The Coyote's Bicycle (30 page)

“We just held a marine training exercise,” Kiser said. “This ground cover enhances the perceived threat environment, it gives the semblance of exploded
IED
s—that's an improvised explosive device. Check this out,” he said, as he walked toward the kind of concrete divider you might see on a freeway meridian. Kiser bent and picked it up with one hand. “Foam,” he said, smiling. “Almost as light as air.”

When he lifted the block, I caught the blue frame and bright aluminum rims of a beautiful little ladies' Peugeot called Urban Express. It leaned against a set wall in the background, and sparkled as if it were new. Up close, I could see its registration stickers. Someone had valued the bike enough to register it, which few people do, and here it sat missing a front tire. I then spotted a black Murray
BMX
, with red grips, white cranks, and a white sprocket. I could see that it had once been thoughtfully customized by the
BMX
rat
who owned it. It still bore muck from the Tijuana River wetlands, as well as two flat tires and a rusted chain that curled around the frame like a garden snake.

“Terry's?” I asked.

“Roger. Those are just a couple of Terry's swamp bikes. There aren't many left here. The bikes are being sprinkled all around the country—China Lake, California; Boise, Idaho; Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. It might sound funny, but the bicycles are just as important as the paint and facades. This is pre-deployment training, and hyper-reality means as real as possible. The bikes give the sets a sense of movement and commerce. Plus, the soldiers, actors, crew—hell, everybody loves riding them.”

“How did it come to you? How did you know that Terry was sitting on all of these bikes?”

“Just visiting the ranch, going horseback riding,” Kiser said.

I couldn't envision this Kiser character and the ranch family son, Terry Tynan, trotting along together, enjoying a sunset jaunt.

“And Terry told you how he came into them?”

“Yeah, the Mexicans,” he said.

“Now they're headed to restricted military bases all over the country.”

“Roger.”

The dispersal of Terry's “swamp bikes,” I assumed, had everything to do with President Obama's November 2009 order of a temporary “surge” in Afghanistan. Thirty thousand additional troops were being prepared for deployment at that moment. The common refrain was that few of these young Americans understood much, if anything, about their destination. I stepped around three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees, taking in the hyper-realistic training facility, and I couldn't have named any one country the set might resemble. It had the flimsy and hodgepodge quality of a third-world fever dream.

In a window cut from a plywood facade about twelve feet up appeared what I took to be a mannequin insurgent. It wore a headdress and a baseball player's goatee. Its skin was a coffee brown. On closer inspection, I noted its red-rimmed eyelids, furrowed eyebrows, and a gaze that looked both sad and irate. The figure held a grenade launcher that drooped like a macaroni noodle. There was another insurgent with the exact same face and goatee, the same belligerent stare, but this one was bald, his shirt burnt orange, and he held an AK-47 assault rifle. I couldn't shake the comparison no matter how long I looked—the foam-sculpted insurgents reminded me of Yogi Bear, the chinless cartoon character; the furry one who loved picnic baskets, inhabited Jellystone, and was tailed by a sidekick named Boo Boo. On spring-loaded mounts, Yogi Bear popped up in windows proffering semiautomatic rifles and explosive devices. Soldiers in training were meant to obliterate Yogi Bear on sight.

“Excuse me for saying this, but the sets look kind of one-dimensional. Kind of shabby,” I said. “Are they convincing to soldiers?”

Kiser didn't register insult in any way; on the contrary. He said, “We provide the sights, sounds, and smells of warfare, but like a TV show, the sets need to change quickly. The materials need to be light, and because they get damaged, they need to be cheap. It's all down to the lessons Stu Segall learned in Hollywood. He's the real patriot here. He doesn't do all of this for the glory. He's one of the good ones. I would take a bullet for the guy.”

This declaration of foxhole loyalty from an employee caught me off guard. “Are you former military too?” I asked.

“That's a negative,” he said.

Kiser led me out of Baby Baghdad and into the broader studio lot. Suddenly, as if we'd walked through a curtain, I spotted studio workers commuting building to building on the saddles of bicycles. There were bikes leaning against fences, parked outside mobile office units.
The workers of movie magic wheeled from one narrative into the next. In this way, I understood where at least a few of the serviceable bicycles of Baby Baghdad had slipped off to. They'd careened off the war set to other scenes and other lives. Later, I'd learn that many a worker desirous of a certain model had pedaled them homeward. The wounded, almost always, were left behind. Anyone skilled enough to fix a flat, I thought, would have made off with that pretty little Peugeot.

As we walked, Kiser busily explained some of the products that had emerged from their work in military and police training. One item was called a
GETFO
, which officially stood for Get Forces On/Off, but for people in the know it meant Get the Fuck Off. It was like the mobile version of a fireman's pole that aided soldiers in exiting the seven-ton transporter trucks. It seemed simple, but in war contracting, he said, “branding is everything.” Another product was called a
BUG-V
, short for Ballistic Unmanned Ground Vehicle. This was a full-sized foam reproduction of a car, taxi, or light truck mounted on a remote-controlled undercarriage.

“The
BUG-V
can be used in various exercises: vehicle checkpoints, sniper training, or urban warfare,” Kiser asserted. “Soldiers can literally blow a
BUG-V
apart with up to fifty-caliber rounds, and after, just sweep up the little pieces.”

In person, the
BUG-V
s looked awfully misshapen, as if they'd melted unevenly in the sun. Their spray-paint jobs furthered this perception by lending their soft surfaces the waxy, colored finish of a Spider-Man birthday cake. When the sad and angry coffee-brown foam insurgents were placed behind the wheel and sent rumbling across a desert landscape, I wouldn't have known whether to laugh or to shoot.

Outside a big, open warehouse we encountered a head-high, onion-domed minaret, probably ten feet in diameter. It had been painted a vibrant Easter egg blue. The artifact would eventually cap a mock mosque in a mock village meant to replicate Islamabad—and
was destined for who-knows-what base in backwoods America. At the moment, it was just a chunk of petrochemicals with its paint drying in a Southland parking lot.

Inside the warehouse, a few real-life artisans buzzed about a workplace full of woods, molds, and paints. It resembled a cabinet shop. One man wearing an army-green T-shirt and camouflage pants stood at a desk with a large, marbled side of beef set before him. At first glance, the meat looked blurry. This was because it was really foam. Taped to a board at the back of the desk were photos of real cuts of beef. The artist eyed the photos and used a delicate brush to apply the last strokes of rippling white fat. Impeccably detailed fake fish were laid side by side on beds of fake ice. There were crates of light green cabbages, dark cucumbers, brown potatoes, golden onions, and red peppers. White rice and black beans spilled from plywood platters. In a corner I spotted three Yogi Bears leaning, forgotten, against the shop's fire extinguisher. Each possessed the same red-rimmed eyes and hackneyed face, but different beards. The human, mostly male artists followed Kiser's tour with an ear and an eye, but worked as steadily as elves.

Kiser then led me into a back room that was absolutely packed with fake weaponry: Claymore mines stacked like plates, mortars like a pile of yams, grenades arranged like storefront pomegranates. Plastic AK-47s and M16s hung on racks covering an entire wall. I supposed a boy might have seen in that room a wonderland of playtime possibilities. It was if the weapons of green plastic army men had become, like boys eventually do themselves, fully grown. But the close quarters, the chemical smell, the sight of so many phony weapons destined for simulations of wars with ever-shifting endpoints and illusory goals became repellent. I stepped out of the warehouse.

Our last stop was a cluster of rooms that sometimes posed as an Iraqi restaurant, sometimes a hospital, and sometimes a meth lab. With a finger, Kiser lifted a teapot from a crate of them.

“Guys out there want too much money for, basically, junk,” he said, dropping the teapot. “When a contract says we need to buy two hundred beds, we need two hundred beds. The military doesn't care if they look good, if they're functional, if they smell. The contract will say two hundred; the auditor will look down the list and count the beds.”

“That's why you went to Terry for the bikes?”

“We needed a lot of bikes cheap. They didn't even need to roll.”

The conversation at the end of the tour had cycled back to the very beginning: just a bunch of bikes, dirt cheap. But there were still too many questions the bicycles could not answer for themselves. And grasping for grasping's sake, I fired some of those questions on Kiser:

“Can you tell me the exact number of bicycles you purchased from Tynan, their makes and models, and on what dates? Do you know the price paid per unit, and what price was billed to the US government? Can you tell me what improvements, if any, were made? Can you tell me how, and how many, bicycles were shipped to each specific location? Is there any sort of retention rate, for the bicycles, at each of these facilities? Is Segall Productions responsible for resupplying bicycles should they roll out of these training exercises without authorization? Is there any way to track the bicycles if they do? Is there any sort of manifest as to the entirety of bicycles purchased by the studio and dispersed, for reasons of war preparation, around the nation and the world? How far, that you are aware of—how far, exactly, and for how long, can these border bikes travel?”

“Uh,” said Kiser, “you're going to have to put that to the big man. Give him a try on Monday.”

21

Marta began to spend the majority of her free time with El Indio. And though this was perhaps normal for women dating at her age, the development came as something of a surprise to the family.

“My daughter never was the type to be getting boyfriends like the crazy girls out there today,” her mother said. “No, not at all. She was with her brother all the time.”

Roberto, while frank about missing the companionship of his former lieutenant, granted her access to his recruiters, the best in the city, as well as various crash pads he used to house migrants. Admittance to Roberto's business infrastructure sharply escalated the numbers for the bicycle operation. But Marta's acumen in the business was something special; she had a touch that couldn't be replicated.

“More than anything,” Roberto noted, “this was El Indio's big break.”

And on the job, Roberto couldn't help but notice the chatter that pursued the young coyote. Established
polleros
would place important clients in his care, knowing his success rate and reputation for honesty. Plus, people just seemed to gravitate toward him. Of more importance to Roberto, however, was that El Indio had also become “the main topic of conversation at the house.”

New vehicles marked the gang's rise and scale; so too did the number of unforeseen difficulties they encountered.

One day, Marta took the van to meet Juan, who, as they'd arranged, was waiting in the little Zona Norte room with nine migrants. When she arrived, eight of the
pollos
paced outside with looks of concern, while inside Juan argued with a young man in grubby jeans and a T-shirt. The young man stood in the corner, his hair disheveled and his eyes glassy. Juan stood closest to the door.

“What's up with this guy? Is he on drugs?” Marta asked.

“I don't know,” said Juan. “He thinks he's being kidnapped.”

“Leave him here. We'll take the others.”

“All right, but his contact checks out.”

“We don't need it.”

“No, I have to cross,” the man said in a sudden reversal. “Please don't leave me.”

“Do you still believe that you're being kidnapped?” Marta asked.

“No,” he said.

“Can you calm down?” asked Juan. “If you can calm yourself, we'll go. If not, you're out.”

“I'm calm,” the man said. His breath seemed to be slowing.

Marta and Juan ushered the others into the van. The group avoided the disturbed youth. As an olive branch, Juan offered him the choice of the front bucket seat or the final spot on the bench. The man chose the latter, which caused his immediate neighbors to grimace.

Marta navigated the van out of the Zona and headed west on the International Road. She took a turn near Smuggler's Gulch that led the group through a ramshackle slum and up a rise to the head of Los Laureles Canyon. Here the road descended into the oldest of the city's western settlements. The track became thin. It followed a dry creek bed. Dwellings encroached on the road. The van was not going fast, maybe only twenty miles per hour, when the agitated
pollo
began yelling, “Let me out, let me out.”

The man lunged from his seat and pulled at Marta's arm. Juan attempted to intervene. But the jerk of her arm caused the steering wheel to turn sharply right. Marta tried to brake but lost control, and the van and its riders careened into an irrigation ditch. The van tipped and its right side collided with the bank. The migrants were thrown on top of each other as the van came to rest at a forty-five-degree angle.

The man who caused the wreck was still clamoring. “Get off of me,” he yelled. Crumpled in the passenger seat, Juan looked to Marta. She was strapped in, but not completely alert. The driver's side door above her was the only option for their exit. Juan shook Marta's shoulder. Her eyelids blinked open.