Iron River

33

It was dark by the time they made La Bufa. Jimmy lay in the back asleep. Hood filled the tank and bought food and water and began the steep ascent to Creel. The old station wagon was powerful, but the transmission was imprecise and the steering was loose and the worn tires slipped on the fog-slicked rocks. For a while, Jimmy slept, then he sat up. Hood could see the outline of his head in the rearview.

“It’s good to see you, Jimmy,” he said. “We’re going home.”

But Jimmy had said nothing to that point and he said nothing then. So Hood drove. He peeled tortillas off the bundle and ate them folded with one hand as he steered. He handed the pack back to Jimmy. The soft drinks had been warmed by the heat of the lower barranca. He told Jimmy how hard they had tried to find the tour bus and about the powerful monsoon that hit later that day and about the Guardsmen now stationed in Buenavista and the reporters everywhere and all the Americans who wanted to invade to get Jimmy back and all the tension between the countries and how even the president had acknowledged the idea of U.S. military action. Jimmy’s silhouette came in and out of view in the mirror in the darkness, but he said nothing, then lay down across the seat again.

Just after sunrise in Creel, Hood was able to call Ozburn on a pay phone. Ozburn screamed in joy when he heard that Jimmy was alive and free. He called back ten minutes later to say that in four hours a capable Mexican state police captain named Wilfredo Duarte and two of his officers would collect and drive them to the border at Douglas. Customs would be ready for them. They would be back in the U.S. of A. by midnight.

Hood and Jimmy slept through the morning in Creel on two double beds in a small pension room, Hood with his derringer under the pillow and Jimmy snoring. Music came faintly from a room down the hallway, and the air was cool and fragrant with juniper and pine.

They all left Creel at ten A.M. in Duarte ’s white Chihuahua police Suburban. It had a light bar on top and state emblems and green lettering on the sides. Duarte drove. He was middle-aged and had a somber face and a paunch. His men were younger, one muscled and bald and one slender, with thick black hair. One sat up front and one in back with Hood and Jimmy. The policemen spoke among themselves, and Hood snoozed with his face against a window until the heat woke him up. Jimmy watched the landscape roll past and said nothing.

Close to eight P.M., Duarte answered his satellite phone and a long discussion ensued. Hood caught some of it: Armenta’s Zetas were targeting the Douglas crossing. Duarte said that Nogales would be better. Hood reckoned Nogales was another two hours west, which meant another two hours for Armenta’s men to find them. Jimmy looked at him. Duarte listened. He unleashed a string of sentences too fast for Hood to comprehend. He heard the word Ozburn twice. Then Duarte punched off and turned his head slightly to Hood and Jimmy in the back.

“ Nogales,” he said. “Armenta. Is good. Ozburn knows.”

“I need to call Ozburn.”

Duarte picked up the big phone and dialed. A moment later, Hood heard Ozburn’s voice.

“It’s okay, Charlie. Your guys know what they’re doing. Douglas is a bust, man. Use Nogales. You’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

They approached Nogales in the thick of night. The two officers checked their M16s and set them muzzles-down and close by. The satellite phone rang again and Duarte answered with an expletive. He listened. He said if not Nogales, then where, and he listened for a long while after that. He said yes six times in a row, then cursed again and punched off.

“ Nogales is not good,” he said. “But we have a plan.”

They drove west and north toward Sonoyta. The moon struggled up and dusted the desert with light. Hood knew this road by map only and he knew that it was the one paved road for miles and if Armenta’s Zetas chose to patrol it, they would be easily found. The officers became nervous and held their guns close. Hood was pleased by their nerves because he knew that these Chihuahua policemen could deliver them to Armenta for more money than the officers would make in their lifetimes. They cleared a rise, and Hood saw the new border wall. This was badlands, the hills bald and deeply carved by sudden rain and scorched for months by the sun. In the faint moonlight, Hood saw the steel panels of the wall serpentining along the contours of the terrain until it came to a sudden end. Here at the end of the wall, security lights pounded down on the naked land in clusters of four lights atop portable trailer towers that washed the ground white. Hood saw stacks of steel panels and pallets of concrete and mounds of mixing sand and the Cat D4s with the augurs attached and the mixers and the big water trucks casting shadows.

Duarte slowed and eased off the highway onto a dirt road. The road was narrow and rough and the Suburban bounced gently on its long wheelbase. They descended into a gulley and stopped out of sight from the highway and Duarte flashed the lights twice, then left them off. A set of lights flashed an answer across the desert from the United States, from out in the darkness beyond the end of the wall, twice, then once again.

Duarte turned to Hood. “Apúrate, gringos!”

Hood climbed out and helped Jimmy to the ground. He thanked Duarte, then got his duffel off the seat and started down the dirt road with Jimmy beside him. Hood could hear the cars on Highway 2 behind him, but when he turned, he could see nothing of it. The Suburban still sat at idle, lights off, the officers watching them. The road narrowed to a path, and the path led toward the wall. Hood saw empty water bottles and tatters of clothing and plastic bags tied to rocks and bushes used to mark the way north. The pathway followed the low spots between the badland hills and for a moment they walked between the mounds, invisible to the world. But Jimmy slowed, then stopped, and he looked at Hood, then behind them, then ahead. He was breathing hard and very pale. Hood tossed his duffel into the desert and took Jimmy’s arm around one shoulder and together they found a difficult balance and continued.

They followed down a valley and along its bottom, then they climbed again. They came to the crest of the rise and looked out at the wall and the building equipment bathed in the bright lights. He looked ahead to where the headlights had flashed and saw the glint of windshield and for the first time in two days, he allowed himself to taste the hope of making it out of here alive with Jimmy. Jimmy leaned heavily on him and breathed fast.

“There it is, Jimmy,” said Hood. “That’s home and we’re going there.”

With that, something caught Hood’s eye and when he turned to his right, he saw the headlights coming through the desert toward them. They came from the Mexico side and they were two miles out at least, but he knew if they were Armenta’s Zetas and they could see the Suburban tucked into the little gulley, they would drive toward it, and he and Jimmy would be stranded here in the badlands without cover or weapons. A second pair of headlights appeared south of the first.

“Faster, Jimmy.”

Hood picked up his pace, and Jimmy grunted with every other step, trying to find a rhythm. He stumbled and fell and Hood helped him stand. Hood looked at the headlights approaching. The two sets had become three.

“Come on, Jimmy. It’s now or never for us.” But Jimmy ceded even more of his weight to Hood, and Hood looked ahead to the United States and the glint of mirror glass, then looked at the vehicles coming from Mexico, and he reckoned that he and Jimmy wouldn’t make it at this speed. “Jimmy, you’ve got to climb on.”

Hood balanced Jimmy upright, then knelt on hands and knees on the sharp ground, and Holdstock lay over his back with a huff. Hood stood and got Jimmy’s legs under each arm and started down the path much faster now, but the man’s weight was cumbersome and substantial and his big arms were firm around Hood’s neck. Hood’s legs and back were strong and he took long strides down the path and when the path vanished, he accelerated between the clumps of creosote and the rocks and the infernal cholla, and again judged his distance from the vehicle on the U.S. side against the three-vehicle war party now streaming from the south toward him. He could see the faint contrails of dust in their wakes and he guessed from their speed and violent rocking that they were military all-terrain vehicles of some kind and that they needed no trail to traverse the desert floor.

He broke into a trot. The rise and fall of Holdstock’s weight was prodigious, but Hood found a breathing rhythm as he watched the ground in front of him, then looked up to fix his course toward the wall. Suddenly the headlights of the stateside vehicle came on. Then another set of headlights from beside it, but these were much closer together, a quad all-terrain vehicle, thought Hood, maybe even a sand buggy. Both sets started toward him. He was sucking deep for wind now and trying to control the exhale, imposing his will. Holdstock’s forearms were hard around his neck because of his useless fingers. “Jimmy, not so tight. On my neck. Easy.” From his right advanced the three vehicles from Mexico. He heard footsteps behind him but he couldn’t turn without stopping and he couldn’t stop. Duarte huffed into his view on one side, short-legged, stomach swaying, an M16 in his hands. On Hood’s other side emerged both officers and they also had their assault guns, and these younger men were light in the boots and they moved ahead of Hood a few paces and remained abreast, and the five of them crunched on toward the wall. He could hear the Zetas’ vehicles behind him. Ahead of him the two American vessels broke into the lighted security area, a Hummer and a quad runner, trundling back into darkness and coming across the rough desert straight for him. Hood’s legs were burning and he could feel the imminent collapse of them and he slowed so as not to fall, and both the young officers and Duarte closed ranks around him. He heard the clatter of small-arms fire and he saw the muzzle flash from all of the vehicles except the quad, which came buzzing at them like a mad badger. Duarte and the officers fell back and fired from the darkness. Hood trudged onward. He labored up a rise, lungs heaving and legs wavering and it felt like a miracle just to clear it but he did, gasping for air as the quad whined at him through the darkness, and Sean Ozburn laid it into a slide that brought its rear end around and to a stop. Hood dumped Jimmy onto the cargo carrier on the back and climbed on top of him. Ozburn drew an M16 from the handlebar scabbard and handed it back to Hood. Then Ozburn turned off the lights and gunned the quad, steering back toward the wall and the light.

The four-cycle engine was game but overburdened. Ozburn’s memory of the terrain was good, and in the darkness he was able to keep the quad on its own track most of the time. Hood looked a quarter mile ahead to the pool of security light and the end of the wall. He saw the other American vehicle now, an ATFE Humvee crawling toward them through a sandy plain. The Mexican vehicles closed fast but they were still half a mile out. Hood held to the roll bar with one hand and lowered the assault gun at the oncoming enemy, but in his logic, gunfire wasn’t worth betraying their position in the darkness. Ozburn found a hard-packed gulley and the quad groaned along. Hood watched the Humvee, a hundred yards to their left and a hundred yards behind them, make a wide U-turn and pull up slow so Duarte and his men could climb in. The driver kept the rpms high and the speed even, and the heavy machine began across the sand again, back toward the wall.

Ozburn steered them onto American soil. He veered around the floodlit construction area, then brought the smoking ATV to a stop on a rise a few hundred yards from the unwalled border. The engine smoked, and smelled of overheated metal. Hood saw the Humvee lumbering toward them, rhinoceros-like and unfazed. He watched as the three Zeta vehicles stopped forward progress a quarter mile away and began circling like meat bees, their dust-filled headlight beams crisscrossing the night, then finally turning and speeding off into the darkness. He realized he’d never even seen what kind of vehicles they were.

The Humvee rolled to a stop, and Janet Bly got out of the driver’s side and headed straight for Jimmy. Soriana exited the front, then the three Chihuahua state policemen, then Mars.

Holdstock stood in the moonlight beside the smoking quad with his bandaged hands at his sides while the Blowdown team welcomed him back and lightly clapped his shoulders and messed his hair and told him how good it was to see him. Bly hugged him, crying, and Ozburn hugged him, swearing they still had plenty of beer to drink and Zetas to kill. Then they stepped away just a little to give Jimmy some breathing room, to hear his piece, to reestablish his place within their pack, and Jimmy looked at each of them in turn before turning his tearful gaze to the desert floor and saying nothing.

Ozburn introduced himself and the others to Duarte and his officers. “We’ll give you a ride back to your truck if the Zetas don’t blow it up,” he said.

Before ten minutes had gone by, an orange ball of flame puffed to life a mile south, roiling and growing and fighting to stay upright against the westerly breeze.