by Rick Moody
Beyond, the road is rutted and pitted to such a degree that the Grand Am must slow to a proverbial crawl. To the right of them, the state park rises unvisited. To the left is the river and, therefore, the border. Between the two, the dirt road on which they travel. A bird twitters somewhere and falls silent. A breeze whispers.
They get out of the car.
The two women pry apart the barbs of the fence and they trespass onto the state land, because Vanessa wants to be on the top of the hill about a mile distant, because she wants to see all the way into the interior across the muddy river. Vanessa won’t hear a word about snakes. She threads her way around the prickly pear and agave and starts toward the hill. This is what John Ford saw, this is what Edna Ferber saw, when they looked over to the other side. The border across which all is uncertainty, radical factions, kidnapping, persecution of the natives, executions by the police, disappearances, diviners, sorcerers, visionaries, penitents, this is what they saw when looking out from here.
It’s Allison who breaks the silence.
“So who came up with the idea, anyway?”
Vanessa’s already sweating horribly. She keeps dabbing at her forehead with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “We should have brought water.”
“I mean, who really came up with the miniseries? If everybody has a different version of the story —”
“It was just some piece of coverage that Annabel had. I don’t know. Some novel.”
“I kept trying to, you know, find the original manuscript, but every manuscript that I found that was supposedly the manuscript, it turned out it wasn’t anything like the coverage, the stories were completely different.”
“Melody Forvath? Or whatever her name was?”
“I don’t think Melody Forvath wrote anything about dowsers. She’s friends with my mom, you know.”
“Your mom is friends with her? We could have saved money! You could have said it was a film school project or something!”
The river and its flagstone bottom begins to come into view, winding away like a lasso. Beyond, the neighbor to the south.
“I don’t think there is a book,” Allison declares.
“If there’s no book,” Vanessa says, “then what is there?”
“I don’t know. But there’s no actual book,” Allison replies. She stops. “I’m getting blisters.”
Not much farther. Always a little farther. Always a little more. The farther up you go, the farther you want to go. Once you get to the top of this hill, you just want to crest the next. You want to see the Solitario, the crater from the dormant volcano, and then you want to see the butte beyond.
“That doesn’t make any sense —”
“Unless Annabel —”
“Did it herself.”
“But why would she —”
“Well, she has this awful script about the wife of the Marquis de Sade. Handcuffs and ivory dildos and all that. I always put off dealing with her script.”
“I thought it was good.”
“You read it?”
The ridge of the hill, just another fifty paces. Only when they have trudged the fifty paces, thinking about a story idea that has apparently sprung into being without an author, only after they have gazed solemnly on the land to the south, across the border, only then do they see what is on the north side of the hill, cowering in the shadow of a rock formation. A family of Mexicans. Not exactly a family of Mexicans, or not certainly. The group of Mexicans has no patriarch. The family of Mexicans is composed of women and children, namely a woman who looks as if she’s maybe in her early thirties, a little heavy, careworn, wearing a nylon tracksuit; and a girl in her teens, in denim and halter top; a boy about fifteen, with a first faint growth of mustache; and two little boys, maybe six and eight.
What Vanessa notices right away is that all of them are wet, the legs of their trousers are wet. They have been immersed, maybe in a place where it is possible to ford the great muddy creek.
“Ohmygod, they scared the shit out of me,” Allison blurts out.
It’s the teenager, the boy, who looks as if he might do the two women harm. The others are frightened. And dusty. And wet.
Vanessa says, “Uh, hello. We’re really sorry we bothered you. We were just going for a . . . for a hike.”
The absurdity of her worldly concerns, talking about some miniseries, who wrote the miniseries, who came up with the idea of the dowsers, when nearby this is taking place, the drama of woman and children in pursuit of things that this place offers, this country.
“You guys speak any English? Ingles?”
The woman shakes her head. The teenage boy nods, then changes his mind.
“Allison, you speak any Spanish?”
“I can order dinner in Italian.”
“Where are you going? Can you answer that question?” Vanessa tries, with the family. “Can you say where you are going? What town? Terlingua?”
The woman in the tracksuit, whom Vanessa thinks of as the mother, shakes her head violently. But even if the family could answer where they were going, they wouldn’t, because where they are going is El Paso or Las Cruces or Albuquerque, where they have cousins or other relatives or neighbors who are going to help them slip quietly into the American economy.
“Do you have agua?” Vanessa asks, and she gestures as if to drink from a flask or canteen. The Mexicans stare at her, as if the question is an impropriety, and then, as if there is some preliminary agreement among themselves to scatter in the face of Anglos, especially these filmmaker yanquis wearing too much black and standing in the middle of the desert without water or sunblock, the Mexicans start down the hill, heading north toward an expanse that will take them the whole morning to get across.
“Wait,” Vanessa says. “Wait.”
Allison says, “What are you doing?”
“They can’t,” Vanessa says. “There are bears out there and stuff. They can’t sleep out there.”
She addresses herself to the teenage boy, trying to act it out. “Don’t go, don’t go.”
But the mother begins to head off again, and the boys follow her soon after, and it’s only when they begin walking that Vanessa sees that the teenage boy has a good reason for looking fierce, for looking menacing, namely that he’s limping badly. It’s only after they’ve watched the Mexicans attempt to descend into the valley that Vanessa feels the beginning of responsibility in herself. For certain, this is a tonal color that she has read about but never quite known. She’s skeptical about the Mexican boy. She’s skeptical about what she should do about it. She’s skeptical about the part of American movies where the sentimentalists rush in. She’s skeptical about epiphany, about the Greek origin of the word, the making manifest. Simplicity nauseates her.
But in the moment of being undecided, intellectually, her physiognomy leaps into decisiveness without hesitation. There’s the border patrol somewhere in the distance, and the border patrol will be coming this way. And there is the danger of exposure, and there’s the danger of hypothermia or death by thirst, which is apparently a horrible way to die. She doesn’t know what she feels; she feels something in the crimson range, something in ultraviolet, but she knows she’s going to do something about the Mexican family and she doesn’t care what gets lost in the process.
“You have to help me,” she says to Allison, and she begins running down the hill after the pollos, and Allison the intern follows after, and in the illusionistic space of the desert, the pollos are a hundred yards away, though they seem much closer, and she seems to run after them without ever getting closer, calling all the while to the teenage boy. In the distance, she can see the mother, carrying one of the younger children now, as though the younger boy were a papoose. The little one nuzzles at her, the cuffs of his jeans pushed up so that Vanessa can see that his socks are lime green.
“Wait,” Vanessa says, “wait.”
And as if he understands, the teenager turns and stops, his face sweaty with discomfort.
�
��Do you need money? Dinero? We can give you dinero.” She goes into her wallet, and she pulls out twenties, and she starts putting them into the hand of the teenager. “Take these. Just take them.” And then she points at her ankle. “Don’t you want to let me see your ankle?” And Vanessa pulls off her own hiking boot, hopping up and down, and then her rag sock, and she shows her ankle to the boy. She’s never realized that she has a perfect ankle before. But that’s what it looks like now. The perfect ankle of privilege. She has made her ankle available to him just so that she can point at him. “Let me see. Let me see if you’re injured.”
The mother has doubled back now, and she and her teenage daughter, if that’s who the younger woman is, are repeating the word no to the boy, over and over, and there are some other bits of advice in Spanish: No es tiempo de haraganear, de todos modos seria demasiado peligroso quedarnos por acá, y aquellas son unas locas, a lo mejor estan drogadas, así que deben alejarse de ellas, but the boy has taken the twenties and he is going to display his ankle now, with a kind of bravado, and he sits on the dusty hillside, and he pulls off his damp sneaker and his muddy sock, and he smiles gallantly, and Vanessa can see how his ankle is already swelling up.
“When did you do this? Did you injure yourself in the river? Trying to cross? You know it’s going to get worse, right? It gets worse for forty-eight hours. That’s what happens with a sprain. It’s a sprain, right? You didn’t get bit by a scorpion or anything, right?”
When she touches him, she touches him as if she knows, as if the skills of the nurse-practitioner are suddenly hers, though she’s just a hypochondriac with a home medical encyclopedia, nothing more. “You should let us drive you, wherever you need to go.”
Allison chimes in. “We have a car, back there. We have a car. Pontiac? We have a car and we can drive you wherever you need to go. Because of the border patrol. And we can get you water. Agua.”
The mother says no absolutely and firmly, and then the group of them is standing there in the middle of the desert, the Mexican border jumpers and the two Anglo filmmakers, without having ten words of a common tongue between them. It’s only performance that is going to make the point clear, Vanessa thinks, and it’s not even a performance, when it comes to her. Who’s even thinking about the movies now; the movies are for kids in private colleges, so that they won’t feel lonely on weekends. Movies are so that she’ll have something to tell her grandchildren one day, about the people she met. Movies are because it’s the thing you can do here in this place; you can make a movie with your millions of dollars. Movies are nothing compared with the boy with the sprained ankle and the faces of his little brothers, sun burnished, etched with concern, desperate.
“We can’t let you go walking into the middle of the state park, where you are going to get picked up by the authorities, so that you’ll be delivered to Immigration and get deported immediately. We can’t let you do that to yourselves. If you came with us, you could come back to our hotel, and then we’ll find a way to get you into the interior of the state somehow, away from the border and the border patrol, and then we’ll leave you with whomever you want, in whatever city that you want, and then you can try to get some work somewhere. I’m not saying that I have any comparable experience, but I feel like you can understand some of what I’m saying here, and I’m being genuine about what I’m saying, that we just can’t let you do that. There are coyotes out there, there might be mountain lions out there, and it’s dangerous. We have a car, and we have unlimited Avis mileage, and we think you should get into the car with us, and we’ll bring you to the new life, if that’s what you’re after. We’ll bring you to the life on this side of the border, even though we sort of think this new life isn’t all that great. We don’t want to judge what it looks like to you, we just want you to have what you want, because we have enough to share. We can give you the chances you want, at least for now. We can give you the promise of this side of the border, if that’s what you think you need. Please just don’t go walking toward that volcano crater in the middle of the park when you can’t even walk, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen out there.”
Can’t the Mexican family, with their ruddy features, understand the human truth of the moment? The truth in the earnestness of Vanessa’s “please”? They must understand. They can understand that the teenage boy cannot walk into the desert with his ankle as it is, and they can understand the shoulder that Allison offers him now as they begin to head south, toward the car.
At the top of a hill, Allison tries her cell phone, on a hunch.
To the teenage boy, she says, “Ever tried one of these?”
“Sí,” he says.
“Hey,” Allison says after a moment. “There’s a message from my dad!”
Epilogue and Scenes from Upcoming Episodes
The distinguished jurist, at work, in the temple of jurisprudence, District of Columbia, tenth day of December. The distinguished jurist, in the consideration of his part in history. The distinguished jurist, in a state of aesthetic arrest before the busts of the many noble judicial minds who have worked, labored, cursed, and cheered in these august halls over the course of the two hundred years of our national experiment, viz., the Constitution of the United States of America. Black, Burger, Hughes, Story, Holmes, et alia. The distinguished jurist, in a heartfelt and philosophical moment, knows well that, as the son of an immigrant, and having made his way through myriad barriers via the practice of such elementary virtues as thrift, loyalty, hard work, rugged individualism, et cetera, there is little in his early life to suggest, ab initio, that he should be present at such an important judicial moment. Which of these other justices, depicted in these busts, these marble opulences, was called upon the way this jurist and this court have been called upon to render judgment unto history, to fashion, as it were, an epilogue to democracy?
Every age has its landmark legal conflicts. The distinguished jurist was not birthed into the age of Gompers v. Buck’s Stove and Range Co., where he would have affirmed forcefully with the majority on the matter of property rights. Nor was he raised up so as to add his voice to Feiner v. New York, where it was precisely correct that a no-account hoodlum was carted off to a penitentiary. And, of course, he would like to have ruled during Stone v. Graham, since its outcome makes him miserable, serving as a precedent for his contention that his adversaries on the bench do not know how to read, cannot defend their votes, and cannot see the truth when it is right there before them. Alas, the distinguished jurist had not been called to judge these cases.
And yet the distinguished jurist has been brought here to this place now, and so he means to seize the moment. Well, he’s always here on Sunday. In that sense, it’s a day like any other. He partakes of the Holy Eucharist, et uxor and with those of their nine progeny who might happen to be visiting, and then he comes in. He is always working on Sunday, on petitions for certiorari, likewise the useless in forma pauperis petitions, writs of habeus corpus, which, by virtue of Barefoot v. Estelle, take less time than they did formerly. He works on his concurrences and dissents, which of necessity must include corrections of the imprecise grammar of his colleagues, whose lackluster rhetorical constructions are as delusional as their arguments from history.
This Sunday is not like those other Sundays. On this Sunday, there has been a summons from the chief justice, the man with the specially tailored robe, to discuss the case before them. The justices have assembled, the justices have stayed late, including those of their number who are of advancing years, and they have spoken to one another by memo and by phone, and finally they have met briefly in conference, where there were a number of heated exchanges concerning the preliminary opinion, per curiam, that the clerks are at present drafting. The tone in the building, not that the distinguished jurist worries about tone, is almost as bad as during Furman v. Georgia, wherein every one of the justices wrote, each with a different and in most cases equally specious opinion, on the matter of the penalty of death. Of co
urse, it is not the place of lily-livered citizens of weak temperament to make the law of the land other than what it is and shall ever be, because the law of the land is that a man shall be hanged, or shot, or electrocuted, or injected, no matter whether he or she is old enough to vote. He shall be hanged on earth, and afterward he shall be commended for eternity to a lake of fire.
Here’s the interesting part. Notwithstanding the course of extraordinary events, the distinguished jurist has a long-standing dinner engagement scheduled for this evening and, while pacing the corridors, he is pondering whether or not it would be unseemly to break his dinner engagement. The distinguished jurist is looking at the busts of the justices and is wondering if the justices of the past would have kept a dinner date on a night like this. And it’s not just any guest who comes tonight. It’s his law school chum. How fondly the distinguished jurist feels about his chums from law school. They collected palindromes, they bet informally on outcomes of capital rulings, they rooted for the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, never both. They stayed up long nights, slept badly, pressed their own shirts, never went without neckties. The distinguished jurist had no firm idea, notwithstanding his magna cum laude, that he would ever come to have the opportunity to serve here in a place so august, and as a result he was, in those days, relatively speaking, fancy free. He could spend an afternoon trying to come up with a palindrome like “Star comedy by Democrats.” He could spend an afternoon debating the issues raised in the Republic of Plato, wherein he concurred with the idea that poets should be banished from the city limits. They were close, the chums of law school, and this particular chum was his bosom buddy and his especial pal, because this particular chum would sing. What they did when they needed to blow off some steam was find a piano wherever they could on the campus, and there they would sing from the musicals of the period or they would sing light operatic songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, et cetera, and they would find that the singing of these songs choked them with emotion. They were young men who dreamed grandly, and though there was no certainty that they would come this far, they knew they were destined to do great things, and the songs they sang were a recognition of the scale of their dreams, from which dreams they never once deviated.
