When Abel started raising his voice the man turned toward the snarling tethered dog as though he was going to loose the chain. Then Abel walked away from the gated motor court, and the man in the guayabera shirt calmly reentered his house through a door twelve feet tall. Shelby wondered how many hinges that door needed.
“I come back here someday to keel that dog,” Abel said.
“What’s the story, dude? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Soltero say he geev money to guy from Ensenada to pay for cocaine cargo. He say he don’ got our money now.”
“No fuckin money! What’re we gonna do with a million fuckin navy shoes?”
“He say we must leave them een garage at house of hees mamá back in Colonia Libertad. He say he geev us money nex’ week.”
“Fuck him! His goddamn front door’s worth six grand! He ain’t never gonna give us a penny!”
“Wha’ we do, ’mano?”
“What do we do? This is your fuckin country, remember? You’re the one talkin big and makin all the plans! What do we do?”
“Maybe we go to hees mamá. Leave shoes. Get out of Tijuana.”
“Shit!” the ox said, turning his Mötley Crüe hat around frontwards again. “I mighta known!” After a moment he said, “Okay, drive this piece a shit bobtail back to where that kid was.”
“Where?”
“Back where Soltero’s mother lives.”
“We put shoes een her garage?”
“Yeah, what choice we got? But I wanna give that kid some shoes. Let him trade em fer some good dope or somethin.”
“Okay, Buey,” Abel said. “Okay.”
“And let’s leave this van as close to the border as we can,” Shelby said. “Some fuckin mastermind!”
When they got back to Colonia Libertad, Shelby told Abel to drive around the streets for a few minutes until he spotted the kid with the chewing gum. When he did, he ordered Abel to stop.
“Hey, kid!” the ox yelled at the little boy. “C’mere!”
When the child came forward with a handful of gum, the ox said to Abel, “How you say shoe in Mexican?”
“Zapato.”
“Zapato!” Shelby said to the kid. “Zapato!”
Then he startled the boy by pushing open the door and heaving himself out. Shelby lumbered around to the back of the bobtail truck, opened the cargo door, climbed into the van and ripped open a carton.
Shelby tossed two dozen pair of shoes onto the dusty street, yelling: “Zapato. Viva fuckin zapato!”
Suddenly, a swarm of people emerged from the jumble of houses and began crawling all over the pile of shoes. By the time Abel got the truck turned around, the little boy was running off with his arms full.
“Like cock-a-roaches,” Shelby said. “They jist crawl outta nowhere like cock-a-roaches.”
The house of Soltero’s mother was near the top of a promontory overlooking The Soccer Field, a desolate barren wasteland of relatively flat U.S. soil that served as a place for the poor of this colonia to play soccer unmolested by day, and to gather for their rush north by night. Scanning the soccer field as always was la migra, who captured only a fraction of the pilgrims and deported them just about long enough for them to gather themselves again for the next attempt. And so it went.
But after the soccer field lay El Cañon de los Muertos, better known to the U.S. cops as Deadman’s Canyon, where Mexican bandits preyed upon the pollos coming across in the night. The house of Soltero’s mother looked down on all that, on the misery of those border people who gazed across at el norte. Who could play soccer on U.S. soil anytime they wished.
The house was not a flat-roofed shack like the others. It had a pitched roof, the only one of its kind in the colonia, and a great deal of wood had been used in its construction, including wood siding. There were two mature cypress trees, one on each side of the asphalt driveway, and they too distinguished this home. The entire street had been blacktopped, probably as a result of Soltero paying mordida to the right street-maintenance supervisor, and the new blacktop extended from the curbless street in front, into a spacious two-car garage that was an unheard-of luxury in the colonia.
Abel backed the van into the driveway and walked to a side door that seemed to lead to a patio. No one answered his knock. Shelby discovered that the overhead garage door was not locked, so he swung it open.
When Abel raised the van’s cargo door, Shelby said, “Somebody better get here quick and lock this fucker after we get them shoes inside.”
“I theenk,” Abel said, “somebody watch us now. Maybe mamá of Soltero. When we drive away somebody weel lock the door. Don’ worry.”
Abel climbed into the van and shoved the large cartons to Shelby, who eased them onto the ground, scooting them into the empty garage. The truckers were finished in minutes, and Shelby closed the overhead door, sliding an aluminum bolt in place.
“I ain’t gonna run out and buy a new TV or nothin,” the ox said, “if it depends on money from this.”
“Soltero pay us,” Abel said. “Or we come back and keel his dog.”
“How ’bout him? Shelby said. “He’s the one we oughtta smoke if we don’t get our money.”
Abel said, “We take care of Soltero too.”
Big talk, Shelby thought. If Soltero didn’t pay them, what could they do? This was his town, his country, and he probably had his friends, plenty of them, to deal with the likes of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. Shelby knew that if they didn’t get paid, they’d just have to slink back north.
But maybe they could at least snuff that red-assed dog. Shelby made a mental note to bring some poisoned hamburger when they returned to that big blue house up on rich man’s hill overlooking the Caliente racetrack.
The haulers parked the truck in the Rio Zone, among other cars and trucks, in a parking lot three blocks from the border. Abel broke the driver’s side window with a crowbar; then the ox used it to pop out the ignition. It took a few minutes to make a theft look plausible to any American insurance agent.
As they walked to the pedestrian gate at the border, Shelby asked, “Whadda ya think the Mexican cops’ll do with the drums?”
Abel said, “They leave een truck. Maybe take two, three week before they call San Diego police. They don’ move too fast down here.”
They walked in silence until they got to the San Ysidro crossing, where all twenty-four lanes of traffic were backed up. On the Mexican side, the huge white arched pedestrian bridge that spanned half a dozen lanes and funneled into eighteen other lanes looked to Shelby Pate like a set of animal ears, with fleas swarming in one ear, crossing the curve of the skull, and swarming out the other one. But these fleas were human beings. People swarmed in this fucking town, Shelby thought.
On the U.S. side, the building was conventionally modern with a large flat brown roof resembling a Hershey bar. A bite of chocolate didn’t intimidate Shelby Pate like animal ears did.
As they were going through the entrance to U.S. Customs, they saw a female customs officer and a dope-dog sniffing at the people walking past. Abel turned and said, “Tell me, Buey, why you make me find boy with chicle? Why?”
“Cause I was that poor when we lived in Stockton,” Shelby said. “Only I didn’t sell gum, I sold turnips. And when I went to school for the first time they all ran away like I was a goddamn leper. Cause I had ringworm. Now let’s get the fuck back to the United States of America!”