This is the corner of Bus and Truck.  Streaming east is a line of buses packed with hapless worker drones.  Their faces have the blank stares that announce CULTURE SHOCKED and BORED TO FUCKING DEATH.  They used to scratch dirt for a living in the central highlands or the Yucatan.  Now they inhabit a rapacious border city that eats them up and shits them out.  Their existence is a treadmill between repetitive line jobs in the maquiladora zone and the cardboard-and-plywood shacks they call home.  Soon the buses will return with another load of hapless worker drones.  First shift is over, second shift is starting.  There used to be a third shift, even a fourth shift during the holiday inventory buildup.  But the maquiladoras are only producing at half-capacity now.  Their export markets in the United States have collapsed.  The American consumer is in a debt coma.

Streaming north is a still-impressive line of trucks carrying Mexican manufactured goods into America.  It’s the year-end rush, as distributors move inventory across the border to evade the annual warehousing tax.  Every December the state of Baja California assesses a tax on finished goods awaiting export.  The tradition dates back to 1900, when Tijuana was Mexico’s northern entrepot to the Pacific and the border was just a pile of whitewashed rocks on the coastal road.  Every year the state legislature promises to abolish the tax, and every year it doesn’t.  The semis are driving about one mile to American warehouses in Otay Mesa, then driving back to Mexico again.  I watch their trailers pass with idle curiosity, wondering how many carry contraband – drugs, firearms, human beings.

Mixed in with the bus and truck traffic is an old Crown Victoria, blotchy from years in the Mexican sun.  The car weaves through the intersection with admirable disrespect for traffic laws, provoking a chorus of horn-honking.  It shudders to a halt against the curb and an elderly Mexican emerges.  He looks like a defrocked Catholic priest.  Hornrims ride his beaky nose and his hair is brylcreamed into a creepy helmet.  He pauses to tamp and light a brier pipe.

“Mr. Sedesco,” I say, extending a hand.

His grasp is brittle and papery.  “Good to see you again, kid.”

Last time the freelance rental agent was only gnawing his pipe, not smoking it.  I motion at his wattled bicep.  “What happened to your patch?  I thought you were trying to quit.”

“I gave it up already.”  Sedesco waves at the diesel exhaust engulfing us.  “This is Tijuana.  Why the hell bother?”

The truth of it cracks me up.  This is a cityscape of belching smokestacks, garbage piles burning, tailpipes with no catalytic converters.  Slice open my lungs after a year here and you’ll probably discover twin lumps of coal.

We sit down at the corner “restaurant” – actually just a bunch of plastic chairs arrayed around a taco cart.  It’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so we pacify the street vendor by buying cans of Budweiser out of her ice chest.  Then we kick back, resting our feet on an overturned wooden box.  I’m worth a few curious glances.  Gringos don’t visit this part of Tijuana if they can avoid it.

“You firm up a day for moving into the house?” Sedesco asks, switching between his pipe and beer.

“Nah.  Still during the holidays sometime.”

“I told you, never move in during the holidays.  There’s no chance you’ll get the electricity turned on.  Everybody checks out at the utility companies until the week after New Year’s.  You can’t even find somebody to bribe.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I say, even though I know I won’t.  I’m not paroled from the UCLA academic calendar until mid-December.

“So you got a business proposition for me?”  Sedesco brings it up first, a sign of weakness.  He’s hurting for business.  Any business.  “Because if it’s drugs or something like that, you can forget it.  I already got enough trouble staying alive.”

“Don’t worry.  It’s not drugs.  But it is something, uh…unusual.”

“How…unusual?”

“Well, I need an archive.  From a small maquiladora.  All the business documents – board minutes, tax records, personnel files, timecards, you name it.”

Sedesco’s blink is magnified by his thick lenses.  “Kid.  What the hell?”

“I want to preserve the business documents.  You know, the files.  All the paperwork.  For researchers who want to study maquiladoras – like the small, family-owned ones that are going out of business.”

The rental agent chews on his pipestem thoughtfully.  He’s trying to imagine himself as an archive finder.  “Well, the maquiladoras in Industrialpresidentes are dropping like a whore’s underpants.  You ever drive through there?  I bet everything is being liquidated or thrown out – including all the paperwork.  I’ve seen looters taking whatever’s left.”

“Nah.  That won’t work.  I need clear title to the business documents.  But I can negotiate that on my own with the maquiladora’s owner.”

“So you don’t really want all the paperwork.  You want an introduction to the guy who owns all the paperwork.”

“How about this?  I want you to find a maquiladora like that, and arrange an introduction to the owner.”

“And I want to hear this business proposition you keep putting off.  Let’s find that first.”

I swig from my Bud, watching a busload of blank stares rumble past.  “$200 to find me an archive.  But I have to inspect all the documents before payment, make sure the files are complete.”

“I’ll spend more than $200 on favors.  I can’t just come out and ask people, you know.  They’d think I was some kind of government guy, like an informant or something.”

“So?”

“So $500 is more like it.”

“To find a shuttered maquiladora?  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”  The beer is making my stomach ball up.  I shift uncomfortably, knocking one of Sedesco’s orthopedic shoes with a hiking boot.  “I’m a starving grad student doing this on spec.  If you find me an archive, I might get paid for it.  Might.  You hear what I’m saying?”

Sedesco clacks his dentures.  “Then let’s make it $400.”

“$400 is Gringo Only pricing.  So cutting that in half, we’re back to $200.  My original offer.  And that’s assuming all the documents are there.  I won’t pay until I’ve inspected it.”

“$200 is Mexican Only pricing.  Let’s meet in the middle at $300, so we can get out of here before we’ve both got lung cancer.”

I consider his proposal while diesel exhaust swirls around us.  Driving down from LA I decided to pay a maximum of $400.  Holding Sedesco to $300 is a negotiating victory, but I’m not stupid.  The defrocked Catholic priest lookalike might disappear with a windfall of $300.  “Alright.  $300 it is.  But you only get $100 up front.  I’ll give you the next $100 when you arrange an introduction to the archive’s owner.  You’ll get the final $100 when I have title.”

He drains his beer and tosses the empty can into the gutter.  “I can live with the terms, but they hurt.  You don’t trust me, do you, kid?”

“Same as you don’t trust me, gramps.”  The nickname sort of fits, if grandfathers were Sedesco creepy.

We reach through the mistrust and smog and shake on it.  The handshake has five $20 bills in it.  You don’t flash that kind of money in Tijuana unless you want a view of the city from six feet under.

The elderly Mexican struggles out of his plastic chair, feigning calm behind a gust of pipe smoke.  I know better – that $100 is already burning a hole in his pocket.  He can pay debts, indulge his vices, donate to his favorite charity.  He shambles past the taco cart lady, ignoring her attempts to sell him another Bud, and settles into his sun-bleached Crown Vic.  The car roars off in increments, a slow motion departure into the honking forest of buses and trucks.  I keep staring after Sedesco, making it an implicit threat – I’LL BE WATCHING YOU.  My reward is a flaccid wave through a rolled-down window.