Finnegan's week

CHAPTER 5

At every stoplight there were vendors selling cigarettes, soft drinks, tamales, flowers. Children scampered through traffic placing Chiclets on the window ledge of cars stopped for traffic signals. And if the motorist did not give the children a few coins for the gum, the waifs would snatch back the Chiclets just before the light changed to green, dodging the fast-moving traffic like tiny matadors.

“We early, Buey,” Abel said, looking at his watch. “I drive aroun’ for leetle while. Then we go see Soltero.”

The traffic roundabouts made the ox uneasy, which Abel noticed when a smoking pickup truck cut them off and sped into a hub where streets fed out like spokes of a wheel.

“Thees called gloriettas,” Abel said.

“How the fuck you know when it’s your turn?” Shelby asked, just as a beat-up Oldsmobile, its side windows patched with plywood, zoomed across in front of the van and rattled off on one of the wheel spokes.

“They work good,” Abel said. “Don’ worry.”

“Lotta squids around here,” Shelby said.

“Wha’s that?”

“Fast bad drivers. Squids,” Shelby said nervously.

On nearly every street and highway around downtown Tijuana Shelby saw unfamiliar sights that made him anxious. A clown in sad white-face juggled balls and pocketed coins from motorists stopped for the traffic light. A fire-eater on the opposite corner performed for cars going the other way. Bony dogs prowled and rooted inside garbage containers, or just lay dangerously close to the endless traffic flow, inhaling noxious fumes from derelict cars.

“Man, I coulda crapped through a keyhole when you was givin a bribe to that Mexican cop,” Shelby said as they inched through the city traffic. “My shit was syrup and I ain’t scared to say it. I don’t wanna go to stony lonesome, not down in this fuckin country.”

“Wha’s that, Buey?”

“Jail, man! The fuckin calaboose. A Mexican jail where they wake you up with cattle prods in your ass. And a course, they don’t have no trouble findin your asshole ’cause some four-hundred-pound Indian convict from Sonora jist turned you into his pillow-bitin squaw. That’s stony lonesome around these parts, dude!”

“I tol’ you, ’mano, don’ worry,” Abel said. “That customs man, he jus’ turn us back eef he don’ take the mordida. But he like the money. They all like the mordida. They don’ get paid nada.”

But the ox wasn’t reassured, Abel could see that. The hulking trucker was sweating. Beads dripped off his whiskers, and he was starting to smell, and not just from work sweat. Like in those drainpipes when Abel used to cross the frontier between Tijuana and San Diego at night, hoping that if anyone discovered him it would be la migra, the Border Patrol, and not Mexican bandits. The other pollos who crossed with him, they would smell like this while they waited in those drainpipes by the Canyon of the Dead.

“We going to be out een two, three hour, Buey,” Abel said. “You don’ got to worry.”

It was the multitudes that Shelby didn’t like. People walking, sitting, standing, driving. Shelby didn’t like crowds. He never went to Jack Murphy Stadium even though he was a fan of both the Padres and Chargers. He watched his sports on TV to avoid the mobs. And these people, many were so small, so dark, so leathery: Indians, without a drop of European blood in them. Like burros, he thought, little Mexican burros, exceptionally strong for their size.

As a child, Shelby had seen lots of these little Indian migrants working in the lettuce fields near Stockton. And after getting the job at Green Earth he was often astonished at how they could muscle big drums onto the trucks, drums that he wouldn’t move without a hand dolly, and he was twice the size of any of them.

This Tijuana peasant class, these leathery little Indians, made him very nervous and he couldn’t explain it. Maybe it was those black eyes, fathoms deep, no way to read them. He might be indifferent to them when they were on his side of the border, but now, on their side he was unnerved and didn’t know why.

“How many people live in this miserable fuckin town, Flaco?” asked Shelby, turning his cap around backwards to signify he wasn’t really scared, not really.

Abel shrugged and said, “They say one, maybe two millions. They don’ count when three, four families stay een one house. The peoples, they scared of taxes, see? They don’ talk to the tax man. I theenk maybe two millions.”

“Where we going anyhow?”

“Colonia Libertad,” Abel said. “Soltero, he bought hees mamá a nice house there. Few minute away. Best house. Nice garage for cars, but no cars. When trucks come from the north they go to that garage. He pay cash. I know heem good.”

By then, the van was moving along a more scenic highway, Paseo de los Héroes, where modern nightclubs and discos reassured Shelby.

“This is more like it,” he said, looking around.

“Thees where reech peoples come,” Abel said. “Dance. Dreenk. Very ’spensive.”

Suddenly Shelby found himself gawking at a sixty-foot statue of an American president, right in the center of the roadway.

“Whoa!” he said. “That’s Abraham Lincoln!”

“Uh huh,” Abel said. “We crazy een Tijuana. We make statue of man who was president right after gringos steal our country.” He giggled and said, “We crazy peoples!”

“That must be the biggest fuckin Lincoln outside a Mount Rushmore!” Shelby said.

They passed the huge concrete catch basin for the dry Tijuana River; then Shelby saw some of the many maquiladora factories: Kodak, Panasonic, Sony, G.E., and others.

Abel had told him that the maquiladoras were the hope of Mexican politicians now that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a strong possibility. But Abel, like most of the poor people of Mexico, wasn’t looking for salvation from anything negotiated by the U.S. If the gringos wanted it, it must be bad for Mexico, was how the poor reasoned it out, no matter what their politicians said. Still, the maquiladora program could provide jobs in the short term. Jobs in the short term could buy them time. They were nothing if not patient.

Pointing to the modern factories, Abel said, “Maquiladora breeng money, they say. They say we make new Hong Kong right here een Tijuana.” Then he looked at the ox and said, “But I don’ theenk so, Buey.”

Abel’s relaxed attitude was calming Shelby. “I think we oughtta hold out fer more,” he said. “Sixty-dollar shoes oughtta bring us ten bucks a pair, even down here.”

But Abel shook his head and said, “Three dollar, Buey. He pay three dollar, no more.”

“How do ya know?”

“I know,” Abel said, showing his large white teeth in a grin. “I know.”

“Wait a minute,” Shelby said. “Jist a minute here! You sure we happened to be in the right part a the warehouse where these shoes was?”

Abel laughed and said, “Buey, joo no got, how you say? Eemagine?”

“Imagination, asshole.”

“See, I know many Mexican truck driver. Thees guy I know, he go to North Island all the time. He tell me what he see. I phone my friend een Tijuana. He say, okay, navy boot. Weeth steel toe. Good boot. Three dollar a pair. Cash. Many as we get!”

“You little whorehouse louse! You planned it!”

“Everybody steal from navy, Buey. Maybe after boss sell company, you, me, we find good truck job. Work hard, haul down to Tijuana. But we go back north weeth our truck. No problem at San Ysidro gate weeth empty truck. Today, no. Goddamn poison drum.”

“Wonder if the boss’ll fire us for letting his rig get ripped off? Not that it matters since we’re gettin canned anyways.”

“Ain’t our fault. Somebody stole truck when we eat lunch.”

“Since you thought a everything, how’d the dirty rotten thief steal our locked truck?”

“They break een, hot-wire.”

“So you’re gonna bust out the window when we ditch the truck?”

“Uh huh.”

“And I’m gonna pop the ignition and wire it to make it look kosher?”

“You been to jail for steal car, Buey. You do job,” Abel giggled. “Got to look good for when insurance company take truck back to boss.”

“You’re a ballsy little dude!” Shelby said. “I gotta give ya that. Hunnerd thirty pounds soakin wet, but all balls.”

“I know my country,” Abel said. “We got to sell, ’meno. Everything sell een Tijuana. Nobody worry about bees-ness license, no nothing. Nobody geev welfare check down here, Buey. You don’ work, you don’ sell, you don’ survive.”

“Yeah, these Mexicans got a lot to learn about handouts,” Shelby said. “There’s more moochers on one corner a downtown San Diego than in this whole town, I bet.”

Colonia Libertad, one of Tijuana’s numerous colonias or neighborhoods, was one of the poorest. Some streets were badly paved with asphalt, some were crudely cobbled, some were just hardpan that turned into slick water troughs when it rained. Shelby started worrying about their axle.

“Man, they got potholes that could swallow up Roseanne Barr,” he said. “And why’re these streets flooded? Water must be scarce this time a year, right?”

“Who know?” Abel shrugged. “Maybe somebody break water line. Somebody always break water line, ’lectric line, gas line.”

The ox looked up and saw a cat’s cradle of telephone and electrical lines dangling from poles, from roofs of clapboard shacks, even from trees! They seemed to be looped over anything, finally disappearing into flat-roofed dwellings that dotted the entire hillside. He saw children leaping onto propane tanks abutting those pathetic homes, the tanks being imaginary horses.

Shelby said, “A good stream a piss’d knock down the whole neighborhood.”

The colors, particularly the colors of the commercial structures, many of which were built with corrugated aluminum, also made him nervous. The colors they used to infuse a little gaiety into the drab barrios-yellow, red, green, even purple-got him down, having the opposite of their intended effect.

Many of the houses had witches and skeletons dangling over doors and windows. Already they were preparing for El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The witches and skeletons made Shelby especially uneasy. He found himself wishing he could relive that moment in the quayside warehouse when he’d decided to go along with this nutty scheme to steal shoes.

At the top of the hill was a twelve-foot-high barrier made of welded steel panels, originally designed to reinforce the tarmac on airstrips. Here the steel sheets were used to mark something other than a line between two countries; more accurately, it was between two economies. But even the steel barrier was a joke. It was rusted, chopped full of holes that even someone as big as Shelby Pate might crawl through. And in fact, tens of thousands of people had. Every day they breached that U.S. barrier in order to flock to the plateau on the American side. And when it was dark enough, the masses moved north. Toward la migra, and the bandits who waited in the dark.

Shelby was more tense by the time Abel parked the truck on an unpaved street in Parte Alta, the newer section of Colonia Libertad. He stayed in the truck when Abel disappeared behind a jumble of houses built from every material imaginable. Some houses were made of cinder block, some of wood, some of lathe and stucco. Some actually had four walls consisting of all those materials. If there was such a thing as a building inspector he lived on mordida, Shelby figured.

A falling leaf drifted in the air like a kite, making Shelby realize how few trees there were. And while watching that drifting leaf, he was startled by a little boy wanting to sell him chewing gum.

“Chicle, chicle?” The boy held four cellophane-wrapped pieces of gum in his palm.

The kid’s hair was cropped very short because of a severe case of ringworm. Shelby was disgusted by it. Nobody was supposed to get ringworm or polio or cholera anymore. It made him mad. He shooed the kid away.

When Abel returned he’d lost that merry-Mex grin of his. He was frowning and looking at his watch.

“Gimme the bad news first,” Shelby said, “but I got a feelin there ain’t gonna be no good news to follow.”

“Soltero no’ here,” Abel said. “Nobody here.”

“Now what, dude? Now what the fuck we do?”

“We go to hees bees-ness. Down at central de verduras.”

“What’s that?”

“The fruits and vegetables market. Where they buy and sell the fruits and vegetables.”

Fifteen minutes later, the truckers were wheeling the bobtail into the Tijuana produce market, but by then, Shelby was very unhappy. Even the hum and energy of the marketplace didn’t lift his spirits, not a bit. Before leaving the van, Abel sliced into one of the boxes with Shelby’s buck knife, and removed a pair of shoes to show to Soltero.

All the produce shops bore large colorful hand-painted signs. An explosion of color announced GUERRERO ABARROTES, and FRUTERÍA CARDENAS, FRUTERÍA EL TEXANO, or FRUTERÍA EL CID. The painted signs were adorned with red parrots and yellow tigers with green eyes, and plump stalks of bananas, and ruby tomatoes. A cacophony of voices echoed through the square: men, women, children were haggling, buying, selling, surviving. Trucks were parked helter-skelter within the marketplace, all of it surrounded by low, two-story shops.

Somehow it worked. People managed. Which is what they did best, Abel said. The people of Mexico managed, against all odds. The lanky young Mexican hopped out of the van and disappeared behind one of the fruit stalls.

Shelby was fidgeting now. They’d wasted an hour. They should’ve had the deal done. They should’ve been ready to catch a cab back to the San Ysidro port of entry. Long moments passed before Abel climbed back into the truck and tossed the shoes onto the seat. Shelby noticed that he was sweating.

Abel said, “I find out where Soltero house ees. Lomas de Agua Caliente.”

“And where the fuck might that be?”

“Reech zone. Up over Caliente racetrack. Where reech peoples have homes.”

This time they rode silently, as the van snaked its way up a residential street by the racetrack, past mansions made of concrete block and coated with colored stucco. Here there were new cars in the driveways. The battered rattletraps parked in front belonged to the help or to other workers, cars that were facing downhill in order to get them started.

“If you like concrete you’ll love T.J.,” Shelby said disgustedly.

He noticed that all the cars bearing FRONT BC license plates for “Frontera, Baja California” were American cars made by Ford, General Motors or Chrysler. But as they climbed the hill heading toward Soltero’s home he saw some new foreign cars in the driveways and motor courts of gated properties.

“How come most a the people drive American cars?” he wanted to know.

“Use to be we was not allow to eemport cars,” Abel explained. “Chevies, Dodge, Buick, all U.S. car made een Mexico was all we get license for. And no four-wheel-drive car. None.”

Shelby spotted a new four-wheel-drive Jeep Grand Cherokee and said, “Times must be changin.”

“Oh yes,” Abel said. “Soltero, he like four-wheel-drive.”

Shelby didn’t see any short leathery Indians up here, except for those who were wheeling small children in strollers and prams. And there were a lot of young people on the streets, leaning into cars, chatting, listening to boom boxes. Mostly they were tall and fair, well groomed, expensively clothed. Some of the boys had ponytails, and diamond studs in their ears. Most wore huge gold watches and leather bomber jackets.

“Juniors,” Abel said, gesturing toward them. “We call them Juniors. They do what they wan’. They do sometheeng wrong, their father pay mordida. They got the life, Buey. No’ like us.”

“I ain’t even gonna get to see the inside of a Tia-juana whorehouse!” Shelby moaned. “I knew I shouldn’ta got involved stealin shoes.”

Abel stopped at a blue whale of a house constructed of concrete and Mexican terrazzo. It was situated near the top of Lomas de Agua Caliente, with a view of the city. The ox stayed in the truck while Abel got out, pushed the gate button, and spoke on an intercom. A moment later a middle-aged man emerged from the two-story mansion and stormed across the pebbled motor court toward the ten-foot wrought-iron gate where Abel waited.

Inside the motor court, held securely by a steel chain, was a snarling pit bull that looked like it wanted to eat the skinny Mexican. Abel kept looking from the dog to the man while they talked, but Shelby could see that Flaco wasn’t about to win an argument with either of them. The man had a salt-and-pepper ponytail, and wore a lemon-colored guayabera shirt with epaulets on the shoulders. Shelby hated his guts without even knowing him.

When Abel started raising his voice the man turned toward the snarling tethered dog as though he was going to loose the chain. Then Abel walked away from the gated motor court, and the man in the guayabera shirt calmly reentered his house through a door twelve feet tall. Shelby wondered how many hinges that door needed.

“I come back here someday to keel that dog,” Abel said.

“What’s the story, dude? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Soltero say he geev money to guy from Ensenada to pay for cocaine cargo. He say he don’ got our money now.”

“No fuckin money! What’re we gonna do with a million fuckin navy shoes?”

“He say we must leave them een garage at house of hees mamá back in Colonia Libertad. He say he geev us money nex’ week.”

“Fuck him! His goddamn front door’s worth six grand! He ain’t never gonna give us a penny!”

“Wha’ we do, ’mano?”

“What do we do? This is your fuckin country, remember? You’re the one talkin big and makin all the plans! What do we do?”

“Maybe we go to hees mamá. Leave shoes. Get out of Tijuana.”

“Shit!” the ox said, turning his Mötley Crüe hat around frontwards again. “I mighta known!” After a moment he said, “Okay, drive this piece a shit bobtail back to where that kid was.”

“Where?”

“Back where Soltero’s mother lives.”

“We put shoes een her garage?”

“Yeah, what choice we got? But I wanna give that kid some shoes. Let him trade em fer some good dope or somethin.”

“Okay, Buey,” Abel said. “Okay.”

“And let’s leave this van as close to the border as we can,” Shelby said. “Some fuckin mastermind!”

When they got back to Colonia Libertad, Shelby told Abel to drive around the streets for a few minutes until he spotted the kid with the chewing gum. When he did, he ordered Abel to stop.

“Hey, kid!” the ox yelled at the little boy. “C’mere!”

When the child came forward with a handful of gum, the ox said to Abel, “How you say shoe in Mexican?”

“Zapato.”

“Zapato!” Shelby said to the kid. “Zapato!”

Then he startled the boy by pushing open the door and heaving himself out. Shelby lumbered around to the back of the bobtail truck, opened the cargo door, climbed into the van and ripped open a carton.

Shelby tossed two dozen pair of shoes onto the dusty street, yelling: “Zapato. Viva fuckin zapato!”

Suddenly, a swarm of people emerged from the jumble of houses and began crawling all over the pile of shoes. By the time Abel got the truck turned around, the little boy was running off with his arms full.

“Like cock-a-roaches,” Shelby said. “They jist crawl outta nowhere like cock-a-roaches.”

The house of Soltero’s mother was near the top of a promontory overlooking The Soccer Field, a desolate barren wasteland of relatively flat U.S. soil that served as a place for the poor of this colonia to play soccer unmolested by day, and to gather for their rush north by night. Scanning the soccer field as always was la migra, who captured only a fraction of the pilgrims and deported them just about long enough for them to gather themselves again for the next attempt. And so it went.

But after the soccer field lay El Cañon de los Muertos, better known to the U.S. cops as Deadman’s Canyon, where Mexican bandits preyed upon the pollos coming across in the night. The house of Soltero’s mother looked down on all that, on the misery of those border people who gazed across at el norte. Who could play soccer on U.S. soil anytime they wished.

The house was not a flat-roofed shack like the others. It had a pitched roof, the only one of its kind in the colonia, and a great deal of wood had been used in its construction, including wood siding. There were two mature cypress trees, one on each side of the asphalt driveway, and they too distinguished this home. The entire street had been blacktopped, probably as a result of Soltero paying mordida to the right street-maintenance supervisor, and the new blacktop extended from the curbless street in front, into a spacious two-car garage that was an unheard-of luxury in the colonia.

Abel backed the van into the driveway and walked to a side door that seemed to lead to a patio. No one answered his knock. Shelby discovered that the overhead garage door was not locked, so he swung it open.

When Abel raised the van’s cargo door, Shelby said, “Somebody better get here quick and lock this fucker after we get them shoes inside.”

“I theenk,” Abel said, “somebody watch us now. Maybe mamá of Soltero. When we drive away somebody weel lock the door. Don’ worry.”

Abel climbed into the van and shoved the large cartons to Shelby, who eased them onto the ground, scooting them into the empty garage. The truckers were finished in minutes, and Shelby closed the overhead door, sliding an aluminum bolt in place.

“I ain’t gonna run out and buy a new TV or nothin,” the ox said, “if it depends on money from this.”

“Soltero pay us,” Abel said. “Or we come back and keel his dog.”

“How ’bout him? Shelby said. “He’s the one we oughtta smoke if we don’t get our money.”

Abel said, “We take care of Soltero too.”

Big talk, Shelby thought. If Soltero didn’t pay them, what could they do? This was his town, his country, and he probably had his friends, plenty of them, to deal with the likes of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. Shelby knew that if they didn’t get paid, they’d just have to slink back north.

But maybe they could at least snuff that red-assed dog. Shelby made a mental note to bring some poisoned hamburger when they returned to that big blue house up on rich man’s hill overlooking the Caliente racetrack.

The haulers parked the truck in the Rio Zone, among other cars and trucks, in a parking lot three blocks from the border. Abel broke the driver’s side window with a crowbar; then the ox used it to pop out the ignition. It took a few minutes to make a theft look plausible to any American insurance agent.

As they walked to the pedestrian gate at the border, Shelby asked, “Whadda ya think the Mexican cops’ll do with the drums?”

Abel said, “They leave een truck. Maybe take two, three week before they call San Diego police. They don’ move too fast down here.”

They walked in silence until they got to the San Ysidro crossing, where all twenty-four lanes of traffic were backed up. On the Mexican side, the huge white arched pedestrian bridge that spanned half a dozen lanes and funneled into eighteen other lanes looked to Shelby Pate like a set of animal ears, with fleas swarming in one ear, crossing the curve of the skull, and swarming out the other one. But these fleas were human beings. People swarmed in this fucking town, Shelby thought.

On the U.S. side, the building was conventionally modern with a large flat brown roof resembling a Hershey bar. A bite of chocolate didn’t intimidate Shelby Pate like animal ears did.

As they were going through the entrance to U.S. Customs, they saw a female customs officer and a dope-dog sniffing at the people walking past. Abel turned and said, “Tell me, Buey, why you make me find boy with chicle? Why?”

“Cause I was that poor when we lived in Stockton,” Shelby said. “Only I didn’t sell gum, I sold turnips. And when I went to school for the first time they all ran away like I was a goddamn leper. Cause I had ringworm. Now let’s get the fuck back to the United States of America!”

That night, many in the adult male population of Colonia Libertad were swapping, selling, trading, brand-new, steel-toe, high-top, U.S. Navy shoes.