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shades into those of National City to the North and Otay to the south; and here I met a handsome, pugnacious Border Patrolman named Brian Willett who told me about the bad old days when Beta had declined to cooperate with Alpha at all. Willett once witnessed a murder in No Man’s Land, just beyond the gleaming corrugations of the wall. He radioed Beta on the special frequency set aside for such occasions (like many of his colleagues, he spoke fluent Spanish), but Beta would not come. All the while, the murderer kept staring into Willett’s face. Finally he leisurely sawed off his victim’s hand and flapped it at Willett in a mocking wave. Willett assured me that nowadays, whenever one side witnessed a crime in progress on the other, an officer employed the special frequency with excellent results. Beta sometimes even acted to interdict illegal border crossings! And on the Arizona line, in the Mexican border town of Algodones, one of Beta’s representatives proudly informed me that Alpha had just given him a new white Bronco in which to chase criminals. The result—and a highly desirable one, to Alpha at least—was that Mexican cops had begun to squeeze the border-crossers harder—not so much the fence-jumpers, for they went over very quickly, but the canal- and river-swimmers such as Carlos who were slower and hesitated upon the Southside bank for hours or days, waiting for the perfect moment. Of these water-striders, the solos found themselves at greater risk of police interference than the pollos, because in one solo’ s bitter words: Coyotes pay money for the police, so if the police ask you who you work for, and if your name is not on their list, you’re fucked. You go to jail.
    And Carlos said: The other day, I was by the All-American Canal, and I was with these seven guys, and then this Mexican cop showed up with that fuckin’ automatic shotgun thing. Police started hitting us with their flashlights. They was gonna throw us in the canal. But really all they wanted was money. We said we don’t got nothing. So they gave up and said just get out of here within half an hour. We don’t want to see you here again. Ay, Mexican cops are a damn . . . They’re a bunch of fuckin’ . . .
    Carlos might have been one of the waiting men I spied when I looked across from Northside. Perhaps Officer Murray would have recognized him. Sometimes when I was in Mexico I walked or took a taxi to that very hot and exposed spot where the steel wall ended by jutting forward at a right angle and down to the rippled brown water’s edge; here there never failed to be homeless seekers bathing in the canal or washing their clothes or just sitting, awaiting dusk while on Northside an agent in a white vehicle watched them. They drank out of the All-American Canal, and carried its water with them. They huddled against the graffiti’d wall. They slept, paced, sat spraddle-legged in the litter of plastic and abandoned clothing, whose scraps reminded me of the bits of cloth worked into the earth of the killing-fields of Cambodia, for it was all sad cloth, lost or torn, the temporary skins of the desperate. In the hard and eroded earth, which at least smelled better than the ditch twenty feet farther into Southside, they sat, bowing, closing themselves up against the sun like human jackknives, and when the Border Patrol scanned eyes and binoculars in their direction, they sank their heads even lower into their chests. It was here that Carlos had been introduced to Beta’s shotgun. When I was in Northside I never walked to the place opposite that place; I always took a taxi. The levee, hardpacked out of tan dust, carried on its lonely shoulder no one but myself, my taxi driver, and the inevitable Border Patrol agent, who waved and watched me. Over in Southside, Mexicans were sitting at dusk, their dark heads down, shadows in their faces. I went there on different nights at different months, and they were always there. I never saw Beta. (Beta