“Huh?”
“Fergit it, dude. I’m wastin my fuckin humor.”
The ox turned his cap bill forward to signify he meant business, and he said, “So how’re you gettin me two grand today?”
“We go to Tijuana. My friend, he buy our shoe for three dollar a pair.”
“What? These shoes must cost sixty!”
“Eeen Mexico, three dollar. Right now. Cash.”
Shelby said, “Two thousand pairs times three bucks is six thousand. How come I only get two?”
Abel watched the big trucker nervously chew at a callus on his fat thumb. Filthy. The calluses were filthy like the rest of him, but Abel liked the ox, filthy or not.
“U.S. Customs, they don’ worry about trucks that go south, but we got to pay Mexican customs. Mordida.”
“What’s that?”
“Bite. Mordida.” Abel made the motion of a fist clamping shut.
“Graft?”
“Yes,” Abel said. “We go through San Ysidro gate. I know customs man. We borrow boss money from last job. We put boss money back when we collect for navy shoes.”
The job to which Abel referred was the pickup at Southbay Agricultural Supply where Shelby had received an envelope containing $500. Shelby mulled it over for a moment.
“Okay, how we gonna get back to the U.S. with our drums full a who-knows-what kinda poison?”
“We don’ come back weeth truck.”
“What the fuck?”
“Our truck get stole. We go to San Diego police to make report.”
“Wait a minute! You’re movin too fast.”
“Look, Buey,” Abel said. “I know how to do! We sell shoe, we leave truck een Tijuana. We walk back through border gate.”
“We gonna tell the cops our truck got hijacked? At gunpoint, or what?”
“No. We say we stop for burrito een Chula Vista. Lunchtime. We eat, we come out, truck gone. We don’ care. Our job gone anyways.”
“I got a bad feelin about this, dude,” Shelby said, “I got a bad feelin.”
But he didn’t object when the Mexican turned south on Interstate 5 and headed toward the San Ysidro crossing.
There were four lanes handling the southbound traffic at the international border. Unlike yellow caution signs at deer crossings that show antlered stags in black silhouette, the caution signs in these parts showed the silhouettes of a man, woman and child running. Every year, caution signs or not, many illegals were killed dashing across the freeway. Dying as they ran north to survive.
Abel pulled off the freeway at the Virginia Street truck gate, the gate used by commercial vehicles going into Mexico. As the van rumbled along the dusty hardpan road, Shelby saw several mobile homes, permanently on foundations, that served as offices for insurance and customs brokers. Before Abel wheeled the truck into the customs yard, the ox looked off to his right and saw two green and white U.S. Border Patrol Ford Broncos parked on top of the levee over the Tijuana River.
What made it an astonishing sight was that the uniformed Border Patrol officers were smoking and chatting and drinking soda pop, not thirty yards from a dozen Mexicans just on the other side of the broken-down border fence, who were preparing for their dash to el norte as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The Border Patrol knew they were coming. The Mexicans knew they knew. No hard feelings on either side.
Shelby Pate didn’t want any part of this place. In his entire life, four years of it in the San Diego area, he hadn’t been to Tijuana more than twice, once to buy meth and once to buy a hooker. One had been as bad as the other, so now he bought his cringe and pussy in San Diego.
When speaking of drugs or hookers, Shelby Pate always said, “Be a patriot. Buy American.”
After they were inside the customs yard, Abel got out and approached a Mexican customs officer he knew well. Shelby watched Flaco jabber in Spanish to the guy, who wore a light-blue uniform shirt with epaulets, and a rakish cap with a sixty-mission crush.
At first, the customs officer turned away and shook his head, but finally he shrugged and nodded. Then the two Mexicans walked to the far side of the truck, away from traffic, and Shelby watched in the side-view mirror as Abel peeled off several twenty-dollar bills from the money they’d been given at South-bay Agricultural Supply.
When Abel came back to the truck he said, “I pay five hundred. Two-feefty my money, two-feefty from joo.”
“You lyin little asshole!” Shelby said. “I saw you give him on’y two hunnerd at most!”
Abel grinned sheepishly and said, “Okay, no problem, no problem. I take one hundred from the two thousand I geev to joo.”
“Three thousand. We’re partners, goddamnit! Three fer you, three fer me. Fuck this!”
“Okay, Buey, okay,” Abel said, shrugging his eyebrows.
“Ya know, dude,” Shelby said, “we coulda jist dumped the drums out by Brown Field or somewheres. A real truck thief mighta did that before drivin south, right?”
“No,” Abel said. “I cannot dump poison.”
Shelby paused, then said, “Good call, dude. Neither can I.”
There was something else troubling Shelby Pate after they got waved through the gate, after they were part of the sixty million who would cross north and south during the calendar year.
“Did you ever see that old movie on TV where three guys go hunt fer gold in Mexico? And this Mexican bandit with a gold tooth, he whacks one of em with a machete? And the greasers’re too fuckin stupid to know the stuff he’s carryin is gold dust? Ever see that movie?” the ox wanted to know.
“No, I like funny movie. Bugs Bunny.”
“Those bandits stole his shoes. That’s how come they got caught. They jist had to steal his fuckin shoes. I got a bad feelin about this.” Shelby’s little eyes widened as he looked around at all the brown faces on the Tijuana streets. “The bandits woulda got away,” he continued, “if on’y they didn’t have to stop and steal the shoes.”
“So?” Abel was thoroughly puzzled. “So?”
“Them shoes. Them fuckin shoes got the Mexicans shot by a firin squad, dude!”
CHAPTER 5
At every stoplight there were vendors selling cigarettes, soft drinks, tamales, flowers. Children scampered through traffic placing Chiclets on the window ledge of cars stopped for traffic signals. And if the motorist did not give the children a few coins for the gum, the waifs would snatch back the Chiclets just before the light changed to green, dodging the fast-moving traffic like tiny matadors.
“We early, Buey,” Abel said, looking at his watch. “I drive aroun’ for leetle while. Then we go see Soltero.”
The traffic roundabouts made the ox uneasy, which Abel noticed when a smoking pickup truck cut them off and sped into a hub where streets fed out like spokes of a wheel.
“Thees called gloriettas,” Abel said.
“How the fuck you know when it’s your turn?” Shelby asked, just as a beat-up Oldsmobile, its side windows patched with plywood, zoomed across in front of the van and rattled off on one of the wheel spokes.
“They work good,” Abel said. “Don’ worry.”
“Lotta squids around here,” Shelby said.
“Wha’s that?”
“Fast bad drivers. Squids,” Shelby said nervously.
On nearly every street and highway around downtown Tijuana Shelby saw unfamiliar sights that made him anxious. A clown in sad white-face juggled balls and pocketed coins from motorists stopped for the traffic light. A fire-eater on the opposite corner performed for cars going the other way. Bony dogs prowled and rooted inside garbage containers, or just lay dangerously close to the endless traffic flow, inhaling noxious fumes from derelict cars.