Suicide in the Desert

By Scott Steward, 14 July, 2022

The desert was cold that night. The vault of stars seemed to extend forever beyond the dunes and jagged mountain ranges. We navigated by moonlight. Weglin was ahead of me. My thumb was sore from holding down the throttle of the ATV. The night air bit into my face under my helmet. The wind felt like tiny daggers. Sharp, and cold. Painful. It was February. We were riding to a scene of a suicide from the night before. Weglin believed in ghosts. We were riding into the night to see one.

We passed a sign at the entrance of the recreational area off Interstate 8. The sign read “Imperial Sand Dunes” in large official letters. The dunes stretched seventy-five miles from Mexico to Slab City in Southern California. Slab City was a squatter area whose inhabitants have made their home on the concrete slabs General Patton used to park his tanks on the train up leading to the invasion of North Africa in World War II. This is where we worked. The Imperial Valley.

We pushed our machines up to seventy miles per hour on the black top before slowing down and turning South off the road onto the imposing “Swingles Hill”. There was a wooden plank road at the end of the long flat hill that jutted out separating two small depressions. The plank road was built in 1915 over the Algodones Dunes. The road was the last commercial link between Arizona and San Diego before they built Interstate 8. Parts of the plank road remains, the wooden planks shriveled and warped by decades of baking in the sun. Beyond the plank road was the Mexican border. A drag road of smooth sand ran East and West alongside the imaginary border. The smooth sand of the road allowed the Border Patrol to detect footprints of people crossing the border. It was made by slowly pulling tires behind a Border Patrol SUV. “We’ll start our cut here and then head to where that kid shot himself yesterday.”, Weglin said over his radio. He increased his speed. I followed.

Anthony Weglin was my supervisor. He was a tall bald man. He had a gut on him. His steel blue eyes revealed intelligence. Weglin was Mormon but had the foulest mouth of just about anyone I’ve ever met. The man had a curious mind. We once put blacklights on our quads and searched the desert for scorpions. They lit up every twenty feet. We collected them for Weglin’s scientist friend in Yuma. We collected thirteen scorpions one night, but Weglin told us only twelve made it home. One got eaten.

I was partnered with Weglin that night. I liked riding with him. We were members of the US Border Patrol’s Desert Safety Unit. Our “quads” were Yamaha 450 ATVs. Four wheeled motorcycles essentially with enough power to speed up to ninety miles per hour on the highway. We rode lights out much of the time. It was a dangerous job, but we were addicted to adrenaline. Most of us must have had a death wish. Our unit was tasked with desert rescues and enforcing the border. Migrants often got lost in the desert when their foot guides abandoned them. I once encountered a group of twelve people who had not eaten for three days. I was in a rig that day. A Ford Expedition. I squeezed them all inside with a small girl in the front seat and slowly made my way to the station where there was food and blankets.

Weglin and I were going to start our cut and then go find the spot where a kid shot himself. We rode slowly and let the special lights mounted at the bottom of our quads illuminate the smooth sand of the drag road. Any footprints would stand out under our lights. We called this sign cutting. A fancy word for tracking. We tracked human beings for a living. When we caught them, we would identify and arrest the smuggler. The others would be taken to the station in Calexico and given juice and crackers and taken back to Mexicali where they would cross again until they got through. It took about three days for the average migrant to make it into the United States. It was a senseless game. There was death. People’s lives were on the line. The border was never black and white. It has always been grey.

Weglin and I made our way down the side of Swingles onto the drag road in the valley below. The road passed by the hulk of an abandoned tractor that was stolen and driven North from Mexico. A few weeks earlier I was partnered with Taylor, the tall kid from Buffalo. He used to work at a prison. Taylor and I spotted some men sneaking over the border to strip parts from the tractor. “Let’s ambush them.”, Taylor said. We waited until dusk to make our move. The sun had dipped below the dunes.

When the two men crossed the border for their nightly raid, we pounced. Our quads descended upon them at a high rate of speed blowing a trail of dust behind. The migrants called the quads motos. The men ran toward the drag road and the border. Taylor took off after one and I went after the other. When I got close, I jumped from my ATV and tackled the man. He was shirtless and out of breath. I got him under control. I looked back over my shoulder at Taylor. He was squaring off with the other man who held a shovel above his shoulder as if to swing it. I quickly started handcuffing the man under me so I could help Taylor. “We don’t need to get into a shooting tonight.”, I thought. As I put on the first cuff Taylor returned. “Let him go.”, he said.

I looked back and saw the one with the shovel was standing lone and staring at us from the distance.

“Why?”, I asked.

“He’s drunk.”

“So”

“And we’re in Mexico.”

I looked toward Swingles. We were fifty yards South of the border road.

“Fuck”

There was a policy in our Sector which prevented the arrest of an intoxicated person. The argument was an agent couldn’t determine the alienage of a drunk person. I would have taken him in for processing and records checks but Taylor was right. We don’t need an international incident. Although our incursion was in good faith, the Mexican government often did not see it that way. I released the man. He stood up and they both ran off deeper into the Mexican side of the desert.

I shook off the memory as we passed the tractor and started to head uphill into the tall dunes. I was eating a lot of dust from Weglin’s quad. I backed off but the sand still found its way under the bandana I had tied around my mouth underneath my motorcycle helmet. My goggles protected my eyes. I followed Weglin up the steep dune at the end of the drag road. We turned north when we got to the top. We made our way along a series of sand dunes. Up and down through the peaks and into the valleys. We turned our quads just before the peaks of the tall sand dunes to make sure there wasn’t a razorback. If you went over a razorback, you would fall straight down on the backside of a dune from where the wind created a sheer wall of sand. I knew an agent who broke his femur that way and had to be airlifted. Weglin and I finally stopped on the flat part of a particularly tall dune. From our vantage we could see the Interstate to our North.

I turned off my quad. I took my helmet off. Then my gloves. They were sweaty, even though it was cool outside. Weglin was already walking around with his flashlight. The moon disappeared behind a cloud. It was almost pitch black on top of the dune. The stars that peered between the cloud cover were immaculate. Like diamonds. The lights from the city of Yuma glowed faintly in the East beyond the dunes. “Here it is.”, Weglin exclaimed. “This is where he died.” Weglin’s four cell flashlight shone its yellow light on a deep purple stain in the sand. It was large and spread out two feet in each direction. There was a purple latex glove sticking out from the sand next to the sand. “Can you believe how much blood comes from a single gunshot wound?” Weglin said. “I bet this blood stain clumped up and goes down a foot deep.”

The night before Weglin and Allison Strom was dispatched to this location. Some people saw someone shooting Red Bull cans in the desert by his truck. Weglin and Allison found the guy and spoke with him. She was the only female on our team. She was young with long mouse brown hair. She had a small tattoo of a butterfly on the web between her forefinger and thumb on her right hand. She was short and thin. She could hold her own. I’ve seen her take down a man twice her size. I don’t think anything could have prepared her for what she was to witness that nigh.

There was nothing illegal about shooting cans in this section of the desert. Having found no wrongdoing Weglin and Strom rode off. The kid continued shooting Red bull cans as he finished drinking them.

The kid’s name was John White. He was about twenty-four. He told Weglin he worked as a mechanic in Phoenix. He was slightly overweight and not very good looking. Strom told me he was a motorhead. A dune dummy. That’s what we called the off-road enthusiasts. White’s dark brown hair was already receding. He was driving a new black Toyota pickup truck. He told Weglin he would drive it to the dunes sometimes to clear his head. The Glock pistol belonged to the kid. Everything checked out.

Later that evening Weglin received another call over his radio. This time the call was about an injured person in the dunes. When Weglin and Allison Strom arrived at the location they immediately saw the kid’s truck. A body was laying its back on the ground by the front door of the truck. It was open. It was the kid. His legs were flailing. Blood poured out of a small hole in the side of his temple. The Glock was still in his hand. A song played from inside the cab. It was “Somebody” by Depeche Mode. It was set on repeat.

Next to the kid’s body was a shrine. A large picture frame contained a photograph of a young blonde woman. She was pretty. The kind of woman that was too good to be true for many men. There were other small photos of the two of them attached around the frame. There were Birthday cards. Anniversary cards. Get well cards. A dried corsage. Some dried flowers, the sort that one puts in a book to press. All these items were carefully crafted into a memorial for the woman in photo. The one with whom he apparently dedicated his gunshot to the head. John White did not die there on the sand that day. He was airlifted to the Yuma hospital where he succumbed to his wounds ten hours later. Ten hours of agony as his life slowly left his body.

“Pretty weird right?” Weglin said. We stood silently on the dune under the cold night sky. The head lamps of our ATVs illuminated the purple blood stain as Weglin recounted what he saw. A light breeze came up from the West. It rustled up the fine sand on the dune's surface, and we watched as it danced and weaved over the blood stain and around our boots. I felt sad as the wind blew through my hair and touched my face. “I want to bring a tape recorder out here and let it play to see if it captures anything.”, Weglin said. He did but it never captured anything but silence and the wind in the desert.

On the way home that night I drove down the long stretch of black highway toward Yuma. I thought about the lyrics to the song “Somebody” that the kid had on repeat inside the cab of his truck. The words reverberated in my thoughts sharing the visions of death and despair; of lost love and the pain of living that is sometimes too much for some.

“I want somebody to share, share the rest of my life,

share my innermost thoughts, know my intimate detailsSomeone who'll stand by my side and give me support And in return, she'll get my support

She will listen to me when I want to speak

About the world we live in and life in general

Though my views may be wrong,

they may even be perverted

She'll hear me out and won't easily be converted

To my way of thinking, in fact, she'll often disagree

But at the end of it all, she will understand me…”

~Depeche Mode, Somebody

The End.