Across the Wire (10 page)

“Both
patients?”

“Yes. We have a young woman in bed in the other recovery room. She’s fine. If there is any trouble at all, the clerk in the pharmacy next door will assist you.” He slipped on a jacket, saw his nurse out, and patted me on the arm as he left.

“
Gracias
,” he said.

———

Time dripped by. There was nothing to do. I went next door; a pretty girl was watching Tom y Jerry cartoons on Channel 12. She smiled at me and said, “
Qué curiosas las caricaturas
.” (How curious—cute—these cartoons are.) I went back into the clinic.

Down the hall, Sergio slept. I walked to the other room and glanced in. All I could see was black hair. She was in bed, on her back, the sheet pulled up over her face. Her hair spread across the pillow. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. Then I heard her take a breath, and another, almost silent in the darkness. I backed away from her door. I waited some more.

A gurney was parked in the hall. I lay on it, trying to take a nap. But Sergio and the woman made me too nervous to sleep. I walked into the small operating room, looking in the various drawers and trays, fingering the cold equipment. The tissue from the table top was now sitting in a Gerber baby food jar.

Magnetic curiosity drew me to it, though I was afraid to look. I tried to walk away, but found I couldn’t leave the thing be; I had to look at it and figure it out. I picked up the jar—yellowish fluid, mixed with pale blood, swirled within. The flesh was red and gray, with tiny white blobs in it. Not horrible. Worse in the telling than in the seeing. I turned it over; plumes of blood curled against the glass.

I heard a sob.

The woman in the back room drew a hitching breath. I rushed to her door and stood, looking in at her. She had pulled the sheet down from her eyes, but she kept the rest of her face
covered. Huge brown eyes with a thick fringe of black lashes. As I got closer, I could see the beads of her tears all across her bottom lashes.

Stupidly, I said, “Are you all right?”

She nodded.

“Can I help you?”

She shook her head.

“Would you like a drink of water?”

She shook her head.

“Do you need some Kleenex?”

She shook her head. Another sob. I was panicked, unable to help.

“Can I get you a blanket?” I offered.

She shook her head.

I stood there for another moment, then hurried from her room and ran over to the pharmacy. The girl looked up at me and smiled at me again. The television was blaring disco music. “She’s crying!” I said. “The woman in the back room woke up, and she’s crying. What do I do?”

The girl nodded. “Yes,” she said. “She’s sad.”

I thought,
That’s it?

Finally, she said, “She’s been sick. Her husband is at work, and we couldn’t find him. Her mother’s not at home. She’s alone. She had a baby inside. It died in her, and
el doctor
had to take it out today. It’s still back in the operating room, I think. They put it in a jar.” She smiled reassuringly. “I think she’s all right. She’s just alone and sad.”

I stepped to the window. Outside, a ’68 Chevy Impala was running over a long-flattened cat. The cat was stiff, and its legs kicked as the car drove across its flanks—almost running, even in death. And the world seemed overwhelmingly dark to me that
day. The young mother’s sobs took root in my heart. They continue to grow there because on Good Friday I held her broken little savior in my hand with no reverence, only mild curiosity.

And come Easter, there would be no resurrection from the jar.

I
t was a noble experiment. For ten years, beginning in 1979, the town of Tecate, Baja California, sponsored a running of the bulls inspired by Hemingway’s much-loved event in Pamplona, Spain.
Pamplonada
can be roughly translated as “Pamplonarama.” Tecate is Tijuana’s sweeter sister, a small border city that is mostly known as the home of Tecate beer. Most border towns have a twin on the other side, and Tecate is no exception. However, across the border, the hamlet of Tecate, California, U.S.A., consists of an evangelical center, a convenience store, and a parking lot. Down the road a bit, at Barret Junction, you can get some pretty good fried fish caught up in the reservoir.

Tecate is clearly not the sleazy and steàmy border we hear about. When you consider that the border is two thousand miles long, it stands to reason that there can’t be a Sodom in every port. Juárez and Tijuana have eternally stained the entire frontier. For example, if you head due east on I-8, you’ll reach Calexico, California. Across the border is its twin, Mexicali. Mexicali is ugly, mean, dry, and hot—a town of rough
norteño
farmers and truck haulers trying to make a go of it in a desert. Aside from some dope hauls and the occasional gunplay, Mexicali has absolutely nothing to offer in the way of highprofile “border” excitement. Farther east is the Arizona city of Douglas, and its little sister, Agua Prieta (Dark Water). Low-key.

Believing that an adventurous event would attract
gringos
and enliven Tecate’s somnambulistic reputation, the town fathers chose the running of the bulls as a sure thing. It was doomed from the start. Not only is the Mexican border not
Spain, but a hundred thousand drunk sailors, bikers, cowboys, and college kids is no army of Hemingways. The story of one of the last Pamplonadas reveals what went wrong.

The pace is slow in Tecate, and the people are more friendly than in the big city. The small park in the middle of town is furnished with a tiled gazebo. The city fathers have rigged it with speakers that play music all day for the folks who loiter on the benches. Tecate is a rural town, built in a hilly region long thought by local Indians to hold mystical powers. One conical hill nearby is greatly loved by UFO aficionados. Just south of town, past the Tecate beer plant, a small river floods in winter and blocks access to the main street, frustrating ranchers in souped-up pickup trucks.

During the Pamplonada, this bucolic scene is fractured by an army of
gringos
from San Diego and Los Angeles and swarms of louts from Tijuana and Mexicali. The prospect of seeing hundreds of drunks being pursued by angry bulls really appealed to me. The year before, an American had actually died (anti-climactically, from a heart attack), and street legend was full of unimaginably ferocious gorings and tramplings.

Evidence suggests that the bulls were in as much danger as the runners. On the same day that hapless
gringo
died, runners were seen ganging up on the bulls, kicking their legs out from under them and dog-piling on them. (As it turned out, the bulls were mostly rangy little yearlings.) A couple of the bulls were kicked silly, and the drunks branded them with cigarettes.

In an interesting twist, the organizers of the Pamplonada had decided in favor of the animals: for their protection, only older, larger bulls would run. That did it—I was going, and I was rooting for the bulls.

I
was with my wild-eyed American friend, Mike, who had been living at an orphanage south of Tecate. We drove from Tijuana along the Mexican route—a two-lane highway that skirts the border and meanders through attractive backlands full of farms spread over low green hills. When we pulled into Tecate, a thin pale rainbow stood straight up from the brewery.

An orphanage in the interior had invited us to stay with them. It was one of my favorite spots in the world—a wide valley nestled between mountains and high desert hills, with a sprawling orphanage compound on a small farm tucked between a usually dry river and a cattle ranch. The property was once the site of an ancient Indian village, and prehistoric grinding stones could still be seen, bowls worn into the sides of boulders.

The kids knew where to dig for artifacts. One boy showed me some pieces of clay pottery. “Can you find some pieces for me?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Will you pay me for it?”

“How much?”

“A dollar.”

I gave him the money, and he ran up the hill. In about a half hour, he returned with a coffee can full of fragments.

Less remarkable, but still of interest: a blue Ford Falcon station wagon half buried in the riverbed. The left front fender, half of the grille, and the driver’s side of the windshield stuck out of the sand at an angle. One of the winter floods had dragged it out of the back country and buried it with powerful disdain. There used to be a small house near this site, but the river had washed it away.

As we drove through the orphanage gates, the children stormed out of their building. Their eternal struggle with American names was evident as they shouted, “Mai! Mai!” Night was falling. Mike settled down and cooked chili in his van. The children went back inside to eat their supper. I could hear them saying grace. A group of Americans was camping above the orphanage.

When Mike and I were ready to eat our chili, two of the older orphan girls stood outside the van with a tape recorder, playing tapes of Mexican ballads for us and singing along with them.

Later.

I sat in one of Mike’s lawn chairs under a light pole, bare feet in the gravel, digging with my toes. Immense black ants sauntered across my feet, pushing the hairs around. Some of the
gringo
kids wandered around the farm in groups, afraid to brave the night alone.

A bunch of them collected at the leaky pipe near the chicken coops (where the boys kept ducks, too, and a pair of baby hawks, and an exhausted little rattlesnake). They went crazy every time one of the insatiable desert bugs got them:

“Ow! I just got bit!”

“Prob’ly a scorpion.”

“Ow!”

“Not again!”

“Yeah! Like six times! It’s
all over me!”

“Is it, like,
flying, or … crawling?”

Ironically, within the hour, one of their chaperones—the wife of their pastor—stepped on a scorpion and received a very painful surprise.

A fantastic tilework of dark clouds, backlit by a full moon, spread across the high desert like a disk, a hinged lid closing. The light atop the pole was attracting a swirling ball of desperate moths, crane flies, mosquitoes, and other frantic night fliers. From far off, I could hear—or, more than hear, feel—the
ping
and
tsch-tsch
of bats homing in on the insects. They dove into the globes of light and pulled straight out in stunning vertical power climbs.

This miracle was going on about ten feet above my head. The American kids never saw it. In the blue-gray haze of moonlight, the windmill looked capable of flight, a ragged gyrocopter on stilts. The clouds thinned out, and the moon seemed to pop through them, hanging beneath them, about a mile above the valley.

W
e all rose to the million jangling sounds of a farm at dawn—cowbells and barking dogs, the arguments of crows and the mindless rusty squawk of roosters. A frog the size of my thumbnail policed the area, then flashed down a crack.

José, one of the orphans, sang “Sugar, Sugar” as loud as he could. That he didn’t know a word of English didn’t stop him:

———

Driving toward Tecate, we saw a woman walking on the shoulder of the road. She was carrying the tiniest of babies, shielding it from the sun with a square of white cardboard.

Tecate, in the park.

Porta-Johns stood like a stockade around the edge of the grass. The runners were registered by age and gender:
WOMEN
, 20-25;
MEN
, 25-30, and so on. Drunks were already picking fights—a fat
vato
in mirror shades shouted, “You scared of me? Are you scared of me?”

Americans everywhere.

“I don’t think this picture’ll come out.”

“Sure it will.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Sure it will.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.”

“Okay!”

A man without fingers on either hand sold rubber joke items out of a suitcase—green dog turds, whoopi-cushions, small rubber chickens, bloody rubber thumbs. What did he think of when he sold these? Did he remember his own thumbs? Did he hate his customers and long after their fingers? Did he wish they’d leave their fingers in his case?

The lines at the toilets were long, but not unmanageable. A slightly disheveled Mexican man in his thirties, unshaven, shirt half untucked, cruised down the sidewalk and stopped to look at the lines of
gringos
waiting patiently to get to the toilets. He started to walk by, but did a double take. In retrospect, I believe
this was where the idea hit. A stroke of genius so fast, so sharp, that at first I wasn’t sure I was seeing it.

As soon as there was a slight lull in the pressing of the crowd, he stationed himself before the door of one toilet. When the next tourist stepped up, he extended his hand officiously, palm up, and wiggled his fingers. The startled American didn’t protest—he dug out a quarter, and the Mexican opened the door and ushered him in. This ploy worked time and again. The man grew so bold that whenever the people within seemed to be dawdling, he pounded on the door and scolded them. When one of the passing cops slowed to look at him, the Mexican hustled his last customer out of the stall and locked himself in. He must have made a fortune that weekend.