“So! That’s quite a collection you’ve got in there, huh? I mean, that Harley, wow. How’d you get it?”
He (finally) looks at me. Takes in my (over-) eagerness, my (blatant) whiteness, my (total) outsiderness. Then he stabs a burger with a grilling fork and flips it over. It sizzles, along with my nerve.
“Great talking with you!” I chirp, then hurry back to the picnic table. If Charles Bowden3 were here, he’d be barbecuing with the man—drinking, smoking, telling dirty jokes, maybe even going for a ride on the Harley. Because Bowden knew that the best stories aren’t obtained by asking questions but by building trust. And trust takes time. Lots of time. Yet I’ll be moving cross-country in two weeks—meaning that, once again, the dealer’s point of view will escape me. Feeling inept, I eat a plate of potato salad and wash it down with Bud, consoling myself with the notion that, if it was ethically compromising to write about people’s penchant for smuggling down in South Texas, it is probably even worse reporting about the alternative economies here at Akwesasne.
An hour later, though, I am sunning by the pool when the dealer’s wife sits beside me. Maybe thirty years old, she has Cleopatra eyes and thick, glossy hair. I initiate conversation by inquiring about her kids, mention I’m a writer, and, as casually as possible, ask: “So … what do you do?”
A family business, you could say. She seals high-grade marijuana into bricks, and he transports them across the river. Often, the whole family joins him for the ride, to ward off suspicion. Sometimes even his mother tags along. Of course she knows what he does: she got him into the business in the first place, when he was still in high school. Their family has been shuttling contraband for four generations: alcohol back in the day, and now marijuana and cigarettes. They avoid hard stuff like coke and pills, she says, because the penalties are much stiffer.
Remembering Walter White’s dilemma on Breaking Bad, I ask where she keeps the money. “Do you have an offshore bank, or do you launder it somewhere?”
“Yeah, I launder it. In the laundry basket!” She laughs and sips her beer.
I laugh too, because I assume she’s joking. But no. Lots of dealers hide their money in their laundry, Keetah later tells me, and when word spreads of a raid, they throw it down the chute. Either that, or they bury it in their backyard.
I ask how many other people are in the business. She turns around in her chair and starts pointing at nearby houses. “This one does coke. That one does weed.”
“So … it’s kind of, like, a neighborhood business?”
She gives me a sharp look. “It’s a shitty business. One day you’re loaded, the next day you got nothing. Or you’re making money but losing your freedom because you get so into it.”
She ticks off the pitfalls of the profession: the backstabbing, the lying, the family forever dropping by to “borrow” $35,000. It has only worsened since the bridge situation. Before 2009, she and her husband owned seven trucks, two cars, and a van. Now, money has gotten so tight, they are trying to sell off their warehouse collection. Problem is, the only people making offers are doing so with contraband instead of cash.
“How do you know who to trust?”
“You don’t. And it sucks.”
At that, her youngest son runs up, swinging a pair of goggles. He’s a shrunken replica of his father, down to the hairstyle. She gently tightens his goggles so they fit his small face. As he shuffles off, I ask what she’d do if he ever expressed interest in the business.
“He already did. He asks my mom, he says, ‘How come you don’t have a car?’ and he says, ‘I’m going to have a car and a truck.’ She says, ‘Are you going to work?’ and he says yeah, and she says, ‘What are you going to do?’ and he says ‘Cigarettes!’”
She guffaws. “He was like four years old when his father would have him push cigarette cases out of the truck. In his mind, he was like, ‘I’m helping my parents work.’ But I says to my husband, you need to stop letting him watch. It’s not okay. He should have a job. We should have a job.”
She stares off into the pool, where her daughter is turning handstands in the shallow end and her sons are chasing each other with water guns. “I want my kids to go to school, to college, to get out of this area.”
“Do you think you’ll ever quit?”
“I want out now. It’s getting too hard. My sister’s boyfriend just got caught. It’s not worth it anymore.”
Her hope, she says, is to become a nurse someday, which admittedly sounds far-fetched—until I remember what Chief David said. She can obviously handle high-stakes situations with a level head. Monitoring all that money has undoubtedly honed her math. Confronting so much danger on a regular basis must have rendered her fearless. Who knows what could happen if she channeled those skills elsewhere?
Keetah strolls over. It’s time to drop off her girls at their dad’s house. Before we part, I reiterate the likelihood of my writing about this some day and ask her friend how I should refer to her. She spells out her Mohawk name for me.
“No, no, I should change it, right? You know … to protect you?”
She thinks a second. “All right. Call me Denise.”
“Denise?” I ask. Given the option, people usually pick something more daring.
“Yeah, Denise,” she says, then laughs. “I hate that bitch!”
THAT EVENING AT KEETAH’S, I hound her with so many follow-up questions about “Denise,” she finally suggests interviewing someone else.
“But I don’t know anyone,” I whine.
Whipping out her iPhone, she thumbs through her contacts. “Pot or coke?” she asks, and once we’ve settled that: “Does he have to be dealing still, or is probation okay?”
A mad texting session later, the first one arrives, worrisomely skinny and clutching a bottle of Minute Maid apple juice. He is wearing a Nike shirt, shorts that extend to his knees, and multiple tattoos and piercings. His nose is broken and his veins are prominent. He flounces on the couch beside me.
“Well, I’m kind of retired now,” he says when I ask about the business. “The feds put an end to me pretty quick. I’m kicked out of Canada for life.”
Currently twenty-seven years old, he started smoking weed at fourteen. He liked it so much, he eventually dropped out of school, got a hold of some seeds, and began growing with a friend. (“Where did you learn how?” “That shit they teach you from first to sixth grade—the bean plant and all that shit.”) Their first goal was 300 plants, which they turned into a $6,000 profit in three months. Then they bought five pounds of product and profited even more, so they upgraded to ten pounds next. Within a few years, people were bringing sixty pounds of pot to his house at once.
“Before I was raided, I shit you not, I would wake up at 9 or 10 A.M., smoke a joint, and just sit there. I never left the house. I would just smoke all day and make $1,000 by 1 P.M.,” he says.
That business model imploded the same way his front door exploded: before dawn one morning, with a BOOM.
“I had my two-year-old daughter and my girlfriend with me, and I was like, what the fuck? I looked out the bedroom window, and there was tribal police and ICE. They came off the river, they came from the woods, they came in two helicopters. They shut the whole fucking road down. They came after me like I’m some terrorist, and I’m still in my boxer shorts,” he says, taking a swig from an apple juice bottle that smells like anything but.
The police confiscated ten pounds of Kush, fifty pounds of pot, and thirteen guns that day: “a AK-47, a AR-15, a couple older guns like World War II, and then I had my boomstick—it spits out six-foot fire at night, fucking amazing!—an old-school Mauser like Nazi Germany, a 30 aught 6, and a 90-millimeter.” He spent a week in jail before getting released on a $40,000 bond and is currently serving probation while awaiting his appeals. That doesn’t sound so bad to me, but he calls it “hell on wheels” since everything he worked for is gone: his cars, his house, his savings, his guns. He has managed to secure a minimum wage job but has on
ly $40 left after paying his bills—and another baby is on the way.
“If I could repeat, I probably would have stayed the fuck in school. I could be in college now. I could still be smoking pot. I wanted to go to the military, but my parents talked me out of it. Who knows where I’d be now? I could be dead, but that could have been good, too,” he says. With that, he caps his bottle of faux-juice and bids us ladies good night.
The second dealer pulls up on a motorcycle a few hours later. With his stout build and cinnamon skin, he could pass for one of my primos. When I tell him so, he laughs and says maybe that’s why he hung out with all the “Spanish guys” in prison. His childhood dream was to be a police officer, but then he stole a handgun from a friend’s father and pulled it on someone, which landed him in a home for wayward youth. His career plan ruined, he started working in contraband when his first child came along at age seventeen. Cigarettes brought him upward of $1,500 a night, but he wound up snorting most of the profit.
“Coke gives you a sense you can’t be touched, like you’re invisible out there on the river. You do it and you think they can’t see you,” he explains.
Snowmobiles are his preferred method of transportation, he says, as police don’t have many in stock and seem reticent to do high-speed chases with the few they’ve got. “It’s like an interstate out there, in the winter,” he says of the river. It is stressful, though, as you never know when the ice will break. He invested $600 in a “survival suit” to hold his neck above water and maintain his body temperature for twenty minutes in case of falling through, but he’s never needed it. He has seen a lot of accidents, though, enough to try to sober up. In the late nineties, he made a career change to ironwork, which he calls “an honor job.” His first site was thirty stories of structural steel. The thought of scaling it scared him until his coworkers assured him, “You’ll adjust. It’s in your blood.” He lasted four years there, he says. Then his brother started moving marijuana across the river. In 2003, he decided to help out.
“The biker gangs would hire us. It’s our corridor, so they have to go through us. I was really sketched out at first, but they were respectable gentlemen. Hard-working men, just like me. They sat us down and said we would make a lot of money,” he says.
They were right. He earned $50 for every pound he shuttled across the river for them and moved at least fifty pounds at once. Eventually he made enough connections with suppliers to work for himself. “There was the Mafia—the Italians, the Chinese, and the Russians. They dressed real high-class. You could tell they were wealthy. They drove Maseratis. The Russians would throw big parties in a bar or a strip joint. We’d drink all night. They gained our trust, and we gained theirs.”
At his peak, he was profiting anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 a week, which he stuffed into PVC pipes in his backyard. Addiction inserted its tenterhooks, though—Vicodin and Demerol—and he got caught for possession and was imprisoned for a year. He says he’s “been out” for two years now but constantly fields invitations to return. Just last week, some dealers asked him to be their escort, which would have entailed driving twenty minutes ahead of their load to warn them of any checkpoints. Not a bad way to earn $2,500, he says, “but I’d rather have the honor of earning my paycheck. Being an escort, it’s too easy. I get scared of going back into my addiction. I have thrown partying out of my life for seven months now. I look toward my daughters now.”
These stories are entertaining, of course—especially considering how long I’ve been raring to hear one. Yet, by night’s end, I can’t help feeling the same way I did in the summer of 1994, when I moved to Seattle to write about its music scene. Though psyched to interview so many “rock stars,” I kept thinking, “That’s it?” after each one ended. Their narratives were just so predictable. Ditto with dealers, it seems. For all the films and news stories and policy reports they generate at either border, they turn out to be the least interesting people I have met there. Far more illuminating are those who resist the obvious path and chart one of their own.
THE LAST OF THE NIGHT’S VISITORS is the old family friend. Someone dropped her off a while ago to check the latest on her dating website. Now she needs a ride home. (She has a van but says she “murdered” it after forgetting to change its oil.) Keetah has mentioned that, for many years, this woman battled a crack addiction that so consumed her, she lost custody of her kids. She has since cleaned up considerably, gotten a job at a truck stop, and rented a new apartment that she cannot wait to show us. Walking in, we are dazzled by the sight of hundreds of rhinestones glued to every surface and inspirational quotations stenciled to every wall. The living room is Asian-themed, the guest room is zebra-patterned, and the master bedroom is modeled after Paris, complete with an Eiffel Tower comforter and pillows. Every time I admire something, she says, “I got it at the Dollar Store!” and beams.
Having morally supported her friend throughout her ordeal, Keetah is thrilled by this marker of progress—so much so that she pretends to faint from happiness atop the bed. Laughing uproariously, her friend flings herself up beside her. This sends the bed’s wooden footboard crashing to the ground with such force, the friend is bounced off the mattress and lands smack on top of the splintered wood. Keetah and I stare down at her in horror. Is she paralyzed? Dead? What?!
The woman opens her mouth as if to wail, but instead emits the single greatest peal of laughter I have ever heard. Keetah and I join in—so hard, we fall on the ground, too. The more we laugh, the funnier it becomes, until the three of us are positively howling. Because no matter how hard you try in life, shit still falls apart—but if you can find the humor in that, you will somehow be all right. And so we laugh and we laugh and we laugh until we cry, and then we look at each other and start laughing all over again.
NOTES
1. A venerated tradition for more than a century, ironwork has greatly declined among Mohawks in recent years. In addition to their reticence to put so much of their paychecks toward increasingly exorbitant motel or apartment fees in New York City, where high steel thrives, there is stiff competition for the limited slots at the apprentice training schools where workers learn their trade. Hopeful applicants must pass entrance exams that favor formal education over vocational training, giving graduates an advantage over legacies. The bulk of the last remaining Mohawk ironworkers—believed to number only one hundred or so—are now in their fifties.
2. Though I never visited a tobacco factory myself, I did meet a (non-Native) woman who spent six years rolling cigarettes at Akwesasne. She said she was paid $9 per case, or about $54 an hour for handling 60,000 cigarettes. Every week, she received a little yellow envelope filled with upward of $2,000 in cash. “It was great,” she enthused. “You could smoke all day if you wanted to, and talk. There was always the threat of getting raided, but we never did. Sometimes the factory would close down for a while, or it would keep weird hours, but nobody cared because the pay was so good, it would tide you over.”
3. Author of necessary reads like Down by the River, Charles Bowden is one of the greatest border-chroniclers the United States has ever produced: unrelenting, compassionate, poetic, yet deeply haunted. One of his last stories for Harper’s detailed his friendship with a sicario who used to boil people alive in a kettle while extracting information for a Juarez cartel. Despite enraging murderous men throughout his long career, Bowden managed to die in his sleep in August 2014, at age sixty-nine. For a memorable last interview, read Scott Carrier’s “Charles Bowden’s Fury” in High Country News.
20
The Words That Come Before All Else
THE DOWNSIDE TO ITINERANCY? THE TENDENCY TO FORM YOUR fiercest friendships right when the adventure draws to a close. Always knowing that the farewell is imminent makes you wince a bit when you meet good people—or, in the case of Betsy, wince a lot. She and her husband, Tom, are fixtures among the North Country’s back-to-the-land community dedicated to blasting their carbon footprints into pixie dust. They live on a
solar-paneled, wood-heated estate they built amidst maples and pines, grow most of their own food, chill leftovers in a bathtub sunken beneath their kitchen, and compost their outhouse with peat moss. They think nothing of biking thirty miles for coffee or camping when it’s forty below zero.
It’s been ages since I have called up a girlfriend an hour before meeting to ask what she’s wearing, but I quickly reestablish that habit with Betsy. Only, with her, it’s not fashion that’s at stake but survival. Fleece-lined pants or corduroys over long underwear? Are snow boots sufficient, or should I bring Yaktrax, too? Can I borrow your deerskin mittens again? For Betsy is the kind of woman who will teach you how to snowshoe one day and cross-country ski the next. How to fell a dying tree, split its wood with a maul and a wedge, pyramid it into a fireplace, and then fan the flames with its bark. We once spent an entire afternoon boring holes into maple trees with an auger, inserting taps, and rejoicing at the sweet water trickling into our awaiting tin buckets with a melodic ping-ping. The buckets then got emptied into a massive sugar pan hovering over some bricks stacked above a fire burning in the snow. After days of boiling and stirring, forty cups of hard-won tree-water yielded but a single cup of syrup—a ratio that seems like it can’t possibly be worth it until you down a shot while it’s still hot. It dizzies you, like candied brandy.
After the ice-sludge of spring dry-crumbles into summer, Betsy announces our next adventure: biking across Quebec. That sounds ambitious, but it’s seventy degrees outside, so why not? We set off into the hallucinatory green. Seventy miles into the auto part of our journey, we reach the border town of Churubusco, New York. Betsy pulls into Dick’s, a general store specializing in the four Gs: gas, groceries, guns, and guitars. Browsing its aisles, I wonder if this is what distinguishes a U.S. borderland: the ability to buy an Uzi off one shelf and a banjo off another, with some nice Amish baskets in between.
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