Imperial (6 page)

And Carlos said: The other day, I was by the All-American Canal, and I was with these seven guys, and then this Mexican cop showed up with that fuckin’ automatic shotgun thing. Police started hitting us with their flashlights. They was gonna throw us in the canal. But really all they wanted was money. We said we don’t got nothing. So they gave up and said just get out of here within half an hour. We don’t want to see you here again.
Ay,
Mexican cops are a damn . . . They’re a bunch of fuckin’ . . .

Carlos might have been one of the waiting men I spied when I looked across from Northside. Perhaps Officer Murray would have recognized him. Sometimes when I was in Mexico I walked or took a taxi to that very hot and exposed spot where the steel wall ended by jutting forward at a right angle and down to the rippled brown water’s edge; here there never failed to be homeless seekers bathing in the canal or washing their clothes or just sitting, awaiting dusk while on Northside an agent in a white vehicle watched them. They drank out of the All-American Canal, and carried its water with them. They huddled against the graffiti’d wall. They slept, paced, sat spraddle-legged in the litter of plastic and abandoned clothing, whose scraps reminded me of the bits of cloth worked into the earth of the killing-fields of Cambodia, for it was all sad cloth, lost or torn, the temporary skins of the desperate. In the hard and eroded earth, which at least smelled better than the ditch twenty feet farther into Southside, they sat, bowing, closing themselves up against the sun like human jackknives, and when the Border Patrol scanned eyes and binoculars in their direction, they sank their heads even lower into their chests. It was here that Carlos had been introduced to Beta’s shotgun. When I was in Northside I never walked to the place opposite that place; I always took a taxi. The levee, hardpacked out of tan dust, carried on its lonely shoulder no one but myself, my taxi driver, and the inevitable Border Patrol agent, who waved and watched me. Over in Southside, Mexicans were sitting at dusk, their dark heads down, shadows in their faces. I went there on different nights at different months, and they were always there. I never saw Beta. (Beta frequently hit me up for fines and bribes closer to the legal crossing, in Niños Héroes Park and thereabouts.)

As Officer Murray now drove away from this spot, the Mexicans raised their heads and stood, gazing alertly into the United States. Once the last daylight had failed, the night vision van would be sure to show the rafters coming in, the All-American Canal milky-white on the scope with each raft a black dot, trees transformed into negatives of trees, lights solid black. Later the nightscope man would reverse the contrast to reveal the
bodies
as white as the egrets which prance on their long dark legs on the embankments of Imperial’s irrigation ditches. On foggy nights he had trouble, but usually he could see aliens coming from over a mile away. They did not have much of a chance when he was around. His close-cropped head drank the light of the big screen he gazed into, his tattooed arm pulsing as he reached down at the control keypad, meanwhile keeping his left thumb hooked against the steering wheel out of some prudent habit or instinct; and on his shoulder shone the round patch where the words
U. S. BORDER PATROL
had been superimposed on an outline of continental Northside.

What do you see? Murray radioed him.

They’re comin’ across the check, sir, and I know they’re still there.

All right, said Murray. I’m there.

An asparagus field was blowing in the warm wind, and near it a rope tautly and diagonally spanned the All-American Canal. A
pollista
had lashed it to a bamboo trunk. Rapidly, yet with an almost elegant meticulousness, Murray cut it with his knife. The rope lay in the sandy weedy night like a dead snake. Looking into my eyes, Murray suddenly said with almost ferocious bitterness: Now he’ll write,
and then the heartless bastard cut the rope.

I don’t have anything against you, Dan, I said, but he grew silent.

Murray knew that what he was doing was not very nice. And Gloria Chavez in Chula Vista told me: I remember being on the bike unit and at five in the afternoon I hear
bing!
and they’d thrown a big steak knife at me. That was the kind of aggression I got. Another time we had what we call a
banzai—
thirty or more up there, a group there. Well, this woman started screaming. I said: What’s wrong? She says: My leg, my leg! And when I went up to help her, I got pelted with rocks! I said: You stop throwing rocks or I’m gonna call Beta right now. Beta would’ve responded, although I don’t know if they would have come around there right then. The lady had a broken ankle. I took care of her. The people who are gonna sometimes cause the problems are the smugglers and the guides, not the workers who follow them.

In 1996, a twenty-six-year-old Border Patrolman in Gloria’s sector was blinded by a glass bottle hurled at him in darkness from the Ensenada Freeway. Now there were klieg lights to counter-blind Mexicans who came too near, while the agents lurked behind the lights in Northside’s darkness, further protected by a secondary fence.

Here I had better tell you that in all the ten years it took me to write this book, I never met a single Mexican who could muster up good words for the United States Border Patrol.

See, on the west side you can’t get this close to the fence or they’ll bust your windshield, Murray said to me once, but I never had any such problems. And yet I was on his side. To be sure, I wished Carlos all the luck in the world—Carlos, Roberto, Mario and all the rest. But whether the laws which made them illegal from working on American soil were good or bad, and they were probably (so I suspected even then, and now I am sure) the latter, Murray’s mandate was to prevent illegal entry, a necessary labor in and of itself, because any country unable to control its borders cannot adequately enforce nor even define itself. And the murderer whom Officer Willett got to meet, I do not want that fellow to saunter into California, kill me and saw off my hand.

If something catches your eye, there’s a reason, Murray was saying. So I stopped right here and found a boat and a rope. I got thirty aliens . . .

He drove east to check the four tire-drags which lay in the sand near the Alamo River.—If anybody’s walked, said Murray, it’ll make a fresh wet depression.

I met a coyote who allowed that he sometimes brought his cargo over on the Alamo River, which crosses the border just east of Calexico’s East Port of Entry, then ambles north by northwest past Holtville, Brawley and Calipatria; it goes on brown and secluded all the way to the Salton Sea. Where were the Alamo’s
pollos
on this evening of crying birds which resembled all the other evenings? They might be on their way now; for to the west, the wall was going rustier and redder now against the orange sky; its lights came on, and the palm trees started to hide in the blackness that was the coyote’s best friend.

Let’s show ’im what’s left of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail, another agent jocularly said.

Those Border Patrol agents in dark green with their Sam Browne belts loved to wargame everything, inflating their routines of searches and captures into a movie. They invoked the suicide-charges of our Japanese enemy half a century ago when they said: They’ll
banzai
you with twenty or thirty people. You call a van over and you can hose that van out afterward . . .—And when they named the route up the east side of the Alamo River the
Ho Chi Minh Trail,
they got to fight the Vietnam War all over again. Leaning grasses tall and olive, tall bamboo groves and darkness smothered the place beneath an air of eerie exoticism. Not far away lay bright green fields which almost could have been Vietnamese ricefields.

They’ll come over here and they’ll even go over
here
on the west side or they’ll have tunnels through the brush, an officer said.

They showed me windblown, rounded human tracks through the bamboo. They showed me tunnels. I was going to see many tunnels for the next few years.

We got three groups out of here in the last hour and a half, another agent said.

The cool convenience of the river water and the cover provided by the bamboo had served the
bodies
well for a long time, but now the Border Patrol had placed sensors in the bamboo pipes, so on the Mexicali streets I now met more adherents of the East Highline Canal, whose blue water was born from the rippled All-American approximately five miles east of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

About the East Highline an agent told me: It runs north. It goes north forever.—And it did—all the way up to the county line, at least, where it met the Coachella Canal in the desert along the edge of the Chocolate Mountains. But the problem with the East Highline was that its long flatness left any fugitive enormously exposed. Therefore truly desperate and determined swimmers such as Carlos played their ghastly ace-in-the-hole: the New River.

It runs right through Mexicali, crossing into the United States just west of the West Port of Entry. Southside its cartographic name is the Río Nuevo, but the green canals feeding it are aptly called
shit water.—
I don’t know why the American people want it, Juan the cokehead chuckled.—And at that time, water-illiterate, I still believed that naturally they didn’t. The New River has been called the most polluted waterway in North America. (We will assess that accusation later on.) After sunset it runs black beneath the surveillance lights, with white scum on its surface. Near a million people’s raw sewage thickens it; unregulated industrial runoff spices it. Through the corrugated gape in the steel wall it oozes, stinking, sometimes thick with evilly near-phosphorescent suds. Year by year the color changes, but the stink is always the same. To pick one’s way through the weeds and black plastic bags of abandoned clothing, descending into the slimy ravine through which it flows, is sickening enough.—About ten diseases crawl right up your ass, an agent chuckled. And Dan Murray said: That’s the worst river. If you wanna repaint your bicycle, dip the frame in for half an hour and it’ll strip the old paint right off. Ten years ago, you might see the occasional two-headed fish. Now it’s gotten so poisoned that the only life form you’ll see is—
illegal aliens.—
He told the tale of how he’d dove into that literally feculent river one time to catch a
solo
and broke out with a giant sore that wouldn’t heal for months. Two years later, when I myself took a cruise on the New River, I was granted a similar souvenir.

Carlos said that he’d never attempted the New River, but he was considering it. Maybe if he wrapped his bandanna tight over his nose and mouth, he could bear to give himself to that reeking brown cloaca. It would take an agent as dedicated as Murray to go in and get him. Others might let him pass rather than risking their own health and stinking up their patrol car . . .

Carlos, why do you want to go to Northside so bad?

I dunno. I . . . I been out of my house for about thirteen years. The best thing that ever happened to me was marriage to that white girl in America. Well, see, I took the train to go to Portland, Oregon. I hopped that freight. I got married. And . . . Well, after awhile I got drinking, and got stopped by the police. I didn’t have no papers to the car I was drivin’, or a green card or an ID, so they took me to jail, and then this Immigration officer questioned me, and they deported me to Juárez. I ain’t never seen my wife again.

Do you want to try to find her?

Oh, I dunno, he said listlessly. I dunno if it would work out now . . .

THE WALK

River or wall, let’s say they got across. Here is what happened next. If the Border Patrol did not catch them right away, they could lie low in the fields of Calexico, El Centro or another of those towns whose colors are muted silver and gold; the greys and whites all semiprecious with dust, the reds, yellows, greens, oranges bleached to a faint warm hue that might as well have been gold; but sooner or later they would need to cross a street or search for water. Shy, dark pedestrians where the streets were so wide and empty, a parked car almost an event, they could not evade the Border Patrol week in, week out. The Border Patrol was
everywhere
! Calexico Station, for instance, started as a seventy-man operation (that was what they told me, but we will go back in time and find sixty-nine men less); now two hundred agents operated there. The first time I set up my view camera in Calexico to photograph the international wallscape’s tall narrow rusty bars, there appeared within less than a minute three white wagons, each with a Border Patrolman inside it. And how strangely quiet Calexico was at night, just cricket-songs, the asphalt still hot! Every footfall called attention to itself. The aliens had to go north fast. With luck, they might reach Indio. No matter that the
Indio Post
was filled with announcements such as:
NOTICE OF TRUSTEE’S SALE.
File No.—9903005035 Servicer SOURCE ONE #505199724 Borrower—DEL CID YOU ARE IN DEFAULT UNDER A DEED OF TRUST, DATED 7/22/98. UNLESS YOU TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT YOUR PROPERTY, IT MAY BE SOLD AT A PUBLIC SALE. IF YOU NEED AN EXPLANATION OF THE NATURE OF THE PROCEEDINGS AGAINST YOU, YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LAWYER. These dark brown people lurking in the shade of white walls were not here to borrow. They needed no explanations. They would work hard and live quietly. (Any illegals? I asked at the Brown Jug liquor store.—Right across the street. They jump off the train all the time. But they’re dangerous. If you see anybody in this here desert, don’t ever give ’em money or they’ll put the word out.) But the road to Indio was not easy. A few miles south of Salton City on Route 86, or somewhere on the hot and shimmering stretch of Highway 111 between Niland and Bombay Beach, the Greyhound would pull over at a surprise checkpoint. What happened next was not surprising at all. A man in Border Patrol green came aboard, with a pistol in his belt, and sunglasses perched upon his cap like fabled Argus’s extra eyes. He commanded all passengers to ready their identification. The old lady across the aisle got out her green card. (Her generation used to call a green card “mica,” because it came inside a shiny envelope like a sheet of that mineral.) The Mexican businessman beside me showed his visa, looking sad. Argus examined my passport with a quick, coldly searching look. (Aside from the driver and Argus, I was often the only Caucasian on that bus.) Now another Argus invited himself to this feast of identification and recognition.—Are you a United States citizen? I heard him say, and silence answered him.—The two Arguses took away a slender boy in a blue cap. His head hung low as he trudged forward between our seats. It was very hot outside, and flies came through the open door. The passengers craned their heads to watch him being led away. A moment later, the first Argus returned, and crooked his finger at someone behind me, as if he were slowly squeezing the trigger of a pistol. Another young man came sadly forward. Neither of them came back. The bus driver slammed the door closed, and off we went, north toward Indio. For a time the bus was silent, and then someone laughed too loudly.