by Louise Ure
We headed south, back to Mexico. Creosote and mesquite blurred into a shoulder-high ribbon of dusty green, speckled by pockets of sandy washes and dry brown desert.
“You think this is going to fly in the face of that ‘don’t leave town’ dictum of Detective Sabin’s?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure of it.”
We paid the attendant and left Guillermo’s car in a parking lot on the Arizona side of the border, then crossed over on foot, showed our passports to a bored guard, and traveled south along the railroad tracks.
The beggar children ignored Guillermo after he gave them his spare change, but swarmed me like an incoming tide. I gave them half my beef jerky and all my one-dollar bills.
There are few grand buildings in the Mexican half of Nogales—only shanties, lean-tos, and cinder block-square houses, all encroaching with heavy breath on the cracked sidewalks and potholed streets that fronted them. I followed Guillermo down a narrow lane that dead-ended at a half-domed Quonset hut. A sad road that couldn’t even find its own way out of town. Thin, stray dogs nosed at greasy papers that had swirled into heaps at the curb. We were turning to retrace our steps when a door in the Quonset hut opened.
“Can I help you with something?” said an elderly Caucasian priest, with white hair in a tonsure and soft tufts of equally white hair growing from his ears. The hem of his black robe was dusty and ripped.
“Hello, Father,” Guillermo said. “I have a friend—a friend with no papers and no money—who needs to cross over. Can you tell me where he should go? Who he should see?” Our plan was to take the same coyote-led route across the desert that Raisa’s clients had, to find out for ourselves if the Braceros were involved in stealing children. If we could prove that link, and then prove that Carlos had been trying to stop them, the police would have to listen.
The priest looked us over carefully but not critically, his blue eyes rheumy with age and perpetual dust.
“Let’s go into the church.”
I didn’t see a church anywhere, but then noticed two crossed pieces of wood at shoulder height in front of the metal hut. I’d taken it for the anchor post of a Realtor’s FOR SALE sign. Instead, it was a FOR SALVATION sign. We followed the priest inside.
The air was still and hot. A small gray bird battered at the upper reaches of the metal roof, looking for a way out.
“We started this church almost twenty years ago.” He gestured to the rows of mismatched folding chairs. The altar was built on a raised platform made of plywood, and the priest’s steps bowed the wood as he moved. It bounced when he stopped in the middle to kneel and cross himself. Guillermo did likewise. I’d been absent from any kind of belief in a benevolent deity for too long to move my arms and heart along with them.
“Our flock is not primarily made up of the residents of Nogales, although they have been very supportive. It’s the temporary residents—those undocumented migrants on their way across the border, or those who are turned back into Mexico after the Migra pick them up in the desert.”
“That’s a pretty transient parish, Father,” Guillermo said.
“We see some of them year after year. Yet another attempt to cross the border to a better life. And those are the lucky ones—the ones not killed by the sun or the heat or the wild things in the desert.”
I had read enough newspaper stories about the deaths to know the old priest was right. Their bodies were found every year. Old men who couldn’t take one more step and died less than halfway across the blazing desert. Women and children who died slowly and painfully in locked trucks, abandoned scant miles from the border.
“So you tell them not to go?” I asked.
“How can you tell someone, ‘Don’t try to better yourself? Don’t try to feed your family?’ I look for U.S. sponsors for them, or get them work permits when I can. With God’s help, I’ll minister to the rest and help them make a good life here.”
“We need to take that road, Father.”
“Oh, it’s not ‘a friend’ anymore?”
Guillermo shook his head. “It never was.”
“Don’t do it, young man. If you can get papers, go across legally.”
“We’re trying to help the travelers, too, Father,” I said.
He didn’t ask for the rest of the story. “There is a man I’ve heard of. Not an honorable man, but the best of the lot that can get you across. They call him El Vez. You know…Elvis,” he fingered his jawline, “because of the sideburns.”
“Where can we find him?”
He named a bar on the west side of town. “He usually hangs around in front.”
We thanked the priest and walked west. Although the street we were looking for had shops bursting with serapes and carved artwork and sidewalks full of tourists, there was no sign of El Vez.
“Border crossing’s a nighttime business,” Guillermo said. “We’re probably too early for him.” We found a shaded spot on a restaurant patio to wait for smuggler’s time.
By nightfall, we were positioned across the street from the bar, in a shallow alcove that allowed us a good view of the street and the entrance. The sidewalk strollers were no longer the shorts-and-T-shirt-clad tourists looking to refill low-cost prescriptions; now it was a younger and more dangerous crowd. Bands of white men strutted down the street on their way to the sex clubs. Teenage Mexican boys offered smokes, pills, and powder in hushed voices laced with the promise of euphoria.
By nine o’clock, we still hadn’t spotted El Vez. I watched an encounter between a teenage girl and three young men on the sidewalk in front of the bar. She held tight to her purse as their hands darted, as unwanted as disease, from her breasts to her ass. I moved to cross the street and stop them, but Guillermo grabbed my arm.
“Cuidado. If we’re supposed to be border crossers, we can’t be stopping every injustice in town.”
“We can stop this one.” I stepped off the curb when the boys pushed her against the wall, but stepped back when she moved sideways and they let her go.
When the boys moved away, I saw him. Starched white shirt with the collar raised in the back, and sleeves rolled up almost to his elbows. Dark slacks tight across his butt. Sideburns that widened into fat legs when they reached his jaw. El Vez.
He leaned against the cinder-block wall with one leg cocked, as at-ease as if he were in his own living room. Two younger boys ran down the street to him, passing wadded bills into his hand in exchange for matchbook-sized paper parcels. It looked like human trafficking wasn’t his only crime. He feigned a gut-punch to one of the boys who responded with a mock grunt.
“Do you recognize him?” I whispered. We had to make sure that it wasn’t anyone Guillermo knew from his days with the Braceros. If Chaco found out we were here, we were dead.
“No. Let’s go.” Guillermo checked for any other Bracero lookouts and, seeing none, crossed the street. Guillermo mimicked the coyote’s pose against the wall. “I’ve heard you help people cross.”
El Vez gave us both close scrutiny, then bent close to a cupped hand to light a cigarette. “Who told you that?” The Bracero tattoo on the back of his hand confirmed that we were on the right track.
“The whores at Plaza San Carlos.”
“This is for both of you?” His chin jerked toward me.
We didn’t look like his typical clients. Too soft, too well fed, and I wasn’t a Latina.
“She has her own reasons for wanting to cross,” Guillermo said. “I have money for both of us.”
That was enough for El Vez. “I can get you out tomorrow night. It’ll cost you a thousand each.”
“Five hundred, and it has to be tonight.”
The coyote gave us another once-over. “Why tonight?”
“There’s been trouble. We have to get out.”
“Got your name on a watch list, huh? Then there’s even more reason that your trip’s going to cost a thousand. I won’t be able to take you the easy way. And you’ll be walking.”
Guillermo grabbe
d the guy’s neck, squeezing until his words sputtered to a stop. He forced a wad of bills into the man’s hand. “Here’s half. We leave now.”
El Vez nodded.
If he felt that we were high-risk travelers, maybe he’d be taking us that same wilderness route that Raisa’s clients had gone.
We followed him down the block and around the corner to a quiet side street where his van was parked. I stepped over a trickle of sewage at the curb and got into the back.
“You, too,” El Vez said to Guillermo, gesturing to the rear of the van. Guillermo bent double and joined me. We braced ourselves with heels and hands when the van bucked to life.
There were no windows in back and my view out the front was limited, but it seemed that we were heading out of town to the west. Ten minutes later the road under us was downgraded to hard-packed earth, then to sand. We were climbing; the evening breeze coming in the driver’s window was fresh.
El Vez had turned off the headlights once we reached the dirt portion of the road. We bumped slowly and blindly across the desert. It took almost two hours of crawling between the cactus and rocky outcroppings, trying to distinguish between shadow and stone, before he stopped the van. The silence was profound, broken only by the ticking of the engine as it cooled.
The van groaned a metal complaint when El Vez opened the door. Guillermo crawled over the front seat and exited the van on the driver’s side. I followed him, carrying both of our backpacks. I put them on the ground and stretched my arms overhead.
There were no lights anywhere, just a brocade of shadows sewn by a full, bright moon.
“Where are we?”
“Pajarito Wilderness. The border’s about a half mile straight ahead of you. There are camera towers there and there.” He pointed to two spots on the horizon. “But they don’t work for shit and they don’t cover this area. Just keep walking straight ahead.”
The Pajarito Wilderness was federal land on the U.S. side, and was one of the most inhospitable stretches of the Sonoran desert, reaching more than twenty-five miles along the border, with five-thousand-foot mountain peaks, wind-carved canyons, and no roads.
“And what’s on the other side?”
The Mexican grinned. “More Pajarito Wilderness. Hey, just kidding. My amigos will meet you on the other side. Just keep walking due north; they’ll find you. But they aren’t expecting a shipment until tomorrow night, so you may have to lay low for a day.”
“How will we know them?”
“I’ll tell them where you are and what you look like. Now, the other half of my money, señor.”
Guillermo reached into his backpack and straightened up with a length of rope in his hand. “We’d like a little time before you contact your friends across the border,” he said. The man fought against the ropes but was soon hog-tied in the cargo area of the van. Guillermo stuffed a rag in his mouth and knotted a second piece of cloth behind his head to hold it in place.
I knew that he was picturing his brother’s bound body as he tightened the knots.
“If a delivery was scheduled for tomorrow then I’m sure that one of your Nogales buddies will come find you by then. We’ll leave you some water,” he said, “even though you’re going to have to free yourself to drink it. But that’s more than what you do for your travelers.”
Guillermo shrugged into his backpack. “They don’t use surveillance planes much at night, but we’d better get as far away from this van as we can, unless we want to get stopped by the Border Patrol before we even find the Braceros on the other side.”
We moved north into the darkness. Within a few hundred meters, cactus and dirt gave way to limestone and shale. Soon, small oak trees joined the mesquite that dotted the land. We must have been at a four-thousand-foot elevation already, but the dark hills in front of us towered still higher.
We followed a narrow animal trail to the border where it met a barbed-wire fence with a six-foot section missing: a six-foot breach in the war between the “haves” and the “wanna haves.” We crossed through. There was a hard-packed path paralleling the other side of the fence. It wasn’t wide enough for a car, probably a horse trail for maintenance and security, but it was clear that no one had come this way recently or they would have replaced the missing wire. We followed the path along the fence and then north as it meandered between cactus and bushes, down dry wash ravines and up shallow canyons walls.
It took another half hour to get far enough from the border that we could feel easy about stopping. I spotted a rough shale overhang behind a small, bushy oak and hunkered down.
Digging some beef jerky and a bottle of water out of my pack, I offered them to Guillermo. “Why don’t the Braceros post lookouts here?”
“The farther they can stay from the border itself, the less likely it is they’ll be caught.”
“But what about the people they’re moving across? They could get lost out here.”
“They were already lost before they got here.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I woke with a crick in my neck, wishing that I’d had the good sense to add a blanket or a sleeping bag to the supplies I’d packed. We headed north with the first morning light.
It hadn’t rained for weeks and the ground was covered by tracks, both recent and old. The hoof marks of unshod horses, the spiky piglike marks of javelina, and a dozen different prints from sneakers, some of them brushed out by a torn mesquite branch that trailed behind the traveler, by the looks of it.
As the path detoured to the east, the land began to fold in on itself, straining toward the peaks in wave after wave of rock. Bear grass and hedgehog cactus gave way to madrone, mountain sage, and cottonwoods. I heard birds for the first time since leaving Nogales.
The canyon narrowed in front of us, split by a dry creek bed that might run only a couple of months of the year. Sheer, vertical walls of rock stepped on the toes of the dry wash, looking to claim more territory. The wind had carved the cliffs into ribboned undulations, as smooth and rounded as blown glass.
I used the creek bed as a path, slinking past the limestone walls and over gravel bars and stepping stones. It was the path of least resistance, and the way any other traveler would have come.
We stopped deep in the canyon, where three small pools of water were trapped in the shadow of the cliffs. Except for manmade Peña Blanca Lake five or six miles away, this was probably the only fresh water within a day’s march. There were signs of previous passage through the slippery canyon, but none looked more recent than the pad prints of a large cat that were pressed into the damp earth. A mountain lion? It looked too big for a bobcat.
“Should we wait here for El Vez’s northern counterparts?” I asked. We had to be at least four miles from the border. “What’s this trip going to prove, anyway? That the Braceros are involved with moving illegals across the border? We already know that.”
“I need to see who shows up. What their moves are. If Carlos wanted to put a stop to something, the proof will be here in the desert.” Guillermo wiped his face with his shirttail.
We moved north through the canyon. Pajarito Peak and Manzanita Mountain were behind us now, but smaller hills and rolling grasslands filled the horizon. I swatted at a tenacious fly. What path would the Braceros expect the travelers to take? Would they cling to the mountainous terrain in order not to be spotted out in the open? Or would they trek across the more level ground at night to put as much space as possible between themselves and the border?
“What’s that?” I said, peering west. It was hazy in the ground-level heat, but it looked like hundreds of white skulls, spaced perfectly equidistant from one another and aligned in a row across the horizon.
Guillermo started to run toward them. The ache and pull of the cut on my leg slowed me down, but I followed as quickly as I could.
The image cleared as we got closer. Not skulls, but white plastic one-gallon water jugs, all empty and all marked with a number in thick black ink.
“What the f
uck?” Guillermo muttered.
We followed the line of jugs. Number 134. Number 165. Number 166. The last jug was marked 177. Beside it was a small wooden sign with a paper message tacked to the board. There were bits of paper from previous postings caught in the staples. I bent down to read it. “Ni Uno Más. Not One More. One hundred and seventy-seven people have died crossing the desert this year alone. Turn back! Do not become one hundred seventy-eight.”
“Might have been better if they’d left the jugs full,” I said.
“Might have been better if they’d put up the sign at the border fence—before the travelers got this far.”
We continued north. Half a mile farther on, the foot-wide path had broadened to a dusty, four-wheel drive road, cleared but not leveled, with stony outcroppings that would cripple a car if it were moving with any speed. We had descended into a shallow ravine when I heard, softly, a woman’s voice on the breeze.
“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.”
Guillermo motioned me to slow, and we crept up the other side of the wash until just our heads were above the edge. Less than a hundred yards away, a man and a woman were unloading boxes from the bed of an old blue pickup truck. Off to the side, several others squatted in the shade of a thick creosote bush.
The singer was a young woman, with straight blond hair down to the hem of her walking shorts.
The man unloading the truck was equally blond, although his hair only reached his shoulders. He added a wooden case to the cardboard box and six plastic water jugs in the center of the clearing.
“Illegals?” I whispered.
“Maybe the ones sitting down. I don’t know about the others. Maybe birders or just some kids camping.”
We rose slowly and approached the group with our arms held out to our sides. “Buenos días,” Guillermo called. The seated figures rose like a flock of doves and began to scatter. “No se preocupe! We’re travelers, too.” They held still as we came near.
