The Best American Essays 2016 Read Online Free Page B

But he tried harder than any of us. He sweated the most, yelled the loudest. He was thirty-eight, an accountant from Puerto Rico, a husband and a father. Yesterday he left the firing range with a pocket full of live rounds, and the instructors ordered him to sing “I’m a Little Teapot” in front of the class. He didn’t know the song, so they suggested “God Bless America.” He belted out the chorus at the top of his lungs, his chest heaving after each line. We laughed, all of us, at his thick accent, at the misremembered verses, at his voice, off-key and quaking.
    In town, over drinks, Hart went on about the winters in Detroit. I can’t go back there, he said, not like Santiago. Fuck that. He asked Morales and me about winter in Arizona. Morales laughed. You don’t have to worry about snow where we’re going, vato , that’s for sure. Hart thought it sounded nice. Nice? I asked. Just wait until the summer. Have you ever felt 115 degrees? Hell no, he said. Well, I told him, we’ll be out in the heat, fetching dead bodies from the desert. Who the fuck walks in the desert when it’s 115? he asked. I drank my way through another beer and went rambling on about how everyone used to cross in the city, in San Diego and El Paso, until they shut it all down in the ’90s with fences and newly hired Border Patrol agents like us. If they sealed the cities, they thought, people wouldn’t risk crossing in the mountains and the deserts. But they were wrong, I said, and now we’re the ones who get to deal with it. Morales looked at me, his eyes dark and buried beneath his brow. I’m sorry, I told them, I can’t help it—I studied this shit in school.
    On our way back to the academy, I sat in the backseat of Morales’s truck. In the front, Morales told Hart about growing up on the border in Douglas, about uncles and cousins on the south side, and I sat with my head against the cold glass of the window, staring at the darkened plain, slipping in and out of sleep.
     
    3 January
     
    Last week my mother flew in from Arizona to see me, because—she said—we’ve never missed a Christmas together. She picked me up at the academy on Christmas Eve and we drove through the straw-colored hills, leaving behind the trembling Chihuahuan grasslands as we climbed into the evergreen mountains of southern New Mexico. We stayed the night in a two-room cabin, warm and bright with pinewood. We set up a miniature tree on the living room table, decorating it with tiny glass bulbs. Then, wrapped in blankets, we laughed and drank eggnog and brandy until the conversation deteriorated into discussion of my impending work.
    Look, my mother said, I spent most of my adult life working for the government as a park ranger, so don’t take this the wrong way—but don’t you think it’s below you, earning a degree just to become a border cop? Look, I said, I spent four years away from home, studying this place through facts, policy, and history. I’m tired of reading. I want to exist outside, to know the reality of this border, day in and day out. Are you crazy? she said. You grew up with me, living in deserts and national parks. We’ve never been far from the border. Sure, I said, but I don’t truly understand the landscape, I don’t know how to handle myself in the face of ugliness or danger. My mother balked. There are ways to learn that don’t place you at risk, she said, ways that let you help people. I fumed. I can still help people, I told her—I speak Spanish, I’ve lived in Mexico, I’ve been to the places where people are coming from. And don’t worry, I told her, I won’t place myself at risk—I’m not too proud to back away from danger.
    Good, she said. We hugged, and she told me she was happy I’d soon be back home in Arizona, closer to her. Before bed we each opened a single present, as we have done every Christmas Eve since I can remember.
    In the morning we ate brunch at the town’s historic hotel, feasting on pot roast