Solo made it known to the new workers that El Indio was bringing in a professional to handle general management, as well as some supply and cash-flow issues. This person was to be obeyed as if Indio himself had made the orders. Further, Solo said, Indio would be scaling back his own trips to the inside.
“But as you can see,” Solo added, “we have more migrants than ever. We’ll be running more trips per day. This means more opportunities to make money.”
A man nicknamed El Cholo had been deported from the United States, and like El Indio, he had walked the borderline from the mountains to the sea looking for an opening. After a few days, he began to go hungry. Then he came upon a group of polleros staging a crossing from Los Laureles.
“That’s where I met El Indio,” Cholo said. “He gave me food when I was just starving. He said, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and help that guy over there fixing bicycles, right near the border?’ He paid me well—a decent guy like him, it motivates you to work.”
El Ruso—the Russian—had also been deported after getting caught up in some shady business. He said he was conflicted because he wanted to live as an honorable person. But without a voter ID card, the only work he could find in Tijuana was the illegal kind: selling drugs, smuggling drugs, robbing for the police, and killing for money. For him, pitching in with El Indio’s gang was not only a lesser of these evils but, frankly, also a means to survive.
Solo, El Ruso, and El Cholo had arrived at the canyon a few hours early one day and were working on a pile of bikes near the fence. Cholo squatted on his haunches, helping Ruso adjust some brakes.
A nondescript white van with tinted windows appeared on the access road above and rolled with the creeping sound of granite gravel being crushed under weight. At the end of the track, it slowed, made a three-point turn—its big engine bubbling like a race boat’s—and then backed farther in.
“Whoever gets out . . . if you get a bad feeling,” Ruso warned Cholo, “jump the fence. We can come back later.”
“Okay, amigo.”
The men heard a door slam before they saw the driver. Around the side of the van stepped a tall, dark-haired woman. She wore black sunglasses, a light tank top, and a short skirt.
“Is this bad?” Cholo asked.
“I can’t tell,” said El Ruso.
Solo couldn’t be sure where Marta’s arrival placed him in the pecking order. He didn’t intervene or even acknowledge that he knew the woman.
“Gentlemen,” she said on approach, “what are you doing?”
“I’m working on these brakes,” Cholo said.
“And you.” The woman indicated El Ruso. “What are you doing?”
“I’m also adjusting the brakes.”
“Is this your job? Or are you men just tinkering?”
“No, we are bicycle mechanics.”
“So this is a business? And, maybe, the boss has a phone you can call him on?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“And how are you paid?”
“In dollars,” Cholo said.
“But are you paid by the week, the day, the hour?”
“No, we are paid by the bicycle.”
“So it is in your best interest to repair as many bicycles as you can, as fast as you can?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are two men working on one bicycle?”
Cholo held up the one pair of pliers. “Because we have the one set of tools.”
“Someone has a cell phone, right? Between you, there are six hands, six ears, three mouths, and three phones.”
“One phone,” Solo said.
“If you don’t have something, if something doesn’t fit, if it can’t be done in time with the resources you have, the only thing you have to do is communicate that need and more will be delivered. Correct?”
“Sí,” the men said.
The woman turned on a heel and walked back to the van.
“Run?” asked Cholo.
“No,” said Solo.
The lady opened the rear van doors, and then waved at the mechanics. “I have little burritos and soda here for you. Which would you like, orange or purple soda?” She smiled. “We have both.”
Although Marta’s arrival wasn’t a surprise to Solo, he felt the men standing next to the van with their sodas and wrappers of food—himself included—looked like grammar school kids scolded by the teacher. He said the woman could be charming and energetic one moment, and bark orders like a general the next. It was difficult to argue or even defend oneself because what she said was usually accurate. Her field observations were uncanny.
“That presence brought out in us—I don’t know if it was fear or respect, but we all paid closer attention to the work,” Solo said. “Marta had eagle eyes. She wouldn’t treat you badly, and she never arrived with nothing in her hands. But when she turned up, someone would always look and say, ‘The boss is here.’”
20
I received a phone call from Ben McCue, the environmentalist. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, sounding incredulous. “Terry Tynan’s sold all of his bikes.”
Already, the border bikes were streaming out of the valley in the silent steady way that floodwaters recede into the ocean. Greg Abbott trucked bikes abandoned in the state park to AMVETS—a veterans’ service organization with a chain of thrift stores—as well as to the Salvation Army depot, where they were repaired and sold to the general public. The Border Patrol gathered as many as could be stored for evidence, and agents sometimes dusted the bikes for fingerprints, but when storage space maxed out, they handed the bulk of them off to Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility’s refurbishing and donation program. The Gomez family conferred bikes on Father Joe’s homeless services organization, as well as on a number of young Mormon missionaries. Scavengers scoured under bridges, culverts, and washes. Tynan hawked bikes at the swap meet, and on his property, and finally, McCue claimed, he’d sold out to a single entity that happened to be in desperate need of dirt-cheap bikes.
For my part, given the lack of a comprehensive bicycle registry or any type of paper trail, the only real way to track the bicycles was to follow their travels hand to hand. And so, after fielding McCue’s call, I immediately drove south. Approaching the last exits before the border, I turned off into the Tijuana River Valley, where Monument Road flickered by in a pastoral blur. I crossed Hollister and pulled onto the dirt lane that led into the Kimzey Ranch. And sure enough, next to the barn, I found Terry Tynan poking around what remained of his bike party. He idled, as if sweeping up the confetti. Just about all of the bikes that rolled were gone.
“What happened?” I asked, shutting the truck door.
Tynan still wore his dirty INTIMIDATOR baseball cap. The Marlboro Lights poked from the breast pocket of his white T-shirt. He kept a full mustache but the salt-and-pepper scrub of his unshaved beard was catching up.
“Sold ’em,” he said with a grin.
“To who?” I asked.
“To Hollywood!”
“Hollywood? How did that happen?”
“Well, it’s not really Hollywood. But it is a movie studio out there in Kearny Mesa: Stu Segall. My friend works there and he said they needed bikes, a lot of ’em. He knew about my bikes, and . . . we made a deal.”
Terry visually wiped his hands clean of the bicycles. McCue had been right, I couldn’t believe it. This was not a hoarder’s tendency at all. I’d misjudged Terry.
“They bought a few at first, the studio did, a while back. Then they wanted more, and then they wanted all I had. Their guys had to make regular trips with a twenty-four-foot stake truck. They got most of ’em.”
I looked around. The leftover bike parts and frames at our feet and in small heaps were a sad sight, like the final, dwindling hours of an estate sale—Grandma was dead and no one wanted the chipped teapot she’d loved.
“What do they want with all of your bikes?” I asked.
“Not mine, ha, not anymore,” he said. “My
friend says they’re shippin’ off all over the country. He says they’re going to be used in war-training exercises.”
“What do bikes have to do—” I began to ask, “What does a movie studio have to do with war-training exercises?”
“Uh, here, you should talk to them. I’m fuzzy on the details.” Terry withdrew his cellular phone from his pocket. He hit the speaker function, presumably so I could join the conversation. “I’ll put you on to Eric Kiser, you know, my friend who works there. Hold on.”
“Hey Terry, what’s up?” the voice said.
“Hey. I got a guy down here, a writer, and he’s looking into the bikes. It’s a good story, and, uh, I told him about selling the bikes to you guys. And he was wondering what you all are doing with the bikes.”
“You know what we’re doing, Terry,” the voice said.
“Well, tell it to him,” Terry said. He handed the phone to me.
“Hello,” I said. “Eric?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “So, okay. You’re a writer?”
“Yes. And you bought Terry’s bikes.”
“You bet, the studio did. And we’re looking to buy more.”
“Well, it’s good news for Terry. But that’s a lot of bikes. What do you need them for?”
“So what’s your angle on this? Just about bicycles?”
“That’s the plan,” I said.
“Okay, that sounds all right. So what we do is build hyper-reality training facilities for military applications. If you were to walk through our facility, you’d see the sights and hear the sounds of Iraq or Afghanistan. We’ve got open-air markets and fishmongers in the streets. We’ve got live actors playing locals, as well as insurgents. There are pyrotechnics and ambient sounds. What it is . . . it’s the magic of Hollywood applied to war training. Soldiers—marines, army, or whoever—they come in here to train, and it desensitizes the men on what they’re going to come across in the field.”
“And how do bicycles fit in to all of that?”
“Terry’s bikes are integral to the set dressing. You’ve got to imagine, these are poor countries, so they ride bikes. Now, we’re building these RHUs—that’s Relocatable Habitat Units—and we’re shipping them to vital army, navy, and marine bases. The set dressings go with them—across the country. The military is benefiting from the bicycles Terry there is fishing out of that swamp. It’s pretty impressive, actually.”
“Sounds like it,” I said. “I’d like to see the facility.”
“Well, uh—so you say you’re writing mainly about bikes, right?”
“Yeah, I want to follow the bikes wherever they go.”
“You get my number from Terry, and we’ll set something up. Now, if you’ll hand me over . . .”
I gave the phone back to Terry. He clicked the speakerphone off.
“Some writer, I told you,” he mumbled into the phone. “I don’t know, he just showed up one day with another guy, one of them enviro-dudes. Likes bikes, I guess.”
He listened for a bit, then huffed and clicked the phone shut. He pulled the cigs from the shirt pocket, flicked one from the pack, fished in his jeans for a lighter, and lit up. When he exhaled, Terry looked up to the mesa top and the switchback trail where the first bicycle and migrant had come from.
“Your friend says he needs more bikes,” I said, breaking the silence. “What have you got to sell?”
“Uh, not much,” he said, raising his arms, encouraging me to have a look around.
“Do you think the migrants will just keep on coming, dumping more bikes?”
“Actually, no. I think it’s done. I don’t know if I will have any more bikes to sell. The whole thing, all them Mexicans, just dropped off.”
“Dropped off?”
“It slowed considerably, and then just stopped.”
“It stopped? Why?”
“The Border Patrol workin’ with Special Forces or black ops—that’s what I think. They sent operatives into Mexico and rounded up all them coyotes. Stopped the whole thing.”
“You think Special Forces violated Mexican sovereignty to capture some illegal bicyclists.”
“That’s one way to explain it.”
“How do you know?”
“I talk to Border Patrol around here,” he said, pointing his cigarette around the valley, and added, “But they didn’t tell me that bit about Special Forces. It’s just what I think. Obvious, if you ask me.”
To my surprise, Eric Kiser agreed to give me a tour of the facility at Stu Segall Productions. On the phone, he colloquially called their training facility “Baby Baghdad.” And a week after my visit to the tree-studded, riverside Kimzey Ranch, I found myself standing on a sidewalk out front, amid a colony of orderly business parks that lined eastern San Diego’s Ruffin Road. Stu Segall Productions’ seventy-thousand-square-foot complex was unique among the corporate HQs only in that it was gated. A chain-link-and-oleander-shrub perimeter obscured most of the view from the street. At the gateway, I could see only the guardhouse and a couple of broad, windowless, concrete buildings. From the looks of things, they could have made just about anything inside. Movies wouldn’t have been my first guess.
A squat man maneuvered a tan-and-white golf cart around the side of the main building. He careened through a looping turn and brought the cart back to a succinct stop just inside the gate. If the cart had been a Camaro, it would have slid to a powerful halt—and the man behind the wheel held himself in the manner of a driver who’d made such an entrance. He then threw the guard shack a thumbs-up and waved me through.
“Eric Kiser, vice president of manufacturing,” he said when I approached. “Get in. I gotta take this call.”
I sat down on the cart’s bench seat. The VP withdrew the vibrating cell phone from a belt holster and began offering one-syllable responses to the caller. Kiser was in his forties, I guessed. His wavy brown hair was sun-streaked and parted on the left. He wore a trim, light brown beard and his thin features sported a touch of sunburn. Oddly, his head looked small on top of his bulky shoulders and stocky frame. Maybe it was the narrow, tinted eyeglasses that created the impression.
We wheeled between the nondescript buildings, through a parking lot, and then approached what looked to be a mothballed commuter jet. Next to the airplane stood a wood tower with the business half of a helicopter protruding from its upper deck. Vertical tracks on the tower, I presumed, raised and lowered the copter. Kiser put the cell away, and, as if changing character, he began what seemed to be as thorough a tour as he’d offer anyone. He delivered specs on the jet and the helicopter. The lingo flowed rich in abbreviations, acronyms, and military jargon.
“What is OPFOR?” I had to ask.
“That’s Opposing Force.”
“And this is a TV studio?”
Understanding that I was at a loss, he said, “We are Hollywood. Nothing is too much of a stretch. We can do anything. We’ve got scent replicators that can reproduce the smells of dead corpses and feces. We have simulation rifles that produce an honest sensation of recoil. Former military consult on our designs. Local Arabic and Persian speakers write signs and help us with authenticity. We just made a meth lab, and we got our own meth lab experts. We can recreate the ‘rotor wash’ of a Black Hawk, and the sea spray off the bow of a destroyer. Here we are, right through this way.”
As if entering Disneyland by the back entrance, we approached an arch made of a shipping container set across two low buildings. The container was light green with a logo that read WAN HAI—the name of a Taiwanese shipping line. The top and sides of the container were dressed in the accoutrements of a ship—marine ladders, hand railings, life preservers, portholes, a smokestack, and a control room. If kids had easy access to shipping containers instead of cardboard boxes, the play ship produced would be the same. Then, passing underneath, we emerged into the sunlight again and were confronted by a bizarre and squalid little hamlet.
Like the set of a cowboy flick, Baby Baghdad had a one-dimensional q
uality to it. Plywood paneling, simulated brick, tile facades—all were painted to suggest age and wear. Arabic script splashed across the walls, the work of an imaginary tagger. Clothing was strewn on washing lines. Cables suggesting electric and telephone service passed roof to roof. A few items looked just out of place enough to impart the surreal—a plastic palm tree, a broken lawn chair, a stereo speaker, a spare tire, a rusty Weber barbecue. The ground was littered with plywood chips and asphalt shingles.
“We just held a marine training exercise,” Kiser said. “This ground cover enhances the perceived threat environment, it gives the semblance of exploded IEDs—that’s an improvised explosive device. Check this out,” he said, as he walked toward the kind of concrete divider you might see on a freeway meridian. Kiser bent and picked it up with one hand. “Foam,” he said, smiling. “Almost as light as air.”
When he lifted the block, I caught the blue frame and bright aluminum rims of a beautiful little ladies’ Peugeot called Urban Express. It leaned against a set wall in the background, and sparkled as if it were new. Up close, I could see its registration stickers. Someone had valued the bike enough to register it, which few people do, and here it sat missing a front tire. I then spotted a black Murray BMX, with red grips, white cranks, and a white sprocket. I could see that it had once been thoughtfully customized by the BMX rat who owned it. It still bore muck from the Tijuana River wetlands, as well as two flat tires and a rusted chain that curled around the frame like a garden snake.
“Terry’s?” I asked.
“Roger. Those are just a couple of Terry’s swamp bikes. There aren’t many left here. The bikes are being sprinkled all around the country—China Lake, California; Boise, Idaho; Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. It might sound funny, but the bicycles are just as important as the paint and facades. This is pre-deployment training, and hyper-reality means as real as possible. The bikes give the sets a sense of movement and commerce. Plus, the soldiers, actors, crew—hell, everybody loves riding them.”
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