“But once on a Greyhound bus from Calexico to Los Angeles I met a Mexican-American man whose best friend had lost three sisters, ages sixteen, fourteen and thirteen. It happened right on the eastern border of Imperial, in Yuma, Arizona, and the reason that the man told me his friend’s story was that fourteen more pollos had just died of thirst when their coyote abandoned them in the very same spot; so it must have been 2001 when I heard the story, which took place about fifteen years earlier; and you already know the ending. They’d paid their big money, then waited and waited, after which forensicists identified the decomposed bodies of those three young girls. They never found the coyote. The mother went crazy. And the man told this steadily and so softly that I thought that only I could hear, but when he had finished, everyone on the bus fell silent. How could it be right to make art out of this? And yet of course it would be right to make a poem or a song, a painting or a novel about it, if doing so would help anyone to feel. Steinbeck might have been able to do it. Maybe someday I will attempt to do it. At the moment, I cannot presume to do anything with this story except to show it to you, tiptoe around it, and walk away.”

(William T. Vollmann, Imperial, chapter 11, “Subdelineations: Bookscapes,” pp. 173–4.)