by Bella Pollen
“We can’t let this happen,” she whispered, as Chuché and Ostrich began muscling him down the street. “We can’t let them take him.”
“Of course not,” I responded fiercely, wondering what on earth to do about it.
But in front of us, John had already stopped. “Right, that’s enough.” He planted his legs wide. “Here’s how this thing is going to work. We’ll go to our hotel on our own and contact you when we’re good and ready. You got that, old chap?”
I watched him uneasily. “Old chap” was not good. John shaking off Chuché was not good. In the face-off between Mexico’s chic violent type and our own trim articulate killer, it was hard to know who was the most intimidating. The truth is that inside every soldier is a monster on standby, ready and willing to go from zero to ten in a heartbeat, and once the pin was out of John’s grenade it led to complication and—quite often—jail time.
John’s hands, though scarred and twisted, were moving fast. Before we knew it, he had executed some clever military manoeuver and Emily and I were magically in his grip. Almost as one, the four smugglers stared at him with cartoon indignation, as though he’d done the Road Runner equivalent of running rings around them and leaving them tied back to back with a rope. Chuché, recovering first, took a step forwards.
John pushed his face into the Mexican’s until the brims of their hats kissed.
“We’re good, you and me,” he said tightly. “Understand?”
There is a nuanced vibe that passes between men who acknowledge each other as peers. Chuché made a steadying gesture—the kind you might make to a horse rearing up in front of you—and backed off slowly.
“Walk,” John instructed me and Emily in an undertone, “and don’t turn around.”
“OK,” I whispered, “yes,” then, aware of the Mexicans’ eyes on our backs, “Walk where?”
“Truck,” he said curtly. “Lead on, girl.”
OK, truck was good. Inside the truck’s glove compartment was John’s oily Smith & Wesson. Heading there was a sound idea. At least, God help me, it would have been had I only been able to remember where I’d parked it.
Mortifyingly, an hour or so before we were due to meet the smugglers, I’d lobbied for a quick shopping trip. “I want to get a set of those earthenware bowls, John,” I’d cajoled him. “You know, the ones Emily cooks with?”
“What, now you turn all Suzy Homemaker?” he’d teased. “All right—meet us at the west entrance of the market but leave passports and wallets in the glove compartment. We can’t have ’em on us.”
Copy that, John. Bit late for meeting, though—trouble identifying west entrance of the market. Park truck, copy. Lock wallets and passports in glove compartment, copy, copy.
“Right or left?” John said, as we reached the end of the street.
Finding my way back from anywhere unfamiliar is like waking from a dream. The harder I try to summon the details, the further they slide from my grasp. Through all the years I’ve known John, I’ve played down my disability, aware of what a stinging disappointment it made me as an accomplice. Now, realising we’d exited the market from a different archway I faltered. Chuché’s menace was nothing compared with John’s scorn.
“Come on, girl,” he pushed.
“Left?” I hazarded.
“You’re sure.”
“Positive,” I said miserably.
June in Nogales. The hottest hours of the day had passed, nevertheless, my cheeks were on fire. It took another scrabble board of streets before John cottoned on to what I already knew.
“You’ve lost the truck,” he said flatly.
“Lost . . . as in with our money and ID’s inside?” Emily said.
I hung my head—my professional credentials? More Pink Panther’s inspector Clouseau, than Edward R. Murrow.
Emily sighed. “We should split up and take a grid of streets each.”
“Excellent idea.” I set off, eager for redemption.
“Oh not you, girl,” John said, seizing me around the waist and wrestling me to the ground much in the way he did to my kids when they were cheeky. “You, my little flowerpot, will stay right here till we get back. And I do mean, right here.” Then he and Emily, chortling, took off in opposite directions.
I picked myself up and stepped into the cool dustiness of a bar, but there wasn’t a coin in my backpack. Tap water on the border tended to be served with parasites instead of ice, so I slumped back against the outside wall under a government sign depicting a woolly sheep with a warning bleat coming out of its mouth. DON’T FOLLOW THE FLOCK. BEWARE THE COYOTES!
My ankle, damaged long ago from a car accident, was puffy from the heat. I levered off a shoe, then threw down my cap and ran a hand through my hair. My fingers encountered something soft and sticky—chewing gum, from off the wall behind me.
Nice. I yanked at it crossly. A section of hair came away in my hand.
Oh, real pretty. Now the constellation of mosquito bites on my arm began to itch. I closed my eyes.
The air smelled of sagebrush cut with rust. Across the road a door slammed. A woman in a rah-rah skirt sauntered down her front steps in stilettos. I recognised her immediately. She was togged up in the same cheesecloth shirt as earlier, but it was now knotted at the waist. She loitered on the street, casting her eye over the evening as if deciding how to play it. It was only a matter of time before she saw me. As she took in the sweat rings, the bird’s-nest hair, and the bleeding insect bites on my arm, I got a stretch of lip that definitely couldn’t be mistaken for a smile.
Divided by the road, we gazed at each other.
She had me, no question. She crossed, walked straight on up, dragged something out of her back pocket. I knew what was coming. A pause that felt like an eternity before she dropped it: a single peso. I watched the coin spinning in the sunlight before it landed in my upturned hat with a thunk.
“Cunt,” she said.
I was about to agree with her, when suddenly I remembered who I had become. A different spirit, a darker beast. And now I’d given in to that person, it would take a lot more than name-calling to bring me back.
I pocketed the coin, raised golden eyes to hers. “You’ve no idea.” I bared my teeth, and she skittered away.
Tomorrow suddenly felt open-ended. Unmarked ground waiting to be explored.
Tomorrow I would do better.
DEAR DAVID GILMOUR
I met Vicente where I met everyone in Nogales, Mexico: loitering by the wall. He’d been following me for a while by then, and though I was pretending to check out the inscriptions on the crosses nailed to the corrugated iron, I’d noticed his two paces to my one every time I shuffled along. He was nearly caught up, so I turned, a move he correctly took as a cue for introductions.
“What you doin’ here, lady?” he crooned.
“Who, me?” I shrugged, fake coy. “Nuthin’.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk . . .” He shook his head. “This is not a good place for nuthin’.”
He had a shrill voice, all orchestral highs and lows, as though it had tried breaking during puberty, only to have his hormones bail out on him before the job was done.
I pressed my back to the wall, absorbing the heat off the metal. I liked it here, I told him, and it was no lie. I’d been slipping in and out of Nogales for over a year now, and I found the town as beautiful as it was disturbing. It was late afternoon. A flash of monsoon had washed the lethargy from the day and left a flicker of tension on the evening to come.
“No, you don’t understand.” He was a nondescript man, with an earnest face and plaintive brown eyes. There were few tourists in this town, he went on to explain, and people were watching. He, Vicente, was concerned for my safety. How he would hate for me to be set upon by thugs and muggers. “There are many of them out there,” he said, his eyes flicking left and right and coming to land on an innocent postal box. “Many, many,” he repeated sternly. “I don’t want you to get into no trouble.”
“Me neith
er,” I told him. Trouble, we went on to agree, was a nasty business. Then we lapsed into silence to further contemplate this truth. We were stalling. It was the game. Nogales small talk, a little amuse-bouche before we progressed to the main course of business.
His was not the first advance I’d had that day, but I’d taken a speed-dating approach to the others. I blew off the first purely on the basis that his skin smelled chemical. The second had eyes that mirrored dollar signs when he looked into mine. But for all its dubious characters, there is chivalry to be found in Nogales and Vicente had a thread of it. My task for the afternoon? Find a fixer. And though this one may not have been exactly what John and I were looking for, it would soon be dusk, I was desperate to pee, and for what he considered a truly bargain rate, Vicente was prepared to put himself forwards as my guide—my shepherd against the marauding lobos. Vicente knew this town, and what was it exactly I was after? Spices? Some plastic Tupperware for my shiny U-S-of-A kitchen?
“Come on, tell Vicente,” he wheedled, as though I were withholding my most shameful secrets on his Freudian couch. What would I like to do and where was it precisely I’d like to go?
“Down the tunnels, please,” I told him.
“Here in Nogales?” He feigned innocence. Dear God, there’s always one, his reproachful look implied. The end-of-shift passenger who demands to be taken over the Brooklyn Bridge during rush hour, no change for a tip. “Which tunnels you mean?”
I revealed the roll of dollars in my hand, a skill absorbed from countless reruns of Starsky & Hutch.
“Ah, sí, sí, those tunnels,” he acknowledged, as though hoping I’d been referring to an infinitely more upmarket variety with fine dining and valet parking thrown in.
“Sure, I know where those tunnels are. Vicente knows where is located everything in this sweet ciudad!”
“And you’ll take me? Me and my friend John?”
It’s obvious he’d rather do anything else. Nevertheless, times are hard here in Nogales, city of hope and splintered dreams. In everybody’s sweat are small beads of desperation. So yes, Vicente would take us through the drug tunnels to the US. “But!”—he raised a finger—not before proving his credentials as a moral and trustworthy man. “A good Mexican,” he clarified, and to that end he hauled me along the street, randomly accosting locals on the way. Here, an old woman spit-roasting her sweet corn with the enthusiasm of an organ grinder. Outside the Santa Crista pharmacy it was the turn of a blind man selling trays of sunglasses, and had I not protested Vicente would have put the question to the mongrel pooping disconsolately into the gutter. “Who am I?” he demanded of everyone. “Tell her who I am!”
“Why,” they said, looking bemused, “you are Vicente, of course!”
“Yes, I am Vicente”—he puffed out his chest—“and I am a family man!” He slid out a photograph depicting a fright of sultry teenagers pouting at the lens. “Are these not my daughters?” he demanded. “Well?”
“Indeed they are,” all chorused obediently, including the blind man, who really couldn’t have known whether he was being shown a family photo or the Shroud of Turin.
“You see!” Vicente crowed. “So now I trust you, and you trust Vicente! Welcome to the machine!”
“Huh?” I said.
The Alubia was a dingy local bar that, over the last eighteen months, had become a default office for John and me. Emily was back home in Colorado, delivering twins on the reservation, but John was at a corner table, sketching faces in his leather-bound pad, three beers already sudsing on empty by his elbow. Although I no longer felt like the peashooter John had brought along to the gunfight, it was still with some relief that I presented Vicente before bolting to the lavatory, where a hooker was douching her panocha at the tiny hand basin, her white stiletto balanced against the wall and a teeny-weeny leopard-skin purse chained to her wrist. By the time I returned, John was drumming his fingers on the table in a manner that suggested Vicente was in danger of losing an eye. John does not take kindly to men referring to themselves in the third person, but in the same way that people feel compelled to pass on their handyman however mediocre his services, I was determined that Vicente should be our guy. “Oh, sure, there are many dangers down the tunnels,” he was boasting. “But it’s OK because Vicente is brave. Vicente has been gifted with a pair of cojones the size of a Bengal tiger!”
It would be hard to find a worse person to play the testosterone card with than John, given his military background and love of an unnecessary fight, but he’d always had a soft spot for a fellow exaggerator. A fee was agreed upon, and the deal was done.
Ever since my father told me that alligators roamed the New York subway, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of creatures and people living beneath our feet, in heating shafts, under bridges, in the transit spaces of airports and cinemas. These are the homeless, the outsiders—people who don’t belong, relegated to spaces that don’t exist and making a life in conditions unthinkable for the rest of us. A tunnel connecting two cities on opposite sides of a line felt like the ultimate in-between space. The limbo of limbo, the nowhere of nowhere, a deeper form of exile. Many of Nogales’s tunnels had been requisitioned and remodeled with almost comic-caper genius by the town’s cartels. Others, though, were home to the town’s border orphans, “tunnel kids,” who, on a diet of paint thinner and attitude, reputedly earned a living by charging a fee for passage from one side to the other.
The tunnel Vicente had selected for us began a quarter-mile from the wall. Even though in a year’s time it would be blocked off, secured by Homeland Security and fitted with sensors and cameras, it was, for now, Vicente promised, safe as socks.
“Actually, this is a really shitty part of town,” our cabbie contradicted, pulling up. “So I wait here for you.”
“That’s good of you,” John told him, “but we don’t know how long we’re going to be.”
“Meter’s off, man.” The driver crossed his arms and killed the engine. “I wait for you anyway.”
The tunnel itself was a concrete pipe about five feet high accessed by an entrance ramp sprinkled with garbage. The bunch of giggling schoolgirls at the bus stop opposite seemed impervious to the smell, but then this was Nogales’s special blend Chanel No. 5, and it would have been hovering in the air since the day they were born.
“Good-bye, blue sky,” Vicente sang with feeling.
I’d been thinking much the same. The day was flawless, the sun warm as wax against my skin. By comparison, the mouth of the tunnel seemed a whorl of loneliness, and for some reason “good-bye, blue sky” began repeating in my head like an earworm. Suddenly my brain locked onto why: “Welcome to the Machine,” “Goodbye Blue Sky.” Song titles, both of them.
“Pink Floyd, Vicente?” I said.
Vicente perked up, the guy on a painful first date who had finally found common ground.
“You heard of them?” he asked eagerly. “They’re an English band, you know. The drummer is English, the guitar player is English, the lead singer is—”
“Yes, Vicente, er . . . I’ve heard of Pink Floyd, thank you.”
Vicente looked crestfallen, and I felt bad. “You think they’ll be people down there?” I asked.
Even if the tunnel wasn’t cartel, chances were we’d still be traipsing uninvited through somebody else’s hallway, and this one could have been housing any number of life’s outcasts. The tunnel kids had a reputation for toughness, often beating up and robbing their customers, irrespective of whether or not their fee got paid. Rates for passage varied, depending on which Central American country the immigrants hailed from. Hondurans, we’d been told, came in for a particular drubbing.
“Maybe,” Vicente admitted. “Yes, it’s just possible there might be, well, you know, one or two people down there.”
“And what if one of them tries to mess with us?”
“Ah, no worries. Vicente will show them who’s boss.” He drew himself up, managing to look about as macho as a snow globe. “I
t is Vicente’s job to protect you.”
This got a snort of laughter from John, twenty feet away, but I couldn’t help but like Vicente. Back in London he’d be slipping his business card into letter boxes. House needs a fresh coat of paint? Vicente’s brushstrokes are straight and even! Ask anyone, even if they’re blind! Especially if they’re blind!
“You can trust Vicente in a bad situation,” he said. “This I swear on the life of my daughters.” It was true he had yet to let us down, but the tunnels made him nervous. It had taken him three days to find one he was OK with, and now, as we stood shilly-shallying aboveground, he’d attached himself to my side like Velcro, more for his own protection, I suspected, than mine. John was already heading down the ramp as though on a walkway to the city’s most prestigious social gathering, while inside the cab, the driver was furiously gesticulating at us to come back. So, purely to avoid being named and shamed, the motivation for almost every dubious decision I ever make, I sucked in a deep breath and stumbled down into the gloom.
The smell sharpened. I opened my mouth to call for John and tasted sewage. Thirty feet in, the ceiling of the pipe began to lower. A whispery scuttle of insects and a new smell—urine on the ferment—before the darkness, too bitter for our torches, swallowed everything.
It was hot in the tunnel. A truck rumbled overhead, and my coward’s stream of consciousness switched on. What if it was carrying an oversize load? One of those trucks hauling other trucks? What if the ground gave way, the pipe shattered? It was monsoon season, and I worried about rain, the churning waters of a flash flood, the suffocating, lung-bubbling death to follow. Fuck John! Where was he? And what was Vicente mumbling on about?
“Run, rabbit,” I heard him say.
“What? Where?” I peered into the dark. There were no rabbits—a savagely mutated rat maybe. A blast of subterranean air hit me. I caught a skein of cigarette smoke and, irrationally, had an image of John ahead, debonair as Gatsby, unsoiled in white shirt and tan trousers. Then I saw him, squatting on his haunches, talking to two boys slouched against the curve of the pipe, cocooned in filthy clothes. As we approached, they turned old-men eyes our way. One of them was cradling a Saturday night special—a small, sixty-dollar pistol. Ha! I thought, John’s gun is bigger, then felt ashamed. They were just boys, not much older than Jesse or Sam.
