Pirata

by Patrick Hasburgh

  I didn’t kid myself that I had any good karma to cash in, and I’d already been boned buying US dollars for twenty-two pesos each at the cambio. But the trip el norte was pretty much a snore—until I decided to exit México 15 North just past Culiacán.

  The new cuota calles that are under construction all over boomtown Mexico were slowing me way down—single-file, bumper-to-bumper bullshit—and costing about ten bucks an hour in tolls. I was losing time and money.

  So I took a freebie two-laner that cut up just west of Hidalgo del Parral—which is El Chapo Guzmán’s old neighborhood, but he’s in jail now, so it’s not supposed to be that sharky. I figured, what the hell, I could make up some time.

  It was a mistake.

  Ten miles later, I was at the back end of a long line of cars inching toward another nightmare checkpoint. Mexico is Mexico, and it always requires a third eye—although even then I’d be one eye short, so I had to be even more cautious than the average gringo idiot. But tonight, I wasn’t. I was in too much of a hurry to see my son.

  As I crept closer, I could make out a wooden lookout on the driver’s side of the road. It was three steps tall, and a man wearing a dark suit was perched on its small platform. Just below him, a soldier slung with a machine gun and bandoliers was questioning the occupants of each car. The man in the suit held a spotlight.

  It took me about an hour to reach the soldier. He was being very thorough.

  My window was already down and I tried to fake a smile, but my Adam’s apple kept jumping with each beat of my heart—so I just gritted my teeth.

  “Buenas noches,” I said, about three octaves higher than normal.

  Even though it was dark, the soldier wore sunglasses. It was hard to gauge his mood. I squinted up at the man in the dark suit but was blinded by the spotlight he was pointing at me. I could see a handful of soldiers milling around a fruit stand on the other side of the two-laner.

  All I could think was how close I’d been to seeing my son again, and how I’d put all that on the line just to save a little toll money. I’ve never felt more regretful, or like a bigger fool.

  “Documentos,” the soldier demanded.

  I leaned over to the Suburban’s glove box and reached to open it.

  “¡Pirata!”

  I immediately recognized the voice. El Jefe clicked off the spotlight, and I was able to see him standing on the wooden platform.

  “I’m on my way el norte—to see if any gringos are sneaking across the border,” he said.

  He looked proud. I was terrified.

  “I’m trying to sneak back out,” I said, faking a laugh.

  El Jefe didn’t crack a smile and I recalled how tricky his sense of humor could be. He was wearing a red tie with his dark suit, a white shirt, and polished shoes. A rose was pinned to his lapel. “Actually,” he continued, “it’s my sobrina’s quinceañera in Culiacán.”

  “Felicidades a su familia,” I said.

  “Gracias, Pirata,” he said. “I’m a little drunk—I ate too much tres leches. Por favor perdóname.”

  “No worries,” I said, taking a shot at what he meant.

  “Maybe just a few,” he said. “I have to check mis tropas del destino, ¿y tú?”

  I had to guess again.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” I said.

  And El Jefe went cold. “Don’t lie.”

  Fuck.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Every time I ran into this guy, it was the game show from hell.

  El Jefe sniffed at his boutonniere and started to list. He was pretty drunk, and he grabbed at the platform’s handrail to steady himself. “Where are you going?”

  I was starting to panic. This guy was nuts enough sober.

  The soldier moved to stand in front of the Suburban as he clicked the safety off his machine gun, and I wrestled with whether or not to tell El Jefe the truth.

  “To the US,” I finally said, measuring the opening between the soldier and the roadside and El Jefe listing on his platform. I was going to have to run one of them down, and then, very likely, I’d be shot to death by the other soldiers—all of whom were now paying close attention as they stood at the ready in front of the fruit stand. I started to weep. I’d let Marshall down again.

  “¿Por qué?” El Jefe slurred.

  “Family business,” I said, trying to hide my tears.

  It was the only thing I could think of that didn’t sound like a lie—besides the fact that it was actually true. It seemed to please him.

  “Respuesta perfecta,” El Jefe said softly. “It’s all that matters.” Then he delicately removed the rose from his lapel and tossed it at the soldier. “Déjalo pasar,” he sang, with a grandiose wave of his hand, “¡apúrate!”

  The soldier backed away from the Suburban, and I slowly drove away.

  Jesús Cristo, what an unpredictable motherfucker.

  But I wasn’t bitching.

  I have never believed in luck—bad or good—and maybe you don’t have to for it to work, because I’d just caught a big break from a three-alarm maniac.

  But my luck changed again when I arrived at the border the following night, reminding me why I’m a nonbeliever.

  As soon as I crossed into the country of my birth, I was dragged out of the Suburban by a couple of my fellow Americans. Once the border agents had seen that I was a gringo driving a Mexican vehicle with five-year-old plates, they had waved me into a special lane.

  “Your passport is expired, amigo,” one of the idiot customs agents said.

  I had assumed the position across the hood while another agent conducted a bumper-to-bumper search of the Suburban. A team of drug dogs circled and sniffed.

  “I know, sir,” I said, maybe a little too obsequiously. “One of the reasons I’m coming up is to get it renewed.”

  “Don’t call me sir,” he said. He was going through my wallet and testing for cocaine residue on the edges of my expired credit cards. The other agent had begun opening up the Dakine surfboard pads that he had stripped from the roof rack.

  “And my FM3 has expired, too,” I said.

  “Shut up,” the first agent said.

  Then he handed my wallet and passport to an agent who was standing at a computer in a glass booth.

  “What’s the purpose of your trip?” the agent in the glass booth asked, without looking up.

  He was typing my old California driver’s license number into a computer.

  “I don’t need a purpose,” I said. “I’m a US citizen.”

  “That’s the old days,” the agent said. “You’re a Mexican resident now.”

  He was a little less of a hard-ass than the others and appeared to be the boss on this shift.

  “With an expired FM3, too,” he continued.

  “I’m sending in all the stuff to get that done,” I said. “There’s, like, a three-year wait.”

  “But you can’t beat the al pastor street tacos,” he said, like someone who’d been south of the border and liked it. “What’s in the States?”

  He walked over to the Suburban and motioned for me to get off the hood.

  “My son,” I said, dropping every piece of ass-kissing bullshit. “He used to live with his mom, but now I have to take over.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s in jail,” I said.

  “That’s tough,” he said.

  I was hoping he wasn’t going to ask me the details.

  “How old is he?”

  “Almost thirteen,” I said. “I haven’t seen him in six years.”

  “You won’t recognize him,” he said. “But you have a bigger problem.”

  “I do?” I started to go through a not-so-short list of potentials in my head.

  “I can’t let you drive across the border. You have a reckless under-the-influence in California. Your license to drive has been revoked.”

  “Well, actually,” I said, “I wasn’t under the influence. I was off my seizure meds.”

/>   “It was a felony,” he said. “There were serious injuries.”

  “I remember.” I took a breath. “I have a Mexican license.”

  But he just laughed. “To practice medicine, or drive?”

  Shit.

  “And your expired passport is going to take a couple of days, too,” he continued. “I can’t let you cross until I get a temporary stamp from Phoenix.”

  “I have to get to California.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe in a few days you can take the bus.”

  He motioned for a couple of his guys to move my Suburban out of the special lane.

  “I totally get that you have rules and that this is Arizona,” I said. “But could I try entering at Tijuana?”

  “Too late, brah,” he said.

  Brah? It was pretty old-school surf slang, and he probably didn’t get that now it made him sound like a kook, but maybe he’d been in the lineup back in the day.

  He picked up the Dakine surfboard pads that the other agent had stripped and dissected, and tossed them through the passenger window and onto the seat.

  “These are the kind, dude,” he said. “Don’t lose them.”

  The kind? I knew I was grasping, but Da-kine was Hawaiian pidgin for “the kind—the best.” It was surf talk, no doubt. Maybe this guy was secret-coding me.

  “Do you surf?” I asked.

  Not that surfers were all from the same tribe, but sometimes there is this sense of aloha when we run into each other inland instead of out in the lineup.

  “No surf in Arizona. Got a lot of kooks, though.” He smiled. “I grew up in Encinitas.”

  “Beacon’s?” I asked, flashing back to some surf breaks up in San Diego County.

  “Boneyard and Seaside Reef,” he said. “Black’s when I got brave, and Swami’s when it got big.”

  “Sweet spots,” I said.

  “Then all of a sudden I was too old to ride a shortboard—but I got transferred here, so it worked out.”

  “That’s why I ride a Red Fin.”

  That stopped him.

  “Did Mike Hynson shape it for you?”

  “I didn’t know there was another kind,” I said.

  He opened my passport and looked at the date again. He frowned. “My parents sent me to summer camp in Idaho when I was fourteen. For two weeks, I hid out in the lodge and watched Endless Summer.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a bad vacation,” I said.

  “Not now.”

  “But Hynson didn’t ride a Red Fin in Endless Summer,” I said. “That came later. In the movie, he rode a Hobie.”

  “With those stripes and that sick middle stringer,” he said, measuring out more than an inch with his thumb and forefinger.

  “I remember,” I said.

  He narrowed the gap between his fingers, as if to show me just how close a call I was asking him to make. And I suddenly realized how much of our future this stranger held in his hand. He had to decide whether my son was going to get to live with me or in a foster home among strangers, while betting I wasn’t a drug dealer or a terrorist and simply the dysfunctional surf bum I claimed to be. And he had to make that bet almost instantly. Lives depended on it. I couldn’t imagine that kind of pressure.

  “Okay,” he sighed, shaking his head slightly as he stamped an extension on my passport and stapled an official-looking document to my California driver’s license. “I wouldn’t do this if you didn’t know what a Red Fin was,” he said.

  “If I didn’t know what a Red Fin was, I wouldn’t be living down in Mexico,” I said.

  He nodded. “That’s probably true.”

  I crossed into the United States of America for the first time in nearly six years, and headed west on Interstate 8.

  53

  I turned onto the street where my in-laws had lived ever since they moved out from Iowa so Julie’s dad could work for Hughes Aerospace. Their two-bedroom stucco bungalow with the turquoise gutters and Astroturf front lawn was typical of the homes at the western edge of the Inland Empire, that vast, air-conditioned nightmare known as the 909—which was the original area code for what is considered one of the most heat-stricken and tedious neighborhoods in Southern California.

  Not much had changed since I’d lived here. It looked a little more tired and run-down, maybe—just like I probably do. SoCal was still crowded as hell, but I had missed its everythingness. How all the street lights turned on and the toilets flushed. I liked that the police weren’t going to shake you down or shoot you—at least, not a chubby white guy like me. I hated the chronic politics and the online badgering of America’s chattering class, but I had to admit I missed backyard picnics and the sweet sixteen.

  I just wasn’t sure I could live here again.

  My son was standing in the driveway. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder, and he was holding a skateboard as if it were a guitar. I would have preferred that his instrument of choice was a surfboard, but the closest beach was an hour away by bus. His hair was much longer than in the photograph, and he looked about two feet taller, too. But for sure, this was my son, for real and for the first time in almost six years. It felt like I was paddling into a wave that could either drown me or take me to shore.

  I pulled into the driveway just as the bungalow’s front door closed. It was pretty clear my in-laws didn’t want to see me. They probably figured that what their daughter had done was reasonable, considering what a crappy husband I was.

  Marshall and I looked at each other through the windshield. He was skinnier than I’d thought he was going to be. His jeans were ridiculously tight—and short. When I was his age, we would have called them floods. He was wearing a tony hawk for president T-shirt. I liked him already.

  I started to get out of the Suburban, but Marshall motioned for me to stay inside. He looked back at his grandparents’ house and sort of rolled his eyes.

  I got it.

  He climbed in on the passenger side, and we both kind of fumbled around. Then he handed me his skateboard and backpack, and I tossed them onto the rear seat as if I had been doing it every day for the last six years.

  “Hi, Marshall,” I said.

  He wasn’t sure if he should hug me or shake my hand, so I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and put my arms around his shoulders and squeezed. He felt strong, and I recognized his smell.

  “Nobody calls me Marshall anymore, Dad,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” He waved at the drapes in the front window. “Can we go?”

  “Are they watching?”

  “They watch everything. I even have to pee in a cup after every weekend.”

  “Put on your seat belt,” I said.

  “Okay,” Marshall said, and then buckled himself in almost instantly—as if to keep the moment as small as possible.

  I backed out of the driveway—pretending that driving with my son in the front seat was no big deal. But it was a very big deal. The last time I had taken my son for a ride, I’d nearly killed him. We were both faking that the memory wasn’t hogging up most of the seat between us—and we weren’t exactly pulling it off.

  “So, what do people call you these days?” I asked, trying to pop the boil.

  “Usually Marsh.”

  “You mean like a swamp?”

  I bumped him on the knee to make the joke, but nothing was feeling very funny.

  “Like the Marshman, Dad,” he said. “Like you used to.”

  But it did sound like he was getting a kick out of calling me Dad, and that felt good.

  He pulled up his sleeve and showed off a tattoo—it was a skateboard with The Marshman inked in gothic script just above his left bicep.

  “That’ll last forever, Marsh,” I said, a recent expert.

  “And I got it when I was eleven, so it’s even longer.”

  “Who lets an eleven-year-old boy get a tattoo?!” I asked, faking shock and disdain.

  “Me and Uncle Steve got them in Tijuana,” Ma
rshall said.

  “He’s not your uncle.”

  “Well, I don’t know what else to call him.”

  “How about an accomplice to attempted murder?”

  It was a cheap shot, and it stung a little more than I’d wanted it to. Marshall seemed unsure how to respond.

  “What’s an accomplice?”

  “Usually a guy who can’t say no to a bad idea,” I said, on uncomfortably familiar ground.

  “Oh,” Marshall said.

  He started to bite a thumbnail. I could see that his fingernails were bitten down and a little bloody. Marshall caught me looking and crossed his arms to hide his hands. He was embarrassed.

  “I used to bite my fingernails,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, all the way down. I couldn’t stop.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, who knows—maybe the world made me nervous.” I hadn’t given biting my fingernails that much thought. “But I liked pushing the part I bit off through my teeth.”

  “I do that,” Marshall said. “But Steve told me it’s because I’m a pussy.”

  “That’s not a word I’d use.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said.

  I was hoping my son wasn’t going to hurl the C-word as easily as Obsidian had.

  “It means ‘wimp,’” Marshall said.

  “You’re not a wimp,” I said.

  Marshall clicked his thumbnail against his front teeth. It was quiet and we just sat there, trying to figure out the shapeless space between us and whether we should push into it or lean away.

  “Have you talked to Mom?” Marshall finally asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “I didn’t think you would,” he said. “You guys hate each other.”

  I let out a breath. “You do know what they’re saying, right?”

  “What?”

  “That your mom tried to kill me.”

  “I know they’re saying that,” he said.

  Marshall reached into the back seat and took something out of his backpack. I couldn’t see what it was, but it didn’t look as if he was hiding it from me.