The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  Drawing the apron from her shoulders, Marta emerged from the kitchen. In view of the gathered, she was immediately shy. Indio broke from the center of the crowd to join Marta and the old man. His smile commanded his entire face—chin lifted, eyes alight. The father took their hands. The people hushed.

  “Pablo has quickly become a natural member of the household, and one week ago, he came to me and he asked my permission to marry our youngest daughter, Marta. Her mother and I agreed, and more importantly so has she. So I present to you the news that Marta and Pablo will soon marry.”

  The guests burst into cheers. Marta’s eyes widened, a girl surprised by her own dreams said aloud. Indio looked to her, willing a glance, a ray of her attention.

  The food was served. Some guests sat; some stood. Each party waited and circled around to congratulate the couple, who barely had an opportunity to eat or drink. Watching the pomp, Roberto thought, amusing himself, So my baby sister is going to be a “Mrs.,” and he a “Mr. El Indio.”

  “The announcement filled us with joy,” he said later. “We drank beer. We drank wine. You know, we put the music up and we danced and sang.”

  At work on the borderline, El Indio carried the news of his engagement close to his heart. With Solo at the helm, the operation was running smoothly. Bright new workers had been brought in by Javy and Juan. Marta’s network of enganchadores delivered pollos almost trouble-free, and for the time being, the group was well stocked with bicycles. Though he’d backed away from guiding migrants for strategic reasons, El Indio decided to take the next group. It had been some time since he’d connected with his brother Martín, who’d taken on the duties of pickup and liaison to distant cities. He hadn’t seen the rest of his family for an even longer period. And this, likely, was a sticking point. Indio hesitated to share his joy and good fortune with his parents. He must have understood that his unannounced appearances and swift departures caused them to be guarded in his presence. He would have caught the raised eyebrows and the shrugging of shoulders. The family left a child behind in a faraway place, and now this man came and went at odd hours, always with strangers in tow. It was almost certain, had he shared his news with his mother and father, his joy would have been met by village nail biting and skeptical glances. The very nature of his work precluded the open and honest disclosures expected of a son. El Indio comported himself as if this trip were like any other, a mere business run.

  He and a young guy called Apolo had the pollos “nailed up against the fence.” This is what they called it when they put the migrants under or over the fence and ordered them to stand with their backs to the wall until the signal was given. Indio didn’t like the look of their traditional point of entry. The two Border Patrol agents, each parked on the nearby mesa tops in their kilo trucks, weren’t sticking to the expected schedule. “The action had gotten hot,” Apolo said. Something had occurred down at Playas that was pushing independent pollos east. “Things were always changing,” he said.

  This was a busy time for Simon, el checador, whose job it was to divine the movements of la migra and keep tabs on floating migrants. Depending on the variables, Simon’s report from the heights of Summit Canyon could force El Indio to choose from a few less-than-advantageous options. He might order a worker to approach privateering migrants and offer the bicycle service. Unaccompanied pollos, however, often did not have the means to pay. Or having crossed through the area in the past, they might have opted to chance it themselves. In this case, the polleros could ask the independents to hold off. But if they refused, or looked unreliable or sketchy in any way, the bicycle polleros could simply wait. Foot migrants would often provoke a chase through the bush, and depending on the number of Border Patrol agents involved, the field for El Indio could be left wide open.

  El Indio’s group was small that day and the seven bicycles had already been lifted over the primary fence and were resting on their sides. Indio also stood against the fence. He’d decided to let the independent migrants attempt their crossing. Then he’d assess the area of operation. The cell phone’s walkie-talkie soon beeped and Simon’s voice came across. “They’re on the inside,” he said, “and they’re heading for the river mouth.”

  Twelve thousand eight hundred ground sensors lay buried across the length of the border. Several hundred were said to exist in the five-mile stretch from San Ysidro to the ocean. These sensors were triggered by seismic disturbances—earth-shaking temblors, heavy construction, horses, running and walking people—and they were placed near known entry points and migrant trails. Their sensitivity could be calibrated according to location. Each device was associated with a number. When triggered, the sensor emitted a signal that was bounced off a repeater and then sent to dispatch. The receiving agent at HQ would pinpoint the sensor location using its number. That agent could then radio officers in the field to investigate the cause of the trigger. Faith in the sensors did not run high among rank and file, as they could be tripped by anything from rodents to corrosive elements in the soil. Or the sensors might be tripped by nothing. Sixty-two percent of their signals fell into the category of “unknown causes,” as opposed to the thirty-four percent known to be a false alarm.

  El Indio had no way of knowing whether or not the independent crossers Simon followed with the binoculars had tripped a sensor. But at that moment, the Border Patrol agents surged into action and trundled down off the mesa tops. Indio waited. The dust trails settled. The wind kicked up again. Minutes later Simon called, “They’re going for the river. La migra is after them. The way is open.”

  The polleros ordered the clients to mount their bikes. “Remember, single file,” Indio said. “Keep your eyes on me; don’t look behind, don’t look to the sides.” The cyclists followed the team leader down a bumpy foot trail that eventually led onto a wide and grated dirt road. Apolo brought up the back. Indio increased the tempo to a fast but sustainable pace. The pack elongated, then pulled in again—forming a train that stirred little dust. Simon’s voice came over the walkie-talkie in Indio’s breast pocket. “Still clear,” it said.

  “And the paved road?” he asked.

  “Clear for now.”

  The bottom of the gulch road degraded into a dry wash that lapped up on a bend of Monument Road. Before the juncture rose a brace of pale and dusty cypress trees. Nearly eclipsed by the undergrowth was a small cement marker set in place by a forgotten Boy Scout troop. Its plaque designated this location as the entry point of Father Junípero Serra, founder of Alta California’s mission system. Indio brought his bicycle to a slow stop and raised his fist into the halt signal. He turned in the saddle. “Stay here,” he said. Then he crept out to get a glimpse of Monument Road. It was empty. Indio waved the riders across, where they met a dirt farm lane that carried them off to the ample brush cover of the Tijuana River.

  26

  There are two central facts about the bicycle. First, it is the most efficient device ever created for the conversion of raw human power into locomotion. And second, there is something special about the people drawn to tinker and wrench on them. The proof is all around us—from freeways to airports to factories of mass production. The greatest by-product of the instrument that Susan B. Anthony called the “freedom machine” is the diaspora of remarkable people who had been inspired by bikes and, as a result, created a lot of remarkable things.

  Many of these we just don’t notice anymore. When I was about six or seven, I rode a hand-me-down bicycle with a metal seat and solid rubber tires. I loathed the tires because they spun out, absorbed little, and set me apart from the older kids on their pillowy and sleek pneumatic tires. But it turns out that solid rubber tires were an important gift, a great improvement over wood or steel wheels, given to us in the mid-1800s by Clément Ader—a Frenchman with a reedy mustache and eyebrows like a Muppet, who would go on to improve Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, install the first telecommunications system in Paris, and build three airplane prototypes that looked like nefarious and great
-winged bats.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright owned a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. There they invented a self-oiling hub and left-handed threads to prevent pedals from coming unscrewed en route. Profits from the Wright Cycle Co. funded their work on what was known as the “flight problem,” and the brothers used bikes and bike-building techniques in aspects of their gliders and wind tunnel experiments. The Wright Flyer, the first human-piloted airplane, was built in their final bike shop at 1127 West Third Street, the craft’s spare lines, cables, sprockets, and chain drive leaving no doubt as to the machine that gave it lift.

  Another bike shop owner and mechanic, Glenn Curtiss, is said to be the founder of the commercial aviation industry. He created the seaplane and the first American combat aircraft to enter World War I. He worked with Graham Bell on ever lighter and stronger combustion engines.

  Still another bike mechanic, Henry Ford, adopted the down-the-line mass-production techniques used in cycle factories in the manufacture of another revolutionary vehicle, the Model T. Mr. Ford also borrowed from the bike components such as pneumatic tires, chain drives, ball bearings, and wire wheels. This technology, along with bike industry innovations such as steel tubing and metal stamping, enabled the United States to quickly retool for World War II.

  Today’s 54-million-member-strong AAA (formerly the American Automobile Association) was directly inspired by the League of American Wheelmen, a group of cyclists, clubs, manufacturers, and mechanics that actively instigated the Good Roads Movement, a grassroots campaign advocating a novel idea: to involve the federal government in the building and maintenance of uniform highway systems. Their advocacy led President Woodrow Wilson—himself a cyclist—to sign the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, a program that lasted into the 1920s and shaped the landscape of American road travel as we know it today.

  Requiring no electricity or chemical fuel, bicycles have lifted economies, facilitated industrial revolutions, and circumnavigated the globe. Their inventors and technicians gave us the motorcycle, the short skirt, the unchaperoned date, and an audacious faith in our own forward progress.

  Following my visit to El Negro’s ship, I was desperate to see the swamp bikes again. As a group, the bikes had become something like molecules of air or water—identical, interchangeable, and nearly invisible. I was aware of mass and movement, but I could no longer see individual bikes. My mind was just swimming with interchangeable objects I could only identify by knowing where they’d come from or where they were going.

  To complicate this, the character who’d put them in the valley proved mysterious and exceedingly elusive. The various authorities who scooped bikes up offered little comment. And the vast majority of cycles fled the valley in such disparate and unforeseen ways, I felt as if the foundation of the little world I’d been circling in had steadily eroded out from underneath me. This dislocation spawned a powerful suspicion that I’d wasted profitable man-hours chasing down a funny little dream I’d had—something cute, impractical, and, in the end, unreal. So when the trail went cold like this, I found myself stretching beyond my normally reclusive nature just to be around bikes that might be the bikes I’d followed, or had crossed paths with in the street; or that might share lineages or decals or might have been manufactured in the same facility half a world away.

  A friend texted a photo he’d taken of a stake-bed truck brimming with used bicycles in Los Angeles. I could see in the photo that the truck was about to enter a large metal-recycling facility. When my friend confirmed the destination, my heart made orbital loops around a hard little nucleus of anxiety. At first I thought: now this is tragedy; to melt bicycles guilty only of being abandoned. Then I wondered, could these be my swamp bikes? By 2011, America’s largest export to China, by value, was scrap and waste metal. The largest market for recycled plastic and metal was also the world’s largest bicycle manufacturer. Was it possible that these bikes could be crushed, shredded, melted, and then reconfigured as brake cables, handlebars, bells, and frames? How could I follow them then?

  While feeling disjointed from the bike trail, one of the more logical things I did was hang around a group of punker kids who’d inherited a bicycle co-op from a lesbian organization. Their big idea was to teach basic repair skills to the public in order to get the people back into the saddles of their old beaters. It is surprising how often a flat tire can relegate a bike to oxidation and rust—which is terrible, because both are very slow-acting relatives of burning. The women who had been running it had had a good thing going with the co-op, but their base just wasn’t big enough to sustain an ongoing effort of bicycle repair. So the punkers took it over. And these kids had no boundaries; they would help fix anyone’s bike for free. I got the sense that it was a political gesture in the same way that they Dumpster-dived, aggressively recycled, and grew vegetables on the front lawns of their rented apartments. The bike wrenching was done at a weekly farmers’ market in one of San Diego’s poorest neighborhoods. This particular burg happened to be a melting pot of immigrant communities that, coincidentally, mirrored the United States’ overseas interventions—there were Vietnamese, Laotians, Central Americans, Somalis, and Iraqis. These were the places my contacts at Stu Segall Productions studied in order to create facsimile training grounds.

  Although tolerant of almost everybody and anything, the punkers frowned on beach cruisers as, well, simply pedestrian. Meat eating was so last century. And me, a grown man riding a 1984 ladies’ Free Spirit with slim to no vintage potential—uh, well, they found me peculiar in the way that only the most generous and openhearted people can. I hung around out of some vague hope that I could learn something about the way ordinary bikes moved through the world once their commercial value had plummeted into the low two digits. At that cost, in City Heights at least, bikes beat bus fare every time. I also learned how to use a crank puller, that spit really is the best adhesive for handle grips, and that one could build a whole new society with WD-40 and duct tape. What I really discovered, however, was the exact expression on the face of a ten-year-old whose single mother worked fourteen hours, seven days a week, after you’d fixed his flat tire and he became exponentially more mobile and independent again. The look wasn’t cute; it was triumphant.

  On an early morning not long afterward, I was standing in my kitchen watching a new rainstorm that had set the palms outside to flapping. I switched the radio on in the event that the river valley might be mentioned. Instead, a reporter delivered a short piece about a bicycle giveaway. Christmas was just around the corner, and events like this had become popular with police and fire departments. So I listened with only a minimum of attention until I heard the radio voice mention the name of a local Salvation Army center and, importantly, that these particular refurbished bicycles were being supplied by the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.

  As reported by Janine Zúñiga in her 2009 Union-Tribune article, bikes discovered abandoned by the Border Patrol’s Imperial Beach staff were taken to the station on Saturn Road, checked for drugs or reports of theft, and then stored until a batch of them could be shipped to the prison. For a quarter of a century, the inmate mechanics at Donovan had been repairing and restoring bikes and then donating them to charities and school programs. I was well aware that a portion of the swamp bikes had disappeared behind the prison gates; I just didn’t think I’d ever see them again. I did, however, imagine the bicycle mechanics behind those high fences and walls, plying a craft—truing wheels, adjusting neck sets—that tied them to the greatest engineers and inventors of the twentieth century.

  Soon, I found myself navigating a landscape of freeways and strip malls. The sky above was the color of cement. The pavement below had become a black lake district of interconnected potholes. The weather and traffic caused me to run late to the giveaway. The feeling of missing the bicycles by a slim margin was becoming familiar.

  The pitiful gray tones of the atmosphere seemed a permanent condition until I found the Salvation Army’s Kroc Center. I parked
and, under a gale, scurried toward its arched entry. There I saw a splintering, kaleidoscopic explosion of color. A lanky Salvation Army major wore a pert uniform of navy felt with crimson trim. Sheriff’s deputies wore their dark greens and khaki with sparkling badges of brass. One hundred and twenty-five children, six to eleven years old, writhed in their new helmets like a fleet of helium balloons—buoyant, kinetic, and waiting for liftoff. A pair of Donovan’s inmate bike mechanics, with shaved heads and dressed in light blue scrubs-like uniforms, had arranged the dozens of vivid bicycles by size and style and positioned them upside down in rows. When a bike was presented to one of the children, it was ceremoniously reverted. In the turning over I could see that the swamp bikes now gleamed with new chains and freshly polished hubs and chain rings. Some frames had been completely repainted too, in a rainbow of color—all the bells and whistles had been added, literally. Scents of fresh lubricant and rubber tires almost overpowered the fast-food catering. Both inmates and corrections officers laughed. Bikes rolled. The children glowed. The hushed quality of low clouds only amplified the shrill, chittering sounds of children on squeaky new tires.

  And then it began to rain again; the ceremony was cut short. Children wheeled away, padding their feet to either side while guardians walked uneasily behind as if blowing wet leaves along. The inmates were escorted into the corrections vans. I didn’t like to see bicycle mechanics subjugated in this manner. Many of my new colleagues and interview subjects, including El Negro and several of Stu Segall’s employees, had done time. On the border, it seemed merely a station between here and there. When existence is unlawful, a sentence isn’t so much the result of poor decisions and character flaws as it is a harsh reality of life—like the flu. The fact that the inmates showed interest and skill in rehabilitating dirty, abandoned bicycles when they could be lifting weights, trading cigarettes, and watching TV helped me to see beyond the jailbird denim with the bright yellow Donovan insignia. The uniforms were temporary; the love of a bike was forever.