Across the Wire

by Luis Urrea

  Inside, foosball tables, video games. Scruffy children in various shades of adobe-brown competed noisily. Pastor Von provided them with about six elaborate ray guns, and they used them to shoot at flashing electrical targets. In a corner, a terrified head-banger in a Metallica T-shirt squatted on his haunches. His brown face was blotchy with panic, going an ugly ash-gray. Various vatos and cholos gathered around him. He had made the terminal mistake of punching the little brother of one of the Satánicos. They cornered him in the building. At one point, they sent in an expedition that clubbed him over the head with a hunk of cement. Efren, a veterano of these streets and one of Von’s full-time employees, chased them out. “This is a Christian place,” he told them. “Fight outside, not in here.”

  When spoken to, the head-banger did not respond. Once he got over the shock of the head blow, he stood up and assumed an air of nonchalance, pushing some smaller boys out of the way at the foosball table. His eyes darted to the door regularly; he was trapped and he knew it. Spies from the Satánicos filtered out the door to report on his condition.

  Some of the recovering addicts from the treatment center watched the gang nervously. They had a strangely somber mien, quiet men with mournful eyes. “This is no good,” one of them told me. “This situation is very bad. They’re going to get him.”

  The Satánicos waited along the edge of the ball court. One boy sat on the retaining wall; a bearded boy was lying back between his legs. The top boy wrapped his legs around the bottom boy’s abdomen and pulled him close. He rested his chin tenderly on his head, slipped his hands across his chest and belly. One of them had brought a pit bull. Another had a small black canister of Mace he compulsively pulled in and out of his pocket. They murmured their plans, laughing. The only girls hid at the far end of the gang—two thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, with hard-sprayed chola hairdos rising in black splashes off their heads. A Satánico in a dusty black trench coat pulled a six-inch-long switchblade from his pocket, flicked it open. They laughed. He cut the air. “How do you like it?” he said to his invisible victim. He stabbed. “Are you still alive?” he said. The Satánicos were excited. The ballplayers on the court ignored them: a drive to the basket, a hard shoulder block, a lay-up that clattered through the rim. The pit bull sat somberly, watching.

  “They’re going to cut him up,” the addict told me. “They’re going to make shredded meat—machaca.”

  Nobody could figure out how to get the Metallica boy out of the building. Perhaps, one of the missionaries suggested, we could divert the attention of the Satánicos for a minute, and the boy could jump out the back window.

  Von said, “He’s trapped in the building, eh?”

  We nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “at least he’ll be sure to stick around for the Bible study.”

  Then a curious thing happened. Four big old-timers, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, wandered into the alley outside the clubhouse. They all wore billed caps, and had long hair. Two of them had nut-brown scars on their faces, and their shoulders rocked as they walked. The Satánicos stowed the knife immediately, and they shuffled nervously. The four veteranos swaggered into the clubhouse and scanned the kids within. They gestured at the Metallica boy: come.

  One of the addicts pulled me aside.

  “They’re his brothers,” he said.

  “An escort!”

  “Yes. The Satánicos are bad, but these ones are bad. They came here to kill, not fight.”

  They appeared at the door of the clubhouse. They formed a rough diamond around the head-banger, a flying wedge. He grew cocky in their embrace, heavy-lidded and inscrutable. The Satánicos looked at their feet. One innocently busied himself with his pit bull.

  The veteranos strolled along the top of the wall where the Satánicos sat; they walked up the slope, all four of them staring steadily at the gang, offering them a silent challenge. Nobody took them up on it. Nobody even looked. Eye contact would mean disaster. The only sound on the hill was the squeaking tennis shoes of the ballplayers rushing the net, the laughter of the children inside. The lead veterano snorted in derision, and the group vanished into the dark.

  The Satánicos were suddenly revealed, in the pale light of the ball court, to be boys and girls, confused and chastened. The one with the knife was a skinny little geek with big ears and sticks for legs. The girls faded away, perhaps avoiding the Satánicos’ wrath. The one boy holding the other nuzzled his ear, clutched him tight from behind. The one with the Mace suddenly scuttled along the edge of the court, threatening to Mace one of the players, but even this threat collapsed. These children were not helpless—they held up missionaries at gunpoint out in the street—but that night, their ferocity collapsed on them, just for an instant, and they seemed lost, unable to get it back.

  The pit bull, all soulful eyes, nuzzled my knee.

  “He’s vicious,” one of the Satánicos warned me.

  “A fighter,” I offered.

  “Vicious. A killer.”

  I bent down to the dog. He put out his paw to shake hands.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Father’s Day

  (Thanks to my brother, Juan Francisco Urrea, for providing information that would have otherwise been unavailable to me.)

  January 10. My father, in a red American Motors 440, drives north through the Sonora desert, ticking off towns as the sun rises to his right: Santa Ana, Caborca, Tajito. He is on his way to Tijuana, to his mother’s house, where he has lived on and off since my mother threw him out of our home. He left Culiacán yesterday, in the morning. He’s been driving alone, nonstop, pausing for gas and two terrible roadside meals. The cheap tape recorder nestled among packs of cigarettes on the seat beside him has been playing Mexican songs that call forth all his ghosts and memories. Miguel Prado, Agustín Lara, Pedro Infante, Lola Beltrán. Mile upon mile, the car has gradually filled with the dead and forgotten. The backseat is crowded with a hundred girlfriends, lovers, and wives. Time swirls around him like smoke. His dentures fit badly—the pain keeps him awake. He has spent Christmas in his hometown, in the farthest southern corner of Sinaloa, and he has recognized no one. All of them are old and strange to him. Their concerns are foolish, their laughter painful to his ears. He has retrieved a thousand dollars from the bank on Morelos Street, a gift for me. My father is sixty-one years old.

  San Luis Río Colorado appears in the shimmering early light. He is driving fast—he always drove fast. Far away, Yuma, Arizona, suggests itself through the haze. The Mexican checkpoint is outside of town. Bored and aggressive Mexican Immigration and Federal Judicial Police officers wave cars over and inspect papers. They deny passage randomly, confiscate valuable-looking goods, exact “tolls” from gringos and border Mexicans who lack the papers or the conviction to convince the officers they may proceed. My father is Mexican, but he is also blond and blue-eyed. (His blond hair has gone white, but his skin is still pale pink, and his eyes behind his glasses are still bright.) He has California plates on his car. He is going fast.

  This is where the thing happens.

  No one knows exactly what, or if it happened before the aduana (customs inspection) huts or after. But somehow, my father—Mexican ballads rattling through the cheap speakers, all those voices in his head, smoking a cigarette, smoke trailing from his mouth like he’s burning already and going down—leaves the road and sails into the desert dawn.

  His car sails for a dreadful instant, forever. Angles off the road and lifts into the air. Unimaginable movement of fists on the wheel, trying to right the car after it has taken flight. Dust and gravel cresting beneath him like a wave, as he catapults over the edge of a drop-off. Everything in the car—tapes, cigarettes, ashes, coins, recorder, my father’s glasses—comes to life and eddies around him. The car tips. Its front corner digs into the ground. It flips once, twice. Later, rumors suggest it rolled six times. The wheel breaks off in his hands. The windshield vanishes. He goes out the window. The car rolls on him. He is dragged back in by the
lurching force of the crash. All around, his things scatter across the sand and sage.

  It is easy to imagine the silence returning then. Increments of peace. The wind can be heard again, then the calling of crows and jays. In the distance, a siren.

  I am not brought into this story until late.

  Without me, my father goes about the business of dying. He tries not to die, of course. My father would not surrender easily to death. But the Mexicans manage to convince him.

  Before they take him to the hospital, various agents of the Mexican Republic help themselves to the sudden flea market my father has set out for them. As he bleeds on the gurney, blind and mute, pissing his pants, they sift through the goods: there are a lot of tapes, after all. Someone nabs his recorder. Someone else takes a fancy to his new shoes, bought for him by my favorite cousin and given to him only two days before.

  His wallet and my thousand dollars are safe—soaked in urine in his pockets. Nobody cares to fish for them at the moment. Because nobody wants to reach into all that mess, they don’t find out he’s a Mexican citizen, a retired army officer, late of the presidential staff of Mexico, and a retired federal cop. He can’t talk to tell them. They drive off, blue lights inconsequential against the sun.

  In town, they strip him naked and call in a Mexican doctor.

  The doctor says something along the lines of “My God, it’s Beto!”

  One of the attendants says something else, like “What do you mean, Beto?”

  The doctor looks around him. He can’t believe it. This is too strange. Just days ago, he was at a party with my father in Sinaloa. He’d asked my father for a ride to this very town. My father turned him down, saying, cryptically, “I don’t want to be responsible for your life.”

  “I know this man,” the doctor says. “He’s a Mexican.”

  Somebody calls the police. The Federales are on their way. Something strange is going on here, and the doctor wants nothing to do with it. He snaps some orders to the staff of the clinic, then plunges his hand into my father’s pockets. He is no doubt startled to find a thousand dollars there, in new bills. He takes my father’s wallet out of the back pocket and flees. For reasons that will remain unclear, the Federales will spend the rest of the day trying to find him to get all these things back from him. He will be so busy avoiding them that he will not see my father again.

  Once the doctor leaves, they wheel my father, naked, into a room. He is beginning to struggle, to writhe around in his bed. His ribs are cracked; his internal injuries bleed within him; his chin is split, and he might have a concussion; he has some brain injuries and might have suffered a stroke. Nobody’s quite sure what’s wrong with him. They decide to quiet him down and shoot him with morphine.

  My father, drugged, settles back into a velvet haze. All his ghosts swarm to him and begin to smother him.

  I have siblings whom I know and don’t know: Juan, Alberto, Octavio, Leticia, and Martha. The circumstances of my father’s life took him from them at an early age, and they were left to struggle with their mother. I am younger than all of them, and have never lived with any of them. Like me, they fear him and worship him and miss him even when he’s with us. Somehow, word gets out on the border that Alberto Urrea has been seriously hurt in a car wreck. But people think it’s my brother Alberto. People start looking for my brother’s family to tell them he’s dying.

  In the meantime, in our old neighborhood in Tijuana, my aunt Lety and cousin Hugo are in the family house on Rampa Independencia. They are waiting for Beto to arrive from Sinaloa. Hugo has built him a small bedroom where he keeps all his tokens—love letters, bowling trophies, moldering Playboy magazines, a box of photographs. In those photos, my father is a skinny boy with a heart-shaped mouth. He looks sad in every one. The years have tinted them all brown.

  My aunt hears my father’s car idling in front of the house. She glances out and sees a red shape pull up to her gate.

  “It’s Beto!” she calls. My grandmother, gone mad with age, blinks in her chair like a pudgy bird.

  “Who?” she says.

  “Beto,” says my aunt. “Beto ya llego.” (Beto has arrived.)

  She steps outside to greet him. There is no car there. She steps into the street. Looks both ways. No red car in sight.

  “Beto’s dead,” she says.

  Word spreads—the doctor calls my aunt. Somehow, she and Alberto make contact, and they, along with my cousin Hugo and my father’s former wife, Emilia, head east in Alberto’s car. Strangely enough, it is a vast black Cadillac: they rush to my father’s death in a hearse.

  Other relatives go into a Mexican version of action: one branch grabs the first plane they can that flies to Arizona. In their panic, they don’t realize the ticketing agent has sent them to the wrong part of Arizona. The flight leaves them farther from my father than if they’d stayed in Tijuana.

  Somebody finally calls me in San Diego. I have been listening to music—something as ridiculous as Uriah Heep. Everyone has left for San Luis Rio Colorado. Everything is happening. I am asked to hold steady. Someone will get right back to me. Nobody does.

  My cousin Hugo, the most feared member of the family, is the one who finally tells me what it was like to find my father in the clinic. Hugo was raised by him, and knows him better than some of his own sons. Hugo calls him “Papá.”

  Family legend has it that once, when Hugo was driving through Tijuana late at night, a carload of cholos began to harass him, trying to push him off the road, yelling taunts. Hugo calmly pulled over, took a homemade broadsword out from under the seat, and proceeded to chop pieces off their car. He split their hood with it, pulled it out, and said, “All right, come on.”

  They abandoned their car and ran into the night.

  Hugo pushes his way into the room and sits on the bed, holds my writhing father down. Tells him, “Don’t worry, Papa. We’re here. We’ll get you out.”

  My father cannot say anything to him, but Hugo senses he understands. He calms down, lies back. Hugo talks to him for a moment more.

  According to what faction of the Urrea family you consult, either of the following occurs:

  Arrangements are made to transport my father to the border, and there, an American ambulance will carry him into Yuma. Hugo knows my father will die if left in this clinic. The American ambulance arrives at the border crossing and waits, off to the side, doors open, light circling.

  No Mexican unit arrives. Repeated calls reveal nothing: nobody knows what happened to the ambulance. Isn’t it there? It ought to be there. How curious.

  It never arrives. Hugo and my father wait for an hour. It has been eight hours since the accident.

  Or:

  Hugo and my aunt Lety and my brother Alberto and his mother, Emilia, gather and make the evacuation plans. But my aunt, seeing too clearly what is about to happen, convinces them to abandon hope. Beto is going to die, she tells them. Can’t you see?

  Finally, the ghosts convince my father. He settles back in the bed, eyes looking at nothing in particular. Without a word or a gesture, my father dies.

  A few miles away, the Americans close their doors, turn off their lights, and drive back to Yuma.

  Too late to do any good, I enter the picture.

  Hugo’s sister, Margo, picks me up on her way to Tijuana. A family friend has called me and told me the news. Margo’s car is crammed with silent people as we ride into Tijuana and rise up to Independencia, shoulders digging into each other as the car hits the ruts and half-buried boulders in the road.

  We gather in the dirt street outside the family home: Hugo, Aunt Lety, Margo, the riders, me. Dogs behind the fence think we’re having a party. They think the fun’s about to begin. They dance on their back legs, eagerly watching us in the street.

  “Let’s go,” Hugo says. He means to the funeral home: Funeraria González.

  I get in Hugo’s truck. Hugo has been the closest to the thing. He has accumulated a kind of evil grace. I hope he can tell me i
f anything special happened. If there were any apparitions, sounds, lights, angels.

  “He died,” he says. For him, that’s enough.

  We drive downtown. The funeral home is nondescript, in the middle of a run-down block. But then, most blocks in Tijuana are run-down, all cobbled together with no plan in mind, facade after mid-fifties facade leaning into each other, paint coming away from the walls on thin wedges of stucco.

  The brothers are waiting for me outside. We don’t want to take a step without each other. Nobody knows how to grieve. We stand apart from each other with a strange military precision, two feet between each man. We shuffle. We grin: the old man’s dead. We shake our heads, sigh. We laugh. Nobody can fit the fact into the day. They have my father’s money and wallet. The doctor has turned them over to somebody, I don’t know who, and it has appeared here, in front of the funeral home. My eldest brother, Juan, hands me the cash. It’s floppy. Wet, it feels like felt.

  “It must have rained,” somebody says. “Do you think it rained? Everything’s all wet.”

  Hugo looks at me. He says nothing. I know why it’s wet. Hugo and Juan know why it’s wet. Juan and I stare into each other’s eyes.

  I say, “I guess they had an early-morning shower.”

  Everybody nods.

  Juan gives me the wallet. Inside: driver’s license, green card, social security card, notes, slips of paper, useless cards in various shades of blue and yellow. In his picture, my father looks small and old. He has a pouch under his chin. You can see the curve of his skull under the diminishing front rank of his hair.

  “Okay,” I say.

  We turn as one and enter the door.

  Hugo grabs my arm as the brothers start upstairs. “Down here,” he says.

  “What,” I say.

  “The body’s down here,” he says.