Tim drove through Ensenada leaning over the wheel of his van with his elbows out like wings. He didn’t have his glasses on so his squinted up face awkwardly peered at the passing street signs. We were looking for a tire shop so as to fix our van’s last illness. Both of us had our eyes on either side of the road, and neither of us was looking at where the road ran into the hills.
That is when Tim ran an unseen stop sign, but we didn’t know it yet. We knew something was wrong when we heard the siren. Whoop, Whoop. Tim pulled the van to the side of the road and we waited. “Ya that’s a cop,” I said, as we tried our best in that strange and useless way people try to prepare for an interrogation; cleaning up the trash at our feet, putting on our shoes.
The officer stood in the frame of Tim’s window with the kind of look a parent gives a naughty child. “You gringo’s never learn,” it seemed to be saying. His gaze slid away from ours behind the aviators that shielded his eyes. “You know you just ran a stop sign back there,” he said. He pointed backwards. “No, officer we didn’t see that,” we said looking at one another and then back, in wonder, as if what he spoke of was a mirage that had appeared after we had passed it. “I will have to give you a ticket,” he said. We nodded in agreement.
Then things turned weird. “But we don’t give tickets here,” he continued in his broken English. We had no reply.” So,” he said, “we are going to have to go to the station to pay the fine.” He paused. We nodded to each other and thought this was the best plan. We had heard that the thing to do when pulled over in Mexico is to go to the station so that it is harder to be forced into a bribe. So we naturally thought that this meant we were not going to have to pay a bribe — this officer was honest.
Then he asked Tim a strange question, “How do you feel?” It was as if he were asking him several contradictory questions all at once: How is your health? Are you nervous? Does this feel legitimate? Well officer, he might have answered, I’ve had the shits for three days, and you make me nervous, and this does not feel legitimate. We were perplexed. The three of us hovered in a moment of silence, Tim and I only able to shrug our shoulders as if looking for direction in this matter from the police officer, staring down at us.
After a long period of very uncomfortable silence, I said something to the cop in Spanish, and he whipped around the front of the car and stood, now, in my window, looking down at me. In Spanish he gained a new confidence, as if he could more deftly use the subtly of language to take our money. “How do you want to deal with this?” he asked me. I still didn’t exactly understand what he was about. I said, “How do you want to deal with this?” And then all of a sudden we were on the same page. He smiled and said simply, “How much do you want to pay?” He was asking for a price. He was negotiating almost. I was just glad the ambiguity was over with. Now we could get this thing done and be gone. I said, “How about twenty bucks?” and he agreed. The next thing I knew he was handing me a folded slip of paper, not unlike a ticket, and telling me to put the bills inside the paper and hand it back. As I fumbled with my money belt he looked to his left and right as if making sure the coast was clear. I slipped over the folded paper and its hidden bills. Then he let us go. Thank you officer we told him as he walked back to his cruiser with our twenty bucks.
