THERE WAS JUST NO way I was going to wait there alone in the dark, on the Mexican shore no less, wondering when and if my cousin was going to return. We grabbed a couple of energy bars and a gallon jug of drinking water and took off.
With no streetlights and the village half abandoned, Boquillas was like Terlingua Ghost Town, only more so. You could tell the houses that were still occupied. With soft light from low-wattage bulbs seeping out through the windows, they glowed like candle lanterns. The village was eerily quiet until a dog detected our approaching footsteps and erupted with a full-throated alarm. A couple more dogs joined in. The hackles stood up on the back of my neck.
A door squeaked open. “Quién es?” a man called.
Rio identified himself. The man yelled at the dogs, and they quit barking. A few minutes later my cousin and I squeezed into the cab of a beat-up compact pickup, me in the middle, and headed down the dusty dirt road leading out of Boquillas. Fortino was the name of our white-maned driver. The old man didn’t speak English, but he understood some. He nodded along as Rio told me that one of his sons was in Montana right now fighting a forest fire, and another was working up at the lodge in the nearby Sierra del Carmen.
Rio went on to tell me that Fortino was the one who used to ferry the tourists across the river in the Enchilada before the border was closed. Nowadays, Fortino made some money for his family and the village school by wading to the middle of the river below the Boquillas Canyon Overlook and serenading the tourists with songs of friendship and peace. They left the money in a can Fortino could reach without setting foot on the American shore.
The road was rough, and it felt like the old man’s rattletrap didn’t have shocks, same as it didn’t have seat belts. I wondered if I was going to lose some fillings, or even my life. I wished Rio would ask him to slow down. The road was badly washboarded, and five minutes wouldn’t go by without us going into a skid. Fortino was good at steering out of them—I’ll give him that. After every skid he kept his speed down for half a minute maybe, then it was off to the races again. I pondered how incomprehensible it would be when my parents got a call from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico: “We regret to inform you that your son Dylan has been killed in a rollover on a remote road in the Mexican state of Coahuila.”
Some more chatter from Rio took my mind off my imminent demise. He told me he’d been down this road once before, on the weekly bus with Ariel on one of her missions across the river with Fronteras Unlimited. When the women of Boquillas had a bunch of new quilts to sell, one of the volunteers from Terlingua would cross the river to pick them up and take them back across.
To return to the American side, the volunteer had to cross at an official port of entry. The closest one was at Del Rio, Texas, a couple hundred miles downriver. Getting back to Terlingua from Boquillas entailed a journey of three days and nearly six hundred miles, beginning with a four-hour bus ride down the dirt road we were presently traveling. “I saw a lot of the emptiest part of Mexico,” Rio told me. “It’s rough country, and kind of scary.”
You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know, I thought. Just then Fortino rounded a corner and we came upon red and blue flashing lights, a roadblock in the middle of nowhere. The police were out of their vehicles and heavily armed. They were motioning for Fortino to stop, and they meant now. They raised their assault rifles, ready to mow us down if he didn’t stop, and quick. “Policía Federal” was written large on the side of their vehicles, two cruisers and a tanklike truck.
Somehow Fortino managed to brake without losing control or getting us ventilated with bullets. “Federales,” Rio muttered. “No worries, Dylan.”
Huh? I was going to be lucky if I didn’t mess my pants.
“Say as little as possible and don’t make any sudden moves, okay?”
I was finding it difficult to speak. I couldn’t even swallow. “Got it,” I managed.
The federal police threw spotlights on us. The glare was blinding. Two of the black-uniformed policemen fanned out to cover us while a third approached Fortino’s window, service pistol drawn. Fortino lowered his window. I noticed him placing both hands high on the steering wheel where they could be seen.
The policeman’s face looked like it had been carved from the sharp, cruel stone of the surrounding desert. He pointed the flashlight at our faces and laps and down by our feet.
I began to breathe again, at least, when he holstered his weapon. He began to question Fortino. “No se habla español,” the old man said about us—they don’t speak Spanish. I understood Fortino to say that we were on our way to catch up with a señora who was at a ranch delivering a baby. Stone Face bought that, but he wasn’t buying the explanation for why Rio and I were along, whatever it was. He wagged his finger at the two of us. “Identificación!” he ordered. “ID!”
“Sorry,” Rio said in English. “We don’t have it with us. No ID.” Which was true—it was back with our stuff on the raft.
A smile played at the policeman’s lips. “You two get out. We find out your story at the station.”
Uh-oh, I thought. This is going to be bad, real bad.
Stone Face left the window and walked back toward his cruiser to confer with his backup. The three federales huddled for a minute, maybe discussing which of them was going to take us in.
“Mordida?” Rio whispered to Fortino.
“Sí,” the old man replied.
“You just asked if they’re going to mess us up?” I asked my cousin.
“I asked if we should try a bribe, and Fortino said yes.”
“You’ve got that envelope full of money behind the seat.”
“That much money is nothing but trouble. I pull that out, we get taken in for sure. Do you have that hundred on you that you were telling me about?”
“It’s in my pants pocket.”
Rio’s eyes went to the policeman, who was on his way back. “Hurry—give it to Fortino.”
Quick as I could, I fished it out and slipped it to Fortino, five folded twenties.
I understood next to nothing of the ensuing conversation between the old man and Stone Face. Obviously this had to be done delicately. The conversation ended when Fortino showed the money, and the policeman took it.
Stone Face scolded us about not carrying ID, and we were on our way. Another half hour, and we turned onto a side road, which was badly rutted. Just after midnight the road ended at the edge of nowhere, which would have been a good name for the ranch where we piled out.
The baby had been delivered within the hour. Right away, Rio gave the midwife the envelope from Ariel with the $2,300 in it. We would’ve made a quick turnaround, only Señora Madrid had some news to tell. Evidently it was a bombshell. The Spanish was flying so fast and furious, I never caught on. I got the idea that something really bad had happened nearby, and not very long ago.
As we got under way, lightning and thunder rent the night sky and bullets of rain pelted the windshield. Rio told me that Señora Madrid had been stopped at the same roadblock we were. The federales didn’t hassle her. When she asked what the roadblock was for, they told her there’d been an incident at the lodge up in the Sierra del Carmen—a raid, and killings, and a kidnapping.
“You got my attention,” I said. “Tell me everything you know.”
A bolt of lightning struck directly ahead and lit up the surrounding desert. The dry wash we were about to cross was suddenly filling from the cloudburst. Fortino raced across it, splashing water high on both sides.
With Fortino’s wipers going full speed and barely able to keep up, Rio began to fill me in. The lodge where the killings happened, he explained, was located inside a vast nature preserve in the high-elevation forest. The men from Boquillas who had jobs there either worked in the lodge itself or guided hunts for wild turkey, black bear, and elk.
Rio said that his father had been inside the lodge once, back when his dad was doing wildlife surveys for the preserve. “There’s an airstrip up there,” Rio said. “The lodge flies in groups from all over the world—have a mini-conference, bag an elk.”
“Cut to the chase! What happened up at the lodge?”
“Here’s what the police told Señora Madrid. Early yesterday morning, some men with automatic weapons burst into the lodge and killed some judges. Somebody was kidnapped as the killers were getting away. That’s all Señora Madrid knew.”
“What about the helicopters?”
“She said the federales didn’t say anything about them. I’m guessing Mexico asked the U.S. to help in the manhunt.”
“But why?”
“Maybe we could get there sooner—our closest army base is closer than theirs?”
“Sounds like the lodge didn’t have enough security.”
“They didn’t think they needed much, on account of how isolated they are.”
“Judges? Why judges?”
“All I can figure is, the judges who were meeting at the lodge were helping the government put the leaders of the drug cartels in jail. They must have been judges who weren’t corrupt, who couldn’t be bribed. One of the reasons the cartels have become so powerful is that they’ve been able to pay off government officials and law enforcement. The new president is fighting back. He’s sent in the army to help local police. People are getting killed on both sides, something like three thousand already this year. Kidnapping has gotten out of hand, especially in Mexico City.”
“Who’s getting kidnapped?”
“Business executives, their family members, officials, sometimes tourists. Some of the ransoms are in the millions.”
“Seems pretty spooky, this happening in the mountains right above us.”
“It shouldn’t affect us on the river. We just have to keep our eyes open, that’s all.”
The storm kept up all the way back to Boquillas. Three times, Fortino made it through flooded swales in the road, and once we had to get out and push. We were pumped by the prospect of having a lot more water in the river to work with. I thought of Roxanne, and my cousin saying that tarantulas moving indoors was a sign that the weather was coming.
It was three thirty AM and still raining, though not as hard, when we tromped into camp by the light of our headlamps. Before leaving, we had pulled the raft and the canoe onto high ground and tied them securely. On our return, we were thrilled to find them still tied but floating nicely on much higher water.
Bone weary and ready to drop, we crawled into the tent and slipped into our sleeping sheets. I asked Rio if he had learned his Spanish at school and he said he did, but outside of class. It was mostly what the kids spoke. I asked how many kids were in the high school. He let out a yawn. “Last count, forty-seven.”
“I like the sound of the rain on the tent,” I mused. “You think it will keep coming?”
No reply. He was dead asleep. Half a minute later, so was I.