you have to do to get him back, she had said. So I had.
The Americano began to sob. He was several feet to my left and I could feel the shudder of bodies as they turned towards him. The stress of being dead was too much for him, as I knew in my heart it would be.
He too had packets taped to him, as did the other like me who was returning to her family—a young woman who had been picked up in a raid on a processing plant in Illinois and deported. She had the longest way to travel, but her determination was that of a mother who had to return to her children. If I had to wager, it would be on her. If I had bet on the Americano, I would have lost.
I saw what would happen before he felt the teeth sink into his shoulder. A muerto, who reminded me of a shopkeeper I had known in Nogalas who sold overpriced rugs to touristas, began to chew on the Americano as if he were a rack of prime meat. First one bite and then another. The Americano screamed, the sound barely registering amidst the groans around us, as the herd once again pressed itself into the fence.
The obstruction before us began to shriek in protest. Reinforced metal, backed by rebar and steel-pilings, it was no match for the combined press of the dead. With a metallic scream, a section tore free and gave way. The first rows of muertos stumbled through the gap, as those behind trampled them to the ground. Limbs were crushed and broken as those who had fallen sought to stand while the others above them continued to shuffle forward.
I was far enough back to keep my balance. The groans increased as the muertos found the way ahead open. Like the cry of cattle about to stampede, they raised their heads and moaned towards the jet-black sky. I groaned with them, and in my lament felt compassion for those who were dead and about to die once more. The unfairness of it struck me, even though I could do nothing about it. That is what made me human, I supposed—the realization of what was being lost.
After the fence was breached, I lost sight of the Americano. We surged forward onto a flat plain. I had been here before. The terrain and location of the Black Sand almost ensured that the herd would end up at the same position along the border. To our left and right metal walls had been constructed like chutes in a cattle yard, guiding us onward to where I could see the arroyo begin. We shuffled and lurched forward. As always I wondered if the muertos knew where they were going. Did they have a goal, or were they as mindless as they seemed? What were they hungry for?
Then it happened.
I stumbled and fell to my knees. I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I had forgotten that I was supposed to be mindless and dead. A clumsy foot planted upon my back drove me into the ground. Another struck the back of my head and I must have blacked out for a moment.
Which is when I dreamed of Aldo Ray—not me, but my famous namesake. Tall where I was short, handsome where I was average bordering on ugly, blonde where I was black-haired, and white where I was brown. My mother had given me the name of her favorite American actor and hero in the hope that I would grow up to be like him—in the hope that his name would give me a head start on the American Dream. He had starred with James Coburn, John Wayne, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and everyone who was anyone. With a name like that, how could I lose? He had been a hero during World War II, serving as a Frogman in the Pacific. With a past like that, how could I not succeed? Yet, as I told my mother, I could fail all too easily because a name does not make the man. She could have called me George Washington, but in the end I would always be reminded that Washington was not and had never had been Mexican. And therein lay the truth of it.
I came to my senses with a wetness down my back. It burned, as if someone had scraped the skin away. I wanted to touch there and see if I had