He woke to a searing pain in his left hand, someone rasping it down to the bone with a cheese grater. In fact, one peek revealed a real person bent over his hand, a young man, rubbing a cold wet goo onto the unbearable wound. He clamped his eyes shut again, engulfed by a visceral desire to return immediately to the world of sleep and blot out the pain, but it had so thoroughly invaded his busy dream-state that even there some terrible wolverine-like animal had been chewing on the hand. No, he was awake now. He discovered that his ankles were still taped and his hip told him he lay on cement. His shoulder was being shaken gently. Jack Liffey opened an eye again to see a delicate hand, slim pianist’s fingers.
“Can you swallow, sir?”
The boy was maybe seventeen or eighteen, darkly handsome, and knelt beside him offering a glass of water and two pills.
“It’s codeine. I put Xylocaine on your hand, from the first-aid kit, but it’s probably not strong enough to help much.”
Jack Liffey took the pills from the boy’s palm and swallowed them with a sip of water, and the boy scurried around to strip the tape off his ankles. A pennant of the same tape fluttered from his good wrist, waggling a little as he sloshed the plastic tumbler for no particular reason. Freeing his hands must have been the boy’s first act, after first pushing aside that angry beast gnawing on his hand.
The boy settled back on his haunches with an earnest, concerned look, and Jack Liffey studied his face. He had an olive complexion, but he did not look very Mexican, at least not in the round-faced mestizo-Indian way he was familiar with. His voice had sounded American. Of course, he might have been upper-class Mexican, fitted out with a few more European genes, the people who used to call themselves “Spanish” in L.A.
“I heard those men talking about you before they left. You found Becky.”
Jack Liffey’s eyes snapped back to the young man’s face, studying it for clues. Pain made his thought process stiff and refractory, but he managed the leap of logic. “You’re Fariborz.”
The boy nodded. “We have to get you out of here. They’ll come back tomorrow to question you again. I heard them say you passed out too soon and they couldn’t get you to wake up again. Your body must have a really strong defense mechanism.”
“A really strong defense mechanism would be asbestos skin.” He thrust his fiery hand into the glass of water and closed his eyes. “Oh, Lord!” The relief was immediate, almost total, but within a few seconds he could tell it was not going to last. Pain gathered, the wolf padding forward again to gnaw at the wound, tear off chunks.
“Soon the pills will make you drowsy.”
“Then let’s get going now.”
“We can’t leave until that light turns red.” He indicated a tiny green glow showing on a metal box by the door.
“Why?”
“The alarm is off because the manager came back. He would see us now. I think he needs to finish some work the Mexicans interrupted. He’ll leave soon. He never stays late.”
“Will he come in here?”
“No. He doesn’t want any part of them or what they did to you. I think he’s scared of the big Mexican.”
“So am I. My name is Jack Liffey,” he offered. “I find missing kids. I was hired by Becky’s father to find her, and I talked to your father, too, and to some of the people at your school. Where are the other boys?”
“They’re not here. That’s all I can say.”
Jack Liffey’s hand was throbbing. He had displaced most of the water from the tumbler and there wasn’t enough left to wet the whole wound. “What on earth is this all about?” Jack Liffey asked. His question offered Fariborz the latitude to explain just about anything he wished. “Everyone said you were a good boy.”
The boy looked rueful. There was a distracting pop-bang up on the metal roof, and they both glanced up quickly. But it was probably only a heat contraction or a big bird settling on the ribbed aluminum.
“A good boy,” Fariborz repeated, as if testing the words for some secret meaning. “Yes, I was trying to do good. The Sunna, the straight path, if you’re Moslem, but I don’t think you have to be Moslem to appreciate the idea.” He smiled grimly, as if there were some joke at his expense. “It’s harder than I thought.”
“Congratulations. That sounds like the beginning of wisdom.” Jack Liffey glanced toward the door, but the tiny glowing lamp was still green.
“Or a step straight into cynicism, Mr. Liffey. I don’t want that to happen to me—it’s cheap and ugly.”
He felt the boy’s sincerity reverberate and he tried to give him his full attention. “Sure. Tell me more.”
“I was looking for a way to behave morally in a world that offers almost no moral paths.”
“I don’t think you’re completely alone on that expedition. A few people before you have tried to do the right thing, within their lights.”
“None of them seem to be in charge of anything much that matters these days.”
Jack Liffey chuckled, then grimaced as the pain redoubled. The pain seemed to have the quality of intensifying all experience, including his perceptions of Fariborz, who seemed to carry a hazy aura of piety around himself. He’d met one kid before who had embarked on what Kerouac had called “the holy boy road,” but this young man seemed to have a bit of humor about him, which, in the end, might just save him.
“I’ve read Gandhi,” the young man said. “You can’t just be passive, you can’t just keep your own hands clean. You have to take positive action for the good. Anyway, that’s what I thought.”
The pain charged back into the center of Jack Liffey’s consciousness and made it hard to concentrate. Still, it helped for the young man to talk away. At first Fariborz spoke in evasive generalities but finally he broke down and told him about some grandiose plan he had worked out to draw attention to conspicuous nuggets of vice that were afoot in America—such as paint-bombing Hustler magazine’s headquarters on La Cienega.
The boy had been saving newspaper articles about likely targets: the one industrial block in Studio City where most of the country’s porn production was centered, a neo-Nazi storefront, a notorious sweatshop downtown, etc., etc. He had pictured himself as something like Mexico’s popular hero Super Barrio, an actual caped character who showed up from time to time to twit the rich and powerful. He figured the press might pick it up and start following his exploits, a new Zorro or something. With the right publicist, it was almost wacky enough to have worked.
Fariborz employed the first person insistently, taking the whole plan on himself, but Jack Liffey figured his friends had all been in on it.
“But somebody got hurt. It was my fault. I prayed and prayed to discover the name of my sin.”
“Could you get me some more water?” Jack Liffey asked.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea. Mahmoud’s just down the hall.” The little light was still green.
It was the first time the boy had used the man’s name and Jack Liffey realized the boy knew the setup here pretty well. He nodded dully and waved his hand a little. “My generation was luckier than yours,” Jack Liffey said. “We actually got to stop a war. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.”
He clamped his eyes closed. There was nothing to do but try to talk through the pain. He heard himself saying, “Of course, the Vietnamese had a lot to do with stopping the war, too. But I think it was rebellion spreading through the U.S. Army that finally put the fear of God into the government. I was just a tech over there, monitoring a radar, but we all had peace symbols and strings of beads on our scopes. I heard more than one time about platoons taking their officers prisoner at gunpoint and refusing to go out on patrol, and lieutenants just clamming up about it to prevent an ignominious end to their careers. Who knows.”
They heard a door slam and both looked over, but the light was still unchanged.
“Of course, a lot of kids got a big head about it all. They’d driven out a president and built a rock-’n’-roll culture and they thought they could change everything, overthrow the whole system. That was pretty crazy. America is a big, rich, deeply conservative, almost immovable country. A lot of those kids hurt themselves—psychologically, if not physically—trying to do the impossible. I have to deal with them and their children every day now. It’s best to know the limits of the possible.”
“But you have to try, no matter what the limits seem to be,” the young man protested. “How else can you know what’s possible?”
“I can’t walk through that cement wall, and I don’t have to keep throwing my shoulder into it just to make sure.”
Fariborz shook his head, unconvinced. “Maybe one day the atoms will all line up just right and you will be able to walk through.”
Jack Liffey tried to laugh, but the pain ambushed it. “I think that’s probably excluded.”
“Mr. Liffey, the people who wanted democracy in Czechoslovakia were beaten in 1968. What if they’d given up? They went into the streets twenty years later and won.”
He felt addled and unhinged. Perhaps this was the wrong time for a simple political discussion. “Times were different; I don’t know. Maybe every generation does have to try. I’m not blaming you.”
Jack Liffey flexed his hand, grimacing, unable to concentrate. What he wanted to tell the boy was that the kind of heroism he was talking about wasn’t something a single person could just will on the spot—that even a Gandhi born a century too early would have been irrelevant. When it worked, it was a relationship between a single will and a special time that made moral action possible. But he didn’t want to argue any longer; he didn’t even want to hear his own voice. It seemed to him futile—even a little distasteful—to argue against a boy’s idealism. And then there was the pain, always the pain.
“You came here to disrupt a tiny corner of the drug trade, didn’t you?” Jack Liffey guessed.
The boy nodded warily. Drugs had not been mentioned before then. “How did you know?”
He sighed. “It’s a manageable goal. You have my permission to save my life, too. That’s also a nice small, manageable goal.”
The young man nodded again slowly, and there was a deadpan aspect in it that Jack Liffey missed at first. “Perhaps you’re worth saving. Just barely.”
Jack Liffey laughed softly, despite himself. This was one confident kid. Then Fariborz hissed him quiet. “There.”
A tiny red pilot lamp had come on and begun to flash beside the green. In a moment, the green went out and the red turned steady.
“We’ll give him a chance to drive away,” the young man said.
“When we get out there, I think we’re going to have to avoid just about everybody,” Jack Liffey suggested. “The judiciales have informers everywhere.”
“I’m on it,” the boy said. “If I’m going to be charged with saving your life, you’re not going to be going the gringo route. I’ll be your coyote. That means your unofficial guide across to el Norte.”
“I know what a coyote is. Have you ever crossed illegally?”
“No, but I know how it’s done.”
“I hope you do.” The codeine was starting to fuzz him up now, without doing all that much for the pain. He caught himself looking up at the ceiling and groaning. “Did you do anything here to disrupt the drug business?” Jack Liffey asked. It might interfere with their escape.
“There’s no evidence of it here anymore, nothing.”
“Did you have anything to do with the shipment that was hijacked in Riverside?” He remembered it had been grotesquely violent, with somebody executing the driver.
“No.”
Dark armies, fighting in the dark. Maybe that was just an object lesson, from someone in one camp to someone in another. He’d probably never know. Jack Liffey’s impatience swelled with the pain. “Let’s go now.”
The young man helped him up and turned out the room light before leading him into a hallway where there was only blackness and a pulsating silence. “Follow me. Touch the wall to keep going straight.”
“You’re the boss.”
They tapped their way along, and before long they came around a corner to where they could see, far ahead, a faint haze of light from an emergency lamp, and they could walk a little faster. At the outside door there was another code box on the wall. The boy punched in a series of numbers and a green light came on, then punched what seemed the same numbers again and the red began to flash. “Go!”
Then they were outside, blinded by the glare of a security light overhead as they hurried across a parking lot toward the street. In the distance, the whole sky was orange with town light, and the road showed the taillights of a single car, a big low-riding American sedan, diminishing.
“Do you think you can walk for an hour?”
Jack Liffey looked at his watch for the first time and saw it was only 9:45. “I have to. I do what I have to. Does that get us across?”
“No. It gets us to the right colonia. La Libertad, where many people wait to cross.”
Jack Liffey wondered if the name was somebody’s idea of a joke—for the neighborhood where illegals waited to cross the border to take up their miserable underpaid jobs in Norteamerica. Better La Peonage, La Serfdom.
The industrial street was dusty and curbless, rutted at the edges with weeds, and a footpath snaked alongside it, where people had worn away the weeds, like a well-used game trail. As long as he fought the wooziness and kept moving, he found the pain in his hand almost manageable. A big doubly articulated truck ground slowly out of a driveway behind and crept past them.
“La Libertad is a sad place. People used to wait in the river zone next to it, which was even worse. But that whole colonia was bulldozed to build a shopping center and apartments. It was called cartolandia—cardboard-carton city.”
“How do you know so much about Tijuana?”
“I worked here last summer and made friends with a lot of students and artists. Tijuana is a wonderful city if you stay away from the tourist area. It’s full of energy and a great hunger for decency. Many, many people just try every day to get a little money honestly to live.” His face seemed to glow under the waxy yellowy streetlights.
“I remember only Avenida de la Revolución,” Jack Liffey said. It was the street of bars, brothels, and trinket vendors, cheap serapes, pottery, and leatherware, and he hadn’t seen it in ten years, since Art Castro had taken him there to the jai alai fronton.
“La Revo. The locals say it’s a magnet that pulls two ways. All of America’s losers are pulled there to be preyed on by all of Mexico’s crooks.”
“That’s convenient,” Jack Liffey said. “In America, the crooks have to make more of an effort.”
They walked between big silent factory buildings like raw concrete fortresses, several of them automatically igniting their security lamps as they passed. Here and there a little cluster of beat-up sedans in a parking lot suggested a night shift. The road rose and fell shallowly, and at one crest, a bit higher, he could see the solid metal wall at the border, a scar running for miles, and maybe ten miles on the other side of the wall a mirage, the lit buildings of downtown San Diego like the unattainable Emerald City.
A sound swelled behind them, first just a rumble and then it erupted into a crackling roar. He ducked involuntarily as an old Mexicana DC-9 passed low and incredibly loud on its landing run. The little jetliner sank out of sight beyond some buildings, presumably touching down on an invisible runaway. It roared with reverse thrust.
“This side gets the landings,” Fariborz said. “La Libertad is on the other side of the airport and gets the takeoffs. Then the planes go right across the border. I bet it’s the only airport in the world where you take off into another country.”
A police siren approached them from behind, and they stepped back into shadows. It turned out to be a beige Crown Victoria, many years old, its multicolored light bar flashing away like a gambling casino.
A big truck pulled blindly out of a plant ahead, forcing the cop car to brake hard, backfiring and lighting up everything around it for Christmas. There was a noisy skid and a policeman’s head leaned out into the night: “¡Ándale, pendejo!”
The police car skirled around the truck, clipping dirt on the far shoulder of the road to stir a cloud of dust, and accelerated away.
“Move on, asshole,” the young man translated.
“I guessed that.”
Apparently the police car had been a forerunner. Coming up fast was a truck crammed with soldiers, grim round-faced teenagers standing up in back clutching their automatic rifles and rocking in unison. They looked put-upon and sleepy.
“What’s that about?”
“Could be us, or looking for guerrillas. Sometimes they think guerrillas are everywhere. The army is terrified of the big bad Sub-comandante Marcos in Chiapas.” They waited in the shadows as yet another troop truck whisked past.
The military convoy had stirred in Jack Liffey some adrenaline which seemed to push back his codeine sleepiness a bit, and he tried to keep the boy to a fast pace. Pain still dogged him and he closed his eyes from time to time, drawn along in the wake of Fariborz’s voice as he talked about living in T.J., his trips down to Sonora, Mexican rock groups he’d met, but not about his father or Becky. Some inner self had retreated into Jack Liffey’s core, watching out his eyeholes, separating a little from his unruly body. There was the sound of a gunshot somewhere ahead, bringing him back to the present to discover they had trekked into an area that looked much less industrial. Cantinas that might be open or closed, seafood restaurants, and locked-up car-repair shops with ramshackle wooden fences, even a few dark homes. An old man hobbled toward them. His aluminum crutches dangled bulging plastic bags filled with bottles and rubbish, which all swayed with his steady pace. Fariborz greeted him politely, but the old man was spooked and shied away.
Then they neared a ramshackle disco in full swing, with polkalike music banging away and men in silky black shirts and cowboy hats spilling outside into a dusty parking lot to posture and hit each other’s shoulders. Anatolio’s Jet-Set Go-Go. One group of men appeared to be sniffing glue out of a paper bag, and another was showing off with knives, slashing the air in a mock fight. Well before they reached the disco, he followed the boy to the opposite side of the road to give the place a wide berth.
Jack Liffey was reminded of what life was like for the real outsiders: for blacks in any of the big American cities until very recently, for illegals even today. No cops to call if something went wrong. No taxis, no ambulances or hospitals, no banks, no safety net.
Now the commerce gave way to rickety homes, and the main road descended into a valley of rolling hills, scarred by dirt cross streets that climbed hillsides choked up with shanties. The whole world here was adobe bricks and salvage, reused plywood, cardboard boxes, and black plastic, even opened-out tin drums. Up the slopes, in pools of weak light, he could see that homeowners had terraced their plots with old tires and salvage. The urge to beautify was astonishing. In each old tire there was a geranium, a beavertail cactus, a dark green chili plant.
At an open corner lot business was flourishing under bright lights. Small men were loading big silver propane tanks onto beat-up fender trucks from the 1950s. The bustle was all clangs and crisp calls on the night air, and he marveled that so much infrastructure carried on amidst such poverty. But of course, it had to. There were irreducible minimums for urban life, and even the poorest needed a way to cook and heat.
“Turn right here.”
They skirted the tall fence at the edge of the airport and trended north on a dirt street into the colonia. Soon they crossed a four-lane highway, dodging the slow-moving semis that rolled steadily out of the industrial park toward the twenty-four-hour border crossing. The boy led him into another mesa of shanties that crowded up hard toward the big metal fence ahead. La Frontera itself.
“La Libertad?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Things were livelier here. Knots of men and women stood or squatted where they could, some tending barrel fires, and the air seemed thick and hostile. There was a stench on the faint breeze, smoke and fire ash and ordinary dust, plus piss and rot. A big jet blasted into the air above them, seeming to hurl itself right out of the shantytown, and banked into a hard turn to cross the border wall. Aeromexico markings, an old four-engine 707 that he hadn’t seen in years. He smelled kerosene now, jet fuel.
With his eyes still skyward, he noticed tiny shapes skittering against the clouds lit orange by city lights, moving herky-jerky, like bats. They probably were bats. He had never minded bats, but he remembered the only camping trip he’d taken with his wife, and Kathy’s going hysterical about getting them caught in her hair. He wondered whether there was any rational basis for that. He flexed his hand. Something was working to take the pain down a notch.
There were shouts ahead. The boy seemed to recognize some peril in them and grabbed his sleeve to tug him up a smaller unpaved side road that ascended the hillside. Both sides of the narrow road were a solid tangle of makeshift housing, punctuated by banana trees and old cars.
Ahead, several men were gathered around a campfire in a bare lot, reduced to silhouettes in the glare. If the boy were to disappear suddenly, Jack Liffey thought, just yanked heavenward in some Persian Rapture, he, Jack Liffey, would be irretrievably lost, marooned in La Libertad for the rest of his natural life. “Buenas dias” and “gracias” would not get him very far toward safety.
And he wasn’t sure how long that natural life would last. He guessed he would be a pretty soft target for any toughs hanging out in the busy night, waiting to feed on the gentle souls from inland Mexico who were hoping to cross, waiting for a coyote themselves, or just waiting for some miracle to make their lives a little better. So why not mug a rich gringo?
And why not? he thought. American jerks came down here every day and threw their weight around, took up all the best property along the coast, had no respect for the culture of Mexico, ran wild at fiestas, expected to skim off all the premium foods and goods as their birthright. And then they climbed back into their Winnebagos and Porsches and hightailed it for the border whenever they felt like it. In the right mood, he could mug a gringo himself.
A gang of squat figures drifted slowly down the hill toward them.
“Wait here.” The young man went up to a house and spoke softly to a man who lounged in the doorway. A voice barked something and then slammed the flimsy door on him. Fariborz stepped over a row of oil cans that marked the edge of the front garden and knocked at the next house, light spilling out through chinks in its crude construction.
The group coming downhill was resolving itself in the half-light into teenagers in white T-shirts with some similar homemade marking on each. They banged fists on one another now and then, drifted slightly apart and then back, reminding him of a shoal of fish, looking to feed, and Jack Liffey was pretty sure he was in the food chain, and pretty far down into it.
“Come over here!” the young man called out to him, none too soon, and Jack Liffey hurried to the opened door, where a stocky old woman in an oversized housecoat studied him in abject fear. She held up a carved walking stick, as if fending them both off.
“For a price, she will let us rest here.”
“One of the cops took my money.” He thought it better not to say the word ‘judiciales’ in front of the woman.
“I have some.”
Fariborz handed her some cash and she let them step inside. The stick barred them any further until Fariborz counted out more money. One weak bulb hung from bare wires over a card table, where a single propane burner rested beside several empty cans. Jack Liffey tore his eyes away from the propane ring, his hand crying out in recognition. Everywhere else his eyes moved there was trash and debris, lumpy, stacked on top of itself, and mostly unrecognizable.
“She wants us in the side room.”
Jack Liffey followed them into a dim lean-to chamber where he had to duck his head. The door closed hard behind them. He did not really feel trapped because a good kick would have knocked out the outside wall. They were in nothing more than an add-on shed made of packing crate wood, raw corrugated iron, and delaminating plywood. A mattress lay against the wall, covered by an unspeakably soiled chenille bedspread, and the rest of the floor appeared to be many layers of flattened cardboard carton that had dampened and dried so many times it was spongy and matted into a single piece. The only light came in threads and triangles, gaps in the outer wall.
“We shouldn’t cross until three o’clock, so you might try to nap,” Fariborz suggested.
Involuntarily, as he sat on the mattress, Jack Liffey recalled his tormentor’s chatter about his favorite film stars. “This is another fine mess you’ve got me into,” he said. The young man laughed softly, as if he understood.