The Coyote's Bicycle (27 page)

In his version of the tale, Roberto's summation was this: “My brother was beginning to shine like no one else before.”

18

Two men followed at a distance as Maria Teresa Fernandez and I made our way up a thin dirt trail along the fence line. The route was steep enough so that, at times, we looked for notches or footholds in the climb. At one of these places, I stopped to offer Fernandez a hand, and that's when I noticed the men. This was on the Mexican side of Bunker Hill. And the rusted metal sheets of the wall built during President Clinton's Operation Gatekeeper rose with us. The Pacific Ocean, its line drawn on the horizon and the expansive arch of the western sky, comprised an entire gradient of pale blues. Below, to the south, was the International Road and the neighborhood of Playas de Tijuana. To the north, the russet colors of the Tijuana River Estuary rolled into the United States.

“I don't know, Mateo says it's up here. Somewhere in this section,” Fernandez said.

I'd have imagined the fence line to smell of the white and yellow chrysanthemum flowers and the potent native sages that carpet these hills. Or, maybe, of nothing at all. But up this close it smelled of people—an animal musk with the odd whiff of something worse. The panoramic views, the pillowy brush, the open space, and the sea breeze were all dislocated by this trace scent. It dawned on me: so
much went on here that went unseen, part of this border edifice had to be constructed in the mind.

We reached the graffiti that Fernandez wanted to photograph; any change to the wall offered her a challenge, like documenting sandcastles before the tide came in. Metallic silver and blue, the rounded, indecipherable graffiti letters took up more than a panel of the corrugated iron. It must have taken some time to create. And there were a lot of forces ready to chase the spray can artist away—thieves, thugs, police. Fernandez moved about, clicking images with a silent efficiency. When I turned to look, the men on our trail were still a ways off, but gaining. I could see only that one wore a red shirt and the other a dark shirt with white pants.

“We have all of the states of Mexico represented on the fence,” Fernandez said, pointing as if to a passing crowd. A faded mesh of place names stretched the length of the fence. There are thirty-one states in Mexico. It seemed possible that each was repeated a thousand times. Personal names and dates—recorded by people who had soon crossed, or who had hoped to—were also etched and tagged onto the oxidized iron. Up close it looked like the leaves of a guest registry.
IVAN WAS HERE
—14/4/11. There were the origin countries:
ARMENIA
,
CHINO
,
SAN SALVADOR
. Also listed was what they thought of themselves.
POLLOS PUTOS
. And what they saw of their antagonists.
AHI LES VAN LA MIGRA
.

“Do you know those men?” I asked. This was her beat. I figured she'd know.

“What men?”

“Down there. They've been following us.”

“Oh, no. I don't know those men.”

We continued along the wall—a word most border people use interchangeably with
fence
. The corrugated iron sheets that make up this portion of the boundary once served as interlocking, temporary runways in Vietnam, and found a new life welded together in a
sixty-mile run. You can't see through the metal, which would suggest a wall. Border Patrol agents ruffle at this word. The agency prefers the word
fence
, and their spokespeople admonish others to use it as well. I suppose
wall
conjures obvious and failed reference points: the Wall of Jericho, the Walls of Troy, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall, Hadrian's Wall—that chain of embankments Romans built to keep barbarous Englanders out of England.

I've often thought that our boundary line could use a richer handle, something like Hadrian's. Mexicans call it
la frontera
, or
la línea
. Novelists T. C. Boyle and Joseph Wambaugh named it, respectively, the Tortilla Curtain and the Imaginary Line. Both good, but neither epic to the scale of the boundary. Our border operates as a screening process for motivated laborers—something like a temp agency that separates the good from the bad workers with a mud run—while also acting as an instant cost inflator for prohibited goods, starting with untaxed cigs and alcohol and moving through to people, narcotics, and exotic zoo animals. Maybe this was the point that Border Patrol was trying to make in differentiating
wall
from
fence
. As a wall, it was doomed to failure. But as a fence, it was a great growth engine for border-enforcement jobs.

It's hard to disagree that
fence
sounds neighborly. And it did begin as a fence, this wall. Its history as such might solve the naming problem. The first barriers were mere cattle fencing. And though Richard Nixon launched Operation Intercept, a mandate to search every person and car entering the United States through ports of entry, during his administration five thin strands of barbed wire separated San Diego from Tijuana at the border monument. Since Jimmy Carter, however, each successive president has left us with a new layer to the edifice, something like the legacy gift of a presidential library. “Carter's Curtain” was chain link. Ronald Reagan extended it, and built migrant detention centers. Bush Senior intercepted migrants at sea. Clinton's contractors were kind enough to
weld the metal runway sheets in a way that aligned the corrugations horizontally, creating great foot grips and handholds so our neighbors could pop on over and talk to us anytime. Bush Junior's gift wasn't so generous. It was eighteen feet tall. He also paid a lot of our money for high-tech surveillance towers that corroded, failed in high wind, rain, and dust storms, and went blind in the fog. Obama pulled the plug on the failed “virtual fence” in 2010. Still, he continued to fulfill 580 miles of the triple wall mandated under the Secure Fence Act—this, as if metal-cutting equipment did not exist in Tijuana. There are sections of the Bush fence that boast more holes and patch jobs than a freight-train-load of hobo pants. Obama's legacy might be in the sky, however, as he unleashed the age of drones.

The two men were now quite close. We made eye contact. One was old and one was young. Fernandez and I paused to gauge the situation. Then, at the bottom of the trail, a third man wearing dark clothing appeared. This figure seemed to be advancing at an accelerated pace. We waited.

“
Hola
,” the older man said on approach.

“
Buenas tardes
,” answered Fernandez. “Are you crossing?”

The men caught their breath. “We're trying to cross, yes,” said the older man, “but not now.” He nodded down the trail at the dark figure.

“
Policía?
” asked Fernandez.

“
Sí
, El Gordito.”

They knew him, or knew of him. This pair wasn't following us but escaping the short, fat cop. Tijuana's municipal police extort money from migrants with such regularity, it didn't occur to anyone present to mention exactly what it was the policeman wanted on this hilltop.

“Have you crossed before?” Fernandez asked.

“Yes, we've both been inside. I was in Michigan. I have a daughter there now. I'm trying to get back to her.”

His partner added, “I was packing onions in LA, but then I got deported. If I can get there, I can get my job back.” They both looked down the trail. “Okay,” the young man said with perfect American pronunciation.

“Okay,” we said in turn. “Okay.”

“
Buena suerte
,” offered Fernandez with a low wave.

The migrants turned and hiked toward the crown of the hill. Despite the close and painfully slow chase, there seemed to be many avenues of escape. The men could turn down into Los Laureles Canyon. They could make for the International Road. I didn't worry about their flight from this solitary cop until I saw another uniformed man pop up from the east side of Bunker Hill, a dark figure holding a radio. The migrants looked to be in a pickle, one that appeared well rehearsed. This is when the migrants turned toward Clinton's rusty old fence, climbed the corrugated metal ribs, and threw themselves over. They were gone.

El Gordito caught up to us fast. He was sweating and panting, the uniform bluer than I'd thought, more significant, and pressed. The badge was real. His expression focused. Those goddamned migrants had part of his pay in their pockets, I was sure of it. When Gordito's feet crunched down on the earth we shared, he muttered a curt “
Hola
.”

“
Hola
,” I replied.

“
Buenas
,” followed Fernandez.

Meeting at the top of Bunker Hill, the two policemen conferred for a moment. Their quarry had called their bluff. What could have been some easy pocket change was now the problem of
la migra
and the United States. Who knows, maybe they'd see those fucking
pollos
once they got caught, processed, and deported back to Tijuana. Then one of the policemen pointed toward an open patch on the Mexican slope. A man, presumably homeless, was either sleeping or dead on
a mat of greasy blankets. I'd noticed his camp earlier but took the man's lack of response to this police presence as a sign of impunity. And maybe it was. The police descended on the man and pulled him to his feet. His body language failed to register concern. One cop held the man's hands behind his back while the other rifled his pockets. They came up with nothing, and left the man to his ink spot on the side of the tan hill. I turned to see Fernandez snapping photos of the whole shakedown.

El Gordito's
compadre
passed back over the hill, and the fat man himself approached us on his descent. He wore sunglasses and no expression. “Be careful with that camera,” he said to Fernandez. “There are thieves and criminals about.”

“Okay,” she said. “But what did you want those men for?”

“For assault,” he said.

Fernandez shook her head, and tsked. So much compassion seemed compressed in her slight frame that to be judged by her was to be guilty. Gordito didn't give the gesture a thought; there was money to be made in this town. The air then ripped with the arrival of
la migra
agents on muscular quad motorbikes. First one then another pulled to an idle just on the other side of the fence. The sound of their engines reverberated through the metal. Nothing was visible to Fernandez or me, but we knew our friends were now in the crosshairs of the
jalapeños
as well. And soon to be caught, surely. This was the most enforced portion of the border. The sun had risen to high noon, leaving nowhere to hide. Depending on the migrants' records, detainment could mean anything from a short return trip to a year or more behind bars.

But the quads shot off to the east, and the hilltop went quiet. After a while, we turned to make our way back down the trail. The navy-blue bowling pin figure of El Gordito waddled down the route with a swift familiarity. Soon, he was out of sight. We took our time. Fernandez snapped some shots. I made notes. The bullring in Playas
looked like a saucer I could flip a peso and a wish into. Around a final curve, we watched as the cop drove away in his
camioneta
, his little truck.

The home of Mateo, the man who had sent Fernandez up here to photograph the graffiti, then came into view. The house was a converted semitrailer parked in a kind of stair step notched out of Bunker Hill. It was a dirt mine. And if the excavating progressed any farther north, the billion-dollar border fence would cave into the operation. The house was parked on a level patch. From there, the terrain continued to descend in low undulations to the ocean. It wasn't readily apparent that the house was a truck trailer because its additions and outbuildings had altered its shape into a sculptural construction of white blocks. If it had been parked outside of MoMA, the house would have received serious artistic critique.

“When I first came to the border to make pictures,” Fernandez explained, “I wanted to photograph homes built of unique materials. There are so many in Tijuana.” She came upon a home in Colonia Libertad that used President Clinton's corrugated iron as the back wall of a multiroom house where three generations of the same family lived. Technically, US soil extends three feet south of the wall. Some members of the family slept with their heads in the States and their feet in Mexico. On either side of this compound, neighborhood people gardened at the wall in the way you'd beautify an ugly backyard fence—succulents, tomato plants, and fruit trees. Across from the wall was a small market called Pasadita—the Little Crossing—where essentials for a strange commute might be purchased.

The photographer continued to encounter people who made portions of the wall their homes but, as if at a juncture, her artistic vision skipped tracks. She'd wanted to make art out of these creative houses, but like many people who got too close, she became ensnared by the fence. Now, all she wanted was to document life along this strange line.

Still, Fernandez kept in touch with the friends she'd made while photographing their odd houses, Mateo especially. He would alert her to new artworks on the fence, and importantly, he would accompany her. She'd had rocks thrown at her. She once slipped and fell down a steep decline. So Mateo's companionship was much appreciated. In return, Fernandez brought food and clothing for his family. She took their portraits and framed them for the house. Yet while she'd delivered some gifts when we first arrived at the semitruck earlier that day, for reasons unknown to me at the time, that friendship was not directly perceptible.

Mateo had wide-set teardrop eyes like those in an ancient Egyptian portrait. His face and mouth were also wide and his half smile revealed teeth spaced like fence posts. Fernandez had introduced me as an
amigo
. We shook hands; he barely gripped mine. I could see that he wondered what an American was doing here next to his truck trailer, the pit mine, the border fence.