City of Strangers (15 page)

“How do you know so much about Tijuana?”

“I worked here last summer and made friends with a lot of students and artists. Tijuana is a wonderful city if you stay away from the tourist area. It's full of energy and a great hunger for decency. Many, many people just try every day to get a little money honestly to live.” His face seemed to glow under the waxy yellowy streetlights.

“I remember only
Avenida de la Revolución,”
Jack Liffey said. It was the street of bars, brothels, and trinket vendors, cheap serapes, pottery, and leatherware, and he hadn't seen it in ten years, since Art Castro had taken him there to the
jai alai
fronton.

“
La Revo.
The locals say it's a magnet that pulls two ways. All of America's losers are pulled there to be preyed on by all of Mexico's crooks.”

“That's convenient,” Jack Liffey said. “In America, the crooks have to make more of an effort.”

They walked between big silent factory buildings like raw concrete fortresses, several of them automatically igniting their security lamps as they passed. Here and there a little cluster of beat-up sedans in a parking lot suggested a night shift. The road rose and fell shallowly, and at one crest, a bit higher, he could see the solid metal wall at the border, a scar running for miles, and maybe ten miles on the other side of the wall a mirage, the lit buildings of downtown San Diego like the unattainable Emerald City.

A sound swelled behind them, first just a rumble and then it erupted into a crackling roar. He ducked involuntarily as an old Mexicana DC-9 passed low and incredibly loud on its landing run. The little jetliner sank out of sight beyond some buildings, presumably touching down on an invisible runaway. It roared with reverse thrust.

“This side gets the landings,” Fariborz said.
“La Libertad
is on the other side of the airport and gets the takeoffs. Then the planes go right across the border. I bet it's the only airport in the world where you take off into another country.”

A police siren approached them from behind, and they stepped back into shadows. It turned out to be a beige Crown Victoria, many years old, its multicolored light bar flashing away like a gambling casino.

A big truck pulled blindly out of a plant ahead, forcing the cop car to brake hard, backfiring and lighting up everything around it for Christmas. There was a noisy skid and a policeman's head leaned out into the night:
“¡Ándale, pendejo!”

The police car skirled around the truck, clipping dirt on the far shoulder of the road to stir a cloud of dust, and accelerated away.

“Move on, asshole,” the young man translated.

“I guessed that.”

Apparently the police car had been a forerunner. Coming up fast was a truck crammed with soldiers, grim round-faced teenagers standing up in back clutching their automatic rifles and rocking in unison. They looked put-upon and sleepy.

“What's that about?”

“Could be us, or looking for guerrillas. Sometimes they think guerrillas are everywhere. The army is terrified of the big bad Sub-comandante Marcos in Chiapas.” They waited in the shadows as yet another troop truck whisked past.

The military convoy had stirred in Jack Liffey some adrenaline which seemed to push back his codeine sleepiness a bit, and he tried to keep the boy to a fast pace. Pain still dogged him and he closed his eyes from time to time, drawn along in the wake of Fariborz's voice as he talked about living in T.J., his trips down to Sonora, Mexican rock groups he'd met, but not about his father or Becky. Some inner self had retreated into Jack Liffey's core, watching out his eyeholes, separating a little from his unruly body. There was the sound of a gunshot somewhere ahead, bringing him back to the present to discover they had trekked into an area that looked much less industrial. Cantinas that might be open or closed, seafood restaurants, and locked-up car-repair shops with ramshackle wooden fences, even a few dark homes. An old man hobbled toward them. His aluminum crutches dangled bulging plastic bags filled with bottles and rubbish, which all swayed with his steady pace. Fariborz greeted him politely, but the old man was spooked and shied away.

Then they neared a ramshackle disco in full swing, with polkalike music banging away and men in silky black shirts and cowboy hats spilling outside into a dusty parking lot to posture and hit each other's shoulders.
Anatolio's Jet-Set Go-Go.
One group of men appeared to be sniffing glue out of a paper bag, and another was showing off with knives, slashing the air in a mock fight. Well before they reached the disco, he followed the boy to the opposite side of the road to give the place a wide berth.

Jack Liffey was reminded of what life was like for the
real
outsiders: for blacks in any of the big American cities until very recently, for illegals even today. No cops to call if something went wrong. No taxis, no ambulances or hospitals, no banks, no safety net.

Now the commerce gave way to rickety homes, and the main road descended into a valley of rolling hills, scarred by dirt cross streets that climbed hillsides choked up with shanties. The whole world here was adobe bricks and salvage, reused plywood, cardboard boxes, and black plastic, even opened-out tin drums. Up the slopes, in pools of weak light, he could see that homeowners had terraced their plots with old tires and salvage. The urge to beautify was astonishing. In each old tire there was a geranium, a beavertail cactus, a dark green chili plant.

At an open corner lot business was flourishing under bright lights. Small men were loading big silver propane tanks onto beat-up fender trucks from the 1950s. The bustle was all clangs and crisp calls on the night air, and he marveled that so much infrastructure carried on amidst such poverty. But of course, it had to. There were irreducible minimums for urban life, and even the poorest needed a way to cook and heat.

“Turn right here.”

They skirted the tall fence at the edge of the airport and trended north on a dirt street into the colonia. Soon they crossed a four-lane highway, dodging the slow-moving semis that rolled steadily out of the industrial park toward the twenty-four-hour border crossing. The boy led him into another mesa of shanties that crowded up hard toward the big metal fence ahead.
La Frontera
itself.

“La Libertad?”
he asked.

“Yes.”

Things were livelier here. Knots of men and women stood or squatted where they could, some tending barrel fires, and the air seemed thick and hostile. There was a stench on the faint breeze, smoke and fire ash and ordinary dust, plus piss and rot. A big jet blasted into the air above them, seeming to hurl itself right out of the shantytown, and banked into a hard turn to cross the border wall. Aeromexico markings, an old four-engine 707 that he hadn't seen in years. He smelled kerosene now, jet fuel.

With his eyes still skyward, he noticed tiny shapes skittering against the clouds lit orange by city lights, moving herky-jerky, like bats. They probably
were
bats. He had never minded bats, but he remembered the only camping trip he'd taken with his wife, and Kathy's going hysterical about getting them caught in her hair. He wondered whether there was any rational basis for that. He flexed his hand. Something was working to take the pain down a notch.

There were shouts ahead. The boy seemed to recognize some peril in them and grabbed his sleeve to tug him up a smaller unpaved side road that ascended the hillside. Both sides of the narrow road were a solid tangle of makeshift housing, punctuated by banana trees and old cars.

Ahead, several men were gathered around a campfire in a bare lot, reduced to silhouettes in the glare. If the boy were to disappear suddenly, Jack Liffey thought, just yanked heavenward in some Persian Rapture, he, Jack Liffey, would be irretrievably lost, marooned in
La Libertad
for the rest of his natural life.
“Buenas dias”
and
“gracias”
would not get him very far toward safety.

And he wasn't sure how long that natural life would last. He guessed he would be a pretty soft target for any toughs hanging out in the busy night, waiting to feed on the gentle souls from inland Mexico who were hoping to cross, waiting for a coyote themselves, or just waiting for some miracle to make their lives a little better. So why not mug a rich gringo?

And why not? he thought. American jerks came down here every day and threw their weight around, took up all the best property along the coast, had no respect for the culture of Mexico, ran wild at fiestas, expected to skim off all the premium foods and goods as their birthright. And then they climbed back into their Winnebagos and Porsches and hightailed it for the border whenever they felt like it. In the right mood, he could mug a gringo himself.

A gang of squat figures drifted slowly down the hill toward them.

“Wait here.” The young man went up to a house and spoke softly to a man who lounged in the doorway. A voice barked something and then slammed the flimsy door on him. Fariborz stepped over a row of oil cans that marked the edge of the front garden and knocked at the next house, light spilling out through chinks in its crude construction.

The group coming downhill was resolving itself in the half-light into teenagers in white T-shirts with some similar homemade marking on each. They banged fists on one another now and then, drifted slightly apart and then back, reminding him of a shoal of fish, looking to feed, and Jack Liffey was pretty sure he was in the food chain, and pretty far down into it.

“Come over here!” the young man called out to him, none too soon, and Jack Liffey hurried to the opened door, where a stocky old woman in an oversized housecoat studied him in abject fear. She held up a carved walking stick, as if fending them both off.

“For a price, she will let us rest here.”

“One of the cops took my money.” He thought it better not to say the word
‘judiciales'
in front of the woman.

“I have some.”

Fariborz handed her some cash and she let them step inside. The stick barred them any further until Fariborz counted out more money. One weak bulb hung from bare wires over a card table, where a single propane burner rested beside several empty cans. Jack Liffey tore his eyes away from the propane ring, his hand crying out in recognition. Everywhere else his eyes moved there was trash and debris, lumpy, stacked on top of itself, and mostly unrecognizable.

“She wants us in the side room.”

Jack Liffey followed them into a dim lean-to chamber where he had to duck his head. The door closed hard behind them. He did not really feel trapped because a good kick would have knocked out the outside wall. They were in nothing more than an add-on shed made of packing crate wood, raw corrugated iron, and delaminating plywood. A mattress lay against the wall, covered by an unspeakably soiled chenille bedspread, and the rest of the floor appeared to be many layers of flattened cardboard carton that had dampened and dried so many times it was spongy and matted into a single piece. The only light came in threads and triangles, gaps in the outer wall.

“We shouldn't cross until three o'clock, so you might try to nap,” Fariborz suggested.

Involuntarily, as he sat on the mattress, Jack Liffey recalled his tormentor's chatter about his favorite film stars. “This is another fine mess you've got me into,” he said. The young man laughed softly, as if he understood.

“What's the time?” His own voice surprised him with its scratchiness. He guessed he had slept for a few minutes, maybe as much as half an hour, but he didn't feel the least refreshed. Earlier, after a lot of entreaty through the locked door, the woman had brought a shallow pan of water and his hand now marinated soothingly in it. From outside somewhere, they could hear competing strains of tootling and clangy music.

“It's just after midnight.”

There was an intermittent clatter and bang out there that had invaded his hectic dream-state in odd ways. He only had to roll onto his side on the smelly mattress to look out through an oblong gap between a sheet of corrugated iron and a big square of stained plywood. A flat patch of land across the road was now bathed in light from several bulbs that dangled from the sickly-looking trees, and a dozen men were dismantling two very new cars. They had no power tools, but they scurried over the cars—a silver Toyota Camry and a red Trans-Am with California plates—like soldier ants, unscrewing and tugging at parts. The hoods and trunks were propped open in silhouette like arms thrown up in despair, and the strippers were sorting and stacking body panels and drive-train parts into piles. This is where his VW, parked in another border
colonia,
would end up in a few days, he thought.

He could imagine the parts being transported across town, and then mixed and matched to be reassembled into new hybrid vehicles: pickups with Cadillac fins, minivans with long sports-car hoods. But, in fact, he guessed the choice components would go into the inventories of auto-parts stores all over northern Mexico and the western United States.

Fariborz knelt to peer out his own aperture, a hole poked through a stiff cardboard poster for Bimbo Bread. “I've never seen a chop shop,” the boy said, after watching awhile. “It's like a nature film with piranhas swarming over an animal carcass.”

One of the radios offered a pounding banda polka in weird counterpoint to a wailing North American girl singer on the other, but the outside world had lost its interest for him and he turned away. Beside his bed, there was a splayed-out stack of decomposing newspapers, all with the bold masthead
¡Alarma!
The photos he could see were of gore and crushed cars and gunshot victims and the newspapers smelled heavily of mildew, which mixed with dust and piss smells heavy on the air. There was also a single orange plastic wheel that he recognized from a Big-Wheels tractor.

“Have you always been so confident?” Jack Liffey asked. The boy's cool had impressed him at several points, though he had found it fairly typical of rich kids. He lifted his hand experimentally, but it stung and he plunged it back into the pan of water.

Fariborz had settled into a crouch, and he clasped his knees with his arms. He was lit faintly in stripes, and he pursed his lips, emoting deep thought. “That's hard to answer without sounding like one big fat ego. I had a happy childhood, and I had loving parents who paid attention to me. When I look at my classmates, I think that's mainly what gives you a feeling of confidence as you grow up. But maybe I'm just not imaginative enough to picture things going wrong.”

Somebody outside hollered at the top of his lungs, as if he'd just struck his thumb with a hammer, and the boy made a face. “Whatever I look like to you, I feel like a total outsider. Not just as a Persian. I don't want to feel at home in all the sinfulness I see. Sometimes it seems that the main purpose of education is to get you to accept all that as what's normal. I don't quite mean sinfulness as the word to use. I mean something like selfishness and greediness and just looking the other way when bad things happen.”

All that
is
more or less normal, Jack Liffey thought, but he didn't say anything.

“When I peeked at that big fat Mexican, I could see he was really evil.” The boy's face was overworking itself to suggest difficult, or just painful thought. “It's funny. For some reason, he didn't scare me. I don't know. Maybe I just trust Allah to protect me.”

“I don't want to mess with your religion,” Jack Liffey said softly, “but I think it's a good idea to get over that sense of invulnerability. That's youth. Sooner or later, it's going to hit you that it's entirely random whether things take a wrong turn.”

“I think I learned that—I mean, things did go wrong for us. But it didn't really change me. I mean, it changed my life, for sure, but it didn't change how I am. I guess it's like those girls who grow up with a fat self-image—no matter how thin they get, they still feel fat.”

The boy went on for a while talking about his moral struggles at Kennedy. Jack Liffey could see he had been self-absorbed with this for a long time, spoiling away inside, bouncing around in a fragile ethical wrangle of his own construction while dealing like a trooper with the outside world. His own thoughts subsided toward the much simpler relentless pain in his hand. The burn made anything else an effort.

“Didn't
you
have a happy childhood?” the boy asked.

Jack Liffey tried to drag himself back toward the boy, who probably needed him more than he knew. “I grew up white and suburban in the fifties. That was probably the most fortunate daydream in world history, but it was a freak. We had so much fun playing with our model airplanes, we never looked around at things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Racism is the obvious one. The Dulles brothers destroying Central America because their family owned United Fruit. Vietnam was under way; then somebody went and shot King and the Kennedys. And Malcolm. Suddenly every single stone got turned up, and there was something deeply nasty under every one.”

It was the pain in his hand talking. He decided not to say any more. Fariborz was still young, and it seemed vaguely disgraceful to interfere with the idealism of the young. Maybe it was still possible in the boy's worldview for Shane to ride into town and fix everything. And Jack Liffey knew perfectly well that every once in a while, unpredictably, he could not refrain from trying to act out some Shane drama of his own.

“I don't think moral blindness is my problem,” the young man said.

“No, you were born way too late for that. Think of the change. My TV sitcoms all had perfect moms and slightly goofy dads who wore cardigans and did their earnest best to help their kids stay out of trouble. Yours are full of dysfunctional parents screaming insults at each other.”

“I don't watch TV.”

“It's kind of a metaphor. We've left you a world stripped raw of illusions. You don't have to be a Moslem, you know, to recoil from the pain that shows through.”

“I know. If I thought that, I'd have to leave America. No matter what anoyone's religion is, they have the capacity to add to the good side of the balance.”

“Well, just now, you get to save my life. That's not a bad goal, on any moral level. I have a hunch you're planning something to help your friends, too.”

Fariborz shook his head quickly, as if refusing any conversation about the other boys. He started to say something more when a gunshot slammed into the night, quite close, rattling and buzzing the flimsier panels of the shack. They went to their peer-holes to look out into the dark busy world. The car breakers were still at work, oblivious to the shot, and the light from their workshop poured across a gang of teens and preteens in the middle of the street. What must have been the gang leader had a slightly older teen down on his knees at gunpoint. All the gang members wore white T-shirts with a big 18 drawn on the front with Magic Marker, in that angular, vaguely Aztec lettering of Latino grafitti. “Eighteenth Street” was the Latino supergang of Los Angeles, but in L.A. they didn't wear it on their shirts. These were wannabes or copycats.

The boy on his knees wore a too-big trench coat and was whimpering as the others shouted at him and the tiny mean-looking gang leader held a cheap automatic pistol to his neck. Strangely enough, the car mechanics just went on working. In the background the Trans-Am had been stripped of all its body panels, which were set aside now like big red flower petals.

“They want him to do something I can't figure out,” Fariborz whispered.

The boy in the trench coat pleaded and whined and finally acceded to something, as several of the gang boys danced from foot to foot. One skinny boy at the side breathed fumes out of a paper bag and then bellowed up into the sky.

Poverty doesn't necessarily ennoble, Jack Liffey thought, keeping it to himself and realizing that it was not a particularly profound observation after a century of various genocides by one group of the desperately poor against another. Yet these were just boys. Groups of boys, thrown together, seemed to get in touch all too easily with a warrior ethos, eternally re-creating bands of Visigoth raiders.

Two of the kids were dispatched on errands by the tiny leader with his Saturday-night special. The boy on his knees chose a different gang member as the object of his pleas, but the other boy just made rude gestures at him, clutching his own crotch like a rap singer, and laughing. Not laughing, really—the sound was a ghastly bray, like a distress signal from whatever soul remained within, the boy throwing his head back and opening a wound to the sky to dispatch that horrible sound.

Then one of them trotted back, holding at arm's length a big mangy cat that was kicking and boxing against the air. The boy with the paper bag generously offered the cat a whiff, and the cat yowled and kicked harder. Two boys decided to push the trench-coated victim back and forth on his knees in a demented shove-o'-war. Inevitably it got too rough, and he went over onto his side.

One of the strains of competing music stopped suddenly, and it was like a toothache abating. What remained was ordinary North American rock, dark and angry lyrics over a wailing guitar, somehow fitting for this horrible scene. Across the dirt road, two men rolled a hoist toward the Trans-Am and prepared to winch the engine out of the remains.

A second errand boy came back with what looked like a small dog, a Mexican hairless. It, too, objected to captivity, yipping and writhing, and the trench-coated boy called out to the dog plaintively from where he lay.

“It's his pet,” Fariborz explained unnecessarily.

Jack Liffey had no idea what was about to happen, but he had a feeling that it was going to be something he didn't really want to see. Yet it had the morbid fascination of a train wreck, and he didn't look away. The boys produced a thin rope—maybe ten feet long—and tied the animals' tails to each end of the rope. The boy in the trench coat launched an appeal on deaf ears.

Two of the gang members swung the animals back and forth on the rope like pendulums, the animals objecting with increasing wails. The leader counted off, and the boys hurled their living bolo into the air. Jack Liffey noticed now that a power line—probably an unofficial one—dangled slackly over the dirt street, just low enough so a big truck coming up the road might snag it; but no big trucks would ever come up this road. Neither animal passed over the power line, though that seemed to be the intent. The boys scrambled to catch the rope in midair, halting the free fall of the animals so suddenly that after a moment of shocked silence there was a renewed clamor of yelping and cries. The tiny dog seemed angrier and more feisty than the cat. The gang boys leapt in the air and hurled up their fists and cheered in celebration of something.

The second toss put the heavier cat over the power line, and it jerked to a stop with a screech five feet above the dog, which swung and kicked at shoulder height, a living pendulum. One boy cupped his hands under the dog and boosted it upward, the rope slacking to let the cat descend a few feet. A taller boy leapt to boost the dog again until both animals were just about at equal height, up at the level of a basketball rim, and the original errand boy took a running leap and batted at the animals to set them swaying. The gang members hollered encouragement to this sport as the taller boy jumped again and again to redirect the animal trajectories until the cat and the Mexican hairless finally met upside down in a clash of tiny gladiators. The boy in the trench coat covered his eyes and sobbed.

“Aw, shit!” Jack Liffey said.

On its next pass, the cat wriggled around and slashed with all its legs, and the dog squealed shrilly in pain. The boys set the little gladiators swinging again, and at the next pass, the dog got in a good neck bite to set off a screech from the cat. The cat then doubled itself up at the top of its swing and, judging its aim well, struck home with all four paws on the dog's nose. The dog went into that rapid battle gargle that dogs give.

It was eerie that the car-breakers continued their work only a few yards away, as if they and the street gang existed in parallel universes unaware of one another.

Jack Liffey finally wrenched his eyes away from the tiny oblong window. It was a nastier sight than he could tolerate. The boys' voices went on shouting and rooting, punctuated by abrupt animal noises, while he studied a large print of the Virgin of Guadalupe tacked to the inner wall, imprisoned in her full-body spiky golden aura. It was posted on what was formerly the exterior adobe wall of the house, spiked in place with huge bent nails as if crucified. After another burst of yowling, Fariborz pulled back from his window, too. The young man's face seemed to have gone white, but it was hard to tell in the striped dimness.

Jack Liffey watched in surprise as the boy crawled over and hugged him, resting a forehead against Jack Liffey's chest. He felt the young man tremble. People are so damn complex, he thought. He had just been thinking the boy tough and brave, and though he might yet be, he was certainly not stonyhearted. Outside, the wailing and yipping went on and on. It was hard to tell which animal was getting the worst of it.

“How can boys do that?” Fariborz complained.

“We don't know what was done to them as children.”