Dog Eat Dog (18 page)

“No, take the Mustang. I’m gonna buy a car tomorrow. We’ll use that one.” He turned to Mad Dog. “I’m not gonna buy a new one, so I need you to check it out. I don’t know shit about cars.”

“I’m your man for that,” Mad Dog said. He liked that Troy had a favor to ask. It belied a feeling that Troy had pulled back from their friendship. Mad Dog usually sensed whatever anyone felt toward him; he had a kind of radar that he trusted completely. He knew the
regulars
thought he was paranoid, and maybe he was—but a little paranoia was a valuable tool if one lived in a land of snakes.

Late the following afternoon, Troy bought a five-year-old Jaguar with a Chevy 350 V8 under the hood, which juiced it to the horsepower of a stock Corvette. That part was hidden. The exterior was identical to the newest model, and was similar to what he’d driven twelve years earlier, which was partly why he bought it. Mad Dog checked it out and said it was in good shape. The odometer said it was low mileage, which was confirmed by unworn floor pedals. The seats still had the rich smell of new leather. Nothing mass-produced could compare with Jaguar coachwork.

“They’re supposed to be trouble, but they’re great cars, and this one is primo.”

That’s when Troy told the salesman, “I’ll take it,” and paid cash. They drove both cars back to the Bonaventure and Troy checked out. Except for a few hundred dollars, they hid the proceeds in the spare-tire well of Mad Dog’s car; which they parked at the LAX long-term lot. It would be undisturbed for the few days they would be gone.

When they were underway in the Jag, Troy called Greco on the cellular phone. He would meet them at a Holiday Inn outside San Diego sometime that night. Tomorrow they would cross over. Nothing more was said. Talking on a cellular phone was to throw your words into the air; that was what the Supreme Court said in ruling that the laws against wiretap were inapplicable.

The Jag went east on the Santa Monica Freeway, then south on Interstate 5, which went straight to the border, passing through many Southern California towns en route.

East L.A., seen from the freeway, was much as it had been throughout Troy’s life. He had come here from Beverly Hills when he was fifteen and sixteen, running around with Mexicans he’d met in juvenile hall. He remembered speaking English with a Mexican accent and smiled. Until he went to reform school and met tough white kids from Okie cities like Bakersfield and Fresno and Stockton, who could and would fight, he rather despised most white boys as weak and cowardly. The values of a macho ethic better suited his nature. The frame houses were older here, most from before World War II, and built more substantially, if not palatially. Everything was bleached to pastel by the steady desert sun, for that is what it was without the piped-in water from up north. Long before the blacks of South Central had Crips and Bloods, East L.A. had Chicano gangs—Maravilla, White Fence, Flats, Hazard, Clanton, Temple, Diamond, Dogtown, Eastside-Clover, Los Avenues, La Colonia de Watts, and others. Back then the fathers of the Crips were still picking cotton in Alabama.

The little towns of greater L.A., once described as thirty suburbs in search of a city, now blended into seamless sprawl. Once the factories of Firestone, Goodyear, Todd, and Bethlehem Steel provided the jobs. Now the factories were gone south in phrase and in fact. He had no idea where the working people of the little towns found jobs these days.

Los Angeles became Orange County—and the only way to tell the difference was a small sign beside the road. Billboards for Disneyland appeared.

“Ever been to Disneyland?” Troy asked Mad Dog.

“No. I never been to L.A. before.”

“Let’s go check it out.”

“You’re jiving.”

“No, let’s go.”

“Why not?”

So they did, and seemed to be the only adults without a passel of excited children. They took no rides, the lines being too long, but it was an enjoyable hour just walking around. Mad Dog even had a cotton candy. “You know what,” he said, “I liked it better as a kid.”

Shadows were lengthening when they got back on the freeway. Even in Troy’s memory, most of the landscape had been rural, orange groves and alfalfa, between the little towns. Now it was one urban sprawl for a hundred miles. Newport, Laguna, and the other beach towns were no longer separated by miles of empty shoreline and low hills. Expensive houses covered the seashore and rolling hills, so huge windows overlooked the sea at sunset. This was the land of milk and honey, of tanned bodies that expected the good life as their due.

When darkness came, they pulled off the highway to take a piss, look at the silver ocean under a harvest moon, and to smoke a joint. Looking for privacy, they went through an underpass and found a bumpy dirt road. It looked deserted. Then, without warning, the headlights flashed over an encampment of homeless Hispanics, probably all Mexicans, although there was no way to tell. Nearby were avocado orchards and melon patches. The Mexicans picked the fruit but could not pay for shelter on what they made. As soon as the headlights intruded, most of them ran off into the darkness. It might be the migra, so they couldn’t take a chance.

Troy and Mad Dog turned around. Within a few hundred yards was the fence of a development where the houses started at $800,000. As they got back on the freeway, Troy was unsure of what he thought about the homeless farm workers.

They smoked the joint in the car. Troy still had to piss. It was dark beside the road. “Pull over,” Troy said. Mad Dog did so and Troy got out. He was in pain from the need to urinate. In prison a urinal was always close by, so he was not conditioned to restrain himself. The embankment sloped and was dark. He went down; then slipped and slid five more feet, part of it on his hip, before his feet hit solid ground. He pushed himself erect and unzipped his pants. As he pissed into blackness, he looked up and saw Mad Dog standing atop the embankment while headlight beams flashed over him. “Damn,” Troy said, realizing how stupid he’d been.

Mad Dog realized it, too. The stream of cars and trucks buffeted him with slipstream wind and the headlights blinded him. If a Highway Patrol car was coming, the police would pull over to see what was wrong.

Troy could climb partway, then his feet would slip and he would slide back.

“Here, man, try to grab this.” Mad Dog took off his belt and got down where he could hold on to a root with one hand and toss the end of the belt down the slope. Troy grabbed the belt and, after a step, was able to take Mad Dog’s hand. At the moment that their hands touched, Troy remembered that this man had murdered a seven-year-old child, and he wanted to pull away in revulsion. But Mad Dog pulled him up and they got back into the car. Under way again, Troy thought about his reaction on the embankment. It surprised him because he knew many killers, men who had slain cops or store owners or other criminals, men who came from the cellhouse in the morning without caring if it clouded up and rained dogshit, or if they killed somebody or died themselves before evening lockup. He felt nothing about whatever they had done—except the Zebra Killers, some crazy niggers (the term fit) who ran around San Francisco in a van, and whenever they saw a white person alone and vulnerable, they either murdered him on the spot or snatched her for rape and later murder. One of them had lived three cells away from Troy. Hundreds of times they passed on the tier, inches apart, without looking into each other’s eyes or exchanging a word. It was the heat of obsessed hate that Troy felt, and after a while his initial bemused wariness turned to indignation, and then he saw that this nigger would kill every white person in the world, man, woman and child, if he could. Troy’s hostility smoldered in response to the hatred directed toward him. It was Max Row in San Quentin, where they’d put him on arrival. He had several good partners on the tier, so he never felt threatened enough to require a preemptive assault. Eventually they moved the nigger away.

Troy had never murdered anyone, but that was as much luck as prudence or morality. Once, fresh from reform school, he had robbed a liquor store. The owner pulled a pistol from under the counter. Troy hesitated and yelled, but the owner was courageous and intent, so both fired simultaneously so that it sounded like one weapon. The owner’s bullet passed by his eye like a buzzing bee; he felt the disturbed air. Troy’s bullet hit the man’s collarbone and tore straight through. He was out of the hospital in an hour—but it could have been robbery-murder. It was a crime now older than he had been at the time, sixteen or so. It was so alien from where he’d grown up. Such things were unheard of there, but rather common where he later found himself.

No, he had never killed, but he could have. In prison, too, there had been situations—and confrontations—where death could have resulted, his own or his antagonist’s, but the disputes were settled short of murder, although not always short of violence. Such memories of reality made him hesitant to judge others. Still, murdering a seven-year-old child was a far cry from that.

Suddenly, red lights flashed ahead, all across the several lanes of freeway. Mad Dog hit the brakes and Troy lurched forward. It brought his mind back from reverie.

They began to inch forward. A helicopter went by above them. KNX News reported a multiple-vehicle collision with a “Sig Alert” near the Pendleton Exit. “We’re gonna be late … late,” Mad Dog said. Troy winked and reached for the flip-top phone. A sucker could quickly get used to this, Troy thought as he dialed. A minute later he was talking to Greco moving down a highway on the other side of California. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’ll be late, too.”

“No, shit,” Troy said. He was looking forward to seeing his friend and the trip across the border. He’d heard tales of La Mesa for many years. Now he’d finally see what it looked like.

11

That night the three men ate steak and lobster in the hotel dining room; then took in a topless bar a couple blocks away. They had business early, so they got back to the hotel early. Alex and Mad Dog used the twin beds. Troy was equally content on the hard floor: The thick carpet and a bedspread folded over made an adequate mattress for him to rest comfortably.

In the morning they left the Jaguar in the hotel parking lot and took Alex’s middle-aged Cadillac Seville across the border. Tijuana, Mexico, was no longer a sleazy border town, half Old West and half whorehouse, but rather a shiny metropolis with a million or more residents. Corporate logos were everywhere. Still, a presidential candidate had been assassinated here, and a chief of police had been ambushed and gunned down. Federales had shot it out with the local police. The wealth of drugs was entwined with all of it.

Alex said he usually walked across. It was easier coming back and a lot faster. Driving back took an hour to get across at the best times. And there was always a chance the Border Patrol would motion him out of line for a search that tore the car apart and took several hours. They never found anything, but their goddamned dogs always barked at some residue of something. Today, however, he had the toilet bowl and his companions, so he drove into Mexico. Nobody looked at them. “Damn, man,” said Mad Dog, “don’t they wanna see something … a driver’s license—”

“Hell, no! All they want is some Yankee dollars,” Alex explained.

“They stop you for a visa about fifty miles inland,” Troy explained. “The border is a wide-open game. That’s what I read.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Alex said. “You can stay forever in Tijuana and nobody says anything. Shit, Chepe is from East L.A. He was down here fifteen years before they busted him—and they only did it because the U.S. State Department was putting pressure on Mexico City.”

“If he’s got a couple hundred million and all that power, how come he’s in the joint?” Mad Dog said.

“I’m not a hundred percent about this, but this is what I think. I think his juice is the state authorities, the locals, but if they let him go, Mexico City will snatch him up and deport him into the arms of Deputy U.S. Marshals. But the U.S. Administration changes, the Mexican presidency changes, time passes, U.S. Attorneys come and go. Besides, you’ll see, he’s living pretty good, all things considered.”

“I heard it was way out,” Mad Dog said. “I heard the dope fiends down here line up at the joint.”

“I wouldn’t go
that
far,” Greco said. “But when you can’t score anywhere else in Tijuana, you can alway score at the penitentiary.”

Troy half listened while looking out at Tijuana. At first it was what he remembered, the blinding Day-Glo colors of the taxis, the main boulevard, Calle Revolucion, with miles of businesses aimed at Americans on a day visit. Auto upholstery was cheap, medicine sold at a fraction of the cost across the border, shops sold Joy de Partou, Opium, and other expensive perfumes for half what they cost in L.A. On the streets the beggar women with their babies, the cantinas and strip joints, and the whores were abundant.

Suddenly it changed. What had been shacks and vacant land when he was visiting Tijuana for sex and drugs was now one factory after another, a compendium of the transnational corporations: Ford, Minolta, Panasonic, Smith-Corona, Olivetti, and more. Then the big, bright hostelries, Hyatt, Ramada, Holiday Inn. The visiting businessmen needed lodging.

“It changed, didn’t it?” Greco commented.

“No shit,” Troy replied.

“You ever been to La Mesa?”

“Uh-uh. I’ve heard stories, of course.”

“Check this,” Alex said. “It was built for three hundred. It’s got three thousand …”

“Three thousand for three hundred!” Mad Dog said. “Talk about crowded jails …”

“That’s some kind of cruel and unusual punishment, ain’t it?”

“They don’t play that shit in Mexico. I’ll tell you the truth, though. I’d rather do time down here than anywhere in the U.S.”

“You mean if you had some money,” Troy said.

“Oh yeah. But it doesn’t have to be no whole bunch of money. A hundred a month.”

Troy knew about Mexican prisons because men in jail often talk of other jails. Mexican prisons operated on a different philosophy than those in the U.S. Incarceration was enough in Mexico; thereafter they let things approximate society as much as circumstances allowed. Wives visited for several days at a time, inmates ran businesses inside the walls. It was better preparation for society than an American penitentiary. Troy thought of Pelican Bay, California’s newest nightmare, a world straight from Orwell and Kafka brought to life at the end of the twentieth century. Not clubs but tasers with fifty thousand volts of electricity, not beatings but Prolixin, one injection of which turned a man into a shuffling zombie for a week. What did society expect to walk out? Did they expect to sow hemlock and reap wheat? It made him angry whenever he thought of the sheer stupidity.