City of Strangers (16 page)

“I knew a boy at Kennedy who was beaten by his father every single day, and he's sworn never to harm a living creature.”

The contest outside seemed to quiet down. One could always hope the boys had grown tired of tormenting the animals.

“In the religion I supposedly grew up in, they talk about turning the other cheek, but that seems to be a pipe dream,” Jack Liffey said. “We used to have Gandhi and King and a lot of men like that. I think the world's just run out of saints.”

Then there was a sustained outpouring of yaps and screams, followed by a police whistle that cut through all other sounds. Then more whistles, coming from all over the compass, as if the
colonia
were being invaded by soccer referees. The music cut off ominously. They went quickly to their peepholes. Jack Liffey saw that the car dismantlers were gone, just vanished into the night, the gang boys as well. The animal combat had displaced the rope so that the lighter dog hung about a foot above the cat, just out of reach, and both ropes swung gently together, enforcing a truce. The animals still wriggled now and then as the ropes swayed, but they seemed exhausted and resigned.

A khaki-colored open truck roared past up the hill packed with soldiers carrying automatic rifles at all angles. The soldiers looked little older than the gang members. One soldier craned his neck curiously at the dangling animals passing just at eye level. The truck skidded to a stop nearby, and an amplified voice from the truck barked orders to the community, then went on up the hill and repeated its commands farther up.

“A
gringo
is wanted for violating a little girl,” Fariborz translated softly for him. “He raped her viciously and then killed her. There is a reward. It's you they describe.”

“Oh, wonderful!”

Fariborz went immediately to the locked door and spoke through it, then slid an American twenty halfway under the door. He talked some more, waggling the currency, and after a moment, the money disappeared. He came back and sat with his back against the pile of
¡Alarmas!

“Don't worry. Nobody ever believes what the soldiers say. I told her you humiliated the lieutenant by kissing his wife in a cantina.”

“Hmm.”

“It's something she can believe. I told her there was no reward from the army, but there was plenty more from us. She's seen the color of our money, and she knows if she turns us in I'll tell the soldiers she has it.”

Jack Liffey stared at the boy in wonder. “You don't quite live in a pristine universe after all.”

He made a grim face. “Fear is always understandable, in everyone.”

“You're way past recognizing an old woman's fear. You used it. Bribery and blackmail.”

“I still see it as bad. But would you rather I hadn't?”

“My daughter calls that portable ethics.” Jack Liffey grinned, but the boy was not amused by his own compromises.

They heard another commotion outside and went to their portholes. An army platoon was working its way slowly downhill, dropping soldiers off to each side to pound on doors and push inside. Several of them looked terribly earnest and intense—schoolboys doing their best at dress-up—but others carried their automatic rifles haphazardly, as if they hadn't had the lessons yet. One soldier took note of the animals overhead, still swaying head-down and exhausted. The soldier rapped a companion's shoulder with the back of his hand.

There was laughter, then exhortations and pointing. A few of the gravest round-faced, dark-eyed soldiers looked away, but most gathered at the spectacle. Jack Liffey heard the word
piñata
on the air and then an eruption of laughter. Two soldiers grabbed the arms of the shortest and darkest squaddie who carried only a short carbine and had a big old-fashioned radio strapped to his back. They dragged him toward the animals and somebody produced a bandanna and tied it over his eyes. Soon he had been relieved of the radio, and an NCO snatched away the carbine and reversed it to hand him the barrel end to use as a club.

The tallest soldier, a real beanpole recruit who would have been playing basketball anywhere else in the world, stepped on the locked hands of a comrade and boosted himself upward briefly to grab hold of the rope just above the dog. The renewed activity set both animals protesting as the tall soldier leapt to the ground, holding the dog out away from himself and then sawed the rope up and down to set the hapless cat bobbing up and down above the blindfolded soldier's head. The cat quickly regained enough energy to complain shrilly and slash at the air.

Two troopers spun the blindfolded soldier around and turned him loose to flail at the space over his head with clumsy roundhouse swings of the rifle butt. The calls and cheering intensified and more soldiers descended the hill to watch. The world was not of a single moral opinion though, Jack Liffey noticed. About a third of the soldiers seemed embarrassed and disapproving and moved away with their backs turned.

“This is inexcusable,” Fariborz said softly.

Jack Liffey desperately wanted to turn away, too, but he felt he had to keep watch on the soldiers. He became aware of the pain in his hand—amazed he had forgot it for a few moments—and readjusted his position to get his hand back into the pan of water.

The blindfolded soldier seemed to be taking cues from the shouted directions of his comrades as his big swings with the rifle never strayed far from the cat. The cat itself seemed to sense that something dire was up and it began to loose mewls of terror, one burst after another. One swing clipped the cat's paw and set the animal twirling with a shriek like a steam whistle. The dog was yipping now, too, and it tried to curl itself up to nip at the tall soldier who clung to the rope only a foot above the dog's tail. The dog's assault must have unnerved the soldier because he stopped yanking all at once, which left the cat in easy reach, and one off-balance lunge of the rifle caught the cat square on the head. There was a horrible
thwop
on the hot air like a hardball coming off a bat, and several soldiers ducked away from gouts of cat blood.

Jack Liffey's stomach sank. For a moment the platoon seemed chastened by what they had done. The cat's carcass hung limp, swinging in long pendulum sweeps to spatter blood in arcs across the road, but then they braved themselves up with new cries:
“El perro! Ahorra el perro!”

A far whistle sounded and they looked uphill, warning one another,
“Prisa!”

“El teniente!”

“Allah, please, not the dog, too,” Fariborz objected softly. “Leave the dog alone”

The beanpole grabbed the other end of the rope and began yanking the dog up and down. They spun the blindfolded man again and set him to flailing at the poor dog, which seemed to know what was happening and let out a terrified yip-yap-yip as it wriggled in desperation.

Miss him, miss him, miss him, Jack Liffey begged, but he could not look away. He had seen unpleasantness before, and usually the ugly images dimmed out with time, but he figured this one would probably stick.

The blindfolded soldier swung so hard he stumbled and fell to his knees, and they had to lift him to his feet. Anxious to get it over with, the beanpole lowered the dog into the regulation strike zone and they steadied the blindfolded man into a baseball stance. The dog noticed the ground so much closer and clawed toward it with its forepaws.

“Beisbol, beisbol,”
they chanted. “Strike! Strike! Dodg-airs!”

The blindfolded soldier wound back and fidgeted the rifle over his shoulder for a moment like an old hand at the plate. When he brought the bat around and connected, it was only a glancing blow and so much more terrible for it. A soggy thud marked a swipe to the tiny dog's hindquarters that slung it hard around the butt of the rifle to tangle in its rope. After a stunned instant, the dog emitted one howl that was much too loud for such a small animal. Then the officer came storming down the road, berating and cursing, waving his arms in the air. He was much older and had a bushy mustache and an air of great contempt. The troopers looked sheepish suddenly and backed away, and the tall soldier let go of the rope to leave the bewildered and blindfolded batter standing there alone with the tiny yelping dog strapped to the butt end of his rifle.

The officer drew a .45 automatic from a woven leather holster at his waist and put it against the dog's head. Even as an act of mercy, the gunshot was intolerable in the night, a sacrilege. Much of the dog just disintegrated in a wet rain, and the blast echoed back and forth several times among the shacks. The officer shouted angrily and pointed around the compass to send the soldiers off on their duties. He stared sadly at the slack remains of the hind half of the little dog for a moment as if the officer might have been an animal lover in another life, and then he holstered the pistol and turned to stare straight at the house where they hid.

Jack Liffey felt an electric jolt go through him. Not only was the officer staring directly at their shed but the stocky soldier, the
piñata
breaker, was now unblindfolded and heading for their shack with a sense of purpose, as if he had a lot to make up for.

“Here,” Fariborz whispered. At his direction, they tugged the filthy mattress eight inches away from the wall and Jack Liffey wedged himself into the gap. His hand immediately began to throb, but there was no way now to keep it in the water. The young man tugged the reeking bedspread over him and lay on the bed himself to block any view of what lay in the gap.

They heard a hammering at the front door that was followed immediately by shouts. The old woman must have opened because they heard her and the soldier blustering back and forth. The building shook as heavy boots came inside. Jack Liffey felt a chill course through his limbs. He knew it was only the woman's expectation of more American currency that stood between him and another experience of torture.

He heard the bolt on their inner door clatter, and the door squawked open, and then the soldier shouted into the room. Fariborz said two words very softly. The door slammed and after a while, the young man whispered, “It's okay. The soldier was an idiot. I mean literally.”

“I'm petrified. Literally.”

“We're all right now. The woman was good to us,” the young man said. “I'll give her more money.”

Fariborz lifted the smelly bedspread off him, and Jack Liffey emerged slowly from his niche and thrust his hand into the pan of water. “Ooooh. I'll pay you back when I can.”

“If you can sleep, we've got a couple more hours to kill.”

“Sleep?” His chest shuddered in an attempt at a laugh. “I doubt it. Even my karma is quaking in its boots.”

“How is your hand?”

“That, too.”

“They're early risers, working people,” Fariborz observed. They were making their way across the shadowed
colonia,
and a dozen scattered windows had faint lights burning. One man trudged along the dirt road crossing their path with a paper sack under his arm and the glow of a cigarette stuck in his lip. “Some of them travel for hours on buses to start at six or seven.”

It was three-thirty, and the military sweep had pretty much combed the surplus humanity out of the
colonia.
Jack Liffey was feeling a bit woozy and light-headed. Since he'd had a nap, Fariborz had allowed him a second dose of codeine just before leaving their hideout at about three, the lights over the car-dismantling lot and the remains of the cars themselves completely gone, and the neighborhood sunk into a uniform obscurity. A quarter moon was just rising now out of a banana tree atop the dusty hillside and the moonlight might help them when they got across
la linea
—or hurt them.

There was a four-lane road just ahead, slicing through the heart of the
colonia
away from the industrial zone toward the border station and there was enough traffic on it now to hold them up for a minute, big grinding semis, beat-up Chevys carrying six and seven men to work, pickups with men crouching in back, and even a few taxis. Just after they crossed the airport road, he could see where the abrupt gray scar of the big wall itself showed between rows of the slightly more prosperous homes and shops that nestled down on the flat of the mesa. Funny how it was the better-off who lived on the bottomland in Latin America, he thought, and the poor who lived up the slopes, while it was just the opposite in most of Norte America.

His hand still throbbed dully, but he felt a strange exhilaration as well. Finally he was on the move. And the codeine was kicking in as well, freeing him from self-absorption and fear so he could appreciate that he was treading in the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of others, and he was about to commit the archetypal Southern California crime: He was going to become a wetback, an illegal.

The ebb of pain also freed him up to look around—almost a tourist—at the clash of dimly seen shapes and textures in the
colonia.
Softly eroded mud bricks, pebbly concrete blocks, plywood with oblongs of paint that offered evidence of previous lives, cloudy plastic tacked over window frames. One whole wall of a home was made up of old doors nailed one to another, and an alcove at the end of another house appeared to be a Maytag box, sealed against the weather with shiny resin. A kerosene lantern flickered in a kitchen window where a round old woman in a scarf was busy patting tortillas between her hands, a genuine icon of Mexico.

Nearby a car stammered and coughed, trying to start. The eerie moonlight shone along the unpaved side streets to the east, silvering the hardpan that was dotted with weeds and motionless animals. Then suddenly they arrived. The road sign along the wall said Cañon Emiliano Zapata and rubbish had piled up against the ribbed steel as if a tidal surge had swept through the town and deposited its burden at the limit of the flood.

“It's made of construction panels from the Gulf War,” Fariborz explained. Looking up, Jack Liffey could see the top of the wall was a single strand of that newest sort of razor wire, intolerably sharp little slice-your-finger-off tabs sticking up every inch or so. The whole ugly structure was about ten feet tall and had been hit with a lot of graffiti and dented with rocks and other aimless pounding of resentment. Rust seemed to have proceeded at different rates from panel to panel, suggesting they were of different ages, suggesting in fact an unremitting struggle between one set of people wrenching panels loose and another rebuilding. A little farther west, someone had worked loops of wire onto the rivets holding the wall together and run a washing line flat along the metal for thirty feet, where pennants of underwear and children's bright T-shirts dangled in the still night. He had to admire the resourceful housewife making practical use of the monstrosity.

A block to the east, a burned-out wheelless pickup truck was abandoned right next to the wall and Fariborz led him that way. A fist-sized hole had been punched through the metal two feet above the roof of the cab, and someone had impaled a large gunnysack of rags on the razor strand immediately above the makeshift step. Obviously the
colonia's
designated crossing point for that night, or one of them. He wondered if they had all gone before, or they were still waiting for something; cloud cover, fog, or their own coyote.

Fariborz clambered onto the truck roof as Jack Liffey kept lookout. No one seemed to be stirring. The young man peered through the hole into his other country and waved Jack Liffey up.

“Gotta go, T.J.,” Jack Liffey whispered. “Sorry. It's been fun.”

He helped boost the boy up from the single foothold to the sack of rags at the top, which he bellied himself onto. Fariborz was very agile. He found handholds on the ragbag and swung his legs out sideways and then over, like some trick on a vaulting horse. Jack Liffey heard him drop and land on the far side with a grunt. He peered through the hole into a surprising vision of emptiness. Behind him in the
colonia,
he could picture the miles and miles of houses crowding right up to the
frontera.
But on the other side, there was only a bulldozed hundred feet of no-man's-land, plowed and poisoned to dead weedless soil, and then an even higher mesh fence with the top third angled toward Mexico. Beyond this second see-through fence there were gently rolling knolls and far away a handful of concrete warehouses and other structures. The very United States. It was the first time he'd ever seen it like this, truly from outside, this forbidden land, promised land—a place tantalizing with jobs, wealth, a future, but only beyond a tribulation zone of great danger. Dirt trails cut here and there on the rolling land just beyond the no-man's-land, obviously well-traveled by motorcycles or three-wheelers, and portable light towers were scattered here and there. There was not a tree or shelter to be seen.

Time to go. He planted his foot in the hole and clawed his way up the ribbed metal so his chin was just over the bag of rags. He took a close look at one of the razor-sharp tabs beside the burlap, the size of a fingernail, and realized even with the padding he was going to have to be careful or risk serious injury. He got a grip with both hands where the rag was thickest and tugged himself up slowly, his arm muscles screaming in complaint, until finally his waist rested over the top, his legs sticking straight out behind. At one point the padding was a bit thin and he could feel a tickle of danger in his belly. There would be no fancy vaulting dismount for him. He leaned forward more and more until he felt himself start to go and then he tried to somersault forward into the USA. He didn't come fully over, though, and his back hit first with a wrenching jolt, and then his buttocks and legs slammed down ahead of him, knocking the breath out of him.

Fariborz squatted beside him, looking concerned.

“Oh-point-five,” Jack Liffey said, his diaphragm barely obeying his effort to speak. “Degree of difficulty.” He had scraped his sore hand coming down, too, reanimating a little of that terrible pain, and now he shook it hard. It was probably the codeine keeping him from real pain, and contributing to the goofy amusement he felt at himself. The boy shushed him with a gesture and pointed. A quarter mile away, a green-and-white INS truck was parked facing them right in the middle of the dead strip. The agent inside seemed to be asleep or distracted.

“Let's go.”

Fariborz led in a bent-over Groucho Marx duck walk across the dead zone to where a rag had been tied to the next layer of fence. It marked a slit in the stiff expanded metal lattice. Somebody had gone at it with a metal cutter up to chest height, so all they had to do was pry it open and slip through. He nicked his wrist, but made it easily.

Beyond the second fence, the rolling land was cut up by dry ravines that would offer a little cover if he could talk himself into scrambling down into them. There was an overwhelming reek of human shit rising out of them. A mile or so ahead there were a few well-lit warehouses and parking lots separated by blank patches of pitch dark. He knew the official border crossing—the road that became I-5—was a mile to the their left, but it was hidden by a low rise.

“Are we technically across?”

“I think so.” They descended into the nearest of the fetid arroyos and fell silent when they heard the burring of a light plane advancing low along the border. It probably had infrared going, or night scopes, and they pressed back into the moon shadows on the east side of the arroyo until the faint outline of the high-wing spotter plane passed, replaced by the sound of crickets chirping away in the ravine.

“La Migra,”
the boy said unnecessarily. “That's just the beginning. The INS has helicopters and four-wheeler trucks, and Humvees and those fat-tire desert-bike things.”

“We've got one advantage,” Jack Liffey said. “We're actually legal. We could walk in singing ‘Dixie' if we wanted to, but I'd much rather get out of here unseen. I don't know if some Immigration officer wouldn't hand me back to the
judiciales
in a little quick-and-dirty extradition—‘just a little mistake, señor'—for the extra cash. Maybe they're using that rape story over here, too.”

“And there's the
patrullas ratas,”
Fariborz warned. “Rat patrols, some really nasty gangsters who rip off the illegals. We're not home yet.”

They followed the arroyo for about a quarter mile. Here it was shallow enough that by climbing a few feet they could see the end of Interstate-5 at the border crossing, lit up like a mirage. There was a twenty-four-hour strip mall and a set of yellow MacDonald's arches bright as a picture postcard in the vast, dark no-man's-land. He hadn't really thought through what to do once they got across, but now was the time.

He knew there was a trolley stop at the crossing, and the trolley would take them directly into downtown San Diego. But there were plenty of dangers getting there—overzealous INS agents, the rat patrols, he'd even read of bands of right-wing thugs out of rural San Diego County who liked to come down to the border with baseball bats and powerful flashlights and help the INS defend the American Way of Life by bashing a few wetbacks.

“What do you say we circle around a bit through these arroyos, and come into the trolley stop from the north?” Jack Liffey suggested.

“Sure.”

While they caught their breath, they saw far away a big 747 rising out of San Diego on four throbs of light, like normality waving from just out of reach. He wondered what flew that early—maybe FedEx or something military. Nearby there was a sudden screech out in the darkness, followed by the triumphant cry of a bird. In the moonlight, he could just make out a hawk rising on labored wings as it carried a small kicking rodent in its talons. This was about as emblematic as he needed things to get.

Behind them an engine growled. He saw the silhouette of a big-tire Border Patrol truck riding a ridge, a Chevy Blazer or something similar with the body so high it looked like it could wade through anything. A swivel-light on the roof stabbed around into the canyons like a finger trying for a sore spot. The light fastened briefly on a mangy yellow dog that ran hard out of the sudden illumination. Rabies, he thought—one more thing to worry about.

When the truck went its way, they moved on northward and found the arroyo deepening until they could see only narrowly straight ahead. They weren't the first to come this way. Moonlight showed a discarded packet of Alas cigarettes, and another for Canel's gum, unfamiliar brand names. Here and there the sides of the ditch were scooped out into minicaves, apparently to harbor a few border-crossers for a layover of a few minutes or a few hours. The smell of excrement was much stronger near the hollows.

Fariborz hissed and they both froze. There was just enough moonlight so Jack Liffey could see the young man pointing to the ground ahead, the V-bottom of the arroyo. He wrinkled up his forehead as if willpower alone could intensify his vision, and then, because of the slight movements, he finally made it out in the silver light. A tarantula bigger than his fist was pacing right across their path, languidly lifting two legs at a time and placing them down experimentally beside its hairy body.

“Tarantulas have the right of way,” Jack Liffey insisted, and they waited to let it go its unhurried way. The spider didn't worry him much, with all the other perils out there. As far as he knew, not many people were killed by tarantulas. A rattler would have been a different story. He'd stepped on a diamondback as a ten-year-old hiking in the hills above San Pedro and still had a vivid tactile memory of that rubbery hose of a snake under his shoe. He had run all the way home, periodically flagging in exhaustion, but then picking up the pace again when his imagination flaunted the snake right behind him, right
there,
flailing along frictionlessly, its jaws open to bite.

Fariborz gave a little cry and Jack Liffey's pulse thundered as the tarantula leapt straight up in the air and then just vanished out of their universe. They both patted frantically at themselves to make sure the spider wasn't clinging to their arms or chests. He'd heard tarantulas could leap prodigiously, but it was still startling.

They took a moment to comfort one another and then went on, accompanied by the unremitting stench of human shit and rotting foodstuffs. A flying insect began to make passes at their heads and they waved furiously to shoo it away, Jack Liffey imagining on what offal its tiny feet might have rested only moments before. At a rock outcrop, the ravine took them through a hard right bend and then straightened north again.

“I thought this crossing would be easy,” Fariborz said. “But it's turning out to be pretty weird.”