Across the Wire (13 page)

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?”

“Detective.”

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.

“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.”

L
eaving 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.