South

by Lance Charnes

  The man’s American-flag ball cap covered most of his thin white hair. Decades of sun and heat lined his face. A dark red splotch spread over the message on his tan tee shirt’s chest—“Undocumented Border Patrol Agent”—while another crawled across the upper right thigh of his faded Wranglers.

  “You stupid son-of-a-bitch,” Luis grumbled. “You couldn’t just let it go.”

  The old man squinted up at him. “You speak English?”

  “Of course I speak English!” Luis exploded. “I was born here! I’m as American as you!”

  The old man coughed out a laugh. “You’ll never be as American as me, mojado.”

  This asshole probably voted. No wonder the country was so fucked up. “Maybe. But I’ll never be as stupid as you are, either.”

  Luis yelled “Clear!” into the night. While he waited for Nora to reappear, he hauled the dead Border Keeper next to his buddy beside the SUV, then kicked dirt over the blood in the road so Hope wouldn’t have to see it. He shifted the backpacks and groceries to the cargo area behind the Jeep’s back seats. He was about to go looking for the women when Nora’s shape hobbled out of the darkness, Hope trailing behind her. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He reached her in a few strides, wrapped an arm around her shoulders and half-carried her to the Jeep. He caught Hope, lifted her into the back seat, then gave Nora a scan. Other than being coated with dirt and bits of sagebrush, she looked fine from the front. “Where…?”

  She braced herself against the Jeep, gulped, then pointed at her rear. He swiveled her toward the light reflecting off the Expedition’s tailgate. The seat of her jeans was ripped just above her left thigh, and a dark trail of blood reached to her knee.

  “It really hurts.” Her voice was as tight as her grimace.

  “I’ll bet. Can you sit?”

  “I don’t know.” She peered at his left shoulder. “You’re a mess.”

  The left side of his shirt was caked in a blood-dirt mix that was slowly turning to cement. Nora brushed some dirt off his forehead, then held up blood-smeared fingertips for him to see.

  “Where are they?” she asked. Luis pointed toward the SUV. “Let’s get away from here.”

  “We both need to get patched up.”

  “I don’t care. We can stop down the road. I don’t want Hope around dead people.”

  “Neither do I. Can you get in?”

  “I’ll try.”

  He grabbed a water bottle from behind the back seat, then returned stiff-legged to the old man. The blood had oozed farther across his chest and leg. He watched Luis place the water bottle in the dirt next to his head, then gasped, “You’re not going to kill me?”

  “I’m not like you.” Luis straightened as best he could. “Maybe your cop buddies will find you before the desert kills you. Vaya con Dios, old man.”

  The man’s face pruned in disgust. “Speak English, you wetback fuck.”

  Luis was too tired and hurt too much to be angry. “Fine. Go to hell.”

  55

  SUNDAY, 16 MAY

  If she hadn’t had Hope to worry about, Nora wouldn’t have been able to bear the next two miles. Even at their much-reduced speed, the Jeep’s every bump and jolt shot spears of blinding light into her eyes. She’d never been wounded in all her years in the Army and the Bureau. To get shot down there, now, almost by accident by some wacko, seemed too random to be truly random, as if it was punishment for doing all this to her family.

  But she did have Hope to worry about, so she did what she could to comfort the frighteningly silent little girl wound up in a tight ball against her, sucking her thumb. The past few days must have plowed huge gashes across her daughter’s psyche, ones Nora might never be able to fill in. The truckload of guilt already piled on Nora’s shoulders grew heavier. All she could do was hold Hope and rock her and try not to throw up from her own pain.

  When Luis stopped and turned off the Jeep, the relief was almost sensual. Nora sighed, peeled off her body armor and leaned back in her seat, gazing at the millions of stars in the crystalline sky. With the road and engine noise gone, the world fell nearly silent except for the gentle ticking of cooling metal and the occasional rattle of brush in the spotty breeze. A coyote yipped far, far away.

  “Was that one of your friends?” she asked Luis.

  “Could be.” He undid his seat belt and shifted to look back at her. “How is she?” Nora shrugged; it was far too early to tell. “How are you?”

  She wanted to say something brave but didn’t have it in her anymore. “About to scream.”

  “Yeah, I feel you.” He pushed open the driver’s door and slowly, carefully levered himself out onto the road. After a big stretch, he unlashed and removed his body armor. Then he staggered to the Jeep’s back end, rustled through a backpack, and handed her a white plastic first-aid kit, then an olive-drab military med kit like the one she’d carried in the Army. Finally, he passed her several bottles of water and a larger white plastic box. He held up a flattened roll of what looked like blue paper towels. “Bonus. The knuckleheads had something useful.”

  Luis went over each kit’s contents, then they went to separate ends of the Jeep, Luis in front, Nora to the back. Hope tried to grab her on the way out—“Mommy, don’t leave me!”—but Nora managed to get her to stay in the back seat. Pulling down her pants was pure agony, the now-stiff denim scraping over what felt like every nerve ending in her entire rear. Once she unclenched her jaws, she clamped her penlight between her teeth and surveyed the damage as best she could through the blood. The wound was on the downhill side of her left cheek, almost impossible to see.

  She wet a couple blue towels and scrubbed her leg and hip until she could see skin instead of dirt and blood. That bought only a few minutes. She couldn’t clean or dress the wound if she couldn’t see it. Of all the places to get shot…

  Now what? She knew what she needed to do, but couldn’t get the words out right away. This would be far more intimate than she’d ever wanted to be with Luis, no matter how trustworthy he’d turned out to be, no matter what he’d sacrificed for her. No man (other than a doctor) had seen her undressed since she’d married Paul, and only a couple before that. But if she didn’t get help, blood loss and infection would race to knock her over first. Forgive me, Paul. “Luis? I need your help.”

  He appeared a few moments later, shirt off, blood smeared on the left side of his chest and upper arm. He pulled up short, blinked. “Um…”

  “Don’t get any ideas. I can’t…I can’t see it. Can you…?”

  Luis worked his jaw for a moment. “Okay, sure. Um…I’ll fix that, and you can change the dressing on my back, okay?”

  “Deal.”

  They consolidated all the first-aid supplies in the back of the Jeep. She handed Luis her penlight. He turned it in his fingers, then said, “We have the spotlight. I’d rather run down their battery than—”

  “Not in front of my daughter.”

  “Good point.” He knelt behind her, tugged on the edge of her panties—another fireball of pain—pressed gentle fingertips around the burning area. “Okay, the good news is, it’s a grazing shot. The bullet didn’t go in. The bad news is, it left a pretty good gash. It’s gonna hurt to sit for a while, and it’ll scar up unless you get it fixed.”

  What would Paul think of a big scar on her rear? “Can you make it so I won’t bleed to death?”

  “I can do that.” She gasped as the elastic in her briefs hit the wound’s edge. “Sorry.”

  She leaned forward against the Jeep’s tail, bent slightly at the hips, and did what she could to ignore the fact that a strange man was washing and prodding her almost-bare rear. Luis was incredibly gentle and didn’t try to touch her out of bounds. She kept her briefs out of the way with one hand while with the other she passed him what he called for, which kept her brain busy.

  When he asked for the povidone bottle, she braced for what was next.

 
“This is gonna hurt a little.”

  She couldn’t catch her first scream in time when the iodine solution hit her wound. She grabbed a paper-wrapped bandage roll from the supplies and bit down hard on it. The pain couldn’t burn hotter had he turned a cigarette lighter on her.

  Hope’s head peeked up over the back seat. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Nora pulled the bandage from her mouth. “I’m just fixing an owie, Cupcake.” Her voice sounded like she was being strangled.

  “Can I help?”

  “No, no, no, just sit down, I’ll be done in a couple minutes, okay?”

  A few minutes later, she felt Luis stand and sigh. “Okay, all done. Grab some Avelox tabs from the mil kit. Take one now, then one every twelve hours. It’ll screw up your digestion, but that’s better than gangrene in your butt.”

  She reached back to probe the dressing. It felt neat and secure, far better than she could have done on her own. He’d had practice. “Thanks. I need to change. Can you…?”

  When he went away, she put on new briefs, patched the hole in her jeans with the Jeep’s duct tape, reassembled herself as much as possible. She called to him. Luis had tidied his front more thoroughly, but his back was a horror show. He took her place at the Jeep’s back end while she washed and cleaned both sides of his shoulder wound. It was odd and a bit disturbing being this close to a half-dressed man, touching him, feeling his warmth. There was nothing romantic or sexual about it—blood was not a turn-on for her—but the intimacy unsettled her. Once again, Luis behaved like a gentleman. How wrong she’d been about him at first.

  “All done.” She stepped back, proud of her handiwork.

  Luis tried to rotate the shoulder, but Nora could tell from his wince and sharp sucked-in breath that it hurt a lot. “Thanks,” he rasped. “Good job.” He took a pair of white tablets from a baggie and slugged them down with a gulp of water, then carefully pulled on a long-sleeved black tee shirt he’d draped over the top of his backpack. He handed her a small folding shovel. “Dig a pit and bury all the waste so the animals don’t get into it. I’ll get the supplies squared away.”

  “Okay.” She twiddled the shovel for a moment. Her cheeks warmed despite the breeze. After everything, now she started blushing. “We don’t have to tell anyone about this, do we?”

  56

  Caption: “U.S.-Mexican border between Mexicali and Nogales. The bright white line is the border fence. Wider light pools are the locations of patrol bases along the fence.”

  — “Latest HD Earth Photos from China’s Tiangong Space Station,” SkyandTelescope.com

  MONDAY, 17 MAY

  Well past midnight, and still on the road. The farther south they traveled, the rougher the going, especially once Luis turned off the Camino del Diablo into the Cipriano Pass to cut west through the mountains. Now they did well to maintain an average fifteen miles an hour. The moon had already passed its zenith and had begun its long dive toward the horizon.

  As usual, the day’s warmth had bled off quickly into the cloudless sky. The Jeep’s heater kept their legs warm enough, but Luis was still glad for his field jacket. No one realizes how cold a desert can get even in the summer until they experience it themselves.

  “How much farther?” Nora asked, her voice sleepy.

  He glanced in the rear-view mirror. Nora huddled glassy-eyed in a heavy, dark sweatshirt and windbreaker with the collar turned up, her fists clutched between her thighs. Hope, wrapped in a beach towel, had finally settled down again after a couple episodes of night fright. Poor thing. She’d be one messed-up little kid once this was over, even with devoted parents like Nora and Paul. This trip had been expensive on a lot of different levels.

  “Fourteen, fifteen miles or so. Another hour. How’re you doing?”

  “Okay. That Tylenol works pretty well.”

  “It’s got codeine in it.”

  “You narcos get all the good drugs.”

  He checked to see if she was serious. She wore a tired-dopey smile; probably not. “Actually, you can get it over-the-counter in Mexican farmacias.”

  “Hm. Why are you working for those people? Someone like you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘someone like me’?”

  “You’re a…” She trailed off. He glanced in the mirror, caught her chewing her lip. “You’re honorable and smart and kind and reliable. Why are you mixed up with them?”

  Wow. He had no idea he’d gone up so far in her opinion. “I was moving people south on the side when the cartels discovered they could make money doing it. A friend of mine worked for the Nortes and he hooked me up.”

  “You deal with them even knowing what they are?”

  “I don’t mess with the other stuff. I know, that’s not an excuse. Look at who you work for, the things they do, what they’re doing to you right now. Can you really complain about the Cartel?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How? You and ICE put four hundred thousand innocent people in prison with no trial. You have border guards shooting women and children trying to get out—”

  “That doesn’t really happen, that’s—”

  “It did to me. My last run before this. A couple contractors not too far from here shot me and mowed down four of the five travelers with me. That includes a woman and her daughter, about Hope’s age.” No reply. “I could work for an oil company and shovel some more gunk on the nice beaches we used to have. I could work for a broker and screw people out of their retirement money so they have to live with their kids, like my folks do. That’s legal, I guess. The Cartel bought out my business, now I’m tied to them. It sucks, but there it is.”

  They bounced over more ruts for a while. Finally Nora said, “Sorry I asked.”

  “Yeah.” Now he felt guilty for unloading on her after posing a question he’d asked himself about a million times. “Look, I don’t love them. They do some really evil things. I guess my point is that a lot of big companies do really evil things, and their stock goes up and their CEOs get to have dinner with the President. The cartels are just big companies now.”

  “You don’t want to get laid off by them, though.”

  “No, that gets kinda rough.”

  They rounded a ridge and left the pass. The whole southern horizon was a straight black line against a midnight-blue band of sky. A few scattered bumps broke into the blue in the far distance. Stars shimmered like dewdrops at dawn.

  “You going to miss the States?” Luis asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably. I was born here.” She sounded wistful, as if she’d mentioned an old lover. “But it’s not really my country anymore. It’s decided it doesn’t want me.”

  “They don’t want you blowing the whistle on them.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that. I’ve never been ‘American enough’ for a lot of people.” Luis could hear the quotation marks around her phrase. “I took a lot of static in the Army for being what I am. It’s been a lot worse since 10/19. I see how people look at me when I tell them my last name. People we thought were friends won’t visit anymore. Nearly everyone in our mosque has moved or got sent off to a camp. I can’t tell you how many polygraphs and background investigations I’ve been through at work in the past ten years.”

  “Try being Latino in Arizona or Alabama or Kansas.”

  “At least they think you’re just trying to steal their jobs, not kill their children.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Maybe.” When she didn’t continue, Luis glanced in the mirror. Nora stared up into the stars, her eyes big and sad. After a few moments, she said, “You know the funny thing? Other Muslims didn’t think we were ‘good Muslims.’ We were never really hard-core about it when I was growing up. We’d do Friday prayers and Ramadan and paid our zakat, but we belonged to a pretty liberal mosque. I mean, look what I did—joined the Army, became an FBI agent. What good Muslim dad lets his daughter go crazy like that?”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, 1
0/19, of course. We might as well have been fundamentalists, the way—”

  “No. To you. The hats, your clothes, the way you are around Paul. You changed. Why?”

  Nora gave him a closed-lip smile, looked down, rearranged Hope’s towel. She stayed silent so long, Luis figured the conversation was over. Then she said, “I went on a hajj with my family. I was just out of the Army, out of Somalia. I’d done some bad things, seen a lot of bad things, and…” She turned her gaze back up to the sky. “I guess I was looking for something. Going to those places, seeing all those people who believed so much…it makes things more real. It would be like you going to the Holy Land. It made me want to be better. And now, with the kids…”

  Hearing all this was far more intimate than seeing Nora with her pants down. It was like holding something very fragile in his hands. He could see himself years ago at the baptismal font, welcoming Christa into a church he’d abandoned when he enlisted. He’d wanted to be better, too. “Are you? Better?”

  She shrugged. “I hope so. I’m still not a very good Muslim. It’s hard to be, here, now. But I try. Someday I’ll find my place. It just won’t be…here.”

  Luis shook his head. Such a waste. Nora and her family were the kinds of people the country needed—and was losing. “I hope you do.”

  She sighed. “Thanks. There’ve been some good people, ones who reached out to us, who tried to help. People like that priest back in Yuma. They’re the only reason I can still hope things will get better someday.” Her face didn’t reflect any of that hope, only fatigue and disappointment.

  “Maybe you can get that started with your information.”

  “Maybe.”