Lament of the Vigilant Guard
Jason J Helmandollar
Yes, some of them swam across. Some came across on boats or rafts, or even tire inner tubes. A few walked across the bridge like any normal, legal, person would do, only to leap over the side at the last second – before having to produce papers – and shimmy down the cement bridge supports. Some came across in cars, hidden in trunks or hunkered down in backseats. Many sat in the front seats of those cars and, with shaking fingers, held out phony documents they had purchased for a life’s savings. Most, though, walked across the river, quite often without getting their knees wet in the shallow, nearly-extinct Rio Grande.
None of them carried suitcases. They carried plastic grocery bags, tied at the top and containing a single change of clothes. Or they carried nothing. In a way, I was like them when I moved from Indiana to that place on the edge of nowhere. I had earned my college degree not four months earlier. I was twenty-three and bursting with energy. I brought with me only a duffel bag full of clothes and a head full of raw, naïve hope.
I passed all the interview tests and then, a short time later, entered an alien landscape. When I stepped from the plane onto heat-hazy tarmac – the pilot, as we descended, had told us the ground temperature was 107 – my eyes and throat clinched from the unexpected inferno that was everyday life in south Texas. There was little humidity, but the air still had a dry weight to it, an inexorable presence, and I imagined this must be what Hell was like, if it existed – a barren place of claustrophobia-inducing heat that wrapped around the body like a smoldering blanket.
There were no trees away from the river, only shrubs and pale dirt. Everyone, other than the white boys who had gotten off the plane, had brown skin and dark hair. Everyone spoke Spanish first, and then, noticing our looks of bewilderment, switched to English. I stayed for a week in a hotel on the river with the other white boys, who had all journeyed from the north for this job. During that week, we went to our assigned stations. We met our superiors. We held up our right hands and were sworn in as Federal Officers. We made fast friends, and we all fought to ignore the tiny voice in the pits of our stomachs, saying: What are you doing here? Are you insane?
After our orientation week, they put us on an airplane and sent us to South Carolina – another hot, but this time humid, place for five months of training. Many didn’t make it through those five months. Fifty-nine men and women stepped down from airport shuttles and lined up to check in that first day. Thirty-four of us graduated. Those who didn’t graduate fell into one of three categories: those who got injured, those who quit, and those who got kicked out. The largest category by far was the Quitters. As they quit, most of the Quitters told everyone how much they missed their families. They said their families needed them back home, so they had to quit. Bullshit. The Quitters got scared, plain and simple. They looked up one day and saw this immensely different future looming in front of them, one where they lived on the border and chased Mexicans around all day, and they bolted. I suspect even the ones who were kicked out – due to failing grades, poor physical training or misconduct – were really just Quitters in disguise, silent saboteurs of their own budding careers.
Me? I thrived. With no ties, no family other than my parents back in Indiana, the looming future only managed to intrigue me. During basic training I lost twenty pounds but gained ten pounds of muscle. By the end of it, I could run a mile and a half in under ten minutes and do fifty pushups without stopping. I learned Immigration Law and how to spot a phony visa or passport. I learned to shoot a pistol, a shotgun and an M-4 carbine rifle. And, according to the federal government, in less than five months I learned the Spanish language. I was tough and lean. I hit the border running. I thought I would end illegal immigration in a couple weeks – a month tops.
In the field, we called them Wets or Tonks. I was on duty three months before I worked up the nerve to ask one of the senior agents what Tonk meant. It’s the sound your flashlight makes when you hit a Tonk on the head with it, he said with a perfectly straight face. Over the radio, where supervisors might be listening, we referred to them using generic terms, such as group or traffic – as in: I’ve got some traffic down by the creek, or There’s a group of seven in the back of my truck. They came in all shapes and sizes, all sexes and ages. But they were all traffic. They were all part of the herd, milling around behind a fence made up of six to ten inches of dirty water.
I swear, it was like a videogame or something. Or maybe a better example would be a game of Tag where the players rarely run away, they just stand around with their hands in the air, waiting to be tagged. Most days, they literally came out of the woodwork. There were trees along the river, and all I had to do was stand in a particular spot and wait from them to creep into sight. At that point I would yell stop in Spanish, or just wave my hand. They would usually smile and shrug.
Sometimes, they tried to run away. It depended on the situation, but during a standard encounter – meaning a confrontation in the brushy, swampy, wooded area between the river and the city – the traffic took off running about thirty percent of the time. Many agents became pissed when this happened. Not me. I was thrilled, because then I got to chase them down.
When a group of Wets ran, the trick was to keep them in sight. There was no way to outrun them. They were like gazelles, all bones and hard muscle, leaping over fences and scrub bushes. Their advantage in a foot chase was immediate and absolute: they carried nothing, not even body fat. Me, I carried my boots and uniform, two belts, a .40 caliber pistol, two extra magazines, a collapsible baton, handcuffs, OC spray, a utility knife, a water-filled backpack, at least one flashlight, a radio, sunglasses, keys, and a shiny badge. I carried all this – usually in temperatures topping one hundred degrees – and, still, I caught my prey most of the time. How did I do this? I had a less apparent, more subtle advantage. While I woke up every morning, ate a hearty breakfast and jogged three miles, the Wets sat around by the river all day and ate next to nothing. My advantage was stamina, along with one rule of thumb: eventually, a Wet always stops to hide. If an agent lost a Wet in a foot chase, it was for one of two reasons: either the agent ran right past where the Wet had hidden, or the Wet made it back to the river. Even I considered a chase over once a Wet ran into the river. Nobody but Mexicans stepped into that shit.
Within a year on the job, I developed, like most of my co-workers, an uncanny ability to recognize Wets, even outside of what I came to think of as their natural habitat: the river and its immediate surroundings. Inevitably, many of them made it past our line of defense and up into the city. There, they tried to blend in with the local population, which was over ninety-five percent Hispanic. It didn’t work. I could drive down the road, casually glancing down side streets, and spot a fresh Wet three blocks over. The hunch of his shoulders, his hurried stride, the way his hands clutched the insides of his pants pockets – these were beacons. I would turn at the next block, drive down past the unsuspecting Wet, and then pull up next to him at a cross street. He would stop, eyes darting, wondering what to do but usually doing nothing. Then I would step out and open the back door of my patrol vehicle with the flourish of a limo driver picking up a movie star. The Wets thought we were magic.
Compared to an undercover narcotics agent, or even the average beat cop, the job wasn’t all that dangerous. I never once fired my pistol during the two years I was there, except at the practice range. In fact, I only drew my gun from its holster a total of maybe ten times. There was no need. I don’t even remember using my handcuffs more than a couple times. The groups I arrested were herded into transport vans and ferried back to Mexico with rarely a harsh word spoken – in Spanish or English. I took them to the bridge and let them walk back across to their home country. I saw them off with a smile and then returned to my area of duty. They crossed the bridge, wandered back down to the river, and looked for a spot to try again. It was like resetting the round in a giant game of Hide and Seek.
The environment was more dangerous than the job. There were thorns and razor-sharp leaves. There were cactus needles by the millions. There were mysterious ruts hidden in the brush, waiting to twist your ankle. There were two types of red ants, big ones and small ones, both of them mean bastards. There were scorpions. There were tarantulas – which, it turns out, crack open like an egg when tapped with the end of a collapsible baton. There was the occasional Rattlesnake. Once, in an abandoned house by the river, I saw a bullfrog the size of a large cat, surely mutated by the ungodly chemicals flowing through the Rio Grande. It hopped in our direction as a fellow agent and I entered through the front door. My newbie partner – I can see his face, but his name is a blank – squeaked like a little girl and shot at it. He missed, but I remember being jealous he’d found a way to fire his pistol on duty, even if we did give him shit about it for weeks.
The dangers of this type – be it plant, animal or terrain – were ever-varied, ever-changing. But throughout it all, there was one constant: the invading aliens. More made it through than were caught. Those who were caught tried and tried again until they were successful. They passed through well-worn trails and filled up transport vans and waited impatiently to be written up. They strolled back across the bridge to Mexico with get you next time in their eyes. They tiptoed up from landings and they raised their hands and they interlaced their fingers behind their heads. They dropped to their knees and they sprawled to their faces. They claimed to be U.S. citizens, even as water dripped from their black hair. They trekked for days through barren scrubland with only gallon jugs of water and corn tortillas, following electricity towers to the railroad station. Their entrances, their pathways, were as dependable as the searing sun in the sky.
And perhaps it was the relentless sun that did it, or the painfully faithful crossings of the aliens. Perhaps it was simply the sense of futility that, over time, began to darken the edges of our days like a half-eaten apple. For whatever reason, enthusiasm for the job slipped away, little by little, day after day. This created a distinct divide among the agents. And so, as with the red ants, there were two main types of agent: the Go-getters and Slackers.
The Go-getters were the new agents. They spent their time along the river, following trails and hiding behind thorny bushes. They held contests with each other to see who could capture the most Wets. Their uniforms were always crisp and clean at the beginning of every shift and dusty and torn at the end.
The Slackers’ uniforms were frayed, as well, but from the passage of time as opposed to strenuous activity. They liked to stay in their assigned vehicles, cruising the town or parked somewhere with a magazine in hand. Although relaxing was their primary concern, the Slackers still made arrests when the mood struck them or when they thought their supervisors might be taking notice. During these times, the senior agents drove through the streets and plucked illegals from crowds of people on the sidewalks or in supermarkets – for even though the Slackers were slackers, time had honed their Wet-recognizing abilities to a near-psychic razor’s edge. And the Wets were everywhere, ripe for the picking.
I never became a Slacker. I quit the job a few days after my two-year anniversary. Considering my time at the training academy, I was actually on the border little more than a year and a half. I gave no notice. I stood before the Station Chief in my bare feet, sludge drying on my skin and shredded uniform, he with his mouth open, eyes round, and I told him I wouldn’t be coming back. Not ever.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I talk about that last day, the horrible thing I did, I need to break down one last subject into distinct categories – the aliens themselves. Like the agents and the ants, the traffic came in two very distinct flavors. Most of the time, we apprehended the first, most prevalent, type: the Mexican. But on rare occasions, we stumbled across what we referred to in hushed tones as the OTM, or Other Than Mexican.
OTMs could be from anywhere, but usually they came from Central America – or more specifically, from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador. They walked from these countries, across the enormous landmass of Mexico, to reach the U.S. border. Unlike the Mexicans, who mostly came across to work and send money back to their families, the OTMs brought their families with them. They had no intentions of returning to their country of birth.
They carried nothing by the time they reached the Rio Grande. All their possessions had been taken by bandits during the long trek. Less than half of them had shoes. Some wore nothing but underwear. When I try to imagine their journey now, I picture a man walking through an automatic car wash. At first, he is filled with hope. After all, the car wash will clean him, make him a new person. But as he steps into the dim corridor before him, bags in hand, he begins to feel apprehension. Soapy water sprays out and stings his eyes. Hot wax burns his skin. Noodle-like rags spin up and slap into him, knocking away his bags, his hat. These rotating monsters close in around him and he turns to find there is no going back. So, he presses on, bent forward, still hopeful. Then, up ahead, brushes begin to spin, course and stiff. He closes his eyes and wades into them. The brushes strip away at him. First, his clothes are shredded, the coins in his pockets zinging away. Then his bare skin feels the burn. A large part of him is taken away, claimed by the car wash. What is left is blasted by scorching air from the dryers. He emerges from the corridor a wisp of a man, withered, fifty pounds lighter, to find he is standing at the edge of a brown river.
I met this man, over and over again, every time I arrested an OTM. I met this man on the day I quit. Except that time, he happened to be a woman.
OTMs were easy to spot, even from a distance. They moved like zombies. Their clothes, if they wore any, were colorful and appeared homemade. Their hair was curly and their skin was dark. They came across in large groups – families that had come together on the bank of the Rio Grande as they roamed up and downriver, looking for a place to cross.
Agents universally felt a jolt of fear when they spotted OTMs preparing to wade across the river. Why would an armed federal agent be afraid of these gentle, gangly, half-naked creatures? The answer is simple – paperwork. While the average Mexican could be written up in ten minutes, an OTM took over two hours. Citizenship had to be established, hearings had to be scheduled and arrangements had to be made to ship them back to their countries of origin. All this took paperwork, and paperwork took time. So, if an agent were to arrest even five OTMs, the resulting paperwork could eat up the rest of the shift. And, of course, paperwork was something no one wanted. The Slackers would much rather be reading a magazine somewhere and the Go-getters would rather be out catching more aliens. And this was why, when a call came over the radio that some agent had apprehended a group of OTMs, everyone listening collectively dropped their heads in mourning for the poor bastard.
I could almost feel this imminent outpouring of sorrow on that last day, as I looked across the river and saw eleven of them stepping into the water. They all wore the same expression, a look I had seen many times. By the time an OTM reaches the river, hope is gone. All that is left is grim resolution and a general uncaring about the future. OTMs don’t chat amongst themselves. They stare straight ahead, their lips twisted down to the jaw line. They move forward, not as if they are headed for some great prize, but as if they’re climbing the gallows for their own hangings.
I spotted them while walking along a trail that paralleled the river. The temperature was relatively mild that day and I had stopped atop a dusty ridge to let the breeze wash over me for a moment before plunging back into the thick brush. I took off my cap and closed my eyes, feeling the sweat evaporate from my forehead. After a moment, I opened my eyes and scanned the river. Downriver on the Mexico side I saw a cement-block building, mostly obscured by trees. Next to it, a pipe jutted out of the ground, pouring green fluid into the river. This was not an uncommon sight. There were green waterfalls all up and down the Mexican side of the Rio. My eyes lingered only a second on this streaming pollution, and then traveled upriver. That’s when I saw the OTMs.
As I said, there were eleven of them – men, women and children. They were instantly recognizable as Central Americans – most likely Hondurans, because a couple of the men wore brightly-colored striped sweaters, which they seemed to hand out to every male in Honduras on his eighteenth birthday. My stomach dropped and I took off running for the riverbank. I had but one chance to avoid countless hours of paperwork.
Contrary to what most people believe, the primary mission of my employment was not to arrest people who had illegally crossed into this country. The true mission was – and is today, I’m sure – to deter Mexicans, and all others, from trying to come here in the first place. Not that we didn’t make thousands – I don’t know, millions – of arrests. Once a Wet stepped foot on American soil, marching orders were to apprehend that Wet. But until that point, deter was the word. Keep ’em on their own side.
So, with that thought in mind, I raced for the river’s edge. If I could convince these curly-haired skeletons to stay in Mexico, my shift would be saved. They would cross eventually. Oh, yes, that was a certainty. But if I played my cards right, that would happen during someone else’s shift.
The bank of the Rio Grande is not a beach. It is not some neat line where manicured grass meets flowing water. It is a tangled mess of bamboo-like weeds, mud, tree roots and crumbling stones. It is treacherous, and only on rare occasions are there hidden landings where a person can climb down to the water – or up out of it – with relative ease.
It was into one of these areas I stumbled, after crouching to duck-walk through a tunnel in the bamboo weeds bored out by the passage of countless aliens. River landings, when heavily used, can be awe-inspiring, and I paused for a moment to take in my surroundings. This was a cavern of discarded clothing. Shirts, pants and underwear hung from branches all around and coated the muddy ground. I mentioned earlier that most illegals carried with them only a single change of clothing. It was here they donned those clothes and left behind the wet, polluted things they had worn to cross. Of course, I’d seen this before, countless times, but this particular landing was more heavily used than most. It looked like an explosion at a Laundromat, and this was why the OTMs had decided to cross here. They had seen the landing from across the river and took it for some kind of welcome billboard. In reality, since agents tended to hang around the heavy traffic areas, the clever Wets crossed in a less enticing spot. But these OTMs didn’t know the tricks, and looking back now, I imagine they were scared. The river was swollen from recent rains up north, and as I peered out through the failing light of dusk, I saw the water was already at their waists and they weren’t even halfway across. Some of the younger children were beginning to cry. Adults reached out and picked up the youngest, boosting them to bony backs or shoulders.
This was quickly turning into a serious situation. If the group made it to the halfway point of the river, they might see me and still decide to continue on for fear of being swept away. I needed to begin deterrence activities right away.
Hey! I yelled, stepping to the slick mud where land met water. ¡Volteanse! This word when roughly translated means, You all turn around. I used it many times during my brief career. I know now I was literally telling them to rotate in place, but I’m sure they got the idea. The group halted and looked up. The brown river surged by them. As one, they lowered their heads and continued on, like grim mountain climbers. I yelled a few more times to no effect. The ugly math of paperwork hours calculated and recalculated in my mind.
I’d heard of agents hiding and letting OTMs walk by. I was turned off by this proposition. I prided myself as a Go-getter, and no self-respecting Go-getter could watch a group of eleven walk away. Besides, when OTMs made it into the city, all they did was stand around like shock therapy patients just released from the hospital. Someone, maybe even a wandering supervisor, would see them and ask them where they had crossed. This could be real trouble.
I’d also heard of agents firing their guns into the mud to deter OTMs. This idea didn’t appeal to me, either. I was close to the city and even closer to other patrolling agents. Someone would hear the shot and start asking questions. The only thing that would get me in trouble faster than ignoring a group of OTMs was firing my weapon without cause. No, I needed to turn this group by some other means.
During the academy, we were issued canisters of OC spray. I’ve forgotten what OC stands for, but I know it consists mainly of liquified hot peppers. As part of the training, instructors sprayed it in our eyes and then had us perform simple tasks, like jumping rope or running around obstacles. This was not fun. They told us we needed to experience the stuff first hand, so if we were hit with “blowback” while trying to use it, we wouldn’t be caught totally off guard by its blowtorch-to-the-face effect. As the OTMs emerged from the deepest part of the river and continued their slow-motion trek, I felt my hand move to the canister on my belt.
A female OTM had moved to the head of the group. She was young, I was sure, but she wore the expression of an old woman. Her dark hair was pulled back tightly against her head. Her breasts were large and pendulous, and I could see the brown nipples through her damp, white shirt. Around her shoulders were the orange and purple straps of what looked to be some sort of homemade backpack. She would come out of the water first and I would tell her to get down on the ground, which she would do without hesitation, exhausted from the crossing. Then the rest would come up, and soon I would be surrounded by a mass of lounging, panting bodies. After that, the paperwork would begin.
The young female was only a few feet from the bank now, water swirling about her knees. The others were close behind. I pulled the OC can from my belt and sprayed a long line of mist across the mouth of the landing. It was like I was trying to throw up some magical force field. Although there was no detectable breeze, I immediately felt a crawling sting in my eyes and I lurched back from the edge, coughing and then tripping as my feet became tangled around blobs of wet clothing. I fell to my rear in the mud. My eyes snapped closed and I dug into them with my fingers, trying to get at the fiery itch, but this was a mistake since the mist had coated my hand and I was only getting more of it into my eyes.
Here, my training took over. I did what the instructors had told me to do all those months before. I dropped my hands to my sides and let the tears flow, which would naturally clean out my eyes. Also, I exhaled slowly and controlled my breathing. I’d learned many people passed out from hyperventilation after being sprayed. In just a few seconds, my coughing subsided and I could see a blurry sliver through my left eye. In the distance, I heard more coughing and splashing water. The OTMs had been hit by the burning mist and were returning to the other side.
With my arms stretched out before me, I pushed my way through the weeds and away from the landing. When I reached the ridge, I turned back and watched several blurry points of color struggle toward the middle of river, heading Mexico-way. Even through my pain, I nodded with pride. Within minutes, I was back at my vehicle and pouring water from a bottle over my face. I knew not to pour it over my head. That would only wash the OC spray that was in my hair down into my eyes.
Night fell as I leaned against the side of the truck, drinking water and listening to radio chatter. Some agent a few miles upriver had stumbled across a duffel bag full of marijuana. It was hidden beneath a bush near the road. This was fairly common. Mules brought the stuff across and stashed it for later pickup by the American drug dealers who had crossed over to Mexico and paid them to do it. Whenever the radio code for dope came across the wire, the senior agents scrambled to get involved. It was the only thing left that brought any excitement to their jobs.
Once my eyes returned to normal, I decided to take a walk. My truck was parked downriver from where the OTMs had tried to cross, so I made my way straight to the river and turned away from the landing, moving with the flow of the water. I didn’t want to return to the spot where I’d turned them back in case they were still there, on the other side. I wasn’t afraid they would try to cross again. OTMs were mostly afraid to cross in the dark, and with the river as high as it was, they would probably wait until morning to try again. I just didn’t want to see them over there, staring at me across the murmuring divide.
The moon was high and I found I could follow the worn trails paralleling the river with ease. Occasionally, I stepped away from the trail and eased down to the river’s edge, just to see if anything was up on the other side. It was very dark and quiet over there. During one such jaunt, I emerged from thick brush to find myself standing in a circle of grass only a few feet from the river. To the left, a thick branch had fallen from a tree and lay with its far end jutting into the water. Smaller branches forked away from it every which way, rising out of the river like twisted, reaching fingers. Something bobbed up and down out there, caught in the tangled mess. It looked like a piece of clothing or maybe a trash bag. I moved closer. Now it looked like an animal of some sort. I pulled the flashlight from my belt and glanced up and down the far bank. A cold fear washed over me then, and I suddenly wanted to turn and run from the riverbank, even as I spun the flashlight in my hand, searching for the rubber button that would activate it. The flashlight came alive, a startling cylinder of white, stabbing up into the night. I pointed the beam at the tree branch.
I knew immediately it was the female OTM. She was on her side, facing me, wedged between two jutting fingers of the branch. She vibrated as the water plowed into her and then slipped beneath her body. Her black hair had come free and fell across her face in thin lines like marble veins. I could see only one of her eyes. It was open, bulging, red around the edges from the pepper spray I had released right in front of her. The other eye was beneath the water. It wasn’t her face I recognized. Her expression looked wholly different, so different from the determined frown and narrowed eyes I’d seen only a short time ago. I recognized the orange and purple strap around her shoulder.
I was unable to look away from her. Her nose dipped into the river and then rose out again. I stepped closer and bent down, leaning one hand against the branch for support. The limb shifted from my weight and she drifted free of its grasp. Her feet swung out and away. For a brief second, she rolled forward, her body rigid, face disappearing completely into the water, and I saw the backpack around her shoulders was not a backpack, at all. A whimper escaped my lips, and then she rolled back, her swollen eyes looking up at the sky, her arms out at the sides. She moved away from me, out toward the center of the river.
I stood above the water. Then, without conscious decision, I stepped into it, felt the cold embrace as it closed around me. I immediately felt its current grab me and move me away from the edge. Its sewer scent filled my nostrils, soaked into my skin. The water was deeper than I had imagined and the weight of all my gear began to pull me under. I released the flashlight in my hand and yanked at the belts around my waist. They opened and fell away, along with my gun and radio and handcuffs and baton. I could still see flashes of a white mass ahead of me and I swam, pumping my legs, which seemed to be held down by lead weights. Reaching down, I tore at the laces of my boots and felt them slide from my feet. My shins slammed into sharp rocks. A floating log grabbed hold of my badge, tore it away from my chest, along with most of my shirt.
And I swam, through the thick, cold water, just another half-naked human being, struggling against the current of the once mighty Rio Grande.
I swam.
And at last I reached out, sputtering and gasping, to wrap my arms around the young girl and the child draped in a purple and orange sling around her back – the child who, although swollen and blue, had seemed to reach out to me before it slipped beneath the surface.
~0~
Jason Helmandollar lives in Austin, Texas. His short stories have been published in Encounters Magazine and Bartelby Snopes, among others. His story “The Backward Fall” was published on East of the Web and was adapted into a short film that won a Leo Award.
“The mellow capturing of both self-awareness and self-reckoning elevates a predictable ending” says an impressed Judge Anisha Bhaduri of Jason’s submission to Fabula Press.