Into the Beautiful North (7 page)

During the intermission, Father François told Nayeli, “Of course you know that
The Magnificent Seven
is based on Kurosawa’s classic sword-fighting epic,
The Seven Samurai
.”

Hearing “epic”—
epopeya
—Yolo quipped, “Oh! Popeye is in it?”

Angry, Father François continued: “The villagers are beset by bandidos. Overwhelmed and outgunned, they resort to a desperate plan—they go to Los Yunaites —”

“And work at Burger King!” Yolo blurted.

Father François returned to his seat. If he couldn’t teach these idiots catechism, what made him think they could be taught about world cinema?

Nayeli followed him.

“I’m listening, Padre. Ignore them.”

He huffed.

“As I was saying. They send a group of brave peasants north to Los Yunaites.” He cast an evil eye at Yolo and her homegirls.

“What do they do there?” Nayeli asked.

“They find seven gunmen. The magnificent seven, you see? Seven killers that they bring back from the border to fight for them.”

In spite of herself, Nayeli felt tingles.

“Chido,” she said.

She hurried back to her seat to whisper to Tacho.

When that music started, she got tingles again.

The insanely picturesque color, the gigantic landscapes, even the pathetic Mexican village and the chubby gringo bad guy making believe he was a Mexican bandido, she loved it all.

Tacho yawned. “I want to see a car chase,” he said.

Irma: “SHH!”

“I don’t like horses,” Tacho added.

Irma: “SHHHHH!”

When Yul Brynner strode into the picture, wearing the same outfit he’d worn as the killer cowboy-robot in
Westworld,
Nayeli nudged Tacho.

“Oh, my God!” he said. “Can’t he afford new clothes?”

Aunt Irma growled.

They laughed behind their hands.

Suddenly, there was Steve McQueen.

“He has a stupid little cowboy hat,” Tacho noted, marking McQueen a few points down on his mental fashion scorecard.

Garcí a-García kept his enthusiasm in check as long as he could, but when Mr. McQueen shot a bunch of bad guys out of windows while Yul Brynner merely drove the wagon they were riding in, he could no longer stay silent. ¡Era más macho, ese pinchi McQueen! That was what Tres Camarones needed! Real men doing manly things like shooting sons of bitches out of windows! He let out a yell:

“¡VIVA ESTIP McQUEEN!”

Irma could not believe this.

“¡VIVA YUL BRYNNER!” she hollered back.

“¡ESTIP!”

“¡YUL!”

All around them, people were shushing them.

Tacho noted, “I thought you wanted quiet.”

“Be quiet yourself, you fool. ¡VIVA YUL!”

Someone threw a wadded paper cup at Aunt Irma, and she piped down with some grumbling. She was furious. She could see Garcí a-García down there, turning to his seatmates and explaining the many wonders of Estip McQueen. And McQueen wasn’t even a Mexican!

Nayeli sat with her mouth open. Tacho was snoring softly beside her. She looked deeper into the theater and saw Yolo and her family calmly watching.

Didn’t anybody else feel the electric charge she felt?

She watched the rest of the movie in a daze. She hardly saw what happened on the screen—she had already sunk deep into her own thoughts. When the lights came up and the people clapped and Yolo whistled and Tacho snorted awake and Garcí a-García stood and accepted all the kudos, Nayeli remained in her seat.

“M’ija,” Tacho said, “I’m tired. I’m going home.”

He air-kissed her cheek, but she didn’t notice it.

Nayeli pulled her father’s postcard from her sock and studied it. A cornfield with an impossibly blue sky, an American sky: she had seen it over and over again in the movie. Only American skies, apparently, were so stunningly blue. She turned the card over. It said: “A TYPICAL CORN CROP IN KANKAKEE, ILLINOIS.” She more or less understood the message.
Una cosecha típica,
she told herself. Don Pepe had written, “Everything Passes.”

She rose slowly and drifted out the door.

Yolo and La Vampira were waiting outside.

“¿Qué te pasa?” La Vampi asked.

Yolo said, “Are you all right, chica?”

Nayeli waved them off.

“Hey,” said Yolo. “We’re talking to you.”

Nayeli gestured for them to follow her and walked to the town square.

She absentmindedly swept off a bench and sat down. Her home-girls sat on either side of her. She held up a finger for quiet while she thought some more.

She finally said, “The Magnificent Seven.”

They stared at her.

“So?” said Yolo.

“Bo-ring,” said Vampi.

“The seven,” Nayeli repeated.

“What about them?” Yolo said.

“We have to go get them,” Nayeli said. “We have to go to Los Yunaites and get the seven.”

“¡Qué!” Vampi cried. “¿Estip McQueen?”

“¡No, mensa!” Yolo snapped. “He’s dead.”

“We have to stop the bandits before they come and destroy the village. Don’t you see? They’re coming.”

“So?” said Vampi.

“Who is going to fight them?” Nayeli asked.

Yolo dug her toe into the ground.

“Cops?” she said.

“What cops?” Nayeli asked.

Yolo shrugged one shoulder.

“I guess… your dad would have.”

They sat there.

“We go,” Nayeli said. “We find seven men who want to come home. But they have to be—what?”

“Soldiers,” Yolo suggested.

“Right! We interview men. Only cops or soldiers can come.”

Vampi held up a finger.

“Perdón,” she said. “Where are we going, again?”

“Los Yunaites,” Yolo said.

“What? Are you kidding?”

“We’re not kidding,” Nayeli said.

“Oh, great,” Vampi complained. “There goes my week!”

“We have a mission,” Nayeli said. “We’re only going there to bring the men back home.”

Vampi said, “Maybe you can find your father.”

Nayeli looked at her. She sat back down.

“What about
my
father?” Yolo demanded.

Vampi replied, “He’s not a cop.”

They sat there, stunned by the enormity of Nayeli’s plan.

“We will only be there for as long as it takes to get the men to come,” she continued. “The Americanos will be happy we’re there! Even if we’re caught!”

“You’re crazy,” Yolo said.

“Dances,” Nayeli whispered. “Boyfriends. Husbands. Babies. Police—law and order. No bandidos.”

They sat there for ten minutes, looking at the ground.

“Pin tenders, too,” Yolo offered. “Because, you know, I am tired of working at the bowling alley.”

“Maybe, you know, we could get one gay boy,” Nayeli said. “For poor Tacho.”

Yolo nodded wisely. “Tacho needs love, too.”

“We should take Tacho with us!” Vampi cried.

They turned to her with a bit of awe. It was the first really good idea La Vampi had ever had.

The girlfriends had all seen
Los Hermanos Blues
at the Pedro Infante a few months earlier.

“We’re on a mission from God,” Nayeli intoned.

La Vampi turned to her and said, “I’m going.”

Nayeli cried, “We can repopulate our town. We can save Mexico. It begins with us! It’s the new revolution!” She stood up. “Isn’t it time we got our men back in our own country?” She was slipping into Aunt Irma campaign mode. She sat back down.

“Oh, my God,” said Yolo. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this.”

They slapped hands.

“To the north,” Nayeli said.

“Al norte,” they replied.

“We have to tell the old woman,” Nayeli said.

“¿La Osa?” cried Yolo. “Are you crazy? She’ll never allow us to do it.”

“I think she will.”

“No, she won’t. She’ll bite our heads off.”

“No,” Nayeli said. She stood up and brushed off her rear end. “I think she will give us her blessing.”

She started to walk away, but stopped and turned back.

“We are going,” she said, “to bring home the Magnificent Seven!”

Late that same night, Irma was startled by a knock at her door. When she opened it, she was amazed to discover Garcí a-García standing there with a suitcase. His left eye was black, and he had blood trickling from his nose.

“What the hell happened to you?” she demanded.

“They came to my house.”

“Who?”

“Bandidos.”

“Bastards!”

“They threw me out.”

“No!”

“They took my house from me!”

She stood there in her tattered nightgown and curlers.

“Can I sleep here?” he asked.

Irma had only been in charge of the town for scant days, and already the troubles were starting.

“Sleep in the back room,” she said.

He trudged in, forlorn and humiliated.

“Hope you don’t snore,” La Osa added, and slammed her door.

Chapter Eight

M
ost of them were crammed into Irma’s kitchen. The over-flow stood in the street, with their faces jammed in Irma’s television window. The priest and several concerned grandmothers stood in the living room; the eldest of them took up regal space on the flowered couch. Poor Garcí a-García sulked in the backyard, trying to keep Irma’s turkey away from him with one foot.

Of course, Tacho had always wanted to go north, but he wasn’t going to admit it. What was there for a man like him in Tres Camarones? Less than nothing. Maybe the girls. And there was no way he was going to let the girlfriends face the dangers, or the excitement, of going to el norte without him.

In his mind, they would cross the border under a stack of hay in an old truck, like the heroes in Nazi movies always escaped from occupied France. Some Border Patrol agent might poke the hay with a pitchfork, only to be called away by barking German shepherds just as the tines came perilously close. Maybe Yolo or Vampi would get poked, in a thigh, and would heroically bite back her yelps of pain. Not Nayeli—she was the leader of the commando unit. Tacho saw her in some kind of hot shorts with a red blouse tied under her breasts. There would be a close-up of the blood drops falling on the cobbles, but the impatient Border Patrol agents would wave them through, unseeing—in fact, their own boots would obliterate the telltale blood drops. And then he’d be there: La Jolla and its emerald beaches. Hollywood. Los Beberly Hills. Stars and nightclubs and haute couture. Tacho was ready.

Aunt Irma had to promise to manage the daily operations of the Fallen Hand before Tacho would agree to go with the notorious girlfriends. Then came the tense negotiations between Irma and the mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. No one was willing to let her girl go into the maw of the appalling border. A long journey far from home, predatory men and Mexican police, bandits, injuries, car wrecks, kidnapping, slavers, pimps, drug pushers, illness, jails,
Tijuana!
The word alone speaking volumes about every border-fear they held within them. Coyotes and smugglers. Border Patrol and Minutemen. Rapists, addicts, dogs, robots, demons, ghosts, serial killers, racists, army men, trucks, spotlights.
¡Por Dios!
they cried, these were just girls!

Tacho helpfully informed them: “I am not a girl, thank you very much!”

“If God is with us,” Nayeli pontificated, “what harm can befall us?”

Tacho sipped his Nescafé instant and thought:
How about crucifixion? Lions? Burning alive?
He glanced at Irma. She wasn’t moved by the religious propaganda, either. But Father François stood at the back of the room and raised his hand over the girls in a benediction and said, “Benditas sean.” He looked at Tacho, who was irked that the girls got all the blessings. “And you, too,” François amended.

Tacho raised his cup.

“Amen.”

“When I was on my master tour of the bowling alleys of the borderlands,” Irma said, rising and stubbing her cigarette out in Tacho’s coffee cup, “representing all of you—representing our home—our fine city—I went alone. What horrors did I face? I ask you. What horrors?” She made them jump when she bellowed, “ALL OF THEM!”

She leaned forward on her hands.

“Worse that I was convicted of one crime: being a woman! My efforts for the homeland were disparaged by your men and by you. Admit it! I fought with my bowling ball for all the women—and the useless men—of Camarones. And I did it alone! Yes or no?”

They muttered, “Yes.”

“Well, I was an illegal.”

Cries of shock. Uproar. Shouting.

She held up her hands.

“I may have a passport now. But then? I had no plans to cross that terrible wire! I was bowling in Mexico! But do you think for a minute that the call of athletics stops at some imaginary political boundary? Eh? What of the Olympics! I was called to bowl in the United States! For the honor of MEXICO!”

Her audience reeled, they rocked in their seats, they thrilled.

“I went into Los Yunaites! By God I did! I was showing them all! Mexican womanhood—I stuck it in their faces! I bowled at the Bowlero! I bowled at the Hillcrest! I bowled at the Aztec Lanes!”

This meant nothing to the gathered witnesses, but it sounded impressive. She could have been saying, “I bowled at the White House!” Maybe she had.

The point was, Aunt Irma had been a champion in Gringolandia, too! “And, like these dear girls, I did it for you, you doubters. You should be ashamed.”

Go, Osa! Nayeli smiled at Tacho. She was incredible!

“Do you think I would send these warriors—these brave girls and this fine heroic boy—into the north with no help? No succor? Are you insane! Good God—you ARE insane! First you ladies let yourselves be pushed around by your useless men for a hundred years. Then you let those men escape. Now you deny the future! To bold young women! You are not the new woman! You are shameful!”

She sat back down. She snapped her fingers.

“Get me some more coffee,” she told Tacho.

“I’m not your maid,” he said.

But he got up and got it.

Irma slurped it loudly and said: “I went there. I bowled Tijuana, you know! How do you think I got into the United States? Hmm? Did I sprout wings and fly? I could have if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to! No—I used my brain. Do you have brains? These girls have brains. Tacho… well, I don’t know about Tacho.”

She continued. “Do you think your little husbands, those whore-mongers, were the first to leave Camarones? Do you remember the name… Chavarín?”

Chavarín!
He looked like Gilbert Roland or Vicente Fernández! He was their half-Basque fisherman! That mustache! Those two-tone shoes in shades of brown and crème, shoes that allowed him to glide across dance floors like a sweet outpouring of syrup!

Irma chuckled. “I was a mango in my day. Was I or was I not?”

“You were,” María agreed.

“I’ve seen the pictures,” Nayeli said.

“That must have been a long time ago, m’ija,” Tacho said, “because lately —”

Nayeli kicked him under the table.

Irma glared at him.

“I was the handsomest woman in Sinaloa,” she continued, “and Chavarín had the best mustache. He moved to Tijuana in 1963. Did he not? He did! What did I do? I’ll tell you what I did. I looked Chavarín up in the phone book. How many Chavaríns do you imagine there are in any phone book? Not many!”

The gathered populace was amazed by Irma’s brilliance.

“I called Chavarín! I went to his home! And when the time came, he drove me right across the line in his fine Lincoln Town Car. ‘US ceetee-zin,” he said, and I said, ‘US citee por sure!’ and they let us through! He told them I was his wife!”

Gasps.

The audacity of Chava Chavarín!

“That’s it! You need connections to survive and cross that border! I have connections!”

She rose again: all their eyes followed her.

“I,” she announced, raising her finger above her head like Fidel Castro, “have sent a telegram to Chavarín in Tijuana! The destiny of these warriors is already assured!”

They clapped for her. They sighed and spoke among themselves. María took Irma’s hands in her own.

Irma handed Nayeli a scrap of paper with the outdated telephone number LIB-477.

“Libertad,” she noted portentiously.

Ooh, liberty,
the aunties thought.

Everything had taken on an air of Revolutionary Mexico.

“You will see,” Irma said. “The Americanos are kind. Friendly people. Generous people. They have quaint customs—they aren’t really, shall we say, sophisticated like we are. You can’t drink the water—it will give you diarrhea. But it’s very clean there. Good food. You’ll see.”

She stopped and pointed at all the girls, one by one.

“Your dead are buried here. You were each born here, and your umbilical cords are buried in this earth. This town has been here since time began! God himself came from Tres Camarones, and don’t you ever forget it. When the Apaches rode down the coast, burning all the cities, they stopped here and ate mangos and fresh pineapples! That crazy gringo general Black Jack Pershing came here looking for Pancho Villa! He danced with my aunt Teresa in the plazuela! In the hurricane of 1958, Don Pancho Mena was carried out to sea by the wind, and he rode a dolphin back to shore! And I won’t have some rude gangsters, or some exodus of weak-kneed men looking for money, ruin my hometown!”

They were in awe of Aunt Irma, which was the way she liked it.

“Why do you think I run this town?” she asked. There was no need to answer.

Nayeli stuffed her backpack with her change of jeans, her panties, her clean socks, and her blouses. Deodorant. Tampons. She was packing lightly. She wore her best fútbol tennies with white gym socks. Garcí a-García had presented her with a paperback copy of
Don Quixote,
but she couldn’t make sense of it and would end up leaving it on the bus. Then she pulled out Matt’s card and paper-clipped Irma’s Tijuana phone number to it and tucked it into her back pocket.

Her weeping mother came into her room.

“Are you taking your father’s postcard?” she asked.

“May I?”

“You should.”

They stood together looking at the picture of the paranoiac turkey in the cornfield.

“I wish you could go there,” María said. “To KANKAKEE. I wish you could bring him back.”

Nayeli took her hand.

“If I can,” she suddenly heard herself promising, “I will.”

“Oh, Nayeli!” Her mother threw her arms around her and sobbed.

Aunt Irma made travel packs for each warrior. In big ziplock bags, she put toothpaste, toothbrushes, small bars of hand soap, small bottles of shampoo, rolls of mint Life Savers, packets of matches, some Band-Aids, small packets of tissues. She gave each of them chocolates, M&Ms with peanuts, in case they got hungry. In Nayeli’s bag was a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. “I know you get stuffy,” she said.

They were astonished when Tacho arrived at the bivouac. He had chopped his hair into spikes and oiled it up. Even worse, he had dyed it platinum blond. Vampi ran her hands over the spikes. Tacho had a can of pepper spray tucked into his left sock, and his shirt said: queen. He smirked. Nobody in Camarones would ever get that joke.

In spite of the alarming haircut, Garcí a-García, not trusting mere girls to accomplish the mission, pressed $500 on Tacho. Tacho added the money to his savings, 600 more US dollars, zipped inside his money belt.

There was more to come. The town had taken up a collection, and they handed their savings over to the girls. The bank converted the pesos and coins into American greenbacks, giving Nayeli $1,256. Yoloxochitl had $150 from her family and $65 in pin-tending money. La Vampi had $35. Tacho handed Nayeli $50 of his own. “It’s your tips, m’ija.” She split it with Vampi.

Mothers and strangers gathered in front of the Fallen Hand. Irma’s Cadillac settled on its springs as the travelers loaded the trunk. Vampi and Yolo hefted small shoulder bags onto their backs. Yolo had clothes and books stuffed in her school backpack. Tacho’s duffel was large and heavy, stuffed with discotheque clothes. La Vampi hid a switchblade that El Quemapueblos had once given her in her back pocket. Nayeli carried a tiny gift purse Tacho had given her. Bundles of tortillas were pressed on the travelers. A greasy paper bag of sweet rolls.