High Desert Journal: Back story to Love on the Killing Ground

Back story to Love on the Killing Ground

Back Story

by Charles Bowden | 0 Comments

I got up this morning and starting walking at gray light through the hills and down under the cottonwoods and sycamores. There’d been a light shower at dusk and the world was fresh and clean. The cold settled in the draws and nothing much made a sound but two ravens croaking annoyance at me. I needed the walk to clear my head for the meeting. I did seven miles and then I went into town.

The table is by the window. He’s off duty. I am meeting him in a public place at his suggestion. The town is small. This means he wants everyone to know I am talking with him. This kind of calculation goes on all the time for me when I write about the border. I am the friendly guy who finds trust hard and belief even harder. No one can be trusted, everyone has several layers of motives and there are doubles and triples who sell out so many directions you wonder how they keep track of things. I also lie, about where I am going, about who I am seeing, about what I learn. The only rule I keep is this: I keep my deals.

At first, he and I settle down over our eggs, potatos and coffe and pretend we have no reason for meeting. Then we pretend our talk is normal. I have driven hundred of miles to hear him say that they use five guys as lookouts when they move a load, that they always do rip-offs as a unit of six, that the bury anyone they kill, that . . . . well, I can’t say the rest. Not now. Maybe, never.

It is not a matter of libel. It is not even a matter of my safety. It is because real names can get people killed and the people who kill them will be not be punished by either government. The agent is the one who tells me that with money and connections you can get documents and he says they will not be good copies, they will be the real documents.

The agent facing me wants me to go meet a general — he comes up here once a year he says, he could be a good contact. I nod.

But we are here having breakfast because of strange shootings along the line, ones that seem to escape the attention of major meeting: white guys are shooting brown guys who are moving loads north and then stealing the dope.

We talk a long time. As I said, maybe nothing will come of it. I have spent ten years on a story and once spent over 15 years on a murder before I found out what had happened and who had done the killing. And then could not print it.

The lawyer and the butcher and the strange path love can take, that all happened and all the players have real names and faces and it took place in an exact place and exact time. But for the moment, that must be left out of the story. Not simply to protect the innocent. But also, the guilty.

I keep my deals.

Or I’ll be out of business here.

Plenty of people don’t keep their deals on the line. You read about their bodies in the morning paper. Eventually the white guys doing rip-offs will be there. If they cost the brown guys enough money and pain, well, they will kill them. But what gets lost and what I try to find is that all these people are trying to have a normal life in a crazy world. They want love and work and a little money and a beer and a laugh and by “all” I mean the guys moving drugs and the guys robbing them and the agents trying to ruin both groups.

It’s just that the work can get a little strange in a place where two nations end and nothing much else seems to exist. That’s the story behind the story and behind all the stories that don’t get put down on paper. And the ravens. Without them croaking their annoyance and also indifference I don’t think I’d be able to keep this up.

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High Desert Journal

Winter

Back story to Love on the Killing Ground

Back Story

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