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The body has just been taken away by the authorities.

I lean over and flies rise up off the blood.

Below, a herd of goats searches for food in a garbage dump. The hillside gleams with shards of broken glass.

The flies rise to my face.

And I can only decide whether to face what I see.

Or turn away.

We are high on the hill in Salt Lake City, and this is good. El Pastor is considering a deviled egg when I point out its name in English and suggest it may be satanic. He laughs, and this is a good sign. It is October now, and Juárez has had about twelve hundred murders so far this year. The business community worries that tourists have stopped crossing the bridges for a visit. So they have put up a new billboard on the U.S. side: “Juárez, Land of Encounters.”

In the last, two months, El Pastor has had three messages.

The first time, the federal police came to his office at 6 P.M. Then they returned at 9 P.M. Nothing was ever said.

After that, the phone calls began. A person would say he was with the federal police and he understood El Pastor had a lot of money. After all, it must take a lot of money to run the crazy place in the desert. The second call was similar. And the third.

El Pastor had been given a very nice new car by a man who believed in Jesus Christ, or wanted to believe in Him. This man was a friend of a state policeman in Juárez, a law enforcement agency that handles public safety, killings for the cartel, and also moves drugs. El Pastor began to worry about his fine car because everyone told him that only a narco could own such a car.

So he stopped driving it.

And he stopped coming to Juárez on a schedule.

Now he comes without warning and leaves without warning and struggles to create no pattern. He has long kept his wife and family across the line, where there is less violence. Now he stays home more than he had planned.

And so he is in Salt Lake City giving talks to raise money for the people in the crazy place. He tells the audiences of Jesus, he tells them how Mexicans only want to come north to do dirty jobs Americans do not like.

He asks people, “Do you want to go to the fields and dig potatoes? We will. I don’t think you will.”

He also laughs a lot and smiles and explains how he was a drunk and drug addict and chased a lot of women, and finally the U.S. government got weary of his escapades and threw him back into Mexico. And then he lived on the street, was very dirty, did anything he could find, ate out of garbage cans. Until Jesus saved him.

He feels good here. True, almost everyone is white, and El Pastor is brown. And no one here even knew there is a secret city within this city until one day, when at least eighty thousand illegal Mexicans marched in the streets of Salt Lake asking for a little respect and a lot less pressure from the U.S. government. We are both taking a little holiday from death. Not an escape, because the power of Juárez and the scent of Miss Sinaloa always draws us back.

We sit in the nice house on the hillside, while the fall leaves rustle in their last frolic before the killing season comes and they tumble down yellow and brown and taste life no more. In this exact moment, the poetry of Juárez continues ceaselessly in the daily newspaper of the ciudad:

Body

found in western Juárez

A man turned up dead

in an abandoned lot

of the colonia

21st century

in the western part of the city

around

2:00 P.M.

The victim’s hands were tied

behind his back

and he was thrown face down on the ground.

Personnel

from the Forensic Medical Service

arrived at the scene

to take away

the body

and collect evidence

that might have been left

around him.

There is a beauty in this killing, music, a sonata perhaps, but an extremely loud sonata.

Yet people here listen to El Pastor’s message in the safe city in the safe valley where harm is outlawed—everyone says so—by the flag, by God and the local police. When they see images of the people living in the crazy place, they feel bad, and they give him money. When they see the