The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  “A thousand bikes?” McCue said.

  “More,” said Terry.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “Right on over here.” The younger Tynan turned on a heel. We followed. And around the side of the barn, we came upon the collection. Anything professional in our demeanors—McCue’s as an environmental advocate, mine as a journalist—evaporated with each step we made into the heap. Bikes for every stage of our lives lay mashed together. A change came over all of us, even Terry. Being confronted with that many used and distinctive bicycles, each one a history, laid in piles and rows, on their sides, upright and upside down, poised on seats and handlebars—it does something to the imagination.

  I was immediately transported to a childhood vacation. My parents had wedged us kids into the 1978 Volvo station wagon and pointed it east. Around Rye, Arizona, we came upon a fenced industrial graveyard called All Bikes. Inside were acres of bicycles and motorcycles and three-wheelers. You may know the feeling when, on mountain roads in deep winter, the passing of a snowplow has created a hallway within a snow shed that extends far overhead—you travel between the walls guided only by headlight and depth perception. This was a boy’s experience of navigating the footpaths between these piles and piles of bikes, bikes on top of bikes, machinery without end. For a kid who’d caught the bug of going fast and taking chances, there was nothing to compare it with. The place oozed possibility.

  Sometime before, my first brand-new bike, a white Huffy BMX with blue gel grips and matching rims, had vanished. As the neighborhood rumor mill had it, the Huffy had been stolen by local toughs who’d lifted a manhole cover on an unnamed street and dropped the small bike into the black hole. In my young mind, in my imagination, the bike had fallen like a stone into a dark abyss and continued on forever—through the sewer with the rain and wastewater as if on a journey to the center of the void. When I saw the bicycle Valhalla of Rye, Arizona, I realized where my personal BMX had ended up. If only I had a compass, I thought, and provisions, and years to search for it.

  About as soon as I lost sight of my family members—we’d all cut our own trails—I encountered a man holding an old motorcycle tank. He was trying to flag down the proprietor. “Hello,” he called, “hello? Anyone running this place?” A gray-bearded man with a lank ponytail stood up from a pyramid of parts about twenty yards away. He wore coveralls and held a carburetor in his left hand.

  “What’ll you get for this tank?” asked the customer.

  “That’ll be five hundred.”

  “I could get the motorcycle for that,” the man said knowingly. “How about fifty?”

  “You asked the price, mister, and I told you.”

  “It’s rusty.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dented.”

  “That too.”

  “You Solomon? Think all this junk is gold?” asked the man. “I’ll give you sixty-five.”

  “Five hundred.”

  The customer dropped the tank. It clunked between the frames of bikes. He walked off, disappearing into the metal. The proprietor watched.

  I decided to try my luck. People had a soft spot, I’d learned, for youths. “What about this bike?” I said, pointing to a burnt-orange Schwinn.

  “You don’t have enough, kid,” he said, and bent to his work in the pile. Whatever the cost, he was right, because I didn’t have any. Back in the car, the family exchanged their various encounters with the owner, and we came to the conclusion that All Bikes was not, in fact, a retail operation. It was a hoarder’s paradise, the treasures an obsessive-compulsive had laid up for himself on his acre of heaven in Rye. He didn’t want any of the other kids to have any of it, not one little piece.

  No one deserved to be that lucky, I thought for a long, long time. And decades later, I felt the same way about this Terry Tynan.

  “You can have any one of ’em for twenty, that’s what I sell ’em for at the swap meet. Long as they work; if not, maybe less.”

  Terry, God bless him, was not as particular as the proprietor of All Bikes. Someone dropping by the ranch with a twenty-spot was all the better for Terry. He liked bikes, but he liked to sell them from the same piece of dirt where he’d found them even better. “That’s a pretty good markup, don’t you think?” he asked.

  Within ten minutes of sifting through the possibilities, McCue and I had each mentally separated a bike for ourselves. Still, something inside me reserved the option for a change of heart. There were just so many. And despite our awe at the variety, complexity, and sheer number of his bikes, I’d later come to discover that Terry gleaned what he considered the very best and kept them stored away in a shed right next to the pile for safekeeping. But even if I’d known, I couldn’t have begrudged him because as soon as we’d marveled at his commitment and compulsion for collecting bikes, the three of us were smashed into the truck so Terry could show McCue and me how he tracked them. “I know where there’s three right now,” Terry said. “Let’s go.”

  We bumped along. Terry explained how, a year or so earlier, he’d been standing on the family property and his eyes happened to travel up the slope to Spooner’s Mesa. There he saw a man descending the trail on a bike. It looked like a flea dragging a dust plume down the hillside. Terry realized that this must be “an illegal.”

  “A bold break,” he thought aloud. It was an educated appraisal. Terry and his family had seen just about everything—on the last flood a man had ridden a Boogie Board into the United States and gotten stuck in a tree. It took all kinds.

  One time a young woman crossed the border alone while in labor, lay down in the Kimzey fields, and delivered her own baby—now a US citizen by birthright. The mother mustered enough strength to carry the newborn to the ranch-house door. Sharon Kimzey-Moore, Terry’s aunt, answered the knock and was confronted with the young woman, the baby, and the wet umbilical cord that still connected both. In a state of bewilderment, Kimzey-Moore brought a chair and a glass of water. Terry’s aunt didn’t speak much Spanish but offered to call an ambulance. The woman said, “No ambulance,” and signaled that she wanted to use the phone herself. Fifteen minutes after she placed her call, a taxi pulled up to the house. The new mother simply stepped into the cab with her baby and the driver accelerated off to who knows where.

  For Terry, however, the first bicycle rider represented something new. Sunlight illuminated the dusty contrail for everyone to see. Wind whipped it into an alarm. The man disappeared behind a bend. Terry ran down the ranch lane to catch a view of the rider as he hit the flats. Once at the road, Terry imagined, the man had a number of options. He could veer onto Hollister. He could ride Monument to Dairy Mart Road and run straight into the freeway. In between, there were a dozen farm roads to blend into. But as soon as the rider reached the valley floor, just a few yards from the ranch gate, a white-and-green Border Patrol jeep swooped in—sirens wailing.

  Terry made the scene as the Mexican cyclist was cuffed and escorted into the vehicle. His bike lay in the dirt. The agents stepped into the jeep themselves and slammed the doors. Terry stopped the men to point out the neglected bike. They shrugged. “Take it,” one of them said.

  “The Border Patrol doesn’t mind someone helping ’em out,” Terry reasoned.

  Not long afterward, Dick was out making his rounds on horseback when he rode down to the river. “I saw about ten bicycles abandoned down there,” he said. “And I came back and told Terry.”

  “That was the start of it,” he said.

  As we drove along the valley’s back roads, Terry described the geography in the framework of this new history. “Got one on the side of that bridge,” he said, or “I found a real nice beach cruiser in that ravine,” and, “Seen a big group come down Goat Canyon.”

  The Border Patrol graded the dirt tracks each night by dragging chained tires or logs behind a truck. This way any new marks on the road could give agents an idea of where an illegal crossing might have taken place, how many crossers there were, and a reasonabl
e block of time in which this traffic passed. In the eastern deserts, the technique also allowed BP to track migrants who came in on foot or on horseback. But the wetlands in the Tijuana River Valley halted any northbound sign, as did the pavement at Monument and Hollister. “Cutting sign” didn’t aid enforcement here as much as it did in the wilderness.

  The road grading seemed to benefit Terry a great deal, however. He’d developed a habit of leaving the ranch in the early morning. And he followed any writhing tire tracks he found, often into the bush. After fifty years of steady migration through the valley, the footpaths off the road were obvious. Terry would walk them as far as they went, about to the water’s edge, and that’s where he’d find the bikes.

  “Ten here, fifteen there—day after day after day. It seemed like each group had a scout with ’em. Sometimes I’d just watch ’em hightail it down the road. Then I’d go find the bikes.”

  Once, while driving the ranch four-wheeler, Terry came upon a man he’d never seen before. The man was pushing a bicycle and he waved. Terry stopped. “The bici, it has a bad wheel,” the man complained in broken English. He pointed at the rear tire. It was as flat as a run-down snake.

  “Give me a ride on back?” the man asked, indicating the quad.

  “No way, José,” Terry said.

  Despairing, the migrant dropped the bike and walked off into the trees. “So I grabbed it,” Terry said, nodding.

  Knowing his affinity for the bicycles, BP officers he’d become acquainted with might stop by the ranch or flag Terry on the road to tell him the location of a new stash. Once, he drove up on an agent who was waiting on foot with a detainee. Terry said he stopped his truck and waved, and the agent “actually grabbed the bike and put it in the back of my truck for me.”

  “Pull over here,” Terry said. McCue parked in a random spot on a ranch road. To our left rose the border highlands; unseen but straight ahead lay the Pacific. Hidden somewhere beyond the greenery to our right was the river. We got out and hiked over a berm.

  “There were some points in time where some really nice bikes were being left,” Terry said fondly, as he led us across a clearing and toward what looked like a wall of brambles. Only up close was it possible to see a thin footpath like a crevice in a cliff face. On this path, Terry said, he once stumbled upon three young women and four men, their bikes lying in the dirt and against trees. They’d been forced to break off from their group and were now without a guide. Terry found them huddled as if making a new plan. One of the men spoke some English. On seeing Terry, he asked, “What way do we go?”

  The rancher gave them directions to Imperial Beach as best he could. “Then I went back and called Border Patrol,” he said as we walked. “Well, maybe I didn’t that time, but I have in the past.”

  Terry didn’t care about the illegal crossing. It was obvious what interested him lay right there on the ground.

  We entered onto the path between the trees and just a few yards in, Terry stopped and swept a leafy branch to the side. There was one beach cruiser and one mountain bike—only two bikes, not three as he’d remembered. These days Terry wasn’t the only collector in the valley. One of the neighbors must have come along, probably planning to return with a truck for the other two, as we had. Despite the thousand or so piled back at the ranch, you could see the sting of the missing one cross his brow. Terry Tynan had become as transfixed as a beachcomber by the various multicolored and useful items. Other than a passing interest in the small profit they brought at the swap meet, I don’t think even he knew why he wanted them so much. But there they were, new and different every day.

  3

  Within days of Pablo’s arrival in Tijuana in late 2005, the Oaxacan developed a habit of wandering along the fence line that climbed and dipped through the mesas and canyons west of the city center. The paths along the border were chalky and hot, and the car-tire soles of his huaraches would have slipped easily on the loose sand. Aside from the low brush and the occasional cactus, the hilltops were barren. The rusty border fence was an eel’s fin writhing into the interior. From any of the heights—Russian Hill, Bunker Hill, Spooner’s Mesa—one could see the sparkling blue bay and the gleaming towers of downtown San Diego. Compared to Mexico City’s low sprawl, this vertical skyline was stark—a dazzling precipice of glass and steel. A number of the southernmost California neighborhoods were also in view. To the west was the arch of the Coronado Bridge, and to the east, the snaking cul-de-sacs of salmon-colored tract homes that spilled out toward the mountains. If Pablo had known the location of the two-bedroom apartment his parents, two grown brothers, and two sisters shared in a south country barrio, he likely could have fixed its vicinity in the cityscape. The dream he’d harbored in the village would have looked different from up here.

  Prospects for food or a roof over his head in this part of Tijuana were slim. It was the absolute margin. Even the shantytowns thinned out and gave way before the boundary. One could sleep in a ditch, maybe, or a culvert. The downtown halfway houses that served migrants and deportees could board passers-through for only a few nights, and then the travelers were sent on their respective ways.

  Often the next step for the deported was to take up residence along the Tijuana River, the stinking and paved no man’s land. Here, the challenges of the disenfranchised were laid bare for the city to see—scrums of men surrounding acrid trash fires, faces sunburnt and blackened from exposure. Clustered plastic and cardboard hovels evoked a sense of establishment. These aboveground structures had cultivated a regional nickname, ñongos. But the crude holes that recent arrivals dug for shelter also had a term, pocitos, or “wells.” Many river dwellers existed virtually without a nation. Identification documents were consistently lost during the deportation process. In the streets of Tijuana, the lack of a voter ID card subjected one to arrest at any time; and gaining legal employment was impossible. Mexican federal law guaranteed the public use of water bodies and their shorelines, which made the river the only place to turn.

  New migrants like Pablo who didn’t have enough cash for a hotel room or the ability to pay a coyote soon found themselves in the same boat as the deported. Tijuana police kept their eyes peeled for pollos to sell, as each one was worth about a hundred bucks or so. Wandering men and women dressed in the clothing of peasants were stopped and questioned—amiably at first, but always with the threat of arrest. If the migrants didn’t have the ability to pay smugglers for their services they couldn’t be sold by police. In this instance, officers would take whatever they had in their pockets. Sometimes even belts and shoes were seized. To ensure that victimized migrants couldn’t make a claim, the police often took their identification, a wound that was sure to hasten stagnation and hunger. Tijuanenses called potential crossers migrantes and this term carried a measure of respect for people out to do better for themselves. But just a short stint in the river garnered a new status, indigentes, the indigent—which suggested a person with fewer prospects than the outright homeless.

  To live in a dirt well, scamper from police, abide in a river community ruled by drug users—to slip farther from the lowly rung of migrante into the indigente—was not an option for Pablo. It was not the dream he nurtured. Yet it seemed that in the period before Solo arrived, Pablo was at risk of losing sight of his goals. The masses of cars and heavy trucks, the roar of jets out of Tijuana International, the multistory buildings that stretched higher than the tree line of his foothill village—they all created a dizzying sense of dislocation. Pablo coped only by keeping on the move, by hiking and walking.

  A lone juvenile who stalked the margins, keeping a distinct distance from the camps of strangers, however, would have led a haunted existence: eyeballs and portions of faces peering from tin-roofed shanties in el Cañón de los Laureles, the gazes of passing motorists on the International Road. What did they see? A pollo or an indigente? One could only duck and run at the sight of the municipal police and their flashing blue lights. At some point Pablo’s rambling c
aught the discerning eye of a well-respected coyote, one of the polleros viejos. Roberto did some work along this corridor—not as much here as in the old days, but there were still some opportunities. This was old ground and it was his habit to notice every movement in it.

  One evening, Roberto assembled his workers and pollos in strategic position at the lip of Slaughterhouse Canyon. The sky was riven with gold desert light. But on the western horizon, a great cloudbank surged into the snowy reach of a mountain range. Once the sun dipped into the peaks and ridges of cloud, Roberto knew, all would become gray. He scanned the terrain, including a perch where a white-and-green Border Patrol jeep was parked just on the other side of the boundary. El coyote’s survey continued before locking on the form of a young man—this figure squatted on haunches below a stand of mule fat and sagebrush.

  “You, joven,” Roberto said. “Come here.” The drifter obliged—but neither too fast nor too slow. When the hunched youth drew near, Roberto asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Pablo,” he answered. The coyote paused; he already knew.

  “That’s right, Pablito from Oaxaca.” Roberto nodded. “You look surprised. I have a memory for such things. Last time, you said you were waiting for something, an idea you had.” Roberto quietly stepped to the side and evaluated the migrant in profile. “Are you still waiting for that idea, amigo? Or are you ready to cross tonight?”

  Pablo stiffened, but followed the coyote with his eyes. Otherwise, he didn’t blink or swallow or respond in any way.

  “To be reserved is a good quality, especially here.” Roberto looked over at his people milling about. “Oye,” he shouted, “get in the van.” Then he turned back. “No need to say more than is required.”