The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  She didn’t need to explain. By the time I’d reached Zirpolo I’d heard plenty about the thrifty operation at Segall Productions. The odd aspect of this particular frugality, however, was that the set I’d been shown by Kiser was used as the showcase for a majority of their contracts, an example of sets that were priced in the millions—and now, a major source of studio income.

  According to Zirpolo, the Baby Baghdad I’d seen was a shabby pastiche of her finished product. For example, she said, the marines at Camp Pendleton, California, had wanted a field of opium poppies to replicate such a crop in the Afghan hinterland. Zirpolo sourced container loads of plastic poppy flowers, bulbs, and hip-high stems. Then she and her crew painstakingly erected the fakes into a wind-ruffled expanse of agrarian green. Soldiers used the site to train in opium interdiction and eradication, among other uses. From Zirpolo’s description it wasn’t hard to imagine the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy encountering the spell-cast sea of poppies at the shore of the Emerald City—this time with soldiers stalking through the growth.

  Then, Zirpolo described an $11 million installation at Fort Irwin, California—a drab town of meat stands, groceries, bakeries, and cafés. Command specifically asked Zirpolo to build an Iraqi bike shop. The theaters of war Zirpolo was asked to replicate were almost exclusively impoverished. As early as the 1890s, the bicycle was called “the poor man’s nag.” Even today, African politicians promise bicycles to indigent voters. Soldiers who had been deployed suggested that bicycles would lend the fictive villages a sense of commerce, movement, and vitality. The result of Zirpolo’s labor was a mud-colored, two-story facade ornamented with a green-and-white striped awning. A yellow-and-white sign in Arabic ran across the shop’s front. Outside the darkened doorway, perhaps three dozen bikes—mostly mountain bikes—stood in rows, their bright purples, blues, and reds contrasting with the desert village palette like gummy bears dropped in dirt. The bike shop was the only corner of the installation that truly sparkled.

  For a while, a photo of the Fort Irwin bike shop dominated the Strategic Operations website. I found myself drawn into it—I counted bike frames, tires, the hoops of wheels hanging from the shop awning. Compared to the Tijuana bike stores, it was a wonder. Yet it was obvious that the models displayed were not of Middle Eastern origin. Their source was obvious, but I had to know for sure.

  “Those were all Terry’s bikes,” Zirpolo admitted.

  Even so, during our first phone conversation I could sense that Zirpolo was hesitant to reveal the details. When I asked how many bikes she’d purchased from Tynan, I received a vague and middling approximation. When I asked where, exactly, the bikes had ended up, Zirpolo said she couldn’t be sure. Considering the rise in business brought on by the troop surge and the fact that Tynan’s stockpile had been all but cleaned out, both responses confounded me. I continued to phone Zirpolo, however. We chatted. It helped that I wrote for a surf magazine, as San Diego is a surf-stoked city and a good portion of her studio colleagues, as well as Zirpolo herself, were devotees. I described my passion for the bicycles. I knew people she knew. Moreover, I got the impression that she’d reasoned herself out of worrying over a surfer obsessed with shitty bicycles. I wasn’t a threat anymore; I was pitiable. Eventually, Zirpolo agreed to meet me at a beachside taco joint near her home in San Diego’s north county.

  At a picnic table I greeted the petite blonde at the heart of all of this hyper-realistic war play. Straightaway, in her rich Boston accent, she announced that she was at heart a “peacenik,” and that her work was filled with jarring dichotomies. She wanted to work in the film industry but she didn’t want to live in Los Angeles. Times were tough. War play was the compromise.

  Finally we got to the point of our meeting. “You can’t just go and get a large number of bikes just anywhere,” she said, “especially for us—we’re really frugal. Kiser mentioned that he had this friend down by the border, and he had good bikes. I called [Tynan] up and asked him what he could do for me.” She looked out at the ocean. We watched the surf roll in. “Actually, I have a bike from him,” she said. “It’s a Univega from the 1970s—I’ve looked into its history. Love that bike more than life itself.”

  Lots of people admire bikes, but not often more than life itself. The weight of the sentiment struck me as disproportionate, but Zirpolo repeated the phrase. And then she explained how the bright yellow cycle was currently stranded with an ex-boyfriend in Los Angeles. She’d been thinking of asking some of her shadier coworkers to liberate it. She’d memorized the code to the ex-boyfriend’s apartment complex. In Zirpolo’s expression, I thought I caught the love of a bike mingling with the curls of smoke lifting from the extinguished romance. There is more to a bike than metal tubing, wheels, and a chain.

  And after a long pause in the conversation, Zirpolo said, “I was conservative with you before, you know, about the amount of bikes I bought from Terry Tynan. When you called I thought, My God, what if this is coming back to haunt us? We are subcontracted to the federal government.”

  “So, you did buy more?” I asked.

  “I bought more, a lot more.” Enough bicycles, she said, to require at least six trips with the twenty-four-foot stake bed, and on at least one occasion, the use of a semitrailer. I asked her to describe the scene when such a load arrived at the studio—I saw a chorus line of singers, dancers, and trick riders, a sky filled with the tossing of aluminum rims, and music that mimicked the tempo of gears meshing and chains clinking.

  “You’re forgetting, I get loads of everything. We are salvagers,” she said, curbing my expectations. There were beds to buy, pots and pans. “But when bikes come in on a load, I’m like, ‘Who has tires? Who has chains?’ Everyone would contribute to make them what they are.”

  Zirpolo appointed the studio handyman—a guy said to be Patrick Swayze’s stunt double in the movie Roadhouse—as head bicycle mechanic. Rocking to the soundtrack of Hawaii Five-0, this man toiled on the swamp bikes. Later I’d learn that many workers eyed a cycle for themselves or their kids. The moment the bikes left the valley, they began to fan out in grand fashion.

  It took a few more calls to Zirpolo and another meeting—something like an ongoing conversation, status report, or friendship, even—before I gleaned something of what the parchments contained. Tynan accepted cash only, so money was withdrawn from “petty” reserves, an action that obscured exact accounting. But Zirpolo, who after Kiser’s introduction did the deal, said that the studio paid between five and ten dollars per bike. The studio then sold the bikes to various arms of the military, priced between eighty and one hundred fifty dollars apiece. “Sometimes more,” Zirpolo said. “Sometimes we sold them as part of a bike repair business or shop, like at Fort Irwin.”

  At those prices, the military could have gone to Target or Walmart at retail, but the patina of age and the muck of the wetlands, I understood, had dusted the machines with a meditative squalor that was hard to replicate and tricky to value.

  I needled Zirpolo as to the precise destination of each load. She said that at the beginning she created a file for every installation—the names of which sounded like cities disappeared by sandstorms. She and Bill Anderson were based out of a trailer on the lot where they scoured the Internet for cultural cues to places they’d never been. As the surge in Afghanistan ramped up and business boomed, she continued to make files but details were skipped, papers were stacked, moved, and lost.

  “There were just so many places,” she said with exasperation, indicating a range between the island of Guam and the state of Virginia—and as far north as Canada, as far south as Louisiana, as close as Camp Pendleton. “The only way you’re ever really going to know,” she said, “is by talking to my boys—the swing gang. They’re the ones who placed the bikes by hand.”

  23

  Lupita had never been happy about her daughter’s palling around with Roberto and his associates, much less her direct involvement in his work. The matriarch knew the
telltale signs of a dangerous business when she saw them. With the arrival of El Indio, however, her position slowly altered. She could see that Marta was falling for Roberto’s new friend. A suitor was firmly in the picture, and suddenly Marta’s affinity for the pollo business seemed more reasonable, less about wanton risk-taking and more about building something. Lupita sensed that this ambitious pollero was a “good man.”

  Roberto opened his home to the young Oaxacan. Accepting the hospitality, Indio arrived at and departed from the family compound at will. “On many occasions,” said Roberto, “he stayed there with my sister, since they would come home so tired from work. On average they’d sleep just a few hours before their cell phones began ringing again. My sister would make something for breakfast in a hurry, and set out Indio’s clothes. Then the two of them would hit the street.”

  Lupita listened to their conversation. “All the time you could hear them talking about the business,” she said. “My daughter would tell him: ‘That’s a good idea,’ ‘Maybe better this way,’ or, ‘I don’t think that’s necessary, do this or that.’ They would work out the different situations, they’d drink a few beers, they’d put music on, and then even I would start dancing with them.”

  The change that came over the two of them was plain to see. Part of it was the way they behaved. Roberto said he didn’t believe Marta and Indio could have hidden their feelings if they’d wanted to; it all played out through their expressions. But the couple’s attire began to change as well. Indio asked Marta to dress more conservatively on the job. Maybe it was jealousy. But there was also the argument that her style choices caused Marta to stick out, and maybe even attract the wrong element. Seemingly overnight, gone were the miniskirts and low-cut blouses. Marta wore pants now and sensible tops. El Indio’s dress changed under her influence as well, but in his case, it was to dramatize his identity as border cholo. The tired black windbreaker disappeared, replaced by baggier pants, a handkerchief in the pocket, sometimes a tank top, and even the type of tandito that pachucos used to wear in the United States. His transformation into the kind of cholo that garnered respect en la calle was complete.

  One day El Indio informed Solo that he would start taking Tuesdays off, but that the business of crossing pollos on bicycles would continue under Solo’s care. For undefined reasons, Tuesdays proved to be the lightest days for the crew. Given the way things were shaping up, however, it was still going to be a tough task for Solo. He’d have to manage the team—the bike mechanics, the recruiters, the comunicador, gancho, guía, levantón—as well as the migrants, and give orders exactly as the boss would have wished. Indio would prepare everything Solo needed beforehand, he said, but the coyote had to take the time for Marta and himself. Solo understood; he said he was up to it.

  That first free Tuesday, the couple loaded the company van and pointed it south. Out of the city, Mexican Federal Highway 1 ran like a ribbon that mirrored the contours of the coast. Waves crashed against black rock and filled the desert atmosphere with a fine moisture that diffused and softened daylight, making the jagged landscape appear rounder and everything more radiant. They motored past the Coronado Islands, their brown hummocks like breaching whales. The coastal buttes were intermittently dotted with low-rent vacation homes, shabby cornfields, and dark shacks. Long stretches of beach lay unpopulated. Empty desert lots sometimes gave way to abandoned condo developments. There were both wildflowers and a sense of urban decay. On a lone hill, a seventy-five-foot statue of Christ held his arms out to the sea. The small cities of Ensenada and Rosarito bookended a little surf-splashed fishing village called Popotla, a favorite among Marta’s family. Its bay harbored a fleet of open panga fishing boats, and was protected from Pacific storms by a crescent-shaped point that appeared to gather up its pocket cove. The ocean could be roiling to a fury outside of the rocky promontory, but inside, the water was always sheet calm. The geology was unique, but what drew the eye was the cacophony of shacks on the ridgeline of the point, going all the way out to the last bit. Their fantastic color, their shapes—it looked as if an ancient circus had shipwrecked on the point and had decided to stay there, hosting shows by the hour. These belonged to the fishmongers, restaurateurs, and modern-day pirates of Popotla. In fact, the main smuggling business to rival that of Tijuana’s malandros was the swarm of contraband panga boats that shipped out from Popotla, slipping north with the resolute persistence, and dumb-luck aim, of a grunion run.

  It was common for couples and tourists of all stripes to stroll among the fishmongers and admire or gawk at the variety of their catch. Some of the creatures displayed on beds of ice appeared absolutely prehistoric. At the tip of the point was a restaurant, a wooden establishment seemingly balanced on the rocks like a dry-docked raft. It held an open deck with plastic chairs and tables adorned with flower-printed vinyl tablecloths. For Marta’s family, it was a place of both escape and celebration.

  Away from the house, unhitched from the workload and the secretive world of smugglers they inhabited, Indio and Marta were able to get to know each other. While neither was the type to offer unbidden anecdotes from their personal histories, over the course of their dates, those accounts became not peripheral or incidental, but somehow central and relevant.

  Marta’s memory of her home in the mountains of Sinaloa was still fresh, and she wouldn’t have spun the nostalgic description Roberto might have conjured. Still, it was a real part of her identity. The land was rugged and they had been poor—less so as she came of age, but examples of backwardness were everywhere. Obviously, Marta didn’t dress or even talk the way she did when she first came north. Tijuana had given her a dusting of modernity; her mother would say crudeness, even. But as a girl she was very serious about her studies. Her brothers and sisters called her bookish. But to Marta it was something more. She was competitive and even hinting at superiority. The ranch school was hardly an institution where overachievement was the norm, and betraying a feeling of superiority in such a small class and community was, needless to say, seen as less than generous. It was common for neighbors to lend anything needed to get by. So in the classroom with the teacher sent by the government, when the bookish girl refused to share her test answers with the other girls, great offense was taken. She was called greedy. And prideful, Marta detached from the girls of the village, a course that drew her toward more masculine pursuits.

  Outwardly, El Indio’s defining moments seemed as sharp as the points on a seismograph. He was simply left in the village with his elderly grandfather, and when the abuelo passed, the boy had to fend for himself. The decision to travel north was one of survival. His recent gains in Tijuana—well, somebody was going to do this work, somebody was going to get lucky. Why not him?

  Between the points, however, were more subtle questions that begged answers—confidences that required intimacy. For example, upon arriving in Tijuana and encountering Roberto and his open invitation to cross, why didn’t the young migrante go to be with the people he’d long pined for? Did he resent the family that left him behind? Or had time diluted his feelings? Had he simply forgotten them?

  The truth was, soon after his arrival in Tijuana, El Indio had tried to cross. Three times. And those experiences had forced the traveler to be cautious of others and rely solely on himself, to become distant and inventive. Indio would explain that he’d left Oaxaca with $308.40, his grandfather’s life savings. He’d heard stories about the dangers of la frontera, so he’d made a little pocket inside his underwear where he kept his inheritance. On the trip, he met many other pollos. There was one group who’d made arrangements with a coyote, and one of their number asked him if he had anyone on the other side who could pay for his crossing. It was not a lie to say that he did have people en el otro lado. The coyote accepted him into the group. And this figure planned to cross the pollos in the mountainous Tecate section called the Eagle’s Nest, where they would make a hard trek to the pickup spot. Moments after they set foot in the United States, however, the trave
lers were beset by a gang of violent thieves. These men robbed the pollos of everything visible—money, jewelry, provisions—and sent them, defeated, back into Mexico. Their coyote expressed only a “ni modo”—oh well—and hatched a plan to cross the next night. Indio became suspicious of this man. He never even checked on who would pay for Indio. And the Oaxacan wasn’t going to give the bandits another chance at his hidden money. So he slipped the operation and was soon back in Tijuana’s central district. Within a day, he linked up with another group and another smuggler. But when the time came to leave, this man arrived so drunk the pollos refused to go with him. Later, Indio was picked up by a smooth-talking female recruiter. She had a stunning confidence and a quick wit about her. Her guides seemed competent enough, and he agreed to make the night crossing near Otay. None expected the immediate wash of lights and revving engines of la migra, a rabbit hunt in the brush. But Indio wasn’t about to let the authorities get ahold of him. He ditched this group and ran and ran until he came out on the Mexican side again.

  He started to roam around on his own, sleeping wherever he was at nightfall: up against a market, under stairs, wherever. He wandered close along la línea all the way out to Playas and, little by little, went along checking out the scene.

  This was when he met Roberto. But by that time, he’d begun to see that polleros were buying pollos like himself at a very good price. And because he’d experienced that part of migration, he knew where the valuable clients could be found.

  The pollo became a pollero. It was as if a sheep took a look around, noticed who carried the big stick, and became a shepherd himself. “My whole life I kept my dream close of having something, and, why not, of being somebody,” he said.

  El Indio and Marta liked to drive the smugglers’ van into the tourist beach town of Rosarito. They ate, they drank. They danced to American rock and norteño music and continued their date by club-hopping into the small hours.