I was with a college group that was collecting water samples. Upstream, some six or seven children started shouting at us, "hay un mojado", "hay un mojado"--"there's a crosser", "there's a wet". Our group didn't know what to make of this at first. Were the kids really saying what we thought they were saying? Did they mean what we thought they meant?
I started walking towards the kids, alone, as they began coming our way. When we met, all suspicions were confirmed. While fishing, they had found an "hombre muerto"--a "dead man".
I walked up the river with them. We strode down the shore, chattering, crawled under a barb wire fence and criss-crossed from island to island. The walk seemed so deliberate.
We arrived at body, and we stopped. Just stopped. The kind of stop that you see in the movies, when the protagonists walk into the room with the corpse and they don't know what to do until, of course, they whisper about and try to understand what had happened. They take slow looks around and even slower steps forward. They return to normal time.
The body was red and black, burnt by the sun and charred with decay. The man's hands--surely he was a man at one point--were taut and sinewy. You could see his bones through thin layers of muscle. His torso was bloated, raw and yellowish by the waistline. A whole in his back, along his spine and directly between his shoulder blades, was bubbling like some festering geizer. The man's body was giving one last and long exhale.
I called 9-1-1. I took pictures. The children walked away, perched on a island far away.
I looked at the body, face down and unmoving. Get up, I couldn't help thinking. Why wouldn't he get up? Get up.
He didn't.
The college students arrived and milled about, some close and some far, but all within eyeshot. Would he get up for them?
He didn't.
******
There are two stories to this man's death. The first is the one you might expect. He drowned.
According to official counts by the Border Patrol, four-hundred and seventy-two people died trying to cross the Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo into the United States last year, forty-nine in Laredo. Unofficial counts put the first number much higher--around eight-hundred. Oft-referred to "mojados" cross for many reasons: some haul drugs, more reunite with family and most seek jobs. The river can be unforgiving in these ventures. It swells with irrigation water, whorls in unseen whirlpools and charges with undercurrents. Most know its dangers, but few expect to confront them.
Face-down in the mud, this man had no other choice.
The second story: he was murdered.
Next to the man was a shopping cart, upturned and sinking into the earth along with its ill-fated partner. Had one wanted to kill the man and discard of the body in the river, a shopping cart might have been a sufficient, however unlikely, vehicle to navigate the maze of undergrowth in the hills above. The final heave of the cart might have left the man prone, sprawled and perpendicular to the shoreline.
This year, an average of two homicides are committed in Nuevo Laredo every three days. Chalk up the murders to drug-related violence. Some violence has spilled over into its American sister, Laredo, but at a number that pales in comparison: twenty-one.
The death wasn't reported in the news today. Bodies in the river don't usually make the five o'clock.
Chances are, the man died while trying to cross the river. Homicides are a relatively rare occurrence in Laredo, the body lacked visible signs of trauma, the cart would have been difficult if not impossible to squeeze through thick scrub, and the river was strong enough to carry both cart and body miles from upstream. Ahkam's razor cuts to drowning.
Chances are, I'll never know for sure.
*****
As I walked back downstream, past the bras and panties, shorts, candy wrappers and plastic bags of the successful, I spoke with a director of the college program. A regular of the water sampling trips, this was his third run-in with would-have-been crossers. The second was a skeleton, bleached by the sun and adorned with a burial shroud of swimming trunks. The first was a body, much like the one we just saw.
"You know what the weird thing is, Ryan?", he asked. "We talk about the wages in Mexico, as far as NAFTA and all that.. I'll tell you my personal opinion. Even if they raise wages some, some of the companies are moving because they still can compete. They still have to move to other parts of the world, where labor's even cheaper. And they're not paying much here, y'know?"
He stopped and turned around, facing me. "It all comes back to the consumer," he said.
"How much are you willing to pay?"
*****
While the college group finished collecting samples, I sat and wrote, trying to collect my thoughts.
Hundreds of migrants must have passed through that spot--an enclave of desert thicket, discarded clothing and trash bags, trash bags and more trash bags. Trash bags were everywhere: at my feet, among the empty bags of Ramen and potatoe chips; at my side, wrapped around the trunk of a tree; and overhead among dense, interlocking branches, dangling like cheap party decorations and dancing like phantoms.
I looked at one bag, white and calling for peace. I looked at another, black and signaling death.
There was no peace with this death, I thought. This death was no peace.
I scribbled haltingly, imagining forty-nine bodies stacked one by one by one, placed next to each other in one long string of compounded, irreconcilable failure. I thought of migrants back home--two hundred and eighty two of them--emptied, withered and wasted, leaning against saguaros and swimming through sandy deserts. I thought of the man upstream, and after a while I didn't think any more.
I looked to my right and saw the river. It seemed so peaceful. Peaceful, comforting and inviting.
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