North Into the Night

I remember his face. I will always remember his face.

The border patrol had agreed to let our TV station ride with them along the Rio Grande on long stretches of the river as the water course bent northwesterly. Two agents in their olive drab uniforms sat in the front seat and we bumped along a dirt two-track leading into remote reaches of the brush country. We had been slowly rolling the chip sealed miles of the Old Mines Road when an incoming radio message sent us racing up river.

“KAK 293, this is base for Unit 9.”

“Unit 9. Go ahead base.”

“We appear to have a fatality on the river. It’s about 12 miles past the end of Mines Road. Please move to that position.”

“Roger that,” the driver said. “Unit 9 out.”

“KAK 293.”

My camera guy, Ronnie, a furtive and nervous chain smoker, looked over at me with worried eyes. I had no sense he was excited about the fact we were likely to deliver the day’s big story, although dead immigrants on the riverbank were recurrent enough news items that our viewers were no longer entranced by the tragedy. My reaction was consistently at odds with these incidents becoming passé. I tended to find myself, however, constantly trying to remain detached from circumstances. Sadness was inevitable, I knew, because becoming disaffected from stories I covered was never a psychological skill I was ever able to acquire.

The Big River at Sunset Northwest of Laredo

I stared out the window at the river streaming past to our south, the water brown and earthen colored and the Rio Grande turgid against its banks. Scattered cottonwoods lining the water’s edge grew more sparse as we got farther into the tangles of cholla and prickly pear. Ronnie, without asking permission, rolled down his window and lit a smoke, letting his exhales stream behind us and the 100 degree heat flow unimpeded into the cabin. I was surprised the two agents said nothing. They were probably focused on the matter at hand and scanning through the undergrowth for people or bodies. Not much information had come over the radio.

My first television news job was in the Texas border town of Laredo during the late seventies. The community felt a bit un-evolved for an American city and I had the sense there was some of the Old West in its social mores. There were still more than 150 miles of unpaved roads, and poverty marked the neighborhoods and colonias with sagging rooftops, abandoned vehicles, dogs running loose, and children, often dirty and partially clothed in torn garments and barefoot, wandering without apparent adult interest in their whereabouts. Political corruption had robbed the taxpayers of improvements to their little city, and their children’s educations, and had made millionaires of the mayor and council members.

I do not remember the names of both agents that day, but the driver, I recall, was Ramiro, probably late thirties, his shirt no longer comfortable around his mid-section, and his hair shining black with some kind of product. He was friendly, and joking, before the radio squawked with their assignment. The passenger was a blonde anglo, tall and pasty in the face, who seemed to slouch in his seat as if he were tired and bored. He leaned into the AC vent, periodically, with his face, but did not say a word to Ronnie about raising the rear window, probably because accumulated smoke in the SUV would have been too much to mix with the heat.

“What’s that, over there?” Ramiro pointed to a sharp slope near the river’s edge. “Is that a body?”

“No, I think there’s a man,” I said. “Looks like he’s moving.”

“Yeah, he’s laying on his back, though. We need to get over there. Might still be alive.”

We turned off the track and the brush guard banged against undergrowth as we approached the river. We saw the man slowly sit up and place his head in his hands and brace his arms against his knees.

“Hey, there’s a little boy,” Ronnie said. “He’s just standing there. Other side of the man.”

“Oh my god.”

Ramiro stopped the big four-wheel drive SUV when we broke through the canebrakes, which had been hiding a woman’s body. She lay face down in the mud, and the child was standing about six feet distant, tears and horror on his face as he choked on the reality of his dead mother’s image. The man, bent and shaking, hardly lifted his head as the agents approached.

“She die in river,” he said. “She not swim. I help and she push me away too scared. She keep hitting and fighting and then disappear. I find her here. Oh, my boy.”

The man did not look up and put his head back between his knees. Ronnie had his big camera rolling before the truck had stopped and he was out his door in front of the agents to record the scene. The two agents put their arms around the sobbing immigrant and lifted him to his feet. I noticed he did not look at his wife’s body, twisted and muddy as if she had crawled halfway up the bank before dying. The little boy, six years old at the most, was frozen in shock. His face appeared lined with the age creases of an old man and horror looked like it might be permanently affixed to his countenance as he passed through his years. His arms were still at his side and he remained motionless as a stone.

“What about the boy?” I asked agent Ramiro. “Can I help?”

“No. We’ll get him. We have to restrain his father in the truck and call for help and the coroner.”

“Can’t I just go talk to the kid? Try to reassure him?”

“No, you will be interfering with a federal officer, if you try.”

“Well, okay. But what about the woman? Are you sure she’s dead? Should we try CPR?”

Ramiro’s expression made it clear I was unobservant to her motionlessness. I did not know what I was supposed to accomplish. While we waited for the Border Patrol’s back up officers and the coroner’s van, I tried interviewing the agents. They had been cleared in advance to talk to me, but had little to say beyond one word answers. I assumed their daily endeavors did not make the sight before me all that stunning in their range of experiences. I watched Ronnie taping the boy and framing him with his mother’s prone body in the foreground and wondered why he was wasting his energies. Neither the child nor the woman’s imagery would be allowed on our TV station’s air.

The boy remained still and soundless until forensics and the coroner approached his mother’s body and rolled her over for examination. Almost instantly, he ran and screamed and grabbed at the adult legs, probably mistaken that she was still alive and being harmed. I wondered if her death had really yet registered and if he knew even what was meant by dying. The agents were a bit unconcerned about the boy, I thought, and ought to have moved him before allowing recovery of his mother’s body. Instead, he witnessed her being zipped into a black bag, probably the last sight he ever had of the person who had given him life.

A social worker arrived at our location over an hour later and took the boy gently in her arms and carried him to a waiting vehicle. His father had been transported in a BP truck with a wire cage between him and the drivers. He offered no resistance as he was taken downtown to be processed, which would conclude with him delivered back to the bridge across to Nuevo Laredo for deportation. I wondered how he might be reunited with his son or if his wife’s body were to be shipped back to Mexico. In my third year of living on the border, there was far more to learn about how laws and customs and international protocols functioned between the two countries.

Brush Country Thorn Scrub

Driving back everyone was quiet as we scraped along the rocks and brush, but I had questions. I tried to restrain myself because I saw that the two agents were uncomfortable, I thought, because of what we had seen and recorded. Their supervisors were probably hoping we would only record a common day on patrol, a snapshot of a border agent’s life keeping a wary eye on Mexico. Something else entirely had happened, and I needed to make sense of it for myself, and our viewers.

Downtown Laredo Near the International Bridge

I leaned forward between the two seats upfront. “What happens to that little boy, gentlemen?”

“I’m not sure,” Ramiro answered. “I think the state gets custody of him. They’ll probably contact the Mexican embassy or something.”

“It’s not what we do,” his partner said. “We just take custody and turn them in for processing. That’s where our skill, training is.”

“Okay. I guess I’ll go to the sector office and see what I can find out.”

“Yeah, you should,” Ramiro said.

In those days, my wife and I lived in a single-wide mobile home less than a half mile from the river. Mornings, Mary Lou left for work and I got up and ran the Old Mines Road until I was out of energy, and then jogged homeward for a shower and to prepare for my day at the TV station. The road paralleled the river and I often saw people coming up dripping from the water and wondered about their hopes and desperation. Usually, crossings were made at night but families tended to move in daylight. Our trailer was on a ranch and situated between the Rio Grande and the Union Pacific railroad running north to old San Antonio.

A few times in the night, migrants came up out of the river and stood behind our trailer and tossed pebbles at the windows in the dark. Our landlord, who owned the ranch where we lived, had married a Mexican woman and had got a reputation for helping border crossers. They seemed to think he lived in our trailer rather than in the big house across the drive. I was usually not at home at night because I worked the evening news and Mary Lou called to ask what she ought to do when people were standing at our back gate. I told her that if she were afraid, she needed to call border patrol, but otherwise, give them water and whatever snacks or food we might spare.

On weekends, we often sat the back steps in the early evenings and when the sky was clear we were able to see the mountain ranges of the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico. Our talk was always of travel and the dreams we shared seemed impossible just then staring out at the brush and the endless roll of the desert. One of those evenings, I heard pinging on the window over the kitchen sink and went out to investigate. In the light cast to the steps, I saw a man and a boy, dripping wet. The adult did not wait for me to speak.

“I sorry, Señor,” he said. “You give water. People say you maybe give water or food?”

“Um, okay. Sure. Did you come from the river?”

“Si, si. We go north to San Antonio. You know it, no?”

“Of course. Wait here, just a minute.”

I am sure he thought I was the doctor who owned the ranch and had a Mexican wife but I went inside, nonetheless, and my wife had already made peanut butter sandwiches and put them in a brown paper bag with two bananas. She also found two plastic bottles I used for drinks after running and filled them with ice water. I took it outside and offered it to the father and son. The boy had moved closer to the light by the steps and I saw his face. Not more than two weeks had passed since I had seen that face by the river with the border patrol and he looked, in the dark, to be a thousand years older, emotionless and burdened with confusion. I still had not heard his voice and his face appeared almost wizened in the diminished light, even though I am sure he was no older than six or seven. His wet hair was flat against his forehead, and, like his father’s, his clothes were dripping.

“Gracias, Señor,” the man said. “We go now. You know where is railroad?”

“Yes, sure,” I pointed. “It’s right there. About a hundred yards that way.”

“Oh. I see.”

The Union Pacific ran by the front of the ranch, the trains winding down and screeching as they approached the international bridge, or wailing with long loads as they dragged great cargoes to far points on the compass. I had been told it was also a railroad of immigrants and that they walked northbound between the rails all night and slept out in the brush among the cactus and snakes during the day, hoping to avoid discovery. I had never seen anyone afoot along the UP line but I went out front to watch the father and son pass, their shadows easily visible in a glow from the gibbous moon. The boy appeared to be devouring the sandwich as his father placed his hand on his little man’s shoulder. They reached the end of our drive then stepped between the rails, before leaning toward the hopeful north.

And into the unknowns of an American night.