Whistling

Its calm and cool outside. Its May and its night. I sit outside with a cup of coffee and wait for life to happen.

Across the way Mexican custom agents are shining a spot light on the building adjacent to the port of entry. Suddenly a waif-ish crackhead gets caught in the light, which through some unseen force pins her against the wall of the building. She scans the area with her nervous eyes. She runs away. The Mexican customs agents laugh and the American agents one hundred yards away are as stoic as rocks. Chins jutting out, hands on their pistols, promenading in the tiny space with the flashlights shining into wheel wells and back seats of minivans.
The border night breaths. The soul of Agua Prieta howls and its heart thumps.

A small group of migrants come through, fourteen, we serve them and they are quickly on their way. Seven men pile into a late 80's Crown Victoria driven by a man with tight jeans, a plaid shirt, and a very unnecessary cowboy hat. The fan belt of the old sedan shrieks and the engine roars as it pulls into the life and chaos of the Agua Prieta night. Victor, the guardia on duty, comes up and starts talking. He is just like any other rent-a-cop you might imagine: vulgar, offensive, and pretty hilarious. He doesn't carry any firearms, only his somewhat keen, albeit offensive, whit and a couple pairs of brass knuckles. He looks down at my hands and sees my coffee.
"Oye," he says in toothless, whistling border Spanish, "me regalas un cafecito?"
I give him a hard time about it but also give him a cup of coffee. Then I sneeze, a lot. Four or five times. He asked me what's wrong and if I'm sick. I make some stupid joke about how its la cocaina and he laughs a raspy laugh with his eyes wide open.

"Créeme," he says, "he probabo esa chingadera y no me gustó para nada. Me hace..." then he locks his knees and his elbows, sticks his lower jaw out as far as he can, and walks around the side walk like the love child of Frankenstein and Pancho Villa.
Victor has some strange Irish last name because his father came down to Acapulco and impregnated his mother and then went back to the United States. Though he is a citizen he doesn't go back, because of some probably cocaine related incident that he doesn't talk about very often. Only sparingly does he refer to when was locked up in Arizona.

Most of his adult life, if he tells the truth, consisted of being a body guard and police man for various and sundry political figures in Mexico. That's how he lost his front teeth. Driving the Governor of Tabasco when they got into an accident and he almost ate the steering wheel.

I take a sip of my cooling coffee.

Victor has one tooth on the left side of his mouth that just hangs. It looks like a miniature version of some prehistoric battle ax, made out of the hip bone of a mastodon. Just lodged into the toothless void of his mouth. He whistles at a friend out in the street. He could never whistle before he lost those teeth.
Beautiful girls walk by on their way to clubs. They hold each others' hands and waddle and waver nervously on heels far too high for the rutted and beat up Mexican streets and sidewalks. Victor whistles his empty, tritone-ish, toothless whistle soft enough so the girls don't hear. He looks at me with his eyebrows high above his eyes. He then talks about how he grew up in the "epoca de las mini-faldas" and then proceeded into a strange drunken dance in the middle of the street imitating the girls of his youth. The border is strange juxtaposition upon juxtaposition: beautiful girls sauntering out to a different country for a good time, hopeless vagrants running from one crowd to another pidiendo limosna and shaking cans with a couple pesos inside, hustlers and thugs and smugglers looking for people to take advantage of, cops and customs agents ignoring some things and looking for a way to make some quick money, on both sides. And me and the migrants.

We hear a sound coming from behind the building. Sort of a constant tick, tick, tick, tick. Then around the corner comes a man on crutches with one leg. His voice is a rough, almost nonhuman, belch: "oye carnal! no tienes pa' una soda?"
"No, amigo. No traigo pesos." He shoots us a glance of sad contempt and keeps moving to beg in the growing line of folks headed back to the States after a solid night of debauchery. He is the closest thing to human tumble weed, at the mercy of the whim of everything around him. He goes where the wind goes and where the gringos will give him a peso or two.

I look at my cup with a small dram of cold coffee and I finish the last bit, though I don't really want too.
Victor looks at me and says through the ghosts of his teeth, "está muy tranquilo. Muy tranquilo."