The Line Becomes a River

by Francisco Cantú

  —

  “Bodies stacked in the morgues of Mexico’s border cities tell the story of an escalating drug war,” Julie Watson wrote in 2009. Reporting for the Associated Press, Watson described how the Ciudad Juárez morgue had been modernized and expanded in the wake of the murders of hundreds of women in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how there were now plans to double its size in the coming year. The morgue had seven doctors, Watson wrote, often working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. In two months’ time, more than 460 bodies had arrived for examination. To do their work the doctors drew blood, shaved off pieces of skin, sawed through bone, and extracted fingerprints from headless corpses. Some new hires made it only a few days before quitting. One doctor told Watson he was unable to eat after taking the job. Another said that in order to make it through the day she had to regard the cadavers as medical evidence, not human bodies. Still, the doctors all said, they were glad to have a job in a city where gainful employment was hard to come by.

  The families of the dead feared identification and retribution, and so a fifth of the bodies in the morgue remained unclaimed. Some families mustered the strength to come to the morgue only to find themselves unable to take the final step of identifying the deceased, of accepting the physical manifestation of their death. They sorted through the objects that had been recovered from the bodies of their loved ones and gathered into boxes. These are their clothes, the families would acknowledge, these are their belongings. But no, they would say of the bodies, that’s not them. It can’t be them.

  In Tijuana, the director of the city morgue told Watson that his staff couldn’t keep up with the pace of the killings. The magnitude overwhelmed the interment infrastructure. “When Tijuana coffin makers fell behind during the December holidays,” Watson wrote, “the morgue there crammed 200 bodies into two refrigerators made to hold 80.” In cities like Tijuana and Juárez, the cycle of violence was so tightly looped, so unending, that cartel members often raided morgues, reclaiming the bodies of victims, comrades, and leaders. The bodies were ferried from one death-ridden place to another, hovering indefinitely aboveground, endlessly lying in wait for a place to rest in the earth.

  —

  On the midnight shift I took a call from my old station and immediately recognized the voice on the other end of the line. Cole? I asked. Shit, he said, is that you? Mr. Intel? Already stuck on the graveyard shift, I see. I laughed. Well, Cole began, I’m calling to report a mass-casualty incident. Goddamn, I said. That’s right, he continued. While you’re sitting on your sweet ass watching TV in that air-conditioned command center, wets are dropping like flies out here. Fuck you, I said. Cole snickered. Just busting your chops. After all, someone’s got to give some shit to you hotshots at sector. Can’t have you forgetting what it’s like for us grunts out here in the field.

  Cole went on to tell me that just before dark his training unit had come upon a half-naked man curled up in the fetal position on the desert floor. The man had been drinking his own urine for four days. He was barely able to talk, but Cole was able to ascertain that he had been traveling with his two brothers. Cole asked where they were. Behind me, the man said. Together with one of his trainees, Cole helped the man stagger out to a dirt road where he was evacuated by a helicopter to the nearest city. The man’s body absorbed six bags of IV fluid by the time he arrived at the hospital. The doctor said he had never seen such thoroughly decimated kidneys on a man still living.

  Cole and his agents had spread out into the descending night to comb the desert for the man’s brothers. After an hour of looking, they called for a search and rescue team from sector headquarters. Finally, after several hours, they found the two bodies nearly a mile apart, one of them beneath a gnarled mesquite tree, the other lying faceup and shirtless in a wash beside a hand-dug pit, his belly already swollen wide.

  After hanging up, I sat staring at the camera feeds on the massive screen in front of me, imagining all the bodies that I knew were out there, undiscovered under trees and in dry washes, slowly returning to the earth. Hayward walked over to me from the back of the room. What’s the matter? he asked, startling me. It’s nothing, I said. He hovered over me with his arms crossed, waiting for me to reveal something more. I shrugged. Sometimes I just feel like all the real work is out there. I nodded up at the camera feeds. Hayward stared at the night-vision scenes of the desert. Well, he said, it’s a different way of seeing things from in here, that’s for sure. He looked down at me. To tell you the truth, he finally said, if you want to understand what’s happening out there, it helps to know what it looks like from in here, too. He reached down and smacked me on the back. Now write me up that report. He turned to walk back to his computer.

  Two hours later Cole called again. You won’t believe this, he said. My trainees just chased down a truckload of dope on our way back to the station. Your bigwig buddies are gonna want to know about this one—the vehicle was loaded with 1,800 pounds. Jesus, I said, that’s a ton of dope. It sure is, Cole laughed, see what you’re missing? I was quiet for several seconds. Any arrests with the seizure? I asked. C’mon now, he said, you know me better than that. All suspects fled the scene. I sighed. Look, Cole continued, I know you boys at sector love your paperwork, but I’m still trying to get home on time. Well, I told him, that’s one hell of an abandoned load. Cole chuckled. It sure is.

  —

  I dream that I am back in the desert, cutting for sign along a far-off trail. I am working in an expanse of boulders and dry, cracked-open mudflats. Looking out at the landscape I feel free, surrounded with sparse beauty, happy to be close again to the desert. In the distance I hear voices and I arrive at the edge of a large rock where I gaze out over a wash to observe a group of smugglers gathered in a circle, speaking in hushed tones. With no time to wait for backup, I decide to jump the group alone. I bellow to announce my presence, to strike fear into their hearts. I brandish my weapon, holding it in front of my face with both arms outstretched. I yell at them in Spanish to show me their hands, to sit the fuck down, to not even think about running. The men look at me, their faces featureless and unmoving except for cold, vitreous eyes. Using pull-string handcuffs I bind their wrists together to form a long human chain. I line them up in front of me and order them to lead me to their hidden drug load. As we walk in silence I begin to fear that they are leading me into a trap, that they might turn at any minute to attack. With my handheld radio I try contacting other agents for backup, I try calling for a helicopter, but no one answers. I pass with the men through a deepening boulder field, trying to hide my panic, until finally we arrive at a high-walled box canyon piled with trash from cartel scouts and drug mules. In a series of holes that have been bored into the walls, I observe a multitude of black wooden chests stacked atop one another. These are our belongings, the men tell me. I pull the chests from the walls and throw them open, searching for contraband and wrapped bundles, but each and every chest is empty. I look out at the walls of the canyon and find that all beauty has drained from the landscape, that I am surrounded only by the sinister threat of violence, by faceless men and stacks of empty chests. Where are the bundles? I demand of them. Their cloudlike faces blink in the darkness. You’ve already taken them from us.

  —

  I awoke from the depths of sleep to find my phone ringing on the nightstand. Thank god, my mother said as I answered. What is it? I asked. She breathed deeply. I just got off the phone with a friend. They told me an agent had been killed in a shooting and they heard the name Cantú on the news. My heart, I swear to god, I can hardly move. No no, I told her. I’m safe, I’m at home. My mother stuttered and spoke over herself. I knew it couldn’t be you, she said, I kept telling them you work at a desk now. Of course, I said, of course. I’m fine. Thank god, my mother repeated. There’s another Cantú, I told her, he works with the press. He was probably being interviewed about the shooting—he’s a public information officer. Oh, she said, of course. Of cou
rse that’s it. I sat up in bed. Shit, I finally said. An agent was killed?

  I arrived at work to find the intel center teeming with uniformed agents and high-level command staff. Hayward came to me at the door and led me outside. Let me fill you in, he said. We walked to the parking lot and stood shielding our eyes from the sun. I’m assuming you’ve heard? he asked. Yes sir, I said, just what’s in the news. Did you know him? he asked. No sir.

  Hayward told me the agent had been deployed with a small tactical unit to monitor smuggling traffic in a canyon south of Tucson. After nightfall, the agents got into a firefight with a group of bandits and one of the men was hit. There was nothing the other agents could do for him, he was dead before EMS arrived. As Hayward spoke I looked down and imagined, briefly, the shattered silence of the canyon, the night sky glinting above the agent as the life drained from his body. The other agents at the scene apprehended four bandits, Hayward told me. One of them is in the hospital with a gunshot wound and the other three are in custody. A fifth bandit, probably our shooter, got away. Listen, Hayward said. There’s a shit ton of field agents out there right now, crawling all over the desert. They’ve deployed National Guard troops, intelligence teams and tactical units from El Paso, and auxiliary agents from stations all across the Tucson Sector. They’ve even got drones and a goddamn Black Hawk down there.

  Here’s the deal, Hayward continued—I need you on top of your game. Sector brass is in a frenzy, I’ve got higher-ups doing the high-speed wobble on every side of this. What can I do? I asked. I need you to get with the other intel agents to put together a target folder on those bandits and write up the best damn report you can. He patted me on the back and began to walk with me toward the door. I want to know everything there is to know about those arrests, he said. I want to know every time they’ve crossed the border, every time they’ve been apprehended, I want profiles on every family member and associate you can dig up—name, address, criminal record, whatever you can find. I need to know who’s a scumbag and who’s just a POW. I cocked my head. A POW, sir? You know, he answered, a plain old wet.

  —

  My cousin called to tell me that my great-aunt Frances had died in her sleep, two weeks after her 102nd birthday. I called my mother. They’re having a memorial in San Diego, I told her. Can you go? Not now, she said, not with the way my heart is. Can you? I thought for a moment. Yes, I decided, I’ll drive there. Good, she said. You can go for the both of us.

  The night before the memorial I drank beers with my cousins in a parking lot while we waited for an order of pizza to take back to the rest of the family. We talked about my great-aunt Frances, about my grandfather, about their brothers and sisters, about their mother and father. Frances was hard-core, one of my cousins said, she drank a shot of Canadian Club and ate a raw jalapeño every day right until the end. She was always going on about how we are related to King Ferdinand, said another cousin, laughing. She chewed out my mom at my own baptism, I chimed in, because my mom announced to everyone that she was proud to be Mexican. Frances pulled her aside after the ceremony. We’re Spanish! she scolded her. My cousins and I chuckled. Four hundred years in Mexico, I said, and she still clung to Europe.

  Frances’s daughter took a long drink from her beer. You know the Pancho Villa story, right? she asked me. No, I said. Her eyes grew wide. Well, you know how our family left Mexico when Frances was a girl? Sure. She raised her eyebrows at me. That was right in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. Your grandpa was just a few years old, even younger than Frances. He was born in 1910, you know, just as war was breaking out. Anyhow, the way Frances told it, Pancho Villa’s army was riding through the countryside, making war against the landholders. When the family heard that they were riding through Nuevo León to Monterrey, they hopped a freight train in the middle of the night and headed for the border. Frances said that when the sun came out that morning they could see dead bodies hanging from the passing trees. You’re shitting me, I said. Nope, that’s the way Frances told it. I thought for a minute. Grandpa never mentioned it, I finally said. Frances’s daughter nodded gently. He was just a little boy.

  The next day I went with my family to the mausoleum where Frances had been laid to rest. Frances’s daughter stood before her mother’s nameplate on the wall and spoke of her love and tenacity, of her dogged dedication to family and tradition. When she was done I went up to her. The nameplate, I said, it says Cantú instead of Abrams. That’s right, she said, smiling. She requested it in her final weeks. She had no feeling left for her married name.

  It’s funny, my cousin continued, do you know you’re the only one who still carries the family name? Your grandfather had five brothers and sisters but somehow it turned out you’re the only one who might pass it on. I smiled. I shouldn’t even have it, I said. It’s only because my mother never changed her name. That’s right, my cousin laughed. Your mother is stubborn, just like Frances. You know, I told her, originally there was a hyphen. What do you mean? she asked. My last name, I said, originally it was Cantú-Simmons, after both my mom and my dad. When I was born my mom still wasn’t sure what she wanted to call me. They had talked about Joshua, they had talked about Tyler, so when they had to put a name down for the certificate before leaving the hospital, that’s what they put. Joshua Tyler Cantú-Simmons. My cousin roared with laughter. What a gringo name, she said.

  It wasn’t until a few weeks after my mom got me home that she started calling me Paco, the Spanish nickname for her favorite saint. Soon the other names fell away, and after my parents separated, so did the hyphen.

  My cousin smiled. Thank god for Saint Francis, she said, saving you from that terrible name. I nodded. I’d be a different person. She put her arm around my shoulder as we began to walk toward the rest of the group. That’s right, she said. A name is everything.

  After everyone had paid their respects to Frances, the family walked across the street to an older mausoleum that housed the remains of my grandfather and my great-grandparents. I called my mother to ask if there was anything she wanted me to say to her father. Just talk to him for me, she said.

  On the bottom floor, my cousins pointed to the names of our forebears on the ornate walls: Anastasio Cantú Garza and María del Calzado Cantú. Upstairs, we found my grandfather’s nameplate at the end of a long hallway, three rows up from the bottom and four places away from an open window looking out over an adjacent graveyard. I was surprised by the bright sunlight streaming through the window, bathing the passageway with warmth. I had been here once before, as a young boy at my grandfather’s funeral, and I remembered only the faint image of a wide and dark hallway with souls stuck in the walls.

  As I stood by the window, Frances’s daughter came up behind me. Do you see that? she said. She pointed over my shoulder. Out there past the trees and the city, those are the hills of Tijuana.

  I waited as my cousins paid their respects and made their way back through the hallway and down the stairs. When I was alone, I turned to face my grandfather’s name on the wall of the dead. Héctor Luis Cantú. I repeated his name in my mind as I turned to look out the window at the hills of Tijuana. Grandfather, I finally said aloud. You can see Mexico from here.

  —

  In his chronicle of the Mexican Revolution, historian Frank McLynn writes of the conflict’s slow waning from 1916 to 1917: “After six years of virtually non-stop warfare . . . the countryside was a wasteland of bent and twisted railway tracks, gutted buildings, burned bridges, dynamited factories, carcasses of dead horses or makeshift mass graves for the human fallen. Even in the parched deserts an endless vista of devastation could be descried . . . In the cities and towns indigence and destitution were widespread, and hundreds of cripples, limbless men, mutilated veterans and gravely wounded walking hospital cases thronged the streets.” The country’s northern plain, he wrote, was a “charnel-house of human corpses.”

  In Mexico, there is an axiom that the country
is bound to suffer through hundred-year cycles of uprising. The war for independence from Spain ignited in 1810, exactly one hundred years before the inception of the bloody revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Death-toll estimates for the War of Independence range from 400,000 to 600,000. The revolution claimed anywhere from 500,000 to two million. Today, one hundred years later, historians, journalists, and policy makers struggle to approximate a tally for the country’s ongoing drug war, a conflict that began ahead of schedule, when president Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels in 2006, just two weeks after taking office in the most closely contested election in Mexican history.

  Calderón campaigned on a promise to “clean up the streets,” and more than 100,000 murders were officially tallied by the end of his six-year tenure. In an effort to play down the skyrocketing number of drug war deaths, he argued that the vast majority of the dead were linked to the country’s drug cartels. At one point, he went so far as to claim that 90 percent of the dead were criminals. However, academics like Molly Molloy, a research librarian and professor at New Mexico State University who studies violence in the borderlands, argue that “when President Calderón or other government spokesmen say that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, it is also the case that fewer than 5 percent of the crimes have been investigated. And by reading the daily accounts of murders . . . one sees that the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people and that most of them are poor: children, teenagers, old people, small-business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands, mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the street, a clown juggling at an intersection, boys selling newspapers . . . and dozens of people who have been slaughtered inside drug rehabilitation clinics.”