Imperial Read Free

face. When he had digested us, he drove slowly past, the window still down. He was watching the canal now through his binoculars.
    Think he’s a coyote? I asked.
    What else?
    Now we arrived at a little shrine to the Virgin and a cross. Someone had died, perhaps a solo. Juan read the inscription. Yes, he said, the man had drowned trying to cross into America, where everything was wider, cleaner, safer, more expensive, more controlled and more homogeneous. And by this shrine we parked the car and ascended the levee of crumbing mud-dust to gaze at the United States, where of the three of us only I could legally go. It was hot and thorny and dry on the Mexican side with all those American fields appearing so cruelly green like Paradise, because the water belongs to America, as Juan put it. Beside us, a skinny horse browsed in garbage.
    Some chocolate-brown boys were swimming in the coffee-colored canal, and on Northside, very close to Wistaria Check as I said, a white truck was parked and two middle-aged white men were trying their luck at catfishing, ignoring the boys who ignored them. Juan pointed to the boys and said: See those poor people over there? They’re gonna try for the night time, then they’ll walk through all the fields . . .
    Ask them where they’re going.
    They’re gonna go to Canada, they say, unless Border Patrol catch them.
    Ask them if they know where Canada is.
    They say, they don’t know, but somebody told them it’s a real nice country where you don’t get hassled like you do in America.
    On our side, the dusty desert side, an obelisk marked American dominion, and later I learned from the Border Patrol that the canal actually lay slightly north of the true border, but those guardians found it needlessly troublesome to assert their authority over the few slender feet of United States sovereignty between the marker and the water. Officer Murray said to me: If I saw people on the Southside of the canal, I’d just wave to ’em. You see a raft, now, you just back off. Don’t wanna spook anybody.
    A day or two later the local papers carried a story about how Border Patrol agents had shot one of those rafts with a pellet gun. The raft capsized, and one or two aliens drowned. (There are Border Patrol officers in boats, and they’re like fishing, a solo in Algodones told me. They cut open or shoot at the rafts and let ’em drift downriver.—Last night there were about seven shots, his comrade said, shrugging.) But the drownings, I hope, were an aberration. 2 I never at any time met a solo or pollo who expressed physical fear of the Border Patrol. Murray insisted that some agents bought fast food with their own money for the frightened Southside kids they’d captured.
    But the Mexican consulate never hears that, Murray said bitterly.
    They’ll probably start rafting pretty soon, he muttered.
    He stood listening to the canal, which was long, low, black with bamboo. His job was not to shape the destiny of those who sought America, but merely to postpone it. For what could he do to them, but lock them in a holding cell, then deport them back to Southside so that they could try again? And for a moment, as we stood there, each of us letting his private thoughts fall into the pit of the night, I almost pitied the futility of his occupation, as I suspect he did mine (the main purpose of my essays being to line birdcages), but then I fortunately persuaded myself that all vocations and callings are equally futile. He talked about how beautiful it was when he patrolled the shoulder of an onion field at dusk with the bees returning to their hives, and I started to like him. He told me about the fine catfishing he’d had in the canal, and we gazed at the sparse weak lights which shone from Mexico, until suddenly the radio said: There’s already a rope across. Looks like it’ll be near Martin Ranch.
    Okay, said Murray, I’m up on the canal bank.
    Okay, copy, replied the radio.
    They could be running across the