by Bella Pollen
“You got a phone?” Brer tipped Melody off his lap and held out his hand.
Now I knew what was familiar about him. The white USA branding on his trucker hat—I’d seen it in the film Breakdown, a B movie if ever there was one. Naive East Coasters, Kurt Russell and his busty wife drive west to a new life. Before long they find themselves with car trouble in the middle of a place that looked an awful lot like this one. The wife gets snatched by sinister trucker J. T. Walsh, and poor, sweaty Kurt spends the next ninety minutes trying to wrest her back from Walsh and his cohort, a panoply of cunning sociopaths masquerading as dungaree-clad simpletons.
I thought about Mac. He’d be in his London office, sneakily checking the football scores, when he received the ransom call. “If you dare touch a hair on her head,” I could hear him saying. He was prone to empire-style utterances when threatened, but he wouldn’t have necessarily got the full picture. The Rubios, I suspected, were not the sort of people interested in either your hair or your head—it was the entire body they were after, preferably butchered into family-size portions and shrink-wrapped in a freezer.
“I should really be getting along,” I whispered.
“Something wrong with my cooking?” Mother’s chin shot up, revealing, to my astonishment, a profusion of overlapping warts covering her neck like roof shingles or bird feathers. I wrenched my eyes away and stared down at the stray apple pip on my plate. My stomach was sore. I’m gonna die cos I ate pie, I thought morosely.
Mac was forever telling me to be careful. Sometimes, when I looked at myself through his eyes, it seemed almost inevitable that I would come to a tawdry end, but I liked to think I could take care of myself. Once, overseeing work on the barn in the dead of winter, I’d had to talk down a crystal-meth head who’d wandered up the snowy drive barefoot and threatened to return after dark to party with me. “You’re pretty,” he’d said, eyes like bright moons; “I can sure think of things to do to you.”
After he’d gone, I’d rung John for advice.
“It’s easy girl. If he comes back, just hit him with a fire extinguisher.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“A fire extinguisher.”
“Oh! Um, OK. But . . . where?”
“Right on the head.”
“OK, but, like, how many times?”
“Until he’s dead of course.”
But this was different. There were six Rubios. Jolene might look as harmless as one of Bambi’s woodland friends, but not the twins. Wasn’t it said that in a fight, redheads counted for two each?
Once Mac had loved me enough to play the hero. I remembered the time we’d hiked across the plains searching for land on which to build the barn and been caught in a vicious storm. As lightning opened up craters all around us, he had pushed me to the ground and thrown himself on top of me. When the lightning stopped, the rain had come, unforgiving, apocalyptic. After that it was hail the size of Gobstoppers plummeting from the sky. I’d been heavily pregnant, ungainly as a piece of farm machinery; nevertheless, he’d scooped me up, soaking and shivering, and carried me across a flooding river only to be met by a bull on the other side, its eyes bloodshot and mad with fear. I’d been wearing a vintage rayon dress that afternoon, and the rain shrank it, comically fast. It clung to the mound of my belly, barely covering my knickers, and I’d stood there, my cap sleeve torn by barbed wire, face smeared with mud, a witless, gutless cut-rate Raquel Welch, wringing my hands while my newly minted One Million Years BC husband put his head down and charged the monstrous animal back.
I loved a white knight, who didn’t? But my enjoyment of being mildly in distress probably made me less and less rewarding to save. Mac would be solicitous in his enquiries, of that I was sure. A daily phone call: Good morning, Sheriff, any news? Nevertheless, rescue from the Rubios would require ten constipating hours on a plane, a deadening four-hour layover in Denver, and two more on the Great Lakes puddle jumper (inevitably delayed), even before the long drive up to the barn. It was an awful lot of effort for a wife who favoured chopping vegetables over phone sex. Kurt’s wife, I thought dismally—“five foot five, 115 pounds, three or four of that just pure tit”—had probably put out a lot more.
I stood up.
“Sit,” scowled Brer.
“Go fetch the shrink-wrap,” Mother ordered, and Jolene wordlessly lifted herself from her chair and lumbered, sweet and smiling, towards the kitchen.
I sank back down at the table feeling curiously other. My limbs were as liquid as mercury, but my brain was racing. Hemlock will do that to you. Wasn’t it supposed to render its victims paralysed, yet hyperconscious enough to hear their own death rattle? Who’d died of hemlock? Sophocles? Einstein? Errol Flynn? Concentrate, I scolded myself. Maintain the pretense of normality. In dangerous situations normality was key, though good manners were sometimes a big help too.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said pointedly. “How much do I owe you for the pie?” Jolene had not yet returned and this I took as a good sign. I stretched for my wallet. Perhaps the family was out of shrink-wrap, their chainsaw drained of gas, their freezer brimming with haunches of freshly slaughtered elk. Besides, if they needed money for a lawyer, might not ransom be all they had in mind?
Years ago, when I’d been in Yemen on a job for Harper’s Bazaar, a restaurant owner confided that his family had been proactive in the kidnapping of tourists. “But we were very nice to them,” he said almost wistfully. “We treated them with great respect, fed them like kings. If we were to kidnap you now, for example, I think you would enjoy it very much.”
And I had a vision of staying on with the Rubios of my own free will, dancing barefoot with the ginger twins in the hills above the cabin while the relocated wolves howled in approval.
My wallet was empty. Strange. I could have sworn I’d had dollars when I left town. “Don’t worry,” I muttered, digging deeper to hide my embarrassment. “I have money here somewhere.”
I felt the gentle scratch of Mother’s nail on my arm. “Hey, girl, we don’t need your money.” She handed me the remainder of the pie, which Jolene had finished covering in aluminum foil. “If you’re that hard up, take it for free. Ya look like you could use it.”
My eyes went to the mirror behind her head. My hair needed a wash, and my eyebrows had bolted like broccoli florets. Mirror, mirror, I thought. There was nothing like solitary living to give even a moderately fair girl the veneer of crone. The warm pie felt comforting between my hands. The entire Rubio family was semi-circled around me now, more pitying than threatening.
“Thank you, that’s really kind.” I scraped back my chair. “It’s so great you stayed open, especially with the storm and everything.”
“What storm? There’s been no storm.” Brer said, and I followed his glance out the window. To my astonishment, the sky was a clear indigo.
Weather out here veered between extremes. Sometimes, noodling around in the barn, I’d hear rain drumming on the tin roof. I’d look out to see the landscape divided in two—a definitive line where the rain began and the sun shone bright. I’d stand on the deck with my arms stretched wide, one half of me becoming increasingly cold and wet, the other half burning. I still wasn’t sure which I preferred.
Mother was looking at me strangely. “Passing through or not, be careful for when the snows do come,” she warned. “A person can get isolated up there in the mountains. Loneliness plays tricks. You wouldn’t be the first to get yourself lost for good.”
“That’s sensible advice,” I said. “I won’t forget it.”
As the door of the café blew shut behind me, the newsprint wolves shifted restlessly. The neon light in the window flashed once then switched off. I walked slowly back to the truck, feeling like a fool, a silly fantasist. I turned on the ignition, laying the pie carefully on the passenger seat. Ahead the road was empty, the night so clear I could see the opaque veil of the Milky Way leading me home.
I pressed my foot to the accelerator. It would be nine
p.m. by the time I made it to the barn. In England that was four a.m. in the future—as good a time as any to call Mac.
“I came looking for you, and you are mine.” He’d once read Yeats to me as I fell asleep under his arm. “You are mine until the whole world is burned out like a candle that is spent.” Again, I felt a catch in the back of my throat. I’d make it sound casual, obviously, but I needed to check—you know—the thing about what he’d save in the fire.
THE BORDER
PROWL
The back of John’s pickup smelled of rust and mouldy hay. Late March and the desert air was chilly, but I liked writing in the pickup and had taken to stationing myself there at first light with coffee and a notepad. Upstairs on the top floor of John and Emily’s funny tower house, Mabel and Finn lay sprawled across the bed in a starfish of arms and legs. School started early in the canyon, and I wondered vaguely about waking them for breakfast, but it was so quiet, so pin-drop quiet, that I put off the moment a little longer.
We’d been out West nearly three months now. Mostly homeschooling up at the barn isolated by snowdrifts and power cuts, but twice a week commuting down to John’s farm in the canyon, where Finn was enrolled in a tiny school on the edge of the Navajo reservation. Mabel spent her days, dazed with love, trailing John’s foreman, Jesús, as he fed the goats and lambs, while I loafed around eating Emily’s leftovers and trying to shake an apathy that hung off me like old skin.
You don’t have to know what you’re escaping from to become a fugitive. This, scribbled across the top of my pad. A single line, the only line of a new project. I’d handed in a book, but there had been no word back, and I’d yet found nothing to replace the intensity of working on it. I’m usually happiest in a place of transition, but waiting is an uneasy space to inhabit. I felt stuck in limbo, and limbo was a dangerous place for me.
A discarded newspaper lay under the hay. Idly, I dragged it out as the black-and-white remnants of night lifted. The sun rose in glorious Kodachrome, a thin red line on the horizon, hardening ground and sky into separate worlds. A headline caught my attention—HUGE SURGE IN BORDER FATALITIES—and I scanned the story quickly. Borders were all anyone was talking about that drought-ridden spring. It was the ten-year anniversary of Operation “Hold the Line”, Bill Clinton’s butchly named US–Mexico border initiative, which had lowered the numbers of illegal crossings by exponentially beefing up manpower and technology. It was, according to the mainstream press, Good job! Well done!
This local paper, though, was telling a different story. Over the last decade the figure for people dying while attempting to cross had risen fivefold, and as I finished the article I felt it—the almost painful twinge of curiosity.
I knew a little about the border from Jesús, whose trajectory to US citizenship had included multiple crossings back when it was easy. After the line tightened he’d been forced to choose one country over another. On his final journey, he had curled himself around the engine of a truck whose battery had been removed and ingeniously rigged up beneath the vehicle to make space for him. He survived the burns and the discomfort, but coming through LA the smog had nearly asphyxiated him.
I glanced at the fugitive line in my notepad and for a moment glimpsed an upside-down symmetry. It takes an impressive leap to parallel an impecunious migrant struggling north with a white woman drifting in the opposite direction, but I saw in it, if nothing else, a mad irony.
Borders have always struck me as conceptually flawed divides. If the lottery of birth is already difficult enough to accept, how odd that maps and deeds drawn hundreds of years before should further denote our identity.
I shifted round to face south, remembering the dream about the mountain lion. How afterwards I’d woken, restless, to the dark of night and stepped outside feeling hungry for something I hadn’t yet identified, something that lay beyond the shadow of the mountains.
I’d been to Mexico only once—to a resort where milky tourists turned pink on the beach and were secretly relieved to find English translations on the restaurant menu. It had been a lovely holiday but a long time ago. This was happening now, and the contradictory reports were so disturbing. The border was less than a day’s drive away. What was really going on down there?
The children were ecstatic at the prospect of unlimited Kool-Aid and tortilla chips in Jesús’s care. John needed no persuasion, and Emily had several days holiday coming to her, so the three of us headed down to southern Arizona to find out.
IF IT AIN’T WHITE, the flyer for the Ku Klux Klan said, IT AIN’T RIGHT. The piece of paper had snagged on the spur of a barbed-wire fence. We’d stopped randomly to stretch our legs, and there it was. Unsettled, we looked around at the emptiness of the desert. There was no sign of life unless you count a toothy gopher, and no checkpoint or law enforcement except for the single strand of wire which appeared to constitute the only physical divide between earth’s most prosperous nation and one of its largest third-world countries.
It was the first of several border trips, each going in a little deeper. The conflicting reports both turned out to be accurate. In closing off the revolving door to the United States, the Clinton blockades had indeed lowered the official stats of illegal crossings, but the unintended effect had been to drive people deeper into the Sonoran Desert, North America’s very own Sun’s Anvil, 120,000 square miles of broiled wasteland. Aside from the heat and natural dangers were the human ones: US Border Patrol, smugglers, Mexican police, bandits, and California Minutemen, a group of self-styled vigilantes for whom keeping migrants on the right side of the line had become a rewarding, year-round sport. If, at government level, immigration was a high-stakes game of polemics and economics, down at the Mexican border it was a different kind of game, one that came with the loaded dice of rape, robbery, violence, and murder. The Border Patrol hated illegals. The Mexican police hated the Border Patrol. Smugglers hated the Mexican police while the California Minutemen just hated everyone.
All in all, this low-intensity conflict perfectly matched what was going on inside my head—it took about seven seconds before I was hooked and not much longer than that to convince myself that it was my job and my job alone to highlight the plight of the illegal immigrant. It was unconscionable that so many people were dying, and I attached myself to the cause as though by umbilical right.
Enough daydreaming in trucks, scrabbling in my imagination for stories that had little bearing on real lives. People craved the truth. Journalism was the preserve of the serious, the resourceful, and the professional, and on these grounds there seemed no reason to assume I’d be anything other than excellent at it.
I would make that border crossing myself, I was soon announcing to anyone within earshot. I would highlight the perils migrants faced—write a story so powerful that it would change the way governments thought—and in the process, I privately reasoned, my own escape, my fugitive time, would be validated.
Friends openly laughed. “You? In the desert? Attempting to locate north?”
“Plus, it’s a felony,” Mac said drily, when I proposed the idea over the phone. “Try to imagine life, if you can, in a small, wretched cell without the range of ingredients required to make a club sandwich.”
Undeterred, I e-mailed publications across America. Their editors also laughed—at least, when I heard nothing back from them, I can only assume they did—a thin, wry choke into their pastrami sandwiches.
These resounding endorsements should have been a heads-up that perhaps I wasn’t entirely qualified for the job, but despite plenty of practice, I’ve never learned to deal elegantly with humiliation. So I did what anyone would have done on discovering that no one was the slightest bit interested in commissioning their five thousand words on the subject. I commissioned myself to write a hundred thousand instead.
All of which is how, several months later, with the children safely back in London, I found myself perched on a bale of compressed Guatemalan ponchos with John and Emily in the airless confines
of a market stall in the town of Nogales.
Nogales is a hub of illegal immigration. Rising out of the shimmer of the desert, straddling the border, it is bisected by the wall, a green corrugated fence that curves up and over the hilly contours of the city like a dragon’s tail, relegating its northern half to the United States while sweeping its pesky southern districts back into Mexico.
The American side, generously described by The Rough Guide as a “dreary little community,” is a welter of generic fast-food joints, four-dollar-a-day parking lots, and drab houses crowded one against the other like Monopoly pieces. Nogales, US, is where everyone is trying to get to.
Nogales, Mexico, from where everyone wants to escape, acts as a vast open-air prison, a holding bay of first-time offenders, recidivists, and lifers, the last earning their living aiding and abetting the first two. Colourful, unstable, simmering with tension; just talking to people there was to plug a finger into an energy force field. It crackled through me like static—all the hope, ambition, determination, and anticipation. There was no more apathy. Nogales, Mexico, was where I came back to life.
Driving into the Mexican side from the US is painless. No one stops you, and if anyone does, your passport is given the most cursory of glances. Mexico welcomes all. Crossing back is another matter. There are checkpoints and interrogations and little mirrors on sticks—and that’s if you’re white and have valid ID. For an illegal immigrant, crossing in a town has become nigh on impossible. John, Emily, and I were in the market stall on the Mexican side to negotiate a desert crossing, which typically involved a thirty-mile trek through the Sonoran Desert—location of the greatest number of deaths. But from what? Bad guys, bad luck, or bad geography? To figure it out, we’d resolved to follow the same path as any migrant arriving in town. First task was to find a smuggler, or, as they are less fondly termed, a coyote, and ours was running nearly an hour late.
Earlier that morning an American woman had banged on our truck window while we were stopped at a red light. “Help me, please,” she begged. “My car got stolen!”
