One soldier stands at the front of the bus while another walks down the aisle. Behind me, he asks only one person for a passport. When a French accent replies I know what to expect: this will be a passport check for gringos only. There are more soldiers outside, all armed with assault rifles. Are they looking for me or is this normal? Do they control border traffic like this all the time? If I give these guys the Carlyle passport there will be all kinds of questions about how I’ve been living illegally in their country for three years with no visa. If the search for Morales’s and Candito’s murderer has gone far enough the other passport will get me dragged off this bus by my ankles. And shit, which passport is in which pocket, anyway? Why did I get stoned?

The soldier behind me barks something and the French guy starts a stream of denials in Spanish. The soldier at the front of the bus raises his weapon and takes a step into the aisle. I close the book, tuck it between my thighs, and crane my head out into the aisle to see what’s going on back there. It’s pretty easy to figure out what the ruckus is about because the soldier is holding the French guy’s open knapsack in one hand, and what looks like about a quarter kilo of weed in the other. They get the French guy off the bus and you can see by the looks on the soldiers’ faces how delighted they are to be busting a white guy for a change. The last one has just climbed off and the driver is getting ready to close the door when the soldier steps back in and looks at me.

– Frances?

– No. American.

– Los Angeles?

I shake my head.

He narrows his eyes.

– San Diego?

I shake my head again, desperate not to be associated with either of these clearly undesirable locales.

– New York.

I move my hand, toward my pocket, offering to get my ID for him. Hoping he won’t want to see it.

He waves his hand at me, shakes his head.

– New York?

– Yeah.

– September eleven.

– Yeah.

He nods slowly, sadly, then smiles slightly and sticks up his thumb.

– Go Yankees.

I stick up my thumb.

– Yeah. Go Yankees.

He gets off the bus, and I make it to the can before I piss my pants.

THE FACTS of Robert Cramer’s book were drawn from public records and exclusive interviews he conducted during the year of “exhaustive research” he spent writing The Man Who Got Away. He also refers to an episode of America’s Most Wanted that seems to have featured me. The mind boggles.

The list of people he claims to have interviewed includes a couple childhood friends, an old neighbor, my fifth-grade teacher, my high-school counselor, my Little League coach (whose statements about my competitive nature Cramer makes great hay of), one of the surgeons who operated on my leg, two old girlfriends (who don’t seem to have said anything too embarrassing), a few of my college professors, some former “regulars” from Paul’s Bar (whose names I don’t recognize), and the parents of Rich, the boy, my friend, who I killed when I crashed my car into a tree. Cramer quotes them as saying I showed no emotion at their son’s funeral (true), never contacted them after (true), and had dragged him into a ring of juvenile housebreakers before his death (not so much true, as Rich was already a member of said “ring” when I fell in with him and my other delinquent friends, Steve and Wade).

Cramer dwells for some time on the “killer” competitive instinct my parents programmed into me as they sat on the bench at my baseball games with their “impossible to meet expectations arrayed about them.” He consults a psychologist to diagnose the impact of my baseball accident and to attest to how it forced me to channel those instincts into other areas; thus my brief life of petty crime. He exposes my failed attempt to find a healthy outlet as evidenced by my six-year sojourn through college without receiving a degree. He charts my “loner” ways after my college girlfriend “abandoned” me in New York. And finally, he points to the eventual alcoholism that lit the fuse on all my inner rage and stifled need to win, to “beat others.” And I am certain that if I had Robert Cramer in front of me right now, I would teach him all about beating others.

I AM standing at the top of Kukulcan. It is night and I am surrounded by all the people Cramer talked to for his book. They are lined up along the edge, their backs to the drop behind them. I push them one by one into the pitch darkness that surrounds the pyramid until I get to the end of the line, where I find my mom and dad.

I lurch awake with a slight cry. Still on the bus, still night. The book is open in my lap, facedown, the cover exposed. The old woman in the seat next to mine looks from the grainy black-and-white photo of my short-haired, clean-shaven former self and up to my shaggy, sweaty face. She gives me a sweet smile.

– Pesadilla?

Pesadilla. Nightmare. A word I actually know in Spanish. I nod, closing the book, tucking it into the pack beneath my seat.

– Si, pesadilla.

She smiles again, takes hold of my hand and squeezes it. Still holding it, she points into the darkness outside.

– Catavina.

And out of the black desert around us, I see huge shapes looming in the light thrown by our headlamps. I’ve heard of this place. The Boulder Fields of Catavina; miles and miles of boulders strewn singly or in mounds or in massive piles the size of small mountains. The boulders themselves range in size from cow to house, all dropped here by glaciers that carved the peninsula however many thousands of thousands of years before any of the people I’ve killed were ever born.

I fall asleep still holding the old woman’s hand.

I WAKE to daylight just south of Ensenada. I look to my left and see the Pacific Ocean, the ocean I grew up with. The old woman is gone. About an hour and a half later we pull into the terminal in Tijuana where the Mexican bus lines end because, NAFTA aside, the teamsters don’t want them in America.

Inside I find the Greyhound counter and buy the ticket that will take me over the border. I pay the bathroom attendant fifty centavos to get in the john and clean up a little. Then I go to the lunch counter, where I see the Raiders and Broncos playing on the TV and realize it’s Sunday just before a score scrolls past at the bottom of the screen: DET 21 MIA 0 1Q.

BEFORE I get on the bus I find a trash barrel. I start by dumping Cramer’s book, follow that with torn-up traveler’s checks, the passport and ID I’ve been using for the last two years, and the Carlyle passport. That leaves me with Carlyle’s driver’s license, library card, gym card, and all the stuff you’d expect him to have in a wallet except credit cards.

I get on the bus. We drive a couple miles to the border and find ourselves stuck in a line of buses and cars, all streaming out of Mexico at the end of the weekend. The driver puts the bus in park and stands.

– It looks pretty bad out there today. It’s up to you folks, but if I were you, I’d get out here, walk across the border, and catch one of the buses in the terminal on the U.S. side.

Most of the people on the bus decide this is sound advice. It is soon apparent that if I stay here I will no longer be just one of an anonymous crowd of passengers should an Immigration officer come on board. I grab my pack and walk off the bus. It’s cool and I’m still dressed for the tropics. The sidewalk that leads to the border station is lined with vendor stalls. I see one selling long-sleeved T-shirts. I buy a white shirt with a Mexican flag on the front, Viva Mexico printed on the back. I look at the people around me, the Americans crossing back. Most are empty-handed or carry plastic shopping bags after spending the night getting drunk in TJ. I get a look at myself in a Corona mirror at one of the booths. I look like a vagabond who’s been living here for years, which is only right, I suppose, but not the appearance I want to cultivate.