue. Now I am eating death instead of smelling it.
Trailing behind Davila, I enter the woods. The brush is so dense, I must clear it with my arms before each step, half-swimming across the loamy soil. Brambles crack beneath my boots. It is ninety-five degrees.
Maybe forty feet away, a pair of black jeans becomes visible. An occupied pair of jeans, stretched out in the dirt. One foot remains inside a sneaker, but before I can spot the other, I see the arm. What’s left of the arm. Not long ago, that arm must have hugged and danced, carried firewood and groceries and children, but now it has been eaten to the bone, with just a few pulpy morsels remaining. The hand, meanwhile, has been ravaged not by animals but by sun, baked so black it almost looks blue.
My eyes drift toward the midsection of the body. At first, I think it is wearing a child-size T-shirt, but then I see the belly has bloated to colossal proportions, so engorged it has exploded along the jean line. Slick black beetles crawl in and out of its crater.
It’s the face, though, that unravels me. From the nose down, its remaining skin is black and leathered, but the top half is strangely untouched, the color of a bruised peach. There are deep holes instead of eyes, and the mouth is open as if silently wailing. The hair is streaming all the way down to what used to be elbows, thick and black and damp. It’s a woman, I think, and with that realization comes the overpowering urge to scream, to continue the sound her own mouth was making before “hiking through ranch illegally” forever quieted her, to continue the collective wail they all must have been making before winding up inside the three-ring binders of Brooks County, Texas. I bite my lips until they bleed.
WE GATHER AROUND THE WOMAN—Davila, the sheriff, the Border Patrol, the justice of the peace, the ranch hand, and me—yet we stand a good fifteen to twenty feet away. We lean forward, as if over an imaginary railing, but no one steps any closer. It could be that we are respecting the privacy of this tragedy, or taking care not to trample any evidence. I’ve been told that these bodies harbor all matter of wildlife, including snakes and spiders. Perhaps no one wants to get bitten. Santa Barraza will later inform me that spirits hover long beyond a body’s death, waiting for someone to find them and then affixing to their shoulder. Perhaps no one wants to get cursed. Or maybe we’re just sparing ourselves further revulsion. Whatever the case, I too stand close-but-far, despite a pressing impulse to run up and hold what’s left of the woman’s hand.
The justice of the peace asks for
the time. We all scramble for our watches and cell phones, grateful for the distraction. After much discussion we decide it is 12:35 on July 3, 2012, which the justice of the peace jots in her notebook. Although this woman has clearly been gone for days—three, by Davila’s estimation—this will be her official time of death. And because there is no obvious sign of foul play—no hatchet sticking out of her skull, say—her death will be attributed to “hiking through ranch illegally.”
Just then the undertaker arrives on the scene. He is an older man with a slender build, and he carries a white bedsheet and a large cardboard box. Breaking through our imaginary railing, he walks right up to the woman’s feet, sets down his parcels, and slides on a pair of blue rubber gloves. He briskly searches her pockets, inches from the beetle pit. First he finds some dollar bills: a twenty, a five, three ones. He piles these atop the woman’s thigh. Next he pulls out an LG cell phone and wipes it clean. Running his fingers along her bra line, he checks to see if anything is tucked inside, an ID maybe, or a list of phone numbers. There is nothing.
Now comes the task of slipping the woman into the bag. He unfurls the sheet and lays it out beside her, though ultimately it must go beneath her. Carefully, he rolls the woman onto her side—but that makes her scalp fall off, hair and all, with a strangely soupy sound. She has become liquid. All of her is leaking and dripping, colored fluids as well as beetles. The undertaker catches her scalp and swiftly slides it back into place, as though assisting a lady with an errant wig. While the rest of us simply stand and stare, Davila bounds over to help. They push the sheet beneath her, then roll her back on top.
“She’s small,” Davila announces. “Probably Guatemalan. Or Honduran.”
The two men swaddle her in the sheet, half bones, half stew, and then stuff her into a black body bag with golden zippers, taken from the cardboard box. Davila, the sheriff, and the Border Patrol agent fan out thirty feet and scan the brush for approximately half a minute before heading back to their respective trucks. There is no obvious evidence in sight. We leave behind only an empty water bottle and a host of beetles. No words are spoken. No rites are given.
OVER BY THE FORD, Davila wipes his shoes on a patch of huisache. “Gotta make sure there’s no bodily fluid on me, ’cause it will stink,” he explains.
We notice the undertaker struggling with a gurney, and Davila hurries over. Together they prop it open, lay the body bag on top, strap it down, lift it up, and roll it into the back of the van. Davila introduces me to the undertaker, whose name is Ángel, pronounced An-hell in the Tejano way. I want to say “how fitting” and applaud his professional graces, but before I can speak, Davila tells him I am a writer.
Ángel shakes his head. “A lot of people write stories,” he says softly, “and nothing ever gets done.”
I hear this a lot, and though it never fails to shatter me, I usually brush it off with a self-deprecating remark and a smile. But there’s just something about standing in the woods with a three-days-dead woman in ninety-five-degree heat that gives me the audacity to hope that maybe, just maybe, something will change this time: Congress will change and minds will change and policy will change and a humane immigration law will finally be enacted; and although that hope vaporizes into idealistic mist before I can even articulate it, there remains a spark of optimism that, by virtue of being written about, this Code 500 might be remembered—that, even if we never learn her name or whether she’s Guatemalan or Honduran or for all we know Chinese, this one member of the thirty-four who died before her and the ninety-four who will die after her this single year in this solitary county of this one state could be memorialized inside of a story. And at the very least, I will remember her—this woman who hiked illegally through this ranch and got annihilated for it—I will remember what remained of her feet and of her face when I try to fall asleep at night. Is it wrong, Ángel, to pray this counts as something getting done?
I wish to say this—all of this, and a great deal more—but there is time only to feebly smile before Ángel retreats to his driver’s seat, where he removes a pair of badly soiled gloves. He already knows that he’ll be back tomorrow, and that I will not.
NOTES
1. So many would-be immigrants got struck and killed while darting across San Diego’s freeways, Caltrans started posting yellow caution signs in 1990 that depicted a silhouette of a father, mother, and child in flight. This image has since been adopted by activists on both sides of the immigration debate and emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to book jackets to artwork that hangs in the Smithsonian.
9
The Woman in the Woods
I SEE HER EVERYWHERE NOW.
Santa Barraza had warned me her spirit could latch onto my shoulder, but the woman in the woods seems to have emblazoned my corneas instead. For months afterward, she is the prism through which I view almost everything. I see her in dark spaces, like the corners of closets, but also in white spaces, like unadorned walls. I see her between the pages of books and flickering across computer screens. I see her at night, when she wards off sleep. Though I heard scores of traumatic border-crossing stories while researching my last book, hers is the one I cannot release, despite knowing only its end.
Maybe she was escaping war, or the ghosts of war, such as the ones that ravaged Guatemala and El Salvador. Maybe she was fleeing natural disaster, like the hurricane that obliterated much of Honduras, or social disaster, like the Mara Salvatrucha, which has infiltrated most of las Américas. The murderous gang could have been pressuring her husband or son to traffic drugs across the border. They could even have been cajoling her.
Or maybe she came for love. Her sister was in the United States, her cousin was in the United States, her absolutely favorite tío. Her husband was here, her child was here, her life, she was convinced, was here.
Whatever the push/pull—war, disaster, violence, family, hope—it must have been fierce, tremendously fierce, if it propelled her to gather all of the money she could raise or borrow and relinquish it to a stranger. Whatever her thought process, whatever her reasoning, her conclusion must have been that possibly dying in El Norte was better than living on at home.
And so she said good-bye to her mother and father, her siblings and cousins, all the tías and abuelas who helped raise her. She said goodbye to the friends whom she grew up with, her classmates and coworkers, the neighbors who lived down the road. She said good-bye to her lover and possibly even her children, then summoned all of the courage within and boarded a bus heading north. Traveling across her homeland, she must have paused to take in one last sunset across her ancestral sky. Eaten one last pupusa that her mother had made, one last mango picked from her backyard tree.
No matter where she came from, traveling across Mexico probably seemed worse. First there was jungle followed by mountains and rivers and desert, all infested with terrifying men trafficking drugs and guns and people. Mexican immigration officials patrolled the highways, street gangs traversed the trains, and swindlers prowled the bus stations, yet somehow she avoided them. Chances are, she had a coyote to guide her, but if she didn’t—or if she did and he’d already abandoned her—she probably hired one at the border. He wouldn’t have been hard to find. He saw her shuffling around the bus terminal with her flowing black hair and her skinny black jeans, and he raised an eyebrow with interest. He convinced her that he knew the way; he ensured her that he could be trusted. Houston, no problem, I got a group of forty there last night. Los Angeles, that’s easy, I was there a week ago. Something in his cocksure voice reminded her of her long-lost tío. Something said he was safe.
Maybe she crossed into the United States by raft in the dark of night, current racing, cold water slapping her face. Maybe she crossed by folding herself into the trunk of a car or by squeezing between shipping containers in an eighteen-wheeler. Maybe she crossed by wading through sandy desert. However she did it, the odds were formidable. About a thousand people are caught each day along the 2,000-mile border and eithe
r detained or sent back home. Yet every day, unknown hundreds or thousands more slip through. One day or night, one of those lucky border crossers was her.
The triumph she felt must have been extraordinary. ¡El Otro Lado! The Other Side. Whatever she came for, she must have imagined it would be waiting there, right across la línea. Her mother or brother or lover would be standing there, arms outstretched, ready to receive her. Or else, that cleaning or sewing or child-sitting job she’d heard about—the one that would finally allow her family to buy that house, pay off those debts, finance that car, and splurge on her daughter’s quinceañera while she was at it. Her new boss would be there, ready to stuff her pockets with gringo dollars.
What she probably did not realize—what she couldn’t begin to fathom—was that however far she had traveled, she was still only halfway to her destination. The border is wide; the border is vicious. Her crossing had just begun.
UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS GENERALLY SPEND THEIR first nights in the United States at a stash house. Often located on the fringes of border towns, these rental homes or apartments have traditionally served as motels for illicit travelers—a place to shower and rest while coyotes plot the next stage of the journey. But in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, these houses have degenerated into something else entirely. Ten years ago, coyotes seemed to assign no more than a dozen immigrants to each house, but police these days are finding upward of forty and fifty per house, so many they sleep in shifts (if at all). Food and water are rationed, and when immigrants complain, they often get beaten. Some groups must endure these conditions for weeks while coyotes secretly call their families and extort money for their release. In fiscal year 2012, law enforcement busted 237 stash houses in the Rio Grande Valley and apprehended 4,752 immigrants—nearly two and a half times as many people as the year before.
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