Across the Wire

by Luis Urrea

  They laughed.

  Kids were playing with foam-rubber lizards attached to straightened coat hangers. The little beasts swirled around our legs, in between the cops’ feet.

  An officer, listening to a walkie-talkie, jumped to his feet and shouted, “¡Un treintaisiete!” (A thirty-seven!)

  They stampeded across the park. There I was, running in the middle of about a hundred Mexican cops. They scolded the stragglers: “Hurry up! A thirty-seven!”

  We arrived at the scene.

  Two cops were hustling a shirtless Mexican out of the crowd. They had his arms twisted up behind him. It hurt—he was up on his tiptoes. Two American women came after, being held tightly by grim female officers.

  One of them shouted, “Oh God! Don’t fight! Take my hand!” She was trying to reach back to her friend.

  Her friend was too busy to notice. “Don’t I have any say in this?” she demanded. The cop acted deaf.

  “Don’t fight them!”

  The mass of cops followed in a tan wave.

  I ran around them and caught up to the women as they exited the park. The second one shouted into a male cop’s face, “No fuck! What the fuck do you mean, no fuck!”

  The skinny cop from before nodded at me. “She was putting on un show,” he said.

  Mike found a kitten on a window ledge beside the fire. Someone had put him up there, and he was too small to jump down. He’d taken the brunt of the spray from the fire hoses, which probably saved him from burning to death. However, his nose was cooked, and his throat was so wrecked from the smoke and from screaming that he had no voice left. The smoke had made his eyes leak goo, and they were glued shut. I dipped my handkerchief in water and wiped them clean, but they filled up again. I wrapped him in my T-shirt. He gripped my knuckles with his tiny claws and purred.

  Socorro cooked us a huge supper.

  As we left, Pepe said, “Most people call this thing a ‘Pamlonada,’ but I call it a ‘Simplonada.’ ” (This was quite a joke—simplón means “idiot.” Simple means “simple,” as in “stupid.” Nada means “nothing.” And, of course, the suffix -nada is similar to “-arama.”)

  I held the kitten in my lap as Mike and I drove out of town and up the hills toward the orphanage. We pulled in at Los Encinos to watch a country dance. Somber cowboys shuffled slowly around an open concrete slab with girls in hand-sewn dresses. Booths hung in paper streamers sold tacos and fruit. Paper lanterns wobbled in the breeze. During the fast songs, the ranchers clomped their boot heels, arms aflap like crows.

  Monday, August 17

  The kids woke me up at six. They wanted to know all about the Pamplonada. They loved the ugly little kitten, and they carried him around like a baby. He was still voiceless and blind, but his purr was startlingly loud. One of the girls got so excited that she danced all around me, inadvertently kicking my big toenail loose. We all stood there watching my foot squirt blood.

  Don Victor wouldn’t take the cat. He said he’d drown it if we left it with him.

  Mike and I named the cat Bruce Springsteen, a Cat from the Street. We tucked him in my T-shirt inside a cardboard box and took him with us.

  About fifteen arduous miles outside of Tijuana, we passed an old man struggling along the roadside on crutches. Plastic sacks of junk hung off the handgrips. We pulled over. I got out and helped him get in the van.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Tijuana.”

  “Where in Tijuana?”

  “Tijuana.”

  I shrugged at Mike. The old man sat still, staring out the windshield as though he were driving.

  “Tijuana it is,” said Mike, getting back on the road.

  The old man was dirty. He wore a pinstriped jacket, stained slacks, and several layers of shirts. On his head was a battered straw hat with a dove feather in the hatband. It was quite hot, but he wasn’t sweating. He had tied rags around the handgrips of the crutches. He smelled like turpentine. His skin was so dark it was almost black.

  “Bus station,” he said.

  At the corner near the station, I helped him out. I hung his bags back on his crutches. I tried to give him some water, but he refused it. I pointed him toward the entrance. He balanced himself on the twin sticks and moved away, never looking back. Not a word.

  ———

  We expected trouble with the border guards over Bruce. I was half considering hiding him—he would have almost fit in my pocket. He kept his nails hooked in my skin, even in sleep, and purred constantly. He was very weak, though I had been able to get a little milk down him.

  We finally decided just to be honest and show them the cat. We were lucky; the guard was a young woman who took pity on Bruce. She came around and petted him, and said, “Poor little thing.” She even gave me some tips on trying to revive him before she sent us across.

  We traveled 370 miles that weekend. When I got home, I had enough time to feed Bruce warm milk with a spoon, then tuck him in a box full of underwear. Von was waiting for me—it was time to go to Tijuana.

  Wednesday, August 19

  Two days later, little Bruce went to sleep and never woke up. He purred as he died. I buried him under the bushes in my backyard. I planned to take it easy the next day: it would be my birthday.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TIJUANA COP

  He flicked on the siren. It whooped satisfactorily, sounding like a television show. “Muévete, pendejo” (Move, asshole), he muttered to the cars that blocked his way as he maneuvered the Rio de Tijuana thoroughfare. I glanced at the speedometer: we were doing eighty-five miles per hour, slaloming around the traffic. He steered with his left hand, his right arm casually thrown over the back of the passenger seat. I stared at his wrist hairs as I slid around in the back.

  “Hey,” he said, glancing back at me with a big grin. He wore aviator shades that completely hid his eyes; his mustache drooped past the corners of his mouth. “I bet you never thought you’d be riding in the backseat of a Tijuana cop car!”

  “Not on purpose,” I said.

  It began innocently enough, with me babbling in abject terror.

  I was geting my boots shined in one of those step-up shoeshine stalls you find all over Tijuana. It was like going to confession—the little booth had a wooden seat, and the only things visible to passersby were my feet. The gentleman buffing my left boot was wiry and bright with sweat. I settled in with a copy of ¡Alarma!, Mexico’s premier blood-drenched tabloid. As usual, it was full of satisfyingly lurid pictures: massacred cops, massacred drug dealers, car-wreck victims, cult murders, train-killed bodies.

  We were on the corner of Ninth. A tan-clad arm flashed into the booth, its hard fist closing on my wrist. A cop! I jerked: Oh my God! I’m busted! For what, in retrospect, I don’t know. I had wanted to meet a Tijuana cop, and had asked my relatives to arrange it, yet here I was blanching white and going utterly dry-mouthed. I had forgotten everything.

  “What are you doing here, you son of a bitch,” his voice snarled.

  The shoeshine man, not knowing what was going on, backed away from my foot and sat on his haunches, watching. His face was completely blank.

  “Ubb,” I offered. “Ubba, ubba,” I explained.

  The cop’s face peered in at me. I could see myself in his shades. He started to smile. Then he laughed. He asked me how I was doing. This apparently passed for humor among Tijuana’s finest.

  They are aware of their reputations. They cultivate their reputations. After all, nothing is more macho than causing immediate fear. They swagger, they beat people, they demand bribes, and they shoot. Members of my family have been officers of the Tijuana police force, yet I cut a wide swath around their brothers-in-arms, as does anyone with any sense.

  Still, imagine being a cop in Tijuana. The mind reels. Here is a man called upon to preserve order in the most celebrated bastion of chaos on the border. This man is expected to enforce traffic laws in a country whose roads are haphazard at best, where stop signs often appea
r either twenty yards before an intersection—which is merely a dirt path straggling down to the road—or immediately after. There are no stop lines. No one minds the speed limits. And if he gives a gringo a traffic ticket, the gringo drives home and shows it to his friends and they have a good laugh and throw it away.

  He works a city of famed vice: cascades of liquor, prostitution, child porn, drugs, even a healthy black market in fireworks and faux perfumes. His beat is visited by more gringos than visit Disneyland, and he has to judge which of these tourists are actually here to do harm, which are here to find innocent bargains, which have cocaine stuffed in their underwear, which carry knives, which are stoned or drunk or psychopathic.

  His world is governed by laws that are effectively the reverse of ours: in Mexico, you are guilty until proven innocent. This leads to an enforced, endemic paranoia: of course you’re lying—only a good lawyer will make anybody think otherwise. Add this policy to the already embattled and embittered mentality of a beat cop, and then stir in a Mexican loathing and resentment of gringos, and you’re dealing with a difficult situation, at best. As a walking ambassador of American goodwill, you will invariably fail to impress.

  And then, of course, there are the bribes. Mexicans call them la mordida (the bite). (American kids called cops “pigs” in the sixties, and Mexican kids called cops “dogs.”) La mordida is not a private vice of the Mexican police. Anyone who has dealt with our friendly neighbor knows this. The phenomenon is too complex to dissect here—suffice it to say that it’s a culture of patronage, with a long tradition of graft. It is a social Darwinist’s dream, where the strong rule, and their strength is often measured by how much money they can extract from you for the most basic human need. It is a symbolic world where the money you pay out demonstrates your respect for the official and the official’s position of merit, honor, and service.

  In the case of the cops, add poverty.

  Most police will tell you that no cop is paid enough. In Tijuana, as late as the early eighties, cops pulled in a whopping salary of twenty dollars a week. As if that weren’t difficult enough, Tijuana cops buy their own guns. Motorcycle cops buytheir own motorcycles. A handsome .357 Magnum with ivory grips and a Harley hog cost a bit more than any average officer can afford. Guess where they get their extra budgets.

  I pulled myself from the shoeshine stand and was embarrassed that my knees shook. Man, I thought, what a wimp.

  His shirt was open at the neck, showing black hair curling over the top of a brilliant white undershirt. The inevitable Dirty Harry Magnum rode high on his right hip. He wore knee boots polished bright as mirrors. Stripes ran up the sides of his tight pants.

  “I just got a call I have to investigate. Want to come?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Let’s go,” he said, spinning on his heel and marching toward the police station.

  We hopped into a cruiser, and he clicked on the radio, muttered his name, his destination, and a series of numbers.

  “Hey, Pepe!” he called out the window. “I’m taking your car!”

  “Fuck you!” Officer Pepe yelled back. Everybody laughed.

  “Pinche Pepe,” he said.

  We wove down the street, impatiently honking at slow cars. Pedestrians on the corners gawked at me in the back with the same slack-faced look of dread I suddenly realized I had on my face every time a prisoner was whisked past me in the back of one of those cars.

  “Look at this,” the cop was saying. Cars refused to allow him through the intersection. “Nobody gives a damn about the law!”

  He hit his siren, gestured, waved his arms.

  “¡Policía!” he snapped out the window. “Get out of the way!”

  Tijuana’s downtown gridlock suddenly broke and we shot through.

  “Nobody loves a cop,” he said.

  “Don’t say I said so,” he said, “but there are a lot of crooked officers on this force.”

  “Really?” I said, trying to sound bland.

  He shrugged, raised both hands. The car steered itself for twenty feet. “That’s life. What did you expect? This is Tijuana.”

  We came upon a gap in the center island.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  Before I knew what we were doing, he threw us into a power slide, sideways through the gap. The car fishtailed in front of oncoming traffic, then the tires bit into the road and we shot off in the opposite direction, still going a respectable seventy-five.

  “Not bad, eh?” he said.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I’ll show you who can drive,” he said.

  “No! Please!” I cried. I thought twice about making any jokes about police cruelty or torture of suspects. Instead, I said, “Tell me more about corruption.”

  “A few years ago,” he said, “we were getting a lot of hassle from the San Diego police. We had car thieves working on our force. San Diego told us, ‘Look. You can’t do this. You can’t steal American cars. You’re cops!’ ”

  He glanced back at me. “Lots of these cabrones have new Toyota pickups. Where do you think they got them?”

  We slowed abruptly and left the main road, cutting up a hill at the north end of Tijuana. We passed under a narrow railroad bridge and hit rough patches of dirt.

  “Those crooked cops,” he said, “make it hard for us who want to be honest. Some of us are good cops. But now all of us get investigated all the time.”

  We were heading up into Colonia Libertad, the notorious barrio where illegals and coyotes gathered every night to go into the canyons. Lawlessness had enjoyed a vogue in those hills for so long that police didn’t care to venture there at night. My guide said, “Watch out up here. These people are animals. They don’t give a shit about anything. If they catch us in a dead end, they’ll hit us with rocks. Stay with me and keep your mouth shut.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Apparently, a bus had run over a guy on a motorcycle. Someone called it in to police headquarters, but nobody knew how long ago. When we got there, the twisted bike was lying in the dirt. It was a small Japanese machine. The bus had backed out of a blind drive, climbed over the bike and the rider, and continued backing out.

  “You didn’t see him?” demanded the cop.

  “No,” said the driver.

  “You didn’t feel him?”

  “No.”

  The cop rubbed his face, looked around. “Where’s the cyclist?”

  Everybody shrugged.

  “Is he dead?”

  Shrugs. “Maybe.” “No.” “I don’t know.”

  Mud around the crushed bike could have been blood. Then again, it could have been oil or gas or urine.

  “Did an ambulance take him?”

  “No,” said the bus driver. Then, “A car. One of the neighbors.”

  Clearly angry by now, the cop took his name and address. “We’ll be coming for you,” he said ominously.

  The driver’s eyebrows shot up in alarm, but before the cop could be reasoned with, he was back in his car. On the hill, cholos yelled slang insults at him: “Hey chota” (a nickname for “cop”), “fuck you!”

  Grimly, he backed out and floored it, pelting the crowd with gravel. They skipped and danced in his cloud of dust.

  “We’re going to the city hospital,” he said. “It’s a butcher shop. Don’t say anything when we get there, because they don’t like people seeing their emergency rooms. I’ll tell them you’re a detective.”

  We arrived on the emergency ramp in a burst of lights.

  “Walk fast,” he said, hitching up his gunbelt.

  I followed him at my best police-inspector clip. We stormed through the doors, brushing past a concerned orderly who wanted us to halt. On our way into the bowels of the hospital, however, we were accosted by an old nurse. She held up her hand and commanded us to stop. “What is your business?” she asked.

  “Investigating an accident,” the cop said.

  “And this gentleman?”

  “Det
ective.”

  I looked too much like a gringo.

  “Sí señora,” I said in my best Spanish.

  Like a relentless gnome in a Monty Python skit, she badgered us. “Does he have ID?” she demanded of the cop.

  “Ma’am,” he said, exasperated, “he’s undercover!”

  This arcane police word seemed to work on her, and she relented.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  Although there were surely no flies in the hospital, they remain my overwhelming impression of the place. I imagine big-assed flies bumping into everything. Dust and dirt formed small wedges in the corners, dirty bandages were visible on the floors of rooms standing empty, middle-aged women lay on stretchers in the hall obviously suffering from something that was not readily visible. We glanced into the various emergency cubicles as we went down the hall. Innumerable fascinating scenes were enacted in each, but no biker. The last stall featured the nightmarish vision of a nurse leaning over a boy’s face with pliers of some sort. She had latched on to something and was trying to work it out. He writhed and shouted, flat on his back, arms and legs strapped down. She paused in her efforts and looked up at us, plier handles still firmly in her grip. The cop blandly stared at this tableau, then looked at me and wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “Interesting,” he said.

  Outside, he said, “Well, who knows where the motorcyclist is.” We got in the car. “Fuck him. Let’s go.”

  So we went back to the station.

  I entered with some dread.

  “Keep out of the way,” he said, going in to make out his report.

  A small group of Americans was seated on a bench. One of the women had slivers of glass in her face; she was dabbing at the blood with tissues. Various cops milled around the bench looking down at the kids. The official policía translator hovered over them. He was a smarmy disco-king in a shiny silken shirt and slicked-back hair.