The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  “There was a place that was designated for cross-border communication [Friendship Park], so I honestly didn’t think it was a big deal,” Watman said. Still, he did believe his work to be activist in nature. And he called these meet-ups “actions.”

  The events that hardened Watman’s resolve began in 2006, when the Department of Homeland Security began building the “triple fence.” The initial development occurred in violation of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, among others, as the contractors began grading the mesa east of Smuggler’s Gulch. Because the construction would eventually wall off Friendship Park with an eighteen-foot-tall fence, from perches in the county and state parks, Watman began to film work he thought to be unlawful. This sparked one in a series of incidents in which Border Patrol agents detained him.

  Watman was most famously detained in 2009, when he aided fellow activist Reverend John Fanestil in giving Sunday Communion to Mexicans through the fence. The passing of wafers that signified Christ’s flesh through the pylons was considered a customs violation. Though warned, Fanestil continued to give Communion at the fence. One Saturday, 120 worshipers, students, and human rights activists gathered on the American side. On the Tijuana side were churchgoers and Opera de Tijuana members, who planned to sing through the service. Sheriff’s deputies and an anti-immigration group called the Minutemen arrived; the latter engaged the group with emotional protests of their own. The Border Patrol literally drew a line in the sand before the wall. There was pushing and shoving. Agents readied tear gas and guns loaded with rubber bullets. Fanestil and Watman linked arms with forty others and marched toward the fence. The Opera de Tijuana members began a requiem mass. The Minutemen blasted counterprotests through bullhorns. The marchers advanced on the line in the sand. Fanestil was ordered to drop the Communion items, wafers and all, and place his hands behind his back. Authorities seized the reverend. Watman and the others marched on—until a sheriff’s deputy grabbed Watman and dragged him off.

  During this period of heightened tensions, as Watman regularly hiked the fence line along the canyons and out to the beach and Friendship Park, he began to notice the abandoned bicycles alongside trails. Like Maria Teresa Fernandez, he could only note their number and consistency. Other than the bicycles’ presence and their tracks, nothing was left behind that might explain the situation.

  My interest in Watman had to do with the fact that he was on the ground. Maybe he’d seen something he didn’t know was important. He was also a cyclist, didn’t own a car, and rode his beater everywhere he went. Maybe he pedaled alongside migrants on these roads. Importantly, Watman lived in Tijuana. He knew its bike culture. So when he agreed to meet and visit some bike shops in the city, I thought I saw a crack in the wall.

  The first shop happened to be in the Zona Norte, a short walk from downtown. The late San Diego novelist Oakley Hall described Tijuana as being “suffused with a feverish neon glow.” These few blocks along Coahuila are the source of all that light—bars, brothels, hostess clubs, and hotels that rent by the hour. Billboards announce just about anything you’d desire: better teeth, a straighter nose, companionship, legal counsel—as Edward Abbey once wrote of another desert town, these blocks are “a throbbing dynamo of commerce and pleasure.” An evening around Christmas is a particularly rich time for a visit. The streets and medians are decorated like the Rose Parade while prostitutes smile and wave from the sidewalks. People in cars travel through, but here, the city is the pageant.

  During the day, and up close, the reason for the Zona’s fish tank atmosphere of neon and darkness becomes clear. Crumbling curbs, cracked pavements, municipal projects halted midway through. Opportunists loiter. The homeless slump against walls. The Zona is corralled by both the international border and the river, and the people who haunt both margins linger among the populace.

  We turned onto a sunny street that hosted a permanent rummage sale, crossed a wide, empty intersection, and stopped at a concrete-and-cinder-block cubby. There was no door. Inside was a pile of greasy bike parts. On the sidewalk, a guy with a hip haircut and ear piercings leaned back in a chair. An old man wrenched on a ten-speed a few feet away. This was the bike shop.

  Watman happened to need a part for his mountain bike—the nut to a headset—and his query offered a mild opening to our investigation into illegal migration.

  “No,” said the clerk, “I don’t think we have that part. We only have what you see here.” He nodded at the pile inside the doorway. The structure was about six feet square. There was nothing on the block walls. The parts pile looked like an art installation. A cyclist rolled up and the old man hopped to greet him. The young clerk just leaned. There seemed to be nowhere to start but the beginning.

  “My friend here is looking into the people who cross the border by bicycle,” Watman said. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “Oh, at la línea?” the clerk said. “I don’t think they do that anymore.”

  He was talking about a short period of time when entrepreneurs had manipulated a loophole in Customs and Border Protection rules by renting kids’ bikes to those who waited to enter the United States on foot. That line can take two to three hours, or more. But by parting with five bucks, pedestrians could saddle a bike, split the lanes into vehicle traffic, and coast right up to the customs booths meant for cars and motorcycles. After presenting their documents to the agent and passing through, the riders delivered the kids’ bikes to couriers on the US side, who wheeled them back into Mexico. Per mile traveled, this might have been one of the most lucrative rental agreements going. The business boomed. It even generated a feature in San Diego’s weekly—this is how annoying the inexplicable lines were. Eventually, however, CBP officials were able to close the loophole. But the far-traveled fun and fame of this bike rental business really muddied the waters for me. When I asked about crossing the border via bike, the most likely answer was, “Ah, yes, five dollars. Ha, ha, ha.” Everyone enjoyed getting away with something.

  Watman and I explained the other method of crossing by bicycle to the shop clerk: the dangerous, illegal kind. The bike shop operator looked nervous. He said, “No, I don’t know anything.” His storeful of worn parts couldn’t suggest otherwise.

  Watman mentioned another shop on the west side of town, in Playas de Tijuana. So we flagged a cab that had just deposited some gentlemen at a gentlemen’s establishment, and we slipped out of the Zona Norte and onto the International Road. The cab climbed Russian Hill, descended into Smuggler’s Gulch, traversed a ribbon between Spooner’s Mesa and the neighborhood of Mirador, and then dipped again with Los Laureles—the whole roller coaster. But in truth, I was being shunted along by my own interior diversions, peak and trough; I rolled through our conversation with the shop clerk in the Zona Norte and the flawed thinking that had led me there. Following the parts seemed like a good idea, at first. But I should have anticipated the Tijuanenses’ genius for keeping any sort of moving contraption alive; that this question of tracking replacement parts, and thus estimating the size and duration of the phenomenon, could not prove so simple. Manufactured parts were not necessarily replacing broken and missing parts. Brake levers are made of bent metal, right? A problem easily solved by an old man with a hammer and a thin piece of scrap. I’d seen it happen in transmission shops and front yards that served as tire stores. New parts were in the eye of the beholder, and happy was the man who engineered his own way down the road.

  I decided to visit the next bike shop only to obey the inertia of this investigation. The cab then crested the last summit and tipped down toward the bullring and the shimmering Pacific—and the sight of the blue ocean washed everything I’d been thinking away.

  13

  The first rule of the gang: don’t ask any questions.

  What, when, why—each worker did a job, but only Indio understood how their positions meshed to drive the operation, the exact challenges they faced, and why they seemed to be getting away with the impossible. This compartmen
talization, he told the crew, was a part of keeping the business secure. The secrecy seemed over the top to them, as they were all taking risks together. But as his lifelong friend, Solo knew Indio’s methods to be part and parcel of his personality—only time seemed to uncover Indio’s thinking. To needle him with questions was pointless. So when the curious white pickup passed to the west, to the east, and circled back—and Indio’s demeanor divulged nothing—Solo remained silent. These border people were strange in ways that couldn’t be explained by any clipped answer he might receive from his patron.

  “Hey you, cholo!” the driver said, stepping out of the cab of the truck. He addressed El Indio squarely. He drew near, the ground crunching under his boots. “A minute of your time.” The man opened his palms in a knowing way.

  Indio nodded.

  “I am looking for a joven called Pablito,” he said. “You may have seen him—a nice, hardworking guy from Oaxaca. Wears huaraches. Just kind of starting out in the pollero business.”

  “Hola, Roberto,” Indio said, the shadow of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “How are you?”

  Solo stood to the side with the migrant couple, to whom he’d been talking. They looked ill at ease in the presence of the strangers.

  “I am good today. Thank you for asking,” Roberto replied, not overly engaged. “I was just out, you know, surveying the field. I’ve been hearing all over town about this new guy they are calling El Indio. I understand he’s discovered some crackpot way of passing people over—something of a mystery. Then I remembered a friend who spends a lot of time in these pinche canyons. I once heard him called Indio, yet I thought it the mistake of an ignorant person.”

  “There’s nothing to survey here, amigo. I’m only enjoying the view with some passersby.”

  Roberto looked about. He pointed. “Ah, and what is that over there? You’re crossing pollos on bicycles?”

  “No. People around here, I guess they like exercise.” Indio shrugged. “Cycling is good for that.”

  “Rentals? I see you’ve brought Solovino,” he said, pronouncing the whole of the nickname, which in Solo’s case, no one ever did; but the integrity of Roberto’s information was unsettling. “Well, I’ve also brought a trusted associate. She’s got a keen eye for the truth. She will know what’s happening here.”

  Roberto turned to the pickup and waved to the woman. When she stepped out, she was nearly as tall as Roberto, but slender. Her long dark hair hung almost to her waist. She wore a short skirt and wedge-heeled shoes. She looked too young to be with the older coyote but maybe his stature attracted such advantages.

  As she approached, Roberto said, “Pablo, I would like to present my sister Marta. She is my right-hand man in this business.”

  Her face emitted an olive hue, with just a dusting of freckles over the bridge of her nose. She didn’t wear makeup but her lashes were naturally long and her lips a warm, light mocha—a quality that made her teeth appear startlingly white. The woman offered the pollero a familiar, wry smile, but nothing more.

  “Hola, it is an honor to meet you.” He stepped forward with an open hand. “I’ve done some business with your brother and am honored to meet the sister of a valued friend.”

  Marta didn’t take the hand. “You are El Indio,” she said.

  “That’s what they call me here in Tijuana.”

  “And you’re passing pollos on bicicletas.”

  Indio said nothing. A gust of sea wind tugged at Marta’s hair. Roberto’s gaze was fixed in the distance. The conversation seemed at a momentary impasse. Solo sensed the approach of dangerous information. He gathered the migrant couple and ushered them away from the road and up the canyon slope, lest they hear what was said and become afraid.

  In their brief acquaintance Roberto had noted Indio’s inclination toward two basic postures. He tended to squat—on a hillside, for example—his left forearm resting on his left knee while the right elbow was propped on the right knee, the hand braced under his jaw. This was the shape Pablo had taken when Roberto had first noticed the boy, the posture of the canyonlands observer—and the form Roberto had expected to find him in when he and Marta set out looking for him that morning. The other stance was as straight-backed as a telamon, with his left fist wedged at his hip. It was almost as if the one posture aided the Oaxacan’s decision making while the other was the result of a confident choice having been made. And the latter was the stance of the man Roberto had nearly missed at the side of the International Road, the one who stood with an assistant and two pollos he apparently had no intention of selling to his old jefe.

  “I take it as a compliment, amigo,” Roberto said, filling the silence the young man had a habit of cultivating, even during negotiations.

  He hadn’t told Marta, but Roberto had met with the ten other polleros viejos of Tijuana. At issue was the rash of false coyotes and unprepared guides who led crossers to silent deaths in the eastern wildernesses. It was true what the authorities alleged: that, come trouble, the pollos paid the price as their custodians darted for cover. The older coyotes considered clients personal guests, not offal for the desert floor. You pass a father today, they believed, tomorrow you pass his son. Their business depended on trust, gained by delivery on the promise. Considering the situation in this light, the eleven rendered a harsh decision: a death sentence on freelancers who did not adhere to the ethos and drew unwanted attention to the trade. Under the guise of search-and-rescue volunteers, a squad of mercenaries had already been assembled in Tecate.

  Then Roberto caught wind of this new pollero, El Indio, who was said to be using Roberto’s same words and treating his clients with the same consideration. He wanted to support such behavior in newcomers, but given the council’s recent decision, Roberto could not hitch his reputation to an unproven wanderer of the fence line.

  He indicated the migrant couple who stood a ways off with Solo. “Have you offered them food and drink?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I am glad to see that some of the young still do.”

  Marta inquired, “Are you going to cross these pollos now, in daylight?”

  “I have before, yes. But not right now—I’m training my guy.”

  “So the business is growing.”

  Watching Indio, Marta said, “Brother, you mentioned a desire to grill some carne today. And there were some things you wanted to discuss. Why not invite this pollero?”

  Roberto was not exactly pleased with the suggestion. The location of his home was not a point to be traded among the bus station riffraff. But Marta did not do things just to do them, so he allowed the remark to pass. This recruiter would know better than to accept.

  El Indio said nothing.

  “If your associate is not going to cross these people right now,” Marta pressed, “he might have time for lunch.”

  Roberto huffed.

  She turned to Indio. “You will join us?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I would like that.”

  The pollero, who until this encounter had always appeared raggedy, in a thin windbreaker and worn sandals, jogged on new tennis shoes to confer with his assistant. Solo was dressed likewise, but waiting with the migrant couple, his deference to the boss was clear. Roberto was more than familiar with the postures of those awaiting orders.

  The second rule was: follow instructions exactly. It was a commandment that Solo had no problems with. In the village, failure to follow instructions might mean losing a crop, going without food, or water. The third rule, however, was to keep your opinions to yourself. It was a good rule for the others, the ganchos and guías, but Solo had known El Indio since he was called Pablito, a boy who’d never seen a paved street or a two-story building. And with this sharp-eyed pair who’d arrived in the truck, he sensed an ambiguous yet protracted danger.

  “Who are they?” Solo asked as Indio jogged up.

  “That is the powerful coyote I told you about—and a sister of his. I’ve never seen her before.”

&nb
sp; “What do they want?”

  “They want to take me to his house.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They seem strange.”

  “I know.”

  Solo nodded toward the migrants. He raised his brows.

  “Señor y Señora,” Indio addressed them, “my assistant here will take you to a hotel where you’ll be able to prepare yourself for the crossing tomorrow. Solo will make sure to meet all of your needs until that time. You’ve had a chance to see the layout, and if it is not to your satisfaction, or if you have any doubts about your abilities, we can pass you on to another pollero.”

  “No,” said the man. “We want to do this.”

  “Do you know why I drive this old Ford, Indio?” Roberto asked. It was the first time he’d used the nickname, an offer of respect, now that the pollero had taken on employees and had allowed them to address their jefe in this way.

  “Why do you drive this pickup?”

  El Indio had followed Marta onto the truck’s bench seat. Roberto stepped in on the driver’s side. He tore onto the International Road. They turned around at the entrance to Playas de Tijuana, near the Comercial Mexicana, and sped back east toward downtown—each roadside shack a flashing pixel of color.

  “As you know, I could buy any kind of vehicle,” Roberto said, “but this is the best possible for several reasons. It is old, white, dirty, and dented. There is not a piece on its exterior that shines, not even the chrome. The tires are just good enough, but not any better. There are no fancy rims, no seat covers, no accessories. The radio is not worth turning on, much less stealing. This is the best truck in the world for me because here in Tijuana, amigo, it is invisible.”

  “Sí?” Indio asked.

  “There are so many pinche pickup trucks in Tijuana that this one, even if you did see it, you wouldn’t remember it. It blends into the dusty streets—forgotten the moment it crosses one’s sight. I could park in front of your house and you would fail to describe it. And there is a lesson in that. There is no need to go to extremes in hiding oneself, when one can walk about visible to the world, but never perceived and never remembered.”