Bajada 2

I almost didn’t see them at first. Their old beat-up half-ton was the colour of the twilight. It came to hard metallic stop and I squeezed in beside them. Baseball caps. They smelled of fish. Raul drove and Alex, in the middle, in silence, passed me an open bottle of tequila. We drove off Highway 1, until we arrived at the ocean. I could just make out a small square whitewashed cement hut with a slanted roof of sticks. It was where Alex lived, and would probably eventually die. In a box no larger than a bus shelter. It had one crooked doorframe but no door nor window. His kitchen was a propane burner; his bath was a bucket. He took one, and I took one after him. We ate some old tortillas, frijoles, and some of the sardines they caught that day. We slept. In the middle of the night came the sound of a truck motor. His wife, Gloria, and their two niños arrived. We pretended to give them room that wasn’t there. In the morning I awoke to a dozen skinny cats. I thanked Alex and Gloria. I wondered how a fisherman kept his white pants so white. Raul gave me a lift back to the highway.
There wasn’t much traffic in those days, but what did come down the road was undeniably authentic. I didn’t put out my thumb for the first ride that day, because it was weaving across both sides of the road like a sine wave on an oscilloscope. It stopped anyway. I got in the back. They were all still drunk from the night before. Thankfully they drove slow, stopping frequently to urinate and show off the gringo to their friends. As we came over a hill and accelerated into the descent on the other side, the driver fell asleep. I looked around. Everyone else was asleep as well. I reached over the driver from the back seat and grabbed the wheel. There was no steering. Somehow I managed to climb into the front seat and bring us to a stop, before we became one with the cactus and the rocks. Everybody woke up to my cursing. They insisted it wasn’t their car. I asked whose it was. They didn’t know.
“Es robado, hombre.”
I looked it up in Steve’s dictionary. It said ‘stolen.’ Jeezuz. I left them sleeping on the side of the road.
What I left them for was an expansive alien forest of cardon cactus around the corner. Among the mesquite and the palo verde, on a rocky slope to infinity, stood a fifty-foot army of ancient grey green sentinels playing their own accordian flesh. The bats that would come to pollinate them at night needed their amino acids for lactation. Turning thorns into milk in this kind of solitude is the ultimate Mexican metaphor.
Then came Hair Trigger Ray, a 50 year-old mobile post-traumatic stress disorder, who made his living by bribing the Federales, smuggling vehicles to sell in a used car lot in Constitucion. He likely started off as a sensitive Mexican kid, but the Americans fixed that for him. I noticed the evil in his eyes when he told me about the thousand men, women, children and animals he shot in Korea and Vietnam. His Californian wife had deserted him, upon his return from the last tour. He spoke continuously of God and the Bible, but most of his nouns, verbs and adjectives began with ‘f.’ He complained about racism against Hispanics with the same bitter herbs he used to curse every other ethnicity. Yet, underneath all his easily triggered hostility, I saw the vulnerable little boy. He really wanted to be nice. It was just too late. We stopped for a lunch of frijoles and eggs, during which Ray devised a plan to have me drive past the checkpoint in Santa Rosalia. He didn’t ask if I had a license. We drove all night, and then I slept in the car. The roosters crowing and barking dogs woke me at dawn. After my cold shower and shave, Ray’s wife, Olivia, fixed me a breakfast of coffee, biscuits, and eggs with diced nopales- prickly pear cactus prepared properly this time. We ate quietly under a carmine bougainvillea. Ray slept and Olivia drove me to the highway. It was only after she kissed me goodbye that I realized she could have kept on driving.
The sun grew white hot, and melted the asphalt. Another Raul picked me up, taught me a few more words of Spanish, and took me to the Mazatlan ferry terminal in Pichilingue.