Dude learns a Trade
by
Steven Hunley
When Old Man got down with something he got sick with it. At the first lesson he piled a stack of books on the table. Dude could tell from looking at their spines they were all about the same thing, magic.
“You gonna give me magic lessons?”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to give you,” the old man returned,“You’re going to find out how to make things appear and disappear, especially disappear.”
Two days later, and three books into it, Dude had an idea of what he was talking about when the old man said,
“The thing is with customs, if they really want to search, and know what they’re looking for, they’re going to find it. But so much stuff comes through they only check one out of ten packages, if that. And they can be distracted. By what?”
Dude took his cue. He had been doing his homework.
“By light or sound, or movement.”
“Right.”
“Or by a beautiful assistant in a scanty costume.”
“I don’t think we can supply that, but yes, a pretty girl can supply all three, certainly. But never hide the stuff on them. Some smugglers do, they call the girls mules, but I was never into that. Besides, because so many girls have been used that way they’re a bust if they’re holding anything, so that’s out. You can trust yourself, but how do you know if a girl can work under pressure? You don’t, unless you know her real well. It’s hard to simulate or even imagine the pressure a customs officer can give when you’re under his gun."
“Girls are out then.”
“They were never in. The point is to be prepared and confident and rely on yourself. And here’s another thing, when they open the bag, don’t let your nerves show. They check inside for the usual places a suitcase provides, false bottoms and such. They’ll run their hands over the contents, but if you look at their eyes, you’ll see they aren’t looking at what they’re doing with their hands.”
“Then what are they looking at?”
“They’re looking at you for a tell, like in poker.”
“I don’t play poker.”
"It's like poker but more serious. If you value your freedom the stakes are higher. This isn’t a Las Vegas game where you lose only money. One mistake could cost you years in a South American stink hole like Papillion. They’re running their hands over the contents, like a Geiger counter looking for radiation, but the needle they’re watching is your eyes, get me?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll practice.”
So practice they did, using suitcases and containers of all sorts.The penalty for losing was losing a meal. Before he learned how Dude lost ten pounds. That’s when he got serious.Dude would hide and the old man would search until Dude finally learned to put on his game face.
A week later Dude had studied and had done his homework, and he’d been thinking about the scam a lot. He had questions, lots of questions.
“What about the smell? I hear they have dogs now that can smell everything. What about them? And if we can cover the smell and they can’t see it because we hide it real good, what if they use X rays? I hear they use X rays. What about X rays?”
“Now you’re thinking like a contrabandisto. This weekend I have to take a break. But you need to learn something new anyway so tomorrow wear some old clothes you don’t mind getting dirty, we’ll be going to the beach.”
“You mean flip-flops and old shorts and sun-block?”
“No, long pants, surfer boy, it will be messy."
Dude couldn’t figure what he meant; if it was the beach then why long pants? But he showed up in long pants anyway the next day when they drove to Mission beach and parked out in front of a surf-board shop two blocks from Belmont Park on Mission Boulevard.
“We’re going to surf?”
“No, you’re going to learn.”
When they went through the door, instead of admiring the boards in the showroom they went all the way through the shop to out back. A man was working there shaping blanks with a sure-form. He smiled as they walked up and looked at Dude.
“This him?”
Yeah,” said Old Man.“This is him. Dude, this is Bob. I've known him since third grade. He makes boards.”
That’s all he said as he walked away, but,
“I’ll see you two after lunch. Want smoothies?”
“Of course we want smoothies,” said Bob,“this is Mission beach ain’t it?”
He had a point.They were only two blocks from the roller coaster and out the door to the west you could see the waves breaking if you stood on your toes to look over the seawall.
Dude learned all about resin. How to mix it, how to spread it, color it, and the smell of the acetone it took to wash it free of your brush. It was a crash-course in fiberglass and resin. Dude couldn’t figure what good a surf board would do him where he was going. Hell, he couldn’t even swim.
Then there was the molds. One afternoon Dude and Old Man took a break. They broke out a couple of Stella Artois and were sitting around the table finishing off a roach. Dude noticed something different on the table he’d never seen before. It was a wooden statue of a man about eight inches high. He picked it up. Old man was planning again.
“That’s a figure from Tiahuanaco, up by the lake. It’s one of the oldest statues on the continent, pre-Inca in fact. Most of the other stuff around the house is Incan in design.”
“Lake Titicaca?”
“That’s the one. It’s huge, runs for over a hundred miles,on the border bewteen Peru and Boliva. You’ll see it from the plane.”
“In Bolivia? A plane?”
“That’s where you’re going. Oh, I almost forgot, here’s a book to take along.”
He shoved his way a copy the South American Handbook.
“It’s the only travel book that’s updated every year. That’ll be important. It’s small and easy to pack. Especially where you’re going, beyond electricity. And this,” he said picking up the statue. “Is for your molds.”
“Molds?”
“Two of them.Come on.”
They walked back in to the workroom. On the bench were two trapezoid shaped blocks of resin. They didn’t look pretty and were as dull and blank as bookends.
“They need faces, these faces, so you’re going to learn how to make a mold. It would really help out if they had faces. It makes ‘em look like cheap souvenirs. That’s what they’re going to look like alright, cheesy-cheap souvenirs.
These blocks will be where you stash it. Then after it’s inside you fill it up with resin. After the resin hardens not even smell can get through. We’ll test it tomorrow, now that they’ve got faces.”
By now Dude was tired anyway. Doing the molds had taken some time. They wanted Japanese take-out for dinner. They had enough money because Dude had a coupon. The way Old Man figured it, every ten dollars they saved was worth one hundred when Dude got back with the load. So Japanese take-out with a coupon was what it would be.
But Dude thought he’d found a problem. There was something the old man hadn’t figured on. He remembered it when he woke up one morning just as the sun was coming up. He dressed,splashed some water on his face and went across the alley. A car was parked in front of Old man’s house. A girl with brown curly hair dressed in scrubs came out. Maybe she pulled teeth, or helped someone who did. She said hello to him as they passed as if she knew him.
“Who was that?”
“That’s Nancy.”
“A nurse?”
“Not exactly, though she works in a hospital.”
“Oh.”
Old man seemed to be tight-lipped again.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“We forgot something about the blocks.”
“Yes?”
“X-rays can see right through them.”
“You mean they could see right through them. Come in here.”
He followed him into the work room. The blocks with statue faces were blue now, a kind of a royal blue. And they sparkled, how they sparkled.
Kind of like Candy Apple Red but blue. Then Dude thought he had the old man again when he read the sparkle ingredients. They were tiny aluminum flakes.
“Good try Old Man but no cigar. These are aluminum flakes, they won’t do the trick.”
“What are these here?” the old man asked, pointing to some crescent-shaped objects on the floor. Dude knew he’d seen them somewhere before and picked one up. It was a tire weight for balancing tires.
“This is heavy. It’s a lead tire weight.”
“It’s soft, grinds up easily and can’t be X rayed. It blends in just right with the sparkle."
“Does it work?”
“Looks like it. See here.”
He pulled a large negative out of an eight by ten envelope and held it up to the window. It was the outline of the blocks Dude saw, but within? One hell of an amount of fuzz, pure fuzzyness and that was all.
Dude put one and one together and got two. It was the girl he’d just seen in the scrubs. She wasn’t a dental assistant. She was an X ray tech. Old Man had been around the block and had done his homework at a hospital. Probably done it ever since third grade or whenever they first handed out the stuff and spoiled every student’s free time, from the beginning I guess.
After Dude learned resin, and after he knew how to hide, he still had more to go. There were Spanish lessons to practice, which usually took place in Tijuana, that town just south of the border. If you had to be in a classroom then Tijuana was it. In TJ Dude polished his high-school Spanish.
They drew up a check-list and then travel arrangements. Varig was how he would make the first leg of the trip; it was the most comfortable and the national airlines of Brazil. Varig from LA to Lima, Lloyd Aereo Boliviano from there.
The night before he left he could hardly sleep. To be truthful, he couldn’t sleep at all.
Anxiety was no stranger to Dude. And this night, on the eve of traveling all alone, to an unfamiliar place, where he knew absolutely no one, to do something totally illegal, that he’d never done, well… it just made him think a little too much for good sleeping. Maybe tossing and turning would be better. He could handle tossing and turning so that’s what he did. Tomorrow he’d probably do something else.
Like throwing up.
Flying Down to Lima
It’s so much fun. There’s nothing like it. Dude is so keyed up he barfs the whole way down. Nine hours of continual barfing are required.So he does it. Then, when he’s at his weakest, and his stomach turned inside out, he barely has the strength to press his head up to the cold cabin window to cop some cool. Dude needs relief from nerve-fever. With effort his eyelids open and he sees below the night sea crawling with waves of sparkling obsidian arrowheads pointing towards a new continent.
Pizzaro had nothing on Dude.
Suddenly the black begins to fade to dark blue defining the horizon. Then a brown coast appears, running away to left and right, north and south, at breakneck speed, till it disappears into distant blue mist. He will, in fifteen minutes, land in a place where he must live his life at a run. And he has done this insane thing by choice.
What was wrong with Dude anyway, has he lost his mind?
Lima is only a stop on the way. He doesn't even go through customs or immigration. They have prepared a special room just for him. In it is a leather couch like the kind you see in movies in the offices of psychiatrist. But the doctor won’t be here. Instead, a flight attendant gives Dude what he needs. On her light brown palm lies a capsule with little dots inside. She smiles at him using blue-green eyes, small white-perfect teeth and red cupie-doll lips.
“What’s this?”
“Compazine.”
I guess it’s the same in English or Spanish.
Either way it makes him sleepy.
Right when it gets quiet and Dude gets comfortable, two flight attendants appear wearing Aereo Boliviano uniforms. They escort him out, up the ramp, and into the plane. He barfs his way to La Paz, which he can’t quite remember, then wretches past Cochabamba, which remains a blur, and finally sees out the cabin window a tree-topped land with silver ribbon rivers winding through. It’s Santa Cruz. When he lands and is walking across the tarmac, an insect the size of his hand lands on the lapel of his coat because it smells like papaya. It’s not.
Welcome to the tropics.
He rides in an open Isuzu taxi, but finds his hotel is full.The driver, to start the engine, touches a piece of speaker wire to a battery that lies between his feet on the floor.The other pole is grounded onto the floor. The sky darkens. To another hotel he goes. The sky darkens further. On the way it starts to rain. Thunder booms. Dude ends up in a room face down on a bed. The only thing that happens all night is pouring rain,thundering thunder, and lightning flashing so close it lights up his room, plus the smell of ozone invading the air. Dude would be afraid but no, he is far too compazine-tranquillo to care.
The next day it’s sunny and bright, and leaves him feeling like yesterday wasn’t quite right. That’s why flying down to Lima was so much fun. It’s the first leg to so much more.
He eats an omelet with ham for breakfast because he has memorized the phrase “omelet con jamon” in preparation for this event. He eats it late. He grabs a cab into town. The driver drops him off in the main plaza. It’s one o’clock by now. There’s nobody there. His hopes for an easy score are dashed.
“Where are the gringos? Where’s the people?” he asks the only man there selling ice cream to nobody.
“Later,” he answers.
He returns to the hotel, depressed. The air is thick with heat. Nothing is familiar. This place is no good. Dude thinks,
“I have made a wrong choice in this matter.”
Dude waits for the cool of night. In the blackness which envelopes the countryside he catches yet another cab to return to town. He eats at a Chinese restaurant, dinner. Exactly twenty minutes later he decides he's hungry again and heads back to the plaza for ice cream and hears noise when he turns the last corner where the unexpected lies in wait.
There are dozens, scores,hundreds of people there now. It is as packed as Disneyland on Date-Night. He breathes in the cool air now perfumed with the scent of lovely Crucenos. He even sees some young people who, by the way they dress, may be possible connections. Dude takes heart. He joins the crowd and tries to catch up.
Like I said, welcome to the tropics.
Dude has finally arrived at his destination and is eagerly prepared to suffer his fate.
©Steven Hunley 2011
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