At dusk one evening, three or so years after, Manuel Paz was in the evening-blued stillness of a far corner in Big Bend National Park, looking into a different sort of hole in the earth. He was standing in the ruins of the Mariscal cinnabar mines, for which his grandfather and father alike had worked themselves stooped. Among the wreckage of the old mine camp and the rock-baking ovens that hadn’t been stoked in half a century, the warning signs loomed around him: these mines were still gravid with the mercury his forebears had ored from the earth, the same quicksilver that had engendered the cancer that had taken his father and grandfather both. Manuel Paz twisted the wedding ring on his finger.
Once, ten years before, Manuel had taken his young bride, Lucinda, for a visit to this same mine. Lucinda had just arrived to Texas then, fleeing the narco warfare in the streets of Honduras, escaping with her two sisters, and no small element of their early romance had been Manuel’s attempt to serve as a kind of tour guide to her life on this side of the river. This site seemed a particularly potent example of county history, a place where generations of Mexicans had toiled to an early grave at near slave wages, now just a ghost town, like so many others. “But they couldn’t get rid of us that easy,” Manuel had told Lucinda, and she grasped his hand. He’d brought a bottle of wine and a picnic basket, and he and Lucinda dined together in a roofless shed. An unusual spot for a romantic excursion, perhaps, but Manuel brought her here not only to tell the sad plight of his forebears but also because the national park, in whose far reaches the old mine was situated, held the promise of a more humane kind of border. Out in that park, there was no fence to demarcate Mexico. You could wade back and forth across the Rio Grande.
It was, after all, a new century, and Manuel had let himself believe that perhaps the ancient antipathies into which he had been born might ease. As a young man, he had signed up for the Rangers with the hope that, in his official capacity, he might make life a little easier for the Latinos coming over the river. Over the years, he had become friends with a number of Border Patrol officers, and they often let Manuel serve as first responder when a drone or concerned citizen spotted a figure hiking northward through the desert. Rather than cuffing these parched travelers, Manuel offered them maps, bottles of water, and the wrapped sandwiches that Lucinda had prepared, which he kept in a cooler in the trunk. And Manuel might have continued on like that for an entire career, glad to help in his own little ways, if not for the events of the night of November fifteenth.
Manuel had been in his Marfa office when the call came in, and once the impossible horror had sunk in—“three children?” he repeated several times over—he discovered there was yet another horror packed inside it. “Young Hispanic male,” the arriving officer had described the shooter over the CB and even before he had learned the specifics, Manuel had a lucid, ominous foreboding of what was to come, a premonition that time would bear out. It wouldn’t matter that Hector Espina had been an American-born citizen or that an Ecuadorian named Ernesto Ruiz stopped the kid that night. The fact was that Hector was a Latino with a firearm. He was a demon of white imaginings let loose.
Three dead children: Manuel Paz might have been only one of the many officers who had converged on the town of Bliss in the aftermath, but he carried that number like a mythical affliction, an itch he would forever scratch, the sting of it only growing more insistent, bothering his sleep. Three dead children. The itch asked for an explanation, and Manuel scratched and scratched. Manuel had spent hours playing wallflower in the meetings of the task force investigators. He had talked to all of those poor Theater Club kids. He had spoken to any person who had ever known the killer. And still the devilish irritant at the base of his affliction, a boy named Hector Espina, resided beneath his skin. Manuel could scratch himself raw and might never reach down to that boy’s reasons.
And in the years that had followed, Manuel’s worst fears had come to pass. Despite his peacekeeping entreaties to U.S. Representative Craig Armison, the deportations only ramped up. Despite his pleas to Otto Coop, superintendent of schools for Presidio County, the schoolhouse—the last reason anyone still came to the old town of Bliss—closed for good. “No one wants those memories,” Otto told him.
But Otto was wrong. Manuel still had memories he wanted. He remembered his childhood in that same school; he remembered generations of his family scrapping for this spot of earth. “They can’t get rid of us that easy, right?” Manuel said again to his wife one night.
“But don’t you understand,” Lucinda said with a sigh, “that there’s nothing here worth staying for?”
Certainly Lucinda had a point. Their street, just west of Bliss, had nearly emptied. The few places of employment had long ago closed. Lucinda faced the ill will of the last residents, and she worried for her sisters, who had no green cards of their own. This, then, was how it happened: a few actual deportations, a generally hostile atmosphere, and a paucity of hope.
“You can’t see,” Lucinda had told him just a month ago, “that you are part of the problem. An old man, grasping at lofty ideals.” The fact was that Lucinda’s sisters were heading for better prospects to the north, and she had delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Manuel: leave with me or I leave alone. But Manuel Paz was a man who didn’t take well to ultimatums. She had departed for Chicago three weeks ago, and now, standing over the mine shaft, Manuel tugged the ring from his finger.
But he paused, even still thinking, Why not follow Lucinda? Certainly he could transfer to a different office. Leave the force for good, get some plum private security job. What was there to stay for? Manuel spent his days filling out paperwork, filing reports for violations of laws he hardly believed in. And yet, Lucinda must have known the man she had married, mustn’t she?