Into the Beautiful North (35 page)

Don Pepe.

“¿Papá?” she murmured.

He had gotten fatter. His butt was round and his belly hung over his big belt buckle. He threw his arm around the woman and hugged her, turned her toward the house. He unlocked the door as Nayeli stared. He took off his hat and laughed at something the woman said and accepted a kiss on the mouth from her and smacked her bottom as she yelped and skipped inside. He briefly scanned the neighborhood—his eyes passed right over Nayeli—before stepping inside and slamming the door.

The street was silent. Not many birds at all, and the ones that were there weren’t singing, just making desolate little cheeping noises. She could hear the tractor, of course. She could hear the engine of the big pickup truck ticking as it cooled.

And then, all she could hear was the sound of her soles and her breathing as she sprinted away.

Nayeli ran to the end of the block, to the barrier that ended the street. She jumped over it and ran out into the plowed field. The man on the tractor ignored her, as if he saw women in the rows every day. She shook, she gasped, she shouted as loud as she could.

“FATHER!” she wailed.

Over and over.

There were no words to begin to describe what she felt.

After an hour, she stepped back over the barrier. She walked down the street. She turned up Don Pepe’s driveway. She could hear the baby inside, crying. She reached into her back pocket, withdrew the postcard. She smoothed it carefully. She tucked it under his windshield wiper. Nayeli walked away.

Chapter Thirty-five

T
he van was dead. They abandoned it in the parking lot. Miss Mary-Jo drove them to the Trailways station.

They pulled out of the lot and drove south, across the river.

“You would have never found the station,” said Mary-Jo.

“Gracias,” Nayeli replied.

A sign promised:
TUESDAYS TACO NIGHT
.

They beheld a small trailer park. A building offered smoked fish. They drove toward the Economy Inn.

“What are you going to tell your mother?” Mary-Jo asked. “About your dad?”

“Nothing. He was gone.”

WELCOME TO YOUR HOME ON THE ROAD
.

“I am so sorry,” Mary-Jo said.

SCHLITZ. THE CAPTAIN’S PUB. BUDWEISER
.

“Here we are.”

She followed them into the lobby. It doubled as the bus station.

Three men turned and stared. Ancient paneling. Cement steps. The smell of old men and old smoke and old breath.

“How do,” the man at the counter said.

“Two,” said Mary-Jo.

“Right. Where to?”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“San Diego.”

“Right-o.”

They paid for the tickets.

On the television, CNN was showing a bleached and jumpy film of scores of Mexicans jumping over a fence and racing into Arizona. The three of them stood there, transfixed. The ticket seller turned and blushed. He snapped off the TV. He smiled at them in embarrassment. His teeth were brown and yellow.

Nayeli loved him.

The man said, “Sorry.”

Tacho was studying the big route map on the wall. Their bus went right on down through Saint Louis. KC.

“Please,” he said. “Not again.”

The bus was coming. It rolled their way from the highway, made a sharp left into the lot. Pebbles and dirt clods crunched under its heavy tires. It groaned and hissed. The door opened. The driver got down, shook a leg, nodded to them.

“Folks!” he said. “Be right with you. Got to point Percy at the porcelain.” He winked and strode into the lobby.

The wind was blowing.

Nayeli hugged Mary-Jo.

“Adios,” she whispered.

The driver came back, took their tickets, and climbed aboard. Tacho flew up the steps and vanished into the bus. Nayeli followed. Mary-Jo stood in the cold wind, waving farewell.

The door closed. The bus burped and shuddered and rolled out of the lot. It turned right as the rain started to fall again. Mary-Jo ran to her car. When she looked back, the bus had vanished around the bend.

Chapter Thirty-six

C
alexico.

Arnie Davis was back from San Diego, and his new uniform was roasting him. He was an agent, still, this week of yet another word-salad agency, the—what was it this time? The Customs and Border Enforcement, or the CBP or was it CPB? Whatevs, dawg. The government keeping itself busy.

He pulled his steaming shirt away from his chest. Not for the first time, he wondered why, if the guys invariably had to patrol in hot places, did the government give them forest green outfits?

Arnie didn’t know what was worse, the Tijuana border canyons or this brutal stretch of I-8. Looking into tourists’ cars at the roadblock. Boarding random buses, hunting for wets. Cripes. His knee was aching.

Definitely about time to cash in those chips and get to the Rockies and do some fishing.

He waved cars through. He grimaced. A Trailways bus was coming. He checked his forms, clicked the computer screen.

“Time to roust the good travelers, Bob,” he said. His partner nodded. Why open your mouth to speak and lose more moisture to the burning air? He waved his hand, silently inviting Arnie to step right up and check that bus while he faded back into the shade and waited for a coed in a convertible to come along.

Arnie planted himself on the shoulder of the slow lane. Cones were set out, shunting traffic over. It was all pro forma. Dull as a factory job making left-handed widgets nine hours a day.

He flapped his hand up and down. The bus pulled over. He climbed aboard.

“Routine check,” he told the riders. “How you doing?” to the driver.

“I’m good,” the driver responded.

Arnie nodded to the college kid in the first row. A fat Mexican woman in the third row already had her green card out and held up. He took it and scanned it. “Ma’am,” he said, handing it back.

Everybody on the bus needed a shower.

And then he got to the last row and beheld Nayeli and Tacho.

He stopped dead and stared.

“No way,” he said.

“Is he calling you a buey?” Tacho whispered.

Nayeli looked up. She was too spent to smile. She was done.

“Hola,” she said.

Arnie leaned on the seat back in front of her.

“What was your name?”

“Nayeli.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll be darned,” he said. “Hey,” he said to Tacho.

“Hey,” Tacho said.

“You’re Nayeli’s Al Qaeda friend.”

Tacho nodded. He weakly put out his wrists, awaiting the handcuffs.

Arnie looked around at all the heads studiously looking out the windows yet watching the events in the back of the bus.

“Small world, isn’t it,” said Arnie to Nayeli.

“We are in God’s hands,” she replied.

These kids were so bedraggled it was almost funny.

“OK,” Arnie said.

He crooked his finger at them.

“Vámonos,” he said.

Embarrassed, they trudged down the aisle, being stared at by the other travelers. The driver got their little bags out for them. He didn’t make eye contact. They stood and watched the bus drive away.

Arnie opened his truck’s rear gate.

“In,” he said.

They climbed in.

He slammed it.

“Bob,” he called over to the booth. “Two clients. Taking ’em in.”

Bob nodded.

“Groovy,” he said. He flashed Arnie a peace sign. Those migra agents. They were comical.

Arnie pulled onto the freeway. Turned up the AC.

“You OK back there?” he called.

“Sí.”

He watched Nayeli in the rearview.

“Where’s that smile of yours?” he said.

“Gone.”

He drove a little farther.

“Weren’t you looking for your father?” he said.

“Sí.”

“What happened?”

“I found him.”

“Oh.”

The radio squawked.

“Not so good, huh?”

“Not so good.”

Arnie pulled over. Put on his emergency blinkers.

“You told me a crazy story, I remember. You were going to smuggle wets back into Mex. Isn’t that right?”

They both nodded.

“I don’t see anybody,” he said.

“In San Diego,” Nayeli explained. “Twenty-seven.”

“Bullshit!”

“Is true,” Tacho said.

“No!”

Nayeli was so tired.

“Twenty-seven men waiting for me in San Diego. We go back to Sinaloa.”

Arnie laughed.

He sat there looking out at the desert.

“You thirsty?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.”

He got his thermal jug. He stepped out, slammed the door. Walked around. Opened the rear gate.

“Don’t try anything stupid,” he said.

He handed them the jug. They gulped the cold water.

“Gracias,” they said.

Arnie sat in the open gate, one foot on the ground.

“Run this story by me one more time.”

Nayeli started with Don Pepe. The bandidos. The election. The journey. (She left out the tunnel from her story.)

He kept shaking his head.

Finally, he said, “You’re not lying, are you?”

“No.”

“Is she lying to me?”

Tacho said, “No.”

It was the darnedest thing Arnie had ever heard.

He hung his head and thought for a few minutes.

He sighed. Rubbed his face. They were never going to make it through the gauntlet. They’d be caught and reprocessed.

F-you money,
he thought.

What could they do to him?

“I like you kids,” he said. “I really do.”

He slammed the gate shut. Went back to his seat, radioed in to the station. Tacho and Nayeli didn’t understand the English or the migra codes. He eased back onto the freeway, pulled a U-turn, and drove them in the opposite direction. He got off the road and took them to a small house in a subdivision of Yuma.

He cooked them some eggs and tortillas.

Then, when night fell, he put them back in his truck, and he drove them west, never stopping until they hit San Diego.

Epilogue

T
he bad men had parked their trucks at the major corners of the village. Black Cherokees and Tahoes with dark windows. They simply sat, idling, throbbing with music. Grandmothers kept their daughters in their houses. Irma, home from the Yunaites, had to send Chava and Garcí a-García to Mazatlán for their own protection from the bandidos. But she promised the women of Tres Camarones that change would soon come.

Sensei Grey taught two new judo classes to those women who were sick of waiting for men to come.

The pigs and the donkeys spent their nights engineering daring escapes from their pens. Dogs and chickens refused to let the mornings be silent. Huge coconut crabs wandered into town from the estuaries and climbed the coconut palms to snip the cocos free. They dropped to the ground and split with a sound like a single horse’s hoof on a cobble. The big crabs squatted over the brilliant white meat inside the broken shells and fed themselves with both claws, looking smug.

A Cherokee sat dark as night in front of La Mano Caída, but the morning rose in spite of it, and the day ignored it. Mockingbirds insulted crows from every phone line, and hummingbirds were indistinguishable from the immense black bees that trundled down from the slopes of El Yauco to plunder the red hibiscus and trumpet vines. The skiffs with bundles covered in blue tarps had begun to come ashore; sullen men who spared no friendly word to the women or the children loaded and unloaded flatbed trucks.

The day grew hot almost immediately.

Women were already making tortillas at the market. Women set out stacks of hard cheese and bowls of dripping-wet cheese. Women with blue tin pots came in from the outskirts to sell their fresh milk. Other women stood in line to buy two eggs, three potatoes, a bolillo roll or two, a small jar of marmalade. They remained silent. They kept their heads bowed. The only music came from the black SUVs.

Crazy Pepino was at work early. He rode his bike into the square as the sun rose every day. He swept the front steps of the Cine Pedro Infante. He cleaned the glass door with a squeegee. They were showing
Taras Bulba
and
The King and I
later that night. The window of a Tahoe rolled down, and a lit cigarette flew out and pinged off his head. Laughter.

When he was done with the theater, he rode his bike to La Mano Caída. It was locked tight. Pepino swept the porch. Checked the locks. Checked the windows.

When he was done, looking to make sure nobody was watching, he sneaked past the Cherokee with its gunmen in the street, and he swung around the side and climbed the building. He used the rainspout and the old water tank to get halfway up. From there, he could grab the roof and boost himself. He did this every morning, without fail.

He sat on the tin until it grew too hot to bear. He looked east. He watched through the trees. From the roof, he could see a small elbow of the road from the highway. The road to Mazatlán, where he had never been. It was all trees in that direction. All willows and pecans and mangos and hibiscus. Bamboo and banana and sugarcane.

Pepino liked it on the roof. He liked the breeze, except when it came from the river and stank of rot and mud. And he liked watching the wild parrots fly to the ruins of the church. He liked the butterflies and the occasional peek he caught through Yvette García’s window of her unbearable hotness in her nightgown. The bandidos could not smack him or burn him with cigarettes up here.

But mostly, Pepino liked to watch the road.

Old women below scolded him: “Pepino, you maniac. Get off Tacho’s roof!” But he was deeply into his mischief and ignored them. They gestured at the terrible Jeep, warning with their chin juts and their shrugs:
They will kill you
.

Those women were alarmed when they heard him shouting.

They hurried to the front of the shop and squinted up. Was he stung by a scorpion? A bee? Nobody knew. Why was he shouting? Wasps, some said—it had to be wasps. The doors of the Cherokee opened, and the bandidos peered up at him. They were just skinny punks with scrawny necks and bad expressions on their faces. They craned around, trying to see.

Pepino came to the edge of the roof and slapped the top of his own head.

“Pepino! Pepino!” the women cried. “Is it wasps? Are they stinging you?”

He jumped up and down. He yelled. He pointed east.

“Nayeli!” he yelled.

“What about Nayeli?”

“Nayeli!” He spun in a circle. “Nayeli and Tacho walking with a monkey!”

“What? What monkey?”

“Walking home. With a big monkey.” He held his hands over his head. “With a big stick!”

The bandidos got out of their vehicle.

Pepino laughed and gestured down at them.

“Nayeli and Tacho,” he warned, “brought an army!”

They all turned and looked at the spot where the road from the outside world passed through the dark woods and entered the village.

“Nayeli!” Pepino shouted. He pointed, he waved his arms in widening loops as if he were going to fly right off the roof. Voices came from the distance, small through the trees, and now Pepino looked like a mad conductor, bringing this choir forth.

They all heard a strange voice rising above the others. It called out:

“I am Atómiko!”

“The monkey talks!” Pepino shouted.

Now the women of Tres Camarones were smiling.