14
The broad streets of Playas were sunbaked, the atmosphere made granular by the mist and salt-laden air. The grainy, flickering light projected onto the dirty cab window gave one the impression of a sixteen-millimeter film—of homes painted in pastels, yards gated and walled, everything passing in a Mediterranean kind of slumber. The more opulent the neighborhood in Tijuana, I noted, the fewer the people outside. Dogs idled in the road; brown pelicans looked like miniature posted sentries. It was the mirage of a California beach town in the 1970s. The cab pulled around a gentle curve in the road and up to a glass-fronted shop. I could see the bikes inside. We stopped. A trace scent of rotting kelp marked us about three blocks from the ocean.
The glass door chimed, too loud for the size of the shop, and the ringing added to a buzzy claustrophobia I felt stepping in—bikes were wedged into every inch of floor space and hovered in racks above. The customer was left a shin-wide runway to a small cul-de-sac in which to stand. Light leaked between bike frames in the window, recalling a view from inside a jungle gym. A hard silence settled. The smell of the sea was replaced by the vapors of rubber and lubricant. Watman and I, only just acquaintances, fidgeted in our awkward proximity to each other. Muttering, Watman decided that maybe what he wanted was not a replacement part for his beater but a new bike, and he started to look around by moving frames aside, peering at a certain model and then moving more frames.
“O-la,” I said, hoping to conjure a shop person. “Hola.”
A man stood up from behind the glass counter four feet away. I realized he’d been bent down there working on a repair. Light-skinned, with a kind of sickly pallor, he wore his brown hair slicked back. His green eyes seemed surprised—leery, maybe, of obvious outsiders. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“My friend is looking for a mountain bike,” I said. I had meant to say “used” but they were all used. The clerk looked over at Watman and indicated options, each difficult to get to. Metal clanked.
“I see you’re doing repairs. Do you sell spare parts?” My Spanish had the quality of being both formal and limited—like a parrot’s.
“Yes.” He shrugged and pointed out another mountain bike in a corner.
“To groups, or individuals?” I asked.
“Just to the people who come in,” he said.
Standing there among the bikes felt like standing and talking to strangers from a waist-deep pool without the cocktail to lend a purpose. Watman paused in his search. He emitted this “Eah-mm” sound that Tijuana intellectuals use to begin a sentence and said, “We’re looking for stories of migrants who cross the border on bicycles.”
Watman could be blunt. At times, his manner suggested that a decision had been made: conversational niceties were inefficient, and so they were out. But this bike mechanic was a source we were trying to develop, one who may have abetted criminals. And sensing the motive of our visit prematurely exposed, I saw no choice but to hazard the next obvious question.
“We thought maybe you sold parts to migrants on bicycles,” I said.
Something illuminated the man’s green eyes. It was as if he recognized a person, or something, behind us. I followed the gaze but caught only the door.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. His lip raised to reveal stubby front teeth—a smile.
“There were many people crossing on bikes,” I said. “Right there at the border. And this is the closest bicycle shop. Some of the migrants needed help with their bikes because they were not new bikes.”
“And you look like a good mechanic,” Watman said, pointing to his repair job.
“I don’t know anything about people crossing. But if I did . . .” He paused, and looked up. “I just don’t know anything.”
He shook his head. There was a silence. He gave the smile again.
And I took this as an outright admission. “You know something,” I said in English.
“Sorry,” he replied. He spoke English, and he knew something. “There are a lot of stories around here,” he added.
We stepped out of the shop and into the airy, sunny, empty street and I experienced a dopamine spike as if I’d latched onto a prize sailfish with my naked arms. But then the fish gave me the slip. I could see it out there, jumping and bucking in the great blue. They say addicted gamblers get a bigger jolt from the “almost win,” the four-out-of-five cherries dropping on the slots and the fifth just tipping, but no dice, which is a loss, but as highs go, way better than winning, which is run-of-the-mill. You win, so what? There’s nothing left to hope for. But a near loss, now that has possibilities.
The shop mechanic’s weak smile and disingenuous denial came as the only admission I’d found to date that the bikes emerged from Mexico at all—that they hadn’t just dropped out of the sky onto the Kimzey Ranch. Even as he denied knowledge of or involvement with the bicycle migrants, I knew he knew.
“He knew,” I said to Watman. “He knew something.”
“Yeah, it sure looked like he did.”
It wasn’t until we’d walked a couple of blocks into the streets of Playas that I realized all I had now was a feeling—and when that waned, I had nothing.
Watman wanted to visit a man he called El Negro—the Black—whom he knew from his work at the border. The Playas bicycle shop was only about a quarter of a mile south of the border fence, the border monument, and Friendship Park. As part of his efforts to save the park and revitalize interest in the monument, Watman was in the process of establishing a native species garden on either side of the fence. It was meant to be “binational.” To accomplish this, he traveled between the two countries and worked either side of the iron pylons on alternating Sundays. This was a delicate feat, because even to pass a seed across to the other side would have antagonized the Border Patrol agents who sat nearby in jeeps—and these officials had the ability to terminate Watman’s access to the park without explanation.
As potent a symbol as it was, the garden was a humble little plot. Perimeters of cobblestone framed juvenile Shaw’s agave, wild sage, and bright orange California poppies. The agave was the same dark green species that border commissioner Bartlett illustrated when he visited the marble obelisk in 1852. If the transplants took, it might be the first instance in fifty years that the native bloomed on the mesa. But this coastal desert is deceptively brutal; the young plants needed help. When Watman wasn’t available to water them, he relied on a friend who worked at the municipal bathrooms. This was El Negro, a deportee who, I gathered, held a lot of cachet for a guy who traded folds of toilet paper for five pesos each.
When we arrived, there were actually two people outside the bathrooms, the man and a round-faced woman. Both looked to be in their fifties. They sat in white plastic chairs on either end of a small table set with candies, single cigarettes, and other knickknacks for sale. In their laps they held small handmade looms. The man was busy knitting a long white scarf while the woman put the finishing touches on a black, red, green, and gold beanie—Rasta colors. She looked up from the hat as we approached and kicked the man under the table. He lifted his head.
“Daniel, where have you been?” the man said. “I watered the garden on Tuesday but I didn’t hear from you.”
“Ah, I know, amigo,” Watman said. “I got caught up with moving again. Como estas? Bien?” Watman turned and gestured toward me. “This is a friend of mine.”
“Negro,” the man said, leaning over the loom, a board with nails on it, and offering a weak handshake.
“Mucho gusto,” I replied. The woman buried her head in her work, noticeably uninterested. I didn’t say anything more. But Watman picked up with their plans for the garden, and Negro listened while knitting the scarf. It was easy to assume he’d been nicknamed for his mole-colored complexion. His skin was both dark and bright and contrasted with his angular, Caucasian-looking features. His beard of a few days grew thick with ample white. His dress pants and shoes I took to be overly formal until I noticed their wear.
Watman asked El Negro, “Hey, do you know anything about migrants crossing the border on bicycles?”
“Oh yeah man, that is some funny shit,” he said. “The bikes right there by the Comercial. It’s really something because the polleros wait and watch for la migra to pass by and then, boom, they would just go, man. Vroom, straight there.”
“How much do the bikes cost?” Watman asked, as if he were thinking of going over and picking one up for himself.
“It doesn’t matter how much is the bike. The bike is not for sale. The coyote give it to you for crossing.”
A thin, older man with a bowl cut ambled up. “Que onda,” the man greeted El Negro.
“Que onda,” Negro responded absently.
The bowl cut sat down against the wall beside the bathroom worker, but didn’t greet anyone else, simply looked around as if this were his break-time sitting spot.
“I remember this time,” Negro said, “I was down there at the fence where those guys did that work. The Border Patrol, he drives up to the fence and he says—because you know, sometimes we’re just talking shit with the Border Patrol, there’s no one else around to talk to—and he says, ‘Hey man, don’t you guys have recycling places over there in Mexico?’ I says, ‘Yeah, why do you ask this question?’ The migra guy points at all of the bikes they had there. He says, ‘Well, why do you Mexicans just dump this good scrap metal here next to the fence?’ Man, I’m telling you, that Border Patrol didn’t even know what the coyotes was doing, man.”
He addressed the bowl cut. “Oye, Juan. You remember that bicycle-crossing shit, right?”
“Yeah,” said Juan. “El Indio.”
“El Indio,” Negro said. “That guy is famous around here. It’s a good business, that shit.”
“So the bicycle crossing was organized by one person?” I asked.
“Organized? That shit is professional.”
“Well, my friend here,” Watman said, indicating me with a thumb, “is writing about the bicycles.”
On hearing this, the bowl cut pushed himself up and slipped away. The woman looked like she wanted to roll up into a ball and hide under the beanie she was knitting. El Negro sat back in his seat, turning cold. He shot a look at Watman.
Sensing the moment evaporating, I asked, “Is this ‘El Indio’ around? Can I talk to him?”
“You are never going to find that person,” Negro said, dropping the nickname entirely. “That person is probably in jail. We won’t see him again.”
15
It seems odd that a story about a gift—the possibility of a new life in a new and prosperous country—begins with a thief, but in some ways this one does. One of the first suppliers was a bicycle thief named El Maneta—the Handle. He believed that vehicles were, possibly, the perfect objects to steal because they were simultaneously the desired item and the means by which to whisk it away. In the latter attribute, bicycles were both nimble and silent. El Maneta liked bikes and enjoyed his work. He stole and stole until there was nothing left to steal and then he sold the machines cheap because they were hot—which is a win if, and only if, like the Handle, you value your time at nothing.
But then there was a kid named Angel who, like a species of condor or cougar, roamed at will through the entire border region. He’d crossed the boundary before he could comprehend what such a designation meant, and he’d gained permanent residency in childhood through no action of his own. Now, however, he frequently crossed the line on weekends to visit his girlfriend in Tijuana. His roots spread north too. He had a cousin who worked for the Los Angeles Police Department. And in the summer of 2006, El Indio smuggled another of his cousins into California mounted high in the saddle of a bicycle. The instant this cousin from the south arrived at Angel’s home and spilled his dangerous little story of crossing, Angel’s entrepreneurial spirit sparked on the tale’s straightforward surface like a phosphorous match in gasoline.
Angel liked bikes a lot, always had. And because his cousin in the LAPD had turned him on to the Southland police auctions—during which departments unloaded merchandise taken into custody for any number of reasons—Angel knew where to get a lot of bikes cheap.
According to the Mexican cousin, this bike coyote’s services were in big demand, but in Tijuana at that moment, so were bicycles. For reasons unknown to the migrant, two-wheelers had all but vanished from the streets of Tijuana. The cousin did sense, however, that the high price of his crossing, $4,500, had something to do with the disparity. And, he added, he hadn’t even gotten to keep the expensive machine he’d crossed on. He’d had to leave it—a pretty horse set to run wild. In this scenario, Angel saw a perfect little triangle of low risk, solid profit, and supreme pleasure.
He could buy large batches of bicycles in what were called “lots” at auction for peanuts, then ferry them across in his van to be traded to this coyote for some real money. He and his firecracker girlfriend would then take that money down to TJ’s nightclubs, and trade it all in on a goddamned good time.
“So on my next trip I went looking for this El Indio,” Angel said. “I just dropped the nickname. At that time, he was not a hard dude to find. We started to talk, I mentioned a cheap price. We came to an agreement, and I started to bring him bicycles every weekend.”
Angel thought that what he was selling to the operation was bikes, but what he really delivered was a method.
Indio’s brother Martín also had a friend in the United States who’d acquired residency. But this was no real financial boon to the friend, as he’d been laid off from a series of low-wage jobs and living expenses were high. What really stressed Jimmy out, however, was the fact that his mother, in Mexico, was battling cancer, and the radiation treatments she required were expensive. The truth was, if Jimmy couldn’t pay, his mother wouldn’t receive treatment. Working odd jobs, Jimmy was squeaking by, but his financial situation, he believed, was killing his mother. Jimmy confided the intense stress he felt to his close friend Martín.
Martín confessed something to Jimmy as well. “My youngest brother works in the business of crossing people over from Tijuana.” He added, “I also help out with some driving sometimes. The money is good, and my brother really needs people on this side—especially if you have a driver’s license.”
“No,” Jimmy said. “No way. Absolutely not. I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get my papers, man, and I don’t want to lose them.”
“I understand, amigo. The people at home aren’t too happy about my decisions either. But everything has a price.”
Jimmy was certain that he wasn’t going to work for Martín’s coyote brother. He still believed there was a chance to make a decent living in the United States. Should he be deported for trafficking migrants, he knew he’d be hustling just to make Tijuana’s minimum wage: fifteen dollars per day.
About a week later, Jimmy received a call from his sister, who was helping to care for his mother in Veracruz. She told him that their mother wasn’t doing well, that she wasn’t receiving the radiation treatments because of the family’s inability to pay for them. “They’re not even going to keep her in the hospital,” the sister said. “They’re going to leave her out on the steps if we can’t pay the balance we owe.”
Jimmy’s appetite withered to nothing. He couldn’t sleep. He paced. He ransacked his mind for a way to help his mother with the treatments and the bills. Finally he went to see Martín.
“I guess we got no other choice than to get you working,” Martín said, and he withdrew his cell phone to dial Indio. The brothers di
scussed the open position and Jimmy’s qualifications. Martín said, “Yes, he’s a really good friend,” and he summarized Jimmy’s predicament. Then he handed the cell over.
“Hello,” Jimmy said.
The voice said, “Come down to Tijuana right now.”
“The thing is, I would like to do that. I want to start working with you right away. But I have an immediate expense that I need to find a way to take care of before I go anywhere. I can’t get stuck in Mexico without making sure I got this bill paid.”
“How much is it?” Indio asked.
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Jimmy admitted.
“Give me a name and address for the wire transfer.”
“Excuse me?” Jimmy asked.
“Your sister will receive the money today. You start now. I’ll be waiting.”
Before hanging up, Jimmy received an address in Tijuana, a city he didn’t know. He put a few things together, drove south, and crossed the border. Asking locals for directions, he found the area and then the seedy row of shacks where Indio “was waiting in a closed room.”
“I knocked. El Indio came out. I introduced myself,” Jimmy said, “and that is how we met.”
That was the interview.
Indio directed Jimmy to an address on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles. In an industrial area there, he met a Mexican and a gavacho, or foreigner. They were waiting with an eight-ton cab-over truck. It was something like an enlarged U-Haul—and it was already packed to the brim with bicycles. The men handed Jimmy a sheaf of paperwork—a manifest, proofs of purchase, and documentation that designated these bicycles as donations to Mexican charities. This allowed for an expedited importation process and a duty waiver. The men also instructed Jimmy to drive the truck to a weigh station, where he’d receive another stamped form. He followed their directions; then he pointed the truck south.
The Coyote's Bicycle Page 17
