*
I wrote my name and phone number and a brief message to Chucho Pernales on a leaf of notebook paper. Together with a twenty-dollar bill, I handed it to the lady bartender I’d spoken to before. I asked her to give the note to Chucho, and to tell him that he could make a lot of money just by talking to me, possibly thousands of American dollars if he told me what I needed to hear.
She nodded, pocketed the twenty, turned away to polish glasses, and didn’t look at me again. Neither did anyone else in the bar. The old men drank their beer and the mechanics shot stick. The hustlers in their pointed boots had disappeared.
I stepped outside to the plaza, where the old mariachis had gotten their second wind and resumed their lusty performance, and the little children came at me one more time, begging for coins. I walked the half block back to Avenida Revolución, queasy and spent, drained of patience and feeling dark and edgy in a way I hadn’t in a while. Part of that came from fighting the call of the liquor and part of it from the realization that I was no longer very young or very strong, that my days of adventure and arrogant bravado were behind me, probably forever. Maybe some of it came from the simple fact that I’d come looking for Chucho Pernales on behalf of Charlotte Preston, and when I’d found him, I’d let him get away, partly because I was just so damn scared.
When the barkers saw me this time and began to swarm, trumpeting their wares and their whores, I told them pointedly to fuck off. They cursed me half-heartedly in Spanish as I climbed into a taxi, then quickly turned away, looking for another mark.
I gave the driver the name of my hotel and rode the entire way in silence, not bothering to look out the window, not even as the sound of an old recording of Streisand singing “People” drifted from the open door of El Pequeño Palacio, all the way out to the lonely street.
Tijuana is a different city in the morning, before the flesh peddlers and the predators turn it into a garish nighttime carnival where minds are blown and bodies bought and sold.
I saw it from a corner restaurant near the hotel, off the main boulevard, sitting in a leatherette booth with a cup of coffee and my notebook open in front of me. Beyond the big windows, shopkeepers were raising the folding metal doors on their
paleterias
while the ubiquitous taxis whisked people to work and trucks loaded with water bottles rattled through the streets. Kids trooped past with backpacks on their shoulders and their dark hair slicked down, looking pretty much like any other kids on their way to school at half past eight in the morning. The place was crowded, filled with spirited Latin music and even louder chatter. From time to time, great bursts of laughter rose above the music and the noise of babies, which no one seemed to mind. It was just breakfast, but it felt more like a party, the kind of dining you rarely experience in the more WASPish enclaves of the States, unless you carefully plan and orchestrate it, which is never quite the same. I believe I heard more genuine laughter that morning than I’d heard in any single year of my life growing up back in Buffalo.
I scrawled a note:
Apologize to Maurice for being such a prick.
Then another:
Back to Equus to speak with George Krytanos again.
Chucho Pernales was out there somewhere in bustling TJ, among a million or two others, and I felt like he might be the key to this whole thing, but I also knew I might never see him again, that I needed some options.
Another note:
Put the pressure on Edward T. Felton, see what happens
.
I ordered a Spanish omelet, which came to the table fluffy and hot, wrapped around cheese and spinach with freshly chopped salsa on the side—onion, tomato, cilantro, bright orange jalapeno pepper for that extra bite. It was as good an omelet as I’d ever tasted, but I had to force myself to nibble at it, and I knew that I was growing sicker each day, not just wrung out from the fever and chronic diarrhea and chasing all over TJ, but genuinely diseased in a bad way and getting worse. That made me think of Chucho again, the kid named Prettyboy, who wouldn’t be so pretty or able to run so fast from pursuing gringos unless he found a way to turn his condition around. Chucho and me, we were brothers now, related by the virus.
I closed my notebook, paid my check, and by 9 a.m. was driving down the nearly deserted boulevard of Avenida Revolución. I crossed Calle 3 and turned right at Calle Benito Juarez, which led back to the border, stopping along the way at the sprawling Mercado de Artesanias to find a peace offering for Maurice. The huge, dusty plaza was crowded with a couple of hundred workshops and
tiendas.
It lay in the shadow of the elevated bridge that spanned the two countries, with the clatter and hum of freeway traffic always in the background. I could see hundreds of Mexicans with their precious legal working papers scurrying up the zigzagging stairway and making their way across the freeway to the pedestrian checkpoint on the other side, where they’d continue on to their jobs cleaning toilets and cutting lawns and doing the sweaty, heavy work so many Americans would no longer touch.
I spent half an hour among the craftsmen and their wares, looking at wrought iron, blown glass, woven baskets, leather goods, pottery. I finally selected a stained-glass piece I thought Maurice would like, a design of delicate pastel flowers in leaded glass for hanging in a window and catching the light. While I was at it, I picked up a handcrafted leather belt for Fred so he wouldn’t feel left out and because he’d put up with my arrogance and bullshit for as long as Maurice had. The belt was wide, and long enough to encompass Fred’s girth, with a heavy silver buckle inscribed with the word
amistad,
for friendship, along the top, and at the bottom the word
familia.
For all the distance between us at times, Maurice and Fred were the only family I had now, the oldest friends still living. Fred wouldn’t say much when I gave him the belt—he never said much of anything—but I suspected he’d like it and I knew he’d understand.
*
By ten, I was in line with hundreds of other cars, waiting to cross the border. Because it was a weekday, and not yet summer, most of the drivers were Mexican, heading with their documents to their American jobs, before returning home at the end of the day. Traffic would be just as heavy on the weekends, when
turistas
made up the bulk of the drivers. It always peaked on Monday mornings, when departing visitors and
mexicanos
combined to bring the twenty-seven lanes nearly to a standstill, and inspections became, by necessity, cursory at best. I knew all this because I’d written a couple of stories down here in the old days, choice assignments that got me out of the city room for a day or two, thanks to Harry.
As the lanes gradually merged to only a dozen, I moved the Mustang ahead in fits and starts, with my notebook open in my lap, jotting down thoughts and observations while I slowly approached the border stations. Most of the American drivers were being waved through automatically, unless they drove vans or closed trucks or otherwise looked suspicious for some reason. Those being pulled aside for inspection were generally dark-skinned drivers in vehicles that looked like they might conceal contraband, or those whose papers were not quite in order. If a drug-sniffing dog picked up a scent, then any vehicle became fair game. I looked up to see fifteen or twenty open feet ahead of me and the American border agent waiting at his station glaring at me through dark glasses as the car ahead of me scooted up the road. I put the notebook aside, pressed on the gas, and closed the gap until I was next to the agent’s open door.
He was a paunchy guy in a dark blue uniform with badly trimmed graying hair and a mustache that didn’t look much better. He smiled coldly as I looked up from behind the wheel, then gave the standard greeting in Spanish, designed to catch Spanish-language drivers off guard, which seemed a bit ridiculous in my case.
“Buenos días.”
“Good morning, Officer.”
I’d seen the last of his unpleasant smile for a while.
“You can’t follow the car in front of you?”
I didn’t understand his question and said so.
He held his hands out, two feet apart, like an angler describing the one that got away.
“The way you’re supposed to follow is two to three feet behind, not twenty.”
“I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
“No, I guess you weren’t, were you?”
I smiled, trying to lighten him up.
“I wasn’t stashing contraband, if that’s your worry.”
“If that was my worry, you’d know it by now.”
He said it sounding vaguely like a B-movie tough guy, and I started to understand what was happening. He probably was a miserable man with a job he didn’t like and a life he enjoyed even less. I’d been through these checkpoints half a dozen times over the years without any trouble, sometimes with barely more than a nod and a smile, and a hand waving me through. Most of the agents seemed pretty squared away, sometimes even friendly, just doing their job. This one had me by the
huevos,
a moment of power and glory that seemed to have him tingling, and he was determined to squeeze my balls a little, even if it meant holding up traffic for a minute or two.
“What were you doing in Tijuana?”
“Research. I’m a writer.”
I indicated the pen and notebook on the seat next to me.
“Why don’t you write about the tough job we’ve got trying to keep these people down here where they belong?”
“Maybe I’ll do that.”
He smirked. “Maybe you’ll do that.”
I said nothing, so he asked where I was from, and I told him. He snorted with bitter laughter.
“Los Angeles—it’s just the same as Tijuana these days, isn’t it?”
“If you see it that way.”
He didn’t like that, and made a quick survey of the Mustang.
“I guess you decided not to go for the body work and the new tuck and roll.”
“Maybe next time.”
“Just can’t stay away, can you?”
I took off my dark glasses, knowing it would make a guy like him uneasy.
“Are you going to pass me through? Or send me to the side for a car inspection and a strip search, so you can gloat for the rest of the day and try to feel like half a man?”
He kept his dark glasses on, which I figured he would, and didn’t say anything for a long moment, though he swallowed dryly. When he finally did open his mouth again, he did his best to sound smug and dismissive.
“You’re American, I guess. You don’t mind if I ask you that?”
“I’m American.”
“Have a nice trip home.”
He was already looking at the car behind me, and just as quickly I was pressing the accelerator and moving north again.
*
I merged onto the freeway pushing seventy, cruising past a bright yellow sign with the word
CAUTION
and a silhouette of a mother and father running, pulling a child by the hand, reminding drivers how desperate some families were to get across the border. I used to see them every time I came down, mostly men and boys but sometimes women and children, climbing over the freeway shoulder from the ocean side, where they’d hiked along the beach during the night, eluding the border patrol in the dark. When they thought it was clear, they’d dash pell-mell through the speeding traffic in the southbound lanes, usually surviving but sometimes not, then scramble over the divider into the busy northbound lanes, startling drivers, sprinting to waiting vehicles pulled over at the shoulder on the other side.
The
coyote
freeway connections didn’t happen so much anymore, now that the U.S. Border Patrol had beefed up its manpower and surveillance equipment along the five westernmost miles connecting the two countries. There were more than eight thousand agents nationwide now, with a high concentration between Tijuana and San Diego, and unlike past years, they snagged most of the
ilegales
before they got this far. The crackdown had forced the most desperate farther east, where they sometimes suffocated in overstuffed vans in the desert heat or froze to death in groups as they tried to come across the mountains on foot. It was a game the
ilegales
played, trying to get back into the California that once had been Mexican before they lost it in a territorial war they’d had no hope of winning. It was a dangerous and deadly game, and they knew it, but they came anyway. They would always come, as long as they had strong backs and babies to feed. For most, those were the only things they had at all.
*
I was back in L.A. in time to keep an afternoon appointment with Dr. Watanabe at the Miller Medical Clinic.
I checked in as usual with Ruby, who was in a typically boisterous mood. She’d had her hair braided since the last time I saw her, the way Templeton used to wear hers before she cut it into a pageboy, and when Ruby laughed, her big breasts bounced and her dangling braids did a little dance. Behind her open receptionist’s window, she turned to her computer to verify my appointment in the two o’clock time slot. Over her shoulder, listed for the same hour, I saw another name that caught my attention: Freddie Fuentes.
Ruby thanked me for arriving early and suggested I find a magazine and chair until someone called for me. Instead, I turned the other way, pretending to study the moody desert photographs I’d admired on my last visit. Not quite ten minutes later, Fuentes entered from the elevator with his hand on the shoulder of a waifish-looking Asian boy.
I heard Ruby’s booming voice.
“Mr. Fuentes! We haven’t seen you in a while. And who’s this good-looking young man—a new patient for Dr. Miller?”
I directed my eyes back to the gallery while Fuentes said something I didn’t hear before crossing with the boy to a door on my right. They waited in front of it with Fuentes gripping the knob until Ruby buzzed them through. The phone rang at her desk and when she turned to pick it up, I dashed to the door just before it swung closed, and caught it with my foot. A moment later, I slipped inside.
Fuentes and the boy were disappearing around a corner, and I waited until they were out of sight before going after them. When I peered around the corner, I saw Dr. Miller waiting at the end of the hall, next to the door of the examining room I’d accidentally found him in during my initial visit a few days earlier. He was smiling pleasantly between his red bow and granny glasses as Fuentes led the boy in his direction. When they reached him, Dr. Miller laid a fatherly hand on the boy’s shoulder and turned him into the room while Fuentes followed, shutting the door behind them.
I made my way quietly back out, to wait for my appointment.
*
“What you’ve got is a parasite,
entamoeba histolytica.
We see it in a lot of patients who are HIV-positive.”
Dr. Watanabe sat at his desk with the door closed. My file was open in front of him, while he studied the results of my blood panel.
“It’s commonly found in ordinary tap water. To people whose immune systems are normal, it’s almost never a problem. Their systems simply reject it. To those who are immunosuppressed, however, it can result in a stomach infection and just the kind of symptoms you’re exhibiting.”