Beyond the border is everything they pray for. Pray for, not pray to. The border is no plaster shrine; it is a gateway to paradise. My life is to take them to the border. They pray to God, but cannot see God. They pray for the border, but that, too, they cannot see.
 
The border is a line on a map—not God's work. There's no river to swim, no mountain to climb. It's exactly the same on either side. Those who cross the border do not do it because they want to conquer the palace on the other side. They dream only of tending its grounds. Tending grounds earns what is called by the conquerors, without irony, "slave wages." But on the other side, such wages transform lives.
 
A man can be driven like a mule if each day brings his family closer to glory. He is a hero—a provider and protector. A man can be driven like a mule if it means his children will never be beggars and his wife will not sell her body to feed them. A man can be driven like a mule if it means the next generation climbs higher than the one before, because each will have begun higher.
 
The wife of a man who builds a foundation for his family with his body-crushing labor, she will be the envy of the others in the village. Any fat, drunken coward can tell big stories but never do big things. They make babies, but what is that? A dog can make puppies. A man who builds a foundation for his family, someday, his name will mean something. Even if he dies in the attempt, he will be forever honored as a man.
 
I am no coyote. Those who hire me are not crammed in an airless truck, abandoned at the first sign of danger. I am a warrior, not a courier. Dreamers pay me to fight. And to guarantee they are never, ever taken alive. Everyone knows what happens to those taken by the bandits.

Some take the dreamers across and wait to be paid with the money they send back. I cannot do it like that. I must be paid in advance. Most of the time, I must make sure they are not taken alive. How could they pay me then? It's sometimes years before I take a person across.
 
The truck I use is new. But the business has been here since before there were trucks. This is what my family does—what we have always done.
 
I drive by night without lights. The sounds of the truck still carry across the darkness, but not so far as the sound of my weapons.
 
Gunshots in the desert carry no significance.
 
My truck is camouflaged, but it flies a flag. Our family's flag, at the very top of one of the antennas. Bandits know that flag.
 
Bandits near the border are carrion-eaters. There will always be other trucks, easier prey. They fear my family's flag.
 
I take the border-crossers to the gateway, but I never follow them across. On each drive back, I pray they find their Paradise.
 
Sometimes, I cry because I had to send them to Paradise myself.
 
My eldest son is almost twelve. Soon he will start riding with me. My name will live through him, as my father's does through me.
 
Every time I carry those who seek Paradise, I find it for myself.

© 2009 Andrew Vachss. All rights reserved.

A version of this story appeared on Andrew Vachss' twitter-feed, November 2009

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