Free The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor Page B

ancestors’ wrappings, the layers from which we could glean information, was imminently due to be paved over by Homeland Security’s new road.
    McCue pointed out that the National Guard had also been deployed to the boundary. Their first mission here was called Operation Jump Start. The high ground was key to success, and Guard troops took command of various hillocks, erecting what looked like party tents. The high ground was crucial because they weren’t permitted to engage in immigration matters, only to observe and report what they saw. Each soldier was either coming from or going to Afghanistan or Iraq—one could imagine this landscape as just another exotic desert oddity.
    â€œThere was one group of soldiers who took a position on Spooner’s Mesa and sat in the blowing wind day in and day out,” McCue said. The smell of street food wafted across the border wall. “ Perros calientes ,” street vendors called. “ Carne asada! ” Banda music was caught in the desert drafts. “They took in a dog that had wandered over from Tijuana—as if it had been a meek stray, and not an opportunist,” McCue added. “Those guys had no idea where in the world they were.”
    The migrant woman I imagined—the one astride the Free Spirit—I mentally placed her at various locations in the terrain. This was the kind of place a competitive mountain biker might take on for sport. I thought of the elegant ten-speed. It was a tough image tojibe. The 1974 model had been advertised in a folksy TV commercial; the background song went: “Hear the wind blowing, see the grass growing. Hear the sounds of love and laughter through the day, now you’re on your way. When you have a Free Spirit . . . you’ll always have somewhere to go.”
    Confronted with the border industrial complex—the fences, the roads, the towers mounted with cameras, the jeeps and trucks and the constant buzz of agents patrolling on quad motorcycles—I just couldn’t imagine my migrant going anywhere at all on the Free Spirit.

5
    Roberto came from a small ranch in the state of Sinaloa, a mountainous and arid region that runs up against the azure Sea of Cortez. In 1979, Sinaloa wasn’t the powerhouse of narcotics trafficking that it is today. The Sierra were a badlands so lost in time that the last Apache raiders hid out among its forests and heights even as Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic by plane, the Jazz Age swept America, and Gandhi led his Salt March for independence. Roberto’s family’s ranch was an isolated spread two hours by donkey from the closest school. But he grew up knowing there was another life out there. One of his father’s brothers, he understood through stories, was a worldly man of some esteem who had lived in Tijuana for many years. And the moment Roberto, the eldest of six siblings, had outgrown his dusty little rancho, he found himself walking the streets of a central neighborhood called Cinco y Diez until he found his uncle’s ramshackle house. It was not the urban palace he’d imagined, but Roberto didn’t care. He hadn’t hitchhiked and bused to Tijuana to reunite with the uncle. “I wanted to cross to el otro lado ,” Roberto said. “Well, that was my plan.”
    The uncle was an old bachelor who lived with several yappy little dogs. He worked as a bartender in one of the seediest bars in a citybuilt on them. His bald head, bulbous eyes, and small features caused many people to mark the similarity between the uncle and his perritos . He often said it was a lucky thing the resemblance didn’t earn him a nickname. In Tijuana nicknames were inspired by physical traits, defects, and flaws. A guy called Chango (Monkey) likely boasted a protruding jaw and big ears; El Calaca (the Skeleton) would be bony; El Sombra (the Shadow) might be a mute. There was Feo (Ugly), and Moco (Booger). There was even a kid born