The Line Becomes a River

by Francisco Cantú

  —

  When the call came out on the radio, I braced myself for the smell. That’s the worst part, the senior agents would always say, the smell. During my first week at the station, one of them suggested I carry a small tin of Vicks VapoRub with me wherever I went. If you come upon a dead body, he said, rub that shit under your nose, or else the smell will stay with you for days.

  I arrived at the scene in the still-hot hours of the early evening. Hart had already been with the body for thirty minutes. It’s fresh, he told me, maybe two hours old. It doesn’t smell yet. Hart had been flagged down by two teenagers as he was driving across the reservation. They put rocks in the road, he said, gesturing awkwardly toward the boys. He stood with his hands in his pockets and then asked me if I would talk to them. They keep asking me questions, he said. I can’t understand them.

  One of the boys was sitting on a rock, looking disoriented. I went over to him and asked how he knew the dead man. Es mi tío, he told me. He stared at his hands as he spoke. How old are you? I asked. Dieciséis. I looked at his friend, standing a few feet away with his hands in his pockets. And you? He looked up from the ground. Diecinueve, he said.

  The dead man and the two boys all hailed from the same village in Veracruz and had set out together on the journey north. The nineteen-year-old did most of the talking, telling me that a few hours before the man died, he had taken two Sedalmerck pills, caffeine uppers that border crossers often take for energy, and had washed them down with homemade sugarcane liquor they had brought from Veracruz. A few hours later, he said, the man was staggering around like a drunk, and then he collapsed.

  I walked over to the body. Hart had placed a shirt over the dead man’s face. I lifted it and looked at him. His eyes were closed and he had long dark hair that already looked like that of a dead man. White foam had bubbled up and collected between his parted lips and his face was covered with small red ants traveling in neat lines toward the moisture. His shirt was pulled up at the sides of his abdomen and I could see where his skin was turning purple with dependent lividity as his blood settled to the ground. With the toe of my boot I gently moved his arm, already stiff with rigor mortis.

  The nineteen-year-old told me that the three of them had become separated from their group. Their guide had told them to spread out, to hide in the bushes by the road to wait for the load vehicle. They must have gone too far, he said, because sometime later they heard a car stop and then drive off and after that they couldn’t find anyone. Alone at the edge of the road, they walked for several miles in the August heat until the dead man finally lay down to die. The boys waited beside the road to flag down one of the infrequently passing cars, but no one stopped for them. That’s why they put the rocks out, they said, to make the cars stop.

  The boys asked me what would happen to the dead man, if they could come with the body to the hospital. I told them that they could not, that they had to stay with us, that they would be processed for deportation and that the body would be turned over to the tribal police. They asked if the body would come back to Mexico with them, if they could bring it back to their village. I told them that they could not, that the body would be taken to the county medical examiner, who would try to determine the cause of death. I told the boys they would be taken to the sector headquarters, where they would meet with the Mexican consul, that it was the consul who would make arrangements for the repatriation of the body to Mexico. As I spoke, the man’s nephew stared at the ground. Maybe the consul can provide you with some documentation, I suggested, something to take home to your family.

  The boys didn’t want to leave the body, and even as I explained the procedures to them I began to doubt, given what I knew from my short time on the border, whether they would actually see the consul, whether the consulate would actually arrange for the body to go back to Mexico, whether the boys would even receive a piece of paper to help explain to the dead man’s family what had befallen him on the journey north. As I spoke to them, Hart came over and instructed the boys to take off their belts and shoelaces and any watches, necklaces, or other jewelry they might have, and to take from their pockets any lighters, pens, knives, or other sharp objects. I looked at Hart. Transport is coming, he said.

  Another agent, junior even to Hart and me, arrived to transport the boys back to the station. He brought a camera to photograph the body and as he took his pictures I noticed the dead man’s nephew watching in a sort of trance. I explained to the boy that the pictures were required by the police, that they were needed for the reports we had to file at the station, and he nodded his head as if he had heard and understood nothing, like he just knew it was what he was supposed to do.

  Before the boys were loaded into the transport unit, I went to them and told them I was sorry for their loss. It’s a hard thing, I said. I told them that if they ever decided to cross again, they must not cross in the summer. It’s too hot, I said—to cross in the heat is to risk one’s life. I told them never to take the pills the coyotes gave them, because they suck moisture from the body. I told them that many people died there, that in the summer people died every day, year after year, and many more were found hovering at the edge of death. The boys thanked me, I think, and were placed into the transport unit and driven away.

  The sun had already begun to set as I left the body, and it cast a warm light on the storm clouds gathering in the south. As I drove toward the storm, the desert and the sky above it grew dark with the setting of the sun and the coming rain. When the first drops hit my windshield I could hear the dispatch operator radio to Hart, who had stayed behind with the body, that the tribal police didn’t have any officers available and that he’d have to wait with the dead man a while longer.

  Later that night, at the end of our shift, I saw Hart back at the station and asked what had happened with the body. He told me that finally the storm had come and dispatch had told him to just leave the body there because the tribal police wouldn’t have an officer to take charge of it until the next day. It’s all right, he told me, they have the coordinates. I asked him if it had been strange waiting there in the dark, watching over the body of a dead man. Not really, he said. At least he didn’t smell yet.

  We stood for a few more minutes talking about the storm and about the human body that lay there in the desert, in the dark and in the rain, and we talked of the animals that might come in the night and of the humidity and the deadly heat that would come with the morning. We talked, and then we went home.

  —

  I dream in the night that I am grinding my teeth out, spitting the crumbled pieces into my palms and holding them in my cupped hands, searching for someone to show them to, someone who can see what is happening.

  —

  The various men called upon to survey the nascent border between the United States and Mexico in the years following the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo could not help but comment on the strangeness of their task and the extreme and unfamiliar nature of the landscape. In places, commission reports remarked upon the “arbitrarily chosen” nature of the boundary line and the “impracticable” nature of their work. Survey members noted that “indeed much of this country, that by those residing at a distance is imagined to be a perfect paradise, is a sterile waste, utterly worthless for any purpose other than to constitute a barrier or natural line of demarcation between two neighboring nations.” After the Gadsden Purchase, Lieutenant Nathaniel Michler observed to Commissioner William H. Emory that “imagination cannot picture a more dreary, sterile country . . . The burnt lime-like appearance of the soil is ever before you; the very stones look like the scoriae of a furnace; there is no grass, and but a sickly vegetation, more unpleasant to the sight than the barren earth itself.”

  More than thirty years after the original survey, subsequent surveyors found that the lands adjacent to the border remained “thinly settled” and noted “the prevalence of thorns in nearly all vegetation;
the general absence of fragrance in flowers; the resinous character of the odor of the most common trees and shrubs.” Giant cacti were described as “strange, ungainly, helpless-looking objects” with “clumsy arms.” In places, the borderlands were “beautiful beyond description,” with mountains “rising out of the plains like islands from the sea,” but elsewhere the landscape was “a hopeless desert,” a place of “loneliness and desolation.”

  The field party that departed from El Paso in February of 1892 to begin the work of re-surveying and re-marking the boundary was a massive force numbering about sixty, which included several commissioners, engineers, and astronomers, as well as a secretary, a field clerk, a wagon master, a blacksmith, a quartermaster, a carpenter, a medical officer, a recorder, a photographer, a topographer, a draftsman, a levelman, and multiple transitmen, rodmen, targetmen, teamsters, packers, cooks, and other helpers. To carry their supplies, the group traveled with eighty-three mules and fourteen saddle ponies. The expedition was further provided by the U.S. War Department with a military escort of twenty enlisted cavalrymen and a detachment of thirty infantrymen “as a protection against Indians and other marauders.”

  In the opening days of the expedition “men and animals were new and unseasoned to hardship, but in a few days the majority became accustomed to field life, and the work soon progressed rapidly and satisfactorily.” To reaffirm the course of the line, latitude was determined by astronomers and their assistants using the “Talcott method” or through an “exchange of signals by telegraph” over the course of ten nights in which the same stars were observed from distant stations. The men also used chronometers, bull’s-eye lanterns, steel tape, a Bessel spheroid, a zenith telescope mounted on brick pier, a sextant mounted on a wooden pier, and a Fauth repeating theodolite “furnished, on the horizontal motions, with axis clamps and tangent screws working against spiral springs.”

  As the surveying party moved across the boundary, contingents of men were continually convened and reconfigured and sent by rail or caravan to initiate duties along distinct sections of the line. These contingents often worked out of new settlements along the border, and the commission’s report noted “the grasping and overreaching action of the United States settlers” and “the kindness and courtesy of the Mexican officials.” In some areas, the newly annexed terrain was so remote and unknown as to necessitate the dispatching of reconnaissance parties to secure reliable information “concerning water, roads, and the general topographical features of the country.” The surveyors described the landscape as bare and ragged, desolate and rough, punctuated by rocky hills and steep, narrow-ridged mountains of stratified limestone and porphyry, red basalt and igneous rock thrust upward alongside empty craters and extinct volcanos surrounded by broken lava.

  As they traversed the farthest-flung corners of the desert, the surveying parties passed the gravesites of travelers who had perished before them. “In a single day’s ride,” the commissioners reported, “sixty-five of these graves were counted by the roadside, one containing an entire family, whose horses gave out and who, unable to cross the scorching desert on foot, all perished together of thirst. Their bodies were found by some travelers during the following rainy season, and were all buried in one grave, which is covered with a cross of stones.” As they cautiously made their way along the infamous Camino del Diablo, their reports noted that “during the few years that this road was much traveled,” in the rush to California of the 1850s and 1860s, “over 400 persons were said to have perished of thirst . . . a record probably without a parallel in North America.”

  The surveyors made it clear that “supplying the working parties with water on the deserts was the problem of the survey, in comparison with which all other obstacles sank into insignificance.” The commission’s final report revealed that the terrestrial portion of the line, “although having a total length of about 700 miles, crosses but five permanent running streams between the Rio Grande and the Pacific.” The report took special care in describing the point where the boundary line gave itself over to the Rio Grande, “a variable stream with turbid waters.” The river carried “an immense amount of sediment,” it noted, “and as a consequence it is bordered by alluvial bottoms, through which by erosion, it is continually changing its bed.” It was as if the surveyors wished to acknowledge how the border, no matter how painstakingly fixed upon the land, could go on to endlessly change its course with the whims of a river.

  —

  Walking to my truck at the end of my shift, I saw Mortenson standing outside the armory with a group of agents. I went up to greet him and then listened as an agent named Beech told the other men about his time as a prison guard. There was this one guy, Beech said, we couldn’t keep the bastard from cutting himself. Swear to god, all he thought about all day was how to slash through his own skin. There was hardly a thing he wouldn’t find a way to cut himself with. I’m talking pencils, pieces of plastic, chunks of cardboard, you name it. Shit, even magazines—I came into his cell one day and his forearms were covered in paper cuts and a thousand little blood droplets, and this guy just stared up at me like a fucking deer in the headlights. That’s fucked up, muttered Mortenson. Hell, said Beech, that’s nothing. This same motherfucker, one day I get called into his cell and he’s just sitting there with his crotch all covered in blood. Dude had sliced his cock up with a filed-down plastic spoon, I shit you not. The other agents yelled out and one of them threw an empty can of Monster at Beech’s feet. For Christ’s sake, one cried, holding his stomach. Beech laughed. Shit, he said, how do you think I felt? You should have heard me call that one in to the nurse.

  An older agent named Navarro shook his head and grabbed his gun belt, hoisting it a little higher under his sagging belly. Some people are just like that, he said, les vale madre. A few of the other agents nodded. I was in Iraq with this crazy white kid, Navarro told the group, he had one of those cock piercings. The agents winced. Other guys in the unit were always giving him shit because he was into heavy metal and freaky as hell. We started calling him Marilyn Manson. Mortenson chuckled and Navarro glanced at him. It gets worse, vato. This kid was always looking at these fucked-up magazines, pornos with tattoos and piercings and shit, and one day he shows me a picture of a cock head split right down the middle, like a forked snake’s tongue. I shit you not, the kid looked at me with a straight face and told me it was next on his to-do list. The agents burst out into a chorus of groans and the same agent who had thrown the can of Monster called out to Navarro over the jeers. Did he show it to you or what? The other agents laughed. Navarro pulled his belt up again and shook his head. Kid never had a chance, Navarro replied. A week later he got blown up, vato, just like that. I saw it with my own eyes.

  The other agents became quiet and several of them looked down at the ground with awkward shame. But Beech remained with his head held up, glancing at Navarro to share a brief nod, as if in acknowledgment.

  —

  Morales was the first to hear him, screaming in the distance from one of the dirt spider roads. He hiked for a mile or two and found a teenage kid lying on the ground, hysterical. For more than twenty-four hours he had been lost in a vast mesquite thicket twenty miles from the border. The coyote who had left him there told him he was holding back the group. He handed the kid half a liter of water, pointed to some hills in the distance, and directed him to walk toward them until he found a road.

  When I arrived the kid was on the ground next to Morales, lurching in the shade and crying like a child. He was fat—his pants hung from his ass and his fly was half open, his zipper broken, his shirt hanging loosely from his shoulders, inside out and torn and soaked in sweat. Morales looked at me and smiled and then turned to the kid. Your water’s here, gordo. I kneeled next to him and handed him a gallon jug. He took a sip and began to pant and groan. Drink more, I said, but drink slowly. I can’t, he moaned, I’m going to die. No you’re not, I told him, you’re still sweating.

/>   After the kid drank some water, we helped him up and tried walking him through the thicket toward the road. He lagged and staggered, crying out behind us. Ay oficial, he would moan, no puedo. As we crouched and barged through tangled branches, I slowly became overwhelmed by his panic until finally we broke out of the thicket and spotted the dirt road. You see the trucks, gordo? Can you make it that far? Maybe we should just leave you here, no puedes, verdad?

  On the ride back to the station, the kid regained some composure. He told me he was eighteen, that he had planned to go to Oregon to sell heroin, un puño a la vez. I hear you can make a lot of money that way, he said. For several minutes he was silent. You know, he finally told me, I really thought I was going to die in that thicket. I prayed to God that I would get out, I prayed to the Virgin and to all the saints, to every saint I could think of. It’s strange, he said, I’ve never done that before. I’ve never believed in God.

  —

  I finally went to the hospital to see Morales. He’d been in a motorcycle accident. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and for a while we had been hearing about his head trauma, that he might not make it. I’d been too afraid to see him during the week he’d spent in a coma, and too afraid, still, to see him during the first days after he came out of it, when he would wake up cursing and pulling his tubes out, when he still didn’t recognize anyone.