Tropic of Orange

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  “On a happier note, Saratoga Sara gave birth to a baby girl last night in the back of a VW bus. Far as we know, both mother and baby doing just fine. Contributions of diapers, baby clothing, and food for the mother gratefully accepted.

  “Now here’s Mara Sadat with a special report on Life in the Fast Lane.”

  Cut to Mara Sadat standing in front of the open hood of a rusting Cadillac who said, “I’m standing in the Fast Lane North with Slim City who’s got one interesting project going on: an urban garden. Slim, tell us about your project.”

  Cad occupant said, “Well, since this babe wasn’t goin’ nowhere, we pulled her guts out and filled her yey high with some good old-fashioned dirt.” Camera panned the dirt under the Cad’s hood. “And, now we got a garden goin’. Something we always wanted. Got lettuce in this corner, some baby carrots over here, tomatoes here. A patch like this’ll do some good feedin’. Folks in the Fast Lane a little distant from the right shoulders where the plantin’s easy.”

  “What’s that climbing the antenna there?”

  “Passion fruit. Down here we get our Cs too.”

  “So here’s a solution in self-sufficiency. I’m Mara Sadat for urban gardens here on the Fast Lane.”

  Baby sister turned to Buzzworm. “Are they for real?”

  “They’re for real. Why don’t you catch a workshop? John Malpede and Luis Alfaro. Consummate artists in the field of performance. Next one’s up at four.”

  “Meanwhile the real LAPD is up there.”

  “That’s right. And the man who owns that dirt-filled Cad is probably putting together an arsenal of AK-47S to take it back.”

  Baby sister looked serious at Buzzworm for maybe the first time. “What’s gonna happen?” Then she waxed nonchalant, L.A.-like, “Maybe we’ll be surprised for a change.”

  “What’s gonna surprise you, baby sister? An outright war? That news enough for you? Looks funny for the moment, homeless comedy, doing the local news. But it’s too sweet. Homeless sweet homeless. Like we are the eye of a storm coming this way. Everything’s colliding into everything. No place for these people to go. What they gonna do? Put us all in jail? At forty thou per head, doesn’t seem too cost effective.”

  Baby sister checked the time. “You got an hour. FreeZone’s up next. Who are your guests?”

  “Street peddlers come to tell their side of the poison orange mess. Then, an on-site powwow ’tween the gangs.” Buzzworm started walking. “Yep. Until the invasion or whatever, I guess we’ll conduct business like a FreeZone.”

  Day ran like that. One show running after the other. TV in the FreeZone. TV from the bottom. Aspirations of the lowest bum on skid row. Lifestyles of the poor and forgotten. Who’d a thought? Buzzworm was producing the hottest property on the net. Baby sister said it was a Hollywood wet dream. Either people’d watch anything, or as long as it was a show, it was cool. People figured: ’s long as the tube has to deal with it, it must be outta our hands.

  And for the finale: homeless choir numbering near five hundred featuring three homeless tenors. Manzanar Murakami conducting.

  CHAPTER 32:

  OvertimeEl Zócalo

  It was postsiesta on the Zócalo. I had made a quick call to one of my México City contacts, a radio journalist known to the NPR crowd back home, David Welna. His wife, Kathleen, answered and supposed I could find him in front of the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Of course, she was being facetious. Two hundred and fifty thousand, maybe more, people were wall-to-wall in México’s version of Tienanmen Square or, say, the Washington Monument. Considering that the city’s got twenty-five million inhabitants, that was one percent of the city. It was one of those Todos Somos Marcos events. Maybe a quarter of the crowd were sporting ski masks and wooden rifles. As far as I could figure, hundreds of unions and political concerns were all converging. Of course not all of them were Marcos; there was Welna and me and about five thousand federales. For some reason, the whole thing seemed to be swelling and mobile. It felt like being in a school of fish, a salmon run. I had to keep moving, presumably forward, but for all I knew in circles, to keep my relationship to the crowd and to the plaza. I readjusted my backpack, heavy with the notebook computer and modem thrust upon me by Emi. It wasn’t a large exertion on my part, at least for the moment.

  This moving perceptibly and imperceptibly with the great flow seemed to characterize my existence in México from the moment I’d deplaned. On the major roads to and from the capitol, noticeable were the convoys of federales, Red Cross trucks, human rights observers, United Nations reps, liberation theologians, and press buses crisscrossing each other on the roads to peace and civil war in endless commotion. Soldiers at one checkpoint uncovered a cache of arms and ammunition in a pickup presumably moving south into the mountains, but I was told this was just one checkpoint. The DEA made its moves on a Guatemalan biplane flying a load of cocaine in its fuselage, but I was told this was nothing compared to the seventy tons that regularly made it across the border every year. Two high-level government officials were arrested for fraud, but I was told that the real culprits were too prominent, too powerful to touch. And besides, no one would believe the amount of money that had long seeped out of the country into international bank accounts.

  Meantime, I pursued my hunches into Central America. C. Juárez plus a shipment of spiked oranges. My México City meeting was hardly a meeting in the formal sense. I had been told that it would be at their time and convenience. All I had to do was arrive; they would find me. Figures appeared out of shadows and suggested directions to pursue. They seemed to find me anywhere, but their directions got me through a series of loops only to land me at a family planning clinic. I did the loops several times over and found myself at an adoption agency, an orphanage, and a miserable shantytown of abandoned children on the edges of a vast dump. If I took one lead down one road, it brought me around to the same road again. Impoverished kids, orphaned kids, street kids, dead kids, disappeared kids. The whole system was a damn cloverleaf, and I began to have this nauseating sense of moving constantly to no good purpose. I was doing overtime and getting nowhere. I made this confession to Emi over the net.

  Typically, she replied, Knock it off, Gabe. It’s México. For godssake, focus. By the way, she added. Your package arrived. What should I do with it?

  What’s in it?

  I haven’t opened it. It is addressed to you. The box says faucets. Maybe it’s a bomb. Can I find “bomb squad” in the Yellow Pages under b?

  I can’t think about that just now.

  I went through my notes again. Emi was right. I hadn’t focused. Everything was in this notebook. Interviews with Zapatistas. Notes on collusive military operations out of San Ysidro. A list of recent assassinations. Current value of the peso. Even my last telephone conversation with Rafaela. I proceeded to rip the pages out. I read my cryptic scribble: “Body parts. Kidneys for a two-year-old. Do you think?” The revelation made me gag.

  I got Emi back on the net. What did you do with the package?

  You mean the bomb? We’re dismantling it as we speak.

  Don’t joke. This is serious.

  Okay. Okay.

  Don’t open it. Give it to Buzzworm. Tell him it’s connected to “C. Juárez.” Let him deal with it.

  You mean—

  I don’t mean anything. Stay out of this. Do you read me? STAY OUT OF THIS!

  Alright. You don’t have to yell.

  The fearful voice of Rafaela rose up from my notes, rattled the old memory banks. Meanwhile, her two-year-old, Sol, chased his imagination in my imagination. The story was in my own backyard. Now I had to find Rafaela; if she had taken what I thought, she was in big trouble.

  I made a series of calls to my neighbor Doña Maria. “Lupe went to see,” she explained. “The house is wide open, so they can’t have gone far. Just a little walk. She’s that way you know. What you call a free spirit.”

  “I will call you back in an hour or two, but perhaps if they
can’t be found, you should call the police.”

  “Whatever for?”

  I squirmed, remembering Rafaela’s cryptic question about Doña Maria’s son. How much could the old woman know? “I will be there as soon as possible,” I said and hung up.

  But for the moment, I was caught in the current at the Zócalo, one more flushed salmon pregnant with expectation. The entire crowd was waving paper money in the air: floating the peso they called it. Primer Mundo. Ja Ja Ja!

  I got a tap on the shoulder from a ski-masked Marcos. “Gabriel Balboa?” I didn’t know how he’d found me, but of course he did. Now it was pay-up time. We made the necessary passwords and signals for proper ID. He didn’t waste time, “Have you brought it?”

  “In my backpack.”

  “Follow me.” We made our way out of the current, through side and back streets, into a restaurant and out the back, through doors and alleys. The final destination was a small office with a couple of telephones. Marcos pointed at the telephone plug. I took out the computer, plugged in the modem, called up Emi. Marcos handed me a set of disks.

  “What’s in this?” I asked.

  “The first is a database: names, dates, descriptions, work, family, relations, everyone who lived in that village. Everyone who died or was killed or disappeared, and who did the killing if that is known. The second and third have the stories, the past, memories. The entire history of the village since anyone can remember.”

  I nodded. All these years, computer-stupid, I was supposed to save this man’s village. If he only knew the incompetence he trusted. At least, I thought, Emi was on the other side prompting me through. “Copy everything to your hard drive first,” she commanded.

  I hung my ear over the phone, stared at the monitor, and tried to seem professional. Meanwhile Emi said, “Take it easy. Let’s not be premature. Ouu,” she purred.

  I rolled my eyes, relieved Marcos couldn’t hear her. Only Emi could find a database sexy. She moved me through those windows, coaxing this computer virgin into its innermost temples. “Easy on the AccuPoint. Digital manipulation can make all the difference,” she purred.

  I clicked through the menus, trying to ignore the insinuations.

  “Okay, now you’ve got your very own newsgroup. Voila! Nothing there yet, but wait ’til you post. It’s gonna be swimming in news. A reporter’s wet dream. Okay, message your posting.” She said it like massage. “And, baby, don’t forget to CC me.” She took me deftly through the last steps. “That’s it. You’re getting better all the time. A real natural. Attach files. Ready for take-off? Okay, let her rip.”

  CHAPTER 33:

  To DreamAmerica

  The bus broke down. The engine blew up. The pistons imploded. The diesel ran out through a rusty hole in the tank. And only minutes from the border. They all got out of the bus and looked. Arcangel opened his dusty suitcase and pulled out the steel cables and hooks. He was never without them; one never knew when they might be useful. And this was the second incident this week to prove this theory. Sol was jumping on the seats, pressing his nose into the windows and making faces. He peered into the suitcase and selected the orange from Arcangel’s assortment of toys. Arcangel closed the suitcase and sat the boy on top. “Stay right here,” he commanded gently.

  Sol pressed the orange to his nose, then shook it up and down.

  “Good. Good.”

  Once again, Arcangel offered his services to pull the bus, slipping the steel cable through the axle and hooking his old skin through the metal talons. And once again, the people scoffed at his efforts and gawked amazed as the bus inched slowly along the highway, harnessed to an old man’s leathery person, skin pulled taut across his bony chest and empty stomach, minute droplets of blood kissing the earth, dragging everything forward. It was as the burden of gigantic wings, too heavy to fly.

  Such a commotion was aroused that no one noticed, either on one side or the other of the Great Border—that Arcangel and a broken bus and a boy and an orange and, for that matter, everything else South were about to cross it: the very hemline of the Tropic of Cancer and the great skirts of its relentless geography.

  Televisa, Univision, Galaxy Latin America and local border stations congregated to eyeball the event. If there were a dozen local and national stations, there were a dozen eyes, translating to a dozen times a dozen times a dozen like the repetitious vision of a common housefly. Arcangel strained for this vision even though live television had no way of accommodating actual feats of superhuman strength. The virtually real could not accommodate the magical. Digital memory failed to translate imaginary memory. Meanwhile, the watching population surfed the channels for the real, the live, the familiar. But it could not be recognized on a tube, no matter how big or how highly defined. There were not enough dots in the universe. In other words, to see it, you had to have been there yourself.

  Arcangel, despite his pains, looked out across the northern horizon. He could see

  all 2,000 miles of the frontier

  stretched across from Tijuana on the Pacific,

  its straight edge cutting through the Río Colorado,

  against the sharp edge of Arizona

  and the unnatural angle of Nuevo México,

  sliding along the Río Grande,

  tenderly caressing the supple bottom of Texas

  to the end of its tail

  on the Gulf of México.

  It waited with seismic sensors and thermal imaging,

  with la pinche migra,

  colonias of destitute skirmishing at its hard line,

  with coyotes, pateros, cholos,

  steel structures, barbed wire, infrared binoculars,

  INS detention centers, border patrols, rape,

  robbery, and death.

  It waited with its great history of migrations back and forth—in recent history,

  the deportation of 400,000 Mexican

  citizens in 1932,

  coaxing back of 2.2 million

  braceros in 1942

  only to exile the same 2.2 million

  wetbacks in 1953.

  The thing called the New World Border waited for him with the anticipation of five centuries. Admittedly a strange one, but Conquistador of the North he was. Ah, he thought, the North of my dreams.

  South of his dreams, it had been a long journey. He could remember everything. Here was a mere moment of passage. As he approached, he could hear the chant of the border over and over again: Catch ’em and throw ’em back. Catch ’em and throw ’em back. Catch ’em and throw ’em back. It was the beginning of the North of his dream, but they questioned him anyway. They held the border to his throat like a great knife. “What is your name?”

  “Cristobal Colón.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Quinientos y algunos años.”

  “When were you born?”

  “El doce de octubre de mil cuatrocientos noventa y dos.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “En el nuevo mundo.”

  “That would make you—”

  “Post-Columbian.”

  “You don’t look post-Columbian. What is your business here?”

  “I suppose you would call me a messenger.”

  “And what is your message?”

  “No news is good news?”

  “Is that a question? Say, do you speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “At Harvard University.”

  “So you’ve studied in the U.S.? Where?”

  “At Harvard at the School of Business. I was there at the same time as Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Then at Stanford University in Economics with Henrique Cardoso. Also at Columbia University with Fidel Castro; I did my thesis in political theory there, you see. And finally at Annapolis; what I studied there is a secret.”

  “Where is your visa? Your passport?”

  “Were you not expecting me? You had better consult your State Dep
artment, not to mention the side agreements with labor and the environment. I am expected. Me están esperando.” He moved forward, slipping across as if from one dimension to another.

  And the words came immediately, “SPEAK ENGLISH NOW!”

  The first wave came like a great flood behind him, showing their hands at the border. Ten working fingers, each times thousands. Having to show their fingers meant that they must enter with nothing in their hands,

  nothing but their hats to shade their foreheads,

  the sweat on their backs,

  the seeds in their pockets,

  the children in their wombs,

  the songs in their throats.

  The cockroach. The cockroach. The cockroach.

  Customs officials chased after Arcangel. “By the way, are you carrying any fresh fruit or vegetables?”

  Arcangel yelled behind him, “Only three ears of corn and one lousy orange!”

  “California currently has a ban on all oranges. We are authorized to enforce a no-orange policy,” they shouted back.

  “But this is a native orange!” he yelled, but his voice was swallowed up by the waves of floating paper money: pesos and dollars and reals, all floating across effortlessly—a graceful movement of free capital, at least forty-five billion dollars of it, carried across by hidden and cheap labor. Hundreds of thousands of the unemployed surged forward—the blessings of monetary devaluation that thankfully wiped out those nasty international trade deficits.

  Then came the kids selling Kleenex and Chiclets,

  the women pressing rubber soles into tennis shoes,

  the men welding fenders to station wagons and

  all the people who do the work of machines:

  human washing machines,

  human vacuums,

  human garbage disposals.

  Then came the corn and the bananas,