Finnegan's Week (7 page)

“How many people live in this miserable fuckin town, Flaco?” asked Shelby, turning his cap around backwards to signify he wasn't really scared, not really.

Abel shrugged and said, “They say one, maybe two millions. They don' count when three, four families stay een one house. The peoples, they scared of taxes, see? They don' talk to the tax man. I theenk maybe two millions.”

“Where we going anyhow?”

“
Colonia Libertad,
” Abel said. “Soltero, he bought hees
mamá
a nice house there. Few minute away. Best house. Nice garage for cars, but no cars. When trucks come from the north they go to that garage. He pay cash. I know heem good.”

By then, the van was moving along a more scenic highway, Paseo de los Héroes, where modern nightclubs and discos reassured Shelby.

“This is more like it,” he said, looking around.

“Thees where reech peoples come,” Abel said. “Dance. Dreenk. Very 'spensive.”

Suddenly Shelby found himself gawking at a sixty-foot statue of an American president, right in the center of the roadway.

“Whoa!” he said. “That's Abraham Lincoln!”

“Uh huh,” Abel said. “We crazy een Tijuana. We make statue of man who was president right after gringos steal our country.” He giggled and said, “We crazy peoples!”

“That must be the biggest fuckin Lincoln outside a Mount Rushmore!” Shelby said.

They passed the huge concrete catch basin for the dry Tijuana River; then Shelby saw some of the many
maquiladora
factories: Kodak, Panasonic, Sony, G.E., and others.

Abel had told him that the
maquiladoras
were the hope of Mexican politicians now that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a strong possibility. But Abel, like most of the poor people of Mexico, wasn't looking for salvation from anything negotiated by the U.S. If the gringos wanted it, it must be bad for Mexico, was how the poor reasoned it out, no matter what their politicians said. Still, the
maquiladora
program could provide jobs in the short term. Jobs in the short term could buy them time. They were nothing if not patient.

Pointing to the modern factories, Abel said, “
Maquiladora
breeng money, they say. They say we make new Hong Kong right here een Tijuana.” Then he looked at the ox and said, “But I don' theenk so, Buey.”

Abel's relaxed attitude was calming Shelby. “I think we oughtta hold out fer more,” he said. “Sixty-dollar shoes oughtta bring us
ten
bucks a pair, even down here.”

But Abel shook his head and said, “Three dollar, Buey. He pay three dollar, no more.”

“How do ya know?”

“I know,” Abel said, showing his large white teeth in a grin. “I know.”

“Wait a minute,” Shelby said. “Jist a minute here! You sure we
happened
to be in the right part a the warehouse where these shoes was?”

Abel laughed and said, “Buey, joo no got, how you say? Eemagine?”

“Imagination, asshole.”

“See, I know many Mexican truck driver. Thees guy I know, he go to North Island all the time. He tell me what he see. I phone my friend een Tijuana. He say, okay, navy boot. Weeth steel toe.
Good
boot. Three dollar a pair. Cash. Many as we get!”

“You little whorehouse louse! You
planned
it!”

“Everybody steal from navy, Buey. Maybe after boss sell company, you, me, we find
good
truck job. Work hard, haul down to Tijuana. But we go back north
weeth
our truck. No problem at San Ysidro gate weeth
empty
truck. Today, no. Goddamn poison drum.”

“Wonder if the boss'll fire us for letting his rig get ripped off? Not that it matters since we're gettin canned anyways.”

“Ain't our fault. Somebody stole truck when we eat lunch.”

“Since you thought a everything, how'd the dirty rotten thief steal our locked truck?”

“They break een, hot-wire.”

“So you're gonna bust out the window when we ditch the truck?”

“Uh huh.”

“And I'm gonna pop the ignition and wire it to make it look kosher?”

“You been to jail for steal car, Buey. You do job,” Abel giggled. “Got to look good for when insurance company take truck back to boss.”

“You're a ballsy little dude!” Shelby said. “I gotta give ya that. Hunnerd thirty pounds soakin wet, but all balls.”

“I know my country,” Abel said. “We got to sell, '
meno. Everything
sell een Tijuana. Nobody worry about bees-ness license, no nothing. Nobody geev welfare check down here, Buey. You don' work, you don' sell, you don'
survive
.”

“Yeah, these Mexicans got a lot to learn about handouts,” Shelby said. “There's more moochers on one corner a downtown San Diego than in this whole town, I bet.”

Colonia Libertad
, one of Tijuana's numerous
colonias
or neighborhoods, was one of the poorest. Some streets were badly paved with asphalt, some were crudely cobbled, some were just hardpan that turned into slick water troughs when it rained. Shelby started worrying about their axle.

“Man, they got potholes that could swallow up Roseanne Barr,” he said. “And why're these streets flooded? Water must be scarce this time a year, right?”

“Who know?” Abel shrugged. “Maybe somebody break water line. Somebody
always
break water line, 'lectric line, gas line.”

The ox looked up and saw a cat's cradle of telephone and electrical lines dangling from poles, from roofs of clapboard shacks, even from trees! They seemed to be looped over anything, finally disappearing into flat-roofed dwellings that dotted the entire hillside. He saw children leaping onto propane tanks abutting those pathetic homes, the tanks being imaginary horses.

Shelby said, “A good stream a piss'd knock down the whole neighborhood.”

The colors, particularly the colors of the commercial structures, many of which were built with corrugated aluminum, also made him nervous. The colors they used to infuse a little gaiety into the drab barrios—yellow, red, green, even purple—got him
down
, having the opposite of their intended effect.

Many of the houses had witches and skeletons dangling over doors and windows. Already they were preparing for
El Día de los Muertos
, the Day of the Dead. The witches and skeletons made Shelby especially uneasy. He found himself wishing he could relive that moment in the quayside warehouse when he'd decided to go along with this nutty scheme to steal
shoes
.

At the top of the hill was a twelve-foot-high barrier made of welded steel panels, originally designed to reinforce the tarmac on airstrips. Here the steel sheets were used to mark something other than a line between two countries; more accurately, it was between two
economies
. But even the steel barrier was a joke. It was rusted, chopped full of holes that even someone as big as Shelby Pate might crawl through. And in fact, tens of thousands of people had. Every day they breached that U.S. barrier in order to flock to the plateau on the American side. And when it was dark enough, the masses moved north. Toward
la migra
, and the bandits who waited in the dark.

Shelby was more tense by the time Abel parked the truck on an unpaved street in
Parte Alta
, the newer section of
Colonia Libertad
. He stayed in the truck when Abel disappeared behind a jumble of houses built from every material imaginable. Some houses were made of cinder block, some of wood, some of lathe and stucco. Some actually had four walls consisting of
all
those materials. If there was such a thing as a building inspector he lived on
mordida
, Shelby figured.

A falling leaf drifted in the air like a kite, making Shelby realize how few trees there were. And while watching that drifting leaf, he was startled by a little boy wanting to sell him chewing gum.

“
Chicle, chicle?
” The boy held four cellophane-wrapped pieces of gum in his palm.

The kid's hair was cropped very short because of a severe case of ringworm. Shelby was disgusted by it. Nobody was supposed to get ringworm or polio or cholera anymore. It made him
mad
. He shooed the kid away.

When Abel returned he'd lost that merry-Mex grin of his. He was frowning and looking at his watch.

“Gimme the bad news first,” Shelby said, “but I got a feelin there ain't gonna be no good news to follow.”

“Soltero no' here,” Abel said. “Nobody here.”

“Now what, dude? Now what the fuck we do?”

“We go to hees bees-ness. Down at
central de verduras
.”

“What's that?”

“The fruits and vegetables market. Where they buy and sell the fruits and vegetables.”

Fifteen minutes later, the truckers were wheeling the bobtail into the Tijuana produce market, but by then, Shelby was
very
unhappy. Even the hum and energy of the marketplace didn't lift his spirits, not a bit. Before leaving the van, Abel sliced into one of the boxes with Shelby's buck knife, and removed a pair of shoes to show to Soltero.

All the produce shops bore large colorful hand-painted signs. An explosion of color announced
GUERRERO ABARROTES,
and
FRUTERÍA CARDENAS, FRUTERÍA EL TEXANO,
or
FRUTERÍA EL CID.
The painted signs were adorned with red parrots and yellow tigers with green eyes, and plump stalks of bananas, and ruby tomatoes. A cacophony of voices echoed through the square: men, women, children were haggling, buying, selling,
surviving
. Trucks were parked helter-skelter within the marketplace, all of it surrounded by low, two-story shops.

Somehow it worked. People managed. Which is what they did best, Abel said. The people of Mexico
managed
, against all odds. The lanky young Mexican hopped out of the van and disappeared behind one of the fruit stalls.

Shelby was fidgeting now. They'd wasted an hour. They should've had the deal done. They should've been ready to catch a cab back to the San Ysidro port of entry. Long moments passed before Abel climbed back into the truck and tossed the shoes onto the seat. Shelby noticed that he was sweating.

Abel said, “I find out where Soltero house ees.
Lomas de Agua Caliente
.”

“And where the fuck might that be?”

“Reech zone. Up over Caliente racetrack. Where reech peoples have homes.”

This time they rode silently, as the van snaked its way up a residential street by the racetrack, past mansions made of concrete block and coated with colored stucco. Here there were new cars in the driveways. The battered rattletraps parked in front belonged to the help or to other workers, cars that were facing downhill in order to get them started.

“If you like concrete you'll love T.J.,” Shelby said disgustedly.

He noticed that all the cars bearing
FRONT BC
license plates for “Frontera, Baja California” were American cars made by Ford, General Motors or Chrysler. But as they climbed the hill heading toward Soltero's home he saw some new foreign cars in the driveways and motor courts of gated properties.

“How come most a the people drive American cars?” he wanted to know.

“Use to be we was not allow to eemport cars,” Abel explained. “Chevies, Dodge, Buick, all U.S. car made een Mexico was all we get license for. And no four-wheel-drive car. None.”

Shelby spotted a new four-wheel-drive Jeep Grand Cherokee and said, “Times must be changin.”

“Oh yes,” Abel said. “Soltero, he like four-wheel-drive.”

Shelby didn't see any short leathery Indians up
here
, except for those who were wheeling small children in strollers and prams. And there were a lot of young people on the streets, leaning into cars, chatting, listening to boom boxes. Mostly they were tall and fair, well groomed, expensively clothed. Some of the boys had ponytails, and diamond studs in their ears. Most wore huge gold watches and leather bomber jackets.

“Juniors,” Abel said, gesturing toward them. “We call them
Juniors
. They do what they wan'. They do sometheeng wrong, their father pay
mordida
. They got the life, Buey. No' like us.”

“I ain't even gonna get to see the inside of a Tia-juana whorehouse!” Shelby moaned. “I knew I shouldn'ta got involved stealin shoes.”

Abel stopped at a blue whale of a house constructed of concrete and Mexican terrazzo. It was situated near the top of
Lomas de Agua Caliente
, with a view of the city. The ox stayed in the truck while Abel got out, pushed the gate button, and spoke on an intercom. A moment later a middle-aged man emerged from the two-story mansion and stormed across the pebbled motor court toward the ten-foot wrought-iron gate where Abel waited.

Inside the motor court, held securely by a steel chain, was a snarling pit bull that looked like it wanted to
eat
the skinny Mexican. Abel kept looking from the dog to the man while they talked, but Shelby could see that Flaco wasn't about to win an argument with either of them. The man had a salt-and-pepper ponytail, and wore a lemon-colored guayabera shirt with epaulets on the shoulders. Shelby hated his guts without even knowing him.

When Abel started raising his voice the man turned toward the snarling tethered dog as though he was going to loose the chain. Then Abel walked away from the gated motor court, and the man in the guayabera shirt calmly reentered his house through a door twelve feet tall. Shelby wondered how many hinges that door needed.

“I come back here someday to keel that dog,” Abel said.

“What's the story, dude? Don't keep me in suspense.”

“Soltero say he geev money to guy from Ensenada to pay for cocaine cargo. He say he don' got our money now.”

“No fuckin money! What're we gonna do with a million fuckin navy shoes?”