Into the Beautiful North (11 page)

“We can buy new clothes, can’t we, Nayeli?” Vampi asked.

“Don’t worry, morra. I’ll take care of you.”

She looked at Tacho. His face was without expression.

The waiter put the sweating bottles of Corona in front of them.

“That’s urine,” Tacho noted.

Nayeli kicked him under the table.

“I’ll have shrimp, please,” she said.

“We’ll share an order of spaghetti,” Yolo said, leaning on Vampi’s shoulder.

“We’re on a diet,” Vampi announced.

“Do you want garlic bread?” the waiter asked.

Vampi stared at him for a moment.

“It’s good,” he promised.

“Yes, please.”

She beamed at him.

Tacho said, “Carne asada, amigo. Lots of salsa.”

“Corn tortillas or flour?”

“Corn, of course! Who eats flour tortillas?”

The waiter studied them.

“You’re from the south.”

“So?” said Tacho.

“So be careful,” the waiter said.

He walked away.

“What’s his problem?” Tacho groused.

The girls took long pulls from their beers. Yolo felt the bubbles burn up into her nose and sneezed. Vampi was dizzy immediately. She looked at all of them, opened her mouth, and belched noisily.

“Piglet!” Tacho scolded.

When the waiter came back and started to set their plates down, Nayeli said, “Is there a pay phone here?”

“By the bathroom.”

“Gracias.”

“Don’t be calling your coyotes here.”

“Coyotes?”

“You won’t make it across without a coyote, chica. But the management doesn’t like them coming around here. They give the gringos the creeps.”

“How do you know we want to go across?” Tacho asked.

“Everyone in Tijuana will know what you want as soon as they see you,” the waiter said. He was more than bored with pilgrims. “They have seen you a thousand times a week, brother.”

“Oh.”

“Can I bring you anything else?”

Nayeli shook her head and got up to find the phone.

“Your food will get cold,” the waiter said.

“I’ll be right back.”

Tacho said, “Do you have any advice for us?”

“Get a passport,” the waiter said.

Nayeli asked the cashier to give her some coins for the phone.

“Mexican or American?” he asked.

“What’s the difference?”

He shrugged.

“American money is boring. All the same color, and the coins are dull. But it’s actually worth something. Keep your pesos—give me dólares any day.”

Nayeli suddenly remembered Aunt Irma telling her that’s where
gringo
came from—from the English word for
green.

“It’s for the phone,” she said, handing over a few limp Mexican bills.

He dug out fat Mexican coins for her.

“Over there.”

She stepped into the hall between the bathrooms. American women were laughing and chatting in the doorway. They looked so tall. So glamorous. They smelled good, unlike her, smelled of vanilla and fruit and white musk and shampoo.

She turned her back on these giantesses and dug out her card. Chavarín’s number was a little streaked but still legible. She had the coins on the metal shelf in front of her. She fed a few into the phone, until she heard a dial tone. She studied the number and punched the LIB digits in. The phone made a weird noise, an ascending scale of derision, and a robot voice told her there had been an error. The phone clicked, and she heard her coins drop into the coin box. She dug through the coins and found enough to get the dial tone again. Again, she was kicked off and lost her coins. The third time, she dialed O and told the operator the number. The woman sounded offended. “There is no such number, miss,” she said. Nayeli repeated it. “I’m sorry. There is an error on your part, miss.” Nayeli tried to argue with her, but the operator informed her there hadn’t been a phone number like that in Tijuana since 1964. And there was no listing for a Chavarín. Not in Tijuana, Tecate, Ensenada, or Mexicali.

Her stomach was tight. It started to hurt. She pressed her hands to her face and breathed. She had to keep her wits about her.

She went back to her seat and stared at her food.

Tacho was eating a carne taco and swallowing his second beer. Yolo and Vampi were laughing helplessly. They each had two bottles in front of them.

“We are so drunk,” Vampi noted, and they both snorted and fell on each other.

“They’re weak,” Tacho said.

Nayeli picked at her shrimp.

She looked at Tacho.

He raised his eyebrows at her.

She shook her head.

He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

He turned away from her and watched the bodies moving down the street.

Chapter Eleven

T
hey stood on the street in the dark. The sound was relentless yet somehow flat. There were no echoes in Tijuana. Car horns were sour brays. Cops blew whistles, and they fell dull and bitter on the ear.

Nayeli went into a botica and bought Vampi some pads. She had a hairbrush, four toothbrushes, and a tube of toothpaste in her shoulder bag. Tacho apologized for his vanity and bought hair gel. He worked on his spikes as they stood there, pressed to a wall. His little radio hung from his belt loop by its strap.

“Call Aunt Irma,” Yolo said.

“And tell her what?” said Nayeli.

“I want to go home!” Vampi cried.

“We will go home,” Nayeli said. “When we have completed our mission.”

“This was all a big mistake,” Vampi said.

“I think we have failed,” Yolo added.

“No,” Nayeli replied. “We haven’t even started.”

I am going to Kankakee,
she thought. There was no way this mess was going to work, she decided. Not without Don Pepe.

The other girls gasped and slumped and threw their hands around.

Tacho said, “Ladies, ladies. We have to get off the street. That’s first. There is no Chavarín. All right. Then we have to use our own initiative. Am I right, m’ija?”

Nayeli nodded.

“We’ll get eaten alive if we spend the night out here.”

Happy tourists went by in colorful gangs, but among them were hustlers and sailors and marines and street kids and police and dogs. Men made kissing sounds at them—they couldn’t tell if the kisses were come-ons to the girls or mockery of Tacho. One slim boy in a black T-shirt paused and hissed: “Want to cross? Los Angeles? Safe?” He frightened them. They turned their faces from him until he walked away.

“We’ll find a hotel,” Tacho said. “Things will look better in the morning.”

They didn’t know which way to walk to find a hotel. They mistakenly thought that if they walked north—toward the US border—things would be of a better quality. They got off the main drag and headed down feeder streets and dark sidewalks in front of third-run movie theaters. Nayeli moved fast. She thought speed would keep them out of trouble. Some cementeros came out of an alley—tattered street kids fried on glue and reeking of chemicals. They tugged at Nayeli’s shirt and shoved Tacho and one grabbed at Vampi’s breast before they faded into the dark like a pack of hunting cats, the only thing left behind them, their laughter. Nobody noticed they’d stolen Tacho’s radio.

Shaken, Nayeli stopped at a taco cart on a corner ripe with smashed fruit rinds and peanut shells. The cook stood in a cloud of beef and charcoal smoke, his radio bobbing on a wire by his head, rocking to the distorted cumbia music. Two guys in cowboy boots ate tripe tacos in the glow of a streetlight on a crooked pole. The cook and the men looked Nayeli over, then took in the delicious sight of Yolo and Vampi. Tacho had slipped his pepper spray out of his sock and had it in his pocket with one hand wrapped around it and his finger on the nozzle.

“You lost?” the taco chef asked.

“Yes,” Nayeli replied.

The three men looked at one another and smiled.

“You don’t want to be lost down here, prieta.”

Nayeli was taken aback by that. Nobody had ever called her “dark-faced girl” in her life. Maybe morena—brown girl. That was almost romantic. But prieta was considered rude in Tres Camarones.

“Can you direct us to a hotel?” she asked.

One of the men laughed out loud.

“I’ll give you fifty pesos,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll give you fifty pesos each, and I’ll even pay for the room.”

The other man, who wore a bright yellow sport jacket, said, “No seas guey” to him. “These fine young ladies aren’t hookers.”

“We just need to get off the street,” Tacho said.

“Oh?” the man replied. He finished his taco and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Come here,” he said.

He led them into the red-light district.

“It ain’t pretty, but it’s cheap,” he said, directing them to Hotel Guadalajara, a small cement-block hotel beside the scariest bar they had ever seen.

“Don’t go in there,” the man said, pointing at the bar.

“Don’t worry,” Nayeli said.

They got a room with two beds on the second floor. The stairs were on the outside, and there was a walkway that ran the length of the floor. A woman asked Tacho if he wanted to get his rocks off for cheap, right there on the steps where it was dark, then called him a queer when he shook his head.

“I smell marijuana,” Vampi said.

“That’s a shocker,” Tacho replied.

The door was cheap plywood, and the lock wouldn’t latch properly. Tacho put the chain on the door. The room had a cement floor with no rug. The beds were narrow and stiff as cardboard boxes. They could hear the endless thump of Kid Rock songs coming from next door; shrieks and laughs; a breaking bottle. The room would never be dark, so much street light came in the one window that they could have read magazines, even with their lights out.

They had two towels in the bathroom. Vampi went first, and she stayed in the shower too long, and there was no hot water for the rest of them. Tacho yelled curses. Then he cursed again when he had to dry himself on the wet towels and get back in the same dirty clothes. They looked like street urchins. But their hair was clean.

Yolo and Vampi snuffled and cried in their bed. Tacho kept his back turned to Nayeli in theirs. She found him inscrutable. She lay on her back, listening to the insanity next door. Then feet passed outside their room, and the voices of a woman and a man. It was the same woman from before—Tacho’s girlfriend. Nayeli started to hear sounds she recognized immediately, though she had not heard them before. The man was actually grunting. She scrunched her eyes, as if that would shut out the walkway copulation. The man let out a long moan.

Tacho called, “Somebody milk that cow! It’s starting to moo!”

“Oh, my God!” Yolo said.

They buried their faces in their pillows, laughing.

Just when they thought they were falling asleep, one of them would say, “Moo!” and it would start again.

The men came for them at about three in the morning.

Nayeli heard the whispers first and came awake immediately. The faulty latch on their door began to rattle. She held her breath, thinking it might just be ambient sound or perhaps the remnants of some dream. She squinted at the door, and she saw the knob turning back and forth. Then, a bolt of fear when the latch popped and the door cracked open. She stiffened in the bed. The door swung open slowly, reaching the end of the chain. Hisses. A low man’s voice.

She shook Tacho. He snorted. She punched his arm. He buried his head under his pillow.

She looked around for a weapon. There was a small chair by the bed—she could club them with it when they broke in. She rose silently and stared. An arm was trying to reach into the room, the hand scrabbling like a spider, reaching around for the thin chain to get it off the hook. Nayeli squinted: a yellow sleeve. That bastard! The man from the taco stand.

“Almost,” the yellow man was saying to his associates. She could see their shadows through the window shade, backlit by the neon and streetlights.

She stood in the center of the room, in her panties and her T-shirt, watching the hand clutch at the chain.

Her girls were deep asleep in their bed. Tachito was snoring. Nayeli stretched. She shook out her arms and raised each leg once. She rotated her neck and felt it pop. She grabbed Tacho’s pepper spray can from the bedside table and positioned herself in front of the door.

The yellow man’s hand grabbed the chain and began to work it free.

“Got it,” he said.

Nayeli kicked the door closed on his arm. He screamed. She held the door against his wrist and threw her weight against it three times. He yelled curses. She grabbed his little finger and bent it back until it snapped. He made a terrible sound of shock and agony. But he let go of the chain. She pulled the door toward her and leaned into the gap and fired the pepper spray directly into his eyes. She slammed the door on his bloody arm again.

He jumped and howled and thumped against the wood as if he were being killed. His partners ran away and thundered down the stairs like bison. Tacho was beside her now, yelling, “Kill the bastards! Kill them!” Yolo and Vampi were yowling like air raid sirens. Nayeli fired another round into the yellow man’s face and released the door. He fell on his back and writhed. She stepped out and stomped him once.

“Oh, my,” Tacho noted. “Right in the balls.”

“You,” Nayeli growled, “stay away from me and my friends or I will kill you.”

The man was trying to crawl to the steps.

Tacho kicked him in the ass.

“Dog!” he said.

They slammed their door and fastened the chain again and locked the worthless latch and braced the chair beneath the knob. The girls stared at Nayeli with awe. Tacho was so jazzed that he couldn’t stop dancing and talking. Nayeli sat on the bed and shook.

She trembled until morning came and they went back to the street.