by Bella Pollen
The waiter was seating a table close to us—a sleek-looking black dude and his blonde, meerkat-pretty girlfriend. Jerome, nose and eyes miraculously dry, swiftly levitated out of his seat, smoothed his leather pants, and introduced himself with greased confidence, pressing a business card on the guy—a famous rapper—and bullet-pointing his fully inclusive agent/managerial service. “Don’t be a stranger, man,” he said brightly, before returning to his seat and resuming his crying jag.
If this was the agenting flip side to Sylvie, it was doubly harrowing. The evening served as a timely reminder that, for me, LA was no Kansas. I decided to escape to the relative safety of Tijuana to see whether I could find my old friend Alfredo and talk him into a reconciliation with his daughter.
“Yeah, forget the film thing—wild goose chase—but what about a documentary?” I e-mailed Casey, seeing a less lucrative but equally happy few years of shooting, editing, and indie film festivals. Wasn’t Alfredo’s story of love lost and quest for forgiveness universal? “I mean, how far are any of us from losing our own families?” I pushed.
“I’m in,” Casey replied.
This time we did it smart. Nose in the map. Eye on exits. We parked on the US side and walked over the arched pedestrian crossing to Alfredo’s lot. In the whacked-out trailer that constituted an office, a young woman with crimped hair greeted us as though we were a pair of dykey bounty hunters, and only then did I remember that Alfredo was on parole.
“Check out this photo,” I said to her. “See Alfredo smiling, arm round my shoulders? We’re good friends, understand? See this camera?” I hoisted the rented Nikon onto the counter as though I actually knew how to use it. “We’re here from LA, as in Hollywood—to film Alfredo’s story and—ya know—maybe pay him a little something for his trouble.”
We weren’t lying. Her production company might be interested, Casey had said. Get Alfredo on film and they’d take a look.
Crimped girl was new in the car-parking business, she informed us, wincing at a broken nail. Sorry, but she barely knew this person, Alfredo.
She was lying, so we refused to leave, slouching against the water-cooler, lighting up cigarettes and flicking them disdainfully aside in a manner that we very much hoped implied that we were, after all, ruthless bounty hunters, until finally, much to our satisfaction, she picked up the phone and spoke in rapid-fire Spanish.
“So, in a café half a mile from here,” she said, hanging up, we were to meet a friend who would fix us up with Alfredo, who, by the way, “was known as El Duck.”
“El Duck!” Casey and I exchanged surprised glances. “Muchas gracias, you’re so super helpful.”
“You’re so super welcome!” she smiled sweetly. “Have a great day.”
In the café, a septuagenarian with the erect posture of a cowboy sat at a table eating huevos a la mexicana, tethering and cutting the eggs with meticulous use of his knife and fork. I thought about breakfast back in London and Mabel’s best-loved joke.
“What’ll you have?” asked the mom, idly picking her nose.
“Two boiled eggs,” yelled her daughter. “You can’t get your finger in those.”
A man slid into our booth. Smoothly attractive, a raspberry birthmark over one eyebrow. “You wanna find the Duck? Bueno. Follow me.”
We followed, up and down the tourist estuaries flowing off Avenida Revolución, until we arrived at the steps of a modern church.
“Wait here,” he said.
We waited. The air smelled of fried oil. My stomach rumbled. After a while a man stopped to admire Casey’s arm tattoos.
“Hey, cool frijoles!”
“Oh, yeah, you like my beans?”
“I love them. You get ’em in prison?” He sized her up. Copper hair, five foot eleven, Casey is three parts iron warrior to one part smart-ass.
“Prison? Sure, why not.”
“Two cute palomitas in Tijuana, huh? Who are you really: FBI? CIA? INS?”
“I make films, and my friend here is a writer.”
“A writer? No kidding.” His eyes stayed glued to Casey. “But you make movies, huh?”
“Yeah, but I used to be a cook.” She lifted the hem of her shorts. “See, I have an onion!”
“Cebolla,” the guy breathed, crouching down to examine her thigh.
“Hey, if you like vegetables, check out this bad boy.”
At the sight of the broccoli on her ankle, the man nearly swooned. What are the odds, I thought, a touch peevishly, of running into a fresh-produce fetishist in Tijuana? I’d had an ankle incident in Nogales a while back, but it hadn’t been quite so flattering. John and I had been sitting in a restaurant when a man, flanked by a couple of bodyguards, snaked in and sat down at the table next to us. He was cartel royalty, in clinking gold jewelry and Cuadra stingray boots. He ordered food, lit a Montecristo, his eyes roving lazily around the room until they came full circle to me. A smile glimmered on his face—the sort that glimmers on the face of a hyena when it spots a wounded impala. He blew out a cloud of smoke and then, without dropping his gaze, reached slowly under the table and seized my bare leg.
John stiffened. He hadn’t had a good fight for days, but as the man’s enormous digits attempted to close around my ankle a look of shock and disappointment crossed his face. Calves like pistons! Bail bondswoman boots! He let go as though he’d been bitten by a deadly insect and, apologizing, left shortly afterwards.
“Hey,” I said to Casey. “Ask your veggie friend if he knows El Duck.”
The man looked taken aback. “Sure, everybody knows him.”
“You know where we can find him?”
“Nobody finds El Duck. If he wants you, he’ll find you first.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and hurried off down the street.
Eventually a brown Cadillac drew up, chassis low to the ground. The driver leaned over and sprang the door. “Get in,” he said.
“Where are you taking us?” I demanded. “You’ll see,” he replied, and I was reminded of a hitchhiking incident in England while I’d still been at school.
A girlfriend and I had been trying to get home after an all-night party in the country. We hadn’t been waiting long before a car slowed. Bearded driver, mid-level company executive, document bag stuffed with reports which he tipped off the passenger seat to make room for me. My girlfriend passed out in the back, leaving conversation to me, but the man seemed content with pleasantries. I rested my head against the window and thought about the boy who had kissed me.
“After all, one good turn deserves another, don’t you think?” The man was speaking, and I must have murmured some agreement. Even through the fog of my hangover, the statement seemed fair. “Good,” he said, “so will you play with me?” His voice had turned so creepily childlike that I twisted my head in his direction. He indicated his penis, lying forlornly against his trouser thigh like a dying earthworm in urgent need of resuscitation.
“Ugh, no!” I said, too revolted for tact.
He flushed with anger and, fumbling his dick inside his zipper, snapped on the car’s central locking.
“Just let us out,” I said, feeling the claw of my girlfriend’s hand at the back of my neck, “and we won’t tell.”
“Oh, but you will tell,” he replied. “So I can’t let you out.”
I tried talking him down. Told him we had no intention of calling the police. He took a slip road off the motorway. My limbs prickled with fear. “Where are you taking us?” I demanded.
“You’ll see,” he said. The road was deserted, bordered on either side by dense woods. I shut my eyes and saw a fairy’s grave of moss and bluebells, two girls lying face down, their pale legs crisscrossed by lines of blood.
“Let us go!” I ordered, “or bad things will happen to you!” And maybe the voodoo edge to my voice spooked him, because he swerved onto the verge.
“All right, go on then, get out,” he screamed, as though we were a pair of raccoons at his garbage.
It wasn’t unt
il he drove off that I noticed the baby seat strapped into the back of the car, a pink pacifier attached to it by a ribbon. I don’t think I had any idea before then, any idea at all, of the double lives people led.
I wound down the window as Tijuana passed in a mellow abstract of people, traffic, and houses. Double lives, two selves, twin towns. Mac thought I was in LA eating egg-white omelettes with Sylvie. Sylvie thought I was “standing by” with Jerome. Jerome was most likely on another impressive bender. It didn’t matter. I felt happier than I had in months. I had a purpose, a plan, and nowhere else to be—if there was a better feeling in the world, I’d yet to experience it.
The driver stopped and spat us out into some kind of barrio. The air smelled furtive and sour. A dog with accordion ribs was moseying towards us, scabrous ears twitching. The camera was heavy, and its size rendered us so conspicuous that even the cockroaches were throwing us sideways looks. We agreed not to be fazed. Clearly Alfredo was more than just the regretful old felon we’d originally thought, but it seemed inconceivable that the old man had not spent as much time worrying about me as I had fretting about him. We’d swapped confidences that day, stranger status permitting its own intimacy.
“I know we’re not fazed or anything,” Casey said, “but what’s with all the mystery?”
“Hell I know.” I hoisted the camera onto my other shoulder. “But it’s all good material, right?”
“Only if we find him.”
“Oh, we’ll find him,” I said. My phone began vibrating. I could just make out Sylvie’s disembodied voice over the static on the line. “So, Shar Leaves just put a call into my office!” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“She loves the story. She wants to be part of the project.”
“Uh, great!” I made an effort to match Sylvie’s tone, which fell within the pleased spectrum. “I thought the manuscript had escaped or something?”
“Yes, I know.” Sylvie’s voice was barely audible. “Warn her brothers!”
It crossed my mind that Sylvie might be mentally unstable or a glue sniffer. Now she was suggesting a meeting with a producer who knew all about “Shar Leaves’s interest” and was therefore intending to reach out to “Salmon Cake.” And with this last bewildering incongruity, the signal died.
A car eased along the curb, a plastic Virgin wobbling on its dashboard, and we were off again. Another street corner, another pointless rendezvous, and thus the pattern continued. For each new driver I produced Alfredo’s soft creased photo and held it to my chest like a flak jacket. “We’re friends, El Duck and us,” and into the word friend I injected as much subtext as possible, to leave them in no doubt as to the shocking mala suerte that would befall them should we be harmed in any way. Nevertheless, the afternoon was running on, and we’d eaten nothing all day.
“God almighty, who is this Alfredo dude?” Casey whispered.
I didn’t know, but what kind of secret life must he have, that it should be so encoded and protected? Whoever he was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that El Duck held the answers to everything. “One thing for sure,” I said. “I’m going to hunt him down as if he were last edible fowl on a ruined earth.”
“Man, are you stubborn,” Casey said.
“If you don’t mind,” I muttered, “I prefer tenacious.”
“Chicas!” Our next driver whistled through his teeth. “Mensaje for you: El Duck is ready to meet.”
I brightened, hankering suddenly for a shower and a calming shot of tequila. If Alfredo was on parole, then that parole was surely being spent in a neoclassical mansion draped in bougainvillea and staff. Alfredo, resplendent in warlord chic, would open his world up to the camera. “I’ve been a foolish, stubborn anciano,” he would confide. “but now, mi guerrero Bella, I need your help bringing my daughter home.”
“Told you,” I whispered to Casey, sliding the Alfredo photograph to the driver through the scratched Plexiglas divide. “Hey, somos amigos, you know?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the driver said, bored. He stopped the car. “The Duck will meet you here.”
“Here?” I pressed my nose to the window. “Are you sure?”
We were back where we had started, at the walkway to the United States, less than a quarter-mile from Alfredo’s parking lot.
“You’re kidding,” Casey said.
“Enter the bridge from the south,” the driver directed. “Stop at the halfway point, and in six minutes El Duck will approach.”
Six minutes. I checked my watch as we hoofed it along the walkway. It was rush hour, and commuters streamed around us like sockeye salmon heading upriver. I craned my neck, looking for Alfredo’s dinky paper hat. Suddenly a man jumped out of the flow, grabbed our elbows, and pulled us to the side.
“Hello,” he said, smiling. “I am El Duck.”
He was fortyish or so, wearing a crazy Hawaiian shirt with aloha printed across his chest.
“No,” I stammered. “No, you’re not!”
I said that because he was absolutely not the Duck.
“Oh, I’m the Duck all right,” he said, the lines of his smile beginning to flatten. “And now I’m here, why don’t you tell me what business you have with me?” He took my elbow. “Because if you’re wasting my time . . .”
I wrenched my arm away. Wasting his time? His time? I’m sorry, but how dare he? We’d been dicked around for hours. Dicked and Ducked. Ducked and fucked!
“Hey, take it easy, muchacha!” He bent down quickly and, standing up again, pressed something sharp into my hand.
I stared stupidly at the broken tortoiseshell links, then dropped to the ground and scrabbled about for the watch face, but it was gone. Stricken, I pressed back against the wall and touched a finger to the links, time telescoping backwards. Finn’s football triumphs, Jesse’s first girlfriend, the letter from Sam’s school advising us that he’d bought a pet tarantula—in the last few years I’d been away for all of them. I’d been on the road, too, when Mabel had rung to wish me happy birthday a few days earlier.
“Papa got you a cool present,” she said.
“Ooh? What?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Tell me at once.”
“It’s a picture with a message.”
“Oh.” I hesitated. “What kind of message?”
“OK, wait.” She put the phone down and through the line I heard the receding clomp of her school shoes. When she returned she was breathing heavily.
“‘She was beautiful in the way that forest fire is beautiful.’”
“What?”
“That’s the message on the picture. ‘She was beautiful in the way that forest fire is beautiful.’”
“Oh.”
“It’s sort of an embroidered thingy. Papa’s going to give it to you when you get home.”
“Oh.” I felt a seismic shift in my heart.
“Mum?”
“I’m here, my sweetie.”
“When are you coming home?”
Tears pricked my eyes.
The Mexican was frowning at me. “What’s going on?”
I glared back. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you here?” he said. “What do want? What is it you’re looking for?”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. All those questions I had studiously avoided dealing with. I didn’t need a watch to tell me time was running out—that my temporal swag was all used up. I looked at the people as they continued to stream by, a river that never stopped flowing. I think I was there because there everybody was in flux, everybody was searching for something. We were all fighting against the current to get back home.
I tried to explain.
But the Duck who turned out not to be the Duck did not appear moved. He was, in fact, laughing. “Oh, Dios mio,” he said. “Dios, Dios, Dios mio.” He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans and blew his nose.
“It’s not funny!”
“Oh, but it is. It’s a beautiful thought, but you
’re telling it to the wrong person. On the grave of my dead mother, you are not looking for the Duck.”
“Yes, I am,” I said stubbornly, and perhaps a bit tenaciously, too.
“So, what does he look like, this Duck of yours?”
For the last time I pulled out the photograph of Alfredo and smoothed over its exhausted creases. “We’re friends!” I said, weakly, but only because by then the line was pure reflex. One look at Alfredo’s toothy smile and the fake Duck was off again.
“You know this guy?”
“I know him. Now, ask me how I know he’s not the Duck.”
“How do you know he’s not the Duck?”
“Because he’s the Goose!” And now he was laughing so hard he was folded like a bent playing card.
“The Goose,” I repeated flatly.
“The Goose.” Casey began to smirk.
“Goose, Duck, you got your birds mixed up, querida. You got your eggs all scrambled.”
The inside of my head was beginning to feel like a blast furnace. “So, if you’re El Duck,” I said slowly, “where is El Goose?”
“El Ganso? Ah, yes, so sorry for the inconvenience. I’m afraid he’s out of town right now.”
In LA, I met Sylvie for breakfast. She, too, was not who I thought. She was clever and lovely and, as I would soon discover, brimming with patience, loyalty, and the moral fortitude of Gandhi.
Once I recovered from the shock, we settled down to talk.
“So, the manuscript,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The line was terrible when we spoke, but you got the gist of it, right?”
“I think so,” I answered carefully.
“I’m sorry about it getting out, but somebody passes it on when they’re not supposed to and, before you know it, it’s everywhere.”
“No worries,” I said.
“Well, as I mentioned, Charlize loved it. She called the office to tell me.”
Shar Leaves. I nodded, as if I knew what she was talking about. “Yes, I remember you saying something about that.”