The Governor's Wife (5 page)

"A border wall that's not on the border. That doesn't make any sense."

"There is little on the border that makes sense, Mrs. Bonner. As you will see, this side of the wall is another world entirely—a world that is not
México
, but that is also not America."

"Then what world is it?"

"This, Mrs. Bonner, is the
colonias
." He turned to the window and pointed. "Oh, look—a jackrabbit." He turned back. "Ah, we are here."

The Suburban braked to a stop and stirred up dust that soon dissipated in the wind. The Ranger opened the back door for the governor's wife. Lindsay stepped out and immediately surrendered her hair to the wind. The ninety-degree heat felt like an oven after the air conditioning inside the vehicle. The press crew bailed out of their vans and began unloading their equipment. The troopers and police got out of their cruisers with their large guns strapped to their waists and stretched their large bodies; they must have recruited the biggest men on the force to guard the governor's wife. Congressman Delgado came around and stood next to her. They were both decidedly overdressed, she in a cream-colored linen suit and low heels, he in a tan suit and tie. He inhaled the dry air.

"Ah, spring on the border. It is the same as summer." He extended a hand as if gesturing at a grand monument. "Welcome to
Colonia Ángeles
, Mrs. Bonner. The border's version of a gated community."

They stood at the entrance to this community of angels. But it was not heaven on earth. The dirt road continued on and seemed to disappear into the dust, just a rutted path winding through a vast shantytown of dilapidated structures that in the distance seemed to merge together to form a massive inhabited dump. Half-naked brown children played in the dirt road and down in the river, dull in the hazy sun. Women carried water from the river in buckets and cooked over open fires; smoke rose into the sky in thin spires. An enormous pile of smoldering refuse stood tall near the river; with each gust of wind, paper and plastic items broke free and danced across the dirt as if attempting an escape. Rats rummaged through the refuse. The congressman was right: this was another world. A third world.

"How many people live here?"

"Six thousand. Or perhaps seven."

The women had stopped their work and the children their play, and they now stared at their visitors, as if frozen by the sight of the black Suburban and the police cars and the cameras. Or frightened. One barefooted little girl in a dirty white dress broke away and ran over to Lindsay. Her hair was stringy and gray with dirt. Her face was gaunt. She had pierced ears and dangling earrings. She carried a naked doll.

"
¡Qué lindo el cabello!
"

"She says your hair is pretty," the congressman said. "She has probably never before seen red hair."

Lindsay leaned down to the girl and said, "
Gracias, mi amor. El tuyo también es bonito
."

"Ah, you speak Spanish."

"Enough to converse."

"Juanita!"

A woman down the road called to the child then clapped her hands.

"
¡Venga! ¡Ándale!
"

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
Río 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
Río 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
México
, 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 río 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 to the future. Here, they look to the past. Wrongs beget by wrongs, so many wrongs over so many years, that there will never be a right. Not on the border."

Lindsay turned and looked north toward the wall in the distance. Then she turned back to the river.

"The wall is there and the river here."

"Yes, we are on the American side of the river but the Mexican side of the wall."

"These people, they're trapped by the river and the wall."

"They are trapped by much more than that." He held a hand out to the
colonia
. "They fled Mexico, hoping for a better life in America. But the wall blocks their path into America. And that is their dream, Mrs. Bonner, to live beyond the wall. But for now they must live here in this no man's land, neither here nor there—neither
México
nor America."

The congressman took her arm and escorted her toward the
colonia
as if leading her into a fine restaurant. He was thirty-four years older than her with thick white hair that contrasted sharply with his wrinkled brown skin and thick in the middle and short, but she felt secure next to him, like a girl with her grandfather.

"Come, you are safe with me."

He pulled his coat back to reveal a gun in a belt holster.

"You carry a gun?"

He shrugged. "Of course. It is the border."

The congressman led the governor's wife into
Colonia Ángeles.
Ranger Roy made a move toward them but retreated when she held up an open hand to him. They walked down the dirt road past shacks and shanties, small and odd-shaped and pieced together with corrugated tin sidings and cinder blocks and scrap wood with black plastic tarps for roofs and wood pallets stood upright for fences and seemingly held together with wire and gravity. They continued past lean-tos and huts with thatched roofs, lopsided travel trailers embedded in the dirt with sheet metal overhangs, and abandoned vehicles that lay as if they had been shot from the sky and left to die where they landed. A yellow school bus sat buried in the dirt up to its wheels; it was now a home. Clothes hung over droopy lines and flapped in the dry breeze. They heard babies wailing and Spanish voices. Small children splashed in dirty water that had pooled in low gullies, women and girls cooked and washed outside, and boys played soccer on a dirt field.

"Don't they go to school?"

"No. The buses do not come to this side of the wall. The bus drivers, they are afraid to come in here, and the mothers, they are afraid to take their children out there, afraid they will be detained and deported if they go into Laredo."