The Coyote's Bicycle (38 page)

“So now what?” El Negro asked.

“I don't know,” the man said. “We might just leave.”

“I can drive a backhoe,” Negro said. “If you want to work, let me help you.”

The man consulted with the crew and soon enough El Negro was in the seat of the intimidating machine. He showed smarts and ability, and he was invited to stay on in several capacities. Following completion of the project, the organizers held an opening ceremony in the new park. Negro was asked to work at the bathrooms on that occasion, a kind of concierge of the establishment. And as the event came to a close, almost as an afterthought, an administrator informed Negro that the position was open, and his if he wanted it. He did, and he soon took up residence in an ample supply room in back, almost hidden by the circular design of the structure.

The municipal bathrooms proved to be a nexus point. Plumbing infrastructure was not the beach area's strong suit, so locals frequently stopped by. From them, El Negro gleaned layers of gossip
that came to form an intricate picture of his surroundings. He got to know Playas in less convenient ways too. Not long after he'd taken the new job, Tijuana police picked him up for walking without identification. En route to the police station the officers answered a call concerning the robbery of an area 7-Eleven. On arrival, a gun battle erupted between the officers and two
pistoleros
fleeing on foot. Negro was handcuffed in back of the patrol car. Bullets penetrated the metal like staples through paper.

Another time, he'd cut into an empty lot on the way to the Comercial Mexicana for groceries. In the fading light he came upon some plastic trash bags surrounded by splatters of something wet and black—fresh blood, he discovered as he bent to look. Then Negro noticed the decapitated head set openly on the mound of plastic. The bags were filled with the body parts of three men. The blood at his feet had yet to coagulate. He's done the math a million times. Negro escaped a run-in with the murderers by a matter of minutes.

One day a man in a white pickup stopped in the loading zone at the bathrooms. He was a bigger guy, and as soon as he stepped out of the truck Negro could see that the man still had the way of the ranch about him. His cool gaze traveled the landscape as if assessing the quality of the range. The bed of his pickup was filled with men, day laborers, it looked like. The man approached Negro at the bathroom entrance and introduced himself.

“
Buenos días, señor
. My name is Roberto. You don't know me. I work in the area. And I've noticed that you have a little room there in back of the bathrooms.” A pause settled between them like a centavo coin spinning and shivering to a stop on the concrete. “It is helpful to be observant,” Roberto said.

“That's where I am living,” Negro said.

“Yes, well, I've got these
pollos
here,” he waved at the pickup, “and I've had some arrangements go bad today. If the police see them in my truck or on the streets, these men won't get to where they need to
go. If you hide these men in your room there, for just a short time, it would be a great favor.”

“For them?”

“And for me.”

“For them it's not a problem,” Negro said, taking his key chain from his belt. The eleven men were granted entry to his small space in back. Negro moved his bedding and accommodated them as best he could. Then he returned to his station outside the bathroom entrance.

Sometime later, this man Roberto returned with a white van. He greeted Negro in the same calm, respectful manner. The two of them ushered the men out of the room and into the idling vehicle.

Roberto turned to Negro and said, “Thank you for the hospitality,” and he withdrew a roll of cash. He peeled off a few bills and extended them.

Negro waved them away. “I appreciate the offer. It's not necessary,” he said.

“Why not accept a small tip?” Roberto asked. The bills lay like limp fish in his hand.

“I have compassion for my people.” Negro shrugged. “I've been a migrant like them. And if they are sent back here, I have been that person too. I can't take money.”

“Okay,
amigo
,” Roberto said, tapping the brim of his Stetson. “Maybe you will let me compensate you next time.”

“Good luck,” Negro said.

In this way, he became known as someone who helped exiles. Others brought clothing and sometimes food to be distributed at Negro's leisure. A charitable person once delivered a box of professional attire—dress shoes, clip-on ties. On a slow day at the bathrooms, Negro noticed a group of grubby migrants and waved them over.

“Men,” he said, “you can't go to an interview looking like that. Look, I've got this box of clothes over here; pick out something for yourselves. Take whatever you have a need for.”

The men rifled through the box and donned items that appealed to them—pants, suits, and sports jackets. They had just gathered to look each other over, inventing new occupations for themselves, when a police car pulled up and an officer lowered the window. “
Oye
, bathroom guy,” the officer called to Negro, “where are all of the
pollos
at?”

Negro raised a hand to his brow. He looked down at the beach. He surveyed the park and the sidewalks. “I guess this isn't the place today, officers,” he hollered back. The patrol car sped off. Negro then appraised the men in their new costumes again. They looked, he thought, like a conference of lawyers.

By the beginning of 2005, housing prices in California, Arizona, and Nevada had jumped 25 percent over the previous year. Across the Southwest construction boomed to meet demand—and a web of industries, from complex financial instruments to raw materials, surged with it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate had ebbed to 5.2 that January and was still steadily sinking. These conditions created a vast market for cheap undocumented labor—which was mostly filled by Mexicans. The action in smuggling that labor over the boundary was as hot as any other fed by the bonanza, and in Tijuana, it was hottest at Playas.

Around that time a middling
pollero
we'll call El Ratón—the Mouse, for his oversized ears and shifty gaze—insinuated himself among a significant band of smugglers based near the bullring. Each of his colleagues was known for certain techniques, successes, or feats in the field. There was an attractive young woman who called herself Viva Mexico, for example, who was famous for having cut a garage-door-sized partition in the fence with an arc welder. Her crew then rigged the piece with hinges and meticulously fit it back into place—so as to access the portal again and again. Another operator employed a grappling hook fashioned from rebar with a knotted
rope ladder attached to it. The hook would be thrown up onto the fence line and the
pollo
would climb the rope, straddle the fence, toss the rope over to the US side, and climb right down. This wasn't a simple thing to do. Incidents of broken ankles and legs had skyrocketed at the border fence.

El Ratón, however, was not a specialist. He bought, sold, and crossed
pollos
in the most readily available ways. More than cunning, he was known for an accessory. El Ratón carried a handgun in the band of his trousers and he was rumored to have killed a man in a dispute. When asked why he carried a weapon, El Ratón commonly replied, “It's a dangerous border, a dangerous business.” Few of the other
polleros
armed themselves—getting caught with a gun in the United States would immediately finger them as smugglers and invite a slew of additional charges. Further, the
polleros
understood El Ratón's comment as self-reflective—that he intended a dangerous business. This was a fragile and perilous boast. Handguns were highly illegal in Mexico. If police caught El Ratón with the weapon, and he hadn't already fostered a financial relationship with them, the Mouse would be looking down the barrel of a thirty-year sentence. If he ran into men who truly used their weapons as business tools, his chances would be worse.

One day Negro was tending the bathrooms at the lighthouse when El Ratón approached, his beady eyes darting about. He wore a collared shirt and baggy jeans cinched around skinny hips. A light jacket purposely left open revealed the revolver.

“
Mira
, Negro,” he said, looking right and then left. “I heard that
pinche pollero
Roberto was here talking to you.” He flicked his chin upward. “Where is he now?”

“I don't have that information,” Negro said with a shrug. He continued to break off squares of toilet paper, folding them into personal allotments for his customers.

“You are
amigos
, no? You tell each other things.”

“I work at the bathrooms. He is a client. He used the bathrooms and he left. The people give me five pesos, not their day plans.”

“We both know that is bullshit,” El Ratón said. “So let's agree that when you see Roberto again, you come and find me,
comprende
? I am the only
amigo
you have now. That Roberto, he is a dead coyote. Nobody takes
pollos
off of me.”

Ratón made a show of peering downward. He hunched his shoulders and hollowed out his middle, a gesture that popped the pistol grip from his waist. In this posture, he looked at Negro, his small eyes unusually still. He sucked at his front teeth, tea-colored chalks rimmed in silver.

He said, “Don't end up on the wrong side of this.”

El Negro did spy Roberto again, of course, and as the white pickup casually rounded the curve about the lighthouse, Negro flagged it down. The truck came to a slow halt. Negro then noticed an associate of Roberto's sitting shotgun. This was El Oso—the Bear. The nickname was not an ironic description of his size.

Wearing the Stetson and dark sunglasses, Roberto leaned on the steering wheel and spoke past this man. “
Compa
,” he said, “
que onda?
”

“
Qué onda
,” Negro replied. “Can I have a word with you?”

“Go ahead,” Roberto said. “You know El Oso.”

“
Hola
, Oso,” he said. “No, Roberto, over here by the bathroom,
por favor
.”

Roberto pursed his lips, put the vehicle in park, and stepped out. His associate remained on the vinyl bench seat.

Roberto stood a head taller, which forced El Negro to look up when they faced each other. “El Ratón was here flashing his pistol thirty minutes ago,” Negro explained. “He said you are a dead coyote. Nobody takes his
pollos
.”

“
Sí?
El Ratón? Here, eh? What else did our colleague have to say?”

“That when I see you, I should tell him.”

Roberto whistled. “Yet another complication to the day,
compa
.” He held his chin in thought. “But we can accommodate our friend. What do you say? I don't think he's playing.”

“No, I don't think he is playing,” Negro advised.

Roberto walked back to the truck. At the passenger-side window he took off his hat and sunglasses and handed them through to El Oso. Then he gave this man directions. El Oso placed Roberto's hat on his own head and slid over the bench seat to the steering wheel. He situated the sunglasses upon his brow, put the pickup in gear, and drove away.

Bare of his Stetson and shades, Roberto peered about Monument Mesa. He draped an arm around Negro and said, “Make me a guest in your home for a little while. I would appreciate it.”

Within a half hour or so, Negro recognized Roberto's
pollo
van circling the block. Then, in short succession, five of
el coyote
's workers approached the bathrooms on foot, identified themselves, and asked also to be guests in Negro's home.

“
Pasele
.” Negro waved them through. They opened the steel door at the rear of the structure and entered the supply room in the deft silent file of smugglers.

El Oso eventually returned along the lighthouse road in the white pickup. He parked at the curb in front of the bathrooms. He took his time getting out, and placed the Stetson on his head. He waited in the plaza. He looked at the sky, checked his watch, and then approached and handed El Negro his five pesos. Negro traded them for a fold of tissue and Oso entered.

It wasn't long before El Ratón came loping around the green coconut stand on the opposite corner—but still it was surprising, the way a hunting thing, however quiet, could come side-winding along at the critical moment. His jacket was closed this time. He nodded at the truck.

“You didn't come get me,” he said to Negro.

“I can't leave my job,” he said.

“Inside?” he asked.

“
Sí
.” Negro nodded with gravity.

“With his pants down already?” Ratón winked at the bathroom attendant and stepped inside. On finding the stalls empty, Ratón called out, “Eh, Negro, where's your
amigo
?” El Negro shut the front steel door of the men's bathroom and locked it—a round click of cylinders sinking into place. “Eh?” Ratón said.

The barge-like groan of the supply room door sounded, and then Roberto's voice. “No need to yell, Ratón,” he said. “I'm right here.”

Negro placed the
CERRADO
sign at the entrance. And standing outside, he could hear a scuffing and shuffling of feet, a flurry of muffled sounds like flags flapping in a stiff wind, and then a pronounced moan. “No,” El Ratón said, “think about it.”

“In all of my years as a
pollero
, I have never owned a gun,” Roberto's voice then said—reflective, warm almost. “And now, when I have been openly threatened, just the weapon I need finds its way to my hand.” The measured clip of pacing was detectable. “You paid a lot for this, I'm sure, carried it around—right there in your belt—a mother kangaroo warming its little baby in her pouch.”

“No, Roberto,” Ratón repeated. “Think for a minute.”