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something catches your eye, there’s a reason, Murray was saying. So I stopped right here and found a boat and a rope. I got thirty aliens . . .
    He drove east to check the four tire-drags which lay in the sand near the Alamo River.—If anybody’s walked, said Murray, it’ll make a fresh wet depression.
    I met a coyote who allowed that he sometimes brought his cargo over on the Alamo River, which crosses the border just east of Calexico’s East Port of Entry, then ambles north by northwest past Holtville, Brawley and Calipatria; it goes on brown and secluded all the way to the Salton Sea. Where were the Alamo’s pollos on this evening of crying birds which resembled all the other evenings? They might be on their way now; for to the west, the wall was going rustier and redder now against the orange sky; its lights came on, and the palm trees started to hide in the blackness that was the coyote’s best friend.
    Let’s show ’im what’s left of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail, another agent jocularly said.
    Those Border Patrol agents in dark green with their Sam Browne belts loved to wargame everything, inflating their routines of searches and captures into a movie. They invoked the suicide-charges of our Japanese enemy half a century ago when they said: They’ll banzai you with twenty or thirty people. You call a van over and you can hose that van out afterward . . .—And when they named the route up the east side of the Alamo River the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they got to fight the Vietnam War all over again. Leaning grasses tall and olive, tall bamboo groves and darkness smothered the place beneath an air of eerie exoticism. Not far away lay bright green fields which almost could have been Vietnamese ricefields.
    They’ll come over here and they’ll even go over here on the west side or they’ll have tunnels through the brush, an officer said.
    They showed me windblown, rounded human tracks through the bamboo. They showed me tunnels. I was going to see many tunnels for the next few years.
    We got three groups out of here in the last hour and a half, another agent said.
    The cool convenience of the river water and the cover provided by the bamboo had served the bodies well for a long time, but now the Border Patrol had placed sensors in the bamboo pipes, so on the Mexicali streets I now met more adherents of the East Highline Canal, whose blue water was born from the rippled All-American approximately five miles east of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
    About the East Highline an agent told me: It runs north. It goes north forever.—And it did—all the way up to the county line, at least, where it met the Coachella Canal in the desert along the edge of the Chocolate Mountains. But the problem with the East Highline was that its long flatness left any fugitive enormously exposed. Therefore truly desperate and determined swimmers such as Carlos played their ghastly ace-in-the-hole: the New River.
    It runs right through Mexicali, crossing into the United States just west of the West Port of Entry. Southside its cartographic name is the Río Nuevo, but the green canals feeding it are aptly called shit water.— I don’t know why the American people want it, Juan the cokehead chuckled.—And at that time, water-illiterate, I still believed that naturally they didn’t. The New River has been called the most polluted waterway in North America. (We will assess that accusation later on.) After sunset it runs black beneath the surveillance lights, with white scum on its surface. Near a million people’s raw sewage thickens it; unregulated industrial runoff spices it. Through the corrugated gape in the steel wall it oozes, stinking, sometimes thick with evilly near-phosphorescent suds. Year by year the color changes, but the stink is always the same. To pick one’s way through the weeds and black plastic bags of abandoned clothing, descending into the slimy ravine through which it flows, is sickening enough.—About ten diseases crawl