Limits of Justice, The (31 page)

It was a college-age crowd, male and female, leaning heavily toward blond hair and blue eyes but with an occasional face that was black, Hispanic, or Asian. There were lots of sweatshirts and caps with the names of universities and the Greek emblems of fraternities and sororities, lots of Bermuda shorts and strong, tanned legs, and gaping mouths from which raucous laughter or wild screams emerged. Some of the bodies were out on the floor dancing, strictly heterosexual pairings, and some of the eyes were fixed on the curvaceous, bikini-clad Latinas who danced and stripped on stage, but most of the customers were simply binging on alcohol and calling for more.

The song ended, and over the din I heard a microphone booming and a DJ shouting.

“Do we have any alcoholics out there tonight?”

A roar went up and beer bottles were raised and hands clutching cash beckoned waiters who moved from table to table with half-gallon bottles of Cuervo Gold. The waiters blew shrill whistles while they poured tequila straight down the throats of young men and women who tipped their heads back until they could take no more and began to gag, after which their friends applauded and cheered.

My new buddies shoved me over to a high table against a far wall where three American girls on stools made room for us. They told the girls they’d brought me in to get drunk and then get laid. Everyone but me laughed at that and when I tried to break free, the biggest of the bunch, the one who’d first accosted me outside Mi Amigo, grabbed me and slammed me hard against the wall. He wasn’t laughing when he told me not to move again. Then he was calling for a waiter with a big bottle of tequila, ordering a “popper,” pointing to me. I shouted
no,
but the waiter came on, and again
no, no, no,
shaking my head. Then I felt two of my new buddies seize my arms and the big guy drive his fist into my gut, below the table and out of the sight of the waiter. As I gasped for breath, the big guy grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, and then the tequila was flowing into my mouth and the waiter was blowing his whistle and the crowd was cheering like crazy and I was swallowing to keep from choking and watching the beautiful golden stream come forth from the bottle filled with magic, and the cheering and applause got louder and continuous because I no longer wanted the lovely golden river to stop.

Time had no meaning after that, no parameters at all. Gradually, my world became a visual and aural blur. From time to time I heard the waiter’s whistle and tipped my head back willingly, accepting the tequila gratefully, eager for more. I was aware of laughter and music and even, at one point, my pants and underwear being lowered while a crowd gathered and a prostitute kneeled behind the table to take my limp penis in her mouth and work at it awhile until finally giving up and taking her money and going away. Then my pants were raised and rebuckled and there was more tequila, and more and more, until somewhere within my drunken oblivion I knew I needed a toilet very soon. I sensed myself stumbling through the crowd while hands shoved me forward and I heard the old Mexican phrase—
manejando la camioneta porcelana
—“driving the porcelain bus.” Except there was no porcelain bus, no toilet bowl in front of me—only the entrance to the club, where I lost my footing and tumbled pell-mell down the steps and began to retch violently as pedestrians jumped out of the way, making jokes. When the first wave was over, I felt myself slipping to the sidewalk as if all the air had been let out of me, desperate to be unconscious. I lay my head on the filthy Tijuana sidewalk, facedown in my own vomit, and closed my eyes.

Some time after that, a minute, an hour, I felt myself being lifted, opened my eyes, saw the brown uniforms of two patrolmen who dragged me across the sidewalk and threw me into the back of their car. I was aware of trying to rise from the backseat, trying to speak intelligible words, until the cop in front on the passenger side raised a baton and brought it down in the direction of my face.

Then the patrol car was moving, across streets that became bumpier, then steep, then steeper and more winding, while I slipped in and out of consciousness, until the car finally lurched to a stop as I was coming around. The two cops pulled me out, dragged me to the side of the road, and turned my pockets inside out, although it felt like their hands were distant, tiny insects scrambling over a body that wasn’t quite mine. Then the insects withdrew and I heard car doors slamming as if they were a million miles away, at the end of a long, fuzzy tunnel that was somehow connected to my brain. I was somewhere in the hills, in the dust, in the dark, with warm blood on my face. That was all I knew.

Then I heard the car pulling away, and I went to sleep again.

I woke to sunlight on my face and a pulsing headache that was like a chisel being pounded into my skull. With consciousness came quickly mounting nausea, and to stem it, I forced my eyes open. A small Mexican boy stood over me, staring down wide-eyed.

He wasn’t offering me Chiclets or asking for money, just staring. Then his mother and siblings were there, and his mother was snatching up his hand, saying,
“Ven con migo, ven con migo.”
Come away, come away.

They went away. The blood on my face had dried but I’d vomited during the night and there were flies all around. Some of them were on me, and I shooed them off. I heard Mexican music playing somewhere on a small radio, and felt overpowering thirst, and more nauseous rumblings from a stomach that bubbled like a toxic dump. Within arm’s reach, my wallet lay in the dirt, spread facedown like an open book. I drew it to me, saw that all the cash was gone but my identification had been left behind. The disco cops had also disregarded my wristwatch, probably because it was a cheap Timex with a cracked crystal. I rubbed away the dirt until I could see the hands and face: not quite half past nine.

Gradually, as the shards of my fractured senses began to cohere, I became aware that my legs and feet were lower than my body. I turned my head with a great, roaring pain to see my lower limbs draped over the side of the road. The slope below me was sandstone in color, parched without vegetation. I’d lost a loafer, so I used the other foot to push myself back up the crumbling incline to the flat, where I rolled to my side, sat up slowly, and looked around. Makeshift shanties were everywhere there was buildable space, tacked together from discarded wood, tarpaper, corrugated metal. The huts perched along canyon walls, defying gravity, or crowded the narrow ditch between the cliffs and the rutted dirt lane, resting precariously on earthen walls or propped up by stacks of old tires. A few had picket fences out front, cobbled together from odd slats of splintery wood, and every imaginable kind of discarded plastic sheeting had been used to patch up the shacks against the elements.

It was clear to me that I was in one of the hillside shantytowns one read about every few years, or saw on the evening news back in L.A. The videotape invariably captured the same story, with only the death counts changing: Rainstorms caused flooding that pounded through the canyons and along the roadways, great rivers of mud and debris that crushed and ripped out the ramshackle dwellings, sweeping people away, sometimes whole families. There was an old saying in these parts: When the big storms hit, the residents of San Diego get wet and the people in Tijuana drown. Still, they built here, because there was unclaimed or unusable land, and one has to live somewhere, one has to have a home.

I raised my eyes and looked out across the city. The border stations were visible to my right, off to the north. To my distant left, I could make out a tall, white block building that I recognized as the Jai Alai Palace, where the nightly games were played. That put Avenida Revolución directly ahead, west, maybe a mile or two. I knew then, from my bearings, where I was. The two cops who had been so gracious as to give me a ride in the early morning hours had dumped me in Colonia Libertad, where Chucho Pernales was said to be.

*

The sun beat softly down as I staggered along the narrow road, not quite sure where I was going. I’d kicked off my other loafer and limped along in my socks. People were up and about, glancing at me as I passed but keeping their distance. Once, growing seriously weak, I dropped to my hands and knees, thinking I might vomit again, welcoming it. Nothing came up, but a woman in a shack across the road poured water from a five-gallon plastic bottle into a tin cup and brought it to me. I gulped it down, thanked her, and asked if she knew where I might find a
joven
named Chucho Pernales.

Not to hurt him, I said, to help him, to help his family.

She shook her head no, took the empty cup, went back across the road.

I continued stumbling along until the road leveled out and widened a bit. The homes here were wood frame and stucco, built with foundations on more solid-looking ground, with electric wires running in from power poles. I saw men working on cars and women tending to babies and children, and heard laughter, which made me feel better. Always, from one house or another, there was music playing. When I reached an open dirt courtyard before a small church and saw parishioners coming out, I turned in their direction, with conflicting instincts. I was Catholic by birth and baptism only, with a faith that was long lapsed and a general distrust of priests so deep it bordered on hatred. Yet there’d always been something about a simple, unadorned church and the people who went there for solace and salvation that seemed to transcend the hypocrisy and pious dogma of the larger institution that caused, to my mind, so much shame and suffering. I pressed past the flow of brown-skinned parishioners, drawing more stares with my pale face and its partial mask of darkly caked blood, and as I stepped through the door I crossed myself to show some respect. There were no pews here, just long, wooden benches lined up to face a modest altar consisting of a plain wooden table covered with a faded burgundy cloth trimmed with tattered gold thread. On the table was a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, painted in pastels that some might call gaudy but which I found quite beautiful and comforting. On the distant front wall was a simple wooden cross, and on the side walls were small windows without glass or screens, whose wooden shutters had been opened, letting in the warm air. Near the altar, a young boy in a white tunic, the
monaguillo,
tidied up the wafers and wine from the service that had just ended, as I’d once done in my parents’ church, assisting the priest, who would later help me out of my vestments with his fussy, straying hands in a locked room.

The priest of this church was an older man, in his seventies, I guessed, heavyset, with wispy white hair and rheumy brown eyes, dressed in the customary priestly black tunic and white collar. His hands, which held a tattered Bible and a string of rosary beads, were gnarled and arthritic-looking; he stood halfway down the aisle that divided the room, speaking with the last remaining family. I sat heavily on the nearest bench, along the aisle, and when the padre noticed me, his attention remained divided until the family finally turned away to make its exit. When they were past me and out the door, the priest stopped in the aisle at my shoulder, regarding me with a mix of caution and concern.

“Were you thinking of joining us at the second service?”

He spoke perfect English, heavily accented, with a cadence that was slow and curious, but seemed to imply no judgment.

“I need to find a boy named Chucho Pernales.
Es muy importante.
”

He touched my face where the blood had dried.

“You’re hurt. You need attention.”

“I need to find this boy, Father.”

“Has he done something wrong?”

“Not that I’m aware.”

“Why is finding him so important then?”

“I suspect great wrongs have been done to him. I need him to tell me about it.”

“You’re a policeman?”

“A writer,
periodista.
”

“Americans love to write about poor Mexicans. It seems to make them feel better.”

“I think I can help him, possibly help some other boys who might be in the same kind of trouble. Without his cooperation—I don’t know.”

“Chucho’s troubles are not over.”

“You know him then.”

The priest nodded.

“He is sick, his father is dead, his mother barely gets by.”

“I have money. I can help him.”

“The medicine Chucho needs costs a fortune. He will need it for a long time, perhaps all his life, to stay alive. You have that kind of money?”

“He’d have to go back with me. I’ll find a way for him to get the treatment he can’t get here.”

“I am not sure Chucho will ever go back to the States.”

“You know what happened to him?”

The priest shook his head slowly.

“Not much. He is afraid he might be killed if he tells what he knows.”

“Yet if he stays here, he’ll surely die.”

“There’s a kingdom waiting for him, a better place, if he makes his peace with God.”

“At least let me talk to him, Father. Please.”

He looked me over again.

“Why are you in this condition, beaten and bloodied?”

“Two of Tijuana’s finest gave me a lift.”

He didn’t understand, so I rephrased.

“Two cops robbed me and dumped me here last night.”

The priest studied my eyes for what seemed an eternity, while the flies buzzed and the warm air settled around me like comforting hands. I was too beaten down, too weak, to feel uncomfortable under the padre’s scrutiny, or even to distrust him.

“First, we will attend to your injury. I have some clean water, some antiseptic. Then I will take you to Chucho.”

*

Chucho Pernales lived with his mother and three sisters in two rooms, on a corner in Colonia Libertad at the bottom of a steep dirt road. The priest told me this, along with their story, as he moved slowly toward the Pernales neighborhood, lurching along on his tired knees.

Back in the eighties, he said, Chucho’s father had started going north each season to work in the California fields with tens of thousands of other
braceros,
picking fruit and vegetables for the big American farmers. Most of the money he earned he sent home, for his wife to start up the little family store, the
tienda.
When Chucho was seven, his father was killed in an accident when a truck in which he was riding from the fields overturned. There was no insurance, no benefits. After that, Chucho’s mother and three of her children made tamales and continued to sell sundries in the store, while the oldest sister took a full-time factory job that paid her a hundred dollars a month. It was enough to live on, just barely, but not to get ahead. At thirteen, against his mother’s wishes and fearing that his sisters would end up selling their bodies on the streets to
americanos,
Chucho went north, as his father had before him, and his grandfather, to find better-paying work. It was his destiny, Chucho had told her, to do what a man did, whatever it took to help his
familia.

At first, Chucho had written home, or called if he was staying in Orange County with his aunt and uncle. Then, after a few months, he had simply disappeared, and for three years his family heard nothing from him. His mother tried desperately to locate her son, tried to go through official channels to see if Chucho were in jail or a hospital or even dead. But she found that it was almost impossible to trace a boy like Chucho in the United States, one who’d gone north alone and without documents. There were thousands of boys like that in Southern California, the priest said, and if their families lost contact with them for some reason, it was as if they no longer existed, as if they’d never existed at all.

As the priest led me across the street, he raised a crooked finger to point at an odd-looking corner just ahead, where a ramshackle, two-story structure stood recessed from the curb. It was the Pernales home, he said, at least the lower portion was. During the terrible storm that struck Tijuana in the winter of ninety-eight, a wall of mud and water had come roaring down the hill, carrying away the Pernales’s
tienda
while leaving the rooms behind it intact. Above the two small rooms where Senora Pernales and her children lived was another, larger room that was unusable because the stairway leading to it had been demolished by the flood. With the help of family and neighbors, Senora Pernales and her daughters had erected a new front wall of tarpaper and wood, with a door on the ground floor from which they sold tamales and
refrescos.
It was how they got by.

The priest stopped, and we both studied the strange-looking two-story house with its open, empty second floor and the patchwork facade that covered the ground floor below. Not long after the storm, the priest said, Chucho had suddenly reappeared in Colonia Libertad. He was sixteen by then, ashamed that he was penniless, and troubled by something he had seen or experienced in Los Angeles, which he’d refused to speak about in detail. The following year, he became ill and was diagnosed with HIV, like nearly 200,000 other Mexicans, and many more whose cases were not known. Most of those infected had no medical insurance, the priest said, which meant the expensive combination drug therapy they needed was beyond their reach, as it was to most of the Third World. Chucho would certainly die, the priest added, as more than twenty thousand Mexicans already had, and he’d been spending extra time with the boy, preparing him spiritually for what was to come, guiding him as he atoned for his sins and renewed his faith in the Holy Father.

The priest looked over, with a shrug so slight his stooped shoulders barely shifted.

“I do not know if Chucho will see you, my friend. I do not know if he is even at home.”

We crossed to the corner where the
tienda
once stood, and I stayed back at the curb while the priest made his way across the remnants of the foundation to the rickety, makeshift front door of the Pernales home. He knocked, the door opened, and I saw a pretty teenage girl peer out. They spoke, and a moment later an older woman whom I took to be Señora Pernales appeared. Another brief conversation followed, during which Señora Pernales glanced in my direction several times. She disappeared into the house, came back a minute later, and spoke again to the priest, who then beckoned to me.