Vernon God Little (21 page)

Lines of trucks stretch into the dark on the other side of the bridge, cars heavy with people pass through the middle. There’s plenty of traffic on foot, even now, and no sign of a roadblock, except for the regular border checkpoints. I step onto the bridge knowing I step into my dream, pinning its fucken hem with my foot, for me to climb aboard. The redemption, the souvenirs, the lazy panties in fragrant sunshine.

You can already tell one thing: the clean concrete highway ends at the borderline, it’s a different country after that. Tall, small people flow around me like tumbling store-displays, chubby types in denim carve between them, with all the confidence of home. Mexicans. The faces seem cautious, like you might interrupt a promise made to them. The hem of their dream hangs over this bridge too, that’s why. You can taste it. I pass by an ole man wearing Ray-Bans, a Baywatch cap, a Wowboys jacket, fluorescent green Nikes, and carrying a Nintendo box tied with South Park bedsheets. Makes me stand out like a fucken shaved wiener, even aside from being six inches taller than everybody.

Checkpoint buildings sprawl on the Mexican side, officials in uniform stop cars and search them. I stand up my jacket collar, and try to lose myself in the flow of people. I nearly make it too, until I hear this voice.

‘Joven,’ calls a Mexican officer. I start to scuttle. ‘Joven - Mister!’ I look around. He holds up the flat of his hand.

sixteen

The border officer takes his time strutting over from the checkpoint. His skin is darker than a lot of folks down here, and strings of gray-black hair are greased onto his mostly bald head, like with axle grease or something. Kind of a gross little dude, actually.

‘Passport please,’ he says. He looks pretty serious about things, and on top of everything he now has these gold teeth. Black eyes scald me.

‘Uh - passport?’

‘Yes, passport please.’

‘Uh - I’m American.’

‘Driver license?’

‘Well - no, I’m an American, visiting your beautiful country and all …’

He stares at me. He’s going to default to some nasty official type of shit, I can smell it coming.

‘Follow me,’ he says, and marches me back to the main building.

Inside smells of shoe polish. It’s a kind of Jurassic Park for office supplies, with all these ole desks, and Chinese-restaurant kind of chairs, lit by lonely-looking supermarket lighting. A fan clicks in one corner. The effect is something between a courthouse and one of those public-health waiting rooms you see on TV, specially for the number of ole Mexican ladies in here. Don’t fucken tell anyone I said that, though. I’m not crazy about the effect of it. The official ushers me to a desk, and sits behind it, all straight-backed, like he’s the president of South America or something, like the borderline is the crack of his fucken ass.

‘You have identification?’ he asks.

‘Uh - not really.’

He creaks back into his chair, spreading his hands wide, like he’s about to point out the most obvious fact in the fucken universe. ‘You can’t enter Mexico without identification.’ He tightens his mouth across, for the Most Obvious Fact effect.

Some lies form an orderly line at the back of my throat. I decide to go for tried and tested horseshit, which, if you’re me, is the Dumb Kid routine. I cook up some family, fast. ‘I have to meet my parents, see? They came down earlier, but I had to stay back and come down later, and now they’re over there waiting, like, they’re probably worried and all.’

‘You parents on vacation?’

‘Uh, yeah, we’re going on vacation, you know.’

‘Where you parents?’

‘They’re already in Mexico, waiting for me.’

‘Where?’

Fuck. It’s fatal when you get a guy like this, take note. How it works is that he’ll narrow my bullshit down, make it slither to the spout end of the funnel of truth. See how the lie can start out all vague, like, ‘Yeah, they’re in the northern hemisphere,’ or something? Well now he’ll narrow it down, and narrow it down, until you end up having to give a goddam room number. Where the fuck are my parents?

‘Uh - Tijuana,’ I say, nodding.

‘Ti-juana?’ He shakes his head. ‘This the wrong way for Tijuana - is the other side of Mexico.’

‘No, well that’s right, but they came the other way, see, and I was over here, so I have to go across and meet them. You know?’

He sits with his face pointed down, but his eyes pointed up, the way folks do when they don’t buy your story. ‘Where in Tijuana?’

‘Uh - at the hotel.’

‘What hotel?’

‘The, uh - heck, I have it written somewhere …’ I fumble with my pack.

‘You don’t enter Mexico today,’ says the official. ‘Better call you parents, and they come for you.’

‘Well it’s kind of late to call now - I was supposed to be there already. Anyway, I thought our two countries were in a pact or something, I thought Americans could walk right over.’

He shrugs. ‘How I know you American?’

‘Hell, you just have to look at me - I mean, I’m American all right, sure I’m American.’ I hold out my hands, trying to copy the Most Obvious Fucken Fact effect. He leans forward onto his desk, and levels his eyes at me.

‘Better call you parents. Tonight you stay in McAllen, tomorrow they come for you.’

I do the only possible thing at this end of the funnel of truth. I pretend he just gave me a really smart idea. ‘Hey, yeah - I’ll use the phone and get my parents over, thanks, thanks a lot.’

I limp to an ole phone on the wall, and pretend to put coins in it. Then I fuck around in my pack like a total dork-hole. I even pretend to talk on the goddam phone. Really, it’s this kind of shit that brings up the whole psycho argument. After chewing the fat with my so-called parents, I sit on an empty stretch of bench, drifting into this endless purgatory while the fan squeaks like a sackful of rats. I sit until three in the morning, then three-thirty, horny for cool bedsheets. You know the one voice in your head that makes sense, like your internal nana or whatever? Mine just says, ‘Grab a burger and cop some Zs, until it all makes a little more sense.’

I’m distracted by a flash of red at the window. Then blue. A patrol car pulls up outside. Troopers’ hats appear. American troopers. I twitch off the bench, and shuffle past a wrinkled ole man who dozes against a filing cabinet. He could’ve fucken been here since he was a boy. In desperation, I go back to the official’s desk. He stands talking to another uniformed Mexican. They turn to me.

‘Sir, señor - I really need to cross the border and get some sleep. I’m just an American on vacation …’ Through the corner of my eye I see another trooper pass by the window. He nurses an assault rifle at the entrance, and says something to his partner, then a Mexican officer arrives and talks to them both. The troopers nod, and step away.

‘You parents coming?’ my officer asks me.

‘Uh - they can’t make it right now.’

He shrugs and turns back to his partner.

‘Look,’ I say, ‘I’m just a regular guy, you can check my wallet and everything …’

A different kind of shine comes to his eyes. He motions for my billfold. I hand it over. He pulls out my cash-card, arranging it on the desk with an official flourish, then he sits, takes the billfold to his lap, and checks out the twenty-dollar bill.

‘This all the money you travel with?’

‘Uh - that and my card.’

He picks my card off the desktop and turns it gently in his fingers, pausing at the side that says ‘VG Little’. He chews his lip. I get a sudden inkling that Mexico might have different Fate than home. What I think I see in his black eyes is a shine that admits we’re ole dogs together in a lumpy game. A shine of conspiracy. Then, in a jackrabbit flash, he palms the twenty out of my wallet into his desk drawer.

‘Welcome to Mexico,’ he says.

The famous actor Brian Dennehy would stand quiet, narrow his eyes right now, with unspoken respect for the secluded dealings of men. He might rest a hand on the guy’s back and say, ‘Give my love to Maria.’ Me, I snatch up my pack and fuck off. The troopers are thirty yards away on the American side, talking on their radios. I turn the other way and vanish into the night of my dream.

Picture a wall of cancer clouds sliced clean across the border, cut with the Blade of God, because Mexican Fate won’t tolerate any of that shit down here. Intimate sounds spike the tide of travelers, the new brothers and sisters who spin me south down the highway like a pebble, helpless but brave to the wave.

Reynosa is the town on the Mexican side of the bridge. It’s big, it’s messy, and there’s a whiff of clowns and zebras in the wings, like any surprise could happen, even though it’s the dead of night back home. Night doesn’t die in Mexico. If the world was flat, you just know the edge would look like this. Natural law is suspended here, you can tell. Border traffic starts to break up in the town, and I leave the highway to zigzag through shadowy side streets, until I come to an alley where stalls tumble with music, and food glistens under naked lightbulbs. One kid at a food stall accepts a buck in coins for some tacos, which don’t even smudge my throat on the way down. The food exhausts me. I sloosh back out of the alley like a knot of melted cows, and travel for another hour before logic catches up with me. I know I have to put some distance between me and the border, but I’m fucked without cash, and dead on my feet. Jesus wisps around me in fragments, maybe happy to be home in the land of his blood, maybe vengeful for the foreigners that killed him. I beg him for peace.

I find a dark nook by the edge of town, a bunker between houses, with a view of empty chaparral beyond, and settle against a wall to spin some thoughts. One house window has a curtain that waves in the breeze. As soon as their fucken dog quiets down, Taylor’s body gets wrapped in the curtain like a Goddess, her tones flash milky through the lace bunched between her legs. Then she’s in the dirt with me. Her hair is wild on the first day of our escape together; we lick and play into an anesthetic sleep, just conscious of life collapsing around us in grainy pieces.

I wake late next morning, Thursday, and find myself in a strange place, sixteen days after the moment that ripped my life in two. I know I have to find money to carry on. I could try Taylor, but first I need to be sure she didn’t squeal on me to fucken Leona Dunt. I also have to call home and straighten things out, but Mom’s phone will probably be bugged, and anyway, on thirty American cents I ain’t calling fucken nobody. I pick up my backpack, and lope to the highway out of town - Monterrey is one of the places it heads to. I’m glad to move on. I mean, Reynosa may have ended up having an Astrodome, or a petting zoo or something, but between you and me, I fucken doubt it.

Dirty trucks tilt down the highway, with all kinds of extra lights and antennas, like mobile cathedrals or something. I follow them on foot for now. I just want to be alone with my waves. I shuffle, then lope, then limp all day long until my shadow starts to reach for the far coast, and blobs of cactus grow mushy with evening light. I come to a bend in the road that dips downhill, and I get a feeling it’s like the borderline to my future. Up ahead is night, but behind me there’s color in the sky. It brings a shiver, but a senior thought says: leave the future to Mexican Fate.

As the sky unfurls a drape of stars, important omens arrive. A truck idles past with four million hood ornaments, lit up like JC Penney’s Christmas tree, and painted with sayings everywhere. It doesn’t snag my attention until it’s past me, and I see the mud-flaps at the back. Painted on each one is a lazy road that snakes between a beach and a grove of palm trees. My beach. Before I can scan the palm trees for panties, the truck pulls onto the wrong side of the road, and coasts downhill toward lights burning in some shambly buildings at the roadside. I guess that’s a Mexican turn signal, just moving your vehicle onto the wrong side of the road. Learning: when you see traffic splattered over the front of a Mexican truck, you know it was fucken indicating. I run after it down the hill.

‘El alacrán, el alacrán, el alacrán te va picar …’ Music twangs out of a bar next to a gas station. The truck parks by the bar, and I watch the driver climb down from the cab. He’s smaller than me, with a bunch of growth on his face, and a hefty mustache. He takes off his hat to slide into the roadhouse, cool and straight, like he’s wearing guns. Then, when he’s nearly inside, he gives his balls a squeeze. A little boy jumps from the truck behind him. I shuffle into the building without touching my balls. Nobody seems to mind. Inside, the air’s tinged with muddy cooking oil from an alien kitchen. The driver stands at a rough wooden bar, and looks around at some tin tables where a couple of other dudes sit hunched over their beers. The bartender is Mexican-looking, except that he’s white with red hair - go fucken figure.

The kid scampers to a table near a wall-mounted TV. Everybody else checks me out as I move to the bar with an idea in my head. A cold beer turns up for the truck driver. I pull a music disc out of my pack, point to it, then to the beer. The bartender frowns, looks the disc over, then thumps a cold bottle down in front of me. He hands the disc to the driver; they both nod. I know I should eat before I drink, but how do you say ‘Milk and fucken cookies’ in Mexican? After a minute, the men motion for my pack, and gently rummage through the discs. Their eyes also make the inevitable pilgrimage to the New Jacks on my feet. Finally, whenever a beer turns up for the truck driver, the bartender automatically looks at me. I nod, and a new beer shows up. My credit’s established. I introduce myself. The truck driver flashes some gold through his lips, and raises his bottle.

‘Sa-lud! he says.

Don’t fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar, with stars like droplets on a spider’s web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I’m loaded off my ass. These guys’ mustaches are up where their hair should be, and huge fucken caves are howling underneath, full of gold and tonsils, just look at them, singing their hearts out. Other folk join in, one of them even kneels. The whole night is snatches of humdinger, me and the boys, yelling, laughing, playing bullfights, pretending to be iguanas - I swear you’d load your drawers if you saw this one guy, Antonio, being a fucken iguana. Dudes hug and bawl around me, they become my fathers, my brothers, my sons, in a surge of careless passion that makes back home seem like a fucken Jacuzzi that somebody forgot to switch on.