“Take the people to Los Laureles,” he said. “Javy is there. Tell him and the others that everything is fine. Be alert and do your jobs.”
As Solo moved them into action, Indio dialed his cell phone.
“Roberto, I need a favor. Can you meet your sister and me at the hospital?”
The doctor was young-looking and seemed to choose his words with care. “From what we can observe, Marta’s circulatory system—her blood vessels—relaxed and widened, as part of her condition,” he said. “This increased blood flow to the womb but slowed its return to the brain. The lower-than-usual blood pressure reduced oxygen to the brain and she fainted.”
“‘Womb’? ‘Condition’? What do you mean?” asked Indio.
He and Roberto stood with the doctor in the tiled hallway of Hospital General de Tijuana. Marta had regained consciousness and had since been subjected to a number of tests. Feeling well enough, and propped up by pillows, she wanted to assert her independence and go home, maybe even catch up on the work they’d lost. The incident for her, it was clear, had been an embarrassing one.
Alone with the men in the hall, the doctor responded, “I say ‘womb,’ Señor, because the patient is pregnant—likely a factor in her loss of consciousness.”
Indio regarded Roberto, he outstretched his arms for an embrace.
“Compadre!” Indio said. “You know you are going to be the baby’s compadre, right?” Indio’s face beamed.
“Congratulations, amigo,” Roberto said. “Of course I will be godfather to the little one.”
Indio couldn’t seem to contain himself. He raced off to share the news with Marta. Roberto began to turn as well, but the doctor caught his arm.
“Apologies. You are the brother, correct?”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t finished with the assessment. We believe we’ve identified something of concern in Marta’s right hemisphere. Unfortunately, we can’t make a diagnosis at this time.”
“Something of concern?” Roberto asked.
“A spot,” the doctor said.
“What do you mean, ‘a spot’?”
“A tumor.” The doctor made a grave, affirmative nod.
“In her brain?”
“Marta’s emotional state, given the pregnancy, is our highest priority. It is extremely important not to add stress. If it is a neoplasm, it may be benign. The condition is treatable. In my opinion, it’s best that she not be alarmed. After we receive additional test results, there is a chance that I will recommend a specialist. This might take time. In the absence of further fainting or nausea, she will be free to go tomorrow.”
“Thank you, doctor,” he said. The men shook hands.
Roberto walked to the open doorway of Marta’s room—four green walls and a high window that allowed a raking light into the small space. The metal bedframe was bookended by cabinets that held monitoring equipment. Indio kneeled at the bedside, his hands clasped over Marta’s, which she rested on the blankets over her belly. Marta’s long dark hair lay slack on the pillow, framing a face just a shade off her normal energetic self. On catching her brother in the doorway, Marta raised her eyebrows and mouthed the words, “I’m pregnant.”
A dull, throbbing headache roused Marta most nights.
“What can I do for you?” Indio would ask.
“Nothing, I think.”
In the rare moments that she did complain, Marta described a pressure on the right side of her head that felt like a pulsing balloon. Rubbing her temples with her fingertips alleviated the pressure at times. Painkillers did not prove useful, which was okay, because she did not want to take medication for the sake of the baby. In the daytime, she admitted, there was occasional nausea and vomiting—a natural symptom of pregnancy.
What followed was a state of blankness that wasn’t sleeping or unconsciousness but a feeling of having gone away and returned without knowing where from. A length of time couldn’t be assigned to the absence—if one could think of it as such. Better to think of the moments as spells, “pregnancy brain,” and wave them off as a kind of aftereffect of the fainting.
When Indio raised concerns Marta hushed him and admonished him to get some sleep. She was still able to perform some of her duties with the enganchadores via cell phone, but Indio needed his feet on the ground and his wits about him. For her, the coming baby only heightened a palpable sense of risk in their work.
There hadn’t been an occasion, given her fainting spell, to discuss the problem of finding reliable pickup drivers. Indio listed those from his contacts in the Zona Norte who failed to show, or those who made excuses at the last minute. And he explained how he increasingly tapped his brother Martín, who brought in the other siblings.
“Good,” she said. “If you have to count on someone, count on family.”
“It puts everybody in danger,” he said. “And plus, the price is, maybe, too high.”
“They want more than the others?” she asked.
“I promised to buy my mother a house in exchange for her cooperation.”
“Oh,” Marta said.
The ensuing silence, Indio believed, was occupied with her estimations of the cost, as well as the resources that would not be going to their own start in life. She knew the books better than he. But maybe it was the idea of things going unsaid that concerned her, because what she said next was: “I think a house for your family is a good idea. Your mother would always have a place, and when you and I are ready to cross over, so will we.”
“Listen, Indio,” Roberto said over the cell phone, “your business is never going to have this moment again.” The old coyote had seen enough ups and downs to know, he said. This was El Indio’s high water and he’d better haul some goddamned buckets. “Me, I can afford to take the time.”
The specialist recommended for Marta’s care practiced at a research clinic in sprawling Mexico City—1,700 miles south of Tijuana. Roberto did not inform Marta or Indio about the true nature of the recommendation. Neither did he want to give Marta the opportunity to decline the trip as trivial, so he purchased the airline tickets immediately.
Indio’s resistance was unexpected. Impending fatherhood seemed to have sparked a protective streak in him.
“I don’t feel right about you going; the obligation is mine,” he said.
Roberto could hear the voices of the pollos and workers on the other side of the line. “Amigo, my little sister’s welfare was my obligation long before it was yours,” he said. “Let’s make a deal. Including travel, the doctor said to plan on three days. I’m certain the fainting and headaches are just a part of the process for her, and the tests just a precaution. We’ll shoot back right away. On the chance that she requires more time with them, you and I can swap, and you can fly to Mexico City to be with her. Está bien?”
Indio was hesitant. “Okay,” he said, “that’s fair.”
“All right, go make some money.”
To Marta, Roberto pitched the trip as simply going the extra mile for the health of the baby, something people did in el Norte all the time. To his surprise, Marta proved receptive to the idea. She wanted the best possible advice, and a thorough exam might relieve her needling fears. Roberto asked her to pack for the week, just in case.
Many of Roberto’s international clients arrived in Mexico City. An underground network of fixers, drivers, and safe houses ushered them north. In this instance, Roberto simply reversed his well-oiled machine.
When they arrived at the hospital, Marta was assigned a locker for her things and given a flimsy hospital gown that tied in the back and a cheap pair of earplugs. The MRI machine was described to her as a giant magnet. She was allowed to wear underthings but not her bra, which contained a metal underwire. Checking again for her usual thin chain, Marta touched her neckline. She then handed the locker key to the technician. He helped her to lie down on the sliding table where her shoulders fit into a plastic brace. She’d been told a couple of things: not to move and that it would be loud
. But no one mentioned the impossibility of modesty in the presence of the male technician and her brother. He’d been allowed to accompany her into the room for the test, provided he remove his significant belt buckle, and he stood to the side—a rigid figure dressed like a cowboy.
Marta inserted the earplugs, and the technician rolled her table into the dark, narrow bore. The technician’s voice then boomed over an intercom. Then there was clicking, and then a volley of sound like laser fire or a printing press at capacity.
This was not the only test. One required her to wear an apparatus on her head and look at flashing lights. For another, a dye was injected into her bloodstream. The nurse who performed the sonogram was not associated with the oncologist or any of the technicians and let slip the sex of the child. “I’m having a boy,” Marta told Roberto with a light in her eyes, and for the duration of the return trip this was all she talked about. Would he play baseball or soccer? From her he’d inherit a love of school. And, she suspected, he’d learn to speak English too. Given his father’s long-standing dream, this child might be an American boy.
Indio greeted Marta and Roberto at Tijuana International Airport holding a bouquet of her favorite flowers. He hugged and kissed Marta, who seemed to hum with the vibrancy of her news: a boy, a boy, a man. He kissed her on the cheeks and twirled her around. When they finally parted, Indio thrust a hearty hand at Roberto and said, “Good to see you, compadre.”
Roberto took the hand but, attending to the luggage with unusual concentration, he failed to meet El Indio’s eye.
30
A man missing his right leg below the knee labored by on crutches. Dried blood covered his uniform. It was hot, and he was sweating. Thunderclouds formed above the interior mountains. A guy standing on a roof looked down on the scene and called to the amputee, “What’s up, smiley?” Another soldier followed. He was dressed in desert camouflage. An eyeball hung by bloody sinews from his right eye socket. The white of the eyeball bounced lightly upon his cheekbone as he traipsed along.
A stagehand passed in the opposite direction. “Hey, you get dizzy yet?” he asked. “I wore that thing once. I started to spin after a while.”
The soldier with the dislodged eyeball shrugged and grinned. “Not yet.”
A call to prayer rose from tinny, blown-out speakers. Women wearing black head-to-toe abayas jogged by as if late for Friday services. What I took to be makeup artists, because of their contemporary hairstyles and clothing, ran by holding jugs of what looked to be fake blood.
This parade took place in the relatively sedate moments between explosive training scenarios at one of Strategic Operations’ simulation venues. The actors, whether playing civilians, attackers, the wounded, or the dead, hustled to take up new positions before the next group of navy corpsmen entered the scene. This was to be the troops’ final training before deployment, and the atmosphere was riven with a theatrical sense of ceremony and graduation.
“I’ve got all kinds of shit going on,” said a large man who waved me over. “So if I’m not around—and anybody asks—you just tell them that you’re with Johnny Hoffman.”
Strawberry blond and grizzled, Hoffman seemed all-American in that genre of the high school football hero turned bad. He was well built, had a ruddy complexion, and wore the uniform of a California vet—a tank top, surf shorts, military-issue boots, and grim tattoos. One read BEYOND GONE. Hoffman strode through the fake village like Robert Duvall opining on the smell of victory as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. Between calling shots, he narrated a personal vision shaped by war. It included stints in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. “I’ve been going to war one way or another for thirty years,” he said.
Hoffman then introduced me to an assistant, a young bearded guy—also a vet—whose countenance suggested not quite military or civilian, but freelancer. Hoffman led us through the set to a steel ladder behind one of the structures. He pointed up. We climbed to the top of some shipping containers and met an unbroken view of the amorphous Middle Eastern square. Detritus from previous explosions littered the ground below. The smell of explosives, like cap gun smoke, hung in the air. The next role-play was about to start.
“You’ll see a rocket come over that wire,” Hoffman advised.
If Kim Zirpolo and her boss Bill Anderson were the designers of these pageants, Hoffman was the choreographer. I gathered that he’d held the position from Strategic Operations’ humble beginnings. He mentioned experimenting with the initial decoration himself. Bicycles, he noted from his time in the field, were a natural fit. None of the original crew had known the business would grow the way it had, or that their need for people and props would expand in such a manner. They had been, in fact, a startup at the forefront of a new industry called “atmospherics.” The speed of their growth hadn’t sunk in until the work at Fort Irwin—an early apex for the company—when Hoffman found himself directing thousands of role-players.
On top of the shipping containers, when I should have been mentally prepping, I found myself scanning the set for bicycles. I caught sight of a bedraggled BMX with a rusty chain that looked familiar. A last-minute worker ran by clutching a bloody leg. It was stiff and bent at the knee.
Hoffman nodded. “In Africa, the skinnies would eat that.”
The “skinnies,” I took it, were natives. Hoffman turned to sort out some last-second technical issue. The bearded assistant mentioned, casually, that the old soldier held some kind of record for knife kills in the field. I didn’t know how to process this detail.
A formation of navy corpsmen then entered the village. A woman in an abaya bolted from a hiding place. The soldiers followed her with their rifles. They discovered more locals in an alcove and detained them. Then the rocket, just as Hoffman had said, rose over the wire and exploded much too close and much too loud.
“Damn,” I said, raising a hand to one ear and a notebook to the other. Fragments scattered. More smoke.
“Ha ha. I told you,” Hoffman said.
Below us, the blast sent the troops into fevered action. In a state of dislocation brought on by the ringing in my ears and the sudden clapping of gunfire, I glanced across the village at a thirty-foot tower where, under an awning, with the brilliant white thunderheads behind, stood Stu Segall. In the newspaper, he’d been described as “cherubic.” But with his potbelly, polo shirt, and reddish beard, he looked like one of those dried apple characters on a stick, shriveled and wrinkled without having lost the color.
At Segall’s side stood a gathering of dignitaries. The older men looked down upon the movements of the trainees. They were Roman heads of state observing gladiator practice. One of the men with Segall I recognized as Congressman Brian Bilbray, a border hawk, member of the “drone caucus,” and former chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, who’d lobbied extensively for the new forty-nine billion-dollar border wall.
In recent years, the real meat eaters of the military contracting jungle had taken note of what Segall’s Strategic Operations had been doing. And employing Segall’s own techniques, these well-connected corporations easily snatched large atmospherics contracts out of the studio’s hands. At the time of this visit, a wave of fiscal belt tightening was about to sweep through the nation’s capital as well. Services like those provided by Stu Segall Productions were seen as low-hanging fruit for cuts. Everyone on set could see that the salad days were coming to an end. The Strategic Operations team had already been whittled to a fraction of the size it was at its height. Further cuts were coming. Segall’s hosting of politicians at this late stage looked like a last-ditch effort to gobble up the scraps. “We are going to suffer,” Hoffman said. “Contractors are the first to go.”
The role-play concluded without any point I could have summed up. As far as I knew, it was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. I asked Hoffman what was really going on here.
“I don’t care how many times you practice,” he said, “your first firefight is p
retty fucking terrifying. You can’t ever simulate that, but this gives you something to fall back on.”
Hoffman looked at the young soldiers. They seemed to be working through a series of mental stages—from fantasy to the shores of reality—smoke wafting all around. Wistfully, he said, “A year from now, all these guys will be downrange. Some will be dead.”
We watched Segall and the rest of the delegation walk through the war-torn movie set. I’d been severed from employment enough times to know—from their postures and cadence, this looked like an easy letdown. The age of sequestration was at hand; contracts were drying up. Hoffman didn’t have to mention what I suspected to be the case: the cutbacks meant that the “swing gang” I’d heard so much about, after having been deployed with the bicycles to military installations all over the country for the better part of five years, were now coming home—not because the conflicts were over, but because they were being laid off.
31
Roberto invited Indio out for a couple of beers. There was something he hoped they could discuss. Riding on the bench seat of the old white truck, Roberto found himself heading out toward the dusty eastern edge of Tijuana, and to a neighborhood called el Gato Bronco, the Tough Cat. The bar he had in mind shared the name, and there was always some confusion as to which came first, the settlement or the watering hole. A sleek new highway was being built in the trough of the desert valley that held the few homes there, forecasting the next run of Tijuana’s liquid-like sprawl. They traveled fresh federal pavement for a distance. Then, without signage, the road just ended in dirt and they continued on a temporary road before uniting with the old one again. The bar was nothing special, but Roberto had had good times there. It was somewhere he’d take foreign clients who weren’t able to cross at that time, for whatever reasons, and had been cooped up in his house too long. As the drive extended, however, Roberto questioned the choice. It was more remote than he recalled, but maybe that was best.
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