Ship of Fools - Chapter 31
One Good Thing
[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
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Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more.
In the days since Slim headed for the moon, Shorty has busied himself ridin’ the range on Ester’s Texas ranch. Today, he and his new partner, Juan, come across a scene not entirely unexpected in the border country.
SHORTY managed to follow Slim’s advice for a week, but then trouble managed to find him, or he found it, he never knew which. He was riding the range near the Rio Grande with Juan, Lupe’s brother-in-law, and using his own horse to boot, Pilar having been shipped from Utah, when they came across an extraordinary scene. They’d come to the edge of a bluff overlooking the river, on the banks of which two Border Patrol agents had apprehended four or five migrants who’d just come across. One of the agents had gone into the water to help one of the struggling travelers, who now looked for all the world like he was receiving baptism from a strangely clad minister.
The agent brought the last straggler to shore, while the other spoke into his radio mic. There was a squawk of static and the agent said, clearly audible to Shorty and Juan a dozen or so feet above, “Damn, we’re in one of those reception holes.”
“You’d think they’d have figured that out by now,” said his partner, reaching for a plastic zip tie.
Just then there was a rustling in the tamarisk across the river and a young woman, not more than a teenager, emerged, splashing into the river, shouting “Mamá!” over and over. In another moment came a shout of “Vámonos, amigos!” and a dozen more migrants, mostly men, entered the river with the apparent intention of rescuing their friends and family from la migra.
A race ensued, the agents trying to put the zip ties on the five captives and get them away from the river before their compatriots arrived in numbers too large for the agents to manage. But the formerly cowed captives now became recalcitrant, resisting the agents’ efforts. At last it became clear that the agents would be surrounded before they could get their captives away.
“Those bastards oughta just run away,” Shorty opined in quiet tones.
Instead, the agents, heads swiveling back and forth from each other to their captives to the onslaught of additional immigrants, now drew their sidearms, pointing them first at one group, then the other.
Without giving it too much consideration, Shorty drew the Winchester from its scabbard and said in a voice meant to carry, “Now let’s all calm down. We don’t need any massacreein’ around these parts.”
“Mantengan la calma, amigos,” Juan said.
One of the agents started to turn toward the cowboys. “Nuh-uh,” said Shorty, cocking the rifle vigorously so the sound of the lever action would carry. “Just keep facin’ the way you are, and drop them pistols. Juan, why don’t you go on down there and relieve the agents of their weapons, and don’t forget their body cams. Oh, and best we don’t show our faces.” He pulled his neckerchief up over his nose and Juan did likewise before scrambling down the bank and gathering up firearms, body cams, radios, and boots.
With the threat of the agents removed, a general scramble ensued, the migrants emerging from the water, climbing the river bluff, and thence off to parts north, while the cowboys used the agents’ own zip ties to immobilize them. But the teenage girl stopped at the top of the bluff along with an older man and woman, who waited until the agents were secure, then beckoned the cowboys to come up and talk where they wouldn’t be overheard.
“Gracias a dios mio para ustedes,” the woman said. “Por favor, donde es Laguna Atascosa?”
Shorty knew enough Spanish to get the gist of that. “Why do they want to go there? I’d think they’d want to get farther from the border.”
In the ensuing conversation, Juan translating, it came out that the parents were Honduran, their farms made useless by the alternating flood and drought cycles brought on by climate change, now seeking a better life in the nation most responsible for their predicament. This was their second attempt, the first having failed, with their younger daughter, Rafaela, taken from them. Now they intended to find her. “Rumor is there’s a secret camp for detained children near Laguna Atascosa, and they’re hoping to find out if she’s there.”
“I thought those were closed years ago,” Shorty said.
It surprised him not at all to learn that the current administration had revived the camps in secret a few years back, despite promises to leave them closed. The main corroboration for the existence of such a facility came from a few older escapees who’d returned south of the border to tell their stories.
“How were they hopin’ to extract their daughter from that hellhole?” Shorty asked.
The parents were trying to reach a migrant legal aid organization in Brownsville, where sympathetic lawyers could put the wheels of the legal system into motion, not to mention summoning up public outrage.
“That’ll take years, don’t ya know,” Shorty said.
“Está en manos de Dios,” said the mother.
The migrant family went on their way and the cowboys turned their attention to the agents.
“You can’t leave us here like this,” one of them opined.
“Oh, can’t we? I seen that tattoo on the back of your neck.” He’d noticed it as he was handcuffing the fella, the agent’s shirt pulling down far enough to reveal the top of a sonnenrad. “Seen one just like it on a Nazi’s truck in Utah. And here I’d hoped you’d be one o’ the few good apples in your outfit.”
The agent launched into an invective-filled tirade, not dissimilar from his Utahn colleagues, save that he threw in a lot of bull-pucky about a nation not being able to exist without borders and papers and such.
Which made Shorty laugh, thinking back down the long line of cowpokes to his great-great-grandfather, Otto Westhaller, who’d immigrated to the US in 1861, fresh from a stint in the König Wilhelm I dragoons, no papers required, arriving in Baltimore and boarding the B&O straightaway, then transferring to the O&M, reaching St. Louis with its German community, where he’d shortly joined the St. Louis Wide Awakes to rid the city of the Confederate menace. The brutal fighting, not to mention the Camp Jackson massacre, left him with a bad case of “wrecked nerves,” which nowadays was called PTSD, so young Otto lit out for the territory, finding his skills with a horse in high demand in Kansas and eastern Colorado. He found solace on the open range and did his best to stay out of any type of anti-Indian violence or skullduggery, still finding that in his attempt to flee urban life he’d only brought the contradictions of the young country’s civilization — if you could even call it that — along with him, but still convinced by the end of his days that he’d done more good than harm, and having sired five children, two of whom followed him in a career in the saddle. And so on down the generations, gradually moving westward, each new round of Westhallers seeking some accommodation with their role in Manifest Destiny that would allow them to sleep at night, their pure German blood salubriously mixed with that of Native and Mexican peoples, as well as other varieties of European, until they were what some liked to call “Heinz 57.”
And now down to Shorty, having come back east, deeper into the contradictions of a nation still not having found any type of maturity other than naked power, standing on this here riverbank, feeling the full weight of American glory and tragedy on his shoulders, and finding it in his power to do something about it — not through any act of violence, but one of love. He’d always thought that most of the world’s problems began with countries and religions; best to forget all that and focus on the people right in front of you, while striving to avoid the resulting risks of narrow-mindedness and xenophobia — more of those in-group/out-group dynamics.
And it seemed to him there was now one good thing he could do — a crazy thing, but a good thing, if he could just rustle up some help.
He turned to Juan. “Let’s leave these varmints here. I’m sure they’ll get themselves outta here somehow. Meanwhile, we got some liberatin’ to do.”
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What has Shorty gotten himself into now?
Next up: Chapter 32, “Blending Genres,” in which Slim adapts to his new job at the Tranquility Lunar Base.