Twenty-Nine
The wall is old-school — vertical iron columns spaced wide enough to see and talk through, ten feet high, no concertina. Because the city predates the wall by over a hundred years, its historic downtown, retail, residential, and industrial neighborhoods are divided roughly in half. Small shops, rough cobbles, and dogs. People meet along the wall, trading news and gossip and shopping bags of goods and produce. They talk energetically and touch each other through the rough iron bars.
I spent some time here, helping Charlie Hood, a friend who’d taken the job of chief of police on the American side. His was not an easy assignment, with Buena Vista being a plaza perennially contested by drug cartels, and Hood himself a troubled soul. I hadn’t told him I’d be coming into his jurisdiction with the outspoken marijuana maven Tola Strait. The less people who knew about this, the better.
The Buena Vista Credit Union was located in the newer outskirts of the U.S. downtown, in a humble strip mall home to two restaurants, a photography studio, and electronics shop from which Mexican and American pop songs blared, and a women’s boutique with colorful dresses on racks outside the entrance.
Inside, the building was brightly lit and smelled of new carpet and paint. A counter with three tellers but no customers. On one side of the tellers was a steel gate leading to the vault, on the other side an open seating area built around two impressive wooden desks. No managers on duty. Hand-painted oil copies of Diego Rivera paintings on the walls hung almost straight, potted artificial saguaro cactus with strings of LED lights, magazines on the coffee tables. All three Indians seated and waiting.
The armed guards, each with a machine gun in one hand, pulled the luggage into the desk reception area, then stopped and looked at the Indians for direction.
From an open doorway beyond the desks came a stout older Latino in a gray suit, white shirt, and a red tie, who stopped, considered us briefly, then waved us to follow. With him was a young woman he ignored. He introduced himself to each of us as we walked past him into his office — Robert Calderon, general manager, my pleasure to meet you, please have a seat.
His office was spacious, with hardwood floors and a low ceiling. A wooden desk even larger than the ones out front and plenty of chairs. A sophisticated digital scale, apparently new, sat on the immense desk. Tola and the Indians sat in a line before the desk, the guards retreated to stand on either side of the doorway. I loitered near the guards and their rolling treasures, near the door, another hired hand. PI Ford. Has guns, will travel.
Then a flurry of folders with metal top-clips, distributed by Señor Calderon’s assistant, the documents signed by all parties, notarized by the woman, who then collected and arranged them on a far corner of the big desk. I detected that she felt this ugly business was beneath her. Next she pulled a sturdy metal cart with plump pneumatic tires into position to her boss’s left.
The guards rolled the suitcases to the desk, and at Calderon’s nod, tilted them onto the floor, unzipped them and began handing the bundles to him. He in turn handed several randomly chosen bundles to the notary, who counted the bills with blistering speed and placed them on the cart. Calderon himself weighed the others.
When he was done, Calderon sat down again and slid to Tola a wooden presentation box, open to reveal three tooled-leather checkbooks, six packets of checks, and three elegant-looking pens. He set a business card inside and swung shut the lid.
“It’s so nice to deal with professionals,” said Tola, to no one in particular. Polite assents. She looked back at me with a demure smile.
A few minutes later, deep in the shiny steel vault that smelled faintly of burning metal, we watched Calderon and his never-introduced assistant transfer the bundles to the racks.
Back outside in the bright Imperial County sunshine, we loaded the empty suitcases into my truck. I set Tola’s security shotgun and my uncomfortable ankle cannon in the steel utility box and locked it.
“I’m starved and coming down,” said Tola. “There’s a great place to eat on the Mexico side. If we use the pedestrian crossing, we won’t get stuck in the traffic.”
She requested a shady table in the courtyard restaurant of Hotel Casa Grande. Potted palms, eye-shivering violet bougainvillea, a central fountain in which a pair of spotted towhees splashed. As we were being seated, Tola remarked on the English translation of the hotel name, as pertaining to Kirby, and their old running joke about how much longer he could manage to stay out of the “big house.”
“As it turned out,” said Tola, “not that long at all!”
We drank a small pitcher of margaritas. Tola paid cash from a fat roll in her purse, turned her face up to the palm-slatted sunlight, and closed her eyes.
“I am content right now,” she said. “To be imagining pleasant things behind my rose-colored eyelids. And I’m proud that I remind you of somebody you loved.” Her eyes were heavy on mine. “I got us a good room here. We can continue this discussion inside. Or not. Está bien?”
“More than fine.”
Twenty emotional, pleasure-soaked hours later we were back in the truck and heading for Tola’s pot-growing acres near Palomar Mountain. She consulted the visor mirror and said she looked like a tart, well used.
The highlight reel kept playing through my mind, courtesy of three or four hours of sleep, if that. We made love as soon as we closed the room door, a trail of clothes marking our way to the bed. Followed by a tender, more civilized event. A nap and a time-out for shopping, dinner, and later some Nectar Barn “Love Bomb,” which lived up to its name. Our third engagement took place in a downy time-warp that seemed to last hours, followed by our hysteria over the room’s focal oil painting, a basket of canna lilies appearing to levitate above a table rather than rest upon it. The French-milled soap just floored us. Tola laughed like a scrub jay. You had to be there. We came together again deep in the morning, sleep-deprived and delirious. At sunrise when I tried for another rematch, Tola locked herself in the bathroom and told me to grow up.
I felt taken from and added to at the same time.
In the truck she rambled about girlhood days in the Imperial Valley, how she ran away for San Diego at sixteen, got a job at Taco Bell and a weekly rate room at the Southern Hotel. The job paid $7.25 an hour and no tips, but they’d only give her thirty hours, so the $200 room left her twenty-five bucks for everything else. Wouldn’t have penciled out for long. She’d been eating nothing but Taco Bell until Virgil and Kirby found her a few days later and brought her home. She’d actually put on weight from all the rice and beans and tortillas, had real boobs for the first time, she said. Her mother hadn’t showed for Tola’s homecoming. Mom had divorced Archie by then and had long shed the duties of motherhood.
“I’m extra hard on Mom because she didn’t like me,” said Tola. “But Dad thought I was a rock star. Daddy’s little girl all the way. When Kirby did that to him I was nine years old and riled up enough to want revenge. In the end, the planning did me in. I just couldn’t decide what to do to him — poison him or let the brake fluid out of his motorcycle or maybe just shoot him in the kneecap. After a few weeks of that I realized, well, he’s my brother and it was an accident and I’d never seen Kirby that depressed and disgusted as then. He was punishing himself. So I let it go. It felt good to forgive him. Blood forgives, for better or worse.”
I steered up the mountain toward her property as a black-and-white helicopter hovered in the blue a mile away. Found the shortcut around Kirby’s elaborately padlocked gate, bouncing my truck onto the rutted road with a metallic grate of shocks. In the distance I could see Kirby’s gigantic military tent billowing slightly in the breeze, the Indian motorcycle, the four-wheeler, and the pickup truck were all where I’d last seen them.