A Stranger Walked Into a Bordertown Bar | Bruce Petronio

A stranger appeared in the twilit open doorway of the B’o B bar. In Back o’ Beyond, Arizona, population 4, thirty miles from a paved road to the north, a mile from the Mexican border and the scalable 18-foot-high wall—the surrounding desert scrub a corridor for crossers and drug mules—so the Beyondians were wary of strangers. The light was over the bar, the entrance in shadow, where stood an elderly man wearing an old-time white linen suit. He held something. A leash. The leash moved, and from behind the man’s white pant leg stepped a piglet, garbed in a Christmasy sweater! The four Beyondians gawked. The stranger and his piglet remained just inside the entrance, as if waiting to be invited further, as if sensing they might not be welcome. The man looked seventyplus, his silver hair swept back and augustly genteel in his loose-fitting linen suit, cream shirt and bolo tie. All eyes dropped as the piglet stepped forward, straining against the leash, jerking the man a step forward, but then it stopped, looked back and up at its master, apologetically, it seemed, and sat. It was slightly pudgier than that movie star, Babe, with elfin ears and a flat, button-like snout, its torso clad in a green/white/red candy cane knit sweater like something you’d see on pampered, East Coast dogs.
“Pardon us,” they heard, eyes lifting to a refined and sonorous voice. “Is the local law prejudicial to domesticated mammals in public establishments?”
The Beyondians gaped, as if the man had spoken Swahili. Finally, from behind the bar, red-faced Ollie Steinkopf—collarless XXXL white shirt; red suspenders holding up barrel-legged pants; center-parted hair slick with pomade and furrowed with a steel comb, the pomade, comb and saloon passed down generation to generation—snorted and thundered, “This ain’t Phoeble, ain’t the kind a town for interferin’ horseshit laws!”
The three men at the bar, almost never in agreement, sneered in unison at mention of the capitol in faraway Phoenix. Tripp Bairn, the screenwriter Manqué originally from L.A., wearing the pot-reeking alpaca hoodie he’d bought in Cuzco thirty years before, called out, “Welcome, friend. Join us.”
The stranger bowed graciously. Retracting the leash, he followed it down to the pig’s collar. Once unhooked, the pig pranced high on its trotters to the bar, stopped with a hard-hooved scraping sound on the wide-plank floor, and looked up, pencil-thin tail wagging, its head cocked inquisitively at Tripp. Tripp, high as he was, grinned, slid off his stool, and moved down to make room between him and Thomas Exeter. The pig nodded, as if in thanks, Tripp and Ollie exchanging looks of amused astonishment as the pig poised, wiggled its haunches cat-like, leapt up to the stool and sprang onto the bar, where it spied itself in the mirror and seemed to strike a pose. The Beyondians animated, hope renewed that their world could be more surprising than it day after hot arid dusty cloudless day appeared to be…
Well, okay, not each and every Beyondian. In any gathering of two or more Arizonans, you’re apt to find a Contrarian, without question in a border town bar. Perched hawk-watchful in the shadows at the end of the bar, four empty stools from Thomas Exeter, was one Lyle Stroep. An old-timer, nursing an inexhaustible nostalgia for the Old West. His eyes were obscured by a slouch grayish-yellowing Stetson pulled low, the hat the same color as the coffee-stained, smoke-saturated walrus mustache hiding his mouth, so that it was like someone talking from behind a bush, all of which gave the impression he had something to hide. What he wasn’t hiding was the Colt Peacemaker holstered hugely on his hip. Or his habitual expression, that of a man who smelled a skunk.
And then, four stools from the Contrarian, was Thomas Exeter. The Man Without a Past. Unlike the others, he had revealed nothing about himself; most curiously, hence suspiciously, how he’d come to his obvious wealth and chose to live a mile from an international border. Eight months previously, he’d appeared suddenly in town, in a new Land Rover and with the deed to the red-brick, two-story B’oB Bank building, which he’d then restored to its original preeminence, working alongside the “locals” he’d hired, legally or not. There was no party to commemorate the restoration. He had invited none of the other Beyondians inside. He understood, psychologically and genetically, that the others would soon absorb it as normal. On the other hand, whenever Exeter came wordlessly into the bar he made a finger twirling motion for Ollie to set up a round, for he appreciated the Beyondians in the way an entomologist appreciates an ant colony.
But there sat Stroep. Eyeballing the dapper stranger stepping up to the bar in the space Tripp had vacated. The stranger reached a hand out and the pig leaned, nudged the hand cat-like with its head, the old man giving the head a scritch to snorts of pig pleasure, an awww from Ollie, whereupon Stroep couldn’t take no more and called out, “Heya! Stranger!”
The old man looked over as if he hadn’t noticed the man in the shadows.
Stroep called down the bar, “You’re Mexican.”
“Sí,” the stranger agreed.
“Whaddya sellin, comin here with that dirty grunter?”
Ollie, vigorously toweling a glass, muttered, “Ornery don’t never happen overnight.”
The stranger nodded, as if the query was expected. “Pigs are man’s best friend,” he said. “It is well documented that they have a higher learning quotient than dogs, even chimpanzees. And contrary to the common prejudice, they keep very clean.”
He let these factoids settle, and expand.
“After Guapo’s mother died birthing, he was chosen from the litter and raised by a behavioral biologist.” Pause: one beat; two. “In a spacious parrot aviary, with netting strung high from backstop to light poles of a former Little League baseball field.”
The Beyondians squinted, struggling to picture the aviary.
“But parrots are discriminatory. They mocked Guapo; they would ride on his back and mimic his grunts and squeals. But in time they couldn’t deny his intelligence. They began to talk to him, in the human tongue they themselves had learned, and then taught it to him.”
The Beyondians drew back, as if from an unidentifiable odor.
“Now Guapo is my navigator.”
The pig on the bar wheeled to face its master: “Co-pilot!” it snuffle-snorted, “Co-pilot!”
A struck-dumb silence. A blank moment of cognitive dissonance, before their minds’ neurons started arcing and firing again, that very reconnect instant when the deeply strange is either countenanced or pshawed. Exeter zeroed in the stranger’s mouth. Tripp did the same, though he was abuzz with sudden script possibilities; characters suspend disbelief in hope of experiencing something fantastical! Stroep, never having confided to anyone that his teen self had been abducted by aliens, felt threatened. Ollie, who’d never ventured beyond southeastern Arizona, whose world view was as narrow as a desert slot canyon, was moved to reason that all manner of species had been taught to communicate: chimps, dolphins, heck, parrots spoke whole sentences, why not maybe a few words from a pig raised with parrots by a biologist?
As if nothing odd had just occurred, the old man addressed Ollie, “Friend, it’s been a long, bumpy road to arrive at your establishment. Bourbon for me, neat: and for the last thirty miles my co-pilot waxed poetic about the oatmeal stout he savored last week in Bisbee. You see, he prefers his grains in liquid form. But the hard truth…” he reached out and plumped the pig’s underbelly tight against the knit sweater, “it will have to be Coors Light.”
“Cogeme!” snuffle-snorted the pig, “No piss!”
This time, a full five seconds of goggling awe to the profanity and Spanish from the mouth of the pig like one of those adult animated cable TV cartoons…before Tripp, a Southern Californian who had spent months at a time in Latin America, slapped the bar and said, “Fuckin’ A! A bilingual pig!” Then, louder, “The Spanish means ‘fuck me!’”
The pig’s head jerked around at Ollie’s laughing face and it joined in with high-pitched yelping like an over-excited puppy. Exeter quietly smiled. Set apart, Stroep looked like he’d stepped on a squishy roadkill skunk. Tripp noticed, and called down the bar, “If you doubted this dirty grunter’s intelligence, he just refused Coors Light!”
“So why’s the Mexicant and his dirty grunter here?”
The old man looked down the bar at Stroep. “We have been on a pilgrimage. You see before you a proud American on a historic American road trip.”
“You’re Mexican!”
“Sí,” the Señor nodded. And in a voice at once soft and hard, “And are we not all Americans? North and South, Canada to Patagonia?”
“America is the U.S. of A. We built us a wall to keep aliens out!”
The old man calmly turned to Ollie. “Guapo lacks the genetic code for dieting. So, Corona Light, in a bowl, por favor.” “You bet!” Ollie said, but as he turned for a bowl he saw in the mirror the men arrayed at the bar, the pig atop, and saw B’oB history in the making. A yarn you could swear on the Good Book was no tall tale. He turned to Guapo and in an officious voice, “Can I see some ID?”
Guapo raised his brown, human-like eyes to Ollie, said, “I’m just a pig,” and turned to his master.
The old man waited for Ollie and Tripp to stop laughing. Then reached into an inside pocket and said, “My card,” and handed it to Ollie.
Ollie, beaming floridly, read, “Javier León Rios. President. The Ir-re-? Ir-re-dentist?”
Tripp leaned, lifted the card from Ollie. And read, “President. The Irredentist Front of Mexico.” He grinned. “And their slogan. ‘Vaya al Norte, Repopulate Our Homeland!’”
An apoplectic, strangling sound from the end of the bar.
“Well, well,” murmured Exeter.
A thickening silence. Guapo hunkered down on the bar and glanced about nervously.
Finally, Exeter broke the fraught silence. “The sweater.” Heads turned to Guapo. Seeing Ollie’s blank face, Tripp said, “Colors of the Mexican flag.” The Señor reached out and fussed with the sweater’s fit. “The nights are cold,” he said. “But by day Guapo can burn painfully. Where the sweater does not cover, we use SBF 75.”
Guffaws. But from down the bar: “Show yer passport, beaner!”
Ollie leaned to the Señor. “There’s two ways of argufyin’ with a fool,” he said. “None works.”
“Everyone is as God made him,” the old man said, crossing himself.
“Show yer passport, chalupa!”
The Señor smiled, smugly it seemed, and reached a hand into his suit’s inner pocket, brought out a green passport, opened it to a page, and held it for Tripp to read.
Tripp scanned, announced, “U.S. tourist visa.” He grinned. “Expired months ago.”
“Knew it!” shouted Stroep, slapping the bar.
Tripp glared down the bar at Stroep and said, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“Trouble is, Chief, we did ask! So there you ain’t. With the new law we’re obliged to report aliens.”
Humping and grumbling from the others at being obliged, by any Phoeble law.
“Ya’ll gone deef? That Cheech there’s a jumpin’ bean! Preachin’ some land grab skullduggery.”
“You kin cut your own throat with a sharp tongue!” Ollie shouted, and in the next instant, as it was his business to see trouble coming and defuse it, roared, “Next round on Bo’B!”
A week before Thanksgiving. A piglet, given name El Guapo, stood four-square atop B’oB’s bar, wearing his flag, snuffle snorting as he lapped up Corona Light from a chip bowl, his thick tongue making a loud smacking noise. When Ollie tried to nudge in a long neck Corona to refill the bowl, Guapo clamped his mouth onto the neck and the big man became visibly emotional to find himself bottle-feeding. Once the bottle was drained; Ollie fretted that Guapo was drinking on an empty stomach. He split open a pack of Cheetos on the bar. The orange worms left orange smudges around Guapo’s mouth, his snort-squealing joy in Cheetos like a five-year-old’s tearing into Christmas presents.
Ah, such a memorable B’oB event! But not everyone stayed for the festivities. Stroep had huffed out at the sight of Ollie bottle-feeding the pig, cursing into his mustache that he wasn’t drinkin with no Mexicant and his stinkin grunter. Minutes later, the others distracted by Guapo crunching Cheetos, Exeter slipped away unnoticed, something of a lucrative forte of his.

One A.M. Three diehards—Ollie Steinkopf, Tripp Bairn, Javier León Rios—sat low camp chairs in the middle of the pale caliche thoroughfare outside the bar. When they’d first come out, Tripp made a point of informing the Señor that the street had been named Avenida Copper, a compromise between Anglo and Mexican miners, and cleared wide enough for a three-mule-team ore wagon to manage a horseshoe turn. The three men sat facing the rough road into town from the northeast, so they could gaze up at the rising nearly full moon, but now it was behind them, casting pale light on the town, weathered driftwood-gray structures in two parallel rows maybe eighty yards long, a few with false fronts, some boarded up or with caved in roofs, doors hanging askew, gaping holes in the rows where only crumbling adobe foundations remained. The present-day Beyondians had resurrected several buildings, with varying degrees of livability, though now, at this late hour, the windows of those buildings were dark.
The three men passed a fifth of Beam. Guapo, snuffle-snoring, lay on his side by the Señor’s chair. The riotous evening had reached the stage of quiet reflection. The bottle halfway to his lips, Ollie broke a long silence, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Tripp chortled, turned to catch the Señor’s reaction: the gent’s eyes were narrowed in concentration, as if Ollie had imparted some penetrating wisdom. Ollie glug-glugged, then, in a whiskey-constricted voice, “No matter where you ride to…” cough, hack, “that’s where you’re at.” The Señor’s eyes softly closed. Tripp flung out his legs and settled back in his chair with the certainty of being exactly where he was meant to be at this moment in time. He gazed all about to establish a screenwriter’s mise-en-scène: the Señor’s 70s Chevy van parked in front of the bar’s hitching rail; the glass in the bar’s door showing a peaceful yellow light from deeper inside. Tranquilo, he thought. As he faced forward again, a flash in the desert far beyond town caught his eye. Gazing up Copper, the road alkali white in the moonlight, he was taken aback to see, between the dark outline of the old copper mine’s slag hills, twin lights. Twin beams. And then two more. The lights moved over the land in synch as if choreographed. He reached over, shook Ollie, said, “Vehicles.” Using his hands, he levered himself out of the low chair and stood. Ollie tried to rise, struggled to extricate his broad butt from the chair, and tipped over. He cursed sideways, managed, huffing, grunting, to work himself free. Got to his knees. Stood, weeble-wobbly. Tripp turned away, pretending not to have seen. Chin on chest, the Señor was passed out. Tripp knocked his Tevas against the Señor’s outstretched pointy-toed cowboy boot. The Señor squinted, one-eyed. “Visitors,” Tripp said. The Señor had no reaction. He rose in weary stages from his low chair, showing his age for the first time. Beams of light sliced through the outer darkness.
“La Migra,” the Señor stated unemotionally.
“They don’t venture out thisaway at night,” Ollie countered.
“Stroep?’ Tripp said.
Ollie scoffed. “That gump don’t own no phone.”
“Right,” Tripp said. Then, to himself: Exeter? He knew almost nothing about Exeter, neither how he became wealthy nor why he had settled quietly in a ghost town a mile from a porous international border.
As the headlights probed the far end of Copper, Ollie said, “Señor Rios, a good run is better than a bad stand.”
The Señor clapped at the pig, “Despiertate, borracho! Arriba, arriba!” Guapo, flopped on his side, one bleary eye open, merely grunted. In the pallid moonlight he looked done in, his sweater rumpled and dirty, as if he’d been wallowing. “Ahora, Guapo!” The pig struggled to rise to all fours and stood looking up at the Señor with his expressive brown eyes, trust in his master.
The beams of light revealed tumbledown structures. The Señor had the leash in his hands. Bending to Guapo, he said, “Lo siento, compadre,” and fastened the leash.
Tripp looked up at the sound of vehicles gearing down. Where the street widened, the two beams separated again and became four, filling the street. Suddenly, blue lights flashed horizontally from atop the vehicles, the lights’ strobing eerily frenetic off the driftwood-weathered structures on either side. Then the headlights were in his eyes and his hands came up as if warding off a blow. The vehicles abreast braked hard to a stop, dust billowing in the headlights some ten yards from the three men. Squinting into the light, Tripp was taken aback to discern the shape of dark Hummers, not the green on white SUVs of the Border Patrol. The Hummers ominous, increasingly, as long seconds passed and nothing happened. As if the vehicles were pilotless. Land drones. The three men stood, forearms shielding their eyes from the headlights pinning them and the blue flashing from center to end of the horizontal bar, and repeating. Tripp couldn’t see, at last heard doors open. But not shut. Eyes averted downward, he heard, “Easy now.” A huge hand enveloped and clamped his bicep. The voice again, “Suspects secure!” Headlights extinguished. Tripp raised his eyes. Dome lights, doors open on high vehicles, twin black Hummers, blue light strobing. The man gripping his bicep was about his height but had the solid mass of a macho lifter. His desert camo uniform shirt was too small; a black pistol grip stuck out of a black shoulder holster. Above the sleeve rolled tightly to his bicep a yellow and black Border Rangers patch. Vigilantes! Tripp looked and found the Señor and his stomach knotted. A vigilante led the Señor toward the Hummers, Guapo in his rumpled sweater quick-stepping at the Señor’s heels. Tripp counted six camo-uniformed men. They went about their business silently, until Macho tightened his grip on Tripp’s elbow and said, “American citizen?”
“Claro!” Tripp said, as Ollie cried out, “Yessir!” Tripp leaned to see around Macho. Another vigilante, slight but with a shockingly large head, stood beside Ollie. “Sit!” A sharp downward yank on Tripp’s bicep. He sank into his seat, heard a ripping sound and leaned to see Ollie sunk through his seat, his butt in the dirt. Macho and Head laughed openly. “Watch these yahoos,” Macho ordered, and strode to the Hummers, where Guapo’s leash was handed to him. The Señor, a vigilante’s hand in his back, tried to step up into the Hummer but his foot slipped, and he was pushed, he tottered and sprawled head first into the vehicle. Tripp imagined the white linen suit, rumpled and soiled. After a moment, he could make out the Señor’s head behind the cage. Five men huddled in the strobing blue light. A gut-hanging one with a big white Stetson did all the talking. The huddle broke. Two men strode toward Tripp and Ollie. As they passed, one said to Head, “Oo-rah! We got the Chico’s van.” Tripp turned, watching them strut on to the Señor’s Chevy, but heard, “Posse, saddle up!” And turned back again to see the Stetson grab an interior handhold and laboriously pull himself up onto the passenger seat of the Señor’s Hummer. Another man stepped up into the driver’s seat. Doors slammed; the dome light went out. Behind Tripp, the Chevy started up. As the Señor’s Hummer backed away, EEEEEEEEE! Tripp clamped his hands to his ears, his face clenched at Guapo’s shrieking anguish. Through slitted eyes he saw Macho and Guapo in the flashing blue light of the second Hummer, Guapo, for his size, straining heroically against the leash and keening like a banshee. As the Señor’s driver wheeled a horseshoe turn in the wide street, Guapo’s protest intensified. EEEEEEEEEE! Tripp’s asshole puckered. Macho, one hand on the leash, tried to find purchase in the baked-hard caliche, slid, struggling to hold on while shouldering one ear closed and covering the other with his free hand. EEEEEEEEEE! Guapo’s grief shut down all reason. Tripp didn’t hear the van as it passed, it sped up as if to outrun the onslaught of noise, brake lights flashing as it came up on the Señor’s Hummer’s bumper, the shrieking like a sharp stick in the ear. Macho gripped the leash with both hands and yanked viciously, tumbling Guapo off his trotters. The pig lay in the dirt, side heaving. Macho shook his head sharply, as if to clear it. Guapo tried to rise. Macho bellowed, stomped the leash under his boot, bellowed, took up the leash and hand over hand like a tug-of-war victor dragged Guapo to the Hummer. EEeeaagghh… a guttural gargling. The sweater rolled down and bunched against Guapo’s hind legs like soiled underwear. Guapo a lump at Macho’s feet by the open Hummer door. Macho bent, gripped Guapo’s collar with one hand, a hind leg with the other, hefted, swung, slung Guapo into the back of the Hummer, and karate kicked the door shut…
The shock of it all vibrated the air like the aftermath of an explosion. In the strobing blue light, Macho was doubled over, one arm pressed to his body.
After a long moment, Head called out, “You okay, bud?”
“Fuck me! I pulled sumpthin.” He raised up gingerly, a hand over his ribs. “Fuckin pig!”
Head hustled over to his partner. He hovered uselessly while Macho stepped up into the Hummer with a sharp cry and sat stiffly in the passenger seat. Head shut the door too softly, had to open and shut it again, then raced around, clambered up into the driver’s side, and slammed his door shut. They sat there, the cabin dark, the blue lights flashing across the horizontal bar. The strobing seemed slower, less frenetic now. Tripp guessed they were calling in their status. He looked about, tunnel-visioning with his hands, a greasy yellow light in the Plexiglas window of Stroep’s shotgun shack. Further down, Exeter’s plate glass windows, upstairs and down, dark. Was Exeter sitting in the dark, watching? Would he have contacted vigilantes rather than official authorities, who might question his identity? There was no way to know: Exeter was an even greater unknown than the Mexican gent being hauled away.
The Hummer swung into a horseshoe turn. The interior light came on and the Hummer slowed as it passed alongside Tripp and Ollie. Guapo’s face filled the rear window, looking out at them, something in its face beyond naming, Tripp thought.
So, there they stood: the wannabe screenwriter from L.A. and the fourth-generation B’oB barkeep watched the flashing blue draw away, the strobing reflected in a soundless, post-accident way off the driftwood gray of the buildings on either side. As the Hummer cleared town, the blue lights quit. And for once the taillights’ neon red didn’t seem summery in the desert night. Headlights probed the way out, until, behind a slag hill, all trace vanished.
Tripp and Ollie stared out into the darkness. Speechless. Each felt the bystander’s helplessness of having witnessed something shameful, though one of them without self-reproach. What could one do? The other, fists clenched, mind churning with thoughts of creativity and protest—ACLU, Border Angels, ASPCA, something in its eyes beyond naming… his tangled thoughts interrupted by the faux-twangy voice beside him, “Hell, pard, any time a herd rumbles through town there’s loads a shit to clean up.”

A small backyard of cactus scrub in a cookie-cutter development on Tucson’s desert outskirts. A blue-sky Thanksgiving Day. Two men in short sleeves and baseball caps sit on kitchen chairs brought out from the house, drinking long neck beers. One rests his beer on the ground and gets up to tend a glowing fire pit.

Carl (stirring coals with a stick): “Back in Pennsy it was turkey on Thanksgiving but we’d never stoop so low to buy an industrial bird.”
Ray: “Shit, yeah. Same with us Michiganders. But birds got all skittish soon’s the leaves dropped. If we didn’t get one, we’d jack a deer, forage shrooms, watercress and sheep sorrel for salad to go with wild rice and grilled venison. The weather was usually for shit, but least back east you could live off the land. Pheasant, walleye, mussels, crawdads, all kind a berries, even squirrel pot pie if you weren’t too uppity!”
A moment of silence for the abundance and families they’d left behind when they moved to the desert, drawn by home prices and jobs and, though they wouldn’t admit it, sun. But Ray has just barely held on to his tract home. And Carl—who gleefully figured clerical error when his Hail Mary mortgage application was accepted—lost his home to foreclosure and now rents in a shitass trailer park, his wife and two-year-old daughter cheek to jowl with meth heads and wife beaters and other assorted lowlife. Riff and Raff, he calls them.
Ray: “We’re outta mesquite. Gotta use the Fire Logs from Walgrins.”
Carl: “Shameful!”
Ray: “Never dreamed I’d pay for firewood. Let alone fake stuff! From a drugstore!”
They laugh like stoned teenagers, which they are, stoned anyway, seized weed a job perq. Carl stretches for the last two fake logs, flings them onto the coals.
Ray: “Spin and ro-tate!”
Carl gives Ray the pissy look of a friend being treated like a subordinate.
Ray: “Duh?” Placing a spread hand over his rib cage.
Carl: “Oh, yeah, shit, sorry bro.” He carefully places his beer on the fire pit’s mesquite stump utility table. Shoves his hands into Ray’s barbecue mittens shaped like largemouth bass. As he turns the spit’s crank with both hands, the spread-eagled carcass flips gutted side up, wafting the sweet heady smell of crinkling pork flesh.

After earning an MFA from the University of Arizona, Bruce Petronio was awarded a Distinguished Artist Fellowship, New Jersey’s highest literary award. His work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, MacGuffin, Hawaii Pacific Review and other publications. He has been a resident artist at Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, Fundación Valparaiso (Spain) and Hawthornden Castle (Scotland).