The Coyote's Bicycle (40 page)

Marta inserted the earplugs, and the technician rolled her table into the dark, narrow bore. The technician's voice then boomed over an intercom. Then there was clicking, and then a volley of sound like laser fire or a printing press at capacity.

This was not the only test. One required her to wear an apparatus on her head and look at flashing lights. For another, a dye was injected into her bloodstream. The nurse who performed the sonogram was not associated with the oncologist or any of the technicians and let slip the sex of the child. “I'm having a boy,” Marta told Roberto with a light in her eyes, and for the duration of the return trip this was all she talked about. Would he play baseball or soccer? From her he'd inherit a love of school. And, she suspected, he'd learn to speak English too. Given his father's long-standing dream, this child might be an American boy.

Indio greeted Marta and Roberto at Tijuana International Airport holding a bouquet of her favorite flowers. He hugged and kissed Marta, who seemed to hum with the vibrancy of her news: a boy, a boy, a man. He kissed her on the cheeks and twirled her around. When they finally parted, Indio thrust a hearty hand at Roberto and said, “Good to see you,
compadre
.”

Roberto took the hand but, attending to the luggage with unusual concentration, he failed to meet El Indio's eye.

30

A man missing his right leg below the knee labored by on crutches. Dried blood covered his uniform. It was hot, and he was sweating. Thunderclouds formed above the interior mountains. A guy standing on a roof looked down on the scene and called to the amputee, “What's up, smiley?” Another soldier followed. He was dressed in desert camouflage. An eyeball hung by bloody sinews from his right eye socket. The white of the eyeball bounced lightly upon his cheekbone as he traipsed along.

A stagehand passed in the opposite direction. “Hey, you get dizzy yet?” he asked. “I wore that thing once. I started to spin after a while.”

The soldier with the dislodged eyeball shrugged and grinned. “Not yet.”

A call to prayer rose from tinny, blown-out speakers. Women wearing black head-to-toe abayas jogged by as if late for Friday services. What I took to be makeup artists, because of their contemporary hairstyles and clothing, ran by holding jugs of what looked to be fake blood.

This parade took place in the relatively sedate moments between explosive training scenarios at one of Strategic Operations' simulation venues. The actors, whether playing civilians, attackers, the
wounded, or the dead, hustled to take up new positions before the next group of navy corpsmen entered the scene. This was to be the troops' final training before deployment, and the atmosphere was riven with a theatrical sense of ceremony and graduation.

“I've got all kinds of shit going on,” said a large man who waved me over. “So if I'm not around—and anybody asks—you just tell them that you're with Johnny Hoffman.”

Strawberry blond and grizzled, Hoffman seemed all-American in that genre of the high school football hero turned bad. He was well built, had a ruddy complexion, and wore the uniform of a California vet—a tank top, surf shorts, military-issue boots, and grim tattoos. One read
BEYOND GONE
. Hoffman strode through the fake village like Robert Duvall opining on the smell of victory as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in
Apocalypse Now
. Between calling shots, he narrated a personal vision shaped by war. It included stints in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. “I've been going to war one way or another for thirty years,” he said.

Hoffman then introduced me to an assistant, a young bearded guy—also a vet—whose countenance suggested not quite military or civilian, but freelancer. Hoffman led us through the set to a steel ladder behind one of the structures. He pointed up. We climbed to the top of some shipping containers and met an unbroken view of the amorphous Middle Eastern square. Detritus from previous explosions littered the ground below. The smell of explosives, like cap gun smoke, hung in the air. The next role-play was about to start.

“You'll see a rocket come over that wire,” Hoffman advised.

If Kim Zirpolo and her boss Bill Anderson were the designers of these pageants, Hoffman was the choreographer. I gathered that he'd held the position from Strategic Operations' humble beginnings. He mentioned experimenting with the initial decoration himself. Bicycles, he noted from his time in the field, were a natural fit. None of the original crew had known the business would grow the way it
had, or that their need for people and props would expand in such a manner. They had been, in fact, a startup at the forefront of a new industry called “atmospherics.” The speed of their growth hadn't sunk in until the work at Fort Irwin—an early apex for the company—when Hoffman found himself directing thousands of role-players.

On top of the shipping containers, when I should have been mentally prepping, I found myself scanning the set for bicycles. I caught sight of a bedraggled
BMX
with a rusty chain that looked familiar. A last-minute worker ran by clutching a bloody leg. It was stiff and bent at the knee.

Hoffman nodded. “In Africa, the skinnies would eat that.”

The “skinnies,” I took it, were natives. Hoffman turned to sort out some last-second technical issue. The bearded assistant mentioned, casually, that the old soldier held some kind of record for knife kills in the field. I didn't know how to process this detail.

A formation of navy corpsmen then entered the village. A woman in an abaya bolted from a hiding place. The soldiers followed her with their rifles. They discovered more locals in an alcove and detained them. Then the rocket, just as Hoffman had said, rose over the wire and exploded much too close and much too loud.

“Damn,” I said, raising a hand to one ear and a notebook to the other. Fragments scattered. More smoke.

“Ha ha. I told you,” Hoffman said.

Below us, the blast sent the troops into fevered action. In a state of dislocation brought on by the ringing in my ears and the sudden clapping of gunfire, I glanced across the village at a thirty-foot tower where, under an awning, with the brilliant white thunderheads behind, stood Stu Segall. In the newspaper, he'd been described as “cherubic.” But with his potbelly, polo shirt, and reddish beard, he looked like one of those dried apple characters on a stick, shriveled and wrinkled without having lost the color.

At Segall's side stood a gathering of dignitaries. The older men looked down upon the movements of the trainees. They were Roman heads of state observing gladiator practice. One of the men with Segall I recognized as Congressman Brian Bilbray, a border hawk, member of the “drone caucus,” and former chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, who'd lobbied extensively for the new forty-nine billion-dollar border wall.

In recent years, the real meat eaters of the military contracting jungle had taken note of what Segall's Strategic Operations had been doing. And employing Segall's own techniques, these well-connected corporations easily snatched large atmospherics contracts out of the studio's hands. At the time of this visit, a wave of fiscal belt tightening was about to sweep through the nation's capital as well. Services like those provided by Stu Segall Productions were seen as low-hanging fruit for cuts. Everyone on set could see that the salad days were coming to an end. The Strategic Operations team had already been whittled to a fraction of the size it was at its height. Further cuts were coming. Segall's hosting of politicians at this late stage looked like a last-ditch effort to gobble up the scraps. “We are going to suffer,” Hoffman said. “Contractors are the first to go.”

The role-play concluded without any point I could have summed up. As far as I knew, it was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. I asked Hoffman what was really going on here.

“I don't care how many times you practice,” he said, “your first firefight is pretty fucking terrifying. You can't ever simulate that, but this gives you something to fall back on.”

Hoffman looked at the young soldiers. They seemed to be working through a series of mental stages—from fantasy to the shores of reality—smoke wafting all around. Wistfully, he said, “A year from now, all these guys will be downrange. Some will be dead.”

We watched Segall and the rest of the delegation walk through the war-torn movie set. I'd been severed from employment enough
times to know—from their postures and cadence, this looked like an easy letdown. The age of sequestration was at hand; contracts were drying up. Hoffman didn't have to mention what I suspected to be the case: the cutbacks meant that the “swing gang” I'd heard so much about, after having been deployed with the bicycles to military installations all over the country for the better part of five years, were now coming home—not because the conflicts were over, but because they were being laid off.

31

Roberto invited Indio out for a couple of beers. There was something he hoped they could discuss. Riding on the bench seat of the old white truck, Roberto found himself heading out toward the dusty eastern edge of Tijuana, and to a neighborhood called el Gato Bronco, the Tough Cat. The bar he had in mind shared the name, and there was always some confusion as to which came first, the settlement or the watering hole. A sleek new highway was being built in the trough of the desert valley that held the few homes there, forecasting the next run of Tijuana's liquid-like sprawl. They traveled fresh federal pavement for a distance. Then, without signage, the road just ended in dirt and they continued on a temporary road before uniting with the old one again. The bar was nothing special, but Roberto had had good times there. It was somewhere he'd take foreign clients who weren't able to cross at that time, for whatever reasons, and had been cooped up in his house too long. As the drive extended, however, Roberto questioned the choice. It was more remote than he recalled, but maybe that was best.

Stepping into el Gato Bronco felt like entering a dark closet. The eyes needed time to adjust. There was a musty stillness. A few small tables came into focus. Artificial light emanated from weak lamps
behind the bar. There were just two people in the room, a waitress poised against a barstool and a bartender who was, at that moment, stocking ice. After appraising the men, the woman stood and withdrew a couple of chairs from one of the central tables. “Please come in,” she said. “It's bright out there.”

The men took the seats.

“Something to drink?” she asked.

“A bucket of Tecates,” Roberto said. He winked at Indio. “My brother's brand.”

Indio smiled. “Eventually, even the blind dog gets a bone.”

The woman merely nodded at the bartender, who rose with a wince and stepped to the cooler. He was old, past seventy, and fat—which suggested to Roberto a kind of health. He knew many old men, all of them bone-skinny, even if they'd once been plump. The waitress eased back onto her stool to wait, and this time positioned herself to observe the men.

The bartender raised his head from the bottles. “You look familiar,” he said, pointing the opener at Roberto.

“I haven't been back in a long time,” Roberto answered. “But I always liked the place.”

“I'm glad that you paid the visit,” the bartender said. The woman placed the tin bucket on the bar before him and the bartender filled it with the bottles and ice. “We won't be here for much longer,” he said.

“True?” Roberto asked.

“The new highway, it will pave right over us.”

“This very spot,” the waitress added.

“That's too bad,” Indio said.

“Yes,” said the bartender. He slid the bucket of beers to the waitress and then plunged his trowel back into the ice. The woman stepped across linoleum the color of burnt sugar. As their eyes adjusted, detail emerged. Vinyl seats frayed and splitting, a cracked
mirror. Roberto remembered the jukebox and the plunking sound of its plastic keys.

“Amigo, I once gave you a hundred bucks. A week later, you still had that note in your pocket,” Roberto said.

Indio nodded.

Roberto regarded the young man's wide features, his eyes shaped like a pharaoh's, his quiet yet intensely alert demeanor. “How many
pollos
have you crossed this month?” he asked.

“A few hundred,” Indio said, but then corrected himself. “Two hundred twenty-six.”

“You're joking me.”

“No,” he said.

“Pace yourself. A lot of
polleros
don't cross a thousand people in their careers.”

Indio shrugged.

Roberto waved his finger. “No one is giving out gold medals to smugglers.”

Indio finally cracked a wide, straight smile. He said, “We're thinking of naming him Roberto.”

“The little one?” Roberto's gaze narrowed. “You can't give an angel the name of a
malandro
.”

When Indio laughed, Roberto thought he looked like a boy.

“You're not a
malandro
,” El Indio said. “I owe you everything.”

Roberto didn't know where to begin. He certainly didn't want to take Indio to the cave of thorns where his own heart suffered. Yet it was
el coyote
's business to ferry seekers from one reality to another. And it was his duty to deliver Indio to the truth—facts that he himself did not want to hear spoken out loud.

Roberto began by talking about what had happened in Mexico City—not to Marta, exactly, but to him.

“You know my friend Julian,” he offered. “Julian has been in this business since 1960, a first-generation coyote. Seen it all. He has a
complete infrastructure down there—for the international clients. He gets them visas meant for visiting artists and performers, almost as good as a diplomatic visa. Julian's driver, Alejandro, is the same one who meets my clients at the airport there. So I made the call and Alejandro picked us up. Absolutely no stress in that regard; he took us right there to the clinic, and afterward, to Julian's house. Nice place.”