by Paul Levine
Payne tuned the radio to a local station. A routine news day in the capital city of the state of Baja. A meth lab had blown up, killing some neighbors. Drug traffickers had assassinated a police chief. And a tunnel had collapsed, killing three people trying to sneak underground to Calexico.
Before long, Payne was lost. They were on a street of storefront dental clinics and doctors whose signs boasted of cheap cirugia plastica. They found their way back to a neighborhood of tourist-trap bars. After cruising the same block three times, Tino shouted, "There! That's where we met the cabron. "
Payne found a place to park, and they walked through swinging saloon doors and into a cantina that looked like a set of a 1950s Western with Randolph Scott and John Wayne. Paddle fans stirred the air but did little to cool it. Wooden wagon wheels were nailed to the walls. On the speakers, Gene Autry was singing, "Back in the Saddle Again."
Sitting at tables were a few sweating, shorts-andsneakered Americans. Looking for cheap thrills or cheap Xanax. Still too early and too hot for much of a crowd. Several men who appeared to be locals sat at the bar. Tino scanned the room, then shook his head. El Tigre was not here.
The bartender, a bilingual Tejano in a Texas A amp;M T-shirt, took their order. A Pacifico for Payne, Pepsi for Tino. The beer and soda both arrived in bottles, both lukewarm.
No, the bartender said. He'd never heard of El Tigre. Sure, plenty of coyotes stopped in there. Drug smugglers, too. They think it's easier to spot Mexican undercover cops in a place like this.
Tino described El Tigre. The bartender laughed. "A fat Mexican man with gold teeth and a crucifix. That narrows it down."
The boy's face showed disappointment.
"Sorry," the bartender said. "No way to keep track of all the hustlers around here. Even if you knew his real name, it wouldn't mean nothing." He looked around, leaned closer to Payne. "But anything else you need, just ask. I got connections."
"I need to sell a car."
"I got a guy for you. A mestizo called 'Stingray.' What do you have?"
"Lexus SUV. Leased. I don't have the title."
"Stingray don't care. He's just gonna sell it to some pachuco. What do you want for it?"
"Another car."
The bartender nodded as if the request was no more unusual than asking for lime with your Corona. He took down Payne's cell number on a paper napkin and said Stingray would call him within an hour. A few seats down the bar, two middle-aged Mexican men in Western shirts and cowboy boots seemed to take an interest in the conversation.
"What's with those guys?" Payne asked.
"Local vaquetons. Street guys. Petty thieves. Drivers for coyotes. Anything that pays." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "You need anything else?"
"Papers. Documents to get us back into the States."
The bartender gave them a no-problema shrug. "I got a Chino with a print shop. Green cards, driver's licenses, whatever you want. Excellent work." He rubbed a thumb against an index finger. " Pero mucho dinero. And this Chino don't take no American Express."
"Got it covered." Payne still had forty-eight hundred bucks and change.
The bartender wrote the address of the print shop on another napkin and slid it toward Payne.
One of the two vaquetons, a man about forty, smelling of tobacco and beer, came up behind Payne and said, "I know three pendejos who call themselves 'El Tigre.' "
"Three?" Payne asked. "How's that possible?"
The man shrugged. "I know two other men who call themselves 'El Leon.' The Lion. Around here, everyone wants to appear tough, even when they are full of shit."
"So who are the three tigers?"
"One lives near Bataques and runs cockfights. He is perhaps seventy years old."
"Not the man," Tino said.
"Another informs for the judicales. A little rodent of a man."
Tino shook his head.
"And there is an El Tigre who owes me money for driving a truck across the desert and getting arrested by La Migra. A pollero who wears a crucifix but will surely rot in hell."
"That's him!" Tino cried.
"His cousin owns a cantina on the other side of the city. If you tell him you have cash and need a pollero, he will set up a meeting."
"What cantina?" the boy asked.
"Five hundred dollars." Looking at Payne now.
"Don't pay him," the bartender advised. "He's hustling you."
The man shrugged. "Your decision."
Payne didn't know if he was being hustled. But they'd come this far, and this was their only lead. He opened his wallet and peeled off five hundred-dollar bills.
"Try a bar called 'El Disco,' " the man told him. "A block from the bullring that's shaped like a flying saucer."
"Let's go, Tino," Payne said.
"One more thing," the man called after them. "El Tigre carries a stiletto in his left boot."
THIRTY-SIX
With Tino navigating, Payne tried following directions to a bar called "El Disco" but was lost within minutes. They cruised around a residential neighborhood of bungalows painted in bright blues, greens, and yellows. Every block seemed to have several one-story houses with naked rebar sticking straight up through the outside walls, awaiting the money to complete a second floor. Sagging bags of cement and piles of sand looked as if they'd been there for years. Ancient cars were propped on cinder blocks in side yards, bright shirts hanging limp on clotheslines.
"What's with all the Virgin Mary statues in the front yards?" Payne asked.
"Only a gabacho from Beverly Hills would ask such a stupid question."
"I'm a gabacho from Van Nuys."
"A long time ago, some religious dude saw the Virgin Mary walking on a hill."
"The Virgin of Guadalupe?"
"Exactamente."
"So why paint her on the hubcaps of an '83 Plymouth?"
"Just drive, vato. Look for the bullring shaped like a flying saucer."
Music poured from open windows. Dogs roamed the streets and chickens squawked in fenced-in yards. Kids pranced under a spraying garden hose. The digital thermometer on the dashboard inched up a notch to 107.
They passed an elementary school, mothers walking home with their children in the protective shade of umbrellas, like ducks under their mother's wings.
They could not find the bullring or the bar called "El Disco." There were taco stands and dance clubs, a Ley supermarket, and a Cinepolis movie theater. It was beginning to look as if Payne had been conned out of five hundred bucks. But just past a complex of government buildings, there it was, a bullfighting arena shaped like a flying saucer.
"Over there," Tino said, pointing toward a lighted sign barely visible in the midday glare. El Disco.
They parked the car and walked into the dark, cool cantina, patrons on bar stools hunched over bottles of Tecate, turning in unison to appraise the newcomers. Shaved heads. Wife-beater tees. Tattoos from wrists to skulls. In L.A., they would be gangbangers. Here? Payne was fairly certain he hadn't stumbled into a meeting of the Rotarians or Elks.
"Tino, I don't like the feel of this place."
"Be cool, Himmy."
Tino bounced up to the bar, chattered in Spanish to the bartender, pointed at Payne, talked some more, then bounced back.
"What?" Payne asked.
"I told him you were an American with thirty thousand dollars in cash."
"Great. We're gonna get mugged."
"I said you wanted to get a bunch of whores across the border."
"So now I'm a rich pimp?"
"He said for two hundred dollars he would call a man named 'El Tigre' who can help us."
"Wow. Good work." He gave two hundred-dollar bills to Tino, who turned the money over to the bartender, then listened as the man gave directions in Spanish.
Returning to Payne's side, Tino said, "We're supposed to go to a bowling alley named 'Bola.' El Tigre will meet us there in two hours."
"Okay, let's go."
One of the wife-
beatered, shaved heads slid off his bar stool and moved toward them. Thick-necked, with short, heavily muscled arms and steroid-pimpled shoulders, he walked on his toes, as if trying to look taller.
"Cuanto?" the man growled at Payne.
"How much for what?"
" El muchacho. How much for the boy?"
"He's not for sale, but I'm thinking about giving him away."
"He looks like a quebracho." Using one of the seemingly endless Spanish words for homosexual.
"Yeah, well you look like a side of beef that got all the wrong hormones."
The man took another step toward Payne. He was only five-eight or so, his nose just inches from Payne's chest. "Maybe I just take the quebracho from you."
The guy's breath smelled like pork rinds soaked in beer. He was waiting for Payne to push him or hit him so he could retaliate with some kung fu bullshit.
Buying time, Payne said, "You know the difference between a Mexican heterosexual and homosexual?"
"?Que?"
"Two beers."
The bodybuilder jammed a finger into Payne's chest. "That's stupid."
"Cesar Chavez loved that joke. He told it to Jerry Brown, and they had a good laugh."
"?No me jodas! Get the fuck out. The boy stays with me."
Payne swung his head down as fast as he could, butting Pork Breath on the bridge of his nose. The man's septum cracked, and blood spurted onto Payne's shirt. The guy's hands flew to his face, and he sputtered curses in Spanish. A volcano of chingalo s and baboso s plus some words Payne had never heard.
Tino raced out the door ahead of Payne, but only by a step.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Jimmy and Tino drove through a neighborhood of small shops with brightly painted murals on the stucco walls, depicting Mexico's long history. The Spanish killing Indians. American cavalry killing Mexican soldiers. Mexicans killing one another. It was not a happy history. One mural, labeled "La Frontera," portrayed U.S. Border Patrol agents machine-gunning migrants as they swam across the Rio Grande. Okay, so the artist took some liberties.
The print shop was on the way to Bola, so it made sense to stop there before the meeting with El Tigre. A printer of Chinese descent, a man in his sixties with a bemused smile, said it would cost Payne $1,500 for an Illinois driver's license. Easier to forge than a California license, and harder to check out by a highway patrolman or sheriff's deputy. He would throw in a matching passport for free.
Payne got to choose a new name. California cops would be looking for a James Payne of Van Nuys. Jimmy chose "Alexander Hamilton" of Evanston. He liked sharing the name of a man killed in a duel.
Papers for Tino weren't so simple. Border agents would examine them much more closely. A temporary work permit didn't suit a twelve-year-old. And a green card was out of the question because the border station had scanners that could pick up a phony. The printer had a selection of legitimate visas, some stolen, some lost. His equipment could alter names and photos. He suggested using a visa intended for a transfer student, a Mexican boy attending Temple Emanuel Academy Day School in Beverly Hills.
"Shalom," Payne said.
"Twenty-two hundred dollars," the printer announced happily.
Payne exhaled a whistle. He'd be nearly broke again.
"Guaranteed to work," the printer chuckled, eyes twinkling, "or your money back when you get out of prison."
He snapped digital photos of both of them and said the documents would be ready by eleven that night. Moments later, Payne's cell phone rang. The man who called himself "Stingray," asking about the Lexus Payne wanted to trade.
Stingray claimed to have several cars that wouldn't set off alarms going through the border checkpoints. Payne said they were headed to a bowling alley named "Bola." Why not meet there?
Jimmy and Tino found Bola without getting lost. They were an hour early for the meeting with El Tigre and right on time for Stingray.
The place was ninety percent bar and ten percent bowling alley. Just two warped lanes that looked as if they'd suffered water damage when the Colorado River flooded a hundred years ago. Four men bowled on one lane, waving fistfuls of pesos over their heads, shouting insults at one another as they bet on each frame. Their balls rattled down the lane like cars with bad shocks, clattering into faded yellow pins that showed nicks and hairline fractures from stem to stern.
And then there were the pin-boys.
Payne had never seen a bowling alley with real, live boys working the pit, hand-dropping pins into the setter and rolling the ball down a wooden track that looked like a split-log sluice at an old gold mine.
There were no molded plastic chairs, no video scoreboards, no rock music, no pulsating strobes for "rock 'n bowl." There was a single rack of house balls and a cardboard box of smelly shoes of indeterminate size.
Stingray wasn't hard to find. He sat at the bar wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a red Corvette Stingray. He was a stocky man in his forties with a thick nose, coppery skin, and black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Cradling a chilled Negra Modelo, he said, "I got a couple things in my inventory you might like. A three-yearold Mini Cooper, very clean."
"My Lexus is worth two Mini Coopers," Payne replied.
Stingray shrugged. "Maybe the Mini's not for you, anyway. A real pussy car. You want wheels with machismo, eh?"
"Something that'll blend in but can outrun a cop if we have to."
Stingray grinned. He'd lost a front tooth and never found it. "How about something with a Cobra V-8 on a big block, 428 cubic inches, throws out 335 horsepower?"
"Holy shit. What is it?"
"Mustang convertible, 1969. Acapulco blue."
"That'll be inconspicuous."
"A real classic. Original paint job."
"What about the engine? That original, too?"
"Reconditioned in the nineties. Goes like hell. I had it up to 135 before it started to shimmy. But watch the steering. It pulls right."
"That's all you've got?"
"Special orders take a week."
Payne was beaten. "Bring the Mustang around."
"What license plate you want? I got most of the states, plus Puerto Rico. New Mexico's nice. 'Land of Enchantment.' "
"It should match my new driver's license. Make it Illinois."
" 'Land of Lincoln.' You got it."
Stingray asked for the keys to the Lexus, saying he'd bring the Mustang back within an hour. He promised to transfer their belongings, including the metal baseball bat in the backseat. They would meet later in the alley behind the bowling alley.
It had scam written all over it, Payne thought. But he shot a look at Tino, who nodded his approval. The kid was supposed to know the territory. Payne tossed the keys to someone he knew virtually nothing about. Not even his real name. All Payne knew was the man's occupation: car thief.
"What do we do while we wait for El Tigre?" Tino asked.
Not knowing whether Stingray would return with the Mustang or the police, or even if he would return at all, Payne sighed and said, "We bowl."
THIRTY-EIGHT
Payne checked out Bola's rack of balls, all cratered moonscapes. He chose a black sixteen-pounder, whose brand name had worn off over time. Trying not to inhale, he picked up a couple of mismatched bowling shoes that nearly fit. Tino grabbed an orange eleven-pound ball, and decided to bowl in his socks.
The lane was impossible, the ball hooking on the dry spots and skidding on the oil. Ignoring the scoring, Payne worked with Tino on his form. No one had ever taught the boy the four-step approach or the proper follow-through. But he was a natural. Within a few minutes, he was starting to look smooth, even if the ball hopscotched over the warped boards on the way to the pins.
As he bowled, Payne planned what he would say to El Tigre. It shouldn't be difficult, right? All he needed was a scrap of information.
Where did you take Marisol Perez, you bastard?
If Marisol was okay, there would be nothing to hide.
In the adj
acent lane, a man who'd been winning his bets called over to Payne. "Ey, gringo. You want to bowl against me? Twenty dollars a frame."
An image of the Paul Newman movie The Hustler flashed through Payne's mind. Local thugs breaking his thumbs after he took their money.
"Sure," Payne said. "Let's roll."
"Himmy. Not such a good idea." Tino shook his head hard, as if trying to get water out of his ears.
The man, in a T-shirt advertising a local strip club, belly protruding over his jeans, carried his ball to their lane. Payne rolled first. If it had been a tee shot in golf, it would have hooked into the woods. The ball lunged toward the left gutter, hitting only the seven pin. The pin-boy rolled Payne's ball back, and this time he released underhanded and hard, rolling it straight for the pocket. Pins clattered, but the six skipped around the ten, leaving it standing.
"Nine pins," his opponent said. He took a strange three-step approach, threw off the wrong foot, and sent a bouncing ball on the Brooklyn side of the headpin. After a decent mix, the two-seven baby split was left standing… until the pin-boy swept out a leg and knocked them both over.
"Strike!" the man yelled. "Twenty bucks."
Payne shook his head at the brazenness of the scam and forked over a twenty. He picked up his ball for the second frame. As he settled into his stance, the ball resting comfortably just above his right hip, Tino called to him. "Himmy!"
Payne turned and saw a large man with a fleshy, pockmarked face. He wore wraparound sunglasses, and his jeans were held up by a belt with a huge buckle engraved with a tiger. Expensive cowboy boots. Soft leather-ostrich, maybe. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a chest gone to flab and a heavy gold crucifix. On his head, a thick mass of black hair was lacquered into place with shiny brilliantine.
The man gaped, his eyes darting from Tino to Payne and back again. He was expecting to meet a rich American who wanted to bring whores across the border. Instead, here was the boy he had left behind on his last crossing.
