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frequently hit me up for fines and bribes closer to the legal crossing, in Niños Héroes Park and thereabouts.)
    As Officer Murray now drove away from this spot, the Mexicans raised their heads and stood, gazing alertly into the United States. Once the last daylight had failed, the night vision van would be sure to show the rafters coming in, the All-American Canal milky-white on the scope with each raft a black dot, trees transformed into negatives of trees, lights solid black. Later the nightscope man would reverse the contrast to reveal the bodies as white as the egrets which prance on their long dark legs on the embankments of Imperial’s irrigation ditches. On foggy nights he had trouble, but usually he could see aliens coming from over a mile away. They did not have much of a chance when he was around. His close-cropped head drank the light of the big screen he gazed into, his tattooed arm pulsing as he reached down at the control keypad, meanwhile keeping his left thumb hooked against the steering wheel out of some prudent habit or instinct; and on his shoulder shone the round patch where the words U. S. BORDER PATROL had been superimposed on an outline of continental Northside.
    What do you see? Murray radioed him.
    They’re comin’ across the check, sir, and I know they’re still there.
    All right, said Murray. I’m there.
    An asparagus field was blowing in the warm wind, and near it a rope tautly and diagonally spanned the All-American Canal. A pollista had lashed it to a bamboo trunk. Rapidly, yet with an almost elegant meticulousness, Murray cut it with his knife. The rope lay in the sandy weedy night like a dead snake. Looking into my eyes, Murray suddenly said with almost ferocious bitterness: Now he’ll write, and then the heartless bastard cut the rope.
    I don’t have anything against you, Dan, I said, but he grew silent.
    Murray knew that what he was doing was not very nice. And Gloria Chavez in Chula Vista told me: I remember being on the bike unit and at five in the afternoon I hear bing! and they’d thrown a big steak knife at me. That was the kind of aggression I got. Another time we had what we call a banzai— thirty or more up there, a group there. Well, this woman started screaming. I said: What’s wrong? She says: My leg, my leg! And when I went up to help her, I got pelted with rocks! I said: You stop throwing rocks or I’m gonna call Beta right now. Beta would’ve responded, although I don’t know if they would have come around there right then. The lady had a broken ankle. I took care of her. The people who are gonna sometimes cause the problems are the smugglers and the guides, not the workers who follow them.
    In 1996, a twenty-six-year-old Border Patrolman in Gloria’s sector was blinded by a glass bottle hurled at him in darkness from the Ensenada Freeway. Now there were klieg lights to counter-blind Mexicans who came too near, while the agents lurked behind the lights in Northside’s darkness, further protected by a secondary fence.
    Here I had better tell you that in all the ten years it took me to write this book, I never met a single Mexican who could muster up good words for the United States Border Patrol.
    See, on the west side you can’t get this close to the fence or they’ll bust your windshield, Murray said to me once, but I never had any such problems. And yet I was on his side. To be sure, I wished Carlos all the luck in the world—Carlos, Roberto, Mario and all the rest. But whether the laws which made them illegal from working on American soil were good or bad, and they were probably (so I suspected even then, and now I am sure) the latter, Murray’s mandate was to prevent illegal entry, a necessary labor in and of itself, because any country unable to control its borders cannot adequately enforce nor even define itself. And the murderer whom Officer Willett got to meet, I do not want that fellow to saunter into California, kill me and saw off my hand.
    If