IMPERIAL 2 (Vollmann): 'Body-snatchers'

The state of exception seems to be the normality; there's no need for anger, no need for blame- or is there?  And is truth- the real-  better than deceit, forgetfulness, Verwerfung? At this point, I really plainly don't know. GC

BODY-SNATCHERS

The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border's eyes stained it with yellow tears.—These lights have been up for about two years, Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.

He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he'd played his part in the work first begun by Eden's angel with the flaming sword, the methodical patrols and prowls to keep the have-not millions out of paradise—which in this case was Imperial County, California, whose fields of blondeness, of endless pallid asparagus, onion plants like great lollipops and honey-colored hay bales produced the lowest median tax income of any county in the state. Zone El Centro, named after the county seat, comprised Sectors 210 to 226, of which Sectors 217 to 223 happened to be Murray's responsibility. He kept the key to the armory, whose rows of M4 shotguns awaited a mass assault from Southside which never came. He knew how to deploy the stinger spikes, the rows of accordion-like grids like a row of caltrops: Pull a string and they opened up to puncture a tire. One car actually drove twelve desperate miles on four fl at tires until it was wrecked beyond any conceivable utility to its confiscators.

They'll pop their heads up in a minute, he was always saying. He was always right.

An hour ago we might have been able to see through the bamboo and across the wrinkled brown water into Southside where Mexicans sat on the levee waiting to seize their chance, but at that time Murray and I had been over by the Port of Entry East bridge where two Mexicans waited, not aliens yet; while on our side, Northside, another agent sat calmly watching them in his car.

Hello, said Murray. Have those folks been there all day?

Yessir, the agent said.

Suddenly it was dusk, and the two men were already crossing. Now they were illegals.

Get out! an officer yelled at them. They turned and slowly, slowly walked back into Mexico across the humming throbbing bridge.

Then we drove west down the long horizon of border wall. Two Mexicans walked along the fence down in Southside, screaming obscenities at Murray.

Now, you see, this has got concrete, Murray explained. But it only goes down about four feet. They have their little spider holes. They pop up, throw a rock through the windshield, then go down again.

We drove west, down into the lights of Calexico and out again, passing the sandy waste whose incarnation as a golf course was memorialized by carcasses of palm trees.—See, another hole in the fence back there, Murray said. Usually you just hold back and wait. They'll pop up.—The golf course had gotten robbed once too often, and then somebody burned down the clubhouse after a fence-jumper from Southside was shot. So some townspeople told me. Their stories were weary and muddled, but in them as in this former golf course the border wall remained ever in the background, its long, rust-colored fence dwindling into lights. Then the dim red fence abruptly ended, and we met the All-American Canal, which comprises so much of this sector's border westward of the wall. Follow the All-American upstream on a map, and you'll see that it abruptly turns north, wraps around Calexico International Airport near that abandoned golf course (the hollow in this spot is a good place for pollos and solos to hide, and sometimes for bandits, too, who murdered somebody here half a year ago), and then it bends due east again just before Comacho Road, ducking under the railway and Imperial Avenue, streaming on eastward toward its source, until the last we see of it, it's overlined the streets named after southwestern riches: Turquoise Street, Sapphire Street, Garnet Street, Ruby Court, Emerald Way, Topaz Court—after which it runs off the map and out of Calexico. In the first four months of 1999 alone, eight people whom the authorities knew of had already drowned in the All-American's cool quick current, all of them presumably seekers of illegal self-improvement; and I imagine that other bodies were never found, being carried into jurisdictions where perhaps the nonhuman coyotes got them. In April 1999 the United States Navy began to wire the canal with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar noise-detection apparatus.—The goal is to create a system that can alert authorities when someone is in trouble in the canal, my home newspaper informed me blandly. Who am I to doubt the Navy's altruism?

You should see these guys pickin' watermelon, bent over all day, said Officer Murray. They do work most Americans wouldn't do.

We were close by the Wistaria Check, which lay opposite the place on the Mexican side where the taxi driver and Juan the cokehead had taken me the day before.

The taxi driver had said: If you want, I'll jump into the canal and swim across, if you pay me.

Juan, whose scrawny back and shoulders most proudly bore a tattoo of the Virgin for which he'd paid two U.S. dollars back when he was twenty (he was now Christ's age), stopped the taxi to buy fi ve hundred pesos' worth of powder in a twist of plastic. He was a true addict. Every day I had to advance him his wages. By late afternoon he needed a bonus. I had found him amidst the slow round of beggars and drunks on a street two blocks south of the United States where a poster announcing a MILLION DOLLAR FINANCIAL SERVICE depicted a giant identification card which among all its elysian proclamations faintly whispered NOT A GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT, then rushed on to proclaim ORDER YOUR PERSONAL U.S. I.D. CARD HERE TODAY. On that hot afternoon when we departed Mexicali's red and yellow storefronts and drove westward into the dirt, the houses shrinking into shacks, Juan and the taxi driver kept glancing at me and muttering together; but I told them that I would have even more cash when I came back tomorrow. Far away, deeper into Mexico, I could see the pale bluish-white mountains like concretions of dust. Now we came into Juan's hometown where several of the Mexicali street-whores lived, and although Juan wanted to stop to buy more coke, business, personified by me, demanded that we leave behind those long blocks of tiny houses of cracked dry mud whose yards were dirt instead of grass. So we turned onto a long dirt road in parallel to the All-American Canal, which we could not yet see. Here each of the many tiny cement or adobe houses was fenced away from the world. One fence derived from boxspring bedframes. Other fencepoles had been fashioned of twigs or columns of tires, and there were many hedges of thorns on that nameless road of prickly pears, bamboo, dust, beautiful palm trees, and turtles sleepily lurking in the stagnant ditchwater.

See all those cars in there? Stolen, my guide triumphantly explained. From

America.

Well, I said, I'm glad they have a new home, Juan. How do you know they're stolen?

I don't think these people have enough money to buy a new car—or ten new cars.

He said that in Mexicali it cost two or three hundred dollars for a brand-new stolen American automobile, which I considered not a bad price. He said that another industry of the householders along this road was to hide emigrants on consignment until nightfall, then help them try to swim the canal. And just as he finished explaining these matters, we came upon a man in sunglasses who was driving a brand-new van with tinted windows. We had seen no other vehicles before, and we saw none afterward except for one water truck whose corroded white cylinder tank slowly bled water as it went. The man in sunglasses rolled down his night-dark window to study us, which was the only reason that we could see him at all. He was gripping a pair of binoculars against his face. When he had digested us, he drove slowly past, the window still down. He was watching the canal now through his binoculars.

Think he's a coyote? I asked.

What else?

Now we arrived at a little shrine to the Virgin and a cross. Someone had died, perhaps a solo. Juan read the inscription. Yes, he said, the man had drowned trying to cross into America, where everything was wider, cleaner, safer, more expensive, more controlled and more homogeneous. And by this shrine we parked the car and ascended the levee of crumbing mud-dust to gaze at the United States, where of the three of us only I could legally go. It was hot and thorny and dry on the Mexican side with all those American fields appearing so cruelly green like Paradise, because the water belongs to America, as Juan put it. Beside us, a skinny horse browsed in garbage.

Some chocolate-brown boys were swimming in the coffee-colored canal, and on Northside, very close to Wistaria Check as I said, a white truck was parked and two middle-aged white men were trying their luck at catfishing, ignoring the boys who ignored them. Juan pointed to the boys and said: See those poor people over there? They're gonna try for the night time, then they'll walk through all the fields . . .

Ask them where they're going.

They're gonna go to Canada, they say, unless Border Patrol catch them.

Ask them if they know where Canada is.

They say, they don't know, but somebody told them it's a real nice country where you don't get hassled like you do in America.

On our side, the dusty desert side, an obelisk marked American dominion, and later I learned from the Border Patrol that the canal actually lay slightly north of the true border, but those guardians found it needlessly troublesome to assert their authority over the few slender feet of United States sovereignty between the marker and the water. Officer Murray said to me: If I saw people on the Southside of the canal, I'd just wave to 'em. You see a raft, now, you just back off. Don't wanna spook anybody.

A day or two later the local papers carried a story about how Border Patrol agents had shot one of those rafts with a pellet gun. The raft capsized, and one or two aliens drowned. (There are Border Patrol officers in boats, and they're like fishing, a solo in Algodones told me. They cut open or shoot at the rafts and let 'em drift downriver.—Last night there were about seven shots, his comrade said, shrugging.) But the drownings, I hope, were an aberration. I never at any time met a solo or pollo who expressed physical fear of the Border Patrol. Murray insisted that some agents bought fast food with their own money for the frightened Southside kids they'd captured.

But the Mexican consulate never hears that, Murray said bitterly.

They'll probably start rafting pretty soon, he muttered.

He stood listening to the canal, which was long, low, black with bamboo. His job was not to shape the destiny of those who sought America, but merely to postpone it. For what could he do to them, but lock them in a holding cell, then deport them back to Southside so that they could try again? And for a moment, as we stood there, each of us letting his private thoughts fall into the pit of the night, I almost pitied the futility of his occupation, as I suspect he did mine (the main purpose of my essays being to line birdcages), but then I fortunately persuaded myself that all vocations and callings are equally futile. He talked about how beautiful it was when he patrolled the shoulder of an onion field at dusk with the bees returning to their hives, and I started to like him. He told me about the fine catfishing he'd had in the canal, and we gazed at the sparse weak lights which shone from Mexico, until suddenly the radio said: There's already a rope across. Looks like it'll be near Martin Ranch.

Okay, said Murray, I'm up on the canal bank.

Okay, copy, replied the radio.

They could be running across the fields right now, he said to me. Okay, he's got sign.

We were in the car now, speeding toward the place. We stopped by a wall of hay, which we smelled more than saw in the dark humid night. Border Patrolmen were searching with their lights.

Right here you got the traffic, Murray said.

And he shone his flashlight on fresh footprints in the sand.

These kids should be easy to catch, he went on, half talking to himself. But I feel naked; I don't have a spotlight. I don't have any alleylights . . .

The long field appeared green through an agent's nightscope. The Border Patrolmen hunted and searched, as the crumbly earth devoured their feet up to the ankles. It was silt from the days of the ancient sea. They came through the field, stalking it with headlights which rendered the furrows cruelly bright.

Maybe we'll find the bodies, Murray said. Maybe not. It's just pure luck. But these kids tripped a sensor.

I can't see 'em anymore, another officer said, resting his hands on his Sam Browne belt.

I got an eye on your bodies, said the nightscope man, whose monitor made the word bodies seem chillingly appropriate, for in the green night the aliens glowed white like evil extraterrestial beings or zombies out of a science-fiction movie. The nightscope man could also reverse the contrast if he chose, so that the bodies became green silhouettes in a glowing white field of night-ness.—They're layin' up in the middle of the field, he went on, directing the hunters through a darkness which neither they nor the aliens, who surely thought themselves safe, could penetrate. How eerie it was! Only the nightscope man could see! The aliens lurked on faith that the darkness was their invincible friend. The Border Patrolmen could scarcely perceive where they set their own feet; they could have been approaching a precipice; but they approached the unseen bodies with equal and, as it proved, more justified faith.—Lookin' dead smack in the middle, said the nightscope man. Yeah, I got a fix on your bodies. Turn left. Three steps more. Another coupla steps. They should be right in front of you, right down there in those . . . Yeah, you got 'em.

Now came the wide circle of the spotlight. The hunters' cars circled the field. And the bodies, hopelessly silhouetted, resurrected themselves from the fresh earth, giving in to capture and deportation. They rose, becoming black on black. And the shadow of a man whose hands were on his head was replicated manifold. Two of them with their hands on their heads stood gazing down at the half-empty jugs of water they'd carried. Sad and submissive faces gazed into the darkness, half-blinded by the brightness as the Border Patrolmen frisked them. Yes, the bodies stood wide-eyed in the light, all in the line, with their hands obediently behind them. Coughing, shuffling, they began to cross the fields.

You know what? a Border Patrolman said to one of the bodies. You really need to brush your teeth. You've got wicked bad breath, guy.

The body was silent. In the nightscope it had been as white as one of the freshly dead fishes in the cool green poison (or should I say "reputed poison"?) of the Salton Sea. Now it began to reveal itself to be brown—Hispanic, sunburned and field-stained.

Let's go, amigos. Come on. Let's go; let's go.

None of the captives looked terrified. It was as Officer Murray had said: People realize they're not going to jail for the rest of their lives, so they calm down.

Now, that irrigator's car over there just happens to be in a convenient place, an agent was saying. We'll have to check him out . . .

The Mexicans walked more quickly now, carefully cradling their water jugs, attended by the bright, bright lights. Now they sat in a line on the roadside, a long line of them, with their jugs and bottles of water between their legs. Most of them wore baseball caps. They were young, wiry, strong to work. Their eyes shone alertly in the night. Already resigned, they quickly became philosophical, and in some cases even cheerful, slapping their knees and poking one another smilingly in the ribs. Soon they'd join the people staring out the panes of the holding cells. After eight hours or so, if they had no criminal history, they'd be sent back to Mexico.

(As I reread this chapter almost a decade later, in these days of "extraordinary rendition" and the Patriot Act, I suppose that a body fears capture more nowadays. But how can I be sure? Our Department of Homeland Security seems disinclined to let me watch any more hunts and chases.)

We got some that made the river, but we bagged the rest of 'em, an officer was saying, but already the Border Patrol had found other game.—Two made it up into the housing development, a woman's excited voice cried on the radio, but we're tryin' to inch up on 'em . . .

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