How Ricky Lost His Car by Henry Shukman

Ricky is hoping blind he'll get waved through the frontier. The Santa Fe Bridge is four thick with stationary cars revving. All that exhaust floating off into the sky, what's that doing to the atmosphere, Ricky wonders. The Yanks should let people through faster. So when he finally makes the border booth the cop looks at his papers a long time, then has him pull into this concrete lane. Bad news. Everyone else is driving past the "Welcome to USA" sign. Ricky has to go into this big hall full of people waiting on wooden seats. You can tell the place is still Mexico, it hasn't had a new chair since the fifties. He spends three hours waiting to have his papers looked at by a fat guy eating doughnuts behind a desk, who wears a short sleeve cop shirt. He's so fat his arms come out at an angle. Other cops come to show him papers. He flips through them, doughnut in hand, and either stamps them or returns them unstamped. Which is what happens to Ricky: unstamped.

What the hell. So he'll drive back home over the bridge.

But the bridge is one-way. It's not so simple. The cop says he has to walk back to Mexico. The car will be brought to the border at the next bridge over – the Stanton Street Bridge five miles away, which is one-way the other way – next morning.

This is no good, Ricky tells him. It's my car. I want it now to go home in, if I am not welcome.

The cop shrugs. Tomorrow morning, he says.

But Ricky's car is not an anyone-can-drive. The clutch is broken, the accelerator is a bolt sticking through the floor. You have to know what you're doing, hit the gas twice before ignition, all the rest of it.

The cop listens but doesn't listen.

Tomorrow morning, he repeats. Like he's annoyed with Ricky for wasting his time.

Ricky loses it a bit and leaves under escort.

So the next morning, at the other bridge on the Mexican side, there's this tow truck, and Mr Tow wants paying of course.

I never called you, fuck this. My car is good.

He wants seventy dollars.

He's a nice-looking guy, not tough, a bit round over the belt. He has only gone halfway with disengaging the car, but Ricky reckons he's not going to re-hitch it, for fear of what Ricky might do. Ricky can look mean.

The guy gets on his radio and says he has to go back and talk to his boss. And does in fact re-hitch the car. That's how wrong you can be. He does it smoothly too, and he's gone. Ricky is sure he'll be back, he looks like a guy who will come back, but he's wrong there too, he doesn't ever come back.

That's America for you, they can keep it, Ricky says.

So Ricky marries Juanita and drives the bus, doing the city run out to Las Campanas. Only maybe a mile of hardtop, the rest is dirt road, but he gets to travel the length of the border west of the city, past the copper plant gleaming in the sun across the barb-wired gully. Life is better this side, he says. Well, if there's one thing it isn't, it's better. But we know what he means. To want and want, to put your heart over there on the big shining freeway, is no good.

Ricky is one of the good guys. He lost his car and got his life, he says. We call him the ferryman, although he is a bus driver. He lives real close to me off the Avenida. Sometimes Fridays we get together for a beer and a laugh.