The police truck stopped at the end of the track. Gordito and the female officer stepped out and walked into the declivity where the polleros waited. Gordito rested his hands on his gun belt the way a man might hold the rails of a rowboat in risky seas. The woman proceeded with outstretched arms while gazing at her feet, a fat lady balancing on a line. Their dark uniforms could not mask the darker marks in the armpits.
“Hola, muchachos,” Gordito called, his breath heavy and short.
The timing was particularly bad. If he’d come about some pollos he wanted to sell, it was too late to check them out. And if he’d brought bikes, they weren’t really needed. But today there was an altered demeanor in the partners.
“Buenos días,” Indio said.
A second police truck then pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the International Road above. Two policemen emerged from the vehicle. Standing at the guardrail, they had a direct view of the action.
“No pollos?” Indio inquired of Gordito. “No bikes?”
“You’ve got to come with us today,” the cop said.
“We are about to do some work here.”
“Maybe them,” he said, indicating Solo, Javy, and Juan, “but not you.”
“What’s up?”
“You failed to make arrangements with the chief.”
“We’ve been doing business with you.”
Gordito shrugged. “He doesn’t know that.”
The bikes were already on the other side. The time was right for the crossing; a moment more and the white-and-green migra truck would descend Bunker Hill for the shift change. In one swift action, Indio and the migrants could be cycling away from these cops and their entire union of corruption. It was a plan they’d rehearsed, but for some reason, Indio did not make this move.
“Okay,” he said. “So, I come with you, but my guys stay here, right?”
“Está bien,” the policeman agreed. His shoulders slacked.
While the rest stayed put, Indio began hiking up the gravelly slope to meet the cops. When he reached them, Gordito said, “Now, please turn around.”
Solo, the guides, and their migrants watched as Indio obliged.
“On second thought,” Gordito said, pausing to address his partner, “I believe the pollos should also come with us.”
She nodded in agreement.
“For what purpose?” Indio asked.
“They are worth something to the other polleros.”
“Who will only sell them back to me,” Indio said. “Let’s say we cut out the middleman. I’ll pay you for them now.”
“That will work too.” Gordito shrugged.
The partners led Indio to their vehicle and ushered him in, before squeezing into the cab themselves. Solo watched the truck make a jerky multipoint turn, its tires burdened in the wheel wells as it trundled up the track. The other policemen had vanished from the roadside.
That evening, El Indio strode into the Chicago Club. Both poles were occupied by dancers; the music bumped loud with the tinny brass of norteño music. Vinyl booths overflowed with patrons, waitresses sashaying among them. Juan, Javy, and Solo lounged at the bar—not like celebrants but after-work grumblers.
“Indio,” Juan roared when he spotted the boss approaching, “you got sprung!” He flagged the bartender. “A beer for the inmate!”
Solo stood and grasped his friend about the shoulders. “Amigo, when you were arrested, I thought, shit, we weren’t going to see you again. The Zona room was already so lonely, I couldn’t stand it.”
“I wasn’t arrested,” Indio said.
Solo straightened. Indio let the embrace fall from his shoulders. He looked at the gang of men backed by colored lights and dancers. The rollicking music, the party, suddenly seemed estranged from this interview. There were no friends here. “Did you guys cross the pollos?” Indio asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Every one of them.”
Solo hesitated, but said, “When we met Martín for the pickup, he asked about you. I couldn’t lie.”
“Lie about what?”
“The arrest, or whatever,” Solo said.
“Gordito and the lady? They came on an errand, a courtesy.”
“And the handcuffs?” asked Javy.
“For their protection, cabrón.”
“Indio, you think that fat bitch is afraid of you?”
“At the time, I don’t know. But now, definitely. The chief and I came to an agreement.”
The veteran coyote known as El Sombra confirmed the situation. “When El Indio was working,” he said, “you could see the lights from the police cars stopped on the side of the International Road. Absolutely no one could approach the area. I don’t think the president had the security El Indio did.”
Of course, this was not exactly true. Known operators like El Sombra were granted access. And it wasn’t long before a recruiter whom Indio had met at the bus station along with the very first of his Tijuana acquaintances—such as Javy and Juan—arrived with two migrants he apparently wished to pass. The duty of managing pollos had fallen to Solo, and so it was not without interest that he observed the arrival of this odd troop. The enganchador nodded to Solo. But on greeting El Indio, his demeanor bloomed.
Indio’s old comrade said, “Look at you, amigo, the hero of all of the bus station workers. You know that, right? The way you’ve come up.”
“Gracias, Chino,” Indio said. “It’s good to see that you are well.”
He was called Chino not because he was of Asian descent, as the name might suggest, but because of his curly hair—a nickname derived from the curls of an ancient Mayan pig. This recruiter was several inches taller than Indio and wiry—the amiable sort of drug user who had a habit of standing closer than was acceptable on the frontier. The men he brought with him were filthy. They stood off to the side like a couple of overly lean mongrels.
“I never would have recognized you in these fancy clothes,” Chino said. “You look like a success, really. That kid I met at the bus station would have seen a guy like you and run the other way. Am I right?”
“That was a long time ago,” Indio said, waving off the appraisal.
Solo had not yet arrived in Tijuana during Indio’s time at the bus station. So he did not know the breadth of Indio’s acquaintances. He tempered his suspicions of this recruiter. But what the man said was true: Indio did appear transformed. The influence of the borderlands hung about him like a cape. And lately, there was something more. It couldn’t be summed up in fashion alone, but there were clues. Marta preferred a decidedly urban look on her man, and along with his baggy blue jeans and spotless tennis shoes, he now wore a gray fedora that Marta had admired in a shop window. It held a rooster’s feather in its band.
“Not that long ago, no, not at all,” Chino said. “Your belt too, that’s a nice belt.”
It was a light blue mesh belt, a style worn by military. This one was clasped by a slender silver buckle. The end of the belt hung along Indio’s left hip in the fashion of the time. Also a gift from Marta, the buckle was inscribed with an “I.”
Indio raised a hand to rub his nose, a signal that the appraisals were over. “What can I do for you, Chino?” he asked.
“Your man, he hasn’t greeted my pollos,” Chino said. “Must be new.”
The smugglers looked at Chino’s men and noted their soot-smudged and scabby appearance. Solo didn’t have to guess that the men lived in the river.
“Those pollos don’t check out,” Indio said.
“These are good pollos, quality customers,” Chino said. “They have people on the inside. Tell your worker to make the calls. Where’d you get that one, anyway? I mean, people skills are a must in this line of work.”
“I’ve known this chavo all my life,” Indio said.
“Okay, amigo. Instead of the usual $150 each, give me $280 for the two. That’s a discount.”
Solo shook his head. Indio verbalized the sentiment. “I can’t help you today.�
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Chino bent his elbow and tapped the underside to indicate a cheapskate. “This is not the village. Give me $250.”
“I don’t want them.”
“Cabrón. You’re in Tijuana now. Give me $180.”
Good, hardworking migrantes could be found all over town and this man had brought two drug addicts who wouldn’t check out. Indio said, “Get out of here.”
A light came to Chino’s eyes. He began chuckling. He put his hand on Indio’s shoulder and then embraced him. Indio pushed back, but the two men stumbled as if joined in a sack race. The more Indio pushed, the more unstable they became. Chino cackled. The pair wobbled and fell. Still, Chino would not let go. The gray fedora tumbled, went bowling away. It was not violence, but it was not friendly. Solo jockeyed about them but hesitated to intervene. Chino convulsed in titters and snorts. “I need this one, Pablo,” he wheezed. “I need the favor.”
Indio finally broke the embrace and sprang to his feet, his fists seemingly clinched before he landed. “This is not a bus station game,” he said. “This is serious business.”
Chino, on his back now, raised a slender arm, pointed, and said, “Ha. Look at your hair, amigo. It’s combed so perfectly. Ha, ha.” He caught Solo’s eyes. “Where is Pablo de Oaxaca? He would do me the favor.”
Solo remembered Chino’s pollos. He looked but they were gone.
Without notice, the policeman appointed to guard the highway stepped around Solo and Indio—his club was already drawn. He began to beat Chino, producing a wallop like a dropped sack of rice, each blow making the same inconsequential sound. Chino didn’t resist, but cried in a way that was almost laughing. The cop finally put the curly-haired recruiter on his stomach and, squatting, dug a knee between his shoulder blades. He drew one noodle-like arm at a time and applied the bracelets. And without a word, the officer dragged the recruiter up to the police car parked along the International Road.
Solo bent to fetch the fedora. He picked off foxtails. Indio didn’t even dust himself but watched his old comrade, now kicking his way up the desert slope in the clutches of the cop. The scene had a blown-through quality, a miasma like the moments following the passage of a dust devil. It was up to each man to reconnoiter his frame of mind. Solo handed the hat over. Indio held it between his wide hands—seemingly in contemplation as the police car tore away.
“Chino was right about the clothes,” Indio said finally.
“What do you think is going to happen to him?” Solo asked.
“Something bad, probably.” He let several minutes pass. Indio reached into his baggy jeans pocket, removed a cell phone, and dialed. “Yes, this is Indio,” he said. “Bring your prisoner back to me.”
Maybe Chino spread the story of his release and Indio’s forgiveness. Maybe Solo let it slip in the Chicago Club between dancers and Cuba libres. Or possibly it was the men from the river who likely watched from a hidden distance. But it was an oft-repeated story. The tale of Chino’s aggression and eventual pardon—his release from certain torture—beamed through the smuggling community. Chino was troubled, but well liked. All agreed that he deserved everything he got. The fact that El Indio offered a simple forgetting of the slight won him the esteem of the malandros. Rather than demonstrate the weakness of a leader unable to twist the knife, in the fast-developing narrative, Indio’s gesture represented strength such that he could afford a kindness in a place where few kindnesses went unpunished.
In his version of the tale, Roberto’s summation was this: “My brother was beginning to shine like no one else before.”
18
Two men followed at a distance as Maria Teresa Fernandez and I made our way up a thin dirt trail along the fence line. The route was steep enough so that, at times, we looked for notches or footholds in the climb. At one of these places, I stopped to offer Fernandez a hand, and that’s when I noticed the men. This was on the Mexican side of Bunker Hill. And the rusted metal sheets of the wall built during President Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper rose with us. The Pacific Ocean, its line drawn on the horizon and the expansive arch of the western sky, comprised an entire gradient of pale blues. Below, to the south, was the International Road and the neighborhood of Playas de Tijuana. To the north, the russet colors of the Tijuana River Estuary rolled into the United States.
“I don’t know, Mateo says it’s up here. Somewhere in this section,” Fernandez said.
I’d have imagined the fence line to smell of the white and yellow chrysanthemum flowers and the potent native sages that carpet these hills. Or, maybe, of nothing at all. But up this close it smelled of people—an animal musk with the odd whiff of something worse. The panoramic views, the pillowy brush, the open space, and the sea breeze were all dislocated by this trace scent. It dawned on me: so much went on here that went unseen, part of this border edifice had to be constructed in the mind.
We reached the graffiti that Fernandez wanted to photograph; any change to the wall offered her a challenge, like documenting sandcastles before the tide came in. Metallic silver and blue, the rounded, indecipherable graffiti letters took up more than a panel of the corrugated iron. It must have taken some time to create. And there were a lot of forces ready to chase the spray can artist away—thieves, thugs, police. Fernandez moved about, clicking images with a silent efficiency. When I turned to look, the men on our trail were still a ways off, but gaining. I could see only that one wore a red shirt and the other a dark shirt with white pants.
“We have all of the states of Mexico represented on the fence,” Fernandez said, pointing as if to a passing crowd. A faded mesh of place names stretched the length of the fence. There are thirty-one states in Mexico. It seemed possible that each was repeated a thousand times. Personal names and dates—recorded by people who had soon crossed, or who had hoped to—were also etched and tagged onto the oxidized iron. Up close it looked like the leaves of a guest registry. IVAN WAS HERE—14/4/11. There were the origin countries: ARMENIA, CHINO, SAN SALVADOR. Also listed was what they thought of themselves. POLLOS PUTOS. And what they saw of their antagonists. AHI LES VAN LA MIGRA.
“Do you know those men?” I asked. This was her beat. I figured she’d know.
“What men?”
“Down there. They’ve been following us.”
“Oh, no. I don’t know those men.”
We continued along the wall—a word most border people use interchangeably with fence. The corrugated iron sheets that make up this portion of the boundary once served as interlocking, temporary runways in Vietnam, and found a new life welded together in a sixty-mile run. You can’t see through the metal, which would suggest a wall. Border Patrol agents ruffle at this word. The agency prefers the word fence, and their spokespeople admonish others to use it as well. I suppose wall conjures obvious and failed reference points: the Wall of Jericho, the Walls of Troy, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall, Hadrian’s Wall—that chain of embankments Romans built to keep barbarous Englanders out of England.
I’ve often thought that our boundary line could use a richer handle, something like Hadrian’s. Mexicans call it la frontera, or la línea. Novelists T. C. Boyle and Joseph Wambaugh named it, respectively, the Tortilla Curtain and the Imaginary Line. Both good, but neither epic to the scale of the boundary. Our border operates as a screening process for motivated laborers—something like a temp agency that separates the good from the bad workers with a mud run—while also acting as an instant cost inflator for prohibited goods, starting with untaxed cigs and alcohol and moving through to people, narcotics, and exotic zoo animals. Maybe this was the point that Border Patrol was trying to make in differentiating wall from fence. As a wall, it was doomed to failure. But as a fence, it was a great growth engine for border-enforcement jobs.
It’s hard to disagree that fence sounds neighborly. And it did begin as a fence, this wall. Its history as such might solve the naming problem. The first barriers were mere cattle fencing. And though Richard Nixon launched Operation Intercept, a mandate to
search every person and car entering the United States through ports of entry, during his administration five thin strands of barbed wire separated San Diego from Tijuana at the border monument. Since Jimmy Carter, however, each successive president has left us with a new layer to the edifice, something like the legacy gift of a presidential library. “Carter’s Curtain” was chain link. Ronald Reagan extended it, and built migrant detention centers. Bush Senior intercepted migrants at sea. Clinton’s contractors were kind enough to weld the metal runway sheets in a way that aligned the corrugations horizontally, creating great foot grips and handholds so our neighbors could pop on over and talk to us anytime. Bush Junior’s gift wasn’t so generous. It was eighteen feet tall. He also paid a lot of our money for high-tech surveillance towers that corroded, failed in high wind, rain, and dust storms, and went blind in the fog. Obama pulled the plug on the failed “virtual fence” in 2010. Still, he continued to fulfill 580 miles of the triple wall mandated under the Secure Fence Act—this, as if metal-cutting equipment did not exist in Tijuana. There are sections of the Bush fence that boast more holes and patch jobs than a freight-train-load of hobo pants. Obama’s legacy might be in the sky, however, as he unleashed the age of drones.
The two men were now quite close. We made eye contact. One was old and one was young. Fernandez and I paused to gauge the situation. Then, at the bottom of the trail, a third man wearing dark clothing appeared. This figure seemed to be advancing at an accelerated pace. We waited.
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