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The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese.
Mexico’s Chinese hordes could be hired for cheap, yet they could earn more in the United States than in Mexico, even at cut rates. Jobs opened, word went out, the illegals came north. Sound familiar?
A magus can sit in his pickup and summon the Beast while eating a teriyaki bowl and Diet Coke.
“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.
it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.
Operation Gatekeeper, the final solution to the border crossings, introduced by California in the late nineties, had ushered in a new era of secure urban borders and trampled wilderness.
Many Americans don’t know that Chinese and Russian refugees cross Desolation as well.
Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human—wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: “If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?”) In politically correct times, “illegal alien” was deemed gauche, so “undocumented worker” came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is “undocumented entrant.” As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant.
In the back office of the consulate, the chemical scent of jasmine, musk, vanilla, fights the smell of corruption.
But the nature of desert death is such that forensic evidence is quickly obliterated. The body mummifies. In one of the million ironies of the desert, those who die of thirst become waterproof. Their fingers turn to stiff leather, and the prints are unreadable.
There are two fairly common jokes told about America among “undocumented entrants”—A) Don’t drink the water, and B) For good American food, go to Taco Bell.
Families continued to grow. The gringos and the missionaries and even the government representatives from Mexico City told them to stop procreating. It was simple: too many mouths caused hunger. But the Pope ordered them to continue being fertile—even condoms were wicked.
Mexico itself was spending eighty cents from every earned dollar on foreign debt. The vast money machine that was Pemex gasoline and oil bled more pesos than it put into the national economy. The even bigger narco money never made it out of clandestine mansions.
But the two things that most unify the two sides are each one’s deep distrust of its own government, and each side’s simmering hatred for the human smugglers, the gangsters who call themselves Coyotes.
Policy wonks in Washington, D.C., are as ineffectual as policy wonks in México, D.F.
if you know Spanish, you know that the word for “chicken” is gallina. “Pollo” is usually reserved for something else. A pollo, as in arroz con pollo, has been cooked.
In the new organized crime hierarchies of human smuggling, the actual Coyotes are middle-management thugs.
Experts can’t give a definitive schedule of doom. Your own death is largely dictated by factors outside of your control, and beyond accurate prediction. Your own fitness is a factor, your genetics. Gender doesn’t seem to affect your chances much. Women are far from being the “weaker” sex. They survive as long as men, and often survive longer. Hydration before the event might buy you time, same with shade, a hat, rest. How much, however, remains unknown. All sources say you will die in a period of time that can vary from hours to days.
Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways. The stages are: Heat Stress, Heat Fatigue, Heat Syncope, Heat Cramps, Heat Exhaustion, and Heat Stroke.
But you still have water, so you’re okay. If you brought beer, you’re an idiot, because alcohol makes you thirstier.
If you’re really lucky, someone might piss in your mouth.
And, as the pro-urine Web sites enthusiastically proclaim: “Take the ‘M’ out of Murine Eye Drops, and what do you have?”
The recipe for the proper use of urine is: Collect a midstream sample of fresh (light) urine Avoid all genital contact, particularly female genitals ⅛ oz. distilled water Add 1 drop fresh urine Shake 50 times 1 drop of this solution added to ⅙ oz of 80 proof vodka (as preservative) 3 drops of this mixture under the tongue
To this day, some of the dead are only remembered in Wellton Station as “This poor guy,” “That poor guy there.”
“What kills the people,” he says, “is the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border.”
Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.
