Across the Wire (17 page)

We drag my father off to a dismal little hillside cemetery. He takes his last car ride nestled in pointless plushness; satin pillows cradle him inside the darkness of the box. The hearse is muted and stately. We are led by my uncle, Carlos Urrea, heroic motorcycle cop in the stunning Tijuana uniform. Cars stop and wait for us to drive by. Inside, people are watching the procession, saying
There goes the dead guy
through the glass.

On the hill, his box descends. I back away, then turn around. I watch clouds, heavy as trucks, driving across Tijuana.

When the death certificate comes, it says my father died of a stroke. The insurance company will not pay us a cent, since auto coverage is for car wrecks. They insist on proof.

Hugo goes back to San Luis Río Colorado. He enters the police compound and finds my father’s car. It’s beat to hell—the tires are twisted, the roof collapsed. He shoots a roll of film, then comes home unscathed.

“Somebody killed Papa,” he says. “I know it.”

I look at the pictures.

“One side of the car’s all bashed in,” he says. “There’s black and white paint on the door.”

“So?”

“Cops. They chased him and ran him off the road. Where would he get black and white paint on a red car that crashed out in the desert?”

I don’t know—it sounds far-fetched, then it doesn’t. Mexican relatives tell me I’m crazy. They tell me to deal with reality. My uncle tells me the authorities wouldn’t behave in such a manner.

Since we buried my father, his mother has died. Hugo called me one morning and said, “You know Grandma? She’s dead.”

My own mother is trapped in a financial catastrophe that continues to deepen. Within three years of my father’s death, she is living in a house without heat, without plumbing in the kitchen, with broken plumbing in the bathroom, and without a stove or oven. She cooks on a hot plate.

Months later, Hugo shuffles through his pictures. The car looks red as blood. It looks, at turns, vast and minuscule. I stare at the crooked seats and see my own ghosts and memories, my own hundreds of miles sitting
right there
.

I can’t get my eyes off the roof of the car. It’s bent down. All the windows are broken. Hugo is right. There’s black and white paint smashed into the passenger door. Or are they simply scrapes?

We send the photographs to the insurance company, and we contact the American consulate for help in investigating the
accident. The insurer returns the photos and refuses to pay us a settlement, suggesting the pictures could have been taken after my father died from his stroke. Besides, they tell us, there’s no proof that it’s even his car.

We are again denied the settlement.

The consul contacts me a few days later. After a full investigation into the death of my father, the facts seem to indicate that there can be no investigation of the death of my father. In the months subsequent to his death, the entire police force of San Luis Rio Colorado has apparently retired. No officer can be found who was on active duty at the time of the accident, and since the ones who were on duty have retired and left San Luis to enjoy their leisure time, there is no one to talk to. The case is closed. Official cause of death: stroke.

In a final act of desperation, I write to the chief of police of the town. Hugo, when he hears about it, says, “Hey. You’d better not go to San Luis. Ever.” He laughs.

An answer comes: the chief calls me on the phone. Or he claims to be the police chief. I realize now, he could have been anyone. In response to my inquiry, he says, he has only one thing to say. And I should remember this thing, I should take it to heart. “It is over, Sr. Urrea,” he tells me. “It is better for all of us that you forget it and move on with your life. It is better for all of us,” he says, “if there was no accident. Am I clear? There was no accident.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “You are extremely, perfectly, clear.”

“Good,” he says. Then “Good” again.

He hangs up the phone so quietly, there isn’t even a click.

Within a month of my final conversation with the police, I receive an envelope in the mail. It is from the head office of the
chief of municipal police of San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora. The information is printed on the envelope with various official swirls of ink and a seal of some sort. I expect it’s a letter, but it’s not.

I find instead a bill on flimsy paper. The bill is requesting the immediate payment of twelve hundred dollars in American currency. This sum will cover, in full, the damages my father caused to city property on the date of January 10, 1977. There is no mention of how these damages came about. When people ask me, I make a joke out of it. I tell them,
I don’t know—maybe he fell out of bed really hard
. Nobody laughs but me.

Y
ears later, I returned to duty. I thought I had escaped Tijuana for good, but I should have known. Tijuana is the place from which you never get away.

I’d been away. I escaped the Borderlands in 1982, called to teach in the Expository Writing program at Harvard. There, I met and married my wife. Back in San Diego, however, my mother died. We were left with a decision about what to do with the home I’d grown up in. Ultimately, I couldn’t bear to see it sold, so we packed up and moved west in the summer of 1990.

Still, I was not going back to Tijuana. I gave Von a wide
berth, leaving him messages on his office door but not daring to show my face. Things worked out well that way: the poor stayed in Tijuana, and I stayed in San Diego. But then Christmas came, full of strange and wonderful events. I was lucky enough to watch the unlikely series of occurrences take place, to see San Diego and Tijuana join hands for the slightest instant. Things moved like a river, and they carried many of us to places we never imagined we’d reach. This is a chronicle of those events.

When we arrived in California, we were out of money. I had written a few things, hoping to earn some. Among them were several pieces about the border. Fortunately for us, the first place I submitted them was San Diego’s alternative weekly, the
Reader
. I thought nobody would care. The
Reader
had a surprise in store for me.

It published the first piece near Thanksgiving, as a frontpage exposé. A woman named Cynthia Jeffery, who worked in the advertising and promotion department of an FM radio station in San Diego—91X—read the story. The station was a former border-blaster that actually broadcast out of Tijuana (its call letters were XETRA). Its studios and offices, however, were in San Diego.

Cynthia was moved by the story and wanted to do something for the people of Tijuana. Obviously, the Christmas season was coming. She called me in late November, and she dropped a bombshell: the management at 91X had agreed to make the garbage-dump and
barrio
people the focus of a Christmas project to be called “The 91 X-Mas.” Various clubs and bars around town would begin the season by sponsoring “X Nights”—gift-collecting
events, complete with toy depositories. Meanwhile, requests for food, clothes, and gifts would go out on the air beginning in early December. Finally, December 21 would be dedicated to a live daylong broadcast from the parking lot of the station; disc jockeys would then accompany us into Tijuana to distribute the gifts. Cynthia wanted to know if I could help.

“What do you need?” I said.

“A minister or priest or missionaries who can distribute the stuff.”

“No problem.”

“Can you select a neighborhood for us to go to?”

“Yes.”

“Can you come for the broadcast?”

I thought she was kidding.

She had no way of knowing that the recession, and “Operation Desert Shield” (it was not yet a “Storm”), had hurt Von and Spectrum Ministries. They were down almost twenty thousand dollars, and when Cynthia called, they had not yet received a single toy donation for their yearly Christmas drive. In many
barrios
and orphanages in Tijuana, Von provided the only Christmas the children ever got. Certain neighborhoods had received every toy for a score of years from Von. Before Cynthia’s call, it had looked as though Christmas wasn’t going to happen that year.

The selection of a neighborhood was an interesting challenge. It meant I’d have to go back. The
Reader
published an article about my beloved little girl Negra, who had spent her girlhood in the dump and then vanished. I could have written a hundred more stories about the border without setting foot
across the line. But the memory of Negra receiving her first doll nagged at me. There were thousands of small Negras all over Tijuana. Cynthia was going to try to touch them all.

The Tijuana
colonia
that had once established itself at Tijuana’s garbage dump had changed since the days I’d written about. For example, it wasn’t there anymore. The landowner envisioned making a new fortune by clearing out the garbage and building
maquiladoras
(border factories, American assembly plants administered by Mexicans and employing Mexican labor at ridiculously low daily wages). Clearly, he could make more money with industrial plants than by renting the space to the city and buying recycled glass, tin, wire, and aluminum from the
basureros
(trash-pickers), even though he resold the junk at a high profit. The only problem was the
basureros
didn’t want to go, and in defiance of him, formed a neighborhood collective that parceled out the land in lots.

The old dump site was now two warring
colonias
, Panamericano and Trincherazo. The active dump had moved several hills farther west. The old central dump area and the pig village had filled with tar-paper huts, then a few wooden houses, and now some stucco beauties were appearing. Rough streets meandered between the houses, and each home had a fence, many still fashioned from the coils of burned mattresses. From what I’d been told, it looked for all the world like a little community.

Though a touch more civilized, life was still not easy on that hill. There was no “officially” running water. (They provided their own by running hoses from a huge water tank on a hill above the
colonia;
a series of rubber tentacles snaked all over the neighborhood, bringing in pirated water.) Electric power had only recently been provided by the city. Power was still
often generated by stolen or scavenged car batteries. The only heat came from dangerous fires inside the houses, or even more dangerous braziers of coals, or still more dangerous kerosene burners. If the people weren’t overcome by carbon monoxide fumes, they stood a good chance of being burned to death. With the dump closed down, there was no ready work, and few of the families could afford transportation to the new dump, six or seven miles away. Many of those who went there to work got up at four and made small lunches of flour tortillas, then walked.

Some families had discovered that the hillsides in Trincherazo and Panamericano, formed by tractors piling mud and slag over mounds of garbage, could be mined for glass. Incredibly, there were now small trash-mines dotting the slopes, where families pried apart the hard gray-black soil to recover bottles. A fifty-pound gunnysack of glass from the hill brought them $1.50.

Because the
barrios
were built on roughly improvised landfill, all manner of dreadful substances roiled to the surface. The dust there was not normal dust—it was equal part ash, chemicals, and decomposed biological matter. When it rained, the dirt didn’t quite form mud. It formed a kind of noxious pudding that flooded the outhouses and lifted their contents to float into the streets, adding to the miasma. After rain, methane gas seeped out of the soil. The smell of sewage and explosive subterranean processes leaked from the ground as though the entire
barrio
were a drowsing volcano waiting to blow.

Though the old dump had changed drastically, and though Negra had been missing from it for years, I still felt connected to the place. I still carried pictures of them all with me, showing them around my various English and writing classes. For all I knew, Negra was dead. On the other hand, she could have
simply moved to a neighboring
barrio
and I’d never know where she was. She could have gone home to Michoacán; she could have crossed the wire; she could have died on I-5 running across at San Ysidro, or in Oceanside. There was absolutely no way to know.

In her world, most people don’t read or write. There are no telephones, so nobody calls. And if there should be a writer in the bunch, there would be no way to get a letter to anybody, because they live in places with no addresses. There is no place to write
to
. About the best you can do with Panamericano, for example, is to write to the corner store and hope they’ll give the letter to the right person. Finally, most of the people can’t muster the money to buy postage, paper, or envelopes, should they have an address to which they could send letters. You could move two miles away and vanish forever. Their view of San Diego and the coastline, though, remains spectacular.

There were several other
colonias
around the city that were likely targets for the “X-Mas” drive. In spite of the smell and the dirt, the lice and the dogs stiff with mange, and the violence, Tijuana was a place I loved and had been away from for too long. Writing for the paper had reminded me. And the irony of the situation hadn’t been lost on me: once, a few years ago, I had fed these families. Now I was back, and they were feeding mine.