The Coyote's Bicycle Page 5

  The jefe folded his arms before Pablo. He assessed the sky. Pablo followed his gaze out to the cloudbank approaching from the west.

  “Or is it that you can’t trust anybody?” Roberto asked.

  “I trust people all right,” Pablo answered.

  “Look, I have a whole group going over tonight. You can see them there in the van. Those are my expert guides. They will lead this group across and take them to a safe place. La migra won’t notice nada. Same for you. Name your city, Pablito.”

  Pablo remained quiet and continued to search the sky for the important thing Roberto had seen in it.

  “Over there, joven, you see those people. That’s you too if you want it. Tomorrow, you’ll be toasting Budweisers with them.”

  “I’m not crossing tonight,” Pablo said. “I’ll let you know when.”

  “What’s the holdup? Is there someone on the inside who can spot you? A brother, a cousin, someone from the village?”

  “I have a family right there in San Diego—mother, father, brothers, sisters. But I haven’t seen them in a very long time.”

  “And you are here. They crossed without you, the youngest, asked to stay behind before you understood what that meant. Then something happened. Am I right? I also happen to know what the true holdup is, amigo: it’s pride. You’re too proud to ask for anything.”

  Roberto possessed the alert but distant quality of someone who negotiated deals while his hands worked at small tasks. He was a ticket taker with an eye on the crowd, the other on the clock, and an ear for the whistle. The light of the sky flickered as tendrils of vapor passed beneath the sun, and then, with a seeming hush, the pollo and pollero were left in shadow as the quiet of low clouds fell upon them.

  “Consider the passage as good as earned,” Roberto said. “People owe me favors. I will set you up with a job, and you will pay me back. I’ve passed many people this way.”

  “I’m going to cross when the time is right.”

  “And this moment is not right,” he said, nodding with gravity. “But if you’re not a customer there’s no point in hanging around, verdad? This is a place for workers and la migra. You can go on your way wandering around Laureles and Cúspide or wherever you visit.”

  Pablo turned to leave without a good-bye.

  “Unless . . . you are a worker. And I sense you might be—a hard worker prepared to learn.”

  Pablo stopped. He faced Roberto again.

  “You’ve probably noticed in your walking, it’s been very hot for over a week. They’re calling for a sea fog now, and believe me, when God’s blanket comes rolling off the ocean that thick, la migra goes blind—the agents, their binoculars, night-vision goggles, the heat sensors, those little laser trip wires they have there hidden in the bush, todo. Even the floodlights get trapped by the water in the air and become pale little moons. The light doesn’t even strike the ground. La migra might as well pack it in for the night. Look here.” Roberto pointed at the cloudbank. “The fog is coming now.”

  The cloudbank that had looked like mountains now filled sky.

  “The important thing right now is that some of my people are hungry and thirsty. The key to a long career in this business is to put the people’s well-being first—everything else comes after.” Roberto reached into his jeans pocket and withdrew a roll of money. He leafed some bills off the roll and handed them to the young man. “Okay, Pablito from Oaxaca, hustle down to the Comercial and buy some tacos and water. There are twelve of us, plus you, lucky thirteen. Don’t be stingy. Workers like to eat.”

  Roberto expected Pablo to hurry, but the youth turned and ran. He sprinted down a switchback trail and crossed the trough of the canyon, threading the ragged edge of a shantytown before heading up a goat path on the following side. As he disappeared over the lip of the canyon’s far wall, Roberto experienced a trace of familiarity. This migrante was a rare one. It was as if the country bumpkin had arrived at the central station intending to meet a connecting train, but in the lay time between trains, he’d become transfixed with the station itself—the architecture, the steam, the whistles, the buzz of the crowd. And he refused the onward passage. It was rare for economic migrants heading for low-wage jobs to see the real earning potential on the boundary. It was rare, but not unheard of, and this young man reminded Roberto of someone.

  “Well, I was interested,” he said later. “I really liked this kid.”

  4

  From Terry’s pile, McCue withdrew a burgundy ladies’ ten-speed. It sported decorative lugs at the joints and a lovely little step-through frame. After dusting off a portion of the down tube, we could see that it was called the Free Spirit.

  “My fiancée is going to love this,” McCue said.

  She hadn’t yet learned to ride a bike, and McCue aimed to teach her. He pulled a twenty from his wallet and handed it over to Terry. The bill was crisp. McCue’s smile was earnest. Terry wore the pursed lips of a trader. A later Internet search valued the bike at fifteen dollars. And Terry sold dozens like it for ten.

  “All right,” the rancher said, folding the twenty into his jeans pocket. “Deal.”

  I’ve always had a thing for ladies’ bikes. The act of mounting a man’s diamond frame is accompanied by a certain mindset. You throw your leg over, find the seat, grip the pedals, and the subconscious says, “Okay, we’re going to ride now.” You don’t have to have any thought at all sliding onto and off of a ladies’ step-through. It’s an effortless motion and, once engaged, the bike disappears and you’re simply floating on a parallel plane with the earth.

  Victorian women of the 1890s championed this version of the newfangled “safety”—bicycles with same-sized wheels. Entitled young men of means, wearing mustaches, small caps, and tight pants, preferred the stylish high-wheel; the safety was but a curiosity. Yet because it was the first machine to give women independent mobility, the ladies’ safety soon became an icon of the suffrage movement. They were such potent symbols of women’s struggles for equality that opponents of the movement took to calling them broomsticks, as in, “Did you see Ms. Smith ride past on her broomstick?”

  The Free Spirit’s rear tire had been slashed through to the tube with a box cutter, a disabling tactic employed by Border Patrol. Still, it was a lucky thing the agents hadn’t run the Free Spirit over. In recent days, Terry had come upon several frames that had been “taco-ed” under the weight of a jeep or “kilo” truck. To a bike enthusiast, the tactic seemed a bit hard-hearted.

  “Why would Border Patrol do that?” I wondered out loud. “Frustration?”

  “Maybe,” Terry said. “But there’s a definite chance bikes are getting picked up here, taken back to TJ, and then rolling across the same way again. The exact bike could be crossing, shit, I don’t know how many times. That’s if I don’t get to ’em first.”

  McCue and I loaded the Free Spirit into his vehicle. We said our good-byes to Terry and began to make our way off the property. And then, wondering just how a ladies’ ten-speed could cross the most militarized portion of a two-thousand-mile border, we decided to head up to the border highlands, because topography, it seemed, had something to do with it.

  The same could be said, of course, about the car tires. But even before the Tynans’ forty-foot Dumpster brimming with rubber receded to a green speck in the side mirror, I’d completely forgotten all about the car tires. Now I only cared about bicycles, and how they crossed this prohibitive, fortified, and rugged terrain. And where they went from there, and how many times one bike could cross and cycle back through, and who rode them, and, I guess, where the bikes originated from in the first place. And who, exactly, arranged it all.

  “Can you imagine,” I asked McCue, “a migrant bombing down into the American dream, from one of these hills, on a bike called the Free Spirit?”

  I could see a young woman’s face, wind in her hair, a backdrop of roiling dust, and only the light of a radiant future ahead.

  At the time, I didn’t know that Free
Spirit was a brand that Sears department stores had sold for decades. They’d been built in every country that made bikes—some to exacting standards, some not—and around the time this little burgundy gem was produced in Taiwan, the brand represented a good percentage of all bikes rolling through America’s suburban streets. The idea that an undocumented migrant crossing via bicycle would ride high in the saddle of a Free Spirit was not ironic. It was the odds-on favorite.

  The normally dry hillsides of the Tijuana River Valley were dusted in new shoots of green. In a month or two, wildflowers would flash across the earth. The distance between this desert tableland and the people designing its fate in Washington couldn’t have been farther. But McCue could see influence-peddling and well-honed statecraft behind rocks and boulders. He parked on the edge of a bluff—a thin strip of the highlands that belonged to the United States. As we stepped out of the truck, an osprey caught an updraft into the sky. Small mammals scurried into the scrub. You could point a finger at the general source of the Tijuana River in the Laguna Mountains and another where the water spilled into the sea. Everything was visible and still this was an opaque and strange place to be. Despite the rambling hills of cholla cactus and chaparral, the ocean vista and the soaring quiet, I experienced a sensation of being both remote and surveilled. For good reason—McCue and I were, in fact, being watched. Border Patrol agents crisscrossed the state and county parks that constituted this public space. They drove trucks, jeeps, and quads. They put the glass to everything that moved. On the way up, an agent in a white-and-green truck flagged us down. McCue produced a business card and exchanged small talk. He flashed an advocate’s smile. The agent drove a small distance away, but continued to observe.

  I assumed this had to do with the national terror alert level. It was set at yellow, elevated, as it had been for the past five years. And as on most days, nobody really knew why. No indication in the environment seemed to separate the yellow threat from a blue, guarded, or even a green, low—the two designations that were never applied. Yellow carried implications, however. Citizens were to be “alert for suspicious activity,” more so than they might have been at blue. Authorities were charged with a “closer” monitoring of international borders. The ranks of Border Patrol agents doubled during the George W. Bush administration, and Customs and Border Protection grew to be the largest law-enforcement agency in the nation—so there was an extreme amount of monitoring capability. Which explains how it was that, as McCue and I were alert to the suspicious activity of the lizards and hawks in the county park, an agent watched us through binoculars. It explains how the agent had the time and resources to observe regular citizens in a park, but not why. And this, because CBP was also one of the least open or transparent agencies in the government, was something we’d never know.

  That lack of information—regarding the cause, source, location, or duration of the threat, combined with the obfuscating stance of the authorities—created a gap filled by speculation as easily as a footprint in the wetlands filled with water. In his 2009 memoir, former secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge confirmed that political pressures were applied to the terror alert level. The department’s own website stated that alerts had psychological consequences. But many believed the heightened alerts also gave rise to border-enforcement excess. And the circularity there was troubling: politics instigated heightened threat levels, which spurred overreaching enforcement, which led to abuses and drew media attention, sparking civil outrage, causing increased threat levels. Yellow, orange, red. The same mercurial process was transforming the landscape McCue and I encountered on the hilltop. In Washington, immigration policy had been conflated with the War on Terror, resulting in the construction of a new, higher border fence that was slowly progressing west. We could see its shiny steel—a bright and writhing tapeworm on the back of a camel.

  Back in 1980, a collective of grassroots environmentalists and scientists secured a historic victory in keeping the American side of the Tijuana River open and the valley free from major development. There had been plans for a marina, an amusement park, track homes, and even a nuclear power plant. The environmental achievement allowed for the establishment of state and county parks, as well as open space designations such as the Tijuana Sloughs National Wildlife Refuge. And so the Tijuana River Valley remained one of the last unbroken wetland systems in the state of California, and it was key in keeping featherweight species like the clapper rail from extinction.

  But in 2002, Representative Duncan Hunter added a rider to the Homeland Security Bill that called for the construction of a “triple fence” along the San Diego corridor—an edifice that required filling in canyons to build a paved road across them. This promised to cause a number of environmental problems for both the wetland below and the native species that lived there. Wildcoast, Ben McCue’s employer, allied itself with a coalition of local and national organizations, including the Sierra Club, in opposition to the massive fence. They brought a lawsuit. The California Coastal Commission sided with conservationists and denied permits for the construction. But in 2005, a piece of legislation was slipped into the Real ID Act, a bill intended to bring uniformity to driver’s licenses, which allowed Homeland Security to waive any law that stood in the way of the fence. It was a legislative Trojan horse. Among others, laws ambushed by the Real ID Act included the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

  On April 1, 2008, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff invoked the waiver, and construction began. McCue and I could see contractors filling Smuggler’s Gulch with 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt. McCue’s cause, it appeared, had been lost without any identifiable link between this land and real incidents of international terrorism.

  This wasn’t, however, the only sight. In the span from downtown Tijuana to the ocean, seven narrow canyons divide the palisades into buttes and mesas. The various incarnations of the border wall—the old rusty brown one and tall shiny new one—rise and fall with every incline and descent. This creates a visual effect that has led many to compare the border wall to a roller coaster careening away toward the inland mountains. Every little nook and hill under its track has a story.

  It was on the tops of these bluffs that survey teams from both Mexico and the United States met in 1850 to execute the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and draw the boundary line. But the treaty, which ended the Mexican-American War, did not specify exact coordinates. Some language indicated the line should be set at the original division between Alta California and Baja California, in a rich valley fourteen miles south of Tijuana. But the Mexican representatives wanted to retain some portion of San Diego Bay for commerce. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty transferred more than half of Mexico’s territory to the United States—a landmass that includes the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as parts of Texas, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. In comparison, the bay seemed a trifle. The American camp refused, however, arguing that San Diego Bay had always been a part of Alta California, which was now theirs.

  The parties haggled. Finally, they settled on alternative treaty directions that designated a seventy-year-old map, made by Spanish pilot Juan Pantoja y Arriaga, as the initial point of reference. The treaty then gave directions to mark the border one marine league south of the southernmost tip of San Diego Bay, as indicated by the Pantoja map. Two problems arose immediately. The old map didn’t match the topography the surveyors encountered. The bottom portion of San Diego Bay was a shape-shifting wetland that changed through the seasons and sometimes connected to the Tijuana River. Then the parties couldn’t agree on the actual distance of a marine league. In the spirit of expediency, they split the difference between the conflicting lengths—a happenstance negotiation that put the uniformed commissioners, topographers, and surveyors on the elevated bluff that would become Monument Mesa. Buffeted by a sea breeze, with full views of the b
ay and the river, the men designated the initial point. It was October 10, 1850. A journalist from a London newspaper sent to cover the western demarcation of the epic border survey noted that the Mexican delegation displayed a “remarkable degree of gravity”—some described them as weepy—as they gazed north into the 525,000 square miles of country lost to Mexico at the close of a war that lasted one year, nine months, one week, and one day. The Americans on the other hand were drunk with victory.

  My favorite image of the border is a lithographic plate based on an illustration made by Boundary Commissioner John Russell Bartlett in 1852. Having missed the founding phase of the survey, Bartlett traveled back to the inaugural point at the Pacific. He encountered the eight-ton white marble obelisk Congress commissioned from a stonemason in New York. It had been shipped by sail around Patagonia’s Tierra del Fuego, up the Humboldt Current to San Francisco, and down to San Diego, then dragged across the sloughs and erected on the mesa by captain Edmund L. F. Hardcastle. Until then, the boundary was celebrated only with a pile of stones. Bartlett discovered the new monument framed by a grove of Shaw’s agave in bloom. This particular species shoots a panicle, a spear that looks something like a giant asparagus, six feet up. The tip then flowers in yellow and pink. Beyond the monument and the agave spears, Bartlett illustrated a placid ocean and the hummocks of the Coronado Islands. In his diary, he wrote that the white obelisk “is seen from a great distance on land as well as by vessels at sea.”

  Bartlett has been described as bookish. Many in the commission found him an absentminded and foolhardy dawdler. This could be due to the fact that he used the appointment to fart around the American West like Don Quixote—once stalling survey work for forty-four days so he could return a maiden, who’d been captured by Apaches and traded off, to her small Mexican pueblo. His dedication to the art of illustration, however, was not a priggish hobby but an official element of the commission’s charter. Scientific information concerning the almost unexplored territory was to be recorded and collected, and sketches of native people and species were to be made as the surveyors carved out the line. The compilation of illustrated birds, reptiles, and plants that emerged from the field is a chronicle both elegant and otherworldly. One plate depicts white-robed Tohono O’odham people harvesting bulging red cactus fruit from giant nopal limbs by the use of long, forked sticks. Alien, stylized landscapes at the precipice of change: I found the endeavor to hand-draw the wilderness a thoughtful and forward-looking gesture on the part of what was otherwise an infighting gang of scapegrace rascals. The marking of the two-thousand-mile border was an achievement every bit as profound as the dredging of the Panama Canal or the spanning of the Golden Gate. But the men attached to the Boundary Commission went on to become the direct inspiration for Western cinema’s most notorious thieves, rapists, and murderers. Some became Confederates. Some rose in the ranks of the Union. Some were hanged, some scalped—most deserved it. Things went afoul from the outset.