State of Confusion

When movie cameras focus on the dusty Mexican border replica spanning the University Ave bridge, they will capture the dark hours before sunrise. A man bleeding from a bullet wound will carry a battered valise filled with two million dollars cash, money found in a West Texas field littered with a dozen dead victims of a drug deal gone bad. The man will hold his wounded arm and offer five hundred dollars to a passerby for his coat. He will stagger and fall. He will pick himself up, and with what little strength he can muster, he will hoist the valise over his head and toss it over the bridge, into the no-man's land between Mexico and sleepy border town United States.

I pictured this scene from Cormac McCarthy's disturbing novel, No Country For Old Men, as I walked along Grand Avenue last week. The movie construction crew welded heavy steel supports to their convincing border station as the occasional vehicle exited Interstate 25 and crawled across the bridge into Las Vegas. I paused for a moment after I crossed the intersection. A scruffy man in oil-stained overalls reached into the bed of a pick-up truck and pulled out a piece of flat gray metal. He set it against the newly manufactured gateshack. A red Ford Escort with New Jersey plates gingerly crossed the bridge and turned North. The driver pulled alongside me and a woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window.

"Excuse me! You speak English?"

I turned around to make sure she was speaking to me. A man's thick Jersey accent cut across her shoulder.

"Of course she doesn't speak English! We crossed the friggen border!"

I lowered my head and stared inside their car. The woman sported lethal red fingernails and curled hair sprayed to six times its natural size. Her breasts were barely contained by a gold lamé halter-top, and I worried as she unfolded a AAA map that one might escape. She turned to her companion and hit the map with the back of her hand.

"How can we be in Mexico? We just left Colorado two hours ago!"

My mouth hung open as they consulted the map. The man lit an unfiltered cigarette and flicked ashes into a styrofoam cup half-filled with old coffee. He shrugged his slim shoulders. He opened his mouth to speak but the woman smacked him in the arm.

"You be quiet! You got us into this!"

She turned to me.

"We're supposed to be going to Las Vegas. That's why we took the exit."

She spoke slowly, as if I might not understand. I laughed and pointed to the fake border station.

"Oh! You are in Las Vegas! There's a movie being filmed here, and that's just part of the set."

The couple stared at the bridge, at the signs welcoming them to Mexico. They turned and looked around them, toward the tree-lined streets pointing toward town.

"Movie set, huh? This is Vegas? Wow, that was quicker than I thought."

She grabbed the man's cigarette and took a long drag. She blew smoke into the air between us, and it hung for a moment like a murky cloud.

"So. Where's the friggen Strip?"