no longer understand. And because they would not, neither could we—to survive meant mimicking as best we could this dance of the dead across the roiling sands of the Sonoran Desert.
Los Vaqueros began following us on the second day. They rode far out in the shadows of our crossing, careful not to let the muertos see their movement. Some said they were Mexican Army. Others that they were enchantadors and the reason for the muertos. Whatever they were, they could not really stop us. They just hovered on the edge of my vision, lean mirages twisting with an equine grace that left me longing to be alive once more.
But that was not to be. I was dead, or at least the muertos thought so. And that was the secret. They could not smell, nor did they seem to have any supernatural ability to realize that I was alive. But they could tell by movement the difference between animado and muerto. They could hear us and know from our speech that we were alive. The trick, as I had discovered on my two previous crossings, was to move like them, regardless of what might happen.
In front and behind me, I knew of four other animados like myself. Two of us were trying to get back to our families. Another worked for the Zetas out of Nuevo Laredo. He was a sicario and muled drugs across the border. The last was an Americano who had gotten drunk, been robbed, and sought to return to his home. It was an irony that he had to pretend to be a dead one of us in order to get back to where he belonged so he could live.
He had approached me a week before, after having sought me out in Puerto Peñasco, on the Sea of Cortez, where I was trying to earn enough money to pay the Coyotes for safe passage across the fence. A shrimp-boat captain I knew pointed me out as one who knew how to cross.
“I need to get back,” he had said.
“No way. Usted está en América. Usted no puede pretender estar muerto muy bien.”
“But I can pretend to be dead,” he argued. “I’ll do what it takes. All I want is to go home.”
I still turned him down. How can someone from a land that is so alive be any good at pretending to be dead? And I would have never have shown him had I not gotten the call from mi esposa telling me that my son had disappeared from the playground. Some predator had stolen him and I needed to return. So I taught the Americano, also knowing that I might need him to help me if it came to that.
“Are you sure they can’t tell I’m alive?”
I remember how remarkable it was that he never once disbelieved in the muertos. He took it for granted that they were real—so American to believe so easily.
Then we had lain on the ground pretending to be dead, our bodies covered in pig’s blood and entrails until the herd had appeared. They came from the Black Sand, heading inexorably towards a lonely spot in the desert where it looked like the dunes met sky. When they came grunting and groaning over the top of us, the hardest thing was to keep still. We let them stagger above us, taking us for fellow muertos. The herd was halfway over me when in a state of electric terror I slowly lurched to my feet and joined them in their northbound shuffle.
That was two days ago. Two days of sweating and shitting and crying as I cramped and stumbled, so many times almost giving away my living condition. They never stopped so I never stopped, until we came to the fence the Americans had built. So many thought it was to keep people like me out. They had no idea about the Black Sand that was growing like a cancer through the old country, infecting all of those who walked across it, turning them into mad, hungry creatures.
We kept pushing against the fence. I felt the press of dead and rotting bodies against me. Teeth snapped near my ear. I watched beetles burrowing into the skin of the woman directly in front of me, someone’s mother who was forever changed. Here and there pieces of them were missing, as older bodies had risen up while the Black Sand crept across the land. Some were nothing but dry bones and guitar-string tendons. Others had