• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It reads, “One windy day during the harvest time, Quail sings a song—just as Coyote walks by.

“‘Teach me your song, or I shall eat you up,’ cries Coyote.

“But Quail’s song is no ordinary song, and Coyote may end up swallowing more than he bargained for. . . . ”

That is clearly the risk.

On a Sunday, a man in a Dodge Neon is gunned down.

On Wednesday, two beaten and tortured cops are found under a bridge near the cemetery.

On Wednesday night, that cop crawls into the bakery.

On Thursday, another man is executed.

On Friday, seven men are slaughtered in a house in the state capital by the authorities.

On Saturday, a man in a car is machine-gunned near the crazy place.

On Sunday, a police bodyguard is cut down.

At first, I keep a list, try to see things in sequence, search for cause and effect.

Then I learn and give up.

The kidnapped and beaten cops that turn up, well, they were never reported as kidnapped until they suddenly reappeared.

The cop cut down, his name is not printed, nor the fact that the comandante he was guarding had his name on a certain list.

The names of the seven men killed in the state capital are also never made public.

When I cross from El Paso to Juárez in January, the river is dry. Nine thousand jobs have vanished in the past few months as the economy sinks. It is thirty-three degrees and very still. Air presses down like Jell-O and has a gun-metal blue cast from the wood fires of the poor. A vendor walks with a stack of newspapers on his head and carefully plods between the puddles.

Everything has already begun, but at this moment it has not yet been said out loud. The beginning will come later, when the dead get so numerous we can no longer silence them.

He is really unimportant. He seems to move in and out of jail in New Mexico. He is in the United States illegally, that is true, but he has a list of injustices he wishes to state, injustices that cover thirteen years in the country.

For example, U.S. authorities try to interview him when he is too tired to talk. Also, he suffers from gastrointestinal problems and he is seldom given the right medication at the right time. He has an infection in his right arm, and he does not get proper treatment for that, either. Detention officers have pounded on him and dislocated his shoulder. He says the guards mess with his medications so that he will go crazy. Also, once a dentist drilled his tooth and that tooth disappeared.

He has been drinking fairly hard since age seventeen. Yes, there have been blackouts. When he was young, he did marijuana and inhalants.

As for his family members, they have no history of suicide. True, his dad drank a lot and was violent and his mom got violent also and once tried to choke him when he was a boy.

The examining doctor notes that he has a poorly groomed beard and sometimes does not make sense. He can’t quite figure out what is wrong with him, but the physician does not think the man can represent himself before the authorities. Eventually, the United States kicks him back into Mexico.

And then he winds up at the crazy place in the desert outside Juárez.

He is part of a story that never gets told.

There is a rhythm of casual violence in the city that almost always goes un-mentioned. The mayor of Juárez lives in El Paso so that he can keep his hand on the pulse of the city. The publisher of the daily paper in Juárez also lives in El Paso. The publisher of the daily paper in the capital of Chihuahua lives in New Mexico. A growing number of the businesspeople of Juárez live in El Paso. Leaders in the drug industry also keep homes in El Paso.

But for the average citizen of Juárez, such a remove is not a possibility. They lack the money and the legal documents to live in the United States. As winter slides into spring and the killing season accelerates, the poor continue their lives in Juárez and often find their deaths there. The new violence is simply an increase in the volume of their tired lives.

A woman and her boyfriend sit in a car drinking and arguing. Her young daughter is