2008 Writing D e s e r t E x p o s u r e 
September
2008
Emiliano's War
The last bronco Apache finds a new battle to fight.
By Jack Warner
"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past," William Faulkner famously once said. In this vivid short story set along the Bootheel borderline, the past comes violently to life to settle scores both old and new. Our Grand Prize winner tantalizingly asks, "What if. . .?"
In the Animas Valley, New Mexico
The last warm glow of the sun had vanished behind the jagged peaks of the Peloncillos when the five men came to the rusty barbed-wire fence. It was six strands high, but the third strand was mashed down and it was easy to crawl through, even with their big backpacks made from sacking. The leader took several steps through the white sandy underbrush and crouched by a boulder, listening, as the others ducked under the fourth strand and stepped from one nation into another.
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The moon was an hour away from appearing over the Animas Mountains to the east and the darkness was nearly total. The spring wind cutting up the valley drowned the small sounds of stones nudged and mesquite limbs brushed as the men gathered behind their leader.
They had walked only half a mile from the truck, but they had 20 miles to go before dawn. There was no time to waste. The leader looked back, staring at each man in turn. Like him, they were dark, unshaven, dressed in light jackets and jeans. He nodded and stepped onto a barely visible track, leading down a narrow arroyo for 10 steps and then up and over the side. One by one, the first four men clambered up the stony side of the arroyo and disappeared over the top. The backpacks were long and thin, sticking up higher than their heads, but they weren't heavy. The men moved easily with them.
The fifth man got halfway up and slipped, sliding back several feet and falling to one knee. He mouthed a curse and started back up. He was almost at the top of the arroyo wall when there was a small thunk, a sound almost smothered by the wind. He made a gargling sound and slid to the bottom of the wash. His legs twitched spasmodically and then he was still.
An hour passed. A family of javelinas came down the arroyo and stopped when they saw the man lying there. The old boar stepped forward warily, sniffed at the man, and then led his family around the body at a trot.
A shadow emerged from the rocks to the left, moved silently to the body, felt for a pulse, and lifted the corpse to its shoulder. The full moon had almost cleared the eastern mountains and its pale light outlined the arrow protruding from the dead man's neck. The shadow and the corpse melted into the darkness.
In the northern Sierra Madres, Mexico
My name is Emiliano. That is my Mexican name, of course. No one still alive knows my real name, not even this young woman here who is writing down what I say. Maybe she will know it one day, if she does not run away, and if no one comes and kills us both.
Now, I don't want anyone to think I kidnapped her to come here and do this. She came when I asked her if she would take down the story of my life, because I cannot speak English and I don't know how to write. She will put my words into English for me.
I want to do this for two reasons. First, I promised the young green-suit policeman that I would explain why I started this war. And second, because I am the last bronco Apache.
My father and my grandfather never surrendered. I don't guess I have anybody to surrender to. But I never lived on a reservation. Never lived in a house. I have lived in the mountains all my life, and it has been a pretty long one. My grandfather and my father lived this way because they wanted to be free. I will tell you a little about them.
My family came from the Warm Springs band, the Chokonen. My grandfather was a warrior with Victorio. He and my grandmother were killed when the Mexicans trapped Victorio and most of his people at Tres Castillos. My father says people who got away told him Victorio and my grandfather and some others killed themselves with their knives when they ran out of bullets. I don't know.
My father wasn't there. He was still a boy, but he had gone on a raid with some other men. When he found out what happened, he and the others joined Nana and Juh. He was with Nana on that great raid they made. But when Nana and Geronimo decided to come in, my father stayed in Mexico. When Geronimo broke out again and came back to these mountains here, my father and my mother and some others stayed away from him. They didn't like him very much.
When Geronimo agreed to go back again, my father and a few others trailed along behind, and they saw all those people put on trains and taken away. It was almost 30 years before they let any of them come back to New Mexico and Arizona. They even took the Apaches who had scouted for the Army. It was pretty bad.
So my father came back here to Mexico with my mother, who was a Chiricahua woman. They were part of a band of about 20, maybe seven or eight fighting men. I guess they lived pretty quiet. They had to be careful because if the Mexicans saw them they would shoot at them. I was just a little boy when there was some trouble that broke up the band. Some of the women saw a Mexican and his wife and little boy riding toward our camp. This was very unusual, because Mexicans hardly ever came that far into the mountains. The woman was riding ahead with the little boy, and the man was a little behind them.
Well, those women should have gone and told the men what was happening, but for some reason they got angry and when the Mexican woman and little boy rode by, the women jumped out and killed the woman with their knives and carried the boy off. The man couldn't find them. But pretty soon there were Mexicans in the mountains all the time, looking for us.
Our band decided to split up. My father and mother took me and my little sister, and a girl whose parents had died, and went away.
Lordsburg, New Mexico
I'm Danny Rope. I'm a Border Patrol agent. The day all this started, on this side of the border, anyway, I was working south and east of Cloverdale. It was March 7 — I damn sure won't ever forget that date.
It was a fine spring morning in a beautiful part of this country. Not many people know the New Mexico Bootheel, mainly because there really isn't anything there but cows, deer, wolves, javelina and lions. Probably that's why it's so beautiful.
There's one road that runs through it. It's only paved part of the way. I've had people stop me on the paved part and ask if they could get lunch at Cloverdale, which is on the map near the end of the road. Well, I hate to tell them, but you can't get anything at Cloverdale. Only thing there is one building, and it's been abandoned a long, long time. I don't know why it's on the map.
All the land down here is part of an outfit called the Animas Foundation, which is made up of the huge old ranches, the Grey Ranch, the U-Bar and the like. The only people who live here are the cowhands. The foundation isn't real thrilled by tourists, and they don't want anybody getting out of their cars. All the gates down here are locked, but every Border Patrol officer has the combination to every one of them.
So the Bootheel is very quiet. It's not like anything I've seen anywhere else in New Mexico. After a good wet winter like this, the grass is almost knee high, on soft rolling hills between the Peloncillos and the Animas mountains. Not until you're about a mile or even less from the border fence does the grass fade away and you've got the broken, rocky ground, the boulders, the yucca and agave and cat's claw and mesquite that you find north of the Bootheel.
Well, like I said, it was a lovely morning, and I was just admiring the day when I turned east off the road just north of Cloverdale. There was a brisk breeze coming up as the sun warmed the air. I took the Blazer through one gate, locked it behind me, and headed in a more southerly direction toward the border, looking for sign as I went.
As I got close to the end of the grass, I noticed a buzzard wheeling around just about where the border fence would be. It hadn't been there when I went through the gate. I turned the Blazer toward it, moving maybe 10 miles an hour, and pretty soon two more buzzards showed up.
When I got close enough to see the fence, there was a big boulder, high as a one-story house, about 10 yards this side of the wire. On top of this big rock there was a smaller one, maybe five feet high. Leaning back against it there was a man. Far as I could see he was naked, with an odd sort of pattern on his chest. I radioed Lordsburg to tell them where I was and what I had. I was pretty sure when I got out of the truck that he was dead.
I stood there by the truck for a little bit, just looking and trying to feel things. We don't find many bodies out here. The ones we do find aren't posed up on a rock for us to find. It never crossed my mind that the man might have died where he sat. Whoever put him up there had done it since I went through that gate and I figured he — or they — were watching.
Well, I couldn't stand there all morning, so I checked my sidearm to make sure it hadn't unloaded itself since I left the office. I got the Nikon digital camera out of the case, made some overall scene pictures, and then put a macro lens on it. I worked my way all around the big boulder. There was a fall of rocks and stones on the southwest side, which would be the easy way to get up and down. Somebody had been up there, and come down, a very recently. He'd tried to cover his tracks but I figured he was in a hurry. Once he got off that scree I lost his sign, but he'd been headed toward the fence.
I made pictures of the trail I'd found, first straight ones and then using the flash down low to try to get an oblique light to make them show up better. And for a few minutes, I just stood there, looking around again. I didn't feel threatened, but this was about the weirdest thing I'd ever come upon.
Finally, I walked up the rock fall, trying to stay away from the first guy's tracks, and circled around the smaller rock. I didn't see anything of interest but the corpse. It was a skinny Hispanic, presumably Mexican. His hair was bushy and so was his mustache. His eyes were partially open and the eyeballs were black from the sun. There was a small gash on the left side of his neck, about an inch wide. There was a little dry blood around it, and a thin line of blood running down an inch or two to the point where his suntan stopped, right where his collar would have been.
He'd been dead for a day or so. The outer layer of skin was beginning to slip and boil, but there wasn't much bloating. The reason for that was obvious. The pattern on his chest was made by criss-crossed leather thongs. He had been gutted, stuffed with something, and then sewn up. The stuffing was leaking out between the stitches.
The stuffing was marijuana.
In the Northern Sierra Madres, Mexico
I wanted to go on telling you about my family, but the young woman taking this down says that can wait until later, and that I should cut to the chase. I think she means that I should tell you right away about why I have gone to war. It's all right. Women are smart, and it's usually best to let them have their way.
It's because of my son, Carlito. When he was about 12 years old, he told me he wanted to go to the reservation at San Carlos. He said he wanted to be with people his own age. I could understand that, but after talking to some people there I decided it would be best for him to go to Warm Springs, where the Chokonen are. If there are any Chokonen at San Carlos, I don't know about them. Also people told me that the ones at Warm Springs are better off because they have this big gambling place that makes them a lot of money.
I have never been there myself. It's too far away and you can't get there very well on a horse because people wonder about you. But after a while the people I know talked to some other people and some people at Warm Springs agreed to take in Carlito.
That was about three years ago. Every so often I would hear from him, that he was doing good and was happy. Then a long time passed when I heard nothing, and finally I heard he was dead. I heard he was dead from taking too much of some kind of powder. I heard it was something the Mexicans bring across the border. It is against the American law for them to do that, and for people to have that stuff, but they do it anyway. People told me there are different kinds of things the Mexicans bring over. Some of the things people smoke and some of them they sniff into their nose. I guess it's kind of like beer and whiskey, which has always been the curse of our people. But they say these things are much worse and they make the people who use them crazy, and they steal in order to get more of it, and finally it kills them.
I thought about this a long time. Carlito was my only son. If he had stayed with me, this would not have happened, but a young man has to find his own way. They say this is happening to a lot of our people, and to a lot of the white eyes, too. They say the green-suit policemen try to stop the Mexicans from bringing these things into America, but there are only a few of the policemen and the border is long. They say it is like a game, that the policemen catch some of the Mexicans but they only send them back across the border and the Mexicans just come right back with more of the stuff.
This is something my people have never been able to understand. My father told me that once in my grandfather's time, the white eyes went to war against the Mexicans. He said many of our chiefs decided to come to the reservations the white eyes made and raid no more north of the border. They would only raid in Mexico, like they had done for many years before the white eyes ever came to our land. But the white eye chiefs said no, you cannot do this, because the Mexicans are our friends now. How can somebody be your enemy one day and your friend the next? It is impossible to understand.
I tell you that if this was still our land, what they now call Arizona and New Mexico, and there were as many of us as there are of the white eyes, the Mexicans would not dare to bring this stuff into our land. They would be killed. Every one of them.
So the more I thought about it, the more clear my path became. I am an Apache. The Mexicans once trembled at the sound of that name. I am the last bronco Apache, and I would make them tremble again before I die.
Lordsburg, New Mexico
It wasn't long after I finished taking my pictures that my supervising officer, a Hidalgo County deputy and a deputy medical investigator arrived.
The only other thing we found were marks on the body's ankles that looked as if he had been strung up like a deer to be gutted. We helped the OMI man bag the body to send up to Albuquerque for autopsy and wrapped it up.
Certainly, the body was there to get our attention, and it looked as if there had been a good deal of recent activity at the fence. My supervisor decided to set up surveillance on the area.
For the next five days, we watched the place carefully. There was nothing doing in the daytime, but after dark we set up a spotter truck in a well-concealed place about half a mile away. We can raise a big infrared spotting scope about 15 feet high out the top of these trucks, and agents inside the truck can manipulate the camera and see as well at night as they can through good binoculars in the daytime. We've watched mountain lions hunt with these things.
The first night we picked up a group of seven "mules" coming through, each with a 40-pound backpack. Same thing the next night. Then they got wise and the action stopped.
The second day after we found the body, the deputy medical investigator called. He said the pathologists in Albuquerque told him the cause of death was an arrow in the neck. Severed the carotid and the jugular and he bled out internally. They were sure of it, because they found the arrowhead still in his neck.
It was flint.
That was damned curious, but killings along the border generally aren't in the Patrol's jurisdiction. The case was in Hidalgo County's hands, and they couldn't figure it out. It got to be known around law-enforcement circles as the case of the stoned scarecrow. Turns out we had the victim's fingerprints on file — he was a standard-issue mule, which is what we call the guys who lug contraband over the border. He'd been caught twice before, once over by Columbus and once in our sector. It's dangerous work, but the danger doesn't come from us; it comes from their employers. If they screw up, lose their load or something like that too often, they start losing fingers and eventually their lives.
But the killing of this guy — Homero Cruz was his name — obviously wasn't the work of his bosses. I wouldn't be surprised if they had strung him upside-down and gutted him if they were fairly mad, but they wouldn't waste product stuffing him with it. Whoever did it went to a lot of trouble to send some kind of message, and if the message didn't get the response expected, something else was going to happen.
Jack Warner, a veteran journalist with UPI and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is the author of the novel Shikar, released in paperback as Maneater. He now lives in Silver City, where he is a reserve deputy with the Grant County sheriff's office and a field deputy medical investigator.