Bluesky

We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don’t run in astraight line.… Your chances go up about one percent.—Donald Trump, July 2025

Alligator Alcatraz: under the white sun of the Everglades, under the whitetents soaked by cloudbursts, under the white LED lights gleaming twenty-four hours a day, migrants writhe sleeplessly in chain-link cages, thirty-twomen to a cage. From Cuba, from Guatemala, from México they wandered,house painters and landscapers handcuffed at mealtime, lifting forkfulsof white rice and maggots to their mouths. Here, an inmate says, thereare more mosquitos than water; here the inmates cry Libertad, Libertadafter the water from the toilets crawls across the floor again, after a mancrawls across the floor, his belly stabbed by kidney stones, then disappears.

Near the gate, on Route 41, an alligator drowses in a drainage ditch, his kindsurvivors of the last great extinction, bored by the speeches at the vigil,by Arianne the tour guide, who walked off her job in Little Havana to standin the mangroves and say the name of her father in his chain-link cage: Justo.Courtney the witness raises up a sign that reads Shame. Like a teacherin pigtails at the whiteboard teaching the word Shame, she enunciatesthe single syllable, taps the sign, gesticulates to the man behind the wheelevery time a car guns through the gate and away from Alligator Alcatraz.

Officer Martínez, guard at Alligator Alcatraz, Special Housing Unit, idlesthe car so he can confess to Courtney in her pigtails. I got fired today,he says, the gashes on his cheek proof of the scuffle with another guard,a brown-skinned boy in his twenties, mustache struggling to sprout fromhis lip. I did it for the money, he says, lamenting all the twenties he flung atthe two-drink minimum or the wriggling strippers of Miami. She asks aboutthe patch on his sleeve. Officer Martínez tears the Velcro from his shoulder,handing her the patch like a souvenir postcard of flamingos in the Everglades.

The patch: Alligator Alcatraz on a red banner, the blockbuster movie nowshowing at the movie house; the Grim Reaper and his ruby eyes, scytheharvesting the souls of border-crossing orange-pickers as if they burstwith the boils of the plague; the alligator skeleton, bone stripped of hide,roaring at his prey the way his ancestors roared eight million years ago;two skulls, skin peeled away in the swamp, the proclamation You Can’t Hidestrung between them; the backdrop of cages behind the danse macabre.

Officer Martínez rolls away, and the keepers of the vigil wonder if they sawa New Testament conversion reenacted in the swamp, if he is Saul of Tarsus, ifRoute 41 is the road to Damascus, if his sun-struck vision will clear and he willcircle back to hoist the sign that reads Shame at the gate of Alligator Alcatraz.An hour later he returns, storming through the gate to snarl at his boss aboutthe job, still in his uniform, another Grim Reaper patch stuck to his shoulder.Courtney hears in her head his words about the patch: You can just have it.I have them made, and I give them out. He storms back, still jobless, and Courtneyhops into his car. Are you wearing a wire? he snaps. She lifts her T-shirt to showhim skin, and he has a vision, flashbacks of the strippers teasing him in Miami.

Officer Martínez is not Saul of Tarsus, not the landscaper or the house painteror the orange-picker, not the inmates pleading for water in the Spanish tongueof his grandparents, not the man caged in solitary, the Special Housing Unit,where the rules on the wall say the guards must loosen the shackles if the steelcuts off the flow of blood to the hands, where they have it easy, he says. He isthe keeper of keys to the shackles, the guard who slaps the Reaper patchin the hands of his brother guards. He is the Reaper, the alligator, the skull.

They tell you they’re your executioners, that you won’t get out of there alive,Ana’s husband testifies, freed in court by writ of habeas corpus, his heartpalpitating when reporters speak of patches worn by the guards. He stillwaits for the Reaper to stride from the patch and handcuff him in the hallway,for the alligator to slither from the patch and drag him into the underworld.I am fourteen hundred miles from Alligator Alcatraz, fourteen hundred milesfrom a guard by the name of Martínez who brawled his job away and stillbelieves his gospel, like a missionary to the Seminoles in the Everglades beforethe Trail of Tears. I am fourteen hundred miles from a sign at the gate that saysShame, yet my skin stings as the word floods my face, a feast of mosquitos.