Across the Wire (14 page)

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.

C
hristmas 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 remain 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.

Inside, foosball tables, video games. Scruffy children in various shades of adobe-brown competed noisily. Pastor Von provided them with about six elaborate ray guns, and they used them to shoot at flashing electrical targets. In a corner, a terrified head-banger in a Metallica T-shirt squatted on his haunches. His brown face was blotchy with panic, going an ugly ash-gray. Various
vatos
and
cholos
gathered around him. He had made the terminal mistake of punching the little brother of one of the Satánicos. They cornered him in the building. At one point, they sent in an expedition that clubbed him over the head with a hunk of cement. Efren, a
veterano
of these streets and one of Von’s full-time employees, chased them out. “This is a Christian place,” he told them. “Fight outside, not in here.”

When spoken to, the head-banger did not respond. Once he got over the shock of the head blow, he stood up and assumed an air of nonchalance, pushing some smaller boys out of the way at the foosball table. His eyes darted to the door regularly; he was trapped and he knew it. Spies from the Satánicos filtered out the door to report on his condition.

Some of the recovering addicts from the treatment center watched the gang nervously. They had a strangely somber mien, quiet men with mournful eyes. “This is no good,” one of them told me. “This situation is very bad. They’re going to get him.”

The Satánicos waited along the edge of the ball court. One boy sat on the retaining wall; a bearded boy was lying back between his legs. The top boy wrapped his legs around the bottom boy’s abdomen and pulled him close. He rested his chin tenderly on his head, slipped his hands across his chest and belly. One of them had brought a pit bull. Another had a small
black canister of Mace he compulsively pulled in and out of his pocket. They murmured their plans, laughing. The only girls hid at the far end of the gang—two thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, with hard-sprayed
chola
hairdos rising in black splashes off their heads. A Satánico in a dusty black trench coat pulled a six-inch-long switchblade from his pocket, flicked it open. They laughed. He cut the air. “How do you like it?” he said to his invisible victim. He stabbed. “Are you still alive?” he said. The Satánicos were excited. The ballplayers on the court ignored them: a drive to the basket, a hard shoulder block, a lay-up that clattered through the rim. The pit bull sat somberly, watching.