The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor Read Free Book Online

for collecting bikes, the three of us were smashed into the truck so Terry could show McCue and me how he tracked them. “I know where there’s three right now,” Terry said. “Let’s go.”
    We bumped along. Terry explained how, a year or so earlier, he’d been standing on the family property and his eyes happened to travel up the slope to Spooner’s Mesa. There he saw a man descending the trail on a bike. It looked like a flea dragging a dust plume down the hillside. Terry realized that this must be “an illegal.”
    â€œA bold break,” he thought aloud. It was an educated appraisal. Terry and his family had seen just about everything—on thelast flood a man had ridden a Boogie Board into the United States and gotten stuck in a tree. It took all kinds.
    One time a young woman crossed the border alone while in labor, lay down in the Kimzey fields, and delivered her own baby—now a US citizen by birthright. The mother mustered enough strength to carry the newborn to the ranch-house door. Sharon Kimzey-Moore, Terry’s aunt, answered the knock and was confronted with the young woman, the baby, and the wet umbilical cord that still connected both. In a state of bewilderment, Kimzey-Moore brought a chair and a glass of water. Terry’s aunt didn’t speak much Spanish but offered to call an ambulance. The woman said, “No ambulance,” and signaled that she wanted to use the phone herself. Fifteen minutes after she placed her call, a taxi pulled up to the house. The new mother simply stepped into the cab with her baby and the driver accelerated off to who knows where.
    For Terry, however, the first bicycle rider represented something new. Sunlight illuminated the dusty contrail for everyone to see. Wind whipped it into an alarm. The man disappeared behind a bend. Terry ran down the ranch lane to catch a view of the rider as he hit the flats. Once at the road, Terry imagined, the man had a number of options. He could veer onto Hollister. He could ride Monument to Dairy Mart Road and run straight into the freeway. In between, there were a dozen farm roads to blend into. But as soon as the rider reached the valley floor, just a few yards from the ranch gate, a white-and-green Border Patrol jeep swooped in—sirens wailing.
    Terry made the scene as the Mexican cyclist was cuffed and escorted into the vehicle. His bike lay in the dirt. The agents stepped into the jeep themselves and slammed the doors. Terry stopped the men to point out the neglected bike. They shrugged. “Take it,” one of them said.
    â€œThe Border Patrol doesn’t mind someone helping ’em out,” Terry reasoned.
    Not long afterward, Dick was out making his rounds on horseback when he rode down to the river. “I saw about ten bicycles abandoned down there,” he said. “And I came back and told Terry.”
    â€œThat was the start of it,” he said.
    As we drove along the valley’s back roads, Terry described the geography in the framework of this new history. “Got one on the side of that bridge,” he said, or “I found a real nice beach cruiser in that ravine,” and, “Seen a big group come down Goat Canyon.”
    The Border Patrol graded the dirt tracks each night by dragging chained tires or logs behind a truck. This way any new marks on the road could give agents an idea of where an illegal crossing might have taken place, how many crossers there were, and a reasonable block of time in which this traffic passed. In the eastern deserts, the technique also allowed BP to track migrants who came in on foot or on horseback. But the wetlands in the Tijuana River Valley halted any northbound sign, as did the pavement at Monument and Hollister. “Cutting sign” didn’t aid enforcement here as much as it did in the wilderness.
    The road grading seemed to benefit Terry a great deal, however. He’d developed a habit of leaving