Into the Beautiful North (23 page)

“We didn’t come here to get boyfriends!” Nayeli said.

“We are not here to go on dates,” Yolo agreed.

“We’re on a mission!”

“We can’t fool around with boys—we came to save Tres Camarones!”

Matt came into the kitchen.

“Hola, Mateo,” Nayeli cooed.

“¡Ay, Matt!” sang Yolo.

“How are you?” Nayeli asked in English.
Fou va jou?

“Matt!” Yolo cried.

He looked at them and smiled and got some water and went back out to watch wrestling with Atómiko.

“Vampi,” Nayeli said, “is out of control.”

“She’d better get her priorities right,” Yolo agreed.

They sat in the pickup truck on Mount Soledad. The lights of San Diego were scattered before them. Rivers of high beams and tail-lights beneath them on I-5. The bizarre hair-thin beacon of a laser kept shooting over the mountain, some sort of urban art project. In the distance, the icy-looking white spires of a Mormon temple. And above them, the shining white cross Vampi had first seen when she’d jumped out of the smuggler’s truck. Had it been yesterday? Was that all? Every day seemed a week long to her. She watched the lights of a jet as it descended in the distance.

“It’s magic, isn’t it,” El Brujo said.

“It’s the prettiest thing I ever saw,” she replied.

“You must not have looked in the mirror this morning,” he said.

Oh, Brujo!

Lovers were parked all around them. Music and smoke snaked out of cracked, foggy windows. El Brujo—his real name was Alejandro, but everybody called him Alex—kept the radio tuned to the Mighty 690, and he sang along softly when a good song came on. Vampi sat beside him with her fingers laced through his, rubbing his knuckles with her thumb. She looked at his ferocious profile, his luxuriant hair—he had let it down for her. His hoop earring made him look like a pirate.
Sometimes
, she was thinking,
you just know
. Did he know, too?

“People don’t believe it because of the way I look,” he said, “but I don’t take drugs, and I don’t drink.”

“Me, neither.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Me, neither!”

He leaned over and smelled her hair.

“You are my drug, Vampira.”

“Oh, Alex!”

She furiously buffed his knuckles with her thumb.

“This hill,” he said, “this is where all the rich bastards live.”

“Oh?”

“Part of the hill fell down, on the other side. It swallowed a bunch of their mansions.” He smiled. “God reminded them to be humble.”

Vampi sighed. She scooted closer and put her head on his shoulder.

“Besides,” he continued, “they’ll hire a bunch of Mexicans to fix it for them.”

She raised his knuckles to her lips and rubbed them against her mouth.

“We’ll live up here one day,” he added.

She felt a jolt.

“We will?”

She fell upon his chest.

He was quiet for a moment.

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“But we can make it magic wherever we are… right?”

She was speaking into his collarbone. She wanted to nibble it.

He put his arm around her.

“I must have done something right,” he said. “For you to come into my life.”

And he won her heart forever, in that instant, for he broke into song. His voice was deep, a rich baritone. And he sang it! He sang: “ ‘Just like a gothic girl, lost in the darken world.’ ”

Vampi started to cry.

Alex knew!

He knew.

He had come north from León, Guanajuato. He was a guitarist for a darkwave metal band in Mexico known as Cuernos de Hielo. But there was no money in Guanajuato for a darkwave band. And Alex’s family was hurting—his dad had retired, and his mom was caring for him with little money. So Alex had sought his fortune in Los Yunaites. Wasn’t that where all the big metal bands came from? Black Sabbath, for example. No, wait—Sabbath was from England. Cradle of Filth, maybe? England again. He gestured at his shirt, but Vampi just smiled sweetly. The 69 Eyes were from Helsinki, maybe, some pagan, Viking nosferatu place.

“I think they worship Odin,” she noted.

To his astonishment, Alex found out that there was not much market for an undocumented Aztec death shredder without a guitar and without any English at all. He thought anybody could become a rock star in the USA. He thought you got on MTV and got rich. He thought he’d be opening for Motley Crüe on a world tour. He didn’t think you hid from authorities and felt the Americans’ eyes pass right through you in the supermarket. If nobody could even see him, how was he going to get famous?

It took him a year or two to admit that he never would get famous. He might never play in a band again. He fell into the slums in Logan Heights, southeast of the city, then worked his way up to a Taco Bell in Pacific Beach. He shared an apartment with five other chavalos from Chiapas and Guerrero. They were gardeners. They ate lunch at the pancake house one day and saw the cardboard sign in the window seeking busboys. They told Alex, and he found himself in the happy family of
Velma!
and her duffers.

He’d been at the pancake house now for six years. His dad was dead. (“May he rest in peace,” Vampi said—Alex turned and looked into her eyes and kissed her savagely, unable to contain himself.) He had some money put away, but he was afraid to go to the funeral, so he’d sent it all to his mom via La Western Union.

“Now what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve got this truck. I guess I’ll work six more years.”

She nuzzled him. He smiled down at her. This sweet-smelling girl. She was so soft, so warm. She was better than a million bucks, right there in his truck. Alex hadn’t been with a woman in—well, it had been a long time. He wasn’t sure what to do.

“Are you my girl?” he asked.

“Is it crazy?” she said. “Is it too soon?”

“You might as well ask the moon,” he said. “You might as well ask the stars.”

In Vampi’s opinion, Alex spoke in song lyrics.

The La Jolla laser came back on and shot a vivid emerald beam over their heads.

It seemed like a sign.

Everything seemed like a sign to Vampi.

“My real name is Verónica,” she confessed.

She climbed into his lap and kissed his mouth. She sat on the horn and startled all the lovers—the honk echoed down the hill. She grabbed two handfuls of hair and gazed into his eyes.

“You could come back home with me,” she said.

And she told him her story.

Matt and Yolo looked in the phone book.

“S. Chavarín,” he called out.

“S.,” Yolo said. “Must stand for Salvador, you think?”
Jou teen?

“Sí,” Nayeli said. “Salvador-Chava. That must be him.”

“La Osa’s boyfriend,” said Yolo.

“No! You think so?”

“Yeah.”

Matt and Atómiko didn’t know what the fuss was all about.

“You do it,” Nayeli said.

Yolo smiled nervously and punched the numbers. It rang three times; she scrunched her nose at Nayeli. A man answered.

“Hello?”

“¿Señor Chavarín?” Yolo asked.

“Yes?”

“We are from Tres Camarones,” she said.

“¿Qué?”

“Tres Camarones. We have come from there, and we represent Irma García Cervantes.”

“Dios mío.”

“She is the Mayor of Camarones,” Yolo reported.

He gasped.

“Mayor? Irma?”

“She asked us to call you.”

He said: “I have to sit down.”

Don Chava worked the night shift at the Hillcrest Bowl. He didn’t want them to go there. Yolo could hear the tone in his voice. She thought it was embarrassment. What was there to be embarrassed about? She herself worked in the Camarones bowling alley. She promised to call him in the morning. She hung up.

“What’s he like?” Nayeli asked.

“Sad,” Yolo replied. “Old. Nice.”

She twisted the phone cord around her fingers.

“He told me where he works. But he doesn’t want us to come.”

Nayeli said, “Do you really think he’s Aunt Irma’s boyfriend?”

Yolo smiled.

“Once upon a time. God, Nayeli—he almost had a heart attack when I mentioned her name.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

They grinned at each other.

“Let’s go see him,” Nayeli said.

“Let’s.”

They turned to the guys.

“Mateo?” they sang in their sweetest voices. “Are you busy?”

Chapter Twenty-three

S
alvador “Chava” Chavarín owned the first clear bowling ball in Sinaloa.

It was pale orange, and it could have been a jewel. Nobody could roll the ball like Chava. He released the ball like a dancer, his arm rising and cutting across his face and holding there as his slim hips seemed to steer the ball to yet another strike. Oh yes, Chava Chavarín was Irma’s guru. She followed him to the lanes in Mazatlán, Acaponeta, and Los Mochis. When he had a bowling shirt stitched Americano-style, she saved up her money and sent away for real American shirts from Los Angeles. His shirt had orange piping on a blue-and-white two-tone placket with his name over his heart. Hers was silver and black and featured a lurid 15,000-thread stitching of a ball smashing pins against a white inset.

It was Chava who introduced Irma to the cinema. When she was a girl, she was a tomboy—she was always busy swimming in the river, or crabbing, or climbing the mango and date trees to get fruit. Things like music and movies didn’t catch her eye at all. Until she saw Chava squiring puff-skirted young ladies to the movies. He was exquisite! His mustache was a thin line of inexpressible suggestiveness over his sharp yet tender upper lip! He smoked cigarettes in holders that jutted from his mouth like an old-time Yanqui president’s—he had FDR in mind. He saved every cent he earned and spent it on finery—his bowling winnings making him increasingly dapper. And since he lived with his mother, he had money to burn, plus she kept his clothes washed and ironed. He even wore a white dinner jacket! He carried a flask of rum and a silver cigarette case, and he tapped his cigarettes on the case three times—
¡sas! ¡sas! ¡sas!
—before he inserted them in the holder. He lit the ladies’ smokes with a gold Zippo that appeared with a Fred Astaire flick of the hand that revealed a faux Cartier watch, glittering with paste diamonds, on his wrist. He was always laughing, and everybody in town called him “That Chava!” As in, “Oh, that Chava—he’s too much!”

Sometimes, when he walked down the street, he was so deep into his own rhythm that he snapped his fingers and shuffled a tiny sideways dance, keeping the beat.

Irma, feeling fat and awkward, slunk into the cinema and watched Chava more than the movies. She writhed with envy, the way he put his arm around whatever tramp he was escorting. He would cool them both with a paper fan on a stick, the fans (distributed by the beer dealer) featuring blurry black-and-white photographs of great stars like Lola Beltrán. It was so gallant.

Of course, in those days, nobody dared kiss in public. But was there any doubt, when Chava got his fan going, that he was going to reap great kisses from his various concubines? Everyone assumed he was a devil with the lights out. It made Irma feverish just thinking about it.

Her moment of glory came in a rush, in a twelve-lane bowling alley with a layer of cigar smoke hovering two feet below the ceiling and the sound of a brass band punching the tuba and trumpet cacophony as sweat poured down her back.

It was on the epochal night of the mixed men’s and women’s state bowling finals in Culiacán. Chava had gone down in flames to an upstart from El Rosario. There was no catching the blond bomber, Beto Murray, damn him! So Chava nursed his disgrace and was free to sit in the Camarones section, among the women who had gathered to cheer Irma. And she was magnificent. Just the hot sensation of his stare burning—finally—into her rump sent her hurtling down the lane. His gaze tingled her bottom and lifted her onto her tiptoes. Her throws were devastating. The pins seemed to shatter into toothpicks as she scored strike after strike after strike. Magnificent Irma! Chava rose. He cheered. He shouted. When she won, he leaped over the rail between them and lifted her off the floor in a wild embrace. Irma had not believed a man could lift her: it was disconcerting yet thrilling.

They made love for the first time in Chava’s car, pulled off the road in a huge bean field. Cicadas bombed the car, and worried Brahman bulls sniffed the windows. He was Irma’s first, and only. Frankly, it didn’t feel all that great, and it left a mess. Chava, stylish even with his white skivvies around his ankles, produced a silk hankie and cleaned Irma with it, an act of tenderness she would never forget. But more than the feeling of Chava’s hands carefully blotting her with the cool silk, Irma would always remember the hazy half-moon out the back window. Ever after, when she saw the full moon wane, she grew melancholy. If she’d had any musical gifts, she would have sung ballads to the sky.

Chava ran a small shrimp boat out of the estuaries. In the off-season, he fished for tuna and flounder and occasionally drove a truck. It was on a long-haul mango and banana run that he lost his head and broke Irma’s heart. He drove the ancient Dodge stake bed to Tijuana. He’d been to Tijuana before. What touring bowler hadn’t? But he startled them all by not returning. Perhaps they should have seen it as a harbinger of their future migratory fate. That Chava was always ahead of the curve. There it was, 1963, and he was already gone north.

He sent word that he’d found work. He’d found a cheap house and a good-paying job, and he was going to apply for a green card and work in the tuna canneries of San Diego. His letters and telegrams to Irma were full of innocence and joy—amazing tales of bright American days and clean American beaches. Shining American bowling alleys! When he went on a small tour, he showered her with postcards of bowling alleys in Tucumcari, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; Benson, Arizona. When it came time for her to bowl in the north of Mexico, the year of 1965, she went to Chava on a Mexicana flight, clutching a shiny black purse and wearing high heels for the first time in her life. She was expecting a wedding.

But Chava had stayed in el norte for other reasons. True, the cannery had paid him well. His little yellow house in the bucolic hills of Colonia Independencia was cute. His sly smuggling of Irma into the United States for her San Diego bowling premiere was memorable. But he’d been oddly chaste with her. Even distant. And in the end, he had sent her home with a mere peck on the cheek.

Only when she was back in Tres Camarones did Irma hear from Chava’s mother that he had impregnated an American woman. A blonde, no less. A cocktail waitress from the Aztec Lanes in San Diego. Chava was marrying her.

That was the end of Irma, that day.

La Osa, her alter ego, appeared in all her relentless glory to inspire chagrin and penance in the homeland.

Matt drove them to Hillcrest. Yolo had nabbed the shotgun seat, and Nayeli beamed smiles at him from the back. Their overwhelming girlscents filled the minivan. He was baffled by the whole visitation. What did they want? It was what the ZZs would have called “a for sure blow-mind.”

Atómiko was sprawled in the third row, snoring again.

Matt had the address on a scrap of paper. They took I-5 south to Washington and cut up the hill. The Hillcrest Bowl was across the street from a shabby little medical tower. They pulled into the lot. It was mostly empty. Atómiko stayed asleep in the backseat. A drunk street person addressed them in some ancient Babylonian tongue. Matt handed him a dollar, and they moved away from him.

Nayeli put her arm through Matt’s as they walked into the bowling alley. She had this way of looking up at him from under her brows that made him happy. The old sound of bowling washed over them like a tide, the rumble/
crash
of balls and pins. Matt heard Patsy Cline playing on the jukebox. It must have been a law in America that every bowling alley installed “Crazy,” “Walkin’ After Midnight,” and “I Fall to Pieces” on their jukes.

At the front desk, they asked after Chava.

“Who?” the guy said.

“Señor Chava,” Nayeli repeated.

The guy looked at her.

He turned and yelled, “Hey, Sal! You know anybody named Chávez?”

“Chava,” Nayeli corrected.

“Whatever.”

They looked over at “Sal.” He was carrying a rubber bucket and a mop out of the women’s toilet. He wore blue rubber kitchen gloves that reached almost to his elbows. He wore thick-soled work shoes, and his gray trousers were pressed. His white shirt was buttoned up to his neck. Without the pomade, his hair had gone back to its tight curls. Except it had become white, as had his little mustache.

He looked at them with a frozen half-smile on his face.

Nayeli stepped forward.

“¿Don Chava?” she asked. “¿Chava Chavarín?”

Yolo and Matt were bowling. Atómiko wandered in and nodded to Nayeli and Chava. “¡Orale, guey!” he said. He settled in the booth at Matt’s lane and started insulting the bowlers.

“That boy just called me a water buffalo,” Chava noted.

He and Nayeli sat at a small table, sipping sodas.

“He is a funny boy,” Nayeli said.

“Funny. Yes.”

Chava fidgeted. He seemed to have trouble meeting her eyes. He unwrapped her straw for her.

“Gracias.”

“Root beer is good,” he said.

“What was it you said to that rude man?” she asked.

“Which one? There are so many rude men. Oh. My boss? That was what they say here—
‘Take five.’
It means I am taking a break. They have all these phrases you need to know. Like
‘easy ice
.’ ”

“Easy ice,” she repeated.

“Yes. When you order a drink. They always put too much ice in it. It saves them money. But you want your money’s worth, you see. So you tell them not to put so much ice in the drink.”

“Easy ice.”

“Easy ice. Take five. See you later.”

Nayeli did her smile for him and sipped her soda.

“So. Tres Camarones,” Chava said, as if it had just come up in conversation. “How—is it back there?”

“Hot.”

They laughed.

He rubbed his face.

He said, “You will think I am a bad man.”

And he told her the story of how he betrayed Aunt Irma so many years ago. Nayeli listened carefully, hiding her smile when he admitted to making love to La Osa.

“We were young!” he said when he saw her grin. “Well, she was young.”

His face was tragic as he told her about the blonde. He hung his head, turned his glass of soda around and around on the ring of water it left on the table.