The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  Leti wanted the chronicle to start at the beginning, and she wanted El Negro to hazard a guess, a flip of a coin at the start of a match. “You won’t believe how we crossed,” she said.

  Okay, El Negro thought, assessing her demeanor and social status. “In the trunk of a car,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You swam around the sea fence.”

  “No.”

  “As a passenger in panga fishing boat, then.”

  “No.”

  “You climbed a rope ladder over the fence . . . Someone cut a hole in the fence with an arc welder . . . You passed through a water culvert or a sewer pipe.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “You went through a drug tunnel.”

  “Keep going.”

  “A customs agent was bribed and waved you through.”

  “This way of crossing was different. It was fun,” the other one, Julia, said.

  “You crossed in the mountains and the coyote met you with packhorses,” El Negro said.

  “No.”

  “You rented one of those little personal submarines and it carried you to Coronado.”

  “You’ll never guess,” she said.

  “Okay, tell me, then. How did you cross into el otro lado?”

  “On bicycles!” said Leti.

  El Negro didn’t say a word, because he didn’t want anything he might say to influence the direction of the story that followed. He’d been at this awhile, and he knew that the details come of their own accord. So, there was a distinct and awkward pause, one that could easily be taken for doubt. In the little shack, Leti, Julia, and El Negro looked at each other. “Yes, it’s true,” Julia said.

  El Negro listened to their story then, not letting on, and the two young women explained that they’d come to Tijuana with little money but struck an arrangement with the bicycle coyote. He would cross them despite their inability to pay. He would help them find work, and they would repay him somehow. The coyote dispatched the women in two separate groups, first Julia, whose group was picked up by a man driving a van. Leti and her smaller group were met by a woman in a car. In both instances, the drive was relatively short. Julia said they came to a house in a wealthy enclave of San Diego; the neighborhood was hilly and filled with views of the ocean. The van slowed at a driveway and an automatic garage door lifted before them. The driver pulled the van into the roomy space, and he told the passengers to remain in their seats until the door was completely shut. Afterward, they were led through a side door that opened into a kitchen. The house was “very spacious and beautiful,” with many bedrooms and bathrooms. The matron—an indigenous-looking woman—appeared and set down some rules. Before their departure, no one was permitted to leave the house for any reason. Both the front and back yards were off-limits. The drapes and curtains, which hung thick against the western sun, were not to be touched.

  La señora then pulled Julia aside and informed the young woman that she wouldn’t be leaving with the rest of the group. Because of her debt, Julia would live and work there at the house, helping one of the matron’s daughters with housekeeping. On her arrival, Leti was placed in the service of the kitchen. Both women helped on the three big shopping days per week. The volume of food purchased and prepared astonished them. In time, they came to know the family—and that both the male and female levantones were siblings of El Indio. The matron, who owned the house, was his mother. And El Indio himself appeared once a week, usually on a Saturday. Congenial with the neighbors, he helped with sprinklers and tree planting; there was talk of the family launching a landscaping business. And Indio often hosted large carne asada cookouts on the back porch. The guides and drivers sat outside with El Indio. Leti served migrants in the dining room first. They could watch TV there, but were not invited outside. Likewise with the neighbors who sometimes drifted over. Guests were kept on the porch and directed toward the restroom in a back house, should they need it. No matter their number on these occasions, Julia recalled, “the pollos wouldn’t make a sound.”

  Leti and Julia, however, did meet some neighbors—one of them sold the young women an old Toyota Celica for a very good price. On this basis, they became friendly and were invited to events outside of the home. At one of these, a tanned and talkative couple rather knowingly probed Leti and Julia as to their “work situation.” The women shared, maybe, more than they should have. But the American couple didn’t appear to judge them. The woman offered to get them jobs with a friend in Los Angeles. She insisted, in fact. “Easy work with good wages,” said Leti, “giving massages.”

  In the kitchen not long after, the girls from Sinaloa broached the possibility with their matron. They explained that all of the training for these positions was done on the job. Leaning over a pot, Indio’s mother looked surprised. If it meant doing better for themselves and prospering, la señora said, she was happy for the girls. Leti and Julia waited for El Indio’s next visit to ask for his blessing and to thank him. He’d still not charged them for the crossing, and he even paid them a bit besides. Here they were leaving after a short time, but El Indio said, “If this is your decision, go ahead. You’ve helped me a lot. If someday you need me, look for me and I’ll do whatever I can.” He withdrew some bills and handed each of them $500. “Please take it,” he said.

  The girls packed their few belongings into the Celica and drove to the home of the elegant couple. “They were expecting us,” Leti said. “We left for Los Angeles that day. And I swear, if we knew what lay in store for us there, we never would have gone.”

  El Negro didn’t have to ask about the road their travels had taken. Leti’s verve had become anger. It was clear that she and Julia had been escorted to Los Angeles and turned into prostitutes. The massage parlor must have been raided down the line, El Negro thought, and now, here they were.

  “The truth is, things have been bad for us,” Leti said, “and worse, we aren’t able to find El Indio anywhere.”

  Later, El Negro sat at a simple wood table in a dark kitchen. The scents of percolating coffee and baking bread added a familial intimacy that he missed in his solitary life aboard ship. The squat clay bread oven emitted a comfortable heat and an amber light. It flickered on the gilded portrait of Marta—sitting upright and proud in her traditional attire—which was mounted next to the table. Marta’s mother, Lupita, worked at the kitchen sink.

  Negro had come to Roberto’s home mostly because the story of Leti and Julia lacked important parts—a happy ending for one and, two, the central character. That El Indio was not dead or imprisoned was a revelation only slightly less jarring than the fact that Roberto had failed to confide it in him. He realized the friendship went only so far. One man helped thwart an attempt on his life, the other had been like a brother. Understandably, Roberto always refused to discuss the day of Marta’s death or her funeral, and having reached that limit, their conversations ended in a reconstitution of their masculine stoicism—a drying of eyes and straightening of shoulders, and going no further. El Oso had been more open about that day, but still there were limits: the experience had been too painful. El Negro also assumed a dreadful end for Roberto’s compadre, yet another wound. To probe further into the gracious family’s tragedy posed a challenge that, as an investigator, El Negro was not willing to hazard. He thought it was the same as the kicking of the down-and-out. But the morning of Negro’s arrival at the home, Roberto received his friend from Playas with abrazos, excusing himself only so that he might finish some business before they talked.

  In Roberto’s absence, El Negro spied the opportunity to visit with Lupita. She placed coffee before him but returned to the sink. To her back, then, El Negro suggested that maybe she’d accept just a short interview. “And if there is something you don’t want to discuss . . .”

  “What I feel most,” she said, rinsing a plate, “is sorrow in my soul that such a man’s heart was undone. But the most important thing is the great love that God gave the both of them.” The speed of her reply l
ed Negro to understand that she’d long had words for him. Lupita turned to face her guest. “I know so because, for a time, my daughter was the happiest woman in the world. And Indio tells me that Marta still comes to touch him in his sleep. But enough. I tell him, ‘Son, those are just thoughts. Don’t long for her so much. Find a woman and get married.’ He tells me not yet, that he’s waiting for God to heal his heart fully.”

  “Apologies,” said El Negro. “You still speak with Indio? Do you have plans to get together?”

  “Not a week goes by that we don’t communicate. He says he likes to be with me because I look like my daughter. Last week he was here, we went to eat at Popotla.”

  “He visits?”

  “You know that,” she said.

  Of course, El Negro observed many strangers there. Clients and guests, Mexican and foreign, such as the Indonesian family with the lovely daughter, and many more besides, were compartmentalized in his memory like rooms in that house. Plus, Negro never truly knew the spectrum of Roberto’s associates. It wasn’t a home where one inquired into the business of fellow visitors. Severe men came and went. There was an instance, however, when upon entry El Negro met the gaze of a young man wearing an expensive-looking green sweater. In a corner, the youth had stood in consultation with the man Negro knew as El Oso—and there had been something in his regard that El Negro felt in the marrow, a deep appraisal. Again, Negro thought it had to do with his own poor state of dress. Unfortunately, it was the best he had. But then Roberto appeared and whisked Negro into the backyard where guests had gathered, food was being served, and music piped through. He didn’t see the young man again that day, and wasn’t sure if he’d seen him before. The memory of that brief encounter didn’t surface until Lupita suggested that Negro had been in El Indio’s presence, from time to time, all along.

  “At the restaurant in Popotla, in fact, you came up in conversation,” Lupita said to Negro. “In some ways I agree with El Indio—he didn’t do anything that merits a story. He told Roberto, ‘Look, God was on my side for this, but now I think the devil wants to stick his tail in.’ But Roberto thinks so highly of you, Negro. You don’t know how much he’s gone through with El Indio because of these interviews you’ve done. You’re the fly that’s in the milk all of the time. I don’t say this to upset you. There is almost nothing that Roberto would refuse you, but I don’t think he has skipped out on the bill here. He has given you plenty, risking so much.”

  El Negro assured her that names would be changed. “No one will know who it is except the one who knows his own life,” he said. Lupita inhaled and sighed heavily at the counter. They were quiet. El Negro then thanked Lupita for her honesty. “You have always been very nice to me. I am grateful,” he said.

  “You’re always welcome here, Negro.” She tossed the rag into the sink. “Really, I don’t understand any of it.”

  36

  In November, I stood on the loose talus slope of Spooner’s Mesa with Chris Peregrin, Border Field State Park’s Acting Reserve Manager. His colleague Greg Abbott, wanting to keep his hands in the dirt, waved off such promotions just as he had as a lifeguard. And at that moment, he was busy planting cholla cactus somewhere in the land below us. The hilltop we occupied overlooked that saucer-like bullring of Playas de Tijuana, the rambling border fence, the brown and russet colors of the Tijuana River Valley, and an empty white beach that ran into the cityscape of San Diego.

  I rode this ground on the Free Spirit sometimes, imagining the rush had the authorities been looking to snatch me up. But since they weren’t, I could take time to stand on the mesa and let the landscape seep in. Ninety degrees left offered an intimate view of Los Laureles Canyon—the dusty hillsides of its crevasse terraced with plywood and tin-roofed shacks, their foundations made of the spent car tires that had drawn me here in the first place. An equal turn to the right, and I caught the gleaming downtown towers of San Diego, the harbor, the navy fleet and leisure yachts, the palisades of Point Loma.

  “We’re in luck,” Peregrin said, pointing down toward the wetlands that snaked through rust-colored grasses and green thickets between us and the city. “The tide is really full today. You can see the whole system.”

  The highest tide of the year, actually—and thus the lowest low—came in November. And as Peregrin pointed out, the crystalline blue of the ocean had slinked past the sandy gates of the Tijuana River mouth and crept miles into the American valley—lighting every torpid bend, oxbow, and dead end. Stretching from Otay Mountain to the Pacific, this was the last unbroken watershed in Southern California. And the vibrant blue illuminated all of its inner workings to the naked eye. Without the tide, the sandbanks and vegetation-choked arteries of the wetland would have gone virtually invisible, would have blended into a gradient of browns. The tide acted like dye in the plumbing.

  This was the very role of the bicycles that wheeled over this same topography. Just as seawater defined the tidal lands, the bicycles revealed America’s economic and social systems by floating through its bloodstream and coloring—with sparkling chrome, metallic paints, a whir of spokes and a flicker of handlebar ribbons—the murkiest corners and farthest reaches.

  In the end, I understood few aspects of this story with complete fidelity. Chief among the things that I knew to be true was the fact that a lot of bicycles had come to rest, abandoned and ownerless, in a strange and forgotten valley at the southwesternmost corner of the continental United States. For many months, and at various points since, I believed this was all I’d ever know.

  Yet bicycles hold very special attributes that grant them access. They are both the object and the means by which to move that object. Like a dollar bill, once a bicycle leaves the hand of its owner it becomes general, joins the ambiguous idea of the thing—the sea of dollars, the sea of bikes.

  In the dust trails of their travel, I thought I glimpsed answers to the way things worked. I believed their unique qualities were what led the swamp bicycles to illustrate, for me, certain central equations. Take value, for example, how an object or service is worth nothing until somebody wants it. How once we prohibit something of value, we instantly create a smuggler. The more resources we put into enforcing the prohibition, the higher the value of the thing being smuggled. The higher the value of that desired item, the more incentive there is for the smuggler, whom we created, to smuggle it. How the business and jobs of enforcement rely, in the end, on the business of smuggling. An endless cycle that also helps to explain how these criminal and enforcement worlds overlap like rings on a pond. And how once you begin to pedal among either smuggling or enforcement circles, the circles only become smaller and more elite as you naturally travel up, until one day you’re pedaling around in a specialized training scenario meant to replicate a compound in Pakistan where commando forces practice for an operation whose success the president of the United States will hang his hat on—will win an election on—and will change the way we view our place in the world.

  By now, the shiny new border construction responsible for filling in Smuggler’s Gulch with 1.7 million yards of dirt had been completed to the sea. One could argue that this edifice put an end to the bicycle coyote’s technique. Yet I continued to receive photos and reports of new bikes found in the valley. A plan to replace the entire string of aging seismic censors failed to receive funding.

  In an interview that El Negro conducted with Roberto’s mentor Julian, a pollero viejo who had observed changes in the business since 1960, Negro asked, “With all of the walls being built, do you think someday you won’t be able to cross people into the United States?”

  “Of course I don’t believe that,” Julian said. “One door closes and another one opens.”

  Roberto was more specific on this point. He said, “The deal with walls is just, you could say, smoke and mirrors. They’re built in order to say that the United States is fighting the flow of immigrants. In reality, it’s nothing. What’s happening is that more people are working in government, and
they all have opportunities to make illicit money through their work.”

  Smugglers understood that by erecting an ever more massive border complex, by doubling and tripling agents and resources, the government was also building the pipelines through which people and contraband might pass. This wasn’t only a matter of gaming physical obstacles and boundaries. Social scientists, internal affairs investigators, and attorneys general have often estimated a 10 percent rate of corruption among various law-enforcement entities. This number is sometimes dismissed as insignificant. Yet Homeland Security, of which Customs and Border Protection is a part, is the country’s largest enforcement agency. And that scale matters. In fact, when CBP fired James Tomsheck, its head of internal affairs, as the agency suffered a wave of corruption cases and a leaked audit that suggested it did little to investigate allegations made against its officers, Tomsheck went on record as saying he was scapegoated by a corrupt system. He estimated 5 or 10 percent of CBP’s agents were already corrupt, and “the system was clearly engineered to interfere with our efforts to hold the Border Patrol accountable.”

  This point about percentages is one that smugglers claim to manipulate at ground level. The number of Border Patrol agents was doubled under the George W. Bush administration, when the agency eventually grew to employ twenty thousand officers. This gave smugglers a possible two thousand agents to work with. The heavily debated border-reform bill, the Secure Our Borders Act, called for another doubling of agents. Rather than concern coyotes, this effort suggested there could be as many as four thousand amenable officers on their side.

  “The United States government does visible, grandiose things in order to be seen,” Julian said, “like the enormous walls they build. But they themselves know it does no good. They do it just so the people will see they are doing something to combat the flow.”