by G. M. Ford
The bouncy board bridges were strictly one person at a time, especially for a couple of gorillas like Gabe and me. Worse yet, the bottoms of the ditches were filled with several feet of lumpy green liquid, the toxicity level of which I imagined had to be somewhere north of radioactive isotopes. Falling in was not an option.
I was tiptoeing between the second and third bridges when Henrique made it to the far side of the trench. I pulled my eyes up from my feet just in time to see him dart into a narrow alley on the left.
I held out my arms for balance, like a high-wire walker, hurried across the final ditch, and sprinted left. It was that low, hollow whistle that saved my ass. Turned out Henrique was waiting in the gloom. He’d found himself a six-foot section of aluminum fence pipe for the purpose of putting a permanent dent in my head. As the hollow pipe moved through the air it emitted a low whistling sound, a noise something in me immediately recognized as danger.
I dove for his ankles. I felt the breeze, heard the pipe plow into the wall, bounce off, and clatter to the ground. I grabbed his ankles and jerked them out from under him. He landed flat on his ass right in front of me. And then Gabe was all over him like a cheap suit, and the struggle was more or less over. Took us about five minutes of holding him down before he finally stopped flopping around like a beached trout.
Gabe looked over at me. “You okay?”
“Stop it,” I said.
Gabe chuckled out loud.
Henrique’s struggles had left him winded and mouth breathing. Gabe and I got off him and stood up. We both offered him a hand. He thought about it for a moment and then took us up on the offer.
“Listen, man, we didn’t come here to make any trouble for you,” I said as he dusted himself off.
“But we gotta know about the kid in the picture,” Gabe added.
“I told you I—”
I raised a cautionary hand. He flinched.
“Don’t fucking tell me you don’t know who he is . . . ’cause you do. People been lying to me for the better part of twenty-five years. I know bullshit when I hear it.”
Henrique opened his mouth. Then changed his mind and stared down at his shoes.
“He probably don’t have a name. Mostly she don’t give ’em names, ’cause she knows they ain’t gonna be around for long and she don’t want to get too attached to them.”
“Who?”
“Her.”
“Your mother?” Gabe pressed.
Henrique averted his eyes. “I guess . . . if you say so,” he whispered.
“Where do we find her?” I asked.
“Where she belongs,” Henrique spat and turned his face away again.
“Where’s that?”
“At the fucking dump.”
For some reason, Gabe was appalled. “Hey, man . . . you only get one mother.”
“She ain’t nothing but a whore and a baby machine,” Henrique said. He looked from one of us to the other and back. He could tell we were dubious. “She sells her babies, man. That’s what she does. That’s how she lives.”
“Are you trying to tell me . . . ,” Gabe began.
Henrique pounded his chest. “I oughta know, man. She sold me,” he blurted. “When I was eight. I ended up with some rich old lady on Coronado . . . some old navy guy’s wife. I spent almost three years cleaning her toilets and sweeping her fancy floors.” He slashed the air with his hand again. “She wouldn’t let me wear no clothes in the house neither . . . not the whole time I lived there. Only time I seen clothes was if we had to go out someplace.” His eyes got hard as gravel. “She liked to touch me. Said that was how God intended it to be. You know . . . like in the Garden of Eden.”
His long-smoldering shame radiated from him like heat waves, thickening the air. He looked away. I didn’t much want to hear any more either.
“And then what?” I pressed.
“And then my father . . .” He hesitated. Made a face. “Or at least who we think is my father . . . he found me and took me back home.”
“Can we talk to him?” Gabe inquired.
Henrique shrugged. “He died a couple of years back. He was a good man.”
Gabe kept poking at it. “Howsabout the Coronado lady?”
For the first time, his dark eyes lit up. “She died,” Henrique said. “Fell off that chair lift thing she had on the stairs. Busted her fucking neck.”
He grinned, and I didn’t blame him.
“How do we get to the dump?” I asked.
“See . . . this is the end of the commercial shit right here.” Lamar pointed at the rash of mansions despoiling the mountainside in front of them. “This here’s what they call Sunset Cliffs. This ain’t even Ocean Beach no more. These ain’t the same brand of stoners as back in town. These here are the swells who can afford to buy themselves a genuine ocean view.”
When Chub didn’t say anything, Lamar kept talking. “We start knockin’ on doors up there and Mr. and Mrs. Rich Bitch are sure as hell gonna call the cops on us.”
Chub turned in a half circle and gazed back the way they’d come.
They’d driven down from Dog Beach, where they’d spent a spine-crushing night sleeping in the car and then parked and walked south from Point Loma Boulevard, down the part where it was all cliffs and there was no way to get down to the ocean. No houses on the ocean side of the street at all, just a brown dirt path that wove along the serpentine face of the cliffs. On the east side, it was like strictly McMansionville.
This was Sunset Cliffs Nature Park or something like that. A thousand signs telling you what you could and couldn’t do. No smoking. No drinking. No this. No that. Stay back from the unstable cliff edge, all that kind of pushy government shit. Signs had always pissed Lamar off. Something about being told what to do invariably gave him an almost uncontrollable urge to do the opposite. The shrinks said he had a problem with authority. That pissed him off too.
“Yeah,” Chub said finally. “Ain’t nothin’ we can do down here. Let’s go back and do that neighborhood where we parked the car.” Without further discussion, they turned around and started north, back toward the last of the businesses on Point Loma Avenue.
Half a dozen surfers now rode the swells; the parking lots were full. A pair of middle-aged married types jogged by in identical jogging suits, red-faced, huffing and puffing as they passed. Lamar turned his head, watched them wobble off, and snickered to himself.
He first saw the woman when he turned his attention forward again. She was standing on the ocean side of a little fence designed to keep gawkers back from the edge of the cliff. Standing all stiff and straight, like a ballet dancer or something. Great ass on her too. Whooooie! Some firm-lookin’ cheeks there!
He looked up at Chub and was about to make comment regarding her unusually symmetrical posterior when suddenly Chub dribbled to a stop.
“Where’d she go?” Chub asked nobody in particular.
“Who?”
He pointed. “The lady that was standing there.”
Lamar looked back to the spot where he recalled seeing her. Nothing there.
He checked the path in both directions. She wasn’t there either. Either she’d learned to fly or . . .
“Holy shit,” Lamar whispered.
I sat on an empty wooden spool and watched Gabe work the dump for nearly an hour, moving from shack to shack, from tent to tent, from one haggard garbage picker to another, making conversation at every stop along the way, as an endless armada of garbage trucks washed through the gate like beached whales, disgorging their rancid entrails upon the ancient mountains of waste.
Above my head, a swirling maelstrom of seabirds wheeled and screeched with the sound of tearing metal. On the festering piles of refuse, an army of stray dogs and piebald pigs sniffed and snuffled its way from pile to pile in search of sustenance.
Gabe was coming my way now. Crossing one mountain of refuse and then disappearing down into a trash trough before reappearing again atop the next.
I scoo
ted over on the cable spool. Gabe plopped down beside me.
“So?” I said.
“Anytime you get to thinking people like us had it rough, all ya gotta do is spend some time talking to these folks,” Gabe said. “These folks will cure your ass of feeling sorry for yourself . . . fucking forever, man.”
“The mother here?”
Gabe nodded. “Way over on the far side. Lives in an ancient camper. Been there for as long as any of them can remember. Couple of them told me she was born here.”
“We gonna . . . ,” I began.
Gabe started to talk. “From what they tell me there’s about two hundred people who live here full-time. Most of ’em recycle things for a living—glass bottles, metal, cardboard, wood—anything made in the U.S.” Gabe swung an expansive arm. “And it’s all real territorial . . . folks have died defending their territory. Other people been killed for poaching. Everybody has their own little area they pick. They sell whatever they find to middlemen who sell it to recyclers—you know, except for the food they find. That they either eat themselves or feed to the pigs.”
I watched another garbage truck regurgitate its load. “How the fuck do you eat anything from this place?”
“Don’t think about it,” Gabe advised.
“Anybody hear anything about her selling babies?”
“Just all of ’em,” Gabe said with a sigh. “And she ain’t the only one doing it neither. Around here selling kids seems to be a major part of makin’ ends meet.”
A red wave of anger washed over me. “How the fuck can anybody rationalize selling their own kids, for Christ’s sake?”
“They think they’re doing them a favor. One lady I talked to said she figured they’d end up with a better life no matter where they ended up than they would if they stayed around here.”
I’m not often at a loss for words. Gabe sensed it and pointed west. “Over there, by the ocean, there’s a big graveyard. Costs fifteen bucks to bury your dead. To these people . . . far as they’re concerned, that’s the alternative over there.”
We sat in silence for a while beneath the swirling, keening birds, interrupted at intervals by the rattling knock of diesel engines and the whine of hydraulics.
“We should talk to her,” I said finally.
“About what?” Gabe asked disgustedly. “About how she should be a nice lady and stop selling her kids?” Gabe’s jaw clamped down hard, jaw muscles quivering like cables under strain.
I thought about it some. “We should ask her about how she lets them know she’s got another one ready.” I shrugged. “Some way or another, she has to have a way of getting in touch with whoever it is she sells them to.”
There was no arguing with that, so we didn’t bother. Rather than marching hill and dale over the garbage Alps, we fanned way out to the east side of the dump and walked along the fence line to the very back of the landfill.
Her abode was a scabrous old cab-over camper mounted on cinder blocks instead of a pickup truck. A peeling red logo on the cab-over part announced it was a Caveman camper. Grants Pass, Oregon. The slider window on the near side was broken out and had been replaced with a jagged piece of plywood.
She was sitting on a bent patio chair stirring a pot of something on an old Coleman stove. There were three children sitting on five-gallon paint buckets in an arc around the stove. Ages two to six or so. Genders uncertain, as none of them looked like they’d ever had a haircut.
Her age was anybody’s guess. People who spend their golden years hanging around the pool in Palm Springs tend to age a mite slower than people who scavenge the Tijuana dump for a living. She was somewhere between forty and sixty. Long graying hair and an overall layer of grime that looked like it had been on her for years.
First thing she did at the sight of us was hustle the kids into the camper and close the door. She stood like a sentry, peering out at us with a puffy red eye through a slit in her cascade of falling hair.
I put a hand on Gabe’s arm. We both stopped walking. I reached into my back pocket, pulled up the folded photograph and handed it over.
“Let’s not scare her any more than we have to,” I whispered.
Gabe got the message. I hung back as Gabe slowly approached the woman.
When Gabe unfolded the photo and held it up in front of her face, she shook her head violently and tried to escape into the camper. Gabe threw an arm around her waist and hauled her back to the ground. She punched Gabe in the face with the side of her fist. Gabe ignored it. She started pounding Gabe’s chest. Gabe just stood there and looked at her as she pounded away. Eventually, she ran out of gas. Her limp arm dropped to her side and stayed there.
The wind brought me several snippets of Spanish as the two of them went back and forth, shouting above the din. Finally they walked over to the camper door together. The second she opened the door, Gabe slid into the doorjamb. Couple of minutes passed before she reappeared holding a filthy scrap of paper in her hand.
Gabe turned my way. “Lemme have that pad and pencil you always carry.”
I moved slowly. The woman eyed me like I was a pack of circling wolves.
Gabe stuck out a hand. I put my little spiral-bound private eye notebook and green golf pencil in Gabe’s hand and then backpedaled to where I’d previously been standing.
Took another two or three minutes before Gabe started walking back my way. The second Gabe turned to leave, the woman rushed for the camper and disappeared inside. I heard the snick of the lock. Gabe heard it too.
Gabe gave me a bob of the head that said, Let’s get the hell out of here. I followed along in Gabe’s wake, back along the fence, taking the long way around, until we were back by the gate, sharing the same wooden cable spool we’d shared earlier.
“So?” I said again.
Gabe pulled out my notebook and pencil and handed them to me. “She’s got something she wants to sell, she calls that number,” Gabe said.
I flipped through the pages. “San Diego number,” I said. I’ve always had a keen perception of the obvious.
“She says two guys always show up for the pickup. Both Americans. One she describes as the fancy guy. Says he wears fancy shoes. He’s the one who hands out the money. The other one she refers to as a mechanic. Big man, she says. Says he always wears some shirt with a name on the front.”
“I still can’t wrap my head around anybody selling a kid,” I muttered.
“I said the same thing to her,” Gabe mused. “You know what she asked me?”
“What?”
“She told me how she’s already lost two children to malnutrition, and then . . . then she asked me if I was sure what I’d do to keep them from starving to death?”
I floated it through my circuits for a while. It wasn’t a comfortable ride.
“So . . . we found one end of this daisy chain . . . What are we gonna do about it?”
“Go back to O.B., see if we can unwind the other end.”
I nodded. I felt weary—lead heavy and out of sorts, kinda like my imaginary dog had died or something. “Yeah . . . for sure,” I said. “I don’t see how making that poor woman’s life any more miserable . . .” I threw a futile hand into the air. “I just can’t see how it’s gonna make the world a better place.”
“Wouldn’t work anyway,” Gabe said disgustedly. “I mean . . . who we gonna call? The Federales? Like they’re gonna do anything about it.”
“Ghostbusters,” I suggested.
Gabe stifled a bitter laugh. “Maybe Saunders can trace the phone number,” Gabe added, trying to find something positive amid the refuse of the morning.
“Let’s round up the sheep and get the flock out of here,” I said.
Took us a sweaty hour to walk back to the border and then another forty-five minutes to ride the trolley back to San Diego. I don’t think we shared ten words the whole time.
Lamar skidded to a stop six feet from the edge of the cliff, flopped down onto his belly, and began to crawl forward like an
inchworm on meth.
“You better stay back, man,” he yelled over his shoulder at Chub. “You’re too heavy.”
He kept inching along until he was able to peer down at the beach. The missing girl was there, all twisted up on the black rocks. Lamar winced. Above the roar of the surf he could hear her low moan. He winced again and then crawled backward on his hands and knees. As he pushed himself to his feet, he said to Chub, “She’s still alive, man, but there ain’t no way down there.”
Chub pointed toward the surfers. “They got down there.”
The big guy had a point. Lamar didn’t know squat about surfing, but by his estimation, the surfers were way too far from the beach for anybody to have paddled a board down here, so there pretty much had to be another way down to the water.
Chub jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “I’ll go this way. You go that way,” he said and took off south, moving right up to the edge of the cliff so’s he could see over the top.
Lamar started north at a lope. About seventy yards north of where she’d gone over, he noticed a worn trail of bare footprints that crossed the main trail. He inched over to the edge and looked down.
Looked like a rocky mountain trail. More like a series of footholds worn into the side of the crumbling cliff face.
Lamar brought two fingers to his lips and let go with his best whistle. A quarter mile south, Chub stopped in his tracks and looked back. Lamar gave him a double get your ass here in a big hurry wave. Chub began lumbering in Lamar’s direction.
Took a minute or two. Speed wasn’t necessarily Chub’s strong point. As he approached, Lamar pointed wildly at the spot.
“They go down here,” he shouted.
Lamar had sort of assumed they’d work their way down to the rocks together, but Chub ran by him like he wasn’t there, stepped down onto the first cutout, and disappeared over the side.