Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (14 page)

At this point, the black desk clerk appeared. If we weren’t checking in, he said, we would have to leave. I tried to explain the situation to him, as one American to another: that they had nowhere to go, that they were just into town and out of cash, that it should only be an hour or so. He became very apologetic: if it were up to him, he said, we could stay, but he was new, and the manager ... No doubt the manager, I thought, like the neighborhood, was white. He was in a tough spot too. “But why don’t you go around the block to the doughnut shop?” he said. “They’re open all night.” As we got up to leave, he took me aside.

“Hey man,” he said, “are those guys hungry?” I said I thought they probably were. “Well, then, here,” he said, slipping me a five-dollar bill, “buy ’em some doughnuts or somethin’.”

When we got to the doughnut shop, I told them of the charity. They were surprised—the
negros
in L.A., they had heard, were
muy gachos
—bad news. At this moment, the desk clerk appeared through the door of the doughnut shop and nodded at us. “Telephone!” he said. Carlos hustled back to the hotel with him.

Perhaps in the daytime the doughnut shop could pass as a reputable place in calm, suburban Santa Monica. But the nighttime crowd didn’t fit in ... didn’t fit in anywhere, that is, except maybe an all-night doughnut shop in Los Angeles. The gritty trio in the molded-plastic table-and-chair unit next to ours were dressed in denims and T-shirts, with long, stringy hair (one of them, bald on top, looked liked a hard-bitten Benjamin Franklin), dark glasses, and chains attaching the long leather billfolds jutting from back pockets to belt loops. One wore an overcoat, one was missing front teeth, two were sharing a cup of coffee, perhaps for reasons of economy. One was writing on the plastic tabletop with a pencil. Occupying three of the four seats on our other side were a bag lady and two of her bags. She was holding her coffee close to her face, both hands wrapped around it, as though it were the last source of heat on earth, and occasionally shuffling through old newspapers on the table. The counterman was a young Asian, serving two very expressive men, one black and one white, both wearing makeup. As far down the row of stools from them as he could be sat an old, bewhiskered white man in work pants, heavy black oxfords, windbreaker, and cap, probably just off the night shift somewhere ... or about to begin it. All looked deathly in the wavering fluorescent light.

The time passed slowly. All of us were tired, and yet it was important to stay alert. From my seat I could see out the two large plate-glass windows of the storefront. There were few pedestrians, and no cars—the doughnut shop was about the only thing happening this time of night. I tried to keep something of a lookout but didn’t know exactly what to look for. The police, I guessed—maybe this was where they took their late-shift coffee breaks. And, sure enough, the police would arrive in a short while—but not for any of the reasons we might have suspected.

For a long time we sat, saying nothing. Timoteo and I played a few games of tic-tac-toe, which he had never seen, on napkins from the dispenser. Then I taught them the game of dots, in which you draw a grid of dots and, by taking turns drawing lines to connect any two of them, you try to complete more tiny squares than your opponent. It was a simple game, which took a long time. We played a small demonstration match and then, encouraged by the response, I set to drawing a large grid for a lengthy game.

It was as I was involved in this absorbing task that the man apparently came through the door. I did not see him enter. The realization that he was there caught me in midsentence, as I was explaining to Victor that you could make the grid any size you wanted. When Victor looked up, I followed his gaze to a man standing at the end of our table, just inches from me. He was white, young, thickly built, with short brown hair. He wore a black leather jacket with lots of zippers and buckles, jeans, and heavy boots. He was swaying. The end of one of his lips was swollen, and he had a scar cutting through his right brow and down onto his eyelid. The area around his eyes was sort of puffy, and it was hard to see the eyes themselves. But from the way he held his head, he didn’t seem to be focusing, or seeing too clearly. He didn’t say anything, just stood there and swayed.

“Need anything?” I said finally, not belligerent but not too nice either.

His head sort of turned toward me. There was a long delay. When finally he spoke, his voice was slurred.

“White guy talkin’ to some Messicans, huh?”

I stiffened. My friends all froze. “That’s right,” I said, still sitting. There was no reply. “You got a problem with that?”

“No, no, thassokay,” he said, making a little wave with his thick hand, turning. In his somnambulant, doped-up way, he appeared to take in the room behind him. His slow operation, his sluggish response to stimuli, reminded me of a porcupine, or a big land turtle. He meandered about for a while and then plopped himself down behind me, in the empty seat at the bag lady’s table.

“That seat’s taken!” she snapped. “My friend’s in the john and he’s coming right back!” The man leaned across the table toward her and said things in a low voice I couldn’t hear.

“
Waiter! Counterboy!”
she called out, with strain in her voice. The Asian man appeared from the kitchen. “This man is insulting me! He’s rude and does not belong in this establishment. Tell him to leave!”

The man in the leather jacket rose.

“You want coffee?” asked the Asian. The man in the leather jacket moved toward the counter.

Victor, Ismael, Timoteo, and I exchanged glances.
“Híjole, what a jerk!”
said Ismael. We all nodded. “
What did he say to you?”
Victor asked me.

“
Nothing. Dumb things.”
No one else spoke. All, apparently, were scared. I should have been scared, too, but maybe it was the hour, or the fact I hadn’t been hurt in a long time, or my refusal to take seriously someone so “gone” ... whatever, my pulse was normal, and I thought it important to set a “cool” example.
“Let’s play dots,”
I said.
“But do keep an eye open, okay?”
Since he was behind me, I couldn’t see him. Victor, Timoteo, and Ismael nodded.

We resumed our game, and I discovered that I could see behind me, more or less, by looking at the reflection off the big front windows. The man had bought some coffee and was leaning against the restaurant’s back wall, not far from the bag lady. Every few moments I looked up to check on him, but there was never any change.

The dots game, unlikely though it may seem, became quite absorbing as Victor and I neared its final moments, battling it out for the highest number of squares. At least twenty minutes had passed since the Neanderthal had left our table. My guard was down. I was scribbling a
T
in a square I had just completed, and handing our sole pencil back to Victor, when a tremendous blow landed on the side of my head, knocking me from my chair. From the floor, on my back, I curled up in defense against whatever might follow. It took a moment before I could see. When I could, it was blurry, and through just one eye.

The man was standing again at the end of the table. He had come up from behind me. I thought he had hit me with his fist, but I didn’t know. My hand was up over the eye—there was nothing wet, it didn’t seem to be bleeding. He turned and walked out of the doughnut shop.

“Hey, stop that guy!” I yelled. I tried to get to my feet and failed. The second time, with help from Timoteo, I made it. He held me up as I pointed to the door and yelled, in English: “Somebody get him! Somebody call the cops!”

I looked around at my friends. None of them were moving: all were just staring at me. Why weren’t they helping? “Hey! You guys!
¡Oye! Hey, what’s the matter? Aren’t you going to get him?”
There was no response. The whole scene was beginning to seem surreal. The bag lady was at the counter, telling the counterman to get on the phone to the police. I saw him pick up the phone, and then I realized what the problem was.

The police. Commotion. Attention. This was exactly what our journey was designed to avoid. Probably to their dismay, they had not been the ones who ultimately had attracted attention—
I
had. The police were coming—what would that mean? If they gave chase—what would that mean? Either, probably, would mean questioning, the giving of accounts, the revelation of no English, the hard looks at appearance, and the recognition that these were not Mexican-Americans—these guys were wet.

But their problems weren’t foremost in my mind at this moment. I still couldn’t see with my punched-out eye. It was starting to ache and soon would swell. I didn’t know what to do. I had absolutely no idea.

“
¿Qué hacemos?”
asked Ismael. “What do we do?” I felt like saying, “When your friend is attacked, you have to ask him what to do?” but the translation required too much effort.

I turned to the bag lady and asked if the police had been called. “Yes, sir, and they’ll be right here!” she said, with an air of great satisfaction. I decided to wait for them outside, and suggested the guys just sit tight.

At this moment, Carlos walked through the door from the hotel, looking cheered. The friend of his cousin’s, he said, would be coming to pick us up. It might take an hour or two, but he would come. All we had to do was sit it out.
“¡Hijo de la Santísima Virgen!”
he suddenly exclaimed, at last noticing the disarray and my hand over my eye.
“What happened?”

The patrol cars arrived less than a minute later—two of them. I walked over, still holding my eye, and explained that I had been struck by a man who apparently simply did not like the looks of me. I described him, and the direction he had gone, and they sped off.

Ten minutes later they were back—with my assailant, handcuffed, in the back of one car. He hadn’t gotten very far. I signed a statement and thought that was the end of it until the cop began to open his door. “A few statements from witnesses will help make the charges stick,” he explained, reaching for a clipboard.

“Well, umm,” I stammered—this was the last thing we needed—“I don’t think there
were
any witnesses.”

“No witnesses with all those people? Are you sure?”

“Well, it happened all of a sudden, like, by surprise.”

“If there’s no witnesses, you know, they’ll probably release him.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Well, why don’t I go in and check, just in case?” I entered the doughnut shop.

The bag lady came right up to me. “Let’s get something for that eye!” she said, bending forward for a closer look. “No, not now—I’m just here for a second,” I said. “The cop wants to know if there were any witnesses.”

Nobody said anything; it all had been so sudden. “Well, if that’s the case, then I saw it!” said the bag lady.

“You did?”

“Well, no, but I’ll tell them I did!”

My heart went out to this woman. “Oh, ma’am, thank you. That’s really nice. Thank you. But you’d have to go to court and swear on it and everything, and I’m not sure it would make a big difference anyway. Why don’t we skip it this time?”

“It’s your eye,” she said.

“I'll be right back.”

Soon the police cars had left and I was back inside. The bag lady had gotten a plastic bag filled with ice from the counterman and waved me to her table.

“Now, what you’ve got to do is put it on your eye for thirty seconds, and then take it off for thirty seconds. Guaranteed to keep you from getting a shiner,” she said, placing one hand on top of my head and gently applying the ice pack with the other.

“Oww!”

“Well, okay then, you hold it on.”

With my other eye I watched as she rummaged through one of her bags. “It’s here at the bottom,” she said, “I know it is.” Eventually she produced a huge alarm clock, the windup kind with two bells on top, and set it on the table. And for the next half hour she watched it, telling me when to put the pack on, when to take it off. In between commands, she worked on the
New York Times
crossword puzzle, from the local paper. I was so unobservant I didn’t notice this, until all of a sudden she asked me, “Do you know a river in southern Uganda?”

“Southern Uganda? No, ma’am, I don’t think I do.”

“Damn. I’ve got all the rest of them. Well, except for ‘____ War (1899-1902).’ ”

I peered over in amazement. These puzzles were nearly impossible to complete. I wondered: Did she have the key somewhere?

“ ’Course not! Those don’t come out till the next week.” It was Sunday’s paper; she had done it, all right.

“You do crosswords a lot?”

“Well, Sundays I do.”

I looked over at some of the clues she had solved. “Successful”
(ONTOPOFTHEWORLD).
“Geneva’s lake”
(LEMAN).
“Swiss abstractionist”
(KLEE).
I pointed to the last two. “How did you know those?”

“Oh, I lived in Switzerland for some time. My husband and I moved over there when we were first married. He was in the diplomatic corps.”

I kept asking; this was the sort of bag lady which I had thought, from living with the homeless, was largely mythical: the fallen princess-bag lady. She spoke some Italian and French. After she and her husband split up, “things just began to fall apart.” She wore two coats and a sweater; her face was wrinkled, and her eyes were blue. I stood up after a moment to get some more ice. As I turned to go back to the table, I noticed that Carlos and the others were standing up, gathering their flight bags. Carlos looked at me and gestured toward the door. The ride was here. I walked back to my nurse. “God bless you,” I whispered.