The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  Roberto wasn’t staying up intentionally. As he got older, he just didn’t require as much sleep. And so the brother was aware of all movement in the house.

  “They came back at dawn on Wednesday morning so dichoso and content,” said Roberto. “To me it seemed like living a dream.”

  Lupita, who also slept lightly, noted the hour. “Everything and everybody was happy,” she said. “The same goes for my husband and I—which always makes me really scared. That much happiness is related to fear.”

  24

  In January of 2012 a low-pressure system that had formed in the Gulf of Alaska dropped down to the temperate latitudes and brought cold ragged wind, rain, and turbulent seas to the desert coast. This was the kind of rainstorm that had historically swelled the Tijuana River into a braided, roiling thing that broke dikes and sluices, turned ranchland into bogs, floated car tires by the container load, drowned livestock, polluted the ocean, and spawned flash floods of the type that had washed the Méndez children out of Los Laureles Canyon. This was the kind of storm that had brought me to the Tijuana River Valley in 2008, and the latest arrival signaled that my obsession with the border bikes had tripped into another year.

  Given that I was compelled to travel to Tijuana during the storm, I admired that El Negro lived in a ship, however credible. It was perched on a low cliff above the beach. The entrance, like the rest of the businesses along that stretch across from the bullring, was level with the street. But its facade facing the ocean lorded over the boardwalk below. And this, in truth, was the only aspect that distinguished this barco from the other oceanfront buildings, as an artificial boat’s hull emerged from the structure, black and rusting, and hung midair like a vessel embarking on an elevated plain. The bow held a port for a cannon and was topped by a decorative railing. I assumed that it had been built as part of a themed restaurant, but I could never determine if El Negro’s ship was in a state of halted construction or one of decay. It turns out there is a form of construction so leisurely that it approximates atrophy. This example looked as if Noah’s ark were slowly emerging from the earth. El Negro’s job was to keep squatters from commandeering the ruin.

  The detail of the ship and my contact’s nickname—the Black—suited an increasing feeling I’d had each time I’d come to Playas, that I was slipping ever so surely, notch by notch, into a den of pirates. After that first bungled interview, I’d continued to visit El Negro at the municipal bathrooms. We discussed the myriad ways to cross. We walked the canyons. We plumbed the mysteries of my search—unfolding enough upon each visit, I felt, to chance another. The primary discoveries were, one, the widely accepted belief that the pollero called El Indio had built the most successful migrant-smuggling operation in the area’s history; two, that he had abruptly ceased the bicycle-crossing business at the height of its glory; and three, that he’d simply vanished.

  El Negro proved himself to be a particular fan of a good story. He never greeted me without a new one. And I believe he liked a tale so much that he’d momentarily set aside his strong reservations about me. Those first questions put to him in front of the bathrooms took root in his mind—as he remembered trucks with California plates, laden with bicycles, threading into the little canyon—and spurred a host of his own queries. He began poking around his contacts, and then truly researching the legend of El Indio in a slow, methodical manner that resembled investigating a geriatric’s crime by visiting all the bingo parlors and bridge clubs in town. So when El Negro sent word on the stormiest day in a region not well suited for them, Dan Watman and I dropped everything and set out for Playas de Tijuana.

  In the shadow of the border wall, adjacent to the lighthouse with its single illuminated lens, we visited the first set of bathrooms only to find them shuttered. Same with those on the boardwalk. The rain picked up. We hustled along the line of plywood seafood stalls, restaurants, cantinas. On a sunny day there would have been day-trippers and mariachis. Today the streets were wet, windblown, and empty.

  Among the series of entries, Watman recognized and then knocked on a black particleboard door. “Negro,” he hollered through a crack, and banged again. Under an awning ten feet away stood a light-eyed man with spindly jailhouse tattoos. He might have been loitering; he might have been waiting for the rain to cease. He watched us like a gecko. It was only through his eyes that I saw us for what we were: two gringos knocking on a ramshackle door in a downpour. There’s a chance the spooky güero considered selling us whatever we were there to buy. The badly hung door then wobbled, scraped, and opened a smidge. A brown eyeball peered out. “Sí?”

  “El Negro esta en casa?” Watman asked.

  “Quién es?” The eyeball was fixed in place.

  We identified ourselves. The door stuttered shut. The loiterer under the awning shifted posture. I thought he would be my next interaction. But then a husky laugh erupted inside. The groggy morning voice of El Negro commanded, “Let them in, let them in.”

  The doorman conceded and we were admitted beyond the black gate. The person before us was small, and he wore a yellow rain slicker. It was a fortunate item to have in the storm, I thought, and a fitting detail had the ship been in operation. After granting us entry, he quickly shoved the door closed and locked it with a chain. The interior view came as a revelation: before us was a large open area, a vaulted ceiling, and planked floors stinking of creosote. Broad galley windows the width of the room opened first upon the ship’s bow and then on the stormy Pacific Ocean. Other than the distant Coronado Islands—dark shapes intermittently obscured by cloud drift—no land was visible in the entire panorama. I saw only surging waves and bands of blue showers sweeping the horizon. I nearly expected the floor to list from side to side.

  El Negro emerged from a tiny room to the left of the landing. Inside it I could see a string of socks drying on a line.

  “It’s a rain day,” he said. “You’ve caught me sleeping.” He shuffled into his morning routine, rubbing his eyes, washing at a sink. I realized I’d not seen El Negro without the foam hat that read RECICLADOR CASTRO. I found the hat amusing—not only because it advertised a recycling center named after a dictator, but because I could picture Negro wearing it when the Border Patrol agent at the fence line, indicating the pile of bikes on the Tijuana side, asked if there were any recycling centers in Mexico. El Negro’s wavy, leading-man hair with the wisp of silver running through the crown surprised me—he was not the bathroom worker in this domain. Then the doorman, Ramon, spoke so quietly at my elbow it came as a peep.

  “Mande?” I asked.

  Below the yellow slicker, he shifted his weight from foot to foot, in a state of constant preparation. He could have been eighteen, maybe twenty. He wondered if we might have some change for a morning coffee and a cigarette. Watman and I dug in our pockets for pesos. When Ramon had the coins in his palm, he opened and slipped through the door—a courier of a secret. This was when El Negro gave us the backstory; it was a tale both common and complex. Border Patrol had recently dumped Ramon on the streets of Tijuana at two in the morning, and like most deportees, he didn’t know where the hell he was. Southern Mexicans plucked from a dishwashing job in, say, Newark, New Jersey, and expelled upon the seediest part of a border town with neither connections nor a plan were sitting ducks and everybody knew it. In the Playas community, people ensnared in this circumstance were directed to El Negro. He had a gift for scaring up the essentials: food, clothing, and, if not outright accommodation, at least a sense of place. El Negro had survived the experience himself and, some would say, prospered. Out of feeling for his people, he now captained the deported to safer shores.

  “Tijuana is an octopus,” Negro said. “If you’re smart, it can hand you things. But its arms are so strong and so many—if it decides to take, you will lose everything before you know what happened.”

  We drew up chairs made of two-by-fours. The ship’s mast—fashioned from a local telephone pole—was lying across the deck, out the galley doors, and
onto the bow. The mast divided the room and forced us into an awkward huddle. Although it was mostly dry inside, as bands of the storm blew by, a pitter-patter drummed the decks.

  I’d learned my lesson about asking abrupt questions in Mexico. American-style journalism acted as a kind of antidote to the truth—the more efficient and straightforward the question, the slower and more obfuscating the answer. So I bided my time. We talked about the weather.

  From a corner of the ship’s broad windows, the three of us could see work underway on a new sea fence that extended the border wall into the waves. A significant but temporary pier had been built along the line, and from this, a sequence of pylons was being driven into the seabed by heavy machinery.

  “I tell the people,” El Negro said, pointing, “it’s throwing money away.”

  Quite literally, I believed as well, it was like pouring money into sand. The contractor that won the job had failed to take into account something every surfer knows: anytime a construction like a pier or jetty is placed in the littoral zone, sand quickly forms around it. Shallow spots make great places to surf. Already, El Negro knew of polleros guiding migrants around the sea fence at low tide. Some brought a change of clothes, others endured the knee-deep water. Waving at the entirety of the new $70-million-per-mile US border wall, El Negro said, “The [American] president is all the time trying to pull down the sun with his finger.”

  Ramon returned to the ship with a steaming cup of coffee that he politely shared with his host. He had a cigarette for each of them. As the three of us continued to talk in a hodgepodge of English and Spanish, Ramon paced the plank flooring and took calculated puffs on his cigarette and long gazes out the galley windows. It reminded me of passing time in transit. Floating somewhere out there on the storm clouds was a new life plan.

  In our cluster on the ship deck, as wind and rain beat at the galley windows, El Negro finally cleared his throat before revealing the information that had brought us there. He said he’d been drinking in the Zona Norte and outside a bar called the Chicago Club, he’d run into two men he knew to be bicycle mechanics who worked for the bicycle coyote. From memory, El Negro conjured the scene of these two men working day and night, jammed in a shack lit by a single bulb, surrounded by rims and hubs and frames and cranks, all within spitting distance of the fence. As romantic as the image was, the disclosure that there were two full-time mechanics was a harbinger that told a broader story. The necessity of two mechanics suggested a number of bikes larger than I had yet imagined. It validated the possibility of tracking down delivery drivers, suppliers, etc.

  I began this line of inquiry, when Negro said abruptly, “I don’t know about those things.”

  “Well, what did you learn from the mechanics?” I asked.

  “They told me where to find El Solo.”

  “Who is El Solo?”

  “He is the brother of El Indio.”

  “Brother? Really?”

  “No, not really. But like a brother—a friend since they were little, from back there in Oaxaca.”

  “Wow,” I said. “And what is he like, this El Solo?”

  “I don’t know, just regular. Like him,” Negro said, pointing at Ramon.

  “You mean he looks like Ramon.”

  “Yeah, all the people from over there look like him.”

  On several occasions, Watman had pointed out the sinews of bigotry entwined in Mexican culture. The idea that all indigenous people looked alike, and that this look wasn’t handsome, popped up time and again. The fact that Negro looked indigenous as well was a contradiction so common it wasn’t worth mulling over. But I suspected the answer about Solo’s appearance to be a smokescreen. In the past, when I’d ask about the work or job of one of El Negro’s associates, he’d say, “Oh, a regular job.”

  I’d ask, “What kind of a job is a regular job?”

  El Negro would look around and point at the closest approximation of a man doing work—a coconut vendor, a fishmonger. “Like that,” he’d say.

  “Really?” I’d say. “Your friend sells coconuts too.”

  “Sure,” he’d answer. The truth was that “regular appearances,” “regular names,” and “regular jobs” meant that I couldn’t be trusted with specific information. So right about then, I was wondering what, exactly, I was doing aboard ship.

  Then El Negro stood. He walked off into his cabin and returned with a grammar school folder. He situated a two-by-four table in front of his chair, placed the folder on the table, and took a seat. He withdrew some reading glasses, put them on, and opened the folder as delicately as if it contained sheaves of papyrus.

  “What are these papers?” I asked.

  “These are my interview notes.”

  “Interview notes?”

  “Yeah, my interview with the guy I’m talking about. I am a writer,” he said. “Like you.”

  Then, El Negro began to read from the pages, and within a few minutes, maybe less, Watman, Ramon, El Negro, and I were walking along the gravelly roads of a leafy green Oaxacan village that boasted a dozen or more shacks, one tractor, one bicycle, and two small boys named Solo and Pablito.

  25

  In Roberto’s estimation, Marta appeared a shade slender for a serious chef. Yet she moved about the kitchen with the confidence she’d exhibited on the ranch as a girl, even among colts in the stable. It wasn’t austere so much as efficient. Her hair was up and she wore a dress for a special outing. But then she’d slipped her mother’s heirloom apron on top. Below the trim of the calf-length dress, her ankles dipped into the kind of pumps she donned these days only for her dates with El Indio.

  This was in fact a Tuesday, the one day she and Indio set aside for themselves. But on this occasion the couple had sweet-talked the entire household into treating the day like a traditional family fiesta. This required Roberto to take the day off as well. The hook had been Marta’s promise to make her chiles rellenos with peron peppers. Marta’s cooking was a treat. Roberto especially appreciated her pintos refritos, dark speckled beans she fried with a preparation of mustard and pepper. Even the smell that filled the kitchen from their cooking, he thought, was delicious. The beans and freshly chopped onion and cilantro provided the aroma, but the perons accounted for the flurry of activity. Though he never touched the raw ingredients himself, Roberto observed with such acute attention that years later he could describe every step Marta took in preparing her labor-intensive specialty—the golden-yellow pods opened and the reedy veins and seeds removed; the waxy skin grilled on a hot comal, softening the flesh and giving that smoky flavor; each pepper individually wrapped in paper and set aside for easy peeling. Marta managed the pot of stewed beef with her sinewy arms as deftly as she’d later fold cheese into the tender parcels. Finally, the stuffed peppers were closed with toothpicks and a rich tomato salsa was ladled on top.

  Though Marta approached the kitchen with a characteristic precision, from the outside patio Roberto noticed something additional—something cultivated and secretive. Plans; his clients carried them in their minds like the precious briefcases they’d pop open on the other side. And he recognized the look even as he hefted charcoal into the grill and tussled with an order of carnitas that he’d carried into the house like a fat child. Music played from the stereo. Their mother padded masa into tortillas and tossed them onto the comal. Roberto could make out the voices of other family members in the driveway. They admired a vehicle El Indio had purchased just that week. There were many distractions that afternoon. And still, Roberto mulled over Marta’s demeanor. He wondered if his instinct hadn’t been tainted, maybe by wafts of a less-than-noble emotion he’d experienced in recent times. It wasn’t outright jealousy—he and the entire family were happy for Marta. They felt blessed, even. But Roberto recognized a feeling of displacement. The lovers Marta and Indio commanded the attention of his entire household. All conversation touched on the activities of El Indio, his business, and the success of what was called, in shorthand, “his idea.”
At this moment, Roberto could hear a rather casual discussion between his own father and the young man he’d introduced to the family. And now his sister blissfully swayed to music while presiding over his wife’s kitchen with a matron’s confidence.

  At the time of his courtship with Chedas, Roberto’s people were still living far off in the mountains of Sinaloa. Tijuana was strange and new and blossoming before them. The frontier city was always unpredictable. The couple built this home from almost nothing but their imaginations. They filled it with children, relatives, friends, and strangers. And now that foundational achievement was serving as a humble stage for a more dazzling romance.

  Yet Roberto’s family was content, which had not always been the case. And Roberto believed that his power, in business as well as in the home, derived from his big-tent mentality. There was more to be gained by including others in one’s own successes and supporting them in their individual endeavors than in jealously guarding one’s little tract of plenty. He’d seen more than one smuggler chase off potential allies. So Roberto cooled his thoughts. His own time in the sun had been long and fruitful. The present belonged to Indio and Marta.

  Roberto caught the cascading sounds of more guests arriving—friends and associates. His children spilled onto the back patio like small gusts destined to slam shutters and open doors. Roberto lit the coals and they came to life with a small roar. Stereo volume increased, and chatter rose to meet it. The table was set. Lupita made trips to the kitchen, returning each time with new plates of colorful snacks. And no sooner had Roberto finished preparing the grill than he spied his father at the kitchen stoop, waving his arms for silence.

  “Everybody listen,” the old man said. The guests turned to see the patriarch in his straw hat and plaid short-sleeved shirt. He’d stepped out of his normally reserved persona. “I have something special my wife Lupita and I would like to share. New things, good things.” He looked around him and called, “Dear Marta and Pablo, come please.”