'Ah, you speak Spanish.'
'Enough to converse.'
'Juanita!'
A woman down the road called to the child then clapped her hands.
'?Venga!?Andale! '
The child twirled around and ran to the woman.
'She is afraid,' the congressman said.
'The girl?'
'The woman.'
'Why?'
'Anglos. Police. Cameras.'
The woman and child disappeared. All the residents seemed to fade into the shadows. The dirt road suddenly lay vacant except for a few stray dogs and chickens. Two pigs. A goat. The colonia was now a ghost town. The congressman leaned in close and lowered his voice.
'May I suggest, Mrs. Bonner, that the troopers and the police stay here with the vehicles. The Ranger also.'
'Why my Ranger?'
'Well, the Texas Rangers are not… how shall I say… well regarded here on the border.'
'Why not?'
'History, Mrs. Bonner. History.'
She turned to the police. 'Please stay here.'
They didn't argue.
She turned to her Ranger. 'You, too.'
He did argue.
'But, ma'am-'
'Ranger Roy-'
She felt utterly stupid calling her Texas Ranger bodyguard 'Ranger Roy,' but his surname was Rogers. Roy Rogers. Ranger Rogers was even worse than Ranger Roy.
— 'if these people fear us, we won't accomplish what we came here for today.'
'Mrs. Bonner, your safety requires that I accompany you. The governor, he wouldn't be happy.'
Lindsay embedded her fists in her hips and craned her head up at Ranger Roy. He was a strapping young man of twenty-eight; he had played football at UT. He had been her bodyguard for her husband's entire second term; he had become something of a son to her. A very large son. She had no doubt he'd die before seeing her harmed.
'Who would you rather have unhappy with you-the governor or me?'
Ranger Roy had faced that same choice many times. He knew the wise answer.
'Uh, yes, ma'am, I'll wait here.'
'Thank you.' She gestured to the press crew. 'Let's talk to these people.'
They stood as if embedded in the dirt. A burly TV cameraman smoking a cigarette shook his head.
'No way. My producer didn't say nothing about going into the colonias. And we sure as heck ain't going in there without the cops.'
'Why not?'
'Because this colonia is controlled by the Los Muertos cartel.'
' Controlled? This is America.'
He snorted like a bull, and smoke shot out of his nostrils.
'No, Mrs. Bonner, everything on this side of the wall, it's just a suburb of Mexico.' He jabbed a fat finger at the vast colonia that confronted them. 'Ma'am, you go in there, you might never come out-you can't even call nine-one-one 'cause there ain't no phone service out here, landline or cell.'
Congressman Delgado must have noticed her face flushing with her spiking blood pressure; he took Lindsay's arm.
'Come, let me show you the river.'
They walked away, but she heard the cameraman grumbling behind her back.
'Don't see why I gotta risk my life just 'cause some diva from Austin-'
'Shut up,' Ranger Roy said.
Lindsay smiled. Roy was a good son. They continued a short distance to a low bluff overlooking a narrow strip of brown water. She had never before seen the Rio Grande. She had expected majestic. It was not.
'The Rio Grande disappoints you?' The congressman gave her a knowing nod. 'Yes, I understand. It is not what you had envisioned, this dirty little river. But you see only the tired old man, not the strong young hombre that was born in Colorado. I have stood where the river begins, twelve thousand feet up in the San Juan Mountains, where the headwaters are cool and clean and rapid, fed by the melting snow. The water you now see, it has traveled seventeen hundred miles through New Mexico and West Texas and it must journey two hundred miles more before it will empty into the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica. To the Mexicanos, it is not the Rio Grande, the big river. It is the Rio Bravo del Norte. The brave river of the north.'
But the river did not seem brave or big. It seemed ordinary, too ordinary to separate two nations. The congressman sniffed the air.
'Something has died.' His eyes searched the sky. 'Ah, yes. See the vultures?'
He watched the birds circling, then his gaze returned to the river.
'The dams and the drought take the water. Upriver, before the Rio Conchos joins the flow, you can walk across without getting your feet wet… or your back.'
He smiled at his own joke then gestured at the children playing in the shallow water on the other side below their own slums. They waved; she waved back. Less than two hundred feet separated them, America and Mexico.
'If not for the river, you would not know which side is Mexico and which side is America,' the congressman said. 'But it is a very different world, if you are standing here and looking south or standing there and looking north. It is hard to believe this sad river holds so much power over human life. The river decides if you are American or Mexican, if you deserve ten dollars an hour or ten dollars a day, if you live free or in fear. If your life will have a future. My parents had not a peso in their pockets when they crossed the river, but I am a member of Congress.' His eyes lingered on the Mexican children. 'If you were born on that side, would you not come to this side?'
'I would.'
'They do. Mexicanos have always been drawn north, for the pull of America acts like a magnet on their souls. They think the stars shine brighter on this side of the river. Perhaps they do.'
He stared at the river a long moment then held a hand out to Mexico, to the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo and the vast desert beyond.
'All this land was once Mexico, and Laredo straddled the river. After the war, Mexicanos moved south across the river and began calling that side Nuevo Laredo. But families still straddled the river, and all through my childhood, we crossed this river daily as if it were a neighborhood street instead of an international border. There are still footbridges up and down the river, from the old days. It was nice on the border back then.'
'What changed?'
'Drugs. All that was nice was washed away in the blood from the drug war. This is now un rio de sangre… a river of blood. Forty thousand Mexicans have died in the last four years. It is violence we fund, with our appetite for the drugs. One pound of heroin on that side of the river is worthless. On this side of the river it is worth one hundred thousand dollars. Our drug money has made Nuevo Laredo the bloodiest place on the planet. But we think, Oh, it is their problem. But it is just there, on the other side of this shallow little river. How long before the violence is here, on this side of the river?' He pondered his own words. 'Six nations have flown their flags over this land, but it is the cartels that now claim sovereignty over the borderlands.'
He squinted at the sky and seemed to contemplate the endless blue.
'We have put a Predator drone over the border, as if this is Afghanistan. Perhaps it is.'
'This is not what I expected.'
'No. The borderlands is not like the rest of Texas. The land and the people are brown, the language is Spanish, and the culture is Mexican. And we are burdened by history. In Dallas and Houston and Austin, people look
