The Coyote's Bicycle Read Online Free PDF Page A

sandals, patched trousers, and weathered hats. And immediately, in the presence of city dwellers dressed in suits or crisp jeans and leather shoes, he would have known the difference. He would have known, before learning the term, that he was a pollo , a chicken, something to be preyed upon. And likely, he would have seen the men who approached pollos fresh off the buses from Michoacán and Zacatecas to offer their services. He would have seen the local police who competed with these men to snatch up pollos and sell them body and soul to the coyotes.
    But like the other newcomers without money to pay the smugglers, and looking so poor the police had no interest, Pablo found his way to the border fence— la línea —and walked along its rusted arc and curve to a broad river that was paved with cement, filled with trash, and smelled of sewage. This wasn’t a river anybody wouldwash his family’s clothing in. Pablo walked the paved shore until it ended in dirt at the boundary of the United States. He saw the Border Patrol waiting there in white-and-green trucks and observed the gangs of deported men who idled along the river. Some broke the concrete and dug burrows and caves into the banks, where they lived. Others congregated to smoke and snort chuki —methamphetamine—and to huff paint or glue or gasoline under the walking bridge from the United States. Men lined up at a public water spout to bathe their blackened bodies in view of tourists passing by.
    Pablo would have known that the only difference between himself and these men was time.
    It was in January, six months after Pablo walked out of the pueblo, that Solo learned his friend had wired him money, an intimidating sum. The wire arrived with instructions for Solo to meet Pablo in Tijuana. Solo was surprised that his friend hadn’t made it to the inside, to San Diego, yet. He worried that something was wrong with Pablo’s family, and that this was the reason they hadn’t sent for him long ago. The instructions included a personal note: “Thank you for your prayers. There’s good work here in Tijuana.”
    Days later, when Solo stepped off the red, white, and blue bus from Mexico City—wearing trousers, a worn linen shirt, huarache sandals, and a cowboy hat—he was nearly knocked over by the hustle of the bus station. He took in the gleaming floors and bright ticket counters. He saw women in uniforms. He saw the people in fine clothing. And at some point, Solo noticed a short, dark man in square black sunglasses, standing still among all the travelers hurrying to and fro. This figure wore a loose-fitting T-shirt untucked over baggy canvas pants, and spotless black tennis shoes with bold white stripes. The man made a low whistle.
    â€œPablito,” Solo said, “you are a cholo now!”

2
    It took a flood. My interest in the world’s most crossed international border zone—a sprawling complex not thirty minutes’ drive from my doorstep—was piqued only after it lay under a blanket of water. When Americans talk about a flood of marijuana or cocaine or methamphetamines or migrants or violence pouring over the boundary with Mexico, it’s for rhetorical effect. With the use of the word flood , journalists and politicians mean to say “a larger than normal volume” of something. To put this idea into perspective, our southern border is nearly two thousand dusky, desert miles long—two-thirds the length of the United States, half the span of the Great Wall of China, almost a third of the circumference of the moon. Its parched landscape of surging mountains and mesas could absorb all the drugs of Colombia and, for that matter, all of its rain forests too. It is a place one can walk into and keep on walking into.
    But on a micro-level, the canyon lands of the Southwest do struggle under bursts of rainfall over short periods of time. So what the metaphor makers have missed is that ours