I got another jolt, hard enough this time to crush the trunk and push me toward the shoulder, where I sent gravel flying as I glimpsed the edge of a rocky chasm whose bottom I couldn’t see. I swung the wheel hard, regained the road, pressed down on the accelerator, and pulled away. The headlights came right after me, ramming me again as I entered a sharp curve, causing the Mustang to slide on its old tires, out to the dusty shoulder and inches from the lip of the precipice before I was able to correct the wheels and find some asphalt again.
This time I floored it, shooting away from the headlights and up the narrow road. I stayed on the accelerator like that for miles, my other foot hovering over the brake pedal, dangerously close to going over the side on the sharpest turns. I’d started to smell smoke from my overheated brake pads when the lights of Ojai came into view. Moments later, I spotted the gentle turnoff to the left that led visitors into the quaint little town of artists and musicians and health spas, famous for its fine, dry weather and painterly light. I cut straight across both lanes the moment it was safe and past the sign welcoming me into town, while the vehicle behind me kept going.
It was a dark solid-looking sports utility vehicle with tinted windows, and it was around the bend and gone before I could make out the license number. I might have seen it before but I wasn’t sure. To me, all SUVs looked the same, and there seemed to be several million of them cruising the California highways, hulking vehicles like this one warning smaller cars like mine to get out of their way. All I knew for sure about this one was that its driver had more than a passing interest in seeing me dead.
When my hands were finally still and my heartbeat steady, I pulled back onto the twisting highway, keeping my eyes open.
I returned from Montecito at half past nine to find Maurice and Fred sitting disconsolately on the front porch swing. Fred drank from a can of Bud Light, while Maurice sipped chamomile tea, offering to brew me a cup.
I wanted only to get up to a hot shower and into bed, but Maurice started talking about Mei-Ling, so I spent a few minutes dutifully listening. He told me there was still no sign of her, but that he and Fred planned to go out looking again in the morning, saying it with a questioning glance that let me know I was welcome to go along. I promised to rejoin the search first thing tomorrow, and headed up to bed.
My good intentions evaporated as I played back the three messages waiting for me on my machine. The first was from Templeton, some brief chatter about the plane crash and her role in its coverage. Behind her words I could hear the rush of reporter’s adrenaline that coldly shoved aside all sentimentality, even when she ticked off the body count. The second was a reminder from Dr. Watanabe that I’d need to bring in a second set of stool samples when I finished my ten-day regimen of pills, to make sure they’d done the job. I listened stretched out on the bed, as my eyes slowly closed, the hot shower forgotten, thinking only of sleep.
Then the third message started playing. I sat straight up, wide-eyed, as I heard the voice of Chucho Pernales coming over the lines from Tijuana. He told me to meet him at Mi Amigo at one in the morning:
Bring lots of money. Maybe I tell you what you want.
I grabbed the roll I’d withdrawn from the bank the day before, explained to Maurice and Fred where I was going, and before they could protest, I was back in the Mustang, on my way to an appointment in Zona Norte.
I broke all the speed limits, got away with it, and crossed the border shortly after midnight, into a city of mayhem.
I’d returned on a Saturday night in the middle of spring break, and TJ was filled with thousands of college kids wound up with wild energy and looking for some kind of liberation from the usual rules. Most of them were inside the discos, drinking themselves into a stupor, or staggering through the streets. I saw them kneeling in the gutter, puking their guts out, or being hauled off to jail in vans and patrol cars by the brown-uniformed disco squad. The first three motels I tried, including my favorite, were packed—security guards were stationed out front to turn cars away—and I quickly realized that finding a safe room in TJ would be next to impossible. Carrying several thousand dollars in cash around the streets of Zona Norte after midnight was not my idea of a fun time.
Then I remembered Armando.
Armando Ornellas ran an auto-restoring business on Avenida Ocampo, just south of Calle Benito Juárez. Back in the eighties, I’d written a freelance magazine piece on the legendary paint-and-body shops of Tijuana, and Armando had been touted as the one paint-and-body man you could trust. I’d checked him out, interviewed him, and featured him in the article, publicity that had been so profitable for him that he’d sent me a personal thank-you note and an invitation to visit any time I was in town, along with a photo of himself with his wife, eight kids, and six infant grandchildren. The paint-and-body shops along Ocampo were ordinarily closed at night, but during spring break and the Cinco de Mayo holiday weekend, some of them stayed open twenty-four hours, taking advantage of the hordes of kids who swarmed across the border and went gaga over the bargains.
It was half past twelve when I turned off Calle Benito Juárez and rolled south along bumpy Ocampo, where the sharp smell of paint fumes struck my nostrils and the street clanged with the sound of ball peen hammers banging against metal. Most of the shops were open, with cars lined up at every entrance, even doubled parked out on the street, while workers stripped, sanded, and taped the ones inside before sending them on to the paint rooms. Armando’s shop was in the middle of the block, and I saw him out front with two other men, all of them in slacks and sports shirts, keeping their eyes on the street, watching for potential customers. It had been at least a dozen years and many thousand tortillas since I’d seen Armando; he’d added an inch or two around the belly, but I recognized him instantly—the open, affable face, the broken nose, the drooping, Pancho Villa mustache now completely gray.
He glanced at the Mustang curiously as I pulled over, and regarded me more keenly as I got out, while recognition eluded him. But the moment I spoke my name and said the word
periodista
—journalist—he broke into a grin and greeted me like an old friend. I told him straight out that my time was tight and what my problem was. He agreed to hold most of my cash, and offered me a receipt, which I turned down. Then I told him I’d like some work done on the Mustang—new paint, new top, new upholstery, body work all around—and that I’d need it back first thing Monday morning, looking classy. He said he could get it done as a favor to an old friend, and I asked for a price.
He circled the convertible with questions, stroking his chin, guessing correctly that the Mustang was the classic the car buffs called the 1964-and-a-half. I told him I wanted black tuck and roll inside, front and back. New dashboard, new door panels, accordion top, new taillights, the whole enchilada.
He paused with his hand on his stubbly chin, raising his eyebrows.
“You want a Mexican job or an American job?”
“American—your best materials and two coats of paint, guaranteed no peel.”
He conferred in Spanish with the two men nearby, came back with a price of eighteen hundred dollars. I told him I’d give him two thousand if he’d oversee the job himself. That raised a grin, which showed me a gold tooth in front.
“You got it, amigo.”
I glanced at my watch, saw that it was almost one, peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills from my roll, gave the rest to Armando.
“Monday morning, eight o’clock.”
He shook my hand, and placed his other hand on the Mustang.
“She’ll be ready.”
A few seconds after that I was in a taxi, telling the driver to get me to Plaza Santa Cecilia fast.
*
I pushed through the mob of Americans that filled the plaza, past the mariachis and the vendors with baskets of wrapped tamales balanced on their heads, past the female prostitutes outside the straight bars, and into Mi Amigo.
The same two women were behind the bar—short-cropped hair, rolled sleeves, downcast eyes, hands that always stayed busy. Otherwise, the place was jammed with
mexicanos
and a few
turistas,
drinking beer or shots of tequila. Somebody had put coins in the jukebox, and Miguel Bosé was singing a ballad and there was lots of laughter and the clinking of bottles and the clatter of balls striking one another on the pool table. A few of the
mexicanos,
the young ones, were wearing the wide-brimmed straw hats and boots that marked them as country boys, and all of them tried to catch my eye as I strolled through the room looking for Chucho Pernales.
I didn’t see him, and took a stool at the far end of the bar to wait. He’d said one o’clock, but Mexicans tend to have a different sense of time than Americans, sometimes no sense at all if life happens to get in the way. Yet he had to know how important this meeting was, what it meant to both of us, that it couldn’t be put off until manaña, like so many things that matter less. I ordered a Dos Equis dark and started nursing it, sipping at the cold beer while trying to keep my eyes off the bottles of tequila behind the bar but not doing a very good job of it. One of the country boys sitting at a counter that divided the room was smiling at me like he wanted to spend some time with me, and when he winked, he let me know how easy it could be. A gringo closer to my age but pushing fifty came up to the bar a stool away and ordered tequila. While the bartender sliced up a lime on a small plate and placed a shaker of salt in front of him, he started chatting me up, telling me he was from San Diego, asking me how often I came down, going on about how great TJ was, how willing and cheap the boys were. The weariness I’d experienced earlier had started to overtake me again, weakening my resistance, deadening my will. It would be so easy—a bottle of Cuervo and the cute country boy winking under the wide-brimmed hat, and no more concerns about Chucho Pernales or lost dogs or troubling medical matters. When the bartender poured the shot and the gringo offered me one of my own, I knew it was time to get out of that bar or start dying in it.
I turned down the drink and asked the bartender if she’d seen Chucho Pernales tonight. She told me in Spanish that the cops had picked him up just before I came in. For what? I asked.
She shrugged, laughing darkly.
“Por nada.”
The disco police had come around, she said, and spotted Chucho standing in the doorway. They knew the place was gay, that he was a
joven
who hustled. He’d just turned eighteen, she said, so they demanded to see his military papers, now that he was of draft age. He’d explained that he hadn’t been called for his physical yet, so he had no papers, but they didn’t care about that, and dragged him off.
To do what? I asked.
Beat him up, she said. Maybe take him to jail or down a dark side street and take turns with him, using him like a woman. In Mexico, she reminded me, a man never considers himself homosexual as long as he’s the one on top, doing the fucking. That’s how it’s always been, she said, how it will always be. The husbands have their mistresses, and sometimes a boy if the opportunity arises, and the wives look the other way. For the disco police, opportunity was everywhere, right on the street; they didn’t even need to go to the
baños
on Saturday afternoons to take their pleasure in the steam rooms with other married men. She told me the cops had shot Chucho once, about a year ago, right outside the bar with people watching. Shot him in the leg where it missed the bone and went clean through, she said. Then they laughed at him and walked away, while some men from the bar took him to the hospital. He had a big scar on the fleshy part of his leg that looked like a burn, where the bullet had torn up his flesh.
It’s not right, I said.
This is Zona Norte, she said. The police do what they want here. Be careful, gringo. You are in Zona Norte now.
“Do you know where I can find Chucho?”
Maybe later tonight, she said, in Colonia Libertad, where his mother and sisters live. I asked for the address, but she didn’t know it.
Manana, she said. Come back tomorrow, and maybe Chucho will be here if they didn’t beat him up too badly. Or maybe next week, or some other time.
*
I stepped from Mi Amigo, saw no cops, and headed through the plaza to my right, away from the heart of Zona Norte. I wasn’t sure where I was going; maybe back to Armando’s for some advice about how to find the Pernales family, or just to ask for a bed for the night, so I could close my eyes. I’d sleep in the backseat of the Mustang if I had to, as long as I could curl up and not move for a while.
I had taken only a few steps across the dusty, cobbled stones when I heard the word “faggot!” shouted at my back. The voice was deep and slurred, and sounded American. I kept walking, same pace, without looking back. The voice kept after me, asking the faggot where he was going, why the faggot didn’t get himself a pretty muchacha, why the faggot had come to TJ to suck Mexican dick when there were so many fine lady whores available to do what normal guys like to do.
Then the voice was right beside me and I saw that it belonged to a clean-cut, broad-shouldered college kid who looked like he’d put in plenty of time in the weight room and maybe more on the football field. So did the four young men with him, who crowded around me, laughing, adding their puerile taunts. They were all solidly built, Caucasian, and sufficiently inebriated to swagger through the plaza as if they owned it. I ignored them all the way to the southern edge, where Plaza Santa Cecilia ended on another side street, while realizing that I was forty-one, in lousy health, and unprepared to take on even one of them if things got ugly, which they quickly did.
“Let’s take this dude to a real bar and buy him a drink.”
They seized me by the arms and collar, laughing as they did it, and when I tried to fight them off, twist free, they simply tightened their grip and laughed harder. I was dragged back to Avenida Revolución, around the corner, down the sidewalk, past the endless barkers and the long string of clubs. Most of the curio shops were closed now, surrendering to the youthful crowd and the particular nightlife it demanded. Police cars raced back and forth along the boulevard, sirens wailing, while beer bottles sailed from the open windows of the clubs, shattering on the pavement. I’m sure I looked like just another drunk to the throngs along Revolución and even to the cops, a combative drunk whose buddies were looking out for him, laughing as he tried to fight them off.
“This place.”
The leader stopped at a disco where rock music blasted out the open front windows, which were filled with American kids leaning out with pitchers of beer, calling for us to come on in. The sidewalk pitchmen were urging us on from behind, promising all-you-can-drink specials, beer by the bucket, a sexy underwear contest, “the best DJ in TJ.” A moment later I was being hauled up the stairs, into the thumping music and flashing strobe lights and several hundred stumbling, writhing bodies, where the smell of alcohol and perspiration mixed with the heavier aromas of urine and vomit.