The town had no city hall, police station, or municipal court—all city meetings were held in the elementary school. The tallest structure in town was a cell phone tower in a vacant lot at the top of a ridge on the north edge of town, next to a cylindrical water tower.
Ochoa, the Mexican town on the south side of the river, was even smaller—a Customs station, a scattering of manufactured houses, a cantina and a convenience store with gas and diesel, and a two-acre hard-surfaced parking lot for trucks waiting to make the crossing.
Pershing had had its fifteen minutes of fame a year and a half earlier, when a “caravan” of Central Americans had arrived at the bridge without food, water, or a place to sleep except the concrete parking lot on the Mexican side. They had been expected to go to El Paso, but at the last minute the motley collection of old cars, buses, and bicycles had swerved north, with the idea that they might be shown more mercy at the smaller city.
And they had. Pershing’s mayor, Harry Lopez, with the consent of the other four members of the city council, had invited the refugees into the United States, and had pressured a harried supervisor at the Customs post to allow them through for humanitarian reasons. Lopez and the council members had their stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, and most of the networks. Even when the moment passed, Lopez and the councilmen were left as secular saints, to be occasionally consulted on immigrant matters by the media.
* * *
Since that day, called the Great Crossing in Pershing, Hawkes and Low had been up and down every street in town; had detailed maps, now with extensive annotations, and satellite photos. They knew where the mayor and the council members and all four cops lived, and where the Customs officers and border patrolmen lived, and who carried guns. They knew how big the I-beams were that supported the Chihuahua Bridge.
They’d done their reconnaissance in several different pickups and Jeeps, much of it during the COVID-19 crisis, which allowed them to wear masks without comment.
* * *
After a final crossing of the Arroyo Grande, they drove southeast along the four-wheeler tracks, past the gun range, and into Pershing. Nobody paid any attention; they weren’t the only Bobcat in town. They checked into the Lariat Motel, took turns in the shower, and then plunged into the cool water of the pool.
“This is fuckin’ . . . exquisite,” Hawkes said, pulling up her vocabulary after surfacing in the pool. “My God, why doesn’t everyone have a pool?”
They laughed, but they all knew why, and they didn’t have to say it: you don’t have a pool if you make nine dollars an hour.
With the sun dropping low in the afternoon sky, they dressed and headed back to El Paso, three hours away. They arrived at dark, dropped the Bobcat and trailer at the rental agency, and drove over to Hawkes’s house. She had turned the family room into a war room, maps on the walls, three long folding tables surrounded by folding chairs, three laptops on the tables along with an office printer. A thirty-six-inch television hung from the wall, above a rack of identical black rifles.
Hawkes led the way in, hit the lights, turned on one of the laptops, and brought up the National Weather Service.
“Still no rain in sight,” she said. “That’s the last big worry. The hole bothers me.”
Duran laughed. “My last big worry is getting out of there without any holes in my chest.”
“If we do it right, we’ll be good,” Hawkes said. “We need to make sure Rodriguez gets down there with his camera.”
“A thousand bucks . . . He’ll be there. He’d be there for free if he knew.”
“Can’t tell him,” Hawkes said. “I’ll give you an extra thousand to take along. If he won’t go for one, he’ll go for two.”
Rodriguez ran a freelance video-news truck in the El Paso region. The truck had satellite-link capability.