For Angelene
I want to extend special thanks to José Antonio Castillo Garcia, Dan Watman, and Ben McCue, without whose collaboration and generosity of spirit this book would not have been possible.
A Note to Readers:
Names have been changed and identities have been obscured in order to protect migrants and the smugglers who cross them.
“The bicycle will be found,” said the Sergeant, “when I retrieve and restore it to its own owner in due law and possessively. Would you desire to be of assistance in the search?”
—FLANN O’BRIEN, The Third Policeman
Prologue:
EVERYBODY LOVES A BIKE
This is the story of several thousand bicycles that made an incredible journey. They were very ordinary, used bicycles. Mountain bikes, with their knobby tires and sturdy frames, made up a large percentage of the total. Some of these sported shocks and disc brakes—accessories you might think necessary for a trip of this distance and nature. But there were also fragile-looking ten-speeds, three-speeds, and fixed-gears. I once glimpsed a pink-and-purple girl’s bike with a small white seat and frills at the handle grips. Heavy American beach cruisers rolled on comfortable balloon tires. English roadsters and Dutch omafiets suggested sleek market runs down grass-lined lanes. The bikes were made in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and China. They were adorned in all manners, but the consistent theme was an admirable patina of road wear, rust, dings, dents, and scrapes. The seats and handle grips took the shapes of the bodies that touched them. Yet there were bikes with no seats, no brakes. Some bore labels of origin—shop emblems, registration stickers, or evidence of sale at auction by a police department. In a superstitious, totem-like fashion, an unknown cyclist had drawn simple, elegant waves along the black rubber sidewalls of an unremarkable bike’s tire—giving it the blessing of oceanic drift. There was another cycle I remember because of its brilliance: a classic lowrider fashioned from a boy’s Schwinn, with the “ape-hanger” handlebars, crushed velvet banana seat, gold piping, and gold-colored rims. The bike lay on its side, spokes sparkling in the dirt like a roulette of icicles. Many of the bikes fell into the category of “utility,” a style that peaked in the 1960s and conjured the image of a straight-backed professor pedaling between ivy towers. There were a number of rugged BMX racing bikes that evoked sunny suburban lots and dirty socks. A few high-tech-looking road bikes and classic gems turned up, but soon vanished. I never saw a tandem bicycle, but could easily have missed it. A high-wheel would have been impossible. Clown bikes, depending on personal definitions, abounded. Most of the bikes were not worth much. Some of them were missing important parts. All of them had generated thousands of dollars in their life spans. They had been snatched up by criminals, confiscated by police, purchased by human smugglers, dumped in a swamp, sold to a movie studio, contracted to the military, utilized in war training, co-opted in prisoner reform, donated to orphans, sold at swap meets, cycled and recycled again and again.
Not one human being who influenced the course of the bikes understood their full trajectory or end destination. No one knew how far they had traveled in a group. Few who handled or pedaled them were aware of their specific bike’s origin, its next step, or even its next owner. The bikes were not invisible, but at important stages, they were unseen.
The journey was not made entirely on their own two wheels.
The bicycles rode in trucks packed tight alongside boxes of AK-47s, grenade launchers, and pyrotechnics. They shipped out to a small, craggy, restricted island off the coast of California called San Clemente. They were crammed into the backs of border-enforcement vehicles. They flew to the Hawaiian archipelago. They drove north to Canada, east to Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia. The bikes rolled over the Mexican border powered by the feet of illegal immigrants. They rolled under the seats of actors and horse trainers and pumpkin farmers. Convicts rode them in prison. Real soldiers preparing for battle in Afghanistan took time out to pop wheelies on them. Finally, after years of service, the bikes again coasted under the feet of regular citizens, boys and girls. The bikes are out there now, still rolling. You might own one yourself. Most of their riders have no idea how well traveled their well-worn wheels really are.
When I tell the story of the bikes, listeners invariably ask, “How do you know?” or “Who arranged it all?”
To the first question, all I can say is that I happened upon a large pile of ordinary bikes in an unlikely place, under bizarre circumstances. Everybody likes bikes, I’ll say, and when I saw this motley collection of tubes and cranks and frames and wheels—the bicycle equivalent of a shipyard after a hurricane—I discovered that I liked these bikes most of all. I am a person attracted to thrift stores and yard sales. The more battered and unloved an item’s appearance sparks an equal and opposite sentiment in me. But I wasn’t the only one. A small, feverish cadre of people—ranchers and farmers and alley-trawlers—drawn by the mysterious arrival of bicycles in the bushes, in the river, abreast trails, by the roadside and under bridges, bicycles that poured down with a winter rain that seemed never to end, stopped to pick them up without knowing why. Or, maybe, even caring. Lucky finds don’t inspire deep inquiry.
I, however, am also attracted to a yarn, to irony, circularity, and meaning. It is a documentary flaw, I know. Phenomenal events take place without portent or meaning every day. And so, despite the mystery of the bicycles in plain sight, it is understandable that not many who wheeled their prizes homeward ever bothered to ask why—why here? A front-page article in the city’s only major newspaper reported the event but never asked as much—emitting only a “Huh, look, a bunch of bikes.”
And yet, varying ideas of value just might help answer the question of “Who arranged it all?” Because, maybe, we all did. A pile of discarded cars is an eyesore called a junkyard. The last time I entered a junkyard, I needed a rear turn-signal assembly for a 1982 Nissan extra-cab. I didn’t look around or admire the other clunkers. Bikes, however, belong to that class of essentially elegant innovations of travel—an airship, an airplane’s wing, a sailboat’s hull, a keel, a kite, the fin of a surfboard, a bicycle in motion. Bicycles execute the willpowers of the people who buy, find, steal, trade, and use them; they mark the memories of the people who love them. I like to think that it was the curious sight of ownerless cycles descended from nowhere that sits at the heart of this tale—because suddenly they became available to the will of whoever came upon them next; suddenly their destinies were without limit. I didn’t collect the bicycles myself. I merely wanted to know where they came from and where they were going and how far they could get. I began to understand the nature of their remarkable journey only by seeking out, speaking to, and investigating the people who had handled them one to the next.
At a certain point, as I charted the expanse of the bikes’ adventure, I tried to draw rude diagrams and flow charts. I once tried to draw a map of the journey, but this was difficult; I needed to illustrate things as big as the world yet include details as small as a ditch. In truth, I felt as though I’d caught the tail of a comet, all of the glinting and glittering bits shooting past in the darkness and somehow the very trailing end slowing just enough to get me all tangled up in it. The question of the bikes cost me a good few productive work years when I could least afford it. Following worthless bikes, I was warned a number of times, could cost me everything. On a couple of occasions, I was told, “Don’t end up with your head in a bucket,” and “You might end up off in the desert somewhere.” This was due to the fact that on my own, I was unqualified to sniff this story out. My Spanish is questionable. I’m not a criminal. I’m not affiliated with the military. My motives to e
xpose the story ran at odds with the interests of those who knew the story best. There was no way I could ever keep up with either the speed or trajectory of this comet. It was headed for strange places and worlds that wouldn’t admit a regular, unassociated citizen like myself.
So on the trail, I made unlikely allies: movie makers, a Border Patrol agent, a Homeland Security investigator, a couple of Navy SEALs, a few ranchers, some environmentalists, human rights activists, human smugglers—people Mexicans generally refer to as “malandros” or bad guys—bike freaks, social agitators, artists, architects, academics, and people obsessed in various ways with small aspects of a story I couldn’t always explain. Everybody likes bikes, was my simple premise. Everybody likes to talk about bikes. And to get this story right, I had to believe that people like to talk about bikes to the extent that they’ll talk about them even while they’re stealing them, fencing them, breaking them down into sellable pieces.
The most critical part, however, the questions of where the bikes I was interested in had come from, and how they ended up in ownerless piles, was only answered after I made an alliance that became a friendship, with a fifty-year-old, ex-con deportee who worked at the public bathrooms in Tijuana and lived in a fake ship. Our meeting was not preordained, but it was meaningful in a way that defied logical connections. Because, as it turned out, El Negro was not just a man with entrée but an extraordinary investigator who delved into the border slums. And from his underworld interviews—with the dons of Tijuana smuggling and itinerant cycle mechanics alike—I was able to piece together the story of El Indio, an impoverished child of campesinos who walked out of his tiny Oaxacan village, arrived at la frontera, and built an empire on the strength of a single foolhardy idea.
Abandoned bicycles hold the unique ability of reflecting the desires of their finders. They are equally junk and prizes. Art and vehicles. They move people and goods and plans along. They become machines in the service of their riders’ willpowers and destinies. By following the mass of these bikes that caught my eye even as they rested, I thought I’d discover just where that collective willpower and destiny led.
Everybody likes bikes.
1
We know that the important early bicycle was a milkman’s bike, and that it was saddled with a large wire basket designed to hold fifteen-liter milk canisters. It wasn’t likely the first bicycle in the village, but it was the only one in living memory. And aside from Don Ricardo’s ancient tractor that, even in good times, none of the farming families could afford to rent, the bicycle was the only mechanized vehicle for many miles around.
Pablo, or Pablito as he was known at age twelve, woke every morning at four with the cackle and crow of the village roosters. By then, his mother had already been awake and working for an hour or more. Her quiet shuffling was an integral part of his morning. Like many of the other families, Pablito’s lived in a one-room wood-and-thatch house with a dirt floor. There was no sink. There were no cabinets or bureaus. The stove consisted of three stones enclosing a small fire. In cool weather, this was the heater. And still, the home wasn’t as cramped as it might have been if his two older brothers and two older sisters hadn’t, one by one, as each came of age, walked out of their small Oaxacan pueblo on the thin, rutted road, and headed off into el Norte.
For breakfast, Pablito was given a few tortillas left over from those made the previous evening on the comal. Clutching the now cold tortillas, he stepped out into the dark morning and made his way across the yard to a spindly ranch gate. It was constructed of tree limbs and wire, and was attached to the gatepost by leather hinges. Pablito had known the cow whose pieces of hide formed those hinges. Every morning Pablito waited there, next to the gatepost, for the arrival of his best friend, Solo.
The fresh air, the smell of dew on the earth, and the rich scents of the surrounding mountain forest all mingled in the predawn. Pablito listened to the noises of his village as each of the families, 150 residents in all, began to wake and prepare for the day. Morning fires flickered here and there in a rolling landscape that held cold, wet vapors like little clouds in the folds and depressions. When Solo arrived in the bluing light, Pablito hardly had to look.
We know that each wore leather huarache sandals with soles made from car tires. Their patched, loose-fitting clothing had been handed down by Pablito’s brothers and Solo’s one male cousin who was also in el Norte. Sometimes it was very cold as the boys hiked an hour or more into the mountains. At that time of day, before the sun broke above the peaks, the shroud of green forest looked black.
In the foothills, they approached the tree line and fanned out to scour the forest floor, gathering pieces of dry wood. Each boy needed enough to last his family’s fire the entire day and following morning. As the season wore on, the boys walked deeper and deeper into the trees to gather the necessary amount. They filled slings, simple frames formed from sticks. A cloth headband was attached, and when they slipped it over the crown of their heads, it relieved some of the load from their backs. They bent low and heard the sounds of small life scuttling all about. There were skunks and fox and anteaters and snakes. Leaves shook above, too, as birds and squirrels passed through the branches. Teardrop oriole nests hung from the outer limbs of the great guayacan tree like rattan lanterns marking the way. Now and again Solo fabricated noises, pitching sounds or deep gravelly groans. Or he claimed to see things, like the swish of a tail or any slight hint at the presence of the onza—a large cat related to the jaguar that few in the village had ever seen. In the stories, the toothy creature was sometimes said to be yellow with spots and sometimes black. When people didn’t know what they’d seen, they generally called it a tigre, the catchall word for any big feline. And it was this image that Solo relished. He’d played this teasing trick with the noises so often that it wasn’t funny anymore so much as tradition.
Of the two boys, Pablito was slightly shorter. The village was known to produce small people, so minute differences in height were noticed. Solo could comfortably carry a full sling of wood. Pablito took pains to match the size of Solo’s load, plus a stick or two. He rarely spoke on their descent into the village, perhaps due to the discomfort—the cloth headband put a strain on the neck—but Mixtecs were well known for their reserved demeanor. Those from other provincial states believed Oaxacans to be tough, perceptive, and cunning, but they were also notorious for masking these qualities with a kind of rural quiet city people sometimes took for ignorance.
Not Solo, though—he was a talker. If Pablito didn’t care to chat, Solo didn’t mind carrying both sides of the conversation. As he left the tree canopy, the words seemed to awaken. The boys squinted into the rising sun. The vapors and mists were gone and the blue land they’d left below in the darkness was now a patchwork of deep greens and browns. Gray trails of trash fires lifted column-like into the air, and Solo’s need to talk seemed to rise with the temperature.
“My friend,” he said, “I know you’re always caressing your dream of one day going to the United States and working alongside your brothers. I will ask God to help satisfy this yearning because I know you are too proud. You believe He thinks this dream a little piece of nothing, but maybe not.”
A yellow-bellied flycatcher darted from bush to bush before them. A hawk wheeled in the sky above. This was not a new conversation for the boys, but one that evolved in the telling and the things they’d learn from those who returned or who passed through. Fathers and sons tended to leave one at a time, and once established, they’d send money and, eventually, send for the others. Women composed most of Solo’s family, and he hadn’t heard from his cousin in a long time. So it was expected that Pablito would go first—at the request of one of his brothers, perhaps. “And someday in appreciation of my assistance,” Solo said, “you will help me to get to the United States as well.”
This had always been the plan.
Solo stopped to adjust the sling on his back, and then he hurried to catch up to Pablito, who never dallied. When
the idea of leaving was talked through, it often seemed too big an undertaking. The village was an entire world where everyone knew and helped each other. Nearly everything outside of it was foreign to the boys. At these times, Solo would apply subtle brakes to his narrative—lest Pablito up and depart before both of them were grown and ready. “Even though you hold on to your dream,” Solo pointed out now, breathing more heavily as his full sling weighed on him, “you also love your family. Your grandfather is old but he’s strong and he knows a lot of things.”
Solo could think of three aspects of Pablito’s life in the village that might keep his friend around: the boy’s unique connection with his paternal grandfather, the bountiful wildlife and natural beauty that surrounded them, and the best time of their day, when Pablito and Solo set out on the milkman’s bicycle. “Those are some things you love,” Solo said.
Pablito didn’t agree, or even nod. He didn’t shake his head or avert his eyes. He was simply quiet in the rhythm of walking the hard-packed path with the sandal soles made of car tires.
They came to a familiar curve in the trail and discovered that a dark bull had taken up a position directly on the track. To the left stood a marshy papaya grove where two pale heifers hovered like ghost cows in the deep greenery. To the right ran a wire fence covered in brambles. The boys were about as tall as the wheels on an oxcart. Even if it were not angry but merely startled, the bull could trample Pablito and Solo. It settled its great bulbous eyes on them and shuffled its hind legs around until its whole mass pointed at them like a compass needle. It became clear that the animal would not move without prodding. The boys whooped and whistled. Solo raised his arms to appear taller. Pablito then bent and grabbed some fallen papayas—he instructed Solo to do the same—and they lobbed the green fruit into the path of the bull until, as if receiving the message after some delay, it shuffled off into the grove and casually joined its mates.
The Coyote's Bicycle Page 1
