David Lindsey: The Rules of Silence

Benny Chalmers stared through the opened window of his pickup. He wore a soiled and sweat-stained khaki shirt with long sleeves, dirty jeans, and beat-to-hell cowboy boots with tops that reached nearly to his knees. He was red-faced from forty-one years in the searing border country sun, and his forehead was as white as a corpse where his Stetson had protected it.

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and Chalmers was sitting in the middle of twenty-one million acres of rugged terrain known to ecologists as the South Texas plains and to everyone else as the Brush Country. They were fifty miles from anything other than an isolated ranch house every twenty or so miles. But they were only two hundred yards from Mexico. The sun was white. As far as you could see in any direction was an endless parched landscape of head-high thickets of cat claw and black brush interspersed with prickly pear flats and mesquite.

Chalmers was watching a rancher's vaqueros load 126 head of mixed-breed cattle into Chalmers's cattle truck. He had been hired to take them to another ranch near Bandera two hundred miles north. The cattle were being held in a sprawling maze of pens made of rusty oil rig drill pipe. A long iron-and-wood ramp ran from the pen's chute into the back of the trailer, a massive twelve-wheeler, triple-decker Wilson.

Fifty yards to Chalmers's left, a helicopter had just landed in a tornado of dust. The‘copter had disgorged three men wearing guns, boots, and the familiar deep green uniforms of the U.S. Border Patrol agents. They were interested in watching the vaqueros load the cattle, and they were interested in Chalmers's big rig.

“Goddamn it, ”Chalmers muttered, squinting into the sun. The cattle were bawling and rocking the huge trailer as they clambered up the ramp and into the cavernous belly of their transportation. The cattle that were still in the pens milled and shuffled around in the hot dirt, kicking up dust that hung heavily above the whole operation in a rusty haze.

Chalmers had trucked cattle for border ranchers for twenty-two years. He knew more backcountry roads through the remote border ranches from El Paso to Brownsville than any man alive. And he knew about the hidden airstrips, too, and about the stepped-up Border Patrol activity because of the increase in smuggling of drugs and humans. He also knew that the odds were getting shorter against him.

He watched the three Border Patrol agents huddled at the rear of the trailer, looking in three different directions from behind their sunglasses. They were talking among themselves without looking at one another, the dust from the loading operation drifting over them and sticking to the sweat that stained their dark uniforms.

Then the agents disappeared around the side of the sixty-five-foot-long truck and trailer, and when they emerged from behind the cab of the red Mack tractor, they looked toward Chalmers and waved. He waved back, sticking his beefy arm out the pickup window.

“Adios, boys, ”he said under his breath. He turned back and looked out the windshield again and stared at the rusty fog and the cattle and the vaqueros. But he didn't relax until he heard the chopper's engine start, its low whine cranking up slowly, revving to lift.

He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt.

Chalmers smuggled people, but his operation was more than just a little special. To frustrate the noses of the Border Patrol dogs, he built two cubicles in the curved top of his trailer right in the middle of a big bunch of stinking, shitting cattle. The cubicles were twenty-four inches high (a little more than the thickness of a man lying flat on his back), sixty-two inches long, and twenty-four inches wide. He piped air-conditioning from the cab into the cubicles and put long, narrow water tanks in there with hoses to drink from. A man could live three days in there easy and hardly feel it.

Two people only. Delivery guaranteed. But the fee was high. And Chalmers knew damn well what that meant. Whoever came to him willing to pay his price had to have something more waiting for him in the States than working on a framing crew or wiping tables in a fast-food joint. This was elite human smuggling he was offering here.

And it worked. He'd made nearly $750,000 in six months. Cash.

At dusk Benny Chalmers finished up the paperwork with the rancher, using the hood of the rancher's pickup as a desk. They shook hands, and he said that he was going to get a bite to eat right there in his truck and then head out. Leaning on the front of the truck, he watched the rancher and his vaqueros drive away from the holding pens in their pickups, pulling horse trailers.

Half an hour later Chalmers stood at the edge of the brush, having a serious conversation in Spanish with four Mexican coyotes. His truck idled in the dying light behind him, its tiny amber lights glowing like long strands of embers. Real coyotes yipped and keened out in the endless night of desert brush.

The coyotes Chalmers was dealing with were heartless men who had lots of money, more than the U.S. government doled out to its law enforcement agencies. They bought the best electronic countermeasures that technology could produce, and here they were to prove it, bunch of sorry-ass Mexican smugglers wired up with headphones and mouth mikes like some damned singing kids on MTV.

Chalmers was sweating, nervous, wishing to hell he hadn't agreed to this particular load. He should have quit one load back. The last one should've been his last.

The kid who was apparently in charge of this spoke softly into the mike curved in front of his mouth, and they all turned and looked south toward the river and Mexico. Silence. A minute. Two. Three. Five. They all saw the chopper's distinctive blue light before they heard it, its baffled engine making no more noise than a quiet cough in the distance.

Suddenly Chalmers developed some respect. He'd seen this machine only once before, but he'd heard plenty of stories about it. He could've charged twice what he'd asked. Jesus.

The black chopper landed on a sandbar in the river, stayed no longer than a minute, then lifted up again and wheezed away into the darkness. They waited.

Soon a small group of men emerged from the grease brush, seeping out of it like shadows pulling loose from shadows.

There were three men with two black-hooded figures. The hooded men were dressed better than the others and communicated only by sign. He could tell that they could see through the strange sheen of the fabric. The more muscular of the two hooded men carried a cheap plastic net bag with a couple of mangoes and oranges in it.

One of the three escorts spoke with the young MTV smartasses, and then the little shit in charge turned to Chalmers and spoke to him in perfect, unaccented English.

“Okay, bubba, ”he wisecracked, “this does it for us. We don't have anything to do with the other end.”

Chalmers nodded, and the kid handed him a thick envelope. Chalmers calmly took a small Maglite out of his pocket and started counting. He didn't care how many people were standing around waiting for him. This right here was what it was all about. He was looking after his end.

It was all there. He looked up. “Okay.”

“Let's get these guys loaded up, ”the kid said.

The two hooded men climbed up the side of the trailer and crawled feet first into the tiny compartment in the top of the cattle trailer. They never said a word. Once they were inside, Chalmers, standing on the rails on the outside of the trailer, started explaining to them in Spanish how to operate the air vents and the water hoses.

It was two-thirty in the morning when Chalmers delivered his cattle at another set of isolated holding pens on the Braden Ranch southwest of Bandera. This was the Texas Hill Country, rolling hills studded with oaks and mountain juniper. The Medina River was so close that you could smell it.