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.