Across the Wire

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Across the Wire Page 10

by Luis Urrea

“Hello, frien’,” he said to them. “Hello, baby.”

  “Please,” the cut woman said.

  “Baby,” the translator said, “you go to jail.” It sounded as though he were asking her if she attended Yale.

  “Everybody,” he said, gesturing at the lot of them, “going to Yale!”

  He beamed, as though they had just won a raffle.

  “They have to be investigated,” the cop said behind me. He must have fìled a short report.

  “But they’re hurt,” I said.

  “That’s what happens in a car wreck, amigo.”

  Too dazed to be terrified, the gringo kids slumped on the seat looking stringy and tattered.

  “She needs help,” I said.

  The cop pursed his lips. He took a better look, apparently suspicious that she was faking the glass in her face.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, frien’,” said the translator. “No problem!”

  I didn’t dare speak to the kids. I had no idea what codes of behavior and protocol I might be breaking. I certainly didn’t want to join them in Yale.

  The cop went to talk to the captain, who stepped out of his office and scowled at me, then at them. This was obviously highly irregular.

  “Martínez!” he snapped at some distant officer. “Get this girl some medical attention.”

  He vanished back into his office.

  All the cops seemed shocked by this development. They stood there staring at the kids on the bench. One of them finally detached himself from the mob and tenderly took the young woman by the arm and pulled her up. Then he looked around, wondering what to do with her. They turned and disappeared into the interior of the station, and the translator was cooing, “Okay, baby. Is o-kay.”

  Dark was falling. He was going off-duty.

  “I’ll give you a ride to where you’re going,” he said. We wandered back over to Pepe’s car and got in again.

  “You can sit in the front,” he said.

  He took off his shades, worked his crackling neck, rubbed his eyes.

  “What a job,” he said.

  We backed out, cruised slowly. His eyes compulsively scanned the sidewalks, flicked from door to door, lit fleetingly on faces as we passed.

  “A Salvadoran got his tongue cut out over here,” he said, pointing to a corner. “How do you like that? Right down the street from the police station. Pinche gang of cholos get hold of this poor guy and cut out his tongue. What do you do with people like that?”

  Next block.

  “This old man came up to me this morning. Some crazy pendejo killed his dog over there.” He pointed. “He pulled the dog out of the old man’s truck and kicked it to death.”

  He shook his head. “What are you going to do,” he said.

  It was fully dark by now.

  “That’s a great disco, over there,” he said. “You should try it.” Marko’s Jet-Set Disco.

  “You have a strange job,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “Hey! You know my favorite thing about being a cop?” He pulled over and stopped, turned around in the seat to face me. Tijuana’s one last honest cop.

  “What?” I said.

  “Disco patrol.”

  “Disco patrol?”

  “Yeah. It starts at two or three in the morning. We hang around on the side streets, watching for American women driving alone.” He was really smiling now. “These dumb broads come down here by themselves to dance and pick up Mexicans.”

  “Oh, really,” I said.

  “So they come out of the discos and head for the border, and if they’re alone, or there’s two of them, I pull them over.”

  “Ticket,” I said.

  “Exactly. I turn on my lights, hit the siren—it scares them. They pull over. I get out of the car, mad as hell. I tell them they ran a red light.”

  “And you charge them a bribe?” I offered.

  “A bribe!” he barked. “Don’t make me laugh. I tell them they have to go to jail. I arrest them. Then I get them in the car. Then I pull out my lariat.” (La reata.) He pantomimed laying a penis clearly nineteen inches long across the steering wheel.

  “I tell them, ‘Suck on this and you can go.’ And you know what? Gringas are sluts—they always suck my lariat.” “Oh,” I said.

  He drove me to my destination in silence.

  When we got there, I said, “Do you let them go?”

  He said, “Of course I let them go! I’m a cop, not a monster.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Last Soldier

  of Pancho Villa

  Leaving Tijuana by way of the free road to Ensenada takes you through a dusty poverty that is suggestive of ancient days. The canyons bristle with shacks and tumbled fences, while above, maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories) crown the hills in castlelike sprawls. The serfs below await the day the complexes above them will open their doors. The hillsides seem to crumble as you watch them. Yards are dust. On the slopes, where the soil is often shades of gray, the people have built ingenious gardens using abandoned car tires. They dig the tires into the slope, then fill them with dirt. Often, whole hillsides will be made of a staggered, sloping wall of tires. In each tire, a plant or two-geraniums and nopales (beavertail cactus) are most common. (You can eat nopales, and since geraniums grow from cuttings, certain barrio folk launch garden after garden for their neighbors.)

  Then, the yonkes. Abandoned discos. Yonkes. A Catholic orphanage. Yonkes. The infantry base. Then you come around a bend into fields of flowers—buttercups and mustard splash yellow over the hills. It’s surprising. If you’re not prepared, it might startle you to pop out of the sprawl of the city so suddenly. The sea seems to rise in the distance. The cars spread out on the road and begin to speed, clean wind tearing in through the windows.

  There are small towns before and beyond Rosarito. Near one of them, there is a rock in the ocean that has the same shape as a Volkswagen beetle. It looks like it’s driving to Hawaii. You will see a bright red building on the right. This is the orphanage that has always been run by Mama and Papa T.

  Mama had no teeth. Her nose was a mass of brown scars from years of continuous sunburn. She was always either forty-nine or seventy, there was no way to tell. You heard her before you saw her. She was either laughing, scolding a child or a dog, or crying out in her joy that you came to see her. “¡Oh! ¡Oh!” she’d shout. “¡Qué bueno!”

  She plowed into your ribs as you got out of your vehicle. If you seemed at all friendly, she gave you a fierce hug. She patted you on the arms, back, sides, chest, in the manner of poor old Mexican women—her palm open, her fingers stiff enough so they bent back a little. Her touch was so light you hardly felt it. It was almost as though she were touching you to let herself know you were really there.

  Then she was apt to hold her open hand up by your face—it looked as though you might get slapped—and offer an ecstatic soliloquy that clearly included God, missionaries, and abundant blessings. You might even have gotten a tour of the compound. Mama was proud of her new American toilets and bathtubs. If you took her doughnuts, you could expect to end up in her kitchen, watching her sop up coffee and slurp them down.

  Papa, however, was more reserved. He was a shadow. You would see him in the background, his slightly palsied head nodding gently in a white hardhat.

  Papa, unlike Mama, was ninety. In 1978, he was ninety, and in 1991, he seemed to still be ninety. His skin was dark brown, brown as mahogany. His mustache was white and sparse, small enough to look like a trace of milk he forgot to lick off his lip. His brown eyes were so faded, so encircled by cataracts and clouded with years, that they looked almost blue. He was five feet tall.

  In his youth, Papa rode a horse. He carried a rifle. He rode hard into desert towns and saw army garrisons fall. He slept on the ground, wrapped in a thin blanket. You might see him in some of those old Mexican photographs, with gunbelts crossed over his heart. Long before he became
a Christian, Papa T. was a soldier of Pancho Villa. And when any commotion happened at his orphanage, Papa retreated into his own silence. He hid in the big chicken coop under the water tower. If you followed him, you saw a pale shape standing in there. He held the chickens to his lips. He had a few favorites. He fancied some fluffy white show chickens someone gave him. “Feel this,” he’d say. You’d pet the chicken. Its feathers felt like cat fur. “Soft,” he’d say, his delighted laughter quiet, his voice a reed in wind. “Soft!” He’d kiss the chicken on the head.

  Papa built the orphanage by hand. He first made it of wood, hauling lumber from Tijuana, Rosarito, even Ensenada. At the time, the people of the small fishing village were curious if not suspicious. Papa made a long two-story building, with his and Mama’s dwelling at the west end. Boys would live downstairs, and girls above. Papa called the place the “Home of Light.” (Hogar de Luz.) When he finished building, he painted it sky blue.

  Then, as a service to the children and the community, he built a church next door. He and his sons labored for almost a year, using cement, stucco, and wood. It was the first Protestant church on that part of the coast. Once the church was done, Papa realized the orphanage needed modernizing, so he hauled out his ladders and hammers again and began an ambitious construction project behind the original orphanage. This one would be entirely of brick and cement block, with modern bathrooms and dorm rooms throughout. American work crews eagerly joined in, bringing him supplies and fresh-faced youth groups who scrambled up and down Papa’s ladders, slopping cement and banging nails.

  On those days, Papa stood watching, his ever-present white helmet bobbing slightly. He gripped either a huge white cup of coffee or a banana. He pointed sometimes, then looked at me, as if some secret between us had just been confirmed.

  At the end of the day, he thanked everybody. As soon as they were on the highway back north, he climbed his ladder and undid the work they had done wrong. Often, Papa spent two days fixing angles and rehammering frames.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “The young people need to work. It’s good for them to have work.”

  Because of his age, and his bobbing head, Americans made the mistake of thinking him simple, or diminished in some way. Once, a missionary crew descended on him to repaint his orphanage. They had brought bright red paint, so the orphanage would be easier to spot. Papa liked it blue. The Americanos forged ahead, and the leader of the crew said to me, “Tell him he’s a good man.” Then he patted Papa on the head.

  Papa stood there, shoulders hunched, shaking a little.

  He then offered me the only unsolicited comment I ever heard him make about Pancho Villa. “At least Pancho Villa,” he said, “was a gentleman. He let a man have self-respect.”

  Things went on as normal in the newly red orphanage until one day we pulled into the driveway and found Mama crying and wringing her hands. We thought Papa had died. She held on to us and wailed.

  Papa had left home.

  ———

  Papa had this recurring dream. If you were friends with him, he’d tell it to you. “Jesus Christ is calling me,” he’d say. He heard Jesus almost every night, with the clarity of the dreams of old men. No matter what he did, Jesus intruded on his dreams, took him from whatever reverie he was in and led him back to the same insistent vision.

  He saw a vast, barren plain. It was stark, dead. Nothing grew there. The sun was white. He could hear the empty sound of wind. Jesus would stride toward him. In His hand, a seed. He pressed the seed into Papa’s hand and indicated he was to plant it where they stood. “Here my tree will grow,” Jesus said. “Here you will build my house.”

  Papa cried sometimes, talking about it. He thought he was supposed to die there. He was afraid to go into the desert, fueled by nothing more than a dream. But he was a soldier, and he’d been in the desert before. He had his orders. He put it off as long as he could—he put it off until he knew his life was over. If he was to die out there, at least he had done his work for the children. He told Mama good-bye one morning, took a small bag of things and a blanket, and walked up to the highway. The children cried; Mama wrung her hands and pleaded. The last they saw of him was the white helmet through the window of a bus.

  We were reduced to the religious platitudes you offer people of faith: “You’ll see him again in heaven.”

  “Yes!” she cried. “Glory be to God!”

  Two months passed. A stranger appeared at the Home of Light, asking for Mama. Was she related to a Sr. T?

  “Yes!” she cried. “Oh yes!” Tears ran down her cheeks.

  Did Sr. T wear a helmet, and was he … elderly?

  “Yes!”

  The man sipped a cup of coffee at Mama’s table. He related a story of what he had seen in the great northern desert of Mexico. An old man got off a bus in a desert hamlet where this man had a small business. The locals watched him hobble along with his bedroll and bag. He approached an Indian man. He was a Yaqui. They watched this stranger talk to the Yaqui man for a few minutes, then the two of them turned and hiked out of town together.

  Later, when the Yaqui man came into town for supplies, he reported that the old man had brought him a message from Jesus. They were busy building a new house for God out on the plain. The townsfolk regularly visited the site. Papa somehow accumulated tools, supplies, and helpers.

  “Tell Mama,” he told the visitor, “that the Indians are building a church. It is going well.”

  This fellow had business in Tijuana, and was so curious about this marvelous scene that he promised to drive down the coast and report to Mama.

  After the end of the summer, we drove into the compound. Halloween was approaching soon, and the searing heat of late September had finally drifted off as though it had never happened. Mama wore a bright dress, a scarf tied over her hair. She danced around, clapping her hands like a kid.

  “He’s back!” she shouted. “He’s back! He’s back!”

  We thought she meant one of us until we realized it was Papa.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “With the chickens.”

  I went down to the chicken house. It was dark in there. I pulled open the wire door and stepped through. The floor was three inches of chicken dung.

  “Papa?” I said. “Are you in here?”

  A small blob of white stirred down at the end. That famous helmet.

  I went in deeper.

  “Papa!” I said.

  He had a white chicken in his hands. He held it out to me. He gestured at me with the chicken.

  “Feel these feathers,” he said.

  I petted the chicken.

  Papa glanced at me.

  Looking somewhat amused, he leaned over and confided a secret.

  “I lived,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Meet the Satánicos

  Christmas was coming. Up north, the gringos had just celebrated their Thanksgiving. Tijuana, as always, was beginning to copy them, and many families here, too, had enjoyed “El Tenks-geevee.” In Spanish, it is el día de las gracias, though what exactly Mexicans have to give thanks for on North America’s Thanksgiving is not clear. Perhaps they’re thanking God the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts.

  In barrios and colonias, orphanages and garbage dumps, hope stirred as the cold descended. In spite of the illness and the discomfort of late fall, they knew that the missionaries were preparing Christmas for them. Orphanages picked reluctant children to wrap themselves in sheets and blankets to play Mary, Joseph, and the Wise Men in their yearly pageants. Invariably, a doll that had lost 75 percent of its hair played Jesus. And there always seemed to be a boy who had to crawl around on all fours playing the ass. The orphanage directors opened their doors to neighbors—thinking, somehow, that these Christmas plays would evangelize all the barrio, causing a mass exodus from Catholicism, a spiritual flocking to the Protestant banner.

  The colonia was one of the new ones that caused so much controversy in Tijuana. It will re
main nameless here. This was its first Christmas with Von and his crew. Created unofficially by paracaidistas, or “parachutists,” the clever Mexican nickname for squatters who descend on a piece of land from out of nowhere, it lay two hills over from the old dump area, and it was rumored to be under the control of a gangster who involved entire barrios in car thievery. Driving in, I was struck immediately by the rows of automotive husks lining the rough dirt street; in some places, stripped and burned-out cars were layered on top of each other. Certain arroyos were clogged with car bodies, many of them on their roofs. Yet this colorful so-called gangster took an interest in the missionaries of the area, and he looked out for their well-being. Often his largesse had to be politely deflected—one drug-treatment program in the area graciously rejected his repeated offers of new cars.

  The colonia, being controversial, indeed not officially in existence, lacked any services whatsoever. Aside from the typical lack of water, there was no electricity. There was no bus service. There were no telephones, no streetlights, no doctor’s offices, stores, schools. And there was certainly no police presence. The barrio was the Wild West. The missionary from the treatment center told me of his Saturday nights—he and the addicts in their plywood church and dorms, looking into the pitch-black canyons below them, watched the gunfire flash, listened to the yells and shouting. “Everything happens here on Saturday nights,” he said. “Anything you can imagine. Anything”

  The vans rattled up the hill, cut left into a small clear area at the crest. Beyond lay the deep black of the unsettled outskirts. The missionaries built a lit basketball court and a small clubhouse for the barrio kids. A gasoline generator made a racket. Kids flocked to the ball court and the clubhouse all through the fall. They had nothing else to do on the hill except sleep, listen to radios, or sniff glue. None of them could afford drugs, and few of them could afford booze.

  The local criminal element was a street gang called Los Satánicos. They gathered along the edge of the ball court, arrayed themselves along the retaining wall that kept the top of the hill from burying the youth center. They’d been sniffing glue and paint thinner.

 

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