Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

call, dude. Neither can I.”
    There was something else troubling Shelby Pate after they got waved through the gate, after they were part of the sixty million who would cross north and south during the calendar year.
    â€œDid you ever see that old movie on TV where three guys go hunt fer gold in Mexico? And this Mexican bandit with a gold tooth, he whacks one of em with a machete? And the greasers’re too fuckin stupid to know the stuff he’s carryin is gold dust? Ever see that movie?” the ox wanted to know.
    â€œNo, I like funny movie. Bugs Bunny.”
    â€œThose bandits stole his shoes. That’s how come they got caught. They jist had to steal his fuckin shoes. I got a bad feelin about this.” Shelby’s little eyes widened as he looked around at all the brown faces on the Tijuana streets. “The bandits woulda got away,” he continued, “if on’y they didn’t have to stop and steal the shoes .”
    â€œSo?” Abel was thoroughly puzzled. “So?”
    â€œThem shoes . Them fuckin shoes got the Mexicans shot by a firin squad, dude!”

C HAPTER 5
    A t every stoplight there were vendors selling cigarettes, soft drinks, tamales, flowers. Children scampered through traffic placing Chiclets on the window ledge of cars stopped for traffic signals. And if the motorist did not give the children a few coins for the gum, the waifs would snatch back the Chiclets just before the light changed to green, dodging the fast-moving traffic like tiny matadors.
    â€œWe early, Buey,” Abel said, looking at his watch. “I drive aroun’ for leetle while. Then we go see Soltero.”
    The traffic roundabouts made the ox uneasy, which Abel noticed when a smoking pickup truck cut them off and sped into a hub where streets fed out like spokes of a wheel.
    â€œThees called gloriettas ,” Abel said.
    â€œHow the fuck you know when it’s your turn?” Shelby asked, just as a beat-up Oldsmobile, its side windows patched with plywood, zoomed across in front of the van and rattled off on one of the wheel spokes.
    â€œThey work good,” Abel said. “Don’ worry.”
    â€œLotta squids around here,” Shelby said.
    â€œWha’s that?”
    â€œFast bad drivers. Squids,” Shelby said nervously.
    On nearly every street and highway around downtown Tijuana Shelby saw unfamiliar sights that made him anxious. A clown in sad white-face juggled balls and pocketed coins from motorists stopped for the traffic light. A fire-eater on the opposite corner performed for cars going the other way. Bony dogs prowled and rooted inside garbage containers, or just lay dangerously close to the endless traffic flow, inhaling noxious fumes from derelict cars.
    â€œMan, I coulda crapped through a keyhole when you was givin a bribe to that Mexican cop,” Shelby said as they inched through the city traffic. “My shit was syrup and I ain’t scared to say it. I don’t wanna go to stony lonesome, not down in this fuckin country.”
    â€œWha’s that, Buey?”
    â€œJail, man! The fuckin calaboose. A Mexican jail where they wake you up with cattle prods in your ass. And a course, they don’t have no trouble findin your asshole ’cause some four-hundred-pound Indian convict from Sonora jist turned you into his pillow-bitin squaw. That’s stony lonesome around these parts, dude!”
    â€œI tol’ you, ’ mano , don’ worry,” Abel said. “That customs man, he jus’ turn us back eef he don’ take the mordida . But he like the money. They all like the mordida . They don’ get paid nada .”
    But the ox wasn’t reassured, Abel could see that. The hulking trucker was sweating. Beads dripped off his whiskers, and he was starting to smell, and not just from work sweat. Like in those drainpipes when Abel used to cross the frontier between Tijuana and San Diego at night, hoping that if