Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  He had thought about writing Antonio a letter in advance of his trip, but he had decided against it. It would give his cousin a chance to revoke the invitation, and he didn’t want that. Omar Perez was quite good at figuring the percentages and getting what he wanted, in fact. He was a tough, cocky, durable kid, ambitious and a little crooked, no more than five and half feet tall and gifted with an ability to win the confidence of others. He had dropped out of school at the age of twelve to join a gang of youths who roamed around Guadalajara and cadged money in any way they could, becoming a competent petty thief and an occasional dealer of marijuana. His specialty was fleecing tourists, those elderly or innocent Americans who were susceptible to taking pity when Omar spun them a beggarly tale about his poverty and the beatings he’d endured at the hands of his mongrel parents. Once, he had so impressed a sailor on leave that he had been rewarded not only with some money but also an electric hair drier from the sailor’s hotel room. He carried the drier with him now in a satchel that also held a change of clothes, a pair of sandals, and his radio.

  The trip to Tijuana took almost two days. Omar dozed in his seat, his stomach uneasy. He couldn’t eat the tamales or the fruit that his mother had packed for him in a paper sack. Sometimes at a rest stop he couldn’t resist splurging on a soft drink, upset with himself for spending the cash because he had only forty American dollars to his name. His stomach settled down as the bus made its way up the coast, through Mazatlán and Culiacán along the pure blue waters of the Gulf of California. He was able to sustain himself with visions of Carson Valley and the wonderful grape farm that Antonio had described to him, a farm where he, too, planned to work and where he would become just as wealthy as his cousin. It was easy for him to imagine the treasures that would accrue to him—a better radio, a color TV, a camcorder, and, in time, his own car.

  Tijuana offended Omar at first. It was not a colonial city like Guadalajara and had none of the grandeur to which he was accustomed, no eye-catching cathedral or majestic plazas. It lacked any aspect of welcome and seemed hard and fast to him, in a state of perpetual flux. He slept in an alley on the night he arrived, stretched out on a piece of crumpled cardboard with his money concealed in his underwear and his satchel serving as a pillow. Stray cats kept waking him by nuzzling against his face, and he heard music filtering down from windows and cantinas and the clatter of bottles and cans. There were cars roaring past him until very late, and toward dawn a drunk stumbled along the alley singing and crashing into the walls, pausing to piss down a stairwell before continuing on his oblivious march.

  When a panadería opened nearby, Omar rousted himself and bought a sweet roll and some coffee. He was stiff and sore and wished more than anything for a bath, but there were no facilities for the likes of him. The racket of the city picked up once more, dust and exhaust fumes rising everywhere to mix with the stench of garbage in the gutters, but he was committed to surviving the squalor and achieving his goal. He asked some questions of a girl behind the counter, counting on his good looks to win her sympathy, and she directed him to a brushy area above the levee of the Tijuana River, a murderous stream so poisoned with toxins that PELIGROSO signs were posted on its banks. Already, at noon, many people were gathered on the levee and preparing to cross the border after dark, groups of six or seven or a dozen men, husbands with their wives and children, and criminals armed with knives and revolvers. To Omar’s surprise, they stood utterly revealed, their intent plain for the world to see.

  He wandered through the crowd and made eye contact, nodding to his fellow pilgrims. He heard somebody hiss at him, a coyote promising to guide him safely, but he couldn’t afford the price. Down the levee, he came upon some boys about his own age crouched in the shade of some mesquite bushes, each carrying a satchel or a bundle like his own. He joined them without being invited and sat at a polite distance from their circle, waiting for them to get curious, for one of them to speak.

  “Amigo,” a boy called to him at last, tossing a twig at him. “Qué quiere aqui?”

  Omar shrugged and acted amiable and harmless. “No se.” He pretended that he had nothing special in mind.

  “Váyase!”

  He would not go away. “Yo no he hecho nada,” he told them. That was so, he had done nothing to cause any alarm.

  Another boy repeated the initial question. “Dígame, muchacho. Qué diablos quiere usted?”

  “Necisito ayuda. Quiero ir a California.” Okay, he would tell them—he needed some help in reaching his destination.

  They all laughed in his face. “Taxi!” yelled the first boy. “Lleve el cabrón a California!”

  “No soy un cabrón, amigo,” Omar said staunchly. He would not tolerate insults.

  He made a friend among them eventually, Martín Herrero, a fellow tapatío from Jalisco who was a veteran of the border scene, twice arrested on a strawberry farm in Oceanside and twice returned to Mexico by la migra. Herrero was mightily conceited about his exploits, so Omar played up to him and flattered him with all kinds of questions. It turned out that Herrero planned to cross again that night—not at the levee, where Border Patrol agents were plentiful, but at a safer spot—and Omar asked to accompany him.

  “Por qué tu conducir?” the haughty Herrero wanted to know. Why should I take you?

  “Porque tengo corazón. Soy un tapatío. Puede usted ayudarme, por favor?”

  “Quizá.” Maybe.

  In the late afternoon, they left the levee together and rode a bus to a raw canyon scoured of all vegetation on the outskirts of Tijuana. The soil was a reddish color, very dry and rock solid, baked for centuries under the sun. Houses built of concrete blocks and scrap lumber were perched on the canyon rim, each in a different stage of completion, missing a door here and a wall there, not one of them wholly finished. Herrero led Omar down a dirt road notched with declivities to a spot where the ground was flat and stretched out like a plain. About two hundred people were assembled there, forming a little metropolis hidden from the authorities and patrolled by a few skinny pariah dogs, who yelped and moaned and nosed around in the underbrush.

  “Fenomenal,” Omar said, in a whisper. He was honestly amazed. That morning, he had been alone, but now he was one of many.

  He wandered through the camp with Herrero, his wonder growing. Vendors had set up some folding tables and had stacked used clothing on them in random piles, offering blue jeans, sweatshirts, and baseball caps to disguise those who intended to cross and give them the appearance of Americans. Omar spent two dollars on an L.A. Dodgers cap and wore it with the brim backward as he had seen actors do in movies. He walked over to a food stand on the other side of the canyon and treated his partner to some chicken tacos and a Coke. The atmosphere was almost festive. The woman who did the cooking had a big pot of beans simmering and a charcoal brazier on which she grilled strips of beef for carne asada. She was jolly and fat and wore her hair pulled back in a bun and several showy silver bracelets from Taxco.

  The reddish color of the canyon deepened as the light began to fade, and the sky went from a hazy blue to a deep indigo. Omar felt exhilarated and also slightly anxious. He knew the sensation from his time in the streets of Guadalajara, an energy rush that always preceded the picking of a pocket or the snatching of a purse.

  “Cuanto dura la travesía?” he asked. “A que distancia está?”

  They had about ten miles to cover, Herrero told him. It would take them all night.

  At dusk, the first few people set out, tentative in the face of the vastness before them, a plateau carved with ruts, potholes, and arroyos and made more treacherous still by clumps of sagebrush and thorny mesquite. No one dared to use a flashlight for fear of being detected. The moon was in its first quarter and afforded them little assistance. It was as if they were all being summoned at once, Omar thought, as if they were all responding to a signal only they could hear, moving off in units, three here, six there, each on a different path, their shoulders hunched, their bodies low to the grou
nd, and their eyes constantly alert to any flicker in the immense blackness around them. The pariah dogs howled and chewed on bones and scraps of food, while the vendors packed up their wares and started up a bumpy road to their parked cars, only to return again in the morning to serve a fresh batch of customers.

  An hour passed before Herrero was comfortable enough to take off. Omar followed behind him, not too closely. He found that he could make out shapes and see much more than he had expected. What he had expected was a kind of blindness. He walked carefully and watched the ground for snakes and scorpions, but he fell into a rhythm after a while and relaxed. The stars burned with a fiery brilliance, and he saw insects on the wing before him and once a panicky jackrabbit darting from behind a cactus. He was thirsty and wished for a drink of water, but he put the thought out of his mind and just kept walking, one foot after the other, toward California.

  They came in time to a broad mesa. About two hours had gone by, Omar reckoned. He stopped in fatigue and looked across the mesa to the lights of a distant city. The lights were blinking and dancing.

  “Cigarrillo?” Herrero asked, holding out a pack.

  “Gracias.”

  They rested for a few minutes before going on. Omar walked with a steadiness of purpose now, a resolve. He stared at the horizon, where the lights refused to budge. The lights were never any nearer to him and seemed actually to be receding into the distance. You are imagining it, he told himself. You must be very tired. He trudged on for another mile or so and began to get a second wind, his lungs capacious again and his leg muscles strong. At that instant, he felt that he could keep walking forever, from one end of the earth to the other without a break. He and his new friend Martín Herrero were two heroes scrawling their names across the globe, performing an act of bravery, men from Jalisco, tapatíos who had met by chance on a levee in Tijuana and had forged an ironclad bond—brothers, then, in the mystical night.

  They walked on. Yet another hour passed. The lights blinked and danced, more of them now, more discernible and individual. Omar lost any awareness of the landscape through which he moved. He became a hooded creature of the canyon fighting to stay awake, kin to lizards and spiders, and he did not hear the strange, whirring sound above him right away, a sound of metal blades slashing at the sky. It shocked him when a big cone of light fell from above to illuminate a wide sector of the mesa and every scurrying, furtive refugee on it. He shielded his eyes and looked up as a helicopter approached, its beacon searching the ground and causing people to freeze in place like statues, bathing them in an eerie white glow.

  There was nothing to do but run. Martín Herrero had long legs and ran fast. Omar could not keep up with him. He watched in despair as his mentor and savior moved away from him, ten, fifteen, twenty yards ahead, growing tinier and tinier, diminishing. Herrero might soon have vanished from sight if the beacon had not cut across his path and forced him to duck and hide in some sagebrush, where Omar, panting hard, caught up to him. He grabbed at Herrero’s trousers, a hand inside the waistband, and held him securely to prevent him from escaping again.

  “Silencio! No se mueva!” Herrero warned him, and he did not so much as draw a breath.

  Then they were running again. Herrero slipped free and swung to his left to avoid the helicopter beam. Omar trailed him, falling ever more behind, his spirits sinking as he realized that he would only be a bit player in the drama of Herrero’s liberation. “Espera!” he yelled, but his friend would not wait and would not help. He knew then that he would surely fail in his mission. Instead of crossing safely, he would be arrested, thrown in jail, and herded back to Tijuana, where he would have to begin all over again. He cursed himself for trusting Herrero, a boy whose motives were at least as suspicious as his own.

  Herrero was gone a moment later, vanished completely, not even a spectral trace of him left to be seen. His disappearance dealt a final blow to Omar’s hopes. He simply gave up and quit running. There was a tremendous relief in his surrender, and he soon discovered that he was no more pursued than he had been on the fly. He could breathe at his leisure and didn’t have to struggle. He walked briskly but without any haste and aimed himself toward the lights, which were not so distant now, stopping only when a loud whimper shocked him. He thought it must be an animal of some kind, but as he drew nearer he was sure that the whimper was human. It was the sound of somebody crying in pain, and it came from the pit of an arroyo just ahead.

  He peered into the arroyo. Martín Herrero lay on the ground, clutching his right leg.

  “Amigo,” Herrero begged. “Creo que tengo una fractura.”

  Omar shimmied down the arroyo wall. Herrero released his grip to show off his wound. His ankle was bent at a sharp and terrifying angle, and a shard of bone had punctured the skin. The leg of his pants, his sock, his shoe, the ground, they were all drenched in blood.

  “Fractura, no,” Omar said. “Un hueso roto.” A broken bone.

  “Me siento débil, amigo.” Herrero’s voice was quivering, imploring. “Ayúdame, por favor.”

  To Omar, this was an example of cosmic justice in action. He was delighted to see Herrero groveling at his feet. “No es posible,” he said firmly, denying the request.

  “Soccoro!” Herrero shouted. “Ayúdame!”

  “Adiós, Martín!” Omar climbed from the arroyo and started running again, happy with himself and relishing his freedom, and as he ran the sky grew lighter. He felt then that he was blessed. He could see the actual buildings of a city now and also the other refugees who had eluded capture. They ran in a pack toward a chain-link fence that marked the border, and he joined them and got down on his hands and knees to crawl through a hole. Trash was strewn along the fence, dirty diapers and rinds of fruit and shreds of paper, the detritus of a mass and ceaseless migration, and he kicked it aside and made for a street not far away.

  The city was not as big as he had imagined. It was more of a town, really, and everything in it, every house and every shop, looked new. Omar tried to be inconspicuous, but nobody was paying any attention to him. He didn’t have to be afraid. He blended easily with the people of this place, who had the same dark eyes and dark hair, Mexicans once or twice removed from their homeland. He sat for a time on a bus stop bench, and when a wrinkled old lady sat next to him he asked her what the town was called.

  “San Ysidro,” she told him.

  He had another question for her. “Donde está Carson Valley? Es este el camino más corto?” He wanted the shortest route to his cousin’s house, but she gave him a cronish look of displeasure and left him alone on the bench. He didn’t know what mistake he had made until he noticed that his clothes were smudged with grime and stained with Herrero’s blood, so he went into a gas station rest room and washed his face and combed his hair. He changed into a clean shirt, traded his sneakers for his sandals, fluffed up the crown of his baseball cap, and strolled to the center of town, where the traffic was thick and congested at the port of entry, backed up in both directions.

  Omar stood in the morning sun, his satchel at his feet. The shiny press of things enchanted him. There was a latent power in the endless line of cars ferrying passengers between Mexico and California, and he could feel a thrumming in his chest, as if an engine had kicked into gear, and he looked away to the desert, so near, where the air was heavy and brown and a few buzzards were circling around something dead.

  A man came up to him. He had an insinuating smile, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. “You’re new here,” he said.

  Omar returned the smile. “No comprendo,” he replied, pretending that he had no English, although he spoke it fairly well.

  The man nudged the satchel with his foot. “You’re new here,” he repeated. “I can arrange some things for you.”

  They chatted in the shadow of the port of entry. The man offered to set up a ride to San Diego for Omar. San Diego was a true city, he explained, and it had a vast and teeming barrio, where a person could hide out and some other things coul
d be arranged.

  “Ten dollars,” the man said.

  “Ay, no, eso es más de lo que puede gastar,” Omar told him, bargaining. “Acceptaría five dollars?”

  “Eight dollars.”

  Omar paid. That evening, he waited on a street corner as instructed, thinking that he had made another mistake, but precisely at six o’clock an old gray station wagon pulled up at the curb, and somebody threw open a door. Inside were a number of other people going north—two teenagers from Rosarito, a married couple from Oaxaca, and a girl whose aunt lived in Sacramento. Nobody talked during the ride, as if to speak would be to break a solemn treaty. Everyone shared the same secret, everyone was nurtured by the same dream.

  Omar fell asleep for a while. He woke to find his head resting in the girl’s lap. “Pobrecito,” she said, in a kind way, as she might have to a child.

  He yawned. “Estoy cansado,” he told her.

  “Claro.”

  “Conosce usted Carson Valley?”

  She shrugged. “No lo conosco.”

  They were released eventually into the barrio of San Diego. Omar was puzzled by the city’s complexities, by its sheer volume and size. Not one person here cared about him, not one person knew his name. He asked the driver where he might find a telephone.

  “Two blocks. Up that street.”

  “Necesito fichas para el telefono?”

  “No tokens. American coins.”

  In a liquor store, he bought a bag of salted peanuts and changed three dollar bills for twelve quarters. He handled the transaction ineptly, in a manner that marked him as a foreigner, but the clerk ignored him. The telephone booth was occupied, though, and he had to wait yet again. When his turn came he deposited a coin and dialed his cousin’s number, but nothing happened. Instead, he heard a mechanical voice saying something, so he fed in more quarters until the voice went away and a ringing noise began.