The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [9]
Only one of the walkers stepped forward. The rest hid under trees. They were watching Mike F. like deer in the shadows.
He took in the scene as he rolled toward them.
He stopped, put the truck in park, and opened his door. He put out a foot and gestured for them with one hand to stay put while he got the radio mike with the other and called in to Wellton Station. Cops tend to assess a situation at first glance—people are always up to something. In the desert, they were often involved in some form of dying. Most of them, if not in trouble, were sneaky. If they weren’t illegals, or smugglers, or narco mules, they were trespassing on the military base in some Ed Abbey desert fantasy, or they were cactus thieves, swiping young saguaros for their Scottsdale gardens. Gringos caused more alarm out there than Mexicans. And the OTMs—Other Than Mexicans—were so hapless and weird that you’d just laugh. Like the time they found a large group of Arabs in matching slacks and neckties, like some demented terrorist Jehovah’s Witness neighborhood canvass. “Oh? Are we here illegally? Oh! This is, you say, the United States? Right here? No, we did not know that. Praise to God. We were taking a walk, Allahu Akbar.”
Bad guys had cornered the market on trying to look casual and “innocent.” Mexicans, when not giving up, when not running like maniacs, often got wide-eyed, like a two-year-old stealing cookies. I didn’t do nothin’! I was just out here looking around! The more innocent they acted, the more nervously slouchy and devil-may-care or childlike in their sinlessness, the more hinky the whole scene was, and the cop would start fingering his sidearm.
These guys were clearly no threat—no need to unholster a weapon yet. The radio call went something like: “We’ve got five bodies on Vidrios Drag, over.” His voice probably sounded bored.
“Getting bodies,” in Border Patrol lingo, didn’t necessarily mean collecting corpses. Bodies were living people. “Bodies” was one of the many names for them. Illegal aliens, dying of thirst more often than not, are called “wets” by agents. “Five wets” might have slipped out. “Wets” are also called “tonks,” but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.
Agent F. did not say he had “tonks” on the road.
Arrests of illegals are often slightly wry, vaguely embarrassing events. The relentless border war is often seen as a highly competitive game that can even be friendly when it’s not frightening and deadly. Agents often know their clients, having apprehended them several times already. Daytime arrests have a whole different tone than lone midnight busts, out there in an abandoned landscape where the nearest backup might be a hundred hard miles away. But night or day, the procedure tends to be the same. The cop gets out of the truck and adjusts his gun-belt and puts his hands on his hips and addresses the group in Spanish: “Hola, amigos! Estan arrestados.” The Border Patrol so terrifies some of them that they give up immediately. Things happen. Stories burn all along the borderlands of Border Patrol men taking prisoners out into the wasteland and having their way with them. Women handcuffed, then groped and molested. Coyotes shot in the head.
Texas Rangers allegedly handcuff homeboys and toss them into irrigation canals to drown, though the walkers can’t tell the Border Patrol apart from the Rangers or any other mechanized hunt squad: they’re all cowboys. Truncheons. Beatings. Shootings. Broken legs. Torn panties. Blood. Tear gas.