New Border Voices: An Anthology

Quitclaim

Quitclaim SEAN CHADWELL The old checkpoint is gone. For the last couple months I have seen different crews taking it apart piece by piece. They numbered each part of the old steel structure. You might remember it was just a simple open-sided shed next to that trailer they used as an office and holding cell. Then they took it down, carefully. They hauled it away as they did. They hauled away the trailer. They tore up what was left of the asphalt lane, with its deep impressions left by idling trucks on the days the sun turned the blacktop to molasses, and they hauled it away. They dismantled the chain-link kennels on their concrete pads and hauled them away. They brought out a tractor and turned the earth and spread buffelgrass seed around and watered it, and it sprouted and grew like it does after the first half inch of rain. It looked like they were trying to hide the scene of a crime. They left two tall and lonely palms, though; they will die in time, untended. They will probably last a few years, swaying there next to the northbound side of I-35, 150 miles from anyplace a palm tree chooses on its own to be, and then they will die and be cut down and the roots will be dug out with a backhoe and it will all be hauled away. In no time at all we will say that old checkpoint used to be right in here somewhere, right along here, because it is already fading fast into the monte, like the place that was there, that caused people to feel the way it caused them to feel, was erased from the horizon. The sky and the grass, the mesquite and retama and sunflowers will all just settle into sight instead, just claim the land in that quiet way they do, in that way they make it invisible. I visited there a couple weeks ago. The day before, a boy had shot his father here on the ranch. Hunters. It seemed like that shooting, the sound or the flash of it or the hurt it caused, like it shook things up, like it made old surveys fall from shoeboxes. Like it ruptured something and shone light on the memories of old men. Like it even affected the weather, and caused a cool front that pushed south and lifted the haze so that you could suddenly see all the way down to those Mexican mountains. That’s why I stopped, anyway, the mountains. The day after the shooting it occurred to me that I really had maybe done enough honor to my father’s devotion to these dusty acres and I might move on. Not that I know for certain that he would have called it that, devotion. He never really talked about it. You can still get to the old checkpoint from the access road. It’s a natural high ♦ ♦ ♦ 164 ♦ Sean Chadwell spot, the perfect place to stop and look at the mountains. They always shock me when I have not seen them for a few months; they make me feel a little dizzy, like I have not been living where I thought I had been living. It’s like the world is smaller and all the places you have ever wanted to live, you already live in them, but you just cannot make them out every day. I kicked around over there for a little while, wandering over the hill where the agents used to gather. I felt kind of guilty about it, like you feel in a church that is no longer holy, where they have gone in and decommissioned it, evicted god, you could say, and whoever else might have been in there, and said: OK, this is just a regular building henceforth. I have been in places like that, and it never feels like they got the job all the way done. There’s one on the Carson ranch, just south of here, that dates back to the years when the biggest spreads had chapels and I gather a priest would come by every so often. Some years back the ranchowner had the place officially undone and made into a little house. By that time those who went to church were driving down to Laredo every Sunday anyway. That chapel, with some of its original stone walls still showing on the inside, does not feel enough like it is...