Black Star Nairobi (20 page)

“You keep telling yourself that. Democracy, no matter how fucked up, is not a drug. Drugs are you, Julio. Look at your country, thirty thousand dead,” I said defensively.

“But with your guns. Drugs kill; bombs kill. Boom, you are free but dead! Better be high and alive. No?” Julio responded and laughed the kind of laugh that told me he didn’t believe in what he was saying.

“You don’t have to deal,” I said to him angrily. The more I missed home, the more I defended it, the more I longed for it.

I had only seen Tijuana from afar. Driving out of the slum, we had caught the tail end of the city, vibrant with bold colors. There were buildings from centuries ago standing next to skyscrapers, and it gave the place an odd feeling, as if the past were here in the present.

People were going about their business and, if it weren’t for them taking cover when a car backfired, one would never have thought that the fear of people like Julio ruled the city. It was hard to reconcile what I was seeing with the terror the city’s inhabitants felt every day, the terror of knowing that being innocent wouldn’t stop a stray bullet from a policeman or a gang from hitting you. Nairobi was also beautiful, Limuru even more so, but that had not stopped the violence.

The city suddenly opened up to the desert, where in contrast
everything around us was the same—sand, desert, the occasional thriving cacti, and long-suffering stunted trees. Peaceful in its constancy—like an ocean, or the plains.

An hour or so from the border, as if conjured up from the desert nothingness, two clouds of dust suddenly spiraled toward us from both sides. When they got closer, we could make out four desert ATVs roaring away, bouncing from dune to dune—I could see why they were named dune buggies. If this had been a race I would have been admiring the display of skill; they were like surfers out in an ocean, riding wave after wave. Soon, we could make out four heavily armed men in protective gear and desert camouflage.

“Aren’t we still in our lovely Mexico?” Julio asked the teacher.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then what are these
pendejos
doing out here? Be ready for anything,” Julio told us.

“We can’t get arrested,” O said, as he and Muddy checked their AKs and placed more magazines by them. I readied my Glock. The teacher wasn’t armed, and Julio gave him a 9 mm.

“Who are they? Border patrol?” O asked.

“Welcome to your new life as an illegal immigrant—the Minutemen, white militia, they protect the borders,” I said.

“You mean they protect their own?” Julio said sarcastically.

“If they know who we are, they didn’t cross the border to take prisoners,” I said.

They revved their dune buggies, spinning their wheels and raising so much sand and dust into the air that soon we couldn’t see more than two feet around us.

O tapped the teacher’s shoulder and asked him if he knew what was going on.

“
Órale
, take it easy. I took precautions—I am the only one
who knew we were coming this way. We cannot outrun them. We see what they want, no?” Julio answered.

“Bulletproof windows—we are safe in here,” the teacher said.

We checked our weapons as we waited for the dust to settle. The militiamen beckoned Julio over. Instead, I rolled down the window a few inches.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, trying to sound as friendly as I could.

“You American?” one of them asked.

“Yes—trying to head back home,” I answered, putting on my best innocent-tourist expression.

“Taking the long route, ain’t you? What you doing around here, anyhow?” the same guy asked.

“I could ask you the same, ain’t you a bit out of your way?” I said in turn.

“We ain’t got no jurisdiction out here … Now, why don’t you step out of the vehicle so that we can see who we talking to? We can talk face to face … 
mano a mano
,” the man said.

It was a gamble but I asked Muddy to cover me. I slid my Glock into the small of my back, took off my shoulder holster, and gingerly opened the door as Muddy slid into place.

“Come on down, we ain’t gonna bite you,” their leader said.

I walked over to him—the four men were spaced out so that they were surrounding our car. I could see they had headsets on so they could hear each other, but they couldn’t all see each other. I knew O, Muddy, Julio, and the teacher had each picked their target. If it came to it and I couldn’t get to my gun before the man in front of me did, all I had to do was fall to the ground.

“Like I was saying, we ain’t got no jurisdiction—just like when them Mexicans cross over and shit all over the jurisdiction on the other side. So the better question is, what you doing way
out here? We don’t see many Afro-Americans around here,” he said, drawling out “Afro-Americans.”

“Well, here we are, two Americans talking on this side of the border about jurisdiction. You came to us—what do you want?” I asked, trying to sound firm and polite at the same time.

“What we want to know is whether you’re carrying some Mexicans—you could be one of them black coyotes. So, why don’t you ask your friends to step out the car, we get our Mexicans and the drugs, and you can be on your way?” the leader said, making it sound both reasonable and threatening.

“Out here, you have no authority,” I said, motioning towards the U.S., a vague shape a few miles away. “What you are doing is interfering with my investigation,” I added, thinking how true that was.

“Well, that may very well be true, but we sure could use some proof … you got a badge? Or perhaps a number I can call?” he asked, so sure that I was lying.

I walked closer to him so he would either have to step back or push me backward to use his weapon.

“You rent-a-cops are quite something. I’m undercover—why would I have my fucking badge with me? And the longer you keep me, the more questions they will ask,” I said angrily, having decided to play the part that I was playing in real life anyway. He hadn’t expected that tone and it gave him pause.

His friends were getting impatient, as I presumed mine were as well, and now that they had heard me over their leader’s headset, they would be a little less sure of the course of action to take. They had been expecting, at the very least, a simple Stepin Fetchit routine.

“Just walk away—hop away on your toys and pretend we never met. I can carry on and you can continue playing your
games,” I said to him, knowing that there was no way this was going to end well.

“You got one of yours in the White House, almost, but not out here in wetback country. You dig, my brother? So this is what you are gonna do. You are gonna call your little friends and ask them to step out the car one by one. Then we are going to search your vehicle. And then I will want to see some undercover identification,” he instructed, sounding like he was talking to a junior partner.

“Dumb fuck—you think I have some Mormons in the car? I ask them to step out and they step out shooting,” I said.

He pulled back, trying to raise his M-16. I edged closer in so that I was holding his gun down at an angle, pointing away from me. I still hadn’t gone for my Glock, hoping that, somehow, we would all come to our senses and have a good laugh, and then we would be on our way.

“Hey, that’s not all I have to say,” I said before he could respond. “I’m going to reach into my pocket slowly—I want to give you something—for you and your men.”

“Very slowly,” came the inevitable warning.

“Here is five thousand dollars—they see me giving it to you, I go back and tell them you took a bribe and we are all safe, and you can have a drink on the Bureau. Just take it and move on and I can put down in my report that the Minutemen have good judgment,” I said, trying to sound as convincing as Julio had been when he gave the teacher the choice of truth, lies, or death. He hesitated.

“What I am telling you is that you were dead the moment you stopped us. And now I am giving you money to stay alive,” I said to them all, via the leader’s headset.

He was starting to waver. Whatever he had against Mexicans
was not principle. Way inside Mexico, confronting a black man with a car full of people whose intentions and capabilities he didn’t know, reason was telling him to take the money and run. As he put out his hand for the money, I reached for my Glock, closed in, and raised it to his chin.

“I’m going to walk away now,” I said. “You make a move and you will be the first to die.”

I could see the fear growing in his eyes—the tables had turned.

“Hey, fellas, five thousand dollars for nothing? Let’s get outta here!” he yelled out to his men. I backtracked to the car and climbed in.

“They were trying to get us out of the car—I think they know who we are,” I whispered urgently as the leader made a big show of putting the money in his pocket. They rode off and we continued on.

“Think they are coming back?” the teacher asked.

“Regardless of whether they know who we are, that was their reconnaissance—try and gauge our strength. Not bad at all,” Muddy said.

“And now we also know who we’re dealing with,” I said.

“They will be back. Stop the car—I’ll climb up on the roof,” O said to the teacher.

“We are safer in the car,” Julio said, tapping the windows.

“Inside we have only four guns—on the roof, I have an advantage and we have an extra gun—five on four,” O explained.

It made sense: sitting in the middle, Muddy couldn’t very well shoot over O or me, and if they took out the tires, we couldn’t stay in an immobilized car indefinitely. We had to fight our way out.

“When you see them, stop the car,” O said.

Stopping the car was counter-intuitive—a moving target is harder to hit, so they would expect us to try to outrun them. Stopping would throw them off and we would be able to pick our shots.

“It’s going to be bumpy,” the teacher said as he spun the wheels and churned up a sand storm to camouflage O’s move.

We hadn’t gone very far before we saw the four-wheelers coming furiously toward us from both sides. The teacher stopped the car—as we had expected, they had been anticipating a chase, and so they stopped a few hundred feet away to think about their next move. Then they started up again—they sped toward us as they fired and we could feel their rounds tearing into the jeep like a hailstorm. I heard the disciplined roar from O’s AK, and the four-wheeler coming at the teacher spun in the air and came crashing down into the sand. The driver tried to find cover but it was too late. O cut him down.

I waited, feeling the tapping of the M-16 fire getting more and more intense—and just when I thought I couldn’t stand it, the driver of the ATV nearest to us hit a small dune and reached for the wheel with both hands. I waited one second more for the four-wheeler to steady, and just as he was reaching for his weapon again, I let out one shot—the man’s head jerked backwards and the four-wheeler crawled to a stop a few feet from our car. Julio and Muddy were still firing at the remaining vehicles. From the roof, O joined them—it was now three guns to two. One of them tried to turn back but it was too late, as both machines and the men inside came to a dead stop. In a matter of seconds, it was quiet again.

We stepped outside to ID the men. I went to the leader first. In an inside pocket of his jacket, next to my wad of cash, was the man’s wallet. I opened it. There was a photograph of the man, his
wife, and two young children in a park. I stared at it for a moment. The man stirred—he was barely alive.

“Why didn’t you walk away? You should have walked away,” I said to him as he groped for the wallet. I gave it to him and he shakily looked at the photograph.

“Why?” he asked.

I looked at him, trying to understand what he was asking. Why had we fought back? Why didn’t he walk away? Why was he dying? Why were we in Mexico? Why had I betrayed our country? He was gone before I could ask him what he meant.

I was about to put his wallet back in his jacket but remembered it had my prints—as did the M-16. I tore off one of his sleeves, dipped it into the tank of his four-wheeler, and put his wallet and weapon on top of it. Then I asked O for a lighter and set it on fire.

There was nothing useful on any of them. Did they really know who we were? It seemed more than likely. If so, it meant that Sahara knew we were coming, and that was bad news. The good news was that the U.S. government didn’t know—otherwise it would not have been four militiamen.

We drove off. A few hundred feet behind us, the four-wheeler exploded into flames. The man’s question kept playing in my mind. That question, asked into the vacuum of death, when there was nothing else left to lose or gain, that question as a dying man’s confession or curse—that question—I knew that question would fuck me over, someday soon.

An hour later, we came to a stop. Julio took out three shovels from the back of the car and led us to the bottom of a sand dune. He gave the teacher, O, and me a shovel each and pointed to
where we were to start digging. We dug for about ten minutes until we hit what looked like a trapdoor. Julio pulled it open and we all went down a ladder to the beginning of a tunnel. He fumbled around and found some flashlights.

“Whoever is last, close the door—the wind will cover it with sand,” he said nonchalantly. “Sorry about the accommodations, this is not the kind of tunnel that has electricity and air-conditioning. This is a poor man’s drug tunnel.”

We crawled for about an hour before the tunnel suddenly opened up into a basement. Julio knocked on a door in the wall once, paused, then twice more.

“You know what that says?” he asked me.

“No,” I answered, curious.

“My knock say ‘Ju-li-o.’ Get it? I spell my name,” he said, laughing. We were too exhausted to laugh with him.

The trapdoor opened and on other side was a well-dressed old woman who reminded me of O’s mother, aged and wrinkled but not bent.

“What are you doing here, Julio? Aren’t you the big
jefe
over there now?” she asked him in English.

“I had to deliver them across myself,” he replied as he pointed at us.

“They must be very special packages,” she said, beckoning us in.