by Bella Pollen
She extended her hand for money, revealing stale sweat marks on the underarms of her cheesecloth smock. Nobody told her it wasn’t safe to park her car over the border, she said, tearing up—she was just like us, day-trippers, here for the souvenirs.
I felt bad. She was around the same age as Emily and me, but she looked rough—hair tangled as thicket, a rip in her shorts.
“My purse was in there,” she went on. “ID too. You gotta help me, I got no way of getting back over.”
“Sure,” John said mildly. “Hop in, girl, we’ll take you to the consulate.”
“No! No consulate, mister, I need to get back to my kids.” She aimed a quivering lip at Emily and me. “I need money.”
“Money will do you no good,” John said. “You need papers.”
“No, mister,” she wheedled. “Please, just a few dollars.”
“I got this, John.” I thrust a handful of singles towards her.
“That it?” The woman looked at the creased bills in disgust. “That the best you can do?” A gob of spit flew through the air and landed on my cheek. “Fuck you, bitch.”
“Fuck you too!” I retorted, indignant.
The woman had barely completed her fig sign before John’s hand shot past me and grabbed her wrist through the window.
“You want more money?” He turned her arm to reveal the Morse code of needle scars on her inner elbow. “Introduce us to your dealer first.”
While John escorted the junkie to her crack house, Emily and I went for coffee.
“Wouldn’t take much,” Emily mused, watching them go. “No car, money, ID. We’d be begging on streets after a week or two.”
“Speak for yourself.” I knew John would do better at the crack house on his own, but I was peeved not to be going with him. In the grip of a charged impatience, all I wanted was to push out to the edge of everything I was familiar with and keep on going after that.
“Think he’ll be OK?”
“John?” I said, distracted. It was the woman I felt sorry for. Of all the marks in town she’d tried to scam a seasoned opportunist. We’d needed a smuggler and John must have calculated junkie to dealer to smuggler as the fastest route. Sure enough, he returned an hour later with the information that a blow job cost twenty dollars, an eight ball of crack sixty, and our meeting with the coyote was scheduled for three p.m., later that day.
It was now four o’clock, and the tiny covered market stall was sweltering. In my backpack, the light of my disk recorder flashed, dutifully collating audio, but small talk with the coyote’s advance party had dried up, and what to make of the visual? The sizzling brute guarding the stall’s makeshift entrance had a pistol shoved down his shorts and skin as pitted as an ostrich’s. Acne, I thought vaguely, or chicken pox. The other two, their hair greased into tiny samurai man buns, were sporting a range of scars along with menacing stares that might have been perfected in henchmen’s finishing school. Despite their bad rap, most smugglers, so we’d been told, were ordinary guys taking advantage of market opportunity. But there were exceptions. We had given ourselves up to chance and been rewarded with three utterly stereotypical heavies out of some filmmaker’s imaginary Mexico and I felt an odd sense of detachment. If these men weren’t real, then how could the situation be dangerous? Instead of keeping my wits about me, I was beginning to zone out in the heat, wondering whether Ostrich had grown to look mean after years of intimidation or whether he’d been born that way and pigeonholed into his career accordingly. “I’m sorry, hijo”, I imagined his father saying, handing him a serrated knife tied with a big red bow and gently turning him to the mirror. “This face is good for one thing and one thing only.” There was little subtlety to the samurai either, with their intimate language of tattoos and polished blades creviced within the folds of their clothes. You’d think that in this company, an ex-soldier and a doctor would have been exceptional choices of companion—but only in the event that one of these men spontaneously went into labour or required an emergency hysterectomy. Still, any doctor is a good doctor, particularly given Emily’s healthy dose of medical callousness. Once, after too much tequila, she had pulled me close to her. “Ya know,” she began in her Charleston accent—but instead of the profound statement about our friendship I’d been expecting, she came out with, “people say such stoopid shit when they die.” Another time she rang me from a cadaver convention in Seattle and announced that she was standing in a room full of vaginas carved from their bodies. “Such cuties,” she’d said dreamily, “just lyin’ there all alone on big ol’ velvet cushions.”
As for John, if the basic training of Great Britain’s special forces includes the removal of a person’s eye with a toilet plunger it should be interesting to see what damage he could inflict with the rainbow-coloured threads of a poncho. He might these days be in the relatively civilized business of farming, but John remains an unpredictable lunatic with a propensity for improbable stories. And he was spinning one right now to Ostrich about the three of us being stuck in Mexico on the wrong side of line and law.
His sweat glands appeared to have taken on the role of Pinocchio’s nose. With every lie, the damp circles under his arms spread further across his shirt until they began converging on his breast like two oceanic plates. Still, I was admiring his chutzpah. His tale of betrayal and redemption was so captivating I was beginning to wish I’d written it myself.
“So, you see, we just want to get back to the Estados Unidos,” he finished.
“But no passports, huh?” Ostrich said.
“No passports.”
The Mexican border is a place where shifty empathises with shifty. All you need is a compelling reason for not taking your chances at a customs checkpoint. Fortunately, the script of the town was so familiar that our guides were happy to supply the storyline themselves. “Sure, sure,” Ostrich nodded. “So you got busted, I guess?”
“Look, I’d rather not go into this.”
“We get it, we get it, but dope, right?”
John adopted a pained expression, which somehow managed to imply that, yes, wasn’t it always dope that brought a good man down? “Plus, there are some other things—”
“Ah, sure . . . other things.” The wider of the samurai nodded. “I guess you kill someone, huh?”
John’s lips tightened, the very picture of a man determined to reserve his rights.
“Killing someone . . . ,” the other one reflected with nostalgia. “Yeah, that’s a bad rap.”
“A very bad rwap,” John agreed amiably.
The Mexicans did a discreet double take. No one is inclined to believe that a man who can’t say his r’s can be much of a threat, which makes John’s speech defect one of the most dangerous things about him. If his innate Englishness had thrown them, his r’s threw them further.
“OK, OK,” Ostrich said. “So you I get, but the women?” All of a sudden he was staring at Emily and me. A contemptuous stare that implied that if we couldn’t muster our own bad rwap, then what respect could possibly be due us?
And for the first time, John wavered.
“Hey! Juan es mi marido,” Emily jumped in, her Spanish fluent and emotive. “Él es mi amor, and I will never leave his side, entiendes?”
Suddenly I felt sad. It was true; John and Emily were devoted to one another, while Mac’s and my relationship had become a union of two puffer fish, sharp mouthed—each of us doubling in size to keep threats at bay. I wondered about plagiarising Emily’s story. Hey! I too amo Juan. We all amamos each other, entiendes? But what if the Mexicans didn’t understand my pidgin, audiotape Spanish? What if they thought we were weird, or practising Mormons? I imagined playing the family angle—Hey! I am the sister of Juan, and I amo him deeply!—but this made me sound like the expendable spinster aunt. Still, Ostrich was waiting, and for a moment I became my eight-year-old self again, trapped at one of my parents’ cocktail parties. Panic, freeze, blurt.
“I hit a man with a fire extinguisher,” I said.
/> Ostrich blinked. “A fire extinguisher?”
“Correcto. On his head.”
The samurai looked deeply impressed.
“How many times?” Ostrich asked.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see John shaking his head wearily.
“Until he was muerto of course,” I replied smoothly.
Just then, a fourth man stepped through the poncho curtain and the backs of all three henchmen snapped straight. All oiled hair and manicured nails, the Mexican oozed authority that was further evidenced by his pristine cowboy hat, and the starched jeans held to hip by the sort of extravagant belt buckle George W. Bush liked to be papped in at his Texas ranch. On our long-awaited coyote there was not a drop of perspiration. His coolness was unsettling. If his sidekicks presented as cookie-cutter villains, this was something to be grateful for. Their warning was writ bold on the package. El Chuché, as the smuggler introduced himself, was beautiful, but a coiled tightness suggested that the more scrupulous his handshake, the wider his circle of power; and the more deferential his head tilt towards Emily and me, the more women he’d dragged through life by the hair.
“So,” he addressed John, “you wanna get back to the United States.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t help all of you.” He flicked a glance our way.
“How much do you charge?”
“Eighteen hundred dollar per person.”
John whistled. We’d talked to enough people to know that fifteen hundred dollars was the going rate. “And for that you can get us to a safe house? Keep us out of the way of the Border Patrol, the bandidos?”
“Not all of you.”
“Why not?”
The samurai were beginning to fidget like children.
“Bring the women,” El Chuché said, his smile soft, “and it will be bad for them.”
I caught the flash in John’s eye. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking of ditching Emily and me. He was thinking it would be faster and safer without us. He’d taken a dislike to Chuché, but instead of finding a more palatable smuggler, he was toying with “turning” Chuché and his men “around”—his pet phrase for doling out some beastly if unspecified justice to those he believed deserved it. I glared at him, because we had agreed: it was all of us or none.
“You don’t need to do the crossing to get the story,” Mac had said. “You can just interview someone who’s made it over. You do understand that’s how journalism works, don’t you?”
Yes, I understood. But we were ready to go, with press permissions from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service stamped and folded in my pocket. Moreover, the riskier El Chuché made the crossing sound the more I felt the hypnotic lure of danger. I couldn’t wait to touch it, singe my fingers against the heat of it. Window-shopping the experience was of no interest, and in this John and I were the same. Together we could be reckless—his natural bent and mine creating a momentum that tended to override common sense. Nevertheless, a pipette-size drop of reality was beginning to break through. What was our cut-off line? Should things turn bad—and Chuché was virtually promising they would—at what point would we call in the Border Patrol? There would be others in our group. What would we say to them when the cops came whirring? Guys! We’re not actually part of the problem, just here to report it. But hey, good luck in the slammer, and keep in touch!
It was a given that John would use his gun on anyone threatening Emily or me, but there would be others in peril—desperate people whose main preoccupation was survival, as opposed to a fatuous self-imposed deadline. Was John to be the protector of all, and if so, how representative of a true crossing would such potential complication be? Then again, weren’t complications precisely what we were hoping for?
My head can be a dimly lit room at times, but even I could see that the story’s success was entirely predicated on the crossing’s failure.
I didn’t care. My other self was out now and as ravenous as a jungle beast.
If you go, my glare back to him said, I go too, and he’d read my message as easily as I’d read his.
“I’ll worry about the women,” he was saying to Chuché, “and you worry about the crossing.”
“How do I know I can trust you?” Chuché asked.
As if by stage prompt—a sharp click as the disk in my recorder came to an end. The machine purred softly, rewound, and stopped.
I held my breath. I knew it was idiotic to have brought it, but embedded in my ego was still the grandiose conviction that this crossing would prove to be not only a good story but the kind of Pulitzer Prize–worthy story that would have the brightest and best of newspaper editors gibbering with regret for their failure to commission it. Accuracy was fundamental, and without contemporaneous notes I’d have screwed it up before I’d begun. I snatched a quick look around the stall. No one had noticed. Smiling broadly, I thrust my hands into my backpack and began sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of old receipts, antacids, tampons, lidless ChapStick, and an arsenal of cracked, bleeding pens. Find recorder, snap open, insert new disk. More smiling, this time aimed specifically at Chuché. Maintain beatific expression somewhere between gratitude at his cooperation and respect for his manly dominance.
Hell, the disk wouldn’t go in. Why wouldn’t it? Ah, it was still in its wrapping, that’s why. Blindly I searched for some fissure or tab. A mosquito settled on my leg and ogled me with nasty compound eyes. John was bargaining Chuché down on price, and I was missing crucial dialogue. In desperation, I jammed my entire head into the backpack and began nipping at the disk, corn-on-the-cob style. It was a fiddly little sucker, and if the market stall was steamy, it was a polytunnel inside the backpack. After a prolonged struggle I forced the disk in and triumphantly pressed the play button, but as I came up for air, I realised negotiations had stopped and every eye had swiveled my way.
John liked to say that his favourite thing was to be in a crowded bar when the room suddenly went quiet. I got it. In those moments anything can happen and life truly is a surprise. This moment was not quite like that. It was more like I’d taken a long time to tell a uniquely unfunny joke and now the whole dinner party was unsure how to respond. All four Mexicans were giving me the evils. Emily was staring at me in utter stupefaction, while John’s look loosely translated to If these guys don’t kill you now, look forward to me doing it later.
“What’s she got in there?” El Chuché asked, and for the first time it struck me that this meeting might not end well.
This was not yet the Mexico that rolled a father’s severed head through the high school gym until it came to rest at the feet of his own child, the Mexico where, if you so much as looked sideways at the cartels, they suspended you over the I-19 with your entrails dangling. That Mexico was coming and it was coming soon, but Ostrich was coming even sooner. Inside my backpack, the traitorous eye of my recorder glowed red.
Do something, a voice in my head instructed, and do it now.
“Agua!” I blurted, extricating a crushed water bottle from the bag. I pantomimed extreme thirst and threw El Chuché a filthy look, as though he were the asshole barman who’d been ignoring my custom all night.
Ostrich backed off, but the tenor of the meeting changed abruptly.
“You pay me the money now,” Chuché said. “Up front.”
“Forget it,” John snapped, before adding, more placatingly, that being English, we could decide nothing before a nice cup of tea and some quiet time in our hotel.
“Then we come to your hotel with you,” Chuché said. “Help you decide.”
So it was a forced march through the labyrinthine corridors of the market. A samurai each for Emily and me, John sandwiched between Ostrich and El Chuché. Past tin pails of bright marigolds, a donkey turd the size of a Christmas pudding, stands of painted wooden wrestlers, and a dove pecking at ruined fruit in a wheelbarrow, until finally we were ducking through a low stone doorway and into the glare of the sun.
Outside, the paveme
nt was glossy from rain, the sky a sandblasted white. Streets were empty, but this was not siesta time in Nogales. The town thrummed with activity: I could feel its beat in the air like the wings of a thousand black moths. If the bisecting of Nogales is reminiscent of Cold War Berlin, the town’s culture is closer to Bogart’s Casablanca, bursting at the seams with gamblers and refugees. There was a frisson, a tangible prayer, as decks were shuffled, cards were dealt, and bets laid down for the night to come.
“Four thousand dollars for all of you,” El Chuché said. “And I want my money now.”
“ I don’t think so.” John shielded his eyes from the sun.
“We gotta be sure you can pay. Where is your hotel?”
Ah, but we did not have a hotel this side of the border. On neither side did we have four thousand dollars locked into a mini-safe. Whatever the coyote equivalent of doing the washing up when you couldn’t pay your bill, I suspected Emily and I were too long in the tooth for it.
“Here’s what you can be sure of,” John said; “we’ll pay you after, not before.”
“Then you come with us.” El Chuché struck quickly at John’s elbow, locking his arm, and from Emily came a gulp, so small and discreet it might almost have been classed as a hiccup.
Though I desperately want to be perceived as a brave person, the truth is that I’m anything but. Once, to my eternal shame, I sought refuge on Mac’s head, when our Jet Ski capsized near a school of orcas in Panama. In my terror, I swear I must have convinced myself that his bald patch was a nice rock, and not even his pitiful drowning gurgles convinced me to abandon land for that tooth-infested sea. Since then my biggest fear is of being outed. You know what you are? Gary Cooper saying as he runs me out of High Noon’s Hadleyville: Yer yella!
Not so Emily. While training for her medical degree in New York, she famously scared off an approaching assailant on the subway by smiling coyly, then squeezing her trainers together until the fresh blood from the ER pooled onto the floor. But even Emily was jittery at the manhandling—not for herself, predictably, but for John.